How would your job be different if you were doing it in the year you were born?

I'd be told which books to teach, and I would be expected to lecture every day.

No thanks.

 

I was talking yesterday with the fellow who will probably be my landlord about this. He's been in the real estate business a very long time, and was interested in my work and how it relates to him. When I told him that one of the things I do is process automation he perked right up, and we spent some time talking about how things have changed; data that in past years would have had to have been painstakingly hand tabulated and parsed and sorted and acted on is all done automatically now. Input -> output happens with almost no human interaction. A lot of the real drudge work has just evaporated.

We also talked about the fact that, despite the pervasiveness of computers, the IT industry as a whole is very young and still maturing, and things tend to be very different in my world as a direct consequence of that, compared to most people.

In 1983 the closest thing to my current job would probably have been something like a sysop at a college. But that's still not quite right. My job can't really exist without the internet and modern automation/virtualization tools that just weren't possible with the technology of 30+ years ago. I think about that fact and then I think about how the pace of development has only accelerated since then and then I can't help but get excited about what's coming in the next 20-30 years.