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The Tech Industry's Legacy: Creating Disposable Employees
An anonymous reader writes: VentureBeat is running an indictment of the tech industry's penchant for laying off huge numbers of people, which they say is responsible for creating a culture of "disposable employees." According to recent reports, layoffs in the tech sector reached over 100,000 last year, the highest total since 2009. Of course, there are always reasons for layoffs: "Companies buy other companies and need to rationalize headcount. And there's all that disruption. Big companies, in particular, are seeing their business models challenged by startups, so they need to shed employees with skills they no longer need, and hire people with the right skills."
But the article argues that this is often just a smokescreen. "The notion here is that somehow these companies are backed into a corner, with no other option than to fire people. And that's just not true. These companies are making a choice. They're deciding that it's faster and cheaper to chuck people overboard and find new ones than it is to retrain them. The economics of cutting rather than training may seem simple, but it's a more complex calculation than most people believe. ... Many of these companies are churning through employees, laying off hundreds on one hand, while trying to hire hundreds more."
But the article argues that this is often just a smokescreen. "The notion here is that somehow these companies are backed into a corner, with no other option than to fire people. And that's just not true. These companies are making a choice. They're deciding that it's faster and cheaper to chuck people overboard and find new ones than it is to retrain them. The economics of cutting rather than training may seem simple, but it's a more complex calculation than most people believe. ... Many of these companies are churning through employees, laying off hundreds on one hand, while trying to hire hundreds more."
Hire a new FTE programmer/H1B programmer for 50% of the fired employee's salary = 50% savings.
UPS Sucks
As someone who is "surplussed" and "losing" my job in March, it's the norm (3rd time in less than a decade.. Buyouts, contract losses, etc). Just don't complain when your newly hired $150k/year wunderkind jumps ship 3 months later for someone offering more. You've created a "fuck you, I've got mine" bed, and we're all laying around in it.
chuck people overboard and find new ones
If you're hiring new employees to replace the ones you laid off, then the old employees weren't really laid off, were they?
Most tech companies are not operated as going concerns and thus have no HR policies beyond hiring and firing.
Time for a UNION! This bs needs to stop and NO H1B's for places that lay people off.
In many or probably most cases, the companies doing the layoffs are simply cutting headcount as a fast way to get a short term improvement in the company's bottom line and thus cause the stock price to go up or at least stay where it is. Cisco and IBM are both notorious for playing this game. IBM simply moves the job to a cheaper foreign country where they have an office and Cisco just hires new H1-B visa workers at a much lower price than the American citizens they laid off.
When you hire tons of people especially quickly, you're going to have a lower mean of high quality people. Churn can be as stated, but also a common part of the industry, is to find a way of increasing the quality of your employees. Fire the worst, replace them with better. Rinse and repeat. Sometimes its about a body, any body, to move the ball forward. Then it's about getting better and better people. It's not just about training, it is still largely a talent based industry, where the majority of the progress is made by a minority of the people.
Let me see if I understand this author's thesis. back in 2005, Adobe changed direction and needed different people, with a different type of education and experience. From this, they draw the conclusion that ten years the entire tech industry is made up of "disposable employees". I didn't work at Adobe in 2005, so I don't know the details of that reorganization. I do know that in all of the companies I've worked at, most people leave when they choose to pursue an opportunity elsewhere - the employee leaves the company more often than the company leaves the employee.
to greedy, laissez-faire, unregulated, globalized, secret-trade-agreement-favoring, trickle-down, uncaring, 1% favoring capitalism.
Republicans out there -- you voted for it, you got it. As they like to say, "To hell with you, Jack, I'm all right."
Sure, there are large layoffs in the tech industry, but big layoffs are not a new thing.
Two of the largest layoffs in US history occurred in 1993. 60K employees at IBM and 50K employees at Sears/KMart.
Big layoffs are a result of other business conditions, including.
An actual need to cut expenses -- bloated, slow-moving companies find themselves in the condition of declining sales, and big losses.
A desire to increase profit margins, often linked to increased stock prices -- CEO's can get lots of bonus compensation in this form
A result of chopping up a company, perhaps resulting from a hostile takeover.
None of these are unique to technology companies.
This is just the free market in action, treating employees as any other resource: fungible, consumable, disposable, replaceable.
I've spent my career in high tech and enjoy it, but I don't recommend it as a career path to anybody I know.
Many of these companies start out as small startup companies, and the corporate culture is just an extension of college culture. People come and go as they enroll and graduate. Many of them have no experience in a true business culture. The see the overhead as an unnecessary expense, not a necessity for the future. No one know how to train someone for the future. A lot of people coming out of college like this atmosphere. They dread the bureaucracy that comes with standardizing processes and developing employees. Few are aware of the need to transition to a more long term business structure.
I want to live in your world. In my 30+ years in the industry I have seen way more people lost due to layoffs then people leaving.
One thing I've really noticed in the last decade or so is the massive amount of consolidation, mergers, acquisitions, etc.
Every time I turn around, it seems like some company is being bought out by another one. And with so many opting to recycle old company brand names, it's difficult to tell sometimes just who really makes a product or provides a service.
(We've all heard of Polaroid, RCA and Westinghouse -- but they're not the companies they used to be.)
Quite often when these mergers or acquisitions happen, the company originating the process really only wants to add the other business's patent portfolio, or its proprietary product -- not its labor pool. The employees typically come along for the ride, initially though -- with some kind of (often underhanded) plan to eliminate them over time. Perhaps it would be better for everyone involved if they were up front and honest about such plans, except the truth is? If they were, people would start throwing fits and revolting against these buyouts and mergers instead of viewing them as "just part of doing business".
(EG. If you want to own a technology that a competitor created, it's easy to pay off the head of the company who owns the rights to it and let them "resign". Everyone assumes it's because that individual is simply angry that he/she lost so much control over the original business plan and is going to walk away on principle. In reality? He/she just sold out and threw their staff under the bus.)
In the end though -- hey, it's the modern way business is done. They're worried about maximum efficiency, which means having a labor pool that costs the company the minimum in training costs, salaries, etc. while doing as much useful work as possible. Loyalty is pretty much out the window because keeping people around, just because they've "been with us a long time" turns out to be less efficient than hiring fresh people who are motivated to "prove themselves".
Stop letting business majors run your company and stay private.
He mentioned seeing it in many companies, Adobe was only one example. Churn all over the place.
Then they have to enter into collusion deals with other companies to keep the employees that they do want, since such a culture breeds NO company loyalty, encouraging an employee to jump ship the moment they see a better prospect.
I don't read AC A human right
From my own personal exerience, many employees leave their company to avoid being layed off. I wouldn't be surprise for every layed off employee, there is at least one other employee who voluntarly left because of impending layoffs.
....disposable employers.
When the market is doing well, which is almost all the time since I been in IT in my area, it's not hard to find jobs. So if somebody comes along and offers me more money, equal hours (or better) and equal or better working conditions, well let's just say I have a macro'ed resignation word doc that fills in date and employer name. Why? Because I know if the tables where turned, they would not hesitate to put my head on the chopping block.
Loyalty is for suckers.....
Do I like it this way? No, but this is the world we live in.
Big business is in thrall to the MBA's and their "scientific" management. If something can be measured, it's legit; if something can't be, it isn't. The thing is though is that, at any point in time and given any development in statistical research methods, some things are going to be more easily measured than others. If you have a business culture that believes you're clear-eyed and sensible when looking at numbers, but wishy-washy and "unscientific" when going by experience and gut feelings -- and, even worse, if you have a similar investor culture financing the whole thing -- you will run into trouble.
It's the numbers guys firing people with experience (and the judgment that comes with it), and replacing them with spanking brand new rock stars, or foreigners with well-crafted resumes. Add up the columns, contact human resources, collect your bonus check. If it all goes wrong several years down the road, you'll be working somewhere else anyway. That's the business model we're all suffering under.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
Hire another local programmer at 110% of the fired employee's salary to fix the cheap H1B programmer's code = 60% loss.
No. If they DO have to hire a local person ( non-H1-b), they are able to get them at 90% of what they originally paid him.
See, the offshoring and H1-B has been putting DOWNWARD pressure on salaries.
Salaries here where I live haven't moved in 15 years - and that's not including inflation.
Sorry, but there is no real downside for a company to hire offshore or H1-B labor - only an upside.
While the study is great, unless it drives a cultural change to how companies do business - it does little to help the situation.
I always felt that retraining was better than churning. You already have an employee with whom you know their work habits, strengths and weaknesses. You have built-in support for the legacy systems while you transition. And, the current employee most likely knows all the failure modes that the new system will need to handle. All that ancillary stuff that is really, really, difficult to nail down in the requirements document.
But, I sit at the bottom of the food chain and get little in the decision making process.
Seriously, I blame Silicon Valley's attitude in the late 90's on this one. As such, we now have a tragedy of the commons as no one is willing to train, but still expect to find what you need on the open market.
>. I want to live in your world.
It's called Texas. There are advantages and disadvantages.
This didn't start in the tech industry and won't end there. We would see more of it in certain industries (like auto) if those industries weren't heavily unionized.
This is a very current problem. The tech press is talking about IBM's announcements/rumors about yet another huge restructuring. Not so long ago, IBM was one of the most stable places in the world to be employed at outside of government and academia. There was an implicit contract that employees who contributed and worked within the framework of the company would be taken care of for an entire career. I think that needs to come back for those who desire it, not necessarily for socioeconomic reasons, but for workforce improvement reasons. This move to contractors and outsourcing for everything is just idiotic MBA management consultants looking at a spreadsheet and seeing a way to shift costs. The long term problem is that loyalty works both ways, and employees who are treated as disposable will treat their employers the same way.
I know that large organizations generate forests of dead wood as well, and that there comes a time when some of it needs to be cleaned. However, an enlightened company in my mind would be better served retraining that dead wood worker for something else. You get someone who knows the organization's culture and politics, and the institutional knowledge of how their previous job was done doesn't walk out the door.
I know I'm not in the majority on /., but I would love the ability to stay with the same employer for an extended time, without the worry of suddenly losing my job and immediately being branded with The Scarlet Letter U (unemployed) that prevents me from being hired ever again. I actively seek out employers who treat their employees well in exchange for long service -- and they're harder and harder to find. The reality is that the industry is rough - the 25 year old single coder/systems guy is preferred over the experienced person who's done the latest rehashed tech fad over and over again. Anyone with a family would be pretty foolish to go the contractor route - it's hard to explain to the family that you can't pay the bills this month because a customer didn't pay you or there's no work to be had. There's a difference between someone like me, who would put in extra effort in exchange for more security, and someone who just wants job security because they're lazy. I've worked with plenty of those types over my career as well -- they set themselves up as the single point of failure in a system or hold all the knowledge on a particular process just because they're scared someone will come and lay them off. You would get less of this if large companies didn't routinely say "we're cutting 30,000 workers" the way HP just did.
The problem for me with contracting isn't the constant learning - I like that. It's the bouncing around, never knowing where you'll be in 6 months, and never getting to finish anything you start.
In a perfect world, my solution would be twofold:
- Admit that there is going to be huge structural unemployment in the future, and enact European style unemployment insurance and worker protections.
- Take the design/engineering aspects of IT or SW development, draw a clear line between the engineering and the tech tasks, and merge it into the licensed professional engineer track. A professional organization would get a lot more support than the unions that techies irrationally fear. In addition, having a clear career ladder starting out as an entry level tech, spending the time necessary to make mistakes, then graduating to a status that requires you to be responsible for what you build/design is a good thing.
This sounds a little insensitive, but, don't be disposable. You're a Windows admin. Great. So are a million other people. If you're a Windows admin who also knows some programming, there are maybe 250,000 people with your skill set. If you add in that you know some Linux, maybe 100,000 people.
What I'm saying is, if you want to be safer than the average employee, don't be average. Enhance your skill set.
...but it's being eaten...by some...Linux or something...
so i was just laid off and replaced by TWO programmers who have half the skillset that I have. on paper, i have more experience and understanding of fundamentals. the two programmers who replaced me did not understand how to re-engineer solutions that aren't optimal. they just didn't "see" it. but i'm likely making more than both of them combined, so time to shed the fat.
this happened twice in the past 2 years. at first i thought it was the company, but now i'm looking at myself. my desire to set myself apart as a technical resource in all fields raised my costs. nevermind that i have institutional knowledge of java, everyone is using ruby and python. let's find someone who only knows that so we can justify paying them less.
IT is a business. you need to keep that in mind the next time you negotiate your salary..
All employees are disposable, and always have been. Companies exist not to provide jobs but to provide profits for their owners. And they are not stupid. If churning employees didn't produce higher profits, it wouldn't happen. They have the data--if fact, you probably help them gather it.
Sure it may seem like IT salaries are high. But when you look at how much money is made because of the IT departments the salaries are actually low. And to keep them low they keep laying off people and hire in people with low salaries and lay them off when their salaries start to rise.
You are calling people stupid, you arrogant selfish prick?
Agreed. I have been laid just once, but have left two companies who had done a couple rounds of layoffs. I've rather spend a couple months interviewing while I still have a salary than risk having to burn through my savings if it takes a while to find something after I get laid off. In the case of my one layoff, I volunteered because the place had become so toxic inside, so I don't know which category to put that one in really.
The last place I left seemed honestly hurt that I would leave. However they had done nothing like offer retention bonuses for their key people while they slashed people left and right. It turns out that the last round or two were merely to cook the books as they prepared for a secret merger, which actually made it worse in my mind. A decent number of folks got rehired after only a quarter once things got announced. Messing up peoples lives to goose perceived "shareholder value" is pretty nonredeemable.
More illegals and H1B's! That's the answer! Maybe we can get down to Chinese income levels by the time Hillary/Elizabeth leaves office.
Most of the time, layoffs are done without warning to the folks who will be affected. So, unless you've got a friend in HR, you don't get a chance to leave to avoid being layed off. Instead, you have a few people who go "Crap, what's going on here?" and start looking for a position when layoffs *happen*, and a bunch more who go, "Whew! At least I've still got a job!" and stay put.
I've been through about a dozen rounds of layoffs (and survived most of them) over the twenty-mumble years of my career. Only *once* was the fact that layoffs were coming announced in advance (and that was almost 20 years ago). I've never even *heard* of it happening like that for IT folks since then.
> Agreed. I have been laid just once
That's about par for the course for Slashdot nerds. :)
Blaming the tech industry for "inventing disposable employees" is not supportable. Long before the tech industry was significant, 1960 through 1980, there were plenty of massive layoffs, so many that one management author's book was entitled "Welcome to Our Conglomerate, You're Fired". The myth of a company's loyalty to its employees is just that, a myth, and always has been. I've been fired by both old line manufacturers and tech companies, and there is no difference; tech companies invented nothing; they just imitated.
1. Have/Learn marketable skills.
2. Have plenty of money in the bank and as little debt as possible.
3. Have a source of passive income to help with cashflow during times of unemployment (Rents, royalties, etc.).
4. Have as few kids as possible.
5. Be picky on what jobs you accept. Use 1-3 to exit the labor force for as long as necessary to retrain and regroup.
6. Be active politically: e.g. Lobby congress for tighter H-1B restrictions, better labor laws, inclusive capitalism.
7. Live below your means. Try to do as much as possible yourself without hiring contractors, mechanics, gardeners, etc.
Only 22 years ago
Link
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Companies also no longer try to retain employees. Companies no longer offer employees a reason to stay longer than a few years with pensions and other benefits, and they tend to cut benefits over time rather than add them. Additionally, wage increases at most companies suck so much that your best raises will come from hopping to a new job altogether. At least in silicon valley they attempt to give people workplaces and missions they can feel good about, but in the rest of the country the landscape is very depressing and unsatisfying.
You're supposed to be able to simply employee-start and employee-stop for whatever instances you currently need. People who complain that employee-create takes too long to run, just need to read up on how the snapshotting system works. This is way better than trying to guess the right values of StartEmployees, MinSpareEmployees and MaxSpareEmployees and trying to mitigate burnout by tuning MaxRequestsPerEmployee (as though each one needs the same setting!).
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
In that scene, he effectively preaches what I call "douchebag capitalism". The heart of his speech is that people should only be rewarded for success, not for trying. It is based on the false belief that success is entirely based on your innate nature, rather than on the tools you are given or the environment you are in.
So if you are a "Coffee is for Closers" person, then you fire all the people that are not closers. Then you hire a bunch of new people, hoping to get at least one 'closer'. Repeat Ad Nauseum.
The problem is it is based on a false world view. In reality, success is far more often built on the work of others. Whether any individual does well is usually mostly dependent on three things:
1) Have you been given the powers and tools necessary to do your job in your current environment (i.e. has your boss screwed up? - are you trying to sell gold plated crap in a recession? )
2) Your social skills. Can you make friends with your fellow employees and customers? Do they like AND trust you?
3) How hard you tried.
As proof, I will tell you what every HR person in the world knows - when you advertise most jobs you are generally flooded with resumes of people - all of whom on paper are competent to do the job. You are not looking for the one person that can do the job, but instead the person that fits into your corporate culture the best. Someone you will get along with, not someone that will miraculously solve all your problems.
Finally, and most importantly - how hard you tried is often determined on whether you are properly incentived for things BESIDES total success. It's not enough to give coffee to the winners, you also have to give it to the second placers.
Frankly, if an employee has not tried hard enough that usually means the BOSS has screwed up, not the employee.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I have been laid just once.
My condolences. Did you try paying for it?
I don't respond to or upvote ACs
Perhaps H1B priorities should be awarded based on a company's retraining expenditures to encourage them to retrain rather than dump.
However, it's probably easy to manipulate such numbers, as lot of things can be classified as "training".
Or perhaps on the number of technical workers they have laid off. If a company has a high record of laying off techies of related skills, then their visa worker applications should be rejected.
Table-ized A.I.
I think it was in the 1980s that the business world stopped being a place where you could join a company and expect it to look after you in return for your loyalty. I don't know why the author thinks the tech industry is so special that it would be immune from this.
One thing driving this, or at least in the past that I have seen, is that people are brought onto projects when there is the ability to do so, not when there is the need to. So when the times are good you expand your workforce even if you don't really have need to. Then when things look bad you let them go.
In one company I was doing some contracting for their managers level was determined by the number of people reporting to them. This led to a lot of fighting for projects and a lot of people being hired. And a couple of the "software engineers" were lucky to be able to turn on the computers at the start of the day.
I have been with my current employer:
Less than 5 years ___.
More than 5 years ___.
Not employed insensitive clod___.
Get up!
My blog post today argues that it takes as much or less time to train an existing employee on new skills than it does to train a new employee on the company's domain knowledge.
I.e., yes, companies should be training instead of churning. And training doesn't even cost anything any more except for the paid time to do it -- everything is online now.
This increasing churn may be one of the key reasons women tend to avoid IT careers. When you feel compelled to do what's best for a family, job and location instability is undesirable.
The California dot-com burst certainly hit me, a father, in the wallet (and family time), as I was job-seeking in a glut market for a few years, taking crappy fly-by-night gigs that remind me of Bob Seger tunes. If I had been a single parent, I'd be screwed.
Whether it's genetics or social norms, women often end up with the primary burden of taking care of family.
Table-ized A.I.
There was the guy working for some company as a programmer who hired a programmer in China to do his work for him so that he could watch cat videos all day. IIRC, he paid the Chinese guy at the rate of $20k per year and the work was rated highly by the company's managers. Why hire an H1B person for $50k when you can hire someone outside the country for $20k that does good work and you don't have to go to all the trouble to get someone a visa, pay Social Security & Medicare taxes, pay moving expenses to the USA, help him or her set up all that's associated with settling in, etc., etc. We're talking 80% savings, not the much less 50%. Such a manager might might be considered a financial genius and end up Chief Financial Officer of the company.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
My counter-view (sitting, between product and customer).
Product have made something that's not quite right. We ask them to fix it. They don't want to, as they're adding the latest shiny new feature instead.
This makes sense to them, shiney got given budget, fixing something would mean them admitting they screwed up before and there'll be a teensy bit less shiny/budget. They don't like doing that.
So, I have to fix it. I can't charge the customer more, I can't internally pay product less, so I just got myself some additional work.
I can then repeat this process for each customer - or hope that product pick up the fix/feature and integrate it.
This second favoured option whilst easiest for me, sticks in the craw a bit as it's not really motivating product to actually make what we need - throw something out the door, and it'll get fixed if we missed anything important.
Now, obviously you get to point when you lose your rag a bit - and tell the customer it's all borked, tell them to escalate it, and sit back as product fixes product. This can only be used rarely, too often and the customer twigs it's all messed up internally.
A better alternative, and something we seem to be moving towards, is to slice the company the other way - Take chunks of sales, site, delivery, support, product to create a 'functional slice' through all of them. Common purpose, common(ish) pot of money - "We" have a problem, "We" need to fix, or our whole slice is screwed (and the multi-VP shit will rain down equally on all of us).
Above still isn't perfect (more services, than product) but even as a small step, if you get product closer to the customer it improves. Not just people feel more involved in actually providing a solution, but helps shape the product roadmap - These aren't just new "Shiny Features" - They're "A Shiny feature we know if we add to the product, has landed us all another million dollars in the next release".
I guess if I had to sum it up, it's just being more open and then trying to align all the interests. People want to do a good job, but asking them to sacrifice themselves to do something they'll never be rewarded for just demeans and pisses them off, which leads to resentment, which leads to the internal barriers, fiefdoms and all the rest.
It is usually easy to know when there will be layoffs. Here is a short list of common indicators of a pending layoff.
* Early retirement plans are being offered.
* Your company was recently purchased.
* If a team member leaves, there isn't a replacement being hired.
* The company revenues are tanking.
If two or more above indicators are present at your company, it's time to start looking for a new job.
They're deciding that it's faster and cheaper to chuck people overboard and find new ones than it is to retrain them. The economics of cutting rather than training may seem simple, but it's a more complex calculation than most people believe.
I would tend to agree that the calculation is more complex, but err on the side of retraining current employees. Learning a new skill, especially within your field of study, isn't often that difficult, but, for a new employee, learning the company's policies, procedures and well as documentation, development, build and delivery (etc) processes and the company culture is much more complex and, I would argue, more important. A wiz-bang employee that's not well integrated into the environment is a bigger problem than someone simply needing to learn another programming language. All that assumes, of course, that companies actually care, which, in my experience, large companies don't. "Employees are our most valuable asset" - my ass.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Article says "These companies are making a choice. They're deciding that it's faster and cheaper to chuck people overboard and find new ones than it is to retrain them." ... but i don't see where the companies are re-hiring instead of re-training? They cite HP and say they're still letting people go, not hiring.
Gotta back these claims up with numbers, or it's all BS.
1. no body owes korporations their fucking lives, either, and yet they get them, by hook or by crook...
2. so, that was god's 11th commandment ? 'thou shalt only have employment-at-will !'...
oh, well, immutable, then...
3. being a victim of layoffs MOST of the time has FUCKALL to do with your 'skills' or 'value' to the company, it is ALL a numbers game, and you will be flushed REGARDLESS of your 'skills' and 'value'... worked hard and gotten recognition in the form of salary bumps ? too bad, too expensive, off with their head... worked hardly at all but ingratiated yourself to some loser mid-manager making up the lists ? congrats, your 'skill' and 'value' to the company is obviously huge... *snicker*
et ceteral ad nauseum...
oh no, that makes your point indefensible, how did that happen ?
4. not to mention, just HOW is a family guy/gal in a 30 year mortgage with rugrats in school, family/friends in the area supposed to pull up stakes and move to -i don't know- ANYWHERE/EVERYWHERE because they get laid off and can only find a job half a country away ?
easy, right ? *just as easy* as re-inventing yourself EVERY FUCKING TIME a korporation gets an itch to scratch something else...
you know, i "thought" like this when i was an insufferable prick in my younger years, but that is what 'maturity' brings to you...
try it sometime, supermensch...
Even though companies and turbo-capitalist apologists always talk about the virtues of "taking risks", they themselves are the last ones to take any risks. Invest in employees? That's a risk. Therefore let's not do it, instead we'll outsource all that nasty stuff to universities and let employees pay for that themselves!
We have reached such a corrosive environment one step at a time, and we let it happen.
In the 1960s companies hired a few engineers and invested in them, paying for the research done in-house. Engineering was a scientific, valued position.
Now "engineer" is such a diluted term it's worthless, yet you still need that paper just for entry-level jobs.
then you wouldn't go to the trouble of paying them more. For instance, one of the popular tricks is "hire" them in a low income area like Iowa and then have them work in New York. Paying them the Iowa wages of course.
and really wasn't complaining even about the groups - more just the environment they've all been put in (apart from marketing, who should all be shot... as long as they keep selling the stuff that pays my salary... OK, I'll give some of them a pass..).
The guy leading the scrum team, who tells me he sees the issue and isn't going to fix it, isn't personally being a bastard. Actually, he's probably a pretty good leader, protecting his team from my random requests, leading to team late nights, leading to tester queries and defects all based around something he wasn't supposed to be doing in the first place.
It has to come top down. At one end there's a happy customer throwing money at us for our flexible "can-do" attitude - and it's just making sure that money and accompanying 'kudos' attaches itself to everybody in the chain. If you've got hard walls between depts in that chain, each one just seems to want to shaft the ones on either side of it - skim off as much as they can as it goes from the customer to dev. So, when it reaches dev finally they look at the risk/reward and (rightly) determine it's not worth the effort - so nobody benefits.
Companies get rid of tallented people because they dont need them. Customers accept to have shitty and bugy products and will still buy new ones from the same large companies that fired the folks who had the knowledge. Its the same thing all the time.
Another aspect is super short term decisions to increase the bottom line, hence large bonus'es and when the consequences show, the decision maker is long for a long while and usually got promoted.
Large companies are managed by selfih crooks who believe they are so talented because they can make easy decisions.
I dispose of companies when their services are no longer needed. I show the as much loyalty as they show me. Isn't that what Economists say I should be doing? Looking out for my best interest and to heck with everyone else? If every one does this and follows thr princople of "Greed is Good" then the new Garden of Eden will sprout up spontaneously.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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This must have rippled beyond the Tech industry. Larger companies now a days lean towards contracting employees, never making people full time and cycling them out to avoid paying real wages/benefits/etc. It's much cheaper for them and the business model is becoming very attractive to those who watch the bottom line.
Poor managers only manage up, only look at spreadsheets, and only look for short term gains and bonuses before they jump ship to the next company leaving someone else to clean up their mess.
Deferred bonuses for 3 to 5 years would fix this nicely - meaning a manager have to be around in 5 years, and still employed at the same place, to pick up their bonus - better still if paired with an "anti-bonus" if they do poorly. It would also mean that managers would have to live with what they create, and deal with the consequences of firing experienced staff and hiring a bunch of semi-qualified overseas programmers.
I'm pretty sure that would stop the "disposable worker" issue quickly. I'm also sure that it will never happen. It's managers who see companies as "disposable" and who make the policies.
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One correction, I meant to say that people with a partial college education do better than people that just graduated High School.
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Startups hire a lot of folks. A lot of startups fail. A lot of investment cash goes into startups.
Guess were the money goes? And hence a lot of unemployed tech workers. Biggest scam (or distribution of wealth to some) of the century.
Perhaps H1B priorities should be awarded based on a company's retraining expenditures to encourage them to retrain rather than dump.
ince the people I'm hiring aren't here on an H1-B in the first place, and they aren't direct replacements for the people I'm firing anyway, and I'm not going to pay for someone's need to change a career - assuming they are even educable in the new career field - it's no skin off my nose if you screw over Microsoft. In fact, it'd help me out a lot.
Each time a company fires (or lays off) an employee, it's an expression of their power. Same goes for the hiring.
A hiring decision allows the employer to roll the dice and seek The Mythical Candidate:
1). Ideally and perfectly trained (on someone else's dime);
2). Experienced. Even on brand new technologies and systems;
3). Willing to work long hours for cheap.
Sure, the perfect employee doesn't exist, not normally. On the other hand it's fun to dream and unless the labour market is extremely tight, the employer is holding most of the cards. The employer can often wait for instance.
Once a person is unemployed, they are in a relatively weak position. They will have to find employment before their money and assistance runs out. And they are only rarely in a position to play off one employer against another, in a bidding campaign. Yeah, I know it CAN happen. It just doesn't happen often.
But that's a good point too. I.T. seems to be in a strange place when it comes to where it fits in a budget for some companies. Some people want to call I.T. an expense (necessary cost of operations), while others view it as a "profit center" and constantly expect justifications from I.T. management as to how much money it saved the company in a given quarter.
The last couple places I worked insisted on an accounting scheme where I.T. had its hours charged back to cost centers of other divisions of the company, based on how much time we assisted those people. I guess it's fine, if it makes the number crunchers happy with the results? But it never made a lot of logical sense to me since so much of I.T. involved system or network-wide changes or upgrades affecting everybody. And you got into office politics with such things as wanting an office to upgrade to a faster internet connection. Their manager might say no because he didn't want the extra cost billed to his division/department. But not upgrading meant slower VPN access for any remote workers connecting to the router in that office and performance lag for anyone on the WAN who needed to load/save content from servers at his location. So his refusal to upgrade affected others negatively who he wasn't even directly responsible for.
Ever hear of the engineer shortage? No company would ever lay one off. They, in fact, hoard engineers just to deny them to other companies. If you get an engineering degree, you have guaranteed lifetime employment, even if you just slack off.
And the worst part of it was, the cat videos weren't very good.
I remember that story. My impression is that the guy was really good at vetting a developer and managing the communication / transfer of code. Maybe he also got lucky?
I work with a lot of folks in India. One guy is a rockstar, a couple are decent and the rest are dead weight. Very much like here in America. The problem is the time difference and scaling. How many rockstar devs are over there, how can one person find them to capitalize on it and how much time, effort and talent does it take to make it seem invisible like this guy did?
There was more to that story though.
The guy was pretty good at managing his Chinese programmer. I've rescued enough projects that were initiated by clients who hired cheap coders to suggest that your average non-techie manager is not going to succeed at doing the same.
So it's really a story about the rare breed of local programmers who are able to make $20k/year code grunts produce useful things instead of spaghetti. The savings aren't that spectacular upon factoring that in.
Oh, and there are intellectual property considerations to factor in as well. When selecting the very cheapest labor, you occasionally run into full time employees who are in fact working two or three "full time" jobs in addition to the occasional eLance jobs and what have you.
What I'd like to know is how much he was paying the Chinese guy in access to stuff the company considers confidential, and what the Chinese guy got out of it. If I gave some random person in China access to our code repository, I'd expect to be fired and likely sued.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The tech industry didn't really invent this. I think it probably started when MBA's were put in charge of running companies and no one was promoted to management through the ranks. From there things proceeded to the huge layoffs of engineers that happened whenever government decided it was tired of the space program or missile defence. No attempt was made to retrain anybody through any of this. Every ten years a great crisis was announced, we were suffering from a terrible shortage of engineers, then a few years later, large numbers were laid off. Doubtless many individuals could actually have been retrained for various specialities since they had a large base of knowledge in math and engineering, acquired at considerable public expense, in some cases. The people doing the hiring, however, did not understand anything at all about the positions they were hiring for. They were in personnel because it had nothing to do with math, among other reasons, so they weren't able to assess whether people were qualified and re-trainable or not. Things have just gone on like this, decade after decade, ever since.
the Congress's current move to greatly expand the H1 Visa program is nothing more than the tech sector's push to ship even more American jobs abroad, to make American employees more disposable than they already are, and Even more, to further expedite employers' blatant age discrimination in both layoffs and hiring. Regarding the latter, I see a lot of head shaking and hand wringing about age discrimination but nothing being done to acknowledge that not only is it illegal, but it is as illegal as racial discrimination. I and others are beginning to work on getting this stopped, legally, with financial and other penalties imposed for companies snd other institutions who engage in this practice.
As a sysadmin, a lot of the job is doing stuff that *prevents* loss. Unfortunately, bean-counters often don't really understand how properly configured/supported firewalls and security appliances are important, because they don't *MAKE* money.
DOD long ago created "disposable workers". It's been routine over the last 50 years to do massive "Hire and Fire" when a single military contract ends or a contractor fails to win a military contract. Literally thousands of highly skilled workers on the street in a single day.
That assumes the product owner is developing what's needed - not they shiny new feature he was able to sell to the product budget holder.
Also assumes that the people deploying/using the software are involved in the Agile process.
i.e. Product may be developed in an Agile way, but if product just releases a new version every year, that emerges from a black-box, then it really doesn't matter what methodology was followed.
This is the IT world we work in. Projects complete, de-scope and sometimes cancel. Companies are moving more work to contractors both on shore, high level skills, and off shore, commodity skills. Normal application management and infrastructure is more easily moved to lower cost off shore. Workers in our industry for the most part are adapting to this model.