I know most people who work in technology don't really care about the "working class" who are obviously going to be affected greatly by this and other automation. It's easy to look at your DevOps-y CI/CD pipeline, see the code you write immediately go into production, and assume that it would be great to do this with factory work as well. I assure you that people will start to care when those workers start going after everyone who still has a job out of desperation, or when their jobs are eliminated through automation.
We haven't worked out a perfect solution for what happens when the vast majority of workers can't sell their labor for a reasonable price that lets them survive and consume at levels capable of sustaining businesses. Spend some time outside of the technology world, and you will see that _many_ people aren't capable of handling anything more than a job involving repetitive tasks. Lots of people need that job on an assembly line putting Part A into Slot B and adding a screw for 8 hours a day, or driving a forklift in a warehouse, or processing the same paperwork day in and day out according to rules. If you say they can't have that anymore, then you need to come up with a solution. Money's not going to disappear overnight as a store of value, and removing people's ability to earn will not end well at all. People who wouldn't dream of violence will get desperate when they lose any hope of making it.
tl;dr: Some people lost the IQ lottery, no two ways about it. You aren't going to turn a factory worker into a big data scientist. Figure out how to fix this without bloodshed, massive depopulation, gene editing/selection, Soylent Green, or similar. The things I think could work would be make-work type jobs as an employer of last resort, or just dropping the farce and giving a basic income funded by taxing means of automation. I like the idea of a basic income because along with price controls, it basically sets a floor on poverty. Let the basic income pay completely for the necessities of life, have people work part- or full-time for extra income, make it so businesses can't just raise the price of everything to compensate for the added income, and people won't have a cash-scarcity problem.
The state I live in has a pretty generous workers' compensation insurance system, as far as the US is concerned, and there are a fair number who take advantage of it. Investigators routinely go around and follow up on some claims. Every so often you'll see a news story where they caught someone was supposed to be permanently disabled doing roofing work off the books, or posting Facebook pictures kite-surfing in some tropical destination. It's just enough enforcement to make people think twice about filing a false claim....or if they do, to keep out of sight.
In my opinion this is no different. The IRS has a large amount of data on people, but they can't afford to go connecting the dots on every taxpayer. They can do a few random audits, and that's how most "normal" taxpayers get to experience it. But for the targeted ones, they have to pick easy cases and/or the ones with the biggest potential recovery. If someone is dumb enough to post publicly visible pictures on Facebook or Instagram in front of their new mansion and Benz with the hashtag #AllCashBaby, or flashing stacks of $100 bills, then they shouldn't be surprised if the IRS comes around to check.
Outside of W-2 wages and capital gains, almost every income event and deduction is voluntarily reported. Normal wage-earners are almost never going to get audited unless it's random. Owning a wildly popular deli or pizza place, OTOH, and claiming $40K in income is a different story... People's oversharing habits just give the investigators another set of clues. Moral of the story is to keep a low profile! (and pay your taxes...)
It sounds like this was an insider who was just accessing someone's records for fun or to find something out about someone. I'm not surprised it took them 14 years to detect it either -- Tewksbury Hospital is a psychiatric hospital. Every state, even ones like Massachusetts, has been running away screaming from the obligation to provide mental health services ever since Thorazine was invented. They probably have even less budget than a typical hospital's IT department. Where I live in New York, inpatient mental health care barely exists; you need to be truly dangerous to end up in a psychiatric hospital -- even too dangerous for prison or jail.
I'm not in healthcare IT so I don't know...are electronic health record systems designed to not allow random snooping through people's information? You would think, with HIPPA and everything, that record access would be limited to people who have reason to look at it, and of course the system admins. In my experience in other fields though, no one goes looking through system access logs until someone has reason to suspect something, so usually it takes someone reporting something like what happened here.
I guess patient record security would have limited this, but I'm sure there are still ways around it. Back in my client support days, I did a lot of work with HR -- talk about the world's worst gossip clique! HR people love snooping through peoples' files, basically just for the lulz.
I'm old enough to remember the MCSE and Java/back end web development bootcamps from the late 90s. I even went to an MCSE bootcamp to renew my certification when a consultancy I was working for paid for it. Any time a field gets hot, and there's money to be made, people who don't have a whole lot of aptitude for it are going to look for a quick way in. In the case of my bootcamp, there was a clear division between those of us who needed to stuff our brains with facts to pass a certification test quickly, and those who were driving a truck last week and got tricked by the school's recruiter to giving them their student loan money, GI Bill benefits, etc.
But just like 1999, 2018 and beyond isn't going to need 20 million JavaScript developers who know a couple of web framework tricks. Right now, anyone who can fog a mirror and write in Node.js or Rust is in hipster startup heaven, making lots of money. When the downturn comes, and activity goes back down to a reasonable level, all the people who are suffering through this for the money aren't going to stick around. We're already seeing the coder schools folding up the tents because they can't get enough marks through the door anymore.
There's nothing wrong with educating yourself and changing gears. I've been on a journey to learn more about modern IT stuff like DevOps, cloud, etc. and filling the gaps in my knowledge has been a long, slow process. I've been doing end user computing and systems integration stuff for a while, so web programming is something I haven't done a lot of. Would it be great to just sit down and "learn DevOps in 14 days?" Sure, but I know that's not realistic. When you're working with people who've done nothing but code and manage web apps for a decade, you have a lot of catching up to do and it's not something you can rush if you want any deep knowledge. It's the difference between, say, putting an SSL certificate on a website that a CA gave you, vs. knowing how that process actually works, what can go wrong, etc.
It's good for those 50 people, who I assume are going to be reduced to 10 or 15 over time as data center tasks get even more routine. You basically need security guards, 1 or 2 admins and a bunch of hardware guys to run around and replace disks, rack equipment, etc. And with vendors producing Open Compute-style pods-in-a-box that just have cables, water lines and ductwork coming out, this job gets even easier and more automated. Disks are so cheap now that they could probably just let them die and do a once-a-year purge of all the dead drives, meaning you wouldn't even have to have the full time guys for that job.
Data centers are not a good investment for EDAs...the tax forgiveness and free electricity they're getting will never be offset by 50 jobs over the long term. Government officials think "cyber" when they hear about these projects and think they're master negotiators for bringing this big Silicon Valley titan into their jurisdiction. The details come out later...and Apple may not even decide to stick around.
I think it's growing more and more obvious that full-time, lifelong employment is going away, but the need to keep the consumption cycle running isn't. You're not just going to replace the whole "money is the only store of value" thing overnight. Since no one will ever agree to a basic income until people are killing each other over food scraps, I propose blatant make-work projects. Seriously, if employers won't hire the vast majority of people, how can you run a society where most people can't participate in the economy, _and_ not make those who can feel that those who can't are "lazy drug using welfare queens" or similar?
I doubt this will do anything, since it's a fork and the forkers would need to convince everyone to switch. It is an interesting symbolic gesture though.
I know my opinion is very different from most Slashdotters on this subject, but I actually see some of the points these "SJWs" are trying to make. Everyone has the right to free speech, but leading a public open source project means that people will put a little more scrutiny on you than the average person. Publically supporting a position like MRA in a politically charged environment doesn't look good in most people's eyes. The stereotype in the world of development/IT is that we're all a bunch of bro-culture jerks, Asperger's sufferers and socially maladjusted men who don't want women in our little club. Even if that isn't true, why do anything to feed into this perception? Even if you're on your third wife, paying 60% of your income in alimony and child support, or have a female boss you feel is holding you back, why publically endorse a lightning-rod subject like MRA? Rant in private with your other MRA buddies, not out in the open.
Not everyone can pull off being Linus Torvalds, for example. His insult-laden rants are legendary, but usually he's correct even if he can't be nice about it, and people give him a pass because of it. I've worked with a lot of very smart people who, for whatever reason, have had serious personality flaws that were ignored as long as they kept them somewhat under control. The thing that's different now is social media. Even the President tweets whatever comes to his mind at 3 in the morning and has zero filtering capabilities. Ever since LinkedIn changed their interface to clone Facebook, I've seen people get into comment-fights and post very controversial articles/topics...on a site that's basically stapled onto the back of your resume and designed to be your professional "brand." People in positions of leadership need to understand that their words and actions carry a little more weight than the average person.
Doing systems integration work, my recent experience with web applications has mostly supported this point. javaScript, wrapped in FrameworkOfTheMonth, is slowly replacing client-side applications for better or worse. If we're not allowed to have rich client applications anymore, JavaScript is pretty much the only tool to make a browser act like a rich client -- but it's a good example of shoehorning a technology in just to save complexity. I'm not saying we should go back to Java applets or Flash or ActiveX, but JS is really being extended way beyond what it was ever meant to do.
I think its rise comes from a few factors -- massive amounts of cheap CPU and memory being available on clients, and a billion web frameworks to make using it easy for beginners. This latest dotcom bubble has spawned a bunch of "coder bootcamps" that teach basic front-end web development in a JS framework. It really is easy to throw something together that functions. However, you can definitely tell when either the framework and/or the programmer isn't doing something efficiently...just look at client side UIs that totally freeze up when a database call is taking longer than it should, or websites that slow quad-core systems with 16 GB of RAM to a crawl while they load 11,304,283 snippets of code from different hosted libraries.
No one likes paying taxes, so any time the IRS figures out how to track income or close a loophole, there's bound to be lots of grumbling. The only tax that the IRS is pretty much guaranteed to get is the tax on W-2 income and investment capital gains due to automatic reporting. Everything else can be gamed. Large companies purchase tax loopholes by buying politicians and accounting services, and there's not much that can be done about that. Small companies are basically free to report what they want to report, and they just roll the dice and hope they don't get audited.
If you're a government agency that everyone hates, and never get adequate funding because of it, you're not going to have the resources to go after every small-time Bitcoin miner out there. The IRS can only afford to audit a tiny percentage of taxpayers every year. So naturally, they're going to go after the big fish. They'll concentrate efforts on all-cash businesses, high-wealth individuals and companies that are reporting classes of income and deductions that are frequently gamed. In my opinion, this Bitcoin thing is no different than the IRS going after wealthy people and companies who are stashing their income in tax-friendly offshore accounts. If you've made a couple grand in Bitcoin speculation, that's very different from someone using it to launder all their business profits for the year. It's just another tool for them to use to go after people that they would otherwise target...they're not going to audit an individual for a $200 charitable donation unless it's one of the small number of random audits they do.
If you want to avoid taxes, go open a deli or pizza place -- I guarantee the ones near me pay almost nothing in taxes because on paper they have a very meager income. Or, just start your own small business one-person corporation and funnel all of your personal expenses through it. Business owners don't personally own their house, cars or other possessions -- their company does, and uses the purchases to offset income. Wage-earners are the only ones paying the official tax rates because of it.
I wonder if this will be implemented globally, or whether there will be a "Windows 10 G" edition. Windows N and Windows KN editions for South Korea and the EU were created to remove Media Player and force the user to make a browser choice before IE is turned on by default.
Some people were beyond pissed when this happened, so maybe they'll just cut their losses and do it across the board. The sneaky upgrade dialog was the thing I wasn't happy about, but I'm sure there are some people out there who are very privacy-minded, and any files they didn't explicitly ask for are a no-go for them. I work with people all over the world, and the EU and Germany in particular has some of the strictest privacy laws. 99% of the information harvesting that your average one-trick web startup gets away with in the US is just forbidden by law there. Facebook and Google are constantly lobbying to have the rules not apply to them because their business model falls apart without full access to people's data.
As people age, they tend to collect responsibilities outside of work. That's (IMO) what makes people hate their jobs more -- it's stress, and the feeling of being trapped no matter what path you choose: - Places to live where technology professionals congregate are too expensive for most families to survive on a single income. This means both parents work, adding to family stress, as well as having a large amount of monthly expenses even if you aren't spending way above your means. - My wife and I are constantly trying to balance our jobs and our family life. Some people don't give a crap or just give up trying, but actually caring adds a lot of stress onto your plate as you try to juggle different priorities. - Around 35, if you haven't been saving for retirement, you should be feeling the Grim Reaper tapping you on the shoulder inviting you to a future of living on Social Security alone and eating Spam...because it's almost too late to start unless you get a really good run of stock market luck. More stress. - If you have kids, saving for college (should be) a priority too...stress. - As you age, unless you've stagnated for a decade or more, you're probably in a more responsible role, and less shielded from typical corporate political nastiness. You get to see how the sausage is made...and in my personal experience that's a contributor to stress too. - Because you have all these responsibilities eating away at you, you're often less likely to just rage-quit and go find somewhere else to work unless you're really well-off...hence the feeling of being trapped.
And, it doesn't matter what career path you've chosen either: - If you're in management, and you're not 100% suited for the job, I can totally see why people would hate their jobs. You deal with so much, and companies are always looking to "delayer," so the key is to scramble up the middle management layer as quick as possible. - If you've chosen to remain technical (like me,) there are _so many_ pressures. Outsourcing. Offshoring. A constant deluge of new shiny things to learn if you want to stay useful. MBAs waiting around every corner to question why you're being paid so much in their eyes. Balancing home life with having to stay current. Staying productive enough to keep up with the 24 year olds who don't know enough to not work 100 hour weeks for free. You name it -- we techies pay a heavy price to keep using our brains for work. - If you've chosen something like a civil service job, then that "trapped" feeling probably sets in early. I know lots of people who work for the state university system and in state government -- getting a bad boss in a CS position who will never be fired and having to stay in a very similar position so you're never fired must be confining, and people have confirmed this. The only cold comfort is that your retirement and usually your job is secure, so that's one less degree of stress.
The take-away is that the grass isn't greener in most cases - life is just more difficult as responsibilities get layered on top.
Everyone says "I really should back this up" until they need it. I don't even heed my own advice half the time and have been burned horribly over it. This guy's lucky he just lost his own files -- I've found it's way too easy to pave over cloud-based stuff by just issuing a command on the wrong set of resources -- the API and script-based access method is nice and fast, but totally de-nerfed in some situations. If you have the access, it's just going to do what you tell it.
That said....user interfaces can be horribly confusing too. It's one of the downsides of this super-fast deployment cycle; no one tests usability the way they tested a fully released, boxed product.
Large companies often have this problem. At the end of all the financial safeguards, double and triple checks, and hidebound processes for moving money around, the actual way it's done is very dependent on a human recognizing a message is from a trusted source. Billion-dollar companies have a bunch of payroll people literally emailing or EDI-ing unencrypted Excel files to their payroll processor showing who to pay what amount, and the only security on that process is that "I'm the payroll clerk, so I know what's going on." Same goes for invoices -- if something looks legit, and it looks like it came from a vendor, it gets paid.
If a company wants to keep these manual processes in place, they need to ensure the channels these messages run over are totally secure. At least train people to pick up a phone and call if they see something out of the ordinary.
I've been very lucky boss-wise, and only worked for one manager/group of managers in my career that bothered me enough to quit. However, I have many co-workers who have "escaped" from toxic environments run by terrible bosses. Some weren't exactly low-paying jobs either -- think investment banks, elite law firms, and consulting companies. Almost every one has told me that leaving and taking a pay cut was better than dreading going to work every day and dealing with their bosses screaming at them, throwing them to the wolves, or just being a total jerk. Say what you will about Bannon, but I think he's just making a rational decision and answering questions like "Can I control this guy? Is he hurting my long term aspirations? Is the access and influence I have and future untold billions I will have because of it balanced with the probability of everything going sideways?" The problem is always cost/benefit - I know some people who've worked in investment banking as devs or very high-end IT pros, and they say the bonuses are massive and salaries are great, but you have to deal with a company that's basically 100% bro-culture assholes every day in exchange for it.
My dislike of the current administration mostly stems from its apparently inability to control its emotions. I think Trump is not used to being questioned on _anything_ and people in his inner circle have given him a pass on his behavior forever because they want to keep getting paid. I obviously don't know what he's thinking, but I think he feels that international conflicts and political compromise is just like strong-arming some union boss on one of his construction sites or bribing some city official to get one of his properties expedited through the system.
Usually, the high-profile "phone unlocking" cases you hear of lately are terrorism or drug-related. Your average iPhone owner is most likely looking to protect his contact list, evidence of dealings, etc. than planning an attack. I'd say Apple aimed this feature squarely at their core demographic -- affluent Millenials: - Locking up your phone when high/drunk prevents people from using your fingerprint without your knowledge to get access to the phone - If you're stopped for a minor offense (traffic stop, DWI, etc.) it could prevent the police from finding anything else to make your situation worse if they are suspicious - Almost all non-violent interactions with the police involve traffic issues or drugs. If a cop catches you in possession of a small amount of drugs, they may or may not be more willing to just let you go if they have to go through a whole search warrant process, take you in and fill out paperwork to see what's on your phone.
What would be an even more interesting feature is if you held down a certain key sequence (three long, three short, three long sounds good...SOS) and the phone instantly wiped itself by shorting out the flash memory and destroying itself. You wouldn't have your $1000 computer in your pocket anymore, but you'd have to decide if that was worth less than the evidence the police could have obtained.
I guarantee this is going to get challenged in court to sort it out. 200+ years ago, and even in the Miranda era, no one was carrying a device capable of storing every personal detail of their lives in their pocket. The best you'd ever get is a drug dealer's notebook with their contacts. Phones are interesting in that they're extensions of the people who carry them.
There are a few solutions to this problem, pick one or more: 1. Reduce the need for people to show up for work at a physical office 2. Make transportation, both public and private, hyper-efficient 3. Pop the housing bubble around Northern California (and other large metros) by popping the Second Dotcom Bubble 4. Add more housing in the area so people aren't desperately waving sacks of money around saying, "PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE let me pay $4000 a month for a 1-bedroom apartment!"
I live near New York City and back before I had kids I used to commute on the train for work; did it for a couple of multi-year stints before I had had enough. I'm about 60 miles away, and it was easily a 1.5 hour train and subway ride each direction when everything was going perfectly. There are plenty of stories like the one in the article, and I remember hearing tales of multi-hour commutes from places like Stockton and Sacramento as the First Dotcom Bubble was about to hit its peak in 1999. I did my crazy commute for financial gain; I was getting paid a New York salary and living a comfortable distance away. Sheila James, being 62 and a government employee, was most likely priced out of the San Francisco market and is trying to hang on a few more years, as federal pensions are calculated based on final average salary and years of service. These days, you'd really have to offer me a crazy amount of money to go back to doing it...even with cutting my day short and working part of it on the train, it's a life-eater. I work at a place that's closer to home, pays less, but lets me be home more which is more important to me lately.
Housing bubbles suck. Permanently overpriced real estate markets suck more. Metro NY is a perfect example...not nearly as bad as California once you leave the city, but prices are permanently high just because so much wealth is concentrated here. You have everything from "old money" to celebrities to CEOs to hedge-fund Masters of the Universe, and if they're not living in Midtown Manhattan, they want to live right outside of it. It makes it difficult to find good housing a reasonable distance from work.
I mean, I get that Ericsson probably saw they need to get going if they want to be part of 5G and future telecom equipment rollouts....but I have NEVER heard a CEO, even of a technology company, acknowledge that they haven't spent enough on R&D. At least lately, R&D has always been a cost that had to be minimized in any way possible. Anything outside of a 3-month timeframe is completely off the table at most companies; it has to affect this quarter's numbers or it's totally invisible.
At least in big US corporations, I blame this on the MBA grooming cycle. MBAs are taught that they can manage anything using metrics and spreadsheets, and that they need no knowledge of the actual business processes they're managing...it's enough to be able to run the numbers. Add to this the fact that an MBA gets you an immediate management job at most companies, even if you've never done the work before or know anything about the company. And on top of that, the truly elite business schools graduate MBAs who haven't really had to work or get any real-world experience. It's Harvard MBA --> McKinsey --> VP job at a high-end McKinsey customer, with no stops in between. I've seen this happen in a couple of large companies - you get people who have no clue what's going on unless there's a dashboard telling them some metric is out of spec.
I wish more companies would admit mistakes like Ericsson is doing and try to focus on something other than the share price...but I'm not holding my breath!
In other news, AOL buys Time Warner, VA Linux has the largest first-day IPO price increase, and Pets.com announces free shipping on all 50 lb or larger bags of dog food...CEO says they'll "make it up in volume."
Unless things get crazier than they are now, I see this bubble deflating more slowly. There are fewer crazy pointless IPOs (Twitter and Snapchat are notable exceptions.) The average investor isn't being pushed so hard to buy tech stocks, and there's less cheerleading on CNBC this time. So maybe we've learned something.
It's amusing that one thing keeping this bubble inflated is the thing that I think we're going to take away from the bubble period and use...cloud computing. When a VC just has to cut a check to Amazon or Microsoft or Google instead of building a data center and buying network capacity, profitless startups can kick along for a lot longer. All that free capital can then be used to deck out a startup's hip trendy San Francisco office space with preschool furniture, free food and free massages for their employees.
Make no mistake though -- there are going to be thousands of scrum masters, DevOps ninjas and JavaScript framework of the month coders looking for work as the field contracts. Not because they're bad (although I hear startups are hiring anyone who can fog a mirror and write code in Rust...) but because you just don't need as many superficially-skilled web developers to go around. Just like last time, the good people will find or keep work, although I'm sure a lot of people's lives will be upended while they look to escape startup-land.
I'm 42, so I think I officially qualify as old. Yet, here I am still doing senior-level engineering work. I'm not a DevOps ninja (yet...) and don't code 16 hours a day, but I really enjoy my job. I'm hoping for the day that more employers will see that older workers who are still contributing aren't a drag on the company they work for -- they're the adults that are needed to redirect some of the "bright ideas" and temper them with reality and experience. Unfortunately, we're a society that worships Silicon Valley wunderkinds and 24-year-old CEOs, and even boring old school companies are trying to behave like web startups. So here's my suggestions -- companies shouldn't try too hard; if they do even some of these things they will retain talented older workers:
Like the article says, have a technical track people can move along. Before my company implemented an "official" parallel career track for skilled technical people, lots of older people were "promoted" into management. It was the only place to go if you wanted to continue up the career ladder. This works great in traditional paper-shuffling corporate work, but IT, science, R&D, etc. is work that people actually don't mind doing and some of us would rather continue doing so. Traditional corporate jobs tend to promote people out of work, and most people are happy for this because who wants to shuffle paper? But, technical work and managerial work are _not_ related, not even close. The alternative for promotion on the technical track (at least for me) is being trusted with greater responsibility and helping with developing our junior staff. This (IMO) is a much better use of my skills than a management job would be.
Understand that older workers can't live at work. It's not a sign of disloyalty or laziness to put in a reasonable amount of hours. Most older workers don't want to continue their college dorm days and live at an office with their co-workers. The way I manage it (with a huge volume of work) is to stay reasonably productive during the actual workday so I don't have to spend 13 hours a day at the office. Many older workers have kids and families, but it's also not the 1950s anymore where the husband was the sole breadwinner and would do anything the company told them to keep their job.
Be flexible! This is one that gets major flak from the vocally child-free crowd and the younger set who have fewer out-of-work responsibilities. I have 2 kids, and the shorter work commute between my wife and I, so I do a lot of school activity appearances and other things during the day. But, I also regularly do the odd task for an hour or two after the house goes to bed. The company I work for gets plenty of work out of me; it's just not all in contiguous blocks.
Lay off the preschool workplace furniture a little bit. Most older workers can be trusted with a little personal space. Most of us also don't want to attend meetings sitting on orange and blue beanbag chairs against a bright white wall. Have a mix of traditional office space and Millenial preschool office space -- our company does because we tend to skew older. Not everyone is happy with open plan offices and for some people (like me) they can be productivity killers.
Appoint older workers as informal trainers. This is part of my job, and I'm actually someone who enjoys doing it. If you can convince your older workers that there aren't a bunch of MBAs waiting to lay them off as soon as the younglings' training is complete, this is a great way to pass on institutional knowledge. For this to work though, you have to provide...
Job security. I'm not talking union-level or tenure-level "we can't fire you for any reason", I'm just talking about dialing back the outsourcing/offshoring/layoff drama a little bit. I would (and have!) taken a lower salary to work somewhere that is more stable than your average web startup. Older workers with families want an income they can count on. Part of that is up to us (by keeping o
I've been working in IT for over 20 years, and the thing I've seen over and over again is that organizations that cheap out on IT get stung by things like these more frequently. I've been through multi-hour company-wide outages because someone said there was no reason to keep a core application in more than one data center. We constantly see companies where "IT is not our core competency" getting breached when their lowest-bidder contractors leave an open hole exposed, or when the entire company is run on a massive tower of outsourcers that don't communicate with each other. If I remember correctly, that's how the Target breach happened...a contractor running the HVAC for the stores had a security hole in the systems connected to the store networks, which attackers were able to use to get to the registers and credit card terminals.
You will never convince companies to do this, but in my opinion the only way to prevent breaches from happening or to minimize their damage is to pay in-house IT staff who *actually* understand what's being deployed. Staff who are paid well and not worked to death are going to be a lot more interested in keeping your business alive than some disinterested offshore firm or body shop who cares only about fulfilling the minimum terms in the contract. (The other thing that has to happen is that everything has to be secure by default, but almost nowhere I've worked has been able to wrap their heads around this. Too many places assume that there's an "outside" and an "inside" and spend all their effort defending the perimeter.)
What's interesting is that $250K is pretty low for a first offer. I haven't looked through the archive of data these hackers claim to have, but summaries say they were able to get access to sensitive corporate data as well as unreleased content. Some group of people at HBO must be going through all the access logs and figuring out what kind of damaging information they may have exposed. Given that they're an entertainment company, just a dump of the company's email should reveal some very interesting exchanges with various high-profile individuals. Worth way more than a quarter million in my opinion....
Microsoft, Apple and Google are all about controlling the user experience in their operating systems these days. I think that they're responding to a market where the non-power users have mostly migrated over to tablets and phones for daily use, and the idea of one strictly enforced UI standard actually makes sense in this case.
The problem is that power users aren't dead, but there's fewer of us and it makes less sense to cater to power users' needs in the minds of the hardware/software vendors. Windows 10 users, myself included, have been asking Microsoft for ages to bring back more customization features, and especially now that Windows Phone is dead. I'm not talking anything crazy -- just bringing back the ability to reskin things without having to resort to third party tools. But the trend has been to include fewer knobs and buttons to customize things, not more. I'm actually surprised about the favicon thing though -- most web developers I know, at least on the front end, are Mac users and you would think they'd have some pull with Apple.
In my opinion, the fight for the ability to customize commercial OSes died when everyone started using phones. People expect an iPhone or stock Android device to work the exact same way, appliance-style, and you can only customize a very narrow band of settings.
I live in a high-tax state, and places like North Carolina, Texas, Florida and others are constantly begging large companies to move some or all of their operations there. Sometimes it works, and the usual method for doing it is these big tax deals. The problem I've seen is that state governments are easily swayed by companies promising large amounts of high-quality jobs...only to find that someone like Amazon, Apple or Microsoft is just building an unmanned data center in the middle of nowhere. Or, the company does the absolute bare minimum to comply with the agreement, then shuts everything down and moves to the next jurisdiction they're able to convince. An autonomous data center for AWS or Azure probably needs a handful of people - security guards, one or two higher-level engineers on site, and a couple of "equipment pullers" installing and replacing hardware.
I question whether Foxconn is actually going to employ workers at these factories long-term, or if they're just going to say "sorry, we're automating our operations and laying everyone off" a couple of years in. The problem is that for these tax deals to work out for the states giving them, they have to make back the money they're losing on tax waivers, free power and infrastructure, etc. - and the way they do that is through payroll and property taxes. This is what New York is doing to try to get companies to locate here -- they're betting that by waiving direct corporate taxes for a few years, they'll get companies to hire people who will pay people, who will pay into the system through taxes.
The state economies in the US vary significantly. High-tax states like New York, California and a lot of New England fund their education systems to a much higher degree than low-tax states. Some states have way more infrastructure to maintain than others. Some have to remove snow in the winter and fix potholes. The long-term problem is that companies are much more mobile than they were, and need fewer workers. A large employer will think nothing of moving 1000 workers to a different state if the tax deal they get is right, and that seems to be a change that's happened in the last 30 years or so. I'm assuming they feel they're doing workers a favor by not offshoring the work.
"Horrific I know, suggesting the current work environment could be improved."
I read the paper fully, and think I get where he's coming from. Given that he has a Ph. D. in biology, I can only assume he's quite scientific and rational...things that most humans don't fully get. He lays the argument out quite thoroughly. I'm not sure i believe 100% of what he says, but he is at least citing a few sources. I'm not the most extroverted, socially attuned person, but I do know how to _tactfully_ suggest improvements and get them acted on. Even if something is perfectly rational, you don't get far if your criticism of the current situation steps on political third rails. Saying "process X is stupid and here's my idea of how to fix it" can be done without throwing people under the bus directly, and that's how to make long-term changes that aren't going to alienate a huge chunk of your audience.
People might say that's too PC and would rather attack others directly, call a spade a spade and all that. But there's a spectrum between fully PC, zero-discussion and an all-out bitchfest. As an example, in the past, I have worked with a lot of guys who were on Wife #2 or more, paying child support and alimony to #1, and just wouldn't stop bitching about how evil women are...I'm sure these guys are quite happy to see James' paper see the light of day and he's probably getting a lot of support from that camp.
Whether you agree with him or not, Google is being a rational large company. Their lawyers met with the chief counsel and calculated that allowing, then settling one wrongful termination suit far outweighs the damage that might be caused in the press each time the two parties show up in court. Not to mention the potential class actions -- every female who ever had any interaction with James Damore, every female who was denied a job by Google, every female who wasn't promoted, and on and on. It's the same thing that happens with product liability -- do you issue a recall or hope everything blows over, even though you're on the hook for a lot of money and reputational damage if someone connects the dots? Takata, VM and the GM ignition switch cases are good example of this.
I said it yesterday, but it bears repeating -- even if it's not overt, if a company knowingly creates what a jury believes is a hostile work environment, and doesn't take action to stop it, they're on the hook. This was their smart play in this case -- they showed that they took immediate action and disavowed that Damore was speaking in any way for Google in general. I know people are turning this into a "conservative witch hunt" story, but I think it's just legal butt-covering.
From the article, I noticed that Johny Srouji is quoted as defending his team...quite vocally...against having an open office imposed on them. Individual workers will never win over the MBAs touting cost per square foot, or the design eggheads like Jony Ive demanding everything be white, flat and rounded. But the boss of a very influential part of the company has a little more pull. If a boss has sufficient leverage (and guts) to say something like, "Maybe I should take my chip design team over to Qualcomm/Intel/AMD and you can just buy processors for your iThings from them!" things like corporate "mandates" tend to fall away pretty quickly. Problem is that most managers aren't like that; if I were a computer engineer I sure wouldn't mind working for this guy.
I know people have different work styles, and some extroverts and recent college graduates want to continue the college lifestyle by recreating the dorm/dining hall/open classroom feel. But in my experience, it's going to take Google saying "oops, we screwed up...open plan is only good for web startups with 25 people, and everywhere else should have a mix of styles and let teams/people choose." Every large company I've ever worked for copies HR policy verbatim from either GE, IBM or Google. I think they all use the same management consulting firm.
Mistakes happen, and this was a BIG one, but I'm of the opinion that the pendulum is too far over in the "get it done now" realm and needs to swing a little back toward the middle. I'm in systems integration/engineering, and there is a relentless push for even established companies to be fully buzzword compliant, move towards DevOps, and basically remove any barrier whatsoever to putting stuff out there the second a developer checks in a code change. A lot of this is good, but unless your developers are accomplished system admins who actually know how things work under their layer of code, the Ops people do need to work with them to ensure they're not doing anything crazy or taking shortcuts.
The whole pendulum-swing thing is being driven by web startups and the ever-raging battle beyond Devs creating Apps! and Ops people maintaining all that LUDDITE infrastructure. When the Ops people were allowed to fully drift over to being the Department of No, the Apps! developers just walked around them and built their Apps! in the public cloud with a credit card. At the same time, all the web startups were starting up with zero legacy anything, so everything was built to that cloud model and it's felt that Devs don't need to know about infrastructure anymore.
I have one foot in both worlds (agile cloudy stuff and infrastructure-centered stuff) and I feel that items like this are going to pop up more often given the constant push to move move move or else. Stuff like putting confidential customer data on a public S3 bucket, leaving a key system fully exposed to the Internet because your cloud's IaaS platform doesn't stop you, etc. Once the Second Dotcom Bubble pops, I'm hoping we take the good stuff that DevOps gives us and apply a sane schedule to it, letting people who actually understand the nuts and bolts of infrastructure, ports and protocols weigh in also.
Slashdot Mirror
I know most people who work in technology don't really care about the "working class" who are obviously going to be affected greatly by this and other automation. It's easy to look at your DevOps-y CI/CD pipeline, see the code you write immediately go into production, and assume that it would be great to do this with factory work as well. I assure you that people will start to care when those workers start going after everyone who still has a job out of desperation, or when their jobs are eliminated through automation.
We haven't worked out a perfect solution for what happens when the vast majority of workers can't sell their labor for a reasonable price that lets them survive and consume at levels capable of sustaining businesses. Spend some time outside of the technology world, and you will see that _many_ people aren't capable of handling anything more than a job involving repetitive tasks. Lots of people need that job on an assembly line putting Part A into Slot B and adding a screw for 8 hours a day, or driving a forklift in a warehouse, or processing the same paperwork day in and day out according to rules. If you say they can't have that anymore, then you need to come up with a solution. Money's not going to disappear overnight as a store of value, and removing people's ability to earn will not end well at all. People who wouldn't dream of violence will get desperate when they lose any hope of making it.
tl;dr: Some people lost the IQ lottery, no two ways about it. You aren't going to turn a factory worker into a big data scientist. Figure out how to fix this without bloodshed, massive depopulation, gene editing/selection, Soylent Green, or similar. The things I think could work would be make-work type jobs as an employer of last resort, or just dropping the farce and giving a basic income funded by taxing means of automation. I like the idea of a basic income because along with price controls, it basically sets a floor on poverty. Let the basic income pay completely for the necessities of life, have people work part- or full-time for extra income, make it so businesses can't just raise the price of everything to compensate for the added income, and people won't have a cash-scarcity problem.
The state I live in has a pretty generous workers' compensation insurance system, as far as the US is concerned, and there are a fair number who take advantage of it. Investigators routinely go around and follow up on some claims. Every so often you'll see a news story where they caught someone was supposed to be permanently disabled doing roofing work off the books, or posting Facebook pictures kite-surfing in some tropical destination. It's just enough enforcement to make people think twice about filing a false claim....or if they do, to keep out of sight.
In my opinion this is no different. The IRS has a large amount of data on people, but they can't afford to go connecting the dots on every taxpayer. They can do a few random audits, and that's how most "normal" taxpayers get to experience it. But for the targeted ones, they have to pick easy cases and/or the ones with the biggest potential recovery. If someone is dumb enough to post publicly visible pictures on Facebook or Instagram in front of their new mansion and Benz with the hashtag #AllCashBaby, or flashing stacks of $100 bills, then they shouldn't be surprised if the IRS comes around to check.
Outside of W-2 wages and capital gains, almost every income event and deduction is voluntarily reported. Normal wage-earners are almost never going to get audited unless it's random. Owning a wildly popular deli or pizza place, OTOH, and claiming $40K in income is a different story... People's oversharing habits just give the investigators another set of clues. Moral of the story is to keep a low profile! (and pay your taxes...)
It sounds like this was an insider who was just accessing someone's records for fun or to find something out about someone. I'm not surprised it took them 14 years to detect it either -- Tewksbury Hospital is a psychiatric hospital. Every state, even ones like Massachusetts, has been running away screaming from the obligation to provide mental health services ever since Thorazine was invented. They probably have even less budget than a typical hospital's IT department. Where I live in New York, inpatient mental health care barely exists; you need to be truly dangerous to end up in a psychiatric hospital -- even too dangerous for prison or jail.
I'm not in healthcare IT so I don't know...are electronic health record systems designed to not allow random snooping through people's information? You would think, with HIPPA and everything, that record access would be limited to people who have reason to look at it, and of course the system admins. In my experience in other fields though, no one goes looking through system access logs until someone has reason to suspect something, so usually it takes someone reporting something like what happened here.
I guess patient record security would have limited this, but I'm sure there are still ways around it. Back in my client support days, I did a lot of work with HR -- talk about the world's worst gossip clique! HR people love snooping through peoples' files, basically just for the lulz.
I'm old enough to remember the MCSE and Java/back end web development bootcamps from the late 90s. I even went to an MCSE bootcamp to renew my certification when a consultancy I was working for paid for it. Any time a field gets hot, and there's money to be made, people who don't have a whole lot of aptitude for it are going to look for a quick way in. In the case of my bootcamp, there was a clear division between those of us who needed to stuff our brains with facts to pass a certification test quickly, and those who were driving a truck last week and got tricked by the school's recruiter to giving them their student loan money, GI Bill benefits, etc.
But just like 1999, 2018 and beyond isn't going to need 20 million JavaScript developers who know a couple of web framework tricks. Right now, anyone who can fog a mirror and write in Node.js or Rust is in hipster startup heaven, making lots of money. When the downturn comes, and activity goes back down to a reasonable level, all the people who are suffering through this for the money aren't going to stick around. We're already seeing the coder schools folding up the tents because they can't get enough marks through the door anymore.
There's nothing wrong with educating yourself and changing gears. I've been on a journey to learn more about modern IT stuff like DevOps, cloud, etc. and filling the gaps in my knowledge has been a long, slow process. I've been doing end user computing and systems integration stuff for a while, so web programming is something I haven't done a lot of. Would it be great to just sit down and "learn DevOps in 14 days?" Sure, but I know that's not realistic. When you're working with people who've done nothing but code and manage web apps for a decade, you have a lot of catching up to do and it's not something you can rush if you want any deep knowledge. It's the difference between, say, putting an SSL certificate on a website that a CA gave you, vs. knowing how that process actually works, what can go wrong, etc.
It's good for those 50 people, who I assume are going to be reduced to 10 or 15 over time as data center tasks get even more routine. You basically need security guards, 1 or 2 admins and a bunch of hardware guys to run around and replace disks, rack equipment, etc. And with vendors producing Open Compute-style pods-in-a-box that just have cables, water lines and ductwork coming out, this job gets even easier and more automated. Disks are so cheap now that they could probably just let them die and do a once-a-year purge of all the dead drives, meaning you wouldn't even have to have the full time guys for that job.
Data centers are not a good investment for EDAs...the tax forgiveness and free electricity they're getting will never be offset by 50 jobs over the long term. Government officials think "cyber" when they hear about these projects and think they're master negotiators for bringing this big Silicon Valley titan into their jurisdiction. The details come out later...and Apple may not even decide to stick around.
I think it's growing more and more obvious that full-time, lifelong employment is going away, but the need to keep the consumption cycle running isn't. You're not just going to replace the whole "money is the only store of value" thing overnight. Since no one will ever agree to a basic income until people are killing each other over food scraps, I propose blatant make-work projects. Seriously, if employers won't hire the vast majority of people, how can you run a society where most people can't participate in the economy, _and_ not make those who can feel that those who can't are "lazy drug using welfare queens" or similar?
I doubt this will do anything, since it's a fork and the forkers would need to convince everyone to switch. It is an interesting symbolic gesture though.
I know my opinion is very different from most Slashdotters on this subject, but I actually see some of the points these "SJWs" are trying to make. Everyone has the right to free speech, but leading a public open source project means that people will put a little more scrutiny on you than the average person. Publically supporting a position like MRA in a politically charged environment doesn't look good in most people's eyes. The stereotype in the world of development/IT is that we're all a bunch of bro-culture jerks, Asperger's sufferers and socially maladjusted men who don't want women in our little club. Even if that isn't true, why do anything to feed into this perception? Even if you're on your third wife, paying 60% of your income in alimony and child support, or have a female boss you feel is holding you back, why publically endorse a lightning-rod subject like MRA? Rant in private with your other MRA buddies, not out in the open.
Not everyone can pull off being Linus Torvalds, for example. His insult-laden rants are legendary, but usually he's correct even if he can't be nice about it, and people give him a pass because of it. I've worked with a lot of very smart people who, for whatever reason, have had serious personality flaws that were ignored as long as they kept them somewhat under control. The thing that's different now is social media. Even the President tweets whatever comes to his mind at 3 in the morning and has zero filtering capabilities. Ever since LinkedIn changed their interface to clone Facebook, I've seen people get into comment-fights and post very controversial articles/topics...on a site that's basically stapled onto the back of your resume and designed to be your professional "brand." People in positions of leadership need to understand that their words and actions carry a little more weight than the average person.
Doing systems integration work, my recent experience with web applications has mostly supported this point. javaScript, wrapped in FrameworkOfTheMonth, is slowly replacing client-side applications for better or worse. If we're not allowed to have rich client applications anymore, JavaScript is pretty much the only tool to make a browser act like a rich client -- but it's a good example of shoehorning a technology in just to save complexity. I'm not saying we should go back to Java applets or Flash or ActiveX, but JS is really being extended way beyond what it was ever meant to do.
I think its rise comes from a few factors -- massive amounts of cheap CPU and memory being available on clients, and a billion web frameworks to make using it easy for beginners. This latest dotcom bubble has spawned a bunch of "coder bootcamps" that teach basic front-end web development in a JS framework. It really is easy to throw something together that functions. However, you can definitely tell when either the framework and/or the programmer isn't doing something efficiently...just look at client side UIs that totally freeze up when a database call is taking longer than it should, or websites that slow quad-core systems with 16 GB of RAM to a crawl while they load 11,304,283 snippets of code from different hosted libraries.
No one likes paying taxes, so any time the IRS figures out how to track income or close a loophole, there's bound to be lots of grumbling. The only tax that the IRS is pretty much guaranteed to get is the tax on W-2 income and investment capital gains due to automatic reporting. Everything else can be gamed. Large companies purchase tax loopholes by buying politicians and accounting services, and there's not much that can be done about that. Small companies are basically free to report what they want to report, and they just roll the dice and hope they don't get audited.
If you're a government agency that everyone hates, and never get adequate funding because of it, you're not going to have the resources to go after every small-time Bitcoin miner out there. The IRS can only afford to audit a tiny percentage of taxpayers every year. So naturally, they're going to go after the big fish. They'll concentrate efforts on all-cash businesses, high-wealth individuals and companies that are reporting classes of income and deductions that are frequently gamed. In my opinion, this Bitcoin thing is no different than the IRS going after wealthy people and companies who are stashing their income in tax-friendly offshore accounts. If you've made a couple grand in Bitcoin speculation, that's very different from someone using it to launder all their business profits for the year. It's just another tool for them to use to go after people that they would otherwise target...they're not going to audit an individual for a $200 charitable donation unless it's one of the small number of random audits they do.
If you want to avoid taxes, go open a deli or pizza place -- I guarantee the ones near me pay almost nothing in taxes because on paper they have a very meager income. Or, just start your own small business one-person corporation and funnel all of your personal expenses through it. Business owners don't personally own their house, cars or other possessions -- their company does, and uses the purchases to offset income. Wage-earners are the only ones paying the official tax rates because of it.
I wonder if this will be implemented globally, or whether there will be a "Windows 10 G" edition. Windows N and Windows KN editions for South Korea and the EU were created to remove Media Player and force the user to make a browser choice before IE is turned on by default.
Some people were beyond pissed when this happened, so maybe they'll just cut their losses and do it across the board. The sneaky upgrade dialog was the thing I wasn't happy about, but I'm sure there are some people out there who are very privacy-minded, and any files they didn't explicitly ask for are a no-go for them. I work with people all over the world, and the EU and Germany in particular has some of the strictest privacy laws. 99% of the information harvesting that your average one-trick web startup gets away with in the US is just forbidden by law there. Facebook and Google are constantly lobbying to have the rules not apply to them because their business model falls apart without full access to people's data.
As people age, they tend to collect responsibilities outside of work. That's (IMO) what makes people hate their jobs more -- it's stress, and the feeling of being trapped no matter what path you choose:
- Places to live where technology professionals congregate are too expensive for most families to survive on a single income. This means both parents work, adding to family stress, as well as having a large amount of monthly expenses even if you aren't spending way above your means.
- My wife and I are constantly trying to balance our jobs and our family life. Some people don't give a crap or just give up trying, but actually caring adds a lot of stress onto your plate as you try to juggle different priorities.
- Around 35, if you haven't been saving for retirement, you should be feeling the Grim Reaper tapping you on the shoulder inviting you to a future of living on Social Security alone and eating Spam...because it's almost too late to start unless you get a really good run of stock market luck. More stress.
- If you have kids, saving for college (should be) a priority too...stress.
- As you age, unless you've stagnated for a decade or more, you're probably in a more responsible role, and less shielded from typical corporate political nastiness. You get to see how the sausage is made...and in my personal experience that's a contributor to stress too.
- Because you have all these responsibilities eating away at you, you're often less likely to just rage-quit and go find somewhere else to work unless you're really well-off...hence the feeling of being trapped.
And, it doesn't matter what career path you've chosen either:
- If you're in management, and you're not 100% suited for the job, I can totally see why people would hate their jobs. You deal with so much, and companies are always looking to "delayer," so the key is to scramble up the middle management layer as quick as possible.
- If you've chosen to remain technical (like me,) there are _so many_ pressures. Outsourcing. Offshoring. A constant deluge of new shiny things to learn if you want to stay useful. MBAs waiting around every corner to question why you're being paid so much in their eyes. Balancing home life with having to stay current. Staying productive enough to keep up with the 24 year olds who don't know enough to not work 100 hour weeks for free. You name it -- we techies pay a heavy price to keep using our brains for work.
- If you've chosen something like a civil service job, then that "trapped" feeling probably sets in early. I know lots of people who work for the state university system and in state government -- getting a bad boss in a CS position who will never be fired and having to stay in a very similar position so you're never fired must be confining, and people have confirmed this. The only cold comfort is that your retirement and usually your job is secure, so that's one less degree of stress.
The take-away is that the grass isn't greener in most cases - life is just more difficult as responsibilities get layered on top.
Everyone says "I really should back this up" until they need it. I don't even heed my own advice half the time and have been burned horribly over it. This guy's lucky he just lost his own files -- I've found it's way too easy to pave over cloud-based stuff by just issuing a command on the wrong set of resources -- the API and script-based access method is nice and fast, but totally de-nerfed in some situations. If you have the access, it's just going to do what you tell it.
That said....user interfaces can be horribly confusing too. It's one of the downsides of this super-fast deployment cycle; no one tests usability the way they tested a fully released, boxed product.
Large companies often have this problem. At the end of all the financial safeguards, double and triple checks, and hidebound processes for moving money around, the actual way it's done is very dependent on a human recognizing a message is from a trusted source. Billion-dollar companies have a bunch of payroll people literally emailing or EDI-ing unencrypted Excel files to their payroll processor showing who to pay what amount, and the only security on that process is that "I'm the payroll clerk, so I know what's going on." Same goes for invoices -- if something looks legit, and it looks like it came from a vendor, it gets paid.
If a company wants to keep these manual processes in place, they need to ensure the channels these messages run over are totally secure. At least train people to pick up a phone and call if they see something out of the ordinary.
I've been very lucky boss-wise, and only worked for one manager/group of managers in my career that bothered me enough to quit. However, I have many co-workers who have "escaped" from toxic environments run by terrible bosses. Some weren't exactly low-paying jobs either -- think investment banks, elite law firms, and consulting companies. Almost every one has told me that leaving and taking a pay cut was better than dreading going to work every day and dealing with their bosses screaming at them, throwing them to the wolves, or just being a total jerk. Say what you will about Bannon, but I think he's just making a rational decision and answering questions like "Can I control this guy? Is he hurting my long term aspirations? Is the access and influence I have and future untold billions I will have because of it balanced with the probability of everything going sideways?" The problem is always cost/benefit - I know some people who've worked in investment banking as devs or very high-end IT pros, and they say the bonuses are massive and salaries are great, but you have to deal with a company that's basically 100% bro-culture assholes every day in exchange for it.
My dislike of the current administration mostly stems from its apparently inability to control its emotions. I think Trump is not used to being questioned on _anything_ and people in his inner circle have given him a pass on his behavior forever because they want to keep getting paid. I obviously don't know what he's thinking, but I think he feels that international conflicts and political compromise is just like strong-arming some union boss on one of his construction sites or bribing some city official to get one of his properties expedited through the system.
One of my favorite political cartoons of late (sorry about the ) came out when Trump started signing his first executive orders and shows him sitting on Bannon's lap saying, "I'm a big boy!" I think that it's pretty obvious that no one can control him at this point, so we'll see what happens.
Usually, the high-profile "phone unlocking" cases you hear of lately are terrorism or drug-related. Your average iPhone owner is most likely looking to protect his contact list, evidence of dealings, etc. than planning an attack. I'd say Apple aimed this feature squarely at their core demographic -- affluent Millenials:
- Locking up your phone when high/drunk prevents people from using your fingerprint without your knowledge to get access to the phone
- If you're stopped for a minor offense (traffic stop, DWI, etc.) it could prevent the police from finding anything else to make your situation worse if they are suspicious
- Almost all non-violent interactions with the police involve traffic issues or drugs. If a cop catches you in possession of a small amount of drugs, they may or may not be more willing to just let you go if they have to go through a whole search warrant process, take you in and fill out paperwork to see what's on your phone.
What would be an even more interesting feature is if you held down a certain key sequence (three long, three short, three long sounds good...SOS) and the phone instantly wiped itself by shorting out the flash memory and destroying itself. You wouldn't have your $1000 computer in your pocket anymore, but you'd have to decide if that was worth less than the evidence the police could have obtained.
I guarantee this is going to get challenged in court to sort it out. 200+ years ago, and even in the Miranda era, no one was carrying a device capable of storing every personal detail of their lives in their pocket. The best you'd ever get is a drug dealer's notebook with their contacts. Phones are interesting in that they're extensions of the people who carry them.
There are a few solutions to this problem, pick one or more:
1. Reduce the need for people to show up for work at a physical office
2. Make transportation, both public and private, hyper-efficient
3. Pop the housing bubble around Northern California (and other large metros) by popping the Second Dotcom Bubble
4. Add more housing in the area so people aren't desperately waving sacks of money around saying, "PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE let me pay $4000 a month for a 1-bedroom apartment!"
I live near New York City and back before I had kids I used to commute on the train for work; did it for a couple of multi-year stints before I had had enough. I'm about 60 miles away, and it was easily a 1.5 hour train and subway ride each direction when everything was going perfectly. There are plenty of stories like the one in the article, and I remember hearing tales of multi-hour commutes from places like Stockton and Sacramento as the First Dotcom Bubble was about to hit its peak in 1999. I did my crazy commute for financial gain; I was getting paid a New York salary and living a comfortable distance away. Sheila James, being 62 and a government employee, was most likely priced out of the San Francisco market and is trying to hang on a few more years, as federal pensions are calculated based on final average salary and years of service. These days, you'd really have to offer me a crazy amount of money to go back to doing it...even with cutting my day short and working part of it on the train, it's a life-eater. I work at a place that's closer to home, pays less, but lets me be home more which is more important to me lately.
Housing bubbles suck. Permanently overpriced real estate markets suck more. Metro NY is a perfect example...not nearly as bad as California once you leave the city, but prices are permanently high just because so much wealth is concentrated here. You have everything from "old money" to celebrities to CEOs to hedge-fund Masters of the Universe, and if they're not living in Midtown Manhattan, they want to live right outside of it. It makes it difficult to find good housing a reasonable distance from work.
I mean, I get that Ericsson probably saw they need to get going if they want to be part of 5G and future telecom equipment rollouts....but I have NEVER heard a CEO, even of a technology company, acknowledge that they haven't spent enough on R&D. At least lately, R&D has always been a cost that had to be minimized in any way possible. Anything outside of a 3-month timeframe is completely off the table at most companies; it has to affect this quarter's numbers or it's totally invisible.
At least in big US corporations, I blame this on the MBA grooming cycle. MBAs are taught that they can manage anything using metrics and spreadsheets, and that they need no knowledge of the actual business processes they're managing...it's enough to be able to run the numbers. Add to this the fact that an MBA gets you an immediate management job at most companies, even if you've never done the work before or know anything about the company. And on top of that, the truly elite business schools graduate MBAs who haven't really had to work or get any real-world experience. It's Harvard MBA --> McKinsey --> VP job at a high-end McKinsey customer, with no stops in between. I've seen this happen in a couple of large companies - you get people who have no clue what's going on unless there's a dashboard telling them some metric is out of spec.
I wish more companies would admit mistakes like Ericsson is doing and try to focus on something other than the share price...but I'm not holding my breath!
In other news, AOL buys Time Warner, VA Linux has the largest first-day IPO price increase, and Pets.com announces free shipping on all 50 lb or larger bags of dog food...CEO says they'll "make it up in volume."
Unless things get crazier than they are now, I see this bubble deflating more slowly. There are fewer crazy pointless IPOs (Twitter and Snapchat are notable exceptions.) The average investor isn't being pushed so hard to buy tech stocks, and there's less cheerleading on CNBC this time. So maybe we've learned something.
It's amusing that one thing keeping this bubble inflated is the thing that I think we're going to take away from the bubble period and use...cloud computing. When a VC just has to cut a check to Amazon or Microsoft or Google instead of building a data center and buying network capacity, profitless startups can kick along for a lot longer. All that free capital can then be used to deck out a startup's hip trendy San Francisco office space with preschool furniture, free food and free massages for their employees.
Make no mistake though -- there are going to be thousands of scrum masters, DevOps ninjas and JavaScript framework of the month coders looking for work as the field contracts. Not because they're bad (although I hear startups are hiring anyone who can fog a mirror and write code in Rust...) but because you just don't need as many superficially-skilled web developers to go around. Just like last time, the good people will find or keep work, although I'm sure a lot of people's lives will be upended while they look to escape startup-land.
I'm 42, so I think I officially qualify as old. Yet, here I am still doing senior-level engineering work. I'm not a DevOps ninja (yet...) and don't code 16 hours a day, but I really enjoy my job. I'm hoping for the day that more employers will see that older workers who are still contributing aren't a drag on the company they work for -- they're the adults that are needed to redirect some of the "bright ideas" and temper them with reality and experience. Unfortunately, we're a society that worships Silicon Valley wunderkinds and 24-year-old CEOs, and even boring old school companies are trying to behave like web startups. So here's my suggestions -- companies shouldn't try too hard; if they do even some of these things they will retain talented older workers:
I've been working in IT for over 20 years, and the thing I've seen over and over again is that organizations that cheap out on IT get stung by things like these more frequently. I've been through multi-hour company-wide outages because someone said there was no reason to keep a core application in more than one data center. We constantly see companies where "IT is not our core competency" getting breached when their lowest-bidder contractors leave an open hole exposed, or when the entire company is run on a massive tower of outsourcers that don't communicate with each other. If I remember correctly, that's how the Target breach happened...a contractor running the HVAC for the stores had a security hole in the systems connected to the store networks, which attackers were able to use to get to the registers and credit card terminals.
You will never convince companies to do this, but in my opinion the only way to prevent breaches from happening or to minimize their damage is to pay in-house IT staff who *actually* understand what's being deployed. Staff who are paid well and not worked to death are going to be a lot more interested in keeping your business alive than some disinterested offshore firm or body shop who cares only about fulfilling the minimum terms in the contract. (The other thing that has to happen is that everything has to be secure by default, but almost nowhere I've worked has been able to wrap their heads around this. Too many places assume that there's an "outside" and an "inside" and spend all their effort defending the perimeter.)
What's interesting is that $250K is pretty low for a first offer. I haven't looked through the archive of data these hackers claim to have, but summaries say they were able to get access to sensitive corporate data as well as unreleased content. Some group of people at HBO must be going through all the access logs and figuring out what kind of damaging information they may have exposed. Given that they're an entertainment company, just a dump of the company's email should reveal some very interesting exchanges with various high-profile individuals. Worth way more than a quarter million in my opinion....
Microsoft, Apple and Google are all about controlling the user experience in their operating systems these days. I think that they're responding to a market where the non-power users have mostly migrated over to tablets and phones for daily use, and the idea of one strictly enforced UI standard actually makes sense in this case.
The problem is that power users aren't dead, but there's fewer of us and it makes less sense to cater to power users' needs in the minds of the hardware/software vendors. Windows 10 users, myself included, have been asking Microsoft for ages to bring back more customization features, and especially now that Windows Phone is dead. I'm not talking anything crazy -- just bringing back the ability to reskin things without having to resort to third party tools. But the trend has been to include fewer knobs and buttons to customize things, not more. I'm actually surprised about the favicon thing though -- most web developers I know, at least on the front end, are Mac users and you would think they'd have some pull with Apple.
In my opinion, the fight for the ability to customize commercial OSes died when everyone started using phones. People expect an iPhone or stock Android device to work the exact same way, appliance-style, and you can only customize a very narrow band of settings.
I live in a high-tax state, and places like North Carolina, Texas, Florida and others are constantly begging large companies to move some or all of their operations there. Sometimes it works, and the usual method for doing it is these big tax deals. The problem I've seen is that state governments are easily swayed by companies promising large amounts of high-quality jobs...only to find that someone like Amazon, Apple or Microsoft is just building an unmanned data center in the middle of nowhere. Or, the company does the absolute bare minimum to comply with the agreement, then shuts everything down and moves to the next jurisdiction they're able to convince. An autonomous data center for AWS or Azure probably needs a handful of people - security guards, one or two higher-level engineers on site, and a couple of "equipment pullers" installing and replacing hardware.
I question whether Foxconn is actually going to employ workers at these factories long-term, or if they're just going to say "sorry, we're automating our operations and laying everyone off" a couple of years in. The problem is that for these tax deals to work out for the states giving them, they have to make back the money they're losing on tax waivers, free power and infrastructure, etc. - and the way they do that is through payroll and property taxes. This is what New York is doing to try to get companies to locate here -- they're betting that by waiving direct corporate taxes for a few years, they'll get companies to hire people who will pay people, who will pay into the system through taxes.
The state economies in the US vary significantly. High-tax states like New York, California and a lot of New England fund their education systems to a much higher degree than low-tax states. Some states have way more infrastructure to maintain than others. Some have to remove snow in the winter and fix potholes. The long-term problem is that companies are much more mobile than they were, and need fewer workers. A large employer will think nothing of moving 1000 workers to a different state if the tax deal they get is right, and that seems to be a change that's happened in the last 30 years or so. I'm assuming they feel they're doing workers a favor by not offshoring the work.
"Horrific I know, suggesting the current work environment could be improved."
I read the paper fully, and think I get where he's coming from. Given that he has a Ph. D. in biology, I can only assume he's quite scientific and rational...things that most humans don't fully get. He lays the argument out quite thoroughly. I'm not sure i believe 100% of what he says, but he is at least citing a few sources. I'm not the most extroverted, socially attuned person, but I do know how to _tactfully_ suggest improvements and get them acted on. Even if something is perfectly rational, you don't get far if your criticism of the current situation steps on political third rails. Saying "process X is stupid and here's my idea of how to fix it" can be done without throwing people under the bus directly, and that's how to make long-term changes that aren't going to alienate a huge chunk of your audience.
People might say that's too PC and would rather attack others directly, call a spade a spade and all that. But there's a spectrum between fully PC, zero-discussion and an all-out bitchfest. As an example, in the past, I have worked with a lot of guys who were on Wife #2 or more, paying child support and alimony to #1, and just wouldn't stop bitching about how evil women are...I'm sure these guys are quite happy to see James' paper see the light of day and he's probably getting a lot of support from that camp.
Whether you agree with him or not, Google is being a rational large company. Their lawyers met with the chief counsel and calculated that allowing, then settling one wrongful termination suit far outweighs the damage that might be caused in the press each time the two parties show up in court. Not to mention the potential class actions -- every female who ever had any interaction with James Damore, every female who was denied a job by Google, every female who wasn't promoted, and on and on. It's the same thing that happens with product liability -- do you issue a recall or hope everything blows over, even though you're on the hook for a lot of money and reputational damage if someone connects the dots? Takata, VM and the GM ignition switch cases are good example of this.
I said it yesterday, but it bears repeating -- even if it's not overt, if a company knowingly creates what a jury believes is a hostile work environment, and doesn't take action to stop it, they're on the hook. This was their smart play in this case -- they showed that they took immediate action and disavowed that Damore was speaking in any way for Google in general. I know people are turning this into a "conservative witch hunt" story, but I think it's just legal butt-covering.
From the article, I noticed that Johny Srouji is quoted as defending his team...quite vocally...against having an open office imposed on them. Individual workers will never win over the MBAs touting cost per square foot, or the design eggheads like Jony Ive demanding everything be white, flat and rounded. But the boss of a very influential part of the company has a little more pull. If a boss has sufficient leverage (and guts) to say something like, "Maybe I should take my chip design team over to Qualcomm/Intel/AMD and you can just buy processors for your iThings from them!" things like corporate "mandates" tend to fall away pretty quickly. Problem is that most managers aren't like that; if I were a computer engineer I sure wouldn't mind working for this guy.
I know people have different work styles, and some extroverts and recent college graduates want to continue the college lifestyle by recreating the dorm/dining hall/open classroom feel. But in my experience, it's going to take Google saying "oops, we screwed up...open plan is only good for web startups with 25 people, and everywhere else should have a mix of styles and let teams/people choose." Every large company I've ever worked for copies HR policy verbatim from either GE, IBM or Google. I think they all use the same management consulting firm.
Mistakes happen, and this was a BIG one, but I'm of the opinion that the pendulum is too far over in the "get it done now" realm and needs to swing a little back toward the middle. I'm in systems integration/engineering, and there is a relentless push for even established companies to be fully buzzword compliant, move towards DevOps, and basically remove any barrier whatsoever to putting stuff out there the second a developer checks in a code change. A lot of this is good, but unless your developers are accomplished system admins who actually know how things work under their layer of code, the Ops people do need to work with them to ensure they're not doing anything crazy or taking shortcuts.
The whole pendulum-swing thing is being driven by web startups and the ever-raging battle beyond Devs creating Apps! and Ops people maintaining all that LUDDITE infrastructure. When the Ops people were allowed to fully drift over to being the Department of No, the Apps! developers just walked around them and built their Apps! in the public cloud with a credit card. At the same time, all the web startups were starting up with zero legacy anything, so everything was built to that cloud model and it's felt that Devs don't need to know about infrastructure anymore.
I have one foot in both worlds (agile cloudy stuff and infrastructure-centered stuff) and I feel that items like this are going to pop up more often given the constant push to move move move or else. Stuff like putting confidential customer data on a public S3 bucket, leaving a key system fully exposed to the Internet because your cloud's IaaS platform doesn't stop you, etc. Once the Second Dotcom Bubble pops, I'm hoping we take the good stuff that DevOps gives us and apply a sane schedule to it, letting people who actually understand the nuts and bolts of infrastructure, ports and protocols weigh in also.