Derrick Harris, posting on GigaOm yesterday, postulates that the introduction of cloud computing to the IT industry will put a lot of information workers out on the streets in the same way that the automation of manufacturing work in the seventies and eighties lead to the permanent destruction of many assembly line factory jobs.

Careful not to verge into raging-against-the-machine territory, Harris is careful to point out that there are real economic advantages to adopting the utility computing models. He also re-states the popular conception that enough new jobs will spring up to replace the old ones; someone will have to build and maintain these cloud services, after all, and they will in turn spur the growth of new services which do not yet exist and will drive job growth in ways we can't yet foresee. "The law of conservation of jobs," is how he terms it.

The problem he see with this is that those folks laid off from the old-school IT jobs, the sysadmins and network techs, will be unlikely to be properly equipped to land the new jobs that will replace them in the cloud-world order. Like the auto assembly line worker who was unable to step up immediately into the role of auto assembly line robot maintenance technician, these folks don't have the right skills to keep the cloud moving.

Today's laid-off systems administrators, however, are not likely landing these newly formed IT 2.0 jobs. They have been too busy applying duct tape and Band-Aids to existing infrastructures to stay on top of the cutting edge. Nearly a year and a half ago, already, I heard a FedEx Corporate Services IT executive bemoan how ill-equipped his team was to deal with the division's increasingly fabric-like infrastructure. He was neither the first nor the last to express that sentiment.

Instead of these worn-down, out of touch old folks, Harris sees the new generation as the most likely inheritors of the boon of cloud computing jobs. Fresh out of school, steeped in a culture of social networking and cutting edge web applications, surely they will be the first choice of employers staffing their new-age utility computing mega-centers.

I agree with Harris' general conclusion if not the logic by which he arrives at it or some of the specifics of his vision. I think a lot of people are going to be out on the streets and unable to find new tech sector jobs as a result of cloud computing initiatives. I don't believe this is necessarily because they haven't had time to keep up with the state of the art; in my experience, those who are interested in keeping up with new developments do so, often dragging their departments along with them out of a sheer sense of curiosity. Those who have difficulty adapting settle on the system they first learned and never budge, and it doesn't matter if it is cloud computing or Windows Server 2008 that is becoming en vogue, they'll stick happily with their OS/400, thanks very much.

Further, I think existing IT workers have a leg up on the new generation of graduates in fighting for the limited positions available, for reasons better articulated here by Larry Dignan. In short, most of them know how to work for a living, and have a better sense of their real worth than do the Millenials coming out of school right now (my own take on this, softer than Larry's, can be found here).

But I do think that a lot of existing IT staff have the wrong mindset for working for or with utility computing providers and that may prove a significant roadblock on both sides. I don't see it so much in the blogosphere, but simply interacting with people in the industry, there isn't much acceptance yet of the tremendous cultural shift that this sort of technology represents. The IT department is still seen as a bastion of sorts (the "sole means of production" as Jonathan Sapir critiques this view in alarmingly Marxist terms), and CIOs and IT staff as the wizards who keep the mysterious gears meshing.

It's true that these sorts of changes do not happen as rapidly as their proponents might like, and that traditional IT operations will continue in many organizations for many years to come. But the change is coming, and I don't believe that it will create as many jobs as it destroys, particularly in the ranks of IT management. CIOs have much to be concerned about in this transition. Cloud technologies, in many of their disparate forms, really do have the effect of simplifying the application of technology, and often to a level where it can be discussed more at the level of business process than raw technology. In these cases, more so than ever in the past, vendors or consultants can sit down directly with other CxO level executives and make a coherent pitch directly and understandably. The day that SAP can walk into the CFO's office and talk about how their new offering can benefit the bottom line and run all the necessary accounting processes with full compliance and no tech-talk is the day the CIO can clean out his desk.

That day isn't here yet, except for in some relatively narrow verticals, but it's on the way. If you can't restructure your own job to remain relevant to the business in an era of dramatically simpler and less costly solutions, get ready to pound pavement with millions of former factory workers looking for retraining.