The Dead Sea Effect In the IT Workplace

Alien54 notes a blog posting by old hand Bruce F. Webster on the current state of affairs in hiring in IT, focusing on what he calls the Dead Sea Effect. "Many large IT shops... work like the Dead Sea. New hires are brought in as management deems it necessary. Their qualifications... will tend to vary quite a bit, depending upon current needs, employee departure, the personnel budget, and the general hiring ability of those doing the hiring. All things being equal, the general competency of the IT department should have roughly the same distribution as the incoming hires. Instead, what happens is that the more talented and effective IT engineers are the ones most likely to leave -- to evaporate, if you will. They are the ones least likely to put up with the frequent stupidities and workplace problems that plague large organizations; they are also the ones most likely to have other opportunities that they can readily move to. What tends to remain behind is the 'residue' -- the least talented and effective IT engineers."

Comments

Assuming there are other better jobs

[gelfling]

When employers all threaten everyone with the same outsourcing when/if the salary budget gets too high then none of us are better off. No one leaves and instead of a Dead Sea you have an algae pond that clogs and festers.

Re:Assuming there are other better jobs

[timmarhy]

i'm not afraid of outsourcing, never have been. the only ones that quiver in fear are the incompetent ones who are easy to replace with a $5/hr from banglore.

Re:Assuming there are other better jobs

[Gr8Apes]

I'd have to agree. Finding another job isn't really that hard, the hardest part about it is finding the pay to coincide with the right people and boss, right type of work, with the right perks, like no travel.

Adding all that in makes for a pretty restrictive job search, but even then it's not so hard.

Re:Assuming there are other better jobs

[TheSkyIsPurple]

The thing that worries me in companies like mine, is the new management is hot on outsourcing, and have no real idea what we do.
We've seen a large chunk of our work go out, quality and timing suffer, and they're pushing to do it more because the costs are down, and of course there's going to be a blip during a change.

Our skill has nothing to do with it... it's the 6 levels of management between us and the "deciders"

Re:Assuming there are other better jobs

[hobo sapiens]

You are assuming the people who make the decisions are aware of or care about your competency. Often those decisions are made far up the management chain. Those in your management chain who are aware of your competency are often powerless. I am convinced that's how corporations work by design: layers of abstraction so that nobody in particular is responsible for anything, and everything is done by the big machine.

I work at a very large company, and have for a relatively long time by today's standards. I have seen it happen time and again. People who are very good at what they do are sometimes just working on the "wrong" project. Often it's projects, not people, who get offshored or outsourced.

Yes, I know I said I have been at my job for a while, but don't be so quick to judge. Some of us have a very cozy niche where we are given a lot of creative latitude, work with a great team, and get to do a lot of self-initiated stuff. As soon as that changes, I am SO done with this place. Or maybe I am being crazy, but the summary made me feel a little defensive.

Re:Assuming there are other better jobs

[Antique Geekmeister]

And I've got to disagree with both of you. Finding another job that leaves weekends free for your hobbies, or has good medical insurance for my friends who need CPAP machines to sleep well, or that are one block from their house they just paid for, or don't involve a 3-hour daily commute that drains your will and creativity, or where you've mastered the intricacies of the company's proprietary software build system, or where you've built a community of friends that you support and who appreciate your work, all matter, or where you really think the company is saving lives, can all be quite difficult.

Not every job has all or even most of those factors. But they can affect your willingness to put up with dross in the workplace.

Re:Assuming there are other better jobs

[cp.tar]

the only ones that quiver in fear are the incompetent ones who are easy to replace with a $5/hr from banglore Or those who bosses believe they can be. Or have companies that bring in consultants who can be. Or who get bought out by a cost-saving firm who replace the executives with someone who believes they can be.

Well, then you just leave, and return from time to time to offer your services as an expert consultant. Because you know they'll need them.

Re:Assuming there are other better jobs

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, ultimately bad management is the issue, but outsourcing and layoffs are some of the few things good lower management can't screen you from. A good manager has a large bag of tricks they can and will dig into to shield their groups. But outsourcing is one of those decisions that's made in secrete on high, and often your manager finds out the same day you do.

I'm in the same boat as the grand parent. For the last 8 years I've been employed by one of the top 50 in the fortune 500. I'd say there is a lot of truth to the article.

So why have I stayed for 8 years? Because for the first 7 I had a very good manager. She shielded us from a lot of the corporate bullshit. Because of this she was able to hold together a group of fairly skilled people. I enjoyed working with them, and that's why I stayed so many years even with the ever increasing corporate stupidity. But, last year she pissed off someone higher on the corporate ladder (fighting for us). Our team was disbanded, and she was tricked into leading a group that had already been selected for outsourcing.

I should have quit then. But, one of my former teammates convinced me to join his team on another application (he's just a team lead, not true management). I've been regretting that decision ever since. The distribution of skills in the new application follows that described in the article, and there is little shielding from the corporate bullshit. I've spent a large part of the last 6 months trying to push through a small tool that took around a week to write. In my previous group, it would have been a small side project that would have been handled outside of the usual process (it's just a small tool to aid the test team). I've held on as long as I have because my old teammate is a good friend, and he was convinced he could change things.

But, there have been rumors flying around for a week that upper management is looking to replace our application (actually longer, but there's been more substance lately). And now I have a meeting request on my calendar from our manager with a subject so vague there can't be any doubt about it's purpose. That's it, I'm out. I have my resume open in another window, time to get back to work.

Re:Assuming there are other better jobs

[blind biker]

The firings that happened in the 50.000-employee company I used to work, were random with regards to talent or usefulness: both deadwood and excellent employees, were fired. They outsourced our jobs to China, in spite of the rumours that most of the people at the site that already worked for us, were woefully incompetent and we ended up fixing their mistakes and wasting just as much time with that, as if we did the development ourselves.

It doesn't matter how good you are, you'll be outsourced. And you know why? Because this whole outsourcing is just a big scam. It's NOT about making things better; it's about managers PRETENDING they are doing something to justify their salaries, and an opportunity to get bonuses.

Re:Assuming there are other better jobs

[Anonymous Coward]

You should be. I spent the better part of the past 9 years developing the IT department from a 1 person shop (me) to a 37 person team spread around the globe. We managed to bypass the HR department to do our hiring (in other words, we hired based on actual ability rather than some standard that HR used to filter resumes before we got them) getting the people with the skills that we needed to build the strongest team possible. And we spent a good portion of our time developing relationships within the company that helped us make sure that we were doing the right things at the right times for our end users.

During that time period, I managed (and managed is just another word for led - we were all hands on) and trained 3 different teams in our IT group - server engineering, network engineering and one of our coding groups. I also worked two full time jobs for over a year in the company, starting a new division from scratch with only two other people to help. When the facilities department was gutted, I picked up the slack, spending nights going through facilities contracts with another IT director to save the company millions of dollars. All the while having the highest retention rate of any department in the company (we didn't have anybody leave the department for over 4 years).

But then management starting making even more brilliant decisions than usual. First they decided that with all the free time that IT had (first clue they were in fantasy land - they didn't even know were the IT offices were to have this discussion), we should be made into billable staff and start doing work for outside customers as well as our normal jobs. Then the company changed direction from commercial clients to government and started acquisitions. Which meant that we needed the person leading the IT department to come from a government contractor so the made the lead IT person from our first acquisitions (3 person IT department, 65 employees total) our CIO. That decision was rapidly followed by divesting the commercial entities. At this point I was among the longest serving employees in the company.

And then it happened. The last commercial division was sold, even though I was corporate I was included in the sale along with my senior server engineer and a senior support person. The new owners decided that outsourcing everything (and I mean everything - engineering, support, end user interaction, etc) to a datacenter was the way to go. For the 6 months that I worked for the new company I was basically tasked with how to migrate 400 people to a new network/domain/phone system. During that time I only dealt with consultants, never actually meeting my boss. Heck, I didn't even know who my boss was. As soon as I said something about what a mess the consultants were making to the head of IT of the acquiring company, I was terminated for failure to produce results (ie - I was termed because they didn't listen to me and continued to futz around with their $250/hr consultants who, for some reason, were unwilling to hurry up the transition). That was in November of last year.

Since then I've been unable to find equivalent work. I've now got my own startup going, but am still not making money. It's ugly out there for qualified people demanding a salary right now. Sure, I could pickup entry level positions somewhere, but those positions really don't pay the bills when you have a family with two very young children, housing prices that are so overinflated that people are burning them down so they don't have to pay their mortgages and gas prices that make it an extremely expensive proposition to commute any distance to work.

And I'm not looking for jobs in one of the "slow" markets, I'm in Seattle.

Don't be too cocky - I was and have now ended up at the bottom of the barrel believing that anything could happen to anyone.

Re:Assuming there are other better jobs

[jbengt]

Who in their right minds would turn down an opportunity to see new places, especially when your employer will foot the bill?

Well, when I used to do a lot of travel, it often went like this:
Wake up at 4:00 in the morning, leave at 4:30, spend an hour getting to the airport, (getting there the requisite hour before take-off), spend 2-1/2 to 3 hours on the plane, rent a car and drive an hour or so, spend 6 to 8 hours at the job site, usually on my feet, and often without a break (taking a break means a possibility of not finishing or missing my flight back), catching a flight back, arriving late evening, often getting home near midnight, then going in to work the next day at my regular time.

Even on longer trips where I actually got to see the place I went to, most of my "spare" time would be spent with clients, which was usually OK, often a chore, only occasionally fun.

Re:Assuming there are other better jobs

[Mongoose Disciple]

It's not the location, the culture, the color of the people being outsourced to, it's the nature of outsourcing.

This is dead on.

I've worked a few places where they managed to make outsourcing work for them, and a damn lot that tried it and got catastrophic failure.

At a bare minimum, to outsource a project to someone on another continent, you absolutely must be able to write a design that is so exact and so good that the offshore team can realistically work 8 hours every day without having to ask you, or anyone in the home office, any questions. If you have a good offshore team, you can assume that they won't need to be asking questions about the base technology, but they will need to ask questions about the nature of the business, its rules, and what the project is trying to accomplish. (This is true of an on-site team as well, but getting these kinds of answers on-site is much, much faster and easier.)

Very, very few people are in a position to create a design like that for non-trivial projects. Typically you need a person who understands the business very well and who also is an excellent architect. Few businesses will have or be able to produce such a person; those that do generally need to give them a boatload of money. What's worse is that most businesses will either not realize this requirement or think they have someone who can do this, and will find out in a disasterous way that they don't.

To sum it up.

[Mastadex]

This just in, smart people find dumb people dumb. Film at 11.

Re:To sum it up.

[JoshJ]

To summarize the summary of the summary, people are a problem.

Re:To sum it up.

[mooingyak]

I have definitely worked with people who possessed negative programming skills.

I have not found them to be rare.

thank you captain obvious

[timmarhy]

Smart people with better options leave. wow who would have thought that would happen. next on slashdot, all about how water is wet.

Re:thank you captain obvious

[Frosty Piss]

Smart people with better options leave. wow who would have thought that would happen. next on slashdot, all about how water is wet.

IT people with elitist attitude who think they are indispensable? Not anymore...

Re:thank you captain obvious

[Angst Badger]

It's worse than that -- the effect being described is pretty much universal across professions, not just IT. Large organizations are by their very nature bureaucratic and only become more top-heavy and inefficient over time. It's that process that makes them vulnerable to the smaller challengers that eventually eat their lunch. It's called the business cycle, and if the original poster is only now noticing it, it just means he's never taken an economics course or, more likely, lived long enough to see the 25- to 30-year cycle that most industries run through.

I'm not even sure it's a problem, per se. I've made a long career out of working for startups and small to medium sized companies. Either they fold, as is the case with the majority of startups, or they prosper and end up growing and eventually being bought by larger companies. Either way, when the bureaucracy becomes stifling, I collect my letters of recommendation and move somewhere more lively. Unless you work in oil or heavy industry, there's always a wave to ride, and I wouldn't trade it for the world. The pay is generally lower than what you'd get being a placeholder at a large company, but on the other hand, I've never had trouble paying the bills, either. Money isn't everything.

Like Slashdot

[Hao Wu]

The real nerds are busy doing math and science somewhere, while the fake ones come here to talk about video games.

Re:Like Slashdot

[TheRealMindChild]

Don't hate brotha! I know this other guy who couldn't beat Contra either, even with the 30 lives!

Re:Like Slashdot

[AstrumPreliator]

How is this insightful? Funny maybe, but certainly not insightful.

I sure as heck wasn't aware that being a 'nerd' precluded me from playing video games and discussing them. Nor was I aware that I had to be doing 'math and science' every waking moment of my life. Considering I willingly buy and enjoy reading graduate level math books as well as playing video games I take offense to your ridiculously broad generalization.

it's really simple

[nitelord]

This tends to happen when companies don't focus on keeping their best talent, and don't regularly get rid of those who have no desire or ability to learn or do their job better. There are two types of employees - the guys who love their job and would spend time at home (for free) to learn more.. and those who show up, do their job, go home and don't give a shit. Your company is only as good as the people who work for it.

Re:it's really simple

[ZorinLynx]

What about those of us who love our jobs and love to excel in them, but don't want to make work our entire life?

I really hate it when companies put employees down for not making work their entire life. I love my job, but when I get home I want to relax, enjoy my hobbies, go out with friends and have fun doing things that aren't work. It's part of living a healthy lifestyle.

People who love their job so much they do it even at home and do nothing but their job usually end up burning out within a decade or so. I've seen it happen.

It's all about balance. You don't want to wake up one day and realize "I put the last 15 years of my life into this company, but hardly any time into *myself*... I have no life outside work!"

Re: it's really simple

[gabrieltss]

"There are two types of employees - the guys who love their job and would spend time at home (for free) to learn more.. and those who show up, do their job, go home and don't give a shit. Your company is only as good as the people who work for it."

You don't take into account that people should have lives outside of work. Especially if they have families. It sounds like to me you don't have a life. If you think that the only dedicated employees are ones who eat/sleep/breath their job at the company then you must not have a life. People need to have a balance in life. I found that out way late in my career. I spent so much of my time early on in my career eating/sleeping/breathing "the job" I missed out on my sons first 6 - 7 years of his life. I'm sorry but if beign someone who comes in puts in 9 hours a day (extra at night and on weekends as necessary) does his job and does it well then goes home to spend time with his family is considered a "sub standard" employee then the whole industry needs to take a giant brain dump! I spent 80% of my time outside of work finishing up a college degree (at the expense of spending time with my family) for about three years. Now, I take time to volunteer as a boy scout leader in my sons scout troop, I volunteer in the community and spend time with my family outside of work. I'm donig more than just a job now, I'm being part of the COMMUNITY, not sone loner living in it. A job is just that a job. You go in do your -job-, the company pays you. Just like the barter system. Yes I do love my job, I've been a "geek" my whole life. Before I had a family I spent 24/7 in front of a computer. When I met my wife she called my computer "my mistress". I just had to find my balance. You just have to remember the majority of companies out there don't give a shit about you, your just a body, a number to them. They have NO loyalty to you these days so why should we show loyalty to them? I got sick of showing loyalty to a company only for them to shit all over me. Now I look out for myself, because no one else will.

not just IT

[tick-tock-atona]

This is certainly not restricted to the IT industry.
In my experience working in a large petroleum company I have seen the exact same thing - high turnover of good engineers, with a few competent people who stay on dotted around the organisation, but also a lot of dead weight.

However this is not news. This is just what HR battles every day in large orgainisations - balancing pay, benefits, career advancement etc. against turnover rates, to try to make staying on more attractive. Which is hard because the grass is always greener...

Story is wrong

[zappepcs]

I don't want to bust this guy's bubble, but let me give it a try anyway. The problem that he describes is part 'peter principle' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle and part of the culture of bad leadership that infests (at least western cultures) big business.

The trouble is not what you think. Modern western businesses are generally run like the military, at least in form if not function. This puts too much control in the hands of those who are not proven fit to lead. The problem of good people moving on is prevalent in ALL industries, including the all volunteer military, forklift drivers, plumbers, restaurant managers... on and on and on. It has nothing to do with IT other than its affect on IT.

Bad leadership is the problem, and it spills out of corporate offices like stink from a blocked sewer pipe of grand proportions.

Hiring decisions are effected via budget restraints and leadership decisions between what amounts to two basic waring factions within the company: The IT shop and the HR group.

When you start to think of modern corporate businesses like armies you can see how things go wrong. It only takes one bad lieutenant to totally fuckup the battlefield. With field promotions, that Lt. gets to a spot that s/he doesn't belong and it becomes more short term pain to replace them than to let them carry on fucking things up.
Bad leadership chooses to avoid short term pain. If sports teams were run the same way they would never win anything (sorry NY).

The problem is bad leadership. end. of. story.

With good leadership, all the other problems can be mitigated or removed.

Re:Story is wrong

[tom's a-cold]

The problem is bad leadership. end. of. story.

Not.quite.end.of.story.

This bad leadership has root causes. Incentives to sociopathic management behavior are intrinsic to the capitalist system. In the short term this psychopathic exploitation pays off. Anything with negative effects that manifest after the next quarter's numbers doesn't matter. By that time the perrpetrators have been rewarded and have moved on. Don't assume that better efficiency can fix an inherently corrupt, dysfunctional system. Making the trains run on time has been tried before. Good thing the Allies came along to blow up the tracks.

Re:well

[moderatorrater]

If you start with the assumption that the distribution of the talent is uniform across the marketplace, then the migration of talent from one shop to the next obviously doesn't change that. That's like saying that if you start with the assumption that the distribution of matter in the universe is uniform, then movements won't change that. But that's not the case. Some shops start with more talented programmers and make an environment where good programmers want to work. Other shops work their programmers like mules and give them a hostile environment that makes them cover their asses instead of working effectively. These processes build on each other until the distribution is more definitely uneven.

In addition, the companies with the best programmers will tend to do better in the marketplace, meaning they can afford to treat the good ones better and fire the bad ones. They can also be pickier about picking up new programmers and will have to hire people less often because they have a core of talent that they tend to expand instead of constantly replacing workers that get fed up. Talent tends to clump just like matter in space, leaving a vacuum where it's hard to find the talent that they need.

Agreed, but also...

[mkcmkc]

The Peter Principle is great, and if you liked it you should also check out The Dilbert Principle (and the entire corpus of Dilbert strips) and The Systems Bible.

The Dead Sea effect is not really wrong, but I believe it's swamped by larger effects:

1. In general, few organizations can recognize competence in computer personnel and very few care about it.
2. If you do twice as much work (by any relevant measure), you will get at most 5% more pay than if you hadn't.
3. The measures most highly prized by the organization are attendance (a la Woody Allen), "being a team player", and (perhaps) dress.
4. Talented employees eventually figure all of this out and look for sinecures. That is, they look for situations that are pleasant and have sufficient compensations (monetary or otherwise), and once they find one, they tend to burrow in. (Note that this tends to offset the Dead Sea effect.)
5. Technical excellence is only possible on hobby projects or perhaps in a minor eddy of a larger project (e.g., "the 100 million dollar messaging system I worked on was an abject failure, but I implemented a really nice regular expression library").
6. If this seems upsetting, take a deep breath and go hug your girl, your kid, your dog, or your teddy bear. In 100 years it won't bother you much at all.

Re:Laminated talent

[Eagle7]

That is why one of the keys to being promoted is never allow yourself to become indispensable in your current job. As another reply stated, always be training your replacement. Its common advice from hundreds of "career help" books, and it makes sense precisely because of what you described.

Re:Money, money, money

[johnw]

Sure, but even Mozart died penniless in an unmarked grave. Surely an unusual place to die?

9-to-5'ism and allegedly "loving your job"

[Morgaine]

What about those of us who love our jobs and love to excel in them, but don't want to make work our entire life?

That suggests to me that you've chosen a job that you don't *really* love, since you see a clean break between going to work as a necessary chore and returning home to enjoy life. That's not uncommon: it's called 9-to-5'ism, and it's the bane of company life because it creates shoddy, uncommitted workforces full of people whose main concern is leaving the office.

If you truly love something, then you *DO* want to make it your entire life --- it's part of the human makeup, to seek to maximize what you enjoy and to minimize what you don't enjoy. If you truly loved your job then you would give it unlimited attention, and multiplex it with other things that you love (eg. sleep, eating, family) as best you can, flexibly. That means sitting at the job's bedside for 48h non-stop when there is trouble, just as you would sit at a beloved's bedside non-stop when they are in trouble. No 9-to-5'ism, no treating the job as second best.

From your description, it seems that you don't place your job in the same category as your home life. This contradicts your statement that you really love your job, and it casts a doubt on your claim that you love to excel in it, since your level of committment to it is limited. You may "love to excel in it" as you say, but only on your own terms, as a secondary, less-loved interest. It's still 9-to-5'ism, and it really isn't in the same league as working in a job that you truly love.

Incidentally, the tell-tale sign of really "loving your job" is continuing to do it when you get back home after office hours are over, without getting paid, when there are no other issues of higher priority to attend to. It's part of our natural desire to maximize those things we love. If you don't do that, on principle, then you're actually deluding yourself about loving your job.

Re:9-to-5'ism and allegedly "loving your job"

[LainTouko]

So there's no room in your philosophy for being able to love more than one thing.

CEO perspective

[PietjeJantje]

(I'm not a CEO)

"I don't care about individual talent, that's crazy. Programmers are like plumbers. I run a company with 1000 plumbers. There's a turnover and a general skill level, I won't bother beyond that. Of course every plumber thinks he's a star plumber, which is funny, considering how replaceable they are. Let them scream, let them whine, let them hate the management, let them move on. They are just another commodity. The numbers are fine. Now please excuse me while I collect a huge bonus."

I think it's a bit naive and too easy to think that companies fail to hang on to star programmers because of bad management. The management doesn't care by design, as a professional choice.

Re:Money, money, money

[str8razor]

Unusual, yes, but very efficient.

Re:Travel

[tchuladdiass]

Who in their right minds would turn down an opportunity to see new places

That's what I used to think. But in reality, when you travel for work, you get to see the inside of airplains, hotels, the client's office, and a taxi, and very little else. What you don't get to see a lot of is friends and family.