"I'm 42 and when I went to school it was really the end of the days where going to a "good school" actually mattered."
I'm 43, and I agree with some exceptions. If you can get into an Ivy League school, the opportunities you gain access to aren't available to others:
- Admissions to top law and medical schools depend partially on where you went for your undergrad studies. And especially with law school, the only way to get highly-paid corporate law firm jobs is to go to a Top 14 law school. For medicine it's the same...you can't get into a good med school without a stellar academic record, and you can't land a good specialty placement if you don't go to a top medical school.
- Academic fields are generally more open to graduates of "good schools" and there's a lot more emphasis on degree pedigree/grades than regular employers would consider.
- Investment banking is a guaranteed ticket to riches and generally open only to Ivy League and other prestigious universities.
- "White shoe" management consulting firms like McKinsey or BCG are also only open to top school graduates, and also guaranteed tickets to wealth and prestigious positions at "customer" companies.
If you don't care about any of these, then realistically it doesn't matter where you go to school.
I'm in the minority in the IT world, but I'm of the opinion that a degree helps people who aren't going into the trades, or the military, to have a little bit of growing-up time after high school. I got a STEM degree a while ago, and don't use a bit of the specific technical knowledge I gained in my day to day life. What I did learn from a technical education that was transferable was the ability to write well, interact with others professionally and troubleshoot methodically. All of these skills have been critical to my (modest) success in the world of work.
That said, the days are gone where just graduating from college would guarantee you a solid job. Even when I graduated, people who partied their way through school and barely got degrees in business, psychology or communications were immediately snapped up by large corporations and put to work shuffling paper, working the trade show circuit, or some other random entry level task. New grads who really lucked out or went to the right school would get high-paying jobs at consulting firms flying around the world 300 days out of the year. Today, Lots of the paper shuffling is offshore now, the jobs don't exist anymore, and/or they don't command the same upper-middle class salary they used to. This is why people are complaining about the ROI on degrees. Even people who barely make it through CS or engineering find employment. Dotcom Bubble 2.0 is taking CS grads faster than they can be made.
In general, you should shoot for a degree that's at least tangentially related to something technical to make yourself stand out. And once you're in, you need to make the most of the opportunity, including doing internships and other activities that make companies want to pick you over Joe Random Graduate. Also, private universities are a complete rip-off UNLESS you are guaranteed to profit from the experience. Harvard, Yale, MIT...yeah, take out the loans because you'll never be allowed to fail once you make it through an Ivy League school...you'll make so many contacts and have more opportunities than I did graduating from a big public university. But, $45 or $50K for a tiny no-name college with no special affiliation? No way...save your money. I still think education is a good investment, but you need to consider the cost vs. the ROI.
I live outside of NYC and I'm totally shocked. I'm sure they had to give the store away (ha ha) in terms of tax abatements and other giveaways, and that isn't New York's strong suit. From my experience, NY loses large corporate headquarters to North Carolina, Texas, Georgia and other states because those states will do anything to attract them. Even if the executive HQ doesn't move there, they'll make a deal to move the "support campus" to Dallas or Atlanta and suck out thousands of decent mid-level jobs. The execs get to stay in NY while all the regular workers have to move or lose their jobs, and the places accepting the workers will build roads, provide free electricity and gas, construct buildings, not charge taxes for decades, whatever it takes. It's definitely not a fair fight when you're talking about run-of-the-mill employees. There's so much free space in any of the places I've mentioned that they could build out millions of square feet with thousands of parking spaces. The execs can live in their gated communities and send their kids to private schools, etc.
I'm sure we'll never find out the full extent of the giveaway, but NYC is really trying to gentrify Long Island City. Back when the city had industry, there were a ton of factories and other manufacturing support items like reasonably-priced housing there. I'm assuming part of the deal is to arrange for the construction of a "techbro fortress" and a few square blocks of luxury apartments around it, especially since there's a huge housing project right near where they're going.
I'm happy to see a company for once understanding that moving to a high-tax high-cost area might actually be a good thing in terms of employee quality, education, etc. But, it's going to be a hard sell for anyone who isn't young, hip, single and willing to shell out huge bucks for rent/housing. Getting to LIC even from Long Island is a bit rough right now because the public transportation that exists right now is totally jam-packed. Moving the people off the 7 train once the LIRR goes into Grand Central will help, but even 25,000 new employees will add a lot of riders to an already busy system.
One thing that I think is going to make China the dominant global power in the mid-to-late 21st century -- besides a massive population advantage -- is their government structure. If they want a cyber-weapons program, that's what they'll get.
Like it or not, the way things are set up now in China is incredibly efficient. Anywhere else, there would be years of debate over any decision. With both economic and political control, decisions that just can't be made anywhere else are simply made by decree and done. Having control over companies lets the central government choose what industries get attention and which get less, as well as react immediately to outside influences. An example would be the massive amount of infrastructure spending that simply materialized to stave off the effects of the 2008 GFC, or their plans to re-colonize Africa via economic means this time.
I don't think most Westerners would want to live under such a system, but it's incredibly good at allocating resources and turning sharply to face challenges. It doesn't matter whether a decision is unpopular...that's the decision and that's it.
I think this is one instance of a more general problem. People are getting more of a peek behind the curtain through social media, constant news coverage and the fact that politicians seem to telegraph their decisions through Twitter. IMO if we do end up destroying the US as we know it, historians are going to point to social media as a big driving force. People are seeing how the sausage is made and they don't like it. Corruption used to be hidden and although it sucks, it is and always will be the way things are done. Do you really think the president personally vetted his Supreme Court pick? No way, I assume the party bosses told him in some unofficial way, "You will put this guy in place or we'll make sure you don't get re-elected and nothing you want will get done." Remember, people didn't used to see any of this...their information sources were limited and investigative journalism wasn't very investigative when it came to sensitive topics.
I'm a little surprised that the average tech worker wouldn't make the logical leap that the same facial recognition phone unlocking algorithm can be used to reliably track people in a crowded city. How did people working for defense contractors during the Cold War and Vietnam Wars feel about building technology that was much more overtly deadly?
> I understand your frustration now that we have made it and are no longer the jokers, but 14 years ago I got an IT job with an associates degree at about 2x minimum wage and not really having much of a clue (looking back now). Thank god there wasn't some group of gatekeepers ensuring I couldn't get that job until I had a 4 year degree (which I have now) and passed some certs (which I have now).
I'm not so sure it's a good idea to have a gatekeeper-free entry process. it's great to be able to work your way up form nothing, but look at how much crappy insecure code gets written by people who don't know what they're doing. Or, look at all the data breaches caused by simple misconfigurations that almost any experienced sysadmin would pick up on. (Public S3 buckets containing sensitive info for the taking are way too common.)
As it is now, there are already too many people chasing the money who really don't have an aptitude for this field, or thought they're "good at computers." IMO there's nothing at all wrong with forcing people to do a little apprentice-level work that ensures everyone coming out as s fully credentialed IT person has the fundamentals under their belt. Besides being the equivalent of academic hazing, medical school ensures that anyone coming out, starting from nothing but basic science, is in a position to pass the medical licensing exams. Having everyone understand the absolute basics so they aren't shooting in the dark when they're trying to fix a problem would be worth it.
I've long held the view that IT and SW development need to figure out a way to form a professional organization like the one physicians have. A "lite" example of this is the Society of Actuaries, and it looks like they're doing their job. Actuaries have had a very stable career for a very long time. It's not as sexy as slinging ads at Google or Facebook or working at a hip web startup, but it does pay well.
I don't have the math skills to even consider getting into this profession, but it's a very good example of an industry needing very talented people and paying accordingly for them, Insurance companies can go bankrupt if they make bad actuarial decisions...too conservative and they don't make enough money, too risky and they can go broke paying out more claims than they expected.
What I think they do right is similar to what I think the medical profession got right:
They make it difficult to enter the profession. Too many jokers can get into entry level dev/IT and it gives the whole industry a bad reputation.
Entry is based on licensing exams that your school career prepares you for, but your school career isn't your vocational training in most cases.
By limiting the number of new entrants and providing a career progression at different steps in the certification process, salaries are kept high for members.
Not knowing the industry, however, I do wonder how insurance companies don't just go around the whole thing and hire 25000 Indian number crunchers the same way IT outsourcers "replace" experienced developers and systems engineers. Either the skillset is so esoteric that only the super-intelligent math geniuses among us can do it, or the SOA has the ability to force companies to do what it wants the same way the AMA does in the US.
I'm of the opinion that we're in the middle of an inflating Second Dotcom Bubble. Having lived through the First one, I'm seeing similar patterns, one of which is, "We need more computer science students!" I think it would be beneficial for everyone to have a basic understanding of how computers work below the consumer level, especially now that things are so abstract and "Just Work(TM)" But, let's call it what it is...an attempt to push AWS adoption. Big hardware and software companies have done this for years...Sun practically gave away workstations and servers to universities in the hopes that people would buy them in their businesses later. Apple, same thing. And, Microsoft/Google are nearly giving away O365 and GSuite for the same reasons.
I see a lot of comments saying they're trying to drive salaries down by flooding the market. While I'm sure that's true to some extent, offshoring and visa programs have already done this. I also see comments on topics like this that basically treat development as some sort of priesthood that outsiders can't join. Reality is that we're 400 levels abstracted away from real hardware in most cases these days. Especially with "code monkey" type projects like front-end JavaScript or CRUD applications, we're almost at the gluing-Lego-blocks-together level of simplicity. Go beyond that and it's exponentially harder, but these Dotcom Bubble startups and cloud providers don't need CS geniuses for the next round of expansion.
The industry would be better served by teaching some of the basics to get the interested students hooked, publicly state that there are actually long-term opportunities in development and IT that aren't going to end up in India in 5 years, and make available entry-level positions that pay a reasonable starting salary. Students aren't dumb, and especially when they're paying huge sums for a degree, they're going to go with what they perceive as a safe career path. Current students who have IT and developer parents are probably seeing first-hand to some extent the effects of downward pressure on salaries, outsourcing and offshoring. I love my job in systems engineering and am good at it, but I work for a multinational company and know that I'm one MBA's spreadsheet and PowerPoint away from being kicked out when the CIO hires Infosys or similar.
I've worked at places that use an insanely short email retention policy to get out of e-discovery in lawsuits. One place had a 30-day retention..anything older than that and, "la la la, we have no record of the email you are attempting to recover." And apparently that works, if you have a written policy stating that you don't keep email or backups for more than X days.
But, couldn't any company just send all their computers to the metal shredder the second a lawsuit is filed using the same argument? Maybe that's how they're planning on hiding how bad their data breach was. Somehow I doubt that though...if there were no rules against destroying evidence, every computer would have a self-destruct circuit in it.
Of course no one knows what actually happened, but this totally reads like some clueless CIO getting pressure from the board and CEO to just make the problem disappear.
There's no getting around the fact that college is extremely expensive. It makes perfect sense to me that people entering college today, unless they have a full scholarship and a "free pass" like inheriting a family business later on, wouldn't be studying humanities. They're going to try to maximize their employability if they have the ability to do so. I majored in chemistry 20 years ago, and this was because I realized that I wasn't going to be able to handle the math in the engineering curriculum I was aiming for, AND that some random business management or psychology degree wasn't going to be a good return on investment.
I'd say the students trying to be as employable as possible are making a smart decision. However, I wonder if the humanities people are going to have the last laugh. Automation and offshoring are rapidly eating up entry level STEM jobs and humanities are going to be one of the few things an algorithm and cloud automation platform aren't going to be able to handle. When I went to school (graduated 1997) it was almost a guarantee that anyone getting through a degree program would find work somewhere. Large corporations would basically do cattle calls for all the management school grads and send them off to some random entry level job doing TPS reports. I'm thinking it's a little different now...Accenture sent the TPS report processors offshore, Infosys runs the company's IT from India, etc.
I also wonder this...we're in the middle of the Second Dotcom Bubble, which started inflating right after the financial crisis (iOS and Android gained ground shortly after this, followed by cloud, DevOps, etc.) Are we seeing tons of new computer science grads the same way we did when everyone in 1998 was getting a CS degree? Are they chasing the money again and lining up to be JavaScript front end developers for 6-figure salaries at hip startups?
IMO there's nothing wrong with going to college...at worst it's a good way to grow up a little bit before heading into the real world. If you get into a top 10 school, it can change your life because no one graduating one of these schools will ever fail to find an opportunity. If you don't, you can go to a "regular" state school, work hard and find a path to success that way. The not-so-smart money is in these little private colleges...that $50K+ investment per year really needs to pay off, and unless you're in the particular niche that these small colleges funnel grads into, you'll just be left with six figures of debt and no better off than a state school grad.
I've heard that Japanese employers are almost paternal when it comes to keeping employees around for an entire career. I guess in an environment like that, where you graduate school and are employed with one firm for your entire life it would be hard to quit. It also explains why Japanese employees put up with whatever their bosses demand...apparently getting hired anywhere else after being let go is impossible.
I hate the US attitude that all employees are disposable, but having a culture like this isn't a good solution either. I also read this article that basically says all large companies come around only _once_ to recruit new graduates, then never accept any new hires. What do people do if, for whatever reason, they mess up the last year of university and don't get picked? Are they out of a job forever?
I admit that I'm not one who easily rage-quits jobs and have never had a position for less than 5 years. I know that's a minority position in the tech industry...especially with the Second Dotcom Bubble I'm starting to see more instances of employees throwing a tantrum and just walking into another job the second things don't go exactly their way. But paying someone to quit on your behalf? That's definitely something built into the culture.
I wonder what that series of meetings was like...Large Investor A asks him to keep the gravy train rolling in exchange for positive coverage by their investment bankers?
One thing I wonder about how this time period in history will be viewed is what role Twitter and other social media played overall. It's one thing to say you're privatizing your company to another CEO golf buddy, but a whole other one to tell the world and have investors freak out. Same thing with the President -- we've never had a direct line plugged into people's brains like this before that lets them fire off random thoughts.
Also, why is Musk such a crazy micromanager? I've worked for large companies my whole career and CEOs there do nothing but get hauled around in corporate aircraft and vehicles, golf, give the occasional speech or conference call, attend board meetings for the other companies they're on the boards of, etc. They've delegated everything to subordinates...not Elon Musk!
This is the Second Dotcom Bubble. Look at all the front end developers being cranked out of JavaScript bootcamps. In my field (IT), I ran into lots of MCSE bootcamp graduates around 1999-2000. There will always be people chasing the money with no real talent for the work, and bootcamps will spring up to make them "overnight experts."
"Nobody codes a red-black tree or writes a game engine from scratch now, it's all libraries put together like legos."
I have a science degree (not a CS degree) and I agree that this is the case. Run of the mill development is indeed gluing a massive Lego project together. But in my opinion it's very important to have a grounding in the fundamentals...start from the bottom and move up the stack instead of starting 400 levels up and not knowing how the magic box you're calling works under the hood.
This is happening a lot in my field (IT infrastructure.) The IaC frameworks and languages are good enough to let a developer say, "Give me this" without knowing anything about the inner workings. All of the IaC, CI/CD and DevOps tooling was designed by developers to give them a way to bypass all the fundamentals and make their stuff Just Work (TM). When you look at things from the bottom up you see how much is behind delivering a service and can see potential bottlenecks and ways to improve. When you look from above down on the URL, connection string or API call, you lose that perspective..."I call this, with these arguments, I get this. I don't care how it works, It Just Works(TM)."
Apple, Google and friends already have their own independent evaluations of someone's ability. They can afford to be picky and hire geniuses. For a time in the early days of Google no one got in without a top-10 CS degree. When employers like that run out of elite CS grads to pick up, the next stop is finding people who can pass their interview process. These companies are looking for once-in-a-generation savant geniuses to come up with the next world-shattering trillion-dollar product. If they don't have degrees that doesn't concern them as long as they can extract the product from their brain.
Where this doesn't work is the outside-of-Silicon-Valley world. It's common knowledge that really good IT people don't have a CS degree, just a knack for troubleshooting. I have a degree in chemistry from way back and wound up in IT. But, when you have more people applying than positions open, the sad reality is that anyone who doesn't check that "degree in anything" checkbox is going to get their resume thrown out by most employers. Whether that's fair or smart is another story...but traditional employers employing traditional people for run of the mill tech jobs are going to list it as a hard requirement and frankly they're not concerned if they miss anyone.
Call me an elite out of touch intellectual, but I think some time working on a degree in a non-vocational setting is a good thing. Even the really good people I've worked with that don't have degrees are often tunnel-vision focused on the technical aspects of their job. If nothing else, it's a good time for students to finish growing up if they hit age 18 without all that complete. You're exposed to a small amount of courses in fields unrelated to your technical major and students that do it right learn how to absorb new information quickly, write well and communicate effectively. There are tons of people who waste the opportunity also, or pay way more than the education they receive is worth. I think these folks as well as the people complaining about not having a degree are the ones who are most vocal about not needing one.
"Generally, people today want to work on meaningful projects."
I think this is true, especially if the employee is more experienced and has choices. When you're starting out with a freshly-minted CS degree or IT certification, you'll take any old front-end web dev/code monkey or desktop support job. Startups and even big tech players at the entry level are fueled by new grads who have no idea that 90 hour work weeks aren't normal.
I'm about 20 years into my "professional" life and I'm way more interested in doing something interesting than I am at achieving an absolute maximum salary. I live near NYC and know lots of people making way more than I do in finance IT (hedge funds, investment bank specialty groups, etc.) But you ask them about their jobs, and you basically get, "It sucks/it's boring and they work me to death, but it pays well." I make about the average salary for my local job market. But I have a normal work week and help build software and systems that's used by thousands of people every day to perform a critical task...stuff I can easily go and watch being used. This beats keeping some reporting service churning out useless figures no one reads running 24/7 (at least for me.)
No one should EVER flake out on an interview. But, stories like this were coming out around 1999/2000 as well, just as the First Dotcom Bubble was about to pop. I think it might be time for another one...maybe not a pop, but a slow deflate,
I really like my job, and I've been at it for almost 10 years. Without trying to sound like a jerk, I'm good at what I do, have lots of diverse experience and should be hopping jobs every 6 months for 20% raises each time while the bubble keeps inflating. But one of the reasons I don't is the difficulty of getting recruiters and companies to follow up. Why should I waste my time crafting a custom resume, wading through phone interview screening hell and not even hear, "No thanks" back from an employer? It's odd to see employers and recruiters complaining when the shoe is on the other foot. Maybe they could learn to communicate a little better with candidates? Even if it's "no" I'd rather know to stop wasting my time thinking about a position.
Bubbles and a crappy hiring process aside, there's no excuse for not being a professional. Maybe you can get away with it in Silicon Valley, but almost everywhere I've dealt with has looked down on people who can't dress appropriately for the environment, can't show up on time, etc. I work in a small technology niche (air transport) and the pool of people who really have a good handle on things is surprisingly small. I run into people from past jobs at totally different employers...we just keep rotating it seems. If I pulled something like not showing up for an interview, throwing a temper tantrum on an exit interview or other "employees' market" items, I guarantee someone down the line in the future would hear about it.
I actually like OS X and iOS to a degree, but I agree, there's no real reason to buy MacBook hardware other than to blend in with the other hipster emulators with the Github stickers on their MacBooks.
BMW and Mercedes do this too. Especially with Mercedes, the idea used to be that you spend a ton of money and get a reliable tank. Now, both are designed to last just beyond the 3-year lease period. Both have insanely expensive, single-source electronic components that can make a simple repair cost thousands. And all of these electronics are designed so they can only be replaced by a BMW dealer and fail long before the mechanical parts do.
Apple would love nothing more than to lease you a MacBook and have it simply stop working at the end of the 3 years...just send a high voltage pulse and destroy the electronics on the motherboard...sorry, logic board. They're waiting a generation until absolutely everyone is over on the "new iPhone every 2 years" model and doesn't remember what owning electronics was like.
It seems like whenever there's an economic expansion of any kind, people are desperate to put their money in anything regardless of the chance of success. This particular time will be very interesting to look back on, because you basically have multiple different bubbles all going on at the same time and they all feed on each other. I feel old, but I really don't see cryptocurrency as anything more than a scam.
The mobile/app economy bubble is fed by the cloud bubble, which both feed the blockchain/cryptocurrency bubble, and all of them are sustained by The Cloud. Back in the 90s, if you wanted to sell bags of dogfood online and ship them for free to get eyeballs, getting started cost tons of money. You had to buy servers, colocate them in a data center, etc. and it cost millions to start up. Now, all you have to do is use the founder's credit card to buy AWS/Azure/GCP time and the money comes out much more slowly. This is why I think the bubble(s) are going to last a lot longer than the last one...there's way less pressure to IPO and topple the house of cards. Most of unicorn startups are being happily fed money by VCs rather than Grandma's pension fund buying into pets.com, and they need less every month.
My worry is that allowing these bubbles to live longer than they should will make them huge and cause an even bigger mess when everything comes crashing in. Look at Silicon Valley housing markets as an example. I live near NYC, so I'm not one to point fingers at crazy housing prices. But if i wanted to move there for a job, a similar house to mine, a similar distance to work would be 4 or 5 times the price of my already-expensive one here in suburban NY. Yet, people are happily buying/renting so they can cash in on the gold rush...no thanks.
I guess this is what happens when a communications executive takes over a bunch of creatives. I live near NYC and it's nothing like LA, but the entertainment work scene here is pretty much the opposite of AT&T. It's not quite Don Draper 3-martini lunches but former colleagues of mine who now work in that business say it's pretty close. People are creative and used to having a fair amount of freedom around the way they get the job done.
When a creative company gets acquired by someone who just wants to squeeze it for all it's worth, they'll probably lose some of their better creative talent...those folks have options. AT&T is used to providing a cheap-to-deploy, incredibly high margin service. Once they start cracking the whip, the content quality is going to drop. I imagine the first thing they'll do is offshore every business process that isn't outsourced already. When that doesn't produce the savings, they're going to start cutting into the creatives' budget. No more personal assistants, free car service, free food, expense account dinners, etc.
"Regulatory burdens of all kinds are absolutely killing small businesses, which makes the buyouts from large players all that more lucrative."
I deal with lots of "entrepreneurs" who constantly repeat this refrain over and over. What regulation is killing a business? Paperwork is handled by accounting software. Collecting sales tax is done via your POS software or online merchant processor, and you can even pay them online as well. Minimum wage is just something business owners have to live with...if you can't make ends meet paying someone minimum wage then you shouldn't be in business or just do the work yourself.
There's no burden. Business owners already get a huge free pass that salaried employees don't...the ability to make up their own income numbers and overstate expenses. Literally every small business owner I've ever seen is passing all of his/her personal expenses through their business entity. The company owns their houses, cars, etc. and they pay themselves a tiny salary.
"While companies that were less than two years old made up about 13% of all companies in 1985, they only accounted for 8% in 2014. From around 1998 to 2010, the share of private sector workers in companies that were less than two years old plummeted from more than 9% to less than 5%. "
This makes sense given the timeline. In the mid-80s everyone was experimenting and you had tons of small companies chipping away at the monolithic UNIX/mainframe computing culture...as well as a few manufacturers actually making physical goods. From 1998 to 2010, you had the top of Dotcom Bubble 1.0, followed by the financial crisis in 2010, so you go from 8% at the height to 5% at the start of the recovery cycle. Then in 2014, you have the inflation of the Second Dotcom Bubble which (IMO) we're nearing the top of. plus smartphones and social media really go nuts from 2010 to 2014, hence the increase to 8%.
My opinion is that startups aren't sticking around very long, simply because they're easier to cobble together from outsourced parts. SaaS providers offer HR, finance, payment acceptance, logistics, and IT in a box. Cloud providers will host your workloads for a monthly fee which the VCs probably like a lot, because they slowly burn money rather than give millions at a time to build data centers and such. So, some guy building Yet Another Provisioning Tool or Yet Another Abstraction Layer on JavaScript can follow the First Dotcom Bubble playbook on an accelerated timeline...either they get big enough to IPO, or get bought by Microsoft/Facebook/Google/Netflix.
The other thing that might be driving this is just the sheer risk involved. Despite what the media portrays about SV startups, they are not stable places to work. It's great when you're fresh out of college and can continue the lifestyle...getting paid in free food and doing 100 hour weeks in the office with your buddies. But when you grow up, steady paychecks have a huge appeal, especially when you have a family.
This happens at every big company, and Microsoft also has super-deep pockets so they can afford to have some dead wood. If you're measuring 'time put in" as years with the company, that's true...there are some people in big companies who know the right people and can coast for decades. But you can also measure time put in as how many 100-hour weeks you put in on product deathmarches, how tethered you are to VSTS 24 hours a day, etc. Those people who are workaholics will also be recognized over very productive, smart people because they're more visible. They're the ones leaving work at 1 AM and coming back for more.
As a counter example to MS dead wood, look at HP/HPE. The bottom has dropped out of non-white box servers and storage...if you believe the pundits no one is buying new equipment. Companies also have less of a need for third-rate crappy offshore IT support. As a result, HP/HPE/DXC have been throwing thousands of people overboard. We actually do buy equipment still, and it's a normal occurence to have the person you've been talking with for years suddenly get fired. HP could afford to be bloatted when they were making a healthy margin on servers and selling a ton of them.Azure.
Microsoft doesn't have this problem. They have huge cash reserves and are about to lock every single Windows enterprise into Office 365 and Azure. I wouldn't expect the dead wood to go away anytime soon.
Back in the late 90s, anyone who had a passing familiarity with computers was commanding a huge salary regardless of talent. I'm sure Microsoft is in an arms race with Amazon and Google these days. All three companies are going at a breakneck pace trying to develop new cloud services or make the ones they already run cheaper to run. The race is on to lock as many customers into their cloud provider as they can because no one is buying software licenses anymore.
What's interesting is that with everything moving to the cloud, these 3 companies and a few others will probably be the chief consumers of developer and infrastructure engineering talent. And at least in previous years, Microsoft selected for highly talented people and paid enough to ensure they didn't run off to a competitor. I've worked with people who've been at Microsoft for 20+ years...if you're really talented they do a lot to keep you. I think this is why that survey result is surprising.
We'll see what happens in a couple years. I'm betting a huge chunk of cloud consumption is startups selling bags of dog food and AI-powered, IoT driven, blockchain-enabled subscription boxes online. When that goes away, people are still going to use AWS/Azure/GCP, but I just don't think they'll get the stupid levels of revenue they're getting today from the VC money.
Something tells me these numbers are being manipulated. If things really were that good, employers would raise wages. You'd have fast food places offering $20/hr to flip burgers if they needed the labor that badly. Also, including every "job" regardless of full/part time status and suitability is misleading. No one who spent a reasonable effort getting a college degree wants to be working a minimum wage retail job. If all the jobs advertised were professional jobs, or even high-paying factory work this would be an actual story.
One other problem especially in the tech and IT fields is the huge mismatch between employers/employees and the absolutely crappy hiring/headhunting process. Employees lowball their offers, headhunters have zero clue about the jobs they're advertising, and there's a massive fetish for anyone under 30. God help you if you're in your mid-50s and end up on the wrong end of an offshoring/outsourcing. The 28 year old MBA in HR is going to assume you're a dinosaur and immediately pass you over.
It's sure better than 10+% unemployment, but let me know when employers are offering solid, well paying, stable full time work. You can't expect anyone with a family to want to string together 3 part time gigs plus some Uber driving on the side. It's great for the unattached, but a bad way to encourage stable home lives for people.
Slashdot Mirror
"I'm 42 and when I went to school it was really the end of the days where going to a "good school" actually mattered."
I'm 43, and I agree with some exceptions. If you can get into an Ivy League school, the opportunities you gain access to aren't available to others:
If you don't care about any of these, then realistically it doesn't matter where you go to school.
I'm in the minority in the IT world, but I'm of the opinion that a degree helps people who aren't going into the trades, or the military, to have a little bit of growing-up time after high school. I got a STEM degree a while ago, and don't use a bit of the specific technical knowledge I gained in my day to day life. What I did learn from a technical education that was transferable was the ability to write well, interact with others professionally and troubleshoot methodically. All of these skills have been critical to my (modest) success in the world of work.
That said, the days are gone where just graduating from college would guarantee you a solid job. Even when I graduated, people who partied their way through school and barely got degrees in business, psychology or communications were immediately snapped up by large corporations and put to work shuffling paper, working the trade show circuit, or some other random entry level task. New grads who really lucked out or went to the right school would get high-paying jobs at consulting firms flying around the world 300 days out of the year. Today, Lots of the paper shuffling is offshore now, the jobs don't exist anymore, and/or they don't command the same upper-middle class salary they used to. This is why people are complaining about the ROI on degrees. Even people who barely make it through CS or engineering find employment. Dotcom Bubble 2.0 is taking CS grads faster than they can be made.
In general, you should shoot for a degree that's at least tangentially related to something technical to make yourself stand out. And once you're in, you need to make the most of the opportunity, including doing internships and other activities that make companies want to pick you over Joe Random Graduate. Also, private universities are a complete rip-off UNLESS you are guaranteed to profit from the experience. Harvard, Yale, MIT...yeah, take out the loans because you'll never be allowed to fail once you make it through an Ivy League school...you'll make so many contacts and have more opportunities than I did graduating from a big public university. But, $45 or $50K for a tiny no-name college with no special affiliation? No way...save your money. I still think education is a good investment, but you need to consider the cost vs. the ROI.
I live outside of NYC and I'm totally shocked. I'm sure they had to give the store away (ha ha) in terms of tax abatements and other giveaways, and that isn't New York's strong suit. From my experience, NY loses large corporate headquarters to North Carolina, Texas, Georgia and other states because those states will do anything to attract them. Even if the executive HQ doesn't move there, they'll make a deal to move the "support campus" to Dallas or Atlanta and suck out thousands of decent mid-level jobs. The execs get to stay in NY while all the regular workers have to move or lose their jobs, and the places accepting the workers will build roads, provide free electricity and gas, construct buildings, not charge taxes for decades, whatever it takes. It's definitely not a fair fight when you're talking about run-of-the-mill employees. There's so much free space in any of the places I've mentioned that they could build out millions of square feet with thousands of parking spaces. The execs can live in their gated communities and send their kids to private schools, etc.
I'm sure we'll never find out the full extent of the giveaway, but NYC is really trying to gentrify Long Island City. Back when the city had industry, there were a ton of factories and other manufacturing support items like reasonably-priced housing there. I'm assuming part of the deal is to arrange for the construction of a "techbro fortress" and a few square blocks of luxury apartments around it, especially since there's a huge housing project right near where they're going.
I'm happy to see a company for once understanding that moving to a high-tax high-cost area might actually be a good thing in terms of employee quality, education, etc. But, it's going to be a hard sell for anyone who isn't young, hip, single and willing to shell out huge bucks for rent/housing. Getting to LIC even from Long Island is a bit rough right now because the public transportation that exists right now is totally jam-packed. Moving the people off the 7 train once the LIRR goes into Grand Central will help, but even 25,000 new employees will add a lot of riders to an already busy system.
One thing that I think is going to make China the dominant global power in the mid-to-late 21st century -- besides a massive population advantage -- is their government structure. If they want a cyber-weapons program, that's what they'll get.
Like it or not, the way things are set up now in China is incredibly efficient. Anywhere else, there would be years of debate over any decision. With both economic and political control, decisions that just can't be made anywhere else are simply made by decree and done. Having control over companies lets the central government choose what industries get attention and which get less, as well as react immediately to outside influences. An example would be the massive amount of infrastructure spending that simply materialized to stave off the effects of the 2008 GFC, or their plans to re-colonize Africa via economic means this time.
I don't think most Westerners would want to live under such a system, but it's incredibly good at allocating resources and turning sharply to face challenges. It doesn't matter whether a decision is unpopular...that's the decision and that's it.
I think this is one instance of a more general problem. People are getting more of a peek behind the curtain through social media, constant news coverage and the fact that politicians seem to telegraph their decisions through Twitter. IMO if we do end up destroying the US as we know it, historians are going to point to social media as a big driving force. People are seeing how the sausage is made and they don't like it. Corruption used to be hidden and although it sucks, it is and always will be the way things are done. Do you really think the president personally vetted his Supreme Court pick? No way, I assume the party bosses told him in some unofficial way, "You will put this guy in place or we'll make sure you don't get re-elected and nothing you want will get done." Remember, people didn't used to see any of this...their information sources were limited and investigative journalism wasn't very investigative when it came to sensitive topics.
I'm a little surprised that the average tech worker wouldn't make the logical leap that the same facial recognition phone unlocking algorithm can be used to reliably track people in a crowded city. How did people working for defense contractors during the Cold War and Vietnam Wars feel about building technology that was much more overtly deadly?
> I understand your frustration now that we have made it and are no longer the jokers, but 14 years ago I got an IT job with an associates degree at about 2x minimum wage and not really having much of a clue (looking back now). Thank god there wasn't some group of gatekeepers ensuring I couldn't get that job until I had a 4 year degree (which I have now) and passed some certs (which I have now).
I'm not so sure it's a good idea to have a gatekeeper-free entry process. it's great to be able to work your way up form nothing, but look at how much crappy insecure code gets written by people who don't know what they're doing. Or, look at all the data breaches caused by simple misconfigurations that almost any experienced sysadmin would pick up on. (Public S3 buckets containing sensitive info for the taking are way too common.)
As it is now, there are already too many people chasing the money who really don't have an aptitude for this field, or thought they're "good at computers." IMO there's nothing at all wrong with forcing people to do a little apprentice-level work that ensures everyone coming out as s fully credentialed IT person has the fundamentals under their belt. Besides being the equivalent of academic hazing, medical school ensures that anyone coming out, starting from nothing but basic science, is in a position to pass the medical licensing exams. Having everyone understand the absolute basics so they aren't shooting in the dark when they're trying to fix a problem would be worth it.
I've long held the view that IT and SW development need to figure out a way to form a professional organization like the one physicians have. A "lite" example of this is the Society of Actuaries, and it looks like they're doing their job. Actuaries have had a very stable career for a very long time. It's not as sexy as slinging ads at Google or Facebook or working at a hip web startup, but it does pay well.
I don't have the math skills to even consider getting into this profession, but it's a very good example of an industry needing very talented people and paying accordingly for them, Insurance companies can go bankrupt if they make bad actuarial decisions...too conservative and they don't make enough money, too risky and they can go broke paying out more claims than they expected.
What I think they do right is similar to what I think the medical profession got right:
Not knowing the industry, however, I do wonder how insurance companies don't just go around the whole thing and hire 25000 Indian number crunchers the same way IT outsourcers "replace" experienced developers and systems engineers. Either the skillset is so esoteric that only the super-intelligent math geniuses among us can do it, or the SOA has the ability to force companies to do what it wants the same way the AMA does in the US.
I'm of the opinion that we're in the middle of an inflating Second Dotcom Bubble. Having lived through the First one, I'm seeing similar patterns, one of which is, "We need more computer science students!" I think it would be beneficial for everyone to have a basic understanding of how computers work below the consumer level, especially now that things are so abstract and "Just Work(TM)" But, let's call it what it is...an attempt to push AWS adoption. Big hardware and software companies have done this for years...Sun practically gave away workstations and servers to universities in the hopes that people would buy them in their businesses later. Apple, same thing. And, Microsoft/Google are nearly giving away O365 and GSuite for the same reasons.
I see a lot of comments saying they're trying to drive salaries down by flooding the market. While I'm sure that's true to some extent, offshoring and visa programs have already done this. I also see comments on topics like this that basically treat development as some sort of priesthood that outsiders can't join. Reality is that we're 400 levels abstracted away from real hardware in most cases these days. Especially with "code monkey" type projects like front-end JavaScript or CRUD applications, we're almost at the gluing-Lego-blocks-together level of simplicity. Go beyond that and it's exponentially harder, but these Dotcom Bubble startups and cloud providers don't need CS geniuses for the next round of expansion.
The industry would be better served by teaching some of the basics to get the interested students hooked, publicly state that there are actually long-term opportunities in development and IT that aren't going to end up in India in 5 years, and make available entry-level positions that pay a reasonable starting salary. Students aren't dumb, and especially when they're paying huge sums for a degree, they're going to go with what they perceive as a safe career path. Current students who have IT and developer parents are probably seeing first-hand to some extent the effects of downward pressure on salaries, outsourcing and offshoring. I love my job in systems engineering and am good at it, but I work for a multinational company and know that I'm one MBA's spreadsheet and PowerPoint away from being kicked out when the CIO hires Infosys or similar.
I've worked at places that use an insanely short email retention policy to get out of e-discovery in lawsuits. One place had a 30-day retention..anything older than that and, "la la la, we have no record of the email you are attempting to recover." And apparently that works, if you have a written policy stating that you don't keep email or backups for more than X days.
But, couldn't any company just send all their computers to the metal shredder the second a lawsuit is filed using the same argument? Maybe that's how they're planning on hiding how bad their data breach was. Somehow I doubt that though...if there were no rules against destroying evidence, every computer would have a self-destruct circuit in it.
Of course no one knows what actually happened, but this totally reads like some clueless CIO getting pressure from the board and CEO to just make the problem disappear.
There's no getting around the fact that college is extremely expensive. It makes perfect sense to me that people entering college today, unless they have a full scholarship and a "free pass" like inheriting a family business later on, wouldn't be studying humanities. They're going to try to maximize their employability if they have the ability to do so. I majored in chemistry 20 years ago, and this was because I realized that I wasn't going to be able to handle the math in the engineering curriculum I was aiming for, AND that some random business management or psychology degree wasn't going to be a good return on investment.
I'd say the students trying to be as employable as possible are making a smart decision. However, I wonder if the humanities people are going to have the last laugh. Automation and offshoring are rapidly eating up entry level STEM jobs and humanities are going to be one of the few things an algorithm and cloud automation platform aren't going to be able to handle. When I went to school (graduated 1997) it was almost a guarantee that anyone getting through a degree program would find work somewhere. Large corporations would basically do cattle calls for all the management school grads and send them off to some random entry level job doing TPS reports. I'm thinking it's a little different now...Accenture sent the TPS report processors offshore, Infosys runs the company's IT from India, etc.
I also wonder this...we're in the middle of the Second Dotcom Bubble, which started inflating right after the financial crisis (iOS and Android gained ground shortly after this, followed by cloud, DevOps, etc.) Are we seeing tons of new computer science grads the same way we did when everyone in 1998 was getting a CS degree? Are they chasing the money again and lining up to be JavaScript front end developers for 6-figure salaries at hip startups?
IMO there's nothing wrong with going to college...at worst it's a good way to grow up a little bit before heading into the real world. If you get into a top 10 school, it can change your life because no one graduating one of these schools will ever fail to find an opportunity. If you don't, you can go to a "regular" state school, work hard and find a path to success that way. The not-so-smart money is in these little private colleges...that $50K+ investment per year really needs to pay off, and unless you're in the particular niche that these small colleges funnel grads into, you'll just be left with six figures of debt and no better off than a state school grad.
I've heard that Japanese employers are almost paternal when it comes to keeping employees around for an entire career. I guess in an environment like that, where you graduate school and are employed with one firm for your entire life it would be hard to quit. It also explains why Japanese employees put up with whatever their bosses demand...apparently getting hired anywhere else after being let go is impossible.
I hate the US attitude that all employees are disposable, but having a culture like this isn't a good solution either. I also read this article that basically says all large companies come around only _once_ to recruit new graduates, then never accept any new hires. What do people do if, for whatever reason, they mess up the last year of university and don't get picked? Are they out of a job forever?
I admit that I'm not one who easily rage-quits jobs and have never had a position for less than 5 years. I know that's a minority position in the tech industry...especially with the Second Dotcom Bubble I'm starting to see more instances of employees throwing a tantrum and just walking into another job the second things don't go exactly their way. But paying someone to quit on your behalf? That's definitely something built into the culture.
I wonder what that series of meetings was like...Large Investor A asks him to keep the gravy train rolling in exchange for positive coverage by their investment bankers?
One thing I wonder about how this time period in history will be viewed is what role Twitter and other social media played overall. It's one thing to say you're privatizing your company to another CEO golf buddy, but a whole other one to tell the world and have investors freak out. Same thing with the President -- we've never had a direct line plugged into people's brains like this before that lets them fire off random thoughts.
Also, why is Musk such a crazy micromanager? I've worked for large companies my whole career and CEOs there do nothing but get hauled around in corporate aircraft and vehicles, golf, give the occasional speech or conference call, attend board meetings for the other companies they're on the boards of, etc. They've delegated everything to subordinates...not Elon Musk!
This is the Second Dotcom Bubble. Look at all the front end developers being cranked out of JavaScript bootcamps. In my field (IT), I ran into lots of MCSE bootcamp graduates around 1999-2000. There will always be people chasing the money with no real talent for the work, and bootcamps will spring up to make them "overnight experts."
"Nobody codes a red-black tree or writes a game engine from scratch now, it's all libraries put together like legos."
I have a science degree (not a CS degree) and I agree that this is the case. Run of the mill development is indeed gluing a massive Lego project together. But in my opinion it's very important to have a grounding in the fundamentals...start from the bottom and move up the stack instead of starting 400 levels up and not knowing how the magic box you're calling works under the hood.
This is happening a lot in my field (IT infrastructure.) The IaC frameworks and languages are good enough to let a developer say, "Give me this" without knowing anything about the inner workings. All of the IaC, CI/CD and DevOps tooling was designed by developers to give them a way to bypass all the fundamentals and make their stuff Just Work (TM). When you look at things from the bottom up you see how much is behind delivering a service and can see potential bottlenecks and ways to improve. When you look from above down on the URL, connection string or API call, you lose that perspective..."I call this, with these arguments, I get this. I don't care how it works, It Just Works(TM)."
Apple, Google and friends already have their own independent evaluations of someone's ability. They can afford to be picky and hire geniuses. For a time in the early days of Google no one got in without a top-10 CS degree. When employers like that run out of elite CS grads to pick up, the next stop is finding people who can pass their interview process. These companies are looking for once-in-a-generation savant geniuses to come up with the next world-shattering trillion-dollar product. If they don't have degrees that doesn't concern them as long as they can extract the product from their brain.
Where this doesn't work is the outside-of-Silicon-Valley world. It's common knowledge that really good IT people don't have a CS degree, just a knack for troubleshooting. I have a degree in chemistry from way back and wound up in IT. But, when you have more people applying than positions open, the sad reality is that anyone who doesn't check that "degree in anything" checkbox is going to get their resume thrown out by most employers. Whether that's fair or smart is another story...but traditional employers employing traditional people for run of the mill tech jobs are going to list it as a hard requirement and frankly they're not concerned if they miss anyone.
Call me an elite out of touch intellectual, but I think some time working on a degree in a non-vocational setting is a good thing. Even the really good people I've worked with that don't have degrees are often tunnel-vision focused on the technical aspects of their job. If nothing else, it's a good time for students to finish growing up if they hit age 18 without all that complete. You're exposed to a small amount of courses in fields unrelated to your technical major and students that do it right learn how to absorb new information quickly, write well and communicate effectively. There are tons of people who waste the opportunity also, or pay way more than the education they receive is worth. I think these folks as well as the people complaining about not having a degree are the ones who are most vocal about not needing one.
"Generally, people today want to work on meaningful projects."
I think this is true, especially if the employee is more experienced and has choices. When you're starting out with a freshly-minted CS degree or IT certification, you'll take any old front-end web dev/code monkey or desktop support job. Startups and even big tech players at the entry level are fueled by new grads who have no idea that 90 hour work weeks aren't normal.
I'm about 20 years into my "professional" life and I'm way more interested in doing something interesting than I am at achieving an absolute maximum salary. I live near NYC and know lots of people making way more than I do in finance IT (hedge funds, investment bank specialty groups, etc.) But you ask them about their jobs, and you basically get, "It sucks/it's boring and they work me to death, but it pays well." I make about the average salary for my local job market. But I have a normal work week and help build software and systems that's used by thousands of people every day to perform a critical task...stuff I can easily go and watch being used. This beats keeping some reporting service churning out useless figures no one reads running 24/7 (at least for me.)
No one should EVER flake out on an interview. But, stories like this were coming out around 1999/2000 as well, just as the First Dotcom Bubble was about to pop. I think it might be time for another one...maybe not a pop, but a slow deflate,
I really like my job, and I've been at it for almost 10 years. Without trying to sound like a jerk, I'm good at what I do, have lots of diverse experience and should be hopping jobs every 6 months for 20% raises each time while the bubble keeps inflating. But one of the reasons I don't is the difficulty of getting recruiters and companies to follow up. Why should I waste my time crafting a custom resume, wading through phone interview screening hell and not even hear, "No thanks" back from an employer? It's odd to see employers and recruiters complaining when the shoe is on the other foot. Maybe they could learn to communicate a little better with candidates? Even if it's "no" I'd rather know to stop wasting my time thinking about a position.
Bubbles and a crappy hiring process aside, there's no excuse for not being a professional. Maybe you can get away with it in Silicon Valley, but almost everywhere I've dealt with has looked down on people who can't dress appropriately for the environment, can't show up on time, etc. I work in a small technology niche (air transport) and the pool of people who really have a good handle on things is surprisingly small. I run into people from past jobs at totally different employers...we just keep rotating it seems. If I pulled something like not showing up for an interview, throwing a temper tantrum on an exit interview or other "employees' market" items, I guarantee someone down the line in the future would hear about it.
I actually like OS X and iOS to a degree, but I agree, there's no real reason to buy MacBook hardware other than to blend in with the other hipster emulators with the Github stickers on their MacBooks.
BMW and Mercedes do this too. Especially with Mercedes, the idea used to be that you spend a ton of money and get a reliable tank. Now, both are designed to last just beyond the 3-year lease period. Both have insanely expensive, single-source electronic components that can make a simple repair cost thousands. And all of these electronics are designed so they can only be replaced by a BMW dealer and fail long before the mechanical parts do.
Apple would love nothing more than to lease you a MacBook and have it simply stop working at the end of the 3 years...just send a high voltage pulse and destroy the electronics on the motherboard...sorry, logic board. They're waiting a generation until absolutely everyone is over on the "new iPhone every 2 years" model and doesn't remember what owning electronics was like.
It seems like whenever there's an economic expansion of any kind, people are desperate to put their money in anything regardless of the chance of success. This particular time will be very interesting to look back on, because you basically have multiple different bubbles all going on at the same time and they all feed on each other. I feel old, but I really don't see cryptocurrency as anything more than a scam.
The mobile/app economy bubble is fed by the cloud bubble, which both feed the blockchain/cryptocurrency bubble, and all of them are sustained by The Cloud. Back in the 90s, if you wanted to sell bags of dogfood online and ship them for free to get eyeballs, getting started cost tons of money. You had to buy servers, colocate them in a data center, etc. and it cost millions to start up. Now, all you have to do is use the founder's credit card to buy AWS/Azure/GCP time and the money comes out much more slowly. This is why I think the bubble(s) are going to last a lot longer than the last one...there's way less pressure to IPO and topple the house of cards. Most of unicorn startups are being happily fed money by VCs rather than Grandma's pension fund buying into pets.com, and they need less every month.
My worry is that allowing these bubbles to live longer than they should will make them huge and cause an even bigger mess when everything comes crashing in. Look at Silicon Valley housing markets as an example. I live near NYC, so I'm not one to point fingers at crazy housing prices. But if i wanted to move there for a job, a similar house to mine, a similar distance to work would be 4 or 5 times the price of my already-expensive one here in suburban NY. Yet, people are happily buying/renting so they can cash in on the gold rush...no thanks.
I guess this is what happens when a communications executive takes over a bunch of creatives. I live near NYC and it's nothing like LA, but the entertainment work scene here is pretty much the opposite of AT&T. It's not quite Don Draper 3-martini lunches but former colleagues of mine who now work in that business say it's pretty close. People are creative and used to having a fair amount of freedom around the way they get the job done.
When a creative company gets acquired by someone who just wants to squeeze it for all it's worth, they'll probably lose some of their better creative talent...those folks have options. AT&T is used to providing a cheap-to-deploy, incredibly high margin service. Once they start cracking the whip, the content quality is going to drop. I imagine the first thing they'll do is offshore every business process that isn't outsourced already. When that doesn't produce the savings, they're going to start cutting into the creatives' budget. No more personal assistants, free car service, free food, expense account dinners, etc.
"Regulatory burdens of all kinds are absolutely killing small businesses, which makes the buyouts from large players all that more lucrative."
I deal with lots of "entrepreneurs" who constantly repeat this refrain over and over. What regulation is killing a business? Paperwork is handled by accounting software. Collecting sales tax is done via your POS software or online merchant processor, and you can even pay them online as well. Minimum wage is just something business owners have to live with...if you can't make ends meet paying someone minimum wage then you shouldn't be in business or just do the work yourself.
There's no burden. Business owners already get a huge free pass that salaried employees don't...the ability to make up their own income numbers and overstate expenses. Literally every small business owner I've ever seen is passing all of his/her personal expenses through their business entity. The company owns their houses, cars, etc. and they pay themselves a tiny salary.
"While companies that were less than two years old made up about 13% of all companies in 1985, they only accounted for 8% in 2014. From around 1998 to 2010, the share of private sector workers in companies that were less than two years old plummeted from more than 9% to less than 5%. "
This makes sense given the timeline. In the mid-80s everyone was experimenting and you had tons of small companies chipping away at the monolithic UNIX/mainframe computing culture...as well as a few manufacturers actually making physical goods. From 1998 to 2010, you had the top of Dotcom Bubble 1.0, followed by the financial crisis in 2010, so you go from 8% at the height to 5% at the start of the recovery cycle. Then in 2014, you have the inflation of the Second Dotcom Bubble which (IMO) we're nearing the top of. plus smartphones and social media really go nuts from 2010 to 2014, hence the increase to 8%.
My opinion is that startups aren't sticking around very long, simply because they're easier to cobble together from outsourced parts. SaaS providers offer HR, finance, payment acceptance, logistics, and IT in a box. Cloud providers will host your workloads for a monthly fee which the VCs probably like a lot, because they slowly burn money rather than give millions at a time to build data centers and such. So, some guy building Yet Another Provisioning Tool or Yet Another Abstraction Layer on JavaScript can follow the First Dotcom Bubble playbook on an accelerated timeline...either they get big enough to IPO, or get bought by Microsoft/Facebook/Google/Netflix.
The other thing that might be driving this is just the sheer risk involved. Despite what the media portrays about SV startups, they are not stable places to work. It's great when you're fresh out of college and can continue the lifestyle...getting paid in free food and doing 100 hour weeks in the office with your buddies. But when you grow up, steady paychecks have a huge appeal, especially when you have a family.
This happens at every big company, and Microsoft also has super-deep pockets so they can afford to have some dead wood. If you're measuring 'time put in" as years with the company, that's true...there are some people in big companies who know the right people and can coast for decades. But you can also measure time put in as how many 100-hour weeks you put in on product deathmarches, how tethered you are to VSTS 24 hours a day, etc. Those people who are workaholics will also be recognized over very productive, smart people because they're more visible. They're the ones leaving work at 1 AM and coming back for more.
As a counter example to MS dead wood, look at HP/HPE. The bottom has dropped out of non-white box servers and storage...if you believe the pundits no one is buying new equipment. Companies also have less of a need for third-rate crappy offshore IT support. As a result, HP/HPE/DXC have been throwing thousands of people overboard. We actually do buy equipment still, and it's a normal occurence to have the person you've been talking with for years suddenly get fired. HP could afford to be bloatted when they were making a healthy margin on servers and selling a ton of them.Azure.
Microsoft doesn't have this problem. They have huge cash reserves and are about to lock every single Windows enterprise into Office 365 and Azure. I wouldn't expect the dead wood to go away anytime soon.
Back in the late 90s, anyone who had a passing familiarity with computers was commanding a huge salary regardless of talent. I'm sure Microsoft is in an arms race with Amazon and Google these days. All three companies are going at a breakneck pace trying to develop new cloud services or make the ones they already run cheaper to run. The race is on to lock as many customers into their cloud provider as they can because no one is buying software licenses anymore.
What's interesting is that with everything moving to the cloud, these 3 companies and a few others will probably be the chief consumers of developer and infrastructure engineering talent. And at least in previous years, Microsoft selected for highly talented people and paid enough to ensure they didn't run off to a competitor. I've worked with people who've been at Microsoft for 20+ years...if you're really talented they do a lot to keep you. I think this is why that survey result is surprising.
We'll see what happens in a couple years. I'm betting a huge chunk of cloud consumption is startups selling bags of dog food and AI-powered, IoT driven, blockchain-enabled subscription boxes online. When that goes away, people are still going to use AWS/Azure/GCP, but I just don't think they'll get the stupid levels of revenue they're getting today from the VC money.
Something tells me these numbers are being manipulated. If things really were that good, employers would raise wages. You'd have fast food places offering $20/hr to flip burgers if they needed the labor that badly. Also, including every "job" regardless of full/part time status and suitability is misleading. No one who spent a reasonable effort getting a college degree wants to be working a minimum wage retail job. If all the jobs advertised were professional jobs, or even high-paying factory work this would be an actual story.
One other problem especially in the tech and IT fields is the huge mismatch between employers/employees and the absolutely crappy hiring/headhunting process. Employees lowball their offers, headhunters have zero clue about the jobs they're advertising, and there's a massive fetish for anyone under 30. God help you if you're in your mid-50s and end up on the wrong end of an offshoring/outsourcing. The 28 year old MBA in HR is going to assume you're a dinosaur and immediately pass you over.
It's sure better than 10+% unemployment, but let me know when employers are offering solid, well paying, stable full time work. You can't expect anyone with a family to want to string together 3 part time gigs plus some Uber driving on the side. It's great for the unattached, but a bad way to encourage stable home lives for people.