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A New Reality For IT: the 18-Month Org Chart
StewBeans writes: Finding and keeping IT talent is getting increasingly competitive and expensive. A recruiter for Bay Area and Seattle tech companies said in a recent New York Times article about the cloud computing skill gap. "Someone working deep inside Amazon is getting five to 20 recruiting offers a day. Compensation has doubled in five years." Beyond steep salary and benefits packages, the resources to train new IT talent is wasted if they jump ship for the next best offer. That's why some IT executives are focusing talent management inward and investing in their current employees who are loyal and eager to learn, adapt, and grow with their company. Curt Carver, CIO for the University of Alabama at Birmingham, said that this approach led him to do away with the 10-year IT org chart and remain more agile as technology needs change. He argues that 18-month org charts and constant training are the new reality for IT, providing this example: "If you go back a couple of years ago, we were heavily involved in the storage business. Now I can buy unlimited storage from the cloud. I don't need a lot of people doing storage. In fact, I may only need one. Everybody else, I'm willing to retrain you, but you're going to be doing mobile, or you're going to be doing business intelligence, or you're going to be helping our organizations do gap analysis."
The gap between the expectation that technology would lead to a leisure society, and the realization that it just leads to a feudal, totalitarian regime where the billionaire beggars just take, take, take.
"The cloud computing skill gap" "Finding and keeping IT talent is getting increasingly competitive and expensive"
Juxtaposed with "mass IT layoffs across the industry"
I think it's pretty clear what we're seeing here. People are leaving the industry or the West Coast, whichever you prefer.
Even the slowest orgs have been doing this on a 12-18 month cycle. Plugs are lost to attrition, and those willing to retrain/refocus keep their jobs. Those who stop training become plugs.
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
What about the gig economy? Fill out a 1099, slave away, and ciao after a few months?
That's why some IT executives are focusing talent management inward and investing in their current employees who are loyal and eager to learn, adapt, and grow with their company.
Wow, were back to this again?
Who would have thought!?
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Everybody else, I'm willing to retrain you, but you're going to be doing mobile, or you're going to be doing business intelligence, or you're going to be helping our organizations do gap analysis
Let me translate that to English:
Everyone else, you're redundant. If you don't have pointless buzzwords on your resume you won't get one of the 3 do-nothing, fluff positions we're keeping open.
Is this companies realizing investing in their employees is the best long term plan for a good and cost effective workforce?
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Depending on which bit of it you're in depends on how in demand you currently are. All the Kool Kids doing the latest new shiny will probably have job offers being thrown at them. But in 5-10 years time their skills will be borderline irrelevant (Ruby On Rails anyone?) so its retrain time again. And again. And again.
Meanwhile those of us plodding along doing old style boring backend coding in (supposedly according to the Kool Kids) grandpa languages like C/C++/Java or even COBOL might not have recruiters kicking down the door to get us to an interview but we're unlikely to be out of work for the forseable future or need retraining other than to learn some new library now and then so long as our skills are good to start with.
So it is more cost effective to retain the IT staff, retrain them, and give them career paths, than it is to simply lay them off every 18 months and bring in people who already know the new systems?
Who would have thought?
I suppose your next statement will be something about how it is more cost effective for the company to foster loyalty and retain local workers than it is to offshore the job to India.
**Checks Calendar to see if it is April 1**
How often have we heard about the mass layoff and now the industry is surprised that people jump ship? The industry has shown a lack of loyalty to the employees the treated like replaceable widgets, it's no surprise that these employees are looking out for themselves. Add to that the various companies that replace their loyal employees with contractors (hmmm Disney etc) it shouldn't have surprised anyone that this would happen.
Or maybe if companies showed the same loyalty to their employees that they demand from them, this wouldn't be a problem.
This, on the surface, sounds great.
What doesn't sound so great is it will probably end up being a gig-economy style hustle, always trying to get that edge to keep your job. "Oh, Bob, you got 3 certs last month, that's great!, but Susan got 4 and she paid for them on her own dime, sorry, bud, there's the door, get the fuck out."
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
What is this "training" of which you speak? I have never seen any.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
This problem and the appropriate solution is not new. You want people to stay? Give them a reason to stay. Provide a pension plan that vests (and grows) after 5 years. Maybe pay retirement medical benefits for those that stay 10+ years.
(granted, this doesn't work if you plan to sell your company within the next 10 years.)
The article is looking from an internal perspective instead of the entire business perspective. Cutting ten jobs at $100,000 each by outsourcing to another company for $800,000 helps the entire business. Cutting the same amount of jobs and hiring a worker at $200,000 to manage the outsourcing to a cloud provider does not create new efficiencies in the organization. It is tough to really draw relevant data from the article without having a complete picture of the benefits to the organization, which is the context most of these articles need to be written. How many companies really judge the capability of their employees based on the salaries they could demand on the open market?
How hard are they trying to reach out to the places where people actually want to live?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
"If you go back a couple of years ago, we were heavily involved in the storage business. Now I can buy unlimited storage from the cloud. I don't need a lot of people doing storage. In fact, I may only need one."
After seeing "I can buy unlimited storage from the cloud" somehow I'm having a hard time taking the rest of the article seriously.
Such a wasteful human resources policy is only possible in the US where there is a massive surplus of cheap labor (read H1-B's). Remove that and the market will be more rational, and serve the needs of a society that aspires to be prosperous.
"Training" is a joke - its either half-working CBT courses, or non-existent. There's no investment in people as they can hire more cheaply elsewhere.
If you are lucky enough to have an IT job, hold onto it for dear life.
Actually, you do need to elaborate. We're not mind readers...
Or maybe if companies showed the same loyalty to their employees that they demand from them, this wouldn't be a problem.
That's very idealistic and I respect the intent but it's just not reality and probably not sensible for either party.
First off, it's a business transaction. The company needs work done and the worker needs money to do it. If the company no longer needs that work done or if the worker isn't doing it competently or efficiently it make no sense for the company to continue to employ that person. Paying someone to do no work or for bad quality work is idiotic. Conversely if the worker can do work elsewhere and get a better compensation package or a better situation then why on earth should he/she be expected to be "loyal" to company? Neither situation is a win/win. Loyalty between employees and companies only makes sense when both side benefit. That does happen sometimes but it shouldn't be a default expectation, especially in a competitive global economy.
Second, even if both sides want to be loyal to each other economic reality sometimes makes it impossible. I have about 20 people who work for me. I would LOVE to pay them more than I do. But the industry I am in (contract assembly) is very competitive on labor costs so if I raise salaries for everyone we would be out of work faster than I can say "Chapter 11 bankruptcy". I do what I can for them but if one of them finds a better job somewhere else I just have to wish them the best and hope I can replace them with someone else who is competent. Demanding loyalty to the company from employees in that situation would be ridiculous of me.
Not being a wizard software dev or sys admin, I have reached my peak at desktop support + light admin.
All these tech companies need a desktop support dude once they hit about 50 to 100 employees, and if you're good at getting stuff done then they'll love you because their highly paid engineers and devs will have minimal down time.
The bonus of doing this slightly less paid work is that its stable, predictable, and my job isnt going to evaporate overnight. How do I afford to exist in this pricy Seattle housing market on a mediocre (by Seattle standards) income? I don't live in or even near Seattle, I make use of the southline commuter train, live somewhere much cheaper where one income buys a half decent house and avoid the terrible traffic.
We need IT people more way than they need us. Oh, Fuck.
10 years? 18 months?
Makes the entire article sound like B.S.
No, I don't think segedunum needs to elaborate why. Let me say what s/he's thinking.
Massive IT layoffs.
Massive IT outsourcing.
Now we have companies whinging that they can't find talent even though they claim to be paying more and more.
Let me go one step further.
The problem is that NOBODY FUCKING KNOWS HOW COMPUTERS WORK. Nobody can figure out whether the person they're hiring is a rock star or a confidence man. Nobody can figure out if the person working for them is a rock star or a confidence man. They have no basis for comparison and no context for even approaching the comparison.
That is one of the major reasons I left tech. The other reason is the diversity shit. I can't magically turn myself into a black woman. In fact, according to what's-her-name on the Daily Show, blacks apparently have found themselves using the same logic as feminists. I'm evil because I'm white. There are methods to darken one's skin that were used by reporters during the civil rights era. I could turn myself black over the course of a month. But that would make me even more evil! It's the same as if I were to get a sex change. I'm evil for being a man, but if I get a sex change then I'm a rapist of the female form.
I can tell you I've been in too many situations where it's clear that a huckster is getting paid way more than me, and I'm only pulling down barely enough to afford owning a house where I live. I'm sick of seeing slick gaslighting assholes driving around high-end sports cars when the best I could afford is a subcompact.
Hiring managers need to seriously stop snorting cocaine for a moment and actually learn a thing or two about how data processing works. You know, about how I CAN'T FUCKING GET DATA OUT OF YOUR OTHER VENDOR'S WEBSITE WITHOUT A FUCKING INTERFACE. The basics. I don't ask much.
Nope, I didn't make nearly enough for it to be worth it. I'd need to be paid twice what I made for it to be worth it.
Considering that companies stopped being loyal to their employees somewhere around 1985, I'd like to know where they're finding this pool of selfless employees who are loyal and expect to be with the company long enough to grow with it.
A company can fire you an a moment's notice but when you leave they want 2 weeks from you.
You can leave any time you want. The company is REQUIRED BY LAW to pay you for any time you have worked. The 2 week notice thing is nothing more than a courtesy. They cannot withhold pay (legally) nor can they require anything further of you unless you agreed to it in an explicit contract. The company can ask for two weeks notice but you are under no obligation to give it to them.
My take on two weeks notice is that in two weeks they will notice I haven't been there in two weeks.
The most insightful thing Curt Carver says is at the very beginning of his article:
Candidly, the people that have been loyal to the organization, that are active employees, that are eager and hungry to learn – those are the ones that I’m willing to invest in to keep.
What he doesn't get is that Silicon Valley is the antithesis of that. There was a time where Silicon Valley didn't exist, and IBM and Bell Labs were king. According to this PBS Documentary, the culture at that time was that talent was nurtured, not bought. You got your desk, you were a pencil pusher, and if you had ambition, you climbed the ladder, but you remained loyal to the company that provided for you. Then William Shockley broke away from Bell Labs, ventured out to California to make them a reality, and formed Shockley Semiconductor Laboratories. In a twist of irony, the very people he recruited to break ranks from Bell Labs (The "Traitorous Eight" as they came to be called, quit to form their own company, Fairchild Semiconductor. (And exactly 18 months later, interestingly.)
Silicon Valley has always been about venturists who seek opportunity wherever they can find it. If that's Silicon Valley's own undoing, so be it. Let the snake consume its own tail.
This is the very definition of bad math/outsourcing mistakes.
Just because it costs less doesn't mean you're getting an equivalent service. If you save $200k but lose $500k in productivity then congrats you have outsourced to the detriment of the business. Likewise transition costs take out more productivity.
IT recruiters are becoming a victim of their own quarter to quarter short sightedness. Success breeds success. If you want successful people to come into the industry you are hiring for, you must make the current people in the industry successful. You must also sustain this quality for long enough for kids to go through grade school and see it as a good choice to make it their career. It's kind of funny how they talk like the game is all changing, when it is really their failure or refusal to participate in the game that has always been that is causing them issues.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
As opposed to the rest of the world, where most of will never see double-digit raises? And training - do mean something other than online stupid courses, with content we already know?
mark
Cutting ten jobs at $100,000 each by outsourcing to another company for $800,000. No try for $300-500K with H1B's
Well, as a 40-year worker in technology, I can definitely say that HR, managers, and CXX have all contributed to any problems they have. .NET programmer with 5 years experience. HR.
In 2001 I saw an ad for a
In 2005 I saw an ad for a linux programmer with VBA experience. HR
Golden Parachutes. Managers and CXX...
Outsourcing: Managers and CXX and MBAs . ( also, any in-house workers from some-unnamed-country ).
17 to 119 page employment contracts - HR extravagance and ego.
Sorry. I will not feed your machine any more. Or enable your delusions. Or your manipulations/threats.
You could have had a good worker, who would have gotten better.
Instead, you have someone 10 timezones away. Good luck with them.
No more of the $35,000 / year graduate.
No more of the $55,000 / year worker with 10 years experience.
Get off the dime and pay what it's really worth.
You pay for what you get. Good. Or Cheap. Pick one.
The relationship isn't equal financially in that they make financially a substantially larger amount of money than what they pay you - which isn't disclosed to you.
That is not necessarily true. Sometimes it is true and sometimes it very much is not. Believe it or not a lot of companies don't actually make much profit. Many actually lose money. People tend to have this peculiar notion that all companies are just raking in megabucks but for many of them that is very far from the truth. Furthermore in many cases the profit of the company is published. If I worked for Apple or Google I can look up exactly how much money they made during my tenure with the company. The financial relationship is fair in the sense that the company and the employee agreed on a value for the services provided to the company by the employee.
If you make $100k but they're making $700k off of you (even after expenses), who is getting the bad deal?
False dilemma. That situation could easily be a very good situation for both parties. If either side thinks it is unfair somehow both are free to seek a better situation any time they want. But there is a market rate for salaries and both sides can get a good or bad deal if they deviate far from it. If you are making $100K and the market rate for your work is really $50K then you are getting a spectacular deal even if the company makes a handsome multiple of profit on top of that.
If I'm understanding TFA correctly, we've come full cycle. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. In the nineties, the thing was to hire bright individuals and grow them. Later, the paradigm changed to "IT is plug and play" so hire the talent you need at the time and lay off the people with training you didn't need anymore. Now we're back to the more healthy paradigm of growing your current employees to meet new challenges. This is a good thing. I wonder how long it'll last.
I also wonder what this will do of the paradigm of laying off locals and substituting green cards.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The problem is that NOBODY FUCKING KNOWS HOW COMPUTERS WORK.
I was working the help desk at Google in 2008 when I got call from a university graduate who didn't know how to turn on a workstation. I literally had to walk him through pushing the power button on his workstation, as no one stood around to turn on his computer like they did at the university computer labs. You're be surprised by how many computer engineers don't know much about hardware.
That's the thing. You're completely ignoring the emotional element, dismissing it as something valueless. But it's not just about a pay packet.
Companies by definition cannot have emotions. So any emotional attachment by an employee towards a company is inherently irrational. Either it is a good situation and you can be happy about that or it isn't good for your particular needs/wants and you should consider other options. Either the company gives you a reason to feel good about working there or they don't but there has to be a cause.
I could be making a shit ton more money elsewhere, with my skill set. But I'm not leaving, cause the company I currently work for is one of the best places I've ever worked.
There is more to a compensation package than just the salary. Working conditions, colleagues, enjoyment of work, benefits, proximity, hours, etc all play a role. It's not just about money. You obviously value the environment highly. That's fine. So do I. Some others simply want the biggest paycheck possible and don't care about the rest. That's fine too. But at the end of the day you add all that stuff up and you decide if it provides enough value to you to start/continue to work there. If you can find greener pastures somewhere else (for whatever you value most) then you are a fool to stick around out of irrational emotional loyalty.
Also, a huge thing they have not factored in is the more companies that outsource, the worse the industry looks overall and you really harm your pick of local talent over the next many years. Who is going to an industry that will get rid of you at the drop of a hat? If I'm a student coming out of high school I'm looking to start a career that will be with me through to retirement as much as possible.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
No problem, I just outsource my training.
Table-ized A.I.
Believe it or not, at one time, companies didn't lay people off at the drop of a hat.
And now we don't because in many (not all) cases that is economically irrational.
Because hiring them back again is expensive and hiring new people means that you not only have to train them to do the job the way your company needs it done, but they also have to learn where to go in the company to get things done.
Hiring new people is expensive but keeping people employed when you don't have work for them can easily be more expensive.
There was a certain noblesse oblige there. The company took care of you and you took care of the company.
I think you have rose colored glasses there. The labor movement happened because there WASN'T any noblesse-oblige. Working conditions 100 years ago were atrocious, safety terrible, pay was low and heaven forbid you actually spoke out about any of it. Things moved slower and labor was less mobile so it was easier to keep talent for longer because it was harder for labor to move. Increased labor mobility benefits both workers and companies but there is a cost to it.
I would be surprised by how many computer engineers don't know much about hardware. I wouldn't be surprised if you'd said coders, developers, managers, etc. Computer engineers, though!?
Then by the laws of capitalism they should not exist!
If they lose money long enough to deplete their assets then they won't. But many companies lose money on a routine basis and have to adjust manpower levels to compensate. Sometimes it's because their industry is cyclical. Sometimes it's due to unexpected business problems. Sometimes it's just bad management. But companies can survive periods of losing money. They cannot do so indefinitely and continuing to employ surplus labor in the face of economic losses is a great way to ensure the company doesn't survive.
Furthermore many business are roughly break even propositions. It's not hard to find companies that make enough to stay in business but profits are very thin indeed. This is especially common in small businesses.
Slashdot first post titled "I've got a gap you can analyze", no link to Goatse... what the!?
I wouldn't be surprised if you'd said coders, developers, managers, etc.
Based on my experience from working at software-based Fortune 500 companies, HR classifies coders, developers or managers as computer engineers. My own company classifies me as a computer engineer doing system admin work at an IT specialist pay rate, which I occasionally badger my manager about because the title implies I should be making two to four times my current salary in Silicon Valley.
But here we have companies complaining that it is too expensive to retain employees.. What I was trying to suggest is, if a company cannot have enough left over to make the employees happy and therefore stay, then obviously there is something fundamentally flawed with their business plan. Usually they float way too much money towards the top, not taking into account the longer term investment of retainment. How these companies even stay around long enough to complain about not being able to retain employees is beyond me. Obviously something is not working correctly in the market.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
The article is greater than recent? Are they still writing it or something?
At the bottom of the
I'd like to know where they're finding this pool of selfless employees who are loyal and expect to be with the company long enough to grow with it.
The people who spent 8+ years in the same position, collecting the same 2% raise each year, and are terrified of being laid off.
agile, business intelligence, cloud computing, doing mobile, gap analysis, IT org chart, storage business, the cloud ..
So, how many computer engineers *does* it take to change a lightbulb?
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
But here we have companies complaining that it is too expensive to retain employees.. What I was trying to suggest is, if a company cannot have enough left over to make the employees happy and therefore stay, then obviously there is something fundamentally flawed with their business plan.
You are making the mistake of assuming that low employee turnover and successful business plans are highly correlated. It's pretty easy to demonstrate that this is not necessarily true. Sometimes it is too expensive to retain employees and the economically sane thing to do is to let them go and hire new as business conditions dictate. For an extreme example McDonalds has an annual turnover rate in excess of 100%. That means they will turn over more employees in the next 12 months than they currently employ. And they do this every year. This is not a sign of a bad business model, it's simply the reality of their industry. Nobody would argue that McDonalds is not a wildly successful business. And all their fast food competitors are in roughly the same position. There is no realistic way they could make the work rewarding enough to retain all those employees. The work is often unpleasant, the pay is low and there is little McDonalds can do about much of that. Sure it's cheaper if they don't have to hire new employees but that doesn't mean they will be able to keep most of them. If they doubled pay they wouldn't get double the economic output so pay is effectively capped. High turnover is not an automatic indicator of a bad business model. In fact in some cases it can be vital to the viability of the business.
Finding and keeping IT talent is getting increasingly competitive and expensive
There is a ton of talent out there. I would say there is more qualified IT talent available in the USA now than has been in over 20 years. The problem is they filter out anyone over 40 or anyone without 10+ years in the latest 'thing' that was only developed 5 years ago. Then, they want them to work 80+ hour a week or some other work/life imbalance. In short, they want H1B's. They want them for next to nothing and indentured so they can't quit. Screw these assholes.
The article has a lot of abstract waffle. It doesn't really say much.
Ah, I see. I was thinking a computer engineer as someone like my friend who went to GA tech and took a bunch of actual hard-core engineering courses, as opposed to my other friend who got a ivy-league CS degree, vs me who majored in history and really likes computers as a hobby, and working towards turning it into a real jerb.
FUNDAMENTAL SHIFT!!! Your IT people will be paper pushers!!! So who provides the storage you buy off the cloud? It must come by magic.
Outsourcing destroyed the supply chain of new talent.
Back pre-Y2K people would get into help desk, those that were good at help desk and expanded there knowledge could move up to Jr Admins, then to Admins, to Sr. Admins, etc.
Outsource help desk, Jr Admins, and most Admins (L1,L2, and 1/2 or more of L3) and you have distorted the supply chain of new talent. Now they only want people that are strong L3 or L4 with lots of experience and don't understand why they can not find anyone locally.
Here's the basic problem:
For most corporate management, IT -- particularly infrastructure -- is simply a black hole of cash. They don't understand what we do, they don't understand the value we bring to the company, and they don't know why they're paying us. It's just money going somewhere, and they don't understand where.
There's no way to make them understand. They lack even the basic computer skills necessary to do anything beyond everyday work on a PC. They have not spent years or decades in the field, and you can't expect them to understand anything without that experience.
We're a black hole. We can be jettisoned any time a corporate bean-counter wants to save some money. I've been in the industry for over 30 years, man and boy, and it's always the same story: we're a black hole.
So we're expendable when crunch time comes. After all, what the hell are we being paid for, anyway?
I haven't worked for a company -- ever -- that displayed the same loyalty to me as I did to them. I no longer have the energy to be loyal when I know for a certain fact that I'll be canned the moment someone wants to cut expenses.
Want me to learn new skills? Fine, I'm happy to. Been doing it for over 30 years.
No company I've worked for paid for learning new skills. It was just do the work -- and then shoved out the door when crunch time came.
I don't know where this article originates, but it's nonsense. Employers don't train IT people. They don't even know why it's necessary.
We're an expendable black hole. Period.
Microsoft leads to Bluescreen; Bluescreen leads to downtime; downtime leads to suffering.
None, the computer engineers replaced them with Light Emitting Diodes over 2 years ago, they last years while using 1/10th the electricity.
As such we eliminated the position of bulb changer.
>Finding and keeping IT talent is getting increasingly competitive and expensive.
Considering working hours are going up, benefits are going down, work/life balance is getting more unbalanced, and many employees can (and do) get sacked for any reason or no reason at any time the employer feels like, how is this a surprise at all?
Spoiler alert: it wasn't employees who decided that businesses should no longer treat their most valuable assets... like valuable assets.
It's no surprise that employees in high-demand fields have started thinking (and acting) about what's best for themselves and stopped thinking of what's best for the business that may or may not decide their position is unnecessary 12 months down the line.
If I wrote "computer scientist" instead of "computer engineer," I would get a lot of comments explaining how computer scientists didn't need to know hardware at all.
If I'm a student coming out of high school I'm looking to start a career that will be with me through to retirement as much as possible.
Then I'd recommend med school, or becoming a veterinarian (and even then, tons of training over the years). There's no "lifetime industry" any more, because the world changes and jobs move on. Sure, you as an individual can have a career, but the job 20 years from now won't be very related to the job now.
If you want an industry that will still be here in 40 years, pick one where you get your hands dirty: the skilled trades aren't going away. College optional (unless you become a surgeon, dentist, or vet, which is a better-paying way of getting your hands dirty).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Sure, but it takes more h1b's to get an equivalent output. Very rarely does the total cost result in more than a 30% net savings.
From what I have seen, the only times outsourcing business-critical tasks makes sense is when it is to cover short-term or seasonal needs where overtime alone would be insufficient. Support needs generally make sense in similar conditions, or if the time requirement is less than 35% of a FTE.
What is this "training" of which you speak? I have never seen any.
A grueling weeks-to-months-long process where you're being interviewed by your cheaper, offshore replacement about how to do your job.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Part of the problem is that the web UI stacks are so convoluted and version-sensitive and fad-chasing that a programmer/analyst has to spend all their time tweaking GUI's instead of business logic. The old tools simplified the GUI side so that one could focus on the biz logic, which is how it SHOULD be. I shouldn't have to be a DOM rocket scientist to get a normal internal CRUD app working, and end up micro-managing scroll bar bugs etc.
It's like mowing the lawn with tweezers.
For marketing-oriented glitz stuff you may need to chase fads, but daily-grind GUI/CRUD standards settled by late 80's. The CRUD GUI standards shouldn't be moving, yet they are, for no farking reason other than fad chasing.
They have to be sliding all over the place like buttered glass now, and shrinking and growing like a throbbing thumb.
K.I.S.S. is dead. Something is screwed up. I want my lawn back, your convolutinators!
Table-ized A.I.
Amazon, etc. have so much turnover because their corporate environment is toxic.
They could retain, save all the money on hiring and training, and not have to pay 2x current salary to their employees if they just treated their employees better.
Also: outsourcing/layoffs
HP, Yahoo, something something
Thank you Dave Raggett
The gap between the expectation that technology would lead to a leisure society, and the realization that it just leads to a feudal, totalitarian regime where the billionaire beggars just take, take, take.
In Capitalism the surplus goes to the Capitalists. Why would anyone be surprised by any other result?
Another hit piece showing how the problem can be solved by utilizing more H1B visas and outsourcing everything.
What a load of crap. This sounds more like me that Mr. Carver is a self aggrandizing ladder climber looking to build his his resume at the expense of subordinates. Ergo, the multiple times I, me, turbulence, and HR wasn't happy. People like this should not be in leadership roles, especially in our institutions of higher learning!
The thing you need to realize is aritcles like this are talking about SPECIFIC ENCLAVES in the world - namely the Seattle area, the Bay area, the Austin area, and a few others... areas with huge concentrations of high tech companies. This huge concentration of companies combined with a huge concentration of very intelligent labour, results in a very competitive labour market. People in these markets routinely will work for 3 different companies in a 5 year timespan... they have no loyalty, they go where the money and/or opportunities are. As a result salaries are high and benefits are good. When you are competing against Google, Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce, and Uber for employees, you have to pay well.
The thing that people who live in these areas DO NOT realize is that this is a UNIQUE situation to these enclaves, and does not translate to other places in the United States, let alone the world. People who work on the east coast or midwest do not have anywhere near the hypermobility of those on the west coast because the labour pool competition is not there.
The base message - if all you care about is a job and IT and money, move to the bay area. I can basically guarentee you you will find tons of well-paid work. Will you be able to afford to live there though? That is a different problem.
Supply and demand baby. It rarely comes around to working stiffs. If CEOs can demand oodles of money since they're such a rare talent (haha), then techies with a desirable skill set can too.
Grab as much as you can, as fast as you can. The company will get rid of you as fast as they can sometime in the future.
"Now I can buy unlimited storage from the cloud"
Well no shit sherlock? Enjoy paying 10-100x the cost of that storage.
Cloud storage is the biggest rip off in the history of mankind, besides bandwidth of course.
How about you pay the employee their worth? Maybe they may consider staying unless the boss is a dick.
Depends, does the lightbulb support Wi-Fi or 4G?
Fuckin Susan! Every time.
The people who spent 8+ years in the same position, collecting the same 2% raise each year, and are terrified of being laid off.
I see you, too, have experience with government workers. Except for that last bit. That doesn't sound like them.
None. It's a software problem.
Says the Anonymous Coward.........
Cloud storage? Check. Storage can just be plucked out of someone's arse? Check. You can all retrain depending on what ridiculous ideas I pull out of thing air at any given time? Check.
This is Slashdot, or at least it was.