I work in a very traditional environment that has just started putting their toes in the water on a few Azure projects. Because I'm the guy on our engineering team who likes learning new stuff, I sort of got tasked with figuring it out and teaching everyone else.
I think the main reason Microsoft is trying to get major educational clients on board is to get people used to Azure as the default deployment method for workloads. A lot of what they're doing makes a lot of sense but requires you to think in a different way to properly manage your stuff. When I was in (non-CS) college in the early 90s and doing tech support as a student job, absolutely everything was Sun hardware and Solaris. Sun used to charge businesses astronomical pricing for their equipment but practically give it away to universities...the idea being that today's CS grads would be tomorrow's IT purchase decision makers. If you teach newbies from scratch how to deploy things to Azure, then that's what they learn and will take to employers. With Azure Stack coming out, and traditional boxed software being a thing of the past from Microsoft, it makes perfect sense to get students on board early before they learn anything else.
I'm certainly not one of those people who thinks every company should jump in with both feet and dump all their physical servers into a cloud provider. There's a balance and for most places that aren't a one-trick phone app based shop, I think that for most places, the balance is still going to tilt towards on-site once the Second Dotcom Bubble pops and the hype goes down. But, Microsoft is clearly going for becoming another mainframe provider with this move to Azure -- they're doing everything in their power to help companies move their workloads, and once they're in they will be collecting revenue forever instead of one-off license fees.
The interesting thing about this is whether or not Microsoft is going to get out of the media-selling business. You can buy movies and music for your XBox or PC through the Windows Store, but adding iTunes as a client might mean they're getting away from that...who knows? With Windows Phone pretty much cooked, maybe they're starting to figure that a large part of their Store ecosystem doesn't make sense anymore.
I wonder if the app is going to be a Universal rewrite, or if they're using that Project Centennial Win32 emulator to move the existing app to the store.
It seems to me like Microsoft hasn't fully learned the lesson that desktop/laptop users don't want a touch-centric iTunes style user interface. If you look at some of the screenshots, we're back to monochrome icons and flat totally featureless windows. I wonder if menus will even make an appearance, and if they do, they'll be back to ALL CAPS.
I'm all for having something like this in Tablet Mode. But come on guys, Windows Phone is dead. There's no reason to force PC users to use a phone-inspired interface. This honestly looks like what MS did with Visual Studio 2013 -- removed all the color, made the default text color an unreadable gray on white, etc. It took the developers complaining bitterly to get both Visual Studio and Office to have some color and visual differentiation again.
Maybe a better example is something like Catholic Charities. There are lots of religious organizations with the mission to help the poor. One problem with this is that decades ago, a good chunk of the wealthy were also highly religious and felt duty-bound to help out. More well-off people also lived in cities and saw on a daily basis what happens when you don't do something.
These days, religion and charity seem to be more a domain of the poor, who have fewer resources to give. Most growth in Catholic parishes is due to immigrants from Latin America, where almost all new growth is coming from. There are fewer and fewer Italian grandmothers and Irish blue-collar families every day, and suburbanites have less of an appetite for organized religion in general. You can argue why, but my feeling is that people feel they have more options now. My mother's family grew up in a working-class neighborhood of a medium-sized city, and in that environment your parish's priests were most likely the only people who had any sort of advanced education. People really looked up to them and to the Church (and this also fueled a lot of the scandals that have come to light IMO.) If someone actually made it out of the neighborhood and did well for themselves, there was a sense of duty to give back.
In a way, it's like employer/employee loyalty -- employees will jump to a new employer with the slightest provocation now, because most employers have made it clear that they're not interested in keeping people long-term. See the people who spent an entire 4 or 5 decade career at places like IBM and AT&T as counter-examples. Employers like these (in the previous era where this was fashionable) were famous for not just dumping people out on the street at every single change in fortune, and that was reflected by employees' willingness to stay on and maybe ride out a few bad years or wait for a bad boss to be replaced.
Most chronic homelessness is caused by mental illness and addictions. Instead of putting up shelters, why not spend a little extra and reopen public mental hospitals? Before the deinstitutionalization movement in the 70s, states had huge mental health treatment systems in place. Admittedly, part of that was because there was nothing that could be done to treat mental illness before the 50s and the only thing to do was to lock them away. But, we've seen that treatment isn't 100% effective, people relapse, they self-medicate with drugs and alcohol, etc. Why not operate facilities where people who need treatment can be placed until they're stable enough to actually live in the community?
In all but an official announcement, Microsoft is telgraphing that Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 are completely dead. They want nothing to do with supporting downlevel operating systems at this point (because Windows as a Service) and anyone who wants to remain on Windows 7 is just not going to be tolerated for much longer. I'm getting the impression that the farthest back Microsoft is going to go in terms of support is the last LTSB release, and even then grudgingly so.
Holdouts on the business side of things don't have much longer to buy systems that will correctly work downgraded to Windows 7. Windows 10 migrations are essentially forced at this point, at least for any new corporate hardware purchases, because Microsoft has stopped supporting Windows 7 updates on current-generation Intel CPUs. It'll run, but they have artificially blocked updates for Windows 7 if you have a 7th generation Intel chip (or whatever they have on the AMD side.) There was a small window where Microsoft allowed vendors to sell a subset of their business PC line that would be immune from this block, but that time is now over.
I'm mostly OK with Windows 10 at this point, and most compatibility problems we've seen so far have been because of very old and very strange software we need to support. Still, between giving away the upgrade to consumers for "free" in exchange for usage data, and slowly pulling back business support for older OSes, no wonder the adoption numbers keep rising. The interesting thing to see will be once everyone's on "10," how frequently can they get people to jump to the next LTSB release? Consumers have no choice (CB for them,) and businesses not running LTSB will be upgraded automatically on the CBB schedule too.
Northeast Utilities did what lots of big companies do -- outsource their IT to some faceless consulting company. It goes in cycles -- a new CIO comes in, promises millions of dollars in savings, it gets done, people are usually disappointed and IT usually swings at least partially back in-house. I've experienced it twice working in a financial services company and an airline. There is very little one can do when the MBA crowd presents the board with a spreadsheet showing 50 or 60% savings on IT.
Those consulting companies should be the targets of any action. I actually think the H-1B as it was originally intended is a good "safety valve" to get a few very talented people into the country. I now work for a multinational company who has their own issues with offshoring, but has also used H-1Bs to move very key people to the US. What these outsourcing companies use it for is not that at all, and this abuse should be what's targeted. I would be fine with consulting companies using contractors, paying a little less, etc. as long as it was done fairly. What I've experienced is that the offshore company will bring in a few H-1B workers for the jobs that absolutely require a physical presence, as well as the "train your replacement" crew. This second group is who collects all the information, procedures, etc. from the soon-to-be-fired IT workers and sends it back to the offshore teams. H-1Bs are supposed to be high-level experts, not train-the-trainer guys.
That said, I'm really hoping I don't wind up like this guy, a few years away from retirement and unhireable. The covert age discrimination in IT and software dev is what needs to stop. Every other proper profession values experienced people -- newbie doctors aren't considered experts until they've seen a lot of things, and frankly had their egos checked by having a few patients die on them unexpectedly. Yet, in the Silicon Valley startup world, and corporate IT in general, 25-year-old "rockstars" who work 100 hour weeks to make up for inexperience are celebrated. Now, it is true that there are older people who have not kept current with things and basically done the exact same job for 20 years. The problem is that as I age, and continue to keep my skills current because I really like what I do, I'm lumped in with the same "too old, too expensive, can't hang with the bros" crowd.
I think that's one of the crappiest things companies do -- kicking out someone in their late 50s/early 60s to save money, knowing that they're never going to find a comparable job to bridge the gap between now and retirement. I've seen it happen many times...and people should save to defend against it. But at the same time, IT work or development is not like being a professional athlete, where you have a 10 year career at most and have to make all your money then.
I've read articles in the recent past detailing the "generational divide" in bigger workplaces where you have the Millenials, the Xers and the baby boomers all sharing the same environment. The articles I've read seem to indicate that Millenials need much more constant feedback than previous generations. I wonder if that's part of it, and whether older managers are having trouble keeping up with the new pace.
The workplace I'm at currently skews older, but we do have some new grads coming in every couple of years. Since we're all older types who've been around the black a few times, the traditional management "tricks" that work on younger people tend to be less accepted. But, since Google and GE have switched to continuous feedback now, we're doing it too. It used to be one performance conversation a year plus one mid-year checkup...now the dream is that both the employee and manager keep a running journal in their HR files about performance, etc. The reality is that we're so short-staffed that none of it gets done anymore.
No feedback at all for any generation is bad though. There are so many companies where the only hope of advancement is the management track, and so there are a lot of ill-suited managers. Often, you end up being the best at doing the actual work in your department, then you're taken out of it into a completely different world. Some people get the hang of it, and others just freeze - I've worked for both, and I've frozen when promoted.
If you have a really well-connected single sign on environment in place, standardizing on a single password that you have to change periodically makes sense. Where it breaks down is when you have a million passwords scattered across different services (internal or external.) If you have to change those over and over, you end up recycling passwords or writing them down, or storing them in a password vault tool (which is a bad idea given how many vulnerabilities have come to light on those.)
In fact, with SSO systems like Google or Azure AD, it makes sense to protect that single key much more carefully than an individual password. For example, if someone guessed my corporate account's password or found a way to steal information from Microsoft without them knowing (or telling anyone,) my Azure AD account has a lot of access -- off the top of my head, from the naked Internet I can access my Exchange email, OneDrive, all the Azure resources I have control over, most of my HR vital data, access to Internet-facing applications, access to my MSDN and volume licensing stuff from Microsoft, and the list goes on. I'm OK with changing that password pretty frequently. If I had 50 of them to remember, not so much.
The fact that the standards are being updated to reflect that it's much harder to steal passwords from properly secured systems these days and crack them offline is good though. Corporate security types tend to follow these rules verbatim regardless of whether they make operational sense.
That's strange, because times have changed for anyone outside the very senior executive levels of a company. Previously, promotion into middle or upper management was like being admitted into an exclusive club, where everything was basically taken care of for you and you were just the public face of your organization. You had a high salary, a whole staff to manage every aspect of your life, etc. Now, flatter organizations push a lot of things onto lower numbers of managers that they wouldn't have to deal with in the past.
I think it's the flatter organizations that cause more stress...the managers are responsible for more than they used to be, and the speed/pace of business has wound up to levels that are beyond healthy.
"In a fight between AMA and Big Insurance, my money is on the insurance companies."
It's all going to come down to how much money can be piled on by both sides. If the insurance companies had any clout compared to what the AMA has, then doctors could be trained in 14-day "MD Bootcamps" the same way we send people to coder schools. Physicians would see their salaries drop to a tiny fraction of what they're being paid today.
I admit I'm totally cynical and don't understand the nuances of lobbying. But, I think that if the professional organization responsible for your high salary says your profession is under attack and you could lose your lifestyle, you'd give until it hurts to ensure those payments keep coming in. I assume that lobbyists do little more than pass paper bags full of money to lawmakers in creative ways. My assumption is that it works the way software sales works in big companies -- the sales guy just spends as much as they need to on strip clubs, golf and dinners to get the sale.
The parallels to IT and software development are striking and should be noted by everyone in our career field. Automation, offshoring and outsourcing of routine legal tasks has meant hugely depressed salaries and new lawyers not being able to find any entry-level work. This sounds exactly like what's happening in IT -- offshored help desk and outsourced data center positions leading to low wages or no jobs for people starting out.
This is interesting to me, because I live near New York City where most of the "BigLaw" firms have huge offices. It's been known for about 10 years (but ignored by many) that law school is now a waste of money if you are not in the top of your class in one of the top 14 law schools (according to US News and World Report) in the country (#1, 2 and 3 are Harvard, Yale and Stanford.) If you manage to make this cut, life is just fine for you. Big firms hire out of this pool and industry standard starting salary is $180K. If you last as a junior member of the firm, you're officially done worrying about life when you make partner. The only thing you will ever stress over again is whether to take the Bentley or the Rolls to the club this weekend, or what color the draperies in your Hamptons summer home should be. If you don't fall into that crowd, you might as well take the money you would spend on law school and light it on fire to achieve the same results.
The thing that's interesting is that the American Bar Association could have used their immense clout to save the pipeline of newbies. They chose to accredit tons of new law schools and encourage class size to increase even though the trend was for fewer lawyers on the horizon. This is how the American Medical Association keeps physicians' salaries high. They know that the only way to do this is to keep supply limited, so medical school slots are very tightly controlled. You need near-perfect grades, a photographic memory and the ability to ace the MCAT to even be considered. Then, you get 3 years of academic hazing where you're force-fed information, and years of low-salary, high stress internship/residency. If you can get through that, then you're a doctor and you're in the same Easy Street club as the BigLaw partners. It's just interesting to see how a professional organization can help like the AMA does or destroy the profession like the ABA is doing.
What do you do when, say, 50 or 60 percent of the workforce is only capable of doing jobs that aren't profitable to pay people to do anymore? I don't think that you're going to be able to instantly break the cycle of "work--earn--consume" that has driven life since forever. Telling people who have spent their lives saving for retirement or amassing wealth that their money is no longer useful in the way it once was isn't going to go well.
In my opinion, most people who say people who want a universal income in place are lazy freeloaders who just want to sit around all day haven't worked with a large cross-section of humanity. They work as IT people, or developers/engineers, or doctors, or some other profession that requires a lot of education and are surrounded by smart people all day long. Out in the rest of the world, there exist people who can't handle anything more than a menial job. You don't just turn paper filers and customer service people into data scientists and biochemists. The job-replacement train ran out of gas a while back. It worked well when it was farming, then factory work, then corporate factory-style work like clerical/secretary work, then service jobs. Once those service jobs are gone, what high-salary, low-requirement job replaces them? Economies are built around consumers having a good job, taking on debt, spending, and keeping that cycle going. Universal income would allow this cycle to continue for a little longer, allowing employers to pay people less but keep them employed if they wished to earn beyond the minimum income. It basically buys us time to figure out how to deal with what could end up being massive unemployment and poverty for a formerly stable portion of the first-world workforce.
Being on the IT side of the house, I distinctly remember MCSE, Solaris and other for-profit bootcamps popping up towards the top of the dotcom bubble in the late 90s. They also loudly touted the fact that they accepted veterans' benefits as payment and I'm sure they made a lot of money doing this -- similar to the ITT Tech or DeVry style schools.
I guess my question is what a coder bootcamp prepares you to do. Do they just teach one or two JavaScript frameworks like node.js or Ruby on Rails or something? What is a coder bootcamp graduate supposed to be able to do? I actually went to one of these places to rapidly upgrade my Windows NT certs (which I did on my own) to Windows 2003 -- I was working for a consulting company back then who wanted to bill me out at a higher rate. I felt bad because there were obviously a few people in the class who had been sold the dream and had no clue what was going on, no aptitude for anything IT-related, etc. I'm betting there will be a fair number of veterans who will be "encouraged" to use their one-time education benefit to go through one of these coding schools. I'm just assuming that the only job you can get out of one of these schools is front-end web code cleanup or QA testing or something equally low-end -- am I right?
From what I know about the unemployment number's survey process and recent trends in employment, I wonder how relevant it actually is. The government only surveys 6,000 people out of 300+ million, and defines employment as any job.
These days, there are a lot of underemployed people, people stringing together gig economy jobs, etc. Also, in the past it was pretty much assumed that unemployment was a temporary thing -- the factory laid people off during slow times and hired them back, or there were a ton of places to jump to. Now, it seems like full time work is getting harder to find and keep.
Obviously, improvement is good. You personally only need one full time job, and the closer we get to full employment, the further the pendulum swings back over into the worker side of the spectrum. But certainly, there are a lot of people that the official employment statistics don't capture.
I imagine that things are going to be very rough once automation _really_ starts cutting into employment in ways that haven't been seen previously. The ironic thing is that the "knowledge worker" is the target for this round, as most large-scale US factory work is offshored or automated by now. All that money people are paying to get themselves the education they need for a job is never going to be recovered if employees aren't receiving salaries to make it worth going in the first place.
I graduated high school in 1993, and even by then, everyone was being told that there was no longer a viable career path that didn't go through college. And this was in the Rust Belt city I grew up in, where just 20 years prior it was possible to guarantee a lifetime of work by joining a union's apprenticeship program and working in a factory for your whole career. I distinctly remember events at the end of high school that were basically send-offs into the "grown-up" world like the prom and a formal senior dinner -- as if to say that for at least a chunk of the graduating class, this was the last time they'd ever see the education system again. Wind the clock forward, and we're requiring college degrees for receptionists and the few factory workers that are left. So now we have a more educated workforce, who may no longer have anything to do that will allow them to make money, start families, buy things, etc.
I've done most of my career working directly for or contracting with large companies -- think companies big enough to have a huge corporate campus, parking garages, etc. Even in 2017, there really are a ton of corporate jobs that could go away in this next round of automation. Lots of jobs we IT people support involve taking input stacks of work, performing some sort of process on them, and putting them on the output stack. Look at how mega-corps lay people off in huge numbers -- HP/HPE just got rid of more than 30,000 people last year. I'm sure a lot of that was just idiotic MBA spreadsheet jockeying, but how many of those 30,000 people were doing one of these easily automated jobs? Each one of those 30,000 people probably owned a house, paid property/school taxes, some of them had kids, they bought cars, and basically contributed to society. Now, we're saying that even high end positions like healthcare workers are in for a big restructuring as more stuff gets automated.
With no way for educated people to make money, what happens to the work-money-consumption cycle we've been used to for ages? Some people propose paying people regardless of their employment status, and I think that's one way to bridge the gap. But what happens on the other side? Will we have a Star Trek utopia where everyone does what they're best at instead of driving to MegaCorp every morning to file papers? Or will we have a Hunger Games style existence or go back to feudal serfdom?
These are arguably in the top 5 of companies at the center of a massive Second Dotcom Bubble. Of course they're going to pay their interns a lot: - Cost of living in SV, even temporarily, is more than just about anywhere else in the country - Google and Facebook do most of their hiring from Stanford and other top 10 private-school computer science and engineering departments. People who can afford to go there on their own will expect at least what an investment bank or management consultancy is willing to pay them for an internship. People who are smart enough to get into a private school on an academic scholarship are also probably worth paying that kind of money for.
Two other industries, law and investment banking, are famous for internships that pay handsomely. - Big law firms will recruit interns from the top of the class of only the Top 14 law schools in the country. They put them up in New York City, pay them a comparatively large salary, and basically spend the summer shuttling them between parties and events while giving them some token work to do. And if they find they like you, starting salary is $180K nowadays. Too bad you have to be at the top of your class at Harvard, Yale or Stanford to get "drafted" like this. - Investment banks take on "associates" either while they're getting their MBA or just after. Again, only the top business school grads need apply. The difference is that they work their associates 100-hour weeks doing menial processing tasks for years. If you work out you're in the "cannot fail" club for life, but the route there is quite different from the law firm crowd.
So, I wouldn't get too bent out of shape over this. Plum internships at hot companies aren't the norm. Media and publishing interns often get _nothing_ for a huge amount of very menial work.
I don't doubt there will eventually be something new on the horizon, but I think it's definitely time for them to stop trying to force their way into the phone market. While it was in full swing, it bled over into every single product they made (Windows 8 and 10, the current Office design and subscription model, etc.) For a while it seemed they were obsessed with getting access to the magic ATM that is the 30% cut on all customer purchases. That's where the Store, Windows RT and now WIndows 10 S is coming from. I can't blame them; I'll bet Apple's senior executives are swimming in bathtubs full of money and Champagne. But Microsoft is pretty much the go-to for enterprise IT, and even more so with Azure now...the recurring revenue they get could fill a few Scrooge McDuck-style money bins.
It seems to me that unless they patent some revolutionary, ground breaking form factor, their phone business should just be allowed to die. Apple has a massive base of rabid fans who would pay $200 for an Apple branded USB cable if they sold one, and full control of the hardware/app store/ecosystem. Google has a fragmented hardware network, but they have the Play Store and access to every single shred of user interaction data. Either one of these is tough to beat -- it's going to be iOS and Android slugging it out for quite a while.
I know they're trying to compete with the Chromebook, but I thought they learned their lesson with Windows RT -- very few use cases exist for an artificially limited device that can only run Store apps and, essentially, Office.
It's obvious that Azure and cloud services are the way they want to go, but no one wanted the non-Pro Surface. Outside of education, why would anyone want this? Phone is dead, UWP apps exist but certainly aren't the only type of apps people use, and it seems silly to me to artifically limit a device using Windows 10 S.
The ideal endgame for Microsoft is definitely having locked-down devices that are useless without paying subscription fees and consuming Azure services. They're going to be the new IBM and we're all going to be mainframe customers at some point.
It seems like Infosys is trying to get ahead of any criticism regarding the way they use the H-1B program. I do systems integration work so we work with a wide range of these companies. I've worked with people and software from Infosys and TCS as well as the lower-tier guys like Mindtree and NIIT. The problem is that even if you bring the work to somewhere like Indiana, you can't change the fundamental business model and so you'll still get less than optimal service.
All of these consulting firms, whether they're body shops like Infosys and TCS, or white-shoe management consulting firms, operate on a very familiar business model: - Rely on a gold-plated sales team and rockstar consulting team to sell the dream and come up with the initial proposal - Once the deal is signed, replace the rockstars with fresh grads or less-than-rockstar experienced consultants for the client-facing stuff, like collecting requirements or delivering PowerPoints. - In the case of an outsourcing, send in a group to collect all the information about the company's business processes. Body shops sending the work offshore typically use their H-1Bs for this task, while the fancy consulting firms fly in the graduating class of the Ivy League business schools; it's a very common first job for that crowd. - Send everything that actually involves work offshore or to other cheap "delivery centers" to maximize the profit on the deal
The problem is that whether these cheap delivery centers are offshore or onshore, I think they'll have big problems staffing them with qualified people. Consulting firms squeeze every last dime out of outsourcing deals because they have to break even...and in many cases they have to support a huge raft of executive salaries with big expense accounts on top of that. Consulting firms think nothing of flying senior people in from wherever, for months at a time on full reimbursement, and their customers end up paying for that. When you get down to the people who would be working in Infosys's Indiana office, they're going to try to pay minimum wage or slightly above because the entire model is making the actual work cheap while putting a good face on for the customer.
I don't think I'd like to work there, simply because they have a reputation among experienced IT people and developers. Just because you move the people here doesn't mean the model changes. It will still be a body shop mentality where you're cranking out random Java or.NET code for some corporate website or managing a company's IT systems poorly from remote. At the very least, however, it is domestic entry level work for newbies. Hopefully those newbies will endure a year or two in the middle of nowhere, then use the experience to move on.
I'm not a big fan of Trump, but if it takes his ego and bully power to get us back into space exploration, then that's a good thing. The thing I know he doesn't understand is how much effort and resources it takes to untertake a mission like this. I'm sure SpaceX has also been whispering in a few well-placed ears about taking over NASA's role as well -- that would definitely appeal to the conservative, small government, privatization always works crowd.
The problem I see is that no one would ever be willing to just dump the amount of money required into this. I'm a firm believer of the idea that throwing enough money and resources at a problem will solve it, but no one's willing to do that. We were willing back in the 60s when the Soviet Union beat us into space -- and we also poured uncountable sums of money into nuclear weapons and espionage technology as well with virtually zero limits. No one complained one bit back then, but they sure do now. Or, go back a few years and look at the Manhattan Project -- again, bags of money were just lit on fire and forgotten about because the goal of winning a war that was consuming huge numbers of men was possible if you paid for it. If you read about it, it was a massive project -- not just the bomb design, but the mining and refining of radioactive material that consumed vast amounts of resources.
The only way we could ever do something like this again is to have China plant a flag on Mars first...then all bets would be off.
Anyone surprised at this wasn't around for the last Dotcom Bubble, or wasn't paying attention. This is exactly what happened in early 2000, when you started to hear the first few whispers that the peak had finally been hit. Investors are just coming to their senses. I don't entirely blame them this time -- the last bubble was about some people having access to the Internet, and this one is about having absolutely everyone worldwide accessing the Internet over a phone, which is with them 24/7 and can generate tons of marketing data.
I'm just glad that there aren't too many individual investors who are losing out with crappy IPOs of companies that will never make a profit. I remember people losing a ton of money speculating on pets.com or VA Linux or theglobe.com -- all companies with almost no hope of doing well in the long run. What I am seeing this time is the fact that there are just _so many_ startups, and how many copycats there are. The barrier to entry is low, the cloud runs their software, they use social media to advertise, and there seem to be 20 different clothing subscription services, food delivery services, etc. I think the sales pitch for VCs this time is "disruption" more than "eyeballs" but it's still the same result.
Just like the last one, I'm sitting out on the sidelines in a traditional IT/engineering job and watching everything fall in on itself again. When I started reading stories about new edgy web startups popping up in California again, all I could feel was deja vu... There's only so much ping pong, foosball, hipster open office spaces, catered meals, and brogramming that VC money will buy, and I think we're about to see that come to an end. Since these startups can just run in the cloud, they definitely have longer to live, but I don't know how much.
This is a symptom of two much larger problems -- the coming automation of menial work leading to massive unemployment, and employers that squeeze every single inefficiency out of a process.
If employers had a choice, they'd make people work for free -- they have no desire to pay even the minimum wage. After all, it cuts into their profits. I'm one of those people who thinks we should leave some slack in the system -- not because I'm a lazy entitled idiot, but because I don't want to see all the desperate unemployed people running around stealing and killing each other.
If you take automation to the extreme end of the spectrum, every job that people typically do is automated, including things like paper filing, IT, programming and fruit picking. This time, skilled workers aren't going to be able to sit back and say "oh, it's those lazy factory workers that don't want to retrain." The reality is that there is no retraining workers for this next phase. If you're below an IQ of, say, 120, there's no work for you. Where that leads, I have no idea...eugenics? Culling of the low end of the population?
People who think that all these migrant workers can just retrain to be data scientists are fooling themselves. I've dealt with a large cross section of society in my various jobs -- there are actual limits on how much a person can handle intellectually. In the past, we had work for them, but I'm not sure what we're going to do now.
I've been working in IT for almost 20 years, and have been involved in offshorings a few times. I've fortunately been able to get other jobs after this happens, but I worry about the overall direction of the industry:
- I worry about entry level IT jobs disappearing entirely or becoming so unattractive that no newbies want to join the profession. My life was a series of entry level IT jobs where I had enough responsibility and access to learn what I needed to learn at each stage. I imagine the same thing goes for programmers -- you don't let a total n00b make changes to your core application; you give them UI cleanup work or similar so they can learn. If all of those jobs go offshore or become minimum-wage level jobs, rational students aren't going to study CS or IT.
- As a result of the first thing, I also worry about having fewer places to jump to. Usually, offshoring goes in cycles where a new CIO comes into town and declares he can save millions by cutting the in-house workforce. When the reality hits, the company either terminates the contract or lets it ride until the end, then starts in-housing everything again. Not every company is in phase on this cycle, so it's been relatively easy to find work when it's your company's turn -- just find one that either never jumped on the bandwagon or is coming back from it. If the newbie pipeline dries up, then offshore firms will be able to say "See? No one domestically wants these jobs" the same way migrant farm work is justified.
I feel really bad for the IT guys in this situation -- you join a public university system knowing you're not going to make a ton of money compared to the private sector. I know, because I know people who work in the SUNY system. They're trading off current salary for stability and a safe retirement, and are well aware of their choices. When you're midway through a career and are told that your public sector salary is still too high, that's a pretty big blow.
I'm not a mainframer but I do work in another industry highly dependent on them (airlines.) Some of the core components of major passenger processing systems like Sabre, Amadeus, etc. are still kicking along on mainframes. A lot of the COBOL has been refactored into something more modern but some things are much harder to replace. Also, a lot of the stuff that's non-core has been migrated to more open systems so it's cheaper to run and easier to change. But, the thing to remember about airline applications is that all the customer-facing stuff like kiosks, web booking, RFID baggage tracking, etc. rides on top of this ancient core. When you do something on an airline website or check in at a kiosk, the software running there is usually reaching down into the mainframe either directly or through an equally complex web of services, wrappers, etc.
I think one of the reasons mainframes refuse to die is because nothing has replaced the "uptime culture" surrounding them. For example, I love x86 virtualization and cloud computing because I can instantly start up any environment I want, use it, and rip it down whenever I'm done. Mainframes don't really have that -- the goal is 100% uptime which is why businesses like banks, insurance, airlines, etc. rely on them so heavily. To achieve that, the culture around the mainframe is to have expert systems programmers who know the ins and outs of the system, and to test everything to death before rolling it out to production. It's incredibly rare to see code updates severely break anything, and part of the reason is that the culture is to not touch things that are working "just because."
It's very easy to say "oh, just rewrite everything in Java and rip out the mainframe." It's much harder to instill the discipline required to maintain core systems that can't ever go down, can't corrupt data and are vital to a business. Replacing veteran system programmers with a bunch of 20-something bros refactoring in 18-hour code sessions while doing shots, or an offshore body shop of 1,000 Indians who took a COBOL course is a culture shift.
From what I see, companies are dealing with the COBOL shortage by going the body shop route rather than train new grads. I think that new grads would be perfect for this kind of work, because it exposes them to good change management practice. Then again, I'm a big believer in the apprenticeship/trade guild system for training software and IT pros. Right now, companies want drop-in replacements for new hires and anything other than the new hotness on your resume gets it trashed. I'm very lucky to have been able to work in environments with a healthy mix of new and ancient, and it's been very helpful career-wise to at least have an idea of what's going on in the legacy side of the house. Even if I really don't know what's going on under the hood, it's better than throwing your hands up and refusing to touch something, saying "I'm a Windows/Linux admin" or "I'm a Java developer"
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I work in a very traditional environment that has just started putting their toes in the water on a few Azure projects. Because I'm the guy on our engineering team who likes learning new stuff, I sort of got tasked with figuring it out and teaching everyone else.
I think the main reason Microsoft is trying to get major educational clients on board is to get people used to Azure as the default deployment method for workloads. A lot of what they're doing makes a lot of sense but requires you to think in a different way to properly manage your stuff. When I was in (non-CS) college in the early 90s and doing tech support as a student job, absolutely everything was Sun hardware and Solaris. Sun used to charge businesses astronomical pricing for their equipment but practically give it away to universities...the idea being that today's CS grads would be tomorrow's IT purchase decision makers. If you teach newbies from scratch how to deploy things to Azure, then that's what they learn and will take to employers. With Azure Stack coming out, and traditional boxed software being a thing of the past from Microsoft, it makes perfect sense to get students on board early before they learn anything else.
I'm certainly not one of those people who thinks every company should jump in with both feet and dump all their physical servers into a cloud provider. There's a balance and for most places that aren't a one-trick phone app based shop, I think that for most places, the balance is still going to tilt towards on-site once the Second Dotcom Bubble pops and the hype goes down. But, Microsoft is clearly going for becoming another mainframe provider with this move to Azure -- they're doing everything in their power to help companies move their workloads, and once they're in they will be collecting revenue forever instead of one-off license fees.
The interesting thing about this is whether or not Microsoft is going to get out of the media-selling business. You can buy movies and music for your XBox or PC through the Windows Store, but adding iTunes as a client might mean they're getting away from that...who knows? With Windows Phone pretty much cooked, maybe they're starting to figure that a large part of their Store ecosystem doesn't make sense anymore.
I wonder if the app is going to be a Universal rewrite, or if they're using that Project Centennial Win32 emulator to move the existing app to the store.
It seems to me like Microsoft hasn't fully learned the lesson that desktop/laptop users don't want a touch-centric iTunes style user interface. If you look at some of the screenshots, we're back to monochrome icons and flat totally featureless windows. I wonder if menus will even make an appearance, and if they do, they'll be back to ALL CAPS.
I'm all for having something like this in Tablet Mode. But come on guys, Windows Phone is dead. There's no reason to force PC users to use a phone-inspired interface. This honestly looks like what MS did with Visual Studio 2013 -- removed all the color, made the default text color an unreadable gray on white, etc. It took the developers complaining bitterly to get both Visual Studio and Office to have some color and visual differentiation again.
Maybe a better example is something like Catholic Charities. There are lots of religious organizations with the mission to help the poor. One problem with this is that decades ago, a good chunk of the wealthy were also highly religious and felt duty-bound to help out. More well-off people also lived in cities and saw on a daily basis what happens when you don't do something.
These days, religion and charity seem to be more a domain of the poor, who have fewer resources to give. Most growth in Catholic parishes is due to immigrants from Latin America, where almost all new growth is coming from. There are fewer and fewer Italian grandmothers and Irish blue-collar families every day, and suburbanites have less of an appetite for organized religion in general. You can argue why, but my feeling is that people feel they have more options now. My mother's family grew up in a working-class neighborhood of a medium-sized city, and in that environment your parish's priests were most likely the only people who had any sort of advanced education. People really looked up to them and to the Church (and this also fueled a lot of the scandals that have come to light IMO.) If someone actually made it out of the neighborhood and did well for themselves, there was a sense of duty to give back.
In a way, it's like employer/employee loyalty -- employees will jump to a new employer with the slightest provocation now, because most employers have made it clear that they're not interested in keeping people long-term. See the people who spent an entire 4 or 5 decade career at places like IBM and AT&T as counter-examples. Employers like these (in the previous era where this was fashionable) were famous for not just dumping people out on the street at every single change in fortune, and that was reflected by employees' willingness to stay on and maybe ride out a few bad years or wait for a bad boss to be replaced.
Most chronic homelessness is caused by mental illness and addictions. Instead of putting up shelters, why not spend a little extra and reopen public mental hospitals? Before the deinstitutionalization movement in the 70s, states had huge mental health treatment systems in place. Admittedly, part of that was because there was nothing that could be done to treat mental illness before the 50s and the only thing to do was to lock them away. But, we've seen that treatment isn't 100% effective, people relapse, they self-medicate with drugs and alcohol, etc. Why not operate facilities where people who need treatment can be placed until they're stable enough to actually live in the community?
In all but an official announcement, Microsoft is telgraphing that Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 are completely dead. They want nothing to do with supporting downlevel operating systems at this point (because Windows as a Service) and anyone who wants to remain on Windows 7 is just not going to be tolerated for much longer. I'm getting the impression that the farthest back Microsoft is going to go in terms of support is the last LTSB release, and even then grudgingly so.
Holdouts on the business side of things don't have much longer to buy systems that will correctly work downgraded to Windows 7. Windows 10 migrations are essentially forced at this point, at least for any new corporate hardware purchases, because Microsoft has stopped supporting Windows 7 updates on current-generation Intel CPUs. It'll run, but they have artificially blocked updates for Windows 7 if you have a 7th generation Intel chip (or whatever they have on the AMD side.) There was a small window where Microsoft allowed vendors to sell a subset of their business PC line that would be immune from this block, but that time is now over.
I'm mostly OK with Windows 10 at this point, and most compatibility problems we've seen so far have been because of very old and very strange software we need to support. Still, between giving away the upgrade to consumers for "free" in exchange for usage data, and slowly pulling back business support for older OSes, no wonder the adoption numbers keep rising. The interesting thing to see will be once everyone's on "10," how frequently can they get people to jump to the next LTSB release? Consumers have no choice (CB for them,) and businesses not running LTSB will be upgraded automatically on the CBB schedule too.
Northeast Utilities did what lots of big companies do -- outsource their IT to some faceless consulting company. It goes in cycles -- a new CIO comes in, promises millions of dollars in savings, it gets done, people are usually disappointed and IT usually swings at least partially back in-house. I've experienced it twice working in a financial services company and an airline. There is very little one can do when the MBA crowd presents the board with a spreadsheet showing 50 or 60% savings on IT.
Those consulting companies should be the targets of any action. I actually think the H-1B as it was originally intended is a good "safety valve" to get a few very talented people into the country. I now work for a multinational company who has their own issues with offshoring, but has also used H-1Bs to move very key people to the US. What these outsourcing companies use it for is not that at all, and this abuse should be what's targeted. I would be fine with consulting companies using contractors, paying a little less, etc. as long as it was done fairly. What I've experienced is that the offshore company will bring in a few H-1B workers for the jobs that absolutely require a physical presence, as well as the "train your replacement" crew. This second group is who collects all the information, procedures, etc. from the soon-to-be-fired IT workers and sends it back to the offshore teams. H-1Bs are supposed to be high-level experts, not train-the-trainer guys.
That said, I'm really hoping I don't wind up like this guy, a few years away from retirement and unhireable. The covert age discrimination in IT and software dev is what needs to stop. Every other proper profession values experienced people -- newbie doctors aren't considered experts until they've seen a lot of things, and frankly had their egos checked by having a few patients die on them unexpectedly. Yet, in the Silicon Valley startup world, and corporate IT in general, 25-year-old "rockstars" who work 100 hour weeks to make up for inexperience are celebrated. Now, it is true that there are older people who have not kept current with things and basically done the exact same job for 20 years. The problem is that as I age, and continue to keep my skills current because I really like what I do, I'm lumped in with the same "too old, too expensive, can't hang with the bros" crowd.
I think that's one of the crappiest things companies do -- kicking out someone in their late 50s/early 60s to save money, knowing that they're never going to find a comparable job to bridge the gap between now and retirement. I've seen it happen many times...and people should save to defend against it. But at the same time, IT work or development is not like being a professional athlete, where you have a 10 year career at most and have to make all your money then.
I've read articles in the recent past detailing the "generational divide" in bigger workplaces where you have the Millenials, the Xers and the baby boomers all sharing the same environment. The articles I've read seem to indicate that Millenials need much more constant feedback than previous generations. I wonder if that's part of it, and whether older managers are having trouble keeping up with the new pace.
The workplace I'm at currently skews older, but we do have some new grads coming in every couple of years. Since we're all older types who've been around the black a few times, the traditional management "tricks" that work on younger people tend to be less accepted. But, since Google and GE have switched to continuous feedback now, we're doing it too. It used to be one performance conversation a year plus one mid-year checkup...now the dream is that both the employee and manager keep a running journal in their HR files about performance, etc. The reality is that we're so short-staffed that none of it gets done anymore.
No feedback at all for any generation is bad though. There are so many companies where the only hope of advancement is the management track, and so there are a lot of ill-suited managers. Often, you end up being the best at doing the actual work in your department, then you're taken out of it into a completely different world. Some people get the hang of it, and others just freeze - I've worked for both, and I've frozen when promoted.
If you have a really well-connected single sign on environment in place, standardizing on a single password that you have to change periodically makes sense. Where it breaks down is when you have a million passwords scattered across different services (internal or external.) If you have to change those over and over, you end up recycling passwords or writing them down, or storing them in a password vault tool (which is a bad idea given how many vulnerabilities have come to light on those.)
In fact, with SSO systems like Google or Azure AD, it makes sense to protect that single key much more carefully than an individual password. For example, if someone guessed my corporate account's password or found a way to steal information from Microsoft without them knowing (or telling anyone,) my Azure AD account has a lot of access -- off the top of my head, from the naked Internet I can access my Exchange email, OneDrive, all the Azure resources I have control over, most of my HR vital data, access to Internet-facing applications, access to my MSDN and volume licensing stuff from Microsoft, and the list goes on. I'm OK with changing that password pretty frequently. If I had 50 of them to remember, not so much.
The fact that the standards are being updated to reflect that it's much harder to steal passwords from properly secured systems these days and crack them offline is good though. Corporate security types tend to follow these rules verbatim regardless of whether they make operational sense.
That's strange, because times have changed for anyone outside the very senior executive levels of a company. Previously, promotion into middle or upper management was like being admitted into an exclusive club, where everything was basically taken care of for you and you were just the public face of your organization. You had a high salary, a whole staff to manage every aspect of your life, etc. Now, flatter organizations push a lot of things onto lower numbers of managers that they wouldn't have to deal with in the past.
I think it's the flatter organizations that cause more stress...the managers are responsible for more than they used to be, and the speed/pace of business has wound up to levels that are beyond healthy.
"In a fight between AMA and Big Insurance, my money is on the insurance companies."
It's all going to come down to how much money can be piled on by both sides. If the insurance companies had any clout compared to what the AMA has, then doctors could be trained in 14-day "MD Bootcamps" the same way we send people to coder schools. Physicians would see their salaries drop to a tiny fraction of what they're being paid today.
I admit I'm totally cynical and don't understand the nuances of lobbying. But, I think that if the professional organization responsible for your high salary says your profession is under attack and you could lose your lifestyle, you'd give until it hurts to ensure those payments keep coming in. I assume that lobbyists do little more than pass paper bags full of money to lawmakers in creative ways. My assumption is that it works the way software sales works in big companies -- the sales guy just spends as much as they need to on strip clubs, golf and dinners to get the sale.
The parallels to IT and software development are striking and should be noted by everyone in our career field. Automation, offshoring and outsourcing of routine legal tasks has meant hugely depressed salaries and new lawyers not being able to find any entry-level work. This sounds exactly like what's happening in IT -- offshored help desk and outsourced data center positions leading to low wages or no jobs for people starting out.
This is interesting to me, because I live near New York City where most of the "BigLaw" firms have huge offices. It's been known for about 10 years (but ignored by many) that law school is now a waste of money if you are not in the top of your class in one of the top 14 law schools (according to US News and World Report) in the country (#1, 2 and 3 are Harvard, Yale and Stanford.) If you manage to make this cut, life is just fine for you. Big firms hire out of this pool and industry standard starting salary is $180K. If you last as a junior member of the firm, you're officially done worrying about life when you make partner. The only thing you will ever stress over again is whether to take the Bentley or the Rolls to the club this weekend, or what color the draperies in your Hamptons summer home should be. If you don't fall into that crowd, you might as well take the money you would spend on law school and light it on fire to achieve the same results.
The thing that's interesting is that the American Bar Association could have used their immense clout to save the pipeline of newbies. They chose to accredit tons of new law schools and encourage class size to increase even though the trend was for fewer lawyers on the horizon. This is how the American Medical Association keeps physicians' salaries high. They know that the only way to do this is to keep supply limited, so medical school slots are very tightly controlled. You need near-perfect grades, a photographic memory and the ability to ace the MCAT to even be considered. Then, you get 3 years of academic hazing where you're force-fed information, and years of low-salary, high stress internship/residency. If you can get through that, then you're a doctor and you're in the same Easy Street club as the BigLaw partners. It's just interesting to see how a professional organization can help like the AMA does or destroy the profession like the ABA is doing.
What do you do when, say, 50 or 60 percent of the workforce is only capable of doing jobs that aren't profitable to pay people to do anymore? I don't think that you're going to be able to instantly break the cycle of "work--earn--consume" that has driven life since forever. Telling people who have spent their lives saving for retirement or amassing wealth that their money is no longer useful in the way it once was isn't going to go well.
In my opinion, most people who say people who want a universal income in place are lazy freeloaders who just want to sit around all day haven't worked with a large cross-section of humanity. They work as IT people, or developers/engineers, or doctors, or some other profession that requires a lot of education and are surrounded by smart people all day long. Out in the rest of the world, there exist people who can't handle anything more than a menial job. You don't just turn paper filers and customer service people into data scientists and biochemists. The job-replacement train ran out of gas a while back. It worked well when it was farming, then factory work, then corporate factory-style work like clerical/secretary work, then service jobs. Once those service jobs are gone, what high-salary, low-requirement job replaces them? Economies are built around consumers having a good job, taking on debt, spending, and keeping that cycle going. Universal income would allow this cycle to continue for a little longer, allowing employers to pay people less but keep them employed if they wished to earn beyond the minimum income. It basically buys us time to figure out how to deal with what could end up being massive unemployment and poverty for a formerly stable portion of the first-world workforce.
Being on the IT side of the house, I distinctly remember MCSE, Solaris and other for-profit bootcamps popping up towards the top of the dotcom bubble in the late 90s. They also loudly touted the fact that they accepted veterans' benefits as payment and I'm sure they made a lot of money doing this -- similar to the ITT Tech or DeVry style schools.
I guess my question is what a coder bootcamp prepares you to do. Do they just teach one or two JavaScript frameworks like node.js or Ruby on Rails or something? What is a coder bootcamp graduate supposed to be able to do? I actually went to one of these places to rapidly upgrade my Windows NT certs (which I did on my own) to Windows 2003 -- I was working for a consulting company back then who wanted to bill me out at a higher rate. I felt bad because there were obviously a few people in the class who had been sold the dream and had no clue what was going on, no aptitude for anything IT-related, etc. I'm betting there will be a fair number of veterans who will be "encouraged" to use their one-time education benefit to go through one of these coding schools. I'm just assuming that the only job you can get out of one of these schools is front-end web code cleanup or QA testing or something equally low-end -- am I right?
From what I know about the unemployment number's survey process and recent trends in employment, I wonder how relevant it actually is. The government only surveys 6,000 people out of 300+ million, and defines employment as any job.
These days, there are a lot of underemployed people, people stringing together gig economy jobs, etc. Also, in the past it was pretty much assumed that unemployment was a temporary thing -- the factory laid people off during slow times and hired them back, or there were a ton of places to jump to. Now, it seems like full time work is getting harder to find and keep.
Obviously, improvement is good. You personally only need one full time job, and the closer we get to full employment, the further the pendulum swings back over into the worker side of the spectrum. But certainly, there are a lot of people that the official employment statistics don't capture.
I imagine that things are going to be very rough once automation _really_ starts cutting into employment in ways that haven't been seen previously. The ironic thing is that the "knowledge worker" is the target for this round, as most large-scale US factory work is offshored or automated by now. All that money people are paying to get themselves the education they need for a job is never going to be recovered if employees aren't receiving salaries to make it worth going in the first place.
I graduated high school in 1993, and even by then, everyone was being told that there was no longer a viable career path that didn't go through college. And this was in the Rust Belt city I grew up in, where just 20 years prior it was possible to guarantee a lifetime of work by joining a union's apprenticeship program and working in a factory for your whole career. I distinctly remember events at the end of high school that were basically send-offs into the "grown-up" world like the prom and a formal senior dinner -- as if to say that for at least a chunk of the graduating class, this was the last time they'd ever see the education system again. Wind the clock forward, and we're requiring college degrees for receptionists and the few factory workers that are left. So now we have a more educated workforce, who may no longer have anything to do that will allow them to make money, start families, buy things, etc.
I've done most of my career working directly for or contracting with large companies -- think companies big enough to have a huge corporate campus, parking garages, etc. Even in 2017, there really are a ton of corporate jobs that could go away in this next round of automation. Lots of jobs we IT people support involve taking input stacks of work, performing some sort of process on them, and putting them on the output stack. Look at how mega-corps lay people off in huge numbers -- HP/HPE just got rid of more than 30,000 people last year. I'm sure a lot of that was just idiotic MBA spreadsheet jockeying, but how many of those 30,000 people were doing one of these easily automated jobs? Each one of those 30,000 people probably owned a house, paid property/school taxes, some of them had kids, they bought cars, and basically contributed to society. Now, we're saying that even high end positions like healthcare workers are in for a big restructuring as more stuff gets automated.
With no way for educated people to make money, what happens to the work-money-consumption cycle we've been used to for ages? Some people propose paying people regardless of their employment status, and I think that's one way to bridge the gap. But what happens on the other side? Will we have a Star Trek utopia where everyone does what they're best at instead of driving to MegaCorp every morning to file papers? Or will we have a Hunger Games style existence or go back to feudal serfdom?
These are arguably in the top 5 of companies at the center of a massive Second Dotcom Bubble. Of course they're going to pay their interns a lot:
- Cost of living in SV, even temporarily, is more than just about anywhere else in the country
- Google and Facebook do most of their hiring from Stanford and other top 10 private-school computer science and engineering departments. People who can afford to go there on their own will expect at least what an investment bank or management consultancy is willing to pay them for an internship. People who are smart enough to get into a private school on an academic scholarship are also probably worth paying that kind of money for.
Two other industries, law and investment banking, are famous for internships that pay handsomely.
- Big law firms will recruit interns from the top of the class of only the Top 14 law schools in the country. They put them up in New York City, pay them a comparatively large salary, and basically spend the summer shuttling them between parties and events while giving them some token work to do. And if they find they like you, starting salary is $180K nowadays. Too bad you have to be at the top of your class at Harvard, Yale or Stanford to get "drafted" like this.
- Investment banks take on "associates" either while they're getting their MBA or just after. Again, only the top business school grads need apply. The difference is that they work their associates 100-hour weeks doing menial processing tasks for years. If you work out you're in the "cannot fail" club for life, but the route there is quite different from the law firm crowd.
So, I wouldn't get too bent out of shape over this. Plum internships at hot companies aren't the norm. Media and publishing interns often get _nothing_ for a huge amount of very menial work.
I don't doubt there will eventually be something new on the horizon, but I think it's definitely time for them to stop trying to force their way into the phone market. While it was in full swing, it bled over into every single product they made (Windows 8 and 10, the current Office design and subscription model, etc.) For a while it seemed they were obsessed with getting access to the magic ATM that is the 30% cut on all customer purchases. That's where the Store, Windows RT and now WIndows 10 S is coming from. I can't blame them; I'll bet Apple's senior executives are swimming in bathtubs full of money and Champagne. But Microsoft is pretty much the go-to for enterprise IT, and even more so with Azure now...the recurring revenue they get could fill a few Scrooge McDuck-style money bins.
It seems to me that unless they patent some revolutionary, ground breaking form factor, their phone business should just be allowed to die. Apple has a massive base of rabid fans who would pay $200 for an Apple branded USB cable if they sold one, and full control of the hardware/app store/ecosystem. Google has a fragmented hardware network, but they have the Play Store and access to every single shred of user interaction data. Either one of these is tough to beat -- it's going to be iOS and Android slugging it out for quite a while.
I know they're trying to compete with the Chromebook, but I thought they learned their lesson with Windows RT -- very few use cases exist for an artificially limited device that can only run Store apps and, essentially, Office.
It's obvious that Azure and cloud services are the way they want to go, but no one wanted the non-Pro Surface. Outside of education, why would anyone want this? Phone is dead, UWP apps exist but certainly aren't the only type of apps people use, and it seems silly to me to artifically limit a device using Windows 10 S.
The ideal endgame for Microsoft is definitely having locked-down devices that are useless without paying subscription fees and consuming Azure services. They're going to be the new IBM and we're all going to be mainframe customers at some point.
It seems like Infosys is trying to get ahead of any criticism regarding the way they use the H-1B program. I do systems integration work so we work with a wide range of these companies. I've worked with people and software from Infosys and TCS as well as the lower-tier guys like Mindtree and NIIT. The problem is that even if you bring the work to somewhere like Indiana, you can't change the fundamental business model and so you'll still get less than optimal service.
All of these consulting firms, whether they're body shops like Infosys and TCS, or white-shoe management consulting firms, operate on a very familiar business model:
- Rely on a gold-plated sales team and rockstar consulting team to sell the dream and come up with the initial proposal
- Once the deal is signed, replace the rockstars with fresh grads or less-than-rockstar experienced consultants for the client-facing stuff, like collecting requirements or delivering PowerPoints.
- In the case of an outsourcing, send in a group to collect all the information about the company's business processes. Body shops sending the work offshore typically use their H-1Bs for this task, while the fancy consulting firms fly in the graduating class of the Ivy League business schools; it's a very common first job for that crowd.
- Send everything that actually involves work offshore or to other cheap "delivery centers" to maximize the profit on the deal
The problem is that whether these cheap delivery centers are offshore or onshore, I think they'll have big problems staffing them with qualified people. Consulting firms squeeze every last dime out of outsourcing deals because they have to break even...and in many cases they have to support a huge raft of executive salaries with big expense accounts on top of that. Consulting firms think nothing of flying senior people in from wherever, for months at a time on full reimbursement, and their customers end up paying for that. When you get down to the people who would be working in Infosys's Indiana office, they're going to try to pay minimum wage or slightly above because the entire model is making the actual work cheap while putting a good face on for the customer.
I don't think I'd like to work there, simply because they have a reputation among experienced IT people and developers. Just because you move the people here doesn't mean the model changes. It will still be a body shop mentality where you're cranking out random Java or .NET code for some corporate website or managing a company's IT systems poorly from remote. At the very least, however, it is domestic entry level work for newbies. Hopefully those newbies will endure a year or two in the middle of nowhere, then use the experience to move on.
I'm not a big fan of Trump, but if it takes his ego and bully power to get us back into space exploration, then that's a good thing. The thing I know he doesn't understand is how much effort and resources it takes to untertake a mission like this. I'm sure SpaceX has also been whispering in a few well-placed ears about taking over NASA's role as well -- that would definitely appeal to the conservative, small government, privatization always works crowd.
The problem I see is that no one would ever be willing to just dump the amount of money required into this. I'm a firm believer of the idea that throwing enough money and resources at a problem will solve it, but no one's willing to do that. We were willing back in the 60s when the Soviet Union beat us into space -- and we also poured uncountable sums of money into nuclear weapons and espionage technology as well with virtually zero limits. No one complained one bit back then, but they sure do now. Or, go back a few years and look at the Manhattan Project -- again, bags of money were just lit on fire and forgotten about because the goal of winning a war that was consuming huge numbers of men was possible if you paid for it. If you read about it, it was a massive project -- not just the bomb design, but the mining and refining of radioactive material that consumed vast amounts of resources.
The only way we could ever do something like this again is to have China plant a flag on Mars first...then all bets would be off.
Anyone surprised at this wasn't around for the last Dotcom Bubble, or wasn't paying attention. This is exactly what happened in early 2000, when you started to hear the first few whispers that the peak had finally been hit. Investors are just coming to their senses. I don't entirely blame them this time -- the last bubble was about some people having access to the Internet, and this one is about having absolutely everyone worldwide accessing the Internet over a phone, which is with them 24/7 and can generate tons of marketing data.
I'm just glad that there aren't too many individual investors who are losing out with crappy IPOs of companies that will never make a profit. I remember people losing a ton of money speculating on pets.com or VA Linux or theglobe.com -- all companies with almost no hope of doing well in the long run. What I am seeing this time is the fact that there are just _so many_ startups, and how many copycats there are. The barrier to entry is low, the cloud runs their software, they use social media to advertise, and there seem to be 20 different clothing subscription services, food delivery services, etc. I think the sales pitch for VCs this time is "disruption" more than "eyeballs" but it's still the same result.
Just like the last one, I'm sitting out on the sidelines in a traditional IT/engineering job and watching everything fall in on itself again. When I started reading stories about new edgy web startups popping up in California again, all I could feel was deja vu... There's only so much ping pong, foosball, hipster open office spaces, catered meals, and brogramming that VC money will buy, and I think we're about to see that come to an end. Since these startups can just run in the cloud, they definitely have longer to live, but I don't know how much.
This is a symptom of two much larger problems -- the coming automation of menial work leading to massive unemployment, and employers that squeeze every single inefficiency out of a process.
If employers had a choice, they'd make people work for free -- they have no desire to pay even the minimum wage. After all, it cuts into their profits. I'm one of those people who thinks we should leave some slack in the system -- not because I'm a lazy entitled idiot, but because I don't want to see all the desperate unemployed people running around stealing and killing each other.
If you take automation to the extreme end of the spectrum, every job that people typically do is automated, including things like paper filing, IT, programming and fruit picking. This time, skilled workers aren't going to be able to sit back and say "oh, it's those lazy factory workers that don't want to retrain." The reality is that there is no retraining workers for this next phase. If you're below an IQ of, say, 120, there's no work for you. Where that leads, I have no idea...eugenics? Culling of the low end of the population?
People who think that all these migrant workers can just retrain to be data scientists are fooling themselves. I've dealt with a large cross section of society in my various jobs -- there are actual limits on how much a person can handle intellectually. In the past, we had work for them, but I'm not sure what we're going to do now.
I've been working in IT for almost 20 years, and have been involved in offshorings a few times. I've fortunately been able to get other jobs after this happens, but I worry about the overall direction of the industry:
I feel really bad for the IT guys in this situation -- you join a public university system knowing you're not going to make a ton of money compared to the private sector. I know, because I know people who work in the SUNY system. They're trading off current salary for stability and a safe retirement, and are well aware of their choices. When you're midway through a career and are told that your public sector salary is still too high, that's a pretty big blow.
I'm not a mainframer but I do work in another industry highly dependent on them (airlines.) Some of the core components of major passenger processing systems like Sabre, Amadeus, etc. are still kicking along on mainframes. A lot of the COBOL has been refactored into something more modern but some things are much harder to replace. Also, a lot of the stuff that's non-core has been migrated to more open systems so it's cheaper to run and easier to change. But, the thing to remember about airline applications is that all the customer-facing stuff like kiosks, web booking, RFID baggage tracking, etc. rides on top of this ancient core. When you do something on an airline website or check in at a kiosk, the software running there is usually reaching down into the mainframe either directly or through an equally complex web of services, wrappers, etc.
I think one of the reasons mainframes refuse to die is because nothing has replaced the "uptime culture" surrounding them. For example, I love x86 virtualization and cloud computing because I can instantly start up any environment I want, use it, and rip it down whenever I'm done. Mainframes don't really have that -- the goal is 100% uptime which is why businesses like banks, insurance, airlines, etc. rely on them so heavily. To achieve that, the culture around the mainframe is to have expert systems programmers who know the ins and outs of the system, and to test everything to death before rolling it out to production. It's incredibly rare to see code updates severely break anything, and part of the reason is that the culture is to not touch things that are working "just because."
It's very easy to say "oh, just rewrite everything in Java and rip out the mainframe." It's much harder to instill the discipline required to maintain core systems that can't ever go down, can't corrupt data and are vital to a business. Replacing veteran system programmers with a bunch of 20-something bros refactoring in 18-hour code sessions while doing shots, or an offshore body shop of 1,000 Indians who took a COBOL course is a culture shift.
From what I see, companies are dealing with the COBOL shortage by going the body shop route rather than train new grads. I think that new grads would be perfect for this kind of work, because it exposes them to good change management practice. Then again, I'm a big believer in the apprenticeship/trade guild system for training software and IT pros. Right now, companies want drop-in replacements for new hires and anything other than the new hotness on your resume gets it trashed. I'm very lucky to have been able to work in environments with a healthy mix of new and ancient, and it's been very helpful career-wise to at least have an idea of what's going on in the legacy side of the house. Even if I really don't know what's going on under the hood, it's better than throwing your hands up and refusing to touch something, saying "I'm a Windows/Linux admin" or "I'm a Java developer"