I read this as, "Let's hire first-world developers, and give them non-stop coding work for 100 hour weeks. They love this sort of thing, so it's a win-win! And, we don't even have to pay them as much since they're just working constantly!"
Actually, if it's not an exploitative relationship, why not encourage autistic hiring in development? It's a good counter-point to the recent hyper-social brogrammer style startup environment, where autistic tendencies would be frowned upon. SAP's a perfect test case for this as well -- anyone who has worked even on the periphery of an SAP implementation can attest to the insane system architecture and massive tower of layered code that's built up.
I'm "normal" but tend toward the introverted side, like most "classical" IT guys and developers. It is nice to see some effort to cater to people who aren't natural-born communicators.
" I also think that guns should be limited to those who not only pass a *yearly* criminal background check but also should not be allowed for anyone who undergoes psychiatric admission to a hospital, even if it is voluntary."
Have you seen how hard it is to get an actual inpatient psychiatric admission these days? I think that's part of the problem -- people who have legitimate psychiatric problems don't get properly cared for. Usually, the severely mentally ill end up on the streets and cycle through jail. Sometimes they're stabilized, and sometimes they aren't when they come out. States decided quite some time ago that they don't want to pay for institutional care -- you have to be completely incapable of taking care of yourself or so dangerous to others that there's no other choice but to lock you up in order to get custodial treatment now. 50 or 60 years ago, that was different -- asylums had tens of thousands of people that just had to be put away because no effective treatments were available, and it was much easier to get committed even for garden-variety stuff like depression.
The problem is that mental illness goes untreated in the vast majority of cases. Some people are OK, and others lose their minds and shoot up a school. I'm not saying the asylum system was the best way to treat mental illness, but not stigmatizing it is the only way to get it treated.
What a lot of techies who are largely city folk don't realize is that there is a huge market for this in the rest of the country. The NRA is in a full-on marketing push scaring people into buying guns because they're worried about gun control even being talked about. I think something like a gun shopping channel might push some people who are on the fence into buying weapons "for protection" -- mild-mannered exurban moms or dads might be persuaded by a "think of your children" sales pitch, especially if you didn't actually have to go to a gun store.
I'm a realist when it comes to gun control. I dislike guns and would never own one, but I also realize that once something is written in the Constitution, no matter how it's interpreted, it will never get removed. The NRA is a huge pro-gun lobby, and most gun owners are quite anti-government, so I think any attempt to roll this back would end up causing a civil war. I think the pro-gun crowd would be saying "guns don't kill people, people do" even if we had 5 or 10 workplace shootings a day. Do I like it? No, but changing it would be too much effort against a powerful adversary.
I think it's a really good thing to try to help prisoners learn a skill. Anything that reduces recidivism is a good thing.
However...have they thought of where these inmates would work when they came out? You can't get a job with the vast majority of companies if you have bad credit, let alone a criminal record. Everyone wonders why the recidivism rate is so high -- this is one of the reasons. If you can only get crappy off the books jobs, you're more likely to return to crime because it pays better.
This is the major problem with the age of easy, cheap record checks. The second you're involved with the police at all, even if you're not convicted, your resume will immediately be tossed in favor of someone who doesn't have a record. Basically, sentencing someone to prison is permanently writing them off no matter for how long or for which crime. The inability to get meaningful work later on, combined with being housed with violent angry people for a long time doesn't make for a well adjusted person when they do get out.
Outside of the hipster lifestyle in San Francisco and other tech hotbeds, the "gig economy" isn't being celebrated as a major achievement in labor economics. It's a major disruptor, and not in a good way. Doing freelance style work is fine for artists, performers and younger people with no responsibilities other than themselves. Try stitching together a living on 6 jobs at a time while being a parent. Hot internet startups are getting all the tech press lately, and I am worried that engineered PR for things like Uber, Airbnb, Etsy and other "sharing economy" companies is going to permanently shift companies' perception on their workforces. I worry that they're going to take the media's Millenial caricatures that are held up as being the new way forward, and conclude that people don't want to work stable jobs anymore. As a short aside, I'm seeing this in workplaces also; HR people are panicking that the image of a Millenial they've seen in the media (social, job hopper, entitled, etc.) isn't going to want to work for their stuffy old company, so they're slavishly copying Google and turning their office spaces into all-inclusive preschools. Our stuffy old company is doing this now and it's very humorous to watch them try to act like they cater to a bunch of hipsters -- it's like a life insurance salesman trying to market to a bunch of extreme snowboarder dudes.
Unless society reorganizes itself totally around people having a variable income, the resulting instability of more and more jobs being automated, outsourced or part-time "gigs" is going to have a major effect on economies. 30-year mortgages were developed when people had one or maybe two jobs in their entire career. Same thing with car loans and credit card lending -- all of these assume a steady stream of income to pay current obligations as well as a progression of income over a career. If things get to a point where unemployment or underemployment wipes enough people out, things are going to get pretty hairy. No one is going to want to buy a house, a car, or anything at all if they don't think they can pay for it. People will be moving their whole families around the country every few years military-style and whatever sense of community people have now is going to disappear.
I sound like a relic, I know, but I do miss employer/employee loyalty. I'm fortunate to work for a good employer, but know many people who are willingly being taken advantage of by bad ones. I know that for companies to be loyal to their employees, there has to be some give on the employee side also, and a lot of people don't understand that. I've worked under people who have had 20 and 25 year stints at the same employer in the past. IBM was pretty famous for this, and although their corporate culture was weird and you had to make some sacrifices, if you worked hard they would make sure you were taken care of. Same with big companies like GE, defense contractors and others. I just hope companies realize that not everyone is a Milennial living in their Mom's basement or in an apartment with 6 other people. Some of us have real world/family responsibilities and aren't looking to hop jobs every 6 months for a 10% pay raise.
I think that if employees did show a little more loyalty (which is a huge ask in the current climate, I know) then companies would respond by training people properly, not firing them every time the stock goes down a few percent, etc. The problem is shifting the public perception away from the "entitled job hoppers" that the media loves to portray as normal.
"US IT workers could change the situation if they wanted to do so. But that would require actually doing something."
I totally agree. The problems with the current situation are: - The problems are appearing too slowly for people to perceive any wider issue. Everyone assumes that it's just their company making questionable decisions and everything will be made right once they come to their senses. The reality is that this is accelerating and it may be too late to stop the train. - Most of the people I've ever worked with are very conservative, free-market, Libertarian types -- I'm a pretty big exception among IT peers. Mention anything that might limit a company's power, or involve an organization drive on the labor side, and you'll be labeled a pro-union communist. - There is also a very strong belief by people in our field that they are the absolute best at what they do, and they would never dare compare themselves with peers, let alone organize alongside them. - I'm not sure where it comes from, but there also seems to be this belief that if we allow executives to do what they want, then they will let us into their club and we will be rich beyond our wildest dreams. Anything that might limit their ability to amass wealth is seen as jeopardizing that (nonexistent) goal.
Currently, there is very little support for my suggestion -- creating a profession for IT and development, and buying the laws we need. I think it's going to have to get much worse before people get mad enough to fight. And I'm not even talking about a traditional labor union; I'm talking about a professional organization that can lobby alongside the big companies who are fighting for things they want like more H-1Bs and the ability to offshore work more easily.
I've been working in IT for 20 years now and have been through a couple of these outsourcing/offshoring exercises. The truth is this - there is no way to convince executives that IT is a strategic investment opportunity unless the company's only business is IT. Therefore, outsourcing will happen in most big companies the first time the MBA's spreadsheets show a big enough paper cost savings. And in Disney's case, it's not the money -- I have 2 little kids. Disney could fill several of Scrooge McDuck's money bins with just the daily cash flow from their parks. They must carry all the cash out of Disney World in dump trucks. So, there's proof that they're not doing it for cost savings.
The thing that needs to be attacked is the IT service providers' use of H-1B and offshore labor for inappropriate tasks. Go after Cognizant, Tata Consulting Services, Accenture, IBM, HP, Infosys, Tech Mahindra, Xerox, etc. for bringing in H-1B labor for purposes that don't meet the original intention of the program. H-1B was designed to import specific high-end skill sets for a limited time to fill in actual gaps in education/experience. These service companies use the H-1B to bring in "job shadowers" who train the offshore teams, and low-level DBAs, developers and other roles that could easily be had locally without the communications or quality issues. The problem is that this will never get popular support until the vast majority of white collar workers are out of a job or underemployed. IT is still seen as a hot field, and we are all still considered well paid, so we don't get any political attention.
Do I think outsourcing is a good idea? No, I think companies need to have some FTEs who at least have a connection to the company. When you go down the service provider route, the provider has to make money at the rate they bill you. The only way they can do this is reduce labor costs and reduce service levels to the absolute minimum to keep you from invoking breach of contract clauses.
I have no idea how it will work out for Disney, but I've worked on both sides of the outsourcing fence. In the company doing the outsourcing, the FTEs left behind are stuck in a stagnant IT department behind a wall of change management process, 2 AM conference calls and incompetent newbie offshore guys that keep rotating. The outsourcing company is forced to cut so many corners that being an on-site employee of the company is not a fun job -- you get to tell people why they can't have things, why projects are late, etc.
Systems work is impacted by this style of quick fix answers as well. There's ServerFault, as well as vendor support forums and other sources. I love and hate these sorts of resources. They're great because they get fixes and workarounds out there far faster than official vendor support channels can. What they're awful for is providing half-working or potentially dangerous answers that look fine but may not apply at all to the problem at hand.
You can say that the root cause of the problem is inexperienced sysadmin staff, and you would be right. However, the same problem exists on the developer side. On the admin side, it's worse because there are honestly a lot of admin staff who can't automate, can't script and some have trouble with the command line. Therefore, when the requirement comes up to do so, these admins are at the mercy of sites like this. The worst of them copy and paste script code without knowing a thing about what it does.
The state of programming and IT doesn't need to be measured by StackOverflow or ServerFault data. It needs to be measured by the number of staff who lean on these resources too hard and lack the fundamental troubleshooting/reasoning skills to filter the content.
I've worked with a lot of products that are obviously like the one you describe. They tend to be vertical market things where the vendor is one of maybe 2 or 3 choices and has their customers completely locked in. The only way to jar them out of their rut is one of these: - Have a major customer pull up stakes and leave out of frustration. (They would have to generate a big percentage of your product's revenue) - Have a major competitor undertake a similar radical change that leapfrogs anything you're currently doing.
I can think of several "enterprisey" software products that fit this description - SAP, Oracle DB, any CA product, etc. These companies know that migrating away from their product is nearly impossible and so they don't invest in it until they're forced to.
IT has several factors that encourage poor work/life balance: - The IT landscape is littered with awful companies to work for, who treat their IT people like the janitorial service. The ratio of good to bad employers is very low. - Companies that are considered "fun to work for" encourage people to constantly be at work by providing free food, free personal services, etc. I just got back from a meeting at Microsoft, and even after Nadella took over and the reduction in their monopoly power, the place is still like a college campus and employees are encouraged to basically live there. - There's pressure on older workers, who have been around the block and know the game, because there are always younger workers who will willingly work 100 hour weeks because they have nothing else going on in their lives. - There's also H-1B and offshoring pressure. It's not uncommon to hear CIOs remark that their offshore teams never complain about hours worked. And, outsourcing the entire IT department means the company pays a monthly bill and gets even more compliant H-1B workers.
Outside of crazy industries like video games, or investment banking where you can make massive bonuses that make working the extra hours worth it, I think most employees would prefer to be given a 40 hour week, decent pay, and a good work/life balance. The good companies who provide these things tend to have longer staff tenure, but you don't hear about them as much. This is for 2 reasons -- (1) they're not sexy SV startups writing phone apps, and (2) there aren't very many open positions because employees tend to stay where they're happier.
Employers who treat their employees well will be rewarded in the long term.
One problem with Citrix is that their cash cow, XenApp, is getting less relevant. They have a huge presence in health care and other sectors where they can't assure endpoint security, have lots of shared machines/terminals, and have a lot of regulatory compliance issues. However, Microsoft keeps improving RemoteApp which can be had for the price of a CAL rather than a CAL plus Citrix seat. In addition, more applications are migrating to browser-based HTML5 type systems that don't require weird client-side plugins or settings anymore. VDI is also more useful and easier to do now, as long as your company falls into one of the favorable Windows licensing scenarios that make the price reasonable.
I've worked with Citrix since MetaFrame, learned, forgot and relearned it 3 times for various jobs. Every time I came back to it, there was yet another massive shift in the architecture, management tools and deployment model. This latest version that I'm relearning (7.6) merged the XenApp and XenDesktop management platforms into one. I imagine that's a pretty huge shift for average Citrix admins. Anyway, they keep changing things on the periphery of the platform, but the core doesn't change -- it's still a more WAN-friendly drop in replacement protocol for Remote Desktop.
Selling off the GoTo stuff is probably a good idea. It'll let them keep pumping out new XenApp/XenDesktop enhancements or improving NetScaler, which are probably more reliable sources of revenue. And here's the reality from an end user computing guy who works for big companies -- there will always be "senior applications" that are deemed business-critical and cannot be replaced for whatever reason. A new sexy startup isn't going to have these, which is why the cloud, mobile access, etc. is gaining so much traction now. But, even in the more technologically forward companies I've worked for, I've seen stuff like really horrible Access applications, Excel macros, VB 6 GUIs cobbled together by "consultants", and others that just need to keep chugging along. And anyone who says "just move to Salesforce.com" hasn't experienced the corporate politics that prevent some of that from happening.
It's not just medical devices. Anything reasonably proprietary has historically had the security by obscurity defense and that hasn't changed. Why do you think manufacturers of SCADA gear, connected sensors, etc. beg customers to put them on their own disconnected network? I've done a lot of work in this sector and see lots of this all the time -- - Currently shipping devices running old versions of Windows, Linux, etc. with no way to patch them - Simple passwords that can't easily be changed - Obviously hacked-on network connectivity, where the connection is running vulnerable firmware unmodified from the firmware provided in a test kit by its manufacturer (complete with default passwords)
Manufacturers of these devices have historically not cared. Look at magnetic stripe credit cards -- the system was designed in an era where a magstripe encoder was a magical tool that cost thousands of 1970s dollars. That was the only thing that kept the technology safe. Other devices rely on the fact that no one knows their proprietary firmware (or so they think.) Avionics systems were designed in an era where the Internet didn't exist for the public. My experience has been that vendors do not fix security problems even when presented with them. Medical devices might be a different story if the FDA gets serious about it.
I think that if Microsoft, Amazon, Google, etc. get their way and force everyone into the cloud, it'll take a few major hacks into things like these for people to change their security mindset.
Only half-joking -- what about just using Kickstarter to buy the members of Congress directly? I know it's not polite to talk about, but I do wonder how many truckloads of money lobbyists and donors funnel directly to these guys every year. After all, lobbyists wouldn't do the job unless it was lucrative, and I don't see too many politicians who aren't fabulously wealthy. It's certainly not their Congressional salaries...
OK, I'm pretty left leaning, but unfortunately the conservatives appear to be the only ones attacking this issue at all. I think that's just because it doesn't affect "average people" yet, but it's creeping that way slowly.
I posted a piece the other day about Cengage Learning kicking out their entire IT department to Cognizant and forcing their "unskilled, unqualified" staff to train their H-1B replacements. Here's the deal -- nothing is going to get done until some of us become "beltway crapweasels" and buy favorable legislation through a professional organization. Not a union, an AMA-style guild dedicated to making sure salaries stay reasonably high and employment remains stable. Every single one of these Zuckerberg "everyone can code" initiatives or pushes to increase the visa cap is designed to get what these companies want - cheap labor.
I walk the employee-manager line in a "lead" role, so I have to hire staff as well as do actual work. (I'm a pretty well-seasoned systems integration guy with a solid reputation, if that matters.) I'm not entirely deaf to the "we can't find talent" argument, but I do think it's overblown. Even if you're not looking for a drop-in replacement for someone who left, and I'm not, there are some pretty big gaps in knowledge. Nothing is insurmountable given the right attitude and background, but I've seen lots of padded resumes and people who call themselves "expert level" without any justification for that label. It makes the hiring process frustrating because you have to wade through the obvious liars, then phone-screen the people who might be somewhat close, and then still interview a bunch of duds.
Being "experienced," I don't like the trend of entry level IT and dev jobs going away, because that kills your talent pipeline. I like the idea of a professional organization for the following reasons: - If done right, it could ensure a basic vendor-agnostic, technology-agnostic fundamental education for members. No more "web architects" who can only stich together node.js snippets they saw on Stack Overflow or MCSEs who can't troubleshoot basic TCP connectivity. - Gives members a career progression while still allowing them to be individuals -- makes the Libertarian crowd happy. - Unlike a union, each member would be their own person rather than bargaining collectively. - Gives employers a consistent experience and recourse in the case of malpractice -- professionals would need to be responsible for their work, which is sorely lacking today. - Allows members to buy favorable legislation via lobbyists. I can't imagine Congressmen would turn down millions in campaign donations in exchange for a few limits on the H-1B program. - Provides a pipeline of newbies to train as apprentices so companies aren't reliant on these offshoring firms for basic work in the future.
I just don't know how bad it's going to get before people wake up and realize they're not going to become billionaires just because they let them get away with things like this.
They used to have adult dorms very similar to what's described...state mental hospitals.:-)
Seriously. I somehow doubt this catching on. Every Millenial portrait I've seen/heard/read is a caricature...I have seen very few people who fit what are cemented as unshakable models of the generation. Outside of San Francisco hipster startup culture, I doubt anyone actually wants to live in a college dorm past their early 20s. I graduated in the 90s, so I was just before the generation that had all sorts of crazy dorm amenities like private bedrooms...my brother who is 6 years younger than I got to experience apartment style living.
Just because people grow up with Facebook, Instagram and Twitter doesn't make them all narcissistic social butterflies. It seems to me that if someone actually wanted this kind of experience, they could choose to live in a densely populated urban core and talk to their neighbors more often.
I already see the posts coming in saying "No union for me, thanks, I can take care of myself." I honestly used to think that, back when companies were only outsourcing routine tasks and qualified people were still being treated well everywhere. All I can say is, just wait until you're 40 or end up at one of these places offshoring their entire IT department. I am incredibly lucky and (for now) have a great senior-level position doing systems engineering work. However, between age discrimination, the loss of entry-level work, and the relentless drive to offshore anything that costs real money, we run the risk of driving talented people away from IT.
Here's my idea -- form a profession similar to the one engineers have and a related trade guild, not a traditional labor union. Unions will never fly with the Libertarian, lone wolf, I'm-better-than-everyone-in-my-field crowd. It would have to be structured around the professional licensure model, like the AMA. The AMA and related organizations keep doctors employed and making serious money. How do they do this? - Limiting labor supply by not allowing new medical school slots to be opened - Paying for laws their members need passed, such as forcing recent health care reform to rely on the insurance model that keeps their reimbursement rates high - Ensuring quality of profession members by licensing new medical school grads, and training them through residency and fellowship programs - Requiring continuing education
I would say the biggest benefit to members of the profession would be standardizing basic education. I'm not talking about handing Microsoft or Oracle or Google the reins, I'm talking about making sure people understand the fundamentals of IT and development, not just how to feed code into the magic black box. This would mean evil tradesy things like apprenticeships and OJT for new members, but it would ensure that we wouldn't get the typical MCSE bootcamp or coder academy graduates who only know one way to solve a problem.
The first step beyond getting people to agree would be to basically do what the other professional organizations do -- take up a collection and pay for laws to be passed limiting the ability to offshore work. It's time we admit that the only way to get anything passed in Congress is to pay for it, and lobbyists are the equivalent of handing lawmakers paper bags of money.
To make this fair to employers, they would need to get something too. I would say the best approach would be to promise no union style work rules would be enforced, while quality would be maintained by self-regulation. I think it's horrible that someone can screw up a job so badly they get fired, then just clean up their resume and get another job without any repercussion -- and I've seen this happen many times. If companies could be assured that their job would get done without the need to bring it back onshore to clean it up at consulting rates, they'd be open to this possibility.
I think it's been mentioned before that China is moving a lot of its rural population into cities to allow them to provide government services more efficiently, as well as create a larger consumer culture. At the same time, one of the only stable stores of wealth for Chinese is real estate. As many articles lately have mentioned, the stock market is even more speculative than ours and not suitable for long term investing. The only issue now is filling all these empty spaces so the original investors can get their money out.
We'll see what they have in mind for this next phase, but China has been remarkably good at long term central planning. It's something missing in Western countries -- the full control of authoritarianism while doing anything necessary to grow the economy. It'll be interesting to see what happens.
I have no idea how carriers and customers are going to agree on sane pricing. We're right back to the AT&T model of very expensive metered connections. I'm old enough to remember when in-state long distance phone calls were billed at 15+ cents a minute. With HD video streams eating more and more bandwidth as quality improves, typical unmetered monthly allotments will get used up after a couple of streaming sessions. There's that, plus Facebook constantly pulls data in the background, as do messaging apps, as does the automatic cloud backup mechanism on iOS. I predict the carriers will keep billing at current rates until enough people start complaining, then we'll go through another anti-trust process.
That said, there's parallels in the software/infrastructure world. Adobe knows they have a lock on professional creative applications (Photoshop, Premiere, etc.) and decided to force people to pay the Creative Cloud bill forever to use them rather than pay once for a license. Microsoft is headed that way too; Windows 10 may be free, but options for perpetually licensing server software are getting harder to justify to the MBAs. The next step is convincing everyone to just run their stuff in Azure for $XXXX per month rather than forking over that same amount one time. Both situations are only coming around again because consumers are receptive to them, or because they have no other choice.
We're in the middle of the planning for the Windows 7 to 10 transition, and 2008 R2 to 2016, so we're getting plenty of face time with the premier support guys. The message is abundantly clear -- Microsoft is done selling one-off licensed software. Everything is going to be Azure based in their mind, and on-premises installations of software are the exception now. Server 2016 has so many Azure hooks that it might as well not have been released as a standalone product. Windows 10's updating model relegates stable releases to a much more minority position than they were in the past...it requires an Enterprise Agreement/Software Assurance to deploy Windows 10 LTSB and avoid constant cumulative upgrades.
In an environment like this, where they're moving back to mainframe style custodial IT service models, why wouldn't they partner with Red Hat or any other OS vendor for that matter? They want companies to move everything into Azure, not leave some bits hanging out on-premises or with another cloud provider. The Windows vs. Linux wars are cooling off because vendors sense the juicy returns in the cloud. Why sell software once when you can force businesses to pay over and over again for decades to use your resources/products? I've said before that both Amazon and Microsoft are building their clouds on the backs of Bubble 2.0, so funding is plentiful and therefore prices are incredibly cheap. The thing to watch will be when the bubble bursts, and a duopoly exists...will those low prices continue?
Great job, captains of industry...way to read the trends! Just as autism/ASD starts swinging up, suitable employment for these people gets offshored/marginalized. Can't wait to see the revolution brought about by millions of angry people without social graces...just kidding.
Seriously, I do see this as a problem. I don't know if ASD is overdiagnosed, but I do know that there are still people (like me) who are "normal" but not outgoing, don't like group/collaborative work, and would rather spend time solving hard problems than "networking." Not even 30 years ago, there were plenty of jobs for this personality type. Companies valued scientists and engineers, now they just see them as disposable necessities. I just don't see the need for the constant push to make everyone a social animal. I have no desire to be a project manager, salesman or motivational speaker - why is that held out as the only successful path forward?
From a psychopath perspective, you would think companies would be happy to have ASD employees. It's not polite to say, but some can really be taken advantage of due to the lack of social skills. Think of all the software developers who willingly work 100 hour weeks because their boss knows they won't complain. I know some will disagree with me, but I think that's one of the major reasons IT and developers won't organize and turn the job into a profession - dislike of group association, feeling they're superior to everyone they would associate with, etc.
I have a while with my 2 kids; they're just starting school. However, if things continue I can't recommend a STEM job if it turns out they're smart. I'd rather see them kick ass in school, earn their way into the Ivy League club and coast. It's way easier to be an idiot investment banker or management consultant than it is a scientist or engineer. I'd only tell them to pursue STEM if it was clear they had a true gift and could be one of the few people who make a successful life out of it.
I'm a proponent of the cloud when it makes sense, and think that companies should implement a private cloud for their own internal applications. I'm not so sure about a company putting everything out on the public cloud, nor whether the migration will complete. The article says they're 350 apps in, with 1000 targeted for the end of the year. In enterprise IT, an "app" can be anything from the crown jewels to Bob in Accounting's hosted Access database or Excel macros. I'm assuming they're starting with the Access database.:-)
The thing I don't like about the public cloud is the real possibility for permanent vendor lock-in, IBM mainframe style. Prices are low now, but when all the competitors are driven out and the cloud bubble bursts, Amazon and Microsoft are going to slowly turn the prices up. Assuming the cloud provider isn't a security basket case, secure environments can be designed. But, this is GE we're talking about. I guarantee they're wallowing in outsourced-IT mediocrity and managing a massive bloated system. GE was the archetype for the 60s-style conglomerate, so I'm sure they have huge amounts of duplication. They probably have 30 SAP implementations and 20 Oracle ERP systems from the various divisions, acquisitions, etc.
It'll be interesting to see what happens. Just don't forget, big company CIOs, that the public cloud is being subsidized by the latest round of VC funded web startups and phone apps. When that bubble bursts, expect vendors to make their money back in other ways...
This sounds like a twist on the old international broadcaster model -- Radio Free Europe and VOA are still running long after the cold war, and they used to pump information to countries behind the Iron Curtain. The difference is that China is buying up transmitter facilities in the target countries as opposed to blasting shortwave from a remote location.
Realistically, I doubt this will have much local effect. It's not 1965 anymore, and there are much more effective ways of distributing propaganda. It just sounds like the Party is trying to cover all their bases and sees an easy way to do so.
That said, in my opinion, stuff like this is why China will probably win long-term. They have authoritarian control combined with a semi-market economy and a huge population advantage. There's no such thing as a government shutdown because a group doesn't agree with state policy. And, an authoritarian regime is able to do whatever is necessary to achieve its goals.
Never thought I'd use this construct in a post, but... All IT outsourcing is poorly managed. FTFY
The only difference between government and private sector is public scrutiny. I know lots of state IT workers (from the university system) and the universal refrain is that they don't even have budgets for the basics. This is a big departure from the right wing meme of government being awash in tax dollars and lavishly spending, and these aren't the stereotypical lazy worker types either. I think that a lot of the reality is that the money goes to outsourcing giants like HP, IBM, Accenture, etc. and it's wasted in the inefficiencies that this brings to light. I've been in lots of outsourced IT departments and do work for outsourcers. The problem with outsourcing is this -- the company doing the outsourcing is paying $X to maintain their own environment. To win the contract, the outsourcer has to come in at $X - $Y for the bid to be low enough to accept. (X - Y) has to be greater than their cost to make $Z off the deal, where $Z is positive margin. The business model of an outsourcer, therefore, is: - Provide the lowest/cheapest level of service possible to prevent the customer from cancelling the contract. - Offshore everything that doesn't require in-country staff. - Negotiate an open ended contract where almost nothing is spelled out, and all changes are billed on a time and materials basis. - Use this T&M framework to pump up profits by adding chargeable change orders for everything possible. - Bury the customer in endless levels of process, in the name of ITIL, service delivery excellence or whatever. This justifies a whole raft of change managers, project managers and analysts to write the documentation required for something that was previously done internally with much less effort. - Better yet, force the customer to adapt your Standard Operational Framework or whatever the outsourcer calls it. This means the same level of craziness, but you get to reuse processes across all your customers. - Slowly bleed out the on-site IT staff who knew anything. This makes it extremely difficult for the company to decide to insource again, or move to another vendor. After a long contract, they're essentially helpless without the vendor because anyone who knows anything doesn't work for the company anymore.
Now, take that model and apply it to something as complex as a state or federal agency. Make all the records transparent, and wait for the media to run sensational stories about 'Your Tax Dollars are Being Wasted by Big Government." Private sector businesses waste tons of money on outsourcing too, but it's buried in all the accounting sleight of hand and certainly not out in the open for inspection.
I have worked for a lot of large companies, and one of the things I've seen cause a lot of failures is thinking a problem will disappear by throwing Magic at it. - Cripplingly-slow WAN speeds? Vendor X is the Gartner Magic Quadrant leader in WAN Optimization, we'll just use that! Here's $2 million, Vendor X. Just put it in, you're smart IT guys, how hard could it be? - Developers and IT guys are expensive. I know, let's call Infosys/Tata/Accenture/HP/IBM, all I have to do is write them a check and all my IT problems disappear offshore! - I don't want to pay for equipment. I know, let's put it in the cloud! The cloud makes all problems disappear for a low low monthly fee!
I'm a pretty avowed generalist, but my two "specialties" are end user computing stuff and systems management. EUC is rife with magic solutions -- I can't tell you how many thin client/zero client/cloud desktop/VDI/Citrix/Whatever iterations I've been through where the CIO didn't realize that the problems don't go away. Problems just get moved around and may be more expensive to solve in the new configuration. Systems management is a whole other ball game. In this field more than others, vendors like CA, Microsoft and some of the startups have the art of the stunning sales demo down pat. As a result, people like me have spent untold hours and company dollars on expensive vendor consultants getting even a fraction of that sales demo working in the real world.
I love the constant innovation that our field serves up, but one needs to temper that with the reality that most innovation is a rehash of something done before, with the underlying pieces improved. I think the IT field is long overdue for at least some standardization where we don't let vendors run the show.
China has also been doing everything it can to convert most of its population into at least middle class consumers of domestic products. There are huge shifts going on now -- rural people are being picked up and moved to cities to increase efficiency of delivering services to them. Infrastructure projects are being undertaken to basically force-build a consumer society, kind of the same way the Soviets forced industrialization on a largely agrarian society in the early 20th Century.
In my opinion, this is why China will take over the top spots from the US and European countries in the future. I know we said the Japanese were going to take over the US in the 80s, but their culture is pretty insular compared to China's. The reason they'll succeed, besides sheer numbers, will be their ability to control things centrally while maintaining a mostly market economy. Things just get done in China; there's no debates, no government shutdowns, nothing. It's not great from a human rights perspective, but it's a perfect combination for building a robust economy. When you can do what needs to be done without having to take every single special interest in mind, decision making is faster and central planning succeeds.
Slashdot Mirror
I read this as, "Let's hire first-world developers, and give them non-stop coding work for 100 hour weeks. They love this sort of thing, so it's a win-win! And, we don't even have to pay them as much since they're just working constantly!"
Actually, if it's not an exploitative relationship, why not encourage autistic hiring in development? It's a good counter-point to the recent hyper-social brogrammer style startup environment, where autistic tendencies would be frowned upon. SAP's a perfect test case for this as well -- anyone who has worked even on the periphery of an SAP implementation can attest to the insane system architecture and massive tower of layered code that's built up.
I'm "normal" but tend toward the introverted side, like most "classical" IT guys and developers. It is nice to see some effort to cater to people who aren't natural-born communicators.
" I also think that guns should be limited to those who not only pass a *yearly* criminal background check but also should not be allowed for anyone who undergoes psychiatric admission to a hospital, even if it is voluntary."
Have you seen how hard it is to get an actual inpatient psychiatric admission these days? I think that's part of the problem -- people who have legitimate psychiatric problems don't get properly cared for. Usually, the severely mentally ill end up on the streets and cycle through jail. Sometimes they're stabilized, and sometimes they aren't when they come out. States decided quite some time ago that they don't want to pay for institutional care -- you have to be completely incapable of taking care of yourself or so dangerous to others that there's no other choice but to lock you up in order to get custodial treatment now. 50 or 60 years ago, that was different -- asylums had tens of thousands of people that just had to be put away because no effective treatments were available, and it was much easier to get committed even for garden-variety stuff like depression.
The problem is that mental illness goes untreated in the vast majority of cases. Some people are OK, and others lose their minds and shoot up a school. I'm not saying the asylum system was the best way to treat mental illness, but not stigmatizing it is the only way to get it treated.
What a lot of techies who are largely city folk don't realize is that there is a huge market for this in the rest of the country. The NRA is in a full-on marketing push scaring people into buying guns because they're worried about gun control even being talked about. I think something like a gun shopping channel might push some people who are on the fence into buying weapons "for protection" -- mild-mannered exurban moms or dads might be persuaded by a "think of your children" sales pitch, especially if you didn't actually have to go to a gun store.
I'm a realist when it comes to gun control. I dislike guns and would never own one, but I also realize that once something is written in the Constitution, no matter how it's interpreted, it will never get removed. The NRA is a huge pro-gun lobby, and most gun owners are quite anti-government, so I think any attempt to roll this back would end up causing a civil war. I think the pro-gun crowd would be saying "guns don't kill people, people do" even if we had 5 or 10 workplace shootings a day. Do I like it? No, but changing it would be too much effort against a powerful adversary.
I think it's a really good thing to try to help prisoners learn a skill. Anything that reduces recidivism is a good thing.
However...have they thought of where these inmates would work when they came out? You can't get a job with the vast majority of companies if you have bad credit, let alone a criminal record. Everyone wonders why the recidivism rate is so high -- this is one of the reasons. If you can only get crappy off the books jobs, you're more likely to return to crime because it pays better.
This is the major problem with the age of easy, cheap record checks. The second you're involved with the police at all, even if you're not convicted, your resume will immediately be tossed in favor of someone who doesn't have a record. Basically, sentencing someone to prison is permanently writing them off no matter for how long or for which crime. The inability to get meaningful work later on, combined with being housed with violent angry people for a long time doesn't make for a well adjusted person when they do get out.
Outside of the hipster lifestyle in San Francisco and other tech hotbeds, the "gig economy" isn't being celebrated as a major achievement in labor economics. It's a major disruptor, and not in a good way. Doing freelance style work is fine for artists, performers and younger people with no responsibilities other than themselves. Try stitching together a living on 6 jobs at a time while being a parent. Hot internet startups are getting all the tech press lately, and I am worried that engineered PR for things like Uber, Airbnb, Etsy and other "sharing economy" companies is going to permanently shift companies' perception on their workforces. I worry that they're going to take the media's Millenial caricatures that are held up as being the new way forward, and conclude that people don't want to work stable jobs anymore. As a short aside, I'm seeing this in workplaces also; HR people are panicking that the image of a Millenial they've seen in the media (social, job hopper, entitled, etc.) isn't going to want to work for their stuffy old company, so they're slavishly copying Google and turning their office spaces into all-inclusive preschools. Our stuffy old company is doing this now and it's very humorous to watch them try to act like they cater to a bunch of hipsters -- it's like a life insurance salesman trying to market to a bunch of extreme snowboarder dudes.
Unless society reorganizes itself totally around people having a variable income, the resulting instability of more and more jobs being automated, outsourced or part-time "gigs" is going to have a major effect on economies. 30-year mortgages were developed when people had one or maybe two jobs in their entire career. Same thing with car loans and credit card lending -- all of these assume a steady stream of income to pay current obligations as well as a progression of income over a career. If things get to a point where unemployment or underemployment wipes enough people out, things are going to get pretty hairy. No one is going to want to buy a house, a car, or anything at all if they don't think they can pay for it. People will be moving their whole families around the country every few years military-style and whatever sense of community people have now is going to disappear.
I sound like a relic, I know, but I do miss employer/employee loyalty. I'm fortunate to work for a good employer, but know many people who are willingly being taken advantage of by bad ones. I know that for companies to be loyal to their employees, there has to be some give on the employee side also, and a lot of people don't understand that. I've worked under people who have had 20 and 25 year stints at the same employer in the past. IBM was pretty famous for this, and although their corporate culture was weird and you had to make some sacrifices, if you worked hard they would make sure you were taken care of. Same with big companies like GE, defense contractors and others. I just hope companies realize that not everyone is a Milennial living in their Mom's basement or in an apartment with 6 other people. Some of us have real world/family responsibilities and aren't looking to hop jobs every 6 months for a 10% pay raise.
I think that if employees did show a little more loyalty (which is a huge ask in the current climate, I know) then companies would respond by training people properly, not firing them every time the stock goes down a few percent, etc. The problem is shifting the public perception away from the "entitled job hoppers" that the media loves to portray as normal.
"US IT workers could change the situation if they wanted to do so. But that would require actually doing something."
I totally agree. The problems with the current situation are:
- The problems are appearing too slowly for people to perceive any wider issue. Everyone assumes that it's just their company making questionable decisions and everything will be made right once they come to their senses. The reality is that this is accelerating and it may be too late to stop the train.
- Most of the people I've ever worked with are very conservative, free-market, Libertarian types -- I'm a pretty big exception among IT peers. Mention anything that might limit a company's power, or involve an organization drive on the labor side, and you'll be labeled a pro-union communist.
- There is also a very strong belief by people in our field that they are the absolute best at what they do, and they would never dare compare themselves with peers, let alone organize alongside them.
- I'm not sure where it comes from, but there also seems to be this belief that if we allow executives to do what they want, then they will let us into their club and we will be rich beyond our wildest dreams. Anything that might limit their ability to amass wealth is seen as jeopardizing that (nonexistent) goal.
Currently, there is very little support for my suggestion -- creating a profession for IT and development, and buying the laws we need. I think it's going to have to get much worse before people get mad enough to fight. And I'm not even talking about a traditional labor union; I'm talking about a professional organization that can lobby alongside the big companies who are fighting for things they want like more H-1Bs and the ability to offshore work more easily.
I've been working in IT for 20 years now and have been through a couple of these outsourcing/offshoring exercises. The truth is this - there is no way to convince executives that IT is a strategic investment opportunity unless the company's only business is IT. Therefore, outsourcing will happen in most big companies the first time the MBA's spreadsheets show a big enough paper cost savings. And in Disney's case, it's not the money -- I have 2 little kids. Disney could fill several of Scrooge McDuck's money bins with just the daily cash flow from their parks. They must carry all the cash out of Disney World in dump trucks. So, there's proof that they're not doing it for cost savings.
The thing that needs to be attacked is the IT service providers' use of H-1B and offshore labor for inappropriate tasks. Go after Cognizant, Tata Consulting Services, Accenture, IBM, HP, Infosys, Tech Mahindra, Xerox, etc. for bringing in H-1B labor for purposes that don't meet the original intention of the program. H-1B was designed to import specific high-end skill sets for a limited time to fill in actual gaps in education/experience. These service companies use the H-1B to bring in "job shadowers" who train the offshore teams, and low-level DBAs, developers and other roles that could easily be had locally without the communications or quality issues. The problem is that this will never get popular support until the vast majority of white collar workers are out of a job or underemployed. IT is still seen as a hot field, and we are all still considered well paid, so we don't get any political attention.
Do I think outsourcing is a good idea? No, I think companies need to have some FTEs who at least have a connection to the company. When you go down the service provider route, the provider has to make money at the rate they bill you. The only way they can do this is reduce labor costs and reduce service levels to the absolute minimum to keep you from invoking breach of contract clauses.
I have no idea how it will work out for Disney, but I've worked on both sides of the outsourcing fence. In the company doing the outsourcing, the FTEs left behind are stuck in a stagnant IT department behind a wall of change management process, 2 AM conference calls and incompetent newbie offshore guys that keep rotating. The outsourcing company is forced to cut so many corners that being an on-site employee of the company is not a fun job -- you get to tell people why they can't have things, why projects are late, etc.
Systems work is impacted by this style of quick fix answers as well. There's ServerFault, as well as vendor support forums and other sources. I love and hate these sorts of resources. They're great because they get fixes and workarounds out there far faster than official vendor support channels can. What they're awful for is providing half-working or potentially dangerous answers that look fine but may not apply at all to the problem at hand.
You can say that the root cause of the problem is inexperienced sysadmin staff, and you would be right. However, the same problem exists on the developer side. On the admin side, it's worse because there are honestly a lot of admin staff who can't automate, can't script and some have trouble with the command line. Therefore, when the requirement comes up to do so, these admins are at the mercy of sites like this. The worst of them copy and paste script code without knowing a thing about what it does.
The state of programming and IT doesn't need to be measured by StackOverflow or ServerFault data. It needs to be measured by the number of staff who lean on these resources too hard and lack the fundamental troubleshooting/reasoning skills to filter the content.
I've worked with a lot of products that are obviously like the one you describe. They tend to be vertical market things where the vendor is one of maybe 2 or 3 choices and has their customers completely locked in. The only way to jar them out of their rut is one of these:
- Have a major customer pull up stakes and leave out of frustration. (They would have to generate a big percentage of your product's revenue)
- Have a major competitor undertake a similar radical change that leapfrogs anything you're currently doing.
I can think of several "enterprisey" software products that fit this description - SAP, Oracle DB, any CA product, etc. These companies know that migrating away from their product is nearly impossible and so they don't invest in it until they're forced to.
IT has several factors that encourage poor work/life balance:
- The IT landscape is littered with awful companies to work for, who treat their IT people like the janitorial service. The ratio of good to bad employers is very low.
- Companies that are considered "fun to work for" encourage people to constantly be at work by providing free food, free personal services, etc. I just got back from a meeting at Microsoft, and even after Nadella took over and the reduction in their monopoly power, the place is still like a college campus and employees are encouraged to basically live there.
- There's pressure on older workers, who have been around the block and know the game, because there are always younger workers who will willingly work 100 hour weeks because they have nothing else going on in their lives.
- There's also H-1B and offshoring pressure. It's not uncommon to hear CIOs remark that their offshore teams never complain about hours worked. And, outsourcing the entire IT department means the company pays a monthly bill and gets even more compliant H-1B workers.
Outside of crazy industries like video games, or investment banking where you can make massive bonuses that make working the extra hours worth it, I think most employees would prefer to be given a 40 hour week, decent pay, and a good work/life balance. The good companies who provide these things tend to have longer staff tenure, but you don't hear about them as much. This is for 2 reasons -- (1) they're not sexy SV startups writing phone apps, and (2) there aren't very many open positions because employees tend to stay where they're happier.
Employers who treat their employees well will be rewarded in the long term.
One problem with Citrix is that their cash cow, XenApp, is getting less relevant. They have a huge presence in health care and other sectors where they can't assure endpoint security, have lots of shared machines/terminals, and have a lot of regulatory compliance issues. However, Microsoft keeps improving RemoteApp which can be had for the price of a CAL rather than a CAL plus Citrix seat. In addition, more applications are migrating to browser-based HTML5 type systems that don't require weird client-side plugins or settings anymore. VDI is also more useful and easier to do now, as long as your company falls into one of the favorable Windows licensing scenarios that make the price reasonable.
I've worked with Citrix since MetaFrame, learned, forgot and relearned it 3 times for various jobs. Every time I came back to it, there was yet another massive shift in the architecture, management tools and deployment model. This latest version that I'm relearning (7.6) merged the XenApp and XenDesktop management platforms into one. I imagine that's a pretty huge shift for average Citrix admins. Anyway, they keep changing things on the periphery of the platform, but the core doesn't change -- it's still a more WAN-friendly drop in replacement protocol for Remote Desktop.
Selling off the GoTo stuff is probably a good idea. It'll let them keep pumping out new XenApp/XenDesktop enhancements or improving NetScaler, which are probably more reliable sources of revenue. And here's the reality from an end user computing guy who works for big companies -- there will always be "senior applications" that are deemed business-critical and cannot be replaced for whatever reason. A new sexy startup isn't going to have these, which is why the cloud, mobile access, etc. is gaining so much traction now. But, even in the more technologically forward companies I've worked for, I've seen stuff like really horrible Access applications, Excel macros, VB 6 GUIs cobbled together by "consultants", and others that just need to keep chugging along. And anyone who says "just move to Salesforce.com" hasn't experienced the corporate politics that prevent some of that from happening.
It's not just medical devices. Anything reasonably proprietary has historically had the security by obscurity defense and that hasn't changed. Why do you think manufacturers of SCADA gear, connected sensors, etc. beg customers to put them on their own disconnected network? I've done a lot of work in this sector and see lots of this all the time --
- Currently shipping devices running old versions of Windows, Linux, etc. with no way to patch them
- Simple passwords that can't easily be changed
- Obviously hacked-on network connectivity, where the connection is running vulnerable firmware unmodified from the firmware provided in a test kit by its manufacturer (complete with default passwords)
Manufacturers of these devices have historically not cared. Look at magnetic stripe credit cards -- the system was designed in an era where a magstripe encoder was a magical tool that cost thousands of 1970s dollars. That was the only thing that kept the technology safe. Other devices rely on the fact that no one knows their proprietary firmware (or so they think.) Avionics systems were designed in an era where the Internet didn't exist for the public. My experience has been that vendors do not fix security problems even when presented with them. Medical devices might be a different story if the FDA gets serious about it.
I think that if Microsoft, Amazon, Google, etc. get their way and force everyone into the cloud, it'll take a few major hacks into things like these for people to change their security mindset.
Only half-joking -- what about just using Kickstarter to buy the members of Congress directly? I know it's not polite to talk about, but I do wonder how many truckloads of money lobbyists and donors funnel directly to these guys every year. After all, lobbyists wouldn't do the job unless it was lucrative, and I don't see too many politicians who aren't fabulously wealthy. It's certainly not their Congressional salaries...
OK, I'm pretty left leaning, but unfortunately the conservatives appear to be the only ones attacking this issue at all. I think that's just because it doesn't affect "average people" yet, but it's creeping that way slowly.
I posted a piece the other day about Cengage Learning kicking out their entire IT department to Cognizant and forcing their "unskilled, unqualified" staff to train their H-1B replacements. Here's the deal -- nothing is going to get done until some of us become "beltway crapweasels" and buy favorable legislation through a professional organization. Not a union, an AMA-style guild dedicated to making sure salaries stay reasonably high and employment remains stable. Every single one of these Zuckerberg "everyone can code" initiatives or pushes to increase the visa cap is designed to get what these companies want - cheap labor.
I walk the employee-manager line in a "lead" role, so I have to hire staff as well as do actual work. (I'm a pretty well-seasoned systems integration guy with a solid reputation, if that matters.) I'm not entirely deaf to the "we can't find talent" argument, but I do think it's overblown. Even if you're not looking for a drop-in replacement for someone who left, and I'm not, there are some pretty big gaps in knowledge. Nothing is insurmountable given the right attitude and background, but I've seen lots of padded resumes and people who call themselves "expert level" without any justification for that label. It makes the hiring process frustrating because you have to wade through the obvious liars, then phone-screen the people who might be somewhat close, and then still interview a bunch of duds.
Being "experienced," I don't like the trend of entry level IT and dev jobs going away, because that kills your talent pipeline. I like the idea of a professional organization for the following reasons:
- If done right, it could ensure a basic vendor-agnostic, technology-agnostic fundamental education for members. No more "web architects" who can only stich together node.js snippets they saw on Stack Overflow or MCSEs who can't troubleshoot basic TCP connectivity.
- Gives members a career progression while still allowing them to be individuals -- makes the Libertarian crowd happy.
- Unlike a union, each member would be their own person rather than bargaining collectively.
- Gives employers a consistent experience and recourse in the case of malpractice -- professionals would need to be responsible for their work, which is sorely lacking today.
- Allows members to buy favorable legislation via lobbyists. I can't imagine Congressmen would turn down millions in campaign donations in exchange for a few limits on the H-1B program.
- Provides a pipeline of newbies to train as apprentices so companies aren't reliant on these offshoring firms for basic work in the future.
I just don't know how bad it's going to get before people wake up and realize they're not going to become billionaires just because they let them get away with things like this.
They used to have adult dorms very similar to what's described...state mental hospitals. :-)
Seriously. I somehow doubt this catching on. Every Millenial portrait I've seen/heard/read is a caricature...I have seen very few people who fit what are cemented as unshakable models of the generation. Outside of San Francisco hipster startup culture, I doubt anyone actually wants to live in a college dorm past their early 20s. I graduated in the 90s, so I was just before the generation that had all sorts of crazy dorm amenities like private bedrooms...my brother who is 6 years younger than I got to experience apartment style living.
Just because people grow up with Facebook, Instagram and Twitter doesn't make them all narcissistic social butterflies. It seems to me that if someone actually wanted this kind of experience, they could choose to live in a densely populated urban core and talk to their neighbors more often.
I already see the posts coming in saying "No union for me, thanks, I can take care of myself." I honestly used to think that, back when companies were only outsourcing routine tasks and qualified people were still being treated well everywhere. All I can say is, just wait until you're 40 or end up at one of these places offshoring their entire IT department. I am incredibly lucky and (for now) have a great senior-level position doing systems engineering work. However, between age discrimination, the loss of entry-level work, and the relentless drive to offshore anything that costs real money, we run the risk of driving talented people away from IT.
Here's my idea -- form a profession similar to the one engineers have and a related trade guild, not a traditional labor union. Unions will never fly with the Libertarian, lone wolf, I'm-better-than-everyone-in-my-field crowd. It would have to be structured around the professional licensure model, like the AMA. The AMA and related organizations keep doctors employed and making serious money. How do they do this?
- Limiting labor supply by not allowing new medical school slots to be opened
- Paying for laws their members need passed, such as forcing recent health care reform to rely on the insurance model that keeps their reimbursement rates high
- Ensuring quality of profession members by licensing new medical school grads, and training them through residency and fellowship programs
- Requiring continuing education
I would say the biggest benefit to members of the profession would be standardizing basic education. I'm not talking about handing Microsoft or Oracle or Google the reins, I'm talking about making sure people understand the fundamentals of IT and development, not just how to feed code into the magic black box. This would mean evil tradesy things like apprenticeships and OJT for new members, but it would ensure that we wouldn't get the typical MCSE bootcamp or coder academy graduates who only know one way to solve a problem.
The first step beyond getting people to agree would be to basically do what the other professional organizations do -- take up a collection and pay for laws to be passed limiting the ability to offshore work. It's time we admit that the only way to get anything passed in Congress is to pay for it, and lobbyists are the equivalent of handing lawmakers paper bags of money.
To make this fair to employers, they would need to get something too. I would say the best approach would be to promise no union style work rules would be enforced, while quality would be maintained by self-regulation. I think it's horrible that someone can screw up a job so badly they get fired, then just clean up their resume and get another job without any repercussion -- and I've seen this happen many times. If companies could be assured that their job would get done without the need to bring it back onshore to clean it up at consulting rates, they'd be open to this possibility.
I think it's been mentioned before that China is moving a lot of its rural population into cities to allow them to provide government services more efficiently, as well as create a larger consumer culture. At the same time, one of the only stable stores of wealth for Chinese is real estate. As many articles lately have mentioned, the stock market is even more speculative than ours and not suitable for long term investing. The only issue now is filling all these empty spaces so the original investors can get their money out.
We'll see what they have in mind for this next phase, but China has been remarkably good at long term central planning. It's something missing in Western countries -- the full control of authoritarianism while doing anything necessary to grow the economy. It'll be interesting to see what happens.
I have no idea how carriers and customers are going to agree on sane pricing. We're right back to the AT&T model of very expensive metered connections. I'm old enough to remember when in-state long distance phone calls were billed at 15+ cents a minute. With HD video streams eating more and more bandwidth as quality improves, typical
unmetered monthly allotments will get used up after a couple of streaming sessions. There's that, plus Facebook constantly pulls data in the background, as do messaging apps, as does the automatic cloud backup mechanism on iOS. I predict the carriers will keep billing at current rates until enough people start complaining, then we'll go through another anti-trust process.
That said, there's parallels in the software/infrastructure world. Adobe knows they have a lock on professional creative applications (Photoshop, Premiere, etc.) and decided to force people to pay the Creative Cloud bill forever to use them rather than pay once for a license. Microsoft is headed that way too; Windows 10 may be free, but options for perpetually licensing server software are getting harder to justify to the MBAs. The next step is convincing everyone to just run their stuff in Azure for $XXXX per month rather than forking over that same amount one time. Both situations are only coming around again because consumers are receptive to them, or because they have no other choice.
We're in the middle of the planning for the Windows 7 to 10 transition, and 2008 R2 to 2016, so we're getting plenty of face time with the premier support guys. The message is abundantly clear -- Microsoft is done selling one-off licensed software. Everything is going to be Azure based in their mind, and on-premises installations of software are the exception now. Server 2016 has so many Azure hooks that it might as well not have been released as a standalone product. Windows 10's updating model relegates stable releases to a much more minority position than they were in the past...it requires an Enterprise Agreement/Software Assurance to deploy Windows 10 LTSB and avoid constant cumulative upgrades.
In an environment like this, where they're moving back to mainframe style custodial IT service models, why wouldn't they partner with Red Hat or any other OS vendor for that matter? They want companies to move everything into Azure, not leave some bits hanging out on-premises or with another cloud provider. The Windows vs. Linux wars are cooling off because vendors sense the juicy returns in the cloud. Why sell software once when you can force businesses to pay over and over again for decades to use your resources/products? I've said before that both Amazon and Microsoft are building their clouds on the backs of Bubble 2.0, so funding is plentiful and therefore prices are incredibly cheap. The thing to watch will be when the bubble bursts, and a duopoly exists...will those low prices continue?
Great job, captains of industry...way to read the trends! Just as autism/ASD starts swinging up, suitable employment for these people gets offshored/marginalized. Can't wait to see the revolution brought about by millions of angry people without social graces...just kidding.
Seriously, I do see this as a problem. I don't know if ASD is overdiagnosed, but I do know that there are still people (like me) who are "normal" but not outgoing, don't like group/collaborative work, and would rather spend time solving hard problems than "networking." Not even 30 years ago, there were plenty of jobs for this personality type. Companies valued scientists and engineers, now they just see them as disposable necessities. I just don't see the need for the constant push to make everyone a social animal. I have no desire to be a project manager, salesman or motivational speaker - why is that held out as the only successful path forward?
From a psychopath perspective, you would think companies would be happy to have ASD employees. It's not polite to say, but some can really be taken advantage of due to the lack of social skills. Think of all the software developers who willingly work 100 hour weeks because their boss knows they won't complain. I know some will disagree with me, but I think that's one of the major reasons IT and developers won't organize and turn the job into a profession - dislike of group association, feeling they're superior to everyone they would associate with, etc.
I have a while with my 2 kids; they're just starting school. However, if things continue I can't recommend a STEM job if it turns out they're smart. I'd rather see them kick ass in school, earn their way into the Ivy League club and coast. It's way easier to be an idiot investment banker or management consultant than it is a scientist or engineer. I'd only tell them to pursue STEM if it was clear they had a true gift and could be one of the few people who make a successful life out of it.
I'm a proponent of the cloud when it makes sense, and think that companies should implement a private cloud for their own internal applications. I'm not so sure about a company putting everything out on the public cloud, nor whether the migration will complete. The article says they're 350 apps in, with 1000 targeted for the end of the year. In enterprise IT, an "app" can be anything from the crown jewels to Bob in Accounting's hosted Access database or Excel macros. I'm assuming they're starting with the Access database. :-)
The thing I don't like about the public cloud is the real possibility for permanent vendor lock-in, IBM mainframe style. Prices are low now, but when all the competitors are driven out and the cloud bubble bursts, Amazon and Microsoft are going to slowly turn the prices up. Assuming the cloud provider isn't a security basket case, secure environments can be designed. But, this is GE we're talking about. I guarantee they're wallowing in outsourced-IT mediocrity and managing a massive bloated system. GE was the archetype for the 60s-style conglomerate, so I'm sure they have huge amounts of duplication. They probably have 30 SAP implementations and 20 Oracle ERP systems from the various divisions, acquisitions, etc.
It'll be interesting to see what happens. Just don't forget, big company CIOs, that the public cloud is being subsidized by the latest round of VC funded web startups and phone apps. When that bubble bursts, expect vendors to make their money back in other ways...
This sounds like a twist on the old international broadcaster model -- Radio Free Europe and VOA are still running long after the cold war, and they used to pump information to countries behind the Iron Curtain. The difference is that China is buying up transmitter facilities in the target countries as opposed to blasting shortwave from a remote location.
Realistically, I doubt this will have much local effect. It's not 1965 anymore, and there are much more effective ways of distributing propaganda. It just sounds like the Party is trying to cover all their bases and sees an easy way to do so.
That said, in my opinion, stuff like this is why China will probably win long-term. They have authoritarian control combined with a semi-market economy and a huge population advantage. There's no such thing as a government shutdown because a group doesn't agree with state policy. And, an authoritarian regime is able to do whatever is necessary to achieve its goals.
Never thought I'd use this construct in a post, but...
All IT outsourcing is poorly managed. FTFY
The only difference between government and private sector is public scrutiny. I know lots of state IT workers (from the university system) and the universal refrain is that they don't even have budgets for the basics. This is a big departure from the right wing meme of government being awash in tax dollars and lavishly spending, and these aren't the stereotypical lazy worker types either. I think that a lot of the reality is that the money goes to outsourcing giants like HP, IBM, Accenture, etc. and it's wasted in the inefficiencies that this brings to light. I've been in lots of outsourced IT departments and do work for outsourcers. The problem with outsourcing is this -- the company doing the outsourcing is paying $X to maintain their own environment. To win the contract, the outsourcer has to come in at $X - $Y for the bid to be low enough to accept. (X - Y) has to be greater than their cost to make $Z off the deal, where $Z is positive margin. The business model of an outsourcer, therefore, is:
- Provide the lowest/cheapest level of service possible to prevent the customer from cancelling the contract.
- Offshore everything that doesn't require in-country staff.
- Negotiate an open ended contract where almost nothing is spelled out, and all changes are billed on a time and materials basis.
- Use this T&M framework to pump up profits by adding chargeable change orders for everything possible.
- Bury the customer in endless levels of process, in the name of ITIL, service delivery excellence or whatever. This justifies a whole raft of change managers, project managers and analysts to write the documentation required for something that was previously done internally with much less effort.
- Better yet, force the customer to adapt your Standard Operational Framework or whatever the outsourcer calls it. This means the same level of craziness, but you get to reuse processes across all your customers.
- Slowly bleed out the on-site IT staff who knew anything. This makes it extremely difficult for the company to decide to insource again, or move to another vendor. After a long contract, they're essentially helpless without the vendor because anyone who knows anything doesn't work for the company anymore.
Now, take that model and apply it to something as complex as a state or federal agency. Make all the records transparent, and wait for the media to run sensational stories about 'Your Tax Dollars are Being Wasted by Big Government." Private sector businesses waste tons of money on outsourcing too, but it's buried in all the accounting sleight of hand and certainly not out in the open for inspection.
I have worked for a lot of large companies, and one of the things I've seen cause a lot of failures is thinking a problem will disappear by throwing Magic at it.
- Cripplingly-slow WAN speeds? Vendor X is the Gartner Magic Quadrant leader in WAN Optimization, we'll just use that! Here's $2 million, Vendor X. Just put it in, you're smart IT guys, how hard could it be?
- Developers and IT guys are expensive. I know, let's call Infosys/Tata/Accenture/HP/IBM, all I have to do is write them a check and all my IT problems disappear offshore!
- I don't want to pay for equipment. I know, let's put it in the cloud! The cloud makes all problems disappear for a low low monthly fee!
I'm a pretty avowed generalist, but my two "specialties" are end user computing stuff and systems management. EUC is rife with magic solutions -- I can't tell you how many thin client/zero client/cloud desktop/VDI/Citrix/Whatever iterations I've been through where the CIO didn't realize that the problems don't go away. Problems just get moved around and may be more expensive to solve in the new configuration. Systems management is a whole other ball game. In this field more than others, vendors like CA, Microsoft and some of the startups have the art of the stunning sales demo down pat. As a result, people like me have spent untold hours and company dollars on expensive vendor consultants getting even a fraction of that sales demo working in the real world.
I love the constant innovation that our field serves up, but one needs to temper that with the reality that most innovation is a rehash of something done before, with the underlying pieces improved. I think the IT field is long overdue for at least some standardization where we don't let vendors run the show.
China has also been doing everything it can to convert most of its population into at least middle class consumers of domestic products. There are huge shifts going on now -- rural people are being picked up and moved to cities to increase efficiency of delivering services to them. Infrastructure projects are being undertaken to basically force-build a consumer society, kind of the same way the Soviets forced industrialization on a largely agrarian society in the early 20th Century.
In my opinion, this is why China will take over the top spots from the US and European countries in the future. I know we said the Japanese were going to take over the US in the 80s, but their culture is pretty insular compared to China's. The reason they'll succeed, besides sheer numbers, will be their ability to control things centrally while maintaining a mostly market economy. Things just get done in China; there's no debates, no government shutdowns, nothing. It's not great from a human rights perspective, but it's a perfect combination for building a robust economy. When you can do what needs to be done without having to take every single special interest in mind, decision making is faster and central planning succeeds.