I am months from being 50 and I am a cloud architect/eng/admin. I am a former Microsoft MVP (rMVP) in System Center, I have co-authored books on the subject, spoke at conferences, blah, blah, I was a pretty big deal in the space, so much so that competitors would routinely try to hire me. I can still recall the moment when I thought 'I need to get out of this space and into cloud' At the time I was part of a sales team for a gold partner standing in an AMEX building talking to a developer who needed to secure Azure bc there was nothing more than a network and VM functionality and 'some VP had decided all new dev work was going to be done in the cloud'. This was the tipping point, not some revelation, I had been thinking about it for about a year. So I started spending my weekends learning cloud, eventually transitioned to a new job that was 50/50 cloud and system center. Did that again in the hopes of moving to 100% cloud, but it's hard when you have a huge reputation to not be utilized for that skill. Eventually I landed with a small firm that worked exclusively with the Azure team at MSFT on difficult customer use cases the MCS couldn't handle. 10 years later....I have tons of peers/friends who still do system center and I have talked to a lot of them about moving to cloud and almost all of them give me push back on it. These are ppl with ~20 years left working. And not that their skills are irrelevant, system center does Windows 10 deployments, patching, config management, inventory, so on. But it is going away as far as a need. They of course disagree, maybe it will always be around but it's not going to be adding features.
I also see a lot of resistance when I go to customers for cloud migrations, the IT teams will lie to me or withhold information, some even refuse to attend meetings. Which leaves me in a very awkward position because I know the project sponsor, typically a VP or Cxx, who is paying $300/hr for my time but I don't want to say anything bc I know the IT ppl are just afraid they are going to be seen as irrelevant and lose their job, as much as that isn't usually the case, if I say something about the resistance it could be a resume generating event for them. My point being they don't want to embrace the technical direction the company is headed too. The younger ppl in IT don't typically react this way and often times want to spend as much time learning from as they can and have some previous experience with cloud.
My real point being that I can point to several customers ranging in size from a few hundred to a few hundred thousand where the 'old guard' doesn't want to get with the new technical direction or does their best to drag their feet doing so. It's too bad, there is a ton of tribal knowledge that can be lost - or hidden - in these situations, and years of experience that still applies to cloud that is lost too.
I've worked among people that share those sentiments. I would characterize them as being wary of hidden risks and I can't disagree with their position.
Like everything else on a hype train a lot of the people talking don't communicate essential details, or even the basics.
"There is no cloud, it's just someone else's computer."
It makes complete sense that experienced IT teams would be hesitant to move their employers' stuff onto another company's infrastructure which they have no control over.
You're talking about 'IT', but it sounds more like sysadmins. And in my experience sysadmins have always been like this. I saw this 15 years ago even when I first started and was taken on consultancies.
Programmers are not like this and are generally quite excited to be working with something new, then and now.
I also see a lot of resistance when I go to customers for cloud migrations, the IT teams will lie to me or withhold information, some even refuse to attend meetings. Which leaves me in a very awkward position because I know the project sponsor, typically a VP or Cxx, who is paying $300/hr for my time but I don't want to say anything bc I know the IT ppl are just afraid they are going to be seen as irrelevant and lose their job, as much as that isn't usually the case, if I say something about the resistance it could be a resume generating event for them. My point being they don't want to embrace the technical direction the company is headed too. The younger ppl in IT don't typically react this way and often times want to spend as much time learning from as they can and have some previous experience with cloud.
My real point being that I can point to several customers ranging in size from a few hundred to a few hundred thousand where the 'old guard' doesn't want to get with the new technical direction or does their best to drag their feet doing so. It's too bad, there is a ton of tribal knowledge that can be lost - or hidden - in these situations, and years of experience that still applies to cloud that is lost too.