When I graduated in 1997, it was still possible to get some sort of non-Starbucks job with a degree in _anything._ A degree in a high demand field got you an even better job, but the compact was there -- if you get into school, study and pay the tuition, you will have steady work you can use to pay for it later. Today, it seems like that's broken for a significant portion of the student population. Entry level jobs are either offshored or automated now, and employers are expecting people to come into jobs 100% trained instead of identifying people with potential and putting in a little finishing work to round off the college education. One example I like to cite a lot is the thousands of "Business" graduates who basically screwed around for 4 years, graduated with 2.x GPAs and still wound up in the belly of some huge corporation doing a middle class job shuffling reports around or being some random "coordinator" or staffing the trade show booth circuit. That still happens -- Accenture and the like depend on a constant stream of 23 year old cannon fodder to shove in front of suckers^Wclients. It just happens way less, and you have to go to an expensive school to get jobs like that.
People just aren't going to pay $500K for a degree that will no longer help them. This figure also doesn't account for the fact that at least some of that price tag will be inflation. The price will adjust to the point where the average person can afford it either through reasonable loans or savings. And many people will still continue to go if that becomes the only way to get any sort of non gig-economy work. I still think college is very good for some people. I know I learned a lot about how to navigate a bureaucracy and get what I needed without complaining incessantly. 18 year old kids also do need an environment to "grow up" in -- you could argue the military would be a good option, but it's not for everyone. People that age need an environment where screw-ups aren't permanent and there's a little bit in the way of support on the way to being an independent adult.
I'm a big proponent of unions simply because I can see what happens when business owners are allowed to do whatever they want to their employees. The number of ethical employers that treat their employees well is a tiny fraction of the workforce, and I wouldn't count Uber in this class.
People forget that taxi driver is one of those job of last resort for people who don't have the skills to be in the higher levels of the workforce. I live near NYC and some of the recent immigrant cab drivers I've met have crazy stories of coming here, some as refugees, working 14 hour days, 6 days a week while they're learning English and going to school. No one in IT believes me, but this is just a preview of what's coming for a huge swath of white collar workers who will be wiped out in the next automation wave. Those nice safe jobs new grads get shuffling paperwork at some big company are getting squeezed now, but could just disappear entirely very soon since companies seem to be in a massive optimization drive. The white collar workers of today are going to end up as the Uber drivers of tomorrow as no one wants to hire them for their skills anymore. I say we should try to make our Mad Max style future of fighting for scraps as comfortable as possible now while we still can.
The other thing I could see happening is a drivers' association forming a not for profit that makes their own Uber-style app and charges drivers a reasonable percentage of the fares. It's amazing how much better off everyone is when you take the profit motive out of the equation. Note that I'm not saying "non-profit," because people do need to be paid and it's not a charity -- but a not-for-profit removes the pressure to turn the screws on the employees to the maximum revenue-generating setting. It would be a kind of non-scummy, non-evil Uber and they could even use a similar business model.
Even in large companies, many sysadmins have full access to everything, especially those involved in any sort of identity management. In most WIndows environments and projects I've worked on, I've either had or had the ability to gain domain admin access, which is basically as good as having full access. Since we're not licensed professionals, most of us don't learn anything about ethics or the way to responsibly manage your access. I do want to keep my reputation somewhat intact, so whenever I leave an employer or get assigned to another project where I don't need the access, I'm very careful to give it up completely. I take the time to ensure everyone involved knows I've disabled accounts and handed access over to the next person. I've had a couple times where an employer has asked me to come back and help the new guy for a couple hours, and I make sure they create new accounts and remove them immediately. It makes sense -- you wouldn't let an employee you fired keep his badge and keys regardless of the situation.
Of course, this situation sounds like the person was planning from the outset to set up his own backdoor and use it. As much as I hate the idea of malpractice insurance, I think it might be time for something similar in the IT world. Computers and access to them are more important than ever and having someone do something like this can damage a company's results and reputation.
I work in the airline IT world. "Paper tickets" aren't the paper boarding passes you print out at the kiosk. These are actual tickets issued at travel agents or airport ticket counters, and go back to a time when you could buy a ticket independent of a reservation or seat assignment. In fact, travel agents used to be able to manually hand-write them and the only thing keeping them secure was that ticket stock was controlled. It's similar to buying a train ticket for a commuter railroad from the machine at the station...unless you're reserving a seat, you can exchange it for a seat on whatever train you get on. Same went for paper tickets -- if you had a ticket that said "JFK to LAX" you could go to the airport and check in on any flight if you had an open reservation.
The article mentions that they're doing this to get rid of paper buddy passes, which really are the only paper tickets most domestic airlines deal with these days. It's incredibly rare to process paper tickets for passengers these days.
I guess I don't see how this will help domestic employment. In my world of IT, the next big thing is cloud/DevOps stuff and managing thousands of servers via automation. IBM barely makes hardware these days -- they do mainframes, storage and POWER systems. The only thing I can think of that would provide immediate military employment is maintaining Watson or whatever, watching over data that requires a security clearance.
IBM is basically rebranding itself as a "cognitive" Accenture/Wipro clone with an AI system, so what will all these graduates of the P-TECH schools actually do? Are they just going to add a few token US employees to their offshore outsourcing operations? Teach them to fly around the country in identical suits giving PowerPoint presentations to executives? I'd love to see domestic job growth in tech, but this seems like a PR stunt.
"He was dumbfounded that I would even suggest such a thing."
I've dealt with this over and over working for large companies. Once a company grows beyond a certain size, the ability to buy anything is paralyzed. I routinely buy stuff like hard disks, USB drives, little peripherals like that out of my own money for that very reason. You can't just go down to NewEgg or Micro Center with your credit card and submit an expense report -- it has to go through purchasing who will spend a week researching the cheapest price or steer the sale to whichever "preferred supplier" bribed them this year.
"Same boss was chatting with me in my office when he suddenly noticed that my desk was bigger than his. "
True story from a friend who worked for a major European airline...this airline actually had a written policy stating what furniture and accoutrements were available to staff at the various levels. There was a team of people that would actually go around and fit offices with the new hard-won accessories when people were promoted, just like getting a new patch on a military uniform. The policy had strict guidelines stating office size, how big the desk was, whether you got an additional chair or cabinet, what grade of carpet you had, at what exact level of service and seniority you got a door, which desk accessories and quality level thereof you were allowed to have, etc. When people end up working for an organization for a long time, stuff like this becomes extremely important...it establishes a clear hierarchy.
I've been working for a long time in a highly political private company. I'm extremely lucky that I've been allowed to advance in my career on a technical track, but most people foolishly pick the management path. The actual work we do is really interesting and it's a fun job as long as you don't let the politics get to you, or heaven forbid, get involved in it. If you let it get to you, you're going to be miserable. If you do your work and don't step on any landmines, you're golden. It's not government IT, but the politics are very close -- think appointed VPs who can do no wrong, and whose appointments are basically gifts.
Most of my horror show IT boss stories revolve around people promoted into management positions who have no aptitude for it. I've held supervisory and management positions, and I can tell you first-hand that tech and management are completely orthogonal skill sets. I'm not sure what's different about IT, but it seems like there's just no easy way to retrain people to deal primarily with machines instead of people. Unfortunately, most organizations are built around the assumptions that the only way to advance in your career is to manage those doing actual work, and that everyone actually wants to climb the ladder. I was smart enough to realize that I wouldn't be effective no matter how much retraining I did, and luckily the company was interested in keeping someone with good technical skills as a "lead" without the political crap. I actually think it's for the best, because the company just went through its once-a-decade middle management clean-out. Moral of the story: If you want a job, keep your skills sharp and keep learning.
The other stories involve "white knight" MBAs coming in and managing departments through Excel. I worked at one place where the new CIO came in, and within 2 weeks announced that the entire department was being outsourced after a 6 month transition period. His speech basically amounted to "you're too expensive, capex vs. opex, right-sizing,..." The instant the meeting was over, every single person worth hiring was on the phone pulling the emergency cord, arranging new jobs and quitting (including me...I wasn't going to end up with the Scarlet Letter U (for Unemployed) on my record.) Instant dead-sea effect...the outsourcer ended up sucking at their job, got kicked out and the department was in-house again. Luckily the CIO got fired...that akways drives me nuts when executives keep messing up and end up at another company after getting a huge payout. Why can't we worker bees do that?
If I were a thief, the thing I'd try attacking is the increasing use of federated identity, and hit those targets with everything I had...social engineering, zero-days, finding soft spots where cut-rate consulting firms left the door open, the works. In the new cloudy world of abstracted everything, companies are finding it easier to rely on a few identity providers..."log in using Facebook" and the like. In the Microsoft, Google and Amazon iterations of this (MS account, Azure AD, Google Account, Amazon Identity Management,) companies are using third parties to handle authentication to their resources (at least on the web.) This means that the identities are slowly being consolidated to a few providers on the corporate side. Anyone using Office 365 in an organization likely has their credentials synchronized up to Azure AD, for example, so they can use the web apps like Outlook and Skype.
OAuth and the like set up a very strong environment, but it's still just an identity database under the hood. Even if the provider has no idea what your password is, a hash of it is being stored somewhere...otherwise you wouldn't be able to authenticate. If anyone ever comes up with an easy way to break this, then everyone's going to be in for a round of password changes and free credit monitoring. Getting someone's corporate credentials gives thieves a lot more access than stealing one database.
I've never had the opportunity to work in a unionized environment, but would be happy to do so. In environments where it's allowed to work well, unions provide individual employees a balanced environment that they couldn't get on their own. Even a fair dismissal process in the coming age of mass unemployment is a good minimum standard.
Most Uber fans trend younger, and younger employees haven't experienced the other side of the corporate coin. I've been working for almost 25 years now, and have been very lucky to have generally decent employers for most of it. However, younger workers are supremely confident in their ability to negotiate with their employer. They think they'll never be treated unfairly, or if they are they can just walk into another job for a 20% raise the next day. They will happily give their entire life to their job and expect that their employer will never turn on them; look at all the Amazon or Microsoft employees working 100+ hour weeks. And, the most vocal will loudly beat the drum saying that pro-union workers are lazy, entitled and tools of organized crime that drain the precious resources of their employers. They will gladly walk out in front of a train for their employers and say that the free market fixes all. Perhaps the most interesting thing I hear is that they're so much better than the average employer, so why would they ever stoop to the level of helping someone else out?
Even with my decent employers, I've seen people in their 50s who basically built billions of dollars worth of products and gave their entire career to the company get thrown out with no severance one day when the company decides they have to save money. Entire departments get sent off to India or the Philippines by Accenture and their ilk with the stroke of a pen or click of a mouse. Even inflation-index salary increases are routinely denied because "you're too expensive already." Something has to be done to level the playing field in cases like this, and no individual is going to have the power to do that. The labor/management divide needs to exist; companies have spent decades convincing workers that everyone's all on the same team. You need an antagonistic relationship to keep things fair, otherwise you wind the clock back to the beginning of the 1900s.
Absolutely agree. Look at before and after pictures of US presidents. They age a lot more than 8 years (or 4) in that job. However, most of them have the personality type to withstand it, having either been in politics for a lifetime or run businesses, or fought wars, or whatever.
From the presidential biographies I've read, I'd never last in that job. You're subjected to lots of stress: - Hounded by the press and political factions every hour of every day - Having to simultaneously protect and make happy hundreds of millions of people who are all different and have completely different aims - Having your life scheduled down to the minute - Constantly traveling - Being woken up in the middle of the night to deal with a crisis that may or may not be known or threaten the country - Commanding one of the biggest (if not the biggest) military forces in the world and having to decide how and where to use it - Having the power and ultimate authority to destroy the world with nuclear weapons - Never being able to disconnect or unplug -- I'm sure bathroom breaks are scheduled events - Meeting world leaders who you may hate but have to work with, or like but have to disappoint, etc. - Actually knowing all of what your intelligence agencies know -- this would be the ultimate deal-breaker for me; I'm sure there's so much going on that the public never sees and not all of it is pretty or neatly packaged.
If you can make it through that, sure, you're set for life. But it's a lot to get through!
When you're talking about the overall population as a whole, and expanding your study across socioeconomic lines, maybe the factor they're looking for is the calming factor kids have on the average person's personality. (I know any parent will think I'm crazy, but keep listening.) Being a parent is financially, emotionally and physically stressful. I have a 3 and 6 year old, and that phase where the second was a newborn and the first still always needed something was an absolute nightmare in terms of sleep and emotional well-being. I'm only now starting to climb out of the no-sleep, constant-stress fog.
However, one thing I'm not is impulsive. I don't go tell off my boss when I'm having a bad day or rage-quit my job regardless of how nuts someone drives me. I highly doubt I'm going to get the sudden urge to skydive, or bungee jump or drive 110 MPH on the way home from work. Extend this out further, and people with kids might be less likely overall to smoke, take drugs, drink heavily or any other vice that reduces lifespan. Yes, of course there are plenty of parents who still do this stuff (and they're the most noticeable either on the news or reflected in their kids' behavior.) But I think overall, having responsibility for another human calms people down. People might also subconsciously want to stay healthier so they stick around. Childless people, even married childless couples, might not have that same drive below the surface. I've worked with lots of 20-somethings who just throw up their hands and walk out the door when they're mad about work...less doable when you have kids, even if your spouse has a job. There really is a settling-down that takes place -- it's rare that I see someone who has kids _and_ an angry chip on their shoulder; usually they're the divorced ones pissed off about paying child support, etc. If you're happy, it extends to other aspects of your life. If you're pissed off all the time, you just make everyone miserable.
Do I ever wish I didn't have kids? Sure, it's easy to look at no-kid couples and singles who go through life without a care in the world, have millions of dollars in the bank by the time they're 50 and do whatever they want whenever they want. But I've kind of done that -- we had kids later. I wish we had done more, but if we stay healthy enough we can do that later. And if we do a good job, the kids won't come back to live in our basement. I know it's impossible to defend being a parent, but I'm really glad we did it. It was pretty telling when my father in law, who's Mr. Spock as far as emotions go, told me "Congratulations, having kids was the best thing I ever did." after we found out. He's right, and sometimes it's a pain in the butt, but who else am I going to play Lego Worlds with?:-)
I'm in IT, and we have the same problems programmers have, to a slightly lesser degree. Experience is not valued the same way it is in other fields -- most people don't trust a doctor straight out of medical school more than they'd trust a mid-career specialist who's probably seen thousands of patients. The reverse seems true in development -- employers place enormous faith in fresh grads programming in Web Framework of the Month and discard people who've seen this stuff 20 times over because they're too expensive. In IT, experience usually matters a tiny bit more, but it's really hard to justify the higher salary levels and you have to work very hard to keep your skills current as you age.
I'm in the middle of a huge "migration to the cloud" for one of the core products the company I work for sells. When talking about Azure, Microsoft lumps us "old school" folks into a term they call "IT Pros" to separate them from "Developers." Because it's the cloud and they're targeting new developers writing from scratch, almost everything provided is aimed at developers and abstracted to a very high level. This is getting better, but Microsoft's a software company and they're used to interfacing with developers especially since they're not releasing packaged products anymore, instead they're rolling out and improving services as they go. The truth is that all this cloud stuff is just another layer removed from the actual hardware to make people's lives easier. It doesn't absolve you of the need to design in contingencies for failures or to know how things actually work at a low level. The best people I've worked with on cloud things so far have been the older crowd -- they understand that behind the magic is still servers, still TCP/IP, DNS, load balancers, VPNs, firewalls, etc. and that the concepts behind these haven't disappeared. Someone fresh out of school might not have the background and might even say "oh, that's low level crap, the cloud provides magic 100% uptime and infinite scale!" (And yes, I've had conversations that end like that...the concept of backup and DR is lost on some people regardless of cloud-vs.-on-premises.)
That said, I do know people my age who haven't really grown all that much in their careers and have done the same thing for ages. The problem is that everyone over 40 gets lumped in together. You basically have to know someone to get hired past 40 at some places. How do we as an industry recognize hard-won experience for what it is instead of worshiping the cult of the 25 yeard old startup employee working 100 hour weeks because they're basically learning on the job?
I'm surprised that this issue isn't limited to the US. Canada's pretty much my #1 relocation destination if I had to pick another country -- hopefully they're not going fully down the "USA Lite" road the way the UK seems to be. The people are friendly and the climate is only going to get better as the temps start getting uncomfortably high further south.
Lots of people love to share anecdotal evidence of "lazy Millenials" studying Underwater Gender Studies and generally being unemployable. Having graduated eons ago in 1997, I can say it's legitimately different now than it was. Back then, even the Comparative Literature and Classics people were at least getting interviews. It was still the case that graduating with a bachelors' degree in anything was the entry ticket to any sort of corporate job. Employers knew they were getting raw material and trained them. Roll things back another 20 years and employers were training people straight out of high school. My wife works for a company that did this and just got taken over by MBAs -- there are a ton of people who only have a high school degree with 25+ years experience in senior positions, who are getting kicked out now, having never known another employer. Today, it seems the only employers who train people directly out of school are the management consulting firms, and that's basically because they don't want anyone who's learned habits anywhere else. The only ticket in is a high enough GPA in anything from an Ivy League school...everything else is taught.
I think the only thing that can fix this is a "detente" on both sides, borrowing a Cold War term. Employers need to accept that they're not getting a drop-in replacement for someone who leaves, no matter what the Indian consulting firm tells them. Employers need to understand that they need to develop employees if they don't want a bunch of mercenaries working for them. On the other side, employees need to stop job-hopping every 6 months and actually spend time to learn the business they work for. I'm one of those strange people who like working for the same company for long periods. As long as you don't let yourself stagnate it's a really positive thing in my opinion. I've been careful to move around and take work assignments that keep my skills fresh, but I've also built up a ton of industry knowledge that really helps me do my systems engineer/architect job better.
It seems to me like most businesses are pretty unhappy when things are uncertain. Now that the election's settled, and it doesn't look like he's going away for a while, businesses are just relaxing the controls a little bit. Most business owners are Republicans, so I assume they feel they're going to get more of what they want for at least the next 2 years.
I work a lot with small business owners who rail on and on about "regulations" and the big evil government impeding their ability to do business. I just don't see it -- any cost there may be for complying with regulations are deductible from your profits as business expenses. For the average business owner who isn't running a power plant, oil pipeline or transportation business, it seems to me like the cost of what they see as an insurmountable regulatory burden is actually pretty low. Filing paperwork and paying a few fees should be a drop in the bucket if you truly are a "rockstar entrepreneur." Add to that the fact that businesses essentially pay zero taxes, and I'd say business owners have it pretty good in the US.
The article states the survey was conducted for BMC, maker of massively bloated ITIL-happy IT service management tools of all stripes. Ever use Remedy to do service desk tickets or fill out the 2 hours of paperwork for the Change Management Board meeting? That's those guys.
If I had to boil it down to one point, I'd say the article says IT executives are looking at offshoring or outsourcing IT -- again, totally obvious given the audience. No MBA executive has ever seen a service they don't want to outsource. It results in big bonuses for them, a wasteland of fired employees and awful offshore-delivered IT service for those left behind, and copious lunches, rounds of golf and strip club visits paid for by the vendor.
The only nugget of useful info in this buzzword bingo card is the idea of multi-cloud. That's something I can definitely see becoming important because I'm in the middle of a cloud project now. Reining in the developers while letting them use Amazon, Microsoft or in house stuff is a huge challenge. No one is going to stop the IT execs from moving stuff back and forth between cloud providers, and having some way to do this in an orderly fashion will be important once the big cloud players gain a duopoly and raise their prices.
I'm convinced that big companies just pay for cyberattack insurance and call it a day, rather than actually improve their security. Everywhere I have ever worked, the internal network has been treated as completely open. If you can get your machine on an open network port or joined to wireless, you're in and have full access to everything. It's cheaper to give out free credit monitoring for a year than it is to re-architect the network so that nothing is trusted by default.
The root cause analysis will be interesting -- could be anything from an inside job to sloppy contractors leaving a hole open to just poor patching discipline. I wonder how secure places like Visa or American Express are, given that Verifone, the manufacturer of payment processing devices, can't be bothered with security.
This will be my second dotcom bubble, and just like the first I'm working in a non-startup company watching on the sidelines. One thing I noticed about last bubble is that towards the end, people were hopping jobs every 3 to 6 months to try to maximize their salary. If you could spell HTML and CSS back then, or were a reasonably skilled sysadmin, you could hop from startup to startup for 10 or 20% salary bumps just because there was so much of a frenzy.
I guess my question is whether this is normal job hopping or whether people don't want to be associated with Uber given their bad press. Based on reports from colleagues and acquaintances who've worked at startups, all of them have insane cultures so I doubt they're jumping for better working conditions. If they do make it to self-driving cars before the startup bubble pops, and fire all their employees^Windependent contractors, they'll have a near monopoly on phone-initiated taxi service since they're basically giving away rides to boost name recognition.
Unlike most/.ers, I'm inclined to believe some of the allegations about sexism and harassment in these startups. Most don't really have HR departments in the traditional big-company sense -- every big company I've worked for has just said "zero tolerance" and fired anyone involved. Startups work people in insane working conditions, grueling hours and close quarters; I'm sure a lot of employees don't really interact with people outside the company for much of their waking hours, which could definitely lead to "interpersonal issues." And I know anecdote != data, but most inappropriate behavior I've noticed in my career has been in salesy/marketing types -- those slimy middle aged guys leering at younger women that you hope you don't get stuck with when doing engineering work at a customer site. SV startups don't have tons of hardcore "nerds" -- most are just using app SDKs and JavaScript frameworks to write the majority of their code, and so they might trend to the extroverted side of the spectrum more than a heads-down coder working on C++ for an embedded IoT thingy. I hate to use the "brogrammer" stereotype, but I have seen it and while it's not generally true, it exists.
I'm working on a huge migration of an on-site system to Azure right now, and it's hard to convince people paying the bills of what's actually needed to guarantee high availability. The S3 outage is a perfect example of this...we have the same problem with Azure Storage Accounts being treated as a magic box by the developers. For example, Azure storage has locally redundant and geo-redundant levels. People hear "redundant" and assume that there will never be any issues accessing things you store in a storage account. If there was a disaster of some kind, it only protects the _data_ against the failure of a rack (locally redundant) or a datacenter (geo-redundant.) If a problem like what happened with S3 occurred, and access to the actual storage through the software-defined magic is disrupted, you're still going to have a bad day. You just (probably) won't lose the data. Obviously the cloud providers do everything they can to make sure things stay running, but not adding in some sort of failover above the cloud service level is just asking for trouble if you're doing anything critical.
I'm a "classic IT" guy who totally has an open mind about the cloud, but I do think there's lots of hype and misinformation. Designing for high availability is at least as hard as it was. Doing this in the cloud is quite expensive...maybe not as expensive as rolling your own infrastructure, but a wake-up call when the CIO gets the bill. I just wish the hype bubble would die down so people could have rational conversations about public cloud. It's just like on-premises stuff - don't pay for HA and risk downtime, or pay up and get the SLAs you pay for. I just hate that people are going around saying the cloud is bulletproof and immune to failures....it's technology at the end of the day and people make mistakes (especially overworked AWS engineers working 100 hour weeks or Microsoft guys who forgot to renew certificates, etc.)
Back in Dotcom Bubble 1.0 it was "eyeballs" - now it's "engagement". Companies IPOing back then also had no concrete plan on how they were going to make money. This is reminding me of the second phase of the last bubble. First it was VC firms pumping money into anything that involved a web browser, then trying to recover their investments by pumping the companies out to an unsuspecting public. Facebook and Twitter were the first, Snapchat might be a VA Linux or a TheGlobe.com.
The thing that sucks is all the bankruptcy sales won't have any cool servers, storage or network gear since it's all in The Cloud this time around.
I'm 41, so I guess I'm way past due for Logan's Run style "renewal". However, I'm still here working in IT hoping I can stick around as long as possible because I actually enjoy the work a lot. I really don't like the fact that age discrimination makes it very hard for laid-off older IT workers to come back into the profession (and yes, it does exist....I understand some people don't keep their skills sharp, but even good people over 50 can't get cold call interviews; they need to know someone.) In my opinion, outsourcing and the H-1B visa simultaneously implement a brake on salaries for experienced people, and take away entry level positions that are needed to replace people at the low end. When a company can call up one of the body shops and cut their IT costs (on paper) by 80%, it's very difficult to convince them that they'll end up paying way more in the end.
This is a subject I care about a lot, because one of the things I like best about my job is sharing knowledge with the newbies and making them better IT people. It's fun being the adult in the room and showing people who've grown up with systems that are very abstracted from the actual goings-on under the hood how something actually works behind that cloud service, API call or PowerShell cmdlet. IT pros with a good grasp on fundamentals have no trouble picking up the latest fad or hot tool in my experience. What I worry about is the fact that people coming into the profession will see offshoring, outsourcing and age discrimination as a reason to not go into IT or software development. People aren't dumb - if they're smart enough to be excellent students, they'll pick a path like medicine, pharmacy or the rarefied world of investment banking or management consulting. Medicine is especially attractive for simple reasons -- the profession is highly regulated, experience is actually respected and rewarded, and the supply of medical school slots is kept low to ensure high salaries for people who put the work in. If you're smart enough and have a photographic memory, I can't see any reason why a young person today wouldn't try to get into medicine. We could use a lot more smart, talented people in IT. Another thing is working conditions, which could be improved in many places. That said, not every job involves 16 hour days banging out JavaScript in FrameworkOfTheMonth 0.9.1 while chugging Red Bull for a phone app; I've chosen to forego the highest possible salary to choose sane employers who understand work-life balance and actually appreciate my experience.
I think that the body shops who are abusing the L-1 and H-1B programs should be stopped. Kicking out the ladder of entry level IT employment is a bad thing and will lead to executives feeling that the only way they can get competent people is hiring from these body shops. Once that's firmly in place at every company, the profession is pretty much doomed to a fate of hourly, gig economy contracts whose rates just keep dropping. So, preseve the pipeline of newbies -- give them work so they can learn how to do IT right.
From the IT side of the house, I can say I've been there. In the development world, it's the whiteboard test, but in the IT world it's a tool-matching exercise and trivia contest. I freely admit that I have a very bad memory and constantly look up information unless it's actively used in my daily work. I feel the field of IT is too broad for one person to remember even the basics of _everything_. I've failed interviews because I couldn't recall some trivia questions, and I've done well on others when I was given the chance to demonstrate skills I'm comfortable with. Worse yet, I've gotten shut out of interviews because I haven't used the exact brand and version of some tool they have in the toolbox, regardless of how easy it is to pick up on the job.
In an IT context, matching a laundry list of tools, platforms and software isn't going to get you the right candidate. I hate to self-promote, but I've been told by many employers that the reason they like me is my willingness to dig in and learn new stuff, then document what I know and teach people before moving on to something else. One example I like to cite is that this is essentially the 4th time I'm relearning Citrix XenApp at a level deep enough to do a new deployment -- when this is done I'll get assigned some other project working with a completely different tool set. Some people in our field are experts in Foo but not Bar, or worse yet, specific Foo 3.6.1 experts. There are products that I work with daily (Citrix XenApp, SCCM, etc.) that are easily full time positions, and are so complex that people get to be tunnel-vision geniuses on them. Same goes for platforms -- there are Cisco configuration and management experts who go so far down in the weeds that they can't see things like SDN and hybrid network gear slowly taking over. They'll continue to get paid a lot for quite a while, but eventually the contracts and FTE positions will dry up as the product is phased out. Look at how different a typical SAN engineer's job is these days compared to the times when you had to be an EMC or NetApp savant to get things functioning.
If you're looking for someone fresh out of school, the whiteboard interview is only going to get you a sense of whether or not the candidate absorbed basic concepts from their computer science degree. In IT, most of us don't come from CS and end up here because we're crazy people who like complexity and troubleshooting/firefighting. Smart employers recognize this, but often you get programmer-style interviews when you are trying out for a spot at a software or IT services company.
I live in metro New York, another very high cost-of-living place, but slightly less insane than SV or LA. I can understand wanting to live in places where the cost is high. California has really great weather. Metro DC has a combination of extremely stable federal jobs and gov't contractor jobs that are basically like pulling money out of an unlimited ATM. New York has a very good public education system, access to a large, diverse pool of jobs and the city itself. But, I've never had the desire to move to Silicon Valley or San Francisco despite my interest in the computer field. Especially now, there's no justifying the huge cost of owning a house there or throwing away thousands a month to rent a bedroom.
Maybe I'm just not enough of a hipster to "get" startup culture -- but why would anyone other than a new college graduate want to sign up for paying a million plus for a tiny starter home that they're never in because their "all inclusive" company provides all their meals and 16 hours of work a day? Worse yet, why would anyone pay _more_ to live in San Francisco, then let their all inclusive company bus them out to the suburbs 2 hours each way?
I can definitely sympathize with the "scraping by on 6 figures" sentiment -- but the keys to living in a high cost area are living below your means, and not living where everyone else wants to live. I don't care how gentrified and hip some of the former industrial sites in Brooklyn are; there's no way I'm paying $2 million for an apartment there...I live further away where house prices are still way high but not bubble-esque. Plenty of New Yorkers pull up stakes and move to North Carolina or Texas all the time; they hate paying taxes and (IMO) don't take full advantage of the place they live in. If you're childless and don't care where your house is as long as it's huge and on 2 acres of land, then there's no reason to pay the premium. I know plenty of people that have gone from a starter home with $10K in taxes to a McMansion out in the country in a gated community with $3K in taxes. They're happy and that's fine, everyone's entitled to do what makes them happy.
I do feel like you get what you pay for though - I have 2 kids who are going to get a decent public education without paying tuition to a private school. I was asked by a former company to relocate to Florida a while back, and even the real estate agents trying to sell me on the idea agreed that I wouldn't get the same educational experience unless I shelled out for expensive private schooling.
The interesting part of the article isn't about who is affected, but the "certificate expiration" aspect. I've recently started doing the legwork necessary to learn about public key infrastructure (for our company's internal consumption) and have found that there are 3 prevalent camps out there: - Developers who just say "here's my credit card, VeriSign, make my customers' browser address bars turn green." - Admins who get just enough of a PKI background to make the certificate errors go away, then run away screaming -- or worse yet, had it implemented a decade ago by a consultant and have NO CLUE how it works or how to fix it - Auditors who just say "lock icon, green browser windows, check. Congrats, you're PCI compliant."
For something so critical like certificates, there really is a dearth of resources out there that isn't aimed at hardcore security programmers or one of these three groups. Cert expirations have figured prominently in many outages -- Azure had a partial outage a few years ago because of that very reason. I'm seriously considering writing a "PKI for non-dummies" series of blog posts or something because the amount of misinformation out there is scary!
Anyone who's worked with Accenture or similar companies more than once knows the business model: - Partner and "A-Team" expert consultants sell a dream to the executive who called them in. - Project begins, A-Team replaced with C-Team of fresh college graduates and maybe one or two "adults" running things - C-Team is only the PowerPoint presenters -- if any "work" is done it's done by low-cost "delivery centers" in India or the Philippines or similar - C-Team bills and bills for months on end, flying everyone in from all over the place and charging it all to the company - Project either succeeds and the executive gets an ironclad "CYA PowerPoint" absolving him of any blame, or it fails miserably and a new project is put in place...
An announcement like this pushes the right buttons, because Accenture is probably one of the biggest employers of business degree new graduates. I've worked with people who were employed with them, and the orientation is basically an indoctrination -- the entire career path is laid out exactly like a continuation of school. It's apparently like mini-MBA bootcamp -- you learn how to dress, how to talk, which buzzwords to use, etc. to ensure you don't embarrass the firm too much. 23-year old college grads go from eating ramen to flying to client locations 40 weeks out of the year and billing thousands on hotels and meals to the clients. I don't want to perpetuate their business models, but it would be funny if something like this reduced the number of students complaining about paying student loans. Don't get me wrong - it's good to employ new graduates, but I'd prefer they were doing something useful.
I have a relative who's an "experienced hire" with them, and he confirms the business model...they are paid ungodly sums to either give CYA to executives or make whole departments of companies roll up into a monthly check they cut.
One of the things mentioned is the jobs lost to mergers. When two big companies join up, generally one IT department wins and the other gets thrown in the trash. Dell is in Texas and EMC was in Massachusetts -- I wouldn't be surprised if they just emptied out EMC's offices in one day and sent maybe 2 or 3% of them to Austin. Big companies are the source of a lot of good-paying, middle and upper middle class jobs, and they tend to acquire a lot of people over time. It's inevitable that big clean-outs happen every few years or so. Another huge one the article didn't mention is the HP and HPE demerger, then split-sale of EDS to CSC. That must have been an absolute bloodbath, because I know people who work for the former EDS, HP Services and CSC. All of them are absolutely packed with layers and layers of project managers, account executives, etc. that can hang on for years because customers pay for them. The problem is that big companies have gotten so big that these mass-firings affect an entire industry. What happens when 30,000 people are competing for the same 100 jobs in an area, for example?
And yes, the other thing is the cloud. This one drives me nuts as a systems engineering guy, because the reality is that the cloud just shifts the same issues around in many cases. Your IT guys are not suddenly useless dinosaurs, as some DevOps consultants would have you believe. You still need people with a good grounding in the fundamentals of computing even if you completely rebuild your apps to be RESTful, microservice-y and fully buzzword compliant. Even with access to "infinite" computing resources, you have to deal with new problems like accounting for downtime you can't control, dealing with network latency, huge bills for using services you don't need, and integrating old-world applications with new stuff. The problem is this -- we have tons of people in the systems world who could easily be trained on this stuff. Shifting your focus from managing systems to automating stuff is a big shift, but it's doable; I'm working on it right now. What I'd like to see is the cloud providers work on bringing the IT side of the house into the tent, not just the developers. Microsoft's been doing an OK job with Azure, but they could improve and write documentation that doesn't assume decades of software dev experience. AWS is almost completely focused on developers. I'd write a book, but it would be out of date before it was published. Maybe I should start a video series or something...
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When I graduated in 1997, it was still possible to get some sort of non-Starbucks job with a degree in _anything._ A degree in a high demand field got you an even better job, but the compact was there -- if you get into school, study and pay the tuition, you will have steady work you can use to pay for it later. Today, it seems like that's broken for a significant portion of the student population. Entry level jobs are either offshored or automated now, and employers are expecting people to come into jobs 100% trained instead of identifying people with potential and putting in a little finishing work to round off the college education. One example I like to cite a lot is the thousands of "Business" graduates who basically screwed around for 4 years, graduated with 2.x GPAs and still wound up in the belly of some huge corporation doing a middle class job shuffling reports around or being some random "coordinator" or staffing the trade show booth circuit. That still happens -- Accenture and the like depend on a constant stream of 23 year old cannon fodder to shove in front of suckers^Wclients. It just happens way less, and you have to go to an expensive school to get jobs like that.
People just aren't going to pay $500K for a degree that will no longer help them. This figure also doesn't account for the fact that at least some of that price tag will be inflation. The price will adjust to the point where the average person can afford it either through reasonable loans or savings. And many people will still continue to go if that becomes the only way to get any sort of non gig-economy work. I still think college is very good for some people. I know I learned a lot about how to navigate a bureaucracy and get what I needed without complaining incessantly. 18 year old kids also do need an environment to "grow up" in -- you could argue the military would be a good option, but it's not for everyone. People that age need an environment where screw-ups aren't permanent and there's a little bit in the way of support on the way to being an independent adult.
I'm a big proponent of unions simply because I can see what happens when business owners are allowed to do whatever they want to their employees. The number of ethical employers that treat their employees well is a tiny fraction of the workforce, and I wouldn't count Uber in this class.
People forget that taxi driver is one of those job of last resort for people who don't have the skills to be in the higher levels of the workforce. I live near NYC and some of the recent immigrant cab drivers I've met have crazy stories of coming here, some as refugees, working 14 hour days, 6 days a week while they're learning English and going to school. No one in IT believes me, but this is just a preview of what's coming for a huge swath of white collar workers who will be wiped out in the next automation wave. Those nice safe jobs new grads get shuffling paperwork at some big company are getting squeezed now, but could just disappear entirely very soon since companies seem to be in a massive optimization drive. The white collar workers of today are going to end up as the Uber drivers of tomorrow as no one wants to hire them for their skills anymore. I say we should try to make our Mad Max style future of fighting for scraps as comfortable as possible now while we still can.
The other thing I could see happening is a drivers' association forming a not for profit that makes their own Uber-style app and charges drivers a reasonable percentage of the fares. It's amazing how much better off everyone is when you take the profit motive out of the equation. Note that I'm not saying "non-profit," because people do need to be paid and it's not a charity -- but a not-for-profit removes the pressure to turn the screws on the employees to the maximum revenue-generating setting. It would be a kind of non-scummy, non-evil Uber and they could even use a similar business model.
Even in large companies, many sysadmins have full access to everything, especially those involved in any sort of identity management. In most WIndows environments and projects I've worked on, I've either had or had the ability to gain domain admin access, which is basically as good as having full access. Since we're not licensed professionals, most of us don't learn anything about ethics or the way to responsibly manage your access. I do want to keep my reputation somewhat intact, so whenever I leave an employer or get assigned to another project where I don't need the access, I'm very careful to give it up completely. I take the time to ensure everyone involved knows I've disabled accounts and handed access over to the next person. I've had a couple times where an employer has asked me to come back and help the new guy for a couple hours, and I make sure they create new accounts and remove them immediately. It makes sense -- you wouldn't let an employee you fired keep his badge and keys regardless of the situation.
Of course, this situation sounds like the person was planning from the outset to set up his own backdoor and use it. As much as I hate the idea of malpractice insurance, I think it might be time for something similar in the IT world. Computers and access to them are more important than ever and having someone do something like this can damage a company's results and reputation.
I work in the airline IT world. "Paper tickets" aren't the paper boarding passes you print out at the kiosk. These are actual tickets issued at travel agents or airport ticket counters, and go back to a time when you could buy a ticket independent of a reservation or seat assignment. In fact, travel agents used to be able to manually hand-write them and the only thing keeping them secure was that ticket stock was controlled. It's similar to buying a train ticket for a commuter railroad from the machine at the station...unless you're reserving a seat, you can exchange it for a seat on whatever train you get on. Same went for paper tickets -- if you had a ticket that said "JFK to LAX" you could go to the airport and check in on any flight if you had an open reservation.
The article mentions that they're doing this to get rid of paper buddy passes, which really are the only paper tickets most domestic airlines deal with these days. It's incredibly rare to process paper tickets for passengers these days.
I guess I don't see how this will help domestic employment. In my world of IT, the next big thing is cloud/DevOps stuff and managing thousands of servers via automation. IBM barely makes hardware these days -- they do mainframes, storage and POWER systems. The only thing I can think of that would provide immediate military employment is maintaining Watson or whatever, watching over data that requires a security clearance.
IBM is basically rebranding itself as a "cognitive" Accenture/Wipro clone with an AI system, so what will all these graduates of the P-TECH schools actually do? Are they just going to add a few token US employees to their offshore outsourcing operations? Teach them to fly around the country in identical suits giving PowerPoint presentations to executives? I'd love to see domestic job growth in tech, but this seems like a PR stunt.
"He was dumbfounded that I would even suggest such a thing."
I've dealt with this over and over working for large companies. Once a company grows beyond a certain size, the ability to buy anything is paralyzed. I routinely buy stuff like hard disks, USB drives, little peripherals like that out of my own money for that very reason. You can't just go down to NewEgg or Micro Center with your credit card and submit an expense report -- it has to go through purchasing who will spend a week researching the cheapest price or steer the sale to whichever "preferred supplier" bribed them this year.
"Same boss was chatting with me in my office when he suddenly noticed that my desk was bigger than his. "
True story from a friend who worked for a major European airline...this airline actually had a written policy stating what furniture and accoutrements were available to staff at the various levels. There was a team of people that would actually go around and fit offices with the new hard-won accessories when people were promoted, just like getting a new patch on a military uniform. The policy had strict guidelines stating office size, how big the desk was, whether you got an additional chair or cabinet, what grade of carpet you had, at what exact level of service and seniority you got a door, which desk accessories and quality level thereof you were allowed to have, etc. When people end up working for an organization for a long time, stuff like this becomes extremely important...it establishes a clear hierarchy.
I've been working for a long time in a highly political private company. I'm extremely lucky that I've been allowed to advance in my career on a technical track, but most people foolishly pick the management path. The actual work we do is really interesting and it's a fun job as long as you don't let the politics get to you, or heaven forbid, get involved in it. If you let it get to you, you're going to be miserable. If you do your work and don't step on any landmines, you're golden. It's not government IT, but the politics are very close -- think appointed VPs who can do no wrong, and whose appointments are basically gifts.
Most of my horror show IT boss stories revolve around people promoted into management positions who have no aptitude for it. I've held supervisory and management positions, and I can tell you first-hand that tech and management are completely orthogonal skill sets. I'm not sure what's different about IT, but it seems like there's just no easy way to retrain people to deal primarily with machines instead of people. Unfortunately, most organizations are built around the assumptions that the only way to advance in your career is to manage those doing actual work, and that everyone actually wants to climb the ladder. I was smart enough to realize that I wouldn't be effective no matter how much retraining I did, and luckily the company was interested in keeping someone with good technical skills as a "lead" without the political crap. I actually think it's for the best, because the company just went through its once-a-decade middle management clean-out. Moral of the story: If you want a job, keep your skills sharp and keep learning.
The other stories involve "white knight" MBAs coming in and managing departments through Excel. I worked at one place where the new CIO came in, and within 2 weeks announced that the entire department was being outsourced after a 6 month transition period. His speech basically amounted to "you're too expensive, capex vs. opex, right-sizing,..." The instant the meeting was over, every single person worth hiring was on the phone pulling the emergency cord, arranging new jobs and quitting (including me...I wasn't going to end up with the Scarlet Letter U (for Unemployed) on my record.) Instant dead-sea effect...the outsourcer ended up sucking at their job, got kicked out and the department was in-house again. Luckily the CIO got fired...that akways drives me nuts when executives keep messing up and end up at another company after getting a huge payout. Why can't we worker bees do that?
If I were a thief, the thing I'd try attacking is the increasing use of federated identity, and hit those targets with everything I had...social engineering, zero-days, finding soft spots where cut-rate consulting firms left the door open, the works. In the new cloudy world of abstracted everything, companies are finding it easier to rely on a few identity providers..."log in using Facebook" and the like. In the Microsoft, Google and Amazon iterations of this (MS account, Azure AD, Google Account, Amazon Identity Management,) companies are using third parties to handle authentication to their resources (at least on the web.) This means that the identities are slowly being consolidated to a few providers on the corporate side. Anyone using Office 365 in an organization likely has their credentials synchronized up to Azure AD, for example, so they can use the web apps like Outlook and Skype.
OAuth and the like set up a very strong environment, but it's still just an identity database under the hood. Even if the provider has no idea what your password is, a hash of it is being stored somewhere...otherwise you wouldn't be able to authenticate. If anyone ever comes up with an easy way to break this, then everyone's going to be in for a round of password changes and free credit monitoring. Getting someone's corporate credentials gives thieves a lot more access than stealing one database.
I've never had the opportunity to work in a unionized environment, but would be happy to do so. In environments where it's allowed to work well, unions provide individual employees a balanced environment that they couldn't get on their own. Even a fair dismissal process in the coming age of mass unemployment is a good minimum standard.
Most Uber fans trend younger, and younger employees haven't experienced the other side of the corporate coin. I've been working for almost 25 years now, and have been very lucky to have generally decent employers for most of it. However, younger workers are supremely confident in their ability to negotiate with their employer. They think they'll never be treated unfairly, or if they are they can just walk into another job for a 20% raise the next day. They will happily give their entire life to their job and expect that their employer will never turn on them; look at all the Amazon or Microsoft employees working 100+ hour weeks. And, the most vocal will loudly beat the drum saying that pro-union workers are lazy, entitled and tools of organized crime that drain the precious resources of their employers. They will gladly walk out in front of a train for their employers and say that the free market fixes all. Perhaps the most interesting thing I hear is that they're so much better than the average employer, so why would they ever stoop to the level of helping someone else out?
Even with my decent employers, I've seen people in their 50s who basically built billions of dollars worth of products and gave their entire career to the company get thrown out with no severance one day when the company decides they have to save money. Entire departments get sent off to India or the Philippines by Accenture and their ilk with the stroke of a pen or click of a mouse. Even inflation-index salary increases are routinely denied because "you're too expensive already." Something has to be done to level the playing field in cases like this, and no individual is going to have the power to do that. The labor/management divide needs to exist; companies have spent decades convincing workers that everyone's all on the same team. You need an antagonistic relationship to keep things fair, otherwise you wind the clock back to the beginning of the 1900s.
"accelerated stress & wear test"
Absolutely agree. Look at before and after pictures of US presidents. They age a lot more than 8 years (or 4) in that job. However, most of them have the personality type to withstand it, having either been in politics for a lifetime or run businesses, or fought wars, or whatever.
From the presidential biographies I've read, I'd never last in that job. You're subjected to lots of stress:
- Hounded by the press and political factions every hour of every day
- Having to simultaneously protect and make happy hundreds of millions of people who are all different and have completely different aims
- Having your life scheduled down to the minute
- Constantly traveling
- Being woken up in the middle of the night to deal with a crisis that may or may not be known or threaten the country
- Commanding one of the biggest (if not the biggest) military forces in the world and having to decide how and where to use it
- Having the power and ultimate authority to destroy the world with nuclear weapons
- Never being able to disconnect or unplug -- I'm sure bathroom breaks are scheduled events
- Meeting world leaders who you may hate but have to work with, or like but have to disappoint, etc.
- Actually knowing all of what your intelligence agencies know -- this would be the ultimate deal-breaker for me; I'm sure there's so much going on that the public never sees and not all of it is pretty or neatly packaged.
If you can make it through that, sure, you're set for life. But it's a lot to get through!
When you're talking about the overall population as a whole, and expanding your study across socioeconomic lines, maybe the factor they're looking for is the calming factor kids have on the average person's personality. (I know any parent will think I'm crazy, but keep listening.) Being a parent is financially, emotionally and physically stressful. I have a 3 and 6 year old, and that phase where the second was a newborn and the first still always needed something was an absolute nightmare in terms of sleep and emotional well-being. I'm only now starting to climb out of the no-sleep, constant-stress fog.
However, one thing I'm not is impulsive. I don't go tell off my boss when I'm having a bad day or rage-quit my job regardless of how nuts someone drives me. I highly doubt I'm going to get the sudden urge to skydive, or bungee jump or drive 110 MPH on the way home from work. Extend this out further, and people with kids might be less likely overall to smoke, take drugs, drink heavily or any other vice that reduces lifespan. Yes, of course there are plenty of parents who still do this stuff (and they're the most noticeable either on the news or reflected in their kids' behavior.) But I think overall, having responsibility for another human calms people down. People might also subconsciously want to stay healthier so they stick around. Childless people, even married childless couples, might not have that same drive below the surface. I've worked with lots of 20-somethings who just throw up their hands and walk out the door when they're mad about work...less doable when you have kids, even if your spouse has a job. There really is a settling-down that takes place -- it's rare that I see someone who has kids _and_ an angry chip on their shoulder; usually they're the divorced ones pissed off about paying child support, etc. If you're happy, it extends to other aspects of your life. If you're pissed off all the time, you just make everyone miserable.
Do I ever wish I didn't have kids? Sure, it's easy to look at no-kid couples and singles who go through life without a care in the world, have millions of dollars in the bank by the time they're 50 and do whatever they want whenever they want. But I've kind of done that -- we had kids later. I wish we had done more, but if we stay healthy enough we can do that later. And if we do a good job, the kids won't come back to live in our basement. I know it's impossible to defend being a parent, but I'm really glad we did it. It was pretty telling when my father in law, who's Mr. Spock as far as emotions go, told me "Congratulations, having kids was the best thing I ever did." after we found out. He's right, and sometimes it's a pain in the butt, but who else am I going to play Lego Worlds with? :-)
I'm in IT, and we have the same problems programmers have, to a slightly lesser degree. Experience is not valued the same way it is in other fields -- most people don't trust a doctor straight out of medical school more than they'd trust a mid-career specialist who's probably seen thousands of patients. The reverse seems true in development -- employers place enormous faith in fresh grads programming in Web Framework of the Month and discard people who've seen this stuff 20 times over because they're too expensive. In IT, experience usually matters a tiny bit more, but it's really hard to justify the higher salary levels and you have to work very hard to keep your skills current as you age.
I'm in the middle of a huge "migration to the cloud" for one of the core products the company I work for sells. When talking about Azure, Microsoft lumps us "old school" folks into a term they call "IT Pros" to separate them from "Developers." Because it's the cloud and they're targeting new developers writing from scratch, almost everything provided is aimed at developers and abstracted to a very high level. This is getting better, but Microsoft's a software company and they're used to interfacing with developers especially since they're not releasing packaged products anymore, instead they're rolling out and improving services as they go. The truth is that all this cloud stuff is just another layer removed from the actual hardware to make people's lives easier. It doesn't absolve you of the need to design in contingencies for failures or to know how things actually work at a low level. The best people I've worked with on cloud things so far have been the older crowd -- they understand that behind the magic is still servers, still TCP/IP, DNS, load balancers, VPNs, firewalls, etc. and that the concepts behind these haven't disappeared. Someone fresh out of school might not have the background and might even say "oh, that's low level crap, the cloud provides magic 100% uptime and infinite scale!" (And yes, I've had conversations that end like that...the concept of backup and DR is lost on some people regardless of cloud-vs.-on-premises.)
That said, I do know people my age who haven't really grown all that much in their careers and have done the same thing for ages. The problem is that everyone over 40 gets lumped in together. You basically have to know someone to get hired past 40 at some places. How do we as an industry recognize hard-won experience for what it is instead of worshiping the cult of the 25 yeard old startup employee working 100 hour weeks because they're basically learning on the job?
I'm surprised that this issue isn't limited to the US. Canada's pretty much my #1 relocation destination if I had to pick another country -- hopefully they're not going fully down the "USA Lite" road the way the UK seems to be. The people are friendly and the climate is only going to get better as the temps start getting uncomfortably high further south.
Lots of people love to share anecdotal evidence of "lazy Millenials" studying Underwater Gender Studies and generally being unemployable. Having graduated eons ago in 1997, I can say it's legitimately different now than it was. Back then, even the Comparative Literature and Classics people were at least getting interviews. It was still the case that graduating with a bachelors' degree in anything was the entry ticket to any sort of corporate job. Employers knew they were getting raw material and trained them. Roll things back another 20 years and employers were training people straight out of high school. My wife works for a company that did this and just got taken over by MBAs -- there are a ton of people who only have a high school degree with 25+ years experience in senior positions, who are getting kicked out now, having never known another employer. Today, it seems the only employers who train people directly out of school are the management consulting firms, and that's basically because they don't want anyone who's learned habits anywhere else. The only ticket in is a high enough GPA in anything from an Ivy League school...everything else is taught.
I think the only thing that can fix this is a "detente" on both sides, borrowing a Cold War term. Employers need to accept that they're not getting a drop-in replacement for someone who leaves, no matter what the Indian consulting firm tells them. Employers need to understand that they need to develop employees if they don't want a bunch of mercenaries working for them. On the other side, employees need to stop job-hopping every 6 months and actually spend time to learn the business they work for. I'm one of those strange people who like working for the same company for long periods. As long as you don't let yourself stagnate it's a really positive thing in my opinion. I've been careful to move around and take work assignments that keep my skills fresh, but I've also built up a ton of industry knowledge that really helps me do my systems engineer/architect job better.
It seems to me like most businesses are pretty unhappy when things are uncertain. Now that the election's settled, and it doesn't look like he's going away for a while, businesses are just relaxing the controls a little bit. Most business owners are Republicans, so I assume they feel they're going to get more of what they want for at least the next 2 years.
I work a lot with small business owners who rail on and on about "regulations" and the big evil government impeding their ability to do business. I just don't see it -- any cost there may be for complying with regulations are deductible from your profits as business expenses. For the average business owner who isn't running a power plant, oil pipeline or transportation business, it seems to me like the cost of what they see as an insurmountable regulatory burden is actually pretty low. Filing paperwork and paying a few fees should be a drop in the bucket if you truly are a "rockstar entrepreneur." Add to that the fact that businesses essentially pay zero taxes, and I'd say business owners have it pretty good in the US.
The article states the survey was conducted for BMC, maker of massively bloated ITIL-happy IT service management tools of all stripes. Ever use Remedy to do service desk tickets or fill out the 2 hours of paperwork for the Change Management Board meeting? That's those guys.
If I had to boil it down to one point, I'd say the article says IT executives are looking at offshoring or outsourcing IT -- again, totally obvious given the audience. No MBA executive has ever seen a service they don't want to outsource. It results in big bonuses for them, a wasteland of fired employees and awful offshore-delivered IT service for those left behind, and copious lunches, rounds of golf and strip club visits paid for by the vendor.
The only nugget of useful info in this buzzword bingo card is the idea of multi-cloud. That's something I can definitely see becoming important because I'm in the middle of a cloud project now. Reining in the developers while letting them use Amazon, Microsoft or in house stuff is a huge challenge. No one is going to stop the IT execs from moving stuff back and forth between cloud providers, and having some way to do this in an orderly fashion will be important once the big cloud players gain a duopoly and raise their prices.
I'm convinced that big companies just pay for cyberattack insurance and call it a day, rather than actually improve their security. Everywhere I have ever worked, the internal network has been treated as completely open. If you can get your machine on an open network port or joined to wireless, you're in and have full access to everything. It's cheaper to give out free credit monitoring for a year than it is to re-architect the network so that nothing is trusted by default.
The root cause analysis will be interesting -- could be anything from an inside job to sloppy contractors leaving a hole open to just poor patching discipline. I wonder how secure places like Visa or American Express are, given that Verifone, the manufacturer of payment processing devices, can't be bothered with security.
This will be my second dotcom bubble, and just like the first I'm working in a non-startup company watching on the sidelines. One thing I noticed about last bubble is that towards the end, people were hopping jobs every 3 to 6 months to try to maximize their salary. If you could spell HTML and CSS back then, or were a reasonably skilled sysadmin, you could hop from startup to startup for 10 or 20% salary bumps just because there was so much of a frenzy.
I guess my question is whether this is normal job hopping or whether people don't want to be associated with Uber given their bad press. Based on reports from colleagues and acquaintances who've worked at startups, all of them have insane cultures so I doubt they're jumping for better working conditions. If they do make it to self-driving cars before the startup bubble pops, and fire all their employees^Windependent contractors, they'll have a near monopoly on phone-initiated taxi service since they're basically giving away rides to boost name recognition.
Unlike most /.ers, I'm inclined to believe some of the allegations about sexism and harassment in these startups. Most don't really have HR departments in the traditional big-company sense -- every big company I've worked for has just said "zero tolerance" and fired anyone involved. Startups work people in insane working conditions, grueling hours and close quarters; I'm sure a lot of employees don't really interact with people outside the company for much of their waking hours, which could definitely lead to "interpersonal issues." And I know anecdote != data, but most inappropriate behavior I've noticed in my career has been in salesy/marketing types -- those slimy middle aged guys leering at younger women that you hope you don't get stuck with when doing engineering work at a customer site. SV startups don't have tons of hardcore "nerds" -- most are just using app SDKs and JavaScript frameworks to write the majority of their code, and so they might trend to the extroverted side of the spectrum more than a heads-down coder working on C++ for an embedded IoT thingy. I hate to use the "brogrammer" stereotype, but I have seen it and while it's not generally true, it exists.
I'm working on a huge migration of an on-site system to Azure right now, and it's hard to convince people paying the bills of what's actually needed to guarantee high availability. The S3 outage is a perfect example of this...we have the same problem with Azure Storage Accounts being treated as a magic box by the developers. For example, Azure storage has locally redundant and geo-redundant levels. People hear "redundant" and assume that there will never be any issues accessing things you store in a storage account. If there was a disaster of some kind, it only protects the _data_ against the failure of a rack (locally redundant) or a datacenter (geo-redundant.) If a problem like what happened with S3 occurred, and access to the actual storage through the software-defined magic is disrupted, you're still going to have a bad day. You just (probably) won't lose the data. Obviously the cloud providers do everything they can to make sure things stay running, but not adding in some sort of failover above the cloud service level is just asking for trouble if you're doing anything critical.
I'm a "classic IT" guy who totally has an open mind about the cloud, but I do think there's lots of hype and misinformation. Designing for high availability is at least as hard as it was. Doing this in the cloud is quite expensive...maybe not as expensive as rolling your own infrastructure, but a wake-up call when the CIO gets the bill. I just wish the hype bubble would die down so people could have rational conversations about public cloud. It's just like on-premises stuff - don't pay for HA and risk downtime, or pay up and get the SLAs you pay for. I just hate that people are going around saying the cloud is bulletproof and immune to failures....it's technology at the end of the day and people make mistakes (especially overworked AWS engineers working 100 hour weeks or Microsoft guys who forgot to renew certificates, etc.)
Back in Dotcom Bubble 1.0 it was "eyeballs" - now it's "engagement". Companies IPOing back then also had no concrete plan on how they were going to make money. This is reminding me of the second phase of the last bubble. First it was VC firms pumping money into anything that involved a web browser, then trying to recover their investments by pumping the companies out to an unsuspecting public. Facebook and Twitter were the first, Snapchat might be a VA Linux or a TheGlobe.com.
The thing that sucks is all the bankruptcy sales won't have any cool servers, storage or network gear since it's all in The Cloud this time around.
I'm 41, so I guess I'm way past due for Logan's Run style "renewal". However, I'm still here working in IT hoping I can stick around as long as possible because I actually enjoy the work a lot. I really don't like the fact that age discrimination makes it very hard for laid-off older IT workers to come back into the profession (and yes, it does exist....I understand some people don't keep their skills sharp, but even good people over 50 can't get cold call interviews; they need to know someone.) In my opinion, outsourcing and the H-1B visa simultaneously implement a brake on salaries for experienced people, and take away entry level positions that are needed to replace people at the low end. When a company can call up one of the body shops and cut their IT costs (on paper) by 80%, it's very difficult to convince them that they'll end up paying way more in the end.
This is a subject I care about a lot, because one of the things I like best about my job is sharing knowledge with the newbies and making them better IT people. It's fun being the adult in the room and showing people who've grown up with systems that are very abstracted from the actual goings-on under the hood how something actually works behind that cloud service, API call or PowerShell cmdlet. IT pros with a good grasp on fundamentals have no trouble picking up the latest fad or hot tool in my experience. What I worry about is the fact that people coming into the profession will see offshoring, outsourcing and age discrimination as a reason to not go into IT or software development. People aren't dumb - if they're smart enough to be excellent students, they'll pick a path like medicine, pharmacy or the rarefied world of investment banking or management consulting. Medicine is especially attractive for simple reasons -- the profession is highly regulated, experience is actually respected and rewarded, and the supply of medical school slots is kept low to ensure high salaries for people who put the work in. If you're smart enough and have a photographic memory, I can't see any reason why a young person today wouldn't try to get into medicine. We could use a lot more smart, talented people in IT. Another thing is working conditions, which could be improved in many places. That said, not every job involves 16 hour days banging out JavaScript in FrameworkOfTheMonth 0.9.1 while chugging Red Bull for a phone app; I've chosen to forego the highest possible salary to choose sane employers who understand work-life balance and actually appreciate my experience.
I think that the body shops who are abusing the L-1 and H-1B programs should be stopped. Kicking out the ladder of entry level IT employment is a bad thing and will lead to executives feeling that the only way they can get competent people is hiring from these body shops. Once that's firmly in place at every company, the profession is pretty much doomed to a fate of hourly, gig economy contracts whose rates just keep dropping. So, preseve the pipeline of newbies -- give them work so they can learn how to do IT right.
From the IT side of the house, I can say I've been there. In the development world, it's the whiteboard test, but in the IT world it's a tool-matching exercise and trivia contest. I freely admit that I have a very bad memory and constantly look up information unless it's actively used in my daily work. I feel the field of IT is too broad for one person to remember even the basics of _everything_. I've failed interviews because I couldn't recall some trivia questions, and I've done well on others when I was given the chance to demonstrate skills I'm comfortable with. Worse yet, I've gotten shut out of interviews because I haven't used the exact brand and version of some tool they have in the toolbox, regardless of how easy it is to pick up on the job.
In an IT context, matching a laundry list of tools, platforms and software isn't going to get you the right candidate. I hate to self-promote, but I've been told by many employers that the reason they like me is my willingness to dig in and learn new stuff, then document what I know and teach people before moving on to something else. One example I like to cite is that this is essentially the 4th time I'm relearning Citrix XenApp at a level deep enough to do a new deployment -- when this is done I'll get assigned some other project working with a completely different tool set. Some people in our field are experts in Foo but not Bar, or worse yet, specific Foo 3.6.1 experts. There are products that I work with daily (Citrix XenApp, SCCM, etc.) that are easily full time positions, and are so complex that people get to be tunnel-vision geniuses on them. Same goes for platforms -- there are Cisco configuration and management experts who go so far down in the weeds that they can't see things like SDN and hybrid network gear slowly taking over. They'll continue to get paid a lot for quite a while, but eventually the contracts and FTE positions will dry up as the product is phased out. Look at how different a typical SAN engineer's job is these days compared to the times when you had to be an EMC or NetApp savant to get things functioning.
If you're looking for someone fresh out of school, the whiteboard interview is only going to get you a sense of whether or not the candidate absorbed basic concepts from their computer science degree. In IT, most of us don't come from CS and end up here because we're crazy people who like complexity and troubleshooting/firefighting. Smart employers recognize this, but often you get programmer-style interviews when you are trying out for a spot at a software or IT services company.
I live in metro New York, another very high cost-of-living place, but slightly less insane than SV or LA. I can understand wanting to live in places where the cost is high. California has really great weather. Metro DC has a combination of extremely stable federal jobs and gov't contractor jobs that are basically like pulling money out of an unlimited ATM. New York has a very good public education system, access to a large, diverse pool of jobs and the city itself. But, I've never had the desire to move to Silicon Valley or San Francisco despite my interest in the computer field. Especially now, there's no justifying the huge cost of owning a house there or throwing away thousands a month to rent a bedroom.
Maybe I'm just not enough of a hipster to "get" startup culture -- but why would anyone other than a new college graduate want to sign up for paying a million plus for a tiny starter home that they're never in because their "all inclusive" company provides all their meals and 16 hours of work a day? Worse yet, why would anyone pay _more_ to live in San Francisco, then let their all inclusive company bus them out to the suburbs 2 hours each way?
I can definitely sympathize with the "scraping by on 6 figures" sentiment -- but the keys to living in a high cost area are living below your means, and not living where everyone else wants to live. I don't care how gentrified and hip some of the former industrial sites in Brooklyn are; there's no way I'm paying $2 million for an apartment there...I live further away where house prices are still way high but not bubble-esque. Plenty of New Yorkers pull up stakes and move to North Carolina or Texas all the time; they hate paying taxes and (IMO) don't take full advantage of the place they live in. If you're childless and don't care where your house is as long as it's huge and on 2 acres of land, then there's no reason to pay the premium. I know plenty of people that have gone from a starter home with $10K in taxes to a McMansion out in the country in a gated community with $3K in taxes. They're happy and that's fine, everyone's entitled to do what makes them happy.
I do feel like you get what you pay for though - I have 2 kids who are going to get a decent public education without paying tuition to a private school. I was asked by a former company to relocate to Florida a while back, and even the real estate agents trying to sell me on the idea agreed that I wouldn't get the same educational experience unless I shelled out for expensive private schooling.
The interesting part of the article isn't about who is affected, but the "certificate expiration" aspect. I've recently started doing the legwork necessary to learn about public key infrastructure (for our company's internal consumption) and have found that there are 3 prevalent camps out there:
- Developers who just say "here's my credit card, VeriSign, make my customers' browser address bars turn green."
- Admins who get just enough of a PKI background to make the certificate errors go away, then run away screaming -- or worse yet, had it implemented a decade ago by a consultant and have NO CLUE how it works or how to fix it
- Auditors who just say "lock icon, green browser windows, check. Congrats, you're PCI compliant."
For something so critical like certificates, there really is a dearth of resources out there that isn't aimed at hardcore security programmers or one of these three groups. Cert expirations have figured prominently in many outages -- Azure had a partial outage a few years ago because of that very reason. I'm seriously considering writing a "PKI for non-dummies" series of blog posts or something because the amount of misinformation out there is scary!
Anyone who's worked with Accenture or similar companies more than once knows the business model:
- Partner and "A-Team" expert consultants sell a dream to the executive who called them in.
- Project begins, A-Team replaced with C-Team of fresh college graduates and maybe one or two "adults" running things
- C-Team is only the PowerPoint presenters -- if any "work" is done it's done by low-cost "delivery centers" in India or the Philippines or similar
- C-Team bills and bills for months on end, flying everyone in from all over the place and charging it all to the company
- Project either succeeds and the executive gets an ironclad "CYA PowerPoint" absolving him of any blame, or it fails miserably and a new project is put in place...
An announcement like this pushes the right buttons, because Accenture is probably one of the biggest employers of business degree new graduates. I've worked with people who were employed with them, and the orientation is basically an indoctrination -- the entire career path is laid out exactly like a continuation of school. It's apparently like mini-MBA bootcamp -- you learn how to dress, how to talk, which buzzwords to use, etc. to ensure you don't embarrass the firm too much. 23-year old college grads go from eating ramen to flying to client locations 40 weeks out of the year and billing thousands on hotels and meals to the clients. I don't want to perpetuate their business models, but it would be funny if something like this reduced the number of students complaining about paying student loans. Don't get me wrong - it's good to employ new graduates, but I'd prefer they were doing something useful.
I have a relative who's an "experienced hire" with them, and he confirms the business model...they are paid ungodly sums to either give CYA to executives or make whole departments of companies roll up into a monthly check they cut.
One of the things mentioned is the jobs lost to mergers. When two big companies join up, generally one IT department wins and the other gets thrown in the trash. Dell is in Texas and EMC was in Massachusetts -- I wouldn't be surprised if they just emptied out EMC's offices in one day and sent maybe 2 or 3% of them to Austin. Big companies are the source of a lot of good-paying, middle and upper middle class jobs, and they tend to acquire a lot of people over time. It's inevitable that big clean-outs happen every few years or so. Another huge one the article didn't mention is the HP and HPE demerger, then split-sale of EDS to CSC. That must have been an absolute bloodbath, because I know people who work for the former EDS, HP Services and CSC. All of them are absolutely packed with layers and layers of project managers, account executives, etc. that can hang on for years because customers pay for them. The problem is that big companies have gotten so big that these mass-firings affect an entire industry. What happens when 30,000 people are competing for the same 100 jobs in an area, for example?
And yes, the other thing is the cloud. This one drives me nuts as a systems engineering guy, because the reality is that the cloud just shifts the same issues around in many cases. Your IT guys are not suddenly useless dinosaurs, as some DevOps consultants would have you believe. You still need people with a good grounding in the fundamentals of computing even if you completely rebuild your apps to be RESTful, microservice-y and fully buzzword compliant. Even with access to "infinite" computing resources, you have to deal with new problems like accounting for downtime you can't control, dealing with network latency, huge bills for using services you don't need, and integrating old-world applications with new stuff. The problem is this -- we have tons of people in the systems world who could easily be trained on this stuff. Shifting your focus from managing systems to automating stuff is a big shift, but it's doable; I'm working on it right now. What I'd like to see is the cloud providers work on bringing the IT side of the house into the tent, not just the developers. Microsoft's been doing an OK job with Azure, but they could improve and write documentation that doesn't assume decades of software dev experience. AWS is almost completely focused on developers. I'd write a book, but it would be out of date before it was published. Maybe I should start a video series or something...