"Sometimes a reduction in force is totally necessary. I worked for a company that halved it's work force between 2000 and 2005 and just missed getting de-listed from the exchange by 2 days because the stock price was too low. In this case, the MBA's where right and let half the work force walk because the other option was everybody walking when the creditors closed us down. "
That's different. No one is going to close down Cisco. When you get big enough and are still providing an essential service, there's no way to fail so badly you shut down completely. There's just too much money sloshing around. Look at IBM -- the MBAs have been selling the company off in pieces, pinching pennies and offshoring their entire workforce for 15 years now, and the company is still alive. They've done everything in their power to kill it so the execs can walk away with the remaining money by cashing in their stock, and it's still here.
The problem I have is when the MBAs, who have absolutely no idea how the business they're running works, look at spreadsheets and say, "Oh, we don't need these people. Just send the jobs to India." without https://news.slashdot.org/stor... a good look at what those "expensive" workers are actually doing. Often, these people aren't even employees - they're management consultants who have been hired by the exec team to tell them what to do.
Why can't these 14,000 people be trained to write SDN software instead of designing mainboards for hardware? That would save Cisco the restructuring charges they'd have to take, and engender some company loyalty in the employee ranks, which counts for something. There's a lot to be said for the goodwill value that comes from your employees not feeling like you're a heartless asshat employer -- those same employees may even be willing to put in a little extra effort for you.
Companies need to invest in their workers, not just dump them whenever they change direction. One of the reasons I work where I do, and get paid slightly less than market rate, is that they don't just throw people out. Layoffs are major events and don't happen often -- if a project/division goes away, the company just finds something else to place the technical workers on. I know that can change the second some hotshot MBA comes in and sees numbers on his spreadsheets that he doesn't like...but the work environment is good for now. Bottom line is that there are plenty of people over 40 who are totally retrainable and an asset to any company. Some sort of company loyalty needs to return to both sides of the employer/employee equation. Otherwise we're going to end up not being able to plan our lives around having stable employment. I'd even be in favor of a European style model where the company has to commit to an extended severance at the time of hire. Make companies think hard about who they hire, and make it expensive to just dump them whenever they want to juice the stock price.
I hate seeing big companies do this -- it really is the MBAs looking for a short term cash infusion the only way they know how. I saw an interesting post further up the thread saying essentially the MBAs are doing what's best for the company -- Anyone who has worked in a large company long enough sees how important internal tribal knowledge is. They're going to dump these 14,000 people, replace them with offshore or H-1B software developers to write SDN software, and lose all of this knowledge in the process. I've seen it happen many times working for large companies -- the offshore guys or H-1Bs come in, the "official" documentation on a process is 100% factually correct, but they have a very hard time making it work. So, it's not what's best for the company in the long run -- but I guess public companies don't care about the long run anyway.
I'm by no means entrepreneurial, but if I were I'd start a company called "Greybeards, Inc." or similar and go head to head with the offshore body shops, selling quality rather than quantity. It seems like a great business model - hire seasoned engineers/developers who have made all their mistakes, and sell fewer (or more higher-value) consulting hours and much lower chance of having to re-write everything 5 times before it works. If it were run like a partnership without execs getting paid millions, it could definitely work even with the labor cost difference. I've worked in systems integration for a long time, so I've seen tons of body shop monstrosities that go millions over budget and have to be scrapped and redone over and over because the offshore company doesn't understand the business or take the time to learn about it.
Makes sense given the sentiment everyone seems to have about not owning anything these days. Renting living space is way up, companies aren't buying their own computers and data centers anymore, companies don't even own their own core assets like buildings and office furniture. Everything is a creaky tower of outsourcing from the coffee pots to the building management systems.
I'd actually be happier if Ford ended up doing this first instead of Google. I love the idea of a self-driving car, but don't really like the idea of Google having full access to yet another facet of everyone's lives.
I'm not so much worried about people trying to change opinions, because I know how hard that is to do, especially with stupid Facebook memes and copy-pasted propaganda. The thing I don't like is that, ironically, people having access to such a huge microphone in the form of social media makes it harder to hear a different opinion. I argue that if you're a die hard liberal or conservative, there exists an echo chamber that will prevent any opinions you don't like getting through, and make it impossible for the less intelligent among us to form an unbiased opinion of the state of things.
Facebook knows everything you like, click on, share, etc. They know who your friends are and what they like, click on and share. Because they know what you like, they'll only show you things you like. It used to be that people thought AOL was the Internet, that's largely replaced with Facebook and Twitter these days. Anything that pops up on the average idiot's news feed is going to be taken at face value, and oh look, all my friends liked and shared it too. Hillary must be a crook/Trump must be a buffoon.
I know I'll immediately get panned for this, but I do think having 24-hour news cycles, instant social media outrage generators, and other constant surveillance of government officials/candidates makes the country harder to govern. Most politicians are now too paralyzed with fear to do anything that might potentially upset the public even if it might be what's needed -- and this is both on the left and right wings. Fox News or other outlets would be poking fun at FDR's polio and wheelchair if they were around back then. The only reason he ever stood a chance of being elected was that there wasn't widespread, instant coverage of every single syllable every politician utters, followed by hours of analysis and talk. The positive is that corruption is harder to hide, but the negative is that civil political discourse is down the toilet. It must have been a whole lot easier when there were only a few newspapers of record and 3 TV networks with a single national newscast per day.
"Turns out it is very expensive to run wires -- or in Google's case, fiber optic cables -- to each and every house that wants service. "
Holy cow...did nobody at Google see what happens with similar utilities? Or did they just assume the old rules didn't apply to them since it was "on the Internet"? I thought the 1999 "we'll make it up in volume" rules were already thrown out. I highly doubt Economics 101 courses at Stanford leave out the discussion of natural monopolies.
The only thing I can possibly think that they were thinking is that the value of the data they were able to mine by being plugged _directly_ into your Internet usage habits would be way bigger than the cost to run fiber to thousands of houses.
Why do you think Verizon et al is now trying desperately to get out of the wireline business? They're a public utility and can't raise rates whenever they feel like it, unlike their wireless business. At the same time, you have real physical stuff deployed in the ground that needs to be maintained. It's the same over at the electric company, or worse, the water authority. I can't imagine how much it costs to maintain 100+ year old pipes and clean up after water main failures.
So, this looks very interesting. If I hadn't noticed that this course was going to begin by teaching C, I would have assumed it was just another one of these crappy coder bootcamps that will be around until the Web 2.0 bubble pops. These places stuff newbies' heads full of "RESTful AngularNodeRuby on Rails in Docker container microservices" with zero backstory and expect them to turn out useful work. They existed in 1999 as well, but back then it was HTML and MCSE bootcamps.
The whole "educational deathmarch" thing is an issue for me. I work in a normal job for a normal company, but I've now seen two dotcom-style bubbles forming around the Silicon Valley 100+ hour work week ethos. The more new people are conditioned to work these insane hours and never settle down, the worse off the industry as a whole will be. I now see normal companies starting to say "we need to be more like Facebook/Google." In come the Nerf toys and beanbag chairs, free food and the 100 hour work weeks. The reality is that most people have lives outside of work and it's unhealthy to not have downtime.
It'll be interesting to see (a) what they turn out given that they're starting with a more fundamental base than the usual creaky tower of JavaScript newbies these days learn, and (b) how long before the whole thing folds up when the demand for cheap web monkeys goes back down to normal levels.
OK, I agree there's lots of Bobs out there. However, I just hit the magic Logan's Run of 40 in IT, and I hate getting lumped in with the Bobs. I feel I've kept up pretty well with technology, and I've been lucky enough to work in companies where I get exposed to a ton of different things, both new and ancient. My secret has always been to be the guy out in front of anything new we're working on -- the organization & industry I work for now moves very slowly and has tons of proprietary, old technology. it's extremely easy for the Bobs to go very far down a legacy tech rabbit hole if they want to. My goal, and it should be the goal of any "late-career" techie, is to not be Bob, period. I'm currently climbing the really steep learning curve surrounding all the hot new DevOps/cloud technology buzzwords that are being added to the system administration landscape now. It's hard work especially with a family, but it's a lot of fun and my company is giving me a lot of room to run because they know if it's new and interesting, I'll learn it and be good at it.
Yet, if I were to try to get a job using cold-call resume submissions, I doubt I'd even get an interview because everyone assumes I'm Bob, solely because I'm over 40. I have no idea how to combat this, because I'm likely to get swept up with any wholesale offshoring along the lines of the Disney, Southern California Edison, etc. that have happened recently. Even though I have relevant skills, being older in the IT world makes it much harder to communicate my abilities to potential employers.
By the way, how did Bob draw anything? With a drafting table and pencils???
In my opinion, there's absolutely nothing wrong with adding some basic coding education in primary grades. Even if some of it is mandatory, it's better to make sure students are at least exposed to some core concepts. Things like logic, problem solving, etc. need to be developed for just about anyone to function in society these days.
What I don't like are two things -- first is the idea that everyone needs to become a computer programmer, and second is the obvious push for more H-1B visa labor that efforts like this imply.
In the case of "everyone needs to be a coder," here's a perfect concrete example. I'm a systems integration person, so I deal with developers all the time getting their code running in real-world environments. The company I work for has basically offshored all development, so the very few devs and us engineering folks get back a lot of interesting code from a mix of the Usual Suspects (Tata, Infosys, etc.) We're working with an offshore team on brand new development rather than the usual maintenance stuff we give them. They are absolutely incapable of doing anything that isn't explicitly written in a spec document. We have to handhold them through every single step; not once has an original idea come out of that crowd. I think a lot of the "everyone must code" workers domestically will be very much like that. It's not just following a set of procedures -- you need creativity, troubleshooting and problem solving skills to do well in IT or development. In the case I am dealing with now, someone higher up than us got sold the idea by the outsourcer that the offshore team they gave us was a bunch of architect-level, subject matter experts in the technology we're working with, and that's proving to be quite obviously false. But, this same situation could easily be repeated onshore if a bunch of "everyone must code" people are thrown on a project.
Now, for the "we need more H-1Bs" argument -- I don't buy the fact that there aren't trainable people companies can find domestically, and they definitely abuse the H-1B program and body shops to absolve themselves from the need to train employees. If I were elected king, I would fix the problem in 2 phases -- the first would be to turn off the entire program for a period so that no company would have the advantage over another, and re-introduce it slowly with the body shop loopholes closed. Companies only use H-1Bs or body shops because their competitors do -- if no one had access to this cheap labor pool, no one would have an advantage based on it. Until you get rid of the body shop loophole, you're going to have the self-perpetuating spiral of people not finding success in IT or development, and therefore, new entrants will decrease. If people feel they have a stable job ahead of them in their future, they'll continue to study in this field. Otherwise they'll just be rational actors and go into medicine or get an MBA.
I seriously wonder sometimes why Apple, who makes 30% on all media and app purchases, all of which is profit at this point, feels the need to lock customers into non-upgradable hardware. Yes, it's nice to be able to charge $350 for a $10 SSD upgrade, but there comes a point where you have to decide whether you want all these devices to end up as landfill after 2 years. I know it's not 1992 anymore, and computers are "cheap," but it's still expected IMO to be able to add storage capacity or RAM to the "pro" machines in your lineup.
Also, Lenovo tried the touch-screen function key thing on their ultra-small ThinkPads -- everyone hated it. Apple folks might be a little different because they basically have no native need for function keys in MacOS, but I imagine there are a fair number of MacBook Pro users who dual boot Linux or Windows.
Personally, it's enough for me to have a reasonably portable, powerful laptop with productivity-enhancing features. Even if it's a little more cumbersome to haul around, typing on a constrained keyboard isn't worth the hassle just to have a smaller machine. Lighter? Sure. But just admit that the "normal" laptop form factor is the most comfortable for extended work and pursue the lighter goal without worrying about the smaller/thinner. I still use T- and P-series full size ThinkPads for that very reason -- Lenovo (post-design brainfart 2 cycles ago) keeps making them lighter but doesn't mess around (too much) with a working model.
I do systems engineering work. The worst I've ever been asked to do is hack together a completely unrealistic demo environment or two, basically to give our developers time to fix something they're showing to a customer. I feel bad when customers get sold something that barely functions in the real world because of it. I can't imagine what the actual engineers who got asked to implement this "workaround" were thinking at the time. Germany has one of the best engineering cultures on the planet, so I can't imagine they felt too good about this. I can only guess their jobs were threatened -- in the US it would be something like "If you can't work 90 hour weeks, I can certainly find an H-1B who can..." Unfortunately, in any culture, having no income and a family to support is a pretty good incentive to just do what the boss says.
It'll be interesting to see what happens -- having to recall/buy back basically all of your modern diesel cars is not a cheap proposition. I work with German companies all the time for my job, and I can't imagine they don't have meticulous records of email cataloged down to the millisecond showing who put this in motion. Again, part of the culture. It will certainly be an interesting case study for MBAs, if they actually studied stuff like this in business school. (I would assume the MBAs would be doing this case study to find ways to not get caught.)
I guarantee the cloud infrastructure guys are salivating at the opportunity to convince the MBAs to ditch Delta's data center. What they won't mention is how much it would cost to actually implement instant failover capability in a cloud environment. I'm not anti-cloud, but I do think a business as large as Delta isn't going to see a lot of cost savings over what they're paying now for equipment. Microsoft and Amazon doesn't give away capacity for free, and you often pay dearly for certain key elements (IaaS, network connections, etc.) The MBAs don't see this though; they only see CapEx vs. OpEx and "we can fire 90% of the IT department."
IT cost isn't exactly something airlines spend willingly. Unless it directly affects safety or increases revenue/reduces cost, they want nothing to do with it. I guarantee the proposal for a redundant data center, or even a cloud-based DR location was floated, looked at and rejected as being too expensive. Airline IT is a web of third-party dependencies, each of which has a few single points of failure. Although, bad luck for them, this one seems like a straight power outage and/or transformer/generator failure. At least it seems like they didn't fry their computing equipment if they were able to get back online in a few hours. Sadly, I have experience with this and have seen companies dismiss the cost of a $20K server colo and network connection as excessive. People seem to forget that you need to guard against downtime unless you're some Web 2.0 startup social media company...if it costs $XX,000 per minute of downtime, you have to be willing to eat that or pay for DR.
I think it's not just enough to be a "digital native" as they call it, because it really doesn't take a lot of critical thinking, troubleshooting skills, etc. to use modern technology. Smartphone and tablet operating systems are incredibly simple; my 5 year old is quite a proficient user. These devices don't even have a traditional filesystem or other concepts that a regular computer would have. We've abstracted away most of the complexity even in desktop operating systems. Almost all software and websites are cargo-culting the touch-centric UI. It's easy to just pick up and use something without lots of backstory.
I'm not saying that's bad -- look at how many consume-only home users have had their needs satisfied by a locked down tablet or phone. It's just that being "good with computers" means something different now. Almost everyone can use a traditional office suite to do simple documents, knows what email is, knows how to use web applications, etc. This was definitely not the case 20 years ago, or even 10.
The thing is that this complexity doesn't just go away - but it is pulled up to the next level and often is out of the reach of simple consumers. Who is old enough to remember how painful it was manually tweaking your PC's operating environment to get things like sound cards and other hardware playing nicely together? No one does that anymore, but someone at some point hacked together the plug and play standards, and OS vendors get to deal with this stuff under the hood now. Older tech users have this backstory that the younger crowd has to work very hard to understand, because no one sees how insanely complex all this stuff is under the hood unless they peel back the covers and really do a full study on it.
So yes, at the risk of sounding old, I think this study makes a lot of sense. Unless you work at a Web 2.0 hipster startup that's writing everything in from scratch in the cloud, you're bound to run into some old technology. Whether you complain about it or just get on with it might depend on your comfort level with something that isn't consumer facing.
Given the audience of LinkedIn, I imagine the short list of "influencers" includes... - Anyone from Gartner or Forrester -- hello Magic Quadrants! [1] - A random smattering of Web 2.0 startup CEOs talking about "disruption" - HR consulting snake oil salesmen touting the latest fad
LinkedIn is becoming as much of a dumping ground as Facebook these days. I use it as a public resume, recruiter-collector and contact list. Lots of people are using it as a thinly veiled extension of their personal Facebook profile - adding video is just going to hasten this. There's plenty of narcissists on YouTube, no need to pollute LinkedIn.
[1] Part of being a senior level technology guy in big companies leads me to interact with various people who do nothing beyond looking at where Vendor X is in the Gartner Magic Quadrant before dropping millions on products/projects. What is it about Gartner that conveys Pope-level infallibility? Seriously people, these reports are written by 26 year old MBAs with a tiny bit of tech background...
Don't most large companies just budget for this amount as a lawsuit settlement fund for any new initiative? Seems like pocket change for most big guys, especially since they probably have billions in liability insurance stashed away for just such a purpose...
"IT needs to get much more professional but that would mean doing battle with all the companies/lobbyists who like IT being cheap, easily outsourced (in the short term), and with a bunch of cowboys who don't want to unionize or group themselves under a true professional group in any way."
Indeed, this is the problem. There are way too many cowboy sysadmins and coders out there who wouldn't even think about minimum standards for work product. I think the only way to solve it would be to have a purely political organization that did nothing but counteract the corporate lobbyists. If you basically said to everyone, pay us a small amount per year, and we'll give it directly to Congress to pass favorable laws, the only question in my mind is how much money it would take. No work rules, just a direct payment to each lawmaker for legislation. The AMA does this for doctors, and business interests do this for their member companies. I think it's time to admit that the only way to get things done is to hand over paper bags of money and sample legislation.
All large organizations have some messy aspects of their internal IT. The longer the organization has existed, and the larger and more diverse it is, the worse it gets. There was a story a couple days ago circulating about a Citibank employee (NOC engineer or something like it) that was able to stop most network traffic by removing the configs in a few key routers. (Turns out he was upset about a bad review he had just been given.) If a network were properly designed with no choke points, no SPOFs, etc. it would be extremely hard to take out all traffic. But the reality is that stuff grows organically over time and there are lots of IT skeletons in closets. I doubt there's a CIO on earth that wants to go out there and say to the public that they screwed up because they didn't, say, pay an extra $5K for a redundant router.
About SWA's troubles, here's a clue -- airlines have absolutely zero interest investing more in IT than the basics required to run the business. There's cool stuff being done, but airlines are a low-margin business (believe it or not) and have historically relied on a web of third party companies to provide IT services. It used to be just reservation systems, etc. that most airlines couldn't or wouldn't want to run themselves anyway. But in recent years, lots of development and operations work has been moved to "offshore partners" or IT companies that in turn offshore everything. Because of all this abstraction, I'm sure Southwest's onsite IT staff had a very difficult time figuring out who and what was actually to blame for the issue. That, and airline IT is full of single points of failure that are just the nature of the business. Losing operational messaging links, having one system fail in a chain of dependencies that prevents aircraft dispatch or crew scheduling, and others can stop an airline from operating until they're fixed.
Another point - the cloud doesn't really solve this either. It has the potential to, but architecting a failure-tolerant solution in a public cloud is actually harder to do than on-site stuff. Sure, if you're starting from scratch you can write software in a way that gracefully handles failure. However, any legacy application port into the cloud requires very careful thought about how to design it for fault tolerance.
I see a lot of "grumpy old man" posts (I'm 40 for context...) on this subject blaming entitlement and other reasons for this. I don't see it that way...I haven't run into any of the stereotypical Millennials with a capital M that the media describes -- remember, Generation X were supposed to be "slackers" in the 90s also. So, I don't think it's the people. I think it's the work environment. Work is very different from the golden age of the 50s through the 70s in the US... - After WW II, a family could live comfortably on a single income, and there was a reasonably good chance someone could keep their job for life and/or be promoted from within and gain success that way. And this is any family -- from the janitor to the CEO (relatively speaking of course.) - After the great corporate downsizing wave of the 90s, it was still possible to graduate from any college, with any degree in any field, and still find entry-level work. While it was less possible to do the single-income thing and required lots of sacrifice to do so, the opportunity existed. - Now, entry level tech jobs don't exist or are done offshore or by H-1B labor. The economy has fully adjusted to two-earner families, so it's basically impossible to be a single-earner family unless you live in a really cheap part of the country (where, consequently, there are no jobs anymore.)
So, don't blame the Millennials. They're in a tough spot. I was very lucky in my early career to be able to work my way up from an entry-level support job to where I am now...that opportunity is much harder to come by now.
Everyone is hung up on how a basic income would be paid for, how much "money" it would cost, etc. What I think people are missing is the fact that UBI is designed to transition society off of a work-based, money-based economy without the bloody revolution.
Think about it in terms of a 50ish person who has paid into retirement their whole life, and is about to start drawing it down so they can live out their final years. How would you feel if, all of a sudden, new entrants into the economy no longer had to fund their own retirements partially because there aren't any paying jobs left and a UBI is the only answer? The UBI lets society keep the crutch of money and the work-for-income reward system. it lets that 50ish person enjoy a retirement commensurate with the amount they put in, while acknowledging that for most future workers, there won't be jobs or a retirement. If we didn't have this, those people who saved would lead an armed revolution and destabilize everything. So, we start with the UBI, then slowly phase it out as "work" becomes obsolete for most of the population.
I simply don't get why people don't see that there's nowhere left to go on the "better job" scale for a vast percentage of the population anymore. Agriculture is dead, manufacturing is dead, corporate work is dead and service jobs are dead in terms of good solid jobs with incomes allowing people a good life for hard work. I almost want the vast factories employing thousands of unskilled people back just so we could have balance in the economy again. Unless a basic income is implemented, the income disparity is going to keep getting worse, and even educated people are going to be destitute.
This should not be a surprise to anyone here, but it's a very good example that, unless you have a specific document signed by both parties promising some level of service, you don't have that service.
I'm in the middle of a "cloud conversion" for one of our core applications. I get incredulous looks and blank stares when I ask application developers how they've planned for redundancy and potential data loss. The other day, I actually had a senior application architect tell me "the cloud takes care of that." Sigh...yes, you can be reasonably sure that your data will survive a physical disk failure. But will it survive an accidental deletion? The cloud alone sure doesn't guarantee that. They also don't guarantee that your application will run if one of their data centers blows up...unless you pay for that.
In short, smart infrastructure guys have nothing to worry about in terms of the cloud -- you don't have to worry about hardware failure, but you do need to be smart building out the pieces. The developers are being told that all they need to do is push the button to deploy their applications now, so we still need to protect the system as a whole from stuff like that.
Seconded. I've been lucky in that I'm working for a tech company connected to a very change-averse industry doing a complex job and providing a lot of value for money (so say my bosses.) I have no doubt in my mind that I'll be out of a job as soon as an MBA gets a bright idea and offshores the IT department.
You can't let your skills ossify and do the same job for 20 years anymore; those people are gone in the first seconds following an outsourcing decision. But, don't assume that you're safe because you're current and doing a fantastic job. Save like crazy and be ready to retire at a moment's notice...I'm trying my hardest to do this now but it's hard with dependents.
Very little is original when it comes to large companies' policies. One of the large management consulting firms comes up with an idea, sells it to one company, and through C-level golf networking, it gets copied everywhere over time. (Corollary: Anything IBM, GE or Google does will be copied verbatim, regardless of fit.) Think of the conversations -- "Hey, I just figured out a great way to make those IT nerds 90% cheaper!" "Really? How?" "Simple, all I have to do is call up Infosys or Tata, and they will use the H-1B program to send hundreds of cheap replacements! It's foolproof! My McKinsey guys said they could replace the entire IT department with contractors and we won't even notice the difference!" "Sounds great, I was getting sick of dealing with those old neckbeards anyway. Now watch this drive!"
Here's the problem -- every company copies HR ideas, so every company will eventually offshore their IT or live with the higher costs (doubtful.) Now, how do you propose a solution without sounding like a "they took er jerbs!" guy? The problem is not the H-1B program itself -- it's the loopholes in it the body shops use to bring in cheaper labor that isn't as qualified. There's also give on both sides too -- people can't expect high salaries if the technology changes out from under them and they don't adapt. However, given that H-1B labor is often used to replace entry-level work, how do you develop a pipeline of new people to replace the retiring ones, retrain mid-career people for new positions, and make IT (and more broadly, STEM) attractive in the first place?
The only solution I can see working is to take away the loopholes in the program for every company, regardless of size or special interest. When they have to start hiring domestic labor instead of letting their body shop circumvent the rules, all of a sudden there's domestic supply as new students come in, domestic demand because they can't use the emergency cheap labor escape valve, and salaries remain reasonably high because the reality is that most IT jobs worth doing are difficult. The only way to make it work (IMO) is to start paying Congress to do so via a professional organization. Doctors, pharmacists and (to a much lesser extent now) lawyers are going to be the last people working in this country for anything resembling an upper-middle class salary. The reason is that they saw this coming ages ago and made sure their interests were protected. Don't you think United Healthcare or the big hospital chains would do anything in their power to pass a law saying anyone who passed a 1-week certification class could perform low-end medical procedures? They are blocked from doing so by the AMA and other boards of specialist physicians. It's time to admit that the only way to change the rules is to pay for it and hire a professional lobbying group to counteract those already working in businesses' favor.
"There's a lot of snobbery in this profession now."
Agreed -- almost no one without a degree is even considered, and you might as well not even try getting hired at a Silicon Valley startup as a new grad unless you went to Stanford, MIT, etc. even if the work you're doing doesn't have anything to do with CS.
I do think that businesses are using the pedigree as more of a filter than anything else. Investment banks and white shoe management consulting firms hire almost exclusively from the Ivy League. A new lawyer has no chance of success unless they get hired by a big corporate law firm, and those jobs _only_ go to the top grads of the top 14 law schools in the country. As in, you've wasted your law school money if you can't get into the Top 14 and graduate at the top of your class. These more traditional professions use their filter to keep the old boys' (and girls') club going. Getting into one of these companies is a guaranteed ticket to riches for life. Tech companies? Probably not...I think they're just trying to beat off a massive pile resumes with a really short-sighted stick. The state university grad is smarter for not blowing their money on an overpriced private school degree, but state universities also graduate a range of students. Some skated through with barely any work, and some worked their asses off to make sure they mastered the material. It's stupid that firms pass on people just because of where they went to school, but when you have thousands of new grads looking for work, what else are they going to do? Interview them all?
The famous quote "those who don't remember history are doomed to repeat it" is very applicable here. This exact scenario played out in the late 90s during the build-out of the Internet and the web. The things that are different this time are phones and social media are the primary focus, and the bubble is almost entirely in Silicon Valley this time. (Last time, New York City had a part in this because of the financial ties and the fact that traditional publishers and broadcasters were throwing money at the Internet.)
I think that people are starting to see the top of the bubble and opting not to join startups. Startup culture isn't for the young either; you really have to have the fraternity/sorority member personality type to work there so as people age they're less likely to trade salary for beer pong or free dinner. This will be the third recession that I've been on the sidelines doing "boring" work in old-school companies watching the startup mania from a distance. No one with a family or other responsibilities is going to do startup work as their first choice unless they have massive amounts of savings. Very few people (should be) willing to put up with the terrible commutes, traffic and real estate prices in the Bay Area. (That's coming from a New Yorker, we have the second-most insane housing market and I think it's crazy...$1 million+ for a tiny house a 2-hour one way drive to work? $4500 a month for a 2-bedroom hipster loft in San Francisco? Nope, sorry.)
I think, just like last time, it'll all come crashing down, we'll pick up the cool new stuff that came out of the last bubble (not much this time...), and it'll inflate all over again. I just hope something more useful than advertising algorithms comes out of the next bubble.
Spot on...I can't count the number of empty-suit MBAs I've seen who have parachuted into businesses they have no idea about, fired everyone and parachuted back out. Promotion from within should always be the first choice.
What is it about the MBA that holds people in such awe? And what is it about these management consulting firms who employ most of the recent MBA grads that seems to indicate anything they propose is akin to religion? Seriously, why would you trust a 26-year-old from McKinsey who has never had a job outside of school to give your company advice?
"It looks like MS is going the way of IBM did in the 20th century. "
Yes, but not the way you're thinking. This is why Microsoft has spent and is spending so much money and dev effort on Azure. Assuming they don't screw it up too badly, they're in a really good position to change from a software company to a hosting company. Just like Apple gets a 30% cut of everything sold in the App Store, Microsoft is going to collect a toll on every single thing a customer hosts in Azure forever. So yes, they're becoming IBM's mainframe business -- sell capacity, charge a maintenance fee, plus a fee to use the capacity, and collect it until the universe ends.
This is going to be accelerated by Microsoft's existing relationship with businesses. Unlike AWS or Google Cloud, Microsoft is saying to businesses that they're free to run whatever legacy stuff they need to in Azure, not re-architecting existing stuff. "Forget that startup hipster cloud across town, run whatever you need for as long as you need as long as you pay us." The adoption rate is accelerating, and I can definitely see it going up in the next few years as CIOs have to consider the cost of hardware they control. Some companies will never be swayed, but MBA spreadsheet math will probably prevail and the cloud will be in full swing.
Slashdot Mirror
"Sometimes a reduction in force is totally necessary. I worked for a company that halved it's work force between 2000 and 2005 and just missed getting de-listed from the exchange by 2 days because the stock price was too low. In this case, the MBA's where right and let half the work force walk because the other option was everybody walking when the creditors closed us down. "
That's different. No one is going to close down Cisco. When you get big enough and are still providing an essential service, there's no way to fail so badly you shut down completely. There's just too much money sloshing around. Look at IBM -- the MBAs have been selling the company off in pieces, pinching pennies and offshoring their entire workforce for 15 years now, and the company is still alive. They've done everything in their power to kill it so the execs can walk away with the remaining money by cashing in their stock, and it's still here.
The problem I have is when the MBAs, who have absolutely no idea how the business they're running works, look at spreadsheets and say, "Oh, we don't need these people. Just send the jobs to India." without https://news.slashdot.org/stor... a good look at what those "expensive" workers are actually doing. Often, these people aren't even employees - they're management consultants who have been hired by the exec team to tell them what to do.
Why can't these 14,000 people be trained to write SDN software instead of designing mainboards for hardware? That would save Cisco the restructuring charges they'd have to take, and engender some company loyalty in the employee ranks, which counts for something. There's a lot to be said for the goodwill value that comes from your employees not feeling like you're a heartless asshat employer -- those same employees may even be willing to put in a little extra effort for you.
Companies need to invest in their workers, not just dump them whenever they change direction. One of the reasons I work where I do, and get paid slightly less than market rate, is that they don't just throw people out. Layoffs are major events and don't happen often -- if a project/division goes away, the company just finds something else to place the technical workers on. I know that can change the second some hotshot MBA comes in and sees numbers on his spreadsheets that he doesn't like...but the work environment is good for now. Bottom line is that there are plenty of people over 40 who are totally retrainable and an asset to any company. Some sort of company loyalty needs to return to both sides of the employer/employee equation. Otherwise we're going to end up not being able to plan our lives around having stable employment. I'd even be in favor of a European style model where the company has to commit to an extended severance at the time of hire. Make companies think hard about who they hire, and make it expensive to just dump them whenever they want to juice the stock price.
I hate seeing big companies do this -- it really is the MBAs looking for a short term cash infusion the only way they know how. I saw an interesting post further up the thread saying essentially the MBAs are doing what's best for the company -- Anyone who has worked in a large company long enough sees how important internal tribal knowledge is. They're going to dump these 14,000 people, replace them with offshore or H-1B software developers to write SDN software, and lose all of this knowledge in the process. I've seen it happen many times working for large companies -- the offshore guys or H-1Bs come in, the "official" documentation on a process is 100% factually correct, but they have a very hard time making it work. So, it's not what's best for the company in the long run -- but I guess public companies don't care about the long run anyway.
I'm by no means entrepreneurial, but if I were I'd start a company called "Greybeards, Inc." or similar and go head to head with the offshore body shops, selling quality rather than quantity. It seems like a great business model - hire seasoned engineers/developers who have made all their mistakes, and sell fewer (or more higher-value) consulting hours and much lower chance of having to re-write everything 5 times before it works. If it were run like a partnership without execs getting paid millions, it could definitely work even with the labor cost difference. I've worked in systems integration for a long time, so I've seen tons of body shop monstrosities that go millions over budget and have to be scrapped and redone over and over because the offshore company doesn't understand the business or take the time to learn about it.
Your Car in the Cloud.
Makes sense given the sentiment everyone seems to have about not owning anything these days. Renting living space is way up, companies aren't buying their own computers and data centers anymore, companies don't even own their own core assets like buildings and office furniture. Everything is a creaky tower of outsourcing from the coffee pots to the building management systems.
I'd actually be happier if Ford ended up doing this first instead of Google. I love the idea of a self-driving car, but don't really like the idea of Google having full access to yet another facet of everyone's lives.
I'm not so much worried about people trying to change opinions, because I know how hard that is to do, especially with stupid Facebook memes and copy-pasted propaganda. The thing I don't like is that, ironically, people having access to such a huge microphone in the form of social media makes it harder to hear a different opinion. I argue that if you're a die hard liberal or conservative, there exists an echo chamber that will prevent any opinions you don't like getting through, and make it impossible for the less intelligent among us to form an unbiased opinion of the state of things.
Facebook knows everything you like, click on, share, etc. They know who your friends are and what they like, click on and share. Because they know what you like, they'll only show you things you like. It used to be that people thought AOL was the Internet, that's largely replaced with Facebook and Twitter these days. Anything that pops up on the average idiot's news feed is going to be taken at face value, and oh look, all my friends liked and shared it too. Hillary must be a crook/Trump must be a buffoon.
I know I'll immediately get panned for this, but I do think having 24-hour news cycles, instant social media outrage generators, and other constant surveillance of government officials/candidates makes the country harder to govern. Most politicians are now too paralyzed with fear to do anything that might potentially upset the public even if it might be what's needed -- and this is both on the left and right wings. Fox News or other outlets would be poking fun at FDR's polio and wheelchair if they were around back then. The only reason he ever stood a chance of being elected was that there wasn't widespread, instant coverage of every single syllable every politician utters, followed by hours of analysis and talk. The positive is that corruption is harder to hide, but the negative is that civil political discourse is down the toilet. It must have been a whole lot easier when there were only a few newspapers of record and 3 TV networks with a single national newscast per day.
"Turns out it is very expensive to run wires -- or in Google's case, fiber optic cables -- to each and every house that wants service. "
Holy cow...did nobody at Google see what happens with similar utilities? Or did they just assume the old rules didn't apply to them since it was "on the Internet"? I thought the 1999 "we'll make it up in volume" rules were already thrown out. I highly doubt Economics 101 courses at Stanford leave out the discussion of natural monopolies.
The only thing I can possibly think that they were thinking is that the value of the data they were able to mine by being plugged _directly_ into your Internet usage habits would be way bigger than the cost to run fiber to thousands of houses.
Why do you think Verizon et al is now trying desperately to get out of the wireline business? They're a public utility and can't raise rates whenever they feel like it, unlike their wireless business. At the same time, you have real physical stuff deployed in the ground that needs to be maintained. It's the same over at the electric company, or worse, the water authority. I can't imagine how much it costs to maintain 100+ year old pipes and clean up after water main failures.
So, this looks very interesting. If I hadn't noticed that this course was going to begin by teaching C, I would have assumed it was just another one of these crappy coder bootcamps that will be around until the Web 2.0 bubble pops. These places stuff newbies' heads full of "RESTful AngularNodeRuby on Rails in Docker container microservices" with zero backstory and expect them to turn out useful work. They existed in 1999 as well, but back then it was HTML and MCSE bootcamps.
The whole "educational deathmarch" thing is an issue for me. I work in a normal job for a normal company, but I've now seen two dotcom-style bubbles forming around the Silicon Valley 100+ hour work week ethos. The more new people are conditioned to work these insane hours and never settle down, the worse off the industry as a whole will be. I now see normal companies starting to say "we need to be more like Facebook/Google." In come the Nerf toys and beanbag chairs, free food and the 100 hour work weeks. The reality is that most people have lives outside of work and it's unhealthy to not have downtime.
It'll be interesting to see (a) what they turn out given that they're starting with a more fundamental base than the usual creaky tower of JavaScript newbies these days learn, and (b) how long before the whole thing folds up when the demand for cheap web monkeys goes back down to normal levels.
OK, I agree there's lots of Bobs out there. However, I just hit the magic Logan's Run of 40 in IT, and I hate getting lumped in with the Bobs. I feel I've kept up pretty well with technology, and I've been lucky enough to work in companies where I get exposed to a ton of different things, both new and ancient. My secret has always been to be the guy out in front of anything new we're working on -- the organization & industry I work for now moves very slowly and has tons of proprietary, old technology. it's extremely easy for the Bobs to go very far down a legacy tech rabbit hole if they want to. My goal, and it should be the goal of any "late-career" techie, is to not be Bob, period. I'm currently climbing the really steep learning curve surrounding all the hot new DevOps/cloud technology buzzwords that are being added to the system administration landscape now. It's hard work especially with a family, but it's a lot of fun and my company is giving me a lot of room to run because they know if it's new and interesting, I'll learn it and be good at it.
Yet, if I were to try to get a job using cold-call resume submissions, I doubt I'd even get an interview because everyone assumes I'm Bob, solely because I'm over 40. I have no idea how to combat this, because I'm likely to get swept up with any wholesale offshoring along the lines of the Disney, Southern California Edison, etc. that have happened recently. Even though I have relevant skills, being older in the IT world makes it much harder to communicate my abilities to potential employers.
By the way, how did Bob draw anything? With a drafting table and pencils???
In my opinion, there's absolutely nothing wrong with adding some basic coding education in primary grades. Even if some of it is mandatory, it's better to make sure students are at least exposed to some core concepts. Things like logic, problem solving, etc. need to be developed for just about anyone to function in society these days.
What I don't like are two things -- first is the idea that everyone needs to become a computer programmer, and second is the obvious push for more H-1B visa labor that efforts like this imply.
In the case of "everyone needs to be a coder," here's a perfect concrete example. I'm a systems integration person, so I deal with developers all the time getting their code running in real-world environments. The company I work for has basically offshored all development, so the very few devs and us engineering folks get back a lot of interesting code from a mix of the Usual Suspects (Tata, Infosys, etc.) We're working with an offshore team on brand new development rather than the usual maintenance stuff we give them. They are absolutely incapable of doing anything that isn't explicitly written in a spec document. We have to handhold them through every single step; not once has an original idea come out of that crowd. I think a lot of the "everyone must code" workers domestically will be very much like that. It's not just following a set of procedures -- you need creativity, troubleshooting and problem solving skills to do well in IT or development. In the case I am dealing with now, someone higher up than us got sold the idea by the outsourcer that the offshore team they gave us was a bunch of architect-level, subject matter experts in the technology we're working with, and that's proving to be quite obviously false. But, this same situation could easily be repeated onshore if a bunch of "everyone must code" people are thrown on a project.
Now, for the "we need more H-1Bs" argument -- I don't buy the fact that there aren't trainable people companies can find domestically, and they definitely abuse the H-1B program and body shops to absolve themselves from the need to train employees. If I were elected king, I would fix the problem in 2 phases -- the first would be to turn off the entire program for a period so that no company would have the advantage over another, and re-introduce it slowly with the body shop loopholes closed. Companies only use H-1Bs or body shops because their competitors do -- if no one had access to this cheap labor pool, no one would have an advantage based on it. Until you get rid of the body shop loophole, you're going to have the self-perpetuating spiral of people not finding success in IT or development, and therefore, new entrants will decrease. If people feel they have a stable job ahead of them in their future, they'll continue to study in this field. Otherwise they'll just be rational actors and go into medicine or get an MBA.
I seriously wonder sometimes why Apple, who makes 30% on all media and app purchases, all of which is profit at this point, feels the need to lock customers into non-upgradable hardware. Yes, it's nice to be able to charge $350 for a $10 SSD upgrade, but there comes a point where you have to decide whether you want all these devices to end up as landfill after 2 years. I know it's not 1992 anymore, and computers are "cheap," but it's still expected IMO to be able to add storage capacity or RAM to the "pro" machines in your lineup.
Also, Lenovo tried the touch-screen function key thing on their ultra-small ThinkPads -- everyone hated it. Apple folks might be a little different because they basically have no native need for function keys in MacOS, but I imagine there are a fair number of MacBook Pro users who dual boot Linux or Windows.
Personally, it's enough for me to have a reasonably portable, powerful laptop with productivity-enhancing features. Even if it's a little more cumbersome to haul around, typing on a constrained keyboard isn't worth the hassle just to have a smaller machine. Lighter? Sure. But just admit that the "normal" laptop form factor is the most comfortable for extended work and pursue the lighter goal without worrying about the smaller/thinner. I still use T- and P-series full size ThinkPads for that very reason -- Lenovo (post-design brainfart 2 cycles ago) keeps making them lighter but doesn't mess around (too much) with a working model.
I do systems engineering work. The worst I've ever been asked to do is hack together a completely unrealistic demo environment or two, basically to give our developers time to fix something they're showing to a customer. I feel bad when customers get sold something that barely functions in the real world because of it. I can't imagine what the actual engineers who got asked to implement this "workaround" were thinking at the time. Germany has one of the best engineering cultures on the planet, so I can't imagine they felt too good about this. I can only guess their jobs were threatened -- in the US it would be something like "If you can't work 90 hour weeks, I can certainly find an H-1B who can..." Unfortunately, in any culture, having no income and a family to support is a pretty good incentive to just do what the boss says.
It'll be interesting to see what happens -- having to recall/buy back basically all of your modern diesel cars is not a cheap proposition. I work with German companies all the time for my job, and I can't imagine they don't have meticulous records of email cataloged down to the millisecond showing who put this in motion. Again, part of the culture. It will certainly be an interesting case study for MBAs, if they actually studied stuff like this in business school. (I would assume the MBAs would be doing this case study to find ways to not get caught.)
I guarantee the cloud infrastructure guys are salivating at the opportunity to convince the MBAs to ditch Delta's data center. What they won't mention is how much it would cost to actually implement instant failover capability in a cloud environment. I'm not anti-cloud, but I do think a business as large as Delta isn't going to see a lot of cost savings over what they're paying now for equipment. Microsoft and Amazon doesn't give away capacity for free, and you often pay dearly for certain key elements (IaaS, network connections, etc.) The MBAs don't see this though; they only see CapEx vs. OpEx and "we can fire 90% of the IT department."
IT cost isn't exactly something airlines spend willingly. Unless it directly affects safety or increases revenue/reduces cost, they want nothing to do with it. I guarantee the proposal for a redundant data center, or even a cloud-based DR location was floated, looked at and rejected as being too expensive. Airline IT is a web of third-party dependencies, each of which has a few single points of failure. Although, bad luck for them, this one seems like a straight power outage and/or transformer/generator failure. At least it seems like they didn't fry their computing equipment if they were able to get back online in a few hours. Sadly, I have experience with this and have seen companies dismiss the cost of a $20K server colo and network connection as excessive. People seem to forget that you need to guard against downtime unless you're some Web 2.0 startup social media company...if it costs $XX,000 per minute of downtime, you have to be willing to eat that or pay for DR.
I think it's not just enough to be a "digital native" as they call it, because it really doesn't take a lot of critical thinking, troubleshooting skills, etc. to use modern technology. Smartphone and tablet operating systems are incredibly simple; my 5 year old is quite a proficient user. These devices don't even have a traditional filesystem or other concepts that a regular computer would have. We've abstracted away most of the complexity even in desktop operating systems. Almost all software and websites are cargo-culting the touch-centric UI. It's easy to just pick up and use something without lots of backstory.
I'm not saying that's bad -- look at how many consume-only home users have had their needs satisfied by a locked down tablet or phone. It's just that being "good with computers" means something different now. Almost everyone can use a traditional office suite to do simple documents, knows what email is, knows how to use web applications, etc. This was definitely not the case 20 years ago, or even 10.
The thing is that this complexity doesn't just go away - but it is pulled up to the next level and often is out of the reach of simple consumers. Who is old enough to remember how painful it was manually tweaking your PC's operating environment to get things like sound cards and other hardware playing nicely together? No one does that anymore, but someone at some point hacked together the plug and play standards, and OS vendors get to deal with this stuff under the hood now. Older tech users have this backstory that the younger crowd has to work very hard to understand, because no one sees how insanely complex all this stuff is under the hood unless they peel back the covers and really do a full study on it.
So yes, at the risk of sounding old, I think this study makes a lot of sense. Unless you work at a Web 2.0 hipster startup that's writing everything in from scratch in the cloud, you're bound to run into some old technology. Whether you complain about it or just get on with it might depend on your comfort level with something that isn't consumer facing.
Given the audience of LinkedIn, I imagine the short list of "influencers" includes...
- Anyone from Gartner or Forrester -- hello Magic Quadrants! [1]
- A random smattering of Web 2.0 startup CEOs talking about "disruption"
- HR consulting snake oil salesmen touting the latest fad
LinkedIn is becoming as much of a dumping ground as Facebook these days. I use it as a public resume, recruiter-collector and contact list. Lots of people are using it as a thinly veiled extension of their personal Facebook profile - adding video is just going to hasten this. There's plenty of narcissists on YouTube, no need to pollute LinkedIn.
[1] Part of being a senior level technology guy in big companies leads me to interact with various people who do nothing beyond looking at where Vendor X is in the Gartner Magic Quadrant before dropping millions on products/projects. What is it about Gartner that conveys Pope-level infallibility? Seriously people, these reports are written by 26 year old MBAs with a tiny bit of tech background...
Don't most large companies just budget for this amount as a lawsuit settlement fund for any new initiative? Seems like pocket change for most big guys, especially since they probably have billions in liability insurance stashed away for just such a purpose...
"IT needs to get much more professional but that would mean doing battle with all the companies/lobbyists who like IT being cheap, easily outsourced (in the short term), and with a bunch of cowboys who don't want to unionize or group themselves under a true professional group in any way."
Indeed, this is the problem. There are way too many cowboy sysadmins and coders out there who wouldn't even think about minimum standards for work product. I think the only way to solve it would be to have a purely political organization that did nothing but counteract the corporate lobbyists. If you basically said to everyone, pay us a small amount per year, and we'll give it directly to Congress to pass favorable laws, the only question in my mind is how much money it would take. No work rules, just a direct payment to each lawmaker for legislation. The AMA does this for doctors, and business interests do this for their member companies. I think it's time to admit that the only way to get things done is to hand over paper bags of money and sample legislation.
All large organizations have some messy aspects of their internal IT. The longer the organization has existed, and the larger and more diverse it is, the worse it gets. There was a story a couple days ago circulating about a Citibank employee (NOC engineer or something like it) that was able to stop most network traffic by removing the configs in a few key routers. (Turns out he was upset about a bad review he had just been given.) If a network were properly designed with no choke points, no SPOFs, etc. it would be extremely hard to take out all traffic. But the reality is that stuff grows organically over time and there are lots of IT skeletons in closets. I doubt there's a CIO on earth that wants to go out there and say to the public that they screwed up because they didn't, say, pay an extra $5K for a redundant router.
About SWA's troubles, here's a clue -- airlines have absolutely zero interest investing more in IT than the basics required to run the business. There's cool stuff being done, but airlines are a low-margin business (believe it or not) and have historically relied on a web of third party companies to provide IT services. It used to be just reservation systems, etc. that most airlines couldn't or wouldn't want to run themselves anyway. But in recent years, lots of development and operations work has been moved to "offshore partners" or IT companies that in turn offshore everything. Because of all this abstraction, I'm sure Southwest's onsite IT staff had a very difficult time figuring out who and what was actually to blame for the issue. That, and airline IT is full of single points of failure that are just the nature of the business. Losing operational messaging links, having one system fail in a chain of dependencies that prevents aircraft dispatch or crew scheduling, and others can stop an airline from operating until they're fixed.
Another point - the cloud doesn't really solve this either. It has the potential to, but architecting a failure-tolerant solution in a public cloud is actually harder to do than on-site stuff. Sure, if you're starting from scratch you can write software in a way that gracefully handles failure. However, any legacy application port into the cloud requires very careful thought about how to design it for fault tolerance.
I see a lot of "grumpy old man" posts (I'm 40 for context...) on this subject blaming entitlement and other reasons for this. I don't see it that way...I haven't run into any of the stereotypical Millennials with a capital M that the media describes -- remember, Generation X were supposed to be "slackers" in the 90s also. So, I don't think it's the people. I think it's the work environment. Work is very different from the golden age of the 50s through the 70s in the US...
- After WW II, a family could live comfortably on a single income, and there was a reasonably good chance someone could keep their job for life and/or be promoted from within and gain success that way. And this is any family -- from the janitor to the CEO (relatively speaking of course.)
- After the great corporate downsizing wave of the 90s, it was still possible to graduate from any college, with any degree in any field, and still find entry-level work. While it was less possible to do the single-income thing and required lots of sacrifice to do so, the opportunity existed.
- Now, entry level tech jobs don't exist or are done offshore or by H-1B labor. The economy has fully adjusted to two-earner families, so it's basically impossible to be a single-earner family unless you live in a really cheap part of the country (where, consequently, there are no jobs anymore.)
So, don't blame the Millennials. They're in a tough spot. I was very lucky in my early career to be able to work my way up from an entry-level support job to where I am now...that opportunity is much harder to come by now.
Everyone is hung up on how a basic income would be paid for, how much "money" it would cost, etc. What I think people are missing is the fact that UBI is designed to transition society off of a work-based, money-based economy without the bloody revolution.
Think about it in terms of a 50ish person who has paid into retirement their whole life, and is about to start drawing it down so they can live out their final years. How would you feel if, all of a sudden, new entrants into the economy no longer had to fund their own retirements partially because there aren't any paying jobs left and a UBI is the only answer? The UBI lets society keep the crutch of money and the work-for-income reward system. it lets that 50ish person enjoy a retirement commensurate with the amount they put in, while acknowledging that for most future workers, there won't be jobs or a retirement. If we didn't have this, those people who saved would lead an armed revolution and destabilize everything. So, we start with the UBI, then slowly phase it out as "work" becomes obsolete for most of the population.
I simply don't get why people don't see that there's nowhere left to go on the "better job" scale for a vast percentage of the population anymore. Agriculture is dead, manufacturing is dead, corporate work is dead and service jobs are dead in terms of good solid jobs with incomes allowing people a good life for hard work. I almost want the vast factories employing thousands of unskilled people back just so we could have balance in the economy again. Unless a basic income is implemented, the income disparity is going to keep getting worse, and even educated people are going to be destitute.
This should not be a surprise to anyone here, but it's a very good example that, unless you have a specific document signed by both parties promising some level of service, you don't have that service.
I'm in the middle of a "cloud conversion" for one of our core applications. I get incredulous looks and blank stares when I ask application developers how they've planned for redundancy and potential data loss. The other day, I actually had a senior application architect tell me "the cloud takes care of that." Sigh...yes, you can be reasonably sure that your data will survive a physical disk failure. But will it survive an accidental deletion? The cloud alone sure doesn't guarantee that. They also don't guarantee that your application will run if one of their data centers blows up...unless you pay for that.
In short, smart infrastructure guys have nothing to worry about in terms of the cloud -- you don't have to worry about hardware failure, but you do need to be smart building out the pieces. The developers are being told that all they need to do is push the button to deploy their applications now, so we still need to protect the system as a whole from stuff like that.
Seconded. I've been lucky in that I'm working for a tech company connected to a very change-averse industry doing a complex job and providing a lot of value for money (so say my bosses.) I have no doubt in my mind that I'll be out of a job as soon as an MBA gets a bright idea and offshores the IT department.
You can't let your skills ossify and do the same job for 20 years anymore; those people are gone in the first seconds following an outsourcing decision. But, don't assume that you're safe because you're current and doing a fantastic job. Save like crazy and be ready to retire at a moment's notice...I'm trying my hardest to do this now but it's hard with dependents.
Very little is original when it comes to large companies' policies. One of the large management consulting firms comes up with an idea, sells it to one company, and through C-level golf networking, it gets copied everywhere over time. (Corollary: Anything IBM, GE or Google does will be copied verbatim, regardless of fit.) Think of the conversations --
"Hey, I just figured out a great way to make those IT nerds 90% cheaper!"
"Really? How?"
"Simple, all I have to do is call up Infosys or Tata, and they will use the H-1B program to send hundreds of cheap replacements! It's foolproof! My McKinsey guys said they could replace the entire IT department with contractors and we won't even notice the difference!"
"Sounds great, I was getting sick of dealing with those old neckbeards anyway. Now watch this drive!"
Here's the problem -- every company copies HR ideas, so every company will eventually offshore their IT or live with the higher costs (doubtful.) Now, how do you propose a solution without sounding like a "they took er jerbs!" guy? The problem is not the H-1B program itself -- it's the loopholes in it the body shops use to bring in cheaper labor that isn't as qualified. There's also give on both sides too -- people can't expect high salaries if the technology changes out from under them and they don't adapt. However, given that H-1B labor is often used to replace entry-level work, how do you develop a pipeline of new people to replace the retiring ones, retrain mid-career people for new positions, and make IT (and more broadly, STEM) attractive in the first place?
The only solution I can see working is to take away the loopholes in the program for every company, regardless of size or special interest. When they have to start hiring domestic labor instead of letting their body shop circumvent the rules, all of a sudden there's domestic supply as new students come in, domestic demand because they can't use the emergency cheap labor escape valve, and salaries remain reasonably high because the reality is that most IT jobs worth doing are difficult. The only way to make it work (IMO) is to start paying Congress to do so via a professional organization. Doctors, pharmacists and (to a much lesser extent now) lawyers are going to be the last people working in this country for anything resembling an upper-middle class salary. The reason is that they saw this coming ages ago and made sure their interests were protected. Don't you think United Healthcare or the big hospital chains would do anything in their power to pass a law saying anyone who passed a 1-week certification class could perform low-end medical procedures? They are blocked from doing so by the AMA and other boards of specialist physicians. It's time to admit that the only way to change the rules is to pay for it and hire a professional lobbying group to counteract those already working in businesses' favor.
"There's a lot of snobbery in this profession now."
Agreed -- almost no one without a degree is even considered, and you might as well not even try getting hired at a Silicon Valley startup as a new grad unless you went to Stanford, MIT, etc. even if the work you're doing doesn't have anything to do with CS.
I do think that businesses are using the pedigree as more of a filter than anything else. Investment banks and white shoe management consulting firms hire almost exclusively from the Ivy League. A new lawyer has no chance of success unless they get hired by a big corporate law firm, and those jobs _only_ go to the top grads of the top 14 law schools in the country. As in, you've wasted your law school money if you can't get into the Top 14 and graduate at the top of your class. These more traditional professions use their filter to keep the old boys' (and girls') club going. Getting into one of these companies is a guaranteed ticket to riches for life. Tech companies? Probably not...I think they're just trying to beat off a massive pile resumes with a really short-sighted stick. The state university grad is smarter for not blowing their money on an overpriced private school degree, but state universities also graduate a range of students. Some skated through with barely any work, and some worked their asses off to make sure they mastered the material. It's stupid that firms pass on people just because of where they went to school, but when you have thousands of new grads looking for work, what else are they going to do? Interview them all?
The famous quote "those who don't remember history are doomed to repeat it" is very applicable here. This exact scenario played out in the late 90s during the build-out of the Internet and the web. The things that are different this time are phones and social media are the primary focus, and the bubble is almost entirely in Silicon Valley this time. (Last time, New York City had a part in this because of the financial ties and the fact that traditional publishers and broadcasters were throwing money at the Internet.)
I think that people are starting to see the top of the bubble and opting not to join startups. Startup culture isn't for the young either; you really have to have the fraternity/sorority member personality type to work there so as people age they're less likely to trade salary for beer pong or free dinner. This will be the third recession that I've been on the sidelines doing "boring" work in old-school companies watching the startup mania from a distance. No one with a family or other responsibilities is going to do startup work as their first choice unless they have massive amounts of savings. Very few people (should be) willing to put up with the terrible commutes, traffic and real estate prices in the Bay Area. (That's coming from a New Yorker, we have the second-most insane housing market and I think it's crazy...$1 million+ for a tiny house a 2-hour one way drive to work? $4500 a month for a 2-bedroom hipster loft in San Francisco? Nope, sorry.)
I think, just like last time, it'll all come crashing down, we'll pick up the cool new stuff that came out of the last bubble (not much this time...), and it'll inflate all over again. I just hope something more useful than advertising algorithms comes out of the next bubble.
Spot on...I can't count the number of empty-suit MBAs I've seen who have parachuted into businesses they have no idea about, fired everyone and parachuted back out. Promotion from within should always be the first choice.
What is it about the MBA that holds people in such awe? And what is it about these management consulting firms who employ most of the recent MBA grads that seems to indicate anything they propose is akin to religion? Seriously, why would you trust a 26-year-old from McKinsey who has never had a job outside of school to give your company advice?
"It looks like MS is going the way of IBM did in the 20th century. "
Yes, but not the way you're thinking. This is why Microsoft has spent and is spending so much money and dev effort on Azure. Assuming they don't screw it up too badly, they're in a really good position to change from a software company to a hosting company. Just like Apple gets a 30% cut of everything sold in the App Store, Microsoft is going to collect a toll on every single thing a customer hosts in Azure forever. So yes, they're becoming IBM's mainframe business -- sell capacity, charge a maintenance fee, plus a fee to use the capacity, and collect it until the universe ends.
This is going to be accelerated by Microsoft's existing relationship with businesses. Unlike AWS or Google Cloud, Microsoft is saying to businesses that they're free to run whatever legacy stuff they need to in Azure, not re-architecting existing stuff. "Forget that startup hipster cloud across town, run whatever you need for as long as you need as long as you pay us." The adoption rate is accelerating, and I can definitely see it going up in the next few years as CIOs have to consider the cost of hardware they control. Some companies will never be swayed, but MBA spreadsheet math will probably prevail and the cloud will be in full swing.