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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.
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?
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.