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The Coming Tech Gig Economy (infoworld.com)
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?'
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.
basic health insurance for all is needed maybe even basic income.
IRS and others need to crack down on 1099 abuse.
1099's are ok when used right but lot's of places want the control of a w2 worker but don't want the ACA, taxes, labor rights, worker comp, overtime, etc that comes with them.
"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"
really!! organizations follow constantly evolving technical landscape rather than their business? if so... probably jump ship post haste.
Freedom works better than socialist feudal states.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
the days of decades-long careers in corporate environments dwindling for many IT pros
Those days never existed. Hiring and layoffs have always been based on skills needed this year.
Software is eating the world, as the saying goes. Organizations that refuse to invest in building and maintaining software that defines their businesses will simply fail. You can't wish away the incidental complexity of creating software, and it takes YEARS of experience to learn how to minimize the accidental complexity. Until the singularity comes and Skynet puts us all out of our misery; software is here to stay, and only getting bigger.
So: I say, keep your technical skills sharp and go into consulting. Charge lawyers hourly rates (or better) to lean up after these disasters. Between the constant revolving door of developers who only last 5-7 years moving out of the field, and the idiot MBA's who think that this (or offshore outsourcing for mission critical apps, or rapid application development, or whatever other BS comes along) will save them from being responsible: we old programmers are in good demand, doing good business for ourselves, and getting paid relatively well.
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
There will always be contract workers and automation. It is generally a business's responsibility to profit as much as possible. Time and human resources are often the most expensive assets on the books. As an IT worker you can't, or probably shouldn't, help to change these behaviors. Instead focus on what you love. Get as good as you can at what you find the most natural. If you work 45 to 50 years, you will find that unless you enjoy what you do your mental state will suffer. That may bleed into your personal life. There can be work for everyone in IT everywhere in the world. Sometimes you might need to be a little inventive and may need to sell yourself. Finally, you might not have a huge income.
If you price yourself right, are good at something that you have a positive attitude about, and are able to sell yourself as something that can add value then there should always be work for you in IT.
There is or can be built a machine that can simulate any physical object. -Church-Turing principle
It seems to me like finding qualified, full time IT talent is next to impossible. There are too many tech jobs that need to be done and not enough people with the skills to do them. Therefore the people who have the skills that companies need turn into consultants and earn considerably more than they would if they were to work in house.
On the other side of the equation, companies do not seem to want to invest in training employees when they can simply outsource the work (and the risk). They hang on their hat on skill / knowledge transfer activities that nearly always fail, to at least come up short. I believe that the best way to truly understand a technology is research, plan and implement it. That way you develop knowledge of the technology and how to overcome the hurdles. When something breaks, you have a better than average chance of knowing where to look and focus troubleshooting efforts first.
What ends up happening is a widening skill gap between consultants and in house talent. The consultants get experience deploying the same technology multiple times, and hopefully get better at it every time around. The in house talent gets stuck supporting something that someone else built, that they do not really understand, and that they only see once in their own environment. That dynamic is often further compounded by the consultants who always get to work with the latest version, versus the in house techs who often times might not even be allowed to perform upgrades out of fear that they will break it. "Too risky, we better get consultants to do that."
As a nation we pay more for healthcare than any other country, yet we are the 'least socialized' of all the major counties. Perhaps some day you'll understand your place in the self sucking machine of right wing outrage that the GOP has tapped into.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
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?
Strangely enough; unionization could actually facilitate this in a better way. If the trade union and not labour union model was used.
In a trade union, you contact the union and request a number of qualified skilled workers for the job; they do the job on contract and leave. So if you were renovating a building you might contact the Electrician union and get 3 Master Electricians and 5 Journeymen to do a job. They'll come and do the wiring, and you pay their union rate and when the job is over they're employment ends. The union takes care of benefits. If Jack shows up and you hate him you fire him and get a different person from the union. The union polices the skill of their members, and provides benefits from their dues.
So you would call the IT union and get your certified IT workers to complete the job and you pay the union rates. Of course, to square this analogy we might have to get licensed architects for the design to start with too. Maybe we take this further and the designs have to be signed of on by a PE and filed for reference too, so no more do you have confidential system architecture; for the public good needs to be regulated for safety. And then the system inspectors have to approve in test as well.
The more I think about this the more I expect that there will be a trade union for these type jobs; it solves many issues; at least as many for the companies as for the workers.
Because socialism has worked so well in all the countries it has been tried in.
Well, if contracting, all you have to do, is put on your Big Boy pants...and learn to negotiate your bill rate to be enough to cover your salary needs, vacation/sick day needs...AND you healthcare needs.
It isn't rocket science. That is why contractor rates are so much higher than W2 rates. You take the matters into consideration.
And as I mentioned before, there are advantages, get a high deductible medical insurance...which is about $1500 annually. This allows you to set up a Health Savings Account (HSA) into which you can sock away $3500 pre-tax...and use this for your routine medical needs, meds, etc. This HSA is also not use it or lose it like a FSA, you roll over the extras year after year.
We're not talking burger flippers here...know your worth (if you are worth it)...and adjust your bill rate to cover this. It isn't rocket science...you still get benefits, it is just that as a contractor YOU pay for it (covered in bill rate) and choose and manage it, rather than some HR person.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
This isn't really all that new. Back in the 1970's, 1980's and 1990's I did "Consulting". Back then it meant something different than how I see people use the word now. What I did was come in to a company, solve a problem for them such as organizing something, writing a custom application, training them, setting up systems. I was a contract employee in effect except I wasn't an employee, there were no benefits and I didn't expect any. I worked for myself. I got the job done. I billed. I got paid. Worked fine.
It seems very risky to me to have contractors set up a very complex system (i.e. any software system) and then move on. They will not be able to write down all the information you need to maintain it properly.
Of course this happens all the time already, but that doesn't make it healthy.
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?
the "gig economy" actually isn't new. this happened with blue collar work and they got abused badly until they formed unions. why do you think this will end any differently?
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I have several IT friends who are unemployed and they're noticing that companies have notes on the job description that goes along the lines of "We will not hire those with large amounts of contractor work". I'm not anywhere near the IT business; does anyone know why companies are going this route?
Unions assume that workers are more or less interchangeable. Everybody with the same paper qualifications does gets paid the same and they do approximately the same quality of work.
I study every week and I've been doing so for 30 years. Recently I joined a company. Several of their top people had planned a project to take a few months, with a lot of painstaking work. I looked at it for a day or two and demonstrated a way to get it done in weeks, not months, and more reliably by doing mechanical transformations in the database instead . My one day analyzing the problem and applying what I've learned saved the company perhaps $60,000. Because I study and figure out how to save a lot of money and and prevent a lot of problems, I earn twice as much as many of my peers do (who don't study constantly) .
I don't see any reason I'd want to give another half of my earnings to you. (I say "another half" because after payroll taxes, income taxes, gas taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, bpp taxes, etc I already give up half my income.)
Why just sit back and let these new Robber Barons screw the hell out of you just so they can improve their profit margin? How about refuse to work for anyone who doesn't offer you a full time job with benefits?
If you're afraid that what you write on Slashdot could jeopardize your job, then I advise you to quit. Specifically, though, we're talking about unionizing. I'll talk with anyone at any company I work for about unionizing, its pluses and minuses. Being a programmer is about intellectual freedom. If you can't speak your mind, then your ability to program the way you should is probably equally constrained.
The chief benefit of a union for a programmer is this. Let's say that you were injured in a car accident and your intellectual abilities have suffered, but they may eventually recover. A union is the type of organization that might go to bat for you. For a man under 35, the biggest risk of substantial injury is in a vehicle accident.
Programmers are supposed to be smart enough to be able to deal with the business side of their careers. But clearly we are NOT. Hence, Google offers to completely take over its employees financial affairs to get them in order. This benefit seems like Big Brother but to me it's actually quite a nice thing that Google is doing. Going to engineering school virtually bankrupted me, and it costs twice as much today.
far too much ego here. Everybody thinks they're the best at everything and deserve more than their peers.
This goes along with the politics which, at least where I've worked, even in very left leaning fields many in IT lean hard to the right.
Oh, you mean like the United States of America?
If you're afraid that what you write on Slashdot could jeopardize your job, then I advise you to quit.
Generally if you're worried about getting fired from your job, that means that quitting (and thus no longer having your job) is not a very desirable option.
Whether you contract or have a W2 job, learn to live on half of your net-pay-after-taxes. Yes, this means at least a decade or two of cheap housing, a cheap car, and hardly ever eating out or going to a movie.
You'll need the savings to get you through periods of unemployment, pay for education if you need to do some major re-training because your skills are too "niche" to get you past your current job, and pay for an involuntary early retirement or chronic under-employment if you are unfortunate enough to become unemployed after hitting 50.
At least do this until you've saved up enough that it's obvious you don't have to scrimp and save any more.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I call buzzword bingo!!!
Doing this non-anonymously because karma hardly seems worth it if this is the standard of writing these days.
The best times are past. Time to get into an industry that doesn't have a preponderance of management who have failed to mature as they aged.
Was it Amityville Horror with the girl stuck in the tv and the voice saying "Get out!" Good advice in an industry that increasingly is at war with its workers.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Long term disability coverage is meant to protect you in situations like that. Every employer I've ever worked for either provided it outright, or at least offered it. You can also get such a plan yourself, do it when you're young and it won't cost much.
Unions are great if you're dead weight and want to be protected. Those with marketable skills generally don't have need of them, nor want of them. Do you want to pay dues to an org that's going to fight to keep the dead weight around? I don't.
Being ill with no way of affording the treatment is freedom? Your dictionary must be very different to mine.
Seems to work pretty well in Norway, Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands and many others.
Poltergeist I think. It's been a while.
A software developers union would presumably be in a good position to shake off the ways of the past. They could apply some basic 21st-century tech to the situation.
What if they instituted a feedback system where clients rate the developers? Then the hourly rates could vary based on the capabilities of each individual.
If you had the entire union vouching for you as their top "rockstar" developer, maybe you could get even higher pay rates than you could by just tooting your horn on your own.
Everything old is new again - we've finally ditched a whole lot of Virtual Basic shitty little applications by developers that did them and vanished, so now we need a new wave of things where bugs have to be worked around instead of fixed?
Even perfect software can become unusable due to changing circumstances around it. Unless the software is only for short term use there is a need for someone to maintain it for longer than the short term.
stop using dedicated company specific processes
It makes me cringe every time I hear of another over budget, behind schedule, massive software boondoggle that some government bureaucracy or another has blown, and is now "starting over"... Really? You can't outsource payroll? Sheesh.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
My original post was about unions for highly skilled professionals, so I didn't get off-topic going into detail in my example. Later, it occurred to me that my example could give a misleading impression about why, in that example, I presented another proposed solution. It isn't just study.
Of course everyone is different and everyone does things differently.
I also took a big risk that could have hurt me. I was fresh into a new company and hadn't established a solid relationship with my boss. He gave me very specific, step-by-step directions for how they wanted me to do the task. After a half-day of following (and misunderstanding) the directions, I stopped and looked at the problem for the rest of the day and and most of the next day. I then went in and presented to my brand new boss and his boss why I thought "their" solution was suboptimal. Had my boss and his boss not been so gracious and willing to listen, that move could have damaged my career. Fortunately, my boss (and his) feel that since -they- hired me, if their hire contributes something that means they've done well. Of course there are other variables. My willingness to piss you off in order to accomplish your goals is just one of several things.
But apparently repeating propaganda slogans about how well off you are works too, at least for a while longer. Just like in the old Soviet Union.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
I'm thinking I'll be employed until i'm 50 then fuck it all to hell
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
It actually has (sweden)
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
We're not at the point yet where every single tech employer is a sweatshop that operates a revolving door of contractors instead of full time staff. I would say we're heading that way, simply because IT services companies advertise their outsourcing/contracting services to the executives as a complete solution to their problems. No matter how much development is Agile and divorced from the actual business process, or how commoditized the systems everything runs on are, there will always be some institutional knowledge that gets lost. I've worked for companies that have gone down the outsourcing road, and some are actually coming back to in-house IT for some aspects of their operations. I think the pendulum will come back to some kind of middle ground soon. Not everything will be an in house function, but you might not have to string 5 or 6 short contracts together into a full year of employment.
Not every employer subscribes to the "contract everything" theory. Most large public ones have no choice because they're under so much pressure to reduce cost (at least on paper) by any means necessary. But, most businesses that value IT even slightly know that losing an employee can be difficult and they try to keep them. My employer, at least for now, has employed people for very long stretches and prefers people who will stick around and contribute for the long haul. The problem is that when you start dealing with rotating contractors, no matter how well things are documented, things get missed. It's the difference between writing down a sterile operations procedure for some offshore person who doesn't know anything about your company, and knowing how that process affects operations locally.
I do think that if we do allow employers to divorce themselves of their employee responsibilities, something needs to fill the void to provide stability. A professional guild is the best fit in my mind. There's just no other way - IT and programming in particular is a creative skill set. You have a wide range of personalities and negotiation abilities. I see several serial contractors responding to this thread telling people to put their big boy pants on and negotiate their bill rates...I think they fail to realize that most people don't want to do that, nor have the skill, and would rather do the work they're good at. I think that someone who's 24 now, with zero responsibility and bouncing between 3 month contracts that they feel are effortless to obtain, will feel very different when they turn 40, have kids, and need to wear the big boy pants both at home and at work. Suddenly stable employment starts looking like a good option.
Parts of it work well, the rest tends to create all kinds of problems over time. The parts that work well are the ones which ensure equality of opportunity rather than outcomes and involve low amounts of bureaucracy.
Same thing happened in the 1990's for tech workers as part of the DotCom Boom. It works for a short time, but only in a very strong economy. The economy isn't good enough to support it like it did then; it's being promulgated for othe reasons right now.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
The highest deductable ACA HSA can cost $500 a month in many markets for over 40s.
The offshoring company changes workers assigned to the project every month or two. Any worker work his salt is job hopping to increase his salary.
From the first exchanges of pooling foodstuffs via tithing to unionism to wall street, pooled cooperative effort has been the great society game change mechanism. It is time the worker begin the cooperative effort to control their own destiny in the gig economy. I have written a white paper on what a work exchange could look like that has the worker as the owner not just the product. http://www.metier.com/the-demo...
I'll add you should pay of your mortgage early, also.
You should either pay it off or pay into a reserve fund or other investment so you can pay off your mortgage on short notice if you want to.
The decision to actually pay off the mortgage or to build up a reserve fund will be based on several factors, including which gives you the best payoff (if your mortgage is net 3% after tax deductions and your investments are 4% net, then do not pay off the mortgage), your need for spare cash (having spare cash to spend on emergencies at the drop of a hat can be very valuable), and other factors.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Please have some evidence citing your claims. As is, the socialist health care systems save their citizens more money than American's private health insurance system. The bureaucracy for payment collection is eliminated under the socialized health care systems. And a nation's military funding has no bearing on their health care funding. American's still pay more of their GDP in health care costs compared to Canadians and Europeans.
With all this talk about "Cloud" this and that I guess that's the future...
Probably about as accurate as most people that talk about "the cloud"! 8-)
Stop teaching trade skills and start teaching fundamentals which haven't changed since the 1960s. Nearly every "new" technology is a rehash of something that was solved 50 years ago. The implementations may be quite different, but the concepts are nearly identical.
True, most of what is changing now is the "technish". Every new vendor wants a new set of words so they can say they are "new". But he actual operations are old, although the older implementations might not have worked well. If they can make it work well and reliably, thats good. But it doesn't mean they really need new words, that's just hype.
Of course, if you want to talk to the "natives" you have to talk in their dialect. Like saying "Harddrive" for desktop computer, when in administrative offices! 8-)