Iâ(TM)m currently working for a Fortune 500 company in the IT department, and the pendulum is swinging from custom development to off-the-shelf packages (including PeopleSoft and a few others that are smaller in scale). Iâ(TM)m a developer, so I have a bit of a biased opinion. That said, there are a few reasons that Iâ(TM)ve seen for the desire for IT middle-management to go for off-the-shelf tech. And, of course, the first reason is because it is seen as easier than custom, in house, dev work. Face it, if youâ(TM)re a middle manager and you have a project that is over schedule and budget, with an internal dev team the blame is with the manager in the team. With an outside vendor, you have many more excuses. Other reasons include lack of knowledge of software dev practices (which leads to the perception that software dev is just too difficult), the preference to deal with a vendor rather than manage a large number of people, and so on.
Iâ(TM)ve certainly seen internal software dev spin out of control here, but Iâ(TM)ve seen the same kind mess with the off-the-shelf software. You pay the base price, then for the consultants to come in and configure it (for weeks or months on end), then you pay for support and upgrades. And you train the users to use a product that often has a difficult to use UI. And retrain them again each upgrade cycle. And, as has been posted already, the users are sometimes forced to adapt the business process to the software, rather than the other way around.
I donâ(TM)t think that everything should always be done in-house. Itâ(TM)s not always advantageous for a company to have to create its own dev and QA team, as well as get good managers who can oversee the project cycle. Especially for software to suite the companyâ(TM)s basic needs, which may not change very quickly. There just needs to be an alternative to these massive enterprise software/consulting companies, many of which seem to center their business model on keeping consultants on the tab for as long as possible.
I have mixed feelings about whether people need to go to college in today's marketplace, particularly computer technology. However, I do have really strong feelings that everyone should go to college, even if it they don't think its entirely necessary for their desired career or profession. It rubs me the wrong way when people state a college education as simply career training.
Computer technology is a new and different beast than the courses that colleges have taught in the past. When I went to college (U of Wash, 85-90), I studied chemical and materials engineering, something that has fundamentals that don't change yearly, and the courses I took gave me a good level of knowledge that made my first job a lot easier than it would otherwise have been .
Then I switched careers. The only computer course I took was FORTRAN, and I can't say as that's been as useful as the Perl, Java, and Web technologies that I've taugh myself since, on my own time, sans college courses. None of those things really existed prior to my graduation anyway*. And while there are certainly fundamentals in programming and other computer related fields that are relatively unchanged, the technology can be quite different in the 4 or so years it takes to get any college degree. So, its tough to say that 4 years of college vs. 4 years of direct work experience make one a better programmer or more marketable.
Even with that in mind, I wouldn't call my education, let alone any college degree a waste of time (though maybe I'd take some different courses). The math classes and english/writing/tech writing courses are still all invaluable in the skills they gave me. And, though less tangable, I think I'm better at my job because I had to take history courses, language courses, physics courses, and so on. One of my favorite quotes is "a mind that is stretched to a new idea never returns to its original dimension". That's a perfect argument for going to college, as far as I'm concerned. (Jeeze, am I starting to sound like an elitist snob here or what...?)
And the experience of going to college, the good and the bad, is something I wouldn't trade for the world. Or even the extra few $ I might have earned by working instead.
___________________
*Yah, I know Larry Wall created Perl in the mid 80's, but Perl 4 wasn't out until the early 90's, which is the version I first learned.
I think it's a bit more complex than just "people are greedy and don't want to share". Such as:
Many user may be at work or some other place where may makethere may be a policy against Napster and Gnutella, or at least the fear that they could get in trouble if caught by a sysadmin. Therefore, they get in, grab what they want, and get out.
Limits of the average PC. Including low bandwidth and limited storage space. Its harder downloading stuff if people are uploading at the same time. Combine this with the fact that not only a small percent of people on the 'net have always-on connections and fewer of those probably leave their computers on all the time, and its not difficult to understand why there are only 10% of the people who share but don't query. And I don't know what the average user does after downloading a song, but I either toss it away after listening to it a few times or burn it to CD, primarily to save space on my computer. In either case, I couldn't share it easily again if I wanted to. Granted, hard drive space is dirt cheap, but how many older computers are still out there, and how much space does the average computer (not the average Slashdot reader) have? (I have a 2 year old PII with about 3 GB of space. And my MP3s have to compete with Unreal Tournament and those other space-hogging games and apps.)
Guilt. Its one thing to quickly grab a couple of songs you want, but to share out a bunch of stuff you feel more like a pirate. Granted, I could care less if Brittany Spears gets another nickel from her music, but I've never downloaded her stuff or bought a CD. And the record companies can go to heck. But my favorite artists aren't millionaires or superstars, and I hate to think of them getting ripped off because of something I'm doing. I can justify my own downloads by making sure that I support them in any other way I can, but the guy downloading their song from my machine might just be some jerk who could care less. . . .
And finally, in an slightly off topic rant, my pet gripe about Napster (other than it's actually a pretty cruddy piece of software) and Gnutella (which I haven't used as much), is that there's no opportunity for discovery. When I share music with my friends in the real world (aka off-line), its more on the lines of "hey, I found this really cool new group", than "here, have a copy of this one track by this artist you already know". Napster is definitely designed for finding something very very specific and little else. To me, sharing is passing on something new to someone, that they may not have found on their own, which means that Napster isn't really my idea of sharing. . . .
Blackbird was also somekind of proprietary networking thing too. I think it was a reaction to AOL and was killed when they decided to build the Web into Windows (around 1995).
There are two things I wonder about all this. One is how quickly MS will be able to convert programmers to use the language? I'm guessing that they'll try to push VB and VC++ programers to adopt it, maybe Java and J++ people. Personally, my reaction is that I loath to try and pick up on any new language at this point (Perl, Java, JavaScript, and enough VB/VBScript to get by is enough for now). Then again, maybe I'm getting old.
Secondly, anyone taking any bets when this thing becomes available (and how long after that it becomes actually useful)?
Slashdot Mirror
http://technetcast.ddj.com/
They've got a pretty good set of presenters and topics. I've only listened to a couple, but I like what I've heard so far.
Iâ(TM)m currently working for a Fortune 500 company in the IT department, and the pendulum is swinging from custom development to off-the-shelf packages (including PeopleSoft and a few others that are smaller in scale). Iâ(TM)m a developer, so I have a bit of a biased opinion. That said, there are a few reasons that Iâ(TM)ve seen for the desire for IT middle-management to go for off-the-shelf tech. And, of course, the first reason is because it is seen as easier than custom, in house, dev work. Face it, if youâ(TM)re a middle manager and you have a project that is over schedule and budget, with an internal dev team the blame is with the manager in the team. With an outside vendor, you have many more excuses. Other reasons include lack of knowledge of software dev practices (which leads to the perception that software dev is just too difficult), the preference to deal with a vendor rather than manage a large number of people, and so on.
Iâ(TM)ve certainly seen internal software dev spin out of control here, but Iâ(TM)ve seen the same kind mess with the off-the-shelf software. You pay the base price, then for the consultants to come in and configure it (for weeks or months on end), then you pay for support and upgrades. And you train the users to use a product that often has a difficult to use UI. And retrain them again each upgrade cycle. And, as has been posted already, the users are sometimes forced to adapt the business process to the software, rather than the other way around.
I donâ(TM)t think that everything should always be done in-house. Itâ(TM)s not always advantageous for a company to have to create its own dev and QA team, as well as get good managers who can oversee the project cycle. Especially for software to suite the companyâ(TM)s basic needs, which may not change very quickly. There just needs to be an alternative to these massive enterprise software/consulting companies, many of which seem to center their business model on keeping consultants on the tab for as long as possible.
Computer technology is a new and different beast than the courses that colleges have taught in the past. When I went to college (U of Wash, 85-90), I studied chemical and materials engineering, something that has fundamentals that don't change yearly, and the courses I took gave me a good level of knowledge that made my first job a lot easier than it would otherwise have been .
Then I switched careers. The only computer course I took was FORTRAN, and I can't say as that's been as useful as the Perl, Java, and Web technologies that I've taugh myself since, on my own time, sans college courses. None of those things really existed prior to my graduation anyway*. And while there are certainly fundamentals in programming and other computer related fields that are relatively unchanged, the technology can be quite different in the 4 or so years it takes to get any college degree. So, its tough to say that 4 years of college vs. 4 years of direct work experience make one a better programmer or more marketable.
Even with that in mind, I wouldn't call my education, let alone any college degree a waste of time (though maybe I'd take some different courses). The math classes and english/writing/tech writing courses are still all invaluable in the skills they gave me. And, though less tangable, I think I'm better at my job because I had to take history courses, language courses, physics courses, and so on. One of my favorite quotes is "a mind that is stretched to a new idea never returns to its original dimension". That's a perfect argument for going to college, as far as I'm concerned. (Jeeze, am I starting to sound like an elitist snob here or what...?)
And the experience of going to college, the good and the bad, is something I wouldn't trade for the world. Or even the extra few $ I might have earned by working instead.
___________________
*Yah, I know Larry Wall created Perl in the mid 80's, but Perl 4 wasn't out until the early 90's, which is the version I first learned.
Many user may be at work or some other place where may makethere may be a policy against Napster and Gnutella, or at least the fear that they could get in trouble if caught by a sysadmin. Therefore, they get in, grab what they want, and get out.
Limits of the average PC. Including low bandwidth and limited storage space. Its harder downloading stuff if people are uploading at the same time. Combine this with the fact that not only a small percent of people on the 'net have always-on connections and fewer of those probably leave their computers on all the time, and its not difficult to understand why there are only 10% of the people who share but don't query. And I don't know what the average user does after downloading a song, but I either toss it away after listening to it a few times or burn it to CD, primarily to save space on my computer. In either case, I couldn't share it easily again if I wanted to. Granted, hard drive space is dirt cheap, but how many older computers are still out there, and how much space does the average computer (not the average Slashdot reader) have? (I have a 2 year old PII with about 3 GB of space. And my MP3s have to compete with Unreal Tournament and those other space-hogging games and apps.)
Guilt. Its one thing to quickly grab a couple of songs you want, but to share out a bunch of stuff you feel more like a pirate. Granted, I could care less if Brittany Spears gets another nickel from her music, but I've never downloaded her stuff or bought a CD. And the record companies can go to heck. But my favorite artists aren't millionaires or superstars, and I hate to think of them getting ripped off because of something I'm doing. I can justify my own downloads by making sure that I support them in any other way I can, but the guy downloading their song from my machine might just be some jerk who could care less. . . .
And finally, in an slightly off topic rant, my pet gripe about Napster (other than it's actually a pretty cruddy piece of software) and Gnutella (which I haven't used as much), is that there's no opportunity for discovery. When I share music with my friends in the real world (aka off-line), its more on the lines of "hey, I found this really cool new group", than "here, have a copy of this one track by this artist you already know". Napster is definitely designed for finding something very very specific and little else. To me, sharing is passing on something new to someone, that they may not have found on their own, which means that Napster isn't really my idea of sharing. . . .
Blackbird was also somekind of proprietary networking thing too. I think it was a reaction to AOL and was killed when they decided to build the Web into Windows (around 1995).
Secondly, anyone taking any bets when this thing becomes available (and how long after that it becomes actually useful)?