I work in a senior IT position for a large UK company and we basically don't hire UK IT people for development, everything gets offshored to India.
Don't agree with offshoring as it leads to delays and higher costs but am not surprised by this study as high level management in the UK tend to see developers as bottom rung and equivalent exchangeable units so a guy in India has a lower unit cost per hour than a guy in the UK.
You complain that IT should be involved by co-workers "from the start". Perhaps you should to reflect on how your behaviour might be anathema to your goals?
This line is 100% spot on, if you want to be involved from the start them make your coworkers problems your own and help them solve the business problem. Build that relationship and you'll find you'll be invited to things from the start.
Hate to rain on your parade but the world is changing, employees and customers are becoming technologically enabled and corporate IT will have to adapt. I work for a global healthcare company and this is how we address the issues you raise.
- thousands of morons with newly bought insecure devices grab them from the shelves and expect to plug them in behind the firewall at corporations or businesses where trade secrets, GLBA, HIPPA, FERPA, and other privacy or security regulations exist.
Don't let them plug them in behind the firewall, but as important give them a means to access the Internet and come in via your external secure gates into your corporate network. We do this via having a wifi network which is effectively air gapped from the corporate network and they just use our normal Internet access tools to come in. As a side benefit our employees become our beta testers for our consumer orientated channels helping us getting it more right than our competitors.
- thousands of morons are trying right now to install Dropbox, or some other crappy "sharing" software, on their work computer - in the process giving yet another way behind the firewall. Then they're putting sensitive company documents "on the cloud" to "share" them with co-workers.
Ask yourself why they are doing this. Generally it is to collaborate with partners in order to give your company competitive advantage and out of frustration with the lack of capability IT supplies. We stop this by either putting the group who want to be fast and take risks off the corporate network and onto their own wifi connected to the Internet or in a longer term by offering IT services that allow secure and easy collaboration between employees and partners. Also all data does not have the same risk associated with it, one size does not fit all. By realising this an investing in education programmes with our employees they start to see security the same way IT.
Education, invest in communication programmes to your employees and also make them data owners, responsibility goes with control.
- IT gets to have phone calls from these morons at all hours from people traveling or just at home, about how their "iPad stopped working." It will turn out in 99% of these cases that the culprit is either their 3G/4G cell provider, or their home wireless internet, being down. No joke, I had to troubleshoot one of these morons about a year ago: it turned out that her AT&T DSL service was down and had been for close to a month, but she wouldn't admit the possibility or even call AT&T until we made her try it when she was visiting her brother in another state and her laptop worked fine in his house (with his open wireless connection). Instead, we were treated to 3 weeks of "why can't you fucking people make my laptop work at home" from her.
We've all been there with a nightmare user, I've also encountered employees with a better IT knowledge than some IT staff, it's just part of the modern world. We've addressed situations like this by investing in building relationships between IT and our employees, as above helping them solve business problems rather than just saying no helps with this. Escalating this to her line manager and having good relationships in place where the business are co owners of problems along with IT helps to mitigate problems like the one above. No one, IT or not would see her behaviour as reasonable.
- "I don't see why I should have to change my password on my phone when I change my password on my computer in order to get my email on my phone." *HEAD. DESK. HEAD. DESK. REPEAT.*
Educate them, if you're a trusted partner in their business it isn't hard.
FTA "Apple recently paid $2 billion for a collection of 4G wireless networking patents from Canadian telecommunications company Nortel in hopes of gaining a competitive advantage in the smartphone race."
It's not just fighting the patent trolls it's about the other costs as well.
Lobbying tends to have much greater return on investment.
Instead of wasting silly amounts of money on licences, legal fees and patent portfolios wouldn't it be more cost effective to lobby the law makers to change patent law to mean software couldn't be patented?
Wouldn't that be the fiscal duty of CEOs to do so?
The street you are walking down is privately owned, and the private police at either end make escape for you impossible. You are caught, I get my property back, then the street owner sends you to the private court, where you are severely punished.
And what if the person robbing you is the one that owns the street?
Totally agree, my move away from MS desktop PC products has been driven by price as they don't have magnitudes of added value compared to their competitors in order to justify the additional expense.
As someone who is seen as the local 'IT Guy' by friends and family this has also resulted in their machines moving away from MS products too. Microsoft need to maybe look at Steam and learn about how to price things.
Not where I work. Seriously, a *LOT* would have to change - like a move away from Windows networks, and that's not going to happen (sorry).
Doesn't have to be, our solution is to provide an air gapped wifi network connected to the Internet and effectively everyone comes from the 'outside in' when accessing corporate services.
Very handy for having my music in my car though, just plug it into the iPad connector and works way better than my partners VW card reader solution for MP3 files.
Even so it has now raised the bar for DPI and changing incoming HTML, in the days of AOL where you had to have software to use a modem I could see getting ISP signed certs installed on the userbase as very easy but now where a wifi router is the primary interface to the ISP am not so sure. Not to mention that the ISP has to get those certs onto Windows, Macs, iOS devices and Android too.
Also what would the legal implication be of an ISP commiting a MITM attach on a customers HTTPS session.
Slashdot Mirror
I work in a senior IT position for a large UK company and we basically don't hire UK IT people for development, everything gets offshored to India.
Don't agree with offshoring as it leads to delays and higher costs but am not surprised by this study as high level management in the UK tend to see developers as bottom rung and equivalent exchangeable units so a guy in India has a lower unit cost per hour than a guy in the UK.
You complain that IT should be involved by co-workers "from the start". Perhaps you should to reflect on how your behaviour might be anathema to your goals?
This line is 100% spot on, if you want to be involved from the start them make your coworkers problems your own and help them solve the business problem. Build that relationship and you'll find you'll be invited to things from the start.
Hate to rain on your parade but the world is changing, employees and customers are becoming technologically enabled and corporate IT will have to adapt. I work for a global healthcare company and this is how we address the issues you raise.
- thousands of morons with newly bought insecure devices grab them from the shelves and expect to plug them in behind the firewall at corporations or businesses where trade secrets, GLBA, HIPPA, FERPA, and other privacy or security regulations exist.
Don't let them plug them in behind the firewall, but as important give them a means to access the Internet and come in via your external secure gates into your corporate network. We do this via having a wifi network which is effectively air gapped from the corporate network and they just use our normal Internet access tools to come in. As a side benefit our employees become our beta testers for our consumer orientated channels helping us getting it more right than our competitors.
- thousands of morons are trying right now to install Dropbox, or some other crappy "sharing" software, on their work computer - in the process giving yet another way behind the firewall. Then they're putting sensitive company documents "on the cloud" to "share" them with co-workers.
Ask yourself why they are doing this. Generally it is to collaborate with partners in order to give your company competitive advantage and out of frustration with the lack of capability IT supplies. We stop this by either putting the group who want to be fast and take risks off the corporate network and onto their own wifi connected to the Internet or in a longer term by offering IT services that allow secure and easy collaboration between employees and partners. Also all data does not have the same risk associated with it, one size does not fit all. By realising this an investing in education programmes with our employees they start to see security the same way IT.
Their Dropbox (or other service) password is usually no more complex than 12345, the sort of password a fucking idiot would have on his luggage.
Education, invest in communication programmes to your employees and also make them data owners, responsibility goes with control.
- IT gets to have phone calls from these morons at all hours from people traveling or just at home, about how their "iPad stopped working." It will turn out in 99% of these cases that the culprit is either their 3G/4G cell provider, or their home wireless internet, being down. No joke, I had to troubleshoot one of these morons about a year ago: it turned out that her AT&T DSL service was down and had been for close to a month, but she wouldn't admit the possibility or even call AT&T until we made her try it when she was visiting her brother in another state and her laptop worked fine in his house (with his open wireless connection). Instead, we were treated to 3 weeks of "why can't you fucking people make my laptop work at home" from her.
We've all been there with a nightmare user, I've also encountered employees with a better IT knowledge than some IT staff, it's just part of the modern world. We've addressed situations like this by investing in building relationships between IT and our employees, as above helping them solve business problems rather than just saying no helps with this. Escalating this to her line manager and having good relationships in place where the business are co owners of problems along with IT helps to mitigate problems like the one above. No one, IT or not would see her behaviour as reasonable.
- "I don't see why I should have to change my password on my phone when I change my password on my computer in order to get my email on my phone." *HEAD. DESK. HEAD. DESK. REPEAT.*
Educate them, if you're a trusted partner in their business it isn't hard.
At the end
And yet Lucas bought them as items and didn't hire the guy with a wage or contract. The guy was not hired and so didn't pass over his rights.
This is probably the only reason we're not seriously considering Git and use SVN instead, SVN works with anything nowadays.
You mean Tron was a documentary? :)
FTA "Apple recently paid $2 billion for a collection of 4G wireless networking patents from Canadian telecommunications company Nortel in hopes of gaining a competitive advantage in the smartphone race."
It's not just fighting the patent trolls it's about the other costs as well.
Lobbying tends to have much greater return on investment.
Instead of wasting silly amounts of money on licences, legal fees and patent portfolios wouldn't it be more cost effective to lobby the law makers to change patent law to mean software couldn't be patented?
Wouldn't that be the fiscal duty of CEOs to do so?
As maybe "innovations and inventions" in software if you're not a huge mega corp is incompatible with being in the the US anymore.
I guess he thought the wikipedia stub for Bitcoin created 8th March 2009 doesn't count as prior art or something.
But you're no better off are you if the person robbing you is the one that owns the street.
The street you are walking down is privately owned, and the private police at either end make escape for you impossible. You are caught, I get my property back, then the street owner sends you to the private court, where you are severely punished.
And what if the person robbing you is the one that owns the street?
It lasted 1000 years.
And yet it still fell.
Nature has physics but what you're referring to as natural is just as man made as everything else.
What is natural law?
So when has the anarcho-utopia existed?
Go start a family in a failed state and let me know how that works out for you.
There is nothing stopping you do that if you don't like the country you are living in now.
Isn't that Somalia?
If only they had the same rights as an individual and not more! ;)
How about to compete with the economies of scale your competitors are enjoying?
Large Photovoltaic plants shade a lot of ground.
We already have large structures that shade the ground and that's why it's good to mount them on roofs.
Totally agree, my move away from MS desktop PC products has been driven by price as they don't have magnitudes of added value compared to their competitors in order to justify the additional expense.
As someone who is seen as the local 'IT Guy' by friends and family this has also resulted in their machines moving away from MS products too. Microsoft need to maybe look at Steam and learn about how to price things.
Not where I work. Seriously, a *LOT* would have to change - like a move away from Windows networks, and that's not going to happen (sorry).
Doesn't have to be, our solution is to provide an air gapped wifi network connected to the Internet and effectively everyone comes from the 'outside in' when accessing corporate services.
Works very well for all concerned.
Very handy for having my music in my car though, just plug it into the iPad connector and works way better than my partners VW card reader solution for MP3 files.
Even so it has now raised the bar for DPI and changing incoming HTML, in the days of AOL where you had to have software to use a modem I could see getting ISP signed certs installed on the userbase as very easy but now where a wifi router is the primary interface to the ISP am not so sure. Not to mention that the ISP has to get those certs onto Windows, Macs, iOS devices and Android too.
Also what would the legal implication be of an ISP commiting a MITM attach on a customers HTTPS session.