Slashdot Mirror
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.
Most tech companies are not operated as going concerns and thus have no HR policies beyond hiring and firing.
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 know of at least one company that views bodies as disposable and interchangeable. They may fire a bunch of people during a lull only to try and hire back some more in the future. It's still a layoff even if it seems abusive and short sighted.
I even know the guy responsible for making those decisions in that particular company. I tend to refer to him as 2-Bobs to others as he's essentially the 2 Bobs.
Seems like it would be simpler to avoid the whole layoff+rehire scenario but clearly Company X thinks otherwise.
Definitely makes me want to avoid Company X.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
Although this problem needs a solution, a union is not that solution. Unions are a relic of a bygone era. The core premise of a union is that employes are all the same and can be swapped in and out of work like parts in a machine (once they are trained). This leads to collective bargaining which takes back some of the power that big employers have. However it also removes individuality from the worker. If I am smarter, stronger, or more skilled than my coworkers, I want to be able to elevate myself based on my merits. A union interferes with that. You pay a union, and the union acts only in its own best interest, not in your individual best interest.
Modern skilled workers, especially in the IT and Engineering fields, are usually very specialized. This is not a good fit for a union. It would be ill advised to take a good thing and remove all motivation for creativity and the free flow of invigorating talent.
A better solution is to simply prevent large corporations from getting away with their bullshit. No "gentleman's agreements" to prevent poaching. Stop accepting lies regarding layoffs and market performance. Reward employers for using home-grown talent rather than rewarding them with tax loopholes for moving overseas.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
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.
>. 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...
In other developed countries (France, Germany, Japan, etc) there are a lot more hoops to jump through to lay someone off, and the layoff packages are legally set to be much greater. After that the safety net is much stronger while you look for more work. On the upswings companies hire less than a company in the US might, but layoffs are pretty small for even pretty big downturns. It ends up much better for the workers, though it can tie the hands of the companies when they are competing against the rapacious capitalists in the US or China.
I see such protections as an alternative to a union for workers who are very specialized.
Instead most workers are "At Will" employees. You can quit anytime, and can be cut loose at any time. Most full-time employees don't realize that they have less actual job security than the contractors they might be working with.
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.
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.
> Agreed. I have been laid just once
That's about par for the course for Slashdot nerds. :)
This is an INDUSTRY problem, not particularly an employer problem, though they certainly do a lot to fan the flame. A union won't solve all the problems and will make some of them much worse.
Employers:
- Do not hire a person until existing employees are nearly 100% overbooked. No training or ramp-up time in the schedule.
- Want to hire the cheapest person who can barely get the job done
- Do not want to spend money on training or other activities that might increase employee value on the market (even though, in my opinion, that shoudln't be true)
- Do not significantly value sub E-level employees as investments, but rather fungible commodities to broker
- Vastly prefer to lay off people in position who have become expensive and hire H1Bs to replace them to cut payroll costs, essentially creating a glut of people with the same skillset.
Employees, particularly in Tech:
- Want to hire a drop in replacement. Look for someone with many years of experience doing exactly the job being hired for (i.e. create a niche/no-train, no hope environemtn)
- Tend to focus on job skills over job experience. Skills can be taught to any college hire, and ARE taught in low-cost regions, but tend not to be taught in western schools. Think languages (C), tools, mechanics. Things if you have the proper background and education you can pick up in a month or two. For any non-trivial job however, this is nearly worthless.
- Misapprehend "experience". Experience is not, or should not entirely be how long you've done a particular task. Most tasks can be mastered in well under 5 years. Experience is how many problems you've worked on and solved in your life. It's one thing to learn a solution (i.e. school), it's another thing to learn a problem. The more you've seen and internalized, the better you will be. Instead we interview for how well so-and-so knows how to write python, or how long as he been a python-engineer. Useless. I want to hear what projects he worked on, what solutions he considered and rejected, etc. I don't care what language he did them in, or if he was a cardboard-box folder for 5 years and has the audacity to apply to a plastic tub sealer position without any industry experience!
- In some fields, mine in particular, I have noticed people intentionally block candidates because they are not "in", simply because they are not already "in".
So in essence we are all responsible for creating this market we're in.
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.
Well, as this story suggests, the company already views you as interchangeable cogs, so you might as well go with the flow.
You can still collectively bargain for minimum standards. The engineers should go on strike when they take away the secretaries' health insurance. The secretaries should go on strike when they try to replace the engineers with H1Bs.
The "ruthless meritocracy" bullshit is exactly what your corporate masters want you to believe. That it's all dog-eat-dog, but you could be the top dog! And your coworkers? Psssh those losers are just dragging you down! Best not cooperate with them, or they might get some of the scraps we might toss your way instead!
And really it's the prisoner's dilemma. If the workers work together, everybody can be better off! But if everybody's just thinking of themselves as rugged individualists, well...divide and conquer.
I'm glad I work for a non-profit. It's like being an employee-owner. Everybody works well together, everybody gets taken care of, the janitors have health insurance and retirement plans and we've got a lot of people who've been working here 15, 20, and 30 years.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
There Fixed that for you:
More illegals and H1B's! That's the answer! Maybe we can get down to Bangledeshi income levels by the time the rethugicans successfully overthrow the US government with a second business plot.
LMAO, out they come at the whistle of the word. Unions are alive and well today. There is no premise that people can be swapped out, but that collective bargaining means that we all stand together and no-one can get trodden on. A union is the only way that workers can "simply prevent large corporations from getting away with their bullshit". They got working hours and conditions under control in the 19th century, wages and equality under control in the 20th, and may finally get randomly firing people/hiring H1Bs under control in the 20th. Look at Germany - unions working with companies to produce huge profits, high employment and decent working conditions. At the moment all you're doing is enabling divide and rule from the top down.
Only 22 years ago
Link
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Maybe a solution is to move away from the job culture and into service/contract culture. Employment meant something when it was meant to be long term, when companies were stable. Tech world especially moves too quickly. Unless someone really likes the company, wants to be a part of it anyway and accepts that he or she may need to leave when the company's needs change, why be an employee at all? Why go through the pretense of loyalty and security when it doesn't exist? Simply work per project or as a contractor as long as the services are needed, then be quick and nimble and find other clients when the situation changes. Not much different than a taxi driver perhaps. All the while be your own boss and keep your dignity, even if you make a little less (or more, if you are lucky and willing) and accept the short term uncertainty. (Something we evolved to deal with anyway.) Arguably long term uncertainty is worse when you are employed.
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!
I'm glad I work for a non-profit.
You work for the NFL?
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
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.
Same here - Fiserv for starters. They have a layoff every two years at some random month early in the year (it's been derisively termed the "layoff lottery").
The only clue we got was the Friday before, they told all the remote/home workers that from now on, all work will be done in-office, starting Monday (this ensures that you bring all your stuff in so they don't have to worry about recovering it.) Come Monday morning, they began discreetly walking up to desks, quietly asking the victim to come have a chat with them in the office. If you're low-man on the seniority totem pole (as I was at the time, since the department was small and had low turnover), you were guaranteed to be unemployed before lunch that day.
Funny thing is, not six months later they were hiring for the same damned positions that they laid a number of us off from. Word quickly got out in our local tech community though, so recruiters were met with a wall of silence when that company's name was mentioned.
Fortunately for Fiserv, the company is able to get around that by instead bolstering their offices in Norcross (near ATL) and Dallas (larger cities with larger tech communities).
Unfortunately for them, websites like glassdoor.com exist, and anyone with half a brain stops there first before interviewing (unless desperation or similar circumstances dictate otherwise).
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.
"when you look at how much money is made because of the IT departments "
That's the same argument every department makes. "If it wasn't for us, this place would fall apart." It seems, sales depts. are the only ones who can pull that off.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
I don't know about Japan, but these workers rights in France and Germany were largely the work of unions.
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. . . .
changes in tech make their skills useless
You forgot quotes around "skills" to indicate the sarcasm of what many people call "skills". Skills don't get outdated, knowledge does. Problem solving is a skill, programming in C is knowledge. A skillful person can easily apply their skills to new problems.
Professional athletes have unions. There is no reason you can't bargain collectively over common areas (drug testing, for example) and still have individual terms
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.
Employers:
- Do not hire a person until existing employees are nearly 100% overbooked. No training or ramp-up time in the schedule.
- Want to hire the cheapest person who can barely get the job done
- Do not want to spend money on training or other activities that might increase employee value on the market (even though, in my opinion, that shoudln't be true)
- Do not significantly value sub E-level employees as investments, but rather fungible commodities to broker
- Vastly prefer to lay off people in position who have become expensive and hire H1Bs to replace them to cut payroll costs, essentially creating a glut of people with the same skillset.
But that would cost money and none of those things have (easily measurable) returns to justify the investment. Although, that really means that we have to get smarter about how we estimate cost avoidance and the value of missed opportunities.
Employees, particularly in Tech:
- Tend to focus on job skills over job experience. Skills can be taught to any college hire, and ARE taught in low-cost regions, but tend not to be taught in western schools. Think languages (C), tools, mechanics. Things if you have the proper background and education you can pick up in a month or two. For any non-trivial job however, this is nearly worthless.
- Misapprehend "experience". Experience is not, or should not entirely be how long you've done a particular task. Most tasks can be mastered in well under 5 years. Experience is how many problems you've worked on and solved in your life. It's one thing to learn a solution (i.e. school), it's another thing to learn a problem. The more you've seen and internalized, the better you will be. Instead we interview for how well so-and-so knows how to write python, or how long as he been a python-engineer. Useless. I want to hear what projects he worked on, what solutions he considered and rejected, etc. I don't care what language he did them in, or if he was a cardboard-box folder for 5 years and has the audacity to apply to a plastic tub sealer position without any industry experience!
The employee focus on skills is a direct result of HR keyword filters. A well written resume that details an applicant's exceptional capability and experience will be round filed before a human ever sees it if it doesn't have the right words/phrases.
I don't have a solution for any of this. It's a difficult problem and the tools we've created to address it have already exceeded their usefulness. We need a ground up rethink of how to train, hire and keep valuable employees. Until that happens, we'll all have to just do our best to understand the limitations of the current system and work around them.
Knowledge Brings Fear
In my line of work, interviews are a panel of 6-8 people (the higher "experience" you are, the more people) on a grueling 8 hour interview process, followed by an obnoxious round table where we "collectively" decide who to hire. But we're not doing so based on our own motivation, we're doing so on behalf of our corporation and executives who lay out criteria and want us to put our badges on the line for those criteria.
None of us, individually, is the employer except perhaps the hiring manager. He sets the ground rules and promises up the chain (often up to a senior VP) that some candidate is going to meet our criteria. SVP will frequently, independently, interview said candidate himself. So we're kind of handcuffed in how we do our job. Many, many, many times the SVP has pushed back saying "You may not hire this person, he has no experience in ", even if he's otherwise smart and quite qualified. Ultimately I consider him the employer, we're just his screeners enhanced also with our own agenda.
Once a candidate is hired however, you cannot argue we are his employers anymore. He will usually be our peer on any org-chart, no matter how junior.
That's an incredibly selfish attitude that puts the individual interest above the interest of the collective. The irony is that collective bargaining is much more effective and is much stronger in the long run. Your self interest is great until such time that you reach a point when other, more skilled people take your place (which is inevitable, because our cognitive capabilities decline with age, not to mention that older people have more responsibilities and find it hard to work 80 hour weeks).
Even the most meritocratic of individuals can run into unforeseen and unfortunate circumstances (e.g., an accident that has you laid up, or family issues). I worked in a strictly up or out management consulting firm, and about a year ago, my pregnant wife had some issues. My son was born, prematurely, and I was in a rough place with my personal needs and professional responsibilities. My wife was hospitalized and my son was in the NICU, unable to breathe, and I was the only one who could take care of things. My employer was understanding -- for about 6 weeks -- after which things got rather unpleasant. So, I quit and joined another firm that is not only more prestigious but was also more understanding and accommodating of my needs. But I was fortunate -- I could very well have been unable to find a job, and been unemployed for a year because I wanted to take care of my family.
Union agreements ensure that in such cases, collective bargaining agreements protect everyone.
Not really. Most of what goes on in IT today is quite commoditized, and there are very few areas that are truly specialized. And it is only going to get worse as IT matures. You may think your task is highly specialized, but the truth is, there's probably someone in another part of the world willing to do it for a tenth of what you get paid. That is not specialization.
If you want real specialization, you perhaps see it in chip design, algorithmic optimization, biotech etc. You know, all those guys with PhDs who specialize in a subject?
And how do you propose we do that? The share market is the ultimate arbiter, and the people who are rewarding the companies and the executives are the shareholders who are in for short term profit (it's the extension of the same short term myopic outlook of looking out for oneself rather than the collective).
I find that most Americans have a poor understanding of unions almost entirely rooted in propaganda, and it gets repeated again and again as gospel. The truth is, unions are immensely helpful to the labor force, especially in a service economy such as ours. Everyone thinks their skill is specialized, until it gets outsourced and commoditized.
You are not special. And despite what you may think, unions can help you negotiate agreements that would be impossible for you to go at alone.
Yep, and to that I say:
People Soft, ERP, Email, etc,etc,etc. How much is lost when they go down? Name one department that does not require an application or system to be up all the time! If the sales system is down, the sales department does not make sales!
If you think a medium sized company or larger can continue to operate in this day and age without IT. Simple let your IT group go and see how long it takes.
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.
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+
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.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Unfortunately, there is also a disincentive to take a chance on a new employee because it is so onerous to get rid of them. France's under-24 unemployment is astronomical (Over 24%, compared to 14% in the US).
In other developed countries (France, Germany, Japan, etc) there are a lot more hoops to jump through to lay someone off,
FTFY.
Which is why the young are leaving France in droves. This practice has made companies sclerotic and they don't hire because they can't fire.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
One correction, I meant to say that people with a partial college education do better than people that just graduated High School.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
It's better this way. The free market determines who stays and who goes, who gets hired and who gets fired. When I've worked in union environments the relationship between workers and management has been bad. When employers are obligated to do things they wouldn't choose to do or keep people they wouldn't choose to keep it makes for a very screwed up adversarial relationship. Someday tech workers may not be in demand and there may be a reason to unionize, but for now I'd much rather work and know the companies that hire me, value me and continue to employ me because I deliver some value they want.
These rules seem appealing. But, sadly, the longer they are in place, the less competitive countries become. Finally, when they can no longer afford the social safety net, things crash pretty hard. I support some level of additional worker protection but certainly not the level that you see in much of western Europe. I've worked in places where you can't fire people. Everybody knows that some people contribute negative value but you just have to tolerate it. It might seem on the surface that what other people do doesn't matter. But it's demoralizing. Why work harder and be better when there is no additional reward.
"The core premise of a union is that employes are all the same" Then (notwithstanding the suits' efforts to bust them) have the entertainment industry's guilds survived alongside the star system?
'If HR did chemistry hiring like HR does IT hiring we'd hear stories about people being underqualified because they used 50 ml beakers at school instead of 75 ml beakers at $job. Or "You used 2-propanol? Sorry we only hire people who use isopropyl in that synthesis."' -- vlm (69642)
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
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.
attitude that puts the individual interest above the interest of the collective.
Welcome to the United States of America. If you value collectivism over the rights of the individual, you're probably much better off in one of the world's other many countries. Learn new languages, get exposed to multiculturalism, shop in countries where Wal-Mart has been banned. With borders opening more and more every day, what's your excuse?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
-- George Bernard Shaw
That is one reason companies as this one do not get really smart and capable people or they have to pay an excessively high price for them. Somehow these execs think that smart people are all stupid and uninformed...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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?
That's a solution only if you accept the drawbacks of being a contractor. Suddenly you have to do acquisition, you're a business so your taxes get 10x more complicated (e.g. VAT), etc.
We're seeing some industries moving towards an all-contractor model over here (.nl). Postal delivery and the building trade for instance. Some contractors do well for themselves, but there's a large number of them subsisting below the poverty line. As a contractor they're no longer protected by employment laws so they get screwed over no end. Especially in the building slump of the past few years people were agreeing to work for a pittance, not realizing the consequences in time. And if they don't get a contract, they're business owners so not eligible for unemployment benefits either. Meanwhile the contract prices are under pressure as workers from low-wage countries migrate here and accept conditions that result in a wage that is livable in their home country, but not here.
This is a gigantic poverty trap, and an end run around employment law and the unions by building companies. IMO a service/contract culture is not something we should wish for.
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.
That is a good point. We should also push for changes in laws that offer incentives for being a contractor (and/or small business or part of a small business). One of the changes could be eligibility for assistance if you are at the poverty line -- the argument for it being that the state should protect the weak, not the middle class. In my view, if people can live modestly as contractors or workers at small businesses and know they can count on not starving when there's no work, that's still better than the the combination of large corporations and mass consumption that the current system favors, because it would be (I believe) more robust and sane. It might also solve the problem of migrant workers, if people in their own countries are willing to do lower-end jobs.
It's a change that would take time, but I think it should be embraced first by those who can take it more easily, like software engineers, to go back to the original post. (By "should" I mean it would be good for them, if they agree.) Btw I'm not blaming "the Man" for the current state, I think the system evolved that way b/c most of us believed large and more organized is better. I also think enough evidence is coming to show that's not the case.
Except that this discussion is about companies treating workers as disposable, therefore in effect replaceable parts. If the union does that also (and not all unions do), what's the problem with the union?
You suggest preventing large corps from getting away with stuff. No-poaching "gentleman's agreements" are already illegal, and exist, and typically benefit the cheaters more than the settlements benefit the victims. There has to be some organization with some teeth that will be motivated to keep the employers honest. Typically, that's a union.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
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.
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.
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.