The IT generalist’s death is greatly exaggerated

In days long past when SCSI was confined to 68-pin cables and clouds usually meant rain, IT generalists had their heyday. It was a matter of necessity, really — more often than not, there was no other option. The folks who set up and maintained the email system were the very same people who built the network, tended the servers, fixed the workstations, and had a hand in just about every level of IT. This was not confined to small shops. In bigger shops there was more spread, but also a few people who somehow had their hands in every part of the pie — who might be coding an app one day and programming Layer 3 switches the next.

These days, that’s becoming more and more of a rare sighting.

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I suppose you could blame the IT explosion. The sheer number of tools and frameworks available for every aspect of IT today dwarfs the collection available even five years ago. The advent of virtualization has certainly contributed, introducing all manner of abstraction and specialization that defies consolidation. In short, it’s becoming much more challenging to keep up with the progress of information technology, which carries with it the progress of connected devices. One PC per person used to be the rule, but now we have smartphones and tablets to worry about, desktops both physical and virtual, and security sitting atop the whole shebang, mocking us.

If you knew enough about a number of IT silos, it was fairly easy to pull off a true general IT job. Learn enough Perl, Linux, Sun, Windows, and Cisco, and off you went. You didn’t necessarily need to be an expert in any of them, but with a solid enough foundation, you could usually get the job done. These days, those skills will still get you places, but there’s a growing chasm of other technologies and frameworks that aren’t on that list and may prove daunting to integrate.

The spread of scripting and programming languages is one example. Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, C#, JavaScript, Java, VB, and C++ are everywhere, and to become more than competent in a majority of them is the job of a developer, not a generalist. Layers of frameworks within those languages continue to expand as well, so not only are you working within a language, you might be working within a specific framework as well. Modifying or extending an existing project written in one or more of these languages can become very challenging for a generalist, especially if they don’t have a solid foundation in the language to begin with.

The propagation of various virtualization platforms is another example. While most of the top-tier solutions adhere to a central set of features and rules, each is expanding that set rapidly, and not always in the same direction. New technologies like VMware’s VXLAN and Microsoft’s NVGRE are turning the tried-and-true Layer 3 switching model on its head and reworking networking from the foundation to the top of the stack. Adapting to the intricacies of those technologies — as well as implementing and managing them properly — could be considered a full-time job. This is to say nothing about the rest of the technology pile, from the hardware up to the operating systems themselves.

Where IT was once a relatively simple layout of servers, networking, and clients, it has grown to intermingle all those core components within each other. We have servers that are virtual routers and firewalls, and below them, we could have hypervisors performing those tasks. Our clients might be handheld devices or actual desktops or desktops running on servers. Our servers are abstracted into VMs that we can whisk around the infrastructure at a whim, but those VMs still require the care and feeding of their physical counterparts no matter where they reside. We haven’t even mentioned the administration of the myriad services, applications, and operating systems for those servers. To these traditional concerns, we’ve added countless other considerations to designing or maintaining a computing infrastructure.

For sure we’ve made strides in administrating all of these puzzle pieces. Our management tools have become better (but still not, perhaps, good enough). We also have many more options for deployment of any given technology than previously, but that too plays back the concept that it’s harder for a single admin to handle so many disparate tasks and technologies than it once was. With expanded choice comes less specific knowledge in each.

This drift away from wearing a wide assortment of hats started long ago in larger infrastructures. Large infrastructures have had network, storage, physical server, OS, security, and development silos for years, usually with a few generalists that bridged the gaps between them. But while the large shops demanded specialization, the smaller shops were still very much in need of a central technological backstop. Perhaps even that last bastion of generalism is fading now. These businesses may move some things to the cloud, hire specialist consultants for other aspects, and rely heavily on support contracts for the remainder. This follows the top-down model of IT, where what the enterprise is running one year, the midsize business is running the next.

For all the challenges presented to the general IT admin or architect, there is one demand that remains constant: the need for one or two people in the organization to understand the entire technical landscape from a variety of levels, and be able to connect all of those silos into a cohesive, functional unit. You may have the best network, storage, security, and server admins on the planet, but if they’re all working in a vacuum, it’s all for naught.

Perhaps the IT generalist isn’t quite dead yet. They’re just leveling up.

This story, “The IT generalist’s death is greatly exaggerated,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Paul Venezia’s The Deep End blog at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.