Is too much automation harmful to the IT middle class?

Information technology, as a cost center, is heavily geared towards the reduction of costs, and in well-engineered IT shops, improving and streamlining the business’s processes. But is automation sometimes going too far, and reducing our ability to learn? As we automate to new levels, leveraging commodity hardware to build resilient systems on the grid and in the cloud, are we making release engineers into a ruling elite, creating a new operations underclass? And if so, is it really a bad thing, if we improve all the metrics of IT efficiency? I first considered this question a little over a year … Continue Reading →