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Dot-com Unhealth Benefits Other Industries
Ant wrote to us with a story from ZD talking about the flow of engineers back from the .com industry to, for many, whence they came. It's interesting to read, because I do know a number of people who left the defense industry to join in the Internet industry - but they've all stayed in the Internet industry.
<I>As a worker in a pretty stable dot com (actually, the online arm of a media group)</I>
Actually... you're not working for a dotcom, then... No other businesses. You work at the online arm of a media company.
There's the difference right there.
No one's predicting that the internet and business across the internet is fading away. Just that the internet "pure plays" of the last years' times are up. You don't work for one, so you're fairly isolated from what's occuring...
I've been in my current job about 5 years - it's at a much different AT&T than the stuffy phone company, and unfortunately a year or so ago we managed to convince Wall Street to think of us as a high-tech company rather than a blue-chip, and rode the crash&burn of the high-tech industry stocks instead of the annoying 10% slide of the blue-chips :-)
And we're finally seeing resumes from people who left for the dot-com business interested in coming back - though that's more common in sales, where most people are more mobile than the technology side.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
There's an obvious reason for all the programmers from India. Yes, they have a rigorous educational system, but...
In the US, there are far more lucrative careers in other fields: law, medicine, investment banking, business in general. More importantly, in those fields you can stay until retirement, unlike tech, where your career life expectancy is about the same as a professional baseball player. So lots of smart people do the math, look out for number one, and walk away from science, technology, and engineering.
But an Indian lawyer who comes here can only hope to drive a taxi. And an Indian doctor has to retrain for several years before being allowed to practise. On the other hand, Indian programmers can come here and work in their field right away. Exploited H1-B by our standards, but the envy of all the folks back home. High prestige and big bucks, everyone wants their daughter to have an arranged marriage with a programmer in America.
People go into software in India for the same reason that they go into law in the US, which is the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks. That's where the money is.
Yes, there's people who program for the sheer joy of it... but they're the least likely to last in a corporate environment with either their job or their enthusiasm intact. And there's not enough of them to go around.
My credentials for this post: I've worked for a few defense contractors, both as a programmer and a sysadmin.
Friend, that's because you (the collective "you" of the defense industry) don't pay worth shit. You don't let us use the tools that we want because 80% of you are retired military and therefore are both clueless and scared about free-speech software. And, most damning of all...
Every design decision is purely political. We all know that lots of decisions are political, in every computer industry subfield (games, OSes, browsers, tools, whatever). That's unfortunate, but inevitable and expected. But the defense computing industry... shiver me timbers! Technical considerations get about halfway up the ladder, and then they *all* get trampled by the Good 'Ol Boy system. It's rampant. It's like no other part of the computer industry.
It's unbelievably disheartening, watching projects get utterly horked over and over due to nontechnical concerns. It makes Dilbert look like a great place to work. The few skilled coders I know that have remained in the defense industry all A) have no military background, and B) are spinning off into more commercial groups. Everybody else has left, and all of them cited low pay and head-stuck-up-ass management.
Again, nothing against you personally, Courageous, but I seriously hope you aren't surprised with the quality of your applicants.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
I work as a database programmer but I've never once had anyone ask me to write out pseudocode on how a SQL parser works.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
The thing is that at Andersen, they made a policy that if you ditch for a dotcom, you're not allowed back when the dotcom fails! Companies like them knew that there'd be problems such as now, can't say they didn't warn ya...
Mike Roberto
- GAIM: MicroBerto
Berto
I work in the defense industry and also happen to conduct quite a few interviews. I'm not seeing this "dot.com" flight that's being reported here, really, or if I am, it's only the worst who are fleeing. The overall caliber of all our job applicants is really very low in any case. It's quite dismaying.
The old boy network is in effect at most defense jobs. Folks gain their position based on their rank in the military. Look at most defense companies org chart and you'll almost never find a major in a position above a general.
Having spent the past 16 years at a defense contractor, I feel qualified to comment here.
I haven't seen that seniority thing. I do know that most of the higher brass are higher up in the org chart because it makes it easier to get contracts!
In my experience, the ex-military who are hired for their military experience that don't go into management generally are hired as systems engineering. They define requirements. Remember, they're the ones who used this stuff recently, so they know what the customer wants or doesn't want. They know doctrine, and what portions of it the Army is willing to change for the advantages of digitization and decentralizaton.
And, to be honest, the (currently serving) military officers have been some of the most clueful customers I have ever dealt with. Much more clueful than the typical customer I hear about here.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Hmmmm....my experience (from startups in teh software field, NOT startups in the dot-bomb field) is that the opposite is true in project management. I've found that most startups suffer from a complete lack of project management, so no one really knows what everyone is working on.
What happened to the dot-coms is what happens in every gold rush; the vast majority of the pioneers get screwed, and the next generation of settlers comes in and makes themselves at home.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
The information industry partly feeds the internal demands of the computer industry, but to a large extent the dot-com boom has come from transforming business models and business relationships through increased communications and increased information storage and processing capabilities, and through building user interfaces to make it easier for people to use the increasingly affordable hardware. Face it, doing business in the paper-pushing world was unnecessarily difficult, and we're making that simpler and faster (though also making it simpler and faster to generate unnecessary paper, and making that paper or web-equivalent flashier and more decorative without necessarily being more useful - the parts of our business that are essentially the entertainment industry are remarkably pervasive
Some of the failures of the dot-coms are from unreasonably optimistic expectations about our ability to transform other industries (especially transforming them from the outside by people who don't understand them), and the usual failures due to the difficulties of fast, cheap, good (choose all three at once) execution of business models. And some are due to the entertainment-business nature of much of our industry - sometimes you succeed, sometimes you flop, and sometimes you end up as a waiter while trying to get the next performing gig. (Unfortunately, Silicon Valley rents are way too high to hang out on a waiter's salary, though tech-support and sysadmin are similar job niches for many people.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I worked at a dot-gone that is now struggling and is on the verge of collapse, one round of layoffs down and another soon to come (so I hear).
I left on my own accord and took a position at a
manufacturing based company that has been in business for a while.
Having this perspective, I can say that the biggest problem for ex-dot commers is going to be that of corporate culture.
The dot-gone corporate culture is grounded in excess; avante-guard offices and furnishings, silly toys for the employees, and excessive 'project management' meddling. The dot-gone I worked for had more project managers than people actually creating shit, and they had a blank check to write for any flight of fantasy that suited them. We spent more time in meetings with these people and it was apparent they were hired in the "grow like mad" phases of venture funding without much regard for their resumes. These people had to justify their own existence and did it in very frivolous ways. They also tended to surround themselves with hires they knew would be good patsies. So we had a ton of these "uber-geek" web developers and shticky e-commerce hucksters running around; people whose
resumes were buzz words pasted together out of Wired and were never verified for authenticity. It was disgusting, it was like romper room, so I left.
My company now has no beer bashes, no pool tables, no Ikea furnished offices and thank God, no project managers. And I am getting more done and learning more than I ever did in dot-com playland. Fortunately the things I put on my resume I can back up in an interview. But many of these people are going to have a heck of a time ahead of them because unless they can back up their "experience" with solid fundamentals, the time spent at dot-coms is going to be a VOID on their resumes that traditional employers are going to be very skeptical of.
The recent bursting of the dot-com bubble has very little to do with whether the economy is service- or manufacturing- based. The "comeback" of traditional manufacturing companies and utilities is a stock market phenomenon, and is simply a conservative investment response to uncertainty in the tech sector. It doesn't represent any kind of long term shift in the economy. Ultimately, what the stock market does, does not actually decide what happens in the economy anyway. The recent dot-com collapse proves this: the stock market attempted, in effect, to jumpstart a new industry by pumping money into it, and although it succeeded to a degree, at some point the reality of what customers actually do with their money had to take over.
Saying that manufacturing "is a more solid and sensible base" misses the point. A service economy necessarily has a base that includes manufacturing, food production, etc.
The simple fact is that dotcoms are merely margin tight vehicles for the distribution of manfactured goods.
You have an obvious strong bias towards manufacturing, but I don't think it reflects reality. You're talking about a subset of the business-to-consumer websites as though it represents the entire market. What about financial services, including banking, share trading, and insurance? What about business-to-business services, which, buzzwords and fads aside, are already big and growing bigger?
They are a symptom of the volatile worldview on Wall Street.
You got that right. One thing you can safely say about investors as a whole: they overreact, to both good news and bad news. Entire successful trading strategies have been built on this fact. But I have news for you: your message represents a fairly typical overreaction of the exact kind that drives people to buy manufacturing stocks in times like these. They then drive the price up beyond what the fundamentals of the companies can support, and soon enough, you'll be reading about how manufacturing stocks are slumping.
- "AUT 212
Advanced Electronic Transmission Diagnosis
(Prerequisite/Corequisite: AUT 210) Introduces automatic transmission hydraulic/ mechanical and
electronic diagnosis and repair. Topics include electronically controlled automatic transmission, automatic
transmission electrical and electronic problem diagnosis and repair. Contact hours: Class - 2, Lab - 3.
Credit hours: 3."
Note the similarity to a Microsoft MCSE program.This is really bad news for us technology professionals. All of the PHBs are going to be reading propaganda like this for a while to come now and all the hard work we have done as individualists to get employers to respect us through our rare skills will come back to haunt us. The tyrannical bosses will decide that all that turnover was just a fad and they really didn't have to treat IT pros with respect and fairness.
Back to the industrial age for us all as the people who left to get fair treatment lose thier backbones and crawl back to the PHBs to beg for thier old jobs at entry level pay.
We should have banned together when we could have rivaled the ITAA and other corporate interests by joining our resources for our benefit as a group of professionals. We should have formed a guild, (not a union) to pay off polititians to counter the industry and to make our opinions heard.
Is it too late? I don't know... I suppose it depnds on how long it takes most of us to realize how much this could damage us as a group of employees and how bad it can get if we refuse to do something...
"When people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called 'the People's Stick'." -Bakunin
The typical ex-DOTCOM resume I see reads like this:
- Degree in some watered-down lame-ass field like MIS
- 6 Months at GEOCITIES, and the get laid off
- 3 Months at NETSCAPES, and the laid off
- 6 months at iVillage
-6 months at "Women.com"
etc. Then they claim to have 3 years experience! BUT THEY NEVER ACTUALLY DID ANYTHING. Never shipped a product, never worked through a product cycle from beginning to end, and everything they were associated with FAILED.
may be a bit premature. Sure there's a down-turn. It can happen in any industry. It's happened in the defense industry too. But there were few predictions of the demise of the defense industry. Dot-commerce is relatively new, and there's bound to be a shakeout as the shine wears off and it becomes just another way of doing business. But it's not dead and buried.
If the defense industry needs more computer-savvy employees, it had better push for better educations programs to train them. Relying on dot-com layoffs won't cut it.
Yeah, some companies have reset the option strike prices, but ther's big debate that this must, even though it sometimes isn't, hit the bottom line as a charge to profits.
I've talked with too many people this last few years, each well pleased with their options, many of whom I soon discovered did not really understand what an option was, or that they may have traded some hard cash salary for their paper.
Just another example of bad money driving out the good (engineers from dot-coms)?
an after thought - it may be also that, in order to keep accounting liabilities low, dot-coms have only signed short contracts, even with their most valuable staff. That would leave many freer to leave than might otherwise be the case.
having worked for 3 years in the defense industry (right out of college, into the secret world of software development), I will never go back.
:)
The main reason is that the environment is very restrictive. I ran about 70 sun systems (E5500's, 4500's, etc. ) and was in a constant battle with the security folks. Want to put ssh on the system to ditch *rsh apps? Fill out this paperwork, file it, wait 6 months, resubmit for further disapproval.
Want to upgrade the version of perl on the system to fix a bug or two? Dont even think about downloading the source code and recompiling. It must be purchased from a vendor, otherwise it might have back doors in it. Lets not even talk about using any other 'free' software.
The folks in charge of the system security generally do not understand how the various parts of a computer interact and what is a security risk and what is totally benign.
But what has to be the largest source of frustration is working with former military officers who were taught that an officer is trained to take on any task whatsoever and thus they are qualified to do anything just because they were an officer. I'd rather work with a bunch of PhD's (did that in college).
The old boy network is in effect at most defense jobs. Folks gain their position based on their rank in the military. Look at most defense companies org chart and you'll almost never find a major in a position above a general.
But anyway, my current job pays better and I get to work from home