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Young IT Workers Disillusioned, Hard to Retain
bednarz writes to mention that NetworkWorld has an interesting examination of young IT professionals and why many make unreasonable demands for their services. "'The issue managers are facing is with retention, not hiring. That means the work environment is not living up to the employee's expectation,' he says. For instance, many younger workers expect to get an office immediately or be paid at a rate higher than entry level."
participate in a job market by providing incentives!
Economists around the world are stunned. Was Adam Smith right? Were there truly rational actors within an economy?
How many truly influential people (Torvalds, Gates, Jobs, etc, etc, etc) jumped to stardom overnight? For that matter, how many upper-level IT guys and gals in big firms got there overnight? Work hard and treat the other people in your office right and it will happen for you. And most of all, make sure you don't act like this guy :)
cb_is_cool knows where his towel is.
Ouch, I think I hurt my back laughing...
Have you read my blog lately?
Yes, there are rational actors within the economy, but it seems that Young IT Professionals aren't among them.
At least where I work, the IT workers (myself included) are paid 40% less than the market rate so there is a reason everyone has low morale and the turnover rate is around 25% or more each year. I don't think there has been a time since I started working there in the last 4 years where there has been every position in the department actually staffed at the same time. This IT department is around 75 people.
Now, maybe that is just working for the State is not very well paying, but it is a problem affecting thousands of employees not just the younger ones. I guess when it comes down to it though, people need to get off their tails and apply for other jobs that pay more if we want to leave. The problem is often that you like the area you are living in, just not the pay rate you are making working there...
"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." - Tennyson
And pray tell, what magical career instantly gives employees fresh out of college above-entry level rates?
Perhaps the "entry level" rate for whatever position they're talking about is not in sync with the "market rate". Supply and demand affects the job market too.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
In the IT world, in my personal experience, you obtain raises through adding on to your skillset. With more skills, especially cutting-edge, or hard to find skills, you're worth more to the company. Once you have that skillset, you can let your employer know at your next review (ask for quarterly reviews, or at least semi-annual reviews) that you've added those skillsets and feel you're more valuable to the company. If you're not at least given some hope of a worthwhile upcoming raise (typically at your year review, not sooner) start shopping around - but don't quit or burn bridges. Once you've found a good new employer and they're willing to hire you, go back to your boss and say you'd like to stay, but need to have things adjusted. It won't be out of the blue if you've already brought up your new skillset and expectation of more pay with it. Further, you can let your boss know that the new skills you've aquired is worth X in the market now. The key is to do it politely, not with an ultimatum. Even if they turn you down and aren't willing to offer a bump in pay, be polite, ask for a reference letter (not that you're leaving, just that should they or the company of a change of staff soon, you want to make sure you've got good references), and let them know you'll be seriously considering another job offer you have (don't bluff, you must have another job lined up for this to work, otherwise you'll back down and end up looking like a liar).
Should they counter (it should be for more, not just matching), you could go to the company wanting to hire you and ask for a matching rate for what your existing employer is willing to go up to (don't ask for more than your current employer offered, that sounds greedy and doesn't leave much room for growth if you do jump ship).
Don't forget to be sure of perks, number of paid holidays/vacation days, bonuses, like healthcare, cell phone, paid home internet, company laptop, company car, etc. You might have those now, but not if you leave.
I've traded employers twice like this. As I didn't burn any bridges, I actually work for my first real major employer again, and each time I've traded up in position, title, and of course compensation.
This is part of the campaign by businesses to talk down wages. Don't fall for it. Those who run businesses are the most familiar with supply and demand and are trying to con their employees. Labour supply is tightening while demand is rising. Times are good for workers. Make the most of it since it won't last for ever. Use the opportunity to demand as much as you can from your employers and drive IT wages up as high as possible. Build up some fat for the lean years that will inevitably come.
For instance, many younger workers expect to get an office immediately or be paid at a rate higher than entry level.
Hell, I expect to be put in charge! I'm just out of college! I know EVERYTHING!!!
I think our CEO technically has an office, but it's usually being used for meetings he's not in.
I believe the only time I've actually seen non-management tech workers get a private office was the result of a fluke. Large company (several thousand employees) buys remains of relatively small company (few hundred) with a long lease on half of a very roomy building with lots of small individual offices, and underutilizes the space. As a result, the only people in the largely-desolate cube farms were temporary workers. Everyone making more than, say, $35k, got an office.
WTF? If supply for something is less than the demand, of course prices will go up.
If a younger person wants, say, $60K for an entry level job and has negotiation power (i.e. another company that pays it), then that is the entry-level payment and it means that you're paying less than what they deserve to your existing employees.
This is one of the content-free articles.
I don't think an office is unreasonable for anyone. The industry took away employee's rights one by one when there was ample supply. Now it's drying up and the workforce is asking for what belonged to them.
If managers stopped "managing" people like they are a herd and became a part of their team, I don't see why they shouldn't be able to hold on to employees as long as the pay is competitive.
echo 'cat sig | sh' > sig
Let the little bastards have a house payment, car payment and utilities and not pay check. Bet that changes their tune. Hell I'm a CPA with a Masters and 30 years experience and I still don't have an office. But my check is bigger than the guys that do so I'll gladly give up an office for more pay.
Irrational actors make good money too. Look at Tom Cruise.
It isn't just IT, it can be seen in many other industries as well. It believe this is just one more example of what my generation is facing (19-30), the "something for nothing" problem.
Many of my peers expect to graduate college and start off on the same level their parents are (who have worked for 30 years). I see this both in all my peers, from the construction workers to the computer scientists. I don't believe it is unique in I.T.
I am in my mid forties working in IT and I must say that my team members that are in their 20's really don't seem to have the motivation to learn the technology as I did 20 years ago, staying up all night on bulletin boards, spending every free moment tweaking my config.sys or netx stack for better performance. I see kids today that learn their core responsibilities but make no effort to progress further. I don't mind though, I have noticed several local fortune 500 companies are targeting "older" people for open positions, stating that the younger aren't seasoned enough or lack the skillset needed to be successful in the data center. Go ahead kids, keep on playing WOW and put your VMware books aside, that helps me stay relevant for the 15 years until I retire.
The survey question was which generation is the toughest to manage... meaning at least one generation has to be the toughest. The question wasn't "Are your employees aged 18-31 tough to manage?" Since most of the managers are probably older, it is natural that the generation furthest from their age would be the toughest for them to manage. They are the most foreign in terms of experience, lifestyle, life stage, and expectations. I am in fact surprised that it was only 50% who chose the youngest generation. Given the size of the generations listed in the survey, there is most likely only 4 generations at most who are working - 18-31, 32-42, 43-53, 54-65. Given the general youth in the IT field, most of the people who have to be managed in IT will be from the younger generations, making them more likely to be the most difficult to manage. In addition the article states that 'Twenty-three percent of respondents said retaining existing staff is the top concern, while 22% said they struggle to find new qualified candidates.' If this is the case, then clearly they AREN'T paying enough, as the demand out paces supply. I find the whole tone of the summary a bit misleading.
Don't get me wrong, money is important but the environment is just as important. You have to allow leeway both in terms of environment and opportunity. I run a consulting biz and you have to allow room for the younger guys to experiment with new stuff. If you don't, they get bored no matter how much you pay them or what sort of office they have.
The real key though is to migrate the desire of the younger guys from tearing apart every new technology to the skillset of an established professional. It might be somewhat less exciting but in the end it is what customers want and what pays the bills. As your guys/gals get older and move along in life a polished skillset pays the best.
Oh, and if you're really smart, you'll achieve those long view items w/o crushing that natural curiosity out of your folks. That is, after all, what makes all of this exciting.
If one is entry level in a field where a degree is now required, (such as IT), one is entitled to entry level pay and benefits, regardless of what one's parents generation received when they entered the field with its requirements at that time. If one thinks one is underpaid, one has the option of obtaining employment elsewhere. If all employers are underpaying, then one has misjudged one's market value.
Oh please, who do you think your parents generation is?
If you're a "millenial" (what a stupid term) then, roughly speaking, it's me. Everyone I know in the technology arena has at least a bachelor's degree.
I just have a BS in Computer Science. My wife has an MBA, half of another Master's degree, and a BA with a double English/Math major. And don't tell me about student debt!
When I started working in technology 17 years ago, everyone at that company had at least a bachelor's, and most of them had an advanced degree, including some doctorates.
There's nothing special about this latest generation except being whiney spoiled brats. And get off my lawn, damnit.
The preferred solution is to not have a problem.
* Could be that we got out of college and started jobs at or below entry level salaries given the economic downturn immediately after 9/11.
* Could be that 5-10 years later the market has changed so dramatically that it's unusual to even find a company with an "IT department" anymore. It's all been outsourced.
* Could be that most IT workers are tired of seeing executives get 20% raises and stock options year after year while we get flat 3% annual - or no raises at all.
* Could be that with all this automation we're still checking our Blackberries at 3 AM and rebooting servers. We're always on call (like doctors) but we don't paid like them.
* Could be that the "fun" of this industry left long ago. It's no longer hacking away at circuit boards. It's watching server farms blink.
* You want to know why employers are having a touch time retaining us? Could be that we're smart enough to realize the "traditional" career of an IT professional is all but gone and the only real career paths left are through management (hence folks skipping the certifications and going for the MBAs). Alternatively, consulting still proves lucrative. But to chide us because we know that the "IT professional" career is dying is silly.
That's because you are what is called "book smart" right now. Anyone, in any industry can tell you that people fresh out of school, find out they learn more in the first months on a real job, than they did in years of school.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Ben
I think just as it is the right of a company to set their prices I should be able to set mine. Maybe this manager doesn't have the resources to support the type of work he needs done. As a somewhat young worker in the IT / programming area this man proclaiming I am not worth what I am getting paid is outrageous. Especially now that retiring programmers and the legacy of code they leave behind. There will be fewer to replace them and more to do, these guys deserve to be able to set any price they please as far as they can find someone willing to pay it. So in short anyone who complains that the cost of what they need to function is too much I think they can't afford it to begin with.
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
Some of the younger programmers really don't want to work in an inflexible office environment. Absenteeism is pretty high where I am now, and that's a contract that pays pretty well. And they want their web mail, IM's and iPhones. Cut off internet services they want and you'll lose them.
They don't do office hours, don't like cubicles and want their toys. But if you can work with them on those issues, they are capable of producing some amazing work. The best project I ever worked we set up an office in the corner of a warehouse, walled it off with fence panels and white boards, collected old furniture and used shelf grates for desks. We had a basketball hoop, frig, microwave, satellite TV and our own DSL. Plus we'd stay late and play games after hours. No one quit on that project and we worked some long hours toward the end.
You don't really have a lot of options. You can deal with them or outsource to someplace that doesn't speak English as a native language and works in an office that's open in what's the middle of the night for you. They're not going to work in a cubicle so just deal with it and adapt. You're better off giving them an empty, unfinished room and give them money to punk it out to their own taste.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Using "one" in a sentence is a right not to be abused.
One might think one would choose one's words more considerately for other ones when reading one's posts posted from one's computer.
I think that the root cause is lack of knowledge. In many pre-job situations, being able to install XP from scratch was a good feat, knowing your way around BASH was considered amazing and when you could set up a wireless router in 2 minutes people thought that you were a tech genius. Until you start working at a tech-job you don't know that the things that amazed your friends really made no difference in the real world. When you came out of college they knew Python and Perl along with C and Java and in the eyes of their friends they were 1337 Hax0rs, then they go get a tech job where either they don't code much, or everyone has a working knowledge of code. To some less-informed people, just using a non-MS OS such as Linux or knowing the command line on OS-X instantly made you some sort of star, you go to your job and everyone knows Linux and UNIX. Everyone thinks they have talent... Until they find someone who can do the exact same thing better then them.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
1988 wants its story back.
Seriously...the media trots out this "Younger generation wants more" story every 5-10 years. They certainly did twenty years ago, when I was one of those hard-to-please kids.
Nothing's changed. Employers pay crap wages at the entry level, and treat young kids like crap. Said young kids then hop jobs until they find something better. Same as it ever was. When I was that age, I quickly found that without experience, jobs I could get were pretty sucky. I also soon found that it was much easier to get a raise by job-hoping. So I spent the first ten years of my career moving around until I got the experience to get a good job.
The younger generation isn't any different. It's always like this, because entry level jobs tend to be the suckiest and companies that employ lots of entry level coders also tend to be the suckiest. If a company doesn't like their people switching jobs, they should pay more, and stop treating them like crap. Of course, so companies *do* do that. They're the ones people job hop to and then stop.
The cake is a pie
You win - I've been "one-upped"
We do not go into large debt and spend years getting educated in order to start out at the bottom. ---- Yes you did. Its just no one told you that while in school. By the way,Welcome to the real world.
They're complaining that people are doing just that.
Hell I'm a CPA with a Masters and 30 years experience and I still don't have an office.
With 30 years experience I'm sure you know this, but for everyone new to the idea: Offices are only for people who have a business need to have private meetings. No one else needs an office, that's just a waste of space and roadblock to collaboration. I used to work on a production floor where some of the senior machinists made more that the managers in their offices. Skilled workers don't have a need for an office so they don't get one, while even very junior company infrastructure types (management, HR, etc.) frequently need to be able to shut the door and have a discussion with someone.
We are all just people.
I agree entirely. Master's is the new bachelor's. Where I work, you normally start at the lowest level. Master's gets you at the next level. If you transfer from another company, even if you only worked there for two months, you're a level on top of that. Well, there goes THAT use for my master's. People younger than me with less experience and a BS get paid more at my company in the same job now.
and the most depressing thing about entering the workforce for me is how hard it is to get your foot in the door anywhere. I have absolutely no problems starting at the bottom and working my way up, but there doesn't seem to be many places out there that are willing to hire straight out of the gate. Go do a search on Monster or Dice in any major metropolitan area (or anywhere else for that matter) for entry-level positions and I guarantee you won't find more than one to two positions, if that.
I can certainly understand that, considering that the vast majority job postings consist of "Must have 5+ years of exp. with (extremely specific) technologies A, B, & C" as well as a wide swath of skills that are generally only picked up on the job. The companies that complain about not being able to find qualified candidates are often the same companies that outsource all of the entry-level jobs to India.
God, schmod. I want my monkey man!
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
My last employment was terminated in April of 2007 where I earned $35,000 cdn/year.
I was hired in December of 2006 to follow a software development plan to implement a visualization suite which allowed building developers to visualize housing before construction to show potential buyers, city planners, etc..
The software development was in Microsoft Visual C++ 2003 using OpenSceneGraph, XML based configuration and skinning, used OpenThreads and had TCP based network sessions for live or pre-recorded guided tours.
When I was hired, I replaced an intermediate software developer that could no longer get along with the director (immediate supervisor). There was a senior programmer above me but he left by mid-January of 2007, but before he did I was told the development team was going to be expanded to 3 full time developers. We had a graphics artist who used tools like 3D Studio Max to visualize the buildings from architectural blue-prints (or floor plans if you prefer).
Just after the senior programmer left, I started going through all of the modules to get an idea of what would need to be done to prepare the rendering engine for the development plan which had been presented to me. I found that whenever a HUD button was being pressed a new thread was being launched. In fact if you pressed the 'move forward' button twice quickly, the camera would jump back and forth between two positions because two threads were being launched without mutexes or any other safe-guard. I also noticed that nearly all class data members were public and being affected from other classes. And finally that the event processor had code that depended on the event be associated to a HUD button.
So I made recommendations to decouple the modules, fix the event model & processor as well as eliminate the excessive threading which was not making things faster as the unexperienced multi-threading programmer who implemented them had obviously assumed.
When I presented these recommendations to the director he laughed in my face and began yelling at me when I tried to explain why these changes would be necessary. So I backed off after the president of the company heard us out and decided to back the director who had been there longer than I.
At the beginning of April I was falling behind the schedule because of problems directly associated to the event model where the software development plan called for events to be generated by the camera walking through tagged plains. As mentioned, the event processor contained code which read fields from a HUD button which had to be present, so I was trying to emulate a button's state but the events would run in a continuous loop. While struggling with emulating the button states properly there was construction crew in our new office building during the day and my director was having (business?) friends in the office in the evening to drink wine and chat within earshot of my cubicle.
In my last few days of my employment, in early April of 2007 I started going into the office in the late afternoon to ensure at least 4 hours of my 8 hour shift had no distractions since my employers who told me when I was hired that my hours of work were flexible as long as they amounted to 8 hours a day. They decided to fire me without telling me why, though I expect it had to do with my decision to go in during the evening to avoid the distractions during the day. Up until that point I had never handed in any work late. Get this, they still had not hired any other developer, so I was the only programmer left when they terminated my employment.
I have been unemployed since April 2007 (we're now in January of 2008) despite looking for work at junior and intermediate levels, software development, testing, maintenance, help desk support, etc, etc..
In my years of IT work I've found management to be incompetant, not at technical skills but soft skills. It sounds as though the new generation of IT workers have been informed of what kind of crap happens in thes
If there's more demand for workers than there is supply, those who're around can make more and more demands while companies wishing to hire them can either pay that or go out of business for lack of product. Again, over time, salaries and conditions will change, in this case improving, until equilibrium is reached due to increased supply (high salaries attract more people to the field) and reduced demand (companies can no longer make a profit at those costs and stop trying).
Either way, though not a static equilibrium, basic supply and demand implies that salaries will generally regulate relative to the value society places on them.
What doesn't make sense, is the argument, "Both sides need to meet in the middle!" If the young coders are asking too much, ignore them, they'll get hungry and come begging. If the young coders are actually asking a totally reasonable price, given how in demand their jobs are, what's the problem?
And that, to me, is really the crux of this: It sounds more like bitching that, "It wasn't like that in my day! We were lucky to get paid six pence a week to write COBOL!" So what if it was? So what if you don't like how in favor of the young coders the market is these days? If it's such an issue, don't hire them. If you want them badly enough that you are willing to pay what they demand, don't have your actions show that willingness then bitch about that reality.
The reverse is also true: If you're a coder and you think you're entitled to more than you're getting, you need to ask yourself why you're not getting it. Think you deserve an office, a car, expense accounts, 401ks and stock but you're not getting it? Well, if you merit it, why are you sitting here bitching about it rather than in the next job that'll apparently willingly reward you for it?
It's a free country. Employers can [pretty much] employ at will. Employees can [pretty much] be employed at will. That's a pretty good sign supply and demand is allowed to work and everyone's getting roughly what they should get. Look at how fast the dotcom boom came (maybe two years) and how fast it went (six months) - that's another great sign the market regulates pretty quickly. Don't like it? Wait six months. The whining about how things should be is just that - whining.
I think part of the reason younger works move around is simply because they don't have the experience to know what they want and what to expect, and little invested in their current position. I don't think moving around a little to gain that experience and find the right match is necessarily bad.
The recurring story is that 'Millennials' have all these outrageous, inflated expectations and their 'reasonable' employers just don't know what to do about it. If their expectations are really so out of proportion, then eventually they will have to settle for what they're actually worth and employers have nothing to complain about. On the other hand, if that potential employee can find what he or she actually wants somewhere else, well then that employer is just going to have to compete for them! It's all supply and demand just like any other transaction.
If one is entry level in a field where a degree is now required, (such as IT), one is entitled to entry level pay and benefits, regardless of what one's parents generation received when they entered the field with its requirements at that time. If one thinks one is underpaid, one has the option of obtaining employment elsewhere. If all employers are underpaying, then one has misjudged one's market value.
Conversely, employers having trouble retaining staff may well be underestimating their employees market value, and almost certainly made a utility misjudgment somewhere.
It's certainly possible to misjudge one's market value -- there's a good deal of misinformation out there, most accidental, some quite possibly purposeful, however, by those attempting to manipulate labor supply.
But consider this: entry level lawyers don't get paid what joe call center gets paid for his entry-level job. IT is, ostensibly anyway, a skilled and specialized field. There may not be arcane magic to every aspect of it, but experience and training count. Someone has to bear the cost for that training, and if employers want people who know their stuff and stick around, they'd best be prepared to pony up for it rather than trying to externalize that cost.
No, IT isn't as hard as a law degree, but it's not janitorial work either. And I have heard, with my own ears, management complaining about how hard it is to find workers who accept "entry level" -- sub $30k -- and wonder why there's such turnover among those employees they do manage to land. This while rewarding new management talent (with questionable record of delivering, other than being able to keep labor costs down) $20k raises.
The labor pool in IT, if it's actually shrinking at all, is shrinking for a reason and will continue to do so -- until it's opened to a pool of workers who consider prevailing compensation rewarding, or until the prevailing compensation rises.
Or, more cynically, until someone manages to convince enough people that IT is in fact such a rewarding occupation that they'll sink enough resources into training that they're in little position to do much else.
Tweet, tweet.
That's not to say that recent graduates cannot immediately contribute significantly to their company.
My first few months out of college were rather somewhat unproductive since they felt it more important to take weeks of training on their various products and such. However, when I was able to be mentored with the usual work of the group it wasn't long before I noticed something...
"You mean whenever we start working on an issue we do these same series of steps on these same various servers in this particular order?"
I had that automated in short order.
Trouble is, people seem to forget the real lesson of college. What you learn in the university is nowhere near as important as learning how to learn. And sadly, if you don't capitalize on that lesson, it won't do you any good.
(I can never forget that one "oldie" who literally told me to read man pages for breakfast, from A to Z. He also told me it was my mission to become superuser. Ah the days...)
You can never and should never stop learning.
The very best piece of advice someone gave me while interviewing before I got out of college was that you must work extremely hard your first few years. You want to work harder than your peers and as soon as possible to become the most productive in your team.
I followed this advice and found it dovetailed just fine with continued learning. I just had to make certain not to fall into a treadmill routine. If I always made sure to allocate a fair chunk of time (10 to 20%) to trying to learn new things and trying to find faster ways of doing things, my productivity continued to grow. That's because the more productive I was, the more I could create free time to learn new things.
No, the reason is plain management stupidity, that wants to be cheap and has to have something over the peons they manage just to show they are above them.
Or, people who have a business need to shut out the world every now and then and concentrate, or people who have a business need to work with expensive or confidential stuff which they don't want to trust to a filing cabinet lock, etc.
Collaboration is a really nice sounding word, but ultimately collaboration, distraction, and gossip are just different products of the exact same thing.
"millenials" are still in elementary school. You're "generation debt" - the one screwed by the boomers.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
How often do we here, "If you don't like your job - QUIT already!"
So we do just that, and the six and seven-figure salaries in management still feel violated.
I say f- them. Either pay more, or quit complaining about our right to leave.
I suggest you read Slashdot
by well-meaning educators, parents, and public figures for most of their youthful lives.
College is your ticket out of the ghetto, means a higher income, better work conditions, more freedom, more control over your career, more respect, blah, blah, blah. It's true in a way, but the way a university education is described is often as the opposite of blue-collar work. That is to say that many kids are told (I know I was, all the way up through the end of undergrad) that I was going to college to avoid certain things:
- Being poor
- Having to get paid for what I "do" rather than what I "think"
- Being stuck in a "dead-end job"
- Having to "flip burgers," "answer phones," "make copies," or other "menial labor" work
- Low pay (this is a biggy, and you hear it over and over and over)
Well... all of these things are exactly what you confront when you finish your bachelor's degree. I know it was a tremendous shock to me after having been goaded on for years to get good grades in high school, then to go to college, then to hang in there—goaded using all of these reasons for sticking with it—only to find out that college doesn't provide you with wealth, the ability to get paid for what you think, a way to avoid dead-end jobs, having to start at the absolute entry level, or getting paid nothing for all of the above... The only way up the career ladder is to climb it, from the bottom.
It's the "all kids must go to college" culture that we have—we even direct kids away from the things they're interested in in many cases using these kinds of arguments (which are really veiled threats in a way of what consequences await them if they don't go to college) and then they graduate expecting exactly the benefits that have been used as selling points for all these years.
I can completely empathize. It took me a good five years to come to terms with the fact that I'd essentially been had and would now need to choose between going out and starting up the career ladder as if I'd just graduated high school with essentially no advantage, or going to grad school on the other hand (i.e. school for many more years and at great expense) to gain at least some measurable advantage for myself with all the hard work I'd done.
I chose the latter, but I often reflect on the fact that I could easily have chosen the former as well... there was certainly a point in my life where it could have gone either way.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
This statement captures the problem beautifully. The world will be yours one day, want it or not. And if you're a bunch of checked-out WOW playing crybabies it isn't going to be much of a world. Nobody gives anybody anything worth having in this life. You get it by earning it. And if you don't give a shit now, you certainly aren't going to give a shit when the next generation is crying that you don't do enough for them.
I advise you to get your ass off your shoulders and act responsible first. You'll become elite within your generation.
-Peter
If your job included duties like programing where you you have to keep a lot in your mind at one time a private office would seem more of a work requirement than a nicety.
I would clear out a large (or medium sized, the LCD monitor won't take up much space) broom closet for an IT worker that is expected to produce working code, even if it is just maintenance scripts.)
If interruptions do not cause you to be an order of magnitude less efficient than you can happily do with out an office, many top producing sales people prefer not to have an office, or if they do have one they want a fishbowl (glass walls to the hallway).
I don't get this idea of hiring people and then not giving the an environment that the can do the job you are paying good money for.
Work bio at MMWD
Or perhaps before they start providing incentives, they start by treating their employees like humans instead of freaking line item expenses.
Why the hell should I work 70 hour weeks, kill myself outside of a job to learn the latest tech, deal with idiot management and unreasonable schedules when the company would gladly lay me off to save $5?
Treat people like cattle, and you get a bunch of people just biding time until the grass is greener elsewhere.
No only isn't it "necessarily bad", I think it is a positivly Good Thing (TM). Moving around gives a graduate a range of experiences on both the technical level (develop skills etc) but also a range of experiences with various people and ways of working & doing business. All of this helps create a well rounded and skilled professional when then start to grow up and remain longer in jobs.
However, if you're an employer who wants to spend peanuts then you should expect to get either
- Someone with little experience (who will leave when they see they've developed skills someone will actually pay for)
- someone who can't get a better gig right now and promises to remain for ages (but won't)
- someone who can't get a job with better conditions because they are actually worth the little you pay, or maybe worth a little less
- A mixture of the above
Bottom line is - if you pay peanuts you get monkeys. Some monkeys will develop well and you should treat their tenure as a bonus. The monkeys you wish would leave, won't; and then you've got to consult your local labour laws"Which is better? Voting with our dollars by emigrating to countries with more political and economic freedoms while it's still possible."
I'll help you pack.
If young people do develop a sense of responsibility, they are still not going to take jobs. They are going to take over. It is every young generation's manifest destiny to take over from the older generations, eventually. But there are rites of passage. Those older guys know more than you do. They are tougher, meaner, smarter, more experienced, better talkers, better programmers, better negotiators, better strategists, etc.., than their younger colleagues. They are like this because they have been at it a lot longer. You will take over as they retire off and/or as you become experienced enough to outsmart and outcompete them. Again, there are no shortcuts.
So stop being a spoiled brat and go do the grunt work. You aren't yet up to the task of the higher profile stuff. You will know when you are up to the task, because you will take over. Until then, you are just flapping your lips. And no, you aren't worth the same amount of money as someone that has been doing the job for 20 years. In all likelihood, if you disappeared, they would hardly notice - as a green kid, the company is investing in you - you likely add very little value, so you are being payed more than they are able to extract in value from your labor. You are likely being trained, groomed and given experience in the hopes that your value will eventually increase past the point where their investment is, making you a profitable employee to have on board. If the 20 year veteran disappeared, the lights wouldn't turn on, the database would stop working, nobody would be able to get a new release out, it would start raining blood, cats and dogs would be living together and the company would go into crisis mood. But you wouldn't know about that, because you haven't experienced it...
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
Usually because if you don't, someone else will be willing to.
Check out my sysadmin blog!
I worked for a company that was bought out a few years back. The new CEO came to visit us to "pep talk" us, telling us that we were currently number two in the marketplace and that we wouldn't settle for number two: we had to be number one.
No one was enthusiastic in the slightest, and it wasn't because we were in a new company. No, we weren't pepped by his speech because it was clear to us that there was no advantage to us other than perhaps some prestige to being number one. All we would be doing is earning him and the stockholders more money.
We're told that we have to earn our place in society, but from many of our perspectives, there really isn't anything *worth* earning. What is the very best that most of us can hope for? A middle class position in an ever poverty-increasing society due to the tremendous shift of wealth towards a small number of businessmen? A marriage where we both work long hours in order to fatten a tiny number of people's pockets, coming home so exhausted that we're barely able to tend to the children's needs and much less to each other's, so we compensate ourselves by the accumulation of possessions? Some world we've been offered. I'm not sure that it will be worse off if we're a bunch of WOW playing crybaby slackers.
I'm frustrated that despite all of human innovation and technological advancements, I have to kowtow to an alarm clock that rings at 6:30 AM. Where are the promises that technology was supposed to reduce working hours and make our lives more pleasant? No, we're forced to work harder to compete with other organizations who also suffer the same fate as our own. I think many of us have realized just how much society *has* lied to us, about college, technology, etc. and we've grown apathetic and tired of the empty promises. I'd rather be a relatively poor slacker with time to myself to do what I want and to enjoy my family than a successful developer whose time is consumed with largely meaningless pursuits and whose life is filled with possessions.
I was once a disillusioned IT worker. I oft wondered why my ability and all my raw potential weren't being properly compensated as I struggled through the first half of my career. Further clouding my vision was an early payoff in consulting where I managed to bill out more than what was probably justified when I was in my early 20s. There was a distinct lack of IT talent in the community I find myself in and got a lot of business via word of mouth.
It wasn't till later on in my career I learned some humility and became easier to work with, and that's when the bucks started to roll in. When my can-do attitude started to shed the rampant contrarian in me. I see a lot of kids younger than me that go through this - I recently tried to give some budding superstars inside and outside my company some coaching in this regard; however, they didn't become open till they lost their jobs. It seems that this is a lesson the young continue to need to learn, and my dad had hinted to me that this would be my struggle with others as he saw me grow up to be a smart alecky know it all.
So if there's one thing I can recommend to the under 25 crowd, it's this: a little humility and willingness to learn from others goes a long way. You'll find that people that don't always have all the top technical answers at their disposal are useful in other ways: managing chemistry with team members, negotiating with clients, directing personnel in certain directions and managing crisis before they get out of control.
We've done our young people a disservice the past few decades....in schools and society, we've taken away anything that might hurt little Timmy's self esteem.....everyone gets an award for 'trying', and everyone is taught they are all equal and will be treated that way.
Parents who work too much....have tried making up for it...by giving their kids what they want. It leads to people coming out of this sheltered environment, and being shocked that they don't walk right into a job making the $$ their parents did....not instantly being a manager...and [shudder] having to work their way up from the bottom.
I'll admit...my generation (early X) had a great deal of this too...but, not quite as bad as it seems the youth coming into the workforce now have.
I'm not saying it is all of them...but, this attitude does seem to be rising. Unless you can start your own business....you're gonna have to learn that there is the golden rule...whoever has the gold, makes the rules. If you wanna work and make it...well, you're gonna have to sacrifice and work hard for awhile, pay your dues as they used to say.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I'd be considered a young IT worker (and undergrad student), and I don't expect high wages or an office (and won't after finishing either), I do care very much about the technology (e.g stayed up all last night writing code for a hobby project), and I have never played WOW.
But don't let me ruin your feeling of smug superiority
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
wow, really nice to hear that we are all the same and there is absolutely no individual variation for, say, folks like some I know who thrive in an open space environments, and folks like me who are 1000% more productive in an office with a window and a closed door.
Also according to the same yardstick we could also all live chained to our desks 24/7, we'd soon learn to tune out everything else and attend to what's relevant, like somebody handing out some bread & water, or somebody else whipping us if we don't produce enough LoC during the 16 hour workday.
Just because humans can adapt to abysmal environments it doesn't mean that we should be made to.
-- the cake is a lie
Wow...I wonder what has caused this extreme pessimism? If you go into young adult life with this attitude, and defeatist attitude, well, you will end up with a self-fulfilling prophecy. Life won't now, and never HAS given anyone anything, but, with work, motivation, and yes, some spots of luck...you CAN make it...have whatever is success to you. To me..it is money...I like what life it can give me.
Some people never assert to be above what you described, but, you certainly aren't predestined to that life....life is what YOU make of it. Where YOU decide to go with your life. Sure, you generally have to start at the bottom, but, set goals for yourself....maybe to be your own boss....after all, most business in the US are small businesses....do that and you will be able to steer your own path through life.
If money isn't your thing...well, figure out what is. Whatever you're looking for....no one is gonna give it to you....the world has NEVER worked that way. Nothing really is that bad now worse than any other generation has faced. Every generation has its problems....but, you work your way through it.
Rather than give up before really even starting...start trying to be a little more positive...figure where YOU want to be in a few years....and start working towards it.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I don't know I have absolutely seen both sides of this having worked for a number of years as a database programmer and having operated my own company doing this I found when I sold my company I was absolutely stunned by the offers I recieved from companies when I went through the interview process. I cannot tell you how many times I was intervied for postions wanting 5 years plus experience knowledge in a number of diffrent areas including asking for things like CCNA MCDBA (both of which I have) wanting me availible for on call one week a month at night and 2 weekends a month and when it came down to money offering me far less then I was earning bartending in a club. It was apalling I worked my rear end off in school and in the industry to get to a point where I didn't have to work nights weekends holidays etc etc anymore and getting that kind of slap in the face was disheartening to say the least. By the same token in my current position I cannot tell you how many kids I run into that think they should have all the perks of the position and wages commensurate with years of experience while taking on none of the responsibilities that go along with it so in the end I'd say both sides are equally guilty for any issues that we are seeing now.
I don't get this idea of hiring people and then not giving the an environment that the can do the job you are paying good money for.
Part of it is because a lot of managers, HR people, and furniture police don't understand what people writing code actually need. All they see are a bunch of people typing all day, and typists don't need offices, privacy, quiet, etc. They just need a desk and a computer, so that must be all that anyone who just types all day needs.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
I have a choice here whether to mod you down myself or post something and let others do it. I'm going to post.
The problem here is you.
If you work for the #2 company, that wants to be the #1 company, and they're going to compensate you the same whether the company is #1 or #2, QUIT!
Nobody has to slave for a company to make the stockholders more money. Get off your ass and get a job at the #1 company, that's probably #1 because it rewards their employees. Or start your own company.
Where are the promises that technology was supposed to reduce working hours and make our lives more pleasant?
They're here! Move to BFE Nebraska, get yourself a high speed internet connection, and work from home 20 hours a week. You'll make more than enough to cover your needs, and probably have a nifty TV and computer to boot. Glamorous? No, but not possible in 1950 either.
But even working full time, nobody is making you get up to your alarm clock at 6:30 every morning except you - because you're lazy. You have to wake up at 6:30 every morning because you want a job where somebody else guarantees you money every other friday, assigns you what to do every day, and keeps paying you as long as you don't fuck up too bad. THAT's why you get up at 6:30 in the morning.
I'd rather be a relatively poor slacker with time to myself to do what I want and to enjoy my family than a successful developer whose time is consumed with largely meaningless pursuits and whose life is filled with possessions.
You ever watching TV and they have those commercials for tech schools that teach auto repair? Sign up. Seriously. Work 9-5, make enough money to support the family and BBQ every weekend if you want to. Oh, and as a mechanic, you get paid by the job, so the better you are, the more money you get.
Nobody promised you something for nothing. The problem is that if you behave like all the other people who just want to show up for a paycheck, you'll be treated like all the other people who want to show up for a paycheck. You just get more 0's on your check for going to college.
paintball
A middle class position in an ever poverty-increasing society due to the tremendous shift of wealth towards a small number of businessmen?
Way to buy the class warfare line, hook line and sinker, there. The prosperity pie isn't some fixed size, with the slices being re-arranged. Any increase in your standard of living is a result of your producing it. Do you REALLY think that you're not better off than someone 20 years ago, doing roughly the same amount of work with the same overall level of dedication and relative knowledge about a given area of work? What are you spending your money on? Video games, instant access to information from all over the world, three televisions, a new web-enabled cell phone every 18 months, fresh vegetables from all over the world at your finger tips year round...? The averge middle class person's standard of living HAS improved, dramatically. You're using the wrong measurements.
From the Washington Post the other day: Economist Stephen Rose, defining the middle class as households with annual incomes between $30,000 and $100,000, says a smaller percentage of Americans are in that category than in 1979 - because the percentage of Americans earning more than $100,000 has doubled from 12 to 24, while the percentage earning less than $30,000 is unchanged. "So," Rose says, "the entire 'decline' of the middle class came from people moving up the income ladder."
Try actually living with the same creature comforts, vehicles, entertainment, and quality of food and medical care that our parents and grandparents did just a few decades ago. You live like a king.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I started working as an IT professional right out of high school (I had to show my diploma to be hired because I wasn't even 18 yet). I've been an IT consultant now for about 8 years.
The first 5 of my years I worked for a small (3 techs at a time) company. There I found myself under-appreciated, underpaid and hugely taken advantage of. Right before leaving that company, a guy (my age) who just graduated college had the entitled attitude and it did nothing more than piss me off. His focus was "if I don't get a raise in X time, I am going to quit." I had to train him in all I do and I wasn't all that impressed by him nor his attitued despite being part of the same generation.
I may have resented that job, but those 5 years allowed me to gain the experience I needed to obtain the job I have now. I did my time, paid my dues and the company I work for now pays me well, I have the respect of my peers (despite the fact I am one of the young guys) and I am authority in various technologies. Nothing wrong with starting small. Count me among the believers that hard work gets you places.
That very well might be but the worst are stupid managers who don't see farther of their noses.
I agree with you - every new generation has it easier, apparently for all the wrong reasons. However, there is a huge amount of bright young people who have every right to ask more of their employers. More money, better conditions, not to be treated as children just because they only started working in last year or so. It takes forever for a young person to advance, even if he/she is more productive and better educated.
I've seen my share of this over the 25 years of my salaried working life.
My recommendation and this is dead serious, is to get out of IT by age 33 the latest. Not that it's a young person's game but because after that age they treat you like utter garbage. They want nothing better than to force you out and replace you with the next batch of freshly scrubbed young faces at half or less than what you will make then. They will stop your increases, your training until they start telling you to 'mentor' people aka train your replacement. And if you manage to survive that by being where the shit ain't, then you can look forward to a long boring tenure of ever more abstract advisory roles. And when you're chained to the machine at age 50 your economic options are a lot more limited when they just toss you out on the street.
So get out, Make the Suits happy. There is no such thing as retention. Retention is bullshit. You leave and they'll replace you, or not, with a robot or a monkey and a robot.
30-50 years ago, if you went to college, chances are your parents were blue collar people who worked their asses off to save enough money to give you that opportunity, and you probably had to work your ass off to get more money and scholarships to make it. Yeah, there were a few kids of rich parents, but they were the minority.
Now we have a LOT more people in middle-class office jobs. They don't have to pull double-shifts to get their kids into college. And their kids don't have to work their asses off for it - they can just get financial aid and student loans, WITHOUT having to join the army for 6 years. Yeah, there are still kids out there who work their asses off to get into and through school, but they're in the minority.
30 years ago most kids who graduated college were thankful they didn't have grease under their fingernails when they came home from work like their parents did. Nowadays, more of the kids who graduate college are from families who never had to worry about anything. If your parents always had enough money, why wouldn't you?
paintball
You may have little patience for people who demand more than they are worth; but this generation has absolutely no patience for companies unwilling to engage them at market value.
It's simple economics. If a key employee thinks that he is worth $X salary, you evaluate whether or not he's worth it. If he is, you pay it. If not worth it, you don't. That's it. These people are not quitting to go work at McDonalds, they are finding other work that pays them what they want.
The 'retention' problem is not because this generation wants the kitchen sink; it's because these companies don't have any money to buy kitchens.
- DaftShadow
This is one hell of a different world than it was 50 years ago! America is not the place it was in 1958... Let's see, 1958: A college education was completely unnecessary for most well paying and secure jobs. This started someone in their career about 4-5 years ealier and saved them $30k-$40k in debt. In 1958 it only took 1 income earner in a family to provide enough to support the entire family. In 1958 most everyone could count on working for a big megacorp throughout their career and retire with a big fat pension to carry them through their golden years. Healthcare costs were a pittance compared to what they are today. Anyone could own their own home. Rents were also a pittance compared to what they are today. Anyone who thinks people under the age of 31 are too impatient are goddamned right because we don't have time to be patient, your generation has generously taken everything you could get for yourselves and left very little to us except your Medicare and Social Security debt. The company that wants to pretend it is 1958 without offering the same pensions, or unionization, without paying an employee enough to take care of the whole family on 1 income -- is being disingenuous to say the least. Talk about blaming the victims!
-- I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous
Many of my peers expect to graduate college and start off on the same level their parents are (who have worked for 30 years). I see this both in all my peers, from the construction workers to the computer scientists. I don't believe it is unique in I.T. I keep hearing that story and I don't see it. I'm sure there's arrogance amongst the youth, that's always been the case. But this is not your father's entry-level job market these days. It's a fuck and chuck employment market. Sure, there's always been disreputable companies and bosses who want to keep taking money out of the business while never putting any of it back in. But these days it seems to be the universal rule rather than the exception. Every business is operated with the maximization of wealth as the sole goal, to the detriment of all else. Slash staff to increase profit, slash benefits to increase profit, cut corners on quality to increase profit, screw the customer and ream the employee, all in the name of making the top man on the totem pole as much scratch as possible.
Now I've been downmodded by the rah-rah business crowd for expressing these views before so fuck you in advance -- the man who said "the business of America is business" should be smacked. I'm traditional when it comes to these things: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. -- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. There you go. Nobody says you're going to get what you want wrapped up with a red bow and sitting on a silver platter, but if you want it you can get in on the chase.
What's more, no organization exists in a vacuum. Business exists in an ecosystem, the same as farmers and fishermen. You abuse the ecosystem that supports you, you suffer the consequences. A prudent farmer knows when to sow his fields and when to leave them fallow. Fishermen know if they take too much, the fisheries will collapse. The same holds true for the artificial ecosystems of American industry. The leaders these days are not satisfied with sustainable profits, they want to clearcut the forest and to hell with leaving anything for the next guy.
You want to know why people feel discouraged? It's because employers demand as much labor as possible and tell their employees that they're lucky to even have jobs. Hard work is seldom rewarded. And in today's economy it's a cycle of shifting jobs and unsteady employment. There used to be a time when workers could count on a lifetime of working for a single company and a pension upon retirement. We're paying into social security now with no hope of ever seeing any of it. I'm 30 and I know I won't get any. Employers are getting out of the benefits business, cutting down on health care with pensions becoming a thing of the past. Because turnover is so rapid, it's hard to accrue any seniority in a company and the ageism curse is looking to bite us in the ass as we approach middle-age.
Real wages are dropping, the government is lying about inflation, and parents today will be the first in the history of this country who cannot collectively count on their children being better off than they. With all these problems facing us, the presidential horse race is still about foo-foo bullshit issues. The media concentrates on superficial banalities and we continue on course straight into the shoals.
So, what's there to be positive about?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
There's more to it than that. Someone just out of college may say, regarding his first 2-3 jobs, "This sucks! I'm not getting the {respect | money | office | projects} I deserve! F*** this. Bye." But that person mistakenly thinks that he's getting a worse-than-standard deal. So out of ignorance, he leaves a perfectly good job, chasing the mythical perfect job.
It's that pointless churn that I think employers might reasonably be frustrated by. (Of course, those employees might find that they can do less work and get paid more by working in marketing. In that case, the employers are themselves getting a bitter dose of reality.)
It was a question put to me by an MIT tenured professor while I worked at NSF. My position being strange, neither program officer or support staff but a contractor who helped program officers with evaluation of software grants. Seeing all those PhD's around me started me thinking of going for my masters and PhD.
When I asked him for his opinion, he said "Why do you want it?". Money wise I'm making what college grads with Masters or PhD's made and he made the point that at my age, 35 that it was probably more headache than worth it..UNLESS my goal was to learn something rather than just to have the title "PhD" after my name. You don't have to have a PhD to do research, but having one will open some doors that otherwise would be harder to open (but not impossible).
The problem is that many college students see college as a way to make more MONEY first and the love of learning about something SECOND (if at all). From their perspective college is something to be endured like a bad trip to the dentist and if they can make it through it the pot of gold waits at the other end. This is wrong! College is not supposed to be a stamp on a form you get so you qualify for an expensive car, house and trophy wife.
If that is what your expectations are, then you should drop out of college NOW. You can make GOOD money, MORE money than many white collar college requirement jobs. Jobs like electrician, plumber, AC repair and believe me NOBODY looks down on the good plumber who has a BIG freaking house and expensive sports car.
Well, it is called welcome to the reality of the real working world.
I have news for you. 70 hour work weeks should not be a part of anyone's "real working world" unless they are the owner or higher level exec in charge of the business (and then that is done by their choice).
What you're advocating is throwing away almost all of your waking hours for a job - something that doesn't love you, doesn't even care about you, can be done by someone else if you leave, and on the whole, you don't get any more out of at 70 hours than you do at 40.
There is a lesson you need to learn, and that lesson is drawing reasonable boundaries. Trading your whole, active life for a paycheck is a bad deal no matter how you look at it unless you are only doing it for a couple of years so that you never have to do it again.
You work in order to obtain the money needed to live your life. You don't live in order to work.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
I totally agree that there's no motivation in making rich people richer. But...
WTF do you mean, "Some world we've been offered"? In the U.S., we've hardly suffered the ravages of war, compared to those who lived through WWII. Most of us have plenty to eat, and don't go cold in the winter. We have cures for diseases that were death sentences 50 years ago. And much of this is because our parents suffered to make our world a better one than theirs.
Sure our world isn't perfect, and there's a lot of ways that we can improve it if we're willing to shoulder the burden. But complaining about what we've been handed sounds like the tantrum of an early adolescent saying, "I didn't ask to be born!". Grow up, and become part of the solution rather than just whining.
Abysmal? Now who's not leaving room for individual variation? I work in a "pit" (I actually prefer the term bullpen) and I think it's a wonderful way to increase collaboration.
Of course I understand why you might like an office, but for the kind of projects I work on, collaboration is much more important. Don't generalize what people want based on what YOU want.
"VMware books"? What VMware books do you recommend? :)
We have that technology. The amount of work required for survival is much less than it used to be. I live in Melbourne, Australia and I can't easily survive and live a good life on 2 days of work a week. That would have been much more difficult 50 years ago.
But most people don't want to just survive. Most people want a big screen TV, a car, a large house, an Ipod, a laptop, a mobile phone, eatting out every night, support five children and go to expensive concerts and sporting events.
The techology for you to work less is already here, you just don't want to work less.
...and that is all I have to say about that.
http://jessta.id.au
So what you're saying is that if, say, one has a job where you have to be on the phone an hour a day, the best way to operate is to always have the receiver at your ear and ignore it till it mentions your name.
No sir, the "communication" point is just nonsense. If you want to make a point, talk about "socializing", or, since there is no money in that, use the magic "team work". This will work much better for you, as at the same time, without name calling, you portrait your introvert counterpart as unsocial or not a team worker, which only makes you look better!
Logic dictates that "concentration" workers should have offices. Communication jobs, like many of the management or HR, could use the open floor plan. The only reasons it's the opposite are status and finance. In my experience the second reason is most often a case of "penny wise, pound stupid", although one can argue that if the work is not rocket science and if you get a team of junior extrovert monkeys and it works for them on an open plan, it works for the company and it's cheaper.
From my personal experience I have to say I see the problem from a different perspective. Though keep in mind that I am not an American so my situation might be a completely different one.
See, when I tried to get my first job it was the year 2002. IT staff was fired left and right and I decided I was lucky to get a job at all just after one month.
The job was crap. They hired me because I would work for the least money (being so young) but expected me to run their complete IT including fixing a newly introduced business software that had been more like forced into the environment rather than introduced into it.
When they started expecting that not only should I be on call 24/7, do the consulting, learn to handle the whole business software, do user support and actually code some equivalents to things the software should have done in the frickin' first place in Access but also, on top of all that, I was to fix hardware problems without any money I knew it was time to go.
My next job was to be just user support and 'low level' IT work such as deploying workstations and fixing them and such. Then, during the interview, I got offered to work together with the consultant and be the one to actually build the support foundation for the new business software they were introducing. I had never worked in such an environment before, I didn't know the old software and I certainly diddn't know the new one but I thought to give it a go. After all I was offered the fall-back to the original offer of supporter.
A few weeks later they had hired another supporter and I was called into the boss' office and told that some people didn't like some stuff about how I was doing my work. I was neither told what exactly was the problem nor was I told who had complained so I could have discussed the problem with them. I was just told to do stuff differently.
Then I got the job I'm working at now. It is a good job because I like my coworkers and the stuff I do. But until this year, I was 20% underpayed (meaning you had to add another 20% to my actual salary to get to toe average salary). I was told that getting the 10% I asked for would be hard. Usually people in that company had to be happy with raises around one or two percent if they got anything at all. I was lucky since two IT people had left shortly before so they were in something of a tight spot.
But my experience thus far has been as follows: It doesn't matter whether you have managers as your boss or the owner of the company, they're all trying to screw you over and unless you are willing to risk being laughed at because you have such high demands you will NEVER get fair conditions on your job.
If companies started to actually treat us workers like we were trying to help get our company along instead of just an expense on the budget then perhaps we might start to have realistic demands in the first place. I am just unwilling to be treated as slave that has the bonus of being paid. If you think I'm unreasonable to ask that then, frankly, screw you.
This is not the first time entry-level people have thought times were tougher on them than the preceeding generation.
In the mid-1960s my father worked for a contractor on the Apollo space program. Realizing that once the moon rocket design was substantially complete, engineers would be superfluous (a Briton would say redundant), in 1968 he transfered, within his company, out of the space program to a group in another state designing time-shared mainframes for business applications. It was the best decision of his career, but one that was very controversial at the time ("you're leaving the space program?!?").
I will carry the memory of the period that followed to my grave. Some time after the transfer, the NASA cuts began, and we started getting phone calls (at home!) from my father's former coworkers, looking for work -- any work, any where, in any field. More than 20,000 engineers, scientists, and technicians in the state of Florida alone -- and probably 100,000 or more around the country -- were laid of as fast as the mimeograph machines could reproduce the pink slips. Engineers were driving taxis and bagging groceries in the towns around the Kennedy Space Center.
The ultimate was when my father returned to the dinner table from another call to announce that the caller had been his former boss's boss's boss, looking for any work -- even a drafting position (six levels down the corporate ladder, and one that did not require a college degree). Like all the other callers, he had a wife, x young children, and a mortgage to support. (Homes were essentially unsellable in the areas around the major contractors' plants; the mortgages were greater than their market value, so foreclosures were the norm.) I hope I have sufficiently expressed the desperate nature of the situation.
And yet...
No university dropped its engineering program; freshout engineering graduates appeared, just as they always had, at the end of every semester. And all of them needed jobs. Entry-level jobs. All of these people entered school at the height of the space program, only to find when they graduated that the job market was considerably more difficult than they had expected. Having a difficult entry-level job market is not a new thing.
One of the pleasures of age is that one sees the world as dynamic, rather than static. A young person sees a constant world, for it's the only one he's ever known. With age, however, one sees things change, and can evaluate, say, the first derivative of the world function. With greater age, one can see the rate of change change, and appreciate the second derivative; at that point, one can begin modeling the dynamics of social structures.
The shortage of engineers in the 1960s led to the glut of engineers in the 1970s. However, because of the 4- to 6-year delay between entering and completing engineering school, the system is not necessarily stable; the glut of the 1970s led to such an engineering shortage by the early 1980s that separate, higher, salary ladders were established at major corporations for entry-level engineers (creating salary compression that demotivated experienced engineers, but that's a different thread). The system continues to oscillate today; the point is, it's oscillating through values we've seen before.
...we'd drop our present employer in a heartbeat if something was in it for ourselves. Erm, and this is a bad thing how , exactly? Oh yeah, it's not. Unless family or close friends are involved, 'loyalty' is a dead letter in the modern workplace. Might as well look out for #1, because sure as fuck nobody else will....'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
Of course, even that doesn't work well - see the book Peopleware, for example. Listening to music tends to harm your ability to concentrate. I like to listen to music while working, but I have also found that if I really need to concentrate, I turn it off.
This is assuming your co-worker actually listened to music, and didn't just use headphones as a social mechanism (i.e. wasn't actually listening to anything).
Anyway, all the people saying nobody needs an office should read Peopleware. They did the experiments and the math so that we don't have to.
"Woe is me, I have to drive to work in an air conditioned car, sit down for 8 hours doing horrible exhausting typing, then go home to my leather sofa and big-screen TV, never having to worry about going hungry or cold. Why is the world so cruel????"
I fail to see how the poor are getting poorer considering how many of them have subscription TV, brand-name clothes, takeout food every week, mobile phones, MP3 players, and god-knows what else.
Once upon a time, being poor meant cabbage soup for dinner, outside toilets, washing clothes by hand, and smashing up the furniture to burn during winter just to keep yourself alive. But yeah, keep telling yourself the poor are getting poorer.
Exactamundo. Generally, publicly traded companies are the worst in tha the managers there feel completely at ease to sack you if it will save a buck or half. Hiding behind the "shareholder interest" while lining their own pockets while being incompetent, and preparing their own golden parachute, and a landing place (anothe company executive position - we know how these execs are good chums and supportive of each other) - now tell me how the hell is such a person going to appreciate your work and care for your position?
If I try really hard, I might get a little raise, but it's not guaranteed. I am only guaranteed to increase the bottom line of that elite that has no talent to speak of but to land well-paying management jobs. The raise I would get wouldn't make a real difference in my life anyway.
So I quit IT and the corporate world in general, and focus now on scientific work in academia. The salary is ridicolously low, but I enjoy it, and THAT makes the real difference in my life. Even if I had twice the pay, it wouldn't generally change how I live, but if I hated the environment, the job and the person I was making rich, that would.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
The cure for all this is to unionize and negotiate contracts as a community rather than as individual replacable cogs in the machine.
Unfortunately, nearly everyone thinks that they're better than average, and can thus get better pay than average (which is a false conclusion, even if the premise were true), and will consequently not support any such effort, especially since their "lazy coworkers" would also benefit from it.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
"However, there is a huge amount of bright young people who have every right to ask more of their employers. More money, better conditions, not to be treated as children just because they only started working in last year or so. It takes forever for a young person to advance, even if he/she is more productive and better educated."
You say they have a "right" as if that were true. Please give a cogent reason.
The employer has a "right" that more productive, better educated Johnny prove they are more productive and can friggin' work, too.
In my 35 year salaried life, I've seen a large share of worthless new folks claiming they're better.
I'll call bull. If it were just being pampered and having unrealistic expectations, you (or they) would soon discover that. You have to earn a salary _somewhere_. If you had unrealistic criteria, soon you _have_ to adjust them to more realistic levels, or starve. It's that simple.
So basically when we see half a generation starving rather than working anywhere, _then_ I'll believe your point.
Until then, it seems to me that you're moaning about simple supply and demand economics. If those guys leave, surely somewhere else they found a job more to their liking. Either it's more money, or it's better quality of life, or whatever. The fact is, _somewhere_ else they got a better offer. It means that the demand is there.
The fact is, "Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it." That, by the way, comes from Publilius Syrus, circa 100 BC. So it's not even something invented by the new pampered generation.
If they can get someone to pay what you consider to be a fair price for their work, the fact is, it wasn't an unrealistic expectation after all. It was exactly worth what its purchaser is willing to pay for it.
And let's get into another aspect. The golden rule, much as I've noticed it being the darling of some of the most obnoxious PHBs I've ever met, is just wishful thinking and misses the point. Some idiot unilaterally having the right to make the rules, that was 1000 years ago. Now the whole market theory says it's a negotiation. One side might have more leverage there, but at least ideally _both_ sides make the rules.
You may have the gold, but that doesn't give you the right to go to a store and say, "I want that computer for 1$. I have more money than you, so I make the rules. My rule is that everything I buy costs 1$. Now obey, you peon." Well, it doesn't work that way. You may have the money, but the other side also gets to decide what their product is worth. You might be able to negotiate a price that's good for _both_, or they might decide that your price isn't worth their product, and not deal with you at all. You don't just get to tell someone to suck it up and give you whatever you want, for whatever price you want, just because you have the money and you make the rules.
The same applies to the workforce market. You're buying someone else's work. Either you negotiate a price that both can live with, or maybe you don't deal at all. But saying that anyone gets to unilaterally make the rules because they have the money... just doesn't work that way.
And let's get into something else: even the gold alone isn't everything. Everything extra someone wants from me has its own price. If he want me to program, ok, that costs X dollars a month. If he wants overtime, that'll cost extra, one way or another, because if you ask for more work you should also pay more. It's just like trying to get two litres of milk instead of one: no, you're not getting the second one for free. Unless the job did pay twice as much as a similar 40-hours-a-week job, then the payment might not be worth the work after all. If he _also_ wants me to humour his wannabe-dictator "who has the gold makes the rules" ego-trips, well, that costs a lot extra. If he stresses me more than strictly necessary, that costs extra too. Etc.
It's give and take. Different products have different prices. If you want more from me, it costs more. Or to put it the other way around, the more undesirable you make that job, the more it will cost to keep me there.
That's another aspect that wannabe PHB's don't seem to get. They pretend that money is everything, they paid the standard entry wage, now surely their acting like arseholes shouldn't enter that equation too. Well, it does. It changes the product they're trying to buy, hence it changes the price.
I see a lot of people moving to other jobs completely because they reach the conclusion that, frankly, it's not worth it.
Again, you could lament their being pampered pansies, but the fact is that they end up doing _some_ job. So
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Guess they didn't forsee corporations doing everything they could to welch on their agreements.
I think the best part would be the immediate flush of jobs to India once the IT union tried to strike the first time.
Unions are a pyramid scheme. It might work out great for the first few people on board, but it puts the company at a competitive disadvantage which in the long run will result in fewer jobs.
You can't get something for nothing.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
I have really wondered why net admins didn't want to join the Electricians union, or even the Teamsters. [...] There would be no Draconian employment contracts and you would be treated with respect.
Maybe because unions only protect the weak and those who can't negotiate good employment on their own right? Yep, that's it. Some of us, on the other hand, are actually skilled enough to get a job at a firm that cares about their employees, treats them well, pays them well, and recognizes their value, oh and doesn't make them work 60 hour weeks, let alone 70 hour weeks. And go figure, I work on Wall Street.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
Before I worked in my current job, I had roughly the same view as you. But it's not just a matter of using a catchphrase to justify a crappy office environment, I actually do enjoy it much more.
Sure if we had offices, I could just walk down the hall to ask a question or something like that, but losing the walls brings much more than just being able to stay in your seat while you talk to a coworker. It's also brings about a feeling of equality, and yes, even teamwork.
At my current job, I feel comfortable talking to ANYONE, people who are 6 or 7 levels above me in the hierarchy sit in the same kind of desk as me, everyone is totally accessible. There are no secretaries acting as door guards, there aren't even any doors to guard. People ask me my opinion on technology, projects, even strategy.
Everyone in the office feels like we're in the same boat, and we all feel like a team. That's something that has never happened to me while I had my own office. It could just be my specific company, it's the first one I've worked at with an open concept, but I can tell you I prefer it to the ones where I never even saw the CEO, let alone was able to pick his brain.
I'm not going to disagree with you at all. If I'm allowed a small addition, I'd add why that's even a good thing.
See, the whole idea behind capitalism, going all the way to Adam Smith, is that it essentially optimizes using the resources we have, to create the things we actually need. You have X million people, Y million acres of land, etc. You also have these needs that the population has. The "wealthier" nation will be the one which uses them to produce more of what its people need, and less of what they don't.
If it's more profitable to raise sheep than make wine in England, there's probably a good reason why, and you're doing all of us a service if you raise sheep. And if you raised sheep anyway, and France pays more for wool than you'd get in England, then by all means, go sell that wool in France. Then buy the wine where it's cheap and good quality with that money and sell it back in England.
Or if you want to sell your land, and there's this peasant who can only pay you 1000 pounds for it, while another one would pay 2000, then by all means sell it to the latter. Probably he has a better business plan, knows what and how to raise there that's more profitable, and in the end it's better utilization of that resource and makes us all better off. Right?
So then the same applies to the workforce. If another company can pay you more for the same work, they've probably got a better business plan and can make better use of that work. It's making us all better off if you quit your work at the one who pays less, and take the job that pays more. The same resources produces more for society, right?
That's been the theory of capitalism all along. Self-interest is what makes Adam Smith's "invisible hand" work. I mean, right?
At any rate, that's the kind of a theory that apologists of all-out cut-throat capitalism love to wave around. And it's surely used, in one way or another, when they have to justify doing something for _their_ self-interest. So then it's _weird_ to see them turn around 180 degrees and moan about these ungrateful, disloyal graduates who'll leave at the first opportunity to get a bigger wage.
You'd think they'd be _thrilled_ to see the younger generation apply the same kind of capitalism all the way. I mean, surely, if cut-throat capitalism is good for us all, then people using the same principles in their job hunt are, well, nothing short of _patriotic_, right? And if the role of the corporation is solely to produce money for the shareholders, then it's _good_ to move to a corporation which has a better plan for your work and can afford to produce more with it. It's probably producing even more value for its shareholders, then.
Well, ok, that was partially tongue-in-cheek and partially taking the piss, but still... it never ceases to amuse me when people go "capitalism is good! we only have a duty to maximize our profits!" when it excuses their own actions, but demand the exact opposite (e.g., unconditional selfless loyalty) from their employees. I wish they'd make up their mind whether they want one _or_ the other.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Experience matters, and I'm not just talking tech skills experience. Knowing how to contribute to the business processes, meetings, people skills, customer interface, etc. etc. aren't taught during IT studies. Most of the 20-somethings at my work don't even understand that sandals, T-shirts and jeans don't really qualify as "business casual". And with flex hours, they don't understand that coming in around noon and working until midnight isn't very productive when the majority of management and other "adult" employees tend to work around the 7-4 range. As the article states, this is indeed one difficult generation to manage, for sure!
Oh yeah, and get off my lawn! (or get out of my office, and back to your cubicle...to keep it on topic..heh)
I agree that fortresses guarded by secretaries are the opposite end of the spectrum and no good either. The English are still pretty good (or bad) at that. If you look at some of the big guys who dig deep into this like IBM or Microsoft, they end up with a small cluster of offices spanning a central meeting area. See for example:
http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/171/ibmsj1701C.pdf
Or even:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html
> Your initial clients can come from contacts in professional societies (if you maintain memberships) or from conferences or other social gatherings.
I assume you mean desktop support, or maybe simple web-sites? That's fine for getting started at an occasional $10 an hour, and maybe someday you can climb to $20 an hour, but that is about as far as you will ever go.
To get anywhere in IT, you need enterprise-level experience: SAP, Java, Oracle, Solaris, Cisco, Checkpoint, etc. Your social contacts probably just run windows desktop.
My opinion, based on 28 years in IT and a lot of research, is that desktop support will usually not lead to anything more. The reason is that you will be competing with people with much stronger credentials. Even if you try to go into windows admin, you will find yourself competing against hundreds of experienced MCSE admins.
Or, did I mis-understand you?
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
agile and pair programming are just like open spaces, some people thrive in them, some people (me included) can't get any meaningful work done in that situation.
I wonder when people will start figuring out that programming is an art, like making music: some people thrive by composing with all their bandmates (say, guitarists starts a riff, drummer joins in, singer starts noodling, there you go, a typical bullpen/open office), others prefer a duet (say, simon & garfunkel, here is paired programming), and others prefer to write in their room with a piano or a guitar (say, sting, and here you go with a private office).
An enlightened boss would realize this, and have a flexible working arrangement where everybody could choose the environment they are more productive in: if people stopped seeing 'having an office' as a status symbol, then everybody would naturally pick what they need instead of what they think they should.
Managers should start by giving the example, as any manager should be right in the middle of the bullpen, using an office/conference room only during 1-to-1 meetings and phone calls, but guess what, 99% managers will get an office and then go on about how 'my door is always open': if your door is always open you shouldn't have an office, and leave it to somebody who will use it with the door closed to get some work done instead of losing concentration every 5 minutes because somebody is talking to somebody else about an unrelated issue to what you were thinking about.
-- the cake is a lie
IT workers are needed everywhere. IT workers know this.
Managers have managed to keep IT salaries low due to downward pressure on wages from immigrants and offshoring, but these pressures are temporary. As developing countries develop their own IT infrastructures, the worldwide demand will continue to outgrow the worldwide supply, and this will eventually be felt at the local level.
When a worker manages a system which costs an employer oodles of dollars per day of downtime, but is paid peanuts, the worker knows that the worker is giving more value to the employer than the worker is being paid for.
It is time for an upward market adjustment. The IT workers know this. The employers are trying to avoid it, but in time the difficulty hiring and retaining good IT workers will force management to acknowledge it.
Of course, I could be wrong. Maybe someone will come up with a great technology that allows managers to get the benefits of technology without the headaches of IT workers. However, if history is any indicator, most inventions that hold that sort of promise at the beginning (SQL, the GUI, the personal computer, automatic program generators (remember The Last One?), the web, and so on) usually end up creating a requirement for more IT workers than before.
i once worked in a place where the (unofficial but self-evident) criteria for hiring tech support staff was how little money they were prepared to accept. neither knowledge, experience, or aptitude were considered important.
so, of course, most of the hires were completely clueless.
occasionally, though, we'd get lucky and get someone with talent who just didn't have much, or any, experience so had to accept a low paying job.
the inevitable result was that anyone who was any good or had the potential to become good (or even the ability to pick up enough knowledge to bullshit their way into looking as if they were good) stuck around for 3-6 months until they got enough experience to be able to apply for similar positions paying the industry-standard entry-level rate (typically, about 1.5x to twice as much as what we paid them).
leaving us with the complete deadwood who weren't even capable of learning enough to bullshit their way into a better job, who held on desperately to their jobs because they knew they couldn't get or keep another one. it was like a sheltered workshop for technical support retards.
the CS manager (who was far from bright himself) just could not be made to understand that the constant retraining and cleaning up newbie messes etc cost us a lot more than just paying people a decent wage to start with.
You appear not to have understood what the OP was saying.
He didn't say they were better programmers; he said they were smarter. If you're hiring someone with a PhD to crank out code, you're wasting their time and your money.
A PhD is a research degree; that means they're trained in solving problems. It is, typically, a high-level degree, in the sense that details like code matter only insofar as they represent ideas. If you want someone to come up with ideas for tackling a viciously-hard problem, the guy with the PhD is your man; if you want someone to implement a mostly-known solution...say, one that the clever PhD just hacked up a prototype of...then the experienced coder is your girl. If you mistake one for the other, you're woefully misusing your staff's abilities.
A PhD is training for a particular type of work, and it's a mistake to assume they should be like BSc degreed folk only moreso. It's a common mistake, but it's a big one.
(General disclaimer: on average, exceptions exist, blah blah. We're talking generalizations here, so it's pointless to respond with an anecdote about an exception - we all already know they exist, so chill.)
I worked at an organisation, I averaged 70-80 hour work weeks; one stretch I worked for 42 days straight without a break.
After 12 months the department I was in charge had gone from one of the worst performing to one of the best; from wastage measured in the double digits to below 1%. From having loss leaders during specials to everything making a profit due to better procurement of stock.
Who made these changes? Me. Did I get any pay rise or kudos? fuck no! I was working quietly and dillgiently hoping that one day the manager of the organisation would say, "hey son, you've done a great job with this department, we need a real can do person like yourself - how about a promotion" - nope, not even that. Not even a damn bonus after all the money I worked to save the company.
Sorry, I don't expect million dollar salaries, I don't expect huge amounts of cash, but I do expect at the very least an attempt by management to acknowledge those who go far beyond what management expects through some form of recognition. I've since left that organisation, and funny enough, under 3 months everything has not only gone backwards but worse than before I started.
Was I offered a job? yes, I told them that they never took the time to give me due respect when I was there, buggered if I was going to bend over backwards for them now!
Well, yes, that's just the thing: loyalty was never supposed to be a one way street. It always cut both ways, and was _supposed_ to cut both ways.
E.g., a medieval vassal had an obligation to be loyal to his liege-lord, _but_ conversely the liege had a formal obligation to defend his vassal to the full extent of his possibilities too. E.g., a medieval knight was supposed to be loyal to his lord even in the face of death, but conversely he was assured of employment until death. You could take a knights land for treason or such, but otherwise you couldn't go "you're fired. I found a turk who'll do your job for less land." E.g., heck, even the serfs, in exchange for that being formally tied to their lord, could expect the lord's protection. (Though how seriously some lords took that obligation, that's a whole other story.) That's how the whole manorial system was formed in the wake of the crash of the Roman Empire. Etc.
So it's kinda funny to see people nowadays trying to turn it into a one ways street. See, you have a duty to be loyal to us, but we have a duty to not give a damn about you. It never worked that way, and it wasn't supposed to work that way.
Which is why I say they should choose which they want. Not both. Either it's all-out capitalism, they treat you like a replaceable commodity, but then accept that equally the theory is that they're a replaceable commodity too. Or the demand unconditional until-death-do-us-part loyalty, but then they're supposed to provide exactly the same loyalty in return.
I'm not even saying which they should use. Either could be argued for or against, and whole economic theories and apologies have been written about both. Pick one. I may disagree with one or the other on a theoretical level, but I can respect someone who actually is honest in picking one and living by what he/she preaches. Right or wrong, at least it's living by one's principles. I can respect that.
And, yes, just to agree with you some more, it does seem pretty clear which they chose. And they're just getting the other side of the coin they chose. The least they could do is stop moaning about it.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.