Slashdot Mirror
Are Information Technology's Glory Days Over?
Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that computer science students with the entrepreneurial spirit may want to look for a different major, because if Thomas M. Siebel, founder of Siebel Systems, is right, IT is a mature industry that will grow no faster than the larger economy, its glory days having ended in 2000. Addressing Stanford students in February as a guest of the engineering school, Siebel called attention to 20 sweet years from 1980 to 2000, when worldwide IT spending grew at a compounded annual growth rate of 17 percent. 'All you had to do was show up and not goof it up,' Siebel says. 'All ships were rising.' Since 2000, however, that rate has averaged only 3 percent. His explanation for the sharp decline is that 'the promise of the post-industrial society has been realized.' In Siebel's view, far larger opportunities are to be found in businesses that address needs in food, water, health care and energy. Though Silicon Valley was 'where the action was' when he finished graduate school, he says, 'if I were graduating today, I would get on a boat and I would get off in Shanghai.'"
It's just obvious. The reason for IT's growth during late 90's and early 2000's was because it was new, great technology. Now its getting common.
In Siebel's view, far larger opportunities are to be found in businesses that address needs in food, water, health care and energy.
This doesn't really make sense. IT has lots of opportunities too. Its true that "sure ways to get rich" times might be over, but its not like the other indrustries have those anymore.
In other news... Thomas M. Siebel is no longer being asked to come speak at colleges.
It just got sodomized like every other technology area. Nothing to see hear. Move along now, go on! Once the monkeys get a foothold, it's game over.
If everything anyone ever said about IT and computers came true, we would all have 640K memory.
if I were graduating today, I would get on a boat and I would get off in Shanghai
So you'd be in a foreign country with no visa, no local language skills and no experience in any professions. I'm guessing his business is going downhill too.
It seems as if the only tech job left is SysAdmin; I wonder why that spot is always left open...
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
> businesses that address needs in food, water, health care and energy
guess which field in these businesses will address those challenges? the Information Technology field is my guess.
At some point, the efficiencies of a new technology will be fully achieved. Then it's time for a new technology.
I would say microcomputers have largely gone through their cycle. The internet not so much.
Well considering his creation - siebel - is one of the biggest steaming piles of crap i've ever seen... why would i listen to him?
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
His explanation for the sharp decline is that 'the promise of the post-industrial society has been realized.'
Evolution and transformation in technology doesn't happen on a linear time line. It goes in streaks, followed by times where the previously disruptive technologies retrench and normalize. That lasts until the next transformative technology comes along.
Just because we're in a phase of technology normalization doesn't mean it's going to stay that way. I think he's taking kind of a short view of tech history.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Siebel is absolutely right: IT's "glory days" are over. And good riddance, I say: the spectacular growth of IT has attracted all the wrong people and stifled real innovation. And "all the wrong people" includes people like Siebel himself.
If there is less of a get-rich-quick mentality, maybe people can return to focusing on innovation and long term planning again.
Technical progress often takes the form of a repetitive S-curve [see figure 4 in the .pdf] It could be that we're just in a somewhat horizontal part of the curve now, and the industry will experience another boom in the near future.
If you want to get rich doing not much more than touching your windows and talking about it, don't get into IT because all the money now is going somewhere else.
So since we are now in the business of moving information around, what need is there for IT? Is he kidding? Post Industrial also is another stupid term for service economy which is another way of saying the middle class is dieing because the jobs that supported it best are now overseas, but that is "ok" These are the clues I see to say this guy isn't worth listening to seriously.
That the low-hanging fruit have been picked should come as a surprise to nobody. And other countries have imitated us and are now competitive for entry level positions. Again, no surprise. To respond to this, take advantage of the diverse set of viable fields in the market. Take your bachelors in CS and get a masters is something completely different. Odds are that field will have some demand for a cross-disciplinary engineer. The domain knowledge afforded by a graduate degree is invaluable. I'm a bioinformatics scientist, by the way.
I'm glad someone has the balls to say it: Universities are still pumping out IT graduates into an already crowded job market. It's like these kids have shown up to the California Gold Rush after all the gold has gone. IT has well and truly jumped the shark. There will still be jobs, but not enough to support the hordes of unemployed IT people out there. The parties over. Sorry you didn't score, but it's time to go home anyway.
But fear not, because Uncle CuteSteveJobs has a backup plan for you: Biotech. Bioinformatics is a new are and lets even little old you try and crack the genetic code. Hunt through DNA. Discover proteins. Build new drugs, all on your PC. Open source your discoveries, or sell out to Big Pharma.
You'll need to learn a bit of Chemistry, Biochemistry and Bioinformatics. Take heart: It's said Bioinformatics is closer to IT than it is to either of the former. Think of it as learning another language. That .NET isn't exactly cutting it these days, is it?
You'll be curing people and doing far more to help the world. And it's a lot more useful than doing another useless social networking website. Let me help you get started:
1. Download Chimera (It's free!)
https://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/cgi-bin/chimera-get.py?file=win32/chimera-1.3-win32.exe
2. File > Fetch by ID > PDB=1BGX [Fetch] ...wait... Actions > Atoms & Bonds > Show Only ...rotate with mouse...
3. That molecule is a polymerase. It can run down a DNA chain, unzip it, and build a protein as it goes. Yes, a little protein nanomachine? How cool is that? And to think you wanted to write web sites instead. C'mon. Try doing something useful! ;)
Seriously, is this guy delusional?
Look at the way the iPhone has completely changed the mobile landscape in the mere 2 years it has existed. Now granted, I dislike Apple as a company and would never buy an iPhone, but it would be idiotic to deny the huge impact the iPhone and the app store has made on the phone market and on mobile computing in general.
Mobile computing has been a hot area of interest over the last couple of years, and the real potential of mobile devices has yet to be realised. People are now able to easily write software which utilises ubiquitous GPS devices, accelerometers, cameras, microphones, and plenty more - all of it with 3G or wifi internet access, all of it capable of interacting with millions of other users of such devices. There is enormous potential in mobile computing! In fact, many of the problems he cites as being the next big thing could very well be solved by innovative mobile computing devices.
This is just one example of IT with plenty of room for growth. There are plenty more. Sure, you can't roll up to some venture capitalists with a few powerpoint slides and walk away with a couple of million bucks anymore, but that doesn't mean that it's all over and jump ship while you can. It just means you need some actual ability and proof that you're capable of building something that people will invest in. No wonder some people think the sky is falling - for them, maybe it is.
Frankly, the fact that Siebel cannot see any way for the industry to grow significantly says a lot more about his lack of vision and inability to innovate than it does about anything else.
In the 1990's I had the interesting experience of speaking with a number of IT folks about why they chose this field. They said that they looked at job listings, found an industry with high-paying job offers listed, and selected it solely on that basis.
If it's leveling off then great! Leave technology to those of us who have a passion for technology. Even better, as we head into middle age, we won't have to worry quite as much about competing for jobs with 20somethings who are willing to work for half as much.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
but its not like the other indrustries have those anymore.
To name a few: Biotech, green energy and nano tech.
Seriously? Did IT professionals stalk forth upon the killing fields of Europe or Asia, driving forth their enemy, burning and pillaging vast tracts of land? Did network geeks stride mountains to bring food to needy children? Did legions of white shirted nerds conquer Europe or forge the Han Empire? Did the heros of the information age bring power to the weak, save the world from disaster or make anyone, least of all themselves, happy?
They made money hand over fist for a few years because they decided to invest their energy in learning and proliferating a few solutions to a set of abstract math problems solved in the 50s and the associated intellectual and physical machinery involved in solving said problems.
Don't get full of yourselves.
Now cryptographers, those guys are total badasses.
Tom Siebel is an old man trying to shore up his business in the face of increasing competition from young, innovative companies like Salesforce.com and Sugar CRM. Siebel cut his teeth at Oracle (where, interestingly enough, Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com got his start), one of the most ruthless and anti-competitive companies the world has ever seen. What better way to shut down any future competition than to tell would-be entrepreneurs to pack up their toys and go home?
I always used to judge the general well-being of the I.T industry by how lavish the christmas parties were. In the good years there were parties on yachts, triple hull catamarans with a live band and a dance floor large enough for a lot of people, parties on the 50th floor of some luxury hotel as opposed to of late christmas parties where everyone had to chuck in to afford it.
It's rather obvious to say 'water, health and food' are the growth industries because what human on the planet does not require those. Anyone with a minute amount of sense would want to get into the food (or health) industry because it is a massive market and water is so massive it is in the domain of government. Buy stocks in good water filtration technology companies, of course they grow - have you drank anything with water in it today, of course you have.
The IT industry is unique because it disrupts horizontal *and* vertical markets with new innovations. There is always going to be vertical markets that require innovation using technology, and IMHO the energy market is on that is ripe to have the efficiencies information technology can bring to it. The only time there are bottlenecks to this growth is when you have a existing business model lobby to reinforce the status-quo and prevent innovation. Case in point: The music industry, who knows what innovations would have been built on top of reshaping that industry.
He could be right, it's just hard to believe there is no more innovation left in the I.T industry, isn't that I.T's job?
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
From TFA:
The article goes on to point out the obvious, that the percentage growth of an industry will decline as the installed base rises over time. Absolute growth in IT will continue - though it may not be gangbusters of old, IT will never be stagnant.
As other posters here have pointed out, many, (many) industries depend on the support infrastructure that IT provides to work effectively and efficiently. This will not change overnight. While some of this infrastructure has been substantially commoditized over the last 10 years or so, there will always be challenges that non-technical team-members cannot solve themselves. These challenges will require the participation of and collaboration with technologists in organizations that want to function at the high-performance end of the bell curve.
If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law;
There is a transition in the data center from SPARC and proprietary cpu systems to x86 occuring now. AMD based machines started appearing more a few years ago. But there is something pretty incredible going on, and that is what Intel will be shipping soon. It is already becoming apparent that the biggest bang for the buck in midrange is Xeon based hardware. When multi path QPI x86 (like i7) comes out in the near future it will be possible for small businesses to have multiple data center class machines in their office. Right now they probably have a single cpu pentium system, or maybe opteron. I also read that it would take 70,000 petaflops to do a full weather simulation, and machines which could yield that power are on the roadmap, and might be in the *home* by 2020 !
I've found employers are getting ridiculously overspecialized these days. For example, I know Microsoft SQL Server pretty well, but not the latest version which unfortunately makes me unemployable. I've also got skills in other DBs, but none of them are Oracle. Sure I can retrain, but retraining takes time and money and you're not guaranteed a job at the end since you'll be going up against people with active experience in those new systems. You can keep at it and hope you break through, but at some point you give up and say hey - let's do something else.
The dumb thing is if you know one SQL database it's not too hard to learn another one, but employers don't respect that. I hope in a few years they're sweating again, but I won't be around waiting for them.
: Dummy spat off.
IT is dead. Windmills are the future. At least, this week. Next week it may be back to biofuels.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Utter nonsense. Siebel's view may have some merit when applied to those business problems that have largely been solved--payroll, HR, general ledger, etc. But as technology advances (and business models change), there will be entirely new areas for IT and consequently, IT employment. There may not be much growth in the existing job positions, but those who understand computer systems will have opportunities that we simply can't imagine yet. Stay tuned and stay the course.
"All you had to do was show up and not goof it up," Siebel says.
Which is funny, because that's pretty much what he did. Siebel Systems was never as a particularly well run company. I only saw their lame attempts to get on the Homeland Security teat in 2002-2004 for terrorist CRM, but it was all fail. I remember form mockups with a giant red button that said "DETAIN". It was like porn for bureaucrats. Also, it didn't work.
So from 2000 to 2006, Siebel drove the industry leader into the ground, until Oracle put them out of their misery. But by all means, Tom, blame the industry.
"No new technological advances, he believes, would impel I.T. customers to replace the computer technology they already had: âoeI would suggest to you that most of whatâ(TM)s going on today is not very exciting.â"
Yeah, we've already invented it all. Let's go ahead and close our minds, lay down, and die. We know everything there is to know. We've reached the end of our potential.
What a tool. It just shows how powerful human ingenuity is, when even a moron like this can cash in on other people's work. Information technology will continue to grow as long as human imagination drives it. It's unimaginative idiots like you that value money over progress that slow everyone else down.
Think IT, build IT, share IT. Everyone benefits.
BTW...if I were a shareholder in an IT company whose founder was spouting that IT's glory days are over, I'd get rid of either him or the stock.
What a stupid tool.
...we can't find enough people. ... So few are able to really learn on their own...
Bullshit. Either you're in east buttfuck or your company has unreasonable expectations. I bet the latter.
I bet your company has the laundry list of a shit load of skills and yet, if a candidate walked in and told you that they'd learn on their own time any skills they don't have, you'd send them packing.
I had once an interview with a manager who asked me what would I do if I had to change a technology or something on the job or make up for lack of a skill. I replied that I would head down to my local Border's (they have the best tech section) and buy a book and start cramming. He said that was the correct answer. He moved on before the hiring was done and they got a new manager who wanted the laundry list. Of course, he says "He can't get enough "qualified" people.
There are plenty of qualified people. You people just need to get your heads out of your ass and hire people not skills. Because, if you keep that up, your organization will never keep up with the times.
IBM used your excuse and it was just a cover to move all their technical people overseas.
After the Internet, digital content creation, virtualization, moving desktop functionality to commodity wireless devices there does not seem to be an other "earthshaking" IT technology on the horizon. The IT needs of most business seem to be pretty much covered by currently available IT technologies and solutions. These IT solutions are now highly "commodified", from hardware to 99cent games. On corporate level the "IT miracles" are considered as a given, deliverable cheap. While MBA, finance, legal professional incomes continue to grow, IT staff income seems to be stagnating or declining. The "glory days of IT" are over generally.
Our appetite for "IT miracles" both at work and at home seem to be satisfied or relatively easily achievable at this moment.
Feel free to argue against this with your own "I wish if IT could do this..." list.
On the other hand, there is a long not directly IT wish list. ... I wish my house could be energy self-efficient. ... I wish I had a cheap commodity, fully functioning electric car. ... I wish I could grow healthy food for my own consumption. ... I wish I could stay healthy without using prescription drugs or intrusive medical procedures. ... I wish my lost tooth could "grow" back and prevent all others from further decays. ... I wish a truly 8 hours, five days a week work hours could provide sufficient money to support comfortable middle-class life with a family.
Just to name a few items from there randomly:
I'm currently doing sysadmin work, but am looking to move back to dev.
About 6 years ago I left a dev position to do sysadmin work.
My thinking told me you can dev anywhere - but you'll always need someone in the server room to physically touch the servers.
Well, IMHO, what's matured are the tools that make server administration more mindless. I'm not saying it's a good thing, but the perception is that you don't need to have an experienced, well paid sysadmin when XYZ company will monitor your HW. Security is usually an afterthought, and I think cloud computing has the potential to reduce the importance of quality sysadmin to many businesses also.
I think consumer broadband has contributed to the decreased perceived value in a quality sysadmin aslo; many bosses have the mentality of "I built a network at home, how hard is this person's job, really?"
From my perspective development offshoring seems to have slowed down; at least from what I can tell. Another maturity has happened as companies have begun to calculate the costs of off shoring and realized that most of the time those projects take longer and are of lower quality. Combined with the fact that many off shoring shops have figured out they're halfway around the world and double or triple book clients and get away with it, and you have a situation where another "maturing" that's taken place. This maturing is happening in the cube farms in India.
A good sysadmin is worth his weight in gold IMHO.
A good developer is also worth his weight in gold.
From a businesses' perspective, they almost always see the developer as someone who understands their business better and so is therefore more valuable.
So, I'm swinging back towards development. And I think I'll stay with it this time, for good.
Because frankly, a leader with an attitude like this isn't going to drive innovation from the top down. In a few years, they'll be easy pickings because they'll be so locked down in policies and procedures that they'll be slow to compete when new opportunities present themselves.
/me sips his coffee and ponders a new sig...
. . . like the one which made Siebel his fortune. I'm an ex-enterprise software sales guy myself, and have many friends still in the business, some of whom worked for Siebel "back in the day" and have been on sales calls with Siebel (the man, not the company) himself. Most are of the consensus that the "glory days" are indeed long behind us (as in ten years behind us). In fact, one of my mentors recently told me, "enterprise software is dead." I certainly wouldn't tell a young college grad to go get rich selling software to big companies these days (though maybe to the federal government). It's easy to understand his myopic statement when you consider his background (former Larry Ellision disciple and ex-Oracle guy who pioneered selling "value selling" CRM apps into big business for mega dollars).
Here, however, Siebel is ignoring continuing advances in computing hardware, raw processing power and storage (multi-core architectures, SSDs, 64-bit OSes and gobs of fast memory, and other things which software has yet to really take advantage of), as well as other related things like nanoelectronics and continued innovation in materials sciences. The software just hasn't caught up yet to allow developers to take full advantage of these things and build out the next generation of applications.
In short, the more connected our world becomes, and the more people inhabit it, the more data we will create. There will always be a needs to collect, organize, and process this data, and attempt to draw meaningful conclusions from it, because that is what people do when they try to understand the nature of things. Perhaps IT from Siebel's world view (first generation enterprise software applications) is on the downslope, but I guarantee you that within the next decade you will see new ways of working with information that Siebel and co. could never have imagined.
Semi related as an alternative, here is a short article outlining the rising demand for new wind power tech jobs.
After the bubble burst, back around 2001, and students started focusing on economic related major and getting their mba so they could go into banking/wall street. That worked out great.
As a multitime CTO, I can assure you now that IT is now "just" another business arm.... it is hard, boring, unrewarding and accusatorial. Overly accountable, ultra bureaucratic, under-resourced and now infested with leaches. On my 17th year in this gig, I gave it up for online retail? Why? PROFIT.
Pay me 180k as a senior tech guy working bullshit hours with bosses who are basically fuckwits, retarded morons who call themselves "programmers" and useless sysadmins.... or give me decent Human hours, a GREAT PROFIT and some decent people with personalities (not corporate zombies on a brain-eat fix) and Im outta hear.... see-ya IT....
The door will not be hitting me on the way out.
Tell your children to avoid a job in IT like the Black Death. It is not funny.
Just bought a new quantum computer, but I'm uncertain how it works.
kinda. sorta. just saying that Kurzweil thinks that somehow computing power will make EVERYTHING get better, exponentially.
please, i know i'm not being exactly accurate, so you Kurzweil worshipers can refrain from any geometric proofs here, thank you.
So post-industrial society looks a lot like pre-industrial society? A deer, a stream, a tepee and a fire?
My company went chapter seven and I've been scrambling to stop needing to collect unemployment and as I would (though I'll take what i can take) like to work for a small company, should I supplement my sales pitch/resume with being able to mitigate/eliminate the prospective employer's need to buy and have maintained a handful of servers when they could just pay me to make sure their network works and line them up with Google Premiere accounts? Or would that pretty much be saying Hey hire me so I can set you up to fire me a few months later?
Calling out bogus battery capacity claims.
1. Every movement comes to recognize its Golden Age. It is always found to have been the earlier times of the present majority generation.
2. The same will be true of the next generation.
3. Someone may claim from outside the movement that this this Golden Age is past. They will be wrong, despite #1 still being true.
4. Proof that this apparent contradiction is correct will come when #2 comes true, who will in turn have to contend with the outside claims as in #3.
5. When the generation in #2 faces the problems in #1, the previous majority generation will become the mature generation. It will still remember its Golden Age as in #1, but with nostalgia rather than grief.
6. The mature generation will seek to impart the wisdom earned in its Golden Age and since to the majority generation in #1 and the new generation in #2.
7. #1 and #2 will listen with amusement if at all, and may gain some insights, but will proceed to develop their Golden Ages on their own.
Mature: "Will The Circle Be Unbroken?" -- Traditional
Majority: "Will It Go Round In Circles?" -- Billy Preston
New: "Life Circles" -- Soul Control
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
"In Siebel's view, far larger opportunities are to be found in businesses that address needs in food, water, health care and energy."
What a moron. IT's gone as far as it can go, guys. It's done, no more innovation here. Let's go back to studying water.
James Bessen and Robert Hunt did some interesting research at the federal reserve. What they found is that software patents tend to substitute for R&D. The study shows that over a 20 year period, investment in R&D suffered a major decline, apparently to finance software patents, patent searches, litigation and the like.
That might be a better explanation for the decline in IT perceived by Siebel. Or, maybe Siebel isn't happy with his patent portfolio.
You can find that study here.
The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival.
I'd moderate this insightful had I not run out of points. The simple fact is that unless you are already established in a business, and you just want to extend your reach - your supply or possibly customer chain - your best bet is to stay in your own country because you have years of experience of living there. I'm not a fan of Western triumphalism, far from it, but anyone who thinks that there are fortunes to be made just by emigrating should look at the real history of the growth of the US. Many of the people who went West did so because they were failing in the established, well off East. And today? The US East Coast is still where much of the money is, and California is suffering economically. Despite the apparent opportunities of boundless land, minerals and eventually oil, the East leveraged its installed base of civilisation, knowledge and business relationships to stay dominant. The same could well happen with the West and China. It still makes sense to follow the old adage and do not run after money, but go where the money is.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
At age 15 my college plan was to major in computer science. This was in 1978. My father had me meet with some people who worked in the field. They all told me to find another interest, that by the time I graduated from college there would be nothing to do... all the computer programs would be written, all maintenance would be automated, etc. Lucky for me I snicker at crusty old fuckers, ie. anybody 20 years older than my current age.
Run and catch, run and catch, the lamb is caught in the blackberry patch.
Isn't it more important to solve problems than to employ some technology just for the sake of employing it? I'm interested in model checking and working on diagnosability analysis for my BSc thesis, but not because I think it's cool per se. My objective is to help building highly dependable spacecraft, and for that objective approaches leveraged by model checking seem the way to go.
My point is, one should look for interesting problems, challenges, or specialized areas, then pick the technology (most likely IT based) that is best to solve it. There maybe shouldn't be generic academic IT curricula ("Computer Science"), but more specialized ones ("Bioinformatics", "Financial Informatics", "Critical System Design", whatever).
I guess if all you want to do is "show up and not goof it up" and make a great living, then IT may not be the place to go. However if one is interested in putting some effort in and addressing challenging problems, I'm sure they will be able to find opportunities. We had the bubble and the bubble burst in the late 90s.
Further, I disagree that IT is a mature field that will not grow faster than the rest of the economy. And food? FOOD? Didn't that peak prior to the industrial revolution?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
On the one hand, I agree. Personally, too much of what I do is influenced by business leadership who have no personal insight as to what is good technology, yet insist on demanding certain technical decisions based on flashy demos rather than merit. I would be fine working with experience business leadership, or leadership willing to delegate, but we have too many business leaders that come for the high-growth business without the experience, and in order to make themselves feel relevant, attend technology demos and demand their favorite be used, even if the product has zero ability to be scripted or used at all from a CLI simply because it has a web interface that has the shiniest graphics.
Of course, it also means some tolerance of OSS and such may decrease, as the money handlers that do trust the technology to work out in the end start demanding to correlate quantifiable, tangible benefit for transactions. I think there is a lot of value, but placing a dollar value on it is difficult to do in a way that is absolutely believed by someone else.
And of course, this means less money invested in the industry and less money to fund those of us who would have been here regardless of the boom. I suspect the most passionate may not be the last to go, rather the more business oriented will probably wring out the last dollars before the tech people would be able to.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
IT spending will explode again when IT starts actually doing what it could. Right now, we give people hammers to replace their rocks. Someday, we'll be making robotic hammers/manufacturers. Then IT will boom again.
"if I were graduating today, I would get on a boat and I would get off in Shanghai."
Here's a protip for Mr. Siebel and all those people who are sending their kids to chinese lessons: the chinese aren't any more likely to give you a good job than you would a chinese getting off the boat. It's not like they're starved for people willing to work. So you'd better get off your ass and innovate over here instead of playing patent and copyright games.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
all the computer programs would be written
Wow, that's quite a statement. I bet they never thought there'd be a program that lets you tell the world stupid things about yourself in 140 characters or less. Sometimes old people just don't have any imagination.
"Educate the mind but never at the expense of the soul."~Blessed Basil Moreau
Of course.
Consider aviation. Aviation had an age of rapid advance from about 1910 to 1970. In those sixty years, aviation went from the Wright Brothers to the Boeing 747 and the Apollo program. Every decade completely obsoleted the aircraft of a decade earlier. Then, suddenly, it was all over. Advances since then have been minor compared to any ten-year period in those first sixty years.
While im sure others will say the same thing:
Back in the early 90's personal computers in business were "new fangled shiny objects" and here to save the day. People didn't understand them, or what impact they would have, but they wanted one and needed a team of 'strange people' to babysit the horribly expensive little devices.
Today, they are 'toasters'. Simple appliances that help you get work done, and when they break, you get another. The are no longer the end all to be all, and many even make their own toast now, a causality of self efficiency in the industry while we are working ourselves out of a job, in some cases.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Another thing that concerns me are MSP (Managed Service Provider) programs. They are technically essential for IT Vendors to come up with effective solutions to monitor all their clients' workstations and servers. If you have hundreds of clients all with anywhere from 5-50 workstations and a couple servers, you need an effective way to monitor them. Some of you may have heard of the "Kaseya" software. Being heavily promoted by the marketing expert Robin Robins who easily sways dorky IT guys in to spending THOUSANDS of dollars on OBVIOUS ways of marketing thanks to her good looks. Kaseya essentially allows you to install an agent on every computer in an organization, and it reports back to your server with a gold mine of information. It is a low memory, low CPU usage agent that can tell you when bad things happen in the event log, or when the computer is infected with a virus. More importantly when there are certain things that go wrong, you can execute custom scripts that may prevent or fix the problems without you even needing to leave the office for a service call. These are wonderful technologies of course, but sooner or later any idiot can be an MSP and manage thousands of clients without even needing to be an expert. Good bye IT :-\ You might as well start learning how to code instead of being a "Mr. Fixit" because people are coming up with new and better ways to be PROACTIVE IT Vendors rather than a REACTIVE Break-Fix IT Vendor.
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
They were all mainframe guys at insurance and automotive-related manufacturing companies, white short-sleeve shirts and pocket protectors. In 1978 I'm sure PCs and the Internet were way beyond their imagination.
Run and catch, run and catch, the lamb is caught in the blackberry patch.
There are plenty of opportunities in IT, like every other industry on earth, for people who have the right kind of skills and personalities to carve out success and a future of their own. There's no guarantee, but there's no guarantee in anything. If you're truly an entrepreneurial type, and you want to work in IT, then more power to you, you've got as much of a chance of success as anywhere else.
If on the other hand what you want is a job where you can make a quick buck and you don't like the job. Those days are over. You can still make money, but you probably won't get it straight out of the gate and you'll have to be able to provide business value like everyone else. This is a good thing, it keeps the crooked "cross my palm with silver" bastards out of the field and leaves it to people who like it and want to earn an honest living.
Claims that IT is mature are the result of a lack of imagination.
At the turn of the 20th century there were similar claims that the automobile was mature and could not be improved any more.
What about the fact that Moore's Law has no end in sight?
What about the need to shift the focus on design instead of programming, in order to finally be able to create secure and reliable systems?
What about the prospect of autonomous robots - getting more credible every day?
What about the likelihood that CPU-based systems will see their last days when it becomes feasible to reprogram hardware architecture dynamically, in real time?
What about the emergence of massive parallelism on the desktop (and laptop), leading to real-time ray traced graphics and simulation?
What about the prospect of real-time 3D displays?
What about the prospect of intelligent machines? (In this area, there is much to fear.)
If anything, IT is dynamic, and what will come is likely to be more transforming than what has already occurred.
Most folks in IT have had the experience of uninformed management trying to run a technical department they don't understand. In fact I'd say most people in any technical field from engineering to research have had that experience. Investors are much the same way and when they all hit upon an idea at the same time like "IT is a gold mine" you get weird economic bubbles that reward the simple things like simply getting into a field with venture capital and ridiculous returns on investment even when nothing of value is produced. This is created not by some intrinsic value in the field in question but in perception about the field. It's a secondary value created by the inefficient workings of the modern market where perceived value is more important than actual value.
So are those days over when you can just start up an IT shop and make millions without really doing anything...probably and hopefully yes. Those types of situations are not good for an industry or the wider economy as we have seen with repetitive corrections in over-invested in sectors. That said modern life, in developed nations, runs on an IT backbone and if you're good and willing to take risks you'll have plenty of opportunity to make a fortune. There is also the developing world which will be a huge consumer of IT as they evolve into modern economies (again you have to be a risk taker..it's no longer a sure thing) which will offer huge returns for those who are able to aid them. Additionally, if you're looking for a stable middle class life IT has matured to a point where it can provide that as long as you're careful to avoid areas that are likely to be outsourced to the lowest bidder. If on the other hand you just want to be in the right place at the right time and cash out...go to business school and find the next hot sector and profit off of the over-investment then get out before the correction.
One other account I found particularly interesting was from someone who was a little younger. Just along the coast is one of the first universities in the UK to offer programming courses, and this guy was one of the students. He donated his old exercise books to the collection, which had hand-written programs (first drawn as flow charts then in machine instructions). The class would take a bus once a week to the steel works where they would be allowed some time to run their programs on a real computer. The machine they used had a special instruction set called 'simple code' which had a smaller instruction set and a few other limitations, including one that programs were limited to 150 instructions. The marketing literature pointed out that you could avoid this limitation by using the more complex mode, but it was unlikely that anyone would need to write a program longer than 150 instructions (or be able to without serious bugs).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The next computer revolution will make the first one pale in comparison. As soon as we find solutions to the parallel programming crisis and the software reliability/productivity crisis, innovation will explode. Current programming languages are primitive relics of the 20th century. What is needed is a new software construction methodology that turns everybody and their uncle into a computer programmer. See Why I Hate All Computer Programming Languages.
Forget it. Mobile devices can be charged up when power is available. Anything that requires a constant source of electricity to be useful is going to be useless pretty soon - unless you have your own power source.
We are going to start seeing electricity shortages and nobody is going to be building huge datacenters that need their own generators anymore. You might find some folks being real clever with solar power, but what do they do at night? The grid? Sorry, night time is for homes, daytime is for offices and commercial space. No, we no longer have the capacity for running both at the same time.
You will remember fondly the last time the referigerator ran 24 hours. You will remember the first time you came home early and found out the air conditioner wouldn't turn on for a couple more hours. All this and more are coming soon.
IT is going to be a job for people with outmoded skills that can manage the winddown of big computing. Either that, or lots of new IT-related jobs will open up. Things like Generator Tender and Power Manager. Where you have to cut the electric budget for your department by 30% somehow.
We are moving to a much more sustainable environment, but still not really sustainable. We will not be building any more power plants and we will be avoiding all that pollution - whether it is from coal smoke, radioactive waste or dead birds. We will also be ending the light pollution of big cities. We are going to need that electric power for other stuff.
When was the last time anyone saw a new product from Siebel? Wait, didn't Oracle buy them out? But why should I bring up this fact. Maybe it's because I'm making 1995 dollars today, and am very happy I can. IT Workers are not saying that in the BRIC Nations. And I have people like Tom Siebel to thank for it. Thanks Tom, your Economic insight is a foundation in which I will raise my family by; NOT.
If he wasn't completely ignorant of media science his blatherings might have merit. We're just about to START the computer age. We're just about done repackaging the content of old media after that is done the computer age will start. IT is dead is kind of like the claims that everything has already been invented. It just demonstrates a profound ignorance of the processes going on. Read Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan to avoid being an ignorant cunt like this douche.
The NY Times reports that computer science students with the entrepreneurial spirit may want to look for a different major, because if Thomas M. Siebel, founder of Siebel Systems, is right, IT is a mature industry that will grow no faster than the larger economy
IT != all of computer sciences, there is more than just IT for Comp Sci students to go into.
Stuff like this always makes me laugh. Mainly because it is pretty sad.
You'd think for a tech site, people would have a passion for tech. I guess not.
How has it changed the mobile landscape? For starters, it was the first usable, approachable mobile device in existence. Unlike all the other mobile phones before it, the iPhone isn't intimidating. Along with a laundry list of other innovative things, it has a real *usable* web browser in it. I'd go on, but unless you are a tech-Luddite, these things are pretty obvious.
Ordinarily, I would agree with this statement 100%, the Glory Days of IT are pretty much over. Generally, we work long hours and are not appreciated nor respected. However, in the airline industry, the opposite seems to be true. Much of the infrastructure is very old and needs to be brought, kicking and screaming into the 21st century. This has created new and challenging positions and made IT an in demand field despite the industry's whoas. The industry realizes it can only do so much to increase revenue through a la carte pricing. Therefore, the way to decrease costs (and, thereby increasing revenue)is through automation and there has been a large push towards this. Hence, I have employment almost until the company closes its doors, if that should be the case.
"How can anyone argue that the current crappy state of the industry is mature?"
Let's see: low pay, no real serious employment prospects for the unconnected, mind-numbing over-specialization in our jobs, corporate "governance" of what we do, etc. It all adds up to no enjoyment, and that's pretty much a stupid person's (read "average business person's") definition of "mature".
The industry is mature for exactly the reasons you state. The big bang is over, now we're all just sorting out the pieces and organizing everything neatly. The key is that most of the stuff is on the table, now. Revolutionary ideas are now rare, rather than commonplace.
Funny, though, much of what you talk about is like computers before we got large bandwidth networks and complex operating systems. Everything ran independently (remember being able to simply copy the application directory somewhere else and execute it from there?). Add a dynamic pointer and the novel Widget2010 is just like WidgetForDOS, but with the app on a server somewhere.
There will still be breakthroughs, as there are in other fields, but the day when there was so much undiscovered that was fantastically new (remember the first time you saw Visicalc?) is over. Makes me kind of sad, really.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
"'if I were graduating today, I would get on a boat and I would get off in Shanghai.'"
I guess he hasn't heard of those newfangled airplanes.
The suggestion from Siebel that IT's glory days are over since 2000 in fact tie in nicely with the era that the World Wide Web came to prominence in enterprises. As the idea of open standards in information systems has taken hold the old "lock in" proprietary technique for wrestling money out of your customers has become weaker in this sector. Vendors no longer have the upper hand as organisations seek to prevent the lock in through insistence of support for open standards. Those who would be like Sieble can look to biotech for the future of the lockin (and I don't mean down the pub) but you'll find people like Tim Berners Lee already working in that direction too, there is the science commons and the neuro commons not to mention the Semantic Web. Is the archetypal entrepreneur disingenuous when it comes to IT, that I don't know, but I will say this, to my mind IT's "glory days" are far from over, they are in fact just starting, it is just the likes of Siebel "The Commercial Entrepreneur" may no longer be invited to the party as its the many not the few who now benefit!
Excellent points, Good Citizen linhares, and I would heartily approve of Seibel's being offshored to China (I believe they've renamed Shanghai, but I wouldn't expect Seibel to know that).
Excellent newly published S(cience) F(iction) suggestion: Watermind, by M. M. Buckner
People seem to be confusing IT and computer science. There is a difference between programming and plugging in a modem. Computer Scientists make stuff. IT uses other people's stuff. Maybe 20 years ago they were the same thing...
My employer insists on retaining an outsourcing group in India. The code we get from them is of marginal and inconsistent quality. This is probably because most of their developers are in it only for the money (and probably planned on moving on before the global economy tanked), and some sadly deluded executive over here really thought that cost-cutting constituted a business strategy.
We really do get what we pay for. But guess which groups do NOT get new feature development or requirements specification as tasks anymore?
As a younger man, I used to rant about management's willingness to accept crap code so long as it worked. These days, I just smile, knowing full well some jackass across the ocean (who probably now hates his job) is keeping me highly valued and very busy.
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
"All that aside, though, you are right.., but you are, of course, mistaken on all your pro-globalist, anti-union rantings.
Better to know economics, than to know one clownish economist....
Strong buy on recent SF publication: Watermind, by M. M. Buckner - excellent science fiction read!
Unless and until there's a cheap mr. fusion breakthrough, demand for energy in all its forms will just continue to go up. Peaks and valleys like everything else, but general trends are growth industry from here on out. There's a back log for "all of the above" in the energy biz, from more pipelines to more exploring to more drilling to more wind power to more solar PV and thermal to more geothermal and more nukes and they are just getting going on tidal power plus all the different directions for biofuels.
You can call it a bubble, but traditionally bubbles are in reference to demands that are artificially promoted and that get people to over speculate way beyond what the real market can bear and into mass dumbness or "irrational exuberance", such as tulip mania, dotbomb webpages with zero business models to actually make any money, the never ending "house flipping" stupidity bubble combined with the wall street repackaged bad mortgages serious parasitical leech dumbass bubble they just got bailed out on, etc. (and here's my prediction, the wall street derivatives bubble will be hitting hard, not the green energy bubble)
Energy demands on the other hand are *quite real* and are supposed to keep rising through this entire century.
There are only two things that could potentially drop energy demands, mr. fusion breakthrough, and if there was such a calamity or calamities that the bulk of the planets humans kicked off. If neither of those happen, people just want more power, and more people between now and 2100, by a huge multi billion person factor, and that means demands will be steady in general terms and always on a rising slope.
If you mean an overproduction of windchargers (or solar panels, or...)...they'll still get sold at a discount and put up someplace, they just work too well to ignore. Once you start talking about half a megawaatt to two point five megawatts worth of electricity for sale per windcharger, for example, someone will want it. Just not seeing a bubble there or any time in the near or even medium future.
Who knows though, stranger things have happened, but at this time I will have to disagree with your assessment. If you want to expound on your prediction, with the reasoning behind it, I would like to read it.
Excellent post, of course, hairyfeet and should anyone have missed this (FINALLY!!!!) NY Times article (once in a while, even they will report the facts!) on the private sector job growth over the last 10 years, effectively ZERO:
JOB GROWTH LACKING IN PRIVATE SECTOR
Geez...I've been saying - ranting about - this for years....
Really, we should be able again to start to focus on technical solutions and working standards, instead of having to deal with laywers and scammers all the time (often both being one person or company at the same time)
Really the goldrush triggered by the 80s and 90s attracted the usual bunch of crooks which made the live of the people working in this area absolutely miserable. If this all is not shiny anymore I am all for it. I do not want to get rich, I just want to produce working solutions and make a living out of it that is all.
Also, these things also follow R&D results - the 1961 peak which fell to 1969 was due to all the technology that enabled IBM to push out machines businesses could use, the 1982-1983 growth of 28-30% each year was due to the PC, and the 1994 to 2000 growth was pushed by the Internet being rolled out.
I deal with a lot of distributors and resellers and they are always trying to FAX me things, today in 2009. I don't want to spend a dime on a separate fax line, but I don't want to admit to these companies that I don't have a fax line either, so I list my land line as the fax line and my cell phone as the company number. Their websites are backwards, one of them is down almost every weekend, they are totally backwards. With all the open source stuff out there, netbooks going for $300-400, I see a lot of cheap stuff that can be done IT-wise to lower the costs of these and a lot of other businesses.
It is true that there was a go-go era when the Internet was rolled out (money-wise, from 1994 on), and when PCs were rolled out (moneywise, 1981-1983), and when IBM 360s were rolled out (moneywise 1964-1969). It is also true that the ups and downs of the larger economy play into this. Unemployment in the US is over 9% right now, Citigroup is being bailed out by the government and its stock is less than $4 and the like - the larger economy is not growing much so why would IT be growing at 17% a year? The real question to me is now how fast IT is going to grow but how fast it will grow compared to the rest of the economy. I can't see much that is going to grow faster than the rest of the economy, other than a handful of things like biotechnology. And Celera made leaps and bounds in biotechnology due to information technology, he had the computers figure out the genes instead of counting each gene nucleotide by nucleotide, codon by codon. Computer Science is still one of the best paying majors out of college, which may be why I am one of the only white faces in class - most of the people in CS classes throughout my life have usually been people who are from or whose parents are from Asia. So even in the US, Shanghai dominates.
If you want to do something new that has to do with computers today, you should go into quantum computing. I gues QC is now where 'normal' binary computing was in the 1950s. Seriously exciting times are afoot!
-- Cheers!
" They were all mainframe guys at insurance and automotive-related manufacturing companies, white short-sleeve shirts and pocket protectors. In 1978 I'm sure PCs and the Internet were way beyond their imagination."
That's about right. I worked at a PDP-11 shop in 77 for a year and it was there I saw a picture of a 4004 intel processor. The first single chip CPU. That could hardly get out of its own way.
Arguably there wasnt a whole lot of software that needed to be written by then. Everything you could do on an 80 column 12 line VT05 had been done. 24 lines would be a year or so later.
Then I went to the University of Waterloo and found the Unix lab, and began playing with troff. What *I* wanted was a graphics display, but that was 7 years away in the third year of grad school. I said screw that and just took off to LA and as the man said, all you had to do was show up at a computer manufacturor. They hadn't heard of C or Unix.
In the 1980s the onus was on making computers for everybody.
In the 1990s the onus was on making the net work for everybody.
What if we're done with that? Does everybody who wants one have one?
What do I think the next big thing is gonna be? Wireless meshes connecting xboxes via linksys 5 port routers like this: http://www.onlive.com/ 3D will be to graphics displays now what graphic displays were to dumb crts back then
TCP will die, but IP will stay in a modified form, V6 will never take off, DNS will be replaced by DHT. They will also be your set top boxes and these and your phone will largely replace computers as we know it and a thinkpad in 2015 will seem as obsolete as a guy on a glass tty on an old Sun seems today.
Insurance company COBOL code will always need fixing if you're into soul destroying work.
Need Mercedes parts ?
What's lacking is creativity. Exciting stuff is happening in AI, genetic algorithms, quantum computing, microfluidics, etc. any one of which may one day be profitably applied to a plain jane IT job (some now). You just can't get all your information from the talking heads or industry news.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
The aim when getting a job is to pick one that you'll like doing the rest of your life, not to pick one were just "all ships are rising" at a particular time.
I would prefer to work where I'm happy, which may not necessarily be where I can make the easy buck.
Never set the VCR because it was too much of a pain in the ass to bother. I barely ever use the web browser on my phone even though I'm sure it is "feature complete". Why? It is a pain in the ass to use. The iPhone has a non-pain in the ass browser and a non-pain in the ass interface.
Since we've been going at the Personal Computer for at least 30 years, and nobody has yet caught on to the power and potential of capability based security... there is at least one quantum leap of development left to make a small fortune off of... get busy folks!
sorry, respect is earned... and this guy is grade a number 1 prick
There was a mini-boom in 1977 when the first microcomputers appeared on the scene. However, they were difficult to use and didn't have a lot of software (yet), so were mostly hobbyist toys. Then the VisiCalc spreadsheet shot off another business-oriented mini-boom starting around 1981 that lasted until about 1986. Things were growing stagnant again until Windows 3.1 became stable enough to kick off a mini GUI-revolution around 1992. Then the big-ass internet boom from about 1996 to 2000.
There's currently a PDA/Phone mini-boom right now. You never know what's around the corner in this biz. The problem is that it would take a lot of luck to successfully ride every boom. For those not on a given boom, IT may indeed look somewhat stagnant.
But in general it seems that there should be a Next Big Thing soon, based on past history. Nobody knows that it will be, and it may not even involve computers.
Table-ized A.I.
I still don't have a computer that can hold a conversation, effectively vacuum the floor, or clean the windows, or see when I'm running low on coffee. I still have hundreds of a little chores that require little intellect that a machine could do if they were just a little bit more intelligent. A typical desktop now has the power to simulate a nuclear explosion, just too bad I have no need for nuclear explosions. I just want something that do simple tasks like shut off the solar powered battery charger on a hot day when the batteries are getting too hot, or automatically know when to vent the hot clothes dryer exhaust inside or outside according to temperature and humidity.
Tom Siebel is a business guy, not an engineer. Maybe the big enterprise things are all done, but the millions of little things that need to get done will yield lots of people billions of dollars. Richard Feynman was right when he told us there was infinite room at the bottom.
One part of IT that doesn't seem to be suffering as much if at all is security.
The thing is, most IT recruiters know that Indian universities are mostly crap, emphasizing uncreative rote. It is biz lobbyists that are hyping them as an excuse for big co's to hire or rent more Indians, claiming Americans are poorly-educated.
Table-ized A.I.
While it is nice to program systems that provide faster sorting, more efficient network traffic and better inventory analysis, I have to ask: is this what you really want to do? You could get rich with an algorithm for better commodities price prediction, but many are tearing out their hair trying to do the same thing. And the work can be tedious and ultimately almost certain to fail.
If you really must work in tech, what can you do that will be worthwhile, that will satisfy your soul?
Why not begin the singularity? Why not create the first computer that will see a path to it's own improvement and help you to build it? Generation after generation of ever smarter computers that design their own (improved) offspring...
It could make you rich, it could get you killed, but it will certainly get you into the history books.
Computers & robots working together to eliminate all the thinking and back breaking labor that humans tolerate today. Each generation smarter, stronger, better than the last. Kurzweil's singularity come to life.
On the down side you put every IT worker out of work. On the up side, no human thought or toil is ever needed again. You have made us free to watch TV and drink beer all day long.
...omphaloskepsis often...
"VMWare and Citrix are excellent applications, but there ought not be a great need for them. Much of the need comes from defects elsewhere."
Heck yeah!
Our concepts of "operating system" are so weird and clunky that it's a miracle our systems run at all. The older I get in IT the grumpier I get at how fundamentally broken things are - and worse, how we just accept the industry-wide state of brokenness as "normal" and hail as breakthroughs every hacky non-solution like OS virtualisation. Whatever happened to the early vision of objects, where we'd have fully mobile code, sensible clean interfaces, simple trustworthy primitives, and recursively composable systems all the way down to the instruction set?
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
The question is framed ambiguously. If you define IT as a highly paid career supporting Windows 95 computers then yes, those days are long gone. But if you look at how digital technology (IT at it's core) is moving into other fields then you'll see that there's still a demand for skilled workers. I like my niche, so I won't say what it is. But there's lots of things changing and any intelligent person with a background in technology should be able to see which way the wind is blowing.
I'm not sure about these dire predictions. Technology is constantly evolving, and new uses for technology are constantly being created.
I'm the IT director for a small private school (less than 200 students, less than 70 staff, two locations). Our small little school has VOIP to the desktop in every classroom and office, network printers damn near everywhere, 20mbps fiber at each location, and a server room with two telco racks of network equipment and three 48-space racks of servers. We have laptop carts in most classrooms, and a few, well stocked, computer labs.
We are actually stressing our 400 amp service at our main site, and any further expansion will require an electrical service upgrade.
Have I mentioned that we are a SMALL school?
10 years ago we didn't even have one third of this stuff. I don't see any reason why this trend will not continue.
Frankly, I'm thrilled at the evolution of technologies like virtualization - they will make managing all this much easier.
IT is probably one of the few areas in our economy that will actually grow in the next 30 years. Will it grow like the last 30? Maybe not, but any growth is still better than none.
-ted
When price is all that matters, it is a race to the bottom.
That bottom (in manufacturing) may well be Africa.
China and India may have sacrificed a generation to "undercut" the west, but that sacrifice will really hurt them when producers of goods move production to Africa.
Large oil reserves are being found in Africa - it is only a matter of time until industry moves from Asia to Africa.
People only value quality after they've been burned by the lack of it.
-ted
when no one realizes anything
anything will just become booming
just this boom has passed IT
and other things are booming already
only human
only boobs......ooooooops......not booms
Gasp, I can't believe I'm writing this, but I'll lay it out for you.
a) computers are getting faster and faster and we're going to get better at controlling magnetic fields.
b) free electron lasers increasingly have the oomph to make cool things happen.
This is my sig.
Seriously... if you go to school for IT, or for computer science, you get totally different training, and learn totally different skills. Both are related to computers, but that's where the similarities end. People confuse IT with CS all the time, but I would hope on slashdot at least, there would be enough sharp people to differentiate the two. This reminds me of when I meet someone and they say "Computers?... oh my nephew is in computers too... he works at best buy..."
The glory days of IT are probably over, it it ever had any. Then again, I don't think a lot of CS Majors really had a mind to work in IT to begin with. (Many get stuck doing that, though).
The advances just moved to different areas.
Where previously, the state of the art in airframe and propulsion was steadily advanced, most of the industry's evolution is happening in avionics, fly by wire, and other less obvious technologies. Still, any advances in airframe and propulsion, now tend to be made in bigger and more revolutionary steps than in the part. Now, for example, we have business jets such as the Hondajet microjet and Gulfstream G650, which were unimaginable 40 years ago. Also, advances in maintainability, fuel efficiency and noise reduction in aircraft engines, have led to new kinds of large jets, and changed the way they can be used and the airports that can handle them.
One thing is true: building an aircraft like the SR-71, today, would be impossible to do in 18 years, let alone the 18 months it actually took the Skunk Works to build their first flying prototype.
The software that creates the absolute worst user experience ever, by switching to a web interface from a pretty good desktop client... ... claims that technology will never get any better nor grow as it once did.
Wow, that's rich.
How about minding your own garden there, big guy?
+++OK ATH
Employment is to SURVIVE in life.
Entrepreneurship is to SUCCEED in life.
Slashdot = Sarcasm
Simple. Pass the Digital Millenium Copywrong Act and all progress, prosperity, and innovation simply ends, period. End of era! Turn out the lights of civilization in litigation happy hunting ground USA and simply leave it like Siebel says. The only place left where progress is possible now may well be China where it can be hidden, covered up, and protected by an army of 200 million troops that no monopolist can touch unless he wants HIS skin in a bottle of 'Oil of Olay' with 'collagen'. The rest of the world will have to have a revolution in order to get rid of the IP monopolists and their evil handmaiden, 'free trade'. The armies that will fight in this revolt are gathering now in unemployment lines all over the world, and in 'soup lines'. Maybe someone will put enough copies of Karl Marx, Vladimir Ulyanovich, Adolf Hitler, and Ho Chi Minh (People's War, People's Army) to get the downtrodden to think of more than the next television program that they cannot watch because of the arrogation of their analog channels by greedy corporate monopolists.
Ausfag here. I've seen programmer/analyst jobs advertised recently for A$30 p/h. You can stack grocery shelves at the local supermarket for just a bit less. I'm unemployed, but I wouldn't bother applying for that, because you just know the employer is a cheapskate. I'd rather retrain while waiting and so if nothing comes up I can do something else.
then I believe it's good time to be in IT. Because those idiots who jumped in just for the f****** money would start moving away and only the ones who have real passion for this trade will get in.
Glory days...
This is absurd. You're clearly a (junior) trader who can also write a bit of code. You are not a software engineer or developer. There is a difference, you just aren't aware of it.
Any decent software engineering should be perfectly capable of applying their skills to just about any industry. Why? Because good software architecture is a skill in its own right, and the things which go along with it that allow you to interact with the business (good communication, clear specification, lack of jargon, implementing what's needed to run the business) are applicable to any industry.
For example, in my 15-year career as a software developer I've designed and written software systems to do
I didn't have specialised knowledge in those fields before I became involved in them, but I have the ability to listen, and that's what is more important than any other skill in IT.
I think anyone aiming for IT with the idea that you will use it to create intelligent robots is aiming for the wrong bandwagon.
The new areas of IT for the 21s century will be in the following areas.
*** Grab yourself a copy of Circuit Cellar. This is an area of tech that is just starting off. Sure its not pretty yet but go back and look at an Altair 8800 and see what you are competing with. This area of inbuilt computers and programmable devices is just starting to get interesting.
*** Terraforming and Magnaforming. Using sequenced robots to autonomically build things. Take the human effort out of things like infrastructure, reforestation and land reclaimation and you've got some seriously powerful technology that people will want like candy.
*** Molecular re-alignment and 3d Prototyping. Taking objects and realigning their atomic structures to produce new materials and new items. Cars with bodies of reusable bendable aluminium with the strength components of steel. Fabricated foods for the third world. Diamond tipped knives. People will pay for this .. the last one already exists.
The great part is none of this is now impossible. The machines are up to standard to do this. Its just the programs to do this havent even been conceived of yet.
As i said in the beginning, the next big step will blow your mind.
I think programs like Aperture help push some of the limits.
I worked for a Canadian bank back then, on the mainframe. When the first home computers were developed, I saw many potential uses for them. My manager just dismissed them as toys (thanks Tom H., I still remember the name of managers who didn't have a clue from 30 years ago).
As a HS junior I was told basically the same thing. That was ~3 years ago, and I'm now two years into a CS degree. I sure hope they were wrong. :-)
(or sufficient amounts of single malt after hours)
The way you spell "during" might explain why my mail server doesn't work and yours does.
Wait... what?
Was computer science just about computer programming back then?
Non sequitur. You don't need to make a great contribution or invention to be a successful enterpreneur.
My point exactly.
Enterpreneurship != innovation.
My point exactly.
And that's why it's good for the industry if there is less money to be made.
This is crazy, first off since when do all computer science majors only go into IT.
Secondly, I have only started working in IT recently but there is a ton of newer technologies and solutions with virtual server and desktops. I would be surprised if we did not see a switch over in the coming years (I think the reason it is not happening now is b/c companies don't want to spend the money to overhaul and a lot of people in charge of the money probably don't fully understand the benefits).
Anyways I feel like with a CS degree I am in pretty good shape for the future (not too worried)!
If industries in China are polluting it is because it is the only cost effective way to satisfy western consumerism.
Ditto for hiring cheap Indian technicians and Engineers.
For decades the US was told that its way of live was not sustainable in the long term, but the reply was always about US exceptionalism and how you could walk on water.
Guess what? You can't.
Welcome to the real world.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.