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.

Using Clouds for too long might have made you incompetent | Loudwhisper

(loudwhisper.me)

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.

Using Clouds for too long might have made you incompetent | Loudwhisper

(loudwhisper.me)

interviewing senior security engineers

Or maybe senior security engineers from 10 years ago were somewhat different from (wannabee senior) security engineers today?

Did you ask them to write 0xD6 in decimal?

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.

Using Clouds for too long might have made you incompetent | Loudwhisper

(loudwhisper.me)

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.

Using Clouds for too long might have made you incompetent | Loudwhisper

(loudwhisper.me)

I'm a very good engineer, but so much of my time is consumed fighting with Tekton pipelines and migrating testing frameworks and versions I barely have time to write code. But that's because I can figure that stuff out when I have to. All the code is written by the people who can't figure that stuff out.

Why this isn't two separate jobs I can't understand. Let me do some stuff I'm good at rather than constantly fighting with things I'm not?

Or maybe it's just a different skill set

This hits the nail right on the head. The point of cloud services is to take away all the overheads of building and delivering software solutions that have nothing to do with the actual business problem I'm trying to solve.

If I want to get a new product to market, I want to spend most of my time making my core product better, more marketable, more efficient. I don't want to divert time and resources to just keep the lights on, like having to hire a whole bunch of people whose only jobs is to provision and manage servers and IT infrastructure (or nurse a Kubernetes cluster for that matter). Managing Kubernetes or physical tin servers is not what my business is about. All this tech infrastructure is a means to an end, not the end itself.

That's why cloud services is such a cost efficient proposition for 98% businesses. Hell, if I could run everything using a serverless model (not always possible or cost effective) I'd do it gladly.

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.

Using Clouds for too long might have made you incompetent | Loudwhisper

(loudwhisper.me)

That's the thing! I think it wouldn't be conceivable that your "principal engineer" (real position for one of the people) doesn't understand the basic theory of the stuff they are implementing. Now it feels you can instead work years and years just shuffling configuration and pressing buttons, leading to "senior" people who didn't gather actual years of experience.

I don't want to pretend I am outside this logic. I am very much part of this problem myself, having started my career 10 years ago. I do despise cloud services though (if anything, they are super boring), so I tend to work with other stuff. But I could 100% just click buttons and parrot standard and keep accruing empty years of experience...

I'm reminded of when my boss asked me whether our entry test was too hard after getting several submissions that wouldn't even run.

Sometimes prospective employees are just shit.

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.

Using Clouds for too long might have made you incompetent | Loudwhisper

(loudwhisper.me)

That is technically correct in a way, but I'll argue very wrong in a meaningful way.

Cloud services are meant to let you focus less on the plumbing, so naturally many skills in that will not be developed, and skills adjacent to it will be less developed.

Buttttt you must assume effort remains constant!

So you get to focus more on other things now. E.g. functional programming, product thinking, rapid prototyping, API stuff, breadth of languages, etc. I bet the seniors you are missing X and Y in have bigger Zs and also some Qs that you may not be used to consider, or have the experience to spot and evaluate.

That is technically correct in a way, but I'll argue very wrong in a meaningful way.

Cloud services are meant to let you focus less on the plumbing, so naturally many skills in that will not be developed, and skills adjacent to it will be less developed.

Buttttt you must assume effort remains constant!

So you get to focus more on other things now. E.g. functional programming, product thinking, rapid prototyping, API stuff, breadth of languages, etc. I bet the seniors you are missing X and Y in have bigger Zs and also some Qs that you may not be used to consider, or have the experience to spot and evaluate.

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.

Using Clouds for too long might have made you incompetent | Loudwhisper

(loudwhisper.me)

That's the thing! I think it wouldn't be conceivable that your "principal engineer" (real position for one of the people) doesn't understand the basic theory of the stuff they are implementing. Now it feels you can instead work years and years just shuffling configuration and pressing buttons, leading to "senior" people who didn't gather actual years of experience.

I don't want to pretend I am outside this logic. I am very much part of this problem myself, having started my career 10 years ago. I do despise cloud services though (if anything, they are super boring), so I tend to work with other stuff. But I could 100% just click buttons and parrot standard and keep accruing empty years of experience...

This is quite a trite argument from my point of view. Also, this is from the perspective of the business, which I don't particularly care about, and I tend to look from the perspective of the worker.

Additionally, the cloud allows to scale quickly, but the fact that it allows to delegate everything is a myth. It's so much a myth that you see companies running fully on cloud with an army on people in platform teams and additionally you get finops teams, entire teams whose job is optimizing the spend of cloud.
Sure, when you start out it's 100% reasonable to use cloud services, but in the medium-long term, it's an incredibly poor investment, because you still need people to administer the cloud plus, you need to pay a huge premium for the services you buy, which your workforce now can't manage or build anymore. This means you still pay people to do work which is not your core business, but now they babysit cloud services instead of the actual infra, and you are paying twice.

Cloud exploded during the times of easy money at no interest, where startups had to build some stuff, IPO and then explode without ever turning a single dollar of profit. It's a model that fits perfect in that context.

This is quite a trite argument from my point of view. Also, this is from the perspective of the business, which I don't particularly care about, and I tend to look from the perspective of the worker.

Additionally, the cloud allows to scale quickly, but the fact that it allows to delegate everything is a myth. It's so much a myth that you see companies running fully on cloud with an army on people in platform teams and additionally you get finops teams, entire teams whose job is optimizing the spend of cloud.
Sure, when you start out it's 100% reasonable to use cloud services, but in the medium-long term, it's an incredibly poor investment, because you still need people to administer the cloud plus, you need to pay a huge premium for the services you buy, which your workforce now can't manage or build anymore. This means you still pay people to do work which is not your core business, but now they babysit cloud services instead of the actual infra, and you are paying twice.

Cloud exploded during the times of easy money at no interest, where startups had to build some stuff, IPO and then explode without ever turning a single dollar of profit. It's a model that fits perfect in that context.

Mind you that my take and experience is specifically in the context of security.

I struggle to make the parallel that you suggest (which might work for some areas) with a security engineer.

Say, a person learned to brainlessly parrot that pods need to have setting x or z. If they don't understand them, they can't offer meaningful insight in cases where that's not possibile (which might be specific), they can't provide a solid risk analysis etc.

What is the counterpart to this gap?
Because I struggle to see it. Breadth of areas where this superficial knowledge is available is useless, IMHO.