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Dot-Com Work Culture Making a Comeback?
jeebus writes "This week a Deloitte study has shown that high on the agenda of CEOs around the world is the shortage of tech talent. Is a shortage of talented geeks in the market seeing a return of the dot-com culture with foosball tables, beanbags, and inflated salaries used to entice talented workers? Welcome to Web 2.0 work culture, the future of yesterday. 'Global recruitment companies were telling prospecting employees that they were no longer going to be employed just because they were a technical guru. They were going to have to learn to dress, communicate, and adapt all the traditional corporate ideals that IT has been exempt from during the dot-com boom. Fast forward to Web 2.0 and while workplaces aren't as cheesy with their decor as they were were in the late '90s, and developers aren't getting paid $100K for being HTML and JavaScript jockeys, geeks just aren't chuffed with corporate culture.'"
yea cant wait for DotComBurst 2.0
Having to wear nicer (read: more expensive) clothing is a cost, both in terms of purchasing clothes and the time it takes to put them on and iron them (it takes more time to button up a shirt and tie a tie than to toss on a T-shirt). Plus, it's more comfortable. It's probably worth 1-2% of my salary to avoid wearing such things. (Of course, it's a personal preference- it's probably worth 10-20% for my boss, who's picky about such things, and ~0.5% to another coworker, who doesn't mind dressing up, but still sees a slight advantage to not doing so).
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
There's no heady optimism about the future, and that, really, when you think about it, the collapse of the dot net boom and worse, the later ruling about expensing stock options, and then the war, this decade has been utterly depressing.
In my opinion, it all depends on perspective. During the dot-com boom, I was sitting on a stool in a tiny backroom doing electronic repairs on video equipment. To make ends meet, I spent all my free time going house-to-house doing computer repairs. Somehow, I found time to take college classes and get my B.S. in Computer Science. The entire time, I was continually told that I needed to move to California and get in on the big paychecks. Now, I have a nice office at the top of one of the tallest buildings in town, looking across the city and into the bay. I work pretty much when I want to - as long as the work is done, nobody complains. I make enough that my wife doesn't have to work and she can stay at home and raise our son. I don't work evenings or weekends. I'm still taking classes here and there to get my PhD. For me, there is optimism.
The previous comment is purposely vague and generalized, but all of the facts are completely true.
Then there will be a corresponding increase in salaries to attract good employees... Which strangely hasn't happened, so it can't be much of a shortage.
Deleted
"They were going to have to learn to dress, communicate, and adapt all the traditional corporate ideals that IT has been exempt from during the dot-com boom."
IT was never exempt from communication, as IT is all ABOUT communication. Learning to dress usually means adhering to an arbitarily strict dress code that interferes with the nature of IT work to begin with. Ever try to set up a work station while wearing a suit and tie or something similar? You end up fighting your clothes more than the probelm at hand.
And corporate ideals aren't exactly something that I feel good about taking part in. Corporate ideals, for the most part, are trying to figure out how to save the company millions while keeping your mouth shut about anything shady the higher ups are doing. If we went by what people do rather than say, most corporate ideals could be summarized as 'looking for the golden parachute' or 'going to the company picnic to weasel my way into a promotion'.
There's a good reason the dot com companies didn't adhere to most of these. One, if you're working with an open minded crew, dress code doesn't matter aside from a few very basic rules. Two, ideals mean NOTHING if they aren't followed. You can bitch about how its all for the workers all you want, but when you give yourself a nice fat bonus over your workers, all of that just went out the window.
I call it breaking tradition. Tradition is you sit down, shut up, and do your job and whatever else they can trick you into doing. You're to dress up like good little sheeple and make sure not to look any of the higher ups in the eye.
IT people by nature are used to being different. They're used to thinking for themselves, because its probably the only reason they've survived into the IT field far enough to be employed for it. We aren't used to keeping our mouths closed while being treated like shit, or putting on four layers of expensive clothes just to dirty them up by rewiring the networking cabinet.
I wish it could be a wakeup call for all jobs that don't deal with customers/clients face-to-face. Just because the person processing your invoices is wearing a suit and tie doesn't mean he isn't forwarding your account information to his shady cousin. Nor does it mean he isn't talking smack about his co-workers or fantasizing about the new girl down in Advertising. All it means is he's wearing a suit beacuse someone made a policy saying that he had to.
It doesn't even look better than business-casual.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
If there's one thing that bothered me about the dot-com culture, it was all the wasted money on crap like foosball tables. I don't like corporate culture either, but for god's sake people have some perspective and MODERATE! Here are some plain truths that few people want to admit to:
1. Someone who actually knows what they're doing when it comes to computers is not a business person or an executive. A lot of people who dream about jobs in the technology sector always imagine that it somehow leads to the top of the glass tower and a corner office. It doesn't and it shouldn't. If you want that and you have middling to poor technical skills, then you're not cut out for technology. Instead you should go straight for that MBA now. Sure, there's the very rare and occasional individual who is very good with computers and also has business acumen, but you really have to look far and wide to find these strange hybrids. Most business people just aren't that good at computers other than using Office, maybe some SQL and that's about it. (This is not meant to insult anyone BTW)
2. A good software developer writes applications that are meant to be run as binaries. Sorry web folks, you're not software developers. At the very best, you are WEB application developers. At worst, you're still coding static HTML pages and trying to get that six figure job. Yes, web developers are necessary. Yes, web developers are quite talented. But web developers are rarely well versed in C or C++. However, many web developers have a leg up on software developers in the visual department though. Not always, but more often than not.
3. Everything I said about the web developers above? It all applies in reverse to the software developers. As always, there are some exceptions, but they are rare. Software developers should typically not try to write web applications. At best, you'll wind up re-inventing something some other web developer has already done that's ten times better. At worst, you'll wind up with some ugly monstrosity of a web page that isn't user friendly and while the backend might be super efficient, it won't actually do a lot. Stick to software development, it's a different creature altogether. If you are dead set on becoming a web developer, then try REALLY hard NOT to bring much of what you know about UI design (which tends to be little) to the web app side. Remember that the web is primarily a visual medium, including the text. It has to look at least as good as it works.
4. Microsoft based developers are totally different animal. A lot of you are quite talented within your own realm and can whip up some fantastic stuff much faster than your Java and Unix based C using counterparts in terms of look and feel and reusable objects. (The only possible exception being the QT/KDE folks in Unix land) And the subsets of development apply to you as well. There are those of you who develop web apps and those of you who develop applications for use on the desktop. Once again, it's a rare person who can cross those boundaries and do well on both sides. So stick to your side of the development space, unless you want to make a major career change and can actually let go of what you know and take on a totally different mindset.
5. IT computer and network admins are also not executive or "office" positions. A lot of people seem to think that working in IT means a clean office, and you get to wear suits or at the very least business casual. You're wrong. Computer and network admins tend to be the grunts who crawl under desks in a lot of small to medium sized businesses. If you happen to be lucky enough to work in a large or global business, then it's possible that your position will be considered close to but not quite "suit"-ish. Again, if that's what you want, you're better off focusing on the MBA with a minor in CS.
But the bottom line here is that people who really know what they're doing with computers are rarely business people. They are rarely cut out to function within c
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I am not an IT person but an electrical engineer and all I can say is why would you care about beanbags and pinball machines? It is more about the attitude of the people you are working with as well as the company. I would rather work hard, enjoy my work and come off with some sense of achievement than dick around all day.
And when you start costing 30x as much, suddenly you'll be able to out-do 35 of them, right?
... or, hell, even just where's your one big project? Anything? I mean, if you're worth 20 of them, surely you have something to show for all that enormous skill?
One thing I've learned is that when someone starts saying they're better than programmers from (insert country here,) they're just trying to tell me either that they've never worked with programmers from that country, or that they have wildly inflated notions of self worth. I'm curious: given that among 20 programmers you'll have two or three successfully completed large projects, where are your fourty to sixty?
When you have some numbers to back up that you're actually worth 20 of them, let us know; until then, it's hollow dishonest bragging. The only people you're impressing are other people like you.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
Lets face it, many of the IT people were burned during the dot com bust (I still think it was the Y2K bust more than dot com's) We have grown and learned from our mistakes. Many of us have learned how business works, where things can go wrong, and just how the system works. Now it is our turn ;)
I know I have a list.
#1) Do not take options in place of pay.
#2) Do not accept the 50% of your salary now and 50% based on a bonus when the company is profitable.
#3) Do not accept titles in place of raises. Titles are useless.
#4) Make sure the company has a business plan, funding, and a clear way to become profitable.
#5) If something smells funny in accounting, RUN!!! ( If we pay you 45% of your pay as an employee, 40% as a 1099 contractor, 10% in stock options, and 5% in cash, you get to keep more of your money. Or my favorite your pay is $93,000 and your first check comes in and the math only comes up to $85,000. When you ask you find that it is $93,000 - ($1788*3 weeks vacation) - ($1788x 1 week sick leave) In other words, they are not paying for your vacation or time off but offered it when you were hired. )
#6) Do not work more than 55 hours a week unless they are paying overtime.
#7) Document EVERYTHING! Every offer they make needs to be in writing, every promise, everything.
#8) If you want it, negotiate it when being hired!
Any one want to add to this list?
Hey, don't underestimate the secretaries!
In a big firm with a lot of red tape, a good secretary can be the difference between something getting done today, and it taking three to six months. A good one will know who to call and what to do to Get. Things. Done.
If we had a secretary in this department, I would be writing code, instead of trying to coordinate with support people and filling out forms just to get a few computers moved around...
"The amount of intelligence on this planet is a constant. The population is growing." -Cole's Axiom
and developers aren't getting paid $100K for being HTML and JavaScript jockeys
Yes, now they're being paid $100K for being HTML and CSS and JavaScript jockeys. What a huge difference.
I hope the author recognizes the differences between a taxi cab driver and F1 driver. Because HTML/JS has low entry bar doesn't mean you can pay 50 bucks to a random college kid and have Google maps with draggable/adaptable routes in a week.
It wasn't just the salaries if that was the main problem at all. It was more general mis-management of money and lack of responsibility by upper management or project managers. I made 40k right out of the gates, but in about 3 months I expensed nearly that in travel (first class), hotels (The W in SF, HoB in Chicago, etc). I had no limit / per diem for food placed on me. Instead of returning home on the weekends we would take trips to Vegas or Tahoe or LA. Other project managers would fight to goto lunch with us and normally we'd end up with a group of 10 and daily lunch bills of nearly $400. It was one big college party with catered breakfasts and dinners, fully stocked bar and kegs (usually of Guinness) refilled once a week.
I heard stories of people asking for books of cab receipts and filling them out randomly just to get an extra $10 or $20 here and there.
Multiply all that by the 5 or 6 people they would shuffle around to create the team it adds up.
When you add that to all these companies wanting to get the big accounts / clients and ignoring the smaller ones that could keep them afloat, yes, you're going to bleed money. $150 million in funds gone in 17 months. I still can't fathom it.
Is paid for in cash.
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Indeed. What these management types think of as inflated salaries is a perception problem on their part, not the developers'. It is well documented that a really good developer can be at least an order of magnitude more productive than the average. Do they get paid 10x as much for their time buy a business employing them? Of course not, that's "not the market rate"...
...Unless you take a leap of faith and go self-employed or start your own business. Now if you're a talented developer, your greater productivity benefits you directly or a company that you own, and you really can get the financial benefits that your skill level deserves on merit.
Realistically, most managers aren't smart and knowledgeable enough to understand this and offer salaries that really are attractive to people good enough to have the other option open to them. That's why they keep bitching about a shortage of talent, yet in the next breath refer to the "inflated" salaries of the dot com boom (where despite all the failures, quite a few small companies made an awful lot of money very fast using good people).
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I've worked at a number of places where they used oddball naming conventions. as long as they're grouped correctly, and LABELED, what does it matter?
I mean sure, if you take greek gods and name every fricking server after one and don't label them, you're going to have problems.
But if you name the accounting servers after demons, the web servers after presidents, the file infrastructure after animals, etc, then label them clearly, set them up in alphabetical order within their category, you're good to go. The names are easy to remember, the "role" of the machine is obvious from the name, and you don't forever have to recheck the name you scrawled on your hand while you're wandering through the server room looking for a machine with a hugely unpronouncable name.
Now this only flies if you don't have to worry about 1000 machines all doing the exact same thing...That's really what the "standard" naming system is meant for. But since most businesses aren't in that situation, it doesn't make sense to get all gestapo on the naming conventions for a few dozen machines.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Problem is they want to pay the other way. Almost ALL Tech jobs I see are incredibly underpaid and the managers in charge of it wonder why they cant keep the position filled.
guess what, $18.99 an hour is ENTRY LEVEL, yet these guys want to pay $13-16 an hour and then wonder why they only get high school kids or fresh college grads that only work there for 6 months and leave.
If you want good tech people then you have to PAY for good tech people. Yet this incredibly basic bit of understanding seems to elude Americas CEO's and managers.
Hell the job I left 2 years ago is STILL open because they refuse to pay for what the position demands and only get under qualified people because of the pay offered.
the whole article is nothing more than posturing by Executives whining there is a shortage of cheap and competent labor.
I complain that there is an incredible lack of competent executives running the companies out there.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
and this somebody is as good as you? Can you improve then? If they are merely at your level it usually does not pay for the company to employ somebody else only to get 1k savings on your salary. There are of course exeptions - the moron manager getting bonus for a 1k$ saving and moving along before the competence gap hits etc. But if they act in a responsible way they usually need experienced people to do core activities. Such experienced people do not grow on trees and tend to piss off if treated badly.
I admit that knowing this does not help by salary negotiations. If you hit the wall the only way to get more money is to get another job. My experience is that this is the only thing that helps. I do not discuss to much with them. Simple questions are answered simply as in following work instruction:
1.ask the boss:"can I get more money? "
2.if answer is yes CONTINUE
else find another JOB.
3.work a little
4.GOTO1
There is no point in arguing with morons. By doing so anyway you run into danger that you get so low as to their intelectual and moral level. They are like politicians - good boss is difficult to find the rest of them are simple parasites able to come up only with ideas of others.
In college I worked for a company who did 10 hour days, Monday/Tuesday, Wednesday off, and then Thursday/Friday. It was pure heaven. It makes life into short little two day weeks. Tuesday night becomes like a Friday since you don't have to work the next day, and then you get a weekday to either wear off what you did the night before or get errands and stuff done during the week when things are less busy. Then Thursday/Friday and the normal weekend. The only two days that kind of suck then are Monday and Thursday.
Absolutely the best work schedule ever, plus it cuts down on commuting since you are missing the standard rush hours, and since you are already at work the extra hour or two is no big deal when the reward is a full day off. I could care less about fluffy crap and I don't need to be treated like a superstar or anything, just let me work smarter and have an equal amount of time for my real life.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
I will take the onshore guy who claims he can be 20x productive over 20 offshore resources any day of the week because, if he is passionate about technology and has the confidence to make that statement, which could be quickly determined, he is probably right. You probably come from the school of thought that a new resource can only add productivity to a project. In your line of thinking, even if they are not very good, they will at least marginally increase productivity. In reality, most developers are net negative to project productivity and the median developer falls below zero.
It's not that offshore people are inherently inferior. It's that most offshore technical resources have little or no interest in technology. They simply want to make money. This is not bad in and of itself. However, like their onshore counterparts who are driven solely by the same interest, their technical skills are generally quite poor. As a result, hiring a scatter shot of 20 offshore programmers and incurring the managerial overhead will generally result in less overall project productivity than where you started, especially when you consider long term costs.
The smart "bosses" are more concerned about the holistic profitability of their business
Yeah right. Smart bosses are probably weighing up the cost/benefit ratio of keeping you on versus laying you off versus butchering you in the stationary cabinet and selling your organs on the blackmarket.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
I worked at a larger dotcom in the late 1990's, and sure, they coddled developers with all this nice stuff.
But you should see what they did for the salesweasels:
One year, they had an offsite conference - in South Africa. They went on a hunting safari, and each got a commemorative, engraved, gold Rolex watch, for the occasion. I think that was the most extravagant offsite I heard of; but they had a big one like that, every year, and additional quarterly ones that were at local (Bay Area) country clubs or resorts.
I think that, in light of what the idiot salesweasels do, as opposed to, you know, the smart people who actually produce the products, create IP, and innovate, I would say that you can't coddle developers enough. I understand that without sales people, there's no market, no revenue. But these are the people closest to the money, and the people whose professional skillset revolves around lying and cheating to get the most money, and frankly, that sort of coddling is far more corrosive to the health of a corporate budget than a fucking fooseball table, or letting someone come to work in shorts and sandals.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I will definitely concur with your observations, from my work both with "offshore" Indian teams and "near-shore" Puerto Rican teams. The median developer on the team can definitely be counter-productive, so it takes a couple of miracle-workers to bring the mean developer positive and make things crawl along on the positive side of zero.
I will also concur that a great indicator of a highly-positive developer is a developer who is really interested in technology. It's not a litmus test, but it's a cumulative benefit. I always ask other folks if they code things in their spare time. In many cases, it's really easy to see the folks who will not benefit the team-- they have no imagination or creative urges to solve problems, they simply took the courses with a paycheck in mind.
However, I won't quite go so far as to say that this is a truism or even anything more than a stereotype with some "truthiness" to it. I have found some very determined, even dogged, worker-bee personalities who couldn't solve their way out of a paper bag if given a sharp sashimi knife. There are a LOT of this personality available in the workforce, and it's these types of workers that the average manager tends to hire for those offshore/nearshore teams. There is a way to get value from them: don't have them solve the problems. Demonstrate to them how to cut a paper bag with a sashimi knife, and then point them at the seven thousand paper bags that need cutting. If you can organize them in such a way as to not require too much problem-solving, they'll execute your job requirements deep into the night while you're at home with the kids.
In short, an outsourcing services team isn't for solving problems, it's for executing plans. If you have a local resource who behaves this way, see how you can make them part of the outsourcing services team, instead of the core team. If you have a great problem-solver in the remote team, ask your Legal department how you can poach them.
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Yep. You nailed it.
It wasn't the culture that brought these places down, it was the spending. I *was* a project manager during 1997-2001 and I, personally, had hundreds of $100/head dinners during that time. I flew (mostly) first class to client locations (Chicago, LA, San Fran, NYC, Houston) and I stayed at some great hotels (W, Hiltons, Marriotts, Sheratons, etc). I just got lucky on my project assignments being in great cities but that's another story. Since I was in Dallas, we had plenty of 4-star and 5-star restaurants and we definitely used them! Del Friscos, The Mansion on Turtle Creek, 3 forks, etc.
In all of that time, I can't remember a single instance of anyone questioning how much money was being spent. As long as (some) money kept coming in the door, this cycle continued until - duh - the company went out of business. It was no shock to ANYONE who saw the actual books and what we were spending. It was truly astounding (ie: $1300 of wine in one meal at the Mansion on TC, 8 ppl attending, not including food)
I will never understand, no matter how hard you try, why someone would spend $50K to go win a project that would make $15K in profit. It's kinda like selling dollar bills for $0.95 and making it up on volume...
So yea - poor management is the reason most of these companies failed. And by poor management, I really mean "just plain old bad business decisions". There is a reason 80% of startups fail. It's not because the market can not handle the supply, rather, it is usually because of a fatal business decision made early on. And the #1 culprit is: over spending.