UCSF is a medical campus, and they operate a hospital, so this is probably where the cuts are being made. Healthcare IT is badly funded and there's never enough money to do anything interesting...they're focused solely on keeping doctors happy so IT's needs never come before that. But, having a public university system signing outsourcing contracts with vendors, foreign or domestic, is a new twist I didn't see coming.
It didn't say in the article what they offshored, but in my experience HCL is a mainframe programming shop, so of course this means that anyone being replaced is probably "old" and will have a very rough time finding employment even close to previous levels again. That sucks double for them, because they're going to be marched through the "train your replacement" humiliation to get severance/early retirement.
I'm all for stuff like cloud computing, colocation, etc. where it makes sense, but I really don't understand why companies continue to believe they're going to get some great deal doing an outsourcing engagement. Do they not realize these companies have to get paid enough to profit from the deal? Where do they think that money comes from? I hate the trend of running companies on a huge tower of outsourced services. Every company of reasonable size should do almost everything in house -- it's cheaper in the long run and the employees doing the work are more engaged. There is absolutely no task that is better done by an outsourcer than your own employees.
I know ITT Tech and other for-profit schools fill a gap in the education system, but this whole sector seems perfectly positioned to scam uneducated people out of student loan money, VA benefits, trade adjustment benefits, etc. and give them very little in return.
The vast majority of potential students would be much better served going to community college, or if they're in a strong union state, joining a trade's apprenticeship program and actually getting paid while learning.
BA just got done offshoring a lot of their IT operations to Tata, and from what I've been reading, TCS wrote the new software that's causing the issues. I'll give them benefit of the doubt and assume the software at least works. What I assume is happening is what is happening in IT departments all over the place. Offshore Vendor X delivers software with barely adequate documentation to a skeleton crew onshore group that has to try to make it work. And yes, I have relevant experience -- airline IT is one of those fields that you have to develop a lot of domain knowledge to even understand what's going on.
I have seen this in many different industries...they try to offshore something core to their business to a group of random Java programmers who have no clue what it is they're writing or what business process they're supporting. And because these offshore guys operate a revolving-door employment operation, anyone who actually does learn what's going on quickly leaves or becomes a manager -- thus starting the process again with a fresh new grad.
Until companies realize they save money in the long run by carefully managing a directly-engaged, fully involved workforce this will keep happening. You can't keep dead wood around forever, but some of the operations I've seen lately have basically been chopping down the tree and setting it on fire.
Lots of techies forget that 99% of the population does not care about the how it works when it comes to technology -- they care about whether it works and is easy to figure out. Phone operating systems don't even have the concept of user-accessible storage and filesystems. Of course it's all there under the hood, but it's abstracted away. All data is stored in an app-specific data store in the cloud as far as users are concerned.
Warnings like this and the "check what's in the address bar before you hand over your password" type of message need to be given. Few will listen, but putting it out there doesn't hurt. We now have what was asked for in the past -- end user systems that have almost no complexity and learning curve. It makes sense that newer generations growing up with this aren't used to files, filesystems, the concept of stored data and so on.
I'm seeing this automation trend as well in IT. Cloud and software-defined everything is messing with the clear line between software development and systems administration. Unless it turns out to be just hype, and companies decide to keep their equipment onsite (not likely,) only a chunk of systems people will survive the next wave of automation. "DevOps" may be poorly defined now and the stuff of ironic-moustache, skinny jeans wearing SV startup hipsters, but it's definitely more mainstream now than it was just a couple years ago. It'll take companies ages to fully move to it, but I do feel it's coming. I just got involved in a project being deployed in Azure, and it really is a different world compared to the single-server-per-application universe. You can build an entire solution out, IaaS and PaaS, with a script. Systems guys who will make it to the next level need to be able to be the ones designing these things, and able to troubleshoot the software defined mess when it goes awry.
Jeffrey Snover (the guy who invented PowerShell) gave a talk about the "click next admin" who isn't going to make it to the next era of IT. I still know people who do Windows system administration who don't automate anything because they can't or don't want to learn how. As big companies either deploy their own private cloud stuff or go to public clouds like AWS or Azure for everything, the skills IT guys have learned over 20 years aren't going to cut it except in a very few small niches. Yes, nothing has changed under the hood, but the fact that it's abstracted away and you're no longer hand-feeding the servers configs, etc. means that a lot of people who have lots of knowledge on that front are going to either need to retrain or find something else to do. And with the rest of the workforce being automated as well, that "something else" is in serious doubt.
So, in the US, we automate agriculture enough to get the workforce down to 2% of the population. Then we automate enough of the manufacturing sector to reduce it to 8% of the population, not including the millions of offahored factory jobs. Then we tell everyone they have to go to college and get at least a 4 year degree to have any hope of a stable future. The vast majority of people at non-top tier universities are doing the minimum required to get a degree, majoring in business or psychology or communications. In the past, all of those people were absorbed into random entry-level positions doing the kind of work Walmart is now automating. It's a ritual - party through 4 years, show up at the campus career center during your senior year, do a few interviews and pick Random Large Employer to work for as a Random Paper Processing Position. What exactly are people proposing that we do with these "C students," who number in the millions and contribute to society through taxes, buying stuff and raising little C students? - Most of them don't have the aptitude for tech careers (many of which are being automated as well...) - Most of them can't be trained in a skilled trade without asking them to go back through another 4 years of apprenticeship - Almost none can become doctors, lawyers, etc. because the competition is so keen to get in to medical/law school - They can't be investment bankers or management consultants, because those professions only recruit from the Ivy League
I know it's no one's dream to process paperwork, but it has traditionally been one of the most stable ways for middle-skilled people to earn a living and have a career. Students starting out as a Associate Paper Processor have the opportunity to become a Senior Paper Processor, then a Paper Processor Supervisor, Manager of Paper Processing, Director of Document Services, and so on. For everyone in corporate IT, think of all the paper processors we directly support, working away in their cubicles. Most are incapable of doing any more than a defined procedure on an input stack of work. If you suddenly say all these people are unemployed, what do you propose replacing their jobs with? When that good salary goes away, the government doesn't get its payroll tax, the unemployed person chooses not to buy a house and therefore doesn't pay property taxes into the system, they choose not to procreate and reduce the birth rate to an unsustainable level. And, they don't buy anything, meaning businesses can't sell the products they make.
I'm not saying we become Luddites and stop the automation, but we as a whole need to think about what we're going to do with a very large disaffected population. Look how much support Trump has among factory workers who are still unemployed or underemployed even though everyone's being told the economy is in OK shape. I'm one of those people who feels that full employment above all else should be the goal, even if we do make-work for some of it. You can't have millions of people sitting around with nothing to do and no purpose -- it will lead to massive crime over the long run as people get bored and tired of being broke.
I remember hearing high-dram startup flame-out stories right around this time 15-16 years ago. The only differences this time are: - Phones/tablets instead of PCs/browsers - Truly stupid startups are able to stick around longer because of public cloud services - This round of startups isn't going to leave behind goodies like thousands of miles of dark fiber, data centers full of equipment, etc.
Seriously, "the credit karma of LinkedIn?" What does that even mean??
Being an American, and therefore used to our banking system, this was always something I was wondering about with wire transfers. Apparently, they are instant and basically the same thing as handing a bag of cash to the recipient. Once the recipient takes the cash, it's irrevocable - they would have to agree to give you your bag back if you wanted the money. Same thing goes for these bank transfers - anyone with the authority over the company's bank accounts is a target for scams like these. We 'Muricans are used to ACH transactions taking 2-3 business days and having the ability to stop payment on them the same way we would a check. Wire transfers to us are basically Swiss bank account territory; only people who have a good reason to use them do so.
The company I work for is a medium size multinational. We're big enough to do business worldwide but not so big that we get the "good" BPO vendors or hire "good" employees to do our offshore work. I've been working there for a while, and it seems to me that routine work is getting shipped to cheaper and cheaper countries every year. First it was Eastern Europe, then India, then the Philippines, now Central American countries. I can definitely see something like this happening with some of our core processes. If it followed the flowchart exactly, with all the right steps completed, and everything was in order, not one question would be raised.
That said, every company is susceptible to this whether the employees are onshore or off. The problem is knowing when to bother the CEO on his yacht, or the golf course, or the luxury resort he's staying at to ask him a question about routine business...especially when you have a message that looks like it came from right from him. Properly implemented digital signatures would help in this case -- but think about the fact that EV certs turn the entire address bar bright green and no one notices that, and they click "Yes" to every pop-up that comes their way.
I posted about this in the duplicate story from last week - the only difference is now the pay is 75% with full benefits.
This would be a good option for a narrow set of working parents like me. My wife and I both work; she has an awful commute and a workplace that pays well but has no flexible hours (even for professional positions.) I have a flexible job, but not enough so I can work from home. So when my oldest kid starts kindergarten this fall, I'm still home when he's ready to get on the bus for school, but I have to arrange for someone to be there when he gets home. Something like this would be a great deal if: - Both parents worked reasonably well-paying, stable jobs. (A layoff while the other guy is working 3/4 time would be a serious mess.) - The family needs enough discipline to stay out of debt and have a lot of savings, for the reason mentioned above. - They also need to learn to live with less free cash flow in exchange for more time at home/elimination of some child care expenses. - Ideally, they would own their house or have a reasonable mortgage payment they could cover out of savings if a disaster happens.
The problems I see with it are this -- the average family in a high cost of living area is just barely hanging on by their fingernails, has no savings, more than one mortgage, and a huge appetite for stuff. That, and Amazon is known for being a sweatshop that works people ungodly hours and does the stack ranking Hunger Games-style performance evaluations. I suspect something like this will lead to more age-based discrimination. Already we have 28-year-old employees with no kids willing to work 100 hour weeks while the more established family guys get the job done in 40, but appear to be slackers because they're not in the office at 11 PM on a Friday night. Amazon is already a Logan's Run kind of workplace and this could just amplify that and cement the "oh, you're done in IT if you're over 30" mindset.
Honestly it's a great idea if implemented properly. I hate the feeling of getting into work and immediately the clock starts ticking -- trying to get the maximum amount I can do done in the time i have at work. If an employer can help reduce that stress level with a mutually agreeable program I'd be willing to try it.
Speaking as a father of two, nothing prepares new parents for what happens when one of these little creatures stops being a robot and starts being real: - Sleep deprivation - Loss of anything resembling free time unless a kid activity is involved - Loss of money -- they're expensive at every age and stage, just in different ways - Loss of sanity -- $deity help the teen parent who happens to get a perpetually fussy kid
Of course, there are huge upsides to it (it's the best thing I ever did, bar none...) but I'd think those would be drowned out quickly among the stresses of being poorly educated, underemployed, and always broke. I can see why young parents tend to be more abusive and neglectful.
I think it's silly to promote abstinence as a preferred form of birth control, which is what typically wins out in conservative areas of the US. These kids are teenagers -- if you tell them not to do something, and even show them examples of why you might not want to, they're going to go do it more. All the options need to be presented -- it's terrible luck of the draw for a kid who happens to be born to parents who can't properly care for it, and that kid shouldn't have to suffer because religious conservatives are afraid of exposing the real world to kids.
I don't claim to know any political internals, but $70,000 to get legislation that you basically write yourself passed sounds extremely low. Wouldn't this cost at least mid 6 figures? How much are the industry lobbyists and body shops paying Congress to ignore issues with the H-1B program and expand it? I'd guess there's a lot of non-reported money following behind that official $70K figure.
Industry lobbying must be the ultimate blank ticket for a Congressperson. It must be nice to just call up a lobbyist, promise to do something and get whatever your heart desires. I often joke with colleagues about "golfware" products like SAP or Oracle where the salespeople just pump the senior execs full of booze, hookers and blow until they sign the deal, but this must take stuff like that to a whole new level.
Something like this poses an interesting challenge. When you have to build a product that is not quite cheap enough to easily replace, but expensive enough to make it painful to do so, and has a shelf life of about 3 years, what design corners do you cut?
Back when computers of any kind were thousands of dollars, the answer was easy - engineer them to the max since people were paying good money for them and wanted them to last. This is how we get things like the IBM PC case made out of solid steel. Now the equation is flipped, because mobile phones get replaced so frequently. The problem is that you can't get around the fact that you're carrying a laptop in your pocket and it's not just a cheap throwaway toy. This is getting even more noticeable since carriers have pretty much abandoned subsidies and are passing more of the cost of the phone on to the consumer. The top end model is starting to touch that $1000 price point that makes people stop and think hard about replacement costs if they're not getting some deal from their phone carrier.
I know, we're all supposed to be Libertarian free market people on Slashdot, but in this case the tax makes sense. Since Uber and others refuse to be regulated like a taxi service, and are providing the same service cab companies are, this is the penalty for doing business. The thing that regulated cab companies bring to the table is the fact that, in large cities, they provide part of the public transportation system. An Uber driver can choose whether or not to take someone to a sketchy neighborhood at 3 AM, while a regulated cab company can't. In New York, the medallion system prevents traffic nightmares by controlling the number of cabs that can work in Manhattan. Imagine Manhattan rush hour traffic with an extra 50,000 cabs on the road on top of all the private cars, buses, etc. Taxi regulations ensure that cabs are at least inspected once in a while, while Uber has no such requirement other than the driver's personal inspection -- but they don't check that.
I say Uber should just bite the bullet and become a regulated taxi service in the areas they want to do business in. I know disruption and "X on your phone" is all the rage, but think about the taxi drivers themselves. Driving a cab is pretty much a job of last resort for some people. Do you really want to take away yet another way for people to make money in this gig economy?
If this isn't an indicator of the top of the Second Dotcom Bubble, I don't know what is.
I'm old enough to remember the first one. Since I'm a systems guy and not a developer, my side of the house had "MCSE Bootcamps." I worked for a consulting company at the time, so I got sent to one. These were some really interesting operations; some people were clearly there to cram for the exams but had real world experience, and others were basically off the street with zero idea what was going on. The second batch had just heard there was a lot of money to be made in computers...lots of former truck drivers, plumbers, etc. Lots of these places had similar business models to ITT Tech, U of Phoenix, etc. in that they would take people's federal trade readjustment (re-training) benefits or veterans' education benefits and return a dubious education.
So, now that we have the cloud doing the infrastructure for most of these startups, the thing they need is a stream of cheap web framework monkeys. Coder bootcamp will certainly give them that...but they'll only be able to copy-paste stuff from one of the millions of JavaScript front-ends.
"Cumulative updates might help with this - because the bugfix will be incorporated into the next month's cumulative update meaning getting the bugfixed version will be straightforward."
The problem comes not from the cumulative bug fixes, but the applications that, for one reason or another, rely on the buggy behavior. Concrete example - Microsoft has for some time now made IE updates cumulative for the very same reasons they're citing here -- better testing, etc. Since then, I have had more than one incident where I have had to hold back that month's IE updates to machines running some crappy web app until our devs or the vendor got around to fixing the problem. It's not the entire user base in most of these cases, but enough to be a concern. Same goes for.NET -- breaking changes in LOB apps that can't be worked around cheaply.
The other problem is that MIcrosoft's fixes have been of pretty poor quality lately. Having to apply one rollup that fixes 10 vulnerabilities, one of which breaks a line of business application, means that update doesn't get applied and leaves the 9 other holes unpatched. Same goes if the update kills the whole machine. Anyone responsible for thousands of desktops/laptops just won't roll something like that out and hope it works.
When you go to cumulative patching that includes feature changes, the OS becomes a moving target instead of a stable development target. Microsoft has a long term stable branch for Windows 10 for just this reason. (I'll bet that's the workaround -- just upgrade your "free with purchase" Windows 7 Pro license to a permanent subscription to Windows 10 Enterprise.)
Appy app apps guy is right - the future in everyone's mind is Apps, not some LUDDITE desktop application or "pre-App web app" -- but I think Microsoft is really dismissing how much legacy code is out there and is broken by various updates. I do systems integration work with an end user desktop focus, and there are _so many_ crappy IE-only, ActiveX or Java applet or Flash or Shockwave (!) monstrosities lurking in corporate IT shops everywhere. Most of it isn't even in-house developed - it was written by really expensive consultants who want another few million to modernize it.
It will be very interesting to see how they pull this off - whether there will be an exception for Enterprise, etc.
One of the problems with anything desktop-related is the fact that it's all getting drowned out by people beating the phone-and-tablet drum. Developers are cargo-culting the mobile design paradigm, even on applications that are aimed at desktop users. I do systems integration work with a focus on end user computing, so I see lots of user-facing software from many vendors. I swear that the big offshore code shops have all just started using the same "touch-first" AngularJS user interface framework and swap in company logos when they build a new web front end for something.
I'm a big desktop fan - and a big terminal/command line fan. People laugh at me for using Midnight Commander for file operations on my various computers...but it's way faster than navigating a GUI or the command line if you know what you're doing! The problem is that the desktop and even the laptop form factor isn't the default anymore for most people. They've become almost a niche now, even in businesses. Most people want the Surface-style convertible tablets now where I work, and I've still got my boring ThinkPad collection.
I'm also a cross-platform kind of guy, but I find myself on Windows machines most of the time. Microsoft actually did the right thing with Windows 10, walking back some of the 8.x "touch-only, tablet-only" craziness. It's not Windows 7, but in my mind it's a good compromise between the two worlds. If most people are mashing the screens on their Surface, you can't get away with Windows 7-sized user interface elements. I wish they'd let people theme Windows 10, but that's a different story. On the Linux side, I do wonder if having several choices for desktop environments, all with extremely different ecosystems, is the right thing. It's nice to have a million ways to do things, but Apple was able to do a decent UI on top of UNIX that hides everything UNIXy about MacOS until the user gets down into the details. The fragmentation of the Linux desktop is one of the things slowing adoption. Some of the more modern Linux desktop environments have gotten more love recently, and are a better choice for the new user. But, just like CDE on the old UNIX platforms, I'm sure KDE will be kicking around for ages. Just like me and my Midnight Commander...
Everyone's work situation is different. Some people want fixed, regular hours with well-defined time off. Some people just seem to want to be exploited to the maximum extent possible. Others have requirements that fit neither extreme.
For example, one of the reasons I work where I do now is the flexibility. I have 2 little kids, one of which is going into kindergarten this fall. My wife has a job that absolutely demands "butt in seat time" and a horrible commute. I make less than I could be making, but I can disappear when I need to and just do the work later on in the day. One very popular option I could see for people that work and have kids is work structured so that at least one parent can be home when the kid gets home from school and when it's time to leave for school, yet both parents still work. My job's not flexible enough to swing that, but I would certainly give up some pay for that flexibility.
I think employers in the long run will see that being flexible lets them keep a higher-quality work force. I've been looking into working in the state university system, since I would then have a 3-minute commute instead of a 25-minute one. Jobs just aren't available because once people get in, they stay. You have to wait until someone literally retires, partially because it's really hard to hire people, but partially because of long service. Several staff members I know have confirmed this, and a huge reason is flexibility...they certainly don't get paid market rates. You're working for the state and have to deal with bureaucracy, but academic jobs give people the freedom that some like more than money.
This is what I think too. I have always worked in "normal" environments, but there are plenty of stories about people in tech companies getting worked 90+ hours a week simply because that's the culture. Microsoft in the early 90s was like this, every dotbomb SV startup in the late 90s too -- and it's getting repeated for this current tech bubble.
I think part of it is companies self-selecting people who will put up with no life and love the idea of an "all inclusive" workplace. Not surprisingly, growing up and having real-life responsibilities like a family aren't compatible with this lifestyle long-term. Google provides 3 meals a day, concierge service, beanbag chairs...everything a recent grad needs to continue the college lifestyle. Amazon probably wants to try expanding out of the monoculture they have and see what happens when they don't burn people out. Might just be the effect of a mature company - Microsoft is still famously all-inclusive, but people have the option of going home at a reasonable time. They operate more on the academic model than the sweatshop model.
The problem is going to come when the MBAs and management consultants pick up on this and pervert it into "oh look, Millennials don't want stable jobs. They prefer to string together 4 part-time gigs to get through life." Then it just becomes an excuse to hire part-timers exclusively.
Isn't Amazon one of the tech firms that famously burns people out working them 90+ hours a week? If so, it just sounds like they're doing an experiment to see if hiring more people but working them less produces better results (Hint, it does in non-dysfunctional workplaces.)
I would think that anyone who actually chose to work for the NSA in an offensive capacity would be quite dedicated to their job. Same goes for most intelligence operatives -- I can't imagine they get paid as much as they could make in a private business or a well-funded covert organization, yet there they are. By contrast, Snowden was basically a contract sysadmin who had access to what was going on -- he wasn't coming up with these plans/exploits. I'd guess anyone voluntarily working on these exploits would be pretty serious about guarding their work and wouldn't take copies home on the train with them.
So -- is it old fashioned espionage tactics, finding out who these people are and squeezing them in various ways? Did whoever is behind this just get lucky and happened upon unencrypted copies of these tools? Should be interesting to watch.
I wonder how much of this solar build-out is due to an economic bubble in the industry. We've been looking into solar since we have a new roof, and the impression we've gotten both from SolarCity and a parade of local contractors is that they're all lining up before the (very lucrative) tax credits go away. Neither methods (leasing or paying for the system outright) seems like a particularly good deal. If you go the SolarCity route, they take your tax credit _and_ charge you monthly for your panels. If you go the local guy route, you pay (in my mind) hugely inflated prices, and they're trying to cover that up by saying "look at how much of a tax credit you're getting!" since it's a percentage of the price of the system.
I'm guessing all these local solar companies are going to be gone as soon as the tax credits dry up...there's no way they can continue selling systems for the prices they're charging. My impression is that these local solar companies are run by the typical hustler type who always has their eye on the next big money making opportunity, and will be on to the next one as soon as the business is inconvenient. It's too bad, because I'd definitely go for it if they would charge reasonable rates and not try to dupe idiotic homeowners who can't see past the tax credit carrot. In my mind, SolarCity is even more of a flat-out scam; they're the ones offering "no money out of pocket!" conversions, conveniently forgetting to mention that you're locked into a leasing contract with them. It's the perfect setup for them - the same mentality that goes into car leasing. Can't afford an S-class Mercedes? No problem, $999 a month, look, it's cheaper than a loan! Such a deal! Sign today!!
This release would be very interesting if it broke new ground -- finding a computationally-easy way to break commonly used encryption, or a smoking gun universal back door built into OSes or network gear. From what I've read this is just previously undisclosed, easy to implement and potentially dangerous flaws in network equipment firmware.
Here's an interesting question from someone not in the security field -- is this basically what hacking groups do? Are they just collecting a huge inventory of bugs by constantly banging on these devices every possible way they can?
As the investigation goes on, it's going to be enlightening to see how this got out, if it's an actual legit NSA "hack." Was it a spy agency using traditional espionage tactics? Was it a rogue Snowden-esque contractor? Was it some idiot taking work home, then getting his bag stolen on the train or out of his car? Time will tell.
"My wife is a physician and she tells people who say they want to be a doctor that "if you can imagine yourself doing anything else you probably should". That job is too hard and takes too much from you to bother with if it isn't a calling."
That's a really interesting statement. I've always looked at the medical profession as the model for a perfect employment situation: - Physicians and to a lesser extent other health professionals have their interests protected by a very well funded lobbying group, which is way more effective than any union ever could be. There's no such thing as the H-1B or "train your replacement," for example. - The supply of new doctors is kept low by limiting the number of medical schools and making licensure difficult. - The quality of workers is kept high by making it extremely difficult to get through a medical education and get trained via a residency. - The practice of specialties is controlled by other boards that further limit who can perform these specialist procedures. - Salaries are kept extremely high due to low supply/high demand and a regulated practice environment. - Continuing education is mandatory -- as opposed to the IT world where it's DIY and no employer pays for it anymore. - Doctors aren't considered replaceable by cheap labor.
I've always thought that if you could get through the educational hazing, it's the ideal profession to be in. A doctor could easily just get a job at a large hospital and make a huge salary if they didn't want to run their own practice. Is it not as ideal as people think?
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UCSF is a medical campus, and they operate a hospital, so this is probably where the cuts are being made. Healthcare IT is badly funded and there's never enough money to do anything interesting...they're focused solely on keeping doctors happy so IT's needs never come before that. But, having a public university system signing outsourcing contracts with vendors, foreign or domestic, is a new twist I didn't see coming.
It didn't say in the article what they offshored, but in my experience HCL is a mainframe programming shop, so of course this means that anyone being replaced is probably "old" and will have a very rough time finding employment even close to previous levels again. That sucks double for them, because they're going to be marched through the "train your replacement" humiliation to get severance/early retirement.
I'm all for stuff like cloud computing, colocation, etc. where it makes sense, but I really don't understand why companies continue to believe they're going to get some great deal doing an outsourcing engagement. Do they not realize these companies have to get paid enough to profit from the deal? Where do they think that money comes from? I hate the trend of running companies on a huge tower of outsourced services. Every company of reasonable size should do almost everything in house -- it's cheaper in the long run and the employees doing the work are more engaged. There is absolutely no task that is better done by an outsourcer than your own employees.
I know ITT Tech and other for-profit schools fill a gap in the education system, but this whole sector seems perfectly positioned to scam uneducated people out of student loan money, VA benefits, trade adjustment benefits, etc. and give them very little in return.
The vast majority of potential students would be much better served going to community college, or if they're in a strong union state, joining a trade's apprenticeship program and actually getting paid while learning.
BA just got done offshoring a lot of their IT operations to Tata, and from what I've been reading, TCS wrote the new software that's causing the issues. I'll give them benefit of the doubt and assume the software at least works. What I assume is happening is what is happening in IT departments all over the place. Offshore Vendor X delivers software with barely adequate documentation to a skeleton crew onshore group that has to try to make it work. And yes, I have relevant experience -- airline IT is one of those fields that you have to develop a lot of domain knowledge to even understand what's going on.
I have seen this in many different industries...they try to offshore something core to their business to a group of random Java programmers who have no clue what it is they're writing or what business process they're supporting. And because these offshore guys operate a revolving-door employment operation, anyone who actually does learn what's going on quickly leaves or becomes a manager -- thus starting the process again with a fresh new grad.
Until companies realize they save money in the long run by carefully managing a directly-engaged, fully involved workforce this will keep happening. You can't keep dead wood around forever, but some of the operations I've seen lately have basically been chopping down the tree and setting it on fire.
Lots of techies forget that 99% of the population does not care about the how it works when it comes to technology -- they care about whether it works and is easy to figure out. Phone operating systems don't even have the concept of user-accessible storage and filesystems. Of course it's all there under the hood, but it's abstracted away. All data is stored in an app-specific data store in the cloud as far as users are concerned.
Warnings like this and the "check what's in the address bar before you hand over your password" type of message need to be given. Few will listen, but putting it out there doesn't hurt. We now have what was asked for in the past -- end user systems that have almost no complexity and learning curve. It makes sense that newer generations growing up with this aren't used to files, filesystems, the concept of stored data and so on.
I'm seeing this automation trend as well in IT. Cloud and software-defined everything is messing with the clear line between software development and systems administration. Unless it turns out to be just hype, and companies decide to keep their equipment onsite (not likely,) only a chunk of systems people will survive the next wave of automation. "DevOps" may be poorly defined now and the stuff of ironic-moustache, skinny jeans wearing SV startup hipsters, but it's definitely more mainstream now than it was just a couple years ago. It'll take companies ages to fully move to it, but I do feel it's coming. I just got involved in a project being deployed in Azure, and it really is a different world compared to the single-server-per-application universe. You can build an entire solution out, IaaS and PaaS, with a script. Systems guys who will make it to the next level need to be able to be the ones designing these things, and able to troubleshoot the software defined mess when it goes awry.
Jeffrey Snover (the guy who invented PowerShell) gave a talk about the "click next admin" who isn't going to make it to the next era of IT. I still know people who do Windows system administration who don't automate anything because they can't or don't want to learn how. As big companies either deploy their own private cloud stuff or go to public clouds like AWS or Azure for everything, the skills IT guys have learned over 20 years aren't going to cut it except in a very few small niches. Yes, nothing has changed under the hood, but the fact that it's abstracted away and you're no longer hand-feeding the servers configs, etc. means that a lot of people who have lots of knowledge on that front are going to either need to retrain or find something else to do. And with the rest of the workforce being automated as well, that "something else" is in serious doubt.
So, in the US, we automate agriculture enough to get the workforce down to 2% of the population. Then we automate enough of the manufacturing sector to reduce it to 8% of the population, not including the millions of offahored factory jobs. Then we tell everyone they have to go to college and get at least a 4 year degree to have any hope of a stable future. The vast majority of people at non-top tier universities are doing the minimum required to get a degree, majoring in business or psychology or communications. In the past, all of those people were absorbed into random entry-level positions doing the kind of work Walmart is now automating. It's a ritual - party through 4 years, show up at the campus career center during your senior year, do a few interviews and pick Random Large Employer to work for as a Random Paper Processing Position. What exactly are people proposing that we do with these "C students," who number in the millions and contribute to society through taxes, buying stuff and raising little C students?
- Most of them don't have the aptitude for tech careers (many of which are being automated as well...)
- Most of them can't be trained in a skilled trade without asking them to go back through another 4 years of apprenticeship
- Almost none can become doctors, lawyers, etc. because the competition is so keen to get in to medical/law school
- They can't be investment bankers or management consultants, because those professions only recruit from the Ivy League
I know it's no one's dream to process paperwork, but it has traditionally been one of the most stable ways for middle-skilled people to earn a living and have a career. Students starting out as a Associate Paper Processor have the opportunity to become a Senior Paper Processor, then a Paper Processor Supervisor, Manager of Paper Processing, Director of Document Services, and so on. For everyone in corporate IT, think of all the paper processors we directly support, working away in their cubicles. Most are incapable of doing any more than a defined procedure on an input stack of work. If you suddenly say all these people are unemployed, what do you propose replacing their jobs with? When that good salary goes away, the government doesn't get its payroll tax, the unemployed person chooses not to buy a house and therefore doesn't pay property taxes into the system, they choose not to procreate and reduce the birth rate to an unsustainable level. And, they don't buy anything, meaning businesses can't sell the products they make.
I'm not saying we become Luddites and stop the automation, but we as a whole need to think about what we're going to do with a very large disaffected population. Look how much support Trump has among factory workers who are still unemployed or underemployed even though everyone's being told the economy is in OK shape. I'm one of those people who feels that full employment above all else should be the goal, even if we do make-work for some of it. You can't have millions of people sitting around with nothing to do and no purpose -- it will lead to massive crime over the long run as people get bored and tired of being broke.
I remember hearing high-dram startup flame-out stories right around this time 15-16 years ago. The only differences this time are:
- Phones/tablets instead of PCs/browsers
- Truly stupid startups are able to stick around longer because of public cloud services
- This round of startups isn't going to leave behind goodies like thousands of miles of dark fiber, data centers full of equipment, etc.
Seriously, "the credit karma of LinkedIn?" What does that even mean??
Being an American, and therefore used to our banking system, this was always something I was wondering about with wire transfers. Apparently, they are instant and basically the same thing as handing a bag of cash to the recipient. Once the recipient takes the cash, it's irrevocable - they would have to agree to give you your bag back if you wanted the money. Same thing goes for these bank transfers - anyone with the authority over the company's bank accounts is a target for scams like these. We 'Muricans are used to ACH transactions taking 2-3 business days and having the ability to stop payment on them the same way we would a check. Wire transfers to us are basically Swiss bank account territory; only people who have a good reason to use them do so.
The company I work for is a medium size multinational. We're big enough to do business worldwide but not so big that we get the "good" BPO vendors or hire "good" employees to do our offshore work. I've been working there for a while, and it seems to me that routine work is getting shipped to cheaper and cheaper countries every year. First it was Eastern Europe, then India, then the Philippines, now Central American countries. I can definitely see something like this happening with some of our core processes. If it followed the flowchart exactly, with all the right steps completed, and everything was in order, not one question would be raised.
That said, every company is susceptible to this whether the employees are onshore or off. The problem is knowing when to bother the CEO on his yacht, or the golf course, or the luxury resort he's staying at to ask him a question about routine business...especially when you have a message that looks like it came from right from him. Properly implemented digital signatures would help in this case -- but think about the fact that EV certs turn the entire address bar bright green and no one notices that, and they click "Yes" to every pop-up that comes their way.
I posted about this in the duplicate story from last week - the only difference is now the pay is 75% with full benefits.
This would be a good option for a narrow set of working parents like me. My wife and I both work; she has an awful commute and a workplace that pays well but has no flexible hours (even for professional positions.) I have a flexible job, but not enough so I can work from home. So when my oldest kid starts kindergarten this fall, I'm still home when he's ready to get on the bus for school, but I have to arrange for someone to be there when he gets home. Something like this would be a great deal if:
- Both parents worked reasonably well-paying, stable jobs. (A layoff while the other guy is working 3/4 time would be a serious mess.)
- The family needs enough discipline to stay out of debt and have a lot of savings, for the reason mentioned above.
- They also need to learn to live with less free cash flow in exchange for more time at home/elimination of some child care expenses.
- Ideally, they would own their house or have a reasonable mortgage payment they could cover out of savings if a disaster happens.
The problems I see with it are this -- the average family in a high cost of living area is just barely hanging on by their fingernails, has no savings, more than one mortgage, and a huge appetite for stuff. That, and Amazon is known for being a sweatshop that works people ungodly hours and does the stack ranking Hunger Games-style performance evaluations. I suspect something like this will lead to more age-based discrimination. Already we have 28-year-old employees with no kids willing to work 100 hour weeks while the more established family guys get the job done in 40, but appear to be slackers because they're not in the office at 11 PM on a Friday night. Amazon is already a Logan's Run kind of workplace and this could just amplify that and cement the "oh, you're done in IT if you're over 30" mindset.
Honestly it's a great idea if implemented properly. I hate the feeling of getting into work and immediately the clock starts ticking -- trying to get the maximum amount I can do done in the time i have at work. If an employer can help reduce that stress level with a mutually agreeable program I'd be willing to try it.
Speaking as a father of two, nothing prepares new parents for what happens when one of these little creatures stops being a robot and starts being real:
- Sleep deprivation
- Loss of anything resembling free time unless a kid activity is involved
- Loss of money -- they're expensive at every age and stage, just in different ways
- Loss of sanity -- $deity help the teen parent who happens to get a perpetually fussy kid
Of course, there are huge upsides to it (it's the best thing I ever did, bar none...) but I'd think those would be drowned out quickly among the stresses of being poorly educated, underemployed, and always broke. I can see why young parents tend to be more abusive and neglectful.
I think it's silly to promote abstinence as a preferred form of birth control, which is what typically wins out in conservative areas of the US. These kids are teenagers -- if you tell them not to do something, and even show them examples of why you might not want to, they're going to go do it more. All the options need to be presented -- it's terrible luck of the draw for a kid who happens to be born to parents who can't properly care for it, and that kid shouldn't have to suffer because religious conservatives are afraid of exposing the real world to kids.
I don't claim to know any political internals, but $70,000 to get legislation that you basically write yourself passed sounds extremely low. Wouldn't this cost at least mid 6 figures? How much are the industry lobbyists and body shops paying Congress to ignore issues with the H-1B program and expand it? I'd guess there's a lot of non-reported money following behind that official $70K figure.
Industry lobbying must be the ultimate blank ticket for a Congressperson. It must be nice to just call up a lobbyist, promise to do something and get whatever your heart desires. I often joke with colleagues about "golfware" products like SAP or Oracle where the salespeople just pump the senior execs full of booze, hookers and blow until they sign the deal, but this must take stuff like that to a whole new level.
Something like this poses an interesting challenge. When you have to build a product that is not quite cheap enough to easily replace, but expensive enough to make it painful to do so, and has a shelf life of about 3 years, what design corners do you cut?
Back when computers of any kind were thousands of dollars, the answer was easy - engineer them to the max since people were paying good money for them and wanted them to last. This is how we get things like the IBM PC case made out of solid steel. Now the equation is flipped, because mobile phones get replaced so frequently. The problem is that you can't get around the fact that you're carrying a laptop in your pocket and it's not just a cheap throwaway toy. This is getting even more noticeable since carriers have pretty much abandoned subsidies and are passing more of the cost of the phone on to the consumer. The top end model is starting to touch that $1000 price point that makes people stop and think hard about replacement costs if they're not getting some deal from their phone carrier.
I know, we're all supposed to be Libertarian free market people on Slashdot, but in this case the tax makes sense. Since Uber and others refuse to be regulated like a taxi service, and are providing the same service cab companies are, this is the penalty for doing business. The thing that regulated cab companies bring to the table is the fact that, in large cities, they provide part of the public transportation system. An Uber driver can choose whether or not to take someone to a sketchy neighborhood at 3 AM, while a regulated cab company can't. In New York, the medallion system prevents traffic nightmares by controlling the number of cabs that can work in Manhattan. Imagine Manhattan rush hour traffic with an extra 50,000 cabs on the road on top of all the private cars, buses, etc. Taxi regulations ensure that cabs are at least inspected once in a while, while Uber has no such requirement other than the driver's personal inspection -- but they don't check that.
I say Uber should just bite the bullet and become a regulated taxi service in the areas they want to do business in. I know disruption and "X on your phone" is all the rage, but think about the taxi drivers themselves. Driving a cab is pretty much a job of last resort for some people. Do you really want to take away yet another way for people to make money in this gig economy?
If this isn't an indicator of the top of the Second Dotcom Bubble, I don't know what is.
I'm old enough to remember the first one. Since I'm a systems guy and not a developer, my side of the house had "MCSE Bootcamps." I worked for a consulting company at the time, so I got sent to one. These were some really interesting operations; some people were clearly there to cram for the exams but had real world experience, and others were basically off the street with zero idea what was going on. The second batch had just heard there was a lot of money to be made in computers...lots of former truck drivers, plumbers, etc. Lots of these places had similar business models to ITT Tech, U of Phoenix, etc. in that they would take people's federal trade readjustment (re-training) benefits or veterans' education benefits and return a dubious education.
So, now that we have the cloud doing the infrastructure for most of these startups, the thing they need is a stream of cheap web framework monkeys. Coder bootcamp will certainly give them that...but they'll only be able to copy-paste stuff from one of the millions of JavaScript front-ends.
"Cumulative updates might help with this - because the bugfix will be incorporated into the next month's cumulative update meaning getting the bugfixed version will be straightforward."
The problem comes not from the cumulative bug fixes, but the applications that, for one reason or another, rely on the buggy behavior. Concrete example - Microsoft has for some time now made IE updates cumulative for the very same reasons they're citing here -- better testing, etc. Since then, I have had more than one incident where I have had to hold back that month's IE updates to machines running some crappy web app until our devs or the vendor got around to fixing the problem. It's not the entire user base in most of these cases, but enough to be a concern. Same goes for .NET -- breaking changes in LOB apps that can't be worked around cheaply.
The other problem is that MIcrosoft's fixes have been of pretty poor quality lately. Having to apply one rollup that fixes 10 vulnerabilities, one of which breaks a line of business application, means that update doesn't get applied and leaves the 9 other holes unpatched. Same goes if the update kills the whole machine. Anyone responsible for thousands of desktops/laptops just won't roll something like that out and hope it works.
When you go to cumulative patching that includes feature changes, the OS becomes a moving target instead of a stable development target. Microsoft has a long term stable branch for Windows 10 for just this reason. (I'll bet that's the workaround -- just upgrade your "free with purchase" Windows 7 Pro license to a permanent subscription to Windows 10 Enterprise.)
Appy app apps guy is right - the future in everyone's mind is Apps, not some LUDDITE desktop application or "pre-App web app" -- but I think Microsoft is really dismissing how much legacy code is out there and is broken by various updates. I do systems integration work with an end user desktop focus, and there are _so many_ crappy IE-only, ActiveX or Java applet or Flash or Shockwave (!) monstrosities lurking in corporate IT shops everywhere. Most of it isn't even in-house developed - it was written by really expensive consultants who want another few million to modernize it.
It will be very interesting to see how they pull this off - whether there will be an exception for Enterprise, etc.
One of the problems with anything desktop-related is the fact that it's all getting drowned out by people beating the phone-and-tablet drum. Developers are cargo-culting the mobile design paradigm, even on applications that are aimed at desktop users. I do systems integration work with a focus on end user computing, so I see lots of user-facing software from many vendors. I swear that the big offshore code shops have all just started using the same "touch-first" AngularJS user interface framework and swap in company logos when they build a new web front end for something.
I'm a big desktop fan - and a big terminal/command line fan. People laugh at me for using Midnight Commander for file operations on my various computers...but it's way faster than navigating a GUI or the command line if you know what you're doing! The problem is that the desktop and even the laptop form factor isn't the default anymore for most people. They've become almost a niche now, even in businesses. Most people want the Surface-style convertible tablets now where I work, and I've still got my boring ThinkPad collection.
I'm also a cross-platform kind of guy, but I find myself on Windows machines most of the time. Microsoft actually did the right thing with Windows 10, walking back some of the 8.x "touch-only, tablet-only" craziness. It's not Windows 7, but in my mind it's a good compromise between the two worlds. If most people are mashing the screens on their Surface, you can't get away with Windows 7-sized user interface elements. I wish they'd let people theme Windows 10, but that's a different story. On the Linux side, I do wonder if having several choices for desktop environments, all with extremely different ecosystems, is the right thing. It's nice to have a million ways to do things, but Apple was able to do a decent UI on top of UNIX that hides everything UNIXy about MacOS until the user gets down into the details. The fragmentation of the Linux desktop is one of the things slowing adoption. Some of the more modern Linux desktop environments have gotten more love recently, and are a better choice for the new user. But, just like CDE on the old UNIX platforms, I'm sure KDE will be kicking around for ages. Just like me and my Midnight Commander...
Everyone's work situation is different. Some people want fixed, regular hours with well-defined time off. Some people just seem to want to be exploited to the maximum extent possible. Others have requirements that fit neither extreme.
For example, one of the reasons I work where I do now is the flexibility. I have 2 little kids, one of which is going into kindergarten this fall. My wife has a job that absolutely demands "butt in seat time" and a horrible commute. I make less than I could be making, but I can disappear when I need to and just do the work later on in the day. One very popular option I could see for people that work and have kids is work structured so that at least one parent can be home when the kid gets home from school and when it's time to leave for school, yet both parents still work. My job's not flexible enough to swing that, but I would certainly give up some pay for that flexibility.
I think employers in the long run will see that being flexible lets them keep a higher-quality work force. I've been looking into working in the state university system, since I would then have a 3-minute commute instead of a 25-minute one. Jobs just aren't available because once people get in, they stay. You have to wait until someone literally retires, partially because it's really hard to hire people, but partially because of long service. Several staff members I know have confirmed this, and a huge reason is flexibility...they certainly don't get paid market rates. You're working for the state and have to deal with bureaucracy, but academic jobs give people the freedom that some like more than money.
This is what I think too. I have always worked in "normal" environments, but there are plenty of stories about people in tech companies getting worked 90+ hours a week simply because that's the culture. Microsoft in the early 90s was like this, every dotbomb SV startup in the late 90s too -- and it's getting repeated for this current tech bubble.
I think part of it is companies self-selecting people who will put up with no life and love the idea of an "all inclusive" workplace. Not surprisingly, growing up and having real-life responsibilities like a family aren't compatible with this lifestyle long-term. Google provides 3 meals a day, concierge service, beanbag chairs...everything a recent grad needs to continue the college lifestyle. Amazon probably wants to try expanding out of the monoculture they have and see what happens when they don't burn people out. Might just be the effect of a mature company - Microsoft is still famously all-inclusive, but people have the option of going home at a reasonable time. They operate more on the academic model than the sweatshop model.
The problem is going to come when the MBAs and management consultants pick up on this and pervert it into "oh look, Millennials don't want stable jobs. They prefer to string together 4 part-time gigs to get through life." Then it just becomes an excuse to hire part-timers exclusively.
Isn't Amazon one of the tech firms that famously burns people out working them 90+ hours a week? If so, it just sounds like they're doing an experiment to see if hiring more people but working them less produces better results (Hint, it does in non-dysfunctional workplaces.)
I would think that anyone who actually chose to work for the NSA in an offensive capacity would be quite dedicated to their job. Same goes for most intelligence operatives -- I can't imagine they get paid as much as they could make in a private business or a well-funded covert organization, yet there they are. By contrast, Snowden was basically a contract sysadmin who had access to what was going on -- he wasn't coming up with these plans/exploits. I'd guess anyone voluntarily working on these exploits would be pretty serious about guarding their work and wouldn't take copies home on the train with them.
So -- is it old fashioned espionage tactics, finding out who these people are and squeezing them in various ways? Did whoever is behind this just get lucky and happened upon unencrypted copies of these tools? Should be interesting to watch.
I wonder how much of this solar build-out is due to an economic bubble in the industry. We've been looking into solar since we have a new roof, and the impression we've gotten both from SolarCity and a parade of local contractors is that they're all lining up before the (very lucrative) tax credits go away. Neither methods (leasing or paying for the system outright) seems like a particularly good deal. If you go the SolarCity route, they take your tax credit _and_ charge you monthly for your panels. If you go the local guy route, you pay (in my mind) hugely inflated prices, and they're trying to cover that up by saying "look at how much of a tax credit you're getting!" since it's a percentage of the price of the system.
I'm guessing all these local solar companies are going to be gone as soon as the tax credits dry up...there's no way they can continue selling systems for the prices they're charging. My impression is that these local solar companies are run by the typical hustler type who always has their eye on the next big money making opportunity, and will be on to the next one as soon as the business is inconvenient. It's too bad, because I'd definitely go for it if they would charge reasonable rates and not try to dupe idiotic homeowners who can't see past the tax credit carrot. In my mind, SolarCity is even more of a flat-out scam; they're the ones offering "no money out of pocket!" conversions, conveniently forgetting to mention that you're locked into a leasing contract with them. It's the perfect setup for them - the same mentality that goes into car leasing. Can't afford an S-class Mercedes? No problem, $999 a month, look, it's cheaper than a loan! Such a deal! Sign today!!
This release would be very interesting if it broke new ground -- finding a computationally-easy way to break commonly used encryption, or a smoking gun universal back door built into OSes or network gear. From what I've read this is just previously undisclosed, easy to implement and potentially dangerous flaws in network equipment firmware.
Here's an interesting question from someone not in the security field -- is this basically what hacking groups do? Are they just collecting a huge inventory of bugs by constantly banging on these devices every possible way they can?
As the investigation goes on, it's going to be enlightening to see how this got out, if it's an actual legit NSA "hack." Was it a spy agency using traditional espionage tactics? Was it a rogue Snowden-esque contractor? Was it some idiot taking work home, then getting his bag stolen on the train or out of his car? Time will tell.
"My wife is a physician and she tells people who say they want to be a doctor that "if you can imagine yourself doing anything else you probably should". That job is too hard and takes too much from you to bother with if it isn't a calling."
That's a really interesting statement. I've always looked at the medical profession as the model for a perfect employment situation:
- Physicians and to a lesser extent other health professionals have their interests protected by a very well funded lobbying group, which is way more effective than any union ever could be. There's no such thing as the H-1B or "train your replacement," for example.
- The supply of new doctors is kept low by limiting the number of medical schools and making licensure difficult.
- The quality of workers is kept high by making it extremely difficult to get through a medical education and get trained via a residency.
- The practice of specialties is controlled by other boards that further limit who can perform these specialist procedures.
- Salaries are kept extremely high due to low supply/high demand and a regulated practice environment.
- Continuing education is mandatory -- as opposed to the IT world where it's DIY and no employer pays for it anymore.
- Doctors aren't considered replaceable by cheap labor.
I've always thought that if you could get through the educational hazing, it's the ideal profession to be in. A doctor could easily just get a job at a large hospital and make a huge salary if they didn't want to run their own practice. Is it not as ideal as people think?