"But these kids grow up into adults that have families and they just want their money."
I think that's definitely true. The late 90s were like this too...companies would just exploit the latest generation of college grads used to dorm-like living and all-nighters. Free food, wacky furniture and a playful workplace don't cut it when you have a family to support and have to spend millions for a house in SV.
Libertarianism works great when you're an uber-genius (no pun intended) living in a region filled to capacity with other uber-geniuses and more money floating around than you'd ever be able to spend. It's a very intoxicating combination to be fawned over by VCs and startups for your brilliance, to be paid multiples more than most mere mortals make, and to see limitless opportunity. It's easy to just say everyone who isn't you is dumb, lazy and doesn't deserve help. It's also easy to say that you and your company are job creators and everyone else is just stealing from you...and be rewarded for that opinion if you're in the business owner club.
Where it doesn't work out so well is after all the work is gone, after all the VCs have moved on to a new shiny thing and you suddenly aren't on top anymore. I think smart people are slowly starting to see that automation is going to destroy jobs fast and replace them with fewer, lower-paying service jobs...faster than anyone could "learn to code" (which is the popular phrase we hear from the tech libertarian crowd.) Unregulated capitalism or libertarian capitalism isn't compatible with an economy where most people don't have work. It works well when companies have tons of money floating around and lots of slack in the system that allows them to employ more than the bare minimum of people. But when even smart people don't have jobs anymore because knowledge work is automated or offshored, the whole consumption cycle will break down because no one can afford to consume. There are millions of mid- to even high-skilled people who are doing work today that's going to be some of the first to go, and some of that work requires years of education and is high-paying.
If we don't want to go to state-owned everything, I think the only thing to do is to adopt some socialist policies. And yes, that includes make-work jobs. Everyone wrings their hands so much about a basic income guarantee, so I don't think we could do that. But if we want to keep the system in place where everyone goes to a job and works for money to buy things from companies that employ everyone, what's the alternative? The less socially adjusted among us (of which techies are a disproportionate amount) might start suggesting population control and that doesn't lead anywhere good.
I've been in the IT business for over 20 years. No one remotely technical voluntarily does business with Oracle. The executives get sold on the dream by Oracle's sales force, but I have a feeling they're having a very hard time convincing companies to put even more of their eggs in the Oracle basket.
The company I work for is a PeopleSoft customer and they operate in over 130 countries, so I'm sure it's nearly impossible to switch HR software without massive pain. I happen to know the people doing the license negotiation, and they were basically strong-armed into moving to Oracle Cloud hosting and accepting millions of dollars in "cloud credits" that they have no intention of using. This mirrors what I've heard from others as well -- Oracle is making it so expensive and painful to maintain on-premises licensing that it forces people running stuff like PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Siebel and Oracle's own ERP product into hosted cloud stuff.
Oracle seems to be incredibly desperate to become an AWS or Azure...but they don't seem to realize that only the execs are fooled anymore. Oracle Cloud is about as trustworthy as "Symantec Cloud" or "CA Cloud." This latest layoff just sounds like they're putting their foot down and saying every waking hour will be devoted to cloud, no more software packages. My company's doing something similar with DevOps these days...if your project doesn't have enough cloudy DevOps-y buzzwords and tools used, it's on the chopping block.
It's going to be interesting seeing what happens to all these tool and service vendors. The accepted business model for almost all of them appears to be as follows:
- Develop cool new tool, release it as open source - Let people download and use it as much as they want, calling that "ToolX Open Source" - Host it, and make it free for 5 or 10 users/instances/whatever, calling that "ToolX Free Tier" - Charge for support and/or more features/users/instances/whatever, calling that "ToolX Enterprise" - Hang on as long as you can until Microsoft, Amazon, Google or Atlassian buy you or you IPO
For anyone who wasn't around during the First Dotcom Bubble, back in 1999 companies were losing massive amounts of money giving away money or products in the name of "eyeballs" and it was thought they'd make it up in volume. Trello's a little different in that it's a service and not a tool...but some of the same principles apply. They want to get bought and merged into GitHub or Jira, and it seems like the vendors of these little "glue" services are in a good position to have that happen. They just have to give enough of the product away to generate critical mass or get picked up by a unicorn startup on the way up.
What will be interesting to see is how many companies pick up these tools on the free or open source tier and buy extras as they grow. If it's a lot...then IPO and your founders are billionaires. If it's a few...then you become Microsoft employees and your founders are billionaires. What could possibly go wrong?:-)
> I figured that the parents would be smart enough to realize that the school you get into does not help your future career. They already have all these advantages, is going to Stanford really going to open more doors than being the child of someone of wealth or a star?
Yes. Going to Stanford means you're hanging out with the kids of tech industry titans. Going to an Ivy League school puts you in the realm of "old money" families and the Wall Street crowd. It's all about association and who you can get yourself connected with. This is why an elite school admission is worth millions...the ROI is way more. If you happen to get in, don't have a scholarship and need loans, this is the only time I'd advocate taking as many loans as you need...you'll make it back in a couple of years of management consulting, investment banking or running a Second Dotcom Bubble AI-powered blockchain-enabled subscription box service.
I graduated over 20 years ago from a state school. My parents weren't wealthy enough to buy my way into an Ivy League school. I turned out OK, but the fact is that my path could have been a whole lot easier if I had been able to even think about applying to places like this. Once you make it in, that club will never let you fail...the hard part is making it in.
People wonder why these places are $60K+ a year, and accept less than 5% of applicants. It's because getting into one of these schools is a one-way ticket to Easy Street. You get to hobnob with the rich and powerful, they might fund your business ideas, and if you're not an entrepreneur there's a whole class of high-paying jobs open to you too. I live near NYC and investment banks recruit exclusively from the Ivy League for their most prestigious associate positions. My kids are smart but they're not full-scholarship-to-Harvard smart, or athletic enough for a sports scholarship, and I can't pay millions to an admissions broker...so they'll have to suck it up and find a job like the rest of us do instead of having it handed to them.
I always thought wealthy parents just paid millions directly to the school to help build a building in order to secure admissions spots. Is it now so competitive that they have to go to a middleman with connections, and donations aren't enough? It's too bad...these rich parents' kids are taking spots that could otherwise go to someone who would actually use the education for something other than a stepping stone to McKinsey and Company and executive boards.
I wonder if the whole Millenial hipster open-space preschool workplace thing will survive this latest tech bubble...but WeWork is guaranteed to profit. Apparently they're one of the largest commercial landlords in the world and they seem to specialize in this free-flowing startup space. It's akin to selling prospectors supplies on their way to the gold fields.
Whenever I see self-dealing like this, I simultaneously think that it's totally unfair that things can be set up this way, and wonder why I don't take advantage and profit from it.:-) Most business owners structure their affairs in such a way that their company is buying everything they own to offset any profits that pass to the owner. And then they complain bitterly about taxes. It seems ludicrous that I can set up Bob Smith LLC, have Bob Smith LLC purchase a car in the company's name, rent houses and offices, etc. and I would work for Bob Smith LLC as the CEO paying myself a salary of $1/year. This happens all the time with small business owners. I know that the "corporate veil" can be pierced if the IRS or someone suspects this is going on, but the reality is there are way too many ways to avoid it.
We'll see what happens when Dotcom Bubble 2.0 crashes in the next year or two and the VC funds used to rent these offices dry up. I'm assuming WeWork will be just fine though...here in NYC people will give you their life savings for a closet and a hot plate.
Apple is very similar to BMW and Mercedes when it comes to this "immersive brand experience" thing. None of these companies want people running around with old phones or cars. They want them on the 3-year leasing treadmill. They want you to basically subscribe to their hardware. To accomplish this, one of the things they do is fight efforts to make repairs economical. Apple basically builds their phones as glue sandwiches and solders all the components onto the motherboard for "design reasons." BMW/MB make the out-of-warranty repair experience painful with single-source expensive parts, so even if you find a good mechanic who charges reasonable labor rates, this sensor or that sub-assembly will cost thousands to replace. The only way to own one of these cars long term is to have the money and not care about spending it, or just throw in the towel and rent one forever in the form of a never-ending lease.
I think people in the US and Europe will finally get sick of this and realize they're being ripped off now that there's a huge secondary market for iDevices. China and India have huge middle class populations but they're less likely to blow $1100 on a phone than Americans are.
I'm not an MBA or accountant, but I think this is a very common thing. It's not in fashion accounting-wise to own a large number of assets. It's the same thing that's driving companies to the OpEx/cloud/subscription model of infrastructure.
What I don't know is why it isn't good for their accounting. Having untold quantities of prime retail space land and buildings on your books should be a good thing. For the MBAs or accountants out there...what's the reasoning? Is there some measure of revenue that gets hurt by owning things?
I'm 43 so I did grow up in an era where Sears, JCPenney and a couple of regional department stores were the source for everything that most middle class families bought. People forget how easy it is to find out about new products and buy them now, compared to even 20 years ago. Memories of Sears for me include the tail end of the catalog, and the place I saw home computers for the first time as well as video games. In those days, these stores were the way people found out about new things to buy, and in some respects were the tastemakers for the average non-fashionista crowd.
I think the hedge fund vultures swooping in and loading up the companies with debt was the accelerator (Toys R Us would probably still be here if they weren't in so much debt.) But the big thing appears to be too much inward focus and not keeping up with competitors. I wonder if this will eventually happen to Amazon as well. Sears was the country's largest employer for quite some time, and I'm sure most people would have considered it foolish to start a retail business that directly competed since they were untouchable. I think I read somewhere that Sears executives didn't even consider Walmart a competitor until they got bigger and started selling similar things.
Companies can't go chase every new idea like an ADHD kitten chasing laser pointers. But, they do need to keep an eye on what's happening and respond to trends. Walking into my local Sears is like walking back into 1985 or 1990. Too agile and you're just chasing the next fad, but milking the cash cow too much will kill it eventually.
I think people are overly concerned about the MBA-speak used, but aren't paying sufficient attention to the actions of said MBAs.
"Late-stage capitalism" or whatever you want to call it is about squeezing every single drop of productivity out of an already-stretched system. This is where the disruption comes in...everyone is focused on removing every pocket of slack. Replace taxi companies with a phone app that summons drivers directly to you to kill taxi companies. Outsource every single corporate service to the lowest bidder rather than hiring people directly to lower your costs. It's a race to the bottom and if you ask me, it is beginning to have an effect on society in general.
When I graduated in the late 90s, it was still very common for people to have decent mid-level jobs at large companies. A generation before, it was even more pronounced. Now, in the name of agile and disruption, businesses are killing any stability that was there in favor of contracting positions and outsourcing functions. The problem is this...in a previous time it was possible to party your way through a management degree, get randomly selected for some generic position at a company, and use that position to establish a decent family life. The societal change that's happening is that fewer people are able to stay employed in an area. This will eventually lead to people being more nomadic, having fewer children, renting apartments instead of buying houses, and not contributing to any sort of community.
Once you're out of your 20s, most people aren't really excited about pulling up stakes and moving across the country over and over again to chase yet another contract position. Those plants GM is closing are going to dump a ton of previously well-established workers into the nomad pool, chasing lower-wage positions. Union factory work used to be the only way for people with less education to earn enough to support a decent quality of life. This is the disruption people need to think about. If you put the work in by getting educated, your reward should be a stable living that lasts a career. The problem is that these cycles of consolidation and slack-removal are growing shorter and people are likely to experience a major disruption more than once in their working lives.
Economies that have humans involved need slack. The current system just assumes we're machines.
Medicine and law are a little different in that their professional schools are very regimented compared to undergrad university studies. You're right that they don't learn everything. But, anyone getting through medical or law school has a common baseline level of knowledge. They have to pass a licensing exam to move on to the next phase of their training (resident or junior lawyer.)
Every time I run into a "rockstar developer" or "systems ninja" with mile-wide holes in their skills I wish we in IT had a more formal profession and barrier to entry.
The way I see it, in order for society to function correctly and not devolve into a winner-take-all nightmare is to find a way to keep everyone employed. You need the super-geniuses who will advance the state of the art, good solid engineering/technician types who can problem solve and think critically, and yes you need something for the people who can't even graduate high school to do.The top two tiers start with a solid higher education experience, and the lower tier can be filled by vocational training.
20 years back I got a degree in chemistry. Other than being able to understand scientific discussions more than the average person, I don't directly use any knowledge I picked up in my job as a systems engineer. I do use a ton of the life skills I picked up along the way, such as: - Being able to juggle multiple deadlines - Taking in challenging material at a pretty rapid clip and making sense of it - Troubleshooting complex problems and being able to reason my way through them - Learning independence -- going to a big public university where no one directly cared about me was a good experience. - And honestly, learning how to follow stupid rules, pick my battles, etc.
That's what university education should be. If you're an average person like me, you go through a course of study and join that middle tier of workers. If you're a super-genius, you move on to professional school or academia. What it isn't is an 18-month JavaScript bootcamp designed to make you a functional code monkey on Day 1 of your first job.
Universities should prepare students for jobs that don't exist by NOT preparing them for specific job skills. Give them the skills to pick up new skills on their own. And employers aren't blameless here -- on-the-job training of new grads needs to make a comeback.
"Still I had employees who would steal because they "saw how much money came through the store every day""
Obviously they shouldn't be stealing...but I've heard this argument from so many small business owners who complain about taxes, regulation, minimum wage, etc. There is no way a restaurant with massive profit margins is so cash-strapped that they can't afford to pay their employees a living wage, let alone $15/hr. If they don't want to pay people, then they should do all the work themselves and they'll be able to keep 100% of the profits after expenses. Think of a pizza place which has an even higher profit margin than a Subway...selling just a few pizzas during a shift pays for an employees' minimum wage and all the pizza places around me are extremely busy nearly all day. Paying someone $15 or $20 an hour isn't going to make or break you, and you shouldn't hire employees if it would.
It all goes back to the "entrepreneur superhero" mystique that small business owners wrap themselves in. "Why should I pay taxes? I'm a Job Creator!" Reality is that business owners have a sweet deal compared to wage earners. Every personal expense can be funneled through your company, reducing your profits and therefore your taxes. You can't do that on W-2 income. Most business owners I've seen are "employed" by their Subway franchise at a ridiculously low salary, and the franchise owns several houses, cars and other "capital equipment" that just happen to reside at the owner's house.
" No pity for a rich idiot who can't find pleasure in the world."
That's what I'm thinking too. How can you be unhappy when you can call someone and have anything you want, legal or illegal, delivered instantly? Or when you can make any problems disappear by paying someone? Or, if you're bored or need a change of scenery, book a first-class trip anywhere at a moment's notice?
Anyone who says having money is a burden for them is welcome to call me up and switch places. I would be the happiest person alive.
I don't know...if I had as much money as this guy had after being anointed a Twitter billionaire, the last thing I'd be doing is overdosing on drugs. If you're that rich you can pay for a non-contaminated known-good supply...and probably have a crew of people managing your intake.
That, and why is it that celebrities and rich people feel the need to do destructive things? Especially suicides...it just boggles my mind. You get these rockstars who have millions of fans, people of the opposite gender throwing themselves at them, and enough money to buy anything, go anywhere and experience anything...and they're depressed? It's inconceivable. Depression is not a disease of the fabulously wealthy. Money like that would solve any personal problem I had instantly.
It's very easy for a young employee to think that the industry is just an endless field of hot-swappable engineers and developers. Especially in certain markets (SF, Seattle, etc.) I hear there are thousands of nearly-identical openings. Never forget that it's very possible for that list of thousands to go down to a couple hundred, right after a massive tech company dumps 50,000 engineers onto the street in one shot (HP/HPE/CSC is a perfect example, or the mass firings at Microsoft.)
People talk. The industry is smaller than you think. If you're in any sort of specialty that makes you less hot-swappable, the talent pool and list of employers gets smaller. Companies have no-hire lists and acting like a jerk either on your way in or out is a good way to get on them.
I fully admit I'm old school at 43 years old. I'm not a hipster full stack developer stroking my goatee and downing another Red Bull so I can spend 7 more hours debugging JavaScript or Go or whatever my startup's phone app back end is running. But one thing I have experienced is cyclical labor markets. Being a professional may be looked down on today, but I think this is what allows people to survive in the down-swings of these cycles. 1998-2000 was almost exactly like this in the tech world...the only difference is the buzzwords and a lower number of pump and dump IPOs. Back them, if you could write HTML or do basic sysadmin work, you were hopping jobs every 6 months for 20% pay increases, just like web devs and cloud admins are now. You can't swing a dead cat without hitting a high paying job if you have certain skills in certain markets.
I have a feeling in the next 2 years we're going to experience another "interesting time"...maybe not as painful as 2000 or 2008, but bad for IT and developers. The free food, hip work environments and high compensation are going to evaporate and it will instantly become a buyers' market again. Anyone pulling this ghosting stuff, or doing the "Talk with my agent, I know Kubernetes!" rockstar prima donna thing is going to be remembered and not in a good way.
I know a lot of tech people are saying something like, "Good, sweet revenge for the crap companies pull" and I agree somewhat. But, do we really want to pull the two sides even further apart by cementing the idea that all IT people are a bunch of flaky, unprofessional ill-tempered nerds? Because if we do, I know several Indian consulting firms with thousands of perfectly polite needful-doers who are selling executives on that very premise.
My preferred solution? Ghost the crappy companies and work the system from within good environments. There are some out there. It's the only way to fix labor/management relations long term and bring it back to the time where companies actually wanted to keep employees.
Ever since LinkedIn rebuilt the site to look and act like Facebook, the self-promoter social media mavens have been all over it and treating it like Facebook. Most people who actively maintain their LinkedIn account enough to get counted in statistics (I assume Microsoft picks accounts with recent activity) are super-aggressive self-promoters. My assumption would be that these would be the type of people who are out hyping their startup's "AIMLBlockchain with More Cognitive Services" product and calling themselves blockchain developers.
I think that once the cryptocurrency bubble dies down people will find a bunch of uses for this technology...but it's super-bubbly now and anyone who can glue a few blockchain library Legos together into a semi-functional web service is getting paid big money now.
I remember reading something about this...The Dead Sea Effect maybe? From what I've seen, anyone who's able to find other work or doesn't really need the job takes the buyout. Then the company gets stuck with the people who stay behind, who are not going to find anything equal to or better than what they have, or are just so institutionalized that they can't go anywhere else. Then morale goes in the toilet, more people are laid off, and productivity gets worse each subsequent round.
(And yes, employee institutionalization is a thing. For those of you young enough to not have experienced it, companies used to hang onto employees forever, train them, and heavily invest in them so that it's a big loss if they leave. Huge employers like IBM, GE, AT&T, etc. basically had a completely internal labor market/talent pool because there was a belief in promoting from within. Former IBMers I've worked with tell me that the pay and opportunities used to be good enough that people wouldn't leave. Big contrast with today's 3-month contracts.)
I wonder who Verizon's latest crop of management consultants is. I've been seeing a ton of stories along these lines, almost exclusively at old-line companies. I think the execs are being told, "Listen, if we fire all the experienced people and replace them with college grads, our digital transformation will accelerate to unheard-of levels, AND you'll save a ton of money on salary!"
I'm well aware that large companies collect a lot of dead wood (or at least wood that isn't super-productive anymore.) But, as I've said I've seen this over and over again during the run-up of what I'll coin Dotcom Bubble 2.0. IBM is firing anyone in the US and Europe who isn't deemed hip enough to jump on the cloud/mobile/social/AIMLBlockchain/cognitive train. I saw a few months ago that AT&T is doing the same thing. HP/HPE/DXC dumped something like 60,000 people over the last couple of years during their spin-merge. It's almost like they're daring any attorney who might bring an age discrimination lawsuit to just try it and see how they're crushed. Even Microsoft, who was famous for never having to lay people off started doing so in the last few years...and they're not exactly hurting for money.
One thing I wonder is how many people being fired are from the "old school" days when a job with the phone company amounted to permanent employment. I'm assuming that's why they're giving them up to 60 months' salary and benefits...to discourage wrongful termination suits. All I know is this...I'm 43 and work very hard to stay current...and I'm sure that won't save me when the company I'm working for decides to fire me when I'm 55 and still years away from being able to access my retirement money.
It's depressing, but the reality is that successful people generally come from successful families with enough connections to get them what they need. It is still possible (but highly improbable) to make it into top positions based solely on skill, but the path is well worn for those lucky enough to have connections.
This is why people of normal means who want a good future for their kids push them so hard to get into the Ivy League or similar private schools. The price of the degree buys them access to the wealthy and well-connected. If they can somehow blend in with this crowd, the return on investment is incredible. There is no such thing as an unemployed Ivy League graduate at the low end of the ROI scale. And at the top, investment banking and management consulting are guaranteed paths to riches, as well as getting into top professional (law, medical, business) schools giving you access to the best jobs in those fields.
As far as code.org goes, I'm not sure why people are so concerned about exposing kids to this field. Offshore outsourcing and visa programs are the main drivers of salary depression...working on those should be the primary concern of developers because then compensation might have a chance of increasing for everyone.
$15K to move your stuff...don't forget 3-6% of the purchase price of the house, the cost to get a new mortgage, the lawyers' fees, any real estate transfer tax you may need to pay.
Even if you own your house free and clear, the transaction costs are in the thousands. Most people roll it into their mortgage and pretend they're not paying it, but they are. Doing this over and over again gets REALLY expensive over a lifetime.
Millenials get all the press, but there comes a time in people's lives where it actually makes sense to stay in one place for a while. For a lot of people, the lifestyle of moving across the country over and over again just to take another job isn't appealing. Either you're a permanent renter, or you end up spending insane amounts of money in real estate transaction costs. It's not just the house price...it's the mortgage origination fees, the legal fees, real estate commissions, transfer tax, the cost to move, etc.
Moving all over the country made sense back in the good old days of semi-permanent employment. A company would spend a lot of time and effort on you and it was in their best interest to keep you employed. When I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, it was still very common for a company to move an employee to wherever a new promotion opportunity was, all expenses paid. Lots of kids I knew had their parents transferred. Today, IMO that makes little sense. The cost is almost always mostly paid by the employee, and there's no guarantee you'll have a job 6 months after you uproot your family and move.
And, I know I'm going to get dinged as being old, but there's something to be said about putting down roots and becoming a part of a local community. You don't get that if you're chasing contract positions across the country and never in one place for more than a year or two. Look at military families as an example of what frequent moving around does to a kid's ability to make and maintain friendships.
I can attest to this. I've had "good school" managers who have insisted we hire "good school" candidates over people who were clearly better qualified, and this is for regular-person jobs, not some high position. You will always be able to find someone in the alumni network who is in a position to give you a job, period.
The public university equivalent is the fraternity/sorority network. Here again, you are paying for access (both in money and healthy liver cells.) It's just that the payoff isn't as big in most cases. Your fraternity bro who constantly says, "Dude, my dad owns a dealership" might be able to get you a job as a sales manager at that dealership...but it's less likely you'll get the executive positions a management consulting job will groom you for.
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"But these kids grow up into adults that have families and they just want their money."
I think that's definitely true. The late 90s were like this too...companies would just exploit the latest generation of college grads used to dorm-like living and all-nighters. Free food, wacky furniture and a playful workplace don't cut it when you have a family to support and have to spend millions for a house in SV.
Libertarianism works great when you're an uber-genius (no pun intended) living in a region filled to capacity with other uber-geniuses and more money floating around than you'd ever be able to spend. It's a very intoxicating combination to be fawned over by VCs and startups for your brilliance, to be paid multiples more than most mere mortals make, and to see limitless opportunity. It's easy to just say everyone who isn't you is dumb, lazy and doesn't deserve help. It's also easy to say that you and your company are job creators and everyone else is just stealing from you...and be rewarded for that opinion if you're in the business owner club.
Where it doesn't work out so well is after all the work is gone, after all the VCs have moved on to a new shiny thing and you suddenly aren't on top anymore. I think smart people are slowly starting to see that automation is going to destroy jobs fast and replace them with fewer, lower-paying service jobs...faster than anyone could "learn to code" (which is the popular phrase we hear from the tech libertarian crowd.) Unregulated capitalism or libertarian capitalism isn't compatible with an economy where most people don't have work. It works well when companies have tons of money floating around and lots of slack in the system that allows them to employ more than the bare minimum of people. But when even smart people don't have jobs anymore because knowledge work is automated or offshored, the whole consumption cycle will break down because no one can afford to consume. There are millions of mid- to even high-skilled people who are doing work today that's going to be some of the first to go, and some of that work requires years of education and is high-paying.
If we don't want to go to state-owned everything, I think the only thing to do is to adopt some socialist policies. And yes, that includes make-work jobs. Everyone wrings their hands so much about a basic income guarantee, so I don't think we could do that. But if we want to keep the system in place where everyone goes to a job and works for money to buy things from companies that employ everyone, what's the alternative? The less socially adjusted among us (of which techies are a disproportionate amount) might start suggesting population control and that doesn't lead anywhere good.
I've been in the IT business for over 20 years. No one remotely technical voluntarily does business with Oracle. The executives get sold on the dream by Oracle's sales force, but I have a feeling they're having a very hard time convincing companies to put even more of their eggs in the Oracle basket.
The company I work for is a PeopleSoft customer and they operate in over 130 countries, so I'm sure it's nearly impossible to switch HR software without massive pain. I happen to know the people doing the license negotiation, and they were basically strong-armed into moving to Oracle Cloud hosting and accepting millions of dollars in "cloud credits" that they have no intention of using. This mirrors what I've heard from others as well -- Oracle is making it so expensive and painful to maintain on-premises licensing that it forces people running stuff like PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Siebel and Oracle's own ERP product into hosted cloud stuff.
Oracle seems to be incredibly desperate to become an AWS or Azure...but they don't seem to realize that only the execs are fooled anymore. Oracle Cloud is about as trustworthy as "Symantec Cloud" or "CA Cloud." This latest layoff just sounds like they're putting their foot down and saying every waking hour will be devoted to cloud, no more software packages. My company's doing something similar with DevOps these days...if your project doesn't have enough cloudy DevOps-y buzzwords and tools used, it's on the chopping block.
It's going to be interesting seeing what happens to all these tool and service vendors. The accepted business model for almost all of them appears to be as follows:
- Develop cool new tool, release it as open source
- Let people download and use it as much as they want, calling that "ToolX Open Source"
- Host it, and make it free for 5 or 10 users/instances/whatever, calling that "ToolX Free Tier"
- Charge for support and/or more features/users/instances/whatever, calling that "ToolX Enterprise"
- Hang on as long as you can until Microsoft, Amazon, Google or Atlassian buy you or you IPO
For anyone who wasn't around during the First Dotcom Bubble, back in 1999 companies were losing massive amounts of money giving away money or products in the name of "eyeballs" and it was thought they'd make it up in volume. Trello's a little different in that it's a service and not a tool...but some of the same principles apply. They want to get bought and merged into GitHub or Jira, and it seems like the vendors of these little "glue" services are in a good position to have that happen. They just have to give enough of the product away to generate critical mass or get picked up by a unicorn startup on the way up.
What will be interesting to see is how many companies pick up these tools on the free or open source tier and buy extras as they grow. If it's a lot...then IPO and your founders are billionaires. If it's a few...then you become Microsoft employees and your founders are billionaires. What could possibly go wrong? :-)
> I figured that the parents would be smart enough to realize that the school you get into does not help your future career. They already have all these advantages, is going to Stanford really going to open more doors than being the child of someone of wealth or a star?
Yes. Going to Stanford means you're hanging out with the kids of tech industry titans. Going to an Ivy League school puts you in the realm of "old money" families and the Wall Street crowd. It's all about association and who you can get yourself connected with. This is why an elite school admission is worth millions...the ROI is way more. If you happen to get in, don't have a scholarship and need loans, this is the only time I'd advocate taking as many loans as you need...you'll make it back in a couple of years of management consulting, investment banking or running a Second Dotcom Bubble AI-powered blockchain-enabled subscription box service.
I graduated over 20 years ago from a state school. My parents weren't wealthy enough to buy my way into an Ivy League school. I turned out OK, but the fact is that my path could have been a whole lot easier if I had been able to even think about applying to places like this. Once you make it in, that club will never let you fail...the hard part is making it in.
People wonder why these places are $60K+ a year, and accept less than 5% of applicants. It's because getting into one of these schools is a one-way ticket to Easy Street. You get to hobnob with the rich and powerful, they might fund your business ideas, and if you're not an entrepreneur there's a whole class of high-paying jobs open to you too. I live near NYC and investment banks recruit exclusively from the Ivy League for their most prestigious associate positions. My kids are smart but they're not full-scholarship-to-Harvard smart, or athletic enough for a sports scholarship, and I can't pay millions to an admissions broker...so they'll have to suck it up and find a job like the rest of us do instead of having it handed to them.
I always thought wealthy parents just paid millions directly to the school to help build a building in order to secure admissions spots. Is it now so competitive that they have to go to a middleman with connections, and donations aren't enough? It's too bad...these rich parents' kids are taking spots that could otherwise go to someone who would actually use the education for something other than a stepping stone to McKinsey and Company and executive boards.
I wonder if the whole Millenial hipster open-space preschool workplace thing will survive this latest tech bubble...but WeWork is guaranteed to profit. Apparently they're one of the largest commercial landlords in the world and they seem to specialize in this free-flowing startup space. It's akin to selling prospectors supplies on their way to the gold fields.
Whenever I see self-dealing like this, I simultaneously think that it's totally unfair that things can be set up this way, and wonder why I don't take advantage and profit from it. :-) Most business owners structure their affairs in such a way that their company is buying everything they own to offset any profits that pass to the owner. And then they complain bitterly about taxes. It seems ludicrous that I can set up Bob Smith LLC, have Bob Smith LLC purchase a car in the company's name, rent houses and offices, etc. and I would work for Bob Smith LLC as the CEO paying myself a salary of $1/year. This happens all the time with small business owners. I know that the "corporate veil" can be pierced if the IRS or someone suspects this is going on, but the reality is there are way too many ways to avoid it.
We'll see what happens when Dotcom Bubble 2.0 crashes in the next year or two and the VC funds used to rent these offices dry up. I'm assuming WeWork will be just fine though...here in NYC people will give you their life savings for a closet and a hot plate.
Apple is very similar to BMW and Mercedes when it comes to this "immersive brand experience" thing. None of these companies want people running around with old phones or cars. They want them on the 3-year leasing treadmill. They want you to basically subscribe to their hardware. To accomplish this, one of the things they do is fight efforts to make repairs economical. Apple basically builds their phones as glue sandwiches and solders all the components onto the motherboard for "design reasons." BMW/MB make the out-of-warranty repair experience painful with single-source expensive parts, so even if you find a good mechanic who charges reasonable labor rates, this sensor or that sub-assembly will cost thousands to replace. The only way to own one of these cars long term is to have the money and not care about spending it, or just throw in the towel and rent one forever in the form of a never-ending lease.
I think people in the US and Europe will finally get sick of this and realize they're being ripped off now that there's a huge secondary market for iDevices. China and India have huge middle class populations but they're less likely to blow $1100 on a phone than Americans are.
I'm not an MBA or accountant, but I think this is a very common thing. It's not in fashion accounting-wise to own a large number of assets. It's the same thing that's driving companies to the OpEx/cloud/subscription model of infrastructure.
What I don't know is why it isn't good for their accounting. Having untold quantities of prime retail space land and buildings on your books should be a good thing. For the MBAs or accountants out there...what's the reasoning? Is there some measure of revenue that gets hurt by owning things?
I'm 43 so I did grow up in an era where Sears, JCPenney and a couple of regional department stores were the source for everything that most middle class families bought. People forget how easy it is to find out about new products and buy them now, compared to even 20 years ago. Memories of Sears for me include the tail end of the catalog, and the place I saw home computers for the first time as well as video games. In those days, these stores were the way people found out about new things to buy, and in some respects were the tastemakers for the average non-fashionista crowd.
I think the hedge fund vultures swooping in and loading up the companies with debt was the accelerator (Toys R Us would probably still be here if they weren't in so much debt.) But the big thing appears to be too much inward focus and not keeping up with competitors. I wonder if this will eventually happen to Amazon as well. Sears was the country's largest employer for quite some time, and I'm sure most people would have considered it foolish to start a retail business that directly competed since they were untouchable. I think I read somewhere that Sears executives didn't even consider Walmart a competitor until they got bigger and started selling similar things.
Companies can't go chase every new idea like an ADHD kitten chasing laser pointers. But, they do need to keep an eye on what's happening and respond to trends. Walking into my local Sears is like walking back into 1985 or 1990. Too agile and you're just chasing the next fad, but milking the cash cow too much will kill it eventually.
I think people are overly concerned about the MBA-speak used, but aren't paying sufficient attention to the actions of said MBAs.
"Late-stage capitalism" or whatever you want to call it is about squeezing every single drop of productivity out of an already-stretched system. This is where the disruption comes in...everyone is focused on removing every pocket of slack. Replace taxi companies with a phone app that summons drivers directly to you to kill taxi companies. Outsource every single corporate service to the lowest bidder rather than hiring people directly to lower your costs. It's a race to the bottom and if you ask me, it is beginning to have an effect on society in general.
When I graduated in the late 90s, it was still very common for people to have decent mid-level jobs at large companies. A generation before, it was even more pronounced. Now, in the name of agile and disruption, businesses are killing any stability that was there in favor of contracting positions and outsourcing functions. The problem is this...in a previous time it was possible to party your way through a management degree, get randomly selected for some generic position at a company, and use that position to establish a decent family life. The societal change that's happening is that fewer people are able to stay employed in an area. This will eventually lead to people being more nomadic, having fewer children, renting apartments instead of buying houses, and not contributing to any sort of community.
Once you're out of your 20s, most people aren't really excited about pulling up stakes and moving across the country over and over again to chase yet another contract position. Those plants GM is closing are going to dump a ton of previously well-established workers into the nomad pool, chasing lower-wage positions. Union factory work used to be the only way for people with less education to earn enough to support a decent quality of life. This is the disruption people need to think about. If you put the work in by getting educated, your reward should be a stable living that lasts a career. The problem is that these cycles of consolidation and slack-removal are growing shorter and people are likely to experience a major disruption more than once in their working lives.
Economies that have humans involved need slack. The current system just assumes we're machines.
Medicine and law are a little different in that their professional schools are very regimented compared to undergrad university studies. You're right that they don't learn everything. But, anyone getting through medical or law school has a common baseline level of knowledge. They have to pass a licensing exam to move on to the next phase of their training (resident or junior lawyer.)
Every time I run into a "rockstar developer" or "systems ninja" with mile-wide holes in their skills I wish we in IT had a more formal profession and barrier to entry.
The way I see it, in order for society to function correctly and not devolve into a winner-take-all nightmare is to find a way to keep everyone employed. You need the super-geniuses who will advance the state of the art, good solid engineering/technician types who can problem solve and think critically, and yes you need something for the people who can't even graduate high school to do.The top two tiers start with a solid higher education experience, and the lower tier can be filled by vocational training.
20 years back I got a degree in chemistry. Other than being able to understand scientific discussions more than the average person, I don't directly use any knowledge I picked up in my job as a systems engineer. I do use a ton of the life skills I picked up along the way, such as:
- Being able to juggle multiple deadlines
- Taking in challenging material at a pretty rapid clip and making sense of it
- Troubleshooting complex problems and being able to reason my way through them
- Learning independence -- going to a big public university where no one directly cared about me was a good experience.
- And honestly, learning how to follow stupid rules, pick my battles, etc.
That's what university education should be. If you're an average person like me, you go through a course of study and join that middle tier of workers. If you're a super-genius, you move on to professional school or academia. What it isn't is an 18-month JavaScript bootcamp designed to make you a functional code monkey on Day 1 of your first job.
Universities should prepare students for jobs that don't exist by NOT preparing them for specific job skills. Give them the skills to pick up new skills on their own. And employers aren't blameless here -- on-the-job training of new grads needs to make a comeback.
"Still I had employees who would steal because they "saw how much money came through the store every day""
Obviously they shouldn't be stealing...but I've heard this argument from so many small business owners who complain about taxes, regulation, minimum wage, etc. There is no way a restaurant with massive profit margins is so cash-strapped that they can't afford to pay their employees a living wage, let alone $15/hr. If they don't want to pay people, then they should do all the work themselves and they'll be able to keep 100% of the profits after expenses. Think of a pizza place which has an even higher profit margin than a Subway...selling just a few pizzas during a shift pays for an employees' minimum wage and all the pizza places around me are extremely busy nearly all day. Paying someone $15 or $20 an hour isn't going to make or break you, and you shouldn't hire employees if it would.
It all goes back to the "entrepreneur superhero" mystique that small business owners wrap themselves in. "Why should I pay taxes? I'm a Job Creator!" Reality is that business owners have a sweet deal compared to wage earners. Every personal expense can be funneled through your company, reducing your profits and therefore your taxes. You can't do that on W-2 income. Most business owners I've seen are "employed" by their Subway franchise at a ridiculously low salary, and the franchise owns several houses, cars and other "capital equipment" that just happen to reside at the owner's house.
" No pity for a rich idiot who can't find pleasure in the world."
That's what I'm thinking too. How can you be unhappy when you can call someone and have anything you want, legal or illegal, delivered instantly? Or when you can make any problems disappear by paying someone? Or, if you're bored or need a change of scenery, book a first-class trip anywhere at a moment's notice?
Anyone who says having money is a burden for them is welcome to call me up and switch places. I would be the happiest person alive.
I don't know...if I had as much money as this guy had after being anointed a Twitter billionaire, the last thing I'd be doing is overdosing on drugs. If you're that rich you can pay for a non-contaminated known-good supply...and probably have a crew of people managing your intake.
That, and why is it that celebrities and rich people feel the need to do destructive things? Especially suicides...it just boggles my mind. You get these rockstars who have millions of fans, people of the opposite gender throwing themselves at them, and enough money to buy anything, go anywhere and experience anything...and they're depressed? It's inconceivable. Depression is not a disease of the fabulously wealthy. Money like that would solve any personal problem I had instantly.
> You think that shit does not get around?
It's very easy for a young employee to think that the industry is just an endless field of hot-swappable engineers and developers. Especially in certain markets (SF, Seattle, etc.) I hear there are thousands of nearly-identical openings. Never forget that it's very possible for that list of thousands to go down to a couple hundred, right after a massive tech company dumps 50,000 engineers onto the street in one shot (HP/HPE/CSC is a perfect example, or the mass firings at Microsoft.)
People talk. The industry is smaller than you think. If you're in any sort of specialty that makes you less hot-swappable, the talent pool and list of employers gets smaller. Companies have no-hire lists and acting like a jerk either on your way in or out is a good way to get on them.
I fully admit I'm old school at 43 years old. I'm not a hipster full stack developer stroking my goatee and downing another Red Bull so I can spend 7 more hours debugging JavaScript or Go or whatever my startup's phone app back end is running. But one thing I have experienced is cyclical labor markets. Being a professional may be looked down on today, but I think this is what allows people to survive in the down-swings of these cycles. 1998-2000 was almost exactly like this in the tech world...the only difference is the buzzwords and a lower number of pump and dump IPOs. Back them, if you could write HTML or do basic sysadmin work, you were hopping jobs every 6 months for 20% pay increases, just like web devs and cloud admins are now. You can't swing a dead cat without hitting a high paying job if you have certain skills in certain markets.
I have a feeling in the next 2 years we're going to experience another "interesting time"...maybe not as painful as 2000 or 2008, but bad for IT and developers. The free food, hip work environments and high compensation are going to evaporate and it will instantly become a buyers' market again. Anyone pulling this ghosting stuff, or doing the "Talk with my agent, I know Kubernetes!" rockstar prima donna thing is going to be remembered and not in a good way.
I know a lot of tech people are saying something like, "Good, sweet revenge for the crap companies pull" and I agree somewhat. But, do we really want to pull the two sides even further apart by cementing the idea that all IT people are a bunch of flaky, unprofessional ill-tempered nerds? Because if we do, I know several Indian consulting firms with thousands of perfectly polite needful-doers who are selling executives on that very premise.
My preferred solution? Ghost the crappy companies and work the system from within good environments. There are some out there. It's the only way to fix labor/management relations long term and bring it back to the time where companies actually wanted to keep employees.
Ever since LinkedIn rebuilt the site to look and act like Facebook, the self-promoter social media mavens have been all over it and treating it like Facebook. Most people who actively maintain their LinkedIn account enough to get counted in statistics (I assume Microsoft picks accounts with recent activity) are super-aggressive self-promoters. My assumption would be that these would be the type of people who are out hyping their startup's "AIMLBlockchain with More Cognitive Services" product and calling themselves blockchain developers.
I think that once the cryptocurrency bubble dies down people will find a bunch of uses for this technology...but it's super-bubbly now and anyone who can glue a few blockchain library Legos together into a semi-functional web service is getting paid big money now.
I remember reading something about this...The Dead Sea Effect maybe? From what I've seen, anyone who's able to find other work or doesn't really need the job takes the buyout. Then the company gets stuck with the people who stay behind, who are not going to find anything equal to or better than what they have, or are just so institutionalized that they can't go anywhere else. Then morale goes in the toilet, more people are laid off, and productivity gets worse each subsequent round.
(And yes, employee institutionalization is a thing. For those of you young enough to not have experienced it, companies used to hang onto employees forever, train them, and heavily invest in them so that it's a big loss if they leave. Huge employers like IBM, GE, AT&T, etc. basically had a completely internal labor market/talent pool because there was a belief in promoting from within. Former IBMers I've worked with tell me that the pay and opportunities used to be good enough that people wouldn't leave. Big contrast with today's 3-month contracts.)
I wonder who Verizon's latest crop of management consultants is. I've been seeing a ton of stories along these lines, almost exclusively at old-line companies. I think the execs are being told, "Listen, if we fire all the experienced people and replace them with college grads, our digital transformation will accelerate to unheard-of levels, AND you'll save a ton of money on salary!"
I'm well aware that large companies collect a lot of dead wood (or at least wood that isn't super-productive anymore.) But, as I've said I've seen this over and over again during the run-up of what I'll coin Dotcom Bubble 2.0. IBM is firing anyone in the US and Europe who isn't deemed hip enough to jump on the cloud/mobile/social/AIMLBlockchain/cognitive train. I saw a few months ago that AT&T is doing the same thing. HP/HPE/DXC dumped something like 60,000 people over the last couple of years during their spin-merge. It's almost like they're daring any attorney who might bring an age discrimination lawsuit to just try it and see how they're crushed. Even Microsoft, who was famous for never having to lay people off started doing so in the last few years...and they're not exactly hurting for money.
One thing I wonder is how many people being fired are from the "old school" days when a job with the phone company amounted to permanent employment. I'm assuming that's why they're giving them up to 60 months' salary and benefits...to discourage wrongful termination suits. All I know is this...I'm 43 and work very hard to stay current...and I'm sure that won't save me when the company I'm working for decides to fire me when I'm 55 and still years away from being able to access my retirement money.
It's depressing, but the reality is that successful people generally come from successful families with enough connections to get them what they need. It is still possible (but highly improbable) to make it into top positions based solely on skill, but the path is well worn for those lucky enough to have connections.
This is why people of normal means who want a good future for their kids push them so hard to get into the Ivy League or similar private schools. The price of the degree buys them access to the wealthy and well-connected. If they can somehow blend in with this crowd, the return on investment is incredible. There is no such thing as an unemployed Ivy League graduate at the low end of the ROI scale. And at the top, investment banking and management consulting are guaranteed paths to riches, as well as getting into top professional (law, medical, business) schools giving you access to the best jobs in those fields.
As far as code.org goes, I'm not sure why people are so concerned about exposing kids to this field. Offshore outsourcing and visa programs are the main drivers of salary depression...working on those should be the primary concern of developers because then compensation might have a chance of increasing for everyone.
$15K to move your stuff...don't forget 3-6% of the purchase price of the house, the cost to get a new mortgage, the lawyers' fees, any real estate transfer tax you may need to pay.
Even if you own your house free and clear, the transaction costs are in the thousands. Most people roll it into their mortgage and pretend they're not paying it, but they are. Doing this over and over again gets REALLY expensive over a lifetime.
Millenials get all the press, but there comes a time in people's lives where it actually makes sense to stay in one place for a while. For a lot of people, the lifestyle of moving across the country over and over again just to take another job isn't appealing. Either you're a permanent renter, or you end up spending insane amounts of money in real estate transaction costs. It's not just the house price...it's the mortgage origination fees, the legal fees, real estate commissions, transfer tax, the cost to move, etc.
Moving all over the country made sense back in the good old days of semi-permanent employment. A company would spend a lot of time and effort on you and it was in their best interest to keep you employed. When I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, it was still very common for a company to move an employee to wherever a new promotion opportunity was, all expenses paid. Lots of kids I knew had their parents transferred. Today, IMO that makes little sense. The cost is almost always mostly paid by the employee, and there's no guarantee you'll have a job 6 months after you uproot your family and move.
And, I know I'm going to get dinged as being old, but there's something to be said about putting down roots and becoming a part of a local community. You don't get that if you're chasing contract positions across the country and never in one place for more than a year or two. Look at military families as an example of what frequent moving around does to a kid's ability to make and maintain friendships.
"Ivy League people "take care" of each other."
I can attest to this. I've had "good school" managers who have insisted we hire "good school" candidates over people who were clearly better qualified, and this is for regular-person jobs, not some high position. You will always be able to find someone in the alumni network who is in a position to give you a job, period.
The public university equivalent is the fraternity/sorority network. Here again, you are paying for access (both in money and healthy liver cells.) It's just that the payoff isn't as big in most cases. Your fraternity bro who constantly says, "Dude, my dad owns a dealership" might be able to get you a job as a sales manager at that dealership...but it's less likely you'll get the executive positions a management consulting job will groom you for.