Google is a big company now, they're not a startup anymore. Every big company I've worked for as part of the mandatory sexual harassment training talks about creating a hostile work environment. Even if it's not overt, like some half drunk salesman putting the moves on the receptionist, if someone feels uncomfortable within the "reasonable person" standards, the company is liable if they know about it and allow it to continue. I think that's where this stems from...their lawyers would rather deal with one wrongful termination suit than a class action brought by anyone who had contact with James Damore.
Large companies are risk-averse; most of the places I've worked with have dealt with harassment claims by immediately getting rid of anyone that they had any sort of evidence on. If it ever comes out in the open that someone wasn't immediately disciplined for any bad behavior, you get the situation that occurred at Uber, or what happened with Mark Hurd at HP.
Every big company just makes these things go away. Google is going to reach into the couch cushions, pull out a few million bucks, and give it to the guy. It's all about risk management; I'm sure they want this whole thing to disappear so that they're not dragged in front of the media every single time a court date comes up.
In my opinion. they were right to get rid of him. Regardless of the content of what was published, you don't start a highly politically-charged fight, drag your employer into it, and expect to keep your job. Especially when the CEO has to cut his vacation short -- I'm sure that was the last straw. I've been nothing but professional in my career, and there have been _plenty_ of times I could have unloaded on this or that in a public forum but chose not to.
And besides, aren't we beyond this "women are inherently different" thing? Being in IT, you do work with a lot of guys and there is a definite gender gap. But, part of me thinks women are just being rational and avoiding what can be a stressful, thankless job if you're in the wrong environment. It's not all, or even the majority of men I've worked with, but I have worked with some very vocal men who border on the MRA level. But when you get down to the root of the problem, most of them are unmarried/unmarryable, or worse, on their second or third wife and paying large amounts of child support. From what I've seen, that's where a lot of the bitter complaining comes from, and if I was getting 50+% of my salary siphoned off each pay period I'd probably be bitter too.
"They are really good engineers, really indispensable. And then they start to pull 9-5 days"
Working massive numbers of hours weeks is not normal. For a startup, yes...but once a company is out of the "get big fast" phase and actually making money, there's no excuse to burn people out and run the place like a startup. I know younger tech employees want to continue the college dorm lifestyle and live at work, but I dislike the trend of calling anyone who wants to work a sane number of hours a week "coasters."
Lots of big, successful companies have "Distinguished Engineer" positions and use them for different reasons, such as: - To have a raft of smart people on staff, not necessarily to do nuts-and-bolts work but to provide top-level guidance to those who do - To have a position that, because of the pay structure of the organization, is the only technical position that pays high enough to reward a technical person for things like inventing the company's cash cow products, etc. - For vanity or bragging rights...such as having Linus Torvalds or Vint Cerf on your payroll - And of course, to pay these people enough to keep them from jumping to your competitors
Distinguished Engineers are mostly accomplished enough that they don't really have to worry about finding a job. They're getting paid handsomely, and/or able to live off the crazy amounts of money they've made already. It's basically the prize for winning the meritocracy lottery. It's also the closest any of us techies will get to the level of a corporate CxO -- paid handsomely in cash, stock and free stuff by their primary company, plus getting the salary, perks and influence associated with "sitting" on a ton of other companies' boards. I wouldn't call them "coasters." I'd call them savvy!
Why? Medicare has millions of people in the system, they're all old and sick, but they've all been paying into their insurance through payroll for decades. It makes sense that they're more efficient. You don't have a massive corporate bureaucracy trying to deny coverage at every turn -- doctors and hospitals just submit fee-for-service bills and the plan pays almost automatically. Private doctors don't like the rates they pay, but at least they pay without questions. And with millions of insured patients, something like universal Medicare would be able to cover the basics and negotiate cheaper rates for things like prescriptions which are insane.
An example from the private sector is my personal situation -- I work for a multinational company that only has about 900 employees in the US and our health insurance is awful as a result - high deductibles, small networks of physicians, all sorts of crazy rules, etc. My wife works for a much bigger employer with about 25,000 employees and we pay a lot less for better coverage as a result. It's not without problems - there are still crazy rules and they try to wiggle out of paying for anything non-routine until you put up something of a fight, but it is decent.
So wouldn't the solution be to just get rid of the onerous testing requirements? Assume the entire pool is tainted and just use your actual intuition to hire someone you feel is going to be reliable. Either that, or raise the pay to a level worth putting in the effort for.
I've never touched drugs in my life but don't fault anyone for doing so, especially those who've went from stable middle-class work to scraping by on almost nothing. Back before it was easy and cheap to do drug testing, background checks and credit reports, employers had to go with their gut and decide for themselves if someone was going to be a good hire or not. Now, if you have any of these marks on your record there's almost no chance you'll be hired over someone who doesn't, and in this world of unstable finances and work situations, it's very easy to pick up one or more of these marks...way easier than it was in the past.
Of course there is, but that's a much smaller swath of the population than will be showing up for work at Amazon once any other means of earning an income dries up. Amazon must realize the position they're in...they're free to abuse their workers as much as they want because there's 9,000 others waiting in line for the job.
An analogy from the tech world is video game companies abusing and burning out their employees. So many people want to break into the "exciting world" of game development that they'll sacrifice their personal health for it and work as many 120 hour work weeks as their employers tell them to. Because if they don't, thousands of starry-eyed new grads are just waiting for the opportunity.
"Only problem is that probably 70% of these people will probably fail the drug screening."
I've read stories about this as well, where the few manufacturers left who are hiring can't find anyone. What I don't understand is why they can't just relax this requirement and/or pay more. Failing a drug screen doesn't automatically mean you're going to cause an accident or not show up to work. In my opinion it's a very puritanical move to lock people out who've done nothing wrong other than losing the IQ lottery. As a society we used to have work for these populations, and now they're broke and turning to drugs as an escape.
Aren't most factories almost totally computer-controlled anyway and any humans are basically just machine-minders?
This kind of reminds me of longshoremen having to turn up at the docks every morning and stand on the stones just for a chance to get picked to work that day, with no guarantee that you would be working tomorrow. At least Amazon is providing health benefits, but I've heard horror stories about working for them, both in the warehouses and in technology positions.
In my opinion, scenes like this are going to be more prevalent in the future as more stable work gets offshored or eliminated entirely due to automation. I've said this before, but working in big company IT you see positions all the time that could easily be dumped the second some MBA with a spreadsheet gets around to it. This has been the way of the world for decades though -- big companies were big enough and made enough money to afford to have a little slack in the system and still return profits to shareholders. With the push to put everyone through college instead of training them right out of high school, you have a lot of random business grads who may not have gotten good grades or learned much between all the partying. Big companies still hire a ton of these entry level graduates to do some random task. These graduates get/got a decent salary, stable work, and were able to build their lives around the fact that they would have income. As they settle down, new grads get promotions, buy houses, have children, pay taxes, and consume at increasing levels as their salaries increase. Because of this, the consumer cycle continues on -- companies produce goods that customers can afford to buy because they have jobs because companies can produce goods...
Scenes like this are what make me think this cycle is breaking down. If you squeeze so much that an operation is 100% efficient and you have no more need for the vast majority of employees, then you cut out the ability for those former employees to participate in the economy. Forgoing a new grad hire at the help desk or support team for $40K because Tata will give you a "replacement" for $10K in India means that that new grad is going to have limited options and may end up in line at the Amazon warehouse for just over minimum wage. I don't know how to solve it -- people propose a universal basic income, and i think that's the best answer, but the people who happen to be on the positive side of this shift will never go for it. You would have to have massive unemployment, 50% or more, just to register that there's a problem in most people's minds, and I think that will lead to a pretty big upheaval in the not too distant future.
Does that mean we should give people make-work? I think so, unless anyone has a plan for breaking society's dependence on getting an education, going to work, consuming, saving for retirement, and spending down your savings at the end of your life.
From an advertising perspective I don't understand why your browsing history is that useful. No one I know clicks on ads, I've never bought anything based on an advertisement, yet somehow Google and the like continue to rake in money. Until companies figure out that online advertising is useless, there will still be huge pressure for ISPs to cash in on that personal data funny money...greater fool theory and all that. The Second Dotcom Bubble is based on advertising just like the first, but this time people have a computer in their pockets 24/7 that stores a lot more personal information.
Microsoft does a very similar thing with their Bing Rewards program and if you don't watch your privacy settings on Windows 10, you're automatically signed up if you use a Microsoft account. You don't get much - maybe a few gift cards here and there. Most people don't care but I've certainly switched it off. After the FCC rule allowing ISPs to sell personal data was passed, a lot of ISPs came out with statements saying they wouldn't engage in this practice. I guess the ending to that was, "...unless you tell us you want to in exchange for gift cards."
I'm not so sure about that. Unless you're building a company out in the middle of nowhere, it seems like it'd be a perfect opportunity for the right people to ditch SV and live somewhere less hectic. Let's say you start up in a semi-fancy suburb of a lower-tier Northeast city. Compared to California, real estate is so cheap and plentiful that anyone owning or renting in CA would immediately experience a quality-of-life bump. California housing starts at $1 million or more in desirable areas like LA and SF/SV. Taking the example of upstate NY, even though NY has high taxes, anyone relocating from CA would pay less for housing, most would have shorter or less traffic-choked commutes, and even if you paid above market rate to get smarter people, you'd still pay them less.
This would be comparable to domestic outsourcing, which typically locates workers in cheaper places to live. Back before they shipped everything to India, IBM was doing outsourcing work in Iowa, West Virginia and Georgia as examples. As long as you can convince workers that it's not worth the massive premium to live near San Francisco, it could definitely work.
Every week, I see stories that make me check whether it's 2017 or 1999/2000. I'm honestly glad to see that fewer crazy startups with dubious chances of profitability are getting money. There's legitimate investment and then there's chasing an IPO fueled by stupid peoples' money.
The thing that's different about this bubble is how slowly it inflated and how slowly it's deflation will likely be. I think most of this is due to the public cloud. Back in the 90s it took a massive purchase of datacenter space, hardware and network connectivity to "get big fast" like everyone was trying to do. Now, the VCs just have to pay the AWS, GCP or Azure bill every month instead of putting up millions in up front infrastructure costs. It leaves a lot more capital free for expensive offices and employee perks...er...I mean, strategic R&D investment.
Most business organizations I've witnessed tend to thrive when there's a level of stability. For example, people know they should talk to Person X in charge of Process Y directly to get the real deal on things. It's good to get people out who are pretty toxic, but doesn't government work the same way? Don't companies and wealthy people use the back-channel methods to actually get work done?
We'll see what happens...I'm hoping that there's just a ton of drama, things basically get parked for 4 years, and other countries don't see it as an opportunity to get ahead while everyone's distracted.
Airline websites have this same problem -- the online "cheap ticket" engines regularly scrape the publicly available data by essentially running the "book a trip" workflow millions of times to try to pull the entire set of fares for different city pairs. It's a cat-and-mouse game because the information has to be available for normal humans to book trips; no one is going to solve a CAPTCHA to look up fares. Basically these engines are looking for any irregularities like mis-filed fares or fares that happen to be a particularly good deal. (Airlines have to publish their fares in advance and make them available to online sources that are available to travel agents. This is why you'll occasionally see stuff like a transatlantic business class ticket for $50 or similar...)
I'm not sure if LinkedIn can actually bar someone from scraping their public data. If that was the case, no one could run wget on a website and pull down all the static content.
'a workspace designed from the ground up for the millenial generation'
Agreed it's not all about age, but I generally haven't seen older people outside of sales and marketing who love working in one of these Millenial workspaces. I have seen that younger workers are coming into the workforce being used to more distractions, so while they may not be getting a lot of work done, they prefer the "collaborative preschool" environment with the bright colors and the beanbag chairs. It's different from a more traditional work-style, where older people are used to going to an office, doing their work and leaving. Younger people (at least in IT/development) seem to want to continue their college years and work in a dorm-style atmosphere. Without as many commitments at home they find it appealing to basically live at work, which is a huge bonus for employers.
I'll refrain from the obvious jokes about the workers' pods only having rounded corners...
I really think the companies that get this trend right and actually want to keep employees happy will eventually settle on a mix of public and private spaces. Those of us who are older and like our private spaces have to remember that this is the age where "social media manager" is a real, full-time, highly compensated position. There are some people who thrive on collaborative spaces, constant noise and distraction, and love to work at cafeteria tables with zero personal space. There are also some (me included) who can't get any serious work done unless I'm in a private location with the door shut and "do not disturb" turned on in my various messaging accounts.
Unfortunately, the more extroverted among us tend to have the ear of HR more than heads-down workers like me. In addition, most corporate HR departments just copy what Google is doing verbatim regardless of fit. Google's where all the kids work, and companies love to have as many young exploitable employees as possible, so it makes sense...sort of. Unitl it meets an organization with a high average age of employee, that lives and dies by conference calls and work that requires concentration.
I've spent a 20+ year career in IT, and have noticed the trend over the last decade has been to rely almost fully on a service you don't control for a key part of operations. Most of my work has been with Azure lately, and Microsoft is shifting from releasing updates in packaged format that they publish and host to just pumping it out onto GitHub. There was a story last year about how tons of web projects were broken when a developer removed a portion of functionality from a JavaScript framework hosted publically -- and it turned out to be a trivial sting-manipulation function.
There is nothing wrong with not reinventing the wheel every time and using other peoples' resources. There is something very wrong with assuming that third parties will keep their systems running 100% of the time and never have bad days. Even Microsoft won't guarantee that Azure regions, of which most are _collections_ of fully redundant data centers, will be fully available all the time and that your applications will never experience downtime. You should never assume a resource will be published in the same place and remain online forever, nor should you rely fully on a third party service to provide your only means of providing the service you're providing.
There are some fields where it's just expected that you'll work either a completely unpaid or minimum-wage internship. Living in the NYC area, I see it all the time...publishers, media companies, fashion design houses and advertising firms consider it a new graduate's foot-in-the-door opportunity. There are plenty of stories of essentially unpaid interns doing a staff's bidding and putting in massive amounts of hours because everyone else is willing to do the same thing. If new grads could pay these companies for the opportunity, they would...it's the (unpaid) equivalent of programmers being willing to be abused by video game companies just to have the opportunity to work in video games...if you don't want to do your 10th consecutive 120 hour work week, there are 200 others willing to do it.
Anywhere else, it's a scam...interns should expect at least a small amount of money that isn't minimum wage and also expect to actually learn something on the job. Unpaid interns basically run errands and get coffee, but engineering interns usually get at least some of the grunt work associated with a project. That's actually a good way to learn whether you like the field enough to stick it through the grunt work years. I did plenty of grunt work IT jobs in the beginning of my career and put up with it because I knew I'd be doing something more interesting later.
Not entirely true. There are some positions such as investment banking, white shoe management consulting and corporate law firm jobs that are very sensitive to the school you go to. People like me who went to state schools just don't get these opportunities.
As an example...a graduate from Big State U with good grades will likely be able to get an entry level position at a mid-range consulting company like Accenture or KPMG, because those firms live and die on the number of cheap, non-offshore "requirements gatherers" and "PowerPoint deliverers" that they can fly to customer sites 50 weeks out of the year. They will most likely not be able to get a job with McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, Bain & Company or the other high-end fancy consulting firms. These companies almost exclusively hire from the Ivy League schools or require things like military connections, and these positions almost always lead to extremely lucrative careers because you're basically setting yourself up to be on a huge customer's executive ranks when you're done living in hotels and airports. Ir's a closed club and they don't really care _how_ you got to an Ivy League school, but they do care if you graduated from one because they have a lot of high-end customers to impress.
If you have little to no experience, a degree is the most basic filter the HR department can apply to the 12,384 resumes they are receiving for the open positions. No degree? Garbage, and yes I'm well aware of how unfair that is and how many potential good people they lose. A degree from the right program shows you can at least stick with something that's reasonably hard long enough to make it through, and can probably solve a few non-trivial problems given enough time and guidance.
I've been working for big companies for almost my whole career, and the simple truth is that you have to play a lot of stupid, asinine retarded games to get and keep a job, and advance in your current one. if you don't like it, go work for one of the 4 billion "Dude, GitHub is my resume!" web startups. A zero-knowledge, C-student HR generalist is going to apply whatever it takes to reduce that pile of resumes down. She has a degree -- it may not be CS and she may have spent most of her time at sorority functions, but she's going to feel she's college-educated and you should be too. If you're trying to cold-call your way into a job, it's a rare medium to large company that will even consider someone who hasn't completed a degree of some sort.
I'm in IT and we have _plenty_ of people with just a BS, AS or no degree at all who are very good at what they do. A lot of us don't even have a traditional computer science background. But, woe upon any of these smart people who can't network their way into their next job when they need one, because it puts them at a disadvantage no matter how smart they are.
I think it varies...the scary-smart ones are borderline autistic and have the fresh-from-mom's-basement air about them. You need that in order to have the concentration and mental ability to solve the most complex puzzles to find new vulnerabilities. Even in the brogrammer web startup hustler era, deep below everything there really are a bunch of nerds holding the world up.
Every place I've worked that bothered with a security team worth more than the 2 "experts" the consulting company gave them has a split between the actual hardcore types and their handlers. The handlers are the medium-level folks and range from the really smart systems and dev guys who actually know and care about security stuff, the telephone sanitizers who send out the "don't click on obvious phishing links" emails to the boss/CISO who has to go beg the board to please please PLEASE care about security and give them some money to help protect the company,
The root of the problem is a lack of affordable places to live that aren't several hours' commute from places where people work. I live in the NY metro area, and even 60 miles away house prices are high in good school districts. Northern California is way worse -- you're starting at a million for ownership of any kind of home, which means you need a job that pays an outsized salary just to have a massive mortgage payment.
This problem is repeated in cities all over the US to lesser degrees. Atlanta has very affordable housing if you're willing to put up with hours of driving, and Georgia has almost no property taxes...but in my opinion sitting on the road for another 10 or 15 hours a week isn't worth it.
One fix I could see is to make retirement stability easier to maintain. So many people in our area have little saved for retirement and are banking on selling their high-priced house and moving to North Carolina or similar. It's their only retirement asset, and in the current environment it's in everyone's best interest to keep these mini housing bubbles inflated until they can cash out.
I know it's trendy for the Millenial crowd to jump from employer to employer, but I still think finding a decent employer who doesn't treat you like crap is the way to go. Once you find one of those, and some people never do, hang onto it because the grass isn't always greener. I think there's value in sticking with something for a longer period, and at the same time you can wind up in a rut. Maybe it's because I'm 42 and have a family, but I would definitely like to see a little more loyalty on _both_ sides of the employment equation.
I've been with my current employer for a total of about 14 years, in two "tours of duty." But, the key is that I'm not a typical lifetime employee...I work for an IT services company and am constantly shifting around on various projects learning new things. Employees where I work tend to stick around because of the industry-specific knowledge you build up, but it's up to you to avoid becoming pigeonholed in one tiny area. I see this a lot in IT, especially when we hire outside people as specialists. There are so many opportunities to go down the specialization rabbit hole far enough that you become defined by the speciality you work on. Once that specialty dries up, you can become excess weight very quickly. Look at all the Exchange administrators that got replaced with an Office 365 subscription, or CCNAs/CCNPs that are slowly seeing their premium erode due to SDN and cloud providers, or the EMC/NetApp gods whose SANs are being replaced with storage virtualization. You can learn so much about any one of these topics that you practically work for the company that produced them, but at the exclusion of everything else.
There are also some people who spend a career at an organization because they're "political survivors" who always seem to come out on the right side of a layoff/reorg because they spend their time studying organizational behavior instead of doing good work. It is important to keep your ear to the ground and know how to avoid bad situations, but some lifetime employees survive (and often do very well for themselves) because they know exactly what is coming next. We just had a major shake-up at the top levels of the company I work for, and having worked there for a while, I saw some very familiar names surviving (with promotions in some cases) because they play the games. If you don't want to do that, the alternative is to keep doing good work and making yourself valuable enough that they don't think about getting rid of you.
I think we're done with the traditional big-company employer-managed career track in most organizations. I know many people a generation or two back from myself who had full careers with companies like IBM and AT&T. Both of those employers actively developed their workforces back then, and had well-defined career tracks. Now, there's zero loyalty on either side of the table, and employers are increasingly asking that people be 100% trained in their exact narrow set of technologies, skills, etc. But I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to stick around at an employer as long as you don't find yourself 20 years in doing the same job. It sure beats rage-quitting jobs every year just because you don't like one thing that happened.
Is it possible that people are moving away from crazy web startup land to more established companies? Microsoft is poised to become the new IBM in terms of lock-in and guaranteed revenue with Azure, and Amazon has their tentacles in everything including AWS these days. Both are very close to becoming monopolies (again) raking in large amounts of money at a constant rate. Talk about a good place to find a stable job where companies have enough cash on hand to treat employees well...the opposite of post-bubble VC funding that's coming to Silicon Valley.
I like Seattle, but I wouldn't want to move across the country just to have the same insane cost of living I already have in New York. The Californians moving north are probably driving the increase in prices -- average SV techies make $200K+ and many are selling a million-dollar plus house. Microsoft and Amazon are going to have to at least match the SV salary plus pay for relocation.
On one hand, the companies this would be targeting are big enough to hold either de facto or explicit monopoly power, which isn't good for competition. On the other, in this new zero-slack, tiny-margin economy that looks like it's upon us, large companies would be the only ones making enough profit to pay their employees well.
I was just reading this article 2 minutes before reading the linked article. Companies that are being squeezed to the point where they can't make any more money are certainly not going to make life easier for their employees. If you optimize the system 100% and remove all inefficiencies, you could have a situation where nobody can provide enough value to sell their labor anymore. I know that sounds very Luddite-y, but IMO we're at the point where the vast majority of people can't simply move up the job ladder to the next better position when theirs is eliminated. There are too many people employed in middleman positions who will no longer have work, nor have any way to get new work.
Sure, no one wants monopolies with unlimited pricing power. But should the alternative be a hyper-efficient world where no one of average skill and intelligence can find work?
Unemployment as measured today seems like it goes back to a simpler time for the labor force. I know we have U1 through U6, but I think in previous times U1 and U2 modeled the real world better than the higher numbers. Back around the 60s and 70s, the US (and the UK) had a lot more traditional labor cycle. Many more people were employed in the trades or in factories, and the business cycle determined when people were laid off because factories were producing fewer goods, running fewer shifts, etc. If you had a job on an assembly line building a certain component, and the company killed the product line or needed fewer, you were laid off. However, back then you could go down to your local unemployment office and have a much easier time finding a job at a plant across town. Or, you could actually wait until the company called you back once production picked back up.
Today, layoffs are permanent for white collar workers and there are fewer cyclical factory jobs. It represents a permanent shift in the labor force -- you just need fewer humans to do every job these days. Way back in the day I worked an IT helpdesk job for a large life insurer -- they had a 25-floor office that spanned two Manhattan city blocks, plus a 40-story tower that took up 1/4 of a block, plus large offices all over the country. According to the old timers, there were thousands and thousands of file clerks, accountants and clerical staff working in that building as late as 1985 or so, before the first wave of big-company downsizing happened...so many that logistics of getting everyone in and out of the building were more difficult than normal.
Maybe we should redefine what full employment is -- I'm a big proponent of making sure everyone has a way to earn a living, but I think the reality is that the unemployment numbers are going to have to get a lot worse before anybody is going to do anything about it. Maybe publishing some of the scarier numbers is the way to do it, while explaining that this is what's modeling reality these days. I'd prefer finding work for everyone to having more older workers have to fake their way into getting Social Security disability payments because no one is hiring them.
Slashdot Mirror
Google is a big company now, they're not a startup anymore. Every big company I've worked for as part of the mandatory sexual harassment training talks about creating a hostile work environment. Even if it's not overt, like some half drunk salesman putting the moves on the receptionist, if someone feels uncomfortable within the "reasonable person" standards, the company is liable if they know about it and allow it to continue. I think that's where this stems from...their lawyers would rather deal with one wrongful termination suit than a class action brought by anyone who had contact with James Damore.
Large companies are risk-averse; most of the places I've worked with have dealt with harassment claims by immediately getting rid of anyone that they had any sort of evidence on. If it ever comes out in the open that someone wasn't immediately disciplined for any bad behavior, you get the situation that occurred at Uber, or what happened with Mark Hurd at HP.
Every big company just makes these things go away. Google is going to reach into the couch cushions, pull out a few million bucks, and give it to the guy. It's all about risk management; I'm sure they want this whole thing to disappear so that they're not dragged in front of the media every single time a court date comes up.
In my opinion. they were right to get rid of him. Regardless of the content of what was published, you don't start a highly politically-charged fight, drag your employer into it, and expect to keep your job. Especially when the CEO has to cut his vacation short -- I'm sure that was the last straw. I've been nothing but professional in my career, and there have been _plenty_ of times I could have unloaded on this or that in a public forum but chose not to.
And besides, aren't we beyond this "women are inherently different" thing? Being in IT, you do work with a lot of guys and there is a definite gender gap. But, part of me thinks women are just being rational and avoiding what can be a stressful, thankless job if you're in the wrong environment. It's not all, or even the majority of men I've worked with, but I have worked with some very vocal men who border on the MRA level. But when you get down to the root of the problem, most of them are unmarried/unmarryable, or worse, on their second or third wife and paying large amounts of child support. From what I've seen, that's where a lot of the bitter complaining comes from, and if I was getting 50+% of my salary siphoned off each pay period I'd probably be bitter too.
"They are really good engineers, really indispensable. And then they start to pull 9-5 days"
Working massive numbers of hours weeks is not normal. For a startup, yes...but once a company is out of the "get big fast" phase and actually making money, there's no excuse to burn people out and run the place like a startup. I know younger tech employees want to continue the college dorm lifestyle and live at work, but I dislike the trend of calling anyone who wants to work a sane number of hours a week "coasters."
Lots of big, successful companies have "Distinguished Engineer" positions and use them for different reasons, such as:
- To have a raft of smart people on staff, not necessarily to do nuts-and-bolts work but to provide top-level guidance to those who do
- To have a position that, because of the pay structure of the organization, is the only technical position that pays high enough to reward a technical person for things like inventing the company's cash cow products, etc.
- For vanity or bragging rights...such as having Linus Torvalds or Vint Cerf on your payroll
- And of course, to pay these people enough to keep them from jumping to your competitors
Distinguished Engineers are mostly accomplished enough that they don't really have to worry about finding a job. They're getting paid handsomely, and/or able to live off the crazy amounts of money they've made already. It's basically the prize for winning the meritocracy lottery. It's also the closest any of us techies will get to the level of a corporate CxO -- paid handsomely in cash, stock and free stuff by their primary company, plus getting the salary, perks and influence associated with "sitting" on a ton of other companies' boards. I wouldn't call them "coasters." I'd call them savvy!
Why? Medicare has millions of people in the system, they're all old and sick, but they've all been paying into their insurance through payroll for decades. It makes sense that they're more efficient. You don't have a massive corporate bureaucracy trying to deny coverage at every turn -- doctors and hospitals just submit fee-for-service bills and the plan pays almost automatically. Private doctors don't like the rates they pay, but at least they pay without questions. And with millions of insured patients, something like universal Medicare would be able to cover the basics and negotiate cheaper rates for things like prescriptions which are insane.
An example from the private sector is my personal situation -- I work for a multinational company that only has about 900 employees in the US and our health insurance is awful as a result - high deductibles, small networks of physicians, all sorts of crazy rules, etc. My wife works for a much bigger employer with about 25,000 employees and we pay a lot less for better coverage as a result. It's not without problems - there are still crazy rules and they try to wiggle out of paying for anything non-routine until you put up something of a fight, but it is decent.
So wouldn't the solution be to just get rid of the onerous testing requirements? Assume the entire pool is tainted and just use your actual intuition to hire someone you feel is going to be reliable. Either that, or raise the pay to a level worth putting in the effort for.
I've never touched drugs in my life but don't fault anyone for doing so, especially those who've went from stable middle-class work to scraping by on almost nothing. Back before it was easy and cheap to do drug testing, background checks and credit reports, employers had to go with their gut and decide for themselves if someone was going to be a good hire or not. Now, if you have any of these marks on your record there's almost no chance you'll be hired over someone who doesn't, and in this world of unstable finances and work situations, it's very easy to pick up one or more of these marks...way easier than it was in the past.
Of course there is, but that's a much smaller swath of the population than will be showing up for work at Amazon once any other means of earning an income dries up. Amazon must realize the position they're in...they're free to abuse their workers as much as they want because there's 9,000 others waiting in line for the job.
An analogy from the tech world is video game companies abusing and burning out their employees. So many people want to break into the "exciting world" of game development that they'll sacrifice their personal health for it and work as many 120 hour work weeks as their employers tell them to. Because if they don't, thousands of starry-eyed new grads are just waiting for the opportunity.
"Only problem is that probably 70% of these people will probably fail the drug screening."
I've read stories about this as well, where the few manufacturers left who are hiring can't find anyone. What I don't understand is why they can't just relax this requirement and/or pay more. Failing a drug screen doesn't automatically mean you're going to cause an accident or not show up to work. In my opinion it's a very puritanical move to lock people out who've done nothing wrong other than losing the IQ lottery. As a society we used to have work for these populations, and now they're broke and turning to drugs as an escape.
Aren't most factories almost totally computer-controlled anyway and any humans are basically just machine-minders?
This kind of reminds me of longshoremen having to turn up at the docks every morning and stand on the stones just for a chance to get picked to work that day, with no guarantee that you would be working tomorrow. At least Amazon is providing health benefits, but I've heard horror stories about working for them, both in the warehouses and in technology positions.
In my opinion, scenes like this are going to be more prevalent in the future as more stable work gets offshored or eliminated entirely due to automation. I've said this before, but working in big company IT you see positions all the time that could easily be dumped the second some MBA with a spreadsheet gets around to it. This has been the way of the world for decades though -- big companies were big enough and made enough money to afford to have a little slack in the system and still return profits to shareholders. With the push to put everyone through college instead of training them right out of high school, you have a lot of random business grads who may not have gotten good grades or learned much between all the partying. Big companies still hire a ton of these entry level graduates to do some random task. These graduates get/got a decent salary, stable work, and were able to build their lives around the fact that they would have income. As they settle down, new grads get promotions, buy houses, have children, pay taxes, and consume at increasing levels as their salaries increase. Because of this, the consumer cycle continues on -- companies produce goods that customers can afford to buy because they have jobs because companies can produce goods...
Scenes like this are what make me think this cycle is breaking down. If you squeeze so much that an operation is 100% efficient and you have no more need for the vast majority of employees, then you cut out the ability for those former employees to participate in the economy. Forgoing a new grad hire at the help desk or support team for $40K because Tata will give you a "replacement" for $10K in India means that that new grad is going to have limited options and may end up in line at the Amazon warehouse for just over minimum wage. I don't know how to solve it -- people propose a universal basic income, and i think that's the best answer, but the people who happen to be on the positive side of this shift will never go for it. You would have to have massive unemployment, 50% or more, just to register that there's a problem in most people's minds, and I think that will lead to a pretty big upheaval in the not too distant future.
Does that mean we should give people make-work? I think so, unless anyone has a plan for breaking society's dependence on getting an education, going to work, consuming, saving for retirement, and spending down your savings at the end of your life.
From an advertising perspective I don't understand why your browsing history is that useful. No one I know clicks on ads, I've never bought anything based on an advertisement, yet somehow Google and the like continue to rake in money. Until companies figure out that online advertising is useless, there will still be huge pressure for ISPs to cash in on that personal data funny money...greater fool theory and all that. The Second Dotcom Bubble is based on advertising just like the first, but this time people have a computer in their pockets 24/7 that stores a lot more personal information.
Microsoft does a very similar thing with their Bing Rewards program and if you don't watch your privacy settings on Windows 10, you're automatically signed up if you use a Microsoft account. You don't get much - maybe a few gift cards here and there. Most people don't care but I've certainly switched it off. After the FCC rule allowing ISPs to sell personal data was passed, a lot of ISPs came out with statements saying they wouldn't engage in this practice. I guess the ending to that was, "...unless you tell us you want to in exchange for gift cards."
I'm not so sure about that. Unless you're building a company out in the middle of nowhere, it seems like it'd be a perfect opportunity for the right people to ditch SV and live somewhere less hectic. Let's say you start up in a semi-fancy suburb of a lower-tier Northeast city. Compared to California, real estate is so cheap and plentiful that anyone owning or renting in CA would immediately experience a quality-of-life bump. California housing starts at $1 million or more in desirable areas like LA and SF/SV. Taking the example of upstate NY, even though NY has high taxes, anyone relocating from CA would pay less for housing, most would have shorter or less traffic-choked commutes, and even if you paid above market rate to get smarter people, you'd still pay them less.
This would be comparable to domestic outsourcing, which typically locates workers in cheaper places to live. Back before they shipped everything to India, IBM was doing outsourcing work in Iowa, West Virginia and Georgia as examples. As long as you can convince workers that it's not worth the massive premium to live near San Francisco, it could definitely work.
Every week, I see stories that make me check whether it's 2017 or 1999/2000. I'm honestly glad to see that fewer crazy startups with dubious chances of profitability are getting money. There's legitimate investment and then there's chasing an IPO fueled by stupid peoples' money.
The thing that's different about this bubble is how slowly it inflated and how slowly it's deflation will likely be. I think most of this is due to the public cloud. Back in the 90s it took a massive purchase of datacenter space, hardware and network connectivity to "get big fast" like everyone was trying to do. Now, the VCs just have to pay the AWS, GCP or Azure bill every month instead of putting up millions in up front infrastructure costs. It leaves a lot more capital free for expensive offices and employee perks...er...I mean, strategic R&D investment.
Most business organizations I've witnessed tend to thrive when there's a level of stability. For example, people know they should talk to Person X in charge of Process Y directly to get the real deal on things. It's good to get people out who are pretty toxic, but doesn't government work the same way? Don't companies and wealthy people use the back-channel methods to actually get work done?
We'll see what happens...I'm hoping that there's just a ton of drama, things basically get parked for 4 years, and other countries don't see it as an opportunity to get ahead while everyone's distracted.
Airline websites have this same problem -- the online "cheap ticket" engines regularly scrape the publicly available data by essentially running the "book a trip" workflow millions of times to try to pull the entire set of fares for different city pairs. It's a cat-and-mouse game because the information has to be available for normal humans to book trips; no one is going to solve a CAPTCHA to look up fares. Basically these engines are looking for any irregularities like mis-filed fares or fares that happen to be a particularly good deal. (Airlines have to publish their fares in advance and make them available to online sources that are available to travel agents. This is why you'll occasionally see stuff like a transatlantic business class ticket for $50 or similar...)
I'm not sure if LinkedIn can actually bar someone from scraping their public data. If that was the case, no one could run wget on a website and pull down all the static content.
'a workspace designed from the ground up for the millenial generation'
Agreed it's not all about age, but I generally haven't seen older people outside of sales and marketing who love working in one of these Millenial workspaces. I have seen that younger workers are coming into the workforce being used to more distractions, so while they may not be getting a lot of work done, they prefer the "collaborative preschool" environment with the bright colors and the beanbag chairs. It's different from a more traditional work-style, where older people are used to going to an office, doing their work and leaving. Younger people (at least in IT/development) seem to want to continue their college years and work in a dorm-style atmosphere. Without as many commitments at home they find it appealing to basically live at work, which is a huge bonus for employers.
I'll refrain from the obvious jokes about the workers' pods only having rounded corners...
I really think the companies that get this trend right and actually want to keep employees happy will eventually settle on a mix of public and private spaces. Those of us who are older and like our private spaces have to remember that this is the age where "social media manager" is a real, full-time, highly compensated position. There are some people who thrive on collaborative spaces, constant noise and distraction, and love to work at cafeteria tables with zero personal space. There are also some (me included) who can't get any serious work done unless I'm in a private location with the door shut and "do not disturb" turned on in my various messaging accounts.
Unfortunately, the more extroverted among us tend to have the ear of HR more than heads-down workers like me. In addition, most corporate HR departments just copy what Google is doing verbatim regardless of fit. Google's where all the kids work, and companies love to have as many young exploitable employees as possible, so it makes sense...sort of. Unitl it meets an organization with a high average age of employee, that lives and dies by conference calls and work that requires concentration.
I've spent a 20+ year career in IT, and have noticed the trend over the last decade has been to rely almost fully on a service you don't control for a key part of operations. Most of my work has been with Azure lately, and Microsoft is shifting from releasing updates in packaged format that they publish and host to just pumping it out onto GitHub. There was a story last year about how tons of web projects were broken when a developer removed a portion of functionality from a JavaScript framework hosted publically -- and it turned out to be a trivial sting-manipulation function.
There is nothing wrong with not reinventing the wheel every time and using other peoples' resources. There is something very wrong with assuming that third parties will keep their systems running 100% of the time and never have bad days. Even Microsoft won't guarantee that Azure regions, of which most are _collections_ of fully redundant data centers, will be fully available all the time and that your applications will never experience downtime. You should never assume a resource will be published in the same place and remain online forever, nor should you rely fully on a third party service to provide your only means of providing the service you're providing.
There are some fields where it's just expected that you'll work either a completely unpaid or minimum-wage internship. Living in the NYC area, I see it all the time...publishers, media companies, fashion design houses and advertising firms consider it a new graduate's foot-in-the-door opportunity. There are plenty of stories of essentially unpaid interns doing a staff's bidding and putting in massive amounts of hours because everyone else is willing to do the same thing. If new grads could pay these companies for the opportunity, they would...it's the (unpaid) equivalent of programmers being willing to be abused by video game companies just to have the opportunity to work in video games...if you don't want to do your 10th consecutive 120 hour work week, there are 200 others willing to do it.
Anywhere else, it's a scam...interns should expect at least a small amount of money that isn't minimum wage and also expect to actually learn something on the job. Unpaid interns basically run errands and get coffee, but engineering interns usually get at least some of the grunt work associated with a project. That's actually a good way to learn whether you like the field enough to stick it through the grunt work years. I did plenty of grunt work IT jobs in the beginning of my career and put up with it because I knew I'd be doing something more interesting later.
Not entirely true. There are some positions such as investment banking, white shoe management consulting and corporate law firm jobs that are very sensitive to the school you go to. People like me who went to state schools just don't get these opportunities.
As an example...a graduate from Big State U with good grades will likely be able to get an entry level position at a mid-range consulting company like Accenture or KPMG, because those firms live and die on the number of cheap, non-offshore "requirements gatherers" and "PowerPoint deliverers" that they can fly to customer sites 50 weeks out of the year. They will most likely not be able to get a job with McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, Bain & Company or the other high-end fancy consulting firms. These companies almost exclusively hire from the Ivy League schools or require things like military connections, and these positions almost always lead to extremely lucrative careers because you're basically setting yourself up to be on a huge customer's executive ranks when you're done living in hotels and airports. Ir's a closed club and they don't really care _how_ you got to an Ivy League school, but they do care if you graduated from one because they have a lot of high-end customers to impress.
If you have little to no experience, a degree is the most basic filter the HR department can apply to the 12,384 resumes they are receiving for the open positions. No degree? Garbage, and yes I'm well aware of how unfair that is and how many potential good people they lose. A degree from the right program shows you can at least stick with something that's reasonably hard long enough to make it through, and can probably solve a few non-trivial problems given enough time and guidance.
I've been working for big companies for almost my whole career, and the simple truth is that you have to play a lot of stupid, asinine retarded games to get and keep a job, and advance in your current one. if you don't like it, go work for one of the 4 billion "Dude, GitHub is my resume!" web startups. A zero-knowledge, C-student HR generalist is going to apply whatever it takes to reduce that pile of resumes down. She has a degree -- it may not be CS and she may have spent most of her time at sorority functions, but she's going to feel she's college-educated and you should be too. If you're trying to cold-call your way into a job, it's a rare medium to large company that will even consider someone who hasn't completed a degree of some sort.
I'm in IT and we have _plenty_ of people with just a BS, AS or no degree at all who are very good at what they do. A lot of us don't even have a traditional computer science background. But, woe upon any of these smart people who can't network their way into their next job when they need one, because it puts them at a disadvantage no matter how smart they are.
I think it varies...the scary-smart ones are borderline autistic and have the fresh-from-mom's-basement air about them. You need that in order to have the concentration and mental ability to solve the most complex puzzles to find new vulnerabilities. Even in the brogrammer web startup hustler era, deep below everything there really are a bunch of nerds holding the world up.
Every place I've worked that bothered with a security team worth more than the 2 "experts" the consulting company gave them has a split between the actual hardcore types and their handlers. The handlers are the medium-level folks and range from the really smart systems and dev guys who actually know and care about security stuff, the telephone sanitizers who send out the "don't click on obvious phishing links" emails to the boss/CISO who has to go beg the board to please please PLEASE care about security and give them some money to help protect the company,
The root of the problem is a lack of affordable places to live that aren't several hours' commute from places where people work. I live in the NY metro area, and even 60 miles away house prices are high in good school districts. Northern California is way worse -- you're starting at a million for ownership of any kind of home, which means you need a job that pays an outsized salary just to have a massive mortgage payment.
This problem is repeated in cities all over the US to lesser degrees. Atlanta has very affordable housing if you're willing to put up with hours of driving, and Georgia has almost no property taxes...but in my opinion sitting on the road for another 10 or 15 hours a week isn't worth it.
One fix I could see is to make retirement stability easier to maintain. So many people in our area have little saved for retirement and are banking on selling their high-priced house and moving to North Carolina or similar. It's their only retirement asset, and in the current environment it's in everyone's best interest to keep these mini housing bubbles inflated until they can cash out.
I know it's trendy for the Millenial crowd to jump from employer to employer, but I still think finding a decent employer who doesn't treat you like crap is the way to go. Once you find one of those, and some people never do, hang onto it because the grass isn't always greener. I think there's value in sticking with something for a longer period, and at the same time you can wind up in a rut. Maybe it's because I'm 42 and have a family, but I would definitely like to see a little more loyalty on _both_ sides of the employment equation.
I've been with my current employer for a total of about 14 years, in two "tours of duty." But, the key is that I'm not a typical lifetime employee...I work for an IT services company and am constantly shifting around on various projects learning new things. Employees where I work tend to stick around because of the industry-specific knowledge you build up, but it's up to you to avoid becoming pigeonholed in one tiny area. I see this a lot in IT, especially when we hire outside people as specialists. There are so many opportunities to go down the specialization rabbit hole far enough that you become defined by the speciality you work on. Once that specialty dries up, you can become excess weight very quickly. Look at all the Exchange administrators that got replaced with an Office 365 subscription, or CCNAs/CCNPs that are slowly seeing their premium erode due to SDN and cloud providers, or the EMC/NetApp gods whose SANs are being replaced with storage virtualization. You can learn so much about any one of these topics that you practically work for the company that produced them, but at the exclusion of everything else.
There are also some people who spend a career at an organization because they're "political survivors" who always seem to come out on the right side of a layoff/reorg because they spend their time studying organizational behavior instead of doing good work. It is important to keep your ear to the ground and know how to avoid bad situations, but some lifetime employees survive (and often do very well for themselves) because they know exactly what is coming next. We just had a major shake-up at the top levels of the company I work for, and having worked there for a while, I saw some very familiar names surviving (with promotions in some cases) because they play the games. If you don't want to do that, the alternative is to keep doing good work and making yourself valuable enough that they don't think about getting rid of you.
I think we're done with the traditional big-company employer-managed career track in most organizations. I know many people a generation or two back from myself who had full careers with companies like IBM and AT&T. Both of those employers actively developed their workforces back then, and had well-defined career tracks. Now, there's zero loyalty on either side of the table, and employers are increasingly asking that people be 100% trained in their exact narrow set of technologies, skills, etc. But I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to stick around at an employer as long as you don't find yourself 20 years in doing the same job. It sure beats rage-quitting jobs every year just because you don't like one thing that happened.
Is it possible that people are moving away from crazy web startup land to more established companies? Microsoft is poised to become the new IBM in terms of lock-in and guaranteed revenue with Azure, and Amazon has their tentacles in everything including AWS these days. Both are very close to becoming monopolies (again) raking in large amounts of money at a constant rate. Talk about a good place to find a stable job where companies have enough cash on hand to treat employees well...the opposite of post-bubble VC funding that's coming to Silicon Valley.
I like Seattle, but I wouldn't want to move across the country just to have the same insane cost of living I already have in New York. The Californians moving north are probably driving the increase in prices -- average SV techies make $200K+ and many are selling a million-dollar plus house. Microsoft and Amazon are going to have to at least match the SV salary plus pay for relocation.
On one hand, the companies this would be targeting are big enough to hold either de facto or explicit monopoly power, which isn't good for competition. On the other, in this new zero-slack, tiny-margin economy that looks like it's upon us, large companies would be the only ones making enough profit to pay their employees well.
I was just reading this article 2 minutes before reading the linked article. Companies that are being squeezed to the point where they can't make any more money are certainly not going to make life easier for their employees. If you optimize the system 100% and remove all inefficiencies, you could have a situation where nobody can provide enough value to sell their labor anymore. I know that sounds very Luddite-y, but IMO we're at the point where the vast majority of people can't simply move up the job ladder to the next better position when theirs is eliminated. There are too many people employed in middleman positions who will no longer have work, nor have any way to get new work.
Sure, no one wants monopolies with unlimited pricing power. But should the alternative be a hyper-efficient world where no one of average skill and intelligence can find work?
Unemployment as measured today seems like it goes back to a simpler time for the labor force. I know we have U1 through U6, but I think in previous times U1 and U2 modeled the real world better than the higher numbers. Back around the 60s and 70s, the US (and the UK) had a lot more traditional labor cycle. Many more people were employed in the trades or in factories, and the business cycle determined when people were laid off because factories were producing fewer goods, running fewer shifts, etc. If you had a job on an assembly line building a certain component, and the company killed the product line or needed fewer, you were laid off. However, back then you could go down to your local unemployment office and have a much easier time finding a job at a plant across town. Or, you could actually wait until the company called you back once production picked back up.
Today, layoffs are permanent for white collar workers and there are fewer cyclical factory jobs. It represents a permanent shift in the labor force -- you just need fewer humans to do every job these days. Way back in the day I worked an IT helpdesk job for a large life insurer -- they had a 25-floor office that spanned two Manhattan city blocks, plus a 40-story tower that took up 1/4 of a block, plus large offices all over the country. According to the old timers, there were thousands and thousands of file clerks, accountants and clerical staff working in that building as late as 1985 or so, before the first wave of big-company downsizing happened...so many that logistics of getting everyone in and out of the building were more difficult than normal.
Maybe we should redefine what full employment is -- I'm a big proponent of making sure everyone has a way to earn a living, but I think the reality is that the unemployment numbers are going to have to get a lot worse before anybody is going to do anything about it. Maybe publishing some of the scarier numbers is the way to do it, while explaining that this is what's modeling reality these days. I'd prefer finding work for everyone to having more older workers have to fake their way into getting Social Security disability payments because no one is hiring them.