I think lots of countries don't know what to make of the current situation. When you put someone in charge of a country who has no prior political experience, I think the more established politicians are just trying to figure out what's going through his mind.
I don't think he's totally incompetent, having at least dealt with running a business, and hopefully he's listening to someone in his administration who has had some experience in international trade negotiations. But I do think someone needs to telegraph the fact that trade policy isn't the same as lowballing a property/business owner on an offer, or paying a local politician a bribe, or dealing with some construction union boss. Because if that's the experience he's drawing from, the results he's expecting aren't going to come about.
One thing I worry about is national politics getting as openly corrupt as local politics. Local businessmen don't even try to hide it -- it's pretty much out in the open that the mayor or city council or town supervisor will do whatever a business owner wants for the right amount of cash in a paper bag. National politics is still a little veiled -- you have the veneer of lobbyists, etc.
I see everyone saying that Microsoft is just going to destroy Github, but I think they've got different plans. Skype was acquired to give them better video conferencing in O365/Teams and IP for video chat for Windows Phone, etc. Nokia was acquired because they wanted to buy their way into the iPhone/Android app store supported phone model. In neither of these cases were there any plans to keep the companies as-is. I think their overall plan is to make it even easier than it is now to consume Azure services while not touching the underlying culture around Github.
The reason for this is clear in the posts here...no one from the "open source community" trusts Microsoft. This is why they've went out of their way to let people run Linux and non-Microsoft products in Azure as first-class citizens. It's no longer about selling software; they want people to consume services monthly. They don't care what you run as long as you're paying them every month for a VM or PaaS instance to run it on, and that's a huge shift. They know that if they're not selling software licenses anymore, they need to move their focus away from enterprises and towards developers...because developers are the ones writing the new-style apps that will generate them cloud revenue.
I also think another reason they're doing this is because they're trying to establish "hipster developer cred." All the cool kids use Github. All the cool kids use open source. Therefore, if they want cool kids to pay them every month to host their code and build pipelines in VSTS, Github is the onramp. Enterprise developers with their stuffy closed source control solutions will still be supported, but they want to be seen as open to change. I've talked to a lot of people who work at Microsoft, and the change over the last 4 years has been pretty sweeping. Developers used to have private office space and they're slowly being moved into cafeteria-table workspaces to promote a DevOps culture. And they fired the QA testers and are forcing developers to do their own testing now, which is a huge change. It's all about pumping out new services in Azure and Office 365 at a breakneck pace instead of three-year OS release cycles.
Yes.:-) There's a big difference between being an actual imposter and letting the constant deluge of information make you think you are one.
There are plenty of actual imposters in IT and development. There's the coder-bootcamp-trained "full stack developer" in way over their head, or the systems admin who refuses to learn new technology and ways of working, or the total newbie who's pretending they know what people are talking about in "fake it till you make it".
What I'm referring to specifically is the relatively new phenomenon I mentioned previously...a developer builds some tool that is a wrapper around something else, or yet another layer of abstraction, and promotes it as if it's some world-changing breakthrough. Because everything's open source and in the cloud, there are hundreds of these tools and more coming every few months. I'm not saying they're all not useful, but the startup/disruption/DevOps boom encourages the self-promotion aspect so you get these people who set themselves up as the world leading expert and try to get everyone to build everything on top of their tool. And, because IT execs have the attention span of a fruit fly, they declare they're "all in" on whatever thing they hear about at a conference.
True imposters aren't going to be able to understand these new things in the context of the world at large and, as I've noticed in some cases, they basically turn into tool or language groupies following around the experts. People who actually know what they're doing and can say "oh, that's just an abstraction on VMs or yet another way to drive CloudFomration/ARM/vRealize" have to spend time figuring out what to learn, and the constant hyping of things as the wave of the future makes people with a limited time to keep up spend the time figurng out what's actually going on under the hood.
There's two general types of conferences I can think of, and I think both are overrated for different reasons:
The big flashy vendor conferences like MS Ignite, Citrix Synergy, VMWorld, etc...these are just holdovers from the era where the only way to learn anything new about a product was a conference or having a sales guy come talk to you. Think CES or Comdex. They do have some useful content, but everything is basically a marketing spin. It's all about dragging thousands of people to a convention center once a year as the only sales opportunity, plying them with food/alcohol/marketing cheerleaders, and getting them to buy something. Every time I go into a big city convention center, I can almost see the ghosts of the junior sales and marketing people in line at the onsite office place waiting to fax their big career-making order to headquarters. That's what those venues are set up for.
And on the smaller side...every DevOps tool, new language, new JavaScript framework, etc. has its own conference. It seems like it's the way to legitimize that tool's use. DockerCon, RubyCon, JenkinsCon, ChefCon, etc. (yes, I made some of those up but you get the point.) You may get way less marketing at a conference like this, but IMO it's just a way for the truly laser-focused among that conference's tool's users to promote their personal projects or "get on the speaking circuit."
I also think this is partially what's driving a lot of the imposter syndrome in tech. We all know there are plenty of people who thought they could keep the same skillset for 20 years and be OK...but if you listen to all the conference speakers, bloggers, Twitterers and open source contributors, it's very easy to feel like you know nothing. This (IMO) is because a lot of these blogs, speaking engagements, etc. are self-promotion and people with very little going on outside of their work worlds are cultivating the image that they're super rockstar geniuses. For those of us who do keep up, but have to choose very carefully what we spend our time learning, it's tough to not feel like you know nothing compared to someone who appears to know all the buzzwords. I've had to tell myself and others I know who experience this more than once that no one knows everything and unless you're willing to spend all your off-work time reading, you're not even going to get to a fraction of it.
I can deal with emojis and use them...but animated GIFs and memes are idiotic and immature.
I know it's the equivalent of an 85-year-old retired English teacher complaining that no one knows proper grammar anymore, but I do think that even in team chat applications this has no place.
"It is impossible for the culture in MS not to destroy GH."
I think they'd just leave them alone. Microsoft wanted Nokia so they could make an iPhone killer and sell their software and app ecosystem. They wanted Skype so they could get a better video conferencing system for O365/Teams to sell more subscriptions. I think they want Github to drive Azure adoption. To make that work you can't just take them over and apply the old license-based software company culture. The open source crowd would never tolerate any change that smelled of "proprietary closed source code" so I think Microsoft knows they would have to basically not touch anything and just quietly build easy on-ramps to consume more Azure.
Github actually fits with their "new, hip web startup" culture they seem to want to cultivate. People I know who have worked there for a while say that the whole DevOps thing has come through like a freight train. Developers have been moved from private offices to cafeteria tables and they've basically fired all the testers and forced developers to write tests.
Microsoft isn't the 90s Microsoft anymore. They're banking on getting out of the software business and into the cloud business. Every single project they build these days beyond core Windows and Office has at least some open source component and they're already using Github to host all their code. Owning Github would be a way for them to build an even more seamless bridge into Azure for developers' applications. It's already incredibly easy to publish something through VSTS and the other 10,000 CI/CD tools out there.
That's the interesting thing about this whole Azure shift...they don't care what you run on their service as long as you pay them to use it. And, they get guaranteed monthly revenue without having to craft enterprise software agreements. It's an interesting shift to watch, because they're trying hard to not publicly indicate any sort of lock-in while leading people that way. If you're careful about tool selection you can make a totally portable application, but Microsoft is providing enough services that are easy and the path of least resistance...but also happen to run only on Azure.
As for what they would do with Github...probably nothing beyond building stronger Azure connections. They're out of the software and the phone/App Store business for the most part, so we're back to Developers Developers Developers...
I'm older (43) and still tend to answer the phone. But, one thing I do see is that people who don't like talking to people feel they don't have to anymore. There's other non-voice options.
This is especially true in workplaces, where the younger crowd is finally starting to reach the supervisory levels. In tech shops it's all Slack, Teams, IM of one form or another, texting, etc. I actually find myself preferring this, even though I know it's not normal.
I'm not an antisocial nerd, but I'm also not a type-A salesy extrovert either. Talking to people on the phone means uncomfortable small talk, having to manage the conversation, etc. Sending a to-the-point message is much more useful to me. I know extroverts probably love the small talk aspect, but it's something I can live without if I can get my information without it.
One huge difference between dermatologists and all medical professionals, and other workers, is that they will still be pulling in huge salaries and working when we're automated out and roasting rats over garbage cans in the street.
Doctors and other health professions were smart and formed a professional organization. They're set for life - the professional body limits the supply of new entrants, ensures they're trained properly and buys legislation/regulations needed to ensure they're highly compensated and have secure jobs.
If you need to see a stark example, look at pharmacists. Pharmacists are highly trained and probably know more about drugs and delivery mechanisms than any doctor. Those that work in hospitals and specialty settings put their knowledge to work all the time, but there are also tons of retail pharmacists who do very basic tasks. Even while pharmacy techs do the basic jobs, every pharmacy needs a licensed pharmacist on staff. If they didn't have a professional organization paying to keep regulations in place, you can bet CVS, Walgreens and the health insurance companies would funnel as many paper bags of cash as necessary to lawmakers to make that requirement go away.
People think of Microsoft as a software company still, but the reality is that they're not. Google may own all your data, but Microsoft's looking to be the platform that basically every on-premises computing environment migrates to. They are officially done selling software licenses...it's going to be guaranteed perpetual monthly revenue from their customers forever. Soon as they get customers to move to Azure, it's the ultimate vendor lock-in.
You might say "there's no lock-in, I can go to AWS/GCP/whatever anytime I want!" Maybe, but they're being very smart...allowing anyone to build totally platform-agnostic solutions, but dangling just enough proprietary stuff that Just Works(TM) and is the path of least resistance. It's also by far the easiest way to run Windows environments in a hybrid manner where some stuff lives in your data center and others can run in the cloud. I think this is what's going to keep them going the same way IBM is. IBM is making billions off customers who can't migrate off the mainframe and whose businesses literally depend on the mainframe applications running the core of everything staying up. IBM has been able to fumble around trying to become a management consulting firm and bargain-basement offshore workhouse for the sole reason that their mainframe business is an ATM.
I think that once Microsoft saw how willing people were to pay monthly for Office 365 forever, that was the end of enthusiastic support for perpetual licensing and on-premises deployments.
About the "training" aspect -- I'd agree if this were the 50s or 60s and this was a massive lifelong employer like IBM, AT&T, General Motors, etc. Walmart isn't that kind of employer; if they could run their stores with zero employees they would because their margin is so low. So, what incentive do they have to train store managers? I'd think they and other retailers would be figuring out how to replace people as quickly as possible, and certainly not be interested in their career development.
The days where you could start at a big employer out of high school, show some initiative and get chosen for a training program/college tuition waiver are over. Walmart doesn't have an incentive to invest in people the same way a 1960s IBM might because you don't need specialized knowledge to run a retail store.
"We need to tell people that there's no shame in getting a minimum wage job and figuring out how to be an adult and what you want to do with your life before going to school. I think that message would prevent a large part of the problem. "
I'm not so sure about that. Certainly back when I went, if you didn't apply in your senior year of high school you missed out on certain opportunities. Even one year off unless you were in community college put you in the "non-traditional" crowd and effectively limited your choices of schools that would accept you.
You're not wrong; there's a lot of students who really would benefit. But, there's so much pressure, at least among students/parents that care about such things, to have students follow the traditional path. It's all about what opportunities you have...if you can get into an Ivy League school even by the skin of your teeth, there are jobs available to you that other students can't get and connections other students won't have. If you go the state school route like I did you have to work harder to find work and won't have some of the exceedingly lucrative stuff like banking and management consulting available to you.
The summary mentions that these degrees are in "business or supply chain management", and only available through 3 institutions. I'll give them credit for not going to ITT Tech or U of Phoenix or something...that's a plus. But, does the world need any more generic business students? Will Walmart even need them as time goes by?
Even when I graduated a million years ago, the generic business, psychology, communications, etc. students were basically attending class between parties and most just squeaked by. With the increase in students being pushed into college I can't imagine this has changed at all. In the old days when a degree was a guaranteed path to a job, the idea was that if you didn't know what you wanted to do, major in business and some company would find some random job for you. Those random jobs are disappearing, and low-margin employers like Walmart and Amazon are going to be the first to eliminate people wherever they can.
Walmart is at least offering something...they probably cut some sweet deal with the 3 universities to boost their enrollment numbers and got a massive tuition discount, and it's a direct expense that they don't pay tax on. But, limiting where and what can be studied makes this seem like a serfdom arrangement, kind of like the coder bootcamps that take people in and funnel them off to startups desperate for more JavaScript monkeys willing to work 100 hour weeks.
The entire tech industry is built on an endless supply of cheap, young fresh grads who are easily convinced that low salaries and grueling work weeks are the norm. As those grads gain experience, they demand more salary and a more flexible life and will reach a point where employers will find a way to get rid of them.
It's not fair to paint everyone over a certain age as a dinosaur. I've seen many freshly minted MBAs explicitly say they don't want resumes of anyone who "looks over 40." This is due to a widely held stereotype that the only people who understand technology subjects are in their 20s, and the 30s are the time to start planning retirements. Everyone in the first stages of their career deriding older workers should bear in mind that this problem will eventually claim them unless they're very lucky and stay on the cutting edge every day of their lives.
Losing a job in your 50s in tech usually means you won't be working in the field again, so I'm not surprised that these workers are trying to get an age discrimination settlement. Imagine you're 53 and can't access your retirement accounts until you're 59.5, and can't get Social Security until you're 62. If no one will hire you, you're dead. I've seen this happen to many people since our company tends to skew older.
I think this was more about having the ability to have one parent work and the other stay home.
This is a problem because if gets wrapped up in so much religious conservatism/nostalgia for the 50s where a woman's place is in the home. Why couldn't it be both parents having to work less overall so they had more time to actually raise their kids?
Kids from two-parent homes do end up doing better, but they do way better when both parents actually have time to spend with them. If both parents could work a flexible 25 hour work week instead of the old-school "Your butt must be in the seat from 8:30 to 5 every weekday" then things would be better.
I live in a reasonably affluent area and we have a mix of families -- ours and many others are 2-income FTE families, in some cases one parent is a doctor or lawyer and just has the spouse do all the childcare, and in others you have two total workaholic parents with high-pressure jobs. That third group has similar problems to the single-parent kids because even though they have tons of money, the parents don't have time to spend raising the kids or are too exhausted to do anything when they get home.
Outside of military equipment, big-ticket specialty/precision items, airplanes and cars, the US doesn't manufacture many consumer goods anymore, especially tech goods. Unless his next announcement is a nationalization of what little manufacturing infrastructure we have left and a shift to something like war production to force the electronics industry to come back, I don't think the President is thinking this through.
Even if factory work came down to minimum wage, it would still be too expensive to compete with China and other countries. Companies would rather go out of business than open factories domestically. It's a nice idea, and I would love to see factory work as an alternative to shoveling everyone into higher education. But, it would have to be way more than a 25% tariff to get anything to change.
If we actually could accomplish this I would like to see it. Factory workers of a previous generation were able to have good careers and provide for their families. Now, unless you're in the technology sector you're going to end up automated out of a job, and most of the tech jobs are headed that way too.
I can't think of any environment I'm familiar with that isn't actively trying to get away from Oracle. I think they know this too and are just trying to squeeze out the last few drops of money. Basically, anyone doing business with Oracle is doing so because they're stuck with them. This is also true for the other big legacy software houses like CA, MicroFocus, Symantec, etc...where old software packages that hold together the core of large businesses go to live out their retirement years.
Everyone thinks of the database product, but Oracle has bought tons of mission-critical software packages (PeopleSoft, Siebel, etc.) and owns their own huge ERP stack. All require that core database product, and all are exceedingly difficult to move away from. Anyone who waves away the complexity of an ERP system change with "just move it to the cloud" is extremely naïve.
And speaking of cloud, is it a shocker that these companies aren't exactly enthusiastic about buying Oracle Cloud? Our company got hit with a beyond massive bill to relicense PeopleSoft on-premises and bought the Oracle Cloud version. Talk about permanent vendor lock-in...I'm sure Oracle will charge a few million in "exit fees" just to get the data out!
The first dotcom boom had something this one doesn't serving as a brake on growth...getting big fast (the model for all startups) came at a massive cost. Building out data centers, paying for Internet traffic, etc. This second dotcom boom has the cloud. As a result it's going to take a lot longer to deflate...or get even bigger before it pops which will cause more damage.
Back around 1999/2000, if a startup was a truly dumb idea, investors would be much less likely to fund their expansion and you'd see a natural thinning of the herd. This time, a startup only has to bring in enough money to pay the monthly cloud bill and can continue expanding for a longer time. They're starting to ship 50-pound bags of dog food for free like pets.com did, simply because they have more money on hand to burn. They're able to hire more workers and pay them exorbitant salaries to stay ahead in a "talent arms race." And, they're able to exist in a money-losing status for much longer because as long as they pay the cloud and the SaaS vendors, they're in business.
The 90s bubble was about eyeballs, and this one is about monetizing personal information generated by those little supercomputers everyone carries with them. There seems to be an infinite amount of room in the market for hundreds of copycat subscription-box services, "Tinder for X", "Uber for Y", you name it. Oh, and don't forget blockchain enabled, AI-powered dog treat box selection algorithms powered by your Facebook posts of your dog pictures.
Will it end? You betcha. Will it end quickly? I doubt it...there's a much lower barrier to entry and the capital markets seem unwilling to weed out the copycats.
But pensions are guaranteed and a 401(k) is not. You only make more money than you would with a pension if you're exceedingly lucky and start saving a huge percentage of your income immediately upon starting work. Pensions require a much smaller contribution on the part of the worker because they think long-term and can easily smooth over rough market patches. 401(k) savings is a bet...mine is doing OK but could go to zero overnight. I treat it like it doesn't exist...because it's only a gain on paper.
I would be much happier to work in a position that offered a pension, but maybe that's because I think longer term than most people. I'd rather have a smaller absolute return on investment and be able to live to 120 and still get payments, than run out of money 10 years before I die and end up destitute.
People like to blame generations, but I think the overall loss of stability is to blame. I work in IT and am doing well, but I know that a CIO coming in and wanting to make his mark could send my job to Infosys or Tata and put me out on the street. You didn't have this in the baby boomer years...there were practically no layoffs and companies kept their workers for a full career. People could reasonably expect to work for maybe 2 or 3 employers their whole career, and now long tenure employment is very hard to find. Instead, you have people who uproot their families and move across the country at the drop of a hat. Some people do this every year or two.
Being nomadic means you never stay in one place for long and can't put down roots anywhere. This applies to physical location as well as workplace. In the IT field, it means that the majority of workers have absolutely no clue what the business they're working for actually does...I know consultants who take pride in that fact and are at a new employer every 6 months. Previous generations weren't so quick to jump from employer to employer. One of the reasons was that they had pensions, another thing that most newer workers will never see.
I think people who lived in better times were more content, not always looking over their shoulder to see who was going to offshore their job, happy to have a steady paycheck that allowed them to pay their bills, and a guaranteed retirement in contrast to the casino bet that is the 401(k) plan. I also think that the US had a much better mix of employment opportunities -- you could easily graduate from high school and have a high-paying factory job you could keep for life instead of being forced through college like we are now. I live in an area with high housing prices...nothing as crazy as California but still bad. A lot of this is due to those baby boomers desperately trying to cash out the only asset they have left for its maximum value because they lost their pensions and retirement accounts. This is one of the things that's going to make life bad for the younger crowd as we work through this slug of the population.
If you had a legitimate gripe with a company, wouldn't you individually try to get a settlement? Let's say you're 43 (like me) and work at some hipster SV web startup, and have a literal smoking-gun recording of your boss saying he doesn't like promoting old people? Or if you're a woman and some idiot salesman gets wasted at a party and assaults you in front of 50 people?
Class action settlements don't seem like the best way to get results. In consumer class actions, the defendant "admits no wrongdoing," pays an insignificant sum of money, the lawyers get almost all of it, and every consumer gets a check for 63 cents or a worthless coupon. That said, closing off another avenue of legal action is probably something companies have asked for and are paying the politicians to ensure it gets done.
Is it taught in MBA classes now that the only way to make money is to sell subscriptions and non-tangible goods? That makes sense in web startup land...(how many copycat subscription box services are there? There's at least 2 in each category.) But yeah, it's like the entire manufacturing industry has decided that just because something isn't as insanely high-margin as software, that it should be abandoned.
Are there any companies not thinking this way? Even GM and Ford probably want to sell you autonomous car subscriptions instead of getting the measly $1000 or so profit on each car sold.
I guess I'm an old-timer at 42, but I work in a place that skews older. Because it's IT (yes, seriously,) we have lots of men who are divorced or on their 2nd/3rd wife. I think the MGTOW thing is mainly because so many of them got taken to the cleaners by their wives' divorce attorneys. And, I think a lot of them just picked the best-looking woman they could find with zero regard to long-term compatibility. So, they're telling everyone who will listen that all women are manipulative fill-in-the-blanks who do nothing but take all your money. Some are, and I've heard lots of examples that make me shake my head...but it's not a universal truth like they'd have you believe.
It sounds incredibly corny, but I got very lucky in the spouse department. What does the MGTOW crowd think is going to happen if they marry someone who is rock-stupid, has nothing in common with them, and is often equally unhappy about their situation? My wife is very smart, independent and there's nothing keeping her trapped in our relationship; she could kick me out at any time and be just fine. My opinion is that you shouldn't get married "just because" --because you'll just end up divorced and bitter in the end.
The US is going through some big structural/societal changes. It's not some, "I don't want to bring a child into this horrible world" thing -- it's the fact that more people have choices or feel they have choices than they did in the past.
- Fewer women are voluntarily deciding to spend their entire work life raising children. They are better educated overall and the workforce is more open to them. When you go this route, you just can't in good conscience have a huge number of kids because something has to give between work and family. Most good parents I know would rather err on the side of family, but they also know they have a responsibility to work. - People are less religious: I grew up in a very Catholic area of the city, and I'm not shocked that so many priests and bishops got away with crimes against kids. Back in the day, priests were likely the only people in the neighborhood who went to college, and many people felt they were the representative of God and the Pope, and totally beyond question. Birth control is not allowed in Catholic doctrine and Catholic families used to be HUGE as a result. I know people who have 9 siblings...and I think a lot of it is due to people adhering strictly to their religion's rules. - Women as a whole aren't just looking to find a husband and take the first situation that comes their way, so they're starting to have kids later in life. And even if they do get married early on, they're way more likely to delay having kids until they're more financially secure.
The interesting thing is whether the expected replacement rate is still too high. We need fewer people, not less, if we want to keep the whole employment cycle going. The thing that will probably keep this from becoming a catastrophe is the US' diversity. For every hard-charging single-by-choice female executive that's 110% dedicated to their career, there's a traditional, religious woman who gets married when they're 21 and has a kid every 2 years until they're 35. This is different in places like Japan where they have almost no immigration and a very homogeneous society...in their case the birth rate is too low and they're going to have to have some huge shifts in the next few decades to deal with it.
We have 2 kids, we both work and that's way more than enough for us. We've done our evolutionary duty IMO and would rather concentrate on turning the kids into people who will contribute something to society. You can't do that when your attention is spread between 2 jobs, your living situation and 5 kids.
Am I the only one who sees some slight similarities to the First Dotcom Bubble? Obviously data analysis is a very useful skill to have, but I think it's going to get to the point where anyone running a sanitized data set through an R or Python package will be a Data Scientist. We've already got the AI, Blockchain and Data Science bootcamps cranking people out now! In fact, I thought I read the other day that some survey proclaimed AI as the hottest job.
I think this bubble is going to last a very long time and take much longer to fully inflate. If you've been paying attention, it's only the monumentally stupid VC startups that are failing so far...everything else is kicking along. You have hundreds of copycat "product box" subscription services, data-mining apps built on top of social media APIs, "Uber for X," "Tinder for Y", etc. IMO, cloud computing is one of the reasons they can stick around much longer. These startups just have to make enough to pay the AWS/Azure/GCP bill every month, rent a small office (maybe,) and pay a bunch of MacBook toting hipster full stack developers and the executive crew...not build out a million-dollar data center every couple years.
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I think lots of countries don't know what to make of the current situation. When you put someone in charge of a country who has no prior political experience, I think the more established politicians are just trying to figure out what's going through his mind.
I don't think he's totally incompetent, having at least dealt with running a business, and hopefully he's listening to someone in his administration who has had some experience in international trade negotiations. But I do think someone needs to telegraph the fact that trade policy isn't the same as lowballing a property/business owner on an offer, or paying a local politician a bribe, or dealing with some construction union boss. Because if that's the experience he's drawing from, the results he's expecting aren't going to come about.
One thing I worry about is national politics getting as openly corrupt as local politics. Local businessmen don't even try to hide it -- it's pretty much out in the open that the mayor or city council or town supervisor will do whatever a business owner wants for the right amount of cash in a paper bag. National politics is still a little veiled -- you have the veneer of lobbyists, etc.
I see everyone saying that Microsoft is just going to destroy Github, but I think they've got different plans. Skype was acquired to give them better video conferencing in O365/Teams and IP for video chat for Windows Phone, etc. Nokia was acquired because they wanted to buy their way into the iPhone/Android app store supported phone model. In neither of these cases were there any plans to keep the companies as-is. I think their overall plan is to make it even easier than it is now to consume Azure services while not touching the underlying culture around Github.
The reason for this is clear in the posts here...no one from the "open source community" trusts Microsoft. This is why they've went out of their way to let people run Linux and non-Microsoft products in Azure as first-class citizens. It's no longer about selling software; they want people to consume services monthly. They don't care what you run as long as you're paying them every month for a VM or PaaS instance to run it on, and that's a huge shift. They know that if they're not selling software licenses anymore, they need to move their focus away from enterprises and towards developers...because developers are the ones writing the new-style apps that will generate them cloud revenue.
I also think another reason they're doing this is because they're trying to establish "hipster developer cred." All the cool kids use Github. All the cool kids use open source. Therefore, if they want cool kids to pay them every month to host their code and build pipelines in VSTS, Github is the onramp. Enterprise developers with their stuffy closed source control solutions will still be supported, but they want to be seen as open to change. I've talked to a lot of people who work at Microsoft, and the change over the last 4 years has been pretty sweeping. Developers used to have private office space and they're slowly being moved into cafeteria-table workspaces to promote a DevOps culture. And they fired the QA testers and are forcing developers to do their own testing now, which is a huge change. It's all about pumping out new services in Azure and Office 365 at a breakneck pace instead of three-year OS release cycles.
Yes. :-) There's a big difference between being an actual imposter and letting the constant deluge of information make you think you are one.
There are plenty of actual imposters in IT and development. There's the coder-bootcamp-trained "full stack developer" in way over their head, or the systems admin who refuses to learn new technology and ways of working, or the total newbie who's pretending they know what people are talking about in "fake it till you make it".
What I'm referring to specifically is the relatively new phenomenon I mentioned previously...a developer builds some tool that is a wrapper around something else, or yet another layer of abstraction, and promotes it as if it's some world-changing breakthrough. Because everything's open source and in the cloud, there are hundreds of these tools and more coming every few months. I'm not saying they're all not useful, but the startup/disruption/DevOps boom encourages the self-promotion aspect so you get these people who set themselves up as the world leading expert and try to get everyone to build everything on top of their tool. And, because IT execs have the attention span of a fruit fly, they declare they're "all in" on whatever thing they hear about at a conference.
True imposters aren't going to be able to understand these new things in the context of the world at large and, as I've noticed in some cases, they basically turn into tool or language groupies following around the experts. People who actually know what they're doing and can say "oh, that's just an abstraction on VMs or yet another way to drive CloudFomration/ARM/vRealize" have to spend time figuring out what to learn, and the constant hyping of things as the wave of the future makes people with a limited time to keep up spend the time figurng out what's actually going on under the hood.
There's two general types of conferences I can think of, and I think both are overrated for different reasons:
The big flashy vendor conferences like MS Ignite, Citrix Synergy, VMWorld, etc...these are just holdovers from the era where the only way to learn anything new about a product was a conference or having a sales guy come talk to you. Think CES or Comdex. They do have some useful content, but everything is basically a marketing spin. It's all about dragging thousands of people to a convention center once a year as the only sales opportunity, plying them with food/alcohol/marketing cheerleaders, and getting them to buy something. Every time I go into a big city convention center, I can almost see the ghosts of the junior sales and marketing people in line at the onsite office place waiting to fax their big career-making order to headquarters. That's what those venues are set up for.
And on the smaller side...every DevOps tool, new language, new JavaScript framework, etc. has its own conference. It seems like it's the way to legitimize that tool's use. DockerCon, RubyCon, JenkinsCon, ChefCon, etc. (yes, I made some of those up but you get the point.) You may get way less marketing at a conference like this, but IMO it's just a way for the truly laser-focused among that conference's tool's users to promote their personal projects or "get on the speaking circuit."
I also think this is partially what's driving a lot of the imposter syndrome in tech. We all know there are plenty of people who thought they could keep the same skillset for 20 years and be OK...but if you listen to all the conference speakers, bloggers, Twitterers and open source contributors, it's very easy to feel like you know nothing. This (IMO) is because a lot of these blogs, speaking engagements, etc. are self-promotion and people with very little going on outside of their work worlds are cultivating the image that they're super rockstar geniuses. For those of us who do keep up, but have to choose very carefully what we spend our time learning, it's tough to not feel like you know nothing compared to someone who appears to know all the buzzwords. I've had to tell myself and others I know who experience this more than once that no one knows everything and unless you're willing to spend all your off-work time reading, you're not even going to get to a fraction of it.
I can deal with emojis and use them...but animated GIFs and memes are idiotic and immature.
I know it's the equivalent of an 85-year-old retired English teacher complaining that no one knows proper grammar anymore, but I do think that even in team chat applications this has no place.
"It is impossible for the culture in MS not to destroy GH."
I think they'd just leave them alone. Microsoft wanted Nokia so they could make an iPhone killer and sell their software and app ecosystem. They wanted Skype so they could get a better video conferencing system for O365/Teams to sell more subscriptions. I think they want Github to drive Azure adoption. To make that work you can't just take them over and apply the old license-based software company culture. The open source crowd would never tolerate any change that smelled of "proprietary closed source code" so I think Microsoft knows they would have to basically not touch anything and just quietly build easy on-ramps to consume more Azure.
Github actually fits with their "new, hip web startup" culture they seem to want to cultivate. People I know who have worked there for a while say that the whole DevOps thing has come through like a freight train. Developers have been moved from private offices to cafeteria tables and they've basically fired all the testers and forced developers to write tests.
Microsoft isn't the 90s Microsoft anymore. They're banking on getting out of the software business and into the cloud business. Every single project they build these days beyond core Windows and Office has at least some open source component and they're already using Github to host all their code. Owning Github would be a way for them to build an even more seamless bridge into Azure for developers' applications. It's already incredibly easy to publish something through VSTS and the other 10,000 CI/CD tools out there.
That's the interesting thing about this whole Azure shift...they don't care what you run on their service as long as you pay them to use it. And, they get guaranteed monthly revenue without having to craft enterprise software agreements. It's an interesting shift to watch, because they're trying hard to not publicly indicate any sort of lock-in while leading people that way. If you're careful about tool selection you can make a totally portable application, but Microsoft is providing enough services that are easy and the path of least resistance...but also happen to run only on Azure.
As for what they would do with Github...probably nothing beyond building stronger Azure connections. They're out of the software and the phone/App Store business for the most part, so we're back to Developers Developers Developers...
I'm older (43) and still tend to answer the phone. But, one thing I do see is that people who don't like talking to people feel they don't have to anymore. There's other non-voice options.
This is especially true in workplaces, where the younger crowd is finally starting to reach the supervisory levels. In tech shops it's all Slack, Teams, IM of one form or another, texting, etc. I actually find myself preferring this, even though I know it's not normal.
I'm not an antisocial nerd, but I'm also not a type-A salesy extrovert either. Talking to people on the phone means uncomfortable small talk, having to manage the conversation, etc. Sending a to-the-point message is much more useful to me. I know extroverts probably love the small talk aspect, but it's something I can live without if I can get my information without it.
One huge difference between dermatologists and all medical professionals, and other workers, is that they will still be pulling in huge salaries and working when we're automated out and roasting rats over garbage cans in the street.
Doctors and other health professions were smart and formed a professional organization. They're set for life - the professional body limits the supply of new entrants, ensures they're trained properly and buys legislation/regulations needed to ensure they're highly compensated and have secure jobs.
If you need to see a stark example, look at pharmacists. Pharmacists are highly trained and probably know more about drugs and delivery mechanisms than any doctor. Those that work in hospitals and specialty settings put their knowledge to work all the time, but there are also tons of retail pharmacists who do very basic tasks. Even while pharmacy techs do the basic jobs, every pharmacy needs a licensed pharmacist on staff. If they didn't have a professional organization paying to keep regulations in place, you can bet CVS, Walgreens and the health insurance companies would funnel as many paper bags of cash as necessary to lawmakers to make that requirement go away.
People think of Microsoft as a software company still, but the reality is that they're not. Google may own all your data, but Microsoft's looking to be the platform that basically every on-premises computing environment migrates to. They are officially done selling software licenses...it's going to be guaranteed perpetual monthly revenue from their customers forever. Soon as they get customers to move to Azure, it's the ultimate vendor lock-in.
You might say "there's no lock-in, I can go to AWS/GCP/whatever anytime I want!" Maybe, but they're being very smart...allowing anyone to build totally platform-agnostic solutions, but dangling just enough proprietary stuff that Just Works(TM) and is the path of least resistance. It's also by far the easiest way to run Windows environments in a hybrid manner where some stuff lives in your data center and others can run in the cloud. I think this is what's going to keep them going the same way IBM is. IBM is making billions off customers who can't migrate off the mainframe and whose businesses literally depend on the mainframe applications running the core of everything staying up. IBM has been able to fumble around trying to become a management consulting firm and bargain-basement offshore workhouse for the sole reason that their mainframe business is an ATM.
I think that once Microsoft saw how willing people were to pay monthly for Office 365 forever, that was the end of enthusiastic support for perpetual licensing and on-premises deployments.
About the "training" aspect -- I'd agree if this were the 50s or 60s and this was a massive lifelong employer like IBM, AT&T, General Motors, etc. Walmart isn't that kind of employer; if they could run their stores with zero employees they would because their margin is so low. So, what incentive do they have to train store managers? I'd think they and other retailers would be figuring out how to replace people as quickly as possible, and certainly not be interested in their career development.
The days where you could start at a big employer out of high school, show some initiative and get chosen for a training program/college tuition waiver are over. Walmart doesn't have an incentive to invest in people the same way a 1960s IBM might because you don't need specialized knowledge to run a retail store.
"We need to tell people that there's no shame in getting a minimum wage job and figuring out how to be an adult and what you want to do with your life before going to school. I think that message would prevent a large part of the problem. "
I'm not so sure about that. Certainly back when I went, if you didn't apply in your senior year of high school you missed out on certain opportunities. Even one year off unless you were in community college put you in the "non-traditional" crowd and effectively limited your choices of schools that would accept you.
You're not wrong; there's a lot of students who really would benefit. But, there's so much pressure, at least among students/parents that care about such things, to have students follow the traditional path. It's all about what opportunities you have...if you can get into an Ivy League school even by the skin of your teeth, there are jobs available to you that other students can't get and connections other students won't have. If you go the state school route like I did you have to work harder to find work and won't have some of the exceedingly lucrative stuff like banking and management consulting available to you.
The summary mentions that these degrees are in "business or supply chain management", and only available through 3 institutions. I'll give them credit for not going to ITT Tech or U of Phoenix or something...that's a plus. But, does the world need any more generic business students? Will Walmart even need them as time goes by?
Even when I graduated a million years ago, the generic business, psychology, communications, etc. students were basically attending class between parties and most just squeaked by. With the increase in students being pushed into college I can't imagine this has changed at all. In the old days when a degree was a guaranteed path to a job, the idea was that if you didn't know what you wanted to do, major in business and some company would find some random job for you. Those random jobs are disappearing, and low-margin employers like Walmart and Amazon are going to be the first to eliminate people wherever they can.
Walmart is at least offering something...they probably cut some sweet deal with the 3 universities to boost their enrollment numbers and got a massive tuition discount, and it's a direct expense that they don't pay tax on. But, limiting where and what can be studied makes this seem like a serfdom arrangement, kind of like the coder bootcamps that take people in and funnel them off to startups desperate for more JavaScript monkeys willing to work 100 hour weeks.
The entire tech industry is built on an endless supply of cheap, young fresh grads who are easily convinced that low salaries and grueling work weeks are the norm. As those grads gain experience, they demand more salary and a more flexible life and will reach a point where employers will find a way to get rid of them.
It's not fair to paint everyone over a certain age as a dinosaur. I've seen many freshly minted MBAs explicitly say they don't want resumes of anyone who "looks over 40." This is due to a widely held stereotype that the only people who understand technology subjects are in their 20s, and the 30s are the time to start planning retirements. Everyone in the first stages of their career deriding older workers should bear in mind that this problem will eventually claim them unless they're very lucky and stay on the cutting edge every day of their lives.
Losing a job in your 50s in tech usually means you won't be working in the field again, so I'm not surprised that these workers are trying to get an age discrimination settlement. Imagine you're 53 and can't access your retirement accounts until you're 59.5, and can't get Social Security until you're 62. If no one will hire you, you're dead. I've seen this happen to many people since our company tends to skew older.
I think this was more about having the ability to have one parent work and the other stay home.
This is a problem because if gets wrapped up in so much religious conservatism/nostalgia for the 50s where a woman's place is in the home. Why couldn't it be both parents having to work less overall so they had more time to actually raise their kids?
Kids from two-parent homes do end up doing better, but they do way better when both parents actually have time to spend with them. If both parents could work a flexible 25 hour work week instead of the old-school "Your butt must be in the seat from 8:30 to 5 every weekday" then things would be better.
I live in a reasonably affluent area and we have a mix of families -- ours and many others are 2-income FTE families, in some cases one parent is a doctor or lawyer and just has the spouse do all the childcare, and in others you have two total workaholic parents with high-pressure jobs. That third group has similar problems to the single-parent kids because even though they have tons of money, the parents don't have time to spend raising the kids or are too exhausted to do anything when they get home.
Outside of military equipment, big-ticket specialty/precision items, airplanes and cars, the US doesn't manufacture many consumer goods anymore, especially tech goods. Unless his next announcement is a nationalization of what little manufacturing infrastructure we have left and a shift to something like war production to force the electronics industry to come back, I don't think the President is thinking this through.
Even if factory work came down to minimum wage, it would still be too expensive to compete with China and other countries. Companies would rather go out of business than open factories domestically. It's a nice idea, and I would love to see factory work as an alternative to shoveling everyone into higher education. But, it would have to be way more than a 25% tariff to get anything to change.
If we actually could accomplish this I would like to see it. Factory workers of a previous generation were able to have good careers and provide for their families. Now, unless you're in the technology sector you're going to end up automated out of a job, and most of the tech jobs are headed that way too.
I can't think of any environment I'm familiar with that isn't actively trying to get away from Oracle. I think they know this too and are just trying to squeeze out the last few drops of money. Basically, anyone doing business with Oracle is doing so because they're stuck with them. This is also true for the other big legacy software houses like CA, MicroFocus, Symantec, etc...where old software packages that hold together the core of large businesses go to live out their retirement years.
Everyone thinks of the database product, but Oracle has bought tons of mission-critical software packages (PeopleSoft, Siebel, etc.) and owns their own huge ERP stack. All require that core database product, and all are exceedingly difficult to move away from. Anyone who waves away the complexity of an ERP system change with "just move it to the cloud" is extremely naïve.
And speaking of cloud, is it a shocker that these companies aren't exactly enthusiastic about buying Oracle Cloud? Our company got hit with a beyond massive bill to relicense PeopleSoft on-premises and bought the Oracle Cloud version. Talk about permanent vendor lock-in...I'm sure Oracle will charge a few million in "exit fees" just to get the data out!
The first dotcom boom had something this one doesn't serving as a brake on growth...getting big fast (the model for all startups) came at a massive cost. Building out data centers, paying for Internet traffic, etc. This second dotcom boom has the cloud. As a result it's going to take a lot longer to deflate...or get even bigger before it pops which will cause more damage.
Back around 1999/2000, if a startup was a truly dumb idea, investors would be much less likely to fund their expansion and you'd see a natural thinning of the herd. This time, a startup only has to bring in enough money to pay the monthly cloud bill and can continue expanding for a longer time. They're starting to ship 50-pound bags of dog food for free like pets.com did, simply because they have more money on hand to burn. They're able to hire more workers and pay them exorbitant salaries to stay ahead in a "talent arms race." And, they're able to exist in a money-losing status for much longer because as long as they pay the cloud and the SaaS vendors, they're in business.
The 90s bubble was about eyeballs, and this one is about monetizing personal information generated by those little supercomputers everyone carries with them. There seems to be an infinite amount of room in the market for hundreds of copycat subscription-box services, "Tinder for X", "Uber for Y", you name it. Oh, and don't forget blockchain enabled, AI-powered dog treat box selection algorithms powered by your Facebook posts of your dog pictures.
Will it end? You betcha. Will it end quickly? I doubt it...there's a much lower barrier to entry and the capital markets seem unwilling to weed out the copycats.
But pensions are guaranteed and a 401(k) is not. You only make more money than you would with a pension if you're exceedingly lucky and start saving a huge percentage of your income immediately upon starting work. Pensions require a much smaller contribution on the part of the worker because they think long-term and can easily smooth over rough market patches. 401(k) savings is a bet...mine is doing OK but could go to zero overnight. I treat it like it doesn't exist...because it's only a gain on paper.
I would be much happier to work in a position that offered a pension, but maybe that's because I think longer term than most people. I'd rather have a smaller absolute return on investment and be able to live to 120 and still get payments, than run out of money 10 years before I die and end up destitute.
People like to blame generations, but I think the overall loss of stability is to blame. I work in IT and am doing well, but I know that a CIO coming in and wanting to make his mark could send my job to Infosys or Tata and put me out on the street. You didn't have this in the baby boomer years...there were practically no layoffs and companies kept their workers for a full career. People could reasonably expect to work for maybe 2 or 3 employers their whole career, and now long tenure employment is very hard to find. Instead, you have people who uproot their families and move across the country at the drop of a hat. Some people do this every year or two.
Being nomadic means you never stay in one place for long and can't put down roots anywhere. This applies to physical location as well as workplace. In the IT field, it means that the majority of workers have absolutely no clue what the business they're working for actually does...I know consultants who take pride in that fact and are at a new employer every 6 months. Previous generations weren't so quick to jump from employer to employer. One of the reasons was that they had pensions, another thing that most newer workers will never see.
I think people who lived in better times were more content, not always looking over their shoulder to see who was going to offshore their job, happy to have a steady paycheck that allowed them to pay their bills, and a guaranteed retirement in contrast to the casino bet that is the 401(k) plan. I also think that the US had a much better mix of employment opportunities -- you could easily graduate from high school and have a high-paying factory job you could keep for life instead of being forced through college like we are now. I live in an area with high housing prices...nothing as crazy as California but still bad. A lot of this is due to those baby boomers desperately trying to cash out the only asset they have left for its maximum value because they lost their pensions and retirement accounts. This is one of the things that's going to make life bad for the younger crowd as we work through this slug of the population.
If you had a legitimate gripe with a company, wouldn't you individually try to get a settlement? Let's say you're 43 (like me) and work at some hipster SV web startup, and have a literal smoking-gun recording of your boss saying he doesn't like promoting old people? Or if you're a woman and some idiot salesman gets wasted at a party and assaults you in front of 50 people?
Class action settlements don't seem like the best way to get results. In consumer class actions, the defendant "admits no wrongdoing," pays an insignificant sum of money, the lawyers get almost all of it, and every consumer gets a check for 63 cents or a worthless coupon. That said, closing off another avenue of legal action is probably something companies have asked for and are paying the politicians to ensure it gets done.
Is it taught in MBA classes now that the only way to make money is to sell subscriptions and non-tangible goods? That makes sense in web startup land...(how many copycat subscription box services are there? There's at least 2 in each category.) But yeah, it's like the entire manufacturing industry has decided that just because something isn't as insanely high-margin as software, that it should be abandoned.
Are there any companies not thinking this way? Even GM and Ford probably want to sell you autonomous car subscriptions instead of getting the measly $1000 or so profit on each car sold.
I guess I'm an old-timer at 42, but I work in a place that skews older. Because it's IT (yes, seriously,) we have lots of men who are divorced or on their 2nd/3rd wife. I think the MGTOW thing is mainly because so many of them got taken to the cleaners by their wives' divorce attorneys. And, I think a lot of them just picked the best-looking woman they could find with zero regard to long-term compatibility. So, they're telling everyone who will listen that all women are manipulative fill-in-the-blanks who do nothing but take all your money. Some are, and I've heard lots of examples that make me shake my head...but it's not a universal truth like they'd have you believe.
It sounds incredibly corny, but I got very lucky in the spouse department. What does the MGTOW crowd think is going to happen if they marry someone who is rock-stupid, has nothing in common with them, and is often equally unhappy about their situation? My wife is very smart, independent and there's nothing keeping her trapped in our relationship; she could kick me out at any time and be just fine. My opinion is that you shouldn't get married "just because" --because you'll just end up divorced and bitter in the end.
The US is going through some big structural/societal changes. It's not some, "I don't want to bring a child into this horrible world" thing -- it's the fact that more people have choices or feel they have choices than they did in the past.
- Fewer women are voluntarily deciding to spend their entire work life raising children. They are better educated overall and the workforce is more open to them. When you go this route, you just can't in good conscience have a huge number of kids because something has to give between work and family. Most good parents I know would rather err on the side of family, but they also know they have a responsibility to work.
- People are less religious: I grew up in a very Catholic area of the city, and I'm not shocked that so many priests and bishops got away with crimes against kids. Back in the day, priests were likely the only people in the neighborhood who went to college, and many people felt they were the representative of God and the Pope, and totally beyond question. Birth control is not allowed in Catholic doctrine and Catholic families used to be HUGE as a result. I know people who have 9 siblings...and I think a lot of it is due to people adhering strictly to their religion's rules.
- Women as a whole aren't just looking to find a husband and take the first situation that comes their way, so they're starting to have kids later in life. And even if they do get married early on, they're way more likely to delay having kids until they're more financially secure.
The interesting thing is whether the expected replacement rate is still too high. We need fewer people, not less, if we want to keep the whole employment cycle going. The thing that will probably keep this from becoming a catastrophe is the US' diversity. For every hard-charging single-by-choice female executive that's 110% dedicated to their career, there's a traditional, religious woman who gets married when they're 21 and has a kid every 2 years until they're 35. This is different in places like Japan where they have almost no immigration and a very homogeneous society...in their case the birth rate is too low and they're going to have to have some huge shifts in the next few decades to deal with it.
We have 2 kids, we both work and that's way more than enough for us. We've done our evolutionary duty IMO and would rather concentrate on turning the kids into people who will contribute something to society. You can't do that when your attention is spread between 2 jobs, your living situation and 5 kids.
Am I the only one who sees some slight similarities to the First Dotcom Bubble? Obviously data analysis is a very useful skill to have, but I think it's going to get to the point where anyone running a sanitized data set through an R or Python package will be a Data Scientist. We've already got the AI, Blockchain and Data Science bootcamps cranking people out now! In fact, I thought I read the other day that some survey proclaimed AI as the hottest job.
I think this bubble is going to last a very long time and take much longer to fully inflate. If you've been paying attention, it's only the monumentally stupid VC startups that are failing so far...everything else is kicking along. You have hundreds of copycat "product box" subscription services, data-mining apps built on top of social media APIs, "Uber for X," "Tinder for Y", etc. IMO, cloud computing is one of the reasons they can stick around much longer. These startups just have to make enough to pay the AWS/Azure/GCP bill every month, rent a small office (maybe,) and pay a bunch of MacBook toting hipster full stack developers and the executive crew...not build out a million-dollar data center every couple years.