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The Implications Of Knowledge Work
dsplat writes: "Business 2.0 has an article titled Mind Over Matter concerning the implications of "knowledge work" and its potential effects on the relationships between corporations, their employees and their customers. In many ways, it reads like a less strident version of the Cluetrain Manifesto. One telling quote is: 'Traditional capital was stuck in a company's bank account or investments. It could not walk away in disgust. Human capital has free will. It can walk out the door; traditional capital cannot.' This article is part of a larger series titled The 10 Driving Principles of the New Economy.
"
It may be true that human capital can walk, but nondisclosure agreements, incremental vesting and health benefits -- not to mention car payments, mortgages and diapers -- mean that walking often isn't simple. Smart businesses, ironically, may make themselves attractive to potential employees by ensuring that they're easy to leave, not just to start at. And even though this article is about "knowledge work," it bears repeating that only a small fraction of jobs fit that category.
sure there, MR. "CEO". Hey, I guess that makes me CEO of a consulting business. Wow, now I can tell everyone that I am a CEO of a tech company.
I didn't know that programming skills made up for no knowledge in economics, management, leadership, marketing, and research. Now I feel special!
Perhaps it was a poll of "do you think it is in to be on the internet". It probably never said "do you think it is in to be on the internet and not in to be dating and partying".
Wonders why there aren't more people who think.
The world is flat. This was demonstrated in the 15th century.
Columbus attempted to demonstrate the widely believed argument that the world was round, by sailing in the wrong direction. He then made it to a totally different continent, and not to India as he was expecting. This proved that the world was flat, and Columbus was wrong.
Columbus tried denying this for the rest of his life, and even went so far as to threaten anyone who denied that they were in Asia with death. Nevertheless, he was wrong.
And don't believe all these revisionists who tell you that heavier objects don't fall faster than lighter objects. And remember Steel ships don't float, and heavier than air flying machines are impossible.
I guess that makes me CEO of a consulting business.
If you are the sole employee and full owner of your own business, then you can call yourself whatever you want. Nobody's going to complain.
I didn't know that programming skills made up for no knowledge in economics, management, leadership, marketing, and research.
I have learned economics from Henry Hazlitt's "Economics for the Ordinary Man". Management and leadership can only come from superior technical competence -- it's called leading from the front. People like you who claim that you can just "lead" without doing anything make me sick -- you are the main reason why I will NEVER work for a company. Marketing is a moronic profession only suited to poofs from arts courses. If your product is good, you don't need it; if your product is bad, it's immoral to use it. Stop trying to pretend that people need to spend money on overpaid, under-brained consultants like you. You are barely a rung above marketing people on the evolutionary ladder
--SM
IMO, vapid business writings composed of half baked trends and death metaphors about the internet are just as useless as the vapid business writing that has plagued the entire history of Management books
Not the fiction writer the Dianetics Scientology guy. Just my opinion
when you have one, it's a lot easier to get the rest.
how many karma points do you need to get the automatic 2? and how many to get the broadsword?
I don't have a product yet -- unfortunately, I still have to go through the UK educational system. But when I do, I'll do the marketing myself, through the Linux and C++ comunities. Marketing people are scum. Thanks for replying, although I think your response is pretty typical, jaded, corporate bullshit.
--SM
'I have learned economics from Henry Hazlitt's "Economics for the Ordinary Man"'
...[etc]"
:)
Wow, I'm humbled.
"Management and leadership can only come from superior technical competence"
There is a correlation between good management and technical competence, but there is almost no connection between technical competence and leadership and high level management skills.
"People like you who claim that you can just "lead" without doing anything make me sick"
False statement based on supposition.
"you are the main reason why I will NEVER work for a company"
Thanks.
"Marketing is a moronic profession only suited to poofs from arts courses"
Yeah, I forgot products sell themselves.
"If your product is good, you don't need it;"
You've seriously got a lot to learn.
"Stop trying to pretend
And, following false statement attributing comments to me which are really based on your own ignorance.
"under-brained consultants like you"
Yeah, I guess my masters degree in computer engineering from CMU, and my MBA from upenn mean nothing.
Thanks for the ultra ad hominem remark.
Now for the apology:
I didn't want to insult your intelligence as an entrepreneurial 16 year old with my slightly vitriolic comments, but you've got a lot to learn about business.
Have fun
You're wrong. An MBA means much less than nothing. It means that you're a bloodsucking bastard who can't program, so you decided to bullshit and con people for a living. Using the buzzwords from your academic, ivory tower CS course (now that actually does mean nothing, compared to real world experience). People like you make me want to vomit green bile all over my keyboard, but I can't afford a new one, so I guess I'll just have to swallow it down, and have a shit later while thinking of you. MBA stands for Mediocre But Arrogant, by the way.
I didn't want to insult your intelligence as an entrepreneurial 16 year old with my slightly vitriolic comments, but you've got a lot to learn about business.
Fuck off, I wish I'd never mentioned my age, but I can spot a patronising American turd when I see one. Whatever I want to learn about business, I'll teach myself. I certainly don't want to learn the parasitic values of "consultants" like you.
--SM
I understand that you're only sixteen, but it's blatantly obvious that you really don't know much about running an actual business. You just aren't aware of that fact. A certain level of maturity is required.
I recommend that you save these posts, read them again when you get out of college, and then laugh out loud at your own ignorance. By then you'll know what I'm talking about.
Right now you're just a kid who plans on selling some software.
You read too much dilbert. I'll be waiting for you in the real world.
Oh, and thanks for the adversarial ad hominem moronic comments.
Ever done a CS course, or just met people who think they're better because they've done them? If you answer the latter, then you have a distorted view of how things work.
Ever been in a position to compare yourself with a n MBA? Do you know what is actually taught on a CS course?
And how much Real World experience do you have? How much time do you have to do all your developing, marketing, accounts, dealing with enquiries, and distribution? You might have, but if you haven't then you need to hire other people. Why not hire somebody who is a specialist at one of these jobs (on paper at least)?
--
~NS
Ah, but your paranoid ramblings are obviously the work of a scientologist misinformer who wishes to make people side with the scientologists once they see how crazy the people opposing them are! We'd all be doomed if it weren't for my pointing out the misinformants amongst the Slashdot crowd! Bwahahaha!
i use my vast knowledge of pouring bowls of hot grits down my pants in my work. thank you.
COBRA may be a hell of a lot more expensive than your work coverage (hardly surprising, since you pay your part and whatever your company would be paying) but just try and getting health coverage *outside* a group plan. If it comes down to paying 6X, or paying 10X, I know which choice I'd take.
And I'm glad they're going to lose a whole pile of it. But you didn't hear it from me, okay?
> If your product is good, you don't need it
BAWHAHAHAHAHAHAH.
You dumb little shit, arrogance and naivety don't go well together.
Try managing a 20 man team and by programming from the the front.
I hope anyone doing business with you will read your posts, realise what a cocky yorkshire twat you are and do business elsewhere.
You're the same as the kids I hear say stuff like "comments are for wimps". So experienced that you don't believe you could possibly be flawed.
BTW, say hi to Mummy for me. She was good last night.
Nah, not once he looks at his monitoring software that he uses to spy on all his staff.
"We seem to be living in a culture that rewards switching jobs more highly than staying with the same company"
In a system where yearly inflationary growth is common place, you're going to be bouncing from company to company because a) it's a lot harder to get a raise than it is to quit and go somewhere else; b) particularly in the computer industry right now, demand is much higher than supply. This results in salary price wars; c) more focus on the bottom line leads to companies hiring tons of temps and then firing them before they get benifits and stock options (large motivators to stay in a company); d) in many service industries, technical innovation has led to simplification of jobs - and so, workers who don't need specific knowledge are easily expendable; e) corporate downsizing and current corporate culture has led to employees not feeling secure in their jobs. Therefore they don't have much of an incentive to stay on. In the 50's, 60's, and 70's, you could get a basic job and be guaranteed employement for life; f) In the past, one could, with one full time job, buy a house, a car, and support a family. Today both parents work, sometimes 2 or 3 jobs.
Ask for your money back, because your collage didn't teach you how to spell.
master of nits
I guess, being 16, you are too young to remember such things as Video 2000 and Betamax vs VHS, which happened before you were even born, or the technically stunning Amiga 1000 which was launched when you were one year old and provided near photorealistic graphics and a real operating system at a time when state of the art PCs were 4 MHz machines, with CGA if you were lucky (16 colours in text mode, 4 in 320*200 bit mapped mode) and MS-DOS 3.3 (who needs cursor keys anyway?).
Well I do remember these things. Video 2000, in particular, was absoultely stunning, and in many ways VHS has never caught up with it, even after 20 years. That Amiga, launced in 1985, had a 5-7 year head start over its contemporaries. These products are dead now, yet the technically inferior products remain. Why? because the good ones weren't marketed properly or as well as the mediocre ones.
You'll learn, probably the hard way.
Socialized medicine civilized? When Canadians have to visit vets to get CAT scans and there's a shortage of docs b/c it's crappy working for the gov't? No thanks!
Oh my god. I made a typo. Shoot me. That proves I'm wrong.
Soon, the day will come when the proletatiat rises in revolution!
The workers control the means of production!
Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!
Click here... for a different perspective on the article!
People like you make me want to vomit green bile all over my keyboard, but I can't afford a new one..
Well, I can't imagine why. Somebody with the strong, natural, techno-driven business instinct like yourself should be rolling in the dough. Since experience counts for everything, and education counts for nothing, well, how much experience can a 16-year old possibly have?
The only thing more annoying than a cocky know-it-all is a cocky thinks-he-knows-it-all.
Apparently you live in a town where there are loads of plumbers, all competing with one another to serve the customer better. Apparently, in your town, plumbers have to compete all the time against each other, or go out of business.
Where is your town, and how do I move there?
"Yes, we tried that back in 1981, and here's what went wrong then"; "
The same problems in software and hardware development are recurring. The only differences is technology/languages/time.
When I was in school, the cases we got were from the 70's and 80's. The case writers had just updated them with newer technologies inserted to make them new.
"However, once a product becomes "mainstream""
Solution: Create a stable and a development tree.
Easy, simple steps -- yes, even you could do it:-
1. Moderate DOWN all posts questioning or saying negative things about Open Source, no matter how reasonable or accurate they may be.
2. Moderate UP all pro Open Source posts, no matter how stupid or inaccurate.
3. Moderate UP all posts from people saying nice things about VA Linux/Andover/Malda.
4. Watch VA/Andover/Slashdot stock $$$$ rise
and have a really good laugh at all those suckers who let them get away with it.
The bottom line is you need to replace the tinfoil in your hat.
L Ron Hubbard is hands down the WORST science fiction writer to ever put pen to paper. He didn't know jack SHIT about science, and he had a horrible story telling style. Battlefield Earth's fundamental scientific premise was that the atmosphere of the invaders exploded on contact with uranium (HELLO L RON, URANIUM IS A RADIOACTIVE MATERIAL, NOT CHEMICAL EXPLOSIVE!!!). It drags on for half a million dreary words (as he is proud to tell you in the preface) and can be summed up in less than three paragraphs. His characters are one dimensional dorks and his stories are dull as dust. My parents experimented with scientology in the late 80's, and their experience was less than satisfying. Their entire idiocy is based, apparently, on getting you to write a check for their materials. They're banned in Germany because they're essentially nothing more than a cult of personality, and the Germans may remember having a problem or two with that kind of thing in the past . . . . Hope the movie tanks big time. It can't be anything but dreck and droll. Like my hero Maynard says: "Fuck L. Ron Hubbard, and fuck all his clones . . ."
I have been tasked with writing increasingly detailed 'status reports' which I'm told are necessary to justify my existence. The status reports are taking longer and requiring me to micro-detail every little thing I do. Down to 'wiped ass after used toilet.' I'm in charge of software distribution here and the work I do has an effect on every single employee in the entire corporation . . . but managers have to have 'justification' for retaining my job position. Not to mention the fact that upper management couldn't identify me if I mugged them in broad daylight. I don't have time to work 60 hours a week for people who don't know I'm here. When I walk out the door, they'll know I'm gone. That's fer sure.
The science-fiction writer and Scientology founder is one and the same. So if you are reading his science fiction, you are getting subconsciously dosed with Scientology. It's going to get worse... this summer L Ron Hubbord's sci-fi book is going to be released as a major motion picture (Battlefield Earth or whatever). It will probably contain subliminal messages to convert masses of us into Scientologists. If you don't believe this, note that big-time Scientologist guy John Travolta is starring in the movie, and he is very good at converting people to Scientology (he brain washed Kirsty Ally into becoming one). Since the clown is working with Scientologists to find me, I'm sure this movie is just his way of turning more humans into the sleepless person I've become.
Oh? Really? "Human capital can walk out the door"? So I, a business owner, have to pay out all the profits which my business earned to keep a load of second rate CS students in dope and Limp Bizkit records? Well, sorry, but in the real world, where I live, it's just not as simple as that. If only it were; I, for one, would love to have one of these "knowledge" jobs.
I am 16 years old and own three different businesses, each one selling a ground-breaking product application of cryptography technology. At the moment I am the proud owner, chairman and employee, but I plan to take on people to work for me in the near future (one guy and his C++ compiler can only do so much, and there are only 25 hours in a day!)
I plan to treat my employees fairly (by which I mean pay them what I consider to be the market rate), but I don't plan to be made a monkey of. If people want to make unreasonable demands, or don't want to do things my way in my company, I'll show them the door and take over their programming myself untiul someone else with a bit less of an attitude comes along.
What these people don't understand is that more and more businesses are being set up by programmers now, and that it's always the best programmers who run the company (say what you like about Bill Gates, and I have on many occasions before I moved to BSD, but Microsoft QBasic was a marvel of economic use of resources -- look at the source). So, you should remember that the boss, in all probability can do the job better than you can.
Stephen Mundy,
CEO and Chairman of Allegrando, Soviet and Murrinco.
Keighley, West Yorks, England.
I'm workshy, anti-entreperenuerial, and sniping and I voted Lib Dem.
I was once on a 120 person software development project, and 30 of the people were clueless co-op or recent graduates. They spent half the day asking each other questions and searching the net and the other half actually learning how to program. I suppose it was partly our fault for plunking them right into the project, but the overhead they introduced decreased marginal productivity astromically. The more people you add to a project, the later it gets...
Oh yes, un-needed bureaucracy, especially when a product is late (see daily reports and meetings), coupled with a nice turnover rate and clueless new hires just makes me warm inside.
Your postings do not resemble a logical argument so much as paranoid ravings. If you have not already sought professional help for your condition, do so soon.
now if Johnny, Wendel, Joe, and Richard turned themselves into an organized labor group they might better be able to get the respect the "REAL" professionals receive.
Actually you only need 25 to post at +2. This part I know from my own experience. But I didn't know the part about -10. You seem to know better that side of zero.
I was right the first time; you are paranoid.
And you could solve the medical problems by taking the time and effort to learn as much about how your own body works as you do about computers. I personally find it amazing that people who have no problem taking responsibility in other areas of their live become such sheep when it comes to health issues. Doctors are not Gods, and for the most part don't know squat about what keeps people healthy. They are brain-washed by the the AMA and their own drug company stocks. It doesn't take much research to find countless examples of people healed of supposedly uncurable diseases; and often after the doctors had nearly destroyed their immune systems.
Americans wouldn't be spending billions a year out of their own pockets for "alternative" (existed for thousands of years) health care if the "traditional" (been around for only a few decades) health care was working. It doesn't. And unfortunately the health care insurance industry seems to always concentrate on drastic "solutions" after the person has already destroyed themself. Where's the prevention?
Basically, as someone else mentioned, it comes down to diet and exercise and attitude. However, just swallowing what you might have learned in school about 3 squares a day won't work. The people who taught that are now the most sickly (but overfed) people on earth. Do your own research, and your own thinking, and you could have a lot of control over whether you or your family gets sick or not.
Still might be worth some catastrophic case insurance, with maybe a $5K deductable, but that shouldn't be too expensive. A lot more expensive than it would be if everyone took responsibility for their health, but still less than the usual insurance that you shouldn't need.
How about "Open Source health care?" Everyone contributes their experience, and no one is allowed to monopolize the industry. As it is, the AMA and the ("legal") drug cartel run the medical industry like the mob, and even have government on their side.
Okay, Rant Mode OFF...
COBRA's a crock of s**t.
If I were to leave my present job, it would cost me 6x what it costs me now for my family coverage. literally.
Sure the option's there, but nobody can afford to use it.
"How can we educate management about our functions?"
With communication. If you can properly articulate your function, your plan, and insights that only you have, in words that they can understand - they will accomodate you. They don't need to know every little detail. However, if you present relevant information to them that will allow them to do their job better and the company to work more efficiently, they will be happy to listen. Just remember that they may have insightful information - through their personal experiences and education - for you, as well.
Now, if they are obsessed with top down dictation, then you have a problem (go somewhere else, unless you like punishment).
You could always have a national health service like more civilised parts of the world....you know where medical care is given on the basis of need rather than what type of job you have.
Sorry. That's a bit harsh but, (like GSM mobile phones), true.
I find it odd that Slashdot would disclaim this article saying that "few jobs are knowledge work" today.
Blue collar work has been on a steady downward decline since the 1960's. A significant portion of work today IS some form of knowledge work.
Knowledge work is not just "working with computers" - it is an occupation where your education, experience and knowledge are what allow you to do your job.
E.g.:
Auto mechanics
Electricians
Programmers
IT workers
Hardware technicians
Radiologists
Accountants
Clerks
Managers
Analysts
Hairdressers
Nurses
Doctors
Lawyers
Engineers
Scientists
Teachers
Consultants
Economists
Marketing people
to name a few.
The bigger and better the knowledge, the more power one has over their employers. With regards to NDAs or NCAs or whatever agreement one may have, I don't really worry much about them. I have the right to reject an overly restrictive contract, and for narrowly-defined NCA's, finding a job at a non-competitor isn't much of a problem.
-Stu
There's a wise saying: "Success means having the humility to work with people that are smarter than you."
There are smarter people than you out there. Seek them out, and be successful. Bill Gates did.
-Stu
This gives a new meaning "A mind is a terrible thing to waste" Seriously think about it. I work for a company if I leave they will have a lot of problems. Not to say they couldn't get thier jobs done, but will they have a lot of work ahead of them. It is hard for the other guys to figure out the things I do. I feel bad about this but with out the proper training invested in thier people this problem will never be solved. I seen this happen in many different companies. With focus on technology these days it is going to happen time and time agian.
http://theotherside.com/dvd/
Uh, get familiar with how IQ is defined; this is left as an exercise. There's a Subgenius saying,``You know how dumb the average guy is? Well half of everybody else is even dumber!''
Do you mean IQ as measure by the Stanford-Binet test or something else? Because there are different scales, for example, an IQ of 130 might only be 5% of the population on one scale, but 15% on another, I don't remember exactly. Verify at www.mensa.org
The point I want to make is that a person can be insanely great at one activity and a complete basket case in all other areas of his/her life. Read ``The Man Who Loved Only Numbers'' for the ultimate example.
As for being a better world for smart people, I doubt it. The present environment is perfect for someone who has a little brains and a lot of aggression, carefully channeled. It also helps if the main motivator in your life is buying lots of crap. Really smart people might be more motivated by investigating ants or something else of no value for HI-Tech. Maybe you can take their picture and use it in ads or something.
Nah, the whole ``smart'' thing is a marketing ploy. It'll go away after it's lost its use.
This bit:
``It's a better world for smart people, yes. And there isn't going to be a revolution started by the losers, because they really are losers, not merely oppressed. But it has real problems.''
was the funniest thing I saw today. I know quite a few people with better grades and better test scores than me who have opted for lo-tech or suicide. Try again?
Imagine what might happen if we all just threatened to leave our employers? I think we'd easily get some pay raises :P
Imagine what would happen if we were our employers.
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
I appreciate the tone of the conversation. We are all tech workers, or at least fans or fellow geeks. We get glassy eyed and dreamy picturing a utopian world of computers in every home so where can all share knowledge and advancement to the lowest common demoninator.
:) ) What it did do is make every worker more efficent, more valuable to their employer. They could be placed in charge of more complicated, and more efficent, machinary. (Granted this was not an overnight event. I might say the transition is still going on...)
However, history shows that this is not going to happen. We are not going to buck the inevitable truth of humanity. If humanity was a triangle the top tip would be the high or "upper-class", a slice below made of the middle or "middle-class", and the majority of the triangle would be the low or "lower-class".
We are always going to need a large "support" staff. What you and I consider leading edge right now is going to be commonplace in twenty years. Everyone will know how to do it, and the learning curve will continue to rise. There will always be people pushing the edge of possibilites. They are your "knowledge workers".
The printing press, and the rise of literacy, did not end the endanger any monopoly of the intellictuals. (at least not in any bad way
The people who can learn the fastest and implement their ideas are always going to do the best. The technology they perfect is going to allow the sub genius continue to be useful.
Lets not get too cocky.
---
Save the whale hunters.
wow. This is proof the new guy doesn't sleep. Check the time on that post.. maybe I won't go to bed tonight (California time) and see if he goes to bed at all.
*hmpf* back to studying for my Digital Signal Processing Exam. Yucko. Slashdot is much more interesting.
Apologies for off-topicness
__ No registration required to read this message. They did it in the Matrix.
> The company I work for ... likes to think of itself as a leading IT consultancy when in fact it's a dinosaur of dated and inflexible working practices with managers that seem helpless to do anything but wait for the meteorite to hit.
Gartner Group?
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
What some people call technology inflation (or the instability of proprietary standards) has been studied previously and described as the time it takes for half of what you've learn to become irrelevant. From this point of view, the comparisons between OpenSource and ShrinkWrap becomes rather obvious. If the user population is small and adaptable, then it is OK to have rapid release cycles. However, once a product becomes "mainstream" (e.g. email=sendmail, web=apache) people prefer some stability as it reduces the transitional and training costs. One can compare it with a high frequency wave, expanding and broadening out so that others can ride on the envelop. Trying to force high frequency upgrades and changes at the mature stage translates to chop/friction which merely dissipates energy.
So where does this lead companies? As ESR pointed out, the erroneous assumption is that software is a service pretending to be a manufacturing industry. This suggests that companies after a while are going to just treat hackers as high-powered consultants (a la surgical team) to come in, identify an information infrastructure problem, and provide a solution. Trying to capture "broad-based knowledge" and hoarding it will be difficult once your employees realise you are depressing their marketability for the next job (inless it is such a specialised high-demand area you can work anywhere).
Companies have tried before to corner talent, witness certain entertainment megacorps demands to sign away all creative rights for hired animators. It may be highly paid renumeration, but it is still economic slavery in a different form of gilded cage. Perhaps the OpenSource and hacker philosophy is just an unconcious collective movement that realises the inherent dangers of lack of choice which leads to stagnation. There must be some degrees of freedom for knowledge to grow, diversify, cross-pollinate and evolve. Restricting it in a permanent vice may be profitable in the short-term, but the long-run effects may not be that great.
So what can people do to reduce the inevitable decay of their knowledge? Continuous learning, upgrading of skills, and picking software interfaces with long-run stability, and even then be prepared to abandon whole sectors when new technology comes along (e.g. why have a word processor when voice-transcribers mature?). Above all, keep publishing your ideas so that they can join the richer mix and survive for a little longer. IF knowledge keeps on spreading, then the concept of an information monopoly will be harder to sustain without heavy-handed distortions of governments. Unlike labour (which can be easily substituted), knowledge is either you've mastered it or you haven't and fortunately nobody has come up with a mind-transfer machine as yet. Perhaps companies will then be more careful of nurturing scarce human capital instead of playing the diktator (and if anyone hasn't seen the darwinian thinking of MBAs to maximise external capital growth has got a few surprises ahead of them). And least anyone gets too confident about being irreplaceable talent, you should read up on classics like Daedalus.
LL
I haven't had health insurance for over 2 years now. ONE time I had to go visit a doctor. It cost me $45 for the visit plus $8 for the prescription medication I needed.
:)
The alternative was to pay $168 a month to keep the health insurace plan I had when I still lived with my parents. At $168 a month, I'd have to be sick all the damn time for it to pay off.
Some people are sick all the time, but its usually an issue of diet, exercise (or the lack there of), and lifestyle. And besides, insurance is just a gamble. When you get insurance, you're gambling that you're going to need it. Some people see it the other way around, but I happen to be optimistic about these sorts of things.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Jumping in to reply here, but addressing several messages from this thread. Disclaimer: I carry my insurance licenses but I'm not doing anything with them and this is not insurance advice.
/you/ pay the premiums, and the law allows for the employer to charge up to 102% of the actual premium, to cover administrative overhead. COBRA /is/ very expensive to the employee, because the employee is suddenly paying all costs that previously the employer paid. (Yes, they pay /that/ much for your health insurance.) It has two benefits: no underwriting and no pre-existing condition 'blackout phase'. Your coverage simply continues uninterrupted.
> I forget what the acronym stands for, but we've
> got a law, C.O.B.R.A., that allows employees to
> extend their health benefits, for a year IIRC,
> at the employers group rate.
COBRA, or the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (it dealt with more than just insurance), provides that an employer must offer an employee who meets a 'qualifying event' the option to continue on the group plan for a certain amount of time after the 'qualifying event'. That amount of time is either 18 months or 36 months, depending on what said event is. Most common is termination of employment; the COBRA term after that event is 18 months.
Note that
There are instances where one wants to keep paying COBRA even though one has gotten health insurance at one's new job. For instance, if I quit the job I had tomorrow and got a job somewhere that offered me the same coverage, I would not bother with COBRA. However, if I got a job with insurance that would not cover pre-existing conditions for the first year (which is a much more common clause than complete coverage) it would be necessary for me to continue paying COBRA, because my asthma often requires a trip to the ER.
'Pre-existing condition', by the way, has a varying definition based on which health insurance carrier one is using and/or which state one resides in. Most common definition is 'a condition for which you have received medical treatment in the past 12 months'. Nearly all individual health policies and some group policies have pre-existing coverage blackout periods. (It's less common in group policies, because a group policy is a wider statistical and actuarial sample.)
No underwriting also means that they cannot deny you coverage based on your current health. Again, this ties back to the fact that a group policy is drawing from a wider sample, and for every person who is 50+, overweight, cigar-smoking, etc, there's a 20-something who runs 3 miles a day and eats plenty of fiber. This is a plus because if you do decide to go with an individual health policy, it can be tough as hell to find someone who wants to cover you.
Individual health insurance is not a single type of policy. There are a number of variables that can be factored in -- exclusion periods, deductibles, types of coverage, prescription plans, etc, etc. Any and all of these things may affect the price. Really, the thing to do is to talk to someone who knows what he or she is talking about, to make sure that you're not screwing yourself (and/or your family) over in exchange for a few bucks.
It was in tightly-controlled, studio-dominated, early Hollywood when suits _first_ used to say "Here our assets go home at night". It didn't exactly pan out then as a democratizing social force - but we have ended up with a global cult of celebrity and the increasing ability to watch horror movies on computers.
:)
This is a well-argued and interesting piece but: most of the posts reflect one of the problems in even a "progressive" reaction to the changes it describes. Which is: they talk about only programmers, IT professionals, etc as "knowledge workers".
Even from the most pragmatic viewpoint (ie what will make companies scads of cash and give them staying power), companies should start - now - to think of EVERYONE who keeps digitally savvy and plays a role in their enterprise as collaborators in "knowledge work".
I mean the artist/creator/content provider who designs yr company logo, shoots your ad, describes your product, markets you to the world, writes you up in the press and on the Net. Not just the hardware will be involved. People need stuff to sell, that stuff needs to be well-designed and its case persuasively argued. Ditto the case of individual companies.
As someone already pointed out, clueless companies haven't changed yet (& are unlikely to). Plus it will take a little longer for forces - however strong - to make them do so or to wipe them out.
So in the meantime: how about that medical coverage?
The novel Earthweb by Marc Stiegler explores some of the possible ramifications of that idea. Baen Books has a web page for the book containing some sample chapters to whet your appetite. The author also has a page for it with links to information about some of the technologies that he discusses. He is really exploring the possible results of pervasive net access with persistent, verifiable, but anonymous identities.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
Knowledge work is going to change everything, even those things we don't think of as knowledge work. It's going to be all over the place.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Which means Aldous Huxley was wrong, I guess. The deltas and epsilons aren't going to have a place in the Brave New World.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
The major new element of the Net is that you can find knowledge outside your specialty and the specialties of your peers much more easily. However, some things cannot change. The old limitation of what one human being has time to research and understand is still the bottleneck, and will continue to drive the phenomenon of specialization where lots of people know more and more about less and less.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
- People being paid fifteen cents an hour are not going to be motivated, and motivation is the greater part of what drives knowledge workers.
- The people who have serious earnings potential are unlikely to wind up in prison; they generally have better things to do than robbery and the like, and even the zero-tolerance laws are more likely to cost them their cars than their freedom.
Yes, there will be a few who actually have the ability to begin with, then "get religion" behind bars and become captive knowledge workes for the duration of their sentences. Just don't expect them to be a big fraction or a competitive threat.--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
At the company I work for, we recently fired a guy who knew *nothing*, he was originally hired to be the ISP Admin, and to do some perl programming, it turned out that he knew nothing about administrating an ISP (which is why they hired me) so then they thought they could just toss him into full time perl programming, and it turned out he didn't know much about perl either.
He was ripping off the company pretty much, they were paying him to learn perl, and to call Cisco on the phone to baby him through configuring a single PtP link. It only took them 9 months to figure this out..
--
Just because you disagree doesn't make it offtopic or flamebait.
Private health care isn't that expensive in the US -- and usually the taxes are lower (depends on the state) so it is a wash if you make enough money to be in a decent tax bracket. And in the IT industry, odds are you make enough money to qualify for that! =)
A lot of people work on contract and have to provide their own medical -- it's not that big of a deal.
-rt-
** Evil Canadians are taking over the world. Learn about the conspiracy
He is the keynote at a conference in Winnipeg this year, so we have a bio and stuff on him on the TechQuest Site:
http://www.tech quest.mb.ca/quest.phtml?area=keynotes&article=taps cott
Regards,
John.
Speaking as a programmer-become-manager, I'm looking to be the manager I always wanted, and not the bozo, clued-out misplaced administrator that most codes learn to hate. So knowing the strengths of the open environment, I pose a question regarding the futurist lean of the article and the EBC idea within.
When the collaboration is fruitful, and the proceeds are flowing, and one of the "intellectual investors" decides to leave, who now owns the knowledge, and the product? Can one such person pulling out fold the enterprise as the "own" the part of the idea, or is the new economy hinted at truly based on the Open Source basis of "once the knowledge is shared, it is public", or in this case, it is the collective property of the enterprise, much like today's non-disclosure agreements result in?
Ideas, comments, thoughts?
BlackStar
"Imagination is more important than knowlege" -- A. Einstein
'Traditional capital was stuck in a company's bank account or investments. It could not walk away in disgust. Human capital has free will. It can walk out the door; traditional capital cannot.'
If this is true than I expect trouble ahead.
As companies learn this they will take steps to protect their assets...many of them will not take an enlightened approach. I expect to see an errosion of 'free will' in the name of a companies right to protect it's capital. Expect to have to fight hard to keep your intelligence your own, more so than in the past.
Social Capital (ie influence, power)
Human Capital (ie people)
Information Capital (ie knowledge, etc)
Imaginary Capital (ie stocks, banknotes)
Real Capital (ie buildings, gold)
As long as you've been employeed long enough to get health insurance, you're at very little risk of losing it. I forget what the acronym stands for, but we've got a law, C.O.B.R.A., that allows employees to extend their health benefits, for a year IIRC, at the employers group rate. You have this option regardless of the method by which you've been seperated from your company.
If you think you could find a new job in a year, you're fine. In the current economy, if you cannot get a new job in a year, you were probably fired for a good reason.
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
1. How does your direct supervisor justify the cost of employing you, to their boss ?
2. What structure does your performance review take ? How do they know whether you have, in fact, done a good job ?
It's up to you to let the rest of the company know how good you are. As someone else said, it's callled communication. And sometimes it involves fitting in, adapting.... If your current employer values diplomas and certificates, do diploma and certificate, industry recognisesd courses.
In general, make sure that you know what the goals of your boss and your company are,
then work out what you can do to help them acheive these goals,
then do it,
then tell them how you helped them (in terms that they understand).
It's called communication.
But most of my clients are not in traditional IT, and they seem to have a really horrible time retaining people with anything like IT skills. I keep telling them the reason they need to hire externals like myself (for much higher prices) is because they suck at responding to the market and creating the appropriate work environment.
This said, I wonder sometimes about myself, and how Id survive if the economy ever took a serious downturn. When I was just out of school I worked all kinds of shit jobs-- (early 90s, there wasnt much around) temporary secretary, presentation support, help desk. & I dont think I could survive at that kind of job anymore. Im used to a job where I would be astonished if anyone asked me to be at the job at a certain time if I didnt have a reason or a meeting. Ive been in "get there when I get there" mode for so long, I dont think I could punch the clock. Im also accustomed to working from home whenever I feel like it, or going in the middle of the day for hair or dentist appointments. I take these things, this very flexible lifestyle, for granted. I work very hard, but I start from the assumption that my boss is only interested in where I am and what Im doing in regards to getting the job done.
Perhaps the article is right and therell be a new generation of kids who will take these things for granted. But I just dont think that my bosses have made these changes because they suddenly have realized that they should trust and empower their workers, I think theyve made these changes because they dont want me to quit. Should the market change again, I think well see a whole other ball game.
Because the snark was a...
Leadership is a useful skill, and I agree that you need some technical competence, although that is no reason not to hire a specialist and accept that they know more about a specific area than you.
Marketing on the other hand is useful. If your product is good you still need it, if only because of all the immoral people who ARE marketing their bad products. Who actually buys your software, and how do they find your company? I couldn't find any of your companies on Yahoo, which is probably where I'd look first if I wanted to buy some cryptograpy software. What good is a superior product if nobody knows it exists?
this is also a reason for knowledge-employess to aviod anything that is propriatary. My impression of the author was that he thought of intellectual property monopolies such as copyrights and patents as the end all do all fo corporate america, and you needed to butter up the workers to make sure that they will help you get there. He is simply wong. Companies like cisco and MS anr not new-economy - new-economy companies are companies that do not rely on copyrights and patents, but rather service and more efficient work for their bottom line.
Traditional capital was stuck in a company's bank account or investments. It could not walk away in disgust. Human capital has free will. It can walk out the door; traditional capital cannot.
Capital can and does walks away in disgust. Look at what happened in Indonesia/Malasia/Thailand/Korea, etc...Capital fled in a panic, and the economies of those countries were ruined as a result. It is labor that is tied to a particular place. The workers of those countries stayed and suffered while capital escaped. NAFTA and the WTO are all about allowing capital to move around even more freely than they do now.Here is a much simpler explanation of the "new economy" : Techies are simply highly skilled workers. Right now those skills are in demand; therefore techies are well paid for their labor. This will not be the case forever. Eventually most technical skills will be commoditized, the Internet investment boom will level off, and pay will drop as it has for other skilled labor in previous technological advancements. There has been no permanent change in the relationship of labor and capital.
-- Why is there blue shit all over MY shit?! -Josh in Blair Witch Project
There is definitely an old guard of managers around who are terrified of losing control over people's lives. I can't see this changing soon enough.
The company I work for (hence the AC posting) likes to think of itself as a leading IT consultancy when in fact it's a dinosaur of dated and inflexible working practices with managers that seem helpless to do anything but wait for the meteorite to hit. I think if any of them had a new idea they'd die of shock.
How many old style managers are in the habit of dropping by cluetrain.org?
So how is the message going to get through to these people? Bear in mind that in some companies resigning is taken as a sign that you couldn't take the pace.
Your optimism is unwarrented.
Perhaps in the short term you will win, but over time even you will get sick, get injured, or have a dependent that will.
I was hit by a car while crossing the street, in a crosswalk, with the signal. Some idiot decided to turn right on red and was too busy watching the oncoming cars for a gap in the traffic to bother looking in front of his nose to see if there were any pedestrians (this was in Chicago, where there is no shortage of pedestrians).
I got lucky. I landed on his hood, rather than going down beneath his tires. I got off with just a couple of bruises, but I still needed to go to the hospital, simply to make certain there were no internal injuries.
Gambling with your life to save a measly $168/month is your decision, but don't be surprised if the majority of the people reading your post consider you to be very penny wise and pound foolish financially, not to mention foolhardy in the extreme for taking such an unwarrented risk with your physical health.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Most of the kids, who think dating and partying are "in", were simply too busy dating and partying to respond to the poll.
Polls suck. Vote Hemos.
According to Teenage Research Unlimited, the percentage of teens who say that it is "in" to be online has jumped from 50 percent in 1994 to 74 percent in 1996 to 83 percent in 1998. It's now on par with dating and partying!
Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but if 83% of teenagers think it's "in" to be online, and this puts it on a par with dating and partying, then 17% of teenagers must not think that dating and partying are "in."
17 fucking percent. So one in six teens thought partying and dating were "out".
What was their response? "Parties are sooooo early 90's man, everyone cool these days is into sitting at home polishing their gun collection."
Where did they find these kids? I'd expect partying and dating to show up at 99.44%. Did the sample group contain large numbers of amish teens?
--Shoeboy
Tell that to Balzac :)
Pope
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
In the old economy, workers attempted to achieve fulfillment through leisure. The worker was alienated from the means of production, which was owned and controlled by someone else. In the New Economy, fulfillment can be achieved through work, and the means of production shifts to the brain of the producer.
Does anyone else see this statement as a bunch of psuedo-Marxist corporate doublethink?
Now you don't need lesuire for fulfillment, because your job provides that. In other words, you should be glad you have a 60hr work week. It's more fulfilling than spending time with your kids.
And notice how it claims that workers now have more control over the "means of production", but says nothing about a change in ownership structure? Give people the illusion of control, and they won't demand it for real.
I hear you: Someone said "It's getting better for smart people like us" and you're saying "It sure doesn't feel like it's getting better. We're still being screwed."
But you're conflating two things. I agree: they're out to get us, even if they don't mean to. But.
How people treat us -- social status -- is one thing. The affordances of a culture are another. Clearly these two things do not vary completely independently, but they do have some freedom and are distinct.
Social status is a function of values and emotion and squishy stuff like that. The affordances of a culture have objective bases. For instance, in a culture which relies upon breaking rock for vital goods, he who breaks rocks best has the greatest advantage. As much as that society might like to scorn rock-breakers, they are forced by objective reality to value rock-breakers. Those who cannot break rocks at all are left to scrabble for value.
Yes, they hate us. But -- and this is what Animats was saying -- we have finally arrived at a day in which we are those rock-breakers, and the rocks which need breaking can only be broken by about 25% of the population (I agree with that statistical guess for my own reasons).
What he's saying is that the game is increasingly rigged in our favor.
The social aspects will follow. Human hearts have immense inertia, but they will, in time, change.
----------------------------------------------
-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
"Imagine what might happen if we all just threatened to leave our employers? I think we'd easily get some pay raises :P"
:-) You don't even have to mention that you're considering leaving, and that seems to increase the "loyalty" feeling that many tech companies really seem desperate for. Being involved in the hiring process in the past, I can tell you that it's a rare jewel that we find someone who's stuck with the same company for a number of years, and I've seen many companies pay tons extra for that.
I've actually been at 2 companies (no names to keep my legal butt safe) where that has occurred to one level or another.
One company actually did go under (and they pretty much did treat their "knowledge workers" pretty poorly) due to the fact that they could not take even the short term effects of the "work slowdown" that some people participated in. This was a small company and was somewhat fragile.
The second (a much larger company) that had similar demands presented to them. They divided the angry workers by giving some what they wanted (quietly), and giving others just enough to stay then letting them go over time. They did a good job dividing them and sadly several of the workers who were let go had discussed the problem in public in a newspaper story. This had an adverse effect (since you don't see too many "tech strikes") where it did draw a number of other businesses around town's attention. They did eventually find good jobs, but it was quite difficult for them for a short period of time.
Discussing such imaginary possibilities can have some adverse effects. Regarding the second company I worked for, those who made the demands, and did get what they wanted were turned down for other positions in the company. The unstated reason was that due to their past threats to leave that the company, they were concerned that giving them senior positions would be a waste of $ in the case that they may decided to organize again and leave anyway. As unfortunate as it was to see some of them turned down for those jobs, it was hard to blame the company for being worried they'd do it again.
In both cases the workers presented they're case very confrontational. They pretty much said exactly what you stated and laid out their demands. You have to be careful about how you present such demands to an employer. I've found that presenting my "wishes" to my boss one on one often is much easier for the company and myself and less confrontational.
If your the guy your boss needs like you say, you can often do better making those requests on your own rather than with of few of the "dolts" that every office seems to have
- People being paid fifteen cents an hour are not going to be motivated, and motivation is the greater part of what drives knowledge workers.
- The people who have serious earnings potential are unlikely to wind up in prison; they generally have better things to do than robbery and the like, and even the zero-tolerance laws are more likely to cost them their cars than their freedom.
Neither of these are those were good points:- People can be highly motivated by threatened loss coupled with biological sustanence.
- People who have serious earnings potential are under a much greater risk of tax law imprisonment than are people with low earnings potential.
You're ignoring the very real trend toward criminalizing more of the population based on legislative bloat. You have to stop thinking in terms of imprisonment per se, when you are talking about the status of being a slave. Think in terms of loss of full citizenship, starting with being criminalized by a statutory corpus no one comprehends. Institutions, like animals under selective pressure, can become enormously creative when there are such huge incentives. Some additional trends that bear mentioning:Bankruptcy laws are being reformed to allow people with private debt to be more easily criminalized.
Use of mind altering drugs by prescription is now skyrocketing. In many schools, it is virtually mandatory for some students and their parents go along. I've personally seen this target the most gifted students who tend to have some behavioral problems for obvious reasons.
Non-prison sentences involving restrictions on movement via ankle tracers are already making many employees into inmates in their own jobs outside of the prison system.
Seastead this.
The same thing that chains an illegal immigrant to a particular job:
His employer can get him put in jail at the drop of a hat. Remember, you're a criminal. Who's going to believe your word against your employer's?
Seastead this.
The ankle bracelet allows you to be placed back in the work environment where your "employer" can watch over his investment more directly -- rather than in an expensive prison system. Your communications can be monitored and controlled as well as your movements so the likelihood of you even searching for work without your employer's knowledge is virutally nil. Regulations on a criminal under sentence are even more stringent than a criminal under parole or suspended sentence. If you think this won't be used to maximum economic advantage by employers who have the political savvy to benefit from the criminal justice system, I suggest your act of diagnosing my mental condition could, itself, be as easily characterized as a kind of religious belief in the essential goodness of mankind. This is a religious belief I do not happen to share with you.
Seastead this.
No I'm not, I'm postulating a continuation and expansion of the public-private partnerships that have given rise to businesses like Wakenhut. There is no conspiracy necessary to explain the emergence of such partnerships -- it is a direct result of contractual practices and the associated political incentives for porkbarrel. If you want to claim that everytime a smokefilled room's door closes and political deals are cut that is a "conspiracy", then I suppose you can call me a "conspiracy theorist".
Your idea that an existing noncriminalized employee would be reduced in status to a criminal so that his existing employer could exploit him is a paper tiger. I am unimpressed that you knocked it down. The classic job of "license plate manufacturing" wasn't supported by such transformations -- the source of workers were criminals and the "business" was the highly politically connected organization known as the government itself. Expand that to public-private partnerships and you can start to get some perspective.
Seastead this.
Control over a proprietary platform allows a company to control the value of all knowledge related to this platform. This means it can increase its own internal knowledge value and decrease the value of all other companies knowledge by constantly (and needlessly) modifying the platform. The knowledge of people inside the company, who actually design the modifications, will be more valuable then the knowledge of people outside who have to wait for them to be released, and would not be part of their design.
Open source, on the other hand, acts as an equalizer. It is difficult for any group to devalue the knowledge of other groups, since all developement is open. If any improvement to the code is made, it is true the developer will have an advantage; but given that even the design process is open, this advantage would be small.
So there's another incentive for companies to make proprietary software unstable. Besides the usual ones - cheaper and faster development, forcing users to upgrade often - there's a secondary one, devaluating the knowledge of all potentially competing developers.
Call it "knowledge inflation". The company creates more and more knowledge internally, just like a goverment prints more and more money. In both cases, the effect is similar - devaluating it, in effect imposing a tax on anyone without direct access to the printing press.
We all know how well Microsoft played this game... And many are worried that Sun will try to do the same with Java. In fact, every company trying to control a public standard is playing this game.
Sticking with open source is like sticking with a "gold standard" - there's no way someone can devalue it, barring producing a lot more gold - that is, a lot more open source code.
I wonder how far one can push this analogy. Do competeing platforms behave like different currencies? Can one compute an "interest rate
The key to COBRA crap is: You have 60 days from when you get the letter to elect coverage. Just FYI. My HR person (at the job I was leaving) told me how to scam this. I had to wait 90 days for health coverage at my new job (don't ask). She said "look, you won't get the letter for like three weeks anyway, then you have 60 days to decide. So if you get REALLY sick, you can elect COBRA coverage and pay the back premiums." I didn't and was about $300 ahead. NOTE IANAL.
---
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
(I realize this is slightly off-topic, but what the hey...)
:)
The comments in the article body (for lack of a better word) mentioned health benefits as a reason for not leaving a company. The lack of universal health care coverage is one of the reasons I'm rather reluctant to get a job in the States. Sure, as long as you're working you're fine, but if you decide to quit, or are laid off, or are fired then you'd best not get sick. It's a rather scary proposition.
Granted, the diapers, the car payments, and the mortgage are still issues, but you can solve at least one of them by not reproducing, and the other once by cycling
Just my 2 cents.
I guess he took his own advice.
Shaheen writes:
However, job security is a big thing among young programmers these days. Why pay some guy $70k a year, when we can pay the next college grad $50k for the same thing?
Some guy is paid $70K for being an experienced knowledge worker. And by that I mean experienced in the way things are done in the industry. They don't teach you that in college.
"Do you think there are answers to everything here? Is that true in the place you come from?" - Agia
We seem to be living in a culture that rewards switching jobs more highly than staying with the same company. It seems to be much easier to find a higher salary by moving than it is to persuade your employer to pay you close to what you are worth according to the market.
Employers are reducing or dispensing with a lot of the intangiable rewards in jobs (pensions, insurance, etc.) that encouraged people to stay. This starts a vicious circle where the employee leaves and the cost to the employer of replacing them is at least partially recouped by cutting benefits etc. Some are even moving to using contractors (who have less benefits) for a number of permanent internal positions.
There is also the issue that employers will not train their staff because they claim they just change jobs. This leads to employers who rather than training internal staff up to required levels simply hire in the required expertise. This penalises employers who do train their people and also further alienates the existing staff.
This all happens further up the employment tree as well as companies headhunt their required skills. There was however an article somewhere recently that mentioned using headhunters can be a two-edged sword. Once an employee has worked the period necessary to earn the headhunter their fee then the headhunters have been known to start trying to place them all over again.
The fact that there is a new generation who have never experienced an employment environment where loyalty is adequately rewarded will simply exacerpate the situation.
In ten years or so there will probably be a very new employement model that is based more upon some kind of short-term contracts and tele-working (probably controlled/arbitrated by internet mechanisms) that will mean a lot of the knowledge style workers are not employees but resources that a company use when they need them (Website anyone?). I expect someone out there can tell me it already exists.
Gamma Testing - Where testing is extended to the full user community (AKA Shipping the Program)
Being a "knowledge worker" (I just consider myself a smart individual who doesn't mind being paid for thinking) is really the best part about being a geek.
:P
I had a real job (ie. not behind a register) while I was in high school - and that was because I knew computers really well (and was a fledgling programmer). I remember at one point, a lot of the people at the company got pink slips, and all interns would have to go. The coolest part was when my manager quickly called up HR and basically said "I NEED HIM, IDIOTS!" (referring to me).
Wouldn't that just make you feel GOOD? The best thing about being a knowledge worker is that you are needed for more than your typing ability. It is your ability to think analytically about a problem, and come up with a solution faster than the other guy.
However, job security is a big thing among young programmers these days. Why pay some guy $70k a year, when we can pay the next college grad $50k for the same thing? This is where being a good knowledge worker comes in (and it's why I would suggest to anyone thinking about not going to college to cash in on all the tech stuff now to think twice). Your job security is much better when you're the guy behind the desk who isn't just hammering out the code for some guy's design, but you're actually making the design decisions.
Being a knowledge worker should make everyone here feel better. And the better you are at thinking, the even better you should feel.
Imagine what might happen if we all just threatened to leave our employers? I think we'd easily get some pay raises
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
One of the commoner cliches in articles like this is "Hire the young geeks, they've been using computers all their lives, and they really understand what's going on." Guess what? That's also true of many old geeks. Granted, it used to be a lot harder to get computer access -- which means that anybody who spent time geeking was extremely motivated.
I don't buy that software is like languages, learning it young changes your brain. I'm the daughter of a computer-science professor, and I was exposed to computers very young. When I went to college, my doors were blown off by some people who'd first encountered computers at college; they did datasuck faster than I did. What matters is speed of knowledge acquisition, not the age at which it was acquired.
I'm not advocating that young geeks are any less valuable than old geeks; just pointing out that we have different virtues to offer. The old geeks can say "Yes, we tried that back in 1981, and here's what went wrong then"; the young geeks can say "Let's try it this way in 2001, and see if we can do it now."
And, yes, old dogs can learn new tricks. I do it every day.
The Digital Age is not just an age of smart machines but of humans who, through networks, can combine their intelligence, knowledge, and creativity for breakthroughs in the creation of wealth and social development. Just as networking distributes and integrates computer processing - the network becomes the computer - so inter-networking should be able to distribute and integrate human intelligence to achieve a new form of organizational consciousness. The N-Gen may be the first generation to network intellect for problem solving and innovation...
This is something that I have been anticipating since I saw the Internet first begin to expand beyond the academic world and into the mainstream in the early 1990's. The early Internet created a networking of knowledge among researchers that spurred a rapid increase in the pace of technological development throughout the 70's and 80's and continues today. Now the same knowledge sharing enabled by the Internet has spread to the rest of the world.
For the kids growing up today, the Internet is not a novelty, it is their environment. Being immersed in this environment, they accept its inherent properties as natural and subconsciously apply them in their view of the rest of the world. Just as a webpage without hyperlinks is only of limited use, so too is unshared knowledge. In the view of the "N-Generation", everything is connected, and it is this interconnectedness that magnifies the power of any given thing.
This phenomenon of power through knowledge sharing should be quite recognizable to most readers of Slashdot. After all, where would Linux be today if Linus had not shared his ideas with other programmers, and other programmer had not in turn shared their ideas? The entire Open Source movement and its rise to prominence these days is directly attributable to same principle.
It should not come as any surprise then that knowledge sharing will have the same profound effect in changing the nature of business enterprises. As this new generation matures, you can expect to see the same forces being applied to solving social problems.
Knowlege networking has the same synergistic properties as computer networking. Watch over the next decade as people all around the world become part of an enormous Human Beowulf Cluster. It will be quite interesting.
Ideology is for ideots.
But the Net Generation has something far more ominous to face:
With the US prison population growing at phenomenal rates and more of the US population incarcerated than any other leading democracy, privatization of incarceration is increasingly attractive both as a cost-containment measure, and as political porkbarrel. With privatization comes the incentive to work the prisoners to pay for the costs of their incarceration. This comes at a time when we see a major shift in emphasis on "knowledge" as the source of productivity. Therefore after we see prisoners working to pay for the costs of their incarceration, we will next see a natural transition to forms of incarceration that may, increasingly, seem less like incarceration and more like slavery.
This will provide an environment in which employers can make investments in training and then recover those investments.
What? This is utterly outrageous dystopian fantasy?
Think again teenage ubergeek.
There are plenty of incentives to put your sweet young ass permanently in the corrections system.
Seastead this.
This is a new thing in history. Since the dawn of civilization, there have been mass jobs, where many people did similar work under close supervision. That's over. Almost any mass job can today be done better by machinery.
This trend started around 1950, when the first automated auto engine production lines were built. But it was another 25 years before the real squeeze started. In the '70s the auto companies started requiring a high school diploma for new hires. The printing trades (and their unions) were totally destroyed by computer typesetting. Today, manufacturing has only about 16% of the workforce. (Agriculture, over half the workforce a century ago, is below 3%).
Mass work is almost over. Even blue-collar work isn't mass work ay more. Watch a road crew or a building job. You'll see a large number of people, each doing something different. You might see one or two guys with shovels, but you'll very seldom see five; if the job is too big for a few guys, the heavy equipment moves in. Nobody wants bozos on those jobs, least of all the people working them. They're dangerous; the tools are too powerful.
This is the real reason we have homelessness. There's no role left for marginal people. The guy who gets drunk every payday and shows up with a hangover every Monday was tolerated in 1960 auto plants. Today, they're canned, and even the union doesn't object much.
It's a better world for smart people, yes. And there isn't going to be a revolution started by the losers, because they really are losers, not merely oppressed. But it has real problems.
We're gradually pushing up the minimum IQ needed to make a decent living. In 1950, someone with an 80 IQ but a decent work ethic could have a steady job, own a home, and raise a family. That's harder now. Entry level to the good life today is probably around 110 IQ. Here in Silicon Valley, it's probably around 130. Minimum.
That's the real problem with an economy based on "knowledge work". It's out of sync with human biology. Either we rework the economy, rework human biology (quite likely to be an option in a few decades) or see a big class divide. Those are the options.
"Imagine the impact of millions of fresh-thinking, energized youth -armed with the most powerful tools ever created-hitting the work force"
This happens every generation. I don't see what's new.
However, the perception of human resources as capital assets rather than an expense is very important. Those of us with even a limited remit on the commercial side of business know that expense and capital are two very different things. I know that if I could get management to think of people as a capital resource our engineering team at least would be all the better for it.
However, the article seems to think that the entire next generation will be these media-savvy uber-workers. They won't. There will be just as many people working in light industry for minimum wages, just as many short order chefs and just as many petrol station cashiers.
It's only a revolution of the yuppies.
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The hardest part of my job is trying to explain to management what I do. They all know it has something to do with computers, I'm usually the first person they call when problems occur. But the more arcane bits of my job are inexplicable to most of them. It's like magic. Even my direct supervisor is a little hazy about how I spend most of my day (no slashdot jokes please).
And from talking with friends and others, it's the same if not worse elsewhere.
So how can management quantify your value if they don't understand your function? Whose responsiblity is it to understand your function? How can we educate management about our functions?
But what did the author actually say that matters? Here's my breakdown of the article. Consider it the Cliff's Notes (tm) version:
That's my take on it. Now, if I may add my own observations:
Some final thoughts: marketing does not equal product. Hackers do not equal time wasted. Managers are not hackers. Garfield is not Odie. And so on.
Good luck. YMMV, as ever.
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Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.