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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."
This just in, smart people find dumb people dumb. Film at 11.
A morning without coffee is like something without something else.
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.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Smart people with better options leave. wow who would have thought that would happen. next on slashdot, all about how water is wet.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
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...
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.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
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"
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.
blah blah blah
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!"
(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.
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.
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.