Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

The Coming Tech Gig Economy (infoworld.com)

Posted by Soulskill on from the employees-with-benefits dept.

snydeq writes: The rise of contract and contingent work is shaking up the traditional IT career path, with the days of decades-long careers in corporate environments dwindling for many IT pros. "And it's not only nonstop cost cutting that has businesses favoring IT contractors they can bring on — or scale back — as necessary without paying benefits. Emerging platforms, in particular around the cloud, have many organizations shifting their staffing models toward project-based, contingent work in hopes of landing the key skills necessary for their businesses to stay competitive in a constantly evolving technical landscape. ... How should you adjust to this shifting employment landscape? Should you broaden your skills or specialize? Should you develop a plan to strike out on your own or double-down on the skills that will remain invaluable for retaining long-term, full-time employment?'

4 of 177 comments (clear)

  1. Dump them as fast as you can by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Organizations willing to take on itinerant contractors instead of hiring employees will soon learn a painful, and very expensive lesson in the dollar value of organizational memory.

    1. Re:Dump them as fast as you can by Tablizer · · Score: 5, Insightful

      value of organizational memory.

      I agree. Most rotating-contractor-made systems I worked on were a fricken mess.

      It seems contracted work is best for easy-to-define "grunt work" (for lack of a better way to describe it). For example, data entry, simple back-end CRUD ui's that don't have to be pretty, researching an easy-to-reproduce bug, formatting documentation prettier, etc.

      Domain knowledge is under-valued in IT. My work is often far better after I learn the domain, often because I ask better questions or present better alternatives that simplify things rather than interpret initial instructions literally.

      It's true that some permanent IT staff are also screw-ups. But, the solution is either better management of them, or get more disciplined staff, NOT outsourcing.

      --
      Table-ized A.I.
    2. Re:Dump them as fast as you can by davester666 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      All that stuff is valuable next quarter. We need to beat the numbers THIS QUARTER you idiot!

      Then I get my bonus, and I leave for another company.

      --
      Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
  2. The longer view by MountainLogic · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Please excuse someone from outside of IT as I work on embedded systems (who could possibly need more than 640 bytes of RAM), but at some point IT really needs to mature and stop making every application one off in-house prototypes. Some applications have stabilized and are expected to be delivered as COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) products, for example word processors and spreadsheets. Far too many business products have to be (or needlessly are) customized to death. ERP, HR, accounting, etc. Seriously, does a HR program have to be more flexible than a spreadsheet? Should an ERP program require more expertise to setup than a workprocessor? Someday someone in charge is going to catch on that all of this flexibility and customization if far more expensive than any promised gain and just work with a cloud product out of the box. Sure there will always be a super user in every dept/company who is the goto person, but that person really should not be in the the IT department. Everyplace I've worked the most knowledgeable Excel folks are the MBAs, not dev engineers or IT. When this happens you can expect to see a quick death to many IT departments. At one time every factory had an electrical engineer to run an engine to make electricity. With very few exceptions, those practicing EE jobs are now at utilities, architects or electronics companies. It is not that folks working in IT departments may not be doing good work, the problem is that the same problem is being solved in a thousand different companies. At one time IT excellence was a competitive advantage, for example Fed Ex, but now it is a common commodity base utility line like water or power. Why can't it be a something bought as a commodity?