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CIOs Say New Talent and Old Tech Don't Mix
StewBeans writes: Usually when an article references "what keeps IT leaders up at night," it's a chance to talk about "shadow IT," losing control of tech spending, hackers, or some other overly-hyped concept. Adam Dennison, publisher at IDG Enterprise, opposes this interview tactic and says that "reports of pain are greatly exaggerated." IT leaders don't mind shadow IT or sharing control of the IT budget (in fact, they want others in the business to have some skin in the game), and they understand that they are probably being hacked. What they DO care about is talent. Dennison points out gaps in data, security, and app development, based on IDG's recent survey, and he says CIOs tell him that finding the right IT talent that is also able to articulate what the business needs to succeed with technology is very difficult. He says, "They worry that they can't move fast enough to adopt the technology they need because the new IT talent doesn't want to work on the old stuff, and the old talent doesn't understand the new stuff."
...old talent doesn't understand the new stuff."
I have never understood that. Some people seem to reach a point in their professional lives where they stop bothering to learn new stuff and just expect to allowed to vegetate away in their jobs for the last 15-20 years until retirement. I've been coding since around the time than many of the younger developers I work with were still a twinkle in their father's eyes and I still manage to keep up with new developments.
Unwilling to invest in existing staff, they worry about whether or not they can chase the latest fad.
No wonder their pathetic attempts at security are a failure. And I'm looking at Target as a prime example of this.
So the people in Marketing know more about IT than those CIOs do?
Or is it that those CIOs do not understand computer security any better than the Marketing people do?
So when was the last time a CIO was fired because credit card info was leaked?
Have you tried looking in the Marketing department?
What "fast-moving"?
It's funny because, you see, it rhymes.
That is the CIO's job.
...old talent doesn't understand the new stuff."
I have never understood that. Some people seem to reach a point in their professional lives where they stop bothering to learn new stuff and just expect to allowed to vegetate away in their jobs for the last 15-20 years until retirement. I've been coding since around the time than many of the younger developers I work with were still a twinkle in their father's eyes and I still manage to keep up with new developments.
People get tired and life's responsibilities get in the way, especially when they have kids. I love learning so I also manage to find the time but I do understand why people get this way.
They probably just get sick of seeing the same mistakes implemented over and over again. Or tired of the ever growing bloat required to implement the same old thing you already had 10 years ago under a different name.
Okay, I'll admit right off that I'm an old dude. I'm the oldest one in my group, but the rest of the group is roughly in the 35-45 range so they're not particularly young (from the perspective of this story).
Anecdotes are dangerous, but... with my coworkers, I rarely see any evidence that they don't "understand the new stuff". What is true, though, is they sometimes don't understand the appeal of the new stuff, nor why anyone would consider using it. After all, when it comes down to it most new approaches don't really accomplish anything that the "old way" cannot... at least from the perspective of an IT professional. But I think what they sometimes miss is that new ways of doing things sometimes actually might be more user-friendly for a particular set of end users - and there is value in that.
Why bother with ruby when perl has served us so well for so long? Or, further afield, why consider Wordpress when we already have wikis - or why not just keep maintaining a website with a text editor as your only tool? Sometimes I think it helps an IT person if they can learn to set aside their technical hat for a while, and try to see it from the other person's eyes.
#DeleteChrome
There are both pros' and con's for both sides.
You missed the part where the older guys are tired of the latest buzzword of the week, some "SilverBullet" Library, and ad-hoc design.
There is no need to fix what isn't broken.
Some of the new guys love change just for the sake of change.
The weakness of the older guys is inflexibility, where it is a strength of the younger guys.
The strength of the older guys is stability; the younger guys lack experience and wisdom -- there weakness is instability.
This is what tires me the most. I've been through revisions of systems, and usually despite the marketing hype that sells the new systems they end up being used much like the old systems that replaced them. I won't deny that sometimes IT people drag their feet about upgrading when it really truly is time to upgrade, but there are far more times when someone that doesn't directly understand the technology makes a decision to make the change when it is change simply for its own sake. I guess I'm a borderline-cynic, but I want to see a demonstration of improvement before it's widely implemented.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Old Talent: Any legal resident or citizen who makes more then $15/hour, has relevant work experience, a proven track record and knows what they are doing; i.e. someone management wants to lay off as soon as possible.
The old talent doesn't want to do the new stuff: Management would kill their families and pets with a straight razor while they sleep, butcher their bodies, cook the meat into tacos, then serve the tacos to the Sunday school kindergarten class before they would be willing to train anyone for anything ever.
Why is Snark Required?
I got into technology to learn new stuff as much as possible, why is someone telling me I don't like to learn new stuff when I am learning new stuff.
Does anyone else get the feeling that this whole thing is a way to create a young vs old mindset in technologists so that they can work the young guys like slaves and coerce the older guys into taking smaller salaries? This 'vs' mindset produces the double whammy of reducing the career earnings of every technology person no matter what they do, no matter what their age is.
Anyone, young or old, in IT who has a 'commercial' mind set when evaluating whether a technology is worth learning and how long it will take, will have a rough idea if they can yield a return on the effort spent learning it, or if they just like that technology and want to for fun. Brainfuck is an interesting piece of technology however I doubt there is much return in learning it. Young and old have one thing in common, we all want to make money doing something we like and are good at.
The great thing about IT is if I teach a younger guy how to negotiate a higher salary, it pushes my salary up too. I actually want you to be a better negotiator and I want to teach and learn from you because I know increasing the popularity of a certain tech pushes all our salaries up as more companies adopt it. Knowledge isn't scarce however the talent to utilize it is. Talent *is* the scarcity in the technology economy that makes your age irrelevant.
Knowing how callous the management in IT organizations can be, I've got a feeling there was a conversation somewhere that went along the lines of 'how do we drive down the costs of acquiring the talent we need',,,, 'I know let's pit old and young against each other'.
What better way to yield a return on a technology person's career after working them like a slave for the duration of it. The only winners in this younger vs older thing are the companies that either have to pay the same for more hours out of a young person or pay less for the experience of the older people. I've got a sense that this will backfire big time as young people deciding on an IT career go 'Fuck that, its not worth the effort' and older people decide it's not worth dealing with assholes anymore resulting in lethargy and a stagnation of ideas.
Every time I see these stories I get an increased sense that this entire younger vs older thing is about making technology peoples *talent*, no matter what their age, irrelevant so that the ensuing divide drives down salary expenses for all technology people.
We need to stay focused on driving IT in the direction where all our salaries go up.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I'm one ofthe old dogs. I have to admit that App development and such is not my kind of things. But I do have experience. LOADS of it. When I see the fundamental mistakes by young "talented" programmers, it makes me cringe.
Just a few days ago, there was a kickoff meeting for a new project. This project needs multi-user support on the long run - everyone in the team admits that. And access control, with all its implications like "how to I check a password", "how do I store a password", "which kind of permission do I need to call this function". Which they never ever did before. None of them had ever heard of books like "Applied Cryprography". There is a copy here, on my shelf. Actually, it is my second book, the first was worn down due to heavy use. All they cared for was "Licence Management", but I'm not sure if they understand how this works properly. I offered them to ride piggyback on the existing licence management scheme I've implemented in my part of the system, but this was probably too unsexy, because it cannot add licences on the fly over the web, at least not "just so".
My experience tells me (and anyone who has been around for long enough) that any software that will need this kind of multiuser support needs to have this built-in from the very beginning. The very concepts of the software must be aware of the possibility that e.g. a call might fail for lack of permissions. Communication protocols must be designed in a way that they guarantee to a sufficient degree that one side has proper identification presented to the other side to be permitted to do this, and don't that. This is nothing that can be added lateron without SERIOUS headaches, problems, and, worst of all, risks. Windows9x was the living prrof of such a mistake.
Reply from the "young talent": Implementing multi-user is too time consuming at the moment, we will add it later. *FACEDESK*
Translation: "old talent costs more and this is a believable reason to fire them in favor of people we can pay less". Being a programmer *is* always learning new stuff. Sure there are exceptions (the java/c#/c++/etc guy who refuses to learn another language), but they are exceptions. So a generalized quote like this sets off my bullshit detector.
My father started with COBOL on the mainframe. He taught himself Delphi (on Windows, not the newer cross-platform stuff) and then Java. It took him a while to convince anyone he actually knows it, but he's been doing it for several years now, and he enjoys it.
You got by 30+ years doing the job you liked, but they also failed to think ahead and hoped to ride out the lifespan of the technology with the lifespan of their careers.
The "old" system offered people retirement and pension after 20 years, meaning many people could "retire" around age 40 with a modest pension. Not quite enough to live on, but definitely enough to support a dramatic change of career. And you could retire from your second career around age 60.
Turns out, a lot of people get bored, frustrated, or otherwise useless at their job in their 40s. Call it the mid-life crisis, if you like. Failure to adapt, if you like. It can be pretty useful to both the employee and the employer to have people change careers at that point, but it's pretty intimidating to do that if all you've got is a 401k that you're not allowed to touch until you're 59
What is true, though, is they sometimes don't understand the appeal of the new stuff, nor why anyone would consider using it.
This. Growth in the technology industry is heavily dependent on selling the same thing to the same people frequently. The "old dudes" start to see new versions quite often for what they are -- meaningless churn, designed to get support contracts renewed, all the required new licensing models enforced, and the vendors' quarterly results up.
Thus, the new versions are laden with all the new buzzwords, lots of bugs, some breakage from previous versions and all you end up with is the pain of implementing teh shiny to basically do what you did before.
That's utterly full of generalizations and bullshit, which is typical. This whole debate is framed as 'young people don't want to' and 'old people can't', as if the young people could do anything if they just wanted to. Newsflash: They can't. I have an older person right now cleaning up an unbelievable mess that two younger people made because they didn't know what they were doing, and the people managing them didn't catch it because they assumed young people are always talented and get everything.
Know what else young people are terrible at? Recognizing when anything that already exists has value. That's why they waste energy, money, resources, etc. constantly reinventing the wheel and shouting to the world how great they are at it, while expecting to be a founder of a wildly successful startup because they have a decades old process a crappy UI that runs on a smartphone. The narcissism is unbelievable. That mega mainframe you speak derisively of had transactional and security capabilities that these cloud idiots are still trying to re-invent, and using them didn't require stitching together code in 4 languages with 100 libraries that all suck and which some alleged genius will reinvent next week anyway. Hell, even stuff 'in the cloud' is, in the vast majority of actual use cases, just a re-invention of timesharing systems, and there's a reason we got away from those too. (No, I am not nor have I been a mainframe developer. Worked with enough of them though...I use the tech I was just insulting so it comes honestly)
Do people get to where they haven't kept up with some things? Yep. Mostly that happens because you have a portfolio of things to keep running because that's your job. The notion of doing things you're good at may seem alien to people who allow themselves to be abused by 80 hour work weeks, but (having missed it myself) I think things worked better for actual human beings when it was that way.
When you're 20 and have nothing it's easier to experiment. That's normal. The other thing people with experience are saddled with is that business people suck at planning, and pretty much everything else. They never say 'we want to go in this direction so you guys should learn this'. Instead, they let existing systems be and then scramble to replace them with no warning. In that case, it doesn't even matter if you keep up with (alleged) advances in tech, you'd have to have randomly guessed which piece of tech the business people are going to throw at you this time because it's not like they ever ask anybody what will fit in with what they already use.
Of course, business people also don't like older tech people because they have a nasty habit of pointing out stupid ideas. There's a fine line between digging in and making something work and knowing when you shouldn't do that.
Have I met young talent with a clue? Of course I have. Older people who you just can't get to try anything? Yep. This stereotyping has to stop. We in tech need to stop fighting with each other over it.
The real problem is business owners and managers who have no idea how to evaluate talent and fall back on generalizations to cover up their own inadequacy.
Any time someone says' "old talent doesn't understand the new stuff", they're gearing up to lay a bunch of the old talent off.
or you find out a few years after retirement the CEOs loot your retirement money to give themselves bonuses.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
They probably just get sick of seeing the same mistakes implemented over and over again.
Or they're just sick of being asked to jump from one fad to another. A lot of times, the "new stuff" is the same old stuff with a new coat of paint and a bunch of flashy buzzwords. There was a recent story on Slashdot about the amazing new concept of "DevOps", and the only explanation I could get for what it was is, "Have developers work with operations." Wow. Big move there. You mean you don't want different departments within your business at each other's throats? You want them to work together seamlessly?
And I'm sick of programmers going on endlessly about how their brilliant new organizational and project management style will fix everything. "Agile" this and "waterfall" that. Oh, instead of having your project be one single big project, you're going to break your project into smaller projects? You've designed a new theme for your gantt chart? Slap a buzzword on it, and you have the hot new development method that's going to solve world hunger!
"Oh, you're on Friendster? That's lame, I'm on MySpace. Oh, you're on MySpace? That's lame, I'm on Facebook. Oh, you're on Facebook? That's lame, I only use Snapchat now." What are you doing with your lives. Whatever network you're on, you're just sending out pictures that nobody wants to look at.
This is why old people don't care. Young people see the hot new thing and think, "This is going to be the thing that changes the world and makes everything great!" Old people have been through that several times, and think, "This is another one of those things that's supposed to change the world and make everything great. Same as the last 50 things that were supposed to do that. And this one looks even stupider."
The real issue here is that business has shifted its focus to low cost above anything else. Where it was once possible to have a lifelong career based on depth of knowledge on a particular system or vertical business - where technology was used to implement that knowledge, but the value was the knowledge itself, it is now virtually impossible to have such a career. Since there is going to be constant turnover, developers value experience in 'the latest thing' over experience at a particular company. And that's just self-preservation.
Of course, none of this works particularly well. Yes, companies get disposable, replaceable talent - but that talent is never particularly good at what they're asked to do - which is contribute significantly to a particular business. The end results are mediocre, and often barely supportable. You end up with layers of project management attempting to dot I's and cross T's in design specifications and testing plans - just so that the actual developers can be 'agile' in performing what is essentially gruntwork. In the 'old' model, the developers provided input into the designs - or at least were able to understand where a bad design ran into a wall. And those developers provided a pool of knowledgeable recruits for tech management. Nowadays, many software products are essentially as disposable as those interchangeable developers. They need to be rewritten every 5-10 years from scratch, because nobody can support them - and, I suppose, because it's 'necessary' to do that in order to chase the latest development fads.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
Wish you'd written this as a non AC. That covers a whole lot of valid territory.
A couple of points I'd like to add - young people refuse to work with "legacy" apps, rather wanting to rewrite that finely honed cluster as a bunch of web services using some scripting language. (I've actually seen this done, horribly, more than once).
I've see old people that just cannot seem to get their heads around anything that deviates from the narrow slice they've specialized in. That's sad, because they're definitely the first to go when that slice is retired.
But my biggest peeve is with the young, and those who taught them, because they do not learn the basics of programming anymore. Data Structures? Memory management? Algorithm optimizations for CPUs? Nope, none of those, because that's boring and the [language of the day] will take care of it or just buy more memory/servers. That is false for anything interesting you might want to do if you want it to be successful. That lack of knowledge will doom them to poor careers overall.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
1) Implemented a new automated web testing framework. Next year, I'll do the same thing for Android and Apple phones.
2) Migrated some of my control system apps to C#. Three months ago, I didn't know C#.
3) Migrated more system control software than I care to think about from VBScript (awful) to Powershell (slightly less awful).
Four years ago, I didn't know what virtualization was. Today, I'm in charge of the VMWare servers and couldn't do without it.
I have no idea why I can still do this. Like the other commenters here, however, I do regularly cringe at the latest business/software/process fad. They're inevitably retreads of something older and few add any actual improvement. Powershell, for example, although it packs more functionality into fewer characters than VBScript, made the skill set of thousands of system administrators obsolete. No thought was given to the human side of the system. A more useful solution would have been a rewrite of VBScript and the addition of useful function libraries and easier access to the net framework. It was yet another typically wrong Microsoft decision, but it says something about an industry that doesn't have enough of a balanced view to consider the cold, hard neurological facts of their user base.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I have an older person right now cleaning up an unbelievable mess that two younger people made because they didn't know what they were doing, and the people managing them didn't catch it because they assumed young people are always talented and get everything.
Somewhat related CSB. 15 years ago I was working at a startup writing Linux device drivers for our product. Things were going well, I was on schedule, no issues whatsoever. One day my boss' boss shows up with a consultant who was supposed to help me with my work, he was very experienced, I could learn from him, yadda yadda yadda. Ok. At the time I was writing a PCI driver and was hip deep in the read part, so I gave him the write part. A week or so later I got his first cut, he was using an ioctl() to write data to the board. Hmmm, thinks I. This is different. But he's an expert, maybe he knows something I don't. Another week later I get more code from him that just doesn't make sense. I take him to lunch to talk to him a bit. Turns out:
1) He's never used Linux before
2) He's never written a device driver before
3) He's never talked to hardware before
4) He's only been programming for a year
5) In his interview he never claimed to know Linux, hardware, nor device drivers.
6) I never saw him because not only was he on a different floor, but he spent his lunch breaks in his car studying up on Linux
I went to my boss with a WTF, the guy was gone the next day. I felt bad about that, the guy was actually nice and once the blinders were removed from my eyes I realized he was very trainable. I never did hear why he was brought in, who interviewed him, nor how he became a Linux device driver expert.
That company was full of management problems, one of the biggies was at the CXX level they were all snakes in the grass who stabbed people in the back on a regular basis.
One of the reasons we slow down as we age is that most advances are cyclical. X-er here. Grew up with microcomputers. I'm less interested in the web because it really is just a way of reinventing the 3270 forms I beat on when I was getting out of college. Ditto the cloud: it's a glorified mainframe.
Both pre-PC (mainframe/support contract) and post-PC (SaaS/subscription) architectures appear to me as means of encouraging vendor lock-in and recurring monthly revenue streams, while ignoring the fact that we all have what used to be datacenter-sized supercomputers in our pockets.
I'm not going to wait around 20 years for ad-hoc mesh networks of Arduino and Pi-priced hardware to become a the next iteration of the PC/micro revolution. Instead I'll just slog away at the webshit that makes me money at my day job, and tinker with my own little general-purpose computing devices at home.