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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.
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.
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.
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 call buzzword bingo!!!
Doing this non-anonymously because karma hardly seems worth it if this is the standard of writing these days.
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.
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.