Every few years someone announces that IT jobs are going away. The cloud will replace the sysadmins. Automation will replace the operators. Now AI will replace whatever's left. And every few years, the jobs don't disappear — they move.
They move up the stack. When physical servers gave way to the cloud, we didn't stop needing infrastructure people; we needed people who understood infrastructure at a higher level, who could design and secure and cost-manage systems instead of racking hardware. When manual deployments gave way to automation, we didn't stop needing operators; we needed people who could build and reason about the automation itself. Each wave didn't remove the work. It raised the floor and moved the valuable part somewhere higher.
AI is the next wave, and I expect it to behave the same way. It will absorb a lot of the routine — the scripting, the first-draft configs, the boilerplate troubleshooting. What it won't absorb is judgment: knowing what to build, deciding what's worth the risk, understanding how the pieces of a real organization actually fit together, and being accountable when something goes wrong. That work doesn't vanish. It becomes the job.
The people who struggle in each transition are the ones who define themselves by the task that got automated. The people who thrive define themselves by the problem they solve, and let the tools for solving it change underneath them. The task was never the point. Keeping the organization's systems reliable, secure, and useful — that's the point, and that need isn't going anywhere.
So don't defend the specific thing you do today. Get good at the layer above it. The IT job has survived every tool that was supposed to end it, by moving up the stack each time. It'll survive this one the same way — carried by the people who move with it.
– Serguey Shinder
