I see the role of internal infrastructure guys changing radically. Some aspect of their work vanishing completely but other aspects, particularly surrounding security and monitoring getting much more emphasis.

Technological change, particularly in storage is going to affect anyone whose area of responsibility touches that area of change.

If developers can spin up what instances they need in the cloud then although these instances are cheap PAYG computing if you don't keep track of it you end up with death by a thousand cuts. Look after the pennys and the pounds will look after themselves.

I can remember when the Amstrad PC1640 came out complete with Informix Smartware (very early office suite, Microsoft hadn't released Excel at this point). One of the marketing guys turned around and said "you'll all be made redundant, we don't need you anymore". That was 30 years agon 'nuff said.

Despite the rate of change I'm surprised that more progress hasn't been made. I'd hoped for some sort of public global repository of components that auto-updated. If someone wanted to capture an email address then they should simply tell their app to use the one true version. If the standard for an email address changes then everyone's app changes automatically with no programmer involvement. Data quality issues caused by dodgy development becomes a thing of the past.

I can also remember when .NET came out having a conversation where one of our senior developers gleefully stated that the disciplines that .NET expected was going to kill off all the cowboy coders.

Anyone starting today would be shocked by what their predecessors had to to to fight with the early versions of MFC. The sheer amount of code that was necessary to produce a simple Windows form was shocking. Today its drag and drop, set a few properties and fill in the bit that actually delivers value to the business. Back then it was work out how to get windows to resize and redraw correctly, controls to respond to events.

In short, IT will still exist in 5 years time, 25% will have gone, 50% will stay the same, 25% will be brand new and unimagined today.