"When they look at a person it is only to see if they are someone they can use. If not you can actually see the person vanish from their perception. But if the person is someone they can use as another run in their ladder climbing, their eyes light up and the wheels are turning."
Everyone does this to some extent, but the key difference between some sociopath executive and a healthy person is how two-way this is, and the level of sliminess involved.
People like it when they can gain something from others, it's what makes us social animals. I think it crosses the line when someone becomes a master manipulator. It's one of the many reasons I can't stand salespeople. Working as a senior IT person in a large company, I'm approached all the time by slimeball salespeople. From the first second I talk to them, I can tell the only reason they're wasting breath on me is to get me to trust them enough to give them an in with the CIO, project head or whomever else they want to manipulate next. Truly good salespeople and execs know how to tone this down just enough to make their target think they're just being nice. Next time you're dealing with someone like this, flip the situation around and ask yourself how willing this person would be to help you if you were the one calling. That's how you know if you have a Melissa-Mayer-in-Training on your hands.
I already see a ton of misogynistic posts about Elizabeth Holmes, and I'm not going there. What I am going to mention is that she had that Steve Jobs personality that makes people stop thinking rationally. She even wears black turtlenecks. Startups need charismatic founders because how else would they raise money? But there's something about that Type-A Jobsian executive mystique that just appeals to people on some level. It's entirely possible she had very little idea of how things were actually going also - I've seen company executives who clearly have no idea what the company does and are happy as long as the Salesforce.com dashboard gauges are pointing to the green range.
The problem was that Theranos was trying to play the "fake it till you make it" startup game. I totally expect this from startups, and have been pitched numerous software products that were unfinished at best as an example. The idea is, if you're not just trying to get bought by Facebook or Google, to do just enough to cobble together a "product" and fill in the details later. This works for software; you can say you're all Agile and continuous-integration and DevOps and all those "make it up as we go" buzzwords. It's really hard to fake a disruptive blood test process long-term without people trying to poke holes in it.
I think it would have been very interesting to be on the technical side inside Theranos around the time they realized they were never going to get this new process to work right no matter what they did. That must have been very rough on everyone involved, especially with the outside world basically worshiping you.
I've never had a clearance, so this is interesting to me. What could they possibly do to someone who accidentally takes papers home, transfers files somewhere, etc.? It seems to me like prisons would be full of "data leakers" if this were the case. Snowden worked for Booz Allen Hamilton, so I assume those rules don't apply to contractors the same way they do actual federal employees.
I have heard that truly top secret life-or-death material (weapons designs, espionage info, etc.) is way more tightly controlled than someone's email...as in you can only access it from within a Faraday cage on a disconnected computer with a guard watching over the entrance. But it would be interesting to hear how someone with a TS clearance deals with daily work life. Are things just stamped "top secret" as a routine, kind of like how every corporate email, presentation, document, etc. is "company confidential" whether it's the lunch menu or product source code?
Just like the FBI said, she was grossly negligent especially considering the rules about archiving and secrecy...but it happens way too frequently in the "real world" of business for me to be surprised. No executive I have ever seen has had to follow any sort of IT rules. Anything that gets in their way is magically removed.
I did a lot of desktop support in my early career, and am still connected to that world because my specialty is end user computing and end user systems management. The facts are as follows -- every executive, senior VP or above in large companies, has a different set of IT rules than the rest of us: - Almost every executive I've encountered has no password, no drive encryption or other protection on their machines. Either that, or they have Zuckerberg style "dadada" passwords and need special exemptions carved out of the corporate password policies to deal with it. - Almost all of them forward their emails to personal accounts so they can get their emails on whatever flavor-of-the-week consumer device comes out. - 99.9% of them let their secretaries send and receive their email by giving them their password. Same goes for executing transactions. - Before iOS and Android got good Exchange integration and full MDM, it was extremely common to have "basement email servers" -- sometimes they were in the data center, and sometimes they really were in the exec's basement. We don't need that anymore, but I can imagine the State Department's IT people aren't exactly early adopters especially concerning communications. - Tons of support time is spent getting whatever crazy computer, tablet, smartphone, Amazon Echo, game system, etc. connected to the company network and functioning -- stuff that the "little people" would never be allowed to use.
The point is that all executives bend the rules, and the IT staff allow them to because they like being paid. In my mind this is no different...Clinton was essentially the CEO of the State Department. Would you tell your CEO that he wasn't able to access his email from some unsecure consumer laptop on his private jet?
I'm not sure why people deny the reality of a shrinking employable labor pool. I've mentioned below that I do feel people can be trained, but my experience has shown that even among skilled employees, there are some capable of handling higher-level work and others who aren't. As much as I think Trump would be a disaster of a President, the experiment he proposes (cancelling NAFTA, implementing across the board tariffs, etc.) would be very interesting. if it overnight became prohibitively expensive for every company regardless of size to manufacture overseas, the domestic manufacturing base would have to return, including companies supplying tools and parts. Instantly, you'd have the blue collar labor force back, paying taxes and spending money in the economy. This would in my opinion restore a measure of balance. It would be suddenly OK again to have just a high school degree if that was all you could handle academically. People wouldn't be forced into debt getting a degree they're not interested in or qualified to have.
I guess I'm one of those people who feels that full employment should be the primary goal of a society, if living comfortably in that society requires money. There's no easy way to dismantle our money-based economy short of a revolution or some disaster that causes a full reset. This is why the basic income has appeal...it allows a transition so the angry older workers who had to save for retirement, etc. age out and a smaller active labor force comes in.
Have the employers these workers aren't qualified enough for tried raising salaries or paying to train people?
It sounds exactly like what we older workers deal with in the US. Once we start making 'too much," we're targeted for elimination because someone with no family or responsibilities can be employed much cheaper. I know it's very possible to let one's skills atrophy, or do the same job for 20+ years, but I don't do any of those and get lumped in with the "too old" crowd. As a result, I never get responses from a cold call resume submission -- most of my jobs recently have been found because people know me.
As for "not qualified," no one is a 100% drop-in replacement. Not even the Infosys, Tata or Wipro guys they send in...which is also part of the problem. Companies don't train people anymore, and expect them to be immediately productive on the first day. A generation before I graduated, large and even medium employers had extensive training programs for new hires. It was possible for someone motivated to come in out of high school. or you could graduate with a generic degree. As long as the new hire was motivated and trainable it didn't matter.
So yes, I think Spain is starting to get a taste of how the tech employment market is for US workers. I feel the current visa system in the US needs to be reformed (not eliminated) to allow for the domestic workforce to grow. No one with a modicum of sense is going to go into engineering, computer science or other STEM fields if they are destined to be the new humanities degrees in terms of employment success/ROI. Once people see a future in these fields, they'll study them again.
> Isn't it fun to be part of an unsuccessful experiment?
Yup, I have the Lenovo ThinkPad T540p, and its successor model is a counter-example. For those who don't know the history, Lenovo inherited the IBM ThinkPad when they bought their PC division in 2005. ThinkPads have a...distinctive...styling; they're boring black boxes whose design hasn't changed much since the 90s. They're bland, super-rugged business notebooks optimized for work. I'm an old fart (40) and use them exclusively - the hipster project managers and other execs with the MacBook Airs sneer at me when I pull out the computer in meetings and they tell me "We need to get you a new laptop." I paid for them out of pocket when companies were refusing to buy them because they weren't the "standard" HP garbage.
So, a couple model generations ago, Lenovo decided to try to turn the ThinkPad into a black MacBook Pro. They changed the keyboard in one generation, a move some purists consider sacrilegious but I was actually OK with. Then, they got rid of status LEDs and introduced a horrible trackpad monstrosity -- and made the thing totally unusable without an external mouse connected. People (including me) flipped their lids and swore they'd never pay the premium price for a ThinkPad again. Lenovo is slowly walking back the changes. The sad thing is you have to pay $2000+ for a laptop with a hard disk status LED - they only brought those back on the workstation models.:-)
Normal companies will (usually) listen to customers when they screw up and reverse changes. Apple is even more consumer-focused now and has no reason to support hardware long-term the same way other manufacturers do. They'll just discontinue the display, roll out a new one, and the consumers will line up to buy it. In the Lenovo case, they realized there's a core market of people who will pay good money if you give them an anti-hipster work-focused laptop. It's similar to the reason why Ford kept making the Crown Victoria basically unchanged for 30 years and only made small incremental improvements.
I work for a medium sized multinational, and the development teams I work with are exactly as you describe. (I'm in systems integration, so I get to make their output work in the real world.) Many of the senior managers in our company have a professional services background, so development is run like a typical offshore body shop, even when the developers are local. Developers are plugged into a project and disconnected when done like they're working for one of the outsourcing code factories.
The short answer is that it's very difficult to manage developers pulled in a million different directions. Agile is definitely in use here, but the reality is that the nature of our work means that developers actually need to understand a little more than a code specification to do the work. They also need to stay involved after writing their code for that reason, but are often pulled off projects because someone shouts loudly enough or is politically connected. As a result, my experience talking with them is that no one ever feels they can get anything done to a reasonable degree before getting unplugged and reconnected to something else. Project management isn't the best around here as a rule, so there's constant emergencies.
When you're "matrix managed," the actual manager is pretty much responsible for your performance review. The rest of the management direction comes from project managers that range from good to extraordinarily bad. I know I wouldn't want to do dev work in that environment, nor would I ever in a million years want a PM job. But, with DevOps being a thing now, I imagine it's just around the corner for us too.
I know no one really dreams of working in a warehouse filling boxes, or in a factory making steel or whatever. But, society here in the first world has been based for decades on the idea of wealth transfer and stable lifetime employment. Some examples: - 30 year fixed mortgages are designed to be painful in the beginning but manageable over time because of increasing income. - Manufacturers give auto loans with the assumption that people have the monthly income stream needed to pay them off over an extended time. - Retirement under the pension system is dead for most, but for the lucky few, pension based retirement's payoff is dependent on years of service. - Retirement under the DIY 401(k)/IRA system requires lifetime, increasing contributions commensurate with your income to ensure stable retirement income later. - Car and other heavy goods manufacturers assume people will be able to purchase replacement heavy goods throughout their lives, and maybe someone who's worked a long time will buy a Cadillac instead of a Chevrolet for example. - Basically every consumer business relies on people being able to purchase more and better things over time, again due to increasing income.
I really wonder what Amazon, home builders, supermarkets, car manufacturers, etc. will do when almost everyone cannot depend on a reasonably stable work life anymore. Personally, the reason why I buy things is because I'm somewhat confident that I will have a job for the near term. If I didn't have that confidence, I'd close my wallet as any other rational actor would do. Now, combine this fact with the slow creep of unemployment both from the low and the high end. Examples: - Robots replacing fast food workers, warehouse workers, factory workers - Cloud and automation replacing IT workers - Offshoring replacing IT and software developers
Since socialism will never take hold in the US until things are at the French Revolution level, what are we going to do with all the unemployable people? It's not nice to say, but there are a group of people who are absolutely incapable of doing anything beyond warehouse work or factory work. Heck, there are corporate employees who are incapable of doing anything outside a narrow processing-type job description. For these people, I do kind of wish for a return to the pre-automation days when you had 10,000+ people working in a steel mill, or another 10,000+ just churning out paperwork at a corporate job. Those people earned a decent middle class salary, and had a good life. I doubt anyone growing up now is going to have it so good.
I always used to think that large businesses, governments, etc. were incredibly careful with things they exposed to the Internet, and that breaches were mainly caused by unpatched vulnerabilities or just coding mistakes. However, when you see a breach that involves full credit card details being leaked, you can tell that a lot of the problem is a lack of standards. At least in the US, businesses aren't allowed to store or transmit card details unencrypted. I'll bet that data was never encrypted in the first place, or the keys were so poorly secured that they were easy to find once the attacker made it inside.
I think one core problem is either a lack of standards, or relying too heavily on one standard. If you just let your developers go nuts and write their own transaction processing system 1990s-style, you can bet something will be missed. On the other hand, leaning too hard on a few established payment systems exposes you to unpatched, undiscovered flaws in them.
The other thing companies need to stop doing is assuming their inside networks are totally safe. I've worked so many places where once you're in, you have full unrestricted access to anything. That requires a major shift in thinking, as many people are still of the mind that firewalls + DMZ + IDS at the front gates are all the company needs to be secure. You need to assume that people can get through all of that and make it difficult to reach critical systems even from inside.
I know no one ever went broke underestimating the idiocy of typical consumers, but do people _really_ buy every single thing someone sticks an ad in their face for? Is advertising really that powerful? Will knowing that X male, 35-44 year old, potentially Republican Facebook users entered the East Nowhereville Walmart make any difference to Walmart?
I admit I'm not a hipster embedded in the SV startup culture, but this new dotcom bubble based on advertising (again) is looking a lot like the old one from an outsider's perspective. The difference this time is that everyone has a tracking device in their pocket and voluntarily gives these marketing companies the Big Data they need. And oh yeah, real time machine learning cloud analytics for synergistic cross platform marketing opportunities.
I might be an outlier, but I find ads intrusive. I'm not pissed off enough to worry about blocking them, but I certainly remember which companies and products have shoved the most obnoxious ads in my face and avoid them when it makes sense. I just don't get _why_ advertising works; it's annoying! It doesn't make (smart) people more willing to buy your product!
If you have a good product, all you need to do is get it in the hands of a few smart people who will tell their friends about it. That's it; there's no mystery.
OK, first off I think this is a joke. There's no way someone can be good enough to completely automate their job, then have their skills atrophy so much that they can't get another job. Coding isn't (or at least shouldn't be) just about writing the right magical incantations to get something working - you need some fundamental grounding in logic that you can use to learn the next set of incantations.
That said, I have seen a lot of extremely siloed IT and non-IT jobs in my career working for big companies. Siloed as in, take input work, process it the exact same way, send it on to the next silo. These are the kind of things that stuff like BizTalk, Tibco or others can handle automatically these days. However, I have witnessed situations in which someone manages to convince their boss they're doing a massive amount of work while they've figured out how to cut it down to a fraction of the workday. I've also witnessed people who really don't have any work and are for whatever reason still around. It's not surprising when, say, HP says they're going to cut 30,000 employees. Big companies develop a lot of layers over time, as well as nice quiet corners for people to hide in. When a company gets too big to control, things like this could happen...not saying this particular one did though!
I do worry about this for the future though. Yes, it's a drain on everyone, but there are a lot of people who depend on these jobs to maintain a middle class lifestyle. Think of all the people who still process paperwork or write reports all day long...most are supporting families, paying taxes, etc.
Interacting with a machine, even if you're talking to a human at the other side, does encourage trollish behavior. Look at how prevalent cyberbullying is...when you can't see who you're being rude to or calling names, it's less of a human interaction. Here's a good example -- go on any "comments" section of any news site that requires Facebook or similar logins and read some of the comments and responses. Granted, the population that wastes time spewing opinions into comments sections isn't a full cross section of humanity (hmmm.....I'm normal, I swear!) But, take a look at the real names, and in some cases real job titles of some people. "Bob Smith, Social Studies Teacher, West Nowhere Public Schools" or "Jane Doe, VP of Public Relations, BigMegaCorp" sometimes post extremely hateful, racist or ill-informed comments that I doubt they'd ever have the guts to say to anyone in public. Or if they did, they would definitely not be fun people to be around. The cloak of Internet anonymity (even when your name's attached) is a powerful inhibition-remover. Seriously, I've looked some people up on LinkedIn et al to see if they were using fake names and titles....nope, there's that social studies teacher or PR director staring right back at me.
I'm guessing this is also akin to how wealthy people treat their domestic servants or other underlings. Just because Alexa is an electronic box, she does respond to requests.
I think that's just the side effects of offshoring, outsourcing and the drive for companies to squeeze every penny out of every person they can. The problem that people are experiencing is that the number of jobs being affected by these trends is increasing quickly. There was a time, and I was around when this was true, that graduating from any college with any degree in any field was a guarantee that you would be able to start some sort of career with an entry level position. Now, the supply of college-educated people is up, the supply of jobs that reasonably-qualified-or-trainable people can fill is down, and companies are no longer willing to pay someone a salary reflective of their experience throughout their career.
This is why you're seeing little private liberal arts colleges, even ones with lots of history and endowment money, closing up shop. Companies refuse to take educated people and train them, when they can call Tata or Infosys and get a drop-in replacement flown in next week. Therefore, there's less demand for a liberal arts degree, because students don't see them as having an immediate return on investment. Way in the past, the rich sent their kids to small private liberal arts colleges to give them growing-up time until the family business was handed over to them. In the recent past, the fact that any degree from anywhere equaled employment meant students could study what they wanted. Now, it's a vocational program that's valued most.
The interesting thing is that you would never see this happen under previous leadership. Forget the Windows 10 mess, even forget Microsoft selling one-off software at all. They are absolutely committed to using Azure to become the next IBM. The reason why IBM is still alive is because they draw massive monthly revenue from the mainframe business. You don't just buy a mainframe and a z/OS license as a one-time thing. You buy the hardware, the licenses, plus a huge monthly maintenance charge, _plus_ a pay-by-the-MIPS charge to use the hardware. IBM maintains the system for you, sends minions to replace parts, gives you access to upgrades, etc. for this fee. In an environment like this, it makes perfect sense to allow customers to run whatever they want as long as they run it on Azure. Microsoft will be the toll collector for anything their customers choose to migrate there. I'm working on a big Azure migration/rebuild project, and it's so obvious that Microsoft is done pushing their own software...as long as you rent their infrastructure.
Look at this from a macroeconomic point of view. Especially in mid-tier large state universities (like the one I went to a million years ago,) it is super-common to have students fail out after their first year for a number of reasons. Some weren't meant to be there but get pushed in by the "everyone must go to college" rhetoric. Some fall prey to the Greek life or other constant party atmosphere and just neglect doing any work. Some aren't emotionally ready to handle the huge shot of independence they get. Whatever the reason, many (most?) of these students are paying for their education at least partially with loans that must be paid back regardless of the outcome. Going to college and not getting the degree is way worse than not going -- you get no benefits career-wise and are stuck with lifelong debt. Wouldn't it make sense to provide some help and encouragement, especially to a population that really is at a disadvantage?
The state university system I graduated from has something like this - extra help, remedial classes, etc. for truly disadvantaged students to try to give them a leg up, and keep them there once they've made it in. And they need it; going where I went, as a freshman you really are an anonymous number. It's a whole lot like dealing with a state agency in terms of personal attention and "customer service." It wasn't until I got into the end of sophomore year in a relatively small department that I started to lose that sense of anonymity. Going from a 4,000 student random freshman class to about 300 focused chemistry students with good faculty support was a big change. If I had been in the engineering school (~8,000 students) or business (10,000+) that would've been way different. Point being, Joe Random Freshman in a 300-person lecture class might be having a hard time, but have very little in the way of avenues to get help. I do feel that part of the value I got out of my degree was learning to do things for myself, deal with crappy bureaucracies without throwing up my hands, etc. It's allowed me to work for big companies with stupid rules and advance pretty far in my career compared to people who just whine and complain when things won't bend to their will.
Elite universities may have a different problem, in that you have people in the top 5% of their high school classes merging into a population where _everyone_ graduated at the top of their class. That said, elite universities have plenty of support in place...they just don't let you fall out of the club once you've made it in. Having that Harvard, Princeton, Oxford, whatever degree qualifies you for the rarified worlds of investment banking, management consulting and other professions that only hire Ivy League/elite university grads as part of their culture. After that, Easy Street for life, If you're smart, and work really hard in high school, the tuition you pay at any of those places is a worthwhile investment. If you're driven but not rich or super brilliant, going through the state system is still a very valid way to go.
The only positives I can see from an approach like this are the elimination of a vector for ransomware and viruses, and maybe some illusion of control. There was a story about JCPenney corporate headquarters users watching endless hours of YouTube in the 2013 timeframe. This was the same time the company was on the verge of going bankrupt after the Apple Store guy took over as CEO and tried to turn an old-school department store into a hipster haven. I'm very busy at work and have kids to get home to, so my breaks are usually pretty short; I can't imagine sitting for hours on YouTube all day. But, if I was a government worker in a pretty sleepy department, and really only had a couple hours of work to do a day, I would probably goof off a little more. Users with lots of goof-off Internet time are probably a little more susceptible to phishing-style attacks than tech workers, so that's a pretty good vector for spying right there.
The problem with things like ransomware is that they're easy to get, and easy to spread around the network, destroying data. Completely banning the Internet is probably not the best solution, but if China really is serious about asserting its dominance in the region, Singapore is a pretty juicy target. It's smack in the middle of a strategic trade route -- that's why the British were there in the first place.
I never got into it, but I do know a bunch of people who poured way more than a healthy amount of time into World of Warcraft when it was cool in the late 2000s. Granted, there's still a whole cadre of totally hardcore players out there, but that number is way down. Not surprisingly the same thing is happening with social media - people are getting tired of the new toy and want their lives back. I think more people realize they're being tracked and advertised to, the useful-to-crap ratio is going down, and maybe just maybe people are getting tired of staring at their phones all day long. So kind of like WoW...lots of people figured out there was little point to keep grinding and leveling up characters in a world that doesn't really exist.
I don't really want to see Dotcom Bubble 2.0 bust the same way 1.0 did, but I do feel it's getting toward that time. I just hope it'll go slower and not take so much of a toll. Hopefully it'll happen soon and some of the idiotic unicorn VC money can get poured into something useful that isn't just "X service on your phone" instead. Not looking forward to the "AngularJS Engineers" and "Cloud Infrastructure Architects" who will no doubt be flooding the job marketing like the "HTML Programmers" did last time.
I'm the original poster; didn't even notice it was accepted!
The thing about GE is, for whatever reason, every single MBA program teaches that anything GE comes up with in terms of management strategy needs to be copied. Same thing with Google; our big company is now in the process of taking away offices and cubicles because Google does it and "collaboration." GE's stack ranking or elements of it have been replicated in basically every big company. Microsoft famously implemented it and immediately set up a back-stabbing office culture because even people who did a great job would eventually have to be fired or at least not get a raise. We had an ex-Microsoft VP of HR a while back, so stack ranking was in place for 2 years until they realized they were losing a lot of qualified people for no reason.
What I don't get is this -- unless it's forced, basically nobody gets the lower ratings anywhere I've worked. Are there really people out there who don't do their jobs properly and actually get an honest-to-god crappy review? I'm no genius, but I haven't really experienced this. I've seen it used as a tool to manage people out, or reward favorites, and it's easily gamed. But I've never worked anywhere where someone has been fired simply for doing a bad job.
So, the problem is that generations of MBA classes will be taught this new "no predictable raises" trend as dogma. Those MBAs will go get jobs at Accenture, McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, or maybe even the HR departments of large companies. Instantly, employees will be turned into day laborers and have no yearly raise cycle. Even in times of low inflation, I can see that having a huge knock-on effect. Mortgages are designed to be painful up front but tolerable in the long term because the payments are fixed and people (should be) earning more over their lifetimes.
I imagine that Oracle has internally justified their accounting methods simply because their business model is changing out from under them. In short, there are no guidelines so make up your own rules. The problem with Cloud is you're selling the customer the _potential_ to use a service in the future usually. Knowing when to book that as an actual sale seems to be hard with this model.
I'm not an accountant, but I've taken introductory accounting courses twice, once in the 90s and once pretty recently. It's strange because back in the 90s, all the examples were straightforward. This was of course back when companies did LUDDITE things like taking raw materials as input and producing a finished product. Sales, cost of goods sold, etc. are easy to understand in that environment. Now US companies don't manufacture anything tangible - it's Apps(!) and eyeballs and cloud computing environments. That's tricky. I'm not saying Oracle is blameless, but new world accounting is definitely a different beast.
Everything goes in cycles. Apps originally came out because the iPhone didn't have Flash capability in its browser. Now, companies need to write apps for Android, iOS and (maybe) Windows Phone. Each is built on a completely different SDK, with different coding methods, and each one needs to be updated any time the web site introduces a breaking change. Not to mention, you need to squash bugs in different ecosystems too.
I can see, for example, banking or transit apps. Those require a native interface optimized for the phone or tablet they're running on. But if I'm unemployed, I'm not going to download and use the state Department of Labor App to collect unemployment, or the US State Department's app to apply for a passport renewal. Basic services should stick to a web interface that's easily skinned for mobile.
I have worked in so many places where the most powerful executives in the company have had either no passwords or "dadada" style passwords. The interesting thing about this is that the execs who have access to the most secret information in the company are the ones who insist on the no-password policy.
Not to go too far off topic, but this is why I'm not as concerned with the Clinton email scandal as most people. Everyone who's done IT work for executives know that executives break every single rule IT makes to make their lives easier. Whether it's no passwords, letting their staff use their accounts and log in for them, or running an email server in their basement, I've seen most of this. I've definitely seen the basement email server thing around the time the iPhone was becoming popular and Apple hadn't fully integrated Exchange support in yet.
"I suspect people are sacrificing their dignity for the illusion of safety here- how is the situation they are faced with different from the one they will face at the end of the line? The person may have a bit more money but they will still be unemployed."
It would be great if people were smart with their money and saved, but it's tough. For example, I have two kids in child care/preschool, and it's going to be a huge bite out of our salaries until they're both in elementary school. Soon as this started, my savings rate went way down and we've had to focus on pumping money into our retirements and college funds rather than having that essential emergency fund. Child care in an expensive area is like paying another mortgage every month.
Also, a lot of people might need to keep working to fund retirement. There are tons of people who have very little saved for whatever reason. In previous times, employers paid for retirement through pensions, and most people didn't live more than a few years beyond retirement. Now we're faced with the prospect of living until 95 or 100 with only what little savings we could scrape together and Social Security.
As for why people would stay, almost all of these H-1B replacement stories involve companies selectively cutting the people with long service to the company. I'm a long-tenure employee with my employer, but I have no illusions that they're eventually going to offshore everyone if some MBA's spreadsheet tells them to. However, if you worked during a different era where companies took care of their employees, this might hit you really hard. My wife works for a company that routinely has people working there 20, 30, 40 years because the (now previous) owners treated their employees so well. They just got sold off to another company who is notorious for _not_ being nice to their employees and a lot of the long-service people are very upset and nervous about the future. Like it or not, your job becomes part of your identity when you work somewhere long enough. People might feel like they need to stay until the bitter end, that they'll never get new work (even if they're qualified.) This is actually a concern of mine, and I work very hard to keep my skills sharp. Employers don't want to hire people once they turn 40.
I guess my advice to any new entrant to IT is that you need to be flexible, willing to cobble together contract work into a job, and save every single penny you make that isn't covering an essential expense. Oh, and you have to be in another field after 40 unless you're incredibly lucky and land at an employer that values experience. Truth is that insurance companies see computers as a necessary evil, not a competitive advantage.
We can't call it a union (although the CWA just won their 6-week fight against Verizon, so there's that..) but a professional organization is what's needed. A professional organization can hire lobbyists, who will pay Congresspersons whatever is necessary to counteract the lobbyists on the business side. There has to be a way to level the H-1B playing field so body shops can't abuse it, and no one company or set of companies gets a huge advantage. If I were king that's the first thing I would do - cancel the entire program temporarily across the board so no one can keep profiting from it, sort out reasonable limits on it, and restart it alongside a professional organization. The organization would act like a combination of the AMA and state licensing boards, ensuring a high barrier of entry into the profession (i.e. no more coder bootcamp yahoos or paper MCSEs.) It would also enforce quality, make members responsible for messes they create, etc.
The other thing that a professional organization can offer is a reasonably standard training progression through an apprentice-style program. The big offshorings I've read about lately have been at utility companies, Disney and insurance companies. I wonder how many of those jobs they got rid of were mainframe-related. I work in the airline IT industry and it is getting extremely hard to find people to replace the retiring mainframers, and these people will be needed for quite a while. If you had a bunch of apprentice-level people working with the older guys and learning that skill set as one of a broad set of other skill sets, you wouldn't have the knee-jerk offshoring reaction. Plus, you could have a mix of "master craftsmen" and apprentices to spread out the salary levels. Yes, people with 25 years' experience and a family to support are more expensive than fresh grads who don't even have a goldfish to care for and can move tomorrow if needed.
I really think this is the only way to ensure that we have a steady supply of new people coming into the field. Not every system out there is built in Web Framework of the Month; I've been lucky to have the opportunity to work in lots of IT subspecialties with a diverse set of systems, ancient and new. I worry that new people aren't going to get this opportunity because Tata and Cognizant are abusing the H-1B program. Mainframes are ancient, but some of the core banking, government, airline, utility and insurance systems have decades of business logic embedded in them. TCS and the like have the perfect sales pitch for mainframe-dependent CEOs -- "fire your senior guys, sign here and we'll put 50,000 coders on the project tomorrow; you won't even know you have a mainframe."
I wouldn't be surprised if more attacks don't start targeting the installed-by-default bloatware on most home and some business PCs. From what I've seen, these steaming piles are usually written by the cheapest offshore dev place the vendor could find, or are licensed reskinned third-party applications using a million out of date components. The good news is that there are fewer vendor-specific tools absolutely _required_ to run hardware on a Windows laptop anymore because Microsoft provides native controls for most components in Windows 10. The bad news is that the few that remain required are very tied to the hardware and probably have a lot of privilege use on the system that people don't know about. Just look at what happens on some HP laptops when you press the Volume or Brightness keys -- CPU spikes for a few seconds while Windows loads whatever.NET module HP wrote to talk to the device driver and tell it to do its thing. I doubt any of that interaction is heavily audited or even well tested before it goes out.
All the more reason to just wipe the machine and install a clean OS build from scratch when you get it!
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"When they look at a person it is only to see if they are someone they can use. If not you can actually see the person vanish from their perception. But if the person is someone they can use as another run in their ladder climbing, their eyes light up and the wheels are turning."
Everyone does this to some extent, but the key difference between some sociopath executive and a healthy person is how two-way this is, and the level of sliminess involved.
People like it when they can gain something from others, it's what makes us social animals. I think it crosses the line when someone becomes a master manipulator. It's one of the many reasons I can't stand salespeople. Working as a senior IT person in a large company, I'm approached all the time by slimeball salespeople. From the first second I talk to them, I can tell the only reason they're wasting breath on me is to get me to trust them enough to give them an in with the CIO, project head or whomever else they want to manipulate next. Truly good salespeople and execs know how to tone this down just enough to make their target think they're just being nice. Next time you're dealing with someone like this, flip the situation around and ask yourself how willing this person would be to help you if you were the one calling. That's how you know if you have a Melissa-Mayer-in-Training on your hands.
I already see a ton of misogynistic posts about Elizabeth Holmes, and I'm not going there. What I am going to mention is that she had that Steve Jobs personality that makes people stop thinking rationally. She even wears black turtlenecks. Startups need charismatic founders because how else would they raise money? But there's something about that Type-A Jobsian executive mystique that just appeals to people on some level. It's entirely possible she had very little idea of how things were actually going also - I've seen company executives who clearly have no idea what the company does and are happy as long as the Salesforce.com dashboard gauges are pointing to the green range.
The problem was that Theranos was trying to play the "fake it till you make it" startup game. I totally expect this from startups, and have been pitched numerous software products that were unfinished at best as an example. The idea is, if you're not just trying to get bought by Facebook or Google, to do just enough to cobble together a "product" and fill in the details later. This works for software; you can say you're all Agile and continuous-integration and DevOps and all those "make it up as we go" buzzwords. It's really hard to fake a disruptive blood test process long-term without people trying to poke holes in it.
I think it would have been very interesting to be on the technical side inside Theranos around the time they realized they were never going to get this new process to work right no matter what they did. That must have been very rough on everyone involved, especially with the outside world basically worshiping you.
I've never had a clearance, so this is interesting to me. What could they possibly do to someone who accidentally takes papers home, transfers files somewhere, etc.? It seems to me like prisons would be full of "data leakers" if this were the case. Snowden worked for Booz Allen Hamilton, so I assume those rules don't apply to contractors the same way they do actual federal employees.
I have heard that truly top secret life-or-death material (weapons designs, espionage info, etc.) is way more tightly controlled than someone's email...as in you can only access it from within a Faraday cage on a disconnected computer with a guard watching over the entrance. But it would be interesting to hear how someone with a TS clearance deals with daily work life. Are things just stamped "top secret" as a routine, kind of like how every corporate email, presentation, document, etc. is "company confidential" whether it's the lunch menu or product source code?
Just like the FBI said, she was grossly negligent especially considering the rules about archiving and secrecy...but it happens way too frequently in the "real world" of business for me to be surprised. No executive I have ever seen has had to follow any sort of IT rules. Anything that gets in their way is magically removed.
I did a lot of desktop support in my early career, and am still connected to that world because my specialty is end user computing and end user systems management. The facts are as follows -- every executive, senior VP or above in large companies, has a different set of IT rules than the rest of us:
- Almost every executive I've encountered has no password, no drive encryption or other protection on their machines. Either that, or they have Zuckerberg style "dadada" passwords and need special exemptions carved out of the corporate password policies to deal with it.
- Almost all of them forward their emails to personal accounts so they can get their emails on whatever flavor-of-the-week consumer device comes out.
- 99.9% of them let their secretaries send and receive their email by giving them their password. Same goes for executing transactions.
- Before iOS and Android got good Exchange integration and full MDM, it was extremely common to have "basement email servers" -- sometimes they were in the data center, and sometimes they really were in the exec's basement. We don't need that anymore, but I can imagine the State Department's IT people aren't exactly early adopters especially concerning communications.
- Tons of support time is spent getting whatever crazy computer, tablet, smartphone, Amazon Echo, game system, etc. connected to the company network and functioning -- stuff that the "little people" would never be allowed to use.
The point is that all executives bend the rules, and the IT staff allow them to because they like being paid. In my mind this is no different...Clinton was essentially the CEO of the State Department. Would you tell your CEO that he wasn't able to access his email from some unsecure consumer laptop on his private jet?
I'm not sure why people deny the reality of a shrinking employable labor pool. I've mentioned below that I do feel people can be trained, but my experience has shown that even among skilled employees, there are some capable of handling higher-level work and others who aren't. As much as I think Trump would be a disaster of a President, the experiment he proposes (cancelling NAFTA, implementing across the board tariffs, etc.) would be very interesting. if it overnight became prohibitively expensive for every company regardless of size to manufacture overseas, the domestic manufacturing base would have to return, including companies supplying tools and parts. Instantly, you'd have the blue collar labor force back, paying taxes and spending money in the economy. This would in my opinion restore a measure of balance. It would be suddenly OK again to have just a high school degree if that was all you could handle academically. People wouldn't be forced into debt getting a degree they're not interested in or qualified to have.
I guess I'm one of those people who feels that full employment should be the primary goal of a society, if living comfortably in that society requires money. There's no easy way to dismantle our money-based economy short of a revolution or some disaster that causes a full reset. This is why the basic income has appeal...it allows a transition so the angry older workers who had to save for retirement, etc. age out and a smaller active labor force comes in.
Have the employers these workers aren't qualified enough for tried raising salaries or paying to train people?
It sounds exactly like what we older workers deal with in the US. Once we start making 'too much," we're targeted for elimination because someone with no family or responsibilities can be employed much cheaper. I know it's very possible to let one's skills atrophy, or do the same job for 20+ years, but I don't do any of those and get lumped in with the "too old" crowd. As a result, I never get responses from a cold call resume submission -- most of my jobs recently have been found because people know me.
As for "not qualified," no one is a 100% drop-in replacement. Not even the Infosys, Tata or Wipro guys they send in...which is also part of the problem. Companies don't train people anymore, and expect them to be immediately productive on the first day. A generation before I graduated, large and even medium employers had extensive training programs for new hires. It was possible for someone motivated to come in out of high school. or you could graduate with a generic degree. As long as the new hire was motivated and trainable it didn't matter.
So yes, I think Spain is starting to get a taste of how the tech employment market is for US workers. I feel the current visa system in the US needs to be reformed (not eliminated) to allow for the domestic workforce to grow. No one with a modicum of sense is going to go into engineering, computer science or other STEM fields if they are destined to be the new humanities degrees in terms of employment success/ROI. Once people see a future in these fields, they'll study them again.
> Isn't it fun to be part of an unsuccessful experiment?
Yup, I have the Lenovo ThinkPad T540p, and its successor model is a counter-example. For those who don't know the history, Lenovo inherited the IBM ThinkPad when they bought their PC division in 2005. ThinkPads have a...distinctive...styling; they're boring black boxes whose design hasn't changed much since the 90s. They're bland, super-rugged business notebooks optimized for work. I'm an old fart (40) and use them exclusively - the hipster project managers and other execs with the MacBook Airs sneer at me when I pull out the computer in meetings and they tell me "We need to get you a new laptop." I paid for them out of pocket when companies were refusing to buy them because they weren't the "standard" HP garbage.
So, a couple model generations ago, Lenovo decided to try to turn the ThinkPad into a black MacBook Pro. They changed the keyboard in one generation, a move some purists consider sacrilegious but I was actually OK with. Then, they got rid of status LEDs and introduced a horrible trackpad monstrosity -- and made the thing totally unusable without an external mouse connected. People (including me) flipped their lids and swore they'd never pay the premium price for a ThinkPad again. Lenovo is slowly walking back the changes. The sad thing is you have to pay $2000+ for a laptop with a hard disk status LED - they only brought those back on the workstation models. :-)
Normal companies will (usually) listen to customers when they screw up and reverse changes. Apple is even more consumer-focused now and has no reason to support hardware long-term the same way other manufacturers do. They'll just discontinue the display, roll out a new one, and the consumers will line up to buy it. In the Lenovo case, they realized there's a core market of people who will pay good money if you give them an anti-hipster work-focused laptop. It's similar to the reason why Ford kept making the Crown Victoria basically unchanged for 30 years and only made small incremental improvements.
I work for a medium sized multinational, and the development teams I work with are exactly as you describe. (I'm in systems integration, so I get to make their output work in the real world.) Many of the senior managers in our company have a professional services background, so development is run like a typical offshore body shop, even when the developers are local. Developers are plugged into a project and disconnected when done like they're working for one of the outsourcing code factories.
The short answer is that it's very difficult to manage developers pulled in a million different directions. Agile is definitely in use here, but the reality is that the nature of our work means that developers actually need to understand a little more than a code specification to do the work. They also need to stay involved after writing their code for that reason, but are often pulled off projects because someone shouts loudly enough or is politically connected. As a result, my experience talking with them is that no one ever feels they can get anything done to a reasonable degree before getting unplugged and reconnected to something else. Project management isn't the best around here as a rule, so there's constant emergencies.
When you're "matrix managed," the actual manager is pretty much responsible for your performance review. The rest of the management direction comes from project managers that range from good to extraordinarily bad. I know I wouldn't want to do dev work in that environment, nor would I ever in a million years want a PM job. But, with DevOps being a thing now, I imagine it's just around the corner for us too.
I know no one really dreams of working in a warehouse filling boxes, or in a factory making steel or whatever. But, society here in the first world has been based for decades on the idea of wealth transfer and stable lifetime employment. Some examples:
- 30 year fixed mortgages are designed to be painful in the beginning but manageable over time because of increasing income.
- Manufacturers give auto loans with the assumption that people have the monthly income stream needed to pay them off over an extended time.
- Retirement under the pension system is dead for most, but for the lucky few, pension based retirement's payoff is dependent on years of service.
- Retirement under the DIY 401(k)/IRA system requires lifetime, increasing contributions commensurate with your income to ensure stable retirement income later.
- Car and other heavy goods manufacturers assume people will be able to purchase replacement heavy goods throughout their lives, and maybe someone who's worked a long time will buy a Cadillac instead of a Chevrolet for example.
- Basically every consumer business relies on people being able to purchase more and better things over time, again due to increasing income.
I really wonder what Amazon, home builders, supermarkets, car manufacturers, etc. will do when almost everyone cannot depend on a reasonably stable work life anymore. Personally, the reason why I buy things is because I'm somewhat confident that I will have a job for the near term. If I didn't have that confidence, I'd close my wallet as any other rational actor would do. Now, combine this fact with the slow creep of unemployment both from the low and the high end. Examples:
- Robots replacing fast food workers, warehouse workers, factory workers
- Cloud and automation replacing IT workers
- Offshoring replacing IT and software developers
Since socialism will never take hold in the US until things are at the French Revolution level, what are we going to do with all the unemployable people? It's not nice to say, but there are a group of people who are absolutely incapable of doing anything beyond warehouse work or factory work. Heck, there are corporate employees who are incapable of doing anything outside a narrow processing-type job description. For these people, I do kind of wish for a return to the pre-automation days when you had 10,000+ people working in a steel mill, or another 10,000+ just churning out paperwork at a corporate job. Those people earned a decent middle class salary, and had a good life. I doubt anyone growing up now is going to have it so good.
I always used to think that large businesses, governments, etc. were incredibly careful with things they exposed to the Internet, and that breaches were mainly caused by unpatched vulnerabilities or just coding mistakes. However, when you see a breach that involves full credit card details being leaked, you can tell that a lot of the problem is a lack of standards. At least in the US, businesses aren't allowed to store or transmit card details unencrypted. I'll bet that data was never encrypted in the first place, or the keys were so poorly secured that they were easy to find once the attacker made it inside.
I think one core problem is either a lack of standards, or relying too heavily on one standard. If you just let your developers go nuts and write their own transaction processing system 1990s-style, you can bet something will be missed. On the other hand, leaning too hard on a few established payment systems exposes you to unpatched, undiscovered flaws in them.
The other thing companies need to stop doing is assuming their inside networks are totally safe. I've worked so many places where once you're in, you have full unrestricted access to anything. That requires a major shift in thinking, as many people are still of the mind that firewalls + DMZ + IDS at the front gates are all the company needs to be secure. You need to assume that people can get through all of that and make it difficult to reach critical systems even from inside.
I know no one ever went broke underestimating the idiocy of typical consumers, but do people _really_ buy every single thing someone sticks an ad in their face for? Is advertising really that powerful? Will knowing that X male, 35-44 year old, potentially Republican Facebook users entered the East Nowhereville Walmart make any difference to Walmart?
I admit I'm not a hipster embedded in the SV startup culture, but this new dotcom bubble based on advertising (again) is looking a lot like the old one from an outsider's perspective. The difference this time is that everyone has a tracking device in their pocket and voluntarily gives these marketing companies the Big Data they need. And oh yeah, real time machine learning cloud analytics for synergistic cross platform marketing opportunities.
I might be an outlier, but I find ads intrusive. I'm not pissed off enough to worry about blocking them, but I certainly remember which companies and products have shoved the most obnoxious ads in my face and avoid them when it makes sense. I just don't get _why_ advertising works; it's annoying! It doesn't make (smart) people more willing to buy your product!
If you have a good product, all you need to do is get it in the hands of a few smart people who will tell their friends about it. That's it; there's no mystery.
OK, first off I think this is a joke. There's no way someone can be good enough to completely automate their job, then have their skills atrophy so much that they can't get another job. Coding isn't (or at least shouldn't be) just about writing the right magical incantations to get something working - you need some fundamental grounding in logic that you can use to learn the next set of incantations.
That said, I have seen a lot of extremely siloed IT and non-IT jobs in my career working for big companies. Siloed as in, take input work, process it the exact same way, send it on to the next silo. These are the kind of things that stuff like BizTalk, Tibco or others can handle automatically these days. However, I have witnessed situations in which someone manages to convince their boss they're doing a massive amount of work while they've figured out how to cut it down to a fraction of the workday. I've also witnessed people who really don't have any work and are for whatever reason still around. It's not surprising when, say, HP says they're going to cut 30,000 employees. Big companies develop a lot of layers over time, as well as nice quiet corners for people to hide in. When a company gets too big to control, things like this could happen...not saying this particular one did though!
I do worry about this for the future though. Yes, it's a drain on everyone, but there are a lot of people who depend on these jobs to maintain a middle class lifestyle. Think of all the people who still process paperwork or write reports all day long...most are supporting families, paying taxes, etc.
Interacting with a machine, even if you're talking to a human at the other side, does encourage trollish behavior. Look at how prevalent cyberbullying is...when you can't see who you're being rude to or calling names, it's less of a human interaction. Here's a good example -- go on any "comments" section of any news site that requires Facebook or similar logins and read some of the comments and responses. Granted, the population that wastes time spewing opinions into comments sections isn't a full cross section of humanity (hmmm.....I'm normal, I swear!) But, take a look at the real names, and in some cases real job titles of some people. "Bob Smith, Social Studies Teacher, West Nowhere Public Schools" or "Jane Doe, VP of Public Relations, BigMegaCorp" sometimes post extremely hateful, racist or ill-informed comments that I doubt they'd ever have the guts to say to anyone in public. Or if they did, they would definitely not be fun people to be around. The cloak of Internet anonymity (even when your name's attached) is a powerful inhibition-remover. Seriously, I've looked some people up on LinkedIn et al to see if they were using fake names and titles....nope, there's that social studies teacher or PR director staring right back at me.
I'm guessing this is also akin to how wealthy people treat their domestic servants or other underlings. Just because Alexa is an electronic box, she does respond to requests.
I think that's just the side effects of offshoring, outsourcing and the drive for companies to squeeze every penny out of every person they can. The problem that people are experiencing is that the number of jobs being affected by these trends is increasing quickly. There was a time, and I was around when this was true, that graduating from any college with any degree in any field was a guarantee that you would be able to start some sort of career with an entry level position. Now, the supply of college-educated people is up, the supply of jobs that reasonably-qualified-or-trainable people can fill is down, and companies are no longer willing to pay someone a salary reflective of their experience throughout their career.
This is why you're seeing little private liberal arts colleges, even ones with lots of history and endowment money, closing up shop. Companies refuse to take educated people and train them, when they can call Tata or Infosys and get a drop-in replacement flown in next week. Therefore, there's less demand for a liberal arts degree, because students don't see them as having an immediate return on investment. Way in the past, the rich sent their kids to small private liberal arts colleges to give them growing-up time until the family business was handed over to them. In the recent past, the fact that any degree from anywhere equaled employment meant students could study what they wanted. Now, it's a vocational program that's valued most.
The interesting thing is that you would never see this happen under previous leadership. Forget the Windows 10 mess, even forget Microsoft selling one-off software at all. They are absolutely committed to using Azure to become the next IBM. The reason why IBM is still alive is because they draw massive monthly revenue from the mainframe business. You don't just buy a mainframe and a z/OS license as a one-time thing. You buy the hardware, the licenses, plus a huge monthly maintenance charge, _plus_ a pay-by-the-MIPS charge to use the hardware. IBM maintains the system for you, sends minions to replace parts, gives you access to upgrades, etc. for this fee. In an environment like this, it makes perfect sense to allow customers to run whatever they want as long as they run it on Azure. Microsoft will be the toll collector for anything their customers choose to migrate there. I'm working on a big Azure migration/rebuild project, and it's so obvious that Microsoft is done pushing their own software...as long as you rent their infrastructure.
Look at this from a macroeconomic point of view. Especially in mid-tier large state universities (like the one I went to a million years ago,) it is super-common to have students fail out after their first year for a number of reasons. Some weren't meant to be there but get pushed in by the "everyone must go to college" rhetoric. Some fall prey to the Greek life or other constant party atmosphere and just neglect doing any work. Some aren't emotionally ready to handle the huge shot of independence they get. Whatever the reason, many (most?) of these students are paying for their education at least partially with loans that must be paid back regardless of the outcome. Going to college and not getting the degree is way worse than not going -- you get no benefits career-wise and are stuck with lifelong debt. Wouldn't it make sense to provide some help and encouragement, especially to a population that really is at a disadvantage?
The state university system I graduated from has something like this - extra help, remedial classes, etc. for truly disadvantaged students to try to give them a leg up, and keep them there once they've made it in. And they need it; going where I went, as a freshman you really are an anonymous number. It's a whole lot like dealing with a state agency in terms of personal attention and "customer service." It wasn't until I got into the end of sophomore year in a relatively small department that I started to lose that sense of anonymity. Going from a 4,000 student random freshman class to about 300 focused chemistry students with good faculty support was a big change. If I had been in the engineering school (~8,000 students) or business (10,000+) that would've been way different. Point being, Joe Random Freshman in a 300-person lecture class might be having a hard time, but have very little in the way of avenues to get help. I do feel that part of the value I got out of my degree was learning to do things for myself, deal with crappy bureaucracies without throwing up my hands, etc. It's allowed me to work for big companies with stupid rules and advance pretty far in my career compared to people who just whine and complain when things won't bend to their will.
Elite universities may have a different problem, in that you have people in the top 5% of their high school classes merging into a population where _everyone_ graduated at the top of their class. That said, elite universities have plenty of support in place...they just don't let you fall out of the club once you've made it in. Having that Harvard, Princeton, Oxford, whatever degree qualifies you for the rarified worlds of investment banking, management consulting and other professions that only hire Ivy League/elite university grads as part of their culture. After that, Easy Street for life, If you're smart, and work really hard in high school, the tuition you pay at any of those places is a worthwhile investment. If you're driven but not rich or super brilliant, going through the state system is still a very valid way to go.
The only positives I can see from an approach like this are the elimination of a vector for ransomware and viruses, and maybe some illusion of control. There was a story about JCPenney corporate headquarters users watching endless hours of YouTube in the 2013 timeframe. This was the same time the company was on the verge of going bankrupt after the Apple Store guy took over as CEO and tried to turn an old-school department store into a hipster haven. I'm very busy at work and have kids to get home to, so my breaks are usually pretty short; I can't imagine sitting for hours on YouTube all day. But, if I was a government worker in a pretty sleepy department, and really only had a couple hours of work to do a day, I would probably goof off a little more. Users with lots of goof-off Internet time are probably a little more susceptible to phishing-style attacks than tech workers, so that's a pretty good vector for spying right there.
The problem with things like ransomware is that they're easy to get, and easy to spread around the network, destroying data. Completely banning the Internet is probably not the best solution, but if China really is serious about asserting its dominance in the region, Singapore is a pretty juicy target. It's smack in the middle of a strategic trade route -- that's why the British were there in the first place.
I never got into it, but I do know a bunch of people who poured way more than a healthy amount of time into World of Warcraft when it was cool in the late 2000s. Granted, there's still a whole cadre of totally hardcore players out there, but that number is way down. Not surprisingly the same thing is happening with social media - people are getting tired of the new toy and want their lives back. I think more people realize they're being tracked and advertised to, the useful-to-crap ratio is going down, and maybe just maybe people are getting tired of staring at their phones all day long. So kind of like WoW...lots of people figured out there was little point to keep grinding and leveling up characters in a world that doesn't really exist.
I don't really want to see Dotcom Bubble 2.0 bust the same way 1.0 did, but I do feel it's getting toward that time. I just hope it'll go slower and not take so much of a toll. Hopefully it'll happen soon and some of the idiotic unicorn VC money can get poured into something useful that isn't just "X service on your phone" instead. Not looking forward to the "AngularJS Engineers" and "Cloud Infrastructure Architects" who will no doubt be flooding the job marketing like the "HTML Programmers" did last time.
I'm the original poster; didn't even notice it was accepted!
The thing about GE is, for whatever reason, every single MBA program teaches that anything GE comes up with in terms of management strategy needs to be copied. Same thing with Google; our big company is now in the process of taking away offices and cubicles because Google does it and "collaboration." GE's stack ranking or elements of it have been replicated in basically every big company. Microsoft famously implemented it and immediately set up a back-stabbing office culture because even people who did a great job would eventually have to be fired or at least not get a raise. We had an ex-Microsoft VP of HR a while back, so stack ranking was in place for 2 years until they realized they were losing a lot of qualified people for no reason.
What I don't get is this -- unless it's forced, basically nobody gets the lower ratings anywhere I've worked. Are there really people out there who don't do their jobs properly and actually get an honest-to-god crappy review? I'm no genius, but I haven't really experienced this. I've seen it used as a tool to manage people out, or reward favorites, and it's easily gamed. But I've never worked anywhere where someone has been fired simply for doing a bad job.
So, the problem is that generations of MBA classes will be taught this new "no predictable raises" trend as dogma. Those MBAs will go get jobs at Accenture, McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, or maybe even the HR departments of large companies. Instantly, employees will be turned into day laborers and have no yearly raise cycle. Even in times of low inflation, I can see that having a huge knock-on effect. Mortgages are designed to be painful up front but tolerable in the long term because the payments are fixed and people (should be) earning more over their lifetimes.
I imagine that Oracle has internally justified their accounting methods simply because their business model is changing out from under them. In short, there are no guidelines so make up your own rules. The problem with Cloud is you're selling the customer the _potential_ to use a service in the future usually. Knowing when to book that as an actual sale seems to be hard with this model.
I'm not an accountant, but I've taken introductory accounting courses twice, once in the 90s and once pretty recently. It's strange because back in the 90s, all the examples were straightforward. This was of course back when companies did LUDDITE things like taking raw materials as input and producing a finished product. Sales, cost of goods sold, etc. are easy to understand in that environment. Now US companies don't manufacture anything tangible - it's Apps(!) and eyeballs and cloud computing environments. That's tricky. I'm not saying Oracle is blameless, but new world accounting is definitely a different beast.
Everything goes in cycles. Apps originally came out because the iPhone didn't have Flash capability in its browser. Now, companies need to write apps for Android, iOS and (maybe) Windows Phone. Each is built on a completely different SDK, with different coding methods, and each one needs to be updated any time the web site introduces a breaking change. Not to mention, you need to squash bugs in different ecosystems too.
I can see, for example, banking or transit apps. Those require a native interface optimized for the phone or tablet they're running on. But if I'm unemployed, I'm not going to download and use the state Department of Labor App to collect unemployment, or the US State Department's app to apply for a passport renewal. Basic services should stick to a web interface that's easily skinned for mobile.
I have worked in so many places where the most powerful executives in the company have had either no passwords or "dadada" style passwords. The interesting thing about this is that the execs who have access to the most secret information in the company are the ones who insist on the no-password policy.
Not to go too far off topic, but this is why I'm not as concerned with the Clinton email scandal as most people. Everyone who's done IT work for executives know that executives break every single rule IT makes to make their lives easier. Whether it's no passwords, letting their staff use their accounts and log in for them, or running an email server in their basement, I've seen most of this. I've definitely seen the basement email server thing around the time the iPhone was becoming popular and Apple hadn't fully integrated Exchange support in yet.
"I suspect people are sacrificing their dignity for the illusion of safety here- how is the situation they are faced with different from the one they will face at the end of the line? The person may have a bit more money but they will still be unemployed."
It would be great if people were smart with their money and saved, but it's tough. For example, I have two kids in child care/preschool, and it's going to be a huge bite out of our salaries until they're both in elementary school. Soon as this started, my savings rate went way down and we've had to focus on pumping money into our retirements and college funds rather than having that essential emergency fund. Child care in an expensive area is like paying another mortgage every month.
Also, a lot of people might need to keep working to fund retirement. There are tons of people who have very little saved for whatever reason. In previous times, employers paid for retirement through pensions, and most people didn't live more than a few years beyond retirement. Now we're faced with the prospect of living until 95 or 100 with only what little savings we could scrape together and Social Security.
As for why people would stay, almost all of these H-1B replacement stories involve companies selectively cutting the people with long service to the company. I'm a long-tenure employee with my employer, but I have no illusions that they're eventually going to offshore everyone if some MBA's spreadsheet tells them to. However, if you worked during a different era where companies took care of their employees, this might hit you really hard. My wife works for a company that routinely has people working there 20, 30, 40 years because the (now previous) owners treated their employees so well. They just got sold off to another company who is notorious for _not_ being nice to their employees and a lot of the long-service people are very upset and nervous about the future. Like it or not, your job becomes part of your identity when you work somewhere long enough. People might feel like they need to stay until the bitter end, that they'll never get new work (even if they're qualified.) This is actually a concern of mine, and I work very hard to keep my skills sharp. Employers don't want to hire people once they turn 40.
I guess my advice to any new entrant to IT is that you need to be flexible, willing to cobble together contract work into a job, and save every single penny you make that isn't covering an essential expense. Oh, and you have to be in another field after 40 unless you're incredibly lucky and land at an employer that values experience. Truth is that insurance companies see computers as a necessary evil, not a competitive advantage.
We can't call it a union (although the CWA just won their 6-week fight against Verizon, so there's that..) but a professional organization is what's needed. A professional organization can hire lobbyists, who will pay Congresspersons whatever is necessary to counteract the lobbyists on the business side. There has to be a way to level the H-1B playing field so body shops can't abuse it, and no one company or set of companies gets a huge advantage. If I were king that's the first thing I would do - cancel the entire program temporarily across the board so no one can keep profiting from it, sort out reasonable limits on it, and restart it alongside a professional organization. The organization would act like a combination of the AMA and state licensing boards, ensuring a high barrier of entry into the profession (i.e. no more coder bootcamp yahoos or paper MCSEs.) It would also enforce quality, make members responsible for messes they create, etc.
The other thing that a professional organization can offer is a reasonably standard training progression through an apprentice-style program. The big offshorings I've read about lately have been at utility companies, Disney and insurance companies. I wonder how many of those jobs they got rid of were mainframe-related. I work in the airline IT industry and it is getting extremely hard to find people to replace the retiring mainframers, and these people will be needed for quite a while. If you had a bunch of apprentice-level people working with the older guys and learning that skill set as one of a broad set of other skill sets, you wouldn't have the knee-jerk offshoring reaction. Plus, you could have a mix of "master craftsmen" and apprentices to spread out the salary levels. Yes, people with 25 years' experience and a family to support are more expensive than fresh grads who don't even have a goldfish to care for and can move tomorrow if needed.
I really think this is the only way to ensure that we have a steady supply of new people coming into the field. Not every system out there is built in Web Framework of the Month; I've been lucky to have the opportunity to work in lots of IT subspecialties with a diverse set of systems, ancient and new. I worry that new people aren't going to get this opportunity because Tata and Cognizant are abusing the H-1B program. Mainframes are ancient, but some of the core banking, government, airline, utility and insurance systems have decades of business logic embedded in them. TCS and the like have the perfect sales pitch for mainframe-dependent CEOs -- "fire your senior guys, sign here and we'll put 50,000 coders on the project tomorrow; you won't even know you have a mainframe."
I wouldn't be surprised if more attacks don't start targeting the installed-by-default bloatware on most home and some business PCs. From what I've seen, these steaming piles are usually written by the cheapest offshore dev place the vendor could find, or are licensed reskinned third-party applications using a million out of date components. The good news is that there are fewer vendor-specific tools absolutely _required_ to run hardware on a Windows laptop anymore because Microsoft provides native controls for most components in Windows 10. The bad news is that the few that remain required are very tied to the hardware and probably have a lot of privilege use on the system that people don't know about. Just look at what happens on some HP laptops when you press the Volume or Brightness keys -- CPU spikes for a few seconds while Windows loads whatever .NET module HP wrote to talk to the device driver and tell it to do its thing. I doubt any of that interaction is heavily audited or even well tested before it goes out.
All the more reason to just wipe the machine and install a clean OS build from scratch when you get it!