My take on how a decade (or more) of using cloud services for everything has seemingly deskilled the workforce.
Just recently I found myself interviewing senior security engineers just to realize that in many cases they had absolutely no idea about how the stuff they supposedly worked with, actually worked.
This all made me wonder, is it possible that over-reliance on cloud services for everything has massively deskilled the engineering workforce? And if it is so, who is going to be the European clouds, so necessary for EU’s digital sovereignty?
I did not copy-paste the post in here because of the different writing style, but I get no benefit whatsoever from website visits.
I am saying that the competencies of people who grew up (professionally) with outsourced services are more superficial and give them way less understanding (and agency) on the systems they oversee. I make the opinionated argument that knowing which service to use in a cloud provider is not just a different skill from implementing that functionality “manually”, but is hierarchical inferior, easier to acquire and less useful in general.
A weird parallel would be someone who hikes 100% of the time with a guide who takes care of orientation, camp setting etc., and someone who goes alone. If I am simply comparing the pictures they are showing me, I might not appreciate the difference, but if you asked me who I would trust to come hiking with me, I wouldn’t have doubt, because I consider the skill “finding, choosing and listening to the guide” to be hierarchial inferior to “orient, set camp etc. by yourself”.
So it’s not just a matter of matching the skills I need, is actually a much broader argument about deskilling engineers.
I understand.
Obviously, “knowing which cloud services to enable” is a lesser skill than knowing how those services work. That is not a parallel or equal skill in any way.
But do you assume people are just going drrrrr brain off when they don’t learn that one skillset you are accustomed to spotting?
Well, for the relatively small sample of Kubernetes experts I interviewed, basically any topic beyond “you use this tool” was a disaster, including Kubernetes knowledge. I am not selective, it’s not like I expect a specific skillset, but what would you think if someone with a decade of platform security doesn’t understand cryptography and supply chain, Linux permissions, Kubernetes foundational concepts, container isolation or networking? At some point the question is legitimate, what are you expert in? The answer I have been able to give myself so far is “stitching together services that do stuff” and “recommend what the documentation/standard recommends”. I consider myself satisfied to have somewhat decent knowledge in some of those areas, I am not expecting someone understanding all of that, but none of them? Maybe from someone who just joined the industry.