Saying that all companies will eventually get breached is, in my opinion, correct. The unfortunate thing is that nothing will ever be done to even try to improve the situation, because it's too easy for companies to just buy "cyber-insurance" as opposed to playing cat and mouse with "security researchers." In this situation, they don't even have to have the insurance company pay for credit monitoring, because they can give it away for free by just providing the same service they used to sell.
Unless you put nothing on the Internet and have a strict, enforceable we-will-fire-you-immediately policy for people who inadvertently leave the doors open, there's very little chance companies can stay ahead of attacks forever. The bigger the company, the worse it is. Outsourced IT makes security response many times slower as well because the problem has to filter down two reporting chains before it gets fixed (assuming anyone notices.) Even the NSA wasn't able to keep a lid on their information and exploit vault...that should tell you something. All the security in the world is nothing when you have humans in the loop.
What will be interesting to see is what happens when more companies start looking to put core systems into the public cloud. Obviously cloud providers have a huge incentive to keep things safe, but nothing's perfect. And the more complex things get, the more surface area an attacker has to work on. I'm sure there are more than a few "don't be like Equifax" FUD-laden sales calls being made in CIO offices all over the world lately.
The truth is that security has zero ROI in an environment where you can just say "oops," write a small check and move on like nothing happened. So far, nothing bad has happened to any company that has lost customer data. People still shop at Target, Home Depot, etc. and still keep their money in banks that have experienced data loss incidents. People just assume that these things happen and nothing can be done about it, and I agree to some extent.
I don't know if everyone understands this, but board-level executives at large companies don't do much beyond promoting the company and "providing vision." They rely on their army of foot soldiers to do the actual work, so none of them are actually involved in daily operations. It only makes sense that the CIO and CSO were sacrificial lambs, and now the CEO as well. It's what you sign up for in these positions. Your job consists of making a few key decisions after seeing 3 options provided by a management consultant, running around the world speaking and doing CxO things, collecting a huge salary and perks package, and cheerleading for the company. (And, most big-company executives server on several corporate boards of directors.) The implied rule is that if something bad happens, it might be your turn to be scapegoat...which is fine because you'll be paid a severance package and can just jump to the next company.
The interesting thing is that scandals like this are going to be a huge win for the cloud promoters... "Look at Equifax, even they can't keep their data safe. Our cloud is way safer." And with most CIOs I know being risk minimizers, write-a-check outsourcers and unable to listen to their underlings, cloud providers will see a huge benefit.
The difference between an effective and ineffective PM is astounding in most places I've worked. On one end you have a forceful PM who will beat up their resources and harass their managers until the work is done. On the other are the PMPs clinging for dear life to their copy of the PMBOK who are unable to get anyone to do what they want.
You can tell a PM isn't so great when you hear the exact same phrases and jargon repeated in the exact same order on endless conference calls. [1] I'm not saying it's easy either...I could never do that job because I can't coerce people to do what needs to be done. And when it comes down to it, that's a PM's only job...well, that and checking the boxes and filling out Gantt charts.
[1] I swear that one PM I worked with would say "Good morning, who just joined the call?" in the EXACT same tone, rhythm and texture at the sound of every beep on conference calls. It was like a machine!
Now that my kids are entering school, I wonder about this topic a lot. The thing that stinks is that there aren't really any do-overs with this stuff and you only find out if you did the right thing years later. Our current approach has been to praise good work where appropriate and make it clear that it takes hard work to keep producing consistent good work. Allowing a kid to make mistakes while keeping them working hard enough to do well is a big balancing act that I'm still struggling with.
Telling your kids they're smart all the time does 2 things - it ties your approval to their success, so no shocker that they're going to do anything including cheating to get grades at that point. It also means that when they do fail, which they will, it's going to be very hard to bounce back from it. I've seen this happen to people close to me...either they've hit an academic setback that they just can't recover from, or they get out in the real world and fail at something, and it's devastating. If you've been spending 22 years of your life getting straight As and being smarter than everyone else, then hit the workplace and figure out that it's not always the smartest one that gets ahead, I could see that being a huge blow. I studied chemistry in college, and was not a model student by any means. An organic chem course I took was shared with premeds and prepharmacy students and there was rampant cheating among that group...simply because they had no choice but to get an A in it. I was lucky to get a C but it was an honest C.:-) Pre-health programs are so oversubscribed that they just take the top GPAs to fill the class, so anything less than a 4.0 means you won't get into a competitive major. The year I did this, there were 1500 or so students competing for 200 slots in a pharmacy program...talk about pressure to perform and a crushing defeat if you don't make it.
I agree that telling your kids they're super-geniuses when they're not is a really bad idea. What I don't think is the right approach is the Tiger Mom approach, where you tell your kid they're stupid when they get a B+ on an assignment, send them to hours and hours of post-school tutoring, force them to take violin lessons or whatever you think is going to get them into the Ivy League schools and law or medical school immediately after. I think that might work with some kids and some cultural settings, but a lot of kids are just going to end up hating their parents and rebelling when it really does come down to crunch time (i.e. college application years.) Even the original Tiger Mom kid Amy Chua said in her book that this approach doesn't work on everyone and only grudgingly agreed that all that bullying got her to Harvard, Yale Law School and a Biglaw job, at the expense of family relationships.
The thing that sucks is that these days it's almost not acceptable to fail, or realize you made a mistake and make a correction. The US is _way_ more tolerant of failure than Asian countries - I read something a few weeks ago about how Japanese companies still don't hire experienced employees...most technical jobs are obtained in the last year of school and if you miss out on it, you're permanently disqualified. There are a couple of things like this in the US -- it's impossible to recover from bad grades to get into medical school or law school, and it's impossible to get certain jobs like corporate law firms, investment banking or management consulting without doing the exact prescribed steps. But, we need to realize that outside of these rarified slots that only a few will achieve, most of us are going to wind up normal people and do OK in life.
At the executive level, you can assume that anyone holding that position has no actual expertise and sometimes no experience. Anyone with a CxO title is appointed to that position, and is usually well-connected on the boards of several companies. BUT -- good people in this position know they have to hire people who actually do understand the areas they're responsible for. If she wasn't capable of doing this, or was just hiring her friends for key positions, this is the result you get. I've been doing IT work in big companies for over 20 years now and have witnessed stuff like this over and over. It's a constant battle to do a good job when you have executives hiring incompetent people at the top, offshoring or outsourcing key IT functions for big kickbacks, etc. (I'm assuming that when we peel back the covers on this, the unpatched system will be a result of the IT department getting so disconnected that a simple system change takes 3 months and people on 2 different continents coordinating it.)
What I don't like about IT in general is that people can mess up badly, get fired or be allowed to "retire", then go to another company and mess things up there as well. I would love the idea of a professional organization that would ban incompetent people from working in the field after a fair finding of facts. This would really cut down on the number of slapped-together "solutions" that cause breaches like this in the long run. If my reputation were on the line, I wouldn't rush through a system design the way I'm sometimes forced to by schedules. As it is, IT people can do the equivalent of joining the French Foreign Legion and come out on the other end with a clean reputation. (For those unfamiliar, the FFL is France's overseas military force who basically accepts anyone who wants to escape their current situation and grants them a new identity in exchange for military service.)
One interesting thing Canada could do is make it incredibly easy for US citizens to work in Canada. I know I'd move there if I didn't have things tying me down in the US and could have an easily portable work visa. The climate (both literal and political) is better in my opinion...the issue is that there need to be more than a couple of standout tech companies to create an ecosystem. Nortel was absolutely huge until they went bankrupt after the first dotcom bubble, and BlackBerry has basically run its course.
I do hear that Toronto and Vancouver are in the middle of a housing bubble though, so I don't know if now is the right time to move there. But, if US citizens could easily work in the Canadian labor market and not be tethered to an employer the way H-1B visa holders here are, I think a lot of people would jump at the chance to move. I've looked into it in the past, and apparently US citizens don't get any special preference and have to deal with immigration the same way everyone else does.
If they really wanted to accelerate a move, just implement a program where a US citizen with a certain skillset and education can walk into any Canadian embassy and turn in their US passport in exchange for a Canadian one. Overall quality of life seems much better there, so it would just be a matter of convincing people of that.
"Today's union is all about promising workers the moon while skirting the reality that is unskilled labor will never make a living wage."
Actually, it's the only way an unskilled worker will make a living wage, especially now. If you're approaching this from the position of being a skilled worker, change your perspective a little. Suppose you lost the IQ lottery, or had a crappy home life that interfered with your education, and didn't have employers and recruiters beating down your door begging you to come work in Silicon Valley for $350K a year. The only way you can make your situation better is by finding an employer who will pay you a reasonable wage throughout your career. Unions bargain with employers to ensure they can't get away with paying minimum wage in the most expensive labor market in the country. They also negotiate things like sick time, pension and other benefits that no one employee would be able to negotiate for themselves.
A good real-world example that doesn't involve manufacturing or public service (since those are hot-button areas with unions) is supermarkets. Unionized supermarkets are one type of employment that allows semi-skilled workers to have something of a career. Someone with no education or technical ability can be paid enough to survive and have something of a comfortable existence. They'll never get rich, but seniority ensures that they're not going to get kicked out when they're 40 the way a lot of IT folks do, for example.
A friend of mine in college had a part time job in a warehouse for a large supermarket chain. According to him, the difference in outlook between a part time college worker looking to pay some bills and a full-time employee trying to survive is very different. It was a crappy job - hot in the summer, cold in the winter and mind-numbing...but some of the people he worked with were hoping for the day they could go full time and fully join the union. Because once that happened, they would be protected from firing, they would get to do slightly more interesting jobs like operating forklifts, and their pay would increase.
Keep this in mind as we rapidly head toward a world where a much higher percentage of the population falls into the "unskilled" category...and today's knowledge workers are going to be a good example.
I'm actually an advocate of companies retaining most of their employees as FTEs. Current accounting rules and tax law doesn't make this as appealing as it used to be. Too many companies pull a Pontias Pilate and wash their hands of any employee responsibility by hiring contracting firms to do things that aren't their "core competency." It's mainly these contracting firms that turn around and treat their employees like garbage to increase margin on their outsourcing deal. Living in a place like Silicon Valley and earning just over minimum wage as a cafeteria worker must require a huge sacrifice or a multi-hour commute to work a cafeteria job. If the contracting companies did a far superior job than FTEs would, I'd say they should definitely handle the work. But as we've seen in IT, contractors lowball salaries, bring in H-1Bs and offshore any work that doesn't require a physical presence. Services contractors like food service and janitorial companies will do the bare minimum required to make their employees not quit...and that bar is very low when you consider the exploitable nature of that workforce.
What I would like to see on the skilled side of the house is a guild system that replaces the patchwork of vendor certifications, for-profit schools and other training methods. A traditional union is great for commodity workers, but a guild or professional organization works best for workers that don't have uniform levels of experience and aren't doing a simple job. If a company knew the baseline quality of someone they hired, that sure beats having the hiring manager and the team the candidate would work with try to decipher what on their resume is a lie or exaggeration. Most IT interviews I've been on have had a quiz component, and I'm sure that's because the company has been burned by bullshitters too often. It's not enough to graduate with a CS degree, and the field of IT and development is gotten so huge that it's impossible to be great at everything. I'm a big-time generalist and advocate for more people being like this, but I simply have to choose what I'm good at this year and keep shifting focus to be useful in any one area.
Guilds and professional orgs would pretty much be the only thing that would work to organize technology workers. There are way too many prima donnas, "rockstars" and people who would never stoop to the level of a lower-skilled worker. This is why it works well for doctors, a group known for having egos that have an observable gravitational field. The organization is paid by its members to pay for laws that limit the ability to practice and keep the number of new entrants to a minimum. I'd actually like to see this because I really hate the fact that someone can be totally incompetent, get fired, then do the equivalent of joining the French Foreign Legion and get hired somewhere else as if nothing happened.
I concede we're very near the top of the Second Dotcom Bubble, but this is pretty crazy. There has to come a point where technology companies, even the startups, don't see the benefits from being in Silicon Valley anymore.
I live near New York City, and people love to complain about how expensive it is here -- CA is a whole new level. You really do pay a premium to live near NYC...taxes are high and housing prices are way more than you would find in other parts of the country. Metro NY has similar issues that SV does that distort the housing market -- Big law fiirms, investment banking, publishing and traditional media are still centered here; all of these have their share of very high earners. You also have lots of the "old money" crowd who are just independently wealthy after hundreds of years of inheritance. It makes it very hard for truly working class people to buy real estate, and the jobs that they traditionally did are also being squeezed out. I really like where I am and want to stick around, but plenty of people don't care and are just saying "screw this" as they move to North Carolina. One person I know sold a crappy 1950s Levitt house for nearly half a million bucks and now lives in a huge McMansion on 2 acres of land in NC, and their story is being repeated over and over.
I'm not sure why tech companies feel they need to pile into San Francisco or Seattle. You can do work anywhere these days and there are plenty of smart people all over the world. If you have to pay some junior JavaScript guy $250K just so he can keep his head above water, no wonder companies are offshoring all their work. Forget about hiring away some "rockstar" employee from a rival startup -- those guys must be laughing all the way to the bank in their Ferrari. I think that if companies felt they could trust every employee, they'd love the idea of not maintaining office space in the most expensive parts of the country.
If a company is capable of simplifying their product lines enough and delivering a clear advertising, then the traditional sales position is dead. I can't stand talking to salespeople, especially tech salespeople, so that would be a huge positive for me. I've never bought anything based on the recommendation of a salesperson, and don't know people who have. In IT however, CIOs tend to be extremely gullible when it comes to software and hardware sales pitches. It has something to do with all the free dinners and strip club visits, I'm sure.
An interesting example of this hit me when I was attending a tech conference in a big traditional convention center a couple months back. Those convention centers and the conferences themselves are still set up for a previous era, where the only time vendors got new orders was at the annual trade show. I could almost see the lines of eager junior salespeople in identical suits outside the now-dead onsite Kinko's location lining up to fax their orders to HQ. Now, people just order online for all but the most complex products.
I'd be happy if more companies went this route than playing the H-1B visa scheme or sending every scrap of work to Tata or Infosys because their competitors are doing it. And this is coming from someone who lives near a high cost city. HR departments, don't do anything their competitors don't do, and they will only listen to management consultants as a source of new ideas. It explains why nearly every company suddenly jumped on the outsourcing bandwagon at the same time, adopted the Google open office stuff, and enacted all sorts of other management fads. Maybe we have a mole inside of McKinsey who's starting to plant employee-friendly ideas in client's heads!
Satellite offices in cheaper parts of the country aren't new. Even IBM (before they went nuts and moved everyone to India) and other deep-pocketed companies had them back in the day, and that was when it was harder to stay in touch. The only difference was that the office was in Pittsburgh and not Pune, or Moline and not Mumbai. I remember reading something some time back that mentioned IBM would strategically locate big engineering facilities just far enough away from large business centers to be a short flight or medium length drive. They'd import the workers or hire from local university talent pools, and the execs would be mollified because they still felt like they had control. IBM used to have big facilities in Burlington, VT and Rochester, MN that fit that description perfectly. They probably didn't have to pay anything near what they'd have to pay for people in Westchester or Dutchess County, NY.
Spreading out the wealth of a big company over a bigger area is a good thing. Silicon Valley/SF and California in general are out of control in terms of housing prices and cost of living. Metro New York (where I live) isn't far behind at all. If enough employees could be convinced to move to a low cost city, sell the house and save 2/3 of its value while buying a mansion with the other 1/3, that would definitely lower housing prices. You can get over $1M for a total dump in SV, over $400K in outer NYC suburbs and way more when you get closer to the city. That's lots of peoples' retirement fallback plan from what I can tell.
I just think it's funny that companies are "rediscovering" that it's cheaper to employ people who don't have million-dollar houses to maintain. Expectations do need to come down on both sides. Companies have to be willing to invest in people, and employees can't demand unreasonable salaries or else they're just going to continue with the offshoring. The market can't sustain conditions where everyone who can fog a mirror and write Rust or Node.js gets over $200K, nor can it maintain a world with only super-rich executives and massive unemployment in every other class.
The article summary says it right there -- everyone in startup land is trying to be Steve Jobs. Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos fame even wears black turtlenecks to try to complete the look.
It's just the personality version of cargo-culting. Plenty of business types do this but most don't have the degree of success they think they will: - Tons of people try for the Jobs personality, or the Linus Torvalds personality, etc. Most end up only picking up the mannerisms and not the intelligence part. (Linus acts like a jerk, but he's usually correct and doesn't seem capable of being nice about it.) - Go into any airport bookstore and look over any of the books aimed at MBA types. Since most of the customers are consultants, it's a pretty easy predictor of what "brilliant innovative groundbreaking paradigm shifts" will be tried at their customers -- and subsequently by tons of others. - Similarly, any executive who starts using other executives' direct quotes is definitely wishing for similar success. My favorite of late, which I've heard come out of tons of "thought leaders" is the "2 pizza team" concept that Jeff Bezos talked about when he referred to keeping product groups small enough to feed with 2 pizzas.
If it requires taking LSD, they'll do that too. It's just a bunch of MBA weenies emulating their heroes.
"If a company like AT&T treats you poorly then QUIT! Go work for another company that pays you better and treats you well!"
People love to say this whenever workers try to claw back some power. The honest truth is that all employers treat people poorly to some degree. And they love it when more people say that anyone who complains about it should quit, because it just makes their job easier. Compared to today, the 50s and 60s were a golden age of employment because there was a balance in the employer/employee relationship, things were stable, and employers grudgingly agreed to allow workers to follow a career path.
Without some universal check on employers' power, employers will just cut and squeeze until there's nothing left to squeeze. They'd love to see everyone working for minimum wage...no wait, let's get rid of the minimum wage...no wait, let's just hire everyone as an independent contractor and offshore everything that can be offshored to TCS or Wipro or Accenture. That universal check would be a union or trade organization. Otherwise, if you try to be the nice employer and offer a few concessions, the other employers will just get more evil in response and drive you out of business.
The CWA wants the AT&T from a previous era back, and in some respects I would be behind that too. Companies' power to offshore, outsource and basically get rid of any group that isn't 100% profit-generating is a lot of what contributes to middle class instability.
I'm barely old enough to remember when "old" AT&T and the RBOCs existed...I was 10 when they were ordered de-monopolized. But from what I've heard from people alive previously, getting a job with one of these companies was a guaranteed ticket to lifetime stability. In addition, engineering was actually done correctly because there wasn't constant pressure to squeeze every single cost out of the system. I know everyone's going to say monopolies are bad, but they do provide the most stable class of jobs. Maybe monopolies are bad, but the alternative of a ton of cut-throat competitors isn't good for society either. In the model we have, public companies (and private ones controlled by hedge funds) are forced to implement whatever cost-saving trick is in vogue every quarter to make the numbers. A lot of these tricks, like spinning off "expensive" employees into a separate company to reduce benefits, offshoring to a service provider to hide expenses on a different balance sheet line, or constantly squeezing workers to get the tiniest drop of productivity out of them are detrimental to employment in general. Verizon did similar things as well, when they spun out Verizon Wireless. VZW workers get way fewer benefits than the CWA workers in Verizon proper.
I just wish people would get it out of their heads that unions are bad. Especially in the face of automation and offshoring, they're basically the only chance an employee has against their employer. Employers have spent decades convincing employees that they have their best interests in mind and that we're all friends. I think there needs to be a more adversarial labor/management relationship put back into the mix to swing the pendulum back toward the middle more. There's a big difference between "we can't fire you for any reason" demands and standing up when management says "we're moving 20,000 engineering positions to India effective immediately so that I can buy another mansion, and by the way we're still friends, right?"
I'm not defending them, but how else would you propose preventing someone from running up a whole ton of debt, skipping out on it, and then doing it again at another creditor? The best way is to have some sort of equal-access clearinghouse of information on consumers.
The problem is that people are sometimes irresponsible. It's not even just regular consumers...many business owners and wealthy people just go around starting companies, load them up with debt and bankrupt them. That's allowed under the current system...after all they're just a lowly employee of that company when it went bankrupt. It would take someone like a bankruptcy judge or the IRS to make the next hop to connect the dots, but it often doesn't happen. This is why you sometimes see brand-new mansions built a year prior bank-owned or in foreclosure.
Equifax and the 2 other credit bureaus have a ton of non-credit related information on consumers as well. It will be interesting to see what else was not reported as part of the breach.
I'm going to sound like an old fart, but a lot of these "cyberattacks" end up being down to a very dumb misconfiguration like leaving FTP open, failure to patch security holes, and things like leaving data on unprotected public cloud storage. Part of my job is being a technical mentor to some of our more junior staff, and what I'm seeing is a lot of developers and CS people who really don't know the guts of how IT works. I'm not saying people should go back to punch cards and assembler, but having some clue about TCP/IP, DNS, what an open port on a server means, how a firewall works, etc. would go a long way to preventing some of the dumber things I've seen. Most of this is very much abstracted, and in a "cloud-first" world it's even more so. The network is just assumed to work underneath everything else, and i think this is where a lot of the misconfiguration problems get missed.
We may or may not see what actually happened. It could have been some state-sponsored hacking group planning a painstaking attack requiring intimate knowledge of everything. But knowing what I know about corporate IT, it was most likely some lowest-bidder contractor being forced to pull another 12-hour shift and missing something. Until companies have to actually pay for these issues, all we're going to get is "free credit monitoring" for a year, which costs them nothing, and _maybe_ we'll get a check for 11 cents from a class action lawsuit 20 years from now when it winds its way through the system.
They're settled, not litigated. No company's legal team is crazy enough to go to trial on something like this. Especially when it's VC money, they'll just peel off a couple million and throw it at the problem. It sure beats having your company dragged in front of the world every time a new court date comes up in a case that could last years. Large, established companies do this too. It's cheaper for GM to pay a huge settlement and fine than risk damaging their brand over a faulty ignition switch -- especially when you have an admissible e-mail that has an engineer describing the design flaw and expressing concern. (link)
People who file founded lawsuits like this should get settlements. They're totally done career-wise in the startup spectrum, and even established companies might consider her too radioactive... Most lawsuit settlements of this size can allow you to live out your life assuming you can invest carefully. Since neither side is talking about it, I'm assuming it's a big number and she signed a deal saying she would never speak of it again.
Everyone is about to pile in here calling people who can act normally around the opposite sex "SJWs" and similar. But, this behavior is very common at startups, and it almost always starts with the "executives." I'm using quotes because in these cases the executives are usually either fraternity types who just got out of school, or fully-grown man-children. When you give a bunch of glorified salespeople and dealmakers millions of dollars in VC money, they're going to create a club for their friends. It's youth, inexperience and the sales culture, and setting a bad "tone at the top" trickles all the way down the hierarchy.
People like to pretend that sexual harassment doesn't exist, but a lot of people haven't worked 100 hour weeks at startups. I've mainly done corporate work my entire career, and the only time I've seen any even slightly inappropriate behavior is among the salespeople. What I find strange is that people like these guys and the CEO of Uber can get to the point of running fairly large organizations and still think it's OK to act like they're partying their way through sophomore year. Most men I know grew up after that phase of their life...but as we know there are always exceptions.
The problem with great SLAs is that if you really want your data all the time, you have to plan for it and have another copy somewhere that isn't being affected by the bad day that your primary provider is having...no matter how remote the chance. Enterprise IT folks deal with this all the time, balancing need for always-on vs. the cost to make that happen.
Some outages are worse than others too. Cloud providers can have situations where they'll lose access to small portions of their environment, but when you're talking about something wrong with the -entire- software-defined storage soup that those Google Drive URLs feed into....bad day all around.
"But even more so is the legal aspect of licensing. Many professions require state licensing and I'd bet it's not going to be easy to get state licensing boards and legislatures to overturn those laws to allow robots or AI to perform the same tasks."
Licensed professions are going to be the last to go, simply because they're paying for favorable laws. We in the technology sector could learn a thing or two about these two counter-examples: - The health professions are regulated so tightly that there's almost no chance their members will feel any pain. The medical profession tightly controls the supply of medical school slots, assuring that anyone graduating from one is guaranteed to be very wealthy because demand for doctors is always greater than supply. Costs are kept high because their lobbying basically boils down to "Do whatever you want with the insurance system as long as we keep getting paid the same, or we'll unleash our campaign machine." And professional licensing is intentionally difficult to obtain and requires effort to maintain, ensuring minimum quality. - A counter-example of late is the legal profession. The Bar Association in the US actually encouraged the creation of more law schools, and offshoring of routine legal tasks. The difference in outcomes for law students now compared to 25 years ago is staggering. In the past, law school was a guaranteed ticket to a respected job with a good salary, and graduating from one of the top 14 law schools was an express ticket to elite law firm positions and astronomical salaries. Today, the only hope of making back the investment in education is to be at the top 10% of one of those top 14 law schools, be picked up by one of the white shoe firms, and stick it out until you become a partner. When a profession doesn't support its members, this is what happens.
I think that as long as the licensed professions (health, engineering, etc.) can keep a lid on automation through regulation, members will be able to keep working. If not, they have enough lobbying power to ensure their members can be bought out. An example here would be the longshoreman's unions. When containerization occurred, and manual labor wasn't needed to move cargo on and off ships, their members were paid for the rest of their careers out of the savings that the ports and shipping companies realized. I think something similar will have to happen with automation.
The problem with this argument is that wealth isn't created. It's like energy conservation -- it's a fixed supply of money that just keeps getting shifted around. If I pay someone $10, I have $10 less and they have $10 more, but the only way wealth can be created or destroyed is by changing the money supply. In previous generations in the US, this fixed-size pie was more evenly divided for a few reasons; - High corporate taxes meant that companies avoided them by paying workers more and giving them more generous benefits, because there was a point where it made more sense to distribute the next dollar as an expense rather than declare it as profit. - Workers had more rights and a greater voice in their salaries and working conditions. Now it's a race to the bottom, which is going to go into warp speed as people claw and kill each other for the last available jobs at any wage. - There were fewer ways for high net worth individuals and companies to hide their income. Now, there are way more tax loopholes and offshore tax havens to park profits and keep them from being taxed or used domestically. - In general, wealth is being hoarded. Rich people buy the occasional yacht or mansion, but these purchases don't add up to the same effect as employing a bunch of people in a business. - Globalization means that businesses can just pick the cheapest country this year and offshore all their operations for a fraction of what they would pay workers in their home country, further accelerating the race to the bottom.
Short of increasing or decreasing the money supply by manipulating interest rates or buying/selling debt, how do you create wealth? It's definitely a fixed pie.
From the summary: ""Employees need to think of themselves as replaceable in a way that propels them into action," Salemi says, "so they can focus on continuously learning and sharpening their skills."
Learning what? Sharpening their skills for what job? My problem with people saying we should stick with the age-old advice of training for the next better job, is that they don't see that most people won't be able to get a better job. The Industrial Revolution mechanized farm work and sent farmers to factories. Improvements in manufacturing sent factory workers to clerical jobs. Office automation via IT and software killed large-scale clerical work and sent those workers to the service industry. Automation of the service industry sends these workers...nowhere. Automation of intelligence (for example, law school grads being replaced by an algorithm) sends them...nowhere, with lots of debt.
Basically, we've come to the end of the line for the next-best-job fix. For the vast majority of people incapable of handling anything beyond a simple job, this will mean they'll be unemployed and unable to get new work at reasonable pay. And it's not just factory workers and drivers...large corporations routinely pay employees fairly decent salaries to manually execute an unchanging algorithm on a stack of work. We're either going to have to make work for people or realize that not everyone can be employed...and hopefully not resort to drastic measures to fix it.
I think we hit the peak usefulness of the "retrain for a better job" advice back in the early 90s when large corporations got around to destroying their "legacy" white-collar workforces. This was driven by computerization of clerical office work finally reaching a point where permanently fewer humans were needed. Back when I first graduated from college (around 1998), one of my first IT jobs was with a huge life insurance company. According to some of the old-timers I was working under, the then-sparsely populated headquarters was jammed wall-to-wall with various clerical workers up until the 80s or so. The HQ took up two Manhattan city blocks, plus a huge tower uptown, plus they had tons of large regional offices around the country. It was apparently so full that the company staggered start times so that crowds didn't overwhelm the elevators and escalators in the building. Maybe some of those clerical workers got better jobs, but I don't think that's going to happen this time around.
The fundamental problem that needs to be solved is this: If you want to continue with a consumer-based society, you must find some way to allow everyone to sell their labor for a price that allows them to continue consuming and keeping businesses alive. This includes everyone -- not just STEM graduates, CS people, programmers, data scientists, etc. The economy only works when the majority of people can afford to participate at a level appropriate to their skills. Large fully automated cloud data centers employ 20 security guards, HVAC techs, disk-pullers and rack-and-stackers...not 5000 system administrators. Automated warehouses employ a couple of robot-minders. Automated trucks employ zero truck drivers.
If we still have to cling to the idea that everyone has to have a job and earn money to be worth anything in society, how do we avoid nasty problems that crop up when the majority of people are unemployed and desperate? Technology people tend not to understand this, but look outside the tech bubble and see what kind of work the vast majority of people do all day. It's repetitive, automatable and may go away very soon.
The MCSE bootcamps of 1999 have returned. It's just the usual crowd of technical training/education folks trying to squeeze a few bucks out of this bubble before it pops. You're always going to get people trying to take a shortcut to the big money whenever there's a "shortage" of qualified people. Back in the 90s, the MCSE camps were taking people off the streets who'd barely
My opinion is that these bootcamps are only good if they actually teach the fundamentals, but I'm sure they skip most of that and teach codemonkeying in whatever JavaScript framework is hot this week. It makes sense too -- most of he graduates are going to wind up as very junior front-end web developers tweaking layouts and doing simple work. However, there will come a point where these junior developers will need to know more than how to drive Node.js. If you don't understand at least something about how networks, the browser, the naked non-frameworked DOM, and the underlying protocols work, you won't progress beyond a certain phase. if you don't have the internal drive to keep learning, and are just doing it for the money, there's a definite stopping point where you won't move up. At that point, you may end up some random manager or project manager, but the odds are that you'll be out as soon as the economy sours and the web startup you've been coding for tanks. Whether you get another job depends on how good you are, and you will be competing with some very senior people for every position when everyone's going through hard times.
A personal example of this in action is my current challenge at work. I've been doing a combination of systems integration, end user computing and system engineering work for quite some time in an environment that's very sensitive to change -- there's plenty of new things coming in all the time but my focus hasn't been on web-related stuff. All of a sudden, one of the company's core products is being rewritten from scratch for the cloud. We're going from on-premises traditional VMWare and networks to 100 MPH "OMG, dudebro, SoftwareDefined RubyRustNodeAngular ChefPuppetCICDAnsibleJenkins VagrantGithubSlack JIRADockerKubernetes, at web scale!" A lot of the traditional systems people I'm working with aren't taking to it well. However, I've always been one to dig in and figure things out. THIS is where fundamentals are important...instead of all of those tools being magic boxes, learning them with an eye towards what's running underneath them is the key. If you don't have a good grounding, and learn these by going through online tutorials, you're only going to be able to use them as magic boxes and won't be able to effectively diagnose what's happening when your tower of tools breaks down. Bootcamp grads won't get this. CS grads from Stanford won't get this either. The important thing to remember is that no matter what the MBAs say, IT and dev is a profession and a skilled trade combined, and it takes a long time as an apprentice to get good.
What do you propose we do with the people who can't just learn to code? Society doesn't pay people to do a lot of the things you mention unless they're truly exceptional. How do you propose we allow people to make a living while maintaining the money-based economy we have?
Think outside of the dev/IT world for a second. Not everyone is super-brilliant, or even latently super-brilliant. Most people need jobs that they can just show up at, perform a set of tasks, and go home when it's done. I'd argue that lots of corporate jobs paying decent salaries boil down to applying a fixed set of rules to an input stack of work. There are a lot more modern shepherds and manual farmers out there in the world than you think. Before all the factory work was offshored or moved to non-union states, low-skilled people could have a decent lifestyle. This is just the next step -- and it's not going to end well unless we figure out a balance between the Luddites and the ultra-wealthy robot owning class locking themselves in fortresses.
Slashdot Mirror
Saying that all companies will eventually get breached is, in my opinion, correct. The unfortunate thing is that nothing will ever be done to even try to improve the situation, because it's too easy for companies to just buy "cyber-insurance" as opposed to playing cat and mouse with "security researchers." In this situation, they don't even have to have the insurance company pay for credit monitoring, because they can give it away for free by just providing the same service they used to sell.
Unless you put nothing on the Internet and have a strict, enforceable we-will-fire-you-immediately policy for people who inadvertently leave the doors open, there's very little chance companies can stay ahead of attacks forever. The bigger the company, the worse it is. Outsourced IT makes security response many times slower as well because the problem has to filter down two reporting chains before it gets fixed (assuming anyone notices.) Even the NSA wasn't able to keep a lid on their information and exploit vault...that should tell you something. All the security in the world is nothing when you have humans in the loop.
What will be interesting to see is what happens when more companies start looking to put core systems into the public cloud. Obviously cloud providers have a huge incentive to keep things safe, but nothing's perfect. And the more complex things get, the more surface area an attacker has to work on. I'm sure there are more than a few "don't be like Equifax" FUD-laden sales calls being made in CIO offices all over the world lately.
The truth is that security has zero ROI in an environment where you can just say "oops," write a small check and move on like nothing happened. So far, nothing bad has happened to any company that has lost customer data. People still shop at Target, Home Depot, etc. and still keep their money in banks that have experienced data loss incidents. People just assume that these things happen and nothing can be done about it, and I agree to some extent.
I don't know if everyone understands this, but board-level executives at large companies don't do much beyond promoting the company and "providing vision." They rely on their army of foot soldiers to do the actual work, so none of them are actually involved in daily operations. It only makes sense that the CIO and CSO were sacrificial lambs, and now the CEO as well. It's what you sign up for in these positions. Your job consists of making a few key decisions after seeing 3 options provided by a management consultant, running around the world speaking and doing CxO things, collecting a huge salary and perks package, and cheerleading for the company. (And, most big-company executives server on several corporate boards of directors.) The implied rule is that if something bad happens, it might be your turn to be scapegoat...which is fine because you'll be paid a severance package and can just jump to the next company.
The interesting thing is that scandals like this are going to be a huge win for the cloud promoters... "Look at Equifax, even they can't keep their data safe. Our cloud is way safer." And with most CIOs I know being risk minimizers, write-a-check outsourcers and unable to listen to their underlings, cloud providers will see a huge benefit.
The difference between an effective and ineffective PM is astounding in most places I've worked. On one end you have a forceful PM who will beat up their resources and harass their managers until the work is done. On the other are the PMPs clinging for dear life to their copy of the PMBOK who are unable to get anyone to do what they want.
You can tell a PM isn't so great when you hear the exact same phrases and jargon repeated in the exact same order on endless conference calls. [1] I'm not saying it's easy either...I could never do that job because I can't coerce people to do what needs to be done. And when it comes down to it, that's a PM's only job...well, that and checking the boxes and filling out Gantt charts.
[1] I swear that one PM I worked with would say "Good morning, who just joined the call?" in the EXACT same tone, rhythm and texture at the sound of every beep on conference calls. It was like a machine!
Now that my kids are entering school, I wonder about this topic a lot. The thing that stinks is that there aren't really any do-overs with this stuff and you only find out if you did the right thing years later. Our current approach has been to praise good work where appropriate and make it clear that it takes hard work to keep producing consistent good work. Allowing a kid to make mistakes while keeping them working hard enough to do well is a big balancing act that I'm still struggling with.
Telling your kids they're smart all the time does 2 things - it ties your approval to their success, so no shocker that they're going to do anything including cheating to get grades at that point. It also means that when they do fail, which they will, it's going to be very hard to bounce back from it. I've seen this happen to people close to me...either they've hit an academic setback that they just can't recover from, or they get out in the real world and fail at something, and it's devastating. If you've been spending 22 years of your life getting straight As and being smarter than everyone else, then hit the workplace and figure out that it's not always the smartest one that gets ahead, I could see that being a huge blow. I studied chemistry in college, and was not a model student by any means. An organic chem course I took was shared with premeds and prepharmacy students and there was rampant cheating among that group...simply because they had no choice but to get an A in it. I was lucky to get a C but it was an honest C. :-) Pre-health programs are so oversubscribed that they just take the top GPAs to fill the class, so anything less than a 4.0 means you won't get into a competitive major. The year I did this, there were 1500 or so students competing for 200 slots in a pharmacy program...talk about pressure to perform and a crushing defeat if you don't make it.
I agree that telling your kids they're super-geniuses when they're not is a really bad idea. What I don't think is the right approach is the Tiger Mom approach, where you tell your kid they're stupid when they get a B+ on an assignment, send them to hours and hours of post-school tutoring, force them to take violin lessons or whatever you think is going to get them into the Ivy League schools and law or medical school immediately after. I think that might work with some kids and some cultural settings, but a lot of kids are just going to end up hating their parents and rebelling when it really does come down to crunch time (i.e. college application years.) Even the original Tiger Mom kid Amy Chua said in her book that this approach doesn't work on everyone and only grudgingly agreed that all that bullying got her to Harvard, Yale Law School and a Biglaw job, at the expense of family relationships.
The thing that sucks is that these days it's almost not acceptable to fail, or realize you made a mistake and make a correction. The US is _way_ more tolerant of failure than Asian countries - I read something a few weeks ago about how Japanese companies still don't hire experienced employees...most technical jobs are obtained in the last year of school and if you miss out on it, you're permanently disqualified. There are a couple of things like this in the US -- it's impossible to recover from bad grades to get into medical school or law school, and it's impossible to get certain jobs like corporate law firms, investment banking or management consulting without doing the exact prescribed steps. But, we need to realize that outside of these rarified slots that only a few will achieve, most of us are going to wind up normal people and do OK in life.
At the executive level, you can assume that anyone holding that position has no actual expertise and sometimes no experience. Anyone with a CxO title is appointed to that position, and is usually well-connected on the boards of several companies. BUT -- good people in this position know they have to hire people who actually do understand the areas they're responsible for. If she wasn't capable of doing this, or was just hiring her friends for key positions, this is the result you get. I've been doing IT work in big companies for over 20 years now and have witnessed stuff like this over and over. It's a constant battle to do a good job when you have executives hiring incompetent people at the top, offshoring or outsourcing key IT functions for big kickbacks, etc. (I'm assuming that when we peel back the covers on this, the unpatched system will be a result of the IT department getting so disconnected that a simple system change takes 3 months and people on 2 different continents coordinating it.)
What I don't like about IT in general is that people can mess up badly, get fired or be allowed to "retire", then go to another company and mess things up there as well. I would love the idea of a professional organization that would ban incompetent people from working in the field after a fair finding of facts. This would really cut down on the number of slapped-together "solutions" that cause breaches like this in the long run. If my reputation were on the line, I wouldn't rush through a system design the way I'm sometimes forced to by schedules. As it is, IT people can do the equivalent of joining the French Foreign Legion and come out on the other end with a clean reputation. (For those unfamiliar, the FFL is France's overseas military force who basically accepts anyone who wants to escape their current situation and grants them a new identity in exchange for military service.)
One interesting thing Canada could do is make it incredibly easy for US citizens to work in Canada. I know I'd move there if I didn't have things tying me down in the US and could have an easily portable work visa. The climate (both literal and political) is better in my opinion...the issue is that there need to be more than a couple of standout tech companies to create an ecosystem. Nortel was absolutely huge until they went bankrupt after the first dotcom bubble, and BlackBerry has basically run its course.
I do hear that Toronto and Vancouver are in the middle of a housing bubble though, so I don't know if now is the right time to move there. But, if US citizens could easily work in the Canadian labor market and not be tethered to an employer the way H-1B visa holders here are, I think a lot of people would jump at the chance to move. I've looked into it in the past, and apparently US citizens don't get any special preference and have to deal with immigration the same way everyone else does.
If they really wanted to accelerate a move, just implement a program where a US citizen with a certain skillset and education can walk into any Canadian embassy and turn in their US passport in exchange for a Canadian one. Overall quality of life seems much better there, so it would just be a matter of convincing people of that.
"Today's union is all about promising workers the moon while skirting the reality that is unskilled labor will never make a living wage."
Actually, it's the only way an unskilled worker will make a living wage, especially now. If you're approaching this from the position of being a skilled worker, change your perspective a little. Suppose you lost the IQ lottery, or had a crappy home life that interfered with your education, and didn't have employers and recruiters beating down your door begging you to come work in Silicon Valley for $350K a year. The only way you can make your situation better is by finding an employer who will pay you a reasonable wage throughout your career. Unions bargain with employers to ensure they can't get away with paying minimum wage in the most expensive labor market in the country. They also negotiate things like sick time, pension and other benefits that no one employee would be able to negotiate for themselves.
A good real-world example that doesn't involve manufacturing or public service (since those are hot-button areas with unions) is supermarkets. Unionized supermarkets are one type of employment that allows semi-skilled workers to have something of a career. Someone with no education or technical ability can be paid enough to survive and have something of a comfortable existence. They'll never get rich, but seniority ensures that they're not going to get kicked out when they're 40 the way a lot of IT folks do, for example.
A friend of mine in college had a part time job in a warehouse for a large supermarket chain. According to him, the difference in outlook between a part time college worker looking to pay some bills and a full-time employee trying to survive is very different. It was a crappy job - hot in the summer, cold in the winter and mind-numbing...but some of the people he worked with were hoping for the day they could go full time and fully join the union. Because once that happened, they would be protected from firing, they would get to do slightly more interesting jobs like operating forklifts, and their pay would increase.
Keep this in mind as we rapidly head toward a world where a much higher percentage of the population falls into the "unskilled" category...and today's knowledge workers are going to be a good example.
I'm actually an advocate of companies retaining most of their employees as FTEs. Current accounting rules and tax law doesn't make this as appealing as it used to be. Too many companies pull a Pontias Pilate and wash their hands of any employee responsibility by hiring contracting firms to do things that aren't their "core competency." It's mainly these contracting firms that turn around and treat their employees like garbage to increase margin on their outsourcing deal. Living in a place like Silicon Valley and earning just over minimum wage as a cafeteria worker must require a huge sacrifice or a multi-hour commute to work a cafeteria job. If the contracting companies did a far superior job than FTEs would, I'd say they should definitely handle the work. But as we've seen in IT, contractors lowball salaries, bring in H-1Bs and offshore any work that doesn't require a physical presence. Services contractors like food service and janitorial companies will do the bare minimum required to make their employees not quit...and that bar is very low when you consider the exploitable nature of that workforce.
What I would like to see on the skilled side of the house is a guild system that replaces the patchwork of vendor certifications, for-profit schools and other training methods. A traditional union is great for commodity workers, but a guild or professional organization works best for workers that don't have uniform levels of experience and aren't doing a simple job. If a company knew the baseline quality of someone they hired, that sure beats having the hiring manager and the team the candidate would work with try to decipher what on their resume is a lie or exaggeration. Most IT interviews I've been on have had a quiz component, and I'm sure that's because the company has been burned by bullshitters too often. It's not enough to graduate with a CS degree, and the field of IT and development is gotten so huge that it's impossible to be great at everything. I'm a big-time generalist and advocate for more people being like this, but I simply have to choose what I'm good at this year and keep shifting focus to be useful in any one area.
Guilds and professional orgs would pretty much be the only thing that would work to organize technology workers. There are way too many prima donnas, "rockstars" and people who would never stoop to the level of a lower-skilled worker. This is why it works well for doctors, a group known for having egos that have an observable gravitational field. The organization is paid by its members to pay for laws that limit the ability to practice and keep the number of new entrants to a minimum. I'd actually like to see this because I really hate the fact that someone can be totally incompetent, get fired, then do the equivalent of joining the French Foreign Legion and get hired somewhere else as if nothing happened.
I concede we're very near the top of the Second Dotcom Bubble, but this is pretty crazy. There has to come a point where technology companies, even the startups, don't see the benefits from being in Silicon Valley anymore.
I live near New York City, and people love to complain about how expensive it is here -- CA is a whole new level. You really do pay a premium to live near NYC...taxes are high and housing prices are way more than you would find in other parts of the country. Metro NY has similar issues that SV does that distort the housing market -- Big law fiirms, investment banking, publishing and traditional media are still centered here; all of these have their share of very high earners. You also have lots of the "old money" crowd who are just independently wealthy after hundreds of years of inheritance. It makes it very hard for truly working class people to buy real estate, and the jobs that they traditionally did are also being squeezed out. I really like where I am and want to stick around, but plenty of people don't care and are just saying "screw this" as they move to North Carolina. One person I know sold a crappy 1950s Levitt house for nearly half a million bucks and now lives in a huge McMansion on 2 acres of land in NC, and their story is being repeated over and over.
I'm not sure why tech companies feel they need to pile into San Francisco or Seattle. You can do work anywhere these days and there are plenty of smart people all over the world. If you have to pay some junior JavaScript guy $250K just so he can keep his head above water, no wonder companies are offshoring all their work. Forget about hiring away some "rockstar" employee from a rival startup -- those guys must be laughing all the way to the bank in their Ferrari. I think that if companies felt they could trust every employee, they'd love the idea of not maintaining office space in the most expensive parts of the country.
If a company is capable of simplifying their product lines enough and delivering a clear advertising, then the traditional sales position is dead. I can't stand talking to salespeople, especially tech salespeople, so that would be a huge positive for me. I've never bought anything based on the recommendation of a salesperson, and don't know people who have. In IT however, CIOs tend to be extremely gullible when it comes to software and hardware sales pitches. It has something to do with all the free dinners and strip club visits, I'm sure.
An interesting example of this hit me when I was attending a tech conference in a big traditional convention center a couple months back. Those convention centers and the conferences themselves are still set up for a previous era, where the only time vendors got new orders was at the annual trade show. I could almost see the lines of eager junior salespeople in identical suits outside the now-dead onsite Kinko's location lining up to fax their orders to HQ. Now, people just order online for all but the most complex products.
I'd be happy if more companies went this route than playing the H-1B visa scheme or sending every scrap of work to Tata or Infosys because their competitors are doing it. And this is coming from someone who lives near a high cost city. HR departments, don't do anything their competitors don't do, and they will only listen to management consultants as a source of new ideas. It explains why nearly every company suddenly jumped on the outsourcing bandwagon at the same time, adopted the Google open office stuff, and enacted all sorts of other management fads. Maybe we have a mole inside of McKinsey who's starting to plant employee-friendly ideas in client's heads!
Satellite offices in cheaper parts of the country aren't new. Even IBM (before they went nuts and moved everyone to India) and other deep-pocketed companies had them back in the day, and that was when it was harder to stay in touch. The only difference was that the office was in Pittsburgh and not Pune, or Moline and not Mumbai. I remember reading something some time back that mentioned IBM would strategically locate big engineering facilities just far enough away from large business centers to be a short flight or medium length drive. They'd import the workers or hire from local university talent pools, and the execs would be mollified because they still felt like they had control. IBM used to have big facilities in Burlington, VT and Rochester, MN that fit that description perfectly. They probably didn't have to pay anything near what they'd have to pay for people in Westchester or Dutchess County, NY.
Spreading out the wealth of a big company over a bigger area is a good thing. Silicon Valley/SF and California in general are out of control in terms of housing prices and cost of living. Metro New York (where I live) isn't far behind at all. If enough employees could be convinced to move to a low cost city, sell the house and save 2/3 of its value while buying a mansion with the other 1/3, that would definitely lower housing prices. You can get over $1M for a total dump in SV, over $400K in outer NYC suburbs and way more when you get closer to the city. That's lots of peoples' retirement fallback plan from what I can tell.
I just think it's funny that companies are "rediscovering" that it's cheaper to employ people who don't have million-dollar houses to maintain. Expectations do need to come down on both sides. Companies have to be willing to invest in people, and employees can't demand unreasonable salaries or else they're just going to continue with the offshoring. The market can't sustain conditions where everyone who can fog a mirror and write Rust or Node.js gets over $200K, nor can it maintain a world with only super-rich executives and massive unemployment in every other class.
The article summary says it right there -- everyone in startup land is trying to be Steve Jobs. Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos fame even wears black turtlenecks to try to complete the look.
It's just the personality version of cargo-culting. Plenty of business types do this but most don't have the degree of success they think they will:
- Tons of people try for the Jobs personality, or the Linus Torvalds personality, etc. Most end up only picking up the mannerisms and not the intelligence part. (Linus acts like a jerk, but he's usually correct and doesn't seem capable of being nice about it.)
- Go into any airport bookstore and look over any of the books aimed at MBA types. Since most of the customers are consultants, it's a pretty easy predictor of what "brilliant innovative groundbreaking paradigm shifts" will be tried at their customers -- and subsequently by tons of others.
- Similarly, any executive who starts using other executives' direct quotes is definitely wishing for similar success. My favorite of late, which I've heard come out of tons of "thought leaders" is the "2 pizza team" concept that Jeff Bezos talked about when he referred to keeping product groups small enough to feed with 2 pizzas.
If it requires taking LSD, they'll do that too. It's just a bunch of MBA weenies emulating their heroes.
"If a company like AT&T treats you poorly then QUIT! Go work for another company that pays you better and treats you well!"
People love to say this whenever workers try to claw back some power. The honest truth is that all employers treat people poorly to some degree. And they love it when more people say that anyone who complains about it should quit, because it just makes their job easier. Compared to today, the 50s and 60s were a golden age of employment because there was a balance in the employer/employee relationship, things were stable, and employers grudgingly agreed to allow workers to follow a career path.
Without some universal check on employers' power, employers will just cut and squeeze until there's nothing left to squeeze. They'd love to see everyone working for minimum wage...no wait, let's get rid of the minimum wage...no wait, let's just hire everyone as an independent contractor and offshore everything that can be offshored to TCS or Wipro or Accenture. That universal check would be a union or trade organization. Otherwise, if you try to be the nice employer and offer a few concessions, the other employers will just get more evil in response and drive you out of business.
The CWA wants the AT&T from a previous era back, and in some respects I would be behind that too. Companies' power to offshore, outsource and basically get rid of any group that isn't 100% profit-generating is a lot of what contributes to middle class instability.
I'm barely old enough to remember when "old" AT&T and the RBOCs existed...I was 10 when they were ordered de-monopolized. But from what I've heard from people alive previously, getting a job with one of these companies was a guaranteed ticket to lifetime stability. In addition, engineering was actually done correctly because there wasn't constant pressure to squeeze every single cost out of the system. I know everyone's going to say monopolies are bad, but they do provide the most stable class of jobs. Maybe monopolies are bad, but the alternative of a ton of cut-throat competitors isn't good for society either. In the model we have, public companies (and private ones controlled by hedge funds) are forced to implement whatever cost-saving trick is in vogue every quarter to make the numbers. A lot of these tricks, like spinning off "expensive" employees into a separate company to reduce benefits, offshoring to a service provider to hide expenses on a different balance sheet line, or constantly squeezing workers to get the tiniest drop of productivity out of them are detrimental to employment in general. Verizon did similar things as well, when they spun out Verizon Wireless. VZW workers get way fewer benefits than the CWA workers in Verizon proper.
I just wish people would get it out of their heads that unions are bad. Especially in the face of automation and offshoring, they're basically the only chance an employee has against their employer. Employers have spent decades convincing employees that they have their best interests in mind and that we're all friends. I think there needs to be a more adversarial labor/management relationship put back into the mix to swing the pendulum back toward the middle more. There's a big difference between "we can't fire you for any reason" demands and standing up when management says "we're moving 20,000 engineering positions to India effective immediately so that I can buy another mansion, and by the way we're still friends, right?"
I'm not defending them, but how else would you propose preventing someone from running up a whole ton of debt, skipping out on it, and then doing it again at another creditor? The best way is to have some sort of equal-access clearinghouse of information on consumers.
The problem is that people are sometimes irresponsible. It's not even just regular consumers...many business owners and wealthy people just go around starting companies, load them up with debt and bankrupt them. That's allowed under the current system...after all they're just a lowly employee of that company when it went bankrupt. It would take someone like a bankruptcy judge or the IRS to make the next hop to connect the dots, but it often doesn't happen. This is why you sometimes see brand-new mansions built a year prior bank-owned or in foreclosure.
Equifax and the 2 other credit bureaus have a ton of non-credit related information on consumers as well. It will be interesting to see what else was not reported as part of the breach.
I'm going to sound like an old fart, but a lot of these "cyberattacks" end up being down to a very dumb misconfiguration like leaving FTP open, failure to patch security holes, and things like leaving data on unprotected public cloud storage. Part of my job is being a technical mentor to some of our more junior staff, and what I'm seeing is a lot of developers and CS people who really don't know the guts of how IT works. I'm not saying people should go back to punch cards and assembler, but having some clue about TCP/IP, DNS, what an open port on a server means, how a firewall works, etc. would go a long way to preventing some of the dumber things I've seen. Most of this is very much abstracted, and in a "cloud-first" world it's even more so. The network is just assumed to work underneath everything else, and i think this is where a lot of the misconfiguration problems get missed.
We may or may not see what actually happened. It could have been some state-sponsored hacking group planning a painstaking attack requiring intimate knowledge of everything. But knowing what I know about corporate IT, it was most likely some lowest-bidder contractor being forced to pull another 12-hour shift and missing something. Until companies have to actually pay for these issues, all we're going to get is "free credit monitoring" for a year, which costs them nothing, and _maybe_ we'll get a check for 11 cents from a class action lawsuit 20 years from now when it winds its way through the system.
They're settled, not litigated. No company's legal team is crazy enough to go to trial on something like this. Especially when it's VC money, they'll just peel off a couple million and throw it at the problem. It sure beats having your company dragged in front of the world every time a new court date comes up in a case that could last years. Large, established companies do this too. It's cheaper for GM to pay a huge settlement and fine than risk damaging their brand over a faulty ignition switch -- especially when you have an admissible e-mail that has an engineer describing the design flaw and expressing concern. (link)
People who file founded lawsuits like this should get settlements. They're totally done career-wise in the startup spectrum, and even established companies might consider her too radioactive... Most lawsuit settlements of this size can allow you to live out your life assuming you can invest carefully. Since neither side is talking about it, I'm assuming it's a big number and she signed a deal saying she would never speak of it again.
Everyone is about to pile in here calling people who can act normally around the opposite sex "SJWs" and similar. But, this behavior is very common at startups, and it almost always starts with the "executives." I'm using quotes because in these cases the executives are usually either fraternity types who just got out of school, or fully-grown man-children. When you give a bunch of glorified salespeople and dealmakers millions of dollars in VC money, they're going to create a club for their friends. It's youth, inexperience and the sales culture, and setting a bad "tone at the top" trickles all the way down the hierarchy.
People like to pretend that sexual harassment doesn't exist, but a lot of people haven't worked 100 hour weeks at startups. I've mainly done corporate work my entire career, and the only time I've seen any even slightly inappropriate behavior is among the salespeople. What I find strange is that people like these guys and the CEO of Uber can get to the point of running fairly large organizations and still think it's OK to act like they're partying their way through sophomore year. Most men I know grew up after that phase of their life...but as we know there are always exceptions.
The problem with great SLAs is that if you really want your data all the time, you have to plan for it and have another copy somewhere that isn't being affected by the bad day that your primary provider is having...no matter how remote the chance. Enterprise IT folks deal with this all the time, balancing need for always-on vs. the cost to make that happen.
Some outages are worse than others too. Cloud providers can have situations where they'll lose access to small portions of their environment, but when you're talking about something wrong with the -entire- software-defined storage soup that those Google Drive URLs feed into....bad day all around.
"But even more so is the legal aspect of licensing. Many professions require state licensing and I'd bet it's not going to be easy to get state licensing boards and legislatures to overturn those laws to allow robots or AI to perform the same tasks."
Licensed professions are going to be the last to go, simply because they're paying for favorable laws. We in the technology sector could learn a thing or two about these two counter-examples:
- The health professions are regulated so tightly that there's almost no chance their members will feel any pain. The medical profession tightly controls the supply of medical school slots, assuring that anyone graduating from one is guaranteed to be very wealthy because demand for doctors is always greater than supply. Costs are kept high because their lobbying basically boils down to "Do whatever you want with the insurance system as long as we keep getting paid the same, or we'll unleash our campaign machine." And professional licensing is intentionally difficult to obtain and requires effort to maintain, ensuring minimum quality.
- A counter-example of late is the legal profession. The Bar Association in the US actually encouraged the creation of more law schools, and offshoring of routine legal tasks. The difference in outcomes for law students now compared to 25 years ago is staggering. In the past, law school was a guaranteed ticket to a respected job with a good salary, and graduating from one of the top 14 law schools was an express ticket to elite law firm positions and astronomical salaries. Today, the only hope of making back the investment in education is to be at the top 10% of one of those top 14 law schools, be picked up by one of the white shoe firms, and stick it out until you become a partner. When a profession doesn't support its members, this is what happens.
I think that as long as the licensed professions (health, engineering, etc.) can keep a lid on automation through regulation, members will be able to keep working. If not, they have enough lobbying power to ensure their members can be bought out. An example here would be the longshoreman's unions. When containerization occurred, and manual labor wasn't needed to move cargo on and off ships, their members were paid for the rest of their careers out of the savings that the ports and shipping companies realized. I think something similar will have to happen with automation.
The problem with this argument is that wealth isn't created. It's like energy conservation -- it's a fixed supply of money that just keeps getting shifted around. If I pay someone $10, I have $10 less and they have $10 more, but the only way wealth can be created or destroyed is by changing the money supply. In previous generations in the US, this fixed-size pie was more evenly divided for a few reasons;
- High corporate taxes meant that companies avoided them by paying workers more and giving them more generous benefits, because there was a point where it made more sense to distribute the next dollar as an expense rather than declare it as profit.
- Workers had more rights and a greater voice in their salaries and working conditions. Now it's a race to the bottom, which is going to go into warp speed as people claw and kill each other for the last available jobs at any wage.
- There were fewer ways for high net worth individuals and companies to hide their income. Now, there are way more tax loopholes and offshore tax havens to park profits and keep them from being taxed or used domestically.
- In general, wealth is being hoarded. Rich people buy the occasional yacht or mansion, but these purchases don't add up to the same effect as employing a bunch of people in a business.
- Globalization means that businesses can just pick the cheapest country this year and offshore all their operations for a fraction of what they would pay workers in their home country, further accelerating the race to the bottom.
Short of increasing or decreasing the money supply by manipulating interest rates or buying/selling debt, how do you create wealth? It's definitely a fixed pie.
From the summary: ""Employees need to think of themselves as replaceable in a way that propels them into action," Salemi says, "so they can focus on continuously learning and sharpening their skills."
Learning what? Sharpening their skills for what job? My problem with people saying we should stick with the age-old advice of training for the next better job, is that they don't see that most people won't be able to get a better job. The Industrial Revolution mechanized farm work and sent farmers to factories. Improvements in manufacturing sent factory workers to clerical jobs. Office automation via IT and software killed large-scale clerical work and sent those workers to the service industry. Automation of the service industry sends these workers...nowhere. Automation of intelligence (for example, law school grads being replaced by an algorithm) sends them...nowhere, with lots of debt.
Basically, we've come to the end of the line for the next-best-job fix. For the vast majority of people incapable of handling anything beyond a simple job, this will mean they'll be unemployed and unable to get new work at reasonable pay. And it's not just factory workers and drivers...large corporations routinely pay employees fairly decent salaries to manually execute an unchanging algorithm on a stack of work. We're either going to have to make work for people or realize that not everyone can be employed...and hopefully not resort to drastic measures to fix it.
I think we hit the peak usefulness of the "retrain for a better job" advice back in the early 90s when large corporations got around to destroying their "legacy" white-collar workforces. This was driven by computerization of clerical office work finally reaching a point where permanently fewer humans were needed. Back when I first graduated from college (around 1998), one of my first IT jobs was with a huge life insurance company. According to some of the old-timers I was working under, the then-sparsely populated headquarters was jammed wall-to-wall with various clerical workers up until the 80s or so. The HQ took up two Manhattan city blocks, plus a huge tower uptown, plus they had tons of large regional offices around the country. It was apparently so full that the company staggered start times so that crowds didn't overwhelm the elevators and escalators in the building. Maybe some of those clerical workers got better jobs, but I don't think that's going to happen this time around.
The fundamental problem that needs to be solved is this: If you want to continue with a consumer-based society, you must find some way to allow everyone to sell their labor for a price that allows them to continue consuming and keeping businesses alive. This includes everyone -- not just STEM graduates, CS people, programmers, data scientists, etc. The economy only works when the majority of people can afford to participate at a level appropriate to their skills. Large fully automated cloud data centers employ 20 security guards, HVAC techs, disk-pullers and rack-and-stackers...not 5000 system administrators. Automated warehouses employ a couple of robot-minders. Automated trucks employ zero truck drivers.
If we still have to cling to the idea that everyone has to have a job and earn money to be worth anything in society, how do we avoid nasty problems that crop up when the majority of people are unemployed and desperate? Technology people tend not to understand this, but look outside the tech bubble and see what kind of work the vast majority of people do all day. It's repetitive, automatable and may go away very soon.
The MCSE bootcamps of 1999 have returned. It's just the usual crowd of technical training/education folks trying to squeeze a few bucks out of this bubble before it pops. You're always going to get people trying to take a shortcut to the big money whenever there's a "shortage" of qualified people. Back in the 90s, the MCSE camps were taking people off the streets who'd barely
My opinion is that these bootcamps are only good if they actually teach the fundamentals, but I'm sure they skip most of that and teach codemonkeying in whatever JavaScript framework is hot this week. It makes sense too -- most of he graduates are going to wind up as very junior front-end web developers tweaking layouts and doing simple work. However, there will come a point where these junior developers will need to know more than how to drive Node.js. If you don't understand at least something about how networks, the browser, the naked non-frameworked DOM, and the underlying protocols work, you won't progress beyond a certain phase. if you don't have the internal drive to keep learning, and are just doing it for the money, there's a definite stopping point where you won't move up. At that point, you may end up some random manager or project manager, but the odds are that you'll be out as soon as the economy sours and the web startup you've been coding for tanks. Whether you get another job depends on how good you are, and you will be competing with some very senior people for every position when everyone's going through hard times.
A personal example of this in action is my current challenge at work. I've been doing a combination of systems integration, end user computing and system engineering work for quite some time in an environment that's very sensitive to change -- there's plenty of new things coming in all the time but my focus hasn't been on web-related stuff. All of a sudden, one of the company's core products is being rewritten from scratch for the cloud. We're going from on-premises traditional VMWare and networks to 100 MPH "OMG, dudebro, SoftwareDefined RubyRustNodeAngular ChefPuppetCICDAnsibleJenkins VagrantGithubSlack JIRADockerKubernetes, at web scale!" A lot of the traditional systems people I'm working with aren't taking to it well. However, I've always been one to dig in and figure things out. THIS is where fundamentals are important...instead of all of those tools being magic boxes, learning them with an eye towards what's running underneath them is the key. If you don't have a good grounding, and learn these by going through online tutorials, you're only going to be able to use them as magic boxes and won't be able to effectively diagnose what's happening when your tower of tools breaks down. Bootcamp grads won't get this. CS grads from Stanford won't get this either. The important thing to remember is that no matter what the MBAs say, IT and dev is a profession and a skilled trade combined, and it takes a long time as an apprentice to get good.
What do you propose we do with the people who can't just learn to code? Society doesn't pay people to do a lot of the things you mention unless they're truly exceptional. How do you propose we allow people to make a living while maintaining the money-based economy we have?
Think outside of the dev/IT world for a second. Not everyone is super-brilliant, or even latently super-brilliant. Most people need jobs that they can just show up at, perform a set of tasks, and go home when it's done. I'd argue that lots of corporate jobs paying decent salaries boil down to applying a fixed set of rules to an input stack of work. There are a lot more modern shepherds and manual farmers out there in the world than you think. Before all the factory work was offshored or moved to non-union states, low-skilled people could have a decent lifestyle. This is just the next step -- and it's not going to end well unless we figure out a balance between the Luddites and the ultra-wealthy robot owning class locking themselves in fortresses.