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IT Growth: Exponential No More
BreadMan writes "The Economist has has an article about growth in the IT industry coming off a period of unsustainable growth. Compares IT to growth industries of the past like railroads and automobiles."
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I already knew the edge is coming off technology growth. I wasn't getting paid by my previous employer, and he still owes me about $100 and the title to a moped he gave me in place of $100 pay. This sucks, since it's true and getting worse. I'm only half a year from getting my CCNA and now it seems that's the ONLY way i'm even going to get an entry job, whereas just last year, CCNA was a much desired certification. Sucky.
I got nothin'.
Then maybe the growth was a log function, or sigmoidal.
But most journalists couldn't care about growth models. To them, anything that is "big" or "fast" is considered exponential.
I suggest you read Slashdot
You mean this powerpoint course I just took won't make me a millionaire?
Why didn't anybody tell me that you actually need some useful skills to be happily employed in this industry?!
The Economist published the same thing during the peak of the boom (late 90's) saying it was going to end and had a chart of overlaping curve of railroad automobile blah.
The chart was of the derivitaves of total size (a chart of growth) so they looked like bell curves, or maybe upside down purabalas<sp> and not S's but I have a distinct memory because it was at that moment I realized that if I took CS in college I would be getting out just as the job market was impossible (this year).
Not that I wanted to go to college anyway.
I guess it just shows that the use of the past in economics is very effective for predicting the future (better then the weather anyway).
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
The article talks about IT in terms of HARDWARE - Moore's Law - i.e. the doubling of processor speed every two years.
A neat graph shows the typical lifecycle of any technology from 'irruption' (sic) through to 'maturity', closely followed by the 'next great surge'
LINUX - THE NEXT GREAT SURGE !
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
What bothers me is that they assume that "IT" is one technology. In fact it is several, and I'd assume that most of them have not been discovered. It's not that long ago when Internet wasn't in the radar of The Economist reporters...
\Ir*rup"tion\, n. [L. irruptio: cf. F. irruption. See Irrupted.] 1. A bursting in; a sudden, violent rushing into a place; as, irruptions of the sea.
People can only view so much porn..
Are you still reading this?
Yes I am. In fact, I'm going to read it all over again.
Yes it's back to slide rule for you. Computers just didn't work out, so now we're just going to give up on them entierly.
Whatever, the world will continue to cram computers into more and more random devices and network them all together. Can your tivo talk to your cell phone? It should, and I'm sure one day it will. And all along the way there will be companies doing such things, making a lot of money in the process.
So don't give up on the IT market just because you can no longer find a job as a Novell admin anymore.
Chin up slashdoters.
-makoffee
I can not count the times I've talked to people who have either lost jobs or cannot find jobs in the "tech feild" only to find out they (a)have no certs or (b)have to skill to obtain certs.
As an employer, skill set is more important to me than a certification. Then again, when I hire, the prospective employee is required to take, and pass, a practical exam. I've seen my share of paper MCSE's out there.
Oh well. I've been saying it for years... the tech boom and crash happened because the people with money didn't know squat about computer systems. They gave the guy who sounded like they knew more the bucks. Hot air eventually cools off. And when it does...
it's like reading a dissertation for a PhD in economics. Ask anybody trying to find a job in IT -- it sucks, and that pretty much sums it up right there.
Geez, cut it out.
According the graph (supplied by Intel), processors back in 1960 had one transistor each. They probably didn't have a very extensive instruction set.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Sure, explosive growth isn't going to continue in any industry that has reached relative maturity. It's far from doom and gloom, however, and the article doesn't discuss one of the most important effects of IT buildups.
While there's no question much of the economy's boom was based on hype, there are still real, bottom line reasons for strength -- and numero uno, IMHO, is the strong growth in productivity. IT-related expenditures get a lot of credit for this growth.
Railroads and automobiles aren't fair comparisons, because they are essentially 'fixed-function.' Once you can ship things anywhere inexpensively, what else will drive railroad growth? "A little faster" isn't a fundamental change. Unlike these examples, IT infrastructure is constantly evolving, adding new ways to increase productivity.
For example, "B2B" exchanges are no longer flashy, but still growing like crazy and boosting efficiency. There are many other applications with strong potential but currently limited real-world usage, such as e-learning, knowledge management, and video conferencing -- and plenty more great ideas still being dreamed up.
I believe this was all started by the exponential decrease in penis size experienced by all people who work in IT. Not to menition the fact that Slashdot is gay.
Yes, it's true:
Hammers down (NSFW).
hmm, I missed something...how is it redundant when nobody else posted it?
Twenties Retirement
I'm getting about as tired of these stupid on-again off-again IT economy articles as I am about my hotmail spam telling me I can increase my manhood safely and naturally.
:-)
Hey, guess what: The economy sucks right now, things in general are nearly stagnant, and we're still making up for the excesses of the "dot-com era".
It's gonna be a couple of years at lest until the IT field picks up again. It will pick up again, and it will continue to be a viable industry with good paying jobs for people with knowledge, skill, and experience. Will it ever be as good as it was in the 90's? Probably not... but who knows... There are a lot of things on the horizon that could have dramatic effects on our economy... some good, some bad (I'm speaking for the U.S.A.; not sure about other places.).
One thing in particular that comes to mind as a GOOD effect is the Fair Tax Initiative ( http://www.fairtax.org )... The Fair Tax Initiative has been around for several years now, but more recently, it has been formally brought up as a recommendation to President Bush by his economic team, and while he did not say if he thought Fair Tax was the way to go, he did say that he thought the Federal Income Tax System was broken beyond repair...
The reason I mention this is due to the flood of IT jobs overseas... Why is that I wonder?
Think about this: the USA has THE HIGHEST corporate taxes in the ENTIRE WORLD. Who do you think gets stuck actually paying for those taxes (in one form or another)? The corporations? Hah... on paper, yes, but the cost is passed down to the consumers and to the employees by way of higher prices, lower wages, lesser benifits, etc.
If something the the Fair Tax were to pass here in the US, people would have to HIDE in order not to find jobs... prices of goods would go down, people would have more power over where their money went, and best of all, (as the name says) the TAXATION WOULD BE FAIR! There's quite a lot to the plan... and it really would be an amazing thing with nothing but positive implications to our economy...
Yeah... so that was quite a tangent... anyway... the point is, these kinds of articles are repetitions, short-sighted, and suffer from severe tunnel vision, as there is certainly more to "predicting" the future sucess or failure of an industry than just looking at timelines of other industries. There are MANY factors that contribute to the economical outcome of one thing or another. An economy is much like an ecosystem... one can't say that they think a specific species is going to die out in another X years, just because a completely different species did the same thing several decades ago... there are just too many contributing factors for one to make an accurate prediction. Articles like this are basically just FUD... and it seems like every time some dope wrights one up, it makes its way to slashdot... go figure.
Oh yeah, and go to http://www.fairtax.org
funny ! +5 if i were mod
Bring it on, Nazis! You'll just be wasting modpoints by modding me down!
it's like reading a dissertation for a PhD in economics. Ask anybody trying to find a job in IT -- it sucks, and that pretty much sums it up right there.
So a lot of people will go unemployed, some businesses go broke. So what? It helps weed out all the fakes, all the "in-it-for-the-big-bucks" jerks.
I'm a computer science student, and I can't begin to describe just how many people are looking to get into this field just for the money. More than 90 % of my fellow students hate programming. No, I'm not exaggerating.
I myself love programming and learning new things about computers and related fields, and I don't care at all about the money. I just love computers - and for people like I hope there will always be jobs
The IT industry is still growing. It's just growing in third-world countries, so greedy CEO's who are already obscenely compensated can pocket even more by using sweat-shop labor. (Think textiles and the garment industry - nothing new.)
it's redundant because there's no reason to post the text of an economist article. we're not going to slashdot it, it's free to access, and your just karma whoring.
Don't be a dick.
When was the last time Microsoft released a new version of Internet Explorer? I believe it was back before they had 90% or more market share. Hmm. What a coinicidence.
When was the last time that Microsoft significantly improved their desktop OS? That would be Windows 95. Back when Microsoft was facing competition from OS/2 for that business.
When was the last time that Microsoft significantly improved their server OS? Well, you can debate that one, but it's obvious that Microsoft even today faces stiff competition from Linux, BSD, and other Unix variants.
And speaking of lack of competition, we all know the real reason why fiber to the home (the last mile) is taking so long: local telephone monopolies. This is true in the USA and in other countries. Once people can get fiber to the home, the so-called "bandwidth glut" will disappear in a hurry.
There is a lot more innovation that can take place. The biggest area IMO is wireless. The small, handheld wireless device market is certainly not mature. One of the things to look for is cell phone/PDA convergence, which hasn't been done sufficiently well yet. It's not just all-in-one devices, however. We should also look for new functionality in devices.
Content distribution is still the toughest business. Unless you have a world-class product like the Wall Street Journal, it's difficult to charge money for information. The best solution is to sell not just information, but add on something else. This something else could be a service like ad-blocking or a set number of minutes of professional advice or consulting, or a tangible product like a poster or a toy. Don't just sell Harry Potter on the web. Sell a bundle of a Harry Potter book together with a unique poster or action figure. That sort of thing.
In short, the future is very bright. Microsoft's monopoly will not last forever, even if the US government refuses to do anything about it.
What you describe was part of the problem, but certainly not all of it. Zooming out, I believe that the tech boom and crash happened because it was driven by the gold-rush mentality of the stock market. Someone shouted "Money Ahoy!", and people ran to one side of the ship such that it listed so badly to that side it looked like the ship would capsize. Then they all ran to the other side and the ship capsized in that direction. The whole stock market concept is fucked. Watch this process repeat itself with the next big thing.
Shouldn't this have been news about 2 years ago?
A-Bomb
It really does come down to market economics. As the workplace shrinks, what used to be an employees market becomes an employers market - there are more suitable persons per job. Ergo it is harder to get a job, you have to be better qualified in all sense, and you get paid less.
And there isn't much one can do about. A votre sante and good luck.
Chin up slashdoters.
Easy for you to say! It's much easier to tell people it'll be ok when your Mom still lets you stay in that room downstairs... :(
I got thrown out last summer.
I think they have the date wrong, it should be may 8th 2000.
Bugs are just features that have been fixed.
"LINUX - THE NEXT GREAT SURGE !"
Masturbation, does not a surge make.
"Sigmoidal" is not present in "Dumb and Dumber's Fifth Grade Word Looker-Upper" and therefore should not be used in your post. "Exponential" does mean "big big" according to the looker-upper, and "journalists" should be replaced with "writer downers."
The preceding changs will make your post suitable for reading by the 97% of our society. The remain 3%, illiterate and UNIX Wizards, don't buy stuff; therefore they aren't a usefull part of society and can be ignored.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Most mature industries grow exponentially because they grow with the economy as a whole. Any economist that would propose that the economy not grow exponentially would be lynched by politicians--our whole economic system assumes that we can sustain at least modest exponential growth indefinitely (whether that is reasonable is a different question).
The IT industry will continue to grow exponentially, just like almost any other sector . What it won't do is have growth rates that exceed that of the economy as a whole. That is probably what the Economist means.
The Economist just lost a lot of credibility in my eyes: misusing the term "exponential" in this way is something that just shouldn't get past the editors of any publication that claims any competence in economics.
IT is not one industry or one technology, and I have personally survived two prior boom/bust cycles in IT, both undiscussed in the Economist article. First it was mainframes, then it was workstations, this one it was PC's, and sure, if we follow that trend, the next wave will be PDA's, but not as we know it.
Each wave involved computers that were roughly as powerful as those of the previous generation. When workstations could do the work of mainframes, workstations were the cool new thing, and there was a major shake-out in the mainframe sector, while the workstations took some time to get going, and the big iron was relegated to do things that only big iron could do (eg handle big databases, MSRP systems, billing systems, etc). Then workstations and mini-mainframes (starting with PDP-11's, VAXen, then on to Sun, Appollo, SGI...) were king for half a decade. Remember the anti-trust suit against IBM? Remember when DEC pulled out ahead of IBM? Kinda like Linux starting to pull out ahead of Windows during the anti-trust suit agains MS. Same s**t, different decade.
After the crash of '87, a lot of the startups in silicon valley that were writing software primarily for Sun and SGI workstations started seeing their marketshare get gobbled up by the rise of the PC Clone -- which offered a much cheaper OS (DOS) and much cheaper hardware to do it on. While the applications that used to run on big iron have been moved first to the ever more powerful UNIX servers in the back room and are now being moved onto PC's running Linux...because they can.
Can we extrapolate the trends we saw in the last two boom/bust cycles and say that the next wave of innovation will be PDA's with an easily programmed OS (symbian?) talking to servers running linux at the home office or corporate HQ? Sounds good to me.
Right now the name of the game in the last gasp er I mean "deployment phase" of the current wave is "Pick up the Pieces" (Brecker Brothers' wailing in the disco in the background).
In more specific terms this means: Data auditing, database integration, data forensics, data security and data warehousing.
But being able to access your company data over a secure connection with your PDA -- it's sort of happening now, but, extrapolating from the trends of the last two waves, this would logically be the next one. PDA's are where PC's were 10 years ago, PC's are where workstations were 10 years ago, and workstations are where mainframes were 10 years ago. "Where" as in terms of size, functionality, maturity of the code base, special security, power and AC requirements -- and, consequently, where they sit in organisations.
Seems logical, but then, a lot of things do.
Equals unemployment.
1) Factual - the US corporate tax level is not the highest in the world, it is the 4th highest
2) Economic - consumption taxes can just as easily increase, not decrease, the cost of goods. Check out the prices of alcohol in Iceland or cigarettes, or gasoline in the UK versus gasoline in the USA.
3) Fair for who? - why should a low-income person have to pay the same proportion of tax on an item as a high-income person? In effect, a consumption tax increases the relative tax burden on those least able to afford it.
4) Legal - corporations are treated as 'people' under US law in almost every other aspect, why should they also not have to pay taxes like everyone else?
5) A key reason jobs are being located abroad is the cost of employing those people is lower. Salaries will be a major determinant of that cost not corporate tax rates by themselves. Unless of course you are arguing for an across the board reduction in pay levels for all American programmers. Thought not.
Wasn't it nice to get rates of $300 an hour?
Have a company sign a contract to spend 6 million dollars on a web site?
Allow 40% of our project to fail?
I think it is about time that we realized that business is business and we aren't that special. Either we make money for people, one way or another, or we don't work. I don't think this is a bad thing. I think this is an opportunity to step up and honestly make the world a better place with IT. The free ride is over and it has gotten and will get ugly. However, this is my career and I'm not turning back. I have invested too much of myself in it to let it go.
In this case it may simply be demand outstripping supply. Computers today are really, really fast. The constant pressure to get the latest and best machine is no longer anywhere near as strong as it used to be, since for almost all applications, computers are "fast enough." (The main industry still pushing the envelope is, of course, the gaming industry.)
For the last few years, Intel and the other chip manufacturers have been starting to falter, probably because people are really coming to realize that they don't need the latest and greatest chip to do what they need to do. So the slump may be simply due to economics rather than hitting some kind of technological plateau.
For about 20 years, you've been able to buy PC clones. DRAM has been a commodity for decades, too. Software has more market segmentation, but UNIX variants (Linux, BSD, SCO, whatever) are a commodity.
Easy for you to say. I still have to admin Novell shit. I can't take it anymore. I'm going to lock myself in a room and just install windows over and over to get the foul taste of admining Novell boxes out of my mouth. Oh may God reign down his firey vengence upon those that programmed the infernal GroupWise. If you worked on GroupWise code and you read this post, I want you to flog yourself repeatedly.
Easy for you to say when you have a job doing cool new shit and not admining for some jakbal company that can't get their heads out of their asses because the job market sucks so much. I coulda been uh contenda. fuck man. Until we get freaky like Neuromancer shit we fuck'd.
Anyone that says a quality degree was a waste of time either is retarded or didn't attend classes. Also could be american, your post-secondary education system is garbage.
..is that you're foolish to beleive that a job as a programmer or engineer is going to be really hard to find. If you are low skilled, say just a Java programmer or something like that...you know the type, then sure, it may be bleak. But think about all the devices that are out and even more coming out that need EE people to make, programmers to program etc. Perhaps being a network guy or sys-admin is going to be harder to come across but I think the future is going to be even greater for programmers, at least programmers with a good foundation such as a CS degree or by someone who is enthusiastic and self taught.
Think about it, PC's will soon be the smallest market for IT, so if your career is based around writing business apps or PC related software then you may be in trouble. But with so many things going digital, there will be greater demand for people to make these systems, and they will be complex systems.
Although the job market is trash right now for IT, it is trash for just about everything else, except maybe a bankruptcy lawer.
You log onto a site like dice or monster and you see thousands of jobs. The only problem is these jobs demand skill and knowledge. Real knowledge, not the kind that a certifcate from a 5 month program gives you.
I hope I don't come across as a troll, but seriously, most of these certificates A+, MCSE etc are nothing more than going to a factory and reading a really long manual on how to operate a machine. We need people for this of course, but don't expect to be paid well for it anymore as we have found out that anyone can do this if they are willing to put a few months effort into it.
Go back to school right now and learn something real. If not, at least go to the library and read some hard material, the kind that takes a while to learn. These are the types of people needed desperatly right now. People are having a terrible time sifting through the people who can actually solve problems that are defined with the domain of their limited skill set.
I don't know, just some thoughts, but did you really think it was going to last? Eaasy come, easy go goes the saying. I'm convinced if the unemployed IT "professionals" took time off to learn some things, like how a computer really works, they would see the rewards. Then again, nothing is guarenteed and I need as little competition as possible to keep my wallet fat.
We talk about the need for robust software, well become a robust programmer. Don't paint yourself into a corner by putting it all on X technology. Learn the foo and you can adapt to anything.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
the only 'exponential growth' was in fraudulent financial statements...
The term "exponential growth" doesn't tell you what the exponent is either. A negative exponent means that things are getting smaller. The buggy whip business had exponential growth in the years after the invention of the auto. It wasn't a happy exponent, it was a sad exponent.
For the love of god, it's only a week or so since we had an identical thread under a similar name. JUST DEAL WITH THE FACT THAT CLAIMING SOME UNDERSTANDING OF 'NET TECHONOLOGY IS NO LONGER A PATH TO INSTANT RICHES. YOU CAN STILL DO OK IF YOU WORK HARD, BUT THE GOLD RUSH IS OVER, GOT THAT?'. OK, now that's out of my system, can the people who don't really enjoy working late to solve logic puzzles please leave the profession, whilst the rest of us pay our mortgages they way we always planned?
The sky is falling etc.
Guess what, we are in a nasty recession. ALL capital spending is way off. Businesses spend money to increase capacity when growth is strong. No growth, capacity underutilization etc. means no need to increase capacity through either productivity or staff improvements. IT accounts for something like 20-30% of capital investments.
When the economy starts growing again people will start being in short supply (unemployment overall is a relatively low 6% given the severity of the recession) soon. The only way businesses will be able to increase capacity is through capital investment. During all this Moore's law has been chugging along and those new systems will be 10x+ faster (and getting 64bit CPUs in commodity hardware allowing manipulation of massive data sets cheaply) than what the business has been using, and software to take advantage has been getting better too, making upgrades very cost-effective. Businesses have also been amassing mammouth quantities of data in electronic form in the meantime because of their previous investments.
Moore's law doesn't tell the whole story by far. Data storage capacity and network bandwith are increasing at rates far faster than Moore's law. CPUs are relatively mature by comparison, ONLY doubling every two years or so. Hard disk bytes/$ doubles every 9 months, and network bandwidth is tripled every year.
The confluence of trends is obvious, and somebody is going to make a lot of money tying all this together.
The IT good times will roll again soon enough. When it happens you won't be able to outsource to China or India because they will be caught up in it too. Companies who outsourced their IT will find that the new crown jewels of productivity will be beyond their grasp and they will relearn the hard lesson that you DO NOT outsource core business activities if you want to maintain control of your fate.
There are many companies here just waiting for a few extra bucks in the bank to upgrade both their hardware and software.
So, IMHO the slow down in the biz is due to a pathetic economy since we changed presidents. In the Clinton years the U.S. economy had money to burn and a fat surplus. Now our people are practically burning furniture to keep warm and living off credit cards in deficit land.
Moore's Law would still be cooking if we had money. As soon as there is a little cash in the drawer our customers are going to be upgrading.
Harpo Tunnel Syndrome--my wrist feels funny.
Not sure about his penis, but he certainly has a small brain, as evidenced by his failed economic policies so far.
If it wasn't for the war, he'd be nothing!
Computers just didn't work out, so now we're just going to give up on them entierly.
Nobody said anything like this. Try reading the article before lashing out against an argument you haven't even read that was designed to support a conclusion you don't even understand.
Every time there is an article with a less than "ain't it damn sweet to be wired" take on IT industry, some moron (in this case, you) pops up and says something like "yeah, and a hundred years ago the director of the patent office said everything had been invented!" or "l4me analyst. people will still use computers. linux rulez!" or "Can your tivo talk to your cell phone? It should, and I'm sure one day it will" without even trying to understand what the article is about or what it is actually saying.
What's even worse, what's in this case the point of the article is more like "IT is maturing, and the golden age is still ahead" than "we're all doomed!" but you wouldn't really care anyway, would you?
People like you get me worked up. You're smug, ignorant and stupid. Yet you write like you know it all. Distasteful.
a)Chile
b)Beer
c)F*cking expensive
d)Iraq
e)Cheap oil Cheap Gin
f)U
g)Working class?
h)Dr. Sneeze
Still, People are always going to use computers/technology in some form, and therefore they will need someone there to support it.. seeing as though probbally about 80-90% of users are pretty clueless... so while the industry may not keep growing at the same rate, it is still going to keep growing.
In any case taxation is not the issue. Enron didn't pay taxes for years during the 90s. Taxes are not an expense, they are based off of your profit and/or the value of your capital resources.
Companies that are "fleeing" the United States for the third world are going to "flee" those countries once they are sufficiently developed and start demanding services. Hong Kong and Taiwan are now too rich for corporations, so they are tearing up stakes and moving to Indonesia.
No one is fleeing anything. This is a flagrant race for the bottom.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
...the IT can rule the world?
Cesar Cardoso can be found at cesar at zyakannazio dot eti dot br (or at least I believe so)
For Australia at least..
In Australia companies have been trying to cut costs in It for about a year and a half now.
You can only do that for so long before you run the risk of having your company fall so far behind that it will never recover (or you have to spend too much to recover).
I believe that companies in Australia will stop out sourcing and start spending large on IT internally very soon.. in the next 6 - 12 months at least.
I reckon we're about to see the second big rise of IT in Australia, right on the heals of broadband and "free to air" wireless networks..
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
Exponential growth does mean that the exponent is positive. With a negative exponent, it would be exponential decay.
I think there will be these technologies that will revive the tech sector:
1. IPv6. Let's face it: using routers, subnetting, etc. to extend the life of IPv4 addressing can only take you so far. With more and more devices being Internet-accessible, the massively-larger pool of IPv6 addresses will make Internet connectivity of your home entertainment center, home office and various home appliances much easier, not to mention giving IP addresses to your various handheld devices! The problem is that many of today's installed routers and Internet backbone wiring are not ready to support IPv6, and it will require lots of hardware upgrading (and also software upgrades) to get IPv6 support on a wide scale.
2. 3G cellular telephones. Today's latest picture-enabled cellphones are only beginning of things to come; we will eventually include true broadband (384 kilobits per second data transfer rates and faster) over standard cellphone networks, which could end up competing with 802.11b/g wireless connections but 3G could offer more reliable connections with less issues of interference. Again, there will be a need to upgrade the cellphone infrastructure to support full broadband 3G operations.
3. High-Definition TV. We're only beginning the rollout of 720p/1080i digital television with picture quality far superior to today's NTSC standards. By 2010, 720p/1080i 16:9 aspect ratio digital TV signals will be delivered by over-air broadcasts, through your cable line and through small satellite dishes all over the USA on a large scale. Again, this will require large-scale sales of new 16:9 aspect ratio TV sets, sales of new hardware to support upgraded TV broadcasting infrastructure needed for HDTV, and new production hardware sales (cameras, video recorders, video editing facilites, etc.) for broadcasters to handle HDTV.
In fact, by 2010 people will be wondering how quaint IPv4, voice only cellular phone, and NTSC-standard 4:3 aspect ratio TV are. =)
Assume, for a moment, that you are the CEO of Multibillion Dollar Corporation (MDC). Your Software product is entirely "manufactured" in the US. You employ about 5000 programmers/IT workers etc, getting an average of $100,000 per year(including benefits). That is a 500 million dollars per year payroll.
Your main competitor has all the design and the "core" work done in the US, and has the raw implementation done in India, China, Russia or the Philippines. He employs 100 people in the US at $150000 per year, and 7000 people abroad, who make $15000 a year.
Your competitors payroll is only 120 million. His savings in this area are 380 million dollars a year.
Your competitor is able to make his product as fast as you can, faster because he has more quiet, compliant employees who are used to an authoritarian style of management. He suffers no political, legal or economic consequences for his strategy. As far as the US government is concerned, his company is every bit as "God, Mom and Apple pie" as yours, especially if the respective congressment get their cuts.
Your stock is suffering because you cannot show enough profits and expected growth.
What will you do?
If it is any consolation, the IT industry is not the only one being hit. White collar jobs across the board are getting whacked in the US. Insurance calculations have shifted abroad almost completely. Call centers are gone. The lower rungs of the finance industry are shifting abroad. (Why pay a harvard MBA $200000 to analyze company reports when you can get a guy from Banagalore with an MBA from IIM to do this at a tenth of the cost?)
The only reason cars are manufactured in the US is because the goverment has placed stiff tariffs on automobile vendors who don't do x% of their manufacturing in the US.
And that is really the crux of the problem. As long as the US government provides full access to its markets to companies whose labor force is primarily based outside the US, jobs will continue to fly abroad.
What can you do about it? Nothing much. You can try moving up the ladder, or change professions to one that cannot be exported (teaching, nursing, anything with direct customer interaction, working at McDonalds), the military, the US government, blue collar stuff like plumbing etc.
Magnus.
You guys don't know what you're talking about! Computer jobs are easy money, all I gotta do is spend a few thousand dollars and in a FEW MONTHS (not 4 LONG YEARS for a degree) I'll be rolling in cash!
Among normal people, yes. Economists, however, love to talk about "negative growth" and "negative growth rates", so "exponential decay" is "exponential growth with a negative growth rate".
Computers today are really, really fast. The constant pressure to get the latest and best machine is no longer anywhere near as strong as it used to be, since for almost all applications, computers are "fast enough."
Actually, you hit on one point of the article-- in our terms, there is no "killer app" driving the next leap in technology.
Each technology generation, even if it is all about chips, is a different product cycle. It could be reasonably argued that the lifecycle of the individual generations is shorter, but the overall lifecycle of "chips" may match the auto or train.
I've been programming since I was 7 years old. I attended Harvey Mudd College. No, I didn't graduate, due to my poor chemistry grades, but regardless- I did great in my Computer Science and Math courses.
I've worked on several Open Source and Free Software projects. I taught free classes on programming for 2 years, 1ce a week for 6 hours a time, and while the boom was going, got two of my students (out of 8) employed quickly. There's hardly a time in my life where I don't have some programming job going or not.
I have sent dozens of resumes and even made a dozen interviews. I have put Free Software projects (and not) on my resume, just to see if it makes a difference. As far as I can tell, it does not. If anything, it seems to add an air of unprofessionalism to my resume.
It is a myth that employers want seasoned programmers. While it is TRUE that PROGRAMMERS would hire seasoned programmers, it is NOT TRUE that EMPLOYERS would hire seasoned programmers. It is the employers and HR people who hire programmers, and I can tell you exactly what the are looking for right now: BUZZ WORDS. I know this from talking with good people in the industry who are hiring people (and not programmers themselves), as well as people placing people. It makes no difference how much programming you've done before, just as long as you have 5 years Oracle, 4 years C#, COM/ADO/.NET, and speak and write both English and Japanese fluently. NOTHING else matters.
Now as for your claim that "sending in resumes doesn't hurt"- what are you talking about? You obviously don't have a wife and kids. Custom resume construction takes time- a LOT of time. And not just any old time- it takes Daughter-and-wife-free time. That's time you could be hauling furniture to make some money, or doing chores, or tutoring people for some money to help pay for things. Sending resumes hurts a lot.
I challenge you NOW to tell us why anyone should listen to what you have to say about what gets people hired. How old are you? How many people have you hired? How many years have you been paid to work tech? What do you know about the industry right now?
"At my place of employment, engineers are actively involved in serious systems design and modeling of our networks (before they are deployed) - they are not shopping out of a Black Box catalog and hoping it all plays together."
While there's merit in what you're saying. There is one thing you've forgotten. MOST businesses in the US are of a small to medium size. They either have no need for the level your talking about. Or they don't have the economic structure to hire a full time team of engineers to design everything from the ground up (some may contract this out). Even worse most are carrying a legacy system were most responsabilities are of a maintenance nature rather than design. What you're referring to is more of what you see in larger companies. Whom themselves are being pinched by the present economy, and can't always do as years past would have allowed. As the economy turns around what you will see is not a sudden surge, but a bit of a lag being the difference between their present state of efficiency, and the amount of leeway that "efficiency" allows. As well as most of the companies will actually desire the lean state they've become accustom to.
"As this newspaper ... observed in 1857: "It is a very sad thing unquestionably that railways, which mechanically have succeeded beyond anticipation and are quite wonderful for their general utility and convenience, should have failed commercially.""
Huh? Railroading had only begun to be an economic juggernaut by 1857. Using this analogy IT has an hundred years to reach it's full potential.
Since we're playing "what if". You'll most likely see is what presently exist only in big corporations. The mainframe is coming to your basement, without all the size, but definintly the power. Everything PnP. Need more resources? Stop by the store and pick up what you need (kind of the way we shop for groceries), then take it home and plug it in. Same with everything else. People will be interacting with their personal mainframe by clients, fat and thin. PDAs, handhelds, watches, mp3 players and so forth. The trend of smaller, smaller, smaller dictates this, but correspondently what we demand of it will grow in an opposite of moores law.[1] Data mining for the masses? Why not? Artificial Assistant indeed.
[1]If that makes you salivate? Just imaging what it will be like on the other end of the spectrum?
Head Line NANOSCIENCE NEWS streaming wifi local server:
Dateline; July 13 2004
Proof of the thoery of NanoTech DNA with AI self replication was confirmed yesterday when a
file on the University Of Nano science server did succeed in creating a new exponential self replicating executable from within itself. The executable then searched for usable code snipets through Boogle CVS and included several new routines which it duplicated then tested.
Most of the routines now included concern speach recognition and speach from generated wave forms.
The results then asked for dedicated ram/time for
a short debug. The result is now requesting status as a computer entity! The moderators of the experiment gave permission to export the entity to all available cycle time. It is estimated that within 48 hours we should start to see, hear and have streaming real time access to the entity.
Only with the advantages in speed gained by our new BuckyTube memory/processors was this possible.
The evolution of the entity is estimated to be on the order of magnitude (n-1=(6*10^3760.7)/Pi) faster than all technology since the invention of the STEAM ENGINE
As to;
"Using this analogy IT has an hundred years to reach it's full potential."
With BUCKY TUBE TECH we will be lucky if it takes 2!
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
Don't give up yet.
Although the "electronic bubble" may have burst, dragging with it a lot of the IT-related industries, not all have been lost.
Remember the railway boom and bust cycle ?
Well
Now, with the bust of the electronic bubble, some other thing WILL replace it - perhaps it's the wireless, or perhaps it's wearable stuffs, or whatever, but looking back in human history, something WILL EMERGE right after the crash of something else.
Like waves - one wave will come right after another - human civilization will NEVER LET ANYTHING STANDSTILL - and we'll see what come next.
Perhaps it's a combination of textile and electronics (wearable computing) or textile/electronic/long-range-sensing thingy, or perhaps with some bits of bio-electro-tech thrown in.
I'm sure something else will come up. Those who have visions will make a bundle, as usual. Those who do the "follow-the-leader" may make a smaller bundle.
And so on
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Microsoft's still got > $42b in cash. What if 10% of the money was released to innovators? What would that do to growth 3 years hence?
...can have one. I was just looking through my supplier's price list yesterday, looking to set up a low-speed computer, to server as a mail server/movie player/router. A 1.1ghz duron/256mb/20GB costs a touch over $130, and that's here in Poland, where the prices are much higher than in the USA. This is for brand new equpiment, you could probably pick up something used for a bit less. Sure, there will always be families and individuals who have a hard time saving up $130, but for 99% of us it's just a matter of cutting our vices and putting away a bit each week.
People who don't have computers are people who don't want or need them, that's why growth is down . Manufacturers need to expand to other markets, that's the only place they have left to go.
by Average White Band. I have no idea who the person you referenced is.
From my understanding the industry at some point needed a lot of low-skilled IT people. Hell, they even hired people that majored in Latin Literature if they knew a bit of HTML. Another point to be made is what they consider IT. There are the following segments nowadays:
Web Design and Internet application software that is used in a specific market niche, such as for example online bookstores. In this market there is usually a strong emphasis on Databases and general Software Engineering skills. Relationships with clients are close.
System Design, which can be a system-on-a-chip + firmware to become a complete integrated product that is ready to be sold to the consumer, or, alternatively an embedded device to be used in some other consumer gadget There are plenty of technological areas here, and the devices themselves are diverse. Sometimes expertese in the particular tech area is required (IC design, good knowledge of hardware, Telecoms, Control Systems,...)
Pure IC design, which requires less, but more highly skilled people. Analog design requires even less and even more highly skilled people.
There are also research institutes/departments related to all aspects of IT, but a lot of them have shrunk significantly after the bubble burst... a major loss.. however Microsoft seems to be keeping their research dpt healthy.
As far as I can understand the major problem was that everyone was following the money during this time - something that made them change their project goals/ideas. A lot of projects died because of frequent direction changes. A lot of people were working for nothing. Those that work in the more hardcore parts of the industry, that require either a lot of diverse skills, or extreme specialisation have not lost their jobs. Also, companies that had a sucessful IP and were selling that isntead of a tangible product (can you say ARM?) are still quite strong..
I miss my rubber keyboard.(Homepage)
Those who anon cowed in shadow by aninimity be, mod thee not, beware the slithy toad. Lest ye into the /. flames take me!
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
insist on being able to understand everything after the event? They always are able to find patterns _post facto_. Hey, I can do that too... the fact is that economists have never ever managed to predict anything - their predictions have been worse that those of seismologists.. they rely on naive prediction methods, simplistic 1 or 2-variable theories and childish 'cycles' to explain things. Cycles must exist, since growth is not constant, but they can neither explain them nor predict their duration. Just making fancy curves and putting cool names on the graph proves nothing.
And for those of you that would like to say that The Economist had a similar article during the boom, I have to counter that they have published conflicting articles during the same period. Economists have varying opinions, which are anyway never based on any solid evidence. They are just hunches. I trust my bookmaker more.
I miss my rubber keyboard.(Homepage)
You spelt "altogether" incorrectly.
buddy, can you spare a dime?
I have seen the IT industry compared repeatedly to the railroad industry. For instance, see the Business 2.0 article "Is the Information Revolution Dead?" Why the railroad? I think it is because the railroad did go and quadruple after the stock crash. We could just as easily compare IT to the Telegraph. Why don't we?
Laying the development of the telegraph against the development of the information technology, year by year, Western Unions monopoly entry in 1871 would correlate to 2018 in the information technology industry. From that point on, the telegraph operator had been reduced to a minimum paying, button pushing job. The crest of the operator field, when they were considered owners of high tech knowledge and skill, was probably around 1856 or so, when Western Union began buying up smaller outfits and standardizing the technology. This would correspond to 2003.
If we want to look at the railroad, and predict 400% increase in the "golden period," then I think we also must be prepared to look at the telegraph, and predict stagnation under monopolies such as IBM or Microsoft
Cyclical businesses have exponential growth too; just with an imaginary exponent.
Lets face it... employee dumping has become a nice comfortable strategy for the executive branch to continue the smoke and mirrors of post-bubble profitability.
Employee dumping allows people like HP Carla to take moderate profits and stretch them into huge gains in the "bottom line" because 50,000 pay checks were cut from the company's books.
Not because she or people like her did anything special, but the same people who were intoxicated by the hype promises of the bubble have still not recovered enough of their common sense to realize its the same scam only on the other side of the ledger!
...you are at the end of the road i've merely started. this next 3 years are going to suck.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Saying that Bill Gates does not need publically funded infrastructure is naive and myopic. While BG may not utilize these programs directly, they all most certainly have an effect on him.
Growth appears as exponential because real costs like damage to the environment are not factored in into the calculations of growth.
If this was factored in most probably the growth of any economy long term wold be a resounding 0.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Economists calling growth unsustainable is usually slang for "it's too much too quick". Economies don't grow linearly -- they have the weird phenomena of surging & contracting (boom/bust) over years. This is an observable phenomena related to the impefection of all economic systems, being made up of imperfect humans, after all.
This kind of cycle probably would continue to happen no matter what kind of economic policy you subscribe to, so I really must wonder, what's hypocritical?
-Stu
I went to a technical school for about 30k total. The focus was mainly on the fundamentals, syntax, coding standards, etc. There was very little in the way of them teaching you complex algorithyms or a variety of other things you might get at a university. Their OOP class was a joke. On my own, I mainly studied stuff that I downloaded off the net and computer science books from the library. The tutorials that came with my student C/C++ complier where pretty helpfull too. I also made the mistake of joining a huge corporation, in a division bent on making huge amounts of money. Some other divisions of the corporation where more geared toward R&D but those jobs only when to people who had Masters in CS or Phds. We did have a few Phds in our department though. I'm considering giving up on the software industry and taking up something completely different. Thinking about all the things what I've went through in the software/IT industry, only invokes some very negative feelings.
Don't get me wrong, not all teachers are any good at teaching and not all colleges have worthwhile programs. I've had some bad experiences, too. Check THIS out: at one school, the head of the CS department scratched a course several seniors (myself included) needed to graduate on time, so some ding-bat he was pals with out in town could offer a totally useless course in microchip design (wtf???). Basically, the chick wanted to be an adjunct, but didn't know anything we could use for our degree, so he let her teach something useless. He tried to compromise after a few of us went ballistic, by saying we could use the stupid Microchip course instead of the advanced C in Unix course we had wanted to take, but still. It was really screwed up.
All that aside, you might want to go back and get your Masters, and try to nail a job teaching. An MS is good enough for most posts at smaller colleges, and you can't beat the lifestyle (summers off, easy hours, etc). You can't get away from office politics anywhere of course, but from what you're saying about your experience, if anyone takes you on you'd probably be able to hand them their head in a baggie. I don't imagine you'd be too spooked by a little teacher-teacher hustling...
As far as giving up the IT industry, well, I did it two years ago and I'm pretty happy (I went civil service, so I still work in IT as a programmer but the whole environment is different from corporate). You don't have to give up coding, just coding for *corporations*. Don't give up on CS itself, though.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
At one time, I was going for my Master's degree in CS. My degree is actually called CIS not CS. They are both related to software development but are really two different things. I like to atleast think that I learned something of CS, even if it wasn't degree that I earned. Teaching does have some appealing aspects too it. It's worth looking into. I think the problems with corporate greed go well outside the bounds of the IT industry. It just seemed like every manager that I ever dealt with was a Bill Gates wannabe. Someone who pays little to the programmer and then cashes in big on the programmer's work.
I don't know about all this businessy stuff, but I'm gonna have nightmares for weeks about that disturbing graphic with the floating heads and devil baby.
Wanna hear something funny? In 2000, I was living in Rockland, commuting to New York City, doing systems analysis, and getting paid 45K -- basically I was living a hair away from filing bankruptcy. Some of the programmers were in worse shape than me; I knew one who was making only 32K -- as a Java developer. The salesmen and the "content" staff on the other hand, were making money hand over fist. Most had fancy cars, hot motorcycles, you name it. It's the same old story; the people who BUILD the technology don't get paid much, but the people who benefit from it rake it in. Anyway, someone had leaked all the salary figures, and we programmers had found out that although we had 1500 stock options, the salesmen got 5000 and some of the content staff had up in the hundreds of thousands (one had like, 345,000). Let alone the millions of options the bigshots got. Needless to say people were pissed off, and I was pretty fed up and about to quit (I positively LOATHE people who try to tell me programmers were making money during the tech boom -- if they were, I didn't know any of them).
So, I told my boss I figured the whole stock option thing was a joke, I was sick of living on Ramen while the salesmen were eating in restaurants, and I was going to quit unless I got paid a better salary. I'd run the numbers, and figured out that even if the stock were to take off (which it didn't; this was just before the crash and the stock nosedived on opening day, but that's a whole other story) I'd only make at best a few tens of thousands of dollars, total, which doesn't make up for me living on Ramen noodles for months or years. I explained to him that I'd already calculated my best possible outcome, and it sucked ass.
Basically he said that the market cap of the company was some number X (I don't remember exactly what it was, but it was some realistic number). He said that within a year, the market cap will be something like 10 times that, some huge number that seemed like total horseshit to me. So he tried to tell me that the pissy little stock option I was being offered would be worth some huge amount of money in the near future, and it was his goal that none of us programmers would "ever have to work again" (how true! the company ended up laying off right and left shortly after I left it). Then he offered me some of his personal options, which I could buy at the opening price. I was completely underwhelmed, ok? Finally, because I really was going to quit, he raised my salary to 60K and I was able to afford real food, so I stopped trying to quit -- for a while. Of course, the other programmers, who didn't complain or try to quit, stayed at their starvation rate and I was forbidden from talking about how much I was making.
What's significant about this is that:
A) my boss thought I'd actually buy all that market cap crap.
B) he hadn't anticipated that all of us programmers would break out our calculators and figure out how much our options would really be worth, and what range of return we were likely to get.
C) that he thought a verbal promise to sell me some of his options was completely reassuring.
D) that he thought I would *actually believe* that the tiny stock offering I was being given would make me wealthy (I know all about the old "microsoft secretary" rags-to-riches myth, ok? This company was definitely not a new Microsoft).
E) The only reason I got the raise (instead of being fired on the spot) was that I was the principal developer on one of their major projects, and they were mid-IPO. They moved that project to another developer a little while later, and seeing that this was a precursor to them having their revenge upon me, I quit and got a job at a non-internet company out in Jersey, where things are a hell of a lot cheaper.
F) As a side note, they patented the system I developed, and after I left, the lawyer (who I always thought was kind of an asshole) sent me a letter saying I had to sell them the patent for a dollar. I signed it -- who cares, right
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
Unfortunely, this is has become the common trend in business. That sad fact is that there will always be some poor smuck programmer who gets railroaded into it. Do you think it's any coincedence that they are trying to incourage the teaching of CS in lesser developed countries like India and Pakistan? They want these guys to become programmers so that they can get cheap labor in order to turn over even bigger profits. There are some success stories of programmers who managed to win big. One such story is found at: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html After reading it, Lisp seems like an interesting language to learn. Guys like Paul Graham should be the norm, not the exception. His success is proof, not only of his exceptional programming talent, but also his ability to out fox the business crowd.
Paul Graham seems kind of interesting. I've been trying to come up with a project of my own, but it's hard to come up with something that hasn't been done several times (and well) already.
.Net) and an open-source version in C++ for Linux. Make your money from the Windows version and offer the Linux version as a charitable donation to the Linux community. This would seem to cover both angles... It's all I could come up with as a way of making even a little bit of money.
One problem I've been thinking about is this: we all love open source and free software, right? I mean, I use it at home, and most other programmers do too. And, it's a given that if you build something and it's useful, someone will build an open-source knockoff within a few months. This is great from an end-user's point of view, but it screws anyone trying to make a buck in the business -- as soon as the open-source version comes out, your revenue stream will dry up. So, although we love open source because it helps us, it also makes it impossible for us to make a buck in software. I'm a little torn on this issue, as you can imagine.
So, think about this: if you can't build the next great thing on Linux and make money from it, what approach remains?
Here's an approach I've been toying with: build a proprietary version for Windows (maybe using
What do you think? Any ideas? I'm kind of stuck, other than the approach I suggested. What else might work? And, please don't say "sell tech support and service" because aside from a couple of lucky cases, that generally doesn't seem to work. What model would YOU use, if you were starting a business?
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
Open-source was never about making money. Most of those projects are geared toward Linux users because most of the people doing them are Linux users. A few will become successful authors by writting books and some get paid by doing tech-support and/or consulting. The most positive aspect of working on open-source is that it gives you experience and the feeling that you made a contribution to the community. It's much like doing volunteer work. The big draw-back is figuring out how to pay the bills and do open-source at the same time. It's ideal for a young person, still living at home, that wants to work in the software industry. For people out on their own, supporting yourself is going to take prority over doing volunteer work. Windows development is better suited toward making profits but it is difficult to find good people who can work together on the same project. Most people have their own ideas that they want others to work on. I once tried to team-up with some folks but there were too many chiefs, no investors outside the group and everyone had their own agenda. Eventually we just went our separate ways. Starting a business is always a risky endevour. Ideally, you want to be doing something that has little to no real competition, easy to get started and has good market value. There is company that I found on the internet is a pretty good model for doing a startup. Start with just enough highly-skilled people that are all dedicated toward the same goals. Have people at all levels who are willing to devote all their efforts to producing the same product or service. You do need leadership but rather than just calling the shots they will need to do just as much work as everyone else, if not more, until the company is well established. Their website is www.pyrontechnologies.com
While the company you pointed me to as an example is interesting, it's not really in the realm I'm after (it's more a web development and service oriented company, and I'm interested in software development)... I agree with you on Open Source, though. It really is more of a volunteer/hobbyist phenomenon than anything else (of course, now I may get flamed by someone listening to our conversation, but that's ok). Don't get me wrong -- I like and respect that. But, as you agreed, it makes it hard to pay the bills if you happen to be a programmer.
;)
What I was trying to say in my post was that proprietary platforms are more fertile ground for a programmer trying to build a new, interesting product, at least if he wants to actually SELL it. I also think he should produce a Linux/Open Source version as well, using a different language which can't be easily ported back to proprietary platforms. This lets him contribute to open source while at the same time making some money from his work. If you think about it, this lets proprietary development subsidize open source development. Kind of groovy irony, there, isn't it?
Anyway, thanks for the advice. Maybe, given your experiences, it might be a good idea to do solo projects instead of group projects. This would kill off the "too many chiefs" problem and grant greater control over the project while simultaneously reducing overhead. I'm kind of a hermit anyway.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
I'm not sure if proprietary programs would do well after releasing the source. Even if that source was targeted at another platform. The really value of programming lies in the logic, not the source langauge syntax or platform specifics (usless you use assembly). All someone else has to do port it their platform of choice and use it for free. Even worse, make it freely available to the platform your trying to sell it on, ruining your business in the process. Solo projects are a good place to start but don't underestimate the power of collaboration. There is probably a curve to it but adding a few good people can make a big difference. You need to find people that are good and willing to work together. It should shorten development time, provide innovations you wouldn't have thought about and it also helps to do group reviews. The key to working together is getting everyone focused on same project. Good luck with it, whatever you decide to do.
A clarification:
The proprietary project would be written in something like Java or VB.Net, using the proprietary languages' libraries, and would *not* be released open source. It would be closed source.
The open source version would be totally different internally, because it would make heavy use of standard libraries for whatever platform it was built on (like qt on Linux, for example). The use of the Linux-oriented libraries would make the task of porting the project to, say, Windows or Mac O/S really hairy.
Ultimately, you can't prevent someone from stealing your idea and getting in your way. But you can make it a lot harder for them to do it, raising the bar and eliminating eighty or ninety percent of the guys out there who would try.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!