One thing China does have as an advantage over other countries is the ability to fund whatever projects and industries they want without traditional limitations. Look at how much money China plowed into infrastructure projects to stabilize the economy during the last recession. There was no debate, no "we can't afford that," it was just done by fiat. I wish we could get things done this simply in the US, but there is that whole representative government thing.
This ability to just do things with zero debate is helpful, but only works if they make the right bets all the time. The question is how much of AI really is "AI" and how much is just pattern recognition backed up with a huge increase in computing power.
This 3-hour break was certainly a good idea pre-air conditioning. I've been to a few Middle Eastern countries that have similar practices - either they start work late, work late then eat dinner at 9 or 10:00 at night, or they'll have a similar long break during the middle of the day.
Whatever the work arrangements, I'm guessing people who have flexible schedules have a similar issue - they're not able to stop work during the evening and not able to properly wind down. I'm very lucky that I'm not chained to the desk for fixed hours; these days I'm in systems engineering and out of the IT operations craziness except when something needs serious fixing. This is great because I'm a dad - my wife and I share the various kid appointments and appearances, but I have the more flexible job so I try to help out. This isn't so great when I miss 2 or 3 hours in the middle of the day, then have to come home and do the dad thing, and _then_ have to finish up after everyone's asleep. (It's not because someone's cracking the whip over me, but because the work piles up otherwise; much of my job involves reading, writing and trying new things out lately and I have a massive backlog of reading that never gets shorter.)
I think the key to getting a flexible work schedule right is to not let it turn into an always-on situation, while simultaneously not being a clock-watcher. Like anything, balance is always good. I know people who work for companies with totally out-of-whack work life balance, and they can't go 10 seconds without checking their phone, email and messaging apps because someone is always trying to get a hold of them. Yes, someone always has to be on-call when you're in operations, but it can't be everybody 24 hours a day. That's a way to burn people out quick. People need contiguous, long blocks of sleep to be healthy. If Spanish people aren't able to do that because they have a 3-hour hole in the middle of their day, I can't see any reason not to change.
Dealing with technical people all the time, it never ceases to amaze me how few understand life outside their little comfort zone. Any time they have to deal with someone who's lower-skilled than themselves, it's an annoyance and they run back to their crowd as soon as they can. Just like a lot of people say everyone should have at least one menial job serving food, working retail or otherwise dealing with the public, I think it would do smart people a world of good to put in some time working in a social services office. Doing so may reveal to smart people that the vast majority of the world is not like them, and may convince them that we shouldn't shoot for 100% optimization if that leaves out a huge swath of the population.
The truth is that we need something at the level of a manufacturing job, that delivers a lower-middle class salary, has regular hours and can be done by people of average intelligence. I know AI is being overhyped now, but the vast majority of white collar corporate jobs are up for replacement next as well. Unless you want society to break down, you're going to need to give people jobs. I grew up in a Rust Belt city and watched every large factory move to the South or overseas, leaving a burnt-out shell of a city. Not Detroit-level, but it's only now coming back. You need employers like this to give work to the masses who can't be big data scientists or work in engineering.
Feel free to call me a Luddite, but leaving some slack in the system will be the only way to preserve it. We're at the point where people can't just move up to the next better job when automation takes theirs. For better or worse, most people are doing the equivalent of factory work, including corporate types.
From my point of view as a systems engineer/architect, my usual interactions with Gartner involve exchanges with management similar to the following -- "Vendor W's Product X is the leader in Technology Space Y -- look, they're in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. We're pleased to announce that we're all in on Product X." This cycle repeats every year or so, with last year's Product X replaced with Product Z, who's in the Magic Quadrant this year.
Having done this a million times at many different companies, it's easy to be cynical about Gartner. It's quite obvious that vendors pay for their reviews, and management loves the Magic Quadrant because it removes any blame from them when it comes time to do a lessons learned. It's the modern equivalent of "no one ever got fired for buying IBM." But -- this report is actually pretty accurate. In the systems management space, we're getting a lot of magic tools that have the "AI" stamp on them, or some lesser equivalent like machine learning. Even if it's the equivalent of IFTTT when applied to real world systems ("system is down, so send an alert while we try to perform the recovery steps in the runbook") it's being called AI.
It's just the bubble coming to the top -- social media, apps, etc. are also at the top of the hype cycle.
I'm a Windows 10 user, and am reasonably happy. I'm able to use the Enterprise edition so a lot of the more annoying consumer features can be controlled. What I wish Microsoft would do is give more control back to the end user in general.
The person posting that ranty article actually has a valid point -- Windows 10 is currently a take-it-or-leave-it proposition with dwindling alternatives if you're tied to a Windows platform. The user interface is just one aspect; the non-Enterprise versions of the product don't allow you to control the update cycle, you can't disable a lot of the advertising features, and Microsoft is collecting a lot of data for something that's still a "personal" computer. Unfortunately, they must have just taken a massive internal charge to upgrade every Windows 7 and 8 user for "free." This will need to be made back somehow, and I think this is part of the long-term strategy. If they can get people used to this method of operation, then they can treat Windows PCs just like Apple treats iOS devices -- locked down walled gardens that users can't do anything with.
I think Microsoft would get a lot of happy customers dutifully paying their Windows 365 subscription fees if they did this: - Allow all customers to buy access to the Enterprise feature set instead of locking it up behind enterprise agreements. This would keep most of the consumer users under control but allow power users to take back some control. - Relax the UI controls. Windows Phone is dead, and Windows tablets aren't going to rule the entire market -- you don't need a locked down single experience. Don't ship themes, but enable full third party theming support. I would actually use a Windows Classic 2K-style theme if it were available, even though I'm reasonably happy with what comes in the box now. - Relax the forced cumulative feature updates - again, let everyone have access to the CBB and the LTSB by paying for it
Unfortunately, this would be difficult to do because Microsoft has to earn the revenue back for all those free upgrades and loss of future revenues, and they would have to admit that enterprise customers are the ones actually paying for the development.
I'm not sure if I believe that 100% of knowledge worker jobs will be replaced in a timescale short enough to cause upheaval. However it is possible, and I think a basic income is a good option to bridge the gap. It's not because I'm lazy and don't want to work; it's because I can see a time when people won't have to work in some of the crappier knowledge worker jobs, and almost no one will be doing manual labor jobs.
The root of the problem is that our entire society is organized around educating people to take jobs, working at those jobs, selling labor for money, consuming, and repeating the cycle to continue consuming. Money is the key thing that stratifies everyone, and in a perfect scenario how much you have is proportional to how valuable your labor is. (Yes, I know that we don't live in an ideal world - there are plenty of scammers, trust fund kids, criminals and corrupt individuals.) If you suddenly introduce changes into society that make it impossible for people to sell their labor, and impossible for most of them to retrain for something else, then you have to rethink the whole idea of work. If people aren't working in the traditional society we live in, they're consuming less, and companies won't have as many customers for their products. They'll respond by producing less, making less money and therefore hiring fewer people. Once the majority of society is unemployed, you have a big problem on your hands. If you want to keep the old monetary system of valuing things in place, then how do you prevent them from turning to crime or revolting en masse?
I have worked in a lot of big companies, and most corporate jobs are lightweight "knowledge worker" positions that could easily be eliminated by machine learning and automation. There are millions of people who have these jobs and maintain a pretty decent lifestyle while paying taxes into the system and consuming. They're also people who aren't exactly geniuses -- most are typical "C students" who graduated with some random business degree from various state universities. I doubt you're going to retrain someone who's been routing reports around forever to be a big data scientist.
I think most routine radiology could end up at least being assisted by AI, given that the entire practice revolves around using imaging techniques that return incomplete data and making a judgement call. This is the sort of thing machine learning is good at -- reading billions of images and determining what something looks like. Real radiologists in training do the same thing -- except they have a much smaller data set to fall back on.
The real question is how we're going to deal with the sudden flip in what is considered a highly-skilled job: - Doctors in general are a perfect example - because the supply of medical school slots is kept low, only the people with perfect grades and photographic memories, _and_ who can ace the MCAT get into med school (in the US.) If machine learning becomes a thing, then having a photographic memory is not going to be as important as it once was...it's already less important. - The Bar Association didn't limit the amount of law school slots the way the AMA does, and the result today is that law school grads can't find work. Just 20 years ago, having a law degree would definitely get you a job, and having a Top 14 law degree would set you up for life permanently. Law is a profession that relies on interpreting vast amounts of data, and computers are really good at the routine parts of the job that junior associates used to make $180K a year doing. - From the non-professions, another example is air traffic controllers. Even with computers aiding them, humans who have the unique ability to think natively in 3 dimensions and keep an entire sector of airspace's inhabitants in their brains along with their speed, altitude and heading have been doing it for ages. It takes years of training to understand and definitely qualifies in my book as a highly skilled job. They make a lot of money because few people have the ability to do it and keep their stress levels non-lethal. But, it also sounds like something computers could take over eventually.
Remember MCSE bootcamps? If you're in IT and of a certain age, you probably do. These schools sprang up to soak up the demand for system administrators at the peak of the First Dotcom Bubble. I got my MCSE on NT 4.0 (wow, I'm old) through self-study at the time, and these schools were what helped coin the term "paper MCSE." Basically, they'd force-feed total newbies the exam details in a cram session, and teach them a little bit about network and system administration. Microsoft's exams were notoriously easy to game back then, so tons of people who didn't really know anything got certified and were hired in admin positions they weren't qualified for. It took _years_ to clean out some of the paper MCSEs, and some would argue we're not done yet.
I wasn't shocked when I read that web coder bootcamps were starting to pop up as the Second Dotcom Bubble was inflating. I'm not a web developer by any means, but I can't imagine these schools teach anything beyond the absolute basics. Already, if you're starting with one of the JavaScript frameworks, a total n00b is many many levels abstracted from anything that might generate any actual insight. You have to learn the basics if you want to do anything the framework can't do for you, and I bet these coder schools don't teach much beyond how to do front-end coding in one or two frameworks.
It's similar to how the MCSE bootcamps were -- my company paid for me to go to one for a certification upgrade because I was a consultant at the time and they wanted to bill me out at a higher rate. If you were there for a refresher, the model made sense. If you were a former plumber, truck driver, or similar as many of my classmates were, you were in for a world of trouble if you passed and hit the real world. Maybe these coder bootcamps will produce people who can work at some startup banging on front-end code for 16 hours a day, but nothing beats first principles when it comes to really learning.
In the IT world, things move too fast these days to capture everything in a single certification, and I'd argue that it's difficult to learn everything the way you could when products, systems and networks were simpler. I don't know much about web coding though -- is it possible to boil things down enough to make a bootcamp graduate semi-useful?
Getting fired is one thing - getting past the HR filter to get hired is another: - Most big companies use resume keyword scanners like Taleo to do the first cut, so getting to a human HR person is the first hurdle... -...But once you get to the human, that human will review your resume and possibly a bunch of other factors (like social media) to determine whether or not the resume makes it to the hiring manager's pile.
If your resume makes it to Step 2, and you're equally matched with another candidate, the HR person is going to be a human and make a judgement call. Hiring managers often say "no more than X resumes" so that's an even longer set of odds.
I'm sure there's plenty of professional, level-headed people working in HR that I haven't met yet. My experience hasn't been the best, however. No one ever says, "I want to be a Generalist, Talent Acquisition when I grow up." So, you tend to get a lot of people with random business or communication degrees who don't know a whole lot about technology, and can be quick to judge people; social media is just another tool for them to judge with.
I'm sure businesses will still look, but the rule means they'll have to find some other reason to not give people the job, offer a promotion, or fire them.
What surprises me is that there's ample evidence out there that companies search people's social network profiles -- some do it casually and others do it as a formal part of the HR process. Why hasn't it sunk in with average job seekers that oversharing on their public profiles is a bad idea? I've noticed that LinkedIn posts, comments, etc. are getting more controversial since they redesigned the site as a Facebook clone. Why would anyone risk taking themselves out of the running for a job by posting an opinion on something that their potential future employer doesn't like?
The truth is that your social media profiles, if they exist, have to be as boring as possible if you want to be the ultimate drop-in replacement employee these days. HR departments have hundreds of applicants for each job and every reason in the book to narrow the pool. If you post a million pictures of your kids, you might not be perceived as a workaholic team player. If you post rowdy drunk pictures, you might be perceived as a walking latent lawsuit. Political and religious opinions are huge red flags because you never know who you're going to upset. Your public social media profiles need to be totally clean, but they do need to exist -- because then you might be perceived as a hermit.:-)
Maybe Symantec is just trying to get out of the market ahead of the LetsEncrypt announcement that wildcard domain certificates would be available for free shortly. Once your trustworthiness is questioned, that might be the best thing to do.
I admit that I'm pretty much a newbie on public certificates, having spent most of my career in non-web parts of IT. But, isn't the point of buying a certificate from a "real" CA the fact that you can show your customers that the CA took steps to prove your company is your company? And by extension, since your company's cert is issued by a CA that my browser trusts, then there has to be some validation done by the CA. I just went through the process of getting an EV certificate for a project we're working on, and the CA we used certainly spent some effort verifying my company's publically-available information, my employment information and authority to represent the organization before they'd give me the certificate. If a CA gets a reputation for shortcutting this process, or plays fast and loose with how they store their private keys to their issuing certs, then that's the real-world equivalent of a country issuing passports without checking if someone shows up in the country's birth records.
Anyone can stand up a certificate authority and hand out certificates. We (and most other companies with big IT infrastructure) are doing it internally, but the difference is that some browser coming in from the Internet doesn't recognize our internal CA as a trusted root CA. I guess if LetsEncrypt is handing out certificates for free, CAs that can't guarantee they're offering something more trustworthy than that aren't going to be able to charge for issuing little 30K files anymore. LE is certainly going to disrupt the Domain Validation end of the certificate market because there will be a ubiquitous, free and easy way to get certificates -- it's essentially enabling basic SSL/TLS for everyone by getting rid of the cost factor. Whether this eats up the EV side of the market too remains to be seen - users don't typically care whether there's a lock icon in the browser bar or what color it is.
I can't really fault web developers for building incredibly complex pages that don't lend themselves well to interpretation. This is what happens when the industry says we can't have client-side applications anymore, and tries to shoehorn rich client functionality into a browser that wasn't really designed for some of the heavy lifting it's being asked to do. Browsers used to be thin clients back the the olden days, and JavaScript wasn't designed to replace the entire functionality of a rich client. Because of this, you have FrameworkOfTheMonth, and often multiples of them, layered on top of the DOM and JavaScript parser, and the result is unreadable client-side pages.
I think that in general, the level of abstraction and the constant jumping around to the newest shiniest stuff make it very hard for anyone who's a total newbie to come up to speed unless you really start with first principles and work your way up. Back when applications were simple, it was reasonably easy to look at source code and understand how things fit together. It still is at the abstract level, but now the Legos being glued together look more like Duplo blocks. If you are a new web developer and start your education at the framework level, you miss all the under-the-hood stuff about HTTP, network communication itself, and how the browser actually interprets your high level calls.
What I worry about is that the industry is going to shift to a point where the only people who actually know what's working under the hood work for software companies and cloud providers. As this continues, more and more of the low-level stuff is going to get cemented down below a layer of abstraction such that you can't change anything underneath. You might say this happened with assembler, etc. and I agree, but there should be a way for new entrants in the field to actually get to the first principles rather than starting them up 10,000 levels above it.
Having lived through the last Dotcom Bubble, I'm very surprised it's taking this long for the current one to pop. This time, it's mainly situated in Silicon Valley, but last time there was an East Coast bubble outpost in NYC. This was because traditional media publishers and TV networks were desperate to buy into the bubble as well. I saw lots of huge 3-story Times Square billboard ads for companies like Beenz and Webvan as I walked to my "boring, old school" sysadmin job. I always wondered where these companies got their money from...I mean obviously from VCs, but do they just dump $40 million in the company's bank account and say "go buy Nerf toys, Aeron chairs and all the advertising you can book!"?
I'm sure the pop for this current bubble will be coming pretty soon. There are just too many copycat companies out there trying to squeeze the last few drops of blood out of the bubble. I've seen no fewer than 6 meal kit delivery services (like Blue Apron,) at least 4 clothing delivery subscriptions (like Stitch Fix,) and 10,000,000,000,000 magic DevOps tool vendors. (Guess what line of work I'm in these days...I can't tell you how many 5-person startups have offered to solve 100% of my application problems using their One Cool Trick.)
A favorite phrase back then was "this time it's different!" Indeed it is -- this time we have The Cloud. A startup doesn't have to spend millions to buy or rent a data center, and they can coast on VC fumes for much longer than Bubble 1.0 startups. They can also advertise on Facebook and Google instead of those Times Square billboards. So I imagine this will continue for a while, but just like the last bubble, this one isn't sustainable either.
I guess it's been coming for a while. From their perspective it makes total sense - keep everyone on a single version of Windows and Office, force all the consumer users to accept every OS and application update, etc. The average consumer is used to the subscription model now - many are on Office 365 and almost everyone pays for their mobile phone every month. I can't say I'm too happy about the idea of having to rent the operating system as well as the office software running on top of it, but hopefully they'll realize they can't trap everyone in that cycle.
This seems to be the ultimate desired state -- collect revenue on a permanent basis little by little, rather than rely on enterprise agreements and one-off software purchases. It's going to be a big shift though, Windows client licenses have been sold to OEMs for ages, and buying a new computer means it comes pre-licensed for the life of the machine. Windows Server licenses have been either one-off purchases or covered under much bigger enterprise agreements. If you shift to a monthly fee, who pays it, and what happens if you don't pay?
Being in the IT industry for a while gives an interesting perspective...this is officially the point where we start swinging back toward an IBM mainframe style model. IBM still rakes in massive amounts of money by selling companies a mainframe, keeping it fed with parts and software, and charging monthly for the use of computing power. They used to be pretty much the only game in town, and the PC/x86 ecosystem was the break from that. Microsoft's got this going on the Azure side, and now will have another revenue stream on the device side, so we're back to central control of everything. I guess it makes sense because consumers are used to locked-down phones. But, I wonder if as PCs become a niche product for doing actual work rather than consuming entertainment, how many businesses will be happy with having to buy the same software over and over for eternity?
LetsEncrypt is a good idea because it makes certificates accessible to a wider range of users. I've been doing systems engineering work for quite a while, but haven't really concentrated on web stuff. When I got involved with a public-facing web project at work lately, I noticed there really is a lot to the TLS system and certificates once you get beyond internally-trusted certificates. Most places did the legwork for certificate acquisition years ago, but setting something up from scratch requires that you know a little bit about how things work, and it costs money. Even the cheap CAs want a few hundred for a wildcard certificate - so if LetsEncrypt allows people to use HTTPS by removing the cost factor, then this is a good move. They already make the issuing process much simpler than going through a traditional CA.
The only thing I do see happening is the "regular" CAs charging more for real, verified certificates, and the whole trust factor possibly being diluted: - Real CAs that do validation will see that it's now free to get any kind of certificate and raise their prices...creating a kind of "trustworthy TLS" system in parallel with the "free and easy" one. It's reasonably easy to stand up a PKI and hand out certificates from a technical perspective, but the process around how the PKI is operated is the thing that actually creates trust. - The whole TLS system and the chain of trust is based on the fact that CAs don't just issue certificates to anyone who asks. This will probably force anyone wanting to do things like take payments into EV certificates where they previously could have gotten away with DV ones. DV certificates only validate that you have control over the domain, and EV ones are only issued after the CA does reasonable legwork to make sure you're an authority in your organization.
If those 3,000 weren't doing a whole lot, then it might be -- and this is coming from someone who really wants more stable employment relationships in the world.
I've worked in big companies almost my whole career, both as an employee and a contractor. I've seen plenty of people who don't do tons of work and still manage to keep their jobs. The truth is that the bigger a company is, the easier it is for people to "hide out" and find a nice safe corner where they don't have to do a whole lot: - It's gotten way faster in the last 10 years or so, but it used to be that if you were an acquisition hire, it would take a very long time to lay off the person they didn't need. - Large organizations develop their own internal politics, and being a favorite of a well-connected executive or even middle manager is one way to get away without doing the best possible job. - A corollary to this is the fact that those who really know how to work the system have studied every single rule, custom and exception to the rule. They know exactly how every single internal organization decision is made, obsess over things like pay grades and vacation entitlements, and will always come out on the right side of any reorg simply because their second full-time job is internal tea leaf reading. - Large organizations also thrive on empire builders, and managers try to increase the number of employees they're managing by any means necessary. Latch on to someone who likes you, and you could get rewarded with the equivalent of a no-show job -- I've seen it happen. - It's also possible for really big companies to "lose" entire groups of people, as in, we know they're on the payroll but have no idea what that department does these days. - Fewer places allow this these days, but I've worked in jobs where there are levels upon levels of management for even the simplest tasks. What usually happens is the person doing a job gets promoted, then promotes the next in line so they don't have to directly manage the work, then on up the line. If a company has enough margin (like a consulting company for example,) this is how you wind up with a hierarchy of 8 account executives servicing the same customer.
Microsoft is kind of like an IBM or AT&T pre-breakup in that regard. I'm sure there are plenty of people just hanging on because there's just not a lot of pressure cost-wise. One-off software revenue was huge for them, and now they're poised to vacuum in billions a month in rental fees.
This is all in sales, not technology. Being in a systems engineering/design role, I often get pulled in on meetings where the software and hardware sales guys are courting the CIOs and other executives. It's amazing how much money someone can make selling stuff like enterprise agreements, and equally amazing how much money they have to spend to get the CIOs to sign the paper. Expensive dinners, rounds of golf, sports tickets, you name it -- I've never tagged along on the strip club visits some CIOs I've worked with have demanded from their salespeople.
I'm guessing Microsoft is getting rid of all the salespeople who are narrowly focused on closing these big licensing deals and trying to refocus everyone on selling Azure and subscriptions. That's the grand master plan -- get out of the boxed software business and force everyone to rent computing power and software tools from them, IBM mainframe style. It's an absolute license to print money -- all they need to do is provide power, cooling, network and hardware. We're doing a huge Azure-based project now and it's really interesting -- but it's eye-wateringly expensive when you think about the long term. The long term lock-in is what they're going for -- rather than buying a Windows Server license for $20K once, you pay over and over and over, just like companies do for Office 365.
I just wish they'd slow down a little bit and let people catch up -- there are new features every week, major changes to existing ones very frequently and now Azure Stack is almost released. I think at some point they're going to have to slow it down just to nail down problems once things get to a certain size. (God help them the day someone figures out how to compromise Azure AD in an undetectable way.)
In the US, the original intent of the H-1B visa was to be a safety valve to find and hire the most talented people you could find regardless of their current location. I actually know several people whose employers used it for this purpose. But, it has been shown that all the body shops use it to bring in cheap labor. The visa rules state that the minimum salary is $60K, and it never got adjusted for inflation. So, say you're a company in San Francisco and have to pay your IT staff $200K a year just to keep their heads above water. TCS or Infosys or Cognizant will come around and offer you 2 "qualified resources" for the same price, and you get to wash your hands of the IT department. It's not surprising they win outsourcing deals.
Hopefully Canada won't repeat the same mistake. I doubt it though -- there's no point in participating in politics unless you have millions of dollars to buy the laws you want. I'm sure all the big companies have purchased themselves nice loopholes similar to the ones we have. It's a shame too, because I would move to Toronto or Montreal in 2 seconds if I could find a good job.
As a father of 2 kids, I've performed my evolutionary duty.:-) However, there are plenty of younger people in the US who aren't, and in my opinion they're being somewhat rational. Having kids is a big risk unless you just don't give a crap -- they cost a lot of money and you have to be much more careful about maintaining your income and savings than if you were on your own. Millenials are also skipping traditional adult rites of passage like marriage, house-buying, etc. that lay the groundwork for a family. Plus, those that do have kids are having fewer, later. Generally, people are less religious, have heard of birth control, and are less worried about child mortality, therefore less inclined to have "spare" children.
Japan has a few things that are really slowing their birthrate - almost zero permanent immigration, a very slow economy for the last 20 years, a traditional society that says women can have either children or a career but not both, and a reputation for a workaholic culture. People are just so busy spending their lives at work so they can keep their jobs that having a family comes second. This is a big reversal from the 1980s/1990s...I remember growing up hearing that Japan was taking over the world. MBA programs were toying with the idea of making Japanese language study a requirement if I remember correctly. This is similar to what China is doing now, but China has the population to sustain it in my opinion.
We in the US could be headed down this road too. Imagine if we close the borders and enter a period of economic stagnation. Couple this with the trend towards unstable employment, the gig economy, etc. Back in the 50s/60s, a man could count on being employed for life by a large US company and would take on the risk of a family, kids, house, car, etc. Now (IMO) we've let the pendulum swing too far back in favor of employers and removed any loyalty/stability either side had to the other. Hopefully people will realize that they want stability again once this Second Dotcom Bubble bursts and takes many of the sharing economy employers with it.
I already see a million comments from the crowd who dismisses all these complaints as "SJW BS." However, there is a pattern of startups ignoring bad behavior of some "rockstars." If proven to be true, that incident with Uber was pretty blatant -- having a female employee receive a request for...companionship...on her first day from her boss. I'm sure Tesla isn't far from its roots as a startup in terms of HR maturity either. They may be pretty far away from some one-trick phone app startup, but this is a culture thing that doesn't change unless there's external pressure to do so.
It doesn't even have to be a startup; I've worked at established companies where top salespeople get automatic passes on all the sexual harassment rules -- their management is willing to deal with the fallout to keep this salesperson producing. Watching some of these latent lawsuits in action is interesting, and the anti-SJW crowd can't just pretend it doesn't exist or that female employees receiving this treatment are all too sensitive. Whether it's the "neckbeard creeper" sort of stalking harassment, or the "ex-fratboy" overt kind -- if I were a woman I wouldn't be too happy with having to put up with either.
It's interesting that just a few hours ago, we had an article asking whether or not it was worth it to put in long hours at a job. I'm sure the video game thing was meant to increase the article's clickbait factor, but there might be something to this.
Back a long time ago from when I started working (so, maybe peaking around the 60s) getting a job with a large US company was about the closest you could come to lifetime employment without earning tenure. I know lots of people from that era who worked from high school to retirement for large manufacturers, AT&T, IBM, etc. There was a degree of loyalty on both sides, employer and employee, that's missing in the modern workforce. Companies hung onto people as long as they could, and barring some major disaster, you could pretty much count on having a job. There was a clear career path internally, such that you always had an income that kept up with your experience. In return, people were expected to give a little more of themselves. I distinctly recall many families being relocated (at company expense) frequently to work on new projects or land promotions. That must have been hard, but it was the price one paid for the employer's loyalty to the employee.
Am I advocating lifetime employment, no layoff rules/policies and more loyalty on both sides of the fence? Yes, I suppose I am. You don't see companies giving a second thought to sending entire technical departments to India to save 25% in absolute labor costs. And for all but the rockstars, you never see companies paying people to move and take on new jobs. I'm well aware that some people are making out quite well in this new system. But, not enough people are benefiting from what should be a broad period of economic recovery. Companies _can_ afford to offer people stability and security; they just choose not to.
If I were a recent grad facing 40+ years of the current situation work/life wise, and saw many examples of people being kicked to the curb years short of retirement, then I might not want to bust my ass so hard.
"Maybe, if it's the lottery ticket that might take you to the upper ranks someday. Maybe the bonuses are worth it,"
Two examples where it might make sense include investment banking and being a corporate attorney at a prestigious law firm. - Neither of these spots are easy to get - to get a top banking associate spot means being at the top of the best MBA programs in the country, and working for biglaw firms requires you to be at the very top of your class at one of the top 14 law schools in the country. So, you're already at the top of the elite to even think about getting in the door. - Both of these positions are one-way tickets to Easy Street, and also pay quite well while you have them. (Starting salary is $180K at a big law firm with zero experience, and banking bonuses are measured in hundreds of thousands of dollars on top of an already high salary.) - Both require that you put in your "time in grade" to get to the next rung, they realize this and work people to death. More than 100 hours a week is not uncommon.
So, just like the startup lottery, this is probably the only place where it makes sense to deal with the pain. Once you do, the hardest decision you'll ever have to make again is whether to buy the Rolls or the Bentley.
"The people who work those long hours seem to be the ones who, due to a freak of nature, do not sleep as much as others."
I could see that just based on my own evidence. One of the curses of not letting yourself get pigeonholed into a tiny corner of IT is the amount of information you need to consume on a regular basis. I know it's critical for my career, so I do it, but it was a whole lot easier when I didn't have 2 kids. Unfortunately, being a non-nomad in modern IT means being able to turn on a dime, learn something incredibly fast, then pivot just as fast to the new thing. The alternative is becoming a super-specialist, devoting all your time and energy to one or two things, and having to move from job to job every couple of months because people will only hire you to clean up messes.
Lately, I'm all about finding the most efficient ways of dumping this vast firehose of information into my brain and still finding time to sleep, be a semi-normal spouse, and be a good dad. Sleep is what suffers, and I'm definitely not Edison; ask my family how I am in the morning after 3 hours' sleep.
To answer the question in the headline, ask what kind of employer you work for. There is a _huge_ difference between working hard because you want to go a great job, and working hard because you're on your 5th death march this year.
If you work for a cutthroat employer and your co-workers are all back-stabbing and politicking their way to promotions, then of course you'll work until you're burnt out or quit out of frustration. "Tone at the top" is important when it comes to how middle managers behave and force work through too few resources. Some employers, especially in tech, just roll with it and burn through new hires because they feel there's an infinite supply of new grads who would lay down in traffic to get a job there. This was very evident in the video game industry a while back, and I'm sure it hasn't changed much. Although they're an endangered species these days, some employers at the other end of the spectrum recognize that they need to balance crazy levels of work with not burning their best performers out. Where I'm working now, we tend to do everything we can to hang on to truly useful long-service employees. If you've been working here for 20 years collecting a paycheck, this doesn't apply unless you're a major political player and "survivor." But, if you want to stick around and keep your skills fresh, you can be reasonably assured that they'll try to hang on to you even if they have to lay others off.
One of the reasons employers try to retain people is that domain knowledge is hard to impart on newbies. Back to my job, you can't just be an IT or software dev nerd; we're a services company that's actually pretty close to our customers' business. If you're working for Amazon for example, you might be one of 10,000 web developers cranking out new APIs, front end code, etc. and have difficulty differentiating yourself. Same goes for IT - if you're just a generic sysadmin with no business knowledge, the company you work for will be more willing to burn you out and take the next person in line.
Respectfully disagree -- I'm of the opinion that IT and software generalists are going to be the only people companies will actually keep on full-time once the latest wave plays out: - The cloud, SDN and SDStorage are forcing a lot of the infrastructure specialist jobs up a few levels. For companies that actually do have hardware on site, it's going to be increasingly software-defined and virtual, so there will be less specialization needed. All the CCNPs and EMC storage gods who've built a career around knowing absolutely everything about a hardware ecosystem are in for a big change. - Frameworks and other "coding crutches" including SaaS and PaaS cloud services are making it much easier for low-skilled developers to cobble together something that works. Couple that with the "planet scale" of the cloud (uh huh, sure...) and code that just works is going to be preferable to code that's super-efficient. (Embedded/IoT stuff is the exception here.) - If you do specialize, expect to live a nomadic lifestyle, moving from contract to contract every 3-6 months. I can't tell you how many emails I get from recruiters desperately trying to find a contractor with an exotic skill set to work all over the country. This is fine as long as you're single and can live out of a suitcase for years on end - I know tons of nomad consultants who make multiples of what I make in this lifestyle.
If you want to remain an on-shore FTE for a company, you're going to need to know a little about everything, constantly learn new stuff that's a rehash of old stuff, and be flexible. I have a feeling the days of a single-product specialist in IT are coming to a close. I understand that large companies pigeon-hole IT positions, but you want to avoid that as much as possible. Look at how many Exchange gurus have been replace by Office 365. Or how many data center positions have been reduced by companies moving to IaaS solutions. Just the other day, I talked to an old colleague who knows so much about System Center Config Manager that he might have written parts of it. He's one of the nomads I'm talking about, making good money, but even he's saying how companies aren't willing to hire people for more than a few months now even if they're geniuses.
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One thing China does have as an advantage over other countries is the ability to fund whatever projects and industries they want without traditional limitations. Look at how much money China plowed into infrastructure projects to stabilize the economy during the last recession. There was no debate, no "we can't afford that," it was just done by fiat. I wish we could get things done this simply in the US, but there is that whole representative government thing.
This ability to just do things with zero debate is helpful, but only works if they make the right bets all the time. The question is how much of AI really is "AI" and how much is just pattern recognition backed up with a huge increase in computing power.
This 3-hour break was certainly a good idea pre-air conditioning. I've been to a few Middle Eastern countries that have similar practices - either they start work late, work late then eat dinner at 9 or 10:00 at night, or they'll have a similar long break during the middle of the day.
Whatever the work arrangements, I'm guessing people who have flexible schedules have a similar issue - they're not able to stop work during the evening and not able to properly wind down. I'm very lucky that I'm not chained to the desk for fixed hours; these days I'm in systems engineering and out of the IT operations craziness except when something needs serious fixing. This is great because I'm a dad - my wife and I share the various kid appointments and appearances, but I have the more flexible job so I try to help out. This isn't so great when I miss 2 or 3 hours in the middle of the day, then have to come home and do the dad thing, and _then_ have to finish up after everyone's asleep. (It's not because someone's cracking the whip over me, but because the work piles up otherwise; much of my job involves reading, writing and trying new things out lately and I have a massive backlog of reading that never gets shorter.)
I think the key to getting a flexible work schedule right is to not let it turn into an always-on situation, while simultaneously not being a clock-watcher. Like anything, balance is always good. I know people who work for companies with totally out-of-whack work life balance, and they can't go 10 seconds without checking their phone, email and messaging apps because someone is always trying to get a hold of them. Yes, someone always has to be on-call when you're in operations, but it can't be everybody 24 hours a day. That's a way to burn people out quick. People need contiguous, long blocks of sleep to be healthy. If Spanish people aren't able to do that because they have a 3-hour hole in the middle of their day, I can't see any reason not to change.
Dealing with technical people all the time, it never ceases to amaze me how few understand life outside their little comfort zone. Any time they have to deal with someone who's lower-skilled than themselves, it's an annoyance and they run back to their crowd as soon as they can. Just like a lot of people say everyone should have at least one menial job serving food, working retail or otherwise dealing with the public, I think it would do smart people a world of good to put in some time working in a social services office. Doing so may reveal to smart people that the vast majority of the world is not like them, and may convince them that we shouldn't shoot for 100% optimization if that leaves out a huge swath of the population.
The truth is that we need something at the level of a manufacturing job, that delivers a lower-middle class salary, has regular hours and can be done by people of average intelligence. I know AI is being overhyped now, but the vast majority of white collar corporate jobs are up for replacement next as well. Unless you want society to break down, you're going to need to give people jobs. I grew up in a Rust Belt city and watched every large factory move to the South or overseas, leaving a burnt-out shell of a city. Not Detroit-level, but it's only now coming back. You need employers like this to give work to the masses who can't be big data scientists or work in engineering.
Feel free to call me a Luddite, but leaving some slack in the system will be the only way to preserve it. We're at the point where people can't just move up to the next better job when automation takes theirs. For better or worse, most people are doing the equivalent of factory work, including corporate types.
From my point of view as a systems engineer/architect, my usual interactions with Gartner involve exchanges with management similar to the following -- "Vendor W's Product X is the leader in Technology Space Y -- look, they're in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. We're pleased to announce that we're all in on Product X." This cycle repeats every year or so, with last year's Product X replaced with Product Z, who's in the Magic Quadrant this year.
Having done this a million times at many different companies, it's easy to be cynical about Gartner. It's quite obvious that vendors pay for their reviews, and management loves the Magic Quadrant because it removes any blame from them when it comes time to do a lessons learned. It's the modern equivalent of "no one ever got fired for buying IBM." But -- this report is actually pretty accurate. In the systems management space, we're getting a lot of magic tools that have the "AI" stamp on them, or some lesser equivalent like machine learning. Even if it's the equivalent of IFTTT when applied to real world systems ("system is down, so send an alert while we try to perform the recovery steps in the runbook") it's being called AI.
It's just the bubble coming to the top -- social media, apps, etc. are also at the top of the hype cycle.
I'm a Windows 10 user, and am reasonably happy. I'm able to use the Enterprise edition so a lot of the more annoying consumer features can be controlled. What I wish Microsoft would do is give more control back to the end user in general.
The person posting that ranty article actually has a valid point -- Windows 10 is currently a take-it-or-leave-it proposition with dwindling alternatives if you're tied to a Windows platform. The user interface is just one aspect; the non-Enterprise versions of the product don't allow you to control the update cycle, you can't disable a lot of the advertising features, and Microsoft is collecting a lot of data for something that's still a "personal" computer. Unfortunately, they must have just taken a massive internal charge to upgrade every Windows 7 and 8 user for "free." This will need to be made back somehow, and I think this is part of the long-term strategy. If they can get people used to this method of operation, then they can treat Windows PCs just like Apple treats iOS devices -- locked down walled gardens that users can't do anything with.
I think Microsoft would get a lot of happy customers dutifully paying their Windows 365 subscription fees if they did this:
- Allow all customers to buy access to the Enterprise feature set instead of locking it up behind enterprise agreements. This would keep most of the consumer users under control but allow power users to take back some control.
- Relax the UI controls. Windows Phone is dead, and Windows tablets aren't going to rule the entire market -- you don't need a locked down single experience. Don't ship themes, but enable full third party theming support. I would actually use a Windows Classic 2K-style theme if it were available, even though I'm reasonably happy with what comes in the box now.
- Relax the forced cumulative feature updates - again, let everyone have access to the CBB and the LTSB by paying for it
Unfortunately, this would be difficult to do because Microsoft has to earn the revenue back for all those free upgrades and loss of future revenues, and they would have to admit that enterprise customers are the ones actually paying for the development.
I'm not sure if I believe that 100% of knowledge worker jobs will be replaced in a timescale short enough to cause upheaval. However it is possible, and I think a basic income is a good option to bridge the gap. It's not because I'm lazy and don't want to work; it's because I can see a time when people won't have to work in some of the crappier knowledge worker jobs, and almost no one will be doing manual labor jobs.
The root of the problem is that our entire society is organized around educating people to take jobs, working at those jobs, selling labor for money, consuming, and repeating the cycle to continue consuming. Money is the key thing that stratifies everyone, and in a perfect scenario how much you have is proportional to how valuable your labor is. (Yes, I know that we don't live in an ideal world - there are plenty of scammers, trust fund kids, criminals and corrupt individuals.) If you suddenly introduce changes into society that make it impossible for people to sell their labor, and impossible for most of them to retrain for something else, then you have to rethink the whole idea of work. If people aren't working in the traditional society we live in, they're consuming less, and companies won't have as many customers for their products. They'll respond by producing less, making less money and therefore hiring fewer people. Once the majority of society is unemployed, you have a big problem on your hands. If you want to keep the old monetary system of valuing things in place, then how do you prevent them from turning to crime or revolting en masse?
I have worked in a lot of big companies, and most corporate jobs are lightweight "knowledge worker" positions that could easily be eliminated by machine learning and automation. There are millions of people who have these jobs and maintain a pretty decent lifestyle while paying taxes into the system and consuming. They're also people who aren't exactly geniuses -- most are typical "C students" who graduated with some random business degree from various state universities. I doubt you're going to retrain someone who's been routing reports around forever to be a big data scientist.
I think most routine radiology could end up at least being assisted by AI, given that the entire practice revolves around using imaging techniques that return incomplete data and making a judgement call. This is the sort of thing machine learning is good at -- reading billions of images and determining what something looks like. Real radiologists in training do the same thing -- except they have a much smaller data set to fall back on.
The real question is how we're going to deal with the sudden flip in what is considered a highly-skilled job:
- Doctors in general are a perfect example - because the supply of medical school slots is kept low, only the people with perfect grades and photographic memories, _and_ who can ace the MCAT get into med school (in the US.) If machine learning becomes a thing, then having a photographic memory is not going to be as important as it once was...it's already less important.
- The Bar Association didn't limit the amount of law school slots the way the AMA does, and the result today is that law school grads can't find work. Just 20 years ago, having a law degree would definitely get you a job, and having a Top 14 law degree would set you up for life permanently. Law is a profession that relies on interpreting vast amounts of data, and computers are really good at the routine parts of the job that junior associates used to make $180K a year doing.
- From the non-professions, another example is air traffic controllers. Even with computers aiding them, humans who have the unique ability to think natively in 3 dimensions and keep an entire sector of airspace's inhabitants in their brains along with their speed, altitude and heading have been doing it for ages. It takes years of training to understand and definitely qualifies in my book as a highly skilled job. They make a lot of money because few people have the ability to do it and keep their stress levels non-lethal. But, it also sounds like something computers could take over eventually.
Remember MCSE bootcamps? If you're in IT and of a certain age, you probably do. These schools sprang up to soak up the demand for system administrators at the peak of the First Dotcom Bubble. I got my MCSE on NT 4.0 (wow, I'm old) through self-study at the time, and these schools were what helped coin the term "paper MCSE." Basically, they'd force-feed total newbies the exam details in a cram session, and teach them a little bit about network and system administration. Microsoft's exams were notoriously easy to game back then, so tons of people who didn't really know anything got certified and were hired in admin positions they weren't qualified for. It took _years_ to clean out some of the paper MCSEs, and some would argue we're not done yet.
I wasn't shocked when I read that web coder bootcamps were starting to pop up as the Second Dotcom Bubble was inflating. I'm not a web developer by any means, but I can't imagine these schools teach anything beyond the absolute basics. Already, if you're starting with one of the JavaScript frameworks, a total n00b is many many levels abstracted from anything that might generate any actual insight. You have to learn the basics if you want to do anything the framework can't do for you, and I bet these coder schools don't teach much beyond how to do front-end coding in one or two frameworks.
It's similar to how the MCSE bootcamps were -- my company paid for me to go to one for a certification upgrade because I was a consultant at the time and they wanted to bill me out at a higher rate. If you were there for a refresher, the model made sense. If you were a former plumber, truck driver, or similar as many of my classmates were, you were in for a world of trouble if you passed and hit the real world. Maybe these coder bootcamps will produce people who can work at some startup banging on front-end code for 16 hours a day, but nothing beats first principles when it comes to really learning.
In the IT world, things move too fast these days to capture everything in a single certification, and I'd argue that it's difficult to learn everything the way you could when products, systems and networks were simpler. I don't know much about web coding though -- is it possible to boil things down enough to make a bootcamp graduate semi-useful?
Getting fired is one thing - getting past the HR filter to get hired is another: ...But once you get to the human, that human will review your resume and possibly a bunch of other factors (like social media) to determine whether or not the resume makes it to the hiring manager's pile.
- Most big companies use resume keyword scanners like Taleo to do the first cut, so getting to a human HR person is the first hurdle...
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If your resume makes it to Step 2, and you're equally matched with another candidate, the HR person is going to be a human and make a judgement call. Hiring managers often say "no more than X resumes" so that's an even longer set of odds.
I'm sure there's plenty of professional, level-headed people working in HR that I haven't met yet. My experience hasn't been the best, however. No one ever says, "I want to be a Generalist, Talent Acquisition when I grow up." So, you tend to get a lot of people with random business or communication degrees who don't know a whole lot about technology, and can be quick to judge people; social media is just another tool for them to judge with.
I'm sure businesses will still look, but the rule means they'll have to find some other reason to not give people the job, offer a promotion, or fire them.
What surprises me is that there's ample evidence out there that companies search people's social network profiles -- some do it casually and others do it as a formal part of the HR process. Why hasn't it sunk in with average job seekers that oversharing on their public profiles is a bad idea? I've noticed that LinkedIn posts, comments, etc. are getting more controversial since they redesigned the site as a Facebook clone. Why would anyone risk taking themselves out of the running for a job by posting an opinion on something that their potential future employer doesn't like?
The truth is that your social media profiles, if they exist, have to be as boring as possible if you want to be the ultimate drop-in replacement employee these days. HR departments have hundreds of applicants for each job and every reason in the book to narrow the pool. If you post a million pictures of your kids, you might not be perceived as a workaholic team player. If you post rowdy drunk pictures, you might be perceived as a walking latent lawsuit. Political and religious opinions are huge red flags because you never know who you're going to upset. Your public social media profiles need to be totally clean, but they do need to exist -- because then you might be perceived as a hermit. :-)
Maybe Symantec is just trying to get out of the market ahead of the LetsEncrypt announcement that wildcard domain certificates would be available for free shortly. Once your trustworthiness is questioned, that might be the best thing to do.
I admit that I'm pretty much a newbie on public certificates, having spent most of my career in non-web parts of IT. But, isn't the point of buying a certificate from a "real" CA the fact that you can show your customers that the CA took steps to prove your company is your company? And by extension, since your company's cert is issued by a CA that my browser trusts, then there has to be some validation done by the CA. I just went through the process of getting an EV certificate for a project we're working on, and the CA we used certainly spent some effort verifying my company's publically-available information, my employment information and authority to represent the organization before they'd give me the certificate. If a CA gets a reputation for shortcutting this process, or plays fast and loose with how they store their private keys to their issuing certs, then that's the real-world equivalent of a country issuing passports without checking if someone shows up in the country's birth records.
Anyone can stand up a certificate authority and hand out certificates. We (and most other companies with big IT infrastructure) are doing it internally, but the difference is that some browser coming in from the Internet doesn't recognize our internal CA as a trusted root CA. I guess if LetsEncrypt is handing out certificates for free, CAs that can't guarantee they're offering something more trustworthy than that aren't going to be able to charge for issuing little 30K files anymore. LE is certainly going to disrupt the Domain Validation end of the certificate market because there will be a ubiquitous, free and easy way to get certificates -- it's essentially enabling basic SSL/TLS for everyone by getting rid of the cost factor. Whether this eats up the EV side of the market too remains to be seen - users don't typically care whether there's a lock icon in the browser bar or what color it is.
I can't really fault web developers for building incredibly complex pages that don't lend themselves well to interpretation. This is what happens when the industry says we can't have client-side applications anymore, and tries to shoehorn rich client functionality into a browser that wasn't really designed for some of the heavy lifting it's being asked to do. Browsers used to be thin clients back the the olden days, and JavaScript wasn't designed to replace the entire functionality of a rich client. Because of this, you have FrameworkOfTheMonth, and often multiples of them, layered on top of the DOM and JavaScript parser, and the result is unreadable client-side pages.
I think that in general, the level of abstraction and the constant jumping around to the newest shiniest stuff make it very hard for anyone who's a total newbie to come up to speed unless you really start with first principles and work your way up. Back when applications were simple, it was reasonably easy to look at source code and understand how things fit together. It still is at the abstract level, but now the Legos being glued together look more like Duplo blocks. If you are a new web developer and start your education at the framework level, you miss all the under-the-hood stuff about HTTP, network communication itself, and how the browser actually interprets your high level calls.
What I worry about is that the industry is going to shift to a point where the only people who actually know what's working under the hood work for software companies and cloud providers. As this continues, more and more of the low-level stuff is going to get cemented down below a layer of abstraction such that you can't change anything underneath. You might say this happened with assembler, etc. and I agree, but there should be a way for new entrants in the field to actually get to the first principles rather than starting them up 10,000 levels above it.
Having lived through the last Dotcom Bubble, I'm very surprised it's taking this long for the current one to pop. This time, it's mainly situated in Silicon Valley, but last time there was an East Coast bubble outpost in NYC. This was because traditional media publishers and TV networks were desperate to buy into the bubble as well. I saw lots of huge 3-story Times Square billboard ads for companies like Beenz and Webvan as I walked to my "boring, old school" sysadmin job. I always wondered where these companies got their money from...I mean obviously from VCs, but do they just dump $40 million in the company's bank account and say "go buy Nerf toys, Aeron chairs and all the advertising you can book!"?
I'm sure the pop for this current bubble will be coming pretty soon. There are just too many copycat companies out there trying to squeeze the last few drops of blood out of the bubble. I've seen no fewer than 6 meal kit delivery services (like Blue Apron,) at least 4 clothing delivery subscriptions (like Stitch Fix,) and 10,000,000,000,000 magic DevOps tool vendors. (Guess what line of work I'm in these days...I can't tell you how many 5-person startups have offered to solve 100% of my application problems using their One Cool Trick.)
A favorite phrase back then was "this time it's different!" Indeed it is -- this time we have The Cloud. A startup doesn't have to spend millions to buy or rent a data center, and they can coast on VC fumes for much longer than Bubble 1.0 startups. They can also advertise on Facebook and Google instead of those Times Square billboards. So I imagine this will continue for a while, but just like the last bubble, this one isn't sustainable either.
I guess it's been coming for a while. From their perspective it makes total sense - keep everyone on a single version of Windows and Office, force all the consumer users to accept every OS and application update, etc. The average consumer is used to the subscription model now - many are on Office 365 and almost everyone pays for their mobile phone every month. I can't say I'm too happy about the idea of having to rent the operating system as well as the office software running on top of it, but hopefully they'll realize they can't trap everyone in that cycle.
This seems to be the ultimate desired state -- collect revenue on a permanent basis little by little, rather than rely on enterprise agreements and one-off software purchases. It's going to be a big shift though, Windows client licenses have been sold to OEMs for ages, and buying a new computer means it comes pre-licensed for the life of the machine. Windows Server licenses have been either one-off purchases or covered under much bigger enterprise agreements. If you shift to a monthly fee, who pays it, and what happens if you don't pay?
Being in the IT industry for a while gives an interesting perspective...this is officially the point where we start swinging back toward an IBM mainframe style model. IBM still rakes in massive amounts of money by selling companies a mainframe, keeping it fed with parts and software, and charging monthly for the use of computing power. They used to be pretty much the only game in town, and the PC/x86 ecosystem was the break from that. Microsoft's got this going on the Azure side, and now will have another revenue stream on the device side, so we're back to central control of everything. I guess it makes sense because consumers are used to locked-down phones. But, I wonder if as PCs become a niche product for doing actual work rather than consuming entertainment, how many businesses will be happy with having to buy the same software over and over for eternity?
LetsEncrypt is a good idea because it makes certificates accessible to a wider range of users. I've been doing systems engineering work for quite a while, but haven't really concentrated on web stuff. When I got involved with a public-facing web project at work lately, I noticed there really is a lot to the TLS system and certificates once you get beyond internally-trusted certificates. Most places did the legwork for certificate acquisition years ago, but setting something up from scratch requires that you know a little bit about how things work, and it costs money. Even the cheap CAs want a few hundred for a wildcard certificate - so if LetsEncrypt allows people to use HTTPS by removing the cost factor, then this is a good move. They already make the issuing process much simpler than going through a traditional CA.
The only thing I do see happening is the "regular" CAs charging more for real, verified certificates, and the whole trust factor possibly being diluted:
- Real CAs that do validation will see that it's now free to get any kind of certificate and raise their prices...creating a kind of "trustworthy TLS" system in parallel with the "free and easy" one. It's reasonably easy to stand up a PKI and hand out certificates from a technical perspective, but the process around how the PKI is operated is the thing that actually creates trust.
- The whole TLS system and the chain of trust is based on the fact that CAs don't just issue certificates to anyone who asks. This will probably force anyone wanting to do things like take payments into EV certificates where they previously could have gotten away with DV ones. DV certificates only validate that you have control over the domain, and EV ones are only issued after the CA does reasonable legwork to make sure you're an authority in your organization.
If those 3,000 weren't doing a whole lot, then it might be -- and this is coming from someone who really wants more stable employment relationships in the world.
I've worked in big companies almost my whole career, both as an employee and a contractor. I've seen plenty of people who don't do tons of work and still manage to keep their jobs. The truth is that the bigger a company is, the easier it is for people to "hide out" and find a nice safe corner where they don't have to do a whole lot:
- It's gotten way faster in the last 10 years or so, but it used to be that if you were an acquisition hire, it would take a very long time to lay off the person they didn't need.
- Large organizations develop their own internal politics, and being a favorite of a well-connected executive or even middle manager is one way to get away without doing the best possible job.
- A corollary to this is the fact that those who really know how to work the system have studied every single rule, custom and exception to the rule. They know exactly how every single internal organization decision is made, obsess over things like pay grades and vacation entitlements, and will always come out on the right side of any reorg simply because their second full-time job is internal tea leaf reading.
- Large organizations also thrive on empire builders, and managers try to increase the number of employees they're managing by any means necessary. Latch on to someone who likes you, and you could get rewarded with the equivalent of a no-show job -- I've seen it happen.
- It's also possible for really big companies to "lose" entire groups of people, as in, we know they're on the payroll but have no idea what that department does these days.
- Fewer places allow this these days, but I've worked in jobs where there are levels upon levels of management for even the simplest tasks. What usually happens is the person doing a job gets promoted, then promotes the next in line so they don't have to directly manage the work, then on up the line. If a company has enough margin (like a consulting company for example,) this is how you wind up with a hierarchy of 8 account executives servicing the same customer.
Microsoft is kind of like an IBM or AT&T pre-breakup in that regard. I'm sure there are plenty of people just hanging on because there's just not a lot of pressure cost-wise. One-off software revenue was huge for them, and now they're poised to vacuum in billions a month in rental fees.
This is all in sales, not technology. Being in a systems engineering/design role, I often get pulled in on meetings where the software and hardware sales guys are courting the CIOs and other executives. It's amazing how much money someone can make selling stuff like enterprise agreements, and equally amazing how much money they have to spend to get the CIOs to sign the paper. Expensive dinners, rounds of golf, sports tickets, you name it -- I've never tagged along on the strip club visits some CIOs I've worked with have demanded from their salespeople.
I'm guessing Microsoft is getting rid of all the salespeople who are narrowly focused on closing these big licensing deals and trying to refocus everyone on selling Azure and subscriptions. That's the grand master plan -- get out of the boxed software business and force everyone to rent computing power and software tools from them, IBM mainframe style. It's an absolute license to print money -- all they need to do is provide power, cooling, network and hardware. We're doing a huge Azure-based project now and it's really interesting -- but it's eye-wateringly expensive when you think about the long term. The long term lock-in is what they're going for -- rather than buying a Windows Server license for $20K once, you pay over and over and over, just like companies do for Office 365.
I just wish they'd slow down a little bit and let people catch up -- there are new features every week, major changes to existing ones very frequently and now Azure Stack is almost released. I think at some point they're going to have to slow it down just to nail down problems once things get to a certain size. (God help them the day someone figures out how to compromise Azure AD in an undetectable way.)
In the US, the original intent of the H-1B visa was to be a safety valve to find and hire the most talented people you could find regardless of their current location. I actually know several people whose employers used it for this purpose. But, it has been shown that all the body shops use it to bring in cheap labor. The visa rules state that the minimum salary is $60K, and it never got adjusted for inflation. So, say you're a company in San Francisco and have to pay your IT staff $200K a year just to keep their heads above water. TCS or Infosys or Cognizant will come around and offer you 2 "qualified resources" for the same price, and you get to wash your hands of the IT department. It's not surprising they win outsourcing deals.
Hopefully Canada won't repeat the same mistake. I doubt it though -- there's no point in participating in politics unless you have millions of dollars to buy the laws you want. I'm sure all the big companies have purchased themselves nice loopholes similar to the ones we have. It's a shame too, because I would move to Toronto or Montreal in 2 seconds if I could find a good job.
As a father of 2 kids, I've performed my evolutionary duty. :-) However, there are plenty of younger people in the US who aren't, and in my opinion they're being somewhat rational. Having kids is a big risk unless you just don't give a crap -- they cost a lot of money and you have to be much more careful about maintaining your income and savings than if you were on your own. Millenials are also skipping traditional adult rites of passage like marriage, house-buying, etc. that lay the groundwork for a family. Plus, those that do have kids are having fewer, later. Generally, people are less religious, have heard of birth control, and are less worried about child mortality, therefore less inclined to have "spare" children.
Japan has a few things that are really slowing their birthrate - almost zero permanent immigration, a very slow economy for the last 20 years, a traditional society that says women can have either children or a career but not both, and a reputation for a workaholic culture. People are just so busy spending their lives at work so they can keep their jobs that having a family comes second. This is a big reversal from the 1980s/1990s...I remember growing up hearing that Japan was taking over the world. MBA programs were toying with the idea of making Japanese language study a requirement if I remember correctly. This is similar to what China is doing now, but China has the population to sustain it in my opinion.
We in the US could be headed down this road too. Imagine if we close the borders and enter a period of economic stagnation. Couple this with the trend towards unstable employment, the gig economy, etc. Back in the 50s/60s, a man could count on being employed for life by a large US company and would take on the risk of a family, kids, house, car, etc. Now (IMO) we've let the pendulum swing too far back in favor of employers and removed any loyalty/stability either side had to the other. Hopefully people will realize that they want stability again once this Second Dotcom Bubble bursts and takes many of the sharing economy employers with it.
I already see a million comments from the crowd who dismisses all these complaints as "SJW BS." However, there is a pattern of startups ignoring bad behavior of some "rockstars." If proven to be true, that incident with Uber was pretty blatant -- having a female employee receive a request for...companionship...on her first day from her boss. I'm sure Tesla isn't far from its roots as a startup in terms of HR maturity either. They may be pretty far away from some one-trick phone app startup, but this is a culture thing that doesn't change unless there's external pressure to do so.
It doesn't even have to be a startup; I've worked at established companies where top salespeople get automatic passes on all the sexual harassment rules -- their management is willing to deal with the fallout to keep this salesperson producing. Watching some of these latent lawsuits in action is interesting, and the anti-SJW crowd can't just pretend it doesn't exist or that female employees receiving this treatment are all too sensitive. Whether it's the "neckbeard creeper" sort of stalking harassment, or the "ex-fratboy" overt kind -- if I were a woman I wouldn't be too happy with having to put up with either.
It's interesting that just a few hours ago, we had an article asking whether or not it was worth it to put in long hours at a job. I'm sure the video game thing was meant to increase the article's clickbait factor, but there might be something to this.
Back a long time ago from when I started working (so, maybe peaking around the 60s) getting a job with a large US company was about the closest you could come to lifetime employment without earning tenure. I know lots of people from that era who worked from high school to retirement for large manufacturers, AT&T, IBM, etc. There was a degree of loyalty on both sides, employer and employee, that's missing in the modern workforce. Companies hung onto people as long as they could, and barring some major disaster, you could pretty much count on having a job. There was a clear career path internally, such that you always had an income that kept up with your experience. In return, people were expected to give a little more of themselves. I distinctly recall many families being relocated (at company expense) frequently to work on new projects or land promotions. That must have been hard, but it was the price one paid for the employer's loyalty to the employee.
Am I advocating lifetime employment, no layoff rules/policies and more loyalty on both sides of the fence? Yes, I suppose I am. You don't see companies giving a second thought to sending entire technical departments to India to save 25% in absolute labor costs. And for all but the rockstars, you never see companies paying people to move and take on new jobs. I'm well aware that some people are making out quite well in this new system. But, not enough people are benefiting from what should be a broad period of economic recovery. Companies _can_ afford to offer people stability and security; they just choose not to.
If I were a recent grad facing 40+ years of the current situation work/life wise, and saw many examples of people being kicked to the curb years short of retirement, then I might not want to bust my ass so hard.
"Maybe, if it's the lottery ticket that might take you to the upper ranks someday. Maybe the bonuses are worth it,"
Two examples where it might make sense include investment banking and being a corporate attorney at a prestigious law firm.
- Neither of these spots are easy to get - to get a top banking associate spot means being at the top of the best MBA programs in the country, and working for biglaw firms requires you to be at the very top of your class at one of the top 14 law schools in the country. So, you're already at the top of the elite to even think about getting in the door.
- Both of these positions are one-way tickets to Easy Street, and also pay quite well while you have them. (Starting salary is $180K at a big law firm with zero experience, and banking bonuses are measured in hundreds of thousands of dollars on top of an already high salary.)
- Both require that you put in your "time in grade" to get to the next rung, they realize this and work people to death. More than 100 hours a week is not uncommon.
So, just like the startup lottery, this is probably the only place where it makes sense to deal with the pain. Once you do, the hardest decision you'll ever have to make again is whether to buy the Rolls or the Bentley.
"The people who work those long hours seem to be the ones who, due to a freak of nature, do not sleep as much as others."
I could see that just based on my own evidence. One of the curses of not letting yourself get pigeonholed into a tiny corner of IT is the amount of information you need to consume on a regular basis. I know it's critical for my career, so I do it, but it was a whole lot easier when I didn't have 2 kids. Unfortunately, being a non-nomad in modern IT means being able to turn on a dime, learn something incredibly fast, then pivot just as fast to the new thing. The alternative is becoming a super-specialist, devoting all your time and energy to one or two things, and having to move from job to job every couple of months because people will only hire you to clean up messes.
Lately, I'm all about finding the most efficient ways of dumping this vast firehose of information into my brain and still finding time to sleep, be a semi-normal spouse, and be a good dad. Sleep is what suffers, and I'm definitely not Edison; ask my family how I am in the morning after 3 hours' sleep.
To answer the question in the headline, ask what kind of employer you work for. There is a _huge_ difference between working hard because you want to go a great job, and working hard because you're on your 5th death march this year.
If you work for a cutthroat employer and your co-workers are all back-stabbing and politicking their way to promotions, then of course you'll work until you're burnt out or quit out of frustration. "Tone at the top" is important when it comes to how middle managers behave and force work through too few resources. Some employers, especially in tech, just roll with it and burn through new hires because they feel there's an infinite supply of new grads who would lay down in traffic to get a job there. This was very evident in the video game industry a while back, and I'm sure it hasn't changed much. Although they're an endangered species these days, some employers at the other end of the spectrum recognize that they need to balance crazy levels of work with not burning their best performers out. Where I'm working now, we tend to do everything we can to hang on to truly useful long-service employees. If you've been working here for 20 years collecting a paycheck, this doesn't apply unless you're a major political player and "survivor." But, if you want to stick around and keep your skills fresh, you can be reasonably assured that they'll try to hang on to you even if they have to lay others off.
One of the reasons employers try to retain people is that domain knowledge is hard to impart on newbies. Back to my job, you can't just be an IT or software dev nerd; we're a services company that's actually pretty close to our customers' business. If you're working for Amazon for example, you might be one of 10,000 web developers cranking out new APIs, front end code, etc. and have difficulty differentiating yourself. Same goes for IT - if you're just a generic sysadmin with no business knowledge, the company you work for will be more willing to burn you out and take the next person in line.
"If you don't specialize, you're finished."
Respectfully disagree -- I'm of the opinion that IT and software generalists are going to be the only people companies will actually keep on full-time once the latest wave plays out:
- The cloud, SDN and SDStorage are forcing a lot of the infrastructure specialist jobs up a few levels. For companies that actually do have hardware on site, it's going to be increasingly software-defined and virtual, so there will be less specialization needed. All the CCNPs and EMC storage gods who've built a career around knowing absolutely everything about a hardware ecosystem are in for a big change.
- Frameworks and other "coding crutches" including SaaS and PaaS cloud services are making it much easier for low-skilled developers to cobble together something that works. Couple that with the "planet scale" of the cloud (uh huh, sure...) and code that just works is going to be preferable to code that's super-efficient. (Embedded/IoT stuff is the exception here.)
- If you do specialize, expect to live a nomadic lifestyle, moving from contract to contract every 3-6 months. I can't tell you how many emails I get from recruiters desperately trying to find a contractor with an exotic skill set to work all over the country. This is fine as long as you're single and can live out of a suitcase for years on end - I know tons of nomad consultants who make multiples of what I make in this lifestyle.
If you want to remain an on-shore FTE for a company, you're going to need to know a little about everything, constantly learn new stuff that's a rehash of old stuff, and be flexible. I have a feeling the days of a single-product specialist in IT are coming to a close. I understand that large companies pigeon-hole IT positions, but you want to avoid that as much as possible. Look at how many Exchange gurus have been replace by Office 365. Or how many data center positions have been reduced by companies moving to IaaS solutions. Just the other day, I talked to an old colleague who knows so much about System Center Config Manager that he might have written parts of it. He's one of the nomads I'm talking about, making good money, but even he's saying how companies aren't willing to hire people for more than a few months now even if they're geniuses.