Is IT getting too easy?

A few recent situations have led me to believe that IT may be getting too easy. Maybe not for those of us who routinely work in the deepest recesses of network and system architecture, but too easy for those who are just entering the game. You know, “the kids.”

I didn’t get my hands on a computer until I was 10 or so — and then I couldn’t get enough. Every step of the way, I had to figure out how everything worked by trial and error or by asking the few people I knew who were also into computers. It was frequently a slow and painful process, but I learned an enormous amount along the way. When I first connected to the Internet, gopher and Usenet ruled the roost, and the Internet itself was basically an expansion of computerdom: Either you knew enough to use it or you didn’t.

[ Paul Venezia serves up a healthy portion of his hard-bought networking expertise in InfoWorld’s Networking Deep Dive. ]

Even after HTTP, Mosaic, and the beginnings of the “public” Internet, it was still the Wild West. There were no guarantees, no Google, and you were highly likely to be eaten by a grue at any time. Linux, Perl, PHP, and MySQL were infants, Windows was the computing equivalent of nitroglycerin, and Solaris ruled the back-end world. Blood, sweat, and tears were required to do anything of substance. Tens of thousands of mental foundations were laid, and the folks that persevered and brought computing to the next level earned their stripes. Those foundations weren’t the kind that can be taught — they had to be experienced.

Juxtapose that with what a 10-year-old encounters in 2010. Basically everything Just Works (even Windows most of the time). Want to install Linux on a random desktop or laptop? The vast majority of the time you won’t even have to download a single driver. Want to write some cool script? Chances are that someone already has, and you can find the code in Google. Copy, paste, and you’re done.

Have some odd hardware or software problem? Google again and find your answer in a few minutes. While the result may be the same, the path is drastically shorter, and by taking those shortcuts, you lose the whys and wherefores of the situation and never develop a chunk of the foundation.

That doesn’t mean that the information to build that core isn’t available. It’s extremely available. In fact, with the right motivation, a solid IT foundation can be built in a far shorter time now than at any other time in history — for the willing learner. Human nature has a tendency to avoid the intricacies of a solution as long as it works.

As technology progresses, we build layers upon layers. We’ve built applications that function on top of other applications, that function on top of dozens or hundreds of libraries, that reside on hugely complex operating systems that run on ever faster and more involved hardware. The separation between the fundamentals and the presentation grow ever wider. If too few people dive into the inner workings of the lower levels, we may find ourselves orphaned at the top of a massive tower of technology with nobody around who knows how we got there.

If you haven’t seen the movie “Idiocracy,” I suggest you stop reading this and watch it right now, mainly because my next point requires it. One issue I had with the movie was that, even though an IQ of 100 was the highest in that sorry world, all the technology worked — broadcast TVs, networked kiosks, trains, and so on. How could that be? How could all of this gear be maintained by these mental midgets?

Then it occurred to me. They didn’t have to maintain it — it Just Worked and always had, but nobody knew how or why or even really cared. The developers and engineers who had built all that tech may have been long gone, but their efforts were still running, even though nobody knew anything about them.

Nobody likes “black boxes” in their IT infrastructure. They’re a huge liability, because if and when they break, nobody has a clue how to fix them. It’s like having someone follow you around with a gun to your head. This may be where IT is headed if the next few generations aren’t challenged to build their own foundations. We’ll all be working without a net.

Basically, we need another Linux. We need another Perl, PHP, and MySQL. We can’t rest on our laurels and relax with our superstable operating systems and hideously fast CPUs. If we want future generations of IT pros to have the same core competencies that have brought us this far, we need to maintain an element of the Wild West.

IT ain’t easy — yet. But maybe we should make sure that that’s always true.

This story, “Is IT getting too easy?,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in open source at InfoWorld.com.