I would say that you need to go into it knowing that Microsoft isn't making recurring license revenues off the Home and Pro versions of Windows anymore. Therefore, if you're on either one of these editions, the defaults will set you up for maximum data sharing and you should probably reduce this to the lowest level possible. The Enterprise version, which requires recurring revenue paid to Microsoft and is aimed at businesses, is the only edition that you can completely shut off the telemetry on. In Home and Pro, your usage data and eyeballs are what pay the bills. Savvy users should visit the Settings page and start turning that stuff off. If you're really serious about it, you should also configure your home firewall to block known telemetry traffic paths out of your network.
With the privacy restrictions in place, it's a good upgrade and runs well on most older systems as well. I actually like the fact that the Home edition is pretty much locked into updates, because most Home users frankly can't be bothered with keeping their computers up to date. I'd rather have systems like that secure than in a botnet, especially since most home users are running with administrator rights on their everyday account still (and will continue to do so after an upgrade.)
Unless Apple is planning on shipping a pair of Bluetooth earbuds with the product, this sounds very much like a marketing tactic. Apple owns Beats Audio, and I guarantee there will be "seamless integration" with their headphones. This is the same company that charges $200 for headphones of dubious quality, i.e. they're "nice" but "not $200 nice" and endorsed by conspicuous use by celebrities. I know the headphone jack eats up a lot of case space, but wouldn't running Bluetooth a lot more than you would with analog headphones negate any battery life increases?
The extended upgrade cycle makes sense now. Carriers have pretty much stopped subsidizing phones, so the only option to avoid a one time $900+ purchase is a leasing agreement that ends up costing users more over time. There's less stuff to stuff into a smartphone, and fewer simple technologies with silly names like "Retina Display" and "Night Shift" that consumers can be fooled by. I'd be happy if they'd replace the headphone jack with a micro SD slot...even if they called it "Escape Pod" or something silly like that. The mature product cycle plus the fact that a smartphone's true price can't be hidden as easily anymore means people will be buying fewer replacement phones. Add to that the fact that I think most people realize they're walking around with a computer in their pocket and have started treating them a little more carefully than the average built-like-a-tank Motorola cellphone from the 90s/2000s.
The one thing that drives me the craziest as an iPhone owner and a user of Apple's computers is the fixed-capacity non-upgradable nature of them. They might as well be saying "Please throw our products in the dump when you're done with them." Maybe some upgradeability will come from this shift away from yearly phone upgrades. Seriously, I hate paying $300+ for an extra 128 GB of flash memory in a "professional" laptop computer!
I think a lot of companies are realizing they don't really have to be in San Francisco or Silicon Valley anymore. When an area's cost of living gets too high, any company will try to move non-essential operations somewhere else. I live in metro NYC, so this is a really common thing here too. The only industries that are really rooted in New York City anymore are the publishers, fashion, entertainment to some extent and US investment banks. Even those companies have moved their back offices to Iowa, or Atlanta, or even India. Denver's close enough to California for the SV crowd to travel there quickly and still exert some control.
It kind of sucks because if you're not an executive of one of these companies, you're sometimes relegated to a secondary city and the primary city's economy is disproportionately wealthy. No one would stick a call center in the middle of Silicon Valley for example, but you need a mix of jobs and incomes to make a healthy economy and not create a reality distortion bubble. I'm not surprised that secondary citiies' popularity is increasing -- no one thinks the California real estate situation is reasonable. Even here in NY, the second most insane real estate market in the US, it looks ridiculous. Who would pay $1 million or more for a tiny house in a town requiring a 2 hour commiute to work?
The other thing I've noticed living in a primary city is that it's always been en vogue for people and businesses complaining about the high taxes to move to a low or no income tax state. in the 90s it was Atlanta, the 2000s it was North Carolina, and the 2010s seem to be Florida and Texas for where most NY "tax expats" move. Most people I've talked to with families who've taken the deal love living in a huge house and paying almost nothing in taxes, but complain bitterly about the lack of quality schools and low levels of government service. It's funny how quality schools and tax rates correlate...in some states you really do get what you paid for.
I know big companies are all about profits, but I highly doubt that everyone at Nokia was completely useless and unable to fill a spot in Microsoft after they took over. I have lots of big-company IT experience, so it's not like I'm totally unaware that there is always some dead wood. I've seen people "parked" in jobs in some benevolent companies because the divisions they were managing got killed 2 years before their retirement. I've seen people who watch cat videos all day and perform one or two simple tasks. But, there's no way every single person at Nokia couldn't find something to do at Microsoft. And if Microsoft promised to build an Azure data center in Finland, then they should live up to the promise...it's not like they don't need it. Europe is very different than the US - workers have rights and expect employers to be more stable.
My opinion on this topic isn't popular in the US, but I do feel that large companies owe some loyalty to long term employees. I've been lucky to work for a couple of long-tenure employers in my career, and haven't been laid off yet. Companies should realize that there is a subset of people out there who enjoy stability as well as the ability to do challenging work. Give these people both, and don't treat them like office furniture, and they'll stay, keeping your institutional knowledge inside the company. I know I'm not looking to hop jobs every six months, and lots of long-term big company employees aren't either. Not everyone is nomadic and can just move their family across the country or across an ocean for work.
I have some interesting experience with this, having done consulting work for a Saudi Arabian company. The Microsoft takeover of Nokia would be like ExxonMobil or Shell coming in and taking over Saudi Aramco (the state-owned oil company.) The MBA spreadsheet jockeys would immediately start cutting heads, because there really are a lot of "appointed" positions in Saudi companies. As a result, the country's economy would suffer greatly because they're so dependent on a few large employers. This sounds like the Nokia situation exactly. Or look at what happened in the 80s when the steel mills on the Great Lakes and in Pennsylvania closed for a closer-to-home example.
I don't agree with how they're doing it, but the simple fact is that Microsoft is totally done supporting Windows 7 for home users. They're desperate to avoid another Windows XP-style upgrade cycle. Even getting Win7 support for businesses is getting trickier; Microsoft has basically announced that the next revision of business PCs won't natively support Windows 7, and support is limited to a very small list of business-only PCs...so they're not killing support, but just making it really hard to get it.
I'm hoping they'll soften their stance on Windows as a Service and go back to a more traditional release timeframe, but for home users that kind of model is the right choice. Grandma isn't running crazy custom VB6 applications that can't be modernized and must work. She is, however, an inexperienced computer user who is probably happy with a remote servicing model, just like iOS.
Under the hood and without the spyware/Cortana/Store, Windows 10 is actually a good upgrade. It has decent performance on low end hardware. Now that Windows Phone is all but dead, I'm hoping they'll start loosening some of the mobile-inspired UI decisions they made and start allowing custom theming again. The second someone comes up with a Windows 7 look-alike theme for Windows 10, I'm sure a huge chunk of users will move to 10. I skipped Windows 8 because I hated the UI so much, for example, and didn't come back until 8.1's last update.
This seems like a pure financial engineering transaction, but I wonder about the long term health of "IT Services" firms like CSC. I have worked both on the services and the "serviced" side doing various tasks over the years. The services firms cut every single corner they can to provide just enough service to avoid losing their contract; it's frustrating not being allowed to do something for a customer because it might make us less money but be more efficient. The companies hiring them use them as an excuse to wash their hands of anything IT related, dump staff, etc. without having to pay severance or take massive charges against earnings. And in the end, neither side ends up doing anything useful. I just wonder if companies have finally woken up to that fact and aren't just buying whatever the IT services sales guys tell them to anymore. I have seriously never heard of or experienced any good results of an IT outsourcing...it always puts the two companies at odds with each other.
The only long term future I see for these kinds of companies is with government agencies. Agencies in most countries basically aren't allowed to spend agency money on in-house resources. It's always assumed that services companies provide more value for taxpayers' funds, but we know that's not the case. I think that now that companies can offload lots of their day to day IT to cloud providers like Amazon or Microsoft, there will be fewer places for the CSCs of the world to ply their "best practices" trade. It'll be the totally lazy companies that want nothing to do with IT, or agencies that have no choice but to outsource.
I'm amused that HP is unwinding basically all of the mergers that they did to get so big. So many executive decisions like this are basically made by some 26 year old MBA from McKinsey or Booz Allen Hamilton, rather than the executives themselves. Granted, someone may have seen the writing on the wall for CSC/EDS/IBM/Accenture and others, but I doubt that. Like I said originally, it's probably financial engineering to squeeze out as much money as they can from HP before destroying it completely. IBM of late is famous for this.
This second tech bubble is interesting, in that it's a bunch of mini-bubbles. Theranos is the result of investment in the "market disruptors" bubble. Uber is the king here, but there are a whole bunch of tech companies also (like the software-defined-everything vendors who are currently consolidating.)
I understand that sometimes startups need to bend the truth a little bit to get investors and therefore the time they need to perfect their product or service. However, the problem is that they promoted the fact that they had the answer and all the problems were solved...and look, we're doing it with real world testing!
Something like this actually happened during the past year in the big company I work for, so it's not just startups. A politically well-connected division of our company spent untold sums of money building out stuff for a product that they proclaimed was completely ready with all the problems solved. Turns out they weren't exactly telling the truth and it only started coming out when customers started buying and using said product. Looking from the outside in on that, I felt pretty bad that the money they were wasting could have easily paid salaries in divisions that were making useful products, but life's not a meritocracy unfortunately. When you have executive cover for your actions, like Theranos had big-name backers and unicorn status, results matter less.
"The reality is right now the market is jam packed with 2 bit coding bootcamps bozos, people who switched fields when they realized software engineering paid better than their chosen one, and all around wannabes. A small percentage of those people are really into it, worked hard, and are actually good. There's still a shortage."
Yup, that about summarizes it. it's 1999 all over again. I'm in IT, and back in the day it was all about going through vendor certification bootcamp. On my side of the fence, the thing that separates the truly good from the bootcamp career-changer guys is systems thinking and the ability to methodically troubleshoot. Surprisingly, this is even more important now that stuff is cloud-based rather than running on your own hardware. It suddenly becomes much harder to ensure uptime when your cloud vendor can pull the rug out at any time for upgrades, etc.
I'm sure it's that way on the development side too -- there's so much abstraction now that even I could probably retrain as a "developer" at one of those coder bootcamps. I do lots of scripting and automation work, but I've stayed out of development because I'm worried that even the highly skilled are going to get dumped. Now that the focus in the computer world is apps and coding, it's not a surprise that the bootcamp industry is booming. Back in the late 90s there were shady training outfits offering MCSE training for truck drivers, etc. and promising them astronomical salaries.
"The fact that so many people are leaving the labor force to get on welfare and do drugs is driving up the cost of labor very fast"
Citation needed. No one voluntarily leaves the labor force to go on welfare anymore. It's time-limited and means-tested, so anyone with a penny to their name in savings won't get it. Even if they do, they can't keep getting it.
I understand testing for safety-sensitive positions (pilots, transit workers, etc.) but doing this to ordinary line workers isn't justified. Factories have so many safeguards in place now that no one person can cause accidents. People are using drugs precisely because their lives suck, because they can't get better employment than factory work. Think back to the Rust Belt days -- factory workers worked their shifts, and pre-Netflix the only entertainment they had was drinking and sports.
One big problem I can see, across the spectrum of jobs, is that an employer can instantly run any kind of report on you for a very low fee, or even do their own digging. Anyone who has had any interaction with the police has a criminal record, and that person will always be passed over for the person who doesn't. People wonder why recidivism exists, and I think the inability to get a straight legitimate job of any kind is one of the major causes.
The other thing is that this kind of thing follows you forever and anywhere you go. In the past, you were able to move across the country or to another part of the world and start your life over. If you were in real trouble and needed to disappear permanently into a completely new identity, the French Foreign Legion would even take you. Having easy access to everyone's criminal history means even people who've paid for their crimes will never get work again. Getting arrested is now equivalent to a permanent lifetime employment ban.
That said, drugs should be legal, and this is coming from someone who's never had any experience with them. Reducing the product price to nearly zero reduces the crime that users resort to. Imagine being able to walk into a pharmacy and just buy stuff like OxyContin at the generic prescription price rather than risk your life with an unknown-quality product from a drug dealer.
As much as I'm not a Trump fan, one of the things he's right about is that visa abuse is rampant. The original intent of the H-1B program is good; our company is a multinational and we bring lots of very smart, talented employees to the US to work with us. The huge loophole is the body shops and IT service providers who just use it as a relief valve to earn more margin on IT outsourcing deals. The thing I don't like seeing is companies who just decide they don't want a 25-year veteran employee anymore, call up Tata or Infosys, and have a less-skilled replacement shipped in next week (that the veteran has to train to get his severance package.) I don't know how many more stories like that will have to be written before people realize this is not a good way to conduct business.
The problem with the visa abuse, the trade deals, etc. is that to make a dent, every company across the board needs to be affected equally and immediately. The only way to do that is to take away the visa programs for everybody, or unilaterally cancel a trade deal overnight. This would be the only way to ensure no company still had an advantage. One of the reasons companies offshore IT or import cheap H-1B workers from a body shop is because their competitors are doing it. If they don't, their IT costs are higher even if the quality is better. If, all at once, every company suddenly lost access to the loopholes they were exploiting, or that their "IT service partner" were exploiting, the incentive to offshore because everyone else is doing it would disappear.
As someone who grew up in one of those lower-cost-of-living places, the problem is getting a critical mass of smart people to move there. It's absolutely insane that every startup feels they need to be in the Bay Area, especially in 2015. However, let's say you start up a software company in Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, or any other Rust Belt place. Unless you have a diverse economy and/or big university with good academic programs (and yes, that's not just CS...) getting talent to move there is going to be a tough sell. It won't be to rational people -- but in my opinion the rational ones have corporate-style jobs and want stability more than the chance to play the startup lottery. You need a large number of young, inexperienced people who think it's perfectly normal to pay $4500 a month for a 2 bedroom apartment.
Seriously, most of the old-school industrial cities have anchored their hopes to things like medical research and academics for a reason -- they produce stable, well paying jobs. Well paid people who aren't constantly looking over their shoulder for the axe-men spend money and invigorate the local economy. They buy property and pay property taxes into the system. As a result, the local government can invest more in schools, public works, etc. I can't see a purely startup-fueled resurgance in some of these places.
This Internet bubble has lasted a little longer than the last one, and there isn't any one thing you can point to that's absolutely ridiculous this time (pets.com sock puppet, theglobe.com IPO, etc.) But, the VC money has been drying up again, and this forces startups to get rid of staff. There was an article a couple of days ago on Slashdot about Dropbox cutting some of the crazy perks they've been giving out to attract "the best and the brightest" like free meals and laundry.
This is the natural cycle of things, even in big companies. Some places I've worked for routinely over-hire or have staff doing jobs that don't really need to be done during the good times. When things turn bad, bloodbath city. Look at HP cutting 30,000 employees lately - i guarantee that was them finally digesting the last of EDS and dumping the random redundant assistant account liaison executives, etc. The place I currently work for is majority-owned by Europeans, so the opposite is true. You have to prove completely the demonstrated need for a new position, partially because it's harder to just dump people on the street in Europe than it is here. As a result, there are layoffs but they're much smaller and require a bigger downturn than most medium-ish companies would to start hauling out the axe. Length of service around here is pretty long as a result, because people are doing more work than the average IT person stuck in a very narrow silo of activity.
It will be interesting to see what happens, especially in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. I would never move there because of housing costs (and this is coming from a New Yorker...) I can definitely see bigger companies with deeper pockets scooping up the actual smart people, and a huge unemployment nightmare for the hangers-on. Remember how many paper MCSEs and HTML "programmers" there were out of work in 2001!
I'm a systems guy, so most of my development is automation focused (scripts, really simple programs, etc.) The thing that I've noticed about _application_ development is that it's much harder these days to get something functional going right off the bat. Back in the old BASIC days with simple console output it was pretty easy to write a program that both did something tangible and was simple enough to be instructional. Now we have the twofold problem of massive abstraction and having to write against huge SDKs and frameworks so that we don't constantly reinvent everything. That line between writing actual instructions and just connecting huge Lego pieces is getting blurrier every day.
I've always wanted to expand my knowledge of software development, but the problem in this article is very real. There's tons of backstory required to write simple Windows desktop applications, for example, even in the managed languages.
PC manufacturers are running into a few problems: - Despite all the bad things about Windows 10, one of the good things is that the OS has been slimmed down somewhat so it runs reasonably well on lower-spec systems. I have a 7 year old PC at home that works great after I added an SSD. This is probably so they can squeeze Win10 onto bare-bones tablets and even smaller devices. By doing this, however, the need for a new PC is less urgent. - Specs on even low-end PCs are quite impressive and will last most medium-duty users much longer than they used to. - "Information consumers" don't need PCs anymore. That crowd shifted to phones and tablets long ago. Most people won't watch movies on a desktop PC or even a laptop, so the sale vendors might have gotten from there goes away. - For every well-built, good vendor supported PC made by HP, Lenovo, Dell or others, those vendors put out a parallel line of garbage desktops and laptops sold for almost zero margin at Best Buy and friends. All of a sudden, that's not such a good strategy anymore.
The PC vendors need to realize that, although the market is shrinking, there's a lot of room for margin in well-made PCs, laptops and workstations. Look how much Apple makes on their devices, and they even get to charge people $300 for an extra, non-upgradable 128 GB of SSD space! Or, look at the workstation vendors -- you can easily spec out a machine for mid 5 figures if you really need two 24 core Xeons, 4 video cards and a terabyte of RAM.
If the vendors stopped making the garbage line of PCs and trying to make a profit off them, they would find success among the crowd who still needs PCs to do real work.
Employers' perks and work environments vary greatly. Even some established employers lavish perks on their employees, with the intention of keeping them working longer. Some places are just crappy to work for perks-wise, but the reality is that IT and development people are treated pretty well all things considered. If you don't get perks, at least you get a reasonable salary (for now.) I'm not trying to say "be thankful for what you've got" but comparing an established product-selling, cost-managing big boy company to an Internet startup isn't a fair comparison.
Everyone values perks differently. My current employer offers very little beyond free coffee in the non-monetary department. But it works for me -- I have an office, I'm not on call 24/7, I have a short commute, I get to travel once in a while, the pay is decent and the company pays a very generous match into our 401(k) accounts, a concession for them killing pensions. Compare that to two other examples:
1. I have lots of friends who work in the state university system. Free food and laundry style perks don't exist, and the salary is below average. The trade-off comes with non-tangible benefits though; you have to try extremely hard to be fired or laid off, health coverage costs a lot less, retirement is 100% covered and guaranteed, union representation means you'll always get salary increases, and you get to work with generally smarter people. I've considered this for a time in my life when I don't need a big salary anymore, but the pay is just too low for me to take given current expenses. "Stability" is a perk, though it may not be to someone who doesn't need it. Give 20-somethings a few years and a couple of kids; stability will suddenly jump to the top of the priority list.
2. I also know a bunch of people who work for "all-inclusive" employers, some for Microsoft or SAS and some for SV tech companies. Especially the ones that offer free dinner are basically trying to continue the college dorm lifestyle. It makes sense, if you're 24 and have no commitments, why not take advantage of it? Even the Microsoft guys say that Microsoft tries to do everything they can to keep you working longer -- "frictionless" is a word I've heard mentioned, and I saw it on a visit to their HQ lately. Established employers do tend to age however, and it becomes less important keeping the kids on campus 18 hours a day.
I've been working in a diverse set of environments over the last 20+ years, and it's interesting to see the dotcom bubble being replayed in Silicon Valley/San Francisco in almost identical fashion. Once the unlimited VC punch bowl gets put away, startups start having to act more like real companies. The surprising thing from the article was that these cost-cutting startups are worried about retention! As if it was normal to have 3 free meals a day, shuttle service from Hipster Central to the office, free laundry service, etc...
Forget all the "Windows 10 is spyware" stuff for a second; the interesting thing to watch is the tactics they're using. In my opinion they're pursuing a good strategy (for them) but it's going to really anger most "prosumer" users and smaller business users.
The interesting thing about Windows 10 is that it's not a "free upgrade," it never was "free," The consumer versions (Home and Pro) of Windows 10 use data mining to pay the bills with Web 3.0 bubble money. From an IT perspective, the only option these days is Enterprise if you want full control over the machine. You only get Enterprise if you sign a Software Assurance agreement, meaning you basically are paying on an ongoing basis for the OS. The big difference is with Windows 7 and 8, small to medium shops would usually just re-use the Professional license that the OEM obtained when they built the PC, without having to re-license it, because the Professional version gave enough control over the computer. With Windows 10, you can't disable the Store or the telemetry on anything except the Enterprise version, nor can you access the Long Term Servicing Branch (LTSB) which is the closest thing you can get to the old RTM + Service Pack update cadence.
Honestly, it's just semantics. Since it's still a "product," Microsoft still needs to tout a free upgrade as the stepping stone from the previous OS versions. They're just taking a one-time revenue hit pulling everyone up onto the same version of the operating system much the same way Apple has been trying to do. In return, they get all the "grandma PCs" running ancient versions of Windows out of the ecosystem and can redeploy all those development resources doing legacy stuff to the new versions. Windows 8 is basically in the coffin, and Windows 7's end-of-support date is constantly being moved up in such a way that they don't violate any promises, but they do make it hard to deploy new copies of it. In reality they're going to be offering whatever channels they can for free upgrades to Windows 10; there's no upside for them not to at this point.
There are a few cases a year (one recent one was local to us) where a dummy uses Periscope to live-stream their drunk driving. Then they're shocked when the police thank them for providing vital evidence in their case. I read this Snapchat story a couple days ago - obviously it finally got far enough in the court system to be picked up publically because it's being reported everywhere now.
It seems to me that if Snapchat weren't a hip, cool Internet startup, something like a speed filter and/or trophy would have immediately been squashed by even the most clueless in-house legal team. In "real businesses" it's their job to ensure that products don't get released that can lead to lawsuits, or if they can, to minimize their impact. I can just see the discussion around a conference table in Snapchat's HQ about this awesome new feature that uses the GPS to tag a user's speed -- "Wouldn't that be epic? "Yeah, let's do it!" was probably the only consideration it was given.
Obviously, the idiot driver was at fault, but if you're an accident victim, you'll try to recover anything you can. Apparently the other driver in the crash is permanently disabled and has traumatic brain injury as a direct result. You can bet that the first thing that Christal's family did after the crash was to hide their assets and declare bankruptcy. Wentworth will wait for decades to get any sort of compensation from insurance companies, let alone punitive damages.
"He and Bernie Sanders are the only ones even CLAIMING they'll take on H1-B's, outsourcing, and big business. Is it likely that Trump will actually follow through with this? Nope. Is it likely that he's going to represent the same interests of his rich business friends just like ever other politician? Yep."
H-1B is one of those things policy makers can't seem to wrap their heads around. Businesses are funneling tons of lobbying resources basically begging Congress to let them import as many workers as they want, educational institutions are begging them to not kill the only path to prosperity via STEM jobs, and workers' voices are a tiny fraction of both of these, the most vocal sounding more like "they took our jerbs" than the serious issue it is.
I doubt, unless tech workers find some way to lobby Congress directly, that anything will change in the near future. The problem has to get way worse before anyone will act, because the progression is so slow. I could definitely see a Congressperson pointing to the overpaid SV startup wunderkinds and such and wondering what the problem is.
I guess the question now is whether Trump will be willing to tone down the rhetoric, make some comprehensive, real-world arguments on important stuff like foreign policy, and basically be more presidential. Also, he'll have to pick an amazing VP candidate and show himself as open to selecting people who can fill in the experience gaps he has.
Like her or hate her, Clinton was the Secretary of State. Anyone actually watching the political side of this (debates, etc.) and not voting based on stump speeches and commercials can see there's an experience gap, and I think that'll be clear in a general election debate unless Trump does some serious studying between now and then.
All in all, a fun political season is coming. You've got the establishment that wants things as-is, angry workers who have no jobs because they've been offshored, outsourced or automated, angry conservatives who want smaller government, and angry liberals from the Sanders camp who want more. Personally, I'd be amazed if Trump could pull off a trade war with the rest of the world. Coming from the Rust Belt, it would be great to see factories running 3 shifts of thousands of workers again, but I doubt that can be pulled off.
Through luck and some hard work, my family and I are fortunate enough to be able to live in "the nice part of town." We're by no means rich; we make decent salaries, but we're not doctors or executives. Therefore we're always waiting for the career-instability shoe to drop and don't "act rich" for the most part. However, because we live in that nice part of town, we have a lot of interactions with people who are doctors, lawyers, executives and so on. A lot of them are nice normal people who just happen to have lots of money. They even let their kids hang out with ours!:-) But, there seems to come a point where someone just has so much that they turn into a clone of this guy. It's a small fraction of the population, but they're quite noticeable.
I've seen this in my job dealing with executives of large companies as well. Once you get to that level, everything in your life is taken care of for you. Your transportation is arranged for you, meals are handled, house is managed by a staff, family is cared for by a staff, and so on. Anything even slightly out of place like a street vendor is an emergency that needs to be dealt with immediately and harshly. This rant sounds like something a typical "new money" tech CEO would say to one of his friends, but now the world gets to hear how he really feels. It's just further proof that the executive crowd is completely disconnected from reality, and explains things like massive layoffs with no regard to the impact on the business or the individuals.
Apple has made mountains of cash selling iDevices for years now, and will continue to do so. They will also take a cut of all music, entertainment and apps people purchase on these devices. I'm not worried about them disappearing like they were about to in the mid 90s. What they may end up becoming is an IBM. IBM has guaranteed revenue streams from its mainframe business, which are basically safe until people don't need to bank, book airline tickets or consume vital government services. IBM has been able to survive every single attempt by their board of destroying the company. They've sold off most of their hardware production, moved most of the services jobs offshore, and they're still alive.
If Apple does come out with a self-driving car after all this, the pundits will be eating their words if they're able to hit that consumer sweet spot with it. Their products are shiny and nice, and work fine in the hands on non-technical users. I expect an Apple car to have the same level of "UX safety" while being super-complex under the hood. They're just facing a mature market for smartphones - even poor people have them and there's no reason to replace them every single contract cycle. Intel has the same problem and is scrambling to find the next big thing, even though it's clear people still need PCs and servers (but not to the same degree.)
I'd like to see Apple return to making at least a couple of laptops and workstations that are professional-focused and don't just look pretty. Having no way to expand memory or storage on a laptop just to make it thinner is a bad trade-off for anyone other than a throwaway gadget consumer. If they win back the professional users, they can still make the margins they want on hardware. Look at HP, Dell and Lenovo - they sell consumer crap PCs but they also sell workstations that cost five figures and sell well within their niche.
I'm in IT and have worked almost exclusively in large companies. The fact that this is happening is not a surprise -- I question how quickly it will happen. It's great that Watson et al can ingest billions of facts and beat a human at Jeopardy, but I wonder how much this can be applied to something like patient-facing medicine. Sure, the basics will be covered, like determining what medications to give for a set of symptoms, but I wonder how much troubleshooting of real world systems can really be given over to computers. Same goes for building management, etc.
The thing I'm worried about is the effect on society, especially in first-world countries. In my experience in IT at large companies, there are a massive amount of jobs that could easily be automated with a few tweaks to the business process. There are so many positions that basically involve taking work from an input stack, performing a few operations on it, and sending it on to the output stack, even today. Granted there are way less of these now; there aren't hundreds of secretaries in a typing pool or hundreds of file clerks/bookkeepers anymore. But, there are still millions of college-educated people earning middle-class salaries, paying taxes, having children and buying things based on having a job like this. Before the last recession, the default route through life for many mid-level students was to graduate high school, party through college and get a business degree of some sort, then get recruited for a big company for entry level work of some kind. If we dump all these people onto the unemployment rolls over too short a time, this will create a huge crisis. Taxes won't get paid, people won't have kids because they're afraid of being tied down, and people won't buy stuff because they don't have a stable income anymore. Managing the next phase of this is going to be an interesting exercise. Either we'll get "Star Trek" where everyone can figure out what they really want to do instead of some crappy job they hate, or "Elysium" where the wealthy just leave the increasing numbers of poor to rot.
"While the need to expand high-skilled immigration is immediate," read the letter to Congress, "we also need to expand STEM opportunities in U.S. education."
The problem is not with the H-1B program itself; the letter of the law provides a good relief valve for companies who really need a skill that can't easily be taught or acquired. The problem is twofold: - Big tech companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Cisco, Google, etc. use the loopholes in the law to bring in direct, cheaper replacement workers that usually aren't any better than those they could get or train locally. - Companies whose core business is not IT sign an outsourcing deal with Tata, Cognizant, Accenture, IBM, HP, Wipro or any of the other big IT body shops. To make margin on the deal, these companies use the loopholes in the law to replace former IT staff they inherited from their customer after all the knowledge has been transferred.
Until these are at least mitigated somewhat, rational actors are not going to choose a STEM career no matter how much money you put into education. There are many more stable alternatives -- if you're smart, medicine and pharmacy are the only professions with enough political muscle behind them to ensure a restricted supply, high demand and high salaries. If you're not a super genius, there's skilled trades in union states; training is covered through an apprenticeship and pay/benefits are guaranteed through a strong union. If you're crafty, you can go get an MBA and become an investment banker or management consultant.
As someone who helps hire people for our team, there is some truth to the fact that there is a skills shortage. There are a lot of people who coast through their IT careers and who aren't really suited for the job. I'm less sympathetic to someone who's managed to carve out a niche in a big organization and not learn a whole lot after that. There are also a lot of very good people who can't sell themselves well. I just don't think it's so bad that we should give up on the entire domestic talent pool. Keeping a steady stream of junior positions open is the key here -- bring someone on, let them learn in a supervised environment, and they will eventually be quite good or get frustrated and do something else. The problem is that doing most simple tasks offshore or with replacement workers means no one has the opportunity to develop their skills.
STEM careers have the somewhat undeserved reputation of being completely dead-end. I think that temporarily this may be true, but most companies are starting to realize that the stories their offshore consultancies are telling them about cost savings aren't as rosy as they think. The company I work at is notorious for being several years out-of-phase on industry trends. They're just on the cusp of realizing they don't have a great system in place after offshoring almost all development work, and we're just now implementing the early-2000's Google open plan office. In other words, these cycles take time to pan out industry wide.
For those old enough to remember Bubble 1.0, Bubble 2.0 is lasting a lot longer. The effects are still the same: - Massive over-emphasis of the importance of advertising and data-mining - San Francisco / SV housing market distortion taken to a whole new level (no NYC this time though) - Investments in crazy companies/ideas, although it's a little more grounded in reality this time - Loss of talent to social media companies, same as during the stock bubble when the investment banks grabbed all the smart people
The thing that appears to be different is not as many IPOs - the strategy now seems to get bought by Facebook, Google, Microsoft or some other company and cash out that way. I'm all for innovation and stuff, but when absolutely every new startup is "Tinder for nurses" or "Airbnb for pilots" or yet another iteration on an app that's easy to push ads through on a smartphone, there's a bubble afoot.
One thing that's keeping these unicorns alive that didn't exist the first time around is The Cloud and "DevOps" as far as IT is concerned. Bubble 1.0 meant massive build-outs of networks and data centers, and therefore a huge pile of eBay trinkets after it popped. Now, every new company is just using a credit card to buy AWS or Azure time month to month and can survive much longer on a VC investment.
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I would say that you need to go into it knowing that Microsoft isn't making recurring license revenues off the Home and Pro versions of Windows anymore. Therefore, if you're on either one of these editions, the defaults will set you up for maximum data sharing and you should probably reduce this to the lowest level possible. The Enterprise version, which requires recurring revenue paid to Microsoft and is aimed at businesses, is the only edition that you can completely shut off the telemetry on. In Home and Pro, your usage data and eyeballs are what pay the bills. Savvy users should visit the Settings page and start turning that stuff off. If you're really serious about it, you should also configure your home firewall to block known telemetry traffic paths out of your network.
With the privacy restrictions in place, it's a good upgrade and runs well on most older systems as well. I actually like the fact that the Home edition is pretty much locked into updates, because most Home users frankly can't be bothered with keeping their computers up to date. I'd rather have systems like that secure than in a botnet, especially since most home users are running with administrator rights on their everyday account still (and will continue to do so after an upgrade.)
Unless Apple is planning on shipping a pair of Bluetooth earbuds with the product, this sounds very much like a marketing tactic. Apple owns Beats Audio, and I guarantee there will be "seamless integration" with their headphones. This is the same company that charges $200 for headphones of dubious quality, i.e. they're "nice" but "not $200 nice" and endorsed by conspicuous use by celebrities. I know the headphone jack eats up a lot of case space, but wouldn't running Bluetooth a lot more than you would with analog headphones negate any battery life increases?
The extended upgrade cycle makes sense now. Carriers have pretty much stopped subsidizing phones, so the only option to avoid a one time $900+ purchase is a leasing agreement that ends up costing users more over time. There's less stuff to stuff into a smartphone, and fewer simple technologies with silly names like "Retina Display" and "Night Shift" that consumers can be fooled by. I'd be happy if they'd replace the headphone jack with a micro SD slot...even if they called it "Escape Pod" or something silly like that. The mature product cycle plus the fact that a smartphone's true price can't be hidden as easily anymore means people will be buying fewer replacement phones. Add to that the fact that I think most people realize they're walking around with a computer in their pocket and have started treating them a little more carefully than the average built-like-a-tank Motorola cellphone from the 90s/2000s.
The one thing that drives me the craziest as an iPhone owner and a user of Apple's computers is the fixed-capacity non-upgradable nature of them. They might as well be saying "Please throw our products in the dump when you're done with them." Maybe some upgradeability will come from this shift away from yearly phone upgrades. Seriously, I hate paying $300+ for an extra 128 GB of flash memory in a "professional" laptop computer!
I think a lot of companies are realizing they don't really have to be in San Francisco or Silicon Valley anymore. When an area's cost of living gets too high, any company will try to move non-essential operations somewhere else. I live in metro NYC, so this is a really common thing here too. The only industries that are really rooted in New York City anymore are the publishers, fashion, entertainment to some extent and US investment banks. Even those companies have moved their back offices to Iowa, or Atlanta, or even India. Denver's close enough to California for the SV crowd to travel there quickly and still exert some control.
It kind of sucks because if you're not an executive of one of these companies, you're sometimes relegated to a secondary city and the primary city's economy is disproportionately wealthy. No one would stick a call center in the middle of Silicon Valley for example, but you need a mix of jobs and incomes to make a healthy economy and not create a reality distortion bubble. I'm not surprised that secondary citiies' popularity is increasing -- no one thinks the California real estate situation is reasonable. Even here in NY, the second most insane real estate market in the US, it looks ridiculous. Who would pay $1 million or more for a tiny house in a town requiring a 2 hour commiute to work?
The other thing I've noticed living in a primary city is that it's always been en vogue for people and businesses complaining about the high taxes to move to a low or no income tax state. in the 90s it was Atlanta, the 2000s it was North Carolina, and the 2010s seem to be Florida and Texas for where most NY "tax expats" move. Most people I've talked to with families who've taken the deal love living in a huge house and paying almost nothing in taxes, but complain bitterly about the lack of quality schools and low levels of government service. It's funny how quality schools and tax rates correlate...in some states you really do get what you paid for.
I know big companies are all about profits, but I highly doubt that everyone at Nokia was completely useless and unable to fill a spot in Microsoft after they took over. I have lots of big-company IT experience, so it's not like I'm totally unaware that there is always some dead wood. I've seen people "parked" in jobs in some benevolent companies because the divisions they were managing got killed 2 years before their retirement. I've seen people who watch cat videos all day and perform one or two simple tasks. But, there's no way every single person at Nokia couldn't find something to do at Microsoft. And if Microsoft promised to build an Azure data center in Finland, then they should live up to the promise...it's not like they don't need it. Europe is very different than the US - workers have rights and expect employers to be more stable.
My opinion on this topic isn't popular in the US, but I do feel that large companies owe some loyalty to long term employees. I've been lucky to work for a couple of long-tenure employers in my career, and haven't been laid off yet. Companies should realize that there is a subset of people out there who enjoy stability as well as the ability to do challenging work. Give these people both, and don't treat them like office furniture, and they'll stay, keeping your institutional knowledge inside the company. I know I'm not looking to hop jobs every six months, and lots of long-term big company employees aren't either. Not everyone is nomadic and can just move their family across the country or across an ocean for work.
I have some interesting experience with this, having done consulting work for a Saudi Arabian company. The Microsoft takeover of Nokia would be like ExxonMobil or Shell coming in and taking over Saudi Aramco (the state-owned oil company.) The MBA spreadsheet jockeys would immediately start cutting heads, because there really are a lot of "appointed" positions in Saudi companies. As a result, the country's economy would suffer greatly because they're so dependent on a few large employers. This sounds like the Nokia situation exactly. Or look at what happened in the 80s when the steel mills on the Great Lakes and in Pennsylvania closed for a closer-to-home example.
I don't agree with how they're doing it, but the simple fact is that Microsoft is totally done supporting Windows 7 for home users. They're desperate to avoid another Windows XP-style upgrade cycle. Even getting Win7 support for businesses is getting trickier; Microsoft has basically announced that the next revision of business PCs won't natively support Windows 7, and support is limited to a very small list of business-only PCs...so they're not killing support, but just making it really hard to get it.
I'm hoping they'll soften their stance on Windows as a Service and go back to a more traditional release timeframe, but for home users that kind of model is the right choice. Grandma isn't running crazy custom VB6 applications that can't be modernized and must work. She is, however, an inexperienced computer user who is probably happy with a remote servicing model, just like iOS.
Under the hood and without the spyware/Cortana/Store, Windows 10 is actually a good upgrade. It has decent performance on low end hardware. Now that Windows Phone is all but dead, I'm hoping they'll start loosening some of the mobile-inspired UI decisions they made and start allowing custom theming again. The second someone comes up with a Windows 7 look-alike theme for Windows 10, I'm sure a huge chunk of users will move to 10. I skipped Windows 8 because I hated the UI so much, for example, and didn't come back until 8.1's last update.
This seems like a pure financial engineering transaction, but I wonder about the long term health of "IT Services" firms like CSC. I have worked both on the services and the "serviced" side doing various tasks over the years. The services firms cut every single corner they can to provide just enough service to avoid losing their contract; it's frustrating not being allowed to do something for a customer because it might make us less money but be more efficient. The companies hiring them use them as an excuse to wash their hands of anything IT related, dump staff, etc. without having to pay severance or take massive charges against earnings. And in the end, neither side ends up doing anything useful. I just wonder if companies have finally woken up to that fact and aren't just buying whatever the IT services sales guys tell them to anymore. I have seriously never heard of or experienced any good results of an IT outsourcing...it always puts the two companies at odds with each other.
The only long term future I see for these kinds of companies is with government agencies. Agencies in most countries basically aren't allowed to spend agency money on in-house resources. It's always assumed that services companies provide more value for taxpayers' funds, but we know that's not the case. I think that now that companies can offload lots of their day to day IT to cloud providers like Amazon or Microsoft, there will be fewer places for the CSCs of the world to ply their "best practices" trade. It'll be the totally lazy companies that want nothing to do with IT, or agencies that have no choice but to outsource.
I'm amused that HP is unwinding basically all of the mergers that they did to get so big. So many executive decisions like this are basically made by some 26 year old MBA from McKinsey or Booz Allen Hamilton, rather than the executives themselves. Granted, someone may have seen the writing on the wall for CSC/EDS/IBM/Accenture and others, but I doubt that. Like I said originally, it's probably financial engineering to squeeze out as much money as they can from HP before destroying it completely. IBM of late is famous for this.
This second tech bubble is interesting, in that it's a bunch of mini-bubbles. Theranos is the result of investment in the "market disruptors" bubble. Uber is the king here, but there are a whole bunch of tech companies also (like the software-defined-everything vendors who are currently consolidating.)
I understand that sometimes startups need to bend the truth a little bit to get investors and therefore the time they need to perfect their product or service. However, the problem is that they promoted the fact that they had the answer and all the problems were solved...and look, we're doing it with real world testing!
Something like this actually happened during the past year in the big company I work for, so it's not just startups. A politically well-connected division of our company spent untold sums of money building out stuff for a product that they proclaimed was completely ready with all the problems solved. Turns out they weren't exactly telling the truth and it only started coming out when customers started buying and using said product. Looking from the outside in on that, I felt pretty bad that the money they were wasting could have easily paid salaries in divisions that were making useful products, but life's not a meritocracy unfortunately. When you have executive cover for your actions, like Theranos had big-name backers and unicorn status, results matter less.
"The reality is right now the market is jam packed with 2 bit coding bootcamps bozos, people who switched fields when they realized software engineering paid better than their chosen one, and all around wannabes. A small percentage of those people are really into it, worked hard, and are actually good. There's still a shortage."
Yup, that about summarizes it. it's 1999 all over again. I'm in IT, and back in the day it was all about going through vendor certification bootcamp. On my side of the fence, the thing that separates the truly good from the bootcamp career-changer guys is systems thinking and the ability to methodically troubleshoot. Surprisingly, this is even more important now that stuff is cloud-based rather than running on your own hardware. It suddenly becomes much harder to ensure uptime when your cloud vendor can pull the rug out at any time for upgrades, etc.
I'm sure it's that way on the development side too -- there's so much abstraction now that even I could probably retrain as a "developer" at one of those coder bootcamps. I do lots of scripting and automation work, but I've stayed out of development because I'm worried that even the highly skilled are going to get dumped. Now that the focus in the computer world is apps and coding, it's not a surprise that the bootcamp industry is booming. Back in the late 90s there were shady training outfits offering MCSE training for truck drivers, etc. and promising them astronomical salaries.
"The fact that so many people are leaving the labor force to get on welfare and do drugs is driving up the cost of labor very fast"
Citation needed. No one voluntarily leaves the labor force to go on welfare anymore. It's time-limited and means-tested, so anyone with a penny to their name in savings won't get it. Even if they do, they can't keep getting it.
I understand testing for safety-sensitive positions (pilots, transit workers, etc.) but doing this to ordinary line workers isn't justified. Factories have so many safeguards in place now that no one person can cause accidents. People are using drugs precisely because their lives suck, because they can't get better employment than factory work. Think back to the Rust Belt days -- factory workers worked their shifts, and pre-Netflix the only entertainment they had was drinking and sports.
One big problem I can see, across the spectrum of jobs, is that an employer can instantly run any kind of report on you for a very low fee, or even do their own digging. Anyone who has had any interaction with the police has a criminal record, and that person will always be passed over for the person who doesn't. People wonder why recidivism exists, and I think the inability to get a straight legitimate job of any kind is one of the major causes.
The other thing is that this kind of thing follows you forever and anywhere you go. In the past, you were able to move across the country or to another part of the world and start your life over. If you were in real trouble and needed to disappear permanently into a completely new identity, the French Foreign Legion would even take you. Having easy access to everyone's criminal history means even people who've paid for their crimes will never get work again. Getting arrested is now equivalent to a permanent lifetime employment ban.
That said, drugs should be legal, and this is coming from someone who's never had any experience with them. Reducing the product price to nearly zero reduces the crime that users resort to. Imagine being able to walk into a pharmacy and just buy stuff like OxyContin at the generic prescription price rather than risk your life with an unknown-quality product from a drug dealer.
As much as I'm not a Trump fan, one of the things he's right about is that visa abuse is rampant. The original intent of the H-1B program is good; our company is a multinational and we bring lots of very smart, talented employees to the US to work with us. The huge loophole is the body shops and IT service providers who just use it as a relief valve to earn more margin on IT outsourcing deals. The thing I don't like seeing is companies who just decide they don't want a 25-year veteran employee anymore, call up Tata or Infosys, and have a less-skilled replacement shipped in next week (that the veteran has to train to get his severance package.) I don't know how many more stories like that will have to be written before people realize this is not a good way to conduct business.
The problem with the visa abuse, the trade deals, etc. is that to make a dent, every company across the board needs to be affected equally and immediately. The only way to do that is to take away the visa programs for everybody, or unilaterally cancel a trade deal overnight. This would be the only way to ensure no company still had an advantage. One of the reasons companies offshore IT or import cheap H-1B workers from a body shop is because their competitors are doing it. If they don't, their IT costs are higher even if the quality is better. If, all at once, every company suddenly lost access to the loopholes they were exploiting, or that their "IT service partner" were exploiting, the incentive to offshore because everyone else is doing it would disappear.
As someone who grew up in one of those lower-cost-of-living places, the problem is getting a critical mass of smart people to move there. It's absolutely insane that every startup feels they need to be in the Bay Area, especially in 2015. However, let's say you start up a software company in Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, or any other Rust Belt place. Unless you have a diverse economy and/or big university with good academic programs (and yes, that's not just CS...) getting talent to move there is going to be a tough sell. It won't be to rational people -- but in my opinion the rational ones have corporate-style jobs and want stability more than the chance to play the startup lottery. You need a large number of young, inexperienced people who think it's perfectly normal to pay $4500 a month for a 2 bedroom apartment.
Seriously, most of the old-school industrial cities have anchored their hopes to things like medical research and academics for a reason -- they produce stable, well paying jobs. Well paid people who aren't constantly looking over their shoulder for the axe-men spend money and invigorate the local economy. They buy property and pay property taxes into the system. As a result, the local government can invest more in schools, public works, etc. I can't see a purely startup-fueled resurgance in some of these places.
This Internet bubble has lasted a little longer than the last one, and there isn't any one thing you can point to that's absolutely ridiculous this time (pets.com sock puppet, theglobe.com IPO, etc.) But, the VC money has been drying up again, and this forces startups to get rid of staff. There was an article a couple of days ago on Slashdot about Dropbox cutting some of the crazy perks they've been giving out to attract "the best and the brightest" like free meals and laundry.
This is the natural cycle of things, even in big companies. Some places I've worked for routinely over-hire or have staff doing jobs that don't really need to be done during the good times. When things turn bad, bloodbath city. Look at HP cutting 30,000 employees lately - i guarantee that was them finally digesting the last of EDS and dumping the random redundant assistant account liaison executives, etc. The place I currently work for is majority-owned by Europeans, so the opposite is true. You have to prove completely the demonstrated need for a new position, partially because it's harder to just dump people on the street in Europe than it is here. As a result, there are layoffs but they're much smaller and require a bigger downturn than most medium-ish companies would to start hauling out the axe. Length of service around here is pretty long as a result, because people are doing more work than the average IT person stuck in a very narrow silo of activity.
It will be interesting to see what happens, especially in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. I would never move there because of housing costs (and this is coming from a New Yorker...) I can definitely see bigger companies with deeper pockets scooping up the actual smart people, and a huge unemployment nightmare for the hangers-on. Remember how many paper MCSEs and HTML "programmers" there were out of work in 2001!
I'm a systems guy, so most of my development is automation focused (scripts, really simple programs, etc.) The thing that I've noticed about _application_ development is that it's much harder these days to get something functional going right off the bat. Back in the old BASIC days with simple console output it was pretty easy to write a program that both did something tangible and was simple enough to be instructional. Now we have the twofold problem of massive abstraction and having to write against huge SDKs and frameworks so that we don't constantly reinvent everything. That line between writing actual instructions and just connecting huge Lego pieces is getting blurrier every day.
I've always wanted to expand my knowledge of software development, but the problem in this article is very real. There's tons of backstory required to write simple Windows desktop applications, for example, even in the managed languages.
PC manufacturers are running into a few problems:
- Despite all the bad things about Windows 10, one of the good things is that the OS has been slimmed down somewhat so it runs reasonably well on lower-spec systems. I have a 7 year old PC at home that works great after I added an SSD. This is probably so they can squeeze Win10 onto bare-bones tablets and even smaller devices. By doing this, however, the need for a new PC is less urgent.
- Specs on even low-end PCs are quite impressive and will last most medium-duty users much longer than they used to.
- "Information consumers" don't need PCs anymore. That crowd shifted to phones and tablets long ago. Most people won't watch movies on a desktop PC or even a laptop, so the sale vendors might have gotten from there goes away.
- For every well-built, good vendor supported PC made by HP, Lenovo, Dell or others, those vendors put out a parallel line of garbage desktops and laptops sold for almost zero margin at Best Buy and friends. All of a sudden, that's not such a good strategy anymore.
The PC vendors need to realize that, although the market is shrinking, there's a lot of room for margin in well-made PCs, laptops and workstations. Look how much Apple makes on their devices, and they even get to charge people $300 for an extra, non-upgradable 128 GB of SSD space! Or, look at the workstation vendors -- you can easily spec out a machine for mid 5 figures if you really need two 24 core Xeons, 4 video cards and a terabyte of RAM.
If the vendors stopped making the garbage line of PCs and trying to make a profit off them, they would find success among the crowd who still needs PCs to do real work.
Employers' perks and work environments vary greatly. Even some established employers lavish perks on their employees, with the intention of keeping them working longer. Some places are just crappy to work for perks-wise, but the reality is that IT and development people are treated pretty well all things considered. If you don't get perks, at least you get a reasonable salary (for now.) I'm not trying to say "be thankful for what you've got" but comparing an established product-selling, cost-managing big boy company to an Internet startup isn't a fair comparison.
Everyone values perks differently. My current employer offers very little beyond free coffee in the non-monetary department. But it works for me -- I have an office, I'm not on call 24/7, I have a short commute, I get to travel once in a while, the pay is decent and the company pays a very generous match into our 401(k) accounts, a concession for them killing pensions. Compare that to two other examples:
1. I have lots of friends who work in the state university system. Free food and laundry style perks don't exist, and the salary is below average. The trade-off comes with non-tangible benefits though; you have to try extremely hard to be fired or laid off, health coverage costs a lot less, retirement is 100% covered and guaranteed, union representation means you'll always get salary increases, and you get to work with generally smarter people. I've considered this for a time in my life when I don't need a big salary anymore, but the pay is just too low for me to take given current expenses. "Stability" is a perk, though it may not be to someone who doesn't need it. Give 20-somethings a few years and a couple of kids; stability will suddenly jump to the top of the priority list.
2. I also know a bunch of people who work for "all-inclusive" employers, some for Microsoft or SAS and some for SV tech companies. Especially the ones that offer free dinner are basically trying to continue the college dorm lifestyle. It makes sense, if you're 24 and have no commitments, why not take advantage of it? Even the Microsoft guys say that Microsoft tries to do everything they can to keep you working longer -- "frictionless" is a word I've heard mentioned, and I saw it on a visit to their HQ lately. Established employers do tend to age however, and it becomes less important keeping the kids on campus 18 hours a day.
I've been working in a diverse set of environments over the last 20+ years, and it's interesting to see the dotcom bubble being replayed in Silicon Valley/San Francisco in almost identical fashion. Once the unlimited VC punch bowl gets put away, startups start having to act more like real companies. The surprising thing from the article was that these cost-cutting startups are worried about retention! As if it was normal to have 3 free meals a day, shuttle service from Hipster Central to the office, free laundry service, etc...
Forget all the "Windows 10 is spyware" stuff for a second; the interesting thing to watch is the tactics they're using. In my opinion they're pursuing a good strategy (for them) but it's going to really anger most "prosumer" users and smaller business users.
The interesting thing about Windows 10 is that it's not a "free upgrade," it never was "free," The consumer versions (Home and Pro) of Windows 10 use data mining to pay the bills with Web 3.0 bubble money. From an IT perspective, the only option these days is Enterprise if you want full control over the machine. You only get Enterprise if you sign a Software Assurance agreement, meaning you basically are paying on an ongoing basis for the OS. The big difference is with Windows 7 and 8, small to medium shops would usually just re-use the Professional license that the OEM obtained when they built the PC, without having to re-license it, because the Professional version gave enough control over the computer. With Windows 10, you can't disable the Store or the telemetry on anything except the Enterprise version, nor can you access the Long Term Servicing Branch (LTSB) which is the closest thing you can get to the old RTM + Service Pack update cadence.
Honestly, it's just semantics. Since it's still a "product," Microsoft still needs to tout a free upgrade as the stepping stone from the previous OS versions. They're just taking a one-time revenue hit pulling everyone up onto the same version of the operating system much the same way Apple has been trying to do. In return, they get all the "grandma PCs" running ancient versions of Windows out of the ecosystem and can redeploy all those development resources doing legacy stuff to the new versions. Windows 8 is basically in the coffin, and Windows 7's end-of-support date is constantly being moved up in such a way that they don't violate any promises, but they do make it hard to deploy new copies of it. In reality they're going to be offering whatever channels they can for free upgrades to Windows 10; there's no upside for them not to at this point.
There are a few cases a year (one recent one was local to us) where a dummy uses Periscope to live-stream their drunk driving. Then they're shocked when the police thank them for providing vital evidence in their case. I read this Snapchat story a couple days ago - obviously it finally got far enough in the court system to be picked up publically because it's being reported everywhere now.
It seems to me that if Snapchat weren't a hip, cool Internet startup, something like a speed filter and/or trophy would have immediately been squashed by even the most clueless in-house legal team. In "real businesses" it's their job to ensure that products don't get released that can lead to lawsuits, or if they can, to minimize their impact. I can just see the discussion around a conference table in Snapchat's HQ about this awesome new feature that uses the GPS to tag a user's speed -- "Wouldn't that be epic? "Yeah, let's do it!" was probably the only consideration it was given.
Obviously, the idiot driver was at fault, but if you're an accident victim, you'll try to recover anything you can. Apparently the other driver in the crash is permanently disabled and has traumatic brain injury as a direct result. You can bet that the first thing that Christal's family did after the crash was to hide their assets and declare bankruptcy. Wentworth will wait for decades to get any sort of compensation from insurance companies, let alone punitive damages.
"He and Bernie Sanders are the only ones even CLAIMING they'll take on H1-B's, outsourcing, and big business. Is it likely that Trump will actually follow through with this? Nope. Is it likely that he's going to represent the same interests of his rich business friends just like ever other politician? Yep."
H-1B is one of those things policy makers can't seem to wrap their heads around. Businesses are funneling tons of lobbying resources basically begging Congress to let them import as many workers as they want, educational institutions are begging them to not kill the only path to prosperity via STEM jobs, and workers' voices are a tiny fraction of both of these, the most vocal sounding more like "they took our jerbs" than the serious issue it is.
I doubt, unless tech workers find some way to lobby Congress directly, that anything will change in the near future. The problem has to get way worse before anyone will act, because the progression is so slow. I could definitely see a Congressperson pointing to the overpaid SV startup wunderkinds and such and wondering what the problem is.
I guess the question now is whether Trump will be willing to tone down the rhetoric, make some comprehensive, real-world arguments on important stuff like foreign policy, and basically be more presidential. Also, he'll have to pick an amazing VP candidate and show himself as open to selecting people who can fill in the experience gaps he has.
Like her or hate her, Clinton was the Secretary of State. Anyone actually watching the political side of this (debates, etc.) and not voting based on stump speeches and commercials can see there's an experience gap, and I think that'll be clear in a general election debate unless Trump does some serious studying between now and then.
All in all, a fun political season is coming. You've got the establishment that wants things as-is, angry workers who have no jobs because they've been offshored, outsourced or automated, angry conservatives who want smaller government, and angry liberals from the Sanders camp who want more. Personally, I'd be amazed if Trump could pull off a trade war with the rest of the world. Coming from the Rust Belt, it would be great to see factories running 3 shifts of thousands of workers again, but I doubt that can be pulled off.
Through luck and some hard work, my family and I are fortunate enough to be able to live in "the nice part of town." We're by no means rich; we make decent salaries, but we're not doctors or executives. Therefore we're always waiting for the career-instability shoe to drop and don't "act rich" for the most part. However, because we live in that nice part of town, we have a lot of interactions with people who are doctors, lawyers, executives and so on. A lot of them are nice normal people who just happen to have lots of money. They even let their kids hang out with ours! :-) But, there seems to come a point where someone just has so much that they turn into a clone of this guy. It's a small fraction of the population, but they're quite noticeable.
I've seen this in my job dealing with executives of large companies as well. Once you get to that level, everything in your life is taken care of for you. Your transportation is arranged for you, meals are handled, house is managed by a staff, family is cared for by a staff, and so on. Anything even slightly out of place like a street vendor is an emergency that needs to be dealt with immediately and harshly. This rant sounds like something a typical "new money" tech CEO would say to one of his friends, but now the world gets to hear how he really feels. It's just further proof that the executive crowd is completely disconnected from reality, and explains things like massive layoffs with no regard to the impact on the business or the individuals.
Apple has made mountains of cash selling iDevices for years now, and will continue to do so. They will also take a cut of all music, entertainment and apps people purchase on these devices. I'm not worried about them disappearing like they were about to in the mid 90s. What they may end up becoming is an IBM. IBM has guaranteed revenue streams from its mainframe business, which are basically safe until people don't need to bank, book airline tickets or consume vital government services. IBM has been able to survive every single attempt by their board of destroying the company. They've sold off most of their hardware production, moved most of the services jobs offshore, and they're still alive.
If Apple does come out with a self-driving car after all this, the pundits will be eating their words if they're able to hit that consumer sweet spot with it. Their products are shiny and nice, and work fine in the hands on non-technical users. I expect an Apple car to have the same level of "UX safety" while being super-complex under the hood. They're just facing a mature market for smartphones - even poor people have them and there's no reason to replace them every single contract cycle. Intel has the same problem and is scrambling to find the next big thing, even though it's clear people still need PCs and servers (but not to the same degree.)
I'd like to see Apple return to making at least a couple of laptops and workstations that are professional-focused and don't just look pretty. Having no way to expand memory or storage on a laptop just to make it thinner is a bad trade-off for anyone other than a throwaway gadget consumer. If they win back the professional users, they can still make the margins they want on hardware. Look at HP, Dell and Lenovo - they sell consumer crap PCs but they also sell workstations that cost five figures and sell well within their niche.
I'm in IT and have worked almost exclusively in large companies. The fact that this is happening is not a surprise -- I question how quickly it will happen. It's great that Watson et al can ingest billions of facts and beat a human at Jeopardy, but I wonder how much this can be applied to something like patient-facing medicine. Sure, the basics will be covered, like determining what medications to give for a set of symptoms, but I wonder how much troubleshooting of real world systems can really be given over to computers. Same goes for building management, etc.
The thing I'm worried about is the effect on society, especially in first-world countries. In my experience in IT at large companies, there are a massive amount of jobs that could easily be automated with a few tweaks to the business process. There are so many positions that basically involve taking work from an input stack, performing a few operations on it, and sending it on to the output stack, even today. Granted there are way less of these now; there aren't hundreds of secretaries in a typing pool or hundreds of file clerks/bookkeepers anymore. But, there are still millions of college-educated people earning middle-class salaries, paying taxes, having children and buying things based on having a job like this. Before the last recession, the default route through life for many mid-level students was to graduate high school, party through college and get a business degree of some sort, then get recruited for a big company for entry level work of some kind. If we dump all these people onto the unemployment rolls over too short a time, this will create a huge crisis. Taxes won't get paid, people won't have kids because they're afraid of being tied down, and people won't buy stuff because they don't have a stable income anymore. Managing the next phase of this is going to be an interesting exercise. Either we'll get "Star Trek" where everyone can figure out what they really want to do instead of some crappy job they hate, or "Elysium" where the wealthy just leave the increasing numbers of poor to rot.
"While the need to expand high-skilled immigration is immediate," read the letter to Congress, "we also need to expand STEM opportunities in U.S. education."
The problem is not with the H-1B program itself; the letter of the law provides a good relief valve for companies who really need a skill that can't easily be taught or acquired. The problem is twofold:
- Big tech companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Cisco, Google, etc. use the loopholes in the law to bring in direct, cheaper replacement workers that usually aren't any better than those they could get or train locally.
- Companies whose core business is not IT sign an outsourcing deal with Tata, Cognizant, Accenture, IBM, HP, Wipro or any of the other big IT body shops. To make margin on the deal, these companies use the loopholes in the law to replace former IT staff they inherited from their customer after all the knowledge has been transferred.
Until these are at least mitigated somewhat, rational actors are not going to choose a STEM career no matter how much money you put into education. There are many more stable alternatives -- if you're smart, medicine and pharmacy are the only professions with enough political muscle behind them to ensure a restricted supply, high demand and high salaries. If you're not a super genius, there's skilled trades in union states; training is covered through an apprenticeship and pay/benefits are guaranteed through a strong union. If you're crafty, you can go get an MBA and become an investment banker or management consultant.
As someone who helps hire people for our team, there is some truth to the fact that there is a skills shortage. There are a lot of people who coast through their IT careers and who aren't really suited for the job. I'm less sympathetic to someone who's managed to carve out a niche in a big organization and not learn a whole lot after that. There are also a lot of very good people who can't sell themselves well. I just don't think it's so bad that we should give up on the entire domestic talent pool. Keeping a steady stream of junior positions open is the key here -- bring someone on, let them learn in a supervised environment, and they will eventually be quite good or get frustrated and do something else. The problem is that doing most simple tasks offshore or with replacement workers means no one has the opportunity to develop their skills.
STEM careers have the somewhat undeserved reputation of being completely dead-end. I think that temporarily this may be true, but most companies are starting to realize that the stories their offshore consultancies are telling them about cost savings aren't as rosy as they think. The company I work at is notorious for being several years out-of-phase on industry trends. They're just on the cusp of realizing they don't have a great system in place after offshoring almost all development work, and we're just now implementing the early-2000's Google open plan office. In other words, these cycles take time to pan out industry wide.
For those old enough to remember Bubble 1.0, Bubble 2.0 is lasting a lot longer. The effects are still the same:
- Massive over-emphasis of the importance of advertising and data-mining
- San Francisco / SV housing market distortion taken to a whole new level (no NYC this time though)
- Investments in crazy companies/ideas, although it's a little more grounded in reality this time
- Loss of talent to social media companies, same as during the stock bubble when the investment banks grabbed all the smart people
The thing that appears to be different is not as many IPOs - the strategy now seems to get bought by Facebook, Google, Microsoft or some other company and cash out that way. I'm all for innovation and stuff, but when absolutely every new startup is "Tinder for nurses" or "Airbnb for pilots" or yet another iteration on an app that's easy to push ads through on a smartphone, there's a bubble afoot.
One thing that's keeping these unicorns alive that didn't exist the first time around is The Cloud and "DevOps" as far as IT is concerned. Bubble 1.0 meant massive build-outs of networks and data centers, and therefore a huge pile of eBay trinkets after it popped. Now, every new company is just using a credit card to buy AWS or Azure time month to month and can survive much longer on a VC investment.