Recent surveys bear this out. Gartner's 2006 CIO survey indicated that the No. 1 reason for CIOs leaving their jobs was that they were too focused on cost rather than growth.

Now you may be in storage, but this wisdom still applies. Those people who still devote their days to optimizing where each bit and byte of data resides on a disk drive thinking that it will never end better start planning for unemployment now. Why? Because the smart ones in your organization are already working on business cases to buy solid-state disks (SSD) from companies such as Texas Memory Systems and are using the elimination of your position and salary as a way to justify the purchase.

Is that harsh? It sure is. But with the price of technologies like SSD continuing to drop, coupled with its growing capacity and faster-than-disk performance, which would you rather have? Someone who gripes about how tough his job is or a piece of storage hardware that meets the application's requirements, costs less and eliminates the need for the complainer? As for me, I know which one I would choose.

So is unemployment in your future? Not necessarily. But it does mean you should start spending more time translating your job skills into how they can help your company identify the best storage technology to buy in the next purchasing cycle and a little less time whining about how hard your job is.