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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.'"
I'm an excellent slacker... err superstar geek programmer.
It's going to come up, so let me save you all some time:
From The English to American Dictionary
I really haven't seen any hard evidence that all that many 'web jockeys' were getting some $100k salary, unless they lived in the valley, where cost of living is so bad that 100k is practically minimum wage unless you take the bus 2 hours to work. Does anyone have any stats to back up what the average dot-com era 'web jockey' salary was compared with today?
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You see this kind of thing happen whenever demand for IT professionals goes up because of the common perception that IT people are 'geeks/nerds' who are willing to take compensation in the form of casual wear and beanbag chairs instead of in salary... Given that the company is interested in its own bottom line, which is cheaper, a pinball machine or giving everyone a raise?
Thank God Sony gave me this great job developing games for the PS3.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I worked at a DOT BURSTER in 2000, in big wide open space in the burbs, and they had free pizza every Fridays, everyone could wear jeans, I could roll in more or less whenever I wanted, and we all had potentially millions of dollars in soon to be worthless stock options. When hired they asked me if I wanted Linux, or Windows, or both. All of our servers were named after Transformers.
Now, I have a little cubicle, a company issued notebook running Windows XP, and no stock options. All of our servers are named based on an established IBM numbering system. I get to work from home a bit more but that's only because I commute 4 hours a day.
Sure, this gig pays more, but the work environment is not nearly the same. 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.
This is my sig.
Nah, I usually grin at my aunts and uncles at funerals and say "You're next".
Stops them suggesting marriage anytime soon.
Me failed English...
FreeBSD over Linux. If my comments seem odd, this may explain...
Goodbye, pants!
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?
The reason there is a shortage is that those who were burned the first time wont go back and those that haven't been burned yet have been forewarned by those that have. Very few outside the upper echelons of the .com companies of the 90's saw any real benefit from the .com era the vast majority got hosed. Empty promises, foosball and free juice worked the first time but I can't see many falling for it again. Everyone I worked with in my two experiences with the .com era have moved out of the corporate world and are either with small companies or working as consultants, a few have left the field entirely.
I recently received a call from the Recruiter that hired me on to my last corporate job. I was told the company I was laid off from was looking to hire me back. I told me the whole dog and pony show was starting back up, that the culture had changed and this time would be different and this time it wouldn't be a complete waste of five years of my life. I thought about it for five seconds and told her that I would just as soon bathe in hot lava than go back. She sounded a little upset, and proceeded to tell me that so far she was 0-12 in trying to lure back the folks I worked with. Guess I wasn't alone.
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
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?
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.
I can't believe I am reading about ironing on "News for Nerds, Stuff that matters." wtf?
He actually just hires 20 Indian Programmers to do the work for him.
Some days I just get bored and Troll post all the memes I can think of...