Slashdot Mirror
Me-Commerce
Long ago and far away, the idea was that stable, long-term employment once meant a bond between employer and employee. You found a good company and worked there, possibly for decades, and the company paid your bills, took care of your health, and saw you into a secure retirement. That didn't always happen, but it was the ideal of the modern industrial age, also know as the pre-Internet era. The system was both secure and paternalistic.
It's also over.
Scholars, technologists and economists have been saying for years now that we're making a transition from an industrial to an information age. Information is becoming the most valuable single commodity in the world, and the Net and the Web are the vehicles bringing more of it to more people at less cost every day.
For tech workers, according to a new study by the CDI Corporation and MIT's Sloan School of Management, new kinds of companies and new technologies like the Net are sparking a reinvention of work, a flexible kind of workplace that the study's authors call "me-commerce."
Their report shows that the number of positions filled by temporary staffing companies expanded from 1.35 million to 3.23 million between l988 and l998 -- the fastest employment growth of any industry sector during that decade.
Today, more than 25% of American workers are part-timers, independent contractors or temps, the authors explain. When contract and on-call work is included, the share of the nation's workforce operating outside traditional, full-time jobs has mushroomed to nearly 30%. In high-tech employment sectors, those numbers run much higher. Only one in three Californians holds a permanent, full-time, day-shift job working on-site.
While this shift may benefit better-educated, high-end professionals in terms of earnings, job flexibility and creative work, skilled workers have a tougher time, the study warns. They face stagnant and declining wages, alienation from their employeers and a less-certain job market.
Over the past several decades, as large amounts of capital, increased competition, new information technologies and new management philosophies and techniques have downsized large companies and created a favorable environment for start-ups, Americans have come to feel less attachment to their employers. High-tech workers don't really seem to mind; they aren't interested in lifetime employment, but creative working environments and good pay.
That suggests the boundaries between the tech and non-tech work forces are becoming more distinct, even as the former grows increasingly influential. If you know computing and technology, work in IT industries, and use the Net and the Web, you're much more likely to enter this new, affluent, mobile workforce. If you don't, you're not -- and you probably won't be nearly as content with the "flexible" work environment you've been thrust into.
The study also reminds us again that parents, educators and politicans ought to be demanding that all their kids have access to the net, rather than obsessing about pornography and pummeling schools and libraries to install blocking software.
New kinds of organizations (the MIT study calls them "guilds") are emerging to look after the needs of increasingly-mobile workers: professional associations, labor unions and staffing companies, as well as new businesses like Web-based talent brokers and headhunters, along with local employers and some government agencies.
This matters particularly because the work practices of the IT sector are setting the patterns for many kinds of work in the future, one of the ways in which the Net is driving profound and largely unacknowledged social change. Silicon Valley and the tech industry are still seen as a culture apart. But the truth is, as high-tech districts sprout all over the country -- Boston, Austin, Minneapolis, Boise, Portland, Denver, San Diego, Silicon Alley in Manhattan -- their work practices are clearly becoming the mainstream.
We're entitled to mixed feelings about whether this is a healthy trend or not. Much-in-demand mobile tech workers think it's great. They have personal freedom, full employment and a kind of rolling job security. But what if the economy were to turn downward? What if companies sharply scale back on innovation and new directions?
And what about the growing social divisions between tech and non-tech workers? Won't the latter become increasingly disconnected and angry as they're pushed into a job market where they earn less, where their job security and opportunity and benefits may evaporate at any time?
The retreat of the traditional firm and the rise of the guilds definitely mark a new phase in the history of work. What nobody knows yet is whether this new flexibility is a great step forward for individualism or another heartless Darwinian profit-making tool of the new corporation. If history is any guide, it's probably a bit of both.
[Note: to read the study yourself, CDI requires registration.]
Not as bad as "GNU". "GNU/Linux", "GNU/Emacs" etc. Does RMS call them "GNU/Turds" when they come out of his ass i wonder?
Eventually, though, the market will mature. The dot-coms that are unrealistic will fail, and companies will find themselves saddled with more IT people than they can use. The firings will begin, and a lot of ITs (and probably a lot of /. readers) will be out on the streets.
My advice: cultivate secondary skills. Being a top-notch Perl programmer is great when it's in demand, but it won't keep you fed if you get tossed out of a job and there's no market for your obsessively-honed skills.
The business cycle is inevitable. The transition to employer's market is not. The [perceived] shortage of IT workers is going to continue. A recession will not necessarily cause temp/contractor/consultant work to dry up, forcing those types to seem permanant positions. In the past, recessions have increased employer's reliance on those types, as they don't want to take on permanent employees they might have to lay off.
The trend towards temp/contractor people is largely generated from employers like yourself, who look for people whose resumes fit ridiculous molds. Example: HR demands Java programmers with 3 years of Java experience. When they don't get anyone at their price, they fall back on contractors. Contractor whorehouses will outfit you with programmers who went to week-long Java seminars. Bad tech managers don't know the difference anyway; and if they do, there's nothing they can do about it because hiring practices are mandated from above.
As an employer, I look for quality people from diverse backgrounds, who don't necessarily want to do exactly what they've been doing for years, who appreciate an employer who overlooks their background or lack of it.
All the people I have hired have been consistent job-hoppers with resume gaps. Why were they job-hoppers? Because employers routinely suck. Because in most places politics is more important than excellence. Because most employers don't think loyalty is a two-way street.
You want loyal employees? Take any group of people and be loyal to them. And honestly loyal, not just lip service. Care about them and their concerns. Make things right. Be up front about everything.
As it is, you may be self-selecting a group of people whose major traits include conformity, an unwillingness to question authority, a lack of ability to assert themselves, an odd approach to keeping their job at all costs, and/or people who have been unable to get other work for some reason. Their "loyalty" may be simple inertia. Good luck!
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Granted, both the article and the study point to a trend in employers becoming more flexible, but to state that the old system "is over" is, as usual, overstating the significance of the trend. The majority of working Americans work a full time job, and believe it or not, are NOT in the tech industry. Information technology is a powerful tool, and will continue to gain importance, but it's not the only game in town. Next time, Jon, after you read the latest "trend" showing anything about the industry, take a deep breath, step back, and get a little perspective. You're starting to sound like Chicken Little.
Don't ever work for me. Really. I'm sorry if other companies have treated you poorly, but not all companies are like that. You should have checked into that before you went to work. If all you do at work is make money, then you are most likely a very poor employee. I'm sorry to be so harsh, but its true.
Engineering and the Ultimate
What's new here is that Katz found a way to tie it to the internet, so maybe he can pad it out to another page or two and sell it to Wired or somebody. On the whole, though, this is one of his better articles, short and to the point.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Wasn't it IBM that was known for no layoffs? And didn't that policy bite the dust big time about 10 years ago?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Only from the "laughing to keep from crying" standpoint. Ain't it amazing that companies these days have to jump through hoops to keep the share price jacked up to please people who want the price high so that they can bail out of the company, because otherwise the company will have to pay a bunch of legal fees and still possibly wind up transferring money that belongs to all the shareholders to some of the shareholders, instead of being able to tend to their knitting and maximize the amount of profits that can be divided up betweeen all the people who buy and hold the stock?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
As any boom in a particular sector is great. We need to understand there is a time when it is going to end. The question is when is the Great IT race going end? I do not see happening in another 10-20 years. I could be wrong. I myself like to always have a Plan B something I can fall back on if something else drys up. For your own sake get a Plan B maybe even a C and D. It allows the peace of mind to not worry about what the future might bring.
Good points, but you forgot the main crippling part of that tax bill: the IRS changed the way it looked at self-employment. Giving the BIG consulting firms the "goods" while screwing MOST if the independents. This had a HUGE effect on the people who were looking to consulting as a career. And allowed, for a while, the BIG firms to dictate prices, policy, and to determine how badly they would abuse their employees.
Yes you too can have an exciting career making buggy whips, saddles, horse brasses and shoes.
Send me $10 and I'll tell you how.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I also work in minneapolis, and try even mentioning unions/labour laws/worker organisation around the suits... everyone clams up and freezes, and *boom* you're out in the cold.
What I really want is a geek Norma Rae.
you could have someone do a companywide system message saying "Strike" or some such. Volunteers?
EOM
ok it's not an acronym. my bad. but whatever the hell it is, i hate it.
BilldaCat
Yeah, seriously. If my friends or myself ever used those terms, it's in a sarcastic joking manner.
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e! e! e!
my last name is Day, so my so-called-friends now call me eDay. I think one of them even made a logo in the ebay style.
They will be first against the wall when the revolution comes.
BilldaCat
For tech workers, according to a new study by the CDI Corporation and MIT's Sloan School of Management, new kinds of companies and new technologies like the Net are sparking a reinvention of work, a flexible kind of workplace that the study's authors call "me-commerce."
me-commerce?
this industry has the most fucking ANNOYING acronyms.
e-this, e-that, i-this, i-that, me-commerce, information superhighway, dot in dot com, jesus christ, THEY ALL SUCK.
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BilldaCat
Hail to the Queen ;)
I got my BS in psychology, found I sucked as a grad student, became a temp/secretary, and worked my way into computing. I kept my eye out and surfed the changes. Now, ironically, my psych degree makes me valuable as a Senior Consultant as I understand people.
All we can do is adapt, I just wish there was more cultural/community/"guild" support for it. Then again, considering how humans develop . . .
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
I'll admit that after the "Hellmouth" series, I got rather fed up with Katz' writings. This, however, is a more rational, sober, and thoughtful article than what we've seen recently, and worth thinking about.
The Industrial Age *IS* over, and that means a lot of concepts, some quite contrived, that went with it. Just as the Industrial Age gave us the idea of standards and mass production, now these tools give us the ability to communicate across large gaps, share information, and work faster and with less localization.
What we have now is the inevitable result - an environment allowing and even encouraging an age of change, communication, and altering arrangements. It's not something we can think of as good or bad - it is here, and it's time to live with it.
One concern Katz doesn't address in this article that should be is that some people on "this side" of the web need to adjust to changes just as those "outside" the web need access. Whole ways of thinking are outdated, and we need the mental tools to cope with the changes.
I'm a programmer and consultant, and most anything I was taught about the workplace turned irrelevant about eight years ago. It wasn't an easy adjustment, even if it was a profitable one.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
Honestly, I have nothing personally against Katz, but it does bother me to see "Features" tagged for 90% of his stories.
Is this a gimmick?
Ever say "No thanks, I have enough RAM"?
Welcome, to the real world.
When you move to a permanent job, it's no longer called being a prostitute. It's called "being a housewife."
Bouncing around from job to job is great when you're young and have no responsibilities other than yourself. As you get older, marry, have kids, jumping jobs becomes much more difficult. I can't just throw my guitar into the back of my Vega and 'move' to the job three states away.
/. crowd is young on average. There's a lot of college people who participate in these discussions. When I was younger, not so long ago, I always had the attitude that I was smart, adaptable, and could find a job anywhere. The same attitude that is exhibited by a lot of post I see here. While I still have the attitude that I can always find work, my exuberance has been tempered over the years. It's not that the work isn't there, it's that I have more criteria for defining 'good job'. Hours and location are much more important than before. Combine that with what most here are looking for, interesting subject matter, and jobs are really hard to find.
I'm not complaining here, just giving a different perspective. When I got out of school (doesn't everyone get their BS when they're 30 now 8*), I was offered a job 2000 miles away. The wife and kids cried for 2 weeks before I gave up and looked for a job 60 miles away. Even that was contentious. Changing jobs is just anything but easy once you build things up around you.
The
My unrequested advice to all here: Keep the future in mind. Try to build stability into your job whenever possible. Corporations have pushed the work ethic towards 'expendable employees', do whatever you can to push it back in the other direction.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
One of the interesting side topics in this kind of concept is that as individuals become valuable, it makes sense for them to attach knowledge and tools to themselves rather than the company that they're working for.
This seems to be running hand-in-hand with open source software, with the software freely available what you really need is an admin to make effective use of it, and these admins, over time, create significant collections of configuration files, perl scripts, architectures and cooperative setups which solve regular problems effectively, patterns in the system/network space.
While these are commonly available if you request them from the right place, ie the mailing list for a given app, some of this knowledge, especially in the higher-orders of multiple application performance configs, are very hard to locate and invariably require some customisation to the problem at hand.
A goodly percentage of the value a company recieves from hiring a competent administrator is their collection, either mental or digital, of configurations and architectures to solve problems.
The question is whether it will turn into a situation where employees turn up at work with a cd of their own IP, heavily tested high performance plug-in configurations and a suite of scripts in order to make themselves more attractive to potential employers, or whether there is a constant flow back to the community, where only at the very bleeding edge are the configs and scripts hard to find, and as technology moves into mainstream so the relevant information to make it work well becomes publically available.
You can't win a fight.
Cultivating secondary skills is a good piece of advice. I suspect that for alot of people, just like me, this IT thing _was_ a secondary skill. I joined the army outa highschool and fixed trucks for four years and got into this IT thing after leaving the army. I see/know alot of english/ business/ physics majors who did IT once they left university; I suspect alot of IT people jumped into IT because there was a good opprotunity and can easily jump out when the market slows down.
Now.. My esteemed advice: The IT sector is very hot right now, and may perhaps cool off. But while it's hot you've got a tremendous opprotunity to make youself fiscally independent. Do you really need that new BMW or super-widescreen HDTV? Save up a wad of cash and pay off all your debt while you are making all this moola, and when/if the IT sector dries up you'll have a nice cushion of cash and no payments to worry about while you figure out what to do next.
-- Greg
Slashdot, would a spell-checker for posting be too much to ask? It's not rocket science!
I've been a temp for the last 10 years. That includes right through the recession of 1993 (remember that?).
Frankly, economic down-turns can be great times for temps. Nobody wants to hire permanently, so temps get lots of work. Similarly at the peak of the wave (like now) there's lots of work. It was when things were ramping up (1998 sucked for work as a temp coder in Boston) that there was no work for temps, because if you weren't willing to go permanent, they didn't want to talk to you.- --
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There are still COBOL programmers out there today. They are laughing all the way to the banks which employ them for obscene hourly rates.
Oh, I agree with your general premise, don't get me wrong. But there is always an element of crap shoot in pursuing any skill. There are less chancy heuristics, but it's still gambling. There are no guarantees.- ---------
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Of course you don't like temps. You're an employer. Temps you have to pay for every single hour they work -- and time-and-a-half over 40hrs, double-time at 60hrs. Salaried employees you can work like slaves, and never pay them an extra dime. Piss off a temp, and they walk. You can piss all over regular employees and they know they have to suck it up or get a black mark on their resume.
Maybe in your reality. Here in Boston, MA, USA, Earth, Sol System, contracting is considered valuable experience, and indicitive of initiative, self-discipline and willingness to take risks. "Stability and level-headedness" are, frankly, not much in demand. The idea of hiding contracting experience is as ludicrous as failing to mention your most important job responsibilities.
And, by the way, I have taken 3 month vacations. It's good to be a temp. :)-
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Let's take a look at the real pay difference. One of the real issues here is that temps/contractors/freelancers are all paid by the hour, while direct employed techs are almost always salaried and overtime exempt.
Let's compare Curt the Contractor and Denis the Directly employed who work side by side on the same job, with the same responsibilities, for BigCo.
Curt is paid $40/hr. This means if BigCo. has Curt there for a year, 40hrs/week, Curt will be paid (40$/hr)x(40hrs/week)x(52weeks), or $83.2k per annum. Of course, this might not happen: Curt doesn't get paid for all company holidays (only the 6 federal ones), and he might want vacation time off. On the other hand, he might work for one of the many agencies which does have vacation pay, might work federal holidays, etc.
So let's say Denis is getting $83.2k per annum salary, the same as Curt would make for working "full time" for a year on the same job as a temp. But Denis is a salaried employee, even though he's not considered a manager, and he's over-time exempt. He regularly winds up having to work 45hrs/week. At first glance, that's (83.2k$/year)/(52w/yr)/(45hrs/wk) = $35.56/hr. But that's not right. If Denis were a wage employee (like Curt), he'd get time-and-a-half for those 5 extra hours -- money he's not getting because he's salaried. So, really, the equation is (83.2k$/year)/(52w/yr)/((40 + (5*1.5))hrs/wk). That comes to $33.68/hr.
Oops, did I say 45hrs? No, poor Denis is regularly working 10hr days, so it's really 50hr weeks. So he's really only making the same as a temp at $29.09/hr.
Let's take a look at one particularly bad week. Denis spent 60hrs on the job. He didn't get paid extra, and his actual wage for that week was $22.86.
And then there was that time Denis had to come in on the weekend, too, to deal with those pesky servers. He logged 65hrs that week. His wage was $20/hr.
If his coworker Curt had worked 65hrs, Curt would have been paid $1600 more than Denis. And remember, the premise of this exercise was that Curt's wage and Denis' salary were set to be equivalent.
Just something to chew on...
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I've been a temp/contractor/freelancer for 10 years.
Temping/contracting is not the same thing as hopping between direct-employment jobs. Many of your concerns above just don't pertain; for instance the travel consideration. Not only do I not have move for jobs, I haven't even had to have a car. This trick, obviously, only works in dense urban areas, but then, that's where this kind of work is most pervalent.
In fact, I find it terribly ironic that you should hold up location and hours as reasons one would prefer permanent direct employment to temping. That's precisely backwards. As a temp, I can negotiate my hours -- I haven't had to show up anywhere before 10am in 4 years and ~15 clients, and I don't work more than 40 hrs in a week unless I want to -- and I'll never be relocated by my employer (you remember relocations, don't you? Back when jobs were scarce, if your boss told you "you're moving to Bismark, ND", you were moving to Bismark, ND?)
My agency offers 401(k), vacation pay and health insurance; they also offer a special program for temps who want to work as close to full-time as possible without going permanent in one job; there's some traing/education bene I've never looked into. It's just like a real job.
The only real concern is the irregularity of cash flow. That puts temps on exactly the same footing as anyone self-employed, from doctors in private practice to your neighborhood plumber.
You don't hear people lamenting that starting a business or striking up a private law practice is a terrible thing to do to your youth, now do you?
Like many career temps, I do so for life-style choices, not for big bux. It allows me much more time off (I only work half to 3/4th time over the course of the year) to pursue my art, travel and studies. I'm not getting rich doing this, but I am getting ahead. And I'm having a lot of fun.
As I am not supporting kids or spouse or (yet) mortgage or car payments, I can afford to do this. You may have or desire those such things -- but that is your life-style choice. And, indeed, those things are expensive enough to force various other life-style choices, such as how one shall work.
But see that for what it is: trade-offs. And the trade-offs each of us should make are dictated by our personal goals and values and circumstances.
Frankly, your advice is fine for the acquisitive soul who wants all the trappings of middle-class success, but for those of us "free spirits" who have other more esoteric goals, from a higher quality of life (I don't want to ever have to work full time) to more self-determination, temping can be an excellent avenue to what we want.- ---
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When the hype dies off and the economy is in the hangover of its all-night eParty, I'll be waiting for the anti-Katz to lead the backlash against all us techo-elitists sitting in our ergonomic "productivity environments" drinking jolt and eating our cake, thinking our wonderful little thoughts about how information wants to be free and how open source will lead to free love and peace on earth. And the anti-Katz will launch into substanceless tirades about how people really want to pull out a wallet, slap down real money, and walk away with a real physical product without the barriers of net access, without being smothered by attempts at a "pleasent shopping experience", or risking malicious "hackers" stealing their "identity". He'll go on about how people want to get a book from the library and read it under a tree, not pay to wait to download a book to read on a blurry portable LCD screen til they go blind. He'll review books in which he'll proclaim the main characters to be the epitomy of the proletariat ethic. Physical products are changing *everything*!
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
You are so right, but this point of view seems to be very much the minority nowadays. Certification is another thing that leads down this path of specialisation. Admittedly the field of IT is so large that it's impossible to know everything, but good advice is to learn the basic principles behind (almost) everything and specialize in a few things and you won't go too far wrong.
I hear you loud and clear. I got my BA in Creative writing, and taught myself HTML as a hobby. Turns out the hobby has become the job, while writing is something I use only once in a while (for profit, that is). But a few years from now I fully expect to be leaving the realm of web design for the role of 'content provider.' Meaning, ok, now all the world is online, you've got a website, why should people come visit you? You need fresh content that changes daily. Enter me. :-)
Change is good...so is knowing you can pay rent and have money left over for food. I guess all we can do is pay attention to the trends and try to adapt.
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
There won't be any /. readers on the streets when the IT downturn arrives, because there won't be a /. then. Rob and Jeff will go back to being losers without money, and will survive for two years by selling all their overpriced tech toys at a tenth of the initial price. The guy who will have won the Slashdot Cruiser will commit suicide by carbone monoxyde inhaling.
JONKATZ (Java Object for News, Konspiracy, and Anticorporate Text Zenning) has once again spit out a useless bit of data, but it does provide a forum for us to discuss things we already know. People kept saying that the old ways were gone and the new internet age was rewriting the manual. Then the stocks crashed and a bunch of startups went under. While I enjoy being in demand and the ability to get another job in the time it takes to sneeze, I haven't yet deluded myself into thinking that this job market will last indefinitely. Even with the ever more frenetic pace of technology, this trend is not the last trend, and it never hurts to keep your bridges clean and maintained. When the Colorado and California Gold Rushes came through, a lot of people got rich, and a lot of towns sprung up and burnt out just as quickly. Just something to remember BEFORE you sign the thirty year mortgage.
Just my 2X10^-2 Dollars (US)
XeoMage
Long ago and far away, the idea was that stable, long-term employment once meant a bond between employer and employee. You found a good company and worked there, possibly for decades, and the company paid your bills, took care of your health, and saw you into a secure retirement. That didn't always happen, but it was the ideal of the modern industrial age, also know as the pre-Internet era. The system was both secure and paternalistic.
This system predates the modern industrial age. It was quite common in medivial europe. It was called serfdom.
Why can't people accept this novel concept "Personal Responsibility". I don't want my employer to "pay my bills". I want them to pay me for my work. I don't want secure, I want to be free. In the long run, free is more secure than paternalistic.
My Weblog
I've seen examples where salaried, full-time employees make roughly half of their contracted counterparts. Granted there are no benefits, but double the salary is hard to ignore.
:-) ) for a company that had employees quit, and then immediately hired them as contractors for twice the price. (This happened multiple times.) That same company approached me to be an employee, and was surprised when I pretty much laughed at them. They just couldn't understand why they could never staff up.
Hell, I've worked (as a contracter
When I first joined the workforce in 1990, I went through about 5 layoff situations in about 2 years, luckily surviving them all.
I wasn't always so lucky, and it just goes to show how worthless the "stability" of employement is. My average tenure as an employee at any one place is a little over a year. My average contract was about two years.
There are reasons to be an employee. "Stability" is not one of them, because employer loyalty is mostly a thing of the past.
It really angers me when I see companies complain about how employees today lack loyalty. I saw a company dump an entire department, six months after saying explicitly that they would not, and then watched as a few months later, saw memos expressing confusion as to why there was so much turnover and obvious lack of loyalty in other departments.
It is stupid of them, really, and your advise is spot on. In the eighties, companies decided that cutting short-term costs was a good reason to cut jobs. "Sorry, it is just a business decision, no hard feelings". In other words, they are in it just for the bottom-line. Remember that as an employee. It is in your best interest to do the same. Work with who suits you. What you owe is labor. What you do not owe is loyalty to people who aren't loyal to you.
(One caveat: one of the few places where you can find employers with some loyalty is in smaller startups. Not they are more stable, after all, they often dump everyone all at once, but hey, they are better than some corporate beancounter cutting your job because he's too ignorant to realize that you do something critical. (That's never happened to me, but it has happened numerous times to people I've worked with!))
Sorry for rambling. I'll shut up now.
The cake is a pie
This means that those of us with bachelors will be able to keep our job as we could be utalized in more than one way. .com or other tech ventures are really going to get hung out to dry if and when the IT boom ends. Econonmics is a cycle and for every boom, there's a recession whether it's sooner or later. People need to not be so concerned with making all their money now and realize that their career is going to be a 30-40 year thing, not 5-10. Preparation for the future is key.
I was courted by several firms to leave college early becuase I was pretty good with TCP/IP, LANs and WANs. However I'm glad that I didn't becuase in the course of my 4-year college career, I got two degrees in Computers and Business. So even if IT takes a downturn, I have my business background to fall back on. But I think that a lot of people my age (20-26) who left college to work at a high-paying
Some people take their .sig way too seriously
Being a well paid freelancer is great, and in most industries it's where the best money is. But in Boston, where I am, most of these temp jobs are just administrative staff. Many companies are converting as much of their non-management office workers to temp jobs as they can, to avoid paying any benefits to employees are aren't rare IT workers. The tech boom has been great for tech people, but I walk around what used to be family neighborhoods and all the families are gone. People in IT pulling in $60k salaries are now a major part of the workforce and population, so they can afford $1500 - $2400 a month for a one bedroom apartment. Meanwhile, people in unskilled and service jobs, who were middle class five years ago, are now being forced out of their apartments and living with five roommates. This trend to a temporary workforce is one of the big factors dissolving the middle class. Long term employment with steady pay and benefits are nessecary to any family that can't cash in on "me-commerce", and wether we look up from /. long enough to notice or not, millions of Americans are struggling while we're getting rich.
This should not surprise anyone. Unions began in the era of large monopolies. There isn't any one company big enough to be called a monopoly employer in the tech business (with the possible exception of Microsoft, and they do not employ a very large fraction of the total tech heads). Today there is no company with the kind of power over employees to set their wages and working conditions with impunity (though I hear that the auto companies have managed to institute a contractor wage cap in Detroit). The conditions for a union are not met; there is no small number of entities to be bargained with.
This will prevent unions from forming. So long as someone can go submit resumes to two other companies down the road and bargain for pay and working conditions with them, there is no need to have pay scales and contract negotiations.
Most tech jobs are not in the processing and manufacturing of devices, which is where the hazardous chemicals are. The tech jobs are mostly design, programming and prototyping. Many suppliers of electronic gear have moved their manufacturing operations to Mexico. They don't do any engineering in Mexico, just the dirty stuff. A person in a tech job can go for years without looking at a wave-solder machine.This is one reason why unionization of tech workers is so unlikely. In the current business climate, long before a company could be unionized all their tech people would have jumped ship for better pay elsewhere; they'd be out of business. If the economy cooled to the point where reduced employee mobility no longer made this a foregone conclusion, the sheer overhead of union pay scales (just WRITING them!), grievance procedures and so forth would overwhelm the company which had a unionized workforce. How do you rate the pay scale of an embedded assembler/C programmer versus a Perl/CGI web-head? Trying to do this while things change so fast is a ticket on the slow train to bankruptcy, while the more flexible, nimble competitors eat the unionized company's dinner.
Things aren't going to change terribly much for a while. Might as well get used to it.
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
The increasing number of technically-trained production workers and manufacturing engineers will be good for Mexico, if they can keep them from emigrating to the US. The economy of Mexico has been kept down by corruption and neglect for so long, it's going to take a long time to catch up. But catch up it will; it all starts with a bunch of people with know-how.
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Now I still feel like a prostitute - just one on salery. They pay me this ..... I do this....
All in how you look at it I guess...
There's a gorilla from Manilla whose a fella that stinks of vanilla and has salmonella.
Temporary work is great in this industry, for now. Or most industries, for that matter. When things start to dry up (probably not very soon in IT, however), things aren't going to be so pretty.
There is a theory out there that the increasing polarization of wealth in the world is due in large part to this phenomena. In high demand fields like this, and other professional, highly skilled areas, people are raking in the cash. In manufacturing, or semi-skilled office work, and others, the outlook often isn't so great, where demand is average and workers are a dime a dozen.
I believe that labor unions are the main reason that the middle class is where it is today. Traditional unions are having a hard time, however, organizing temp workers in most fields. In many cases, they aren't allowed, which is technically illegal, but we know that doesn't stop corporations all the time. I've seen a few projects here in Minneapolis that were put on hold due to te corporation wanting guarantees that unions would not be formed.
Tech compaines are highly profitable, but this is part of the downside. They can get away with WAY too much. This is a significant part of their profitability. Tax breaks, land deals, and union busting/preventing. Since they bring in high paying jobs, they can get away with this (and don't forget the increasing corporate influence in Washington). Environmentally tech companies are bad as well among manufacturers of circuitboards and microelectronics. These industries use some of the worst chemicals you'll find. Take a look at the article earlier. Making companies responsible for what they make when its useful life is over? In the US, that would take an amazing effort to get such a law into place. With such a focus on profits at the expense of everything else, it isn't likely.
`Temporary staffing positions have tripled in the last decade, according to an MIT/CDI study, which suggests IT workpractices are mainstreaming, spreading well beyond Silicon Valley.''
Is it just me or does anyone else fail to see the correlation here? This is like saying ``rabbits eat carrots therefore nanotube technology is booming.''
It says "work practices." as in "the business model upon which IT companies have been based is spreading to the rest of the work force."
Of course, I don't agree that these changes began with IT. I think they began in the early 80's with corporate downsizing.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Does anyone realize that CDI is a contracting company? This seems a little like propaganda. I used to work for them. They are very good at "exclusive" contracts with companies which mean they are the ONLY supplier for talent. Although I was offered health care and 401(k), the cost was extremely high. I didn't get paid holidays for 6 months and forget about paid vacation time. There was a certain freedom, but unless you have a good company, it can make things more difficult. I have taken a lot of contracting jobs and I am glad the opportunity exists, but being able to directly negotiate - instead of relying on some hack from a consulting firm - has some incredible advantages.
I don't know about IBM, but I started working for HP in 1979, and in the Working at HP class they said that Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard had had experience with government contractors who laid off at the end of the project. They then vowed to avoid layoffs as much as possible. (AFAIK, with success for several decades.)
When HP held a round of VSI [Voluntary Severence Incentives], they used a lot of weaseling to say, "Well, we never guaranteed no layoffs". The first round of these hit about 10 years ago. This was also the time when temps really started getting used heavily.
Actually, the severence package was financially pretty good, as was the case a few years ago when they did it again. I was offered, but declined, and kept my job.
IBM may have had such a policy, but I know that HP had a tradition--not an official policy--when I hired in. Of course, with the new HP, tradition seems to be worth zip. This is in keeping with the trends started one CEO ago, Lew "Why manufacture anything?" Platt.
Agreed with the "Huh?". Before HP split into Agilent-and-HP, the proud boast that HP made "We don't lay off" was getting nibbled at for years. By 1990, the boast had to be modified to "We don't lay off permanent workers--temps don't count."
My division is/was semiconductors, one of the more notoriously cyclical industries around. Not that top management remembered this--we'd build up for the boom, business would crash, and we'd transfer people out. Come the next boom, we'd be unprepared. Again and again.
Eventually, middle management convined the Powers That Be to hire temp workers in the "less skilled" positions. Given a long enough boom, these temps would find permanent positions, either within the company, or would strike out for greener pa$tures.
At a rough guess, we were doing this bigtime starting in 1985. For the long term folks, it meant that come a crash, we didn't get the 4.5 day workweek, but it did mean that we had to spend a lot of time training the 'less skilled' people and providing continuity when someone got fed up and left. Didn't help that HP felt that contractors & temps didn't deserve to attend parties or picnics.
OTOH, Agilent seems a little more fair to temps, and we've had a bit of luck reattracting the alumni, usually to permanent jobs. I don't know the situation in HP anymore.
Is that an issue for contractors? I've been quite able to sell my skills as a contractor without providing any sort of month-by-month accounting. Code talks a lot louder than "What I Did For Summer Break."
And now that I have moved on to other things, I can't imagine asking it of a contractor. When I hire a contractor, I want to know what (s)he can do, not who and when they've done it for somebody else. It's up to them to them to choose how to demonstrate that. If they're any good, they'll make their skills obvious. And if I don't like that, it will probably be my problem in the end, not theirs.
Is what an excuse? Is the fact that a company will stab any employee in the back an excuse for the employee to be rude on the way out?... Yes!
It basically means that you work at the will of your employer. Essentially what it boils down to, is they can fire you for anything that doesn't violate your civil rights. For example, they can fire you for have the wrong color car.
I'm not sure if it's exclusive to Michigan, but it is a reflection of corporate america's stranglehold on government policy.
...if for nothing more than a stock price increase.
I'm of the opinion that nobody is reponsible for your happiness then yourself. And if you don't like your job, find your ass another one.
Personally, I don't give 2 week notices, or any of that bullshit. If I got fired, do you really think they'd give me 2 weeks to find a new job? No. And who cares about references anymore? Most places will give you a BAD reference in order to keep you working there.
I've only quit a total of two jobs, the first I gave 2 weeks notice, and was told to leave 4 days later (after telling my new employer it would be 2 weeks before I could start). Once the company found someone new, there was no need for me.
So I pretty much promised myself it wouldn't happen again. And the second time, when I got the phone call that I was hired, the very next day I brought a cardboard box, packed my things, and said good-bye on the way out.
But maybe that's just because in Michigan everybody is an at-will employee (except if you're contracted). And you can quit/be fired any time and for just about any reason (exclusions would be Fair Employment Act, etc.).
If I were to give any advice to someone coming out of school looking for work, is that you need to take a mercenary approach to things. You are there to do a job, and you expect to get paid for the work you do. You're police to coworkers, not to companies.
Hmm, I'm the CFO of a company, and we are trying to show maximum gross operating profits so that our shareholders are happy. All that matters is the gross profits.
I can hire a full-time employee at $60k/yr (I'm using Boston entry level salaries), or spend $60k on a contractor for 3 months. If it is a one-shot need, it is a wash. If I constantly need the contractor, I pay four times as much, right?
Well, not exactly. With the full-timer, I need to pay for them to keep their skills up to date, $15k/year (either classes or their learning time), soc. sec. tak, $5k/yr, benefits, say $25k/year, now I'm up to 105K/yr for the full-timer, 240K/yr for the contractor.
With the contractor, I record it as a one time expense. It affects my bottom line, but not my gross operating profit which is more interesting to investors. After all, from a business fundamental point, operating profits SHOULD matter more, unless games like this are payed.
If the business needs change, I have to lay-off full-timers, with severance, my unemployment insurance costs increase, etc. I also get my corporate name in the paper for lay-offs, etc. I record big restructuring costs while Wall Street plays wait and see.
With the contractors, I can increase labor in the short term (theoretically true in all labor, but the modern reality is that full-time help is a short-term fixed cost) and adjust to the market. With full-timers, I need to project out 2-3 years.
So, do I take a hit against "profits" to increase "net profits" or do I sacrifice net for gross?
I guess it depends what my cashflow expectancies and my ability to make aquisitions with a high stock price....
A dollar is not a dollar... what column does it go in?
Do I authorize the IT Staff to increase numbers, or do I allocate a one-time cost to get the short-term needs handled.
I know my company is using contractors and part-timers to avoid having to project our cash situation in 6-12 months which depends on financing which is variable... but YMMV.
Alex
But in Gibson's world the corporations had government-like powers. At the moment, public servants don't really go job-hopping (well, maybe within the same department) unless they're political appointments. Plus, in the books corporations are like violent dictatorship-style governments, unlike what we have now.
When M$ (or Sun, or Cisco, or General Motors, or any of the other mega-corps out there) actually demonstrates via trials or whatever that they have more power than the government, then it's time to worry...
Dave
Would William Gibson say?
In the Neuromancer trilogy he saw the top scientists (easily expanded to engineers, programmers, etc.) of the not-so-distant future belonging to one company which would give them security in exchange for their life's work.
He updated his version of cyberspace to include "clicking" in 1999's _All Tommorrow's Parties_.
I wanna know if Gibson is ready to revise his vision of the employer/researcher relationship yet.
wunderhorn
Karma: Bored. (Thinking about resurrecting the "Anyone else is an imposter" joke.)
The largest employer in the US is Manpower. They passed General Motors some years back.
but is it really an excuse to be horribly rude?
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
[o]_O
you're too good to have to stoop to their level. Remember: "Image is something, but wellbeing and dignity are things to show yourself." (Brillohead)
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
[o]_O
Can we have a "stating the bleedin' obvious" department here, too? This isn't worth a long answer. Yes, it's right. Yes, MIT may have just produced a report saying it's so. No, it's not news - this has been the case for the last decade. If MIT released a study showing that the sky was blue, anyone think Jon would be posting links to that too, saying it's hot, happening news?
Grab.
In the UK it was social laws that pushed the employers to rely on contractors, so a lot of people started contracting and pushed the prices up. Still is cheaper for the employer than to pay all the social benefits for a full-timer, and as contracor you get paid extra hours in premium rates. But that was news in early 1990's. Now the trend has even reversed in some cases where employers start to err.. care about employees and what their aspiration? Still, a few job search engine here and there will show you the pros of contracting ($/h)
:> No offense, just a feedback.
John K., have you ever worked for a living? You remind me of a "journalist" called Tristan Louis who was in my class. You two share the same writting style. Look for him on the Net, see what people say about him
The thing is, it is the employers themselves that are causing this to happen. They determine what style of worker will work for them. I've seen examples where salaried, full-time employees make roughly half of their contracted counterparts. Granted there are no benefits, but double the salary is hard to ignore.
When I first joined the workforce in 1990, I went through about 5 layoff situations in about 2 years, luckily surviving them all. That process didn't make me want to dedicate my life to this company. Once you realize that a company simply sees you as a commodity you begin to put your own situation first and if there are better offers somewhere else, take them. Loyalty is a thing of the past between employer and employee. It is a fickle relationship determined by one's salary. If you can get more elsewhere, you go there. If you can't, you stay. Same with the employer. If they can get someone just as good for less, say goodbye. Don't feel bad about it, just realize it and plan your career accordingly. Of course I am generalizing, but this has been consistent with my experiences.
Praying for the end of your wide-awake nightmare.
I really like your articles, but since when did you start using Word (or WordPerfect) to write? I ask because all of your single quotes are escaping into strange Kanji codes.
Please run the demoronizer (or in /usr/ports/www/demoroniser) on your text before submitting. I know, the LA Times and others have the same problems, but I didn't expect to see this kind of non-standard character usage here on /..
Off topic, but needs to be said.
There is an expression to describe the reason for behaving like that: "Efficiency Wars".
If a company does not "perform" in a way some "influential Wall Street analysts" expect, stock tumbles, shareholders' lawyers start preying on the company, and the upper management group is replaced with others (and the company announces layoffs to appease the Wall Street).
And here comes the cynical part: employees LOOK LIKE a HIGHEST COST. No one cares that the contractors-built system might fall apart or be a total mess that no one has knowledge of (even though it is not true most of the time). What is important, you can always tell a contractor that you don't need him as of Monday. And you don't owe him anything. He costs you not so much more while you need him, but IT COST YOU NOTHING TO GET RID OF HIM! This is why they are "allowed" to get more money at the expense of job security.
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
Do you know why ???
:-(
Fscking colleges save tons of money on that. My father works in the community college as a temp instructor. He has compared the temp and permanent conditions of work, and it is a real rip-off.
Permanent instructors cost a college about 4 times more than temps. This is because in academia teaching classes is the only minor part of the time; so, hourly paid instructors are paid for just 10 to 14 hours a week, even though they need to spend much more to prepare to the lessons and score the students' work.
Also, colleges "owe" sabbaticals to the permanent professors, and this is on top of all other benefits including long vacations and so on.
This makes the decision of screwing staff a no-brainer
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
Nice piece, would rather have Jon write another book and let someone like Roblimo do these stories. Ok, time to get JonKatzified...
click here to incinerate homeless people
``Temporary staffing positions have tripled in the last decade, according to an MIT/CDI study, which suggests IT workpractices are mainstreaming, spreading well beyond Silicon Valley.''
Is it just me or does anyone else fail to see the correlation here? This is like saying ``rabbits eat carrots therefore nanotube technology is booming.''
Personally I think it's kinda obvious that IT positions are spreading beyond the Silicon Valley. It's called the ``internet''. Perhaps more temporary staffing positions are being used because more and more postions are being opened up and there's not enough qualified people to fill them. Either that or the companies are to cheap to pay qualified people. In either case we're just watching our field evolve.
IMHO, it would be interesting to hop from job to job . . . it would keep things interesting. That is, as long as there are jobs to go to. Could be for the better, could be for the worse. Only time will tell.
``We are the people our parents warned us about.''
sulli
sulli
RTFJ.
I guess it's a balancing act, like everything. But I learned much more per day as a contractor than I have as a full-time employee.
sulli
sulli
RTFJ.
These days Microsoft is famous for no or few layoffs, but if Win2K and/or .NET severely tank, you may see a different scene. They have, however, been smart enough not to boast excessively about it.
sulli
sulli
RTFJ.
Hmmm... so we're moving post-industrial, are we? Well, since we're all moving into information technology, we don't need anyone to build cars, or manufacture computers, or dig ore out of the ground, or sew clothing, or pave streets or... You get the picture, I'm sure. Information is a valuable commodity; it *isn't* the be-all, end-all of economics, though. Microsoft is a seminal example of a company that abuses temporary workers, high-tech and otherwise. These are the file clerks, secretaries, tech writers, and that keep the giant corporation running. And for those of use with families and kids, benefits and security *do* mean something.
All about me
Can someone enlighten me as to why Mr. Katz keeps posting these annoyingly obvious rehashes of stuff we already know ? I just don't see the point in trying to remind us of what we already know. Is this how he trolls for input with which he will write his next book ? Asking the geek collective to think in his place ?
No thanks. I get used enough already by my S.O. =)
-Billco, Fnarg.com
For those like Jon who don't know, temp agencies have been around since the turn of the century (twentieth, not twenty-first), mostly dealing in secretarial and clerical services. The bulk of the film industry has been independent contractors, and temp employees since the sixties. Design engineers have been working on a consultant basis since the time of Edison. The boon of computer consultants began in the eighties as more and more businesses switched their accounting systems over to computers, as there was little off the shelf software that fit their specific needs, but permanent full time programmers could not be economically justified.
The sudden growth of Corporate use of temp services in the 90's, is simply the 90's version of the gutting of middle management in the 80's, and has very little to do with the influence of the IT community. There are a lot of economic advantages in using temp services. Temp agencies can provide large numbers of prescreened, skilled workers in a short period time, so it is very easy to scale up to a new project, or react to a sudden market demand. There are none of the usual problems associated with early termination, so it is very to scale back from a project. In the overall scheme of things, temps can be less expensive than perms, no benefits, no vacations, no sick leave, no maternity leave, no raises, no reviews, little or no training, less accounting head aches (the temp agency deals with taxes, SDI, unemployment insurance). I'm not saying it's right, but it's good business.
I don't think we have to worry about this predicted future. I think some well meaning politician will regulate us before then. Look at the accounting profession. It was regulated because accounting is seen as vital to maintaining the financial well-being of the nations industries. Could it possibly be argues that computers are not vital? So how long before the government decides we need to be protected? Don't think it sounds like too bad of an idea? Have you ever read a FASB(Financial Accounting Standards Board) ruling? Amazingly boring. What the scares the hell out of me is the the government will pressure programmers into joining such organizations without outright regulation, the way accountants and doctors are regulated by professional organizations. "Programing is so vital to our economy that we need to make sure certain standards and rules are followed", they will say. I used to work as an accountant and there is nothing more boring. On one hand standards and governing rules make sence. On the other hand they make work/life as boring as can be and they make workers highly replacable. Safe vs. a life of boring work. Accounting is now a 5 year degree and it pays nothing. Or at least next to nothing. And there is no career growth. I think this is our future.
Prior to 1986 only half of long term capital gains were taxed. All of short term gains were taxed. In this climate people had a good reason to hang onto stock for 6-12 months or longer. With the change in the tax code people began to think only in the short term. There was zero incentive to consider the age of a stock. Hence the birth of the day trading mentality.
The other thing this did was force companies to think short term. Now they were forced by the stock holders to only worry about what the next quarter's numbers would be. With this mentality the concept of laying off people and hiring back at a rapid rate began to take hold. Now you could tweak the numbers just by getting rid of people and bringing them back later as consultants.
The problem with this was that "laying off" took away all the stigma of being "fired". When an employee could say that they had been "laid off" and no one took it as a bad thing, management lost huge leverage in the fight to get more from people. Now managers could dump people without worrying about ruining their lives and people didn't care. How many of use remember managers saying something like "You'd better get your butt in gear or your outta here." Now the answer would be, "So what."
The fear was gone.
As I've learned when talking with other employers, some people (potential employees) have caught on to this and have started leaving "gaps" in their resumes to hide it. Either way, their resume immediately gets tossed. If they do make it into an interview, they are grilled about the "missing" time. Ususally, it is some bullsh*t like, "Oh, I took a vacation for three months."
Job-jumping doesn't simply occur because of the greed to move from higher-paying job to higher-paying job. It also happens when jobs simply do not work out for various reasons, for either the employee or employer. People do indeed leave jobs because of poor work conditions and/or overbearing bosses. Think about it...carefully.
At any rate, most people do what's in their own best interests, whether it's for money or for self-esteem. On top of that, people make mistakes, and the easiest mistake to make is selecting an employer you thought operated one way, but really operates differently.
Steve Magruder
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
Don't find a job in the USA, found a business at home for yourself and never sell out, keep your land. There is nothing here but a completely messed up way of thinking about the meaning of freedom. Not worth getting bothered with, it's too outrageously fake, stupidly twisted and apparently inate to the way this country was founded. US has a UNIQUE history of coming into being, which is different from any other nation on the world. That is why you find a completely different mindset concerning fight for survival, competition, risk taking, human rights and individual responsibility. They figure everything out here, just not how to live.
High-tech workers don't really seem to mind; they aren't interested in lifetime employment, but creative working environments and good pay.
I've met very few people, tech or non-tech, who weren't interested in a creative working environment and high pay.
That suggests the boundaries between the tech and non-tech work forces are becoming more distinct, even as the former grows increasingly influential.
I'm very confused. If tech is influencing non-tech, then how can they be increasingly distinct?
Has concept of what employment means changed? Yes. Did the tech community influence this change? Yes. Does this mean that that society is polarized on technological lines? Not really. I see it as (in this case, anyway) techs are on the first wave of changes, which then filter through into a more mainstream approach.
I mean, even non-technical people are changing jobs frequently, working on a contract basis, etc. Like my father-in-law. He worked as a comptroller for the same company for years. The company went under, and now he's a contractor for payroll, taxes, etc.
We're in the middle of changes right now. I don't think it's fair to make sweeping statements about how things have polarized until things settle down.
I can spell. I just can't type.
This is of course an obvious find, but the implications relate highly to previous /. discussions. If and when the IT field becomes saturated and we lose this job-seekers market the people that won't get fired are the ones qualified to more than just perl, or java, or whatever or chosen specialty may be. This means that those of us with bachelors will be able to keep our job as we could be utalized in more than one way.
Hey I like Jon Katz, but for all his ranting about the benefits of the internet and blundering publishing neanderthals who don't like to link and make their works interactive, he never link when it's a good idea to do so. I wouldn't have minded some links to these guilds he's talking about. netslave
document.test.visibility
I ain't got time for the jibba-jabba! I need work! I ain't gettin on no plane!
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Moderators: I've got tons of accounts, do your worst.