Employer/employee loyalty is the thing that has to improve first -- then OJT will move beyond an experiment. Back in the good old days, employers would take recent college grads and even recent high school grads, knowing they were only getting raw material, and train them to their standards. Now employers see employees who will jump to the competition in 6 months or less just because they're upset about something or will get a small raise. Because of that, training is a liability and they'd rather hire consultants who may or may not have lied about their level of experience.
Employers need to come to the table too. We need to stop the constant cycle of layoffs and offshoring and maintain a reasonable level of steady employment. If employees feel safe in a job, they'll worry less about finding another one and worry more about doing a good job in the current one. This is one thing from the old days I'd like to see come back -- employers would have to think very hard about hiring someone because they'd at least have some sort of commitment to them.
Training on the job and starting in the bottom of an organization aren't totally dead. I know a lot of people who work for the state university system. Here in NY, university professional staff are effectively tenured the same way faculty are, after a long probationary period and having to convince your department to nominate you. Training is an accepted part of life in this environment because they're keeping the employees whether or not they're skilled up. In this case, it makes perfect sense to invest in employees because you'd rather have a good loyal employee than one who knows you can't get rid of them and doesn't advance their career.
Also, CS degrees are probably overkill for most web programming jobs that LinkedIn typically hires for. You may need a CS degree to write their deep learning algorithm that maps your connections and mines them for data, but you don't need one to be a JavaScript monkey cranking out the front end stuff. I'm in IT, with a chemistry degree, and the only thing I use from my degree is the ability to methodically break down a problem and troubleshoot. It's helpful but I know plenty of older iT people who have no degree or a completely unrelated to CS degree, and they do well.
Social security will most likely be around in some form, and may have to be expanded at some point to cover the realities that no one is saving on their own. I'm not worried about the baby boomers or the generation after -- they all have pensions and will most likely die off quicker than future generations will. Just think of how many people smoked in the 50s compared to today, or drank themselves into oblivion after work every night, or spent the late 60s on drugs. Overall, they will have more health problems and the temporary bump up in social security payments will be short.
The problem becomes how to fund retirement of people who don't have pensions, haven't saved and will live much longer lives. I think at some point work as we know it will disappear for most people too, so we're in for a bad ride at least in the short term. I'm saving, mainly because I don't want to depend solely on social security as my only retirement income, but most younger people aren't because they can't. But, when almost everyone of average intelligence has no useful skill to sell employers, massive unemployment will be the bigger problem. That's where I think a universal income will have to come in. It would have to be something like social security disability, but not for a physical disability. I'm not sure how palatable that would be -- you'd basically be saying that half the population is mentally handicapped, but I think that's the reality we're headed towards. You're not going to take a truck driver, factory worker or customer service person and teach them software development or data science.
"He went from happy engineer to suicide in less than five months?"
If you don't have them already, have kids and get back to me. I'm very lucky that my wife has a great job as well, but I know lots of people with a family to support who are constantly worried. Even if you're not in debt up to your eyeballs (we're not,) it adds a lot of stress to your life. I have to live my life as if I'm going to lose my job at a moment's notice, because that's the world we live in now. Quadruple that stress if your spouse doesn't work, and add more on for each kid. It's not a sign of weakness; it's a sign of being a responsible person in my mind. Worrying about what happens to your family has to come first when you decide to go down that path. I feel bad for Mr. Thomas, because you have to be in a pretty dark place to feel like your life insurance policy is the best thing you can contribute.
I know it's an anachronism, but I do think things were better when people had more stable work and were able to stay with employers for a longer period of time. These days, it just seems like the cycles of boom and bust are increasing in frequency, and the amount of time it takes companies to cut employees or offshore just keeps getting shorter. I think I'm one of the only people who advocate for lifetime employment and no-layoff policies, but we had this only a few decades ago and life was much better. When people feel stable in their jobs they can relax, buy houses, buy cars, take vacations, etc. Now, we're more data-driven than ever and companies are using this to squeeze people harder.
Coming from the New York metro area, I know how insane cost of living is compared to other parts of the country. Generally, New York, Boston, Washington DC, Chicago and of course California cost way more to live in than just about anywhere else. Part of it is taxes, part of it is because that's where all the high-salary jobs tend to gravitate to, but the reality is that a $170K salary in San Francisco is barely above middle class. Rent in SF proper is more expensive than anywhere outside Midtown Manhattan, and houses start in the million dollar range and go up from there. California has great weather, but I would never live there for that reason. I already pay a lot for a house in a suburb about 60 miles from the city -- I love living here but there would be no way I could justify paying more than double what I'm already paying to buy a house.
I think the fact that this person moved from Georgia to California without demanding a much higher salary is a huge contributor to his stress. Uber isn't exactly known as a warm and fuzzy employer either -- it sounds like a carbon copy of all the other frathouse startups from Bubbles 1.0 and 2.0. Anyone who's older and different in an environment like that is going to have a hard time fitting in. If you can't do 16-hour coding sessions while playing beer pong, you're an outsider, but will still be expected to perform the same way as everyone else. Older people who have worked a fair amount usually realize when they're being taken advantage of, but what if this guy just felt he couldn't leave? Having a potential lottery ticket in the form of stock options is a big reason lots of people stay in the crazy startup culture. With a family to support, and the feeling that he'd fail if he had to go back to Atlanta, no wonder he lost it.
That's one of the reasons I'd never work at a startup -- there's zero work life balance, no stability and the "if we wanted you to have a family, we would have issued you one" culture. Seriously, I'm older and have seen how companies take advantage of employees -- I prefer to work hard enough to have an employer want to keep me, but not give my life over to them. That's for suckers!
"How about we just go back to capitalism and let shit fix itself?"
That's the problem -- this time, it can't. The average level of intelligence doesn't support full employment of people for the jobs that are left over after automation fully takes hold. For those that make it over this hurdle, the business owners controlling access to the few remaining jobs are going to realize their position and work to keep employment as low as possible, increasing their profits.
Businesses are greedy - they don't want to employ anyone. Fast food restaurants would happily replace all of their employees with robots and kiosks if they could, and this is the low end (minimum wage level) of employment. It gets even worse for knowledge workers -- this is why businesses offshore or push for visa programs that allow for cheaper labor.
"Is there even any point in getting an education if you know that the state will provide everything - and that there probably won't be any jobs for you anyway?"
I think that the point of these programs isn't to entirely replace the income that you would get by working an average job. I think it's more along the lines of softening the crushing experience of having to live on US-level unemployment benefits if you lose your job. Going down from your current salary to $410/week for what could be an extended period of time is something most people can't just cover out of savings, etc. Once you lose your income and access to credit, then start losing your possessions, life starts getting much harder.
What will be even more interesting is seeing what the plan is for dealing with the people who are just useless and can't be retrained for another "hip, modern" industry. You're not going to take a factory worker who's spent 20 years assembling the same set of parts and teach them to be a software developer, even a code monkey position isn't attainable without at least some aptitude. I'd say the humane thing to do would be to put them on the equivalent of Social Security Disability income for the rest of their lives. Many 50 year olds who are experiencing age discrimination are having to fake disability claims to bridge the gap between the "unhireable" phase of their work life and retirement, so this would provide them the same benefits and reduce fraudulent claims for the actual disability program.
I think that countries, states, or whatever geographic boundaries you prefer deciding to do something about massive unemployment/underemployment before chaos ensues is a good plan. Society falls apart around 20% unemployment and we're headed towards way more than that. I know some people are predicting that another massive shift will happen that allows people to continue to be employed, but I don't see it. The first time we didn't have something readily available to take up the slack that automation produced was the early 90s. During that time in the US, all the big companies went on a massive downsizing spree, dumping all the low-skilled clerical workers onto unemployment. We managed to get through this change, but now the pace of technology change that allows for fewer human workers is getting much faster. Now it's not just low-skill work, but mid-level knowledge work as well. After being told they'd never amount to anything unless they went to college, millions of corporate employees are going to be out on the street with no way to make money.
I think implementing basic income buys us time to let the age groups who've had to build their lives around wealth accumulation and a career ladder age out. The work-for-money-for-stuff way to run your life has been around for ages and I don't think most people know of any way to meaningfully contribute to society outside of that. Unless you want to propose how we kill money and wealth as a measure of success and buying power, this is the best way to solve a very difficult problem. If we don't do it, the divide between rich and poor is going to get to an unsustainable level, possibly at levels seen around the Gilded Age or French Revolution timeframes. That won't end well for anyone.
I have no idea what it is with startup founders -- they all seem to be playing in the same swamp. I guess it's the corporate veil -- it's amazing how much power company owners have compared to individuals. It's pretty obvious that Theranos' technology was a complete fraud. Maybe it didn't start out that way, but somewhere along the way they must have realized that they can't reproduce the results that conventional equipment gave. It must have been much more pleasant to take investors' money and live large for a while longer than it would be to admit failure.
It's not just billion-dollar startups, or megacorporations either. Even the smallest businesses seem to be dishonest to some degree, and I think it really is the fact that a corporation is a separate entity that enjoys personhood under the law. I know so many people who are running little incorporated side businesses and paying zero taxes, or funneling all of their personal purchases through the company to hide any profits. I think that once someone realizes that no one's looking and they're responsible for financial reporting, there's an intense desire to cheat. To me, this is what makes business owners' complaints about over-regulation and taxes ring hollow. Businesses don't pay tax the same way individuals do, and over-regulation to me amounts to filling out paperwork that your accounting software can fill out for you automatically. Business owners are getting such a good deal compared to standard wage-earners; they have no reason to complain.
One of the things that "IT Pros" as Microsoft calls us have been complaining about is the unpredictable nature of updates to Windows 10 and Office. It sounds like this is a nod to the fact that not everyone is using cutting-edge software that updates at the same pace, or using common consumer applications. Corporate IT is still very different from consumer IT. Most places have started modernizing, but the reality is that big companies aren't ever going to be going at the same pace as web startups delivering a consumer phone app.
Large companies and niche users of Windows still need to deal with compatibility problems, and knowing that Microsoft isn't going to change the way the OS works randomly from month to month gives IT groups time to test applications. You might say that only LUDDITES use desktop software and that everyone is using Apps! But, even though Apps! are becoming more prevalent, companies aren't ditching every single desktop application. Some have been running for ages and don't really need Appifying, or require significant costs to Appify. Before Windows 10, Windows was all about backward compatibility and a stable platform. That changed as they were chasing the mobile phone market, but maybe they're seeing that they have to cater both the consumer and corporate user now.
If Microsoft really plans to not make money on client OS licensing for upgraded versions anymore, maybe this is also an attempt to rein in the constant stream of new feature development they must be doing. Adding features just for fun at a rapid pace is a recipe for security vulnerabilities...developers don't want to be bothered with writing something secure when something functional will do.
I think that's the main point of the whole TED thing -- even if it is mostly a bunch of attention-seeking folks and academics desperately trying to promote themselves. The analysis is correct -- there isn't a lot of mainstream substantive discussion of things beyond politics and pop culture. You really have to go seek it out, and things like social media amplify the divide between intellectual and entertaining conversation.
One of the things I really don't like about social media is its tendency to separate the easily led among us into little camps. Because Facebook and other platforms know exactly what stimuli we will respond to, content they know we like is fed our way with little chance to break out of the echo chamber. Add to that the constant drumbeat of bad news, regardless of political side/opinion, and people can't be faulted for assuming the world is going to end tomorrow. It also doesn't help that there's a very strong current of anti-intellectualism among some sectors of the population. For some, universities are seen as bastions of evil, liberal progressive ideas -- not exactly the kind of opinion that fosters the sharing of ideas.
I have mentioned previously on here (and been blasted for it!) that social media is destroying the ability for the average person to relate to others. I've been told I'm too politically correct and everyone should be allowed to shout whatever they want at each other. If politically correct means "I don't want people's default posture to be acting like a bunch of hyenas to each other" then I guess I'm PC. I just want to see my technocratic government implemented at least once before I die -- instead of a bunch of lying politicians, hire the people with the best ideas and make rules based only on facts. Life would be much more peaceful with a bunch of engineers running things. People might actually study things like STEM without thinking about whether their careers will end when they turn 40, or whether all the work will be offshored by the time they graduate.
Just like every new technology changes culture, the smartphone era has its positive and negative changes in how people behave. We went from computers being nerd toys and business machines, to absolutely everyone having a computer in their pockets 24 hours a day, and it's only been about 9 or 10 years. Those of us working from the higher side of the tech spectrum have had to deal with apps that are dumbed down far enough that a non-computer user can mash the screen and use them, and of course we have kids using them as the new TV. I know my kids are heavily into YouTube, etc. The positives in my mind are this -- it's super-easy to find information when you need it now, and even though 99.99999% of the communication is junk, it does provide limited opportunities to connect with others. Another negative is that people are expecting insanely complex business applications to act exactly like their consumer phone apps, making life in IT extra-fun.
As for "smartphone addiction" I have seen tantrums, etc. but I don't know about withdrawal symptoms. My kids love watching YouTube videos and playing games, but they know that when it's time to shut it of, it's time, and complaints get the phone put away for a while. I'm sure there are parents who don't care and park their kids in front of phones whenever they're not doing something. I've felt guilty lately because we're in the middle of moving and renovating a house, eating almost all our non-working lives -- and yes, I've been relying on it more as a tool so I can get some of the work done. (The kids are 3 and 6, their version of "helping" doesn't help at this stage.) But, I would hope most parents are remembering back to their days of being in front of the TV, or the Atari/Intellivision//NES/PlayStation. My poison was Intellivision and the VIC-20 back in the day -- I showed my older son some games in an emulator and he was...not impressed.:-) My mom and dad would just take it away when I'd had enough and make me go outside or do something non-tech related. I think most phone usage can be controlled in this way -- you're the parent, and you're paying the phone bills. Even if it's the kid's phone, it's still "yours" and they should remember that.
Just like everything, there has to be a balance. I'm not sure how much I like the narcissistic social media crap, but we're not at that stage yet. They don't get Facebook for quite a while. I'm sure YOLO/FOMO have something to so with why people are reporting addiction symptoms though. I've seen adults who can't wait on a train platform for 10 minutes without instinctively picking up their phones. Actually, try 10 seconds -- nobody talks anymore, or stares out into space daydreaming, or god forbid has a conversation with a stranger.
Sears actually put in a financial statement a couple weeks ago that they don't feel confident they're going to make it. Macy's is on the way out as well. This is a shift I never thought I'd see and it seems to be happening at an extremely fast pace. Given how bad the reports are on how Amazon is as an employer, I'm assuming they're just preparing to hire a bunch of desperate people suddenly thrown out of their jobs and willing to take anything.
I guess it's OK that they're hiring 30,000 part-timers, but the reality is that people who have gone beyond the college or high school student phase of their lives need full time work with benefits. Also, a lot of these jobs are probably in their "fulfillment centers" where people are working like robots in warehouses, while Amazon figures out how to replace them with actual robots.
No matter how many gig economy jobs you string together, nothing is going to make life easy for a family whose workers are only working part time and have no benefits. It's like we haven't learned anything in the last 100 years since the Gilded Age was put to bed. This rapidly accelerating destruction of retail is probably just the first wave of what will be an extended period of massive unemployment. We had better figure out something for all these people to do quickly, or give them a basic income and call it a day. Otherwise the guillotines are going to make a comeback...
An optimistic view of this situation would be that these tech companies are trying to avoid the monoculture that occurs when all of your employees went to the same 10 or 15 schools, are white, Asian or Indian males, all got near-perfect SAT scores and GPAs, and all have the exact same ideas on how to approach a problem. Google used to only hire top-10 CS graduates for a while in its early history. I think what tech companies are trying to do is to get out of the mindset that no one could possibly be useful without a masters in CS from Stanford, CMU, MIT, etc. It's possible they're just chasing cheap labor -- high school grads would be very happy to have a job that pays anything near what an IT or dev job does. It's also very possible that they're just having trouble finding enough people by limiting their pool of workers to those CS graduates. There's a really big tech bubble that's been inflating for years, and it's just like the one in the late 90s. Back then, if you could spell HTML or did even basic sysadmin work, you were hopping from job to job every 6 months for huge raises.
I'm in IT, and IT tends to have way more people who don't have degrees. Some do really well and have enough drive to teach themselves very advanced stuff. But like development, IT has a lot of technician work and a little bit of design/engineering work. If you work for a typical large company doing IT support (sysadmin, etc.) then you're basically chasing down answers to support tickets in a very narrow subdivision of the company's IT environment. Smaller companies' sysadmins do a lot more jobs, and have to know a little about everything because they don't have hundreds of people each doing one little thing. Those who break out of the support ticket mold end up designing new systems for projects, enhancing the existing environment, and generally do more interesting work. This requires skills beyond the basics, and in my mind having some kind of degree helps mold a person's mind into thinking this way. One thing I really like about my job is the ability to teach junior admins and other IT staff how to make that next career move, and it's obvious to me that people who have had some exposure to post-secondary education work out better. It's not a guarantee, and people without degrees can have the same drive required to pick up something new fast. Here's a perfect example from my life -- IT is shifting both from on-site to cloud and from traditional silos to "DevOps." This is 2 huge shifts for many IT people; I'm learning as fast as I can and teaching others as I go, and it's very clear to me who's going to get it and who isn't.
Am I a cheerleader for higher education? Yeah, maybe I am. While it's unfair to not give people who have a degree a chance, I think there's definitely valid reasons to get one today even with the high cost and possible negative ROI. I don't think everyone needs one, but your career prospects will be much better with one than without. I work for a company with many employees who have extremely long service (20+ years) and who are every bit as good as people with degrees, but they don't have one because you didn't need one back in the day. When those people get laid off, unless they have a professional network to fall back on they're screwed...no one cold calling for a job will get past the first HR filter of a college degree no matter how good they are.
In my opinion, education is what you make of it. If you screw around for 4 years and graduate with some worthless degree and no skills, you're still going to have trouble finding work. If you use your time wisely, show interest beyond the basics, etc. companies looking to hire will notice that.
Like them or not, Uber has succeeded in their quest for ubiquitous brand recognition. They're the "Kleenex" of taxi-hailing apps. I work a lot with people who travel extensively for business, and Uber is practically a verb in their vocabularies -- "I'll just uber to the airport" They're offering new American Express cardmembers $200 in free rides just to drive everyone else out of the business, including their direct competitors and taxi companies. And, they're charging extremely low rates, offering tons of promotions, etc. Once you get big enough and are backed by enough VC money, it's pretty much over.
Even if Uber is found to have stolen the documents, they'll just peel off a million bucks from the VC pile and move on.
We're rolling out Windows 10 in a very low-bandwidth environment, and in some cases a no-bandwidth environment. (Yes, they still exist today!) Turning off telemetry was one of the reasons we upgraded the OEM licenses from Pro to Enterprise -- there's just no need to use precious connection time sending usage data to Microsoft. And yes, that means "paying twice" for the OS, once to the OEM and once for the Enterprise subscription.
In my opinion, Microsoft did a very poor job of communicating what the difference between Home, Pro and Enterprise was. Basically, anyone with Home and Pro is getting the OS for "free" in exchange for telemetry data and information they can sell to marketers, period. Pro is Home with the ability to join a classic AD domain. This is very different from the days of Windows 7, where Pro had enough features to make it the default OS for business deployment. What Microsoft is doing is pulling more and more features under Enterprise, including the ability to opt out of constant feature changes. The result is that most large companies are buying Enterprise upgrades and getting on the subscription treadmill.
I think the best thing they could do right now is to let anybody buy the Enterprise version as a one-off, or make a complete shut-off of the telemetry available but slightly difficult to find in every edition of the OS. Even if they made the telemetry controllable by a few hard to find registry keys, the vast majority of consumers wouldn't touch any of the default settings and they'd still be getting data from them. Microsoft just got done "giving away" Windows 10 to millions of Windows 7 and 8 users in the form of the free upgrade, and the indication is that they will be on the same major release forever from now on, just releasing big update packages once or twice a year. Enterprise customers are subsidizing this development by still paying license fees in the form of subscriptions -- those millions of PCs that were upgraded for free only have the revenue stream of the marketing data coming in until they're replaced. And if Microsoft sticks to their promises, there will be no more revenue for traditional boxed software upgrades either -- no Windows 11 release they can ship out on DVDs to stores is coming.
Do I like being a product for marketing companies to mine data on? Not really -- and I do think Microsoft should be transparent about why they're doing what they're doing. I think all the companies doing this (Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc.) are going to have to find a new way to operate once the social media and advertising bubbles pop too...right now all of them are subsidizing their phone OS development with the fact that they have access to very personal data on a device you carry with you 24 hours a day.
When I went to school a long time ago, I knew a lot of people who would sign up for the absolute maximum amount of loans they could -- way more than tuition costs. The government would pay the university directly, and students would get the extra balance back in a check (this was the mid-90s, we still had checks back then.:-) ) a couple weeks into the semester. Said students would then turn around and buy cars, booze, expensive apartment rents, etc. and just run up the tab their whole time there. I remember on "disbursement day" seeing lines out the door at the student accounts office waiting for their money.
Yes, tuition is stupid expensive now, and you can't swing it with a summer job anymore. But, how many students are borrowing the max, and using it to live large? I'm definitely saving as much as I can for my kids' educations so they don't have to go through the whole debt millstone. I graduated with a relatively small amount of debt and it was still a drag on my income starting out. Crippling? No, but I certainly wasn't able to save much before I got my first few raises.
Everyone loves to say that not everyone needs college, and I do think that's true. We need more trade guild style apprenticeships to feed the skilled labor pipeline. But for those who are going to end up in more involved fields, I still think college is a good way to gain the maturity and self-reliance you need in a controlled environment. If every low-skill job is going to be automated, then you'd better be on the side doing the automating or else life is going to be miserable. Do I use anything I studied in college directly for work? Not really, I'm in IT and studied chemistry. But, I did learn how to tackle a brand new problem, deal with crappy bureaucracy and unfair insider/office politics, and gained the ability to stick to a task and learn new things fast. Those are skills any employer should be looking for, not JavaScript Framework of the Month, but the ability to learn 5 of them in a year.
The company I work for is a light user of H-1B visas, mainly as a way to get foriegn workers into the US to work on different projects. From what I've heard, there's already some sort of "Labor Certification" process that is basically a bunch of hoops to jump through. I'm not sure how this would be different -- the lawyers filing the requirements just make up the information on those requirements. This is the kind of stuff where you see companies posting jobs in some obscure newspaper classified section with absurd requirements, designed to show that they couldn't find any US citizen willing to do the job.
I can definitely see "computer programmer" applications changing to "IT Architect" or "DevOps Engineer" or "Systems Engineer" quickly -- which still leaves us IT folks out of any reform. I've said before that I think the program itself is OK as originally intended -- a safety valve to bring in someone with known skills. The problem is the body shops and large companies who use it to fill low-end positions cheaply. As someone who's "older" and enjoys teaching newbies how not to screw up in IT positions, I really don't want to see the end of low-level employment in IT. How do you ever get up to the level of experience you actually need to be a senior guy if you don't have a ladder of low-level jobs to start with? I've done help desk, desktop support, data center operator monkey, sysadmin and I'm finally in a good engineering spot. If we don't have a pipeline of newbies, no one is going to understand the nuts and bolts you need to know to progress.
I think most of the stagnation is due to the fact that most college graduates are having to take lower-paying jobs. In the past, large companies were happy to take in new college graduates for entry-level jobs. Big companies paid relatively big salaries, and the recipient of that entry level job could either use it to rise in that company, or put it on their resume and move on to another.
These days, there's just not a lot of entry level work that pays well. Big companies are outsourcing and offshoring the stuff that new grads used to do, and the jobs that remain onshore are with service providers. Those providers squeeze every single penny out of every outsourcing deal they make, and one of the ways they do that is to pay workers less and give them crappy benefits. For those who aren't lucky enough to get one of these jobs, yes, Starbucks awaits. The early 90s had a similar problem -- large companies had just killed huge swaths of their employees because computers were starting to automate processes that would require tons of manual work. College grads who would have gotten some faceless cubicle job a generation prior and used it as a stepping stone to prosperity all of a sudden didn't have that option. I'm pretty sure that's where the word McJob came from -- educated people forced to take low-paying, low-skill work because there wasn't a demand for educated people.
I'm foolishly hoping that one day MBA schools will start teaching students that it's better overall to have everything done in-house with employees you control. Accounting rules and tax laws would have to change to incentivize hiring large staffs, but I definitely think everyone, including executives on down to the lowest level employee, were happier when everyone who made the investment in education had the chance to earn a good wage.
Maybe when the FTC gets hold of this merger, it'll be approved solely on the merits of "job creation." Let me explain...
I've had the full experience of working for companies that hired Accenture and the other large management consulting firms over my career. Over the course of working with people, you get to talking. Almost every single client facing employee they have on-shore is a recent college graduate. These firms are structured very much like other professional services firms -- you need to be in them from the beginning of your career (unless they're hiring you for a limited skill set they can't offshore or teach to a new grad.) The consultancies want to get new hires before they've had a chance to learn any other company's "bad habits." As a result, they need a constant pipeline of fresh new college graduates, which could be touted as "job creation."
My experience has been that Accenture and the like has a crack team of partners who bring in their A-Team senior consultants to sell the dream to executives. Once the contract is signed, the partners and the A-Team are replaced with a C-Team full of Joe/Jane Average clones. One of the other reasons they hire recent grads is the fact that all of them fly to client sites, then fly home on weekends, for most of the year. The on-site people are solely responsible for project managing, presenting PowerPoints, and collecting requirements. Any actual work that needs to be done is sent to India or other cheap "delivery centers." So, it makes sense -- you have a guaranteed employment sink for new grads with business degrees, and can point to it as "saving domestic jobs."
One thing that would be strange is how Oracle would manage them. A funny thing I've heard from multiple Accenture employees is that there's an actual indoctrination session before they send you in front of clients. Because they're just getting raw graduates, absolutely everything is taught, such as how to dress, what language to use in front of customers, and a mini-MBA school. (I think this is why you see so many young-ish people in identical dark suits hanging out in airport lounges loudly discussing synergies on conference calls.) This would be an interesting clash with Oracle's sales culture, but it makes sense. They would have a ready resource to sell right along with their ERP software -- and there would be zero incentive whatsoever for Oracle to make the software implementable by end users. (This is SAP's MO by the way, Oracle is just stealing it.)
These days, almost every single small consumer product is made in China or similar countries. Factories turn out the same electronics for Apple, Lenovo, Dell, etc. and the only differentiation is the case and branding. It wouldn't surprise me if there were one or two massive golf ball factories turning out millions of balls a month, and just slapping the Titleist or Nike or Kirkland Signature logo on a slightly differentiated design. This happens a lot in electronics too -- Cisco's contract manufacturers sell non-official Cisco gear all the time at a cut-rate price; same exact specs but no support if Cisco finds out.
In the consumer space, this reminds me of businesses like Dollar Shave Club or similar. If you buy fancy razors and razor blades from Gillette or Schick or whatever, you'll pay insane prices even in bulk for an extremely basic consumer good. The question is whether or not the cheaper substitute good really is directly stealing patented designs. Companies do have to make money back on their research -- I guess the question is how much of a golf ball design really is a trade secret.
It also speaks volumes about the "power of brands." People will happily pay Apple multiples of what their devices are worth just to have an Apple product. BMW owners pay through the nose for their cars, then pay through the nose again to get them fixed just because they're proprietary and expensive. I don't really care where my razor blades or golf balls come from, but I'm sure there are rabid Titleist fans out there too who would never be caught dead with Costco balls. I'm actually surprised that there's a market for cheap golf balls given how much disposable income you need to have to play golf these days. You need to belong to a country club, buy thousands of dollars worth of equipment, and have hours of free time at your disposal, something most people don't have.
I'm glad someone is publishing information that confirms what I've found to be true for years. Force-fitting people together and making them build something in rapid-fire fashion with half-thought out ideas doesn't make for a good experience. Anyone who's ever worked with me knows that my approach to a problem is to identify what's wrong, go have a think on it, do some research and present a semi-formed opinion/argument for discussion. Most of my job these days is reading and writing...and my backlog of reading is extremely long. But, coming to the table with a little knowledge on the subject is better than having people blurt out the first thing that comes to their mind. At best it's not fully thought out, and at worst people are just saying whatever they can think of to avoid not saying something.
Now, can we please fund some studies on how bad "open workspace" offices are for productivity? They may work great for salespeople, marketing folks or 25 year olds pulling all nighters and shooting Nerf guns at each other...but a real workplace needs a mix of environments. You need a quiet personal space to make phone calls, read or work on things. You also need the ability to host a small group in something less formal than a meeting room. I hate to use the word "stand up" or "scrum" because there's all sorts of negative connotations around that. But, having something where people are just human to each other instead of being project management robots is a good way to exchange ideas. I can't tell you how many multi-hour meetings I've sat in with project managers who are using the exact same phrases from their PMP training manuals. I've never taken the coursework for PMP, but I seriously think all PMs are told "this is the exact language you must use when coming to Stage 2.3.5.22 of your Generic Software Project Plan."
There's a range of intelligence and skill no matter where you go. The high end there is like the high end in the US -- there will always be very smart people. However, we do get exposed to a lot of the low end. The body shops (IBM, CSC/HP/EDS, Accenture, Wipro, etc.) are a revolving door for training new graduates...you might get one or two people who have a good grasp on the work they're doing, but the good ones tend to leave quickly. Body shop H-1Bs are a step beyond that, since they were able to do well enough to be sent to interact directly with the customer...but still not ideal. Direct hires (i.e. opening and running the Bangalore division of the company) tend to produce the best results, but there's still the turnover problem, time difference and communications issues.
Of course, this is assuming you're dealing with the typical offshore services customer. Most have no clue about IT or software dev, don't want to know about it since "it's not their core competency" and don't have the ability to objectively evaluate work quality. I can definitely see this being a problem if someone wants true Silicon Valley engineer material for $8600 a year. When I think of that, I think of someone building large chunks of functionality from scratch, not a run of the mill DBA or sysadmin or.NET/Java developer. Just because of a massive economic imbalance, you don't get to change the "Fast, good or cheap, pick 2" classic engineering adage.
The interesting thing will be what happens long-term. Wages in the US and Europe are probably going to continue to stagnate or collapse altogether, and costs will only go up in developing countries. There's going to have to be some equilibrium established...it's not sustainable for someone in Silicon Valley to command $250K+ for what amounts to routine work, and it's not good for either country when companies (whether or not they know better) see the ability to hire for less than minimum wage and just dump all domestic employees.
American society has always had the obsession on self-reliance, but I'm glad people are starting to see gig economy jobs for what they are. The question is what we do when the possibilities of realistically supporting yourself evaporate completely, and we go back to a semi-feudal system -- the nobles having all the power and letting the peasants who serve them exist at the bare minimum standard.
For decades in the US, the formula was simple: - If you're smart, go to college and study anything. A large company will hire you at the entry level and take you through to the end of your career - If you're semi-skilled, go to trade school, become an apprentice and join a trade union; there will be work until you retire. - If you're less skilled, go join a union and work in a factory -- same deal, there will always be work.
It seems to me like this is gone, and no one noticed until now, or brushed it off. The modern economy is built around steady paychecks -- people can't buy a house for cash, they have to get a mortgage and pay it off as they earn. Same thing for consumer credit...no one is going to go into debt if they feel they can't pay for it, and debt is what drives the economy to some extent.
Steady paychecks are one of the reasons I've stayed out of the IT contracting world, even though I've been told I'd be excellent at it. It's stressful worrying about your job, or where the money is going to come from, and having to constantly hustle to find new work.
I've worked for big companies most of my career, and regular employees making purchases, signing contracts, etc. takes an act of God. I can't spend $100 on supplies without getting competitive bids. But there are apparently some very stupid people who have full unrestricted access to the bank accounts.
How do people fall for phishing scams anymore? Everyone has to know this by now -- never trust email requesting you to do anything involving linking to a website, sending money, etc. This could have all been resolved by someone calling and asking if they should really pay this $8 million "invoice" with an irreversible wire transfer.
It reminds me of how people were talking about the Podesta email incident as some massively complex hacking job. It wasn't -- they found out he still used Yahoo Mail and phished him. I can't believe that (a) one of the most powerful political operatives in the Clinton campaign uses Yahoo Mail, and (b) that he fell for it.
I hope the union members get what they want. People are all too willing to give up all of their bargaining power and be at the mercy of employers. I happen to be one of those strange people who would like to see a little more loyalty on the part of both employers and employees. It's not good for either side to have a revolving door - employers lose valuable trained people, employees become modern-day Okies migrating from employer to employer with no consistency in their lives. If you have that loyalty, and a good work environment, and good salary/benefits, then you wouldn't need a union. Unfortunately, we're back on the other side of the pendulum now, and I think it might be time for collective bargaining to make a comeback.
Think about it rationally -- even if you're the l33test, baddest full-stack DevOps Ninja out there, you're still at the mercy of an employer who is actively trying to pay you as little as possible. If you work in Silicon Valley, you're in a salary bubble right now because Apps! Wait until the bubble pops and employers have their pick of 500 DevOps Ninjas, some of whom are willing to work for practically nothing. Or, they have their pick of thousands of H-1B candidates who work for even less, or could just have all the Ninja-ing done in India and pay less than that! And of course, all that savings goes directly into their pockets, increasing the income disparity and making life miserable for everyone except the executives. I don't think there's anything wrong with a union standing up and fighting against the offshoring of their jobs...or look how many IT jobs might have been saved had the H-1B visa been lobbied against. This is what unions do.
Face it, everybody needs a job, and everybody needs a job whose salary keeps up with inflation and lets them earn more as they age. Society is set up around this, and it's not going to change easily. No one is going to buy houses anymore once they see they can't count on their employers to keep them employed. People won't even take out car loans if they don't feel they have income to pay them back. Unless we have a nuclear war and have to rebuild the system with 1% of the population, you're not going to get people to give up using money to transfer value amongst themselves. I think unions and professional organizations are a good limiting factor on the unchecked greed of business owners. No business owner is going to be nice and share their profits equitably among their workers unless something forces them to. A union is an employee's best hope of getting as many table scraps from the executive dining room table as possible -- no one employee, not even a DevOps Ninja, will get the management class to give in to anything they want.
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Employer/employee loyalty is the thing that has to improve first -- then OJT will move beyond an experiment. Back in the good old days, employers would take recent college grads and even recent high school grads, knowing they were only getting raw material, and train them to their standards. Now employers see employees who will jump to the competition in 6 months or less just because they're upset about something or will get a small raise. Because of that, training is a liability and they'd rather hire consultants who may or may not have lied about their level of experience.
Employers need to come to the table too. We need to stop the constant cycle of layoffs and offshoring and maintain a reasonable level of steady employment. If employees feel safe in a job, they'll worry less about finding another one and worry more about doing a good job in the current one. This is one thing from the old days I'd like to see come back -- employers would have to think very hard about hiring someone because they'd at least have some sort of commitment to them.
Training on the job and starting in the bottom of an organization aren't totally dead. I know a lot of people who work for the state university system. Here in NY, university professional staff are effectively tenured the same way faculty are, after a long probationary period and having to convince your department to nominate you. Training is an accepted part of life in this environment because they're keeping the employees whether or not they're skilled up. In this case, it makes perfect sense to invest in employees because you'd rather have a good loyal employee than one who knows you can't get rid of them and doesn't advance their career.
Also, CS degrees are probably overkill for most web programming jobs that LinkedIn typically hires for. You may need a CS degree to write their deep learning algorithm that maps your connections and mines them for data, but you don't need one to be a JavaScript monkey cranking out the front end stuff. I'm in IT, with a chemistry degree, and the only thing I use from my degree is the ability to methodically break down a problem and troubleshoot. It's helpful but I know plenty of older iT people who have no degree or a completely unrelated to CS degree, and they do well.
Social security will most likely be around in some form, and may have to be expanded at some point to cover the realities that no one is saving on their own. I'm not worried about the baby boomers or the generation after -- they all have pensions and will most likely die off quicker than future generations will. Just think of how many people smoked in the 50s compared to today, or drank themselves into oblivion after work every night, or spent the late 60s on drugs. Overall, they will have more health problems and the temporary bump up in social security payments will be short.
The problem becomes how to fund retirement of people who don't have pensions, haven't saved and will live much longer lives. I think at some point work as we know it will disappear for most people too, so we're in for a bad ride at least in the short term. I'm saving, mainly because I don't want to depend solely on social security as my only retirement income, but most younger people aren't because they can't. But, when almost everyone of average intelligence has no useful skill to sell employers, massive unemployment will be the bigger problem. That's where I think a universal income will have to come in. It would have to be something like social security disability, but not for a physical disability. I'm not sure how palatable that would be -- you'd basically be saying that half the population is mentally handicapped, but I think that's the reality we're headed towards. You're not going to take a truck driver, factory worker or customer service person and teach them software development or data science.
"He went from happy engineer to suicide in less than five months?"
If you don't have them already, have kids and get back to me. I'm very lucky that my wife has a great job as well, but I know lots of people with a family to support who are constantly worried. Even if you're not in debt up to your eyeballs (we're not,) it adds a lot of stress to your life. I have to live my life as if I'm going to lose my job at a moment's notice, because that's the world we live in now. Quadruple that stress if your spouse doesn't work, and add more on for each kid. It's not a sign of weakness; it's a sign of being a responsible person in my mind. Worrying about what happens to your family has to come first when you decide to go down that path. I feel bad for Mr. Thomas, because you have to be in a pretty dark place to feel like your life insurance policy is the best thing you can contribute.
I know it's an anachronism, but I do think things were better when people had more stable work and were able to stay with employers for a longer period of time. These days, it just seems like the cycles of boom and bust are increasing in frequency, and the amount of time it takes companies to cut employees or offshore just keeps getting shorter. I think I'm one of the only people who advocate for lifetime employment and no-layoff policies, but we had this only a few decades ago and life was much better. When people feel stable in their jobs they can relax, buy houses, buy cars, take vacations, etc. Now, we're more data-driven than ever and companies are using this to squeeze people harder.
Coming from the New York metro area, I know how insane cost of living is compared to other parts of the country. Generally, New York, Boston, Washington DC, Chicago and of course California cost way more to live in than just about anywhere else. Part of it is taxes, part of it is because that's where all the high-salary jobs tend to gravitate to, but the reality is that a $170K salary in San Francisco is barely above middle class. Rent in SF proper is more expensive than anywhere outside Midtown Manhattan, and houses start in the million dollar range and go up from there. California has great weather, but I would never live there for that reason. I already pay a lot for a house in a suburb about 60 miles from the city -- I love living here but there would be no way I could justify paying more than double what I'm already paying to buy a house.
I think the fact that this person moved from Georgia to California without demanding a much higher salary is a huge contributor to his stress. Uber isn't exactly known as a warm and fuzzy employer either -- it sounds like a carbon copy of all the other frathouse startups from Bubbles 1.0 and 2.0. Anyone who's older and different in an environment like that is going to have a hard time fitting in. If you can't do 16-hour coding sessions while playing beer pong, you're an outsider, but will still be expected to perform the same way as everyone else. Older people who have worked a fair amount usually realize when they're being taken advantage of, but what if this guy just felt he couldn't leave? Having a potential lottery ticket in the form of stock options is a big reason lots of people stay in the crazy startup culture. With a family to support, and the feeling that he'd fail if he had to go back to Atlanta, no wonder he lost it.
That's one of the reasons I'd never work at a startup -- there's zero work life balance, no stability and the "if we wanted you to have a family, we would have issued you one" culture. Seriously, I'm older and have seen how companies take advantage of employees -- I prefer to work hard enough to have an employer want to keep me, but not give my life over to them. That's for suckers!
"How about we just go back to capitalism and let shit fix itself?"
That's the problem -- this time, it can't. The average level of intelligence doesn't support full employment of people for the jobs that are left over after automation fully takes hold. For those that make it over this hurdle, the business owners controlling access to the few remaining jobs are going to realize their position and work to keep employment as low as possible, increasing their profits.
Businesses are greedy - they don't want to employ anyone. Fast food restaurants would happily replace all of their employees with robots and kiosks if they could, and this is the low end (minimum wage level) of employment. It gets even worse for knowledge workers -- this is why businesses offshore or push for visa programs that allow for cheaper labor.
"Is there even any point in getting an education if you know that the state will provide everything - and that there probably won't be any jobs for you anyway?"
I think that the point of these programs isn't to entirely replace the income that you would get by working an average job. I think it's more along the lines of softening the crushing experience of having to live on US-level unemployment benefits if you lose your job. Going down from your current salary to $410/week for what could be an extended period of time is something most people can't just cover out of savings, etc. Once you lose your income and access to credit, then start losing your possessions, life starts getting much harder.
What will be even more interesting is seeing what the plan is for dealing with the people who are just useless and can't be retrained for another "hip, modern" industry. You're not going to take a factory worker who's spent 20 years assembling the same set of parts and teach them to be a software developer, even a code monkey position isn't attainable without at least some aptitude. I'd say the humane thing to do would be to put them on the equivalent of Social Security Disability income for the rest of their lives. Many 50 year olds who are experiencing age discrimination are having to fake disability claims to bridge the gap between the "unhireable" phase of their work life and retirement, so this would provide them the same benefits and reduce fraudulent claims for the actual disability program.
I think that countries, states, or whatever geographic boundaries you prefer deciding to do something about massive unemployment/underemployment before chaos ensues is a good plan. Society falls apart around 20% unemployment and we're headed towards way more than that. I know some people are predicting that another massive shift will happen that allows people to continue to be employed, but I don't see it. The first time we didn't have something readily available to take up the slack that automation produced was the early 90s. During that time in the US, all the big companies went on a massive downsizing spree, dumping all the low-skilled clerical workers onto unemployment. We managed to get through this change, but now the pace of technology change that allows for fewer human workers is getting much faster. Now it's not just low-skill work, but mid-level knowledge work as well. After being told they'd never amount to anything unless they went to college, millions of corporate employees are going to be out on the street with no way to make money.
I think implementing basic income buys us time to let the age groups who've had to build their lives around wealth accumulation and a career ladder age out. The work-for-money-for-stuff way to run your life has been around for ages and I don't think most people know of any way to meaningfully contribute to society outside of that. Unless you want to propose how we kill money and wealth as a measure of success and buying power, this is the best way to solve a very difficult problem. If we don't do it, the divide between rich and poor is going to get to an unsustainable level, possibly at levels seen around the Gilded Age or French Revolution timeframes. That won't end well for anyone.
I have no idea what it is with startup founders -- they all seem to be playing in the same swamp. I guess it's the corporate veil -- it's amazing how much power company owners have compared to individuals. It's pretty obvious that Theranos' technology was a complete fraud. Maybe it didn't start out that way, but somewhere along the way they must have realized that they can't reproduce the results that conventional equipment gave. It must have been much more pleasant to take investors' money and live large for a while longer than it would be to admit failure.
It's not just billion-dollar startups, or megacorporations either. Even the smallest businesses seem to be dishonest to some degree, and I think it really is the fact that a corporation is a separate entity that enjoys personhood under the law. I know so many people who are running little incorporated side businesses and paying zero taxes, or funneling all of their personal purchases through the company to hide any profits. I think that once someone realizes that no one's looking and they're responsible for financial reporting, there's an intense desire to cheat. To me, this is what makes business owners' complaints about over-regulation and taxes ring hollow. Businesses don't pay tax the same way individuals do, and over-regulation to me amounts to filling out paperwork that your accounting software can fill out for you automatically. Business owners are getting such a good deal compared to standard wage-earners; they have no reason to complain.
One of the things that "IT Pros" as Microsoft calls us have been complaining about is the unpredictable nature of updates to Windows 10 and Office. It sounds like this is a nod to the fact that not everyone is using cutting-edge software that updates at the same pace, or using common consumer applications. Corporate IT is still very different from consumer IT. Most places have started modernizing, but the reality is that big companies aren't ever going to be going at the same pace as web startups delivering a consumer phone app.
Large companies and niche users of Windows still need to deal with compatibility problems, and knowing that Microsoft isn't going to change the way the OS works randomly from month to month gives IT groups time to test applications. You might say that only LUDDITES use desktop software and that everyone is using Apps! But, even though Apps! are becoming more prevalent, companies aren't ditching every single desktop application. Some have been running for ages and don't really need Appifying, or require significant costs to Appify. Before Windows 10, Windows was all about backward compatibility and a stable platform. That changed as they were chasing the mobile phone market, but maybe they're seeing that they have to cater both the consumer and corporate user now.
If Microsoft really plans to not make money on client OS licensing for upgraded versions anymore, maybe this is also an attempt to rein in the constant stream of new feature development they must be doing. Adding features just for fun at a rapid pace is a recipe for security vulnerabilities...developers don't want to be bothered with writing something secure when something functional will do.
I think that's the main point of the whole TED thing -- even if it is mostly a bunch of attention-seeking folks and academics desperately trying to promote themselves. The analysis is correct -- there isn't a lot of mainstream substantive discussion of things beyond politics and pop culture. You really have to go seek it out, and things like social media amplify the divide between intellectual and entertaining conversation.
One of the things I really don't like about social media is its tendency to separate the easily led among us into little camps. Because Facebook and other platforms know exactly what stimuli we will respond to, content they know we like is fed our way with little chance to break out of the echo chamber. Add to that the constant drumbeat of bad news, regardless of political side/opinion, and people can't be faulted for assuming the world is going to end tomorrow. It also doesn't help that there's a very strong current of anti-intellectualism among some sectors of the population. For some, universities are seen as bastions of evil, liberal progressive ideas -- not exactly the kind of opinion that fosters the sharing of ideas.
I have mentioned previously on here (and been blasted for it!) that social media is destroying the ability for the average person to relate to others. I've been told I'm too politically correct and everyone should be allowed to shout whatever they want at each other. If politically correct means "I don't want people's default posture to be acting like a bunch of hyenas to each other" then I guess I'm PC. I just want to see my technocratic government implemented at least once before I die -- instead of a bunch of lying politicians, hire the people with the best ideas and make rules based only on facts. Life would be much more peaceful with a bunch of engineers running things. People might actually study things like STEM without thinking about whether their careers will end when they turn 40, or whether all the work will be offshored by the time they graduate.
Just like every new technology changes culture, the smartphone era has its positive and negative changes in how people behave. We went from computers being nerd toys and business machines, to absolutely everyone having a computer in their pockets 24 hours a day, and it's only been about 9 or 10 years. Those of us working from the higher side of the tech spectrum have had to deal with apps that are dumbed down far enough that a non-computer user can mash the screen and use them, and of course we have kids using them as the new TV. I know my kids are heavily into YouTube, etc. The positives in my mind are this -- it's super-easy to find information when you need it now, and even though 99.99999% of the communication is junk, it does provide limited opportunities to connect with others. Another negative is that people are expecting insanely complex business applications to act exactly like their consumer phone apps, making life in IT extra-fun.
As for "smartphone addiction" I have seen tantrums, etc. but I don't know about withdrawal symptoms. My kids love watching YouTube videos and playing games, but they know that when it's time to shut it of, it's time, and complaints get the phone put away for a while. I'm sure there are parents who don't care and park their kids in front of phones whenever they're not doing something. I've felt guilty lately because we're in the middle of moving and renovating a house, eating almost all our non-working lives -- and yes, I've been relying on it more as a tool so I can get some of the work done. (The kids are 3 and 6, their version of "helping" doesn't help at this stage.) But, I would hope most parents are remembering back to their days of being in front of the TV, or the Atari/Intellivision//NES/PlayStation. My poison was Intellivision and the VIC-20 back in the day -- I showed my older son some games in an emulator and he was...not impressed. :-) My mom and dad would just take it away when I'd had enough and make me go outside or do something non-tech related. I think most phone usage can be controlled in this way -- you're the parent, and you're paying the phone bills. Even if it's the kid's phone, it's still "yours" and they should remember that.
Just like everything, there has to be a balance. I'm not sure how much I like the narcissistic social media crap, but we're not at that stage yet. They don't get Facebook for quite a while. I'm sure YOLO/FOMO have something to so with why people are reporting addiction symptoms though. I've seen adults who can't wait on a train platform for 10 minutes without instinctively picking up their phones. Actually, try 10 seconds -- nobody talks anymore, or stares out into space daydreaming, or god forbid has a conversation with a stranger.
Sears actually put in a financial statement a couple weeks ago that they don't feel confident they're going to make it. Macy's is on the way out as well. This is a shift I never thought I'd see and it seems to be happening at an extremely fast pace. Given how bad the reports are on how Amazon is as an employer, I'm assuming they're just preparing to hire a bunch of desperate people suddenly thrown out of their jobs and willing to take anything.
I guess it's OK that they're hiring 30,000 part-timers, but the reality is that people who have gone beyond the college or high school student phase of their lives need full time work with benefits. Also, a lot of these jobs are probably in their "fulfillment centers" where people are working like robots in warehouses, while Amazon figures out how to replace them with actual robots.
No matter how many gig economy jobs you string together, nothing is going to make life easy for a family whose workers are only working part time and have no benefits. It's like we haven't learned anything in the last 100 years since the Gilded Age was put to bed. This rapidly accelerating destruction of retail is probably just the first wave of what will be an extended period of massive unemployment. We had better figure out something for all these people to do quickly, or give them a basic income and call it a day. Otherwise the guillotines are going to make a comeback...
An optimistic view of this situation would be that these tech companies are trying to avoid the monoculture that occurs when all of your employees went to the same 10 or 15 schools, are white, Asian or Indian males, all got near-perfect SAT scores and GPAs, and all have the exact same ideas on how to approach a problem. Google used to only hire top-10 CS graduates for a while in its early history. I think what tech companies are trying to do is to get out of the mindset that no one could possibly be useful without a masters in CS from Stanford, CMU, MIT, etc. It's possible they're just chasing cheap labor -- high school grads would be very happy to have a job that pays anything near what an IT or dev job does. It's also very possible that they're just having trouble finding enough people by limiting their pool of workers to those CS graduates. There's a really big tech bubble that's been inflating for years, and it's just like the one in the late 90s. Back then, if you could spell HTML or did even basic sysadmin work, you were hopping from job to job every 6 months for huge raises.
I'm in IT, and IT tends to have way more people who don't have degrees. Some do really well and have enough drive to teach themselves very advanced stuff. But like development, IT has a lot of technician work and a little bit of design/engineering work. If you work for a typical large company doing IT support (sysadmin, etc.) then you're basically chasing down answers to support tickets in a very narrow subdivision of the company's IT environment. Smaller companies' sysadmins do a lot more jobs, and have to know a little about everything because they don't have hundreds of people each doing one little thing. Those who break out of the support ticket mold end up designing new systems for projects, enhancing the existing environment, and generally do more interesting work. This requires skills beyond the basics, and in my mind having some kind of degree helps mold a person's mind into thinking this way. One thing I really like about my job is the ability to teach junior admins and other IT staff how to make that next career move, and it's obvious to me that people who have had some exposure to post-secondary education work out better. It's not a guarantee, and people without degrees can have the same drive required to pick up something new fast. Here's a perfect example from my life -- IT is shifting both from on-site to cloud and from traditional silos to "DevOps." This is 2 huge shifts for many IT people; I'm learning as fast as I can and teaching others as I go, and it's very clear to me who's going to get it and who isn't.
Am I a cheerleader for higher education? Yeah, maybe I am. While it's unfair to not give people who have a degree a chance, I think there's definitely valid reasons to get one today even with the high cost and possible negative ROI. I don't think everyone needs one, but your career prospects will be much better with one than without. I work for a company with many employees who have extremely long service (20+ years) and who are every bit as good as people with degrees, but they don't have one because you didn't need one back in the day. When those people get laid off, unless they have a professional network to fall back on they're screwed...no one cold calling for a job will get past the first HR filter of a college degree no matter how good they are.
In my opinion, education is what you make of it. If you screw around for 4 years and graduate with some worthless degree and no skills, you're still going to have trouble finding work. If you use your time wisely, show interest beyond the basics, etc. companies looking to hire will notice that.
Like them or not, Uber has succeeded in their quest for ubiquitous brand recognition. They're the "Kleenex" of taxi-hailing apps. I work a lot with people who travel extensively for business, and Uber is practically a verb in their vocabularies -- "I'll just uber to the airport" They're offering new American Express cardmembers $200 in free rides just to drive everyone else out of the business, including their direct competitors and taxi companies. And, they're charging extremely low rates, offering tons of promotions, etc. Once you get big enough and are backed by enough VC money, it's pretty much over.
Even if Uber is found to have stolen the documents, they'll just peel off a million bucks from the VC pile and move on.
We're rolling out Windows 10 in a very low-bandwidth environment, and in some cases a no-bandwidth environment. (Yes, they still exist today!) Turning off telemetry was one of the reasons we upgraded the OEM licenses from Pro to Enterprise -- there's just no need to use precious connection time sending usage data to Microsoft. And yes, that means "paying twice" for the OS, once to the OEM and once for the Enterprise subscription.
In my opinion, Microsoft did a very poor job of communicating what the difference between Home, Pro and Enterprise was. Basically, anyone with Home and Pro is getting the OS for "free" in exchange for telemetry data and information they can sell to marketers, period. Pro is Home with the ability to join a classic AD domain. This is very different from the days of Windows 7, where Pro had enough features to make it the default OS for business deployment. What Microsoft is doing is pulling more and more features under Enterprise, including the ability to opt out of constant feature changes. The result is that most large companies are buying Enterprise upgrades and getting on the subscription treadmill.
I think the best thing they could do right now is to let anybody buy the Enterprise version as a one-off, or make a complete shut-off of the telemetry available but slightly difficult to find in every edition of the OS. Even if they made the telemetry controllable by a few hard to find registry keys, the vast majority of consumers wouldn't touch any of the default settings and they'd still be getting data from them. Microsoft just got done "giving away" Windows 10 to millions of Windows 7 and 8 users in the form of the free upgrade, and the indication is that they will be on the same major release forever from now on, just releasing big update packages once or twice a year. Enterprise customers are subsidizing this development by still paying license fees in the form of subscriptions -- those millions of PCs that were upgraded for free only have the revenue stream of the marketing data coming in until they're replaced. And if Microsoft sticks to their promises, there will be no more revenue for traditional boxed software upgrades either -- no Windows 11 release they can ship out on DVDs to stores is coming.
Do I like being a product for marketing companies to mine data on? Not really -- and I do think Microsoft should be transparent about why they're doing what they're doing. I think all the companies doing this (Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc.) are going to have to find a new way to operate once the social media and advertising bubbles pop too...right now all of them are subsidizing their phone OS development with the fact that they have access to very personal data on a device you carry with you 24 hours a day.
When I went to school a long time ago, I knew a lot of people who would sign up for the absolute maximum amount of loans they could -- way more than tuition costs. The government would pay the university directly, and students would get the extra balance back in a check (this was the mid-90s, we still had checks back then. :-) ) a couple weeks into the semester. Said students would then turn around and buy cars, booze, expensive apartment rents, etc. and just run up the tab their whole time there. I remember on "disbursement day" seeing lines out the door at the student accounts office waiting for their money.
Yes, tuition is stupid expensive now, and you can't swing it with a summer job anymore. But, how many students are borrowing the max, and using it to live large? I'm definitely saving as much as I can for my kids' educations so they don't have to go through the whole debt millstone. I graduated with a relatively small amount of debt and it was still a drag on my income starting out. Crippling? No, but I certainly wasn't able to save much before I got my first few raises.
Everyone loves to say that not everyone needs college, and I do think that's true. We need more trade guild style apprenticeships to feed the skilled labor pipeline. But for those who are going to end up in more involved fields, I still think college is a good way to gain the maturity and self-reliance you need in a controlled environment. If every low-skill job is going to be automated, then you'd better be on the side doing the automating or else life is going to be miserable. Do I use anything I studied in college directly for work? Not really, I'm in IT and studied chemistry. But, I did learn how to tackle a brand new problem, deal with crappy bureaucracy and unfair insider/office politics, and gained the ability to stick to a task and learn new things fast. Those are skills any employer should be looking for, not JavaScript Framework of the Month, but the ability to learn 5 of them in a year.
The company I work for is a light user of H-1B visas, mainly as a way to get foriegn workers into the US to work on different projects. From what I've heard, there's already some sort of "Labor Certification" process that is basically a bunch of hoops to jump through. I'm not sure how this would be different -- the lawyers filing the requirements just make up the information on those requirements. This is the kind of stuff where you see companies posting jobs in some obscure newspaper classified section with absurd requirements, designed to show that they couldn't find any US citizen willing to do the job.
I can definitely see "computer programmer" applications changing to "IT Architect" or "DevOps Engineer" or "Systems Engineer" quickly -- which still leaves us IT folks out of any reform. I've said before that I think the program itself is OK as originally intended -- a safety valve to bring in someone with known skills. The problem is the body shops and large companies who use it to fill low-end positions cheaply. As someone who's "older" and enjoys teaching newbies how not to screw up in IT positions, I really don't want to see the end of low-level employment in IT. How do you ever get up to the level of experience you actually need to be a senior guy if you don't have a ladder of low-level jobs to start with? I've done help desk, desktop support, data center operator monkey, sysadmin and I'm finally in a good engineering spot. If we don't have a pipeline of newbies, no one is going to understand the nuts and bolts you need to know to progress.
I think most of the stagnation is due to the fact that most college graduates are having to take lower-paying jobs. In the past, large companies were happy to take in new college graduates for entry-level jobs. Big companies paid relatively big salaries, and the recipient of that entry level job could either use it to rise in that company, or put it on their resume and move on to another.
These days, there's just not a lot of entry level work that pays well. Big companies are outsourcing and offshoring the stuff that new grads used to do, and the jobs that remain onshore are with service providers. Those providers squeeze every single penny out of every outsourcing deal they make, and one of the ways they do that is to pay workers less and give them crappy benefits. For those who aren't lucky enough to get one of these jobs, yes, Starbucks awaits. The early 90s had a similar problem -- large companies had just killed huge swaths of their employees because computers were starting to automate processes that would require tons of manual work. College grads who would have gotten some faceless cubicle job a generation prior and used it as a stepping stone to prosperity all of a sudden didn't have that option. I'm pretty sure that's where the word McJob came from -- educated people forced to take low-paying, low-skill work because there wasn't a demand for educated people.
I'm foolishly hoping that one day MBA schools will start teaching students that it's better overall to have everything done in-house with employees you control. Accounting rules and tax laws would have to change to incentivize hiring large staffs, but I definitely think everyone, including executives on down to the lowest level employee, were happier when everyone who made the investment in education had the chance to earn a good wage.
Maybe when the FTC gets hold of this merger, it'll be approved solely on the merits of "job creation." Let me explain...
I've had the full experience of working for companies that hired Accenture and the other large management consulting firms over my career. Over the course of working with people, you get to talking. Almost every single client facing employee they have on-shore is a recent college graduate. These firms are structured very much like other professional services firms -- you need to be in them from the beginning of your career (unless they're hiring you for a limited skill set they can't offshore or teach to a new grad.) The consultancies want to get new hires before they've had a chance to learn any other company's "bad habits." As a result, they need a constant pipeline of fresh new college graduates, which could be touted as "job creation."
My experience has been that Accenture and the like has a crack team of partners who bring in their A-Team senior consultants to sell the dream to executives. Once the contract is signed, the partners and the A-Team are replaced with a C-Team full of Joe/Jane Average clones. One of the other reasons they hire recent grads is the fact that all of them fly to client sites, then fly home on weekends, for most of the year. The on-site people are solely responsible for project managing, presenting PowerPoints, and collecting requirements. Any actual work that needs to be done is sent to India or other cheap "delivery centers." So, it makes sense -- you have a guaranteed employment sink for new grads with business degrees, and can point to it as "saving domestic jobs."
One thing that would be strange is how Oracle would manage them. A funny thing I've heard from multiple Accenture employees is that there's an actual indoctrination session before they send you in front of clients. Because they're just getting raw graduates, absolutely everything is taught, such as how to dress, what language to use in front of customers, and a mini-MBA school. (I think this is why you see so many young-ish people in identical dark suits hanging out in airport lounges loudly discussing synergies on conference calls.) This would be an interesting clash with Oracle's sales culture, but it makes sense. They would have a ready resource to sell right along with their ERP software -- and there would be zero incentive whatsoever for Oracle to make the software implementable by end users. (This is SAP's MO by the way, Oracle is just stealing it.)
These days, almost every single small consumer product is made in China or similar countries. Factories turn out the same electronics for Apple, Lenovo, Dell, etc. and the only differentiation is the case and branding. It wouldn't surprise me if there were one or two massive golf ball factories turning out millions of balls a month, and just slapping the Titleist or Nike or Kirkland Signature logo on a slightly differentiated design. This happens a lot in electronics too -- Cisco's contract manufacturers sell non-official Cisco gear all the time at a cut-rate price; same exact specs but no support if Cisco finds out.
In the consumer space, this reminds me of businesses like Dollar Shave Club or similar. If you buy fancy razors and razor blades from Gillette or Schick or whatever, you'll pay insane prices even in bulk for an extremely basic consumer good. The question is whether or not the cheaper substitute good really is directly stealing patented designs. Companies do have to make money back on their research -- I guess the question is how much of a golf ball design really is a trade secret.
It also speaks volumes about the "power of brands." People will happily pay Apple multiples of what their devices are worth just to have an Apple product. BMW owners pay through the nose for their cars, then pay through the nose again to get them fixed just because they're proprietary and expensive. I don't really care where my razor blades or golf balls come from, but I'm sure there are rabid Titleist fans out there too who would never be caught dead with Costco balls. I'm actually surprised that there's a market for cheap golf balls given how much disposable income you need to have to play golf these days. You need to belong to a country club, buy thousands of dollars worth of equipment, and have hours of free time at your disposal, something most people don't have.
I'm glad someone is publishing information that confirms what I've found to be true for years. Force-fitting people together and making them build something in rapid-fire fashion with half-thought out ideas doesn't make for a good experience. Anyone who's ever worked with me knows that my approach to a problem is to identify what's wrong, go have a think on it, do some research and present a semi-formed opinion/argument for discussion. Most of my job these days is reading and writing...and my backlog of reading is extremely long. But, coming to the table with a little knowledge on the subject is better than having people blurt out the first thing that comes to their mind. At best it's not fully thought out, and at worst people are just saying whatever they can think of to avoid not saying something.
Now, can we please fund some studies on how bad "open workspace" offices are for productivity? They may work great for salespeople, marketing folks or 25 year olds pulling all nighters and shooting Nerf guns at each other...but a real workplace needs a mix of environments. You need a quiet personal space to make phone calls, read or work on things. You also need the ability to host a small group in something less formal than a meeting room. I hate to use the word "stand up" or "scrum" because there's all sorts of negative connotations around that. But, having something where people are just human to each other instead of being project management robots is a good way to exchange ideas. I can't tell you how many multi-hour meetings I've sat in with project managers who are using the exact same phrases from their PMP training manuals. I've never taken the coursework for PMP, but I seriously think all PMs are told "this is the exact language you must use when coming to Stage 2.3.5.22 of your Generic Software Project Plan."
There's a range of intelligence and skill no matter where you go. The high end there is like the high end in the US -- there will always be very smart people. However, we do get exposed to a lot of the low end. The body shops (IBM, CSC/HP/EDS, Accenture, Wipro, etc.) are a revolving door for training new graduates...you might get one or two people who have a good grasp on the work they're doing, but the good ones tend to leave quickly. Body shop H-1Bs are a step beyond that, since they were able to do well enough to be sent to interact directly with the customer...but still not ideal. Direct hires (i.e. opening and running the Bangalore division of the company) tend to produce the best results, but there's still the turnover problem, time difference and communications issues.
Of course, this is assuming you're dealing with the typical offshore services customer. Most have no clue about IT or software dev, don't want to know about it since "it's not their core competency" and don't have the ability to objectively evaluate work quality. I can definitely see this being a problem if someone wants true Silicon Valley engineer material for $8600 a year. When I think of that, I think of someone building large chunks of functionality from scratch, not a run of the mill DBA or sysadmin or .NET/Java developer. Just because of a massive economic imbalance, you don't get to change the "Fast, good or cheap, pick 2" classic engineering adage.
The interesting thing will be what happens long-term. Wages in the US and Europe are probably going to continue to stagnate or collapse altogether, and costs will only go up in developing countries. There's going to have to be some equilibrium established...it's not sustainable for someone in Silicon Valley to command $250K+ for what amounts to routine work, and it's not good for either country when companies (whether or not they know better) see the ability to hire for less than minimum wage and just dump all domestic employees.
American society has always had the obsession on self-reliance, but I'm glad people are starting to see gig economy jobs for what they are. The question is what we do when the possibilities of realistically supporting yourself evaporate completely, and we go back to a semi-feudal system -- the nobles having all the power and letting the peasants who serve them exist at the bare minimum standard.
For decades in the US, the formula was simple:
- If you're smart, go to college and study anything. A large company will hire you at the entry level and take you through to the end of your career
- If you're semi-skilled, go to trade school, become an apprentice and join a trade union; there will be work until you retire.
- If you're less skilled, go join a union and work in a factory -- same deal, there will always be work.
It seems to me like this is gone, and no one noticed until now, or brushed it off. The modern economy is built around steady paychecks -- people can't buy a house for cash, they have to get a mortgage and pay it off as they earn. Same thing for consumer credit...no one is going to go into debt if they feel they can't pay for it, and debt is what drives the economy to some extent.
Steady paychecks are one of the reasons I've stayed out of the IT contracting world, even though I've been told I'd be excellent at it. It's stressful worrying about your job, or where the money is going to come from, and having to constantly hustle to find new work.
I've worked for big companies most of my career, and regular employees making purchases, signing contracts, etc. takes an act of God. I can't spend $100 on supplies without getting competitive bids. But there are apparently some very stupid people who have full unrestricted access to the bank accounts.
How do people fall for phishing scams anymore? Everyone has to know this by now -- never trust email requesting you to do anything involving linking to a website, sending money, etc. This could have all been resolved by someone calling and asking if they should really pay this $8 million "invoice" with an irreversible wire transfer.
It reminds me of how people were talking about the Podesta email incident as some massively complex hacking job. It wasn't -- they found out he still used Yahoo Mail and phished him. I can't believe that (a) one of the most powerful political operatives in the Clinton campaign uses Yahoo Mail, and (b) that he fell for it.
I hope the union members get what they want. People are all too willing to give up all of their bargaining power and be at the mercy of employers. I happen to be one of those strange people who would like to see a little more loyalty on the part of both employers and employees. It's not good for either side to have a revolving door - employers lose valuable trained people, employees become modern-day Okies migrating from employer to employer with no consistency in their lives. If you have that loyalty, and a good work environment, and good salary/benefits, then you wouldn't need a union. Unfortunately, we're back on the other side of the pendulum now, and I think it might be time for collective bargaining to make a comeback.
Think about it rationally -- even if you're the l33test, baddest full-stack DevOps Ninja out there, you're still at the mercy of an employer who is actively trying to pay you as little as possible. If you work in Silicon Valley, you're in a salary bubble right now because Apps! Wait until the bubble pops and employers have their pick of 500 DevOps Ninjas, some of whom are willing to work for practically nothing. Or, they have their pick of thousands of H-1B candidates who work for even less, or could just have all the Ninja-ing done in India and pay less than that! And of course, all that savings goes directly into their pockets, increasing the income disparity and making life miserable for everyone except the executives. I don't think there's anything wrong with a union standing up and fighting against the offshoring of their jobs...or look how many IT jobs might have been saved had the H-1B visa been lobbied against. This is what unions do.
Face it, everybody needs a job, and everybody needs a job whose salary keeps up with inflation and lets them earn more as they age. Society is set up around this, and it's not going to change easily. No one is going to buy houses anymore once they see they can't count on their employers to keep them employed. People won't even take out car loans if they don't feel they have income to pay them back. Unless we have a nuclear war and have to rebuild the system with 1% of the population, you're not going to get people to give up using money to transfer value amongst themselves. I think unions and professional organizations are a good limiting factor on the unchecked greed of business owners. No business owner is going to be nice and share their profits equitably among their workers unless something forces them to. A union is an employee's best hope of getting as many table scraps from the executive dining room table as possible -- no one employee, not even a DevOps Ninja, will get the management class to give in to anything they want.