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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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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