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back to article Rejoice, sysadmins, there's a new glamour job nobody understands

Data scientists are reeling, having seen their business cards marked down by up to 70 per cent in value, in after-hours trade overnight. The reason? Analyst, Magic Quadrant layout artist and all-round Delphic oracle Gartner has anointed “Internet of Things Architect” as the new go-to job description. Sorry, data scientists, …

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  1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
    Alien

    Doesn't this go the other way 'round?

    “most of these skill sets, especially the integration and ability to deal with ambiguity, are easily transferable to other jobs in IT”

    Thus, if you are IoT architectoman, you can just easily slide into other jobs in your company, but other jobs in your company do not necessarily give yout the wherewithal to become IoT architectoman.

    We betterl look out for people who have a resemblance to Brainiac (moreover, able to deal with ambiguity!) or having enlarged skuls stalking the halls and muttering about the "stupid humans" or how they "they laughed at me at the academy". I think standard humans goners. The plan will probably involve automated meat cleavers in every home...

    2 0 Reply
  2. Dan 55 Silver badge
    Mushroom

    Roll up, roll up! You don't even need to study!

    Least of all best security practices which was not mentioned at all.

    You can take Gartner's magic rectangle and stick it where the sun don't shine. Sideways.

    9 0 Reply
    1. Jim 43
      Reply Icon

      Re: Roll up, roll up! You don't even need to study!

      Pish! With such a young, rapidly evolving technology you rely on your IoT architect to keep up with the hottest security trends. Your IoT architect will be the first to tell you that the technology is simply too new to have "'best' practices".

      3 0 Reply
      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Roll up, roll up! You don't even need to study!

        "Your IoT architect will be the first to tell you that the technology is simply too new to have "'best' practices"

        What best practices would you suggest? Speaking as someone that has been involved in a IoT product that has shipped tens of thousands of units I can tell you that we are using strong crypto for communications, testing our code extensively with tools like valgrind to find buffer overflows etc etc.

        Any chance you are pulling your hyperbole right out of your bottom?

        0 0 Reply
        1. Anonymous Coward
          Reply Icon
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Roll up, roll up! You don't even need to study!

          And when (not if, when) a security problem is found in your tens of thousands of shipped IoT devices, is there a reasonable way to patch it? That doesn't require intervention from your end users, since you know most of them won't. If it is automated, what are your plans to recover from a bricking, in case of update problems you hadn't seen in your internal testing?

          2 0 Reply
          1. Anonymous Coward
            Reply Icon
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Roll up, roll up! You don't even need to study!

            Yes. Patching remotely is automated and the device has multiple copies of the firmware so it can't be bricked if an update fails. Next question.

            0 0 Reply
        2. Jim 43
          Reply Icon

          Re: Roll up, roll up! You don't even need to study!

          I'll explain the joke for you.

          The job description quoted from Gartner reads like a bullshit bingo card. For fun, I imagined someone who perfectly fit the bill. I imagined that they would have no idea that things like Zigbee had been around since the late 90's, because, you know, Gartner said it was new.

          Cryto for communications and testing. Cool. Wonderful. No idea why you'd be proud of that, but hey, we each have our own standards for success.

          As to my hyperbole... Do you follow security news at all? Maybe we just have different thresholds.

          Anyway, sorry I struck a nerve. Have a nice weekend.

          3 0 Reply
        3. Captain DaFt
          Reply Icon

          Re: Roll up, roll up! You don't even need to study!

          "What best practices would you suggest?"

          For one, how about gadgets that can't call out, and only answer to your personal computer/phone, which polls the gadgets with a secure key.

          Then you get to set settings from your phone/PC,

          You get to approve online orders for whatever item whatever gadget has deemed essential to order.

          You get to see and approve/disapprove any updates and changes, because Gadget Corp has to notify you first, and then you get to decide whether to download them and let your phone/PC pass them on, all without Gadget Corp snooping on you.

          But this'll never fly, because it deprives Gadget Corp of all that juicy data it could be collecting about you to sell to the highest bidder.

          0 0 Reply
    2. Fruit and Nutcase Silver badge
      Reply Icon
      Coat

      Re: Roll up, roll up! You don't even need to study!

      There should be a MBA for "Inception to Deployment - Internet Of Things"

      0 0 Reply
      1. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken
        Reply Icon

        Re: Roll up, roll up! You don't even need to study!

        Somewhat redundant, if you ask me...

        0 0 Reply

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  4. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    "shepherding of IoT solutions"

    So herding cats might be a useful background.

    5 0 Reply
  5. frank ly

    “Internet of Things Architect”

    There isn't an IoTA of justification for any of this.

    14 0 Reply
  6. jake Silver badge

    "“Internet of Things Architect” as the new go-to job description."

    ::snorts::

    Maybe for management/marketing.

    Not so much for engineering.

    One profession will last indefinitely. Choose wisely, Grasshopper.

    3 0 Reply
  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    There should be a Gartner Hype Curve for newly invented job titles.

    A whole bunch of wankers are already are already updating their CV's ... Global Find & Replace to change 'Cloud' to 'IoT'.....

    4 0 Reply
  8. Mike Pellatt

    Isn't that an embedded systems architect, renamed ?

    5 0 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Partly. "embedded" is a pretty wide field. Ranging from 8 bits with less than a k of RAM to Linux SoMs with multiple cores and a gig or more of RAM. There aren't many "embedded" guys that'll say they can whip up a jitterfree BLDC motor driver for an 8 bit and in the next breath say they can bring up the latest kernel release on a random SoM.

      Aside from that there are bunch of things that have come from the web 2.0 world like JSON that are being used for IoT stuff. Your 8 bit micro embedded guy will say "JSON? are you crazy?!" but the guys writing the server side don't want to be messing with binary formats so that's what you have to deal with. People that have experience with both the low level embedded side and the high level client server interaction side are needed for IoT projects.

      0 0 Reply
      1. Mike Pellatt
        Reply Icon

        <Catherine Tate>

        I can do that.

        0 0 Reply
  9. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

    Internet of Things Architecture Visionary

    I used to know him when he was "The Amazing Kargol & Janet".

    0 0 Reply
    1. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken
      Reply Icon

      Correction

      Probably due to a lack of coffee I obviously confused 'The Amazing Kargol & Janet' with 'Mystico & Janet'.

      I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. Normal services will be resumed as soon as possible. Absolutely no user data has been compromised.

      0 0 Reply
  10. Jason Bloomberg Silver badge

    "Master of DevOps"

    I wrote that on my business card. No idea what it means but as everyone who asks "what's that?" doesn't either, it's win-win.

    4 0 Reply
    1. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken
      Reply Icon

      Re: "Master of DevOps"

      I see your 'Master of DevOps' and raise you a 'Structorum Magister'.

      0 0 Reply
      1. Swarthy
        Reply Icon

        Re: "Master of DevOps"

        I see your 'Structorum Magister' and propose 'Aedifex Princeps' as far more impressive.

        0 0 Reply
  11. Keith Glass

    Let's go all out here:

    IoT Cloud Security Architect.

    That title, right there, should get you a private coffee-pod system in your. . . .cube. . .

    0 0 Reply

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