Seriously, as someone who's been doing the IT thing for 20 years and actually likes teaching new people the ins and outs of the job -- where else are you going to get your newbies from? I've seen so many people say teaching development and IT is a waste of time because all the work is going offshore, and it crowds out existing workers, and the kids won't learn anything anyway. I remember and use a tiny fraction of what I was taught in school; not everything has to have an immediate ROI and it helps to have at least a small amount of knowledge about a broad range of topics. If nothing else, you're not helpless when it comes to what's actually going on inside the magic box. There's so much abstraction already, both in software and IT -- it's hard to differentiate "coding" from snapping pre-built libraries and frameworks together. Why not spend a little time in the classroom, show simple examples that illustrate how to make a computer do what you want, and maybe a few students will be interested in it?
Saying we shouldn't teach coding in school is like saying we shouldn't teach at least a basic course of biology or chemistry because no one who isn't a biologist or chemist will ever use it. I already have enough problems with software developers and "architects" who have absolutely no idea how their software runs, or can't get their head around capacity issues that would be easily understood if they just understood first principles.
I'm a fan of the apprenticeship concept, basically for any IT or development job. Start with a baseline of knowledge, or give that knowledge in parallel to on the job training, just like the other skilled trades and professions do. In states with strong unions, it's not uncommon to have people come out of high school and do a union-sponsored internship. THe union sets them up with a total newbie job, pairing them with someone more experienced. At the same time, they run classes to teach the theory needed to do the work. Some people might turn their noses up at this, but what do you think medical residents are doing for years and years of on-call duty? The attending shows the newbie how to do something, then has them do it next time, then has the newbie teach an even newer newbie. The residents don't come out of medical school ready for independent work -- they've spent the last 2 or 3 years being pumped full of book knowledge.
I'm actually still a proponent of a college education if done right, and not as a substitute for OJT. Having a CS degree shouldn't obviate the need for training though -- maybe you would just start a few rungs up the ladder because a lot of the theory was covered. Similarly, having a non-CS degree should not be a bar to employment -- I got a degree in chemistry and wound up doing quite well in IT, moving up through the job progression slowly until I got to systems engineering/architecture. I think a guild-style system is the way to go because the knowledge you have upon finishing a degree gets stale so quickly. The only way I've found to keep up is to fall back on the basics I've learned when trying to figure out what the latest overhyped product/method/framework is an improvement on.
People say college is a scam, but I do think you get benefits proportional to what you put in. If you're going just to check a box, then of course you'll be unhappy. Back just before I graduated (around the mid 90s,) just going to college and finishing was almost a guarantee that someone would hire you. Today, there are no guarantees and like the people in this story, even the educated are hoping for that "one big break." I think going to college vs. not going is still a good idea if you have a plan and take steps to make yourself marketable. I know I was a lot more mature when I left than when I entered - having to navigate a bureaucracy, deal with all sorts of different people and perform under pressure are all good things to have under your belt and make you more employable.
The interesting thing about this is that he's only concerned about tax dodging when it involves a company he doesn't like. I'm sure there are plenty of tax loopholes that is businesses have been able to use over the years.
I think almost everyone knows that businesses don't pay the official tax rates, and the largest ones are able to pay zero or get tax refunds in some cases because they're able to buy loopholes and exploit them. Even small businesses, who are the most vocal about it, structure their transactions to avoid taxes. Wage-earners are about the only taxpayers who don't get these benefits because documented W-2 and 1099 income is directly tracked and taxed at the income tax rate. But, ask any small business owner what entity owns their car, house and personal debt -- I guarantee you the answer is "John Smith Enterprises, Inc." It's way too easy for individuals to just set up a corporation and filter every personal expense they incur through it. It's not technically legal of course, but that doesn't stop it from happening. And then those same people turn around and complain about being taxed and regulated to death...those arguments ring hollow for me.
I know it's not a popular opinion on a tech site, and a lot of people might call me a Luddite, but why can't we leave some slack in the system? Why does everything have to be as efficient as we can possibly make it? Why does every business feel they need to run with zero wiggle room in terms of staffing?
There's nothing wrong with increasing efficiency...until you've gone so far that there's no labor left for the average person to sell that employers are willing to buy. Grocery stores are a really good example of this at work -- I concede that they are running on very tiny margins (except for Whole Foods and other specialty retailers.) But, your average supermarket does employ a lot of people; you need people to stock shelves, cut meat, make sure the produce looks appealing and handle transactions. I'm not trying to be mean here, but supermarkets do tend to be long-term employers of people who really don't have a lot of other marketable skills and no capacity to obtain more. Low-skill employment like this is important for both young people getting a first, low-stakes job that teaches them basics of being an employee, and quite honestly for the people who can't do anything else. In traditional supermarkets, this is why you see strong union representation -- in some cases this is as good as it gets in terms of lifetime employment and it becomes even more important to have job security and a way to make something approaching a middle class wage.
Techies tend to assume that everyone is equally smart and capable of doing anything they put their mind to. Most associate only with other smart people and hate dealing with anyone else further down the intelligence curve. Deal with a wider cross-section of the public, and that perception will change. There's no nice way of saying it; some people are smarter than others, and some are _really_ in need of help in the brains department. You're not going to take a front-end manager of a supermarket, who's been doing the same thing for 20 years, and teach him or her to be a full-stack web developer. You can't retrain a factory worker who assembles parts to be a big data scientist. If they were capable of this, they would have moved out of these positions a long time ago.
Consider these ideas - (1) intelligence is roughly normally distributed, (2) society is 100% based around the concept of selling labor for money, and (3) automation is rapidly removing the low end of the labor market from participation, and is coming for almost all the "knowledge workers" very shortly. What do you do with a population where more than half are "mentally handicapped" because they can't be scientists, engineers or business executives? Automation is great, but don't carry it so far that you break society. Leave some slack in the system so that even the people at the top don't feel like they have to work 24/7 like the robots do.
I think this may be due in part to a few things: - Companies being less susceptible to the sales pitches (i.e. "Our Indian developers are superior in every way to your native ones...and we work for 20% of the salary!") after either being burned once or twice, or playing golf with enough CIOs who've been burned - Saturation -- as in, even if they're cheap, the body shops can't hire people indefinitely if the amount of work is going down - Cloud -- less remote management of infrastructure that isn't automated to some degree
Actually, I know the pendulum has been swinging back for a while -- but we're still seeing huge, high profile deals being signed with TCS, Infosys and all the other body shop consultancies.
Long term employment-wise, I definitely see room domestically for generalists who can be flexible in their skill sets. Companies will hire specialists as they need, but they will need native people who can deal with diverse groups, understand a little bit about everything and can adapt quickly. Unless you want to be a total nomad and hop from job to job every 3 months, being a generalist and investing enough time into being the person your company wants to keep in-house is going to be the key. Not to say that being a specialist is all bad - I know plenty of consultants who make way more than I do. But, the trade-off is living out of a suitcase, bouncing from one short-term job to the next, and having no home life unless your wife is completely happy with you never being there. Most of the nomad consultants I know are unmarried for divorced (some several times) for that reason.
I'm a guy, and I know I feel uncomfortable when I get paired with some sales guy who's a walking sexual harassment lawsuit waiting to happen when visiting one of our customers. I think most guys who are somewhat normal and have regular relationships with the opposite sex do too. The problem comes when the organization you work for doesn't do anything to actively discourage douchbaggery of any kind. I may be old school, but I think workplace interactions should be professional, and any "extracurricular activities" shouldn't need to be discussed in a work context.
I hope she's getting a lifetime's worth of income from her settlements, because I know there are plenty of hiring managers who wouldn't touch someone who has a reputation like the one she has now. Maybe some things will change because of this, but I do know the technology world has shifted. It used to be exclusively nerds, so the complaints you'd get would be of the creeper/stalker variety associated with the "living in your mom's basement" crowd. Now, these web startups are using frameworks, APIs and SDKs to build software, so you're getting a lot of less technical people snapping Legos together to build apps...and just like the CS boom of the late 90s, you're seeing a lot of "bros" getting into the startup biz because of the money involved. If you want to see a parallel in another field, just look at how many former fraternity guys wind up in sales organizations and the culture that develops in most of them as a result.
I just don't understand why people can't be professionals at work. Maybe it's working 100 hours a week with the same people in a cramped office, but I've mostly encountered professional workplaces in my career...usually we're too busy doing work to harass co-workers...
Ever since the middle of the 20th Century, the reduced work week has been a touted benefit of all the automation and technology advances. It hasn't happened yet, but I think it might with this next shift.
UBI is a good idea, but it won't get implemented in the US until the alternative is the majority of the population living in poverty. Reducing the work week and maybe the societal dependency on a 5-day, 40-hour job that you physically commute to might offer a safety valve. The problem is how you keep business owners from turning this into a gig-economy nightmare where no one has stable income and can't afford to buy anything -- or doesn't feel safe buying things. Consumerism in the US worked previously because people were reasonably sure they would have a steady paycheck to cover expenses, and if they lost their job one would be available at another company. This is a fundamental shift that I don't think we're ready for yet.
I've heard Tesla has a ruthless startup culture even though they're a huge company -- kind of the worst stereotypical SV startup taken to a new level because Elon Musk is so driven. If that's the reason he's out I'm not surprised. Coming from Apple where employees are pretty much pampered and living off the constant money flow from the App Store might be a pretty big shock.
But -- this guy is the "main author of LLVM". I've seen this one play out over and over, and have experienced it personally. Almost every company that isn't producing actual software treats their IT and development resources the same way the rest of the company regarding career path. Every individual worker in non-IT/non-engineering departments dreams of becoming the supervisor, then the manager, then the director and maybe a VP someday...mainly because most people aren't passionate about typical corporate jobs. The problem is that people management skills and engineering/work skills are completely orthogonal. No problem in the other departments -- who would want to be some random report analyst when they could be the boss of a bunch of report analysts and never have to see a report again? This is a bad fit for many engineers, scientists and IT people though, because most of us got into the job because we enjoy it.
Some companies are just starting to come around to the fact that not everyone is hard-wired for management and would rather just be doing more interesting and impactful technical work. That's how I've been able to structure my career (luckily.) When my current company figured out I was good at what I do, liked it and wanted to keep doing work like it, they gave me more responsibility on the technical side instead of a Kindergarten class of employees to manage. I'm hoping I can keep going in this way because I've done the whole department manager thing. I really tried liking it, but it's just not where my skills are best used. Being a senior engineer/architect type, teaching the newbies the ropes and figuring out our long term technical path is what I'm good at, and companies who figure this out with their smarter employees will benefit in the long run IMO.
When I started out in IT (back sometime after the last Ice Age,) it was very possible to start out as a help desk person, and work your way up learning as you went. I know, because I started out with a non-CS degree and made the hops from help desk to desktop support to (essentially) a data center operator, then several levels of sysadmin and finally where I am now as a senior engineer/architect. The thing I'm worried about is that current generations will see no future in an IT career and choose not to pursue it. One of the contributing factors is the limited prospects for low-end IT jobs needed to get the skills you have to possess at the higher levels. If help desk work is offshored or a minimum wage job, fewer people will go into the field and gain the kind of OJT you only get in the trenches.
I absolutely don't hold myself out to be some super-genius, but I have noticed that there are a lot more "senior architect" level jobs being filled by people with a much lower skill and experience level than you would expect. This makes sense if there's a whole bunch of missing rungs in the career ladder -- a CS grad will BS his way into a higher level position than they normally would have because of this. This is where you get the architect-level people who just buy whatever's in the Gartner Magic Quadrant because they can't objectively evaluate vendor claims. I've had to work very hard to stay hands on in the company I work for, because the assumption is that once you reach my level all you do is hand-wave a few diagrams and buy million-dollar software tools to badly automate Function X. My boss knows this, but it's hard convincing those above our level that it's worth investing in the talent pool.
I'm one of those crazy people who really likes my job and loves learning and teaching newbies what I know. I also think companies would be fighting fewer fires if the labor market wasn't so distorted at the low end by the body shops and outsourcing companies.
I wonder how Philip Morris feels about e-cigarettes. I would imagine tobacco cigarettes are a lot cheaper for them to make and easier to market because there's low "startup costs." I doubt they'd be funding studies like this because the whole point is to keep as many people addicted to nicotine as possible. It must be hard going from a world of the 50s where the majority of adult men smoked and 30some% of women did too, to a world where smokers are standing in a sad little corner 25 feet from building entrances.
At least in the US, smoking in general (vaping or smoking, that is) isn't usually associated with the upper income brackets unless you're talking high-end cigars and such. As the blue collar labor force is reduced, I would think the number of active smokers would go way down. But, those who are smokers are usually pretty hardcore about it. My mother smokes and when she comes to visit, you can tell how agitated she gets when she can't have her smoke breaks. I used to commute on the train to work, and there was an express train that went almost an hour without stopping that I would take pretty frequently. First stop, the smokers were lining up at the door miles before, smokes and lighters in hand, just waiting for the doors to open. That's dedication.:-)
Toward the end of the last dotcom bubble, you'd see stories similar to this, where the founder was able to keep their employees working even after the money was gone. I would imagine this happens a lot during the death stage in lots of small businesses. From what I've seen, the difference between tech startups and your average small businesses is that some of the employees become brainwashed to some extent. They've been putting in 100 hour weeks for so long that nothing will convince them that it's time to get out.
I think part of the problem with startups is that the founders are these "serial entrepreneur" types who (a) have difficulty dealing with actual employees, and (b) have a huge personal financial cushion to fall back on and therefore have no idea how bad not getting a paycheck can be for "normal" people. Larger companies may move slowly and have dumb rules and a bureaucracy, but most large companies don't make it a regular habit of shorting employees' wages. Startup founders are a lot more likely to say "Oh well, I guess it's time to close up...time to chase that "Uber for nurses" opportunity!" and forget about who they're leaving behind.
Long term, I think that most IT jobs at non-IT companies will be outsourced, and those outsourcers will do anything to raise the margin on their deals. This includes offshoring anything that they possibly can and/or replacing native workers with H-1Bs. The offshoring firms have a well-known loophole in the law that sets the minimum salary for an H-1B at $60K per year, not adjusted for inflation. I actually think that closing this loophole while keeping the program for its intended purpose is the way to go. If you're a body shop, and average onshore salary is $40K more than the $60K you can get away with paying a visa holder, it's obvious how much of a gift that is for the company and no wonder their sales pitches to companies are so effective.
IT companies that outsource are engaging in a race to the bottom - once you outsource, nothing new or interesting will ever be attempted in that environment again because the provider will want to charge an arm and a leg for change orders. Also, the wall between the company and the outsourcer is going to limit how much can be changed and how the company engages with IT.
Other than the distortion of the market this causes, I also don't like the fact that new entrants into the IT world aren't able to find as many entry-level positions at reasonable salaries anymore. Speaking as someone who's been doing this for 20+ years, and got where I am today by going through a progression of these entry-level and mid-level jobs, that pipeline needs to be in place to ensure people have the foundational knowledge they need when tackling bigger, more complex problems. No one comes straight out of college with the entire skill set required to do IT in anything but the simplest environments. In my case, I did a series of support and admin jobs to get the expertise and skills to "learn how to learn" about new stuff and how it fits into the realities imposed by the surroundings.
Fundamentially, I worry about so much cloud abstraction in IT that people who haven't been around forever lose the ability to understand what's actually being provided under the hood by hosted SaaS stuff. Companies who treat their IT like a janitorial service are going to fall into this trap too. Being at the higher end of things these days, I deal with a lot of "systems architects" who are very good at drawing hand-wavey diagrams but can't work out where the bottlenecks and dependencies are because they don't see the end to end view. Anything complex seems to be hand-waved away in a cloud symbol on their diagrams, and an "oh, the provider takes care of that." I'm not saying we should go back to the no-abstraction era of physical servers, etc. but that we should take the time to understand the realities of what's going on.
I'm going to be 42 in a month, and I'm already starting to see a little bit of ageism creeping in. My plan to "navigate" it is to keep my skills sharp and relevant, and try to be as much of a generalist as possible.
I have a decent stable job, but I do go on practice interviews occasionally if I see something I might potentially take if the situation were right. Mature industries like healthcare, education, banking, government, etc. still do hire some people based on experience rather than youthfulness and cheapness. At the same time, if those companies don't care about their IT or development, they're increasingly turning to the offshore body shops. The sweet spot seems to be those companies that aren't hair-on-fire SV startups, but realize that there's an advantage to be had if you have a good IT environment and use it well. The other choice is a more established software/services company (where I am now) that doesn't demand 100 hour weeks cranking out iterations of the latest phone app or web API.
The one thing I would suggest is that the quote from the article about being a lifelong learner is spot on. Employers love to use the stereotype of the older IT worker or developer who isn't flexible and therefore not a good hire. But, like every stereotype there is a little truth. The company I work for is doing work in Azure, and I'm jumping in head-first while maintaining my traditional skill set. Other people I work with...not so much. I hear a lot of "this cloud thing will never catch on" or "DevOps is stupid" -- OK, ironic moustache hipster DevOps is silly, but the core ideas are really good and being up to date on this stuff isn't a bad idea. Also, the generalist thing can't be overstated. This new project I'm working on uses Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop, and we have interviewed a lot of candidates for help with design, etc. Big-company IT will easily let you pigeonhole yourself into a very narrow specialty; I'm seeing a lot of people who have been doing XenApp administration, exclusively, for ages and have not really been able to move into other areas. I also know a lot of people who are SAN or Cisco network experts -- great when everyone is using the technology, but not so great when industry shifts like SDN and storage virtualization take place. Companies are looking for flexible people who aren't locked into one skill.
I'm hoping that the Millenials having kids will start to reverse the ageism trend. They may be having fewer, but not everyone is 30 and still living at home or wafting through life. Once "these kids" start having lives outside of work and family responsibilities, I think some of the attitudes will change. I _really_ don't want to be one of those folks who gets laid off at age 57 and has to figure out a way to live until they can access their retirement savings or Social Security because no one will hire them.
There was an article a couple days ago about how white-collar employees in the US are afraid of using their vacation time...this seems like a good bookend to that. The bottom line is that there are very few nice, generous employers anymore. I work for one that actually treats us pretty well; we have on-your-honor sick days and reasonable amounts of vacation. However, stores like this are necessary to show once in a while that employers will take advantage of you at any turn, and some of them are quite bad.
You see stuff like this a lot in low-margin, low-paying employers with what they consider a disposable workforce. I'm sure Amazon is guilty of this with their warehouse workers, delivery drivers, etc. I guarantee that with steady jobs getting scarcer every day, and a constant narrative depicting business owners as superhuman infallible beings, nothing is going to get better. People are going to be happy to have any kind of job that gives them a steady paycheck, and that's even more true for those at the low end of the skills curve.
When I see stuff like this, it makes me wish labor unions were more powerful like they once were. Unions would never have backed down on something like this, and union members were happier because of it. All those coal miners and manufacturing workers voting last November should realize that they would have been much better off had they been represented by a strong union. Working families used to be able to survive on one income, and now that's very difficult for most people to do. I'm still hoping the pendulum swings back the other direction before things get bad enough to have another revolution or civil war on our hands in the US.
It's good practice to make things so simple that no one could possibly mess them up. It works in programming - look at how many JavaScript frameworks abstract an already sandboxed development environment to a point where "signalling intent" is basically all the developer needs to do. Or in hardware -- we're using HPE servers and there is literally a "don't remove this drive" light that comes on when a drive fails in a RAID set. That had to be a customer-requested change after one too many data-loss events stemming from someone replacing the wrong disk.
But at some point, all that abstraction meets the real world and the man behind the curtain really does need full control of whatever system they're in charge of. A favorite example of mine is a project we're doing in Azure -- the developers have full faith in the magic box that will never fail and is so simple that we don't need to know how it works. Sure we might not need to know the exact implementation details, but it doesn't absolve you from knowing what is and is not possible in the realm of compute, network and storage combinations. I've dealt with support tickets where the Microsoft personnel are quite obviously looking in whatever monster Hyper-V / SCVMM console is controlling their back-end to solve something complex.
At the data center level, you can only idiot-proof so much. Some operations person is actually going to need to control the system directly at some point and have access to the Big Red Lever. You can put a million fail-safes in place to avoid routine problems, but when automatic processes fail, you need at least one smart person who knows _everything_ that could go wrong. When you outsource this function to the lowest bidder, don't expect to get a super-genius in that role. Your typical body shop outsourcer isn't going to pay people enough to stay on to learn the ins and outs of an environment.
I have a feeling that this is just the industry catching up. Airlines used to need the services of travel agents and would pay them a commission to sell tickets. This was because they had no or limited capacity to sell seats directly to the public. Once they got this capability, airlines stopped paying commissions and travel agencies either went out of business or specialized in areas where they could still make money. Hotels are a much higher margin business than airlines, and are much more inclined to increase occupancy at the expense of lower room rates, so it makes sense that they would pay commissions to get someone on the property and spending money. I know when I travel for business I'm much less cost-conscious than I would be if I were a vacationer, so hotels do make a lot of money once travelers are on-site.
I'm in technology and most tech people are all for squeezing every single inefficiency out of every system out there. And it is true that there are a lot of brokers and middlemen out there - ask anyone who just bought a house or car for examples. What I wonder is whether tightening the screws so much that you start to affect employment in significant ways is such a good idea. You can have a 100% efficient process, but if your profit relies on people having a disposable income to buy your products, does it make sense to leave some slack in the system?
Personally, I don't use every single day of vacation because I'm never secure in my job. That's just the nature of the work we're in...if the MBAs ever get around to replacing us with someone cheaper, I'm out no matter how skilled and useful I am. We're only allowed to bank 5 days of vacation, but I tend to hang onto it because honestly that's an extra week of pay at a time where I might need it. The fact remains that the US is a very hostile environment to be unemployed in; unemployment insurance barely covers anything if you've had anything approaching a middle class job previously.
I work for an employer that treats people pretty well on balance...it's very true that there are a lot of sweatshops out there and people continue to work there for many reasons. Web startups and small businesses would probably be at the low end of the spectrum -- most businesses I've worked with in the small to medium category already treat non-family employees as "the help" and are extremely stingy when it comes to pay, time off and benefits. Web startups are their own brand of crazy because everyone's hoping to win the IPO or buyout lottery. At the other extreme end of the spectrum, I know a lot of people who work for the state and can actually bank all of their sick and vacation time, to be paid out at the end of their service. Most people use this windfall to buy into insurance that will last them through their retirement...and along with their pension they are able to enjoy a worry-free retirement just like the old days.
Most people I work with are older and fewer management "tricks" work on us. But, there are still plenty of younger domestic workers who haven't learned that employers will take anything they can from employees and fall into the trap of working crazy hours. I'm by no means a clock-watcher; my employer routinely gets tons of "free" work out of me, but I do this because they also offer me a lot of flexibility. Everyone's trade-offs are different; I trade off raw salary for better retirement benefits, a shorter commute and a better ratio of home to work time. Other workers might just want the money regardless of how bad the work environment is, or they may trade off even more salary for a more stable job working in something like government, or they absolutely have to work for the hottest Silicon Valley employer. I do think employers should staff accordingly so that people can actually take time off from work -- so many places I've seen will only hire one person skilled in some job function, effectively chaining them to their desks or slowing down everyone else when they do need to be off.
In a lot of places I've worked (never for IBM, but know a lot of people who have...) this was done as a copycat HR thing ("Google and GE do this, so I'm going to propose it at the next board meeting" says the VP of HR.) -- or a cheap way to get rid of high-talent, high-salary workers.
The first thing is usually just a silly knee-jerk reaction, and is very similar to VPs of IT reading an airline magazine "article" about some buzzwordy technology and suddenly declaring that we're "all-in" on Technology X. The place I work for is very nice to work for job-wise, but often badly copies HR policies that don't really apply to our company. (Our new push to attract hip young Millenials at the expense of everyone else is a perfect example -- comically out of touch with reality and copied word for word from some business rag article about Google.)
The stealth layoff is more sinister. IBM is famous for offshoring every single job they can in recent years, and arbitrary HR policies like this are less likely to be tolerated by older, talented workers. We have a few fully remote workers, and they earn that privilege because they are _really_ good at what they do. I imagine IBM has a very similar situation, with a small cadre of old-timers who really know what's going on secretly directing the newbies behind the scenes. Older workers with families can't move as easily as some new graduate who can fit all their belongings in their car. Old-school IBM, where people had jobs for life, would have been a different story. Those days, if your company moved you for a new project, you moved because it was a good opportunity and it would increase your salary and/or presence within the company. Now, all employees are treated as disposable and knowledge counts for little.
I'm sure they have some people milking the work from home thing...you always will, and big companies really do build up a lot of excess staff. This happens a lot with companies that go on acquisition sprees, and people just hide out until the next big clean-out. But in my opinion this will force the few talented US-based workers at IBM out, and allow them to say "See? We can't find anyone willing to work here in the US -- prepare this division for relocation to Bangalore!"
There have been many studies like this that show social media in general increases feelings of isolation, inadequacy, etc. that were already there. Coming of age is a difficult time for a lot of people, and having a non-stop 24 hour feed of your "friends" posting all sorts of positive status updates, vacation pictures, etc. doesn't help if you're going through a rough time.
- People tend to post either overly positive aspects of their lives on social media. Most people don't post an equivalent number of bad or boring things that happen to them. The exception to this is when people post about their family members dying or similar to try to get some sympathetic reactions. - Social media narrowly targets your interests and makes it possible to only see one side of things. I heard a pretty scary statistic the other day that the majority of people get their news from Facebook. I tested the results out - created a fake Facebook account and started clicking on and reacting to sensationalist crime stories (every single grisly murder out there, other "shocking" stuff and so on.) Sure enough, the news feed was soon almost 90% crime stories - which could lead someone to assume the world is falling apart because this is all they see. - The pressure to be online all the time and sharing is unhealthy in my opinion. It takes too much effort to "maintain your social media brand" and constantly put a steady stream of positive comments, likes, pictures, videos, tweets, etc. out there.
If someone's already depressed or suicidal, this narrow targeting of bad news punctuated by glowing updates from your friends could be that push they need. I'm a little surprised that Steve Cornell killed himself, just because he's likely rich beyond anyone's wildest dreams _and_ a famous celebrity to boot. But, maybe I could see that if he felt totally alone. Then again, how could anyone with access to that much money, fame and influence be depressed? There must have been any number of diversions available to him.
Even with Cisco making their own SDN gear, they have a pretty big problem - companies aren't as willing to spend the Cisco premium anymore, even those that do have big on-site footprints ("on-prem" makes me sound like a douchebag brogramming hipster, so I'll just use "on-site.") That means they're selling less gear and having to discount it more. Couple that with them trying to extract as much revenue as they can with their SmartNet contracts, which you have to buy if you want firmware upgrades, and it's no wonder they're hurting.
I wonder how the whole SDN thing will shake out. It's interesting because no one would have ever thought of buying dumb white box hardware to do physical connections a few years ago and controlling the whole thing from an abstraction layer. What I wonder is whether they're going to start believing their own hype and just stop investing in the hardware altogether. It's really easy to let the hype train carry you too far over to the extreme edges - like everything, there will always be a middle ground.
What also makes me wonder is how they can just snap their fingers and lose 1,000 people. First, that's a lot of well-paid people to dump onto the labor market all at once. Second, what were these people doing that made Cisco decide they weren't useful anymore?
It's not just ego - it's the constant encouragement from the press and their peers that what they're doing is par for the course. Assuming even parts of this allegation are true, it all boils down to a bunch of fully grown little kids running around doing immature things.
Ego is only one part of it. Look at doctors -- most have egos with an easily detectable gravitational influence on objects around them. And why not -- they made it into and through medical school, a feat that requires perfect grades and a photographic memory. Now, they're members of a holy unassailable profession holding life-or-death powers with significant responsibility and respect bestowed on them. If I was in that boat, I'd have a pretty big ego too. It doesn't help when the average person reveres them as godlike figures and the hierarchy in the healthcare workplace contains a whole staff of people explicitly beneath them. But, most doctors I know aren't immature kids who can't keep conversations about their exploits to themselves.
Putting aside the harassment claims for a second, this sounds like what happens when you have an immature "executive team" running a company fueled by large VC investments. If a company's culture encourages a frathouse mentality, and its executives display that culture, that's exactly what regular employees will see and emulate. It goes down to the department level too - I've worked in IT departments for a number of companies, and there are always problem child departments, usually sales. Some salespeople are just walking sexual harassment lawsuits waiting to happen, and companies tend to turn a blind eye to it when they're "rockstar" salespeople. Working in software, there's just some guys you don't want to get paired with on customer visits because they're just embarrassing. Watching an overweight middle aged balding sales dude hitting on a customer's receptionist or female employees (unsuccessfully) is cringe-worthy.
I do think that years of anonymous online communication as a primary means of interaction does contribute to some of the problems. I'm a guy, and a very liberal laid-back one at that, but it would never occur to me to say or do anything unprofessional at work. I've mentioned on here in the past (and been raked over the coals for it) that people need to understand that free speech doesn't mean you can let whatever comes to your mind slip out. People need to learn impulse control, and not seeing the other person on the other end of your conversation emboldens people to say things they normally wouldn't. Look at any comments section on any online news outlet that uses Facebook logins - even with a person's name, picture and sometimes employment history written right out there, I have a hard time envisioning some people saying the things they say in a public setting.
What I think is funny is that this second tech bubble is playing out almost exactly the way the first one did. We're headed for the top -- products and services are getting wackier every day, there's a million copycats of every single idea trying to squeeze out the last few VC dollars in a space, and the investors are finally starting to shut off the money faucets. It's almost like 1999 never happened, and no one alive at that time has any memory of it. This is going to be one of many flame-out stories in the next 2 or 3 years.
I know it's fashionable to have flat, zero-hierarchy organizations and brief communications styles, but I can tell you from 20+ years of working, clear spoken and written communication is not some irrelevant concept from a bygone age. I'm not one of those people who demands respect simply because of a rank or power dynamic, but I will have a lot more respect for someone who addresses others politely, states their opinions like adults, listens to others' points of view, and can write clearly. It also works both ways -- in my experience I have been able to get much further in having people see things my way than colleagues with more abrupt communication styles.
I am firmly in the introvert crowd, and not a salesy type in the least. But, no matter how introverted you are, learning a few common social courtesies is critical to being successful in any setting. I'm not even talking about ladder-climbing brown-nosing style success -- I know part of the reason I'm kept around and allowed to do interesting technical work is that my bosses know I'll make them look good and be professional; in short, they don't have to worry I'll say something stupid.
I think that if you got people over to the subscription model, it wouldn't be impossible to put 3 or 4 guys on a maintenance team to backport absolutely critical fixes. You'd have to be very explicit about the criticality level that triggers a fix, but the reality is that vendors introduce a lot of dependencies. Those maintenance coders wouldn't have to be your best and brightest either - it would be a very good first job for new grads. I would think that as long as customers were paying something like Software Assurance, fixes for remotely wormable issues in components that haven't changed much since the dawn of the product might qualify. It's not just OSes eitther - look at critical stuff like SAP or Oracle products, where some of the foundations are the same as they were decades back.
Software vendors don't want to maintain old software because they aren't getting license revenue from it anymore, but not all customers remaining on old versions do so by choice. There are plenty of "run it till it dies" customers and small businesses still on very old versions of software, but others, especially in the medical field, aren't so easily migrated. Around the XP timeframe, there were a lot of embedded applications that relied on quirky Internet Explorer behavior or used components in such a way that you can't just migrate them to a new OS. Those browser ones are the absolute killer, and IE's Enterprise Mode only solves a subset of the problems.
I work in another industry with a lot of legacy cruft around, and applications that just can't be economically rewritten. Thankfully we're off of XP, but Microsoft prematurely killing support for Windows 7 is troubling and has caused us to step up our timetable for some critical application changes. I think that the only possible beneift of the subscription model for a customer is to allow the possibility of something like I talked about -- a very small maintenance team -- that doesn't cost millions of dollars a year in custom support agreements.
If I remember correctly, it was revealed a few years back that HP was paying Intel to continue developing Itanium simply because it had bet on the processor for its Integrity servers, which run HP-UX, NonStop OS and used to be the only place to run OpenVMS. Obviously these are legacy operating systems, but where they're used they're highly entrenched and can't be written off with an "oh, just migrate to x86 Linux and Java" kind of mindset. OpenVMS is actually living on; HP sold the development rights to a new company who is porting it to x86 -- interesting to me because that was the first ever OS I supported in any professional capacity. But, it looks like HP-UX is probably going to get killed as slowly as an OS like that can.
There was also a tiny window where Itanium had some life, around the early 2000s before x86-64 became a thing. If you had an application that required large (for that time) amounts of memory, it was basically your only choice if you didn't want to go AIX, Solaris or similar. I worked on such a system around that time (mainframe migration) and the Itaniums were pretty quirky compared to x86 servers. UEFI is one of the things that lives on from that era and actually made it over to the mainstream x86 platform.
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Seriously, as someone who's been doing the IT thing for 20 years and actually likes teaching new people the ins and outs of the job -- where else are you going to get your newbies from? I've seen so many people say teaching development and IT is a waste of time because all the work is going offshore, and it crowds out existing workers, and the kids won't learn anything anyway. I remember and use a tiny fraction of what I was taught in school; not everything has to have an immediate ROI and it helps to have at least a small amount of knowledge about a broad range of topics. If nothing else, you're not helpless when it comes to what's actually going on inside the magic box. There's so much abstraction already, both in software and IT -- it's hard to differentiate "coding" from snapping pre-built libraries and frameworks together. Why not spend a little time in the classroom, show simple examples that illustrate how to make a computer do what you want, and maybe a few students will be interested in it?
Saying we shouldn't teach coding in school is like saying we shouldn't teach at least a basic course of biology or chemistry because no one who isn't a biologist or chemist will ever use it. I already have enough problems with software developers and "architects" who have absolutely no idea how their software runs, or can't get their head around capacity issues that would be easily understood if they just understood first principles.
I'm a fan of the apprenticeship concept, basically for any IT or development job. Start with a baseline of knowledge, or give that knowledge in parallel to on the job training, just like the other skilled trades and professions do. In states with strong unions, it's not uncommon to have people come out of high school and do a union-sponsored internship. THe union sets them up with a total newbie job, pairing them with someone more experienced. At the same time, they run classes to teach the theory needed to do the work. Some people might turn their noses up at this, but what do you think medical residents are doing for years and years of on-call duty? The attending shows the newbie how to do something, then has them do it next time, then has the newbie teach an even newer newbie. The residents don't come out of medical school ready for independent work -- they've spent the last 2 or 3 years being pumped full of book knowledge.
I'm actually still a proponent of a college education if done right, and not as a substitute for OJT. Having a CS degree shouldn't obviate the need for training though -- maybe you would just start a few rungs up the ladder because a lot of the theory was covered. Similarly, having a non-CS degree should not be a bar to employment -- I got a degree in chemistry and wound up doing quite well in IT, moving up through the job progression slowly until I got to systems engineering/architecture. I think a guild-style system is the way to go because the knowledge you have upon finishing a degree gets stale so quickly. The only way I've found to keep up is to fall back on the basics I've learned when trying to figure out what the latest overhyped product/method/framework is an improvement on.
People say college is a scam, but I do think you get benefits proportional to what you put in. If you're going just to check a box, then of course you'll be unhappy. Back just before I graduated (around the mid 90s,) just going to college and finishing was almost a guarantee that someone would hire you. Today, there are no guarantees and like the people in this story, even the educated are hoping for that "one big break." I think going to college vs. not going is still a good idea if you have a plan and take steps to make yourself marketable. I know I was a lot more mature when I left than when I entered - having to navigate a bureaucracy, deal with all sorts of different people and perform under pressure are all good things to have under your belt and make you more employable.
The interesting thing about this is that he's only concerned about tax dodging when it involves a company he doesn't like. I'm sure there are plenty of tax loopholes that is businesses have been able to use over the years.
I think almost everyone knows that businesses don't pay the official tax rates, and the largest ones are able to pay zero or get tax refunds in some cases because they're able to buy loopholes and exploit them. Even small businesses, who are the most vocal about it, structure their transactions to avoid taxes. Wage-earners are about the only taxpayers who don't get these benefits because documented W-2 and 1099 income is directly tracked and taxed at the income tax rate. But, ask any small business owner what entity owns their car, house and personal debt -- I guarantee you the answer is "John Smith Enterprises, Inc." It's way too easy for individuals to just set up a corporation and filter every personal expense they incur through it. It's not technically legal of course, but that doesn't stop it from happening. And then those same people turn around and complain about being taxed and regulated to death...those arguments ring hollow for me.
I know it's not a popular opinion on a tech site, and a lot of people might call me a Luddite, but why can't we leave some slack in the system? Why does everything have to be as efficient as we can possibly make it? Why does every business feel they need to run with zero wiggle room in terms of staffing?
There's nothing wrong with increasing efficiency...until you've gone so far that there's no labor left for the average person to sell that employers are willing to buy. Grocery stores are a really good example of this at work -- I concede that they are running on very tiny margins (except for Whole Foods and other specialty retailers.) But, your average supermarket does employ a lot of people; you need people to stock shelves, cut meat, make sure the produce looks appealing and handle transactions. I'm not trying to be mean here, but supermarkets do tend to be long-term employers of people who really don't have a lot of other marketable skills and no capacity to obtain more. Low-skill employment like this is important for both young people getting a first, low-stakes job that teaches them basics of being an employee, and quite honestly for the people who can't do anything else. In traditional supermarkets, this is why you see strong union representation -- in some cases this is as good as it gets in terms of lifetime employment and it becomes even more important to have job security and a way to make something approaching a middle class wage.
Techies tend to assume that everyone is equally smart and capable of doing anything they put their mind to. Most associate only with other smart people and hate dealing with anyone else further down the intelligence curve. Deal with a wider cross-section of the public, and that perception will change. There's no nice way of saying it; some people are smarter than others, and some are _really_ in need of help in the brains department. You're not going to take a front-end manager of a supermarket, who's been doing the same thing for 20 years, and teach him or her to be a full-stack web developer. You can't retrain a factory worker who assembles parts to be a big data scientist. If they were capable of this, they would have moved out of these positions a long time ago.
Consider these ideas - (1) intelligence is roughly normally distributed, (2) society is 100% based around the concept of selling labor for money, and (3) automation is rapidly removing the low end of the labor market from participation, and is coming for almost all the "knowledge workers" very shortly. What do you do with a population where more than half are "mentally handicapped" because they can't be scientists, engineers or business executives? Automation is great, but don't carry it so far that you break society. Leave some slack in the system so that even the people at the top don't feel like they have to work 24/7 like the robots do.
I think this may be due in part to a few things:
- Companies being less susceptible to the sales pitches (i.e. "Our Indian developers are superior in every way to your native ones...and we work for 20% of the salary!") after either being burned once or twice, or playing golf with enough CIOs who've been burned
- Saturation -- as in, even if they're cheap, the body shops can't hire people indefinitely if the amount of work is going down
- Cloud -- less remote management of infrastructure that isn't automated to some degree
Actually, I know the pendulum has been swinging back for a while -- but we're still seeing huge, high profile deals being signed with TCS, Infosys and all the other body shop consultancies.
Long term employment-wise, I definitely see room domestically for generalists who can be flexible in their skill sets. Companies will hire specialists as they need, but they will need native people who can deal with diverse groups, understand a little bit about everything and can adapt quickly. Unless you want to be a total nomad and hop from job to job every 3 months, being a generalist and investing enough time into being the person your company wants to keep in-house is going to be the key. Not to say that being a specialist is all bad - I know plenty of consultants who make way more than I do. But, the trade-off is living out of a suitcase, bouncing from one short-term job to the next, and having no home life unless your wife is completely happy with you never being there. Most of the nomad consultants I know are unmarried for divorced (some several times) for that reason.
I'm a guy, and I know I feel uncomfortable when I get paired with some sales guy who's a walking sexual harassment lawsuit waiting to happen when visiting one of our customers. I think most guys who are somewhat normal and have regular relationships with the opposite sex do too. The problem comes when the organization you work for doesn't do anything to actively discourage douchbaggery of any kind. I may be old school, but I think workplace interactions should be professional, and any "extracurricular activities" shouldn't need to be discussed in a work context.
I hope she's getting a lifetime's worth of income from her settlements, because I know there are plenty of hiring managers who wouldn't touch someone who has a reputation like the one she has now. Maybe some things will change because of this, but I do know the technology world has shifted. It used to be exclusively nerds, so the complaints you'd get would be of the creeper/stalker variety associated with the "living in your mom's basement" crowd. Now, these web startups are using frameworks, APIs and SDKs to build software, so you're getting a lot of less technical people snapping Legos together to build apps...and just like the CS boom of the late 90s, you're seeing a lot of "bros" getting into the startup biz because of the money involved. If you want to see a parallel in another field, just look at how many former fraternity guys wind up in sales organizations and the culture that develops in most of them as a result.
I just don't understand why people can't be professionals at work. Maybe it's working 100 hours a week with the same people in a cramped office, but I've mostly encountered professional workplaces in my career...usually we're too busy doing work to harass co-workers...
Ever since the middle of the 20th Century, the reduced work week has been a touted benefit of all the automation and technology advances. It hasn't happened yet, but I think it might with this next shift.
UBI is a good idea, but it won't get implemented in the US until the alternative is the majority of the population living in poverty. Reducing the work week and maybe the societal dependency on a 5-day, 40-hour job that you physically commute to might offer a safety valve. The problem is how you keep business owners from turning this into a gig-economy nightmare where no one has stable income and can't afford to buy anything -- or doesn't feel safe buying things. Consumerism in the US worked previously because people were reasonably sure they would have a steady paycheck to cover expenses, and if they lost their job one would be available at another company. This is a fundamental shift that I don't think we're ready for yet.
I've heard Tesla has a ruthless startup culture even though they're a huge company -- kind of the worst stereotypical SV startup taken to a new level because Elon Musk is so driven. If that's the reason he's out I'm not surprised. Coming from Apple where employees are pretty much pampered and living off the constant money flow from the App Store might be a pretty big shock.
But -- this guy is the "main author of LLVM". I've seen this one play out over and over, and have experienced it personally. Almost every company that isn't producing actual software treats their IT and development resources the same way the rest of the company regarding career path. Every individual worker in non-IT/non-engineering departments dreams of becoming the supervisor, then the manager, then the director and maybe a VP someday...mainly because most people aren't passionate about typical corporate jobs. The problem is that people management skills and engineering/work skills are completely orthogonal. No problem in the other departments -- who would want to be some random report analyst when they could be the boss of a bunch of report analysts and never have to see a report again? This is a bad fit for many engineers, scientists and IT people though, because most of us got into the job because we enjoy it.
Some companies are just starting to come around to the fact that not everyone is hard-wired for management and would rather just be doing more interesting and impactful technical work. That's how I've been able to structure my career (luckily.) When my current company figured out I was good at what I do, liked it and wanted to keep doing work like it, they gave me more responsibility on the technical side instead of a Kindergarten class of employees to manage. I'm hoping I can keep going in this way because I've done the whole department manager thing. I really tried liking it, but it's just not where my skills are best used. Being a senior engineer/architect type, teaching the newbies the ropes and figuring out our long term technical path is what I'm good at, and companies who figure this out with their smarter employees will benefit in the long run IMO.
When I started out in IT (back sometime after the last Ice Age,) it was very possible to start out as a help desk person, and work your way up learning as you went. I know, because I started out with a non-CS degree and made the hops from help desk to desktop support to (essentially) a data center operator, then several levels of sysadmin and finally where I am now as a senior engineer/architect. The thing I'm worried about is that current generations will see no future in an IT career and choose not to pursue it. One of the contributing factors is the limited prospects for low-end IT jobs needed to get the skills you have to possess at the higher levels. If help desk work is offshored or a minimum wage job, fewer people will go into the field and gain the kind of OJT you only get in the trenches.
I absolutely don't hold myself out to be some super-genius, but I have noticed that there are a lot more "senior architect" level jobs being filled by people with a much lower skill and experience level than you would expect. This makes sense if there's a whole bunch of missing rungs in the career ladder -- a CS grad will BS his way into a higher level position than they normally would have because of this. This is where you get the architect-level people who just buy whatever's in the Gartner Magic Quadrant because they can't objectively evaluate vendor claims. I've had to work very hard to stay hands on in the company I work for, because the assumption is that once you reach my level all you do is hand-wave a few diagrams and buy million-dollar software tools to badly automate Function X. My boss knows this, but it's hard convincing those above our level that it's worth investing in the talent pool.
I'm one of those crazy people who really likes my job and loves learning and teaching newbies what I know. I also think companies would be fighting fewer fires if the labor market wasn't so distorted at the low end by the body shops and outsourcing companies.
I wonder how Philip Morris feels about e-cigarettes. I would imagine tobacco cigarettes are a lot cheaper for them to make and easier to market because there's low "startup costs." I doubt they'd be funding studies like this because the whole point is to keep as many people addicted to nicotine as possible. It must be hard going from a world of the 50s where the majority of adult men smoked and 30some% of women did too, to a world where smokers are standing in a sad little corner 25 feet from building entrances.
At least in the US, smoking in general (vaping or smoking, that is) isn't usually associated with the upper income brackets unless you're talking high-end cigars and such. As the blue collar labor force is reduced, I would think the number of active smokers would go way down. But, those who are smokers are usually pretty hardcore about it. My mother smokes and when she comes to visit, you can tell how agitated she gets when she can't have her smoke breaks. I used to commute on the train to work, and there was an express train that went almost an hour without stopping that I would take pretty frequently. First stop, the smokers were lining up at the door miles before, smokes and lighters in hand, just waiting for the doors to open. That's dedication. :-)
Toward the end of the last dotcom bubble, you'd see stories similar to this, where the founder was able to keep their employees working even after the money was gone. I would imagine this happens a lot during the death stage in lots of small businesses. From what I've seen, the difference between tech startups and your average small businesses is that some of the employees become brainwashed to some extent. They've been putting in 100 hour weeks for so long that nothing will convince them that it's time to get out.
I think part of the problem with startups is that the founders are these "serial entrepreneur" types who (a) have difficulty dealing with actual employees, and (b) have a huge personal financial cushion to fall back on and therefore have no idea how bad not getting a paycheck can be for "normal" people. Larger companies may move slowly and have dumb rules and a bureaucracy, but most large companies don't make it a regular habit of shorting employees' wages. Startup founders are a lot more likely to say "Oh well, I guess it's time to close up...time to chase that "Uber for nurses" opportunity!" and forget about who they're leaving behind.
Long term, I think that most IT jobs at non-IT companies will be outsourced, and those outsourcers will do anything to raise the margin on their deals. This includes offshoring anything that they possibly can and/or replacing native workers with H-1Bs. The offshoring firms have a well-known loophole in the law that sets the minimum salary for an H-1B at $60K per year, not adjusted for inflation. I actually think that closing this loophole while keeping the program for its intended purpose is the way to go. If you're a body shop, and average onshore salary is $40K more than the $60K you can get away with paying a visa holder, it's obvious how much of a gift that is for the company and no wonder their sales pitches to companies are so effective.
IT companies that outsource are engaging in a race to the bottom - once you outsource, nothing new or interesting will ever be attempted in that environment again because the provider will want to charge an arm and a leg for change orders. Also, the wall between the company and the outsourcer is going to limit how much can be changed and how the company engages with IT.
Other than the distortion of the market this causes, I also don't like the fact that new entrants into the IT world aren't able to find as many entry-level positions at reasonable salaries anymore. Speaking as someone who's been doing this for 20+ years, and got where I am today by going through a progression of these entry-level and mid-level jobs, that pipeline needs to be in place to ensure people have the foundational knowledge they need when tackling bigger, more complex problems. No one comes straight out of college with the entire skill set required to do IT in anything but the simplest environments. In my case, I did a series of support and admin jobs to get the expertise and skills to "learn how to learn" about new stuff and how it fits into the realities imposed by the surroundings.
Fundamentially, I worry about so much cloud abstraction in IT that people who haven't been around forever lose the ability to understand what's actually being provided under the hood by hosted SaaS stuff. Companies who treat their IT like a janitorial service are going to fall into this trap too. Being at the higher end of things these days, I deal with a lot of "systems architects" who are very good at drawing hand-wavey diagrams but can't work out where the bottlenecks and dependencies are because they don't see the end to end view. Anything complex seems to be hand-waved away in a cloud symbol on their diagrams, and an "oh, the provider takes care of that." I'm not saying we should go back to the no-abstraction era of physical servers, etc. but that we should take the time to understand the realities of what's going on.
I'm going to be 42 in a month, and I'm already starting to see a little bit of ageism creeping in. My plan to "navigate" it is to keep my skills sharp and relevant, and try to be as much of a generalist as possible.
I have a decent stable job, but I do go on practice interviews occasionally if I see something I might potentially take if the situation were right. Mature industries like healthcare, education, banking, government, etc. still do hire some people based on experience rather than youthfulness and cheapness. At the same time, if those companies don't care about their IT or development, they're increasingly turning to the offshore body shops. The sweet spot seems to be those companies that aren't hair-on-fire SV startups, but realize that there's an advantage to be had if you have a good IT environment and use it well. The other choice is a more established software/services company (where I am now) that doesn't demand 100 hour weeks cranking out iterations of the latest phone app or web API.
The one thing I would suggest is that the quote from the article about being a lifelong learner is spot on. Employers love to use the stereotype of the older IT worker or developer who isn't flexible and therefore not a good hire. But, like every stereotype there is a little truth. The company I work for is doing work in Azure, and I'm jumping in head-first while maintaining my traditional skill set. Other people I work with...not so much. I hear a lot of "this cloud thing will never catch on" or "DevOps is stupid" -- OK, ironic moustache hipster DevOps is silly, but the core ideas are really good and being up to date on this stuff isn't a bad idea. Also, the generalist thing can't be overstated. This new project I'm working on uses Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop, and we have interviewed a lot of candidates for help with design, etc. Big-company IT will easily let you pigeonhole yourself into a very narrow specialty; I'm seeing a lot of people who have been doing XenApp administration, exclusively, for ages and have not really been able to move into other areas. I also know a lot of people who are SAN or Cisco network experts -- great when everyone is using the technology, but not so great when industry shifts like SDN and storage virtualization take place. Companies are looking for flexible people who aren't locked into one skill.
I'm hoping that the Millenials having kids will start to reverse the ageism trend. They may be having fewer, but not everyone is 30 and still living at home or wafting through life. Once "these kids" start having lives outside of work and family responsibilities, I think some of the attitudes will change. I _really_ don't want to be one of those folks who gets laid off at age 57 and has to figure out a way to live until they can access their retirement savings or Social Security because no one will hire them.
There was an article a couple days ago about how white-collar employees in the US are afraid of using their vacation time...this seems like a good bookend to that. The bottom line is that there are very few nice, generous employers anymore. I work for one that actually treats us pretty well; we have on-your-honor sick days and reasonable amounts of vacation. However, stores like this are necessary to show once in a while that employers will take advantage of you at any turn, and some of them are quite bad.
You see stuff like this a lot in low-margin, low-paying employers with what they consider a disposable workforce. I'm sure Amazon is guilty of this with their warehouse workers, delivery drivers, etc. I guarantee that with steady jobs getting scarcer every day, and a constant narrative depicting business owners as superhuman infallible beings, nothing is going to get better. People are going to be happy to have any kind of job that gives them a steady paycheck, and that's even more true for those at the low end of the skills curve.
When I see stuff like this, it makes me wish labor unions were more powerful like they once were. Unions would never have backed down on something like this, and union members were happier because of it. All those coal miners and manufacturing workers voting last November should realize that they would have been much better off had they been represented by a strong union. Working families used to be able to survive on one income, and now that's very difficult for most people to do. I'm still hoping the pendulum swings back the other direction before things get bad enough to have another revolution or civil war on our hands in the US.
It's good practice to make things so simple that no one could possibly mess them up. It works in programming - look at how many JavaScript frameworks abstract an already sandboxed development environment to a point where "signalling intent" is basically all the developer needs to do. Or in hardware -- we're using HPE servers and there is literally a "don't remove this drive" light that comes on when a drive fails in a RAID set. That had to be a customer-requested change after one too many data-loss events stemming from someone replacing the wrong disk.
But at some point, all that abstraction meets the real world and the man behind the curtain really does need full control of whatever system they're in charge of. A favorite example of mine is a project we're doing in Azure -- the developers have full faith in the magic box that will never fail and is so simple that we don't need to know how it works. Sure we might not need to know the exact implementation details, but it doesn't absolve you from knowing what is and is not possible in the realm of compute, network and storage combinations. I've dealt with support tickets where the Microsoft personnel are quite obviously looking in whatever monster Hyper-V / SCVMM console is controlling their back-end to solve something complex.
At the data center level, you can only idiot-proof so much. Some operations person is actually going to need to control the system directly at some point and have access to the Big Red Lever. You can put a million fail-safes in place to avoid routine problems, but when automatic processes fail, you need at least one smart person who knows _everything_ that could go wrong. When you outsource this function to the lowest bidder, don't expect to get a super-genius in that role. Your typical body shop outsourcer isn't going to pay people enough to stay on to learn the ins and outs of an environment.
I have a feeling that this is just the industry catching up. Airlines used to need the services of travel agents and would pay them a commission to sell tickets. This was because they had no or limited capacity to sell seats directly to the public. Once they got this capability, airlines stopped paying commissions and travel agencies either went out of business or specialized in areas where they could still make money. Hotels are a much higher margin business than airlines, and are much more inclined to increase occupancy at the expense of lower room rates, so it makes sense that they would pay commissions to get someone on the property and spending money. I know when I travel for business I'm much less cost-conscious than I would be if I were a vacationer, so hotels do make a lot of money once travelers are on-site.
I'm in technology and most tech people are all for squeezing every single inefficiency out of every system out there. And it is true that there are a lot of brokers and middlemen out there - ask anyone who just bought a house or car for examples. What I wonder is whether tightening the screws so much that you start to affect employment in significant ways is such a good idea. You can have a 100% efficient process, but if your profit relies on people having a disposable income to buy your products, does it make sense to leave some slack in the system?
Personally, I don't use every single day of vacation because I'm never secure in my job. That's just the nature of the work we're in...if the MBAs ever get around to replacing us with someone cheaper, I'm out no matter how skilled and useful I am. We're only allowed to bank 5 days of vacation, but I tend to hang onto it because honestly that's an extra week of pay at a time where I might need it. The fact remains that the US is a very hostile environment to be unemployed in; unemployment insurance barely covers anything if you've had anything approaching a middle class job previously.
I work for an employer that treats people pretty well on balance...it's very true that there are a lot of sweatshops out there and people continue to work there for many reasons. Web startups and small businesses would probably be at the low end of the spectrum -- most businesses I've worked with in the small to medium category already treat non-family employees as "the help" and are extremely stingy when it comes to pay, time off and benefits. Web startups are their own brand of crazy because everyone's hoping to win the IPO or buyout lottery. At the other extreme end of the spectrum, I know a lot of people who work for the state and can actually bank all of their sick and vacation time, to be paid out at the end of their service. Most people use this windfall to buy into insurance that will last them through their retirement...and along with their pension they are able to enjoy a worry-free retirement just like the old days.
Most people I work with are older and fewer management "tricks" work on us. But, there are still plenty of younger domestic workers who haven't learned that employers will take anything they can from employees and fall into the trap of working crazy hours. I'm by no means a clock-watcher; my employer routinely gets tons of "free" work out of me, but I do this because they also offer me a lot of flexibility. Everyone's trade-offs are different; I trade off raw salary for better retirement benefits, a shorter commute and a better ratio of home to work time. Other workers might just want the money regardless of how bad the work environment is, or they may trade off even more salary for a more stable job working in something like government, or they absolutely have to work for the hottest Silicon Valley employer. I do think employers should staff accordingly so that people can actually take time off from work -- so many places I've seen will only hire one person skilled in some job function, effectively chaining them to their desks or slowing down everyone else when they do need to be off.
In a lot of places I've worked (never for IBM, but know a lot of people who have...) this was done as a copycat HR thing ("Google and GE do this, so I'm going to propose it at the next board meeting" says the VP of HR.) -- or a cheap way to get rid of high-talent, high-salary workers.
The first thing is usually just a silly knee-jerk reaction, and is very similar to VPs of IT reading an airline magazine "article" about some buzzwordy technology and suddenly declaring that we're "all-in" on Technology X. The place I work for is very nice to work for job-wise, but often badly copies HR policies that don't really apply to our company. (Our new push to attract hip young Millenials at the expense of everyone else is a perfect example -- comically out of touch with reality and copied word for word from some business rag article about Google.)
The stealth layoff is more sinister. IBM is famous for offshoring every single job they can in recent years, and arbitrary HR policies like this are less likely to be tolerated by older, talented workers. We have a few fully remote workers, and they earn that privilege because they are _really_ good at what they do. I imagine IBM has a very similar situation, with a small cadre of old-timers who really know what's going on secretly directing the newbies behind the scenes. Older workers with families can't move as easily as some new graduate who can fit all their belongings in their car. Old-school IBM, where people had jobs for life, would have been a different story. Those days, if your company moved you for a new project, you moved because it was a good opportunity and it would increase your salary and/or presence within the company. Now, all employees are treated as disposable and knowledge counts for little.
I'm sure they have some people milking the work from home thing...you always will, and big companies really do build up a lot of excess staff. This happens a lot with companies that go on acquisition sprees, and people just hide out until the next big clean-out. But in my opinion this will force the few talented US-based workers at IBM out, and allow them to say "See? We can't find anyone willing to work here in the US -- prepare this division for relocation to Bangalore!"
There have been many studies like this that show social media in general increases feelings of isolation, inadequacy, etc. that were already there. Coming of age is a difficult time for a lot of people, and having a non-stop 24 hour feed of your "friends" posting all sorts of positive status updates, vacation pictures, etc. doesn't help if you're going through a rough time.
- People tend to post either overly positive aspects of their lives on social media. Most people don't post an equivalent number of bad or boring things that happen to them. The exception to this is when people post about their family members dying or similar to try to get some sympathetic reactions.
- Social media narrowly targets your interests and makes it possible to only see one side of things. I heard a pretty scary statistic the other day that the majority of people get their news from Facebook. I tested the results out - created a fake Facebook account and started clicking on and reacting to sensationalist crime stories (every single grisly murder out there, other "shocking" stuff and so on.) Sure enough, the news feed was soon almost 90% crime stories - which could lead someone to assume the world is falling apart because this is all they see.
- The pressure to be online all the time and sharing is unhealthy in my opinion. It takes too much effort to "maintain your social media brand" and constantly put a steady stream of positive comments, likes, pictures, videos, tweets, etc. out there.
If someone's already depressed or suicidal, this narrow targeting of bad news punctuated by glowing updates from your friends could be that push they need. I'm a little surprised that Steve Cornell killed himself, just because he's likely rich beyond anyone's wildest dreams _and_ a famous celebrity to boot. But, maybe I could see that if he felt totally alone. Then again, how could anyone with access to that much money, fame and influence be depressed? There must have been any number of diversions available to him.
Even with Cisco making their own SDN gear, they have a pretty big problem - companies aren't as willing to spend the Cisco premium anymore, even those that do have big on-site footprints ("on-prem" makes me sound like a douchebag brogramming hipster, so I'll just use "on-site.") That means they're selling less gear and having to discount it more. Couple that with them trying to extract as much revenue as they can with their SmartNet contracts, which you have to buy if you want firmware upgrades, and it's no wonder they're hurting.
I wonder how the whole SDN thing will shake out. It's interesting because no one would have ever thought of buying dumb white box hardware to do physical connections a few years ago and controlling the whole thing from an abstraction layer. What I wonder is whether they're going to start believing their own hype and just stop investing in the hardware altogether. It's really easy to let the hype train carry you too far over to the extreme edges - like everything, there will always be a middle ground.
What also makes me wonder is how they can just snap their fingers and lose 1,000 people. First, that's a lot of well-paid people to dump onto the labor market all at once. Second, what were these people doing that made Cisco decide they weren't useful anymore?
It's not just ego - it's the constant encouragement from the press and their peers that what they're doing is par for the course. Assuming even parts of this allegation are true, it all boils down to a bunch of fully grown little kids running around doing immature things.
Ego is only one part of it. Look at doctors -- most have egos with an easily detectable gravitational influence on objects around them. And why not -- they made it into and through medical school, a feat that requires perfect grades and a photographic memory. Now, they're members of a holy unassailable profession holding life-or-death powers with significant responsibility and respect bestowed on them. If I was in that boat, I'd have a pretty big ego too. It doesn't help when the average person reveres them as godlike figures and the hierarchy in the healthcare workplace contains a whole staff of people explicitly beneath them. But, most doctors I know aren't immature kids who can't keep conversations about their exploits to themselves.
Putting aside the harassment claims for a second, this sounds like what happens when you have an immature "executive team" running a company fueled by large VC investments. If a company's culture encourages a frathouse mentality, and its executives display that culture, that's exactly what regular employees will see and emulate. It goes down to the department level too - I've worked in IT departments for a number of companies, and there are always problem child departments, usually sales. Some salespeople are just walking sexual harassment lawsuits waiting to happen, and companies tend to turn a blind eye to it when they're "rockstar" salespeople. Working in software, there's just some guys you don't want to get paired with on customer visits because they're just embarrassing. Watching an overweight middle aged balding sales dude hitting on a customer's receptionist or female employees (unsuccessfully) is cringe-worthy.
I do think that years of anonymous online communication as a primary means of interaction does contribute to some of the problems. I'm a guy, and a very liberal laid-back one at that, but it would never occur to me to say or do anything unprofessional at work. I've mentioned on here in the past (and been raked over the coals for it) that people need to understand that free speech doesn't mean you can let whatever comes to your mind slip out. People need to learn impulse control, and not seeing the other person on the other end of your conversation emboldens people to say things they normally wouldn't. Look at any comments section on any online news outlet that uses Facebook logins - even with a person's name, picture and sometimes employment history written right out there, I have a hard time envisioning some people saying the things they say in a public setting.
What I think is funny is that this second tech bubble is playing out almost exactly the way the first one did. We're headed for the top -- products and services are getting wackier every day, there's a million copycats of every single idea trying to squeeze out the last few VC dollars in a space, and the investors are finally starting to shut off the money faucets. It's almost like 1999 never happened, and no one alive at that time has any memory of it. This is going to be one of many flame-out stories in the next 2 or 3 years.
I know it's fashionable to have flat, zero-hierarchy organizations and brief communications styles, but I can tell you from 20+ years of working, clear spoken and written communication is not some irrelevant concept from a bygone age. I'm not one of those people who demands respect simply because of a rank or power dynamic, but I will have a lot more respect for someone who addresses others politely, states their opinions like adults, listens to others' points of view, and can write clearly. It also works both ways -- in my experience I have been able to get much further in having people see things my way than colleagues with more abrupt communication styles.
I am firmly in the introvert crowd, and not a salesy type in the least. But, no matter how introverted you are, learning a few common social courtesies is critical to being successful in any setting. I'm not even talking about ladder-climbing brown-nosing style success -- I know part of the reason I'm kept around and allowed to do interesting technical work is that my bosses know I'll make them look good and be professional; in short, they don't have to worry I'll say something stupid.
I think that if you got people over to the subscription model, it wouldn't be impossible to put 3 or 4 guys on a maintenance team to backport absolutely critical fixes. You'd have to be very explicit about the criticality level that triggers a fix, but the reality is that vendors introduce a lot of dependencies. Those maintenance coders wouldn't have to be your best and brightest either - it would be a very good first job for new grads. I would think that as long as customers were paying something like Software Assurance, fixes for remotely wormable issues in components that haven't changed much since the dawn of the product might qualify. It's not just OSes eitther - look at critical stuff like SAP or Oracle products, where some of the foundations are the same as they were decades back.
Software vendors don't want to maintain old software because they aren't getting license revenue from it anymore, but not all customers remaining on old versions do so by choice. There are plenty of "run it till it dies" customers and small businesses still on very old versions of software, but others, especially in the medical field, aren't so easily migrated. Around the XP timeframe, there were a lot of embedded applications that relied on quirky Internet Explorer behavior or used components in such a way that you can't just migrate them to a new OS. Those browser ones are the absolute killer, and IE's Enterprise Mode only solves a subset of the problems.
I work in another industry with a lot of legacy cruft around, and applications that just can't be economically rewritten. Thankfully we're off of XP, but Microsoft prematurely killing support for Windows 7 is troubling and has caused us to step up our timetable for some critical application changes. I think that the only possible beneift of the subscription model for a customer is to allow the possibility of something like I talked about -- a very small maintenance team -- that doesn't cost millions of dollars a year in custom support agreements.
If I remember correctly, it was revealed a few years back that HP was paying Intel to continue developing Itanium simply because it had bet on the processor for its Integrity servers, which run HP-UX, NonStop OS and used to be the only place to run OpenVMS. Obviously these are legacy operating systems, but where they're used they're highly entrenched and can't be written off with an "oh, just migrate to x86 Linux and Java" kind of mindset. OpenVMS is actually living on; HP sold the development rights to a new company who is porting it to x86 -- interesting to me because that was the first ever OS I supported in any professional capacity. But, it looks like HP-UX is probably going to get killed as slowly as an OS like that can.
There was also a tiny window where Itanium had some life, around the early 2000s before x86-64 became a thing. If you had an application that required large (for that time) amounts of memory, it was basically your only choice if you didn't want to go AIX, Solaris or similar. I worked on such a system around that time (mainframe migration) and the Itaniums were pretty quirky compared to x86 servers. UEFI is one of the things that lives on from that era and actually made it over to the mainstream x86 platform.