"I've known many people who didn't suck at their job but got laid off anyway. "
Agreed, and I've been in situations like this. Luckily, I've worked at places where things like this start creeping in slowly and you can see the writing on the wall long before they get around to kicking you out. Part of being smart about your career these days is avoiding unemployment at all costs, because unemployed people are damaged goods in employers' minds regardless of the reason. Like you mention, I've known a few people who just got caught out at the wrong time, didn't suck at their jobs, and had a really rough time finding work again because of the layoff.
Unless it's something insane like a year's salary (and you have lots of savings and no debt,) it's never a good idea to wait around for severance pay. The difficulty of getting back into the workforce, even with a solid history, is way higher than if you already have a job.
In the first dotcom boom, and now the social media/app boom, these same trends started appearing towards the end of each up-cycle: - Massive hiring of anyone who could spell HTML, barely manage a server farm, or cobble together an application starts dropping. - Computer science enrollment at universities hit all time highs. (The subsequent bust reverses this trend.) - The tech news gets wackier every day, as even the dumbest ideas are getting VC funding, IPOing or getting acquired by a huge corporation. - Job hopping increases, especially towards the top of the boom. (This also explains the voluntary resignation increases.) This is just people hopping for the next crazy salary increase or extra perk, and it decreases during the bust as people are happy to be working.
I've managed to stay employed continuously through 2 of these cycles, and I'm hoping my luck holds out. I think the key is simple -- don't suck at your job.:-) I'm not claiming to be a genius or rockstar by any means (and I think the rockstar moniker is stupid,) but I have had a solid track record and very good work experience grounded in fundamentals. Each of these booms has produced a legion of people who are semi-competent but not exactly suited for the job, and they have all been drawn in by the money. Remember paper MCSEs and certification bootcamps? This boom is all about apps, so it's code academies now -- 9 weeks and you're a rockstar developer writing the latest iPhone sensation!
I think the spikes in unemployment can be explained partially by the boom fizzling, but the systems and network administrator increase is likely due to the cloud shift. Not everything is suited to a public cloud, but enough places will see a benefit in moving their stuff that offsets the control they have in locally owned systems. Again, I think (hope, that is, since I'm in systems engineering) that solid people will be retained either as architects or sysadmins in complex environments. What I do think will start to go away is the hyper-specialists like DBAs of one flavor of database, or VSphere administrators, or SAN/storage guys. As more companies try to get away from proprietary stuff, or shift things offsite, that insanely deep knowledge of EMC, VMWare, Cisco, etc. to the exclusion of everything else is going to be less sought after. Someone who can glue all the parts together regardless of who owns them or where they are will still be able to find work. Hopefully.:-)
"BTW.... His little "I only get paid 70K too" idea, while true, isn't really the whole story. He is a co-owner of the business, so if the business makes a profit, he directly benefits from it. So don't fall for that little slight of hand. "
Fully agree on this. Business owners, in my experience, complain a lot for people that are in their situation. This is especially true of cheapskate small business owners, the ones Fox News and company round up to complain about how expensive it is to provide healthcare, pay employees, etc. This is not to say that all business owners are like this, but my experience with small business owners is that they will try to weasel out of paying for anything. All the while, they're enjoying massive tax breaks, having their company pay for all their personal expenses, etc. I find it hard to sympathize with an executive who has their loans guaranteed by their company and conveniently "forgiven" over time, or pays for gardening/security detail out of company funds.
The problem is that, especially for public companies, long term health of the business isn't really part of the narrative. Even small businesses like startups are just trying to survive long enough to IPO or get bought so the owners can get their payday.
I think the business culture would have to change back to a point where people invested for the long term and business owners put their profits back into their businesses to fuel future growth.
This is what people who tout the "gig economy" and job hopping as the future don't get. There are some companies out there who will spend the time, hire the right people, and keep them for as long as possible by paying them and treating them fairly. They aren't sexy Web 2.0 startups, nor are they public companies for the most part, so you don't hear about them as much. Loyalty may be dead, but I think a lot of companies don't like the idea of churning through yet another batch of contractors/employees and would rather stay productive than retrain everyone constantly.
The flip side is that the company is now forced to be extremely careful about who they hire. Sure, it's the US and you can get rid of someone because you don't like their shirt color that day, but you invest more in each employee by paying them more. So, a model like this can't work in a massive corporation that will hire hundreds at a time, not looking too closely at their qualifications. This is a good thing though -- hiring discipline makes sure you only bring on people who are actually going to do a good job. You just have to be dilligent and prepared to get rid of the people who are clearly coasting before they cost you too much.
Personally, I'd like an environment like this. People are happier when their financial situation isn't dire and they can take care of their basic needs. Someone who isn't stressed about paying their mortgage or their other bills will be able to use those processor cycles taken up by worrying on the task at hand, which is probably what the owner had in mind. The truth is this, for every 10 crappy IT sweatshops, there are 1 or 2 decent employers who offer stable work. People who find situations like this tend to stay in them, which is good for productivity. I just wish we could get the sweatshop-to-stable ratio somewhere below 1.0 at least...
It also helps that Gravity Payments is a credit card processor -- talk about a guaranteed, never ending revenue stream from which to pay your employees.
Anecdote != data, but here's my experience from having to interview candidates as a small part of my job:
If all things were ideal, companies wouldn't want to burn through employees. Having a revolving door of people who work for 6 months then disappear is detrimental to productivity. There's a magic balance to walk in this case -- hire someone who wants stability for the right reasons. Some people want stable work because they want to coast. Others who are otherwise great employees have a family to support and don't want the stress of moving, finding new work, etc. all the time.
Job hoppers make OK contractors if all you want is a defined body of work completed. They usually have the latest buzzwords, but our experience is that they're distracted. All of them are constantly searching for their next job which means they're not focusing on the task you hired them for 100%. The other reason is that they might be less likely to care about the overall quality of what they build, since it will be someone else's problem to maintain once they're on to the next job.
We're not at the point yet where every single tech employer is a sweatshop that operates a revolving door of contractors instead of full time staff. I would say we're heading that way, simply because IT services companies advertise their outsourcing/contracting services to the executives as a complete solution to their problems. No matter how much development is Agile and divorced from the actual business process, or how commoditized the systems everything runs on are, there will always be some institutional knowledge that gets lost. I've worked for companies that have gone down the outsourcing road, and some are actually coming back to in-house IT for some aspects of their operations. I think the pendulum will come back to some kind of middle ground soon. Not everything will be an in house function, but you might not have to string 5 or 6 short contracts together into a full year of employment.
Not every employer subscribes to the "contract everything" theory. Most large public ones have no choice because they're under so much pressure to reduce cost (at least on paper) by any means necessary. But, most businesses that value IT even slightly know that losing an employee can be difficult and they try to keep them. My employer, at least for now, has employed people for very long stretches and prefers people who will stick around and contribute for the long haul. The problem is that when you start dealing with rotating contractors, no matter how well things are documented, things get missed. It's the difference between writing down a sterile operations procedure for some offshore person who doesn't know anything about your company, and knowing how that process affects operations locally.
I do think that if we do allow employers to divorce themselves of their employee responsibilities, something needs to fill the void to provide stability. A professional guild is the best fit in my mind. There's just no other way - IT and programming in particular is a creative skill set. You have a wide range of personalities and negotiation abilities. I see several serial contractors responding to this thread telling people to put their big boy pants on and negotiate their bill rates...I think they fail to realize that most people don't want to do that, nor have the skill, and would rather do the work they're good at. I think that someone who's 24 now, with zero responsibility and bouncing between 3 month contracts that they feel are effortless to obtain, will feel very different when they turn 40, have kids, and need to wear the big boy pants both at home and at work. Suddenly stable employment starts looking like a good option.
I think a good chunk of STEM parents hitting the magic middle age mark during their kids' schooling are living examples of why not to study STEM subjects. I'm sure there are a fair number of developers and IT workers who have been forced to train their replacements and tossed out, all while their kids are watching. I know not everyone experiences this, but when you're 18, if you hear about a field having no future, do you flock to it even if it's fun or interesting?
The only truly safe routes if you want steady employment are medicine on the high end and trades on the low end. Medicine is safe because doctors were smart enough to form a trade organization to limit entrants, set standards, bribe Congressmen, etc. Trades are safe because they're not outsourceable, and in union states, operate on a guild/apprenticeship system. Law used to be safe, but the Bar Association started doing things that IT employers are doing, such as allowing offshoring and pumping up law school enrollment to increase supply and reduce salaries. The legal profession used to be a guaranteed meal ticket, regardless of where you graduated from -- now it's a closed club requiring you to be in the top of your class at a top 5 law school to get a lucrative job and make back your investment.
I still think it's time for tech workers to form a trade guild before it's too late to rescue the profession. Companies hate paying high wages for uneven-quality work. And because tech workers refuse to associate, they're able to pass favorable immigration laws and push agendas like "everyone can code." I feel that computers are essential now, and it's time to get out of the wild west phase of the profession...sure it's great to innovate and try new stuff, but when programming languages, platforms and frameworks get thrown out every year, nothing stable ever gets built. As an experienced worker who learned from a lot of other experienced pros on the way up, the loss of entry level (apprentice-level) work to offshoring bothers me because that's where your next generation of talent comes from -- not coder academies and forcing disinterested high school students into AP CS classes.
It seems people have very short memories and don't recall Bubble 1.0. The only difference between "coder bootcamps" and "MCSE bootcamps" is what's hot now. In the late 90s, if you weren't an HTML, Java or CGi guy, there was a huge market for system admins as well. Now there's less systems focus because of "the cloud" but there sure are a lot of phone apps to be written. The result is the same -- less-than-honest training companies selling the dream of being a hotshot app developer in just a few short weeks.
I'm not a developer, I'm a systems guy with 20+ years of experience. Back in the late 90s, I graduated with a non-CS bachelor's degree, got a help desk job and taught myself the fundamentals of the network ecosystems back then (NetWare, OS/2, Windows NT, etc.) As part of the self-teaching, I took the Windows NT MCSE exam track. Slow going, but I learned a lot, including the fundamentals not covered by the exams themselves. A few years later, I had a good solid system admin job and my company sent me to one of the MCSE bootcamps for an upgrade cert. I wish I had saved some of the ads for these places from back then. They were doing what ITT Tech, University of Phoenix, etc. are doing now -- selling completely green newbies on a 2 week course to get them their MCSE for some ongodly sum. I am not kidding when I say we're still working through managing out some of these paper MCSEs from the systems world in 2015. I sound like an old stick in the mud, but these shortcuts around the fundamentals produce some really screwed up employees. There are still people who can't use the Windows command line, can't script/automate anything, and have no basic troubleshooting skills. And sometimes, employers who have been burned paint us all with the same brush.
If you're just reviewing material for a certification, or need to learn a new language in an intensive environment, these bootcamps are fine as long as you have some fundamentals to fall back on. They are not a substitute for learning a subject in more depth.
Public education is in a bad spot right now. You have the right wingers trying to privatize most of it, demonizing teachers and teachers' unions, and meanwhile the students have to deal with it. I am of the opinion that teachers should be paid well and treated like true professionals. Everyone loves to quote the "rubber room" story and point out how hard it is to fire a teacher, but what about the good ones? Why should they have to suffer under a flawed standardized testing regime that will cost them their jobs if they can't force their students to pass the tests?
Back in the Stone Age when I went to school in New York (upstate, not the city) the state board of regents had (and still has) a standardized set of exams administered at the end of high school courses that every student in the state took. We did spend a lot of time "preparing" for the exams, but their content was 100% mapped to the course curriculum, and exams were written by the same branch of the education department that administered curriculum. Students who failed the exam failed the course, period. This meant that the passing bar was set pretty low but there was a reasonable assurance that someone who passed the exam got _something_ out of the course. The big controversy in NY now is that these exams are now more Common Core based, written by a third party and are being used to evaluate teachers. Tenure rules still apply, but I'm sure the right wing anti-union crowd is frothing at the mouth waiting for their chance to dismantle those as well.
I guess my problem is that teacher evaluations based on testing will devolve into a political tool and benefit no one. Political tinkering is why tenure exists in public education, not to give teachers a free ride like the anti-union crowd thinks. I think teachers should have a strong union, be paid and treated like professionals, and not be subject to capricious corporation-style evaluation systems. For those of you who work in large companies, think of the idiotic HR evaluation/performance review systems you have been subject to over the years. Now imagine you're a new teacher. In New York, and probably elsewhere, new teachers have to start out in crappy schools. This means a perfect combination of poor students, disinterested or absent parents, and no support from anyone. On top of this, you now have to get the majority of your students to pass a standardized test battery of dubious quality, _and_ convince your principal and other administrators that you deserve tenure after 3 years. When the majority of your students are below grade level, and have zero interest in doing better, the deck is stacked against new teachers. Oh, and the charter school crowd is trying to siphon off any kids who have a chance of increasing your class's pass rate, because of course the free market is the best way to run an education business.
I'm not a teacher, but I definitely support them on this one. Even if I do pay a lot in property taxes, it's worth it to not have the bottom of the barrel teaching kids. Taking away the one thing teachers have -- stability and guaranteed career progression via tenure, and offset by lower pay -- just to satisfy a political constituency is a bad idea, and you certainly won't attract the best people.
"You can't simply crank out an MBA and put that person in charge of a bunch of cheap programmers and expect innovation."
This. It boggles my mind that no one has stood up and said "this is stupid" over the last decades. Having worked in big corporations almost exclusively, I've seen a lot of this: - Management by spreadsheet, exclusively. (If you can't measure it you can't manage it.) - MBAs being put in charge of divisions they know nothing about. (A good manager can manage anything.) - CxOs listening to McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Accenture, Gartner, etc. exclusively. (They're the most expensive so they give the best advice.)
The last one is particularly funny -- I've experienced a lot of white-shoe consulting firm employees coming in and telling veteran execs 20 years their senior what to do. All of these firms' business models are to take newly minted MBAs, fly them to client sites and dazzle executives with sales PowerPoints. As you can imagine, the problem continues until the consulting firm can't extract any more fees for those former students.
It isn't a question of whether HP can pull something like this off - it's whether it makes sense to even try. Amazon AWS and Windows Azure are well entrenched in the public cloud market, and currently locked in a pricing death spiral. Have you looked at how cheap storage is in either of these clouds? I basically built myself an Azure filer with massive amounts of space that does personal backups for a few bucks a month and could do the same with Amazon -- cheaper than it would cost to buy a home JBOD box (at least in the short term.) This pricing thing is going to spiral down to near-zero until both vendors have their customers, then they'll slowly be able to turn it up notch by notch as leaving the cloud becomes less of an option. It's the same business model as outsourced IT -- come in cheap, and as the customer becomes more and more helpless without you, add in change orders and increase rates.
Even if it funny-moneys the hardware from one division to another, HP can't compete with Amazon or Microsoft rolling out stadium-sized data centers with cheap disposable whitebox hardware. The best they could hope for is to give away the cloud capacity and add "services" on top. And most IT people are familiar with the former EDS and their ability to "deliver" "services.":-)
I think the hardware vendors would be wise to concentrate on making kick-ass hardware for companies to implement their own private clouds. Our company has customer data that can't live in the cloud, and a potential service-wide outage like the Azure certificate failure last year would mean that our redundancy requirements would make us pay for 2 vendors. In addition, we deploy stuff to locations that don't have cheap abundant Internet connectivity yet. Use cases like this will always exist, but the virtualization benefits (ugh, "cloud") are great for internal use as well.
I think HP is totally messed up and has lost its way, but somehow they still manage to produce a few good products. Their servers are still solid, as well as some of their storage stuff. The problem is that they're like IBM -- cutting their way to growth and playing with financial engineering to make shareholders happy. Both companies need a serious clean-out, and I'm not talking about laying off 30,000 more product engineers and talented people who actually do things. They have the same dead wood and inertia problems any big organization has.
This isn't limited to the scientific community, although the insanely expensive journal subscriptions magnify the problem in that area. The problem is that content is increasingly not "printed" and therefore the journals' role is less relevant now. This happens with interlibrary loan of things like eBooks and media, as well as journals. The problem is that wherever you get it from, and whatever DRM timebombs the content, some library has to buy the journal subscription to get the content in the first place.
I'm not sure what the solution is. It's another one of those disruptive things that could put a lot of people out of work and change the scientific landscape. If everyone just publishes whatever they want, where's the quality bar set for research? Don't the journals curate content submissions? This would also force academics to be graded on a different scale for tenure, etc. if "number of accepted submissions" doesn't mean anything anymore.
From a business perspective, this sounds like China wants some assurance that IBM's mainframe software, DB2 and other stuff doesn't have any detectable backdoor code in it. The same thing happened with Microsoft a while back, and other governments including ours audit source code for the same reason.
I think the difference between the US and China in this case is how closely Chinese companies are tied to the government. I doubt there's too much in the way of trade-secret code that a foreign government couldn't reverse engineer given enough time and resources. But, it's much more likely that any information gained will make its way back to state-funded/supported companies in the Chinese environment. IBM isn't stupid, but they probably are greedy, and didn't want to lose access to the Chinese market.
My opinion is that China seems to have the right ingredients in place to be the dominant global player in this century. They have a mix of authoritarian control and an insane focus on economic growth, and are willing to do whatever it takes, popular or not, to achieve their goals. Look at their massive infrastructure build-out during the financial crisis, or their direct intervention in the stock market to fix volatility. We (the US and Europe) aren't there yet, but we'll have to get there at some point.
In my experience, the term DevOps is thrown around by two types of companies: - Startups who use it to tout their agility and fast deployment - Large company CIOs who want to get rid of their sysadmins or abstract all the complexity away into the cloud
What I do like about it is the fact that, when done right, it forces developers to know a little about the environments their creations will need to run reliably in. As a systems guy, my experience has been that developers don't really understand how stuff they works scales beyond their own computer or dev environment. Conversely, my development experience is limited to automation and scripting, and I know I could do much more with some formal programming training.
The problem is that DevOps is used the same way Agile is -- a magic bullet that will fix the problem of expensive sysadmins, expensive QA, production outages and delays in deployment all at once. DevOps works for startups because you're usually dealing with a single product, a small team who all know most of its features, and a group of people who are 100% focused on making it work correctly in production. For bigger companies it can work, but you need that level of focus that you might not have in a large organization juggling hundreds of different deployments.
What I don't like is DevOps being used as an excuse to remove any systems discipline. The cloud is great and you can spin up a million servers if you want, but just handing developers the keys and saying "go nuts" isn't the answer. Nor is locking down the environment so much that processes kill any hope of moving quickly. Like everything, the balance is in the middle, and sysadmins who know a little about the products they're taking care of, plus developers who know a little about the metal their code is running on make for much smoother deployments.
I work in a decidedly legacy field -- airline IT. I'm not a mainframe programmer, but I do work a lot with these systems and see what it takes to care for and manage business-critical processes. I certainly wouldn't recommend learning COBOL as a primary skill these days, but having some diverse systems experience is useful. I have been very lucky and have been able to steer my IT career into very "cross-platform" companies that has given me tons of knowledge that I otherwise wouldn't have. It can't hurt to at least have some familiarity with different technology; I've gotten interviews and jobs simply because I have at least seen a few systems that employers have used and needed someone with a passing knowledge of.
Hanging out with mainframe guys, I hear the contracting job market is actually semi-decent. It's shrinking and not stable by any means, but people who really know both systems programming and a business domain can make tons of money on contracts. The problem is that, for better or worse, companies are stuck with the mainframe for quite some time to come. Ancillary stuff is being migrated off to save on processing -- IBM leases you the hardware and charges you monthly by the MIPS to use it. However, for a lot of companies, decades of business logic is buried in the core transaction processing code. Their choices are to try to pull all this COBOL logic out into something Java-y or just keep it running. Often, keeping it running is seen as cheaper and less risky. In particular, the airline stuff I work with has layers and layers of upstream stuff relying on the base system never changing. The systems integration work that will be needed to eventually pull this stuff out into a different environment is going to be enormous when it does happen, and it will be a fun project for the right kind of insane people.
That said, CIOs and the like are always trying to get rid of or offshore mainframe work. It's seen as legacy crusty stuff, not sexy like phone apps and the like. That contract market I talked about often has work for seasoned mainframe guys to come back and fix the disaster that HP or Tata or Infosys made when they took over mainframe operations, often the same people the company fired. There are also the "onshore hand-holders" that help the offshore guys when things get crazy. Regardless, there will always be pressure to get off the mainframe, and the workforce is retiring right now. The move will happen one day, but it will be extremely painful for some companies and industries. So, having a tiny bit of experience, even if it's "I've seen this before" kind of experience, can be useful in the long run. Not all of IT is exciting or cutting edge -- there are plenty of systems that are just -there- and just have to run.
So it looks like Dell is doing what HP did on the storage front -- buy up a few competitors, merge the technology with the core line, and (possibly) have a big mess while everything consolidates. HP still sells production, ready-to-buy SANs from 3 different "vendors" (HP, 3Par, LeftHand) all while folding the features into something more unified. These consolidations are messy until they're finished, and I expect EMC with all its legacy stuff will be especially hard to merge with Compellent and Equalogic.
What's more interesting is the fact that they now control VMWare. VMWare's the de facto standard for consolidation/vritualization, kind of like Java being the standard for enterprisey applications. Let's just say it would be very difficult for most large companies with on-premises hardware to move away from it. Hyper-V keeps getting more capable, but each of these big platforms has its issues. It sounds like Dell has 2 nice big cash cows -- VMWare licensing, where the vendor lock-in resembles IBM's mainframes or Microsoft Windows., plus EMC, whose reassuringly expensive storage boxes are actually unlimited ATMs connected to the customers' bank accounts. Like I posted previously, that trip through privatization must have washed away a whole lot of sins. That, or they're going into this using insane levels of debt, in which case stupid short term MBA moves might kill the company in an attempt to make the spreadsheets balance.
"We need kids who will become carpenters, electricians, plumbers and other skilled trade workers. "
Agreed, but the construction industry isn't unionized everywhere, and the only way to ensure a pipeline of skilled workers vs. "the guy down the street with a reciprocating saw" is apprenticeship programs. This, plus middle-class pay wages will bring people back into the trades. Right now, the anti-union rhetoric is very strong outside of the Northeast and California. Without training, a career path and salary progression, and worker protections, the field will continue to be filled with low skilled foreign workers, just like we're seeing in dev/IT.
My phone is paid for by the company I work for, so data is Someone Else's Problem for now. My wife's phone is paid for by us, and she's been on the AT&T unlimited plan for ages. Every single time she's done equipment swaps, upgrades, any plan changes whatsoever, they very subtly try to sneak her out of the unlimited data plan. She's extremely savvy when it comes to this stuff, but it's amazing how slick they are when describing the change, and once you sign for the changes, you lose access to the old plan forever.
Metered data is going to be the next thing that will force a change in the industry. Once the carriers start turning the prices up just a little too high, and as the massive amounts of data required for even basic Internet usage skyrocket, people will eventually complain.
Honestly, seeing what I'm seeing as a "veteran" with 20+ years of experience, I feel this is probably the last gasp for average developers and IT people to command a good salary. Offshoring, visa programs, coder bootcamps and yes, these "everyone must learn to code" programs are going to mean a flooded market. This, along with most development centering around locked-down walled garden environments like phone apps, will reduce salaries over time because the _average_ skill level required to get something _working_ will drop. Since Agile development breaks up tasks into neat little packages, and makes code quality a secondary feature, and users are willing to accept low-quality code, you can just farm out a dev project to average people and get something that "works" back.
Good developers are still going to be in demand for non-throwaway systems, and good IT people will still be needed to manage things well. But sending everyone to a mandatory Ruby on Rails or whatever course just doesn't make any sense. Almost no one will make a career out of it. Why not teach basic life skills, like how not to get fooled by lenders into getting stuck in debt, or how to cook/clean for yourself, or basically live on your own? I'd argue you need those skills more than anything else, and kids from crappy households don't get this kind of education from their parents sometimes.
EMC, Cisco and VMWare are tied up in a sort of loose alliance to sell cloudy boxes to large companies (VBlock.) I wonder what would happen with that, and also whether Dell would own VMWare. That would be a pretty huge reversal of fortune for Dell. I guess that trip through privatization let them fix the company without being under the microscope every quarter. It seems to me that this would be a lesson for companies looking to IPO -- unless you need access to billions and billions of dollars in funding, being out of the public eye can be a good thing.
I honestly haven't looked at Dell hardware for a very long time, since most of the physical stuff we deploy is outside of the US and they have horrible international warranty service. Their low end consumer PCs are garbage and always have been, but I've heard the business lines of desktops, laptops and servers are still halfway decent.
I'm guessing the name of the company is also a color between red and yellow in the rainbow. Good guess?
I also work for a not-to-be-named European company and the management culture is very strong in European organizations. It's very confusing to American employees on first brush. I'm not defending it because it's stupid, but the reasoning behind it is that companies in Europe are much more insular -- a lot of them almost exclusively promote from within. People tend to have much longer tenures with the same company and slowly rise in the ranks, so you are more likely to have a manager who knows the job function they're managing. This is not always the case of course. In addition, European companies have been increasingly adopting US-style MBA management tactics. They sometimes mix and match these styles resulting in a messy organization. Finally, in European companies, management below the executive level is a much more privileged class than in American ones. In countries like the UK and France where private car ownership is expensive, management are the ones given a car allowance for example. The privilege tends to feed a "we know best" attitude, and it can work well or be quite toxic given the company's situation.
Not to speculate, but this may have led to the situation at VW. Given my experience I could definitely see one or two managers convincing the rest of the organization to go along with something like this simply based on the culture difference.
OK - I've recently been "promoted" to a Senior Lead position in a small group. This means, in addition to the work I have been doing and continue to do, I now have to deal with the management and HR stuff for a bunch of coworkers. Even though we have a "technical career track," at this point in the track I'm expected to take on some management duties. I'm of the opinion that management by socially promoted workers isn't the way to go. Despite all the complaints from workers, first-line management is an essential function and needs to be performed by people who are good at it, period. I really am trying to make a go of it, and I consider my mandate to be something along the lines of "don't be one of the numerous idiot managers I've had in my lifetime." That said, management is a completely separate skill than just about anything technical. It's not "better," it's just "different" and therefore it shouldn't be held out as something to achieve after working as an individual contributor for X years. I think the fact that management is sometimes much better compensated than their workers leads to people ill-suited for it fighting to be promoted into it.
That said, unless you have a universally motivated workforce, the Zappos no-management thing can't work. There really are people who will do the absolute minimum to avoid getting fired. I've always been a good worker; no one would ever call me a workaholic, but I do put in extra effort consistently and have been recognized for it. It is a huge eye opener to be in the management seat and see that (a) not everyone is like this, (b) those who are not motivated need to be pushed along constantly, and (c) very little can be done to motivate said people beyond keeping their jobs. That's one of the fundamental realizations new bosses should get early on.
I agree that many companies have changed since the authoritarian style of management was the most effective everywhere. Some companies really are capable of having their staff do a good job without being helicoptered constantly. Some (law firms, consulting firms, etc.) have kept the authoritarian and up-or-out style, mainly because they only hire new graduates and indoctrinate them completely. It'll be interesting to see where this experiment ends up in the MBA case study book.
The company I work for, who is late to everything, is now starting to get the Agile religion and is trying to apply it to systems work. (Yes, DevOps.) My honest opinion, having really given it a try, is that Agile is designed for the lowest common denominator engineering teams. Everything has to be broken up into small enough tasks that no one takes on too much, and sometimes more time is spent planning than actual working on stuff, forcing tasks to fit into this model. It's perfect if you are a big offshoring shop and are performing run of the mill development tasks that don't involve any business understanding. It's a whole lot easier to say "code me this service with these interfaces in 2 weeks, don't worry about the rest of the project" than to get developers thinking about the bigger picture.
It seems like Agile and DevOps culture was designed for this kind of "we add developers at web scale" approach to development. If you're doing something that's more complex than the back end for a phone app, that's where it can break down. With Agile you _can_ split tasks up such that no one developer knows anything beyond their own little piece, but that doesn't scale because you can't quickly train new guys in a codebase or operational environment without any context.
This is precisely what a guild would have to focus on first. I don't know much about the lobbying process, but I do see that politicians are very well compensated by other sources of income than their legislative salaries. You don't see very many Congresspeople living simple lives. However wrong it is, it's time people admit that the only way to get something you want passed is to pay for it. Every other trade/industry group does this. I say form a guild, take up a massive collection, hire lobbyists and basically tell them "we want visa reform and worker protection laws, and here's $XXX million for your "re-election campaign"
You can't win the game if you don't play...and the IT employers are playing the game.
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"I've known many people who didn't suck at their job but got laid off anyway. "
Agreed, and I've been in situations like this. Luckily, I've worked at places where things like this start creeping in slowly and you can see the writing on the wall long before they get around to kicking you out. Part of being smart about your career these days is avoiding unemployment at all costs, because unemployed people are damaged goods in employers' minds regardless of the reason. Like you mention, I've known a few people who just got caught out at the wrong time, didn't suck at their jobs, and had a really rough time finding work again because of the layoff.
Unless it's something insane like a year's salary (and you have lots of savings and no debt,) it's never a good idea to wait around for severance pay. The difficulty of getting back into the workforce, even with a solid history, is way higher than if you already have a job.
In the first dotcom boom, and now the social media/app boom, these same trends started appearing towards the end of each up-cycle:
- Massive hiring of anyone who could spell HTML, barely manage a server farm, or cobble together an application starts dropping.
- Computer science enrollment at universities hit all time highs. (The subsequent bust reverses this trend.)
- The tech news gets wackier every day, as even the dumbest ideas are getting VC funding, IPOing or getting acquired by a huge corporation.
- Job hopping increases, especially towards the top of the boom. (This also explains the voluntary resignation increases.) This is just people hopping for the next crazy salary increase or extra perk, and it decreases during the bust as people are happy to be working.
I've managed to stay employed continuously through 2 of these cycles, and I'm hoping my luck holds out. I think the key is simple -- don't suck at your job. :-) I'm not claiming to be a genius or rockstar by any means (and I think the rockstar moniker is stupid,) but I have had a solid track record and very good work experience grounded in fundamentals. Each of these booms has produced a legion of people who are semi-competent but not exactly suited for the job, and they have all been drawn in by the money. Remember paper MCSEs and certification bootcamps? This boom is all about apps, so it's code academies now -- 9 weeks and you're a rockstar developer writing the latest iPhone sensation!
I think the spikes in unemployment can be explained partially by the boom fizzling, but the systems and network administrator increase is likely due to the cloud shift. Not everything is suited to a public cloud, but enough places will see a benefit in moving their stuff that offsets the control they have in locally owned systems. Again, I think (hope, that is, since I'm in systems engineering) that solid people will be retained either as architects or sysadmins in complex environments. What I do think will start to go away is the hyper-specialists like DBAs of one flavor of database, or VSphere administrators, or SAN/storage guys. As more companies try to get away from proprietary stuff, or shift things offsite, that insanely deep knowledge of EMC, VMWare, Cisco, etc. to the exclusion of everything else is going to be less sought after. Someone who can glue all the parts together regardless of who owns them or where they are will still be able to find work. Hopefully. :-)
"BTW.... His little "I only get paid 70K too" idea, while true, isn't really the whole story. He is a co-owner of the business, so if the business makes a profit, he directly benefits from it. So don't fall for that little slight of hand. "
Fully agree on this. Business owners, in my experience, complain a lot for people that are in their situation. This is especially true of cheapskate small business owners, the ones Fox News and company round up to complain about how expensive it is to provide healthcare, pay employees, etc. This is not to say that all business owners are like this, but my experience with small business owners is that they will try to weasel out of paying for anything. All the while, they're enjoying massive tax breaks, having their company pay for all their personal expenses, etc. I find it hard to sympathize with an executive who has their loans guaranteed by their company and conveniently "forgiven" over time, or pays for gardening/security detail out of company funds.
The problem is that, especially for public companies, long term health of the business isn't really part of the narrative. Even small businesses like startups are just trying to survive long enough to IPO or get bought so the owners can get their payday.
I think the business culture would have to change back to a point where people invested for the long term and business owners put their profits back into their businesses to fuel future growth.
This is what people who tout the "gig economy" and job hopping as the future don't get. There are some companies out there who will spend the time, hire the right people, and keep them for as long as possible by paying them and treating them fairly. They aren't sexy Web 2.0 startups, nor are they public companies for the most part, so you don't hear about them as much. Loyalty may be dead, but I think a lot of companies don't like the idea of churning through yet another batch of contractors/employees and would rather stay productive than retrain everyone constantly.
The flip side is that the company is now forced to be extremely careful about who they hire. Sure, it's the US and you can get rid of someone because you don't like their shirt color that day, but you invest more in each employee by paying them more. So, a model like this can't work in a massive corporation that will hire hundreds at a time, not looking too closely at their qualifications. This is a good thing though -- hiring discipline makes sure you only bring on people who are actually going to do a good job. You just have to be dilligent and prepared to get rid of the people who are clearly coasting before they cost you too much.
Personally, I'd like an environment like this. People are happier when their financial situation isn't dire and they can take care of their basic needs. Someone who isn't stressed about paying their mortgage or their other bills will be able to use those processor cycles taken up by worrying on the task at hand, which is probably what the owner had in mind. The truth is this, for every 10 crappy IT sweatshops, there are 1 or 2 decent employers who offer stable work. People who find situations like this tend to stay in them, which is good for productivity. I just wish we could get the sweatshop-to-stable ratio somewhere below 1.0 at least...
It also helps that Gravity Payments is a credit card processor -- talk about a guaranteed, never ending revenue stream from which to pay your employees.
Anecdote != data, but here's my experience from having to interview candidates as a small part of my job:
If all things were ideal, companies wouldn't want to burn through employees. Having a revolving door of people who work for 6 months then disappear is detrimental to productivity. There's a magic balance to walk in this case -- hire someone who wants stability for the right reasons. Some people want stable work because they want to coast. Others who are otherwise great employees have a family to support and don't want the stress of moving, finding new work, etc. all the time.
Job hoppers make OK contractors if all you want is a defined body of work completed. They usually have the latest buzzwords, but our experience is that they're distracted. All of them are constantly searching for their next job which means they're not focusing on the task you hired them for 100%. The other reason is that they might be less likely to care about the overall quality of what they build, since it will be someone else's problem to maintain once they're on to the next job.
We're not at the point yet where every single tech employer is a sweatshop that operates a revolving door of contractors instead of full time staff. I would say we're heading that way, simply because IT services companies advertise their outsourcing/contracting services to the executives as a complete solution to their problems. No matter how much development is Agile and divorced from the actual business process, or how commoditized the systems everything runs on are, there will always be some institutional knowledge that gets lost. I've worked for companies that have gone down the outsourcing road, and some are actually coming back to in-house IT for some aspects of their operations. I think the pendulum will come back to some kind of middle ground soon. Not everything will be an in house function, but you might not have to string 5 or 6 short contracts together into a full year of employment.
Not every employer subscribes to the "contract everything" theory. Most large public ones have no choice because they're under so much pressure to reduce cost (at least on paper) by any means necessary. But, most businesses that value IT even slightly know that losing an employee can be difficult and they try to keep them. My employer, at least for now, has employed people for very long stretches and prefers people who will stick around and contribute for the long haul. The problem is that when you start dealing with rotating contractors, no matter how well things are documented, things get missed. It's the difference between writing down a sterile operations procedure for some offshore person who doesn't know anything about your company, and knowing how that process affects operations locally.
I do think that if we do allow employers to divorce themselves of their employee responsibilities, something needs to fill the void to provide stability. A professional guild is the best fit in my mind. There's just no other way - IT and programming in particular is a creative skill set. You have a wide range of personalities and negotiation abilities. I see several serial contractors responding to this thread telling people to put their big boy pants on and negotiate their bill rates...I think they fail to realize that most people don't want to do that, nor have the skill, and would rather do the work they're good at. I think that someone who's 24 now, with zero responsibility and bouncing between 3 month contracts that they feel are effortless to obtain, will feel very different when they turn 40, have kids, and need to wear the big boy pants both at home and at work. Suddenly stable employment starts looking like a good option.
I think a good chunk of STEM parents hitting the magic middle age mark during their kids' schooling are living examples of why not to study STEM subjects. I'm sure there are a fair number of developers and IT workers who have been forced to train their replacements and tossed out, all while their kids are watching. I know not everyone experiences this, but when you're 18, if you hear about a field having no future, do you flock to it even if it's fun or interesting?
The only truly safe routes if you want steady employment are medicine on the high end and trades on the low end. Medicine is safe because doctors were smart enough to form a trade organization to limit entrants, set standards, bribe Congressmen, etc. Trades are safe because they're not outsourceable, and in union states, operate on a guild/apprenticeship system. Law used to be safe, but the Bar Association started doing things that IT employers are doing, such as allowing offshoring and pumping up law school enrollment to increase supply and reduce salaries. The legal profession used to be a guaranteed meal ticket, regardless of where you graduated from -- now it's a closed club requiring you to be in the top of your class at a top 5 law school to get a lucrative job and make back your investment.
I still think it's time for tech workers to form a trade guild before it's too late to rescue the profession. Companies hate paying high wages for uneven-quality work. And because tech workers refuse to associate, they're able to pass favorable immigration laws and push agendas like "everyone can code." I feel that computers are essential now, and it's time to get out of the wild west phase of the profession...sure it's great to innovate and try new stuff, but when programming languages, platforms and frameworks get thrown out every year, nothing stable ever gets built. As an experienced worker who learned from a lot of other experienced pros on the way up, the loss of entry level (apprentice-level) work to offshoring bothers me because that's where your next generation of talent comes from -- not coder academies and forcing disinterested high school students into AP CS classes.
It seems people have very short memories and don't recall Bubble 1.0. The only difference between "coder bootcamps" and "MCSE bootcamps" is what's hot now. In the late 90s, if you weren't an HTML, Java or CGi guy, there was a huge market for system admins as well. Now there's less systems focus because of "the cloud" but there sure are a lot of phone apps to be written. The result is the same -- less-than-honest training companies selling the dream of being a hotshot app developer in just a few short weeks.
I'm not a developer, I'm a systems guy with 20+ years of experience. Back in the late 90s, I graduated with a non-CS bachelor's degree, got a help desk job and taught myself the fundamentals of the network ecosystems back then (NetWare, OS/2, Windows NT, etc.) As part of the self-teaching, I took the Windows NT MCSE exam track. Slow going, but I learned a lot, including the fundamentals not covered by the exams themselves. A few years later, I had a good solid system admin job and my company sent me to one of the MCSE bootcamps for an upgrade cert. I wish I had saved some of the ads for these places from back then. They were doing what ITT Tech, University of Phoenix, etc. are doing now -- selling completely green newbies on a 2 week course to get them their MCSE for some ongodly sum. I am not kidding when I say we're still working through managing out some of these paper MCSEs from the systems world in 2015. I sound like an old stick in the mud, but these shortcuts around the fundamentals produce some really screwed up employees. There are still people who can't use the Windows command line, can't script/automate anything, and have no basic troubleshooting skills. And sometimes, employers who have been burned paint us all with the same brush.
If you're just reviewing material for a certification, or need to learn a new language in an intensive environment, these bootcamps are fine as long as you have some fundamentals to fall back on. They are not a substitute for learning a subject in more depth.
Public education is in a bad spot right now. You have the right wingers trying to privatize most of it, demonizing teachers and teachers' unions, and meanwhile the students have to deal with it. I am of the opinion that teachers should be paid well and treated like true professionals. Everyone loves to quote the "rubber room" story and point out how hard it is to fire a teacher, but what about the good ones? Why should they have to suffer under a flawed standardized testing regime that will cost them their jobs if they can't force their students to pass the tests?
Back in the Stone Age when I went to school in New York (upstate, not the city) the state board of regents had (and still has) a standardized set of exams administered at the end of high school courses that every student in the state took. We did spend a lot of time "preparing" for the exams, but their content was 100% mapped to the course curriculum, and exams were written by the same branch of the education department that administered curriculum. Students who failed the exam failed the course, period. This meant that the passing bar was set pretty low but there was a reasonable assurance that someone who passed the exam got _something_ out of the course. The big controversy in NY now is that these exams are now more Common Core based, written by a third party and are being used to evaluate teachers. Tenure rules still apply, but I'm sure the right wing anti-union crowd is frothing at the mouth waiting for their chance to dismantle those as well.
I guess my problem is that teacher evaluations based on testing will devolve into a political tool and benefit no one. Political tinkering is why tenure exists in public education, not to give teachers a free ride like the anti-union crowd thinks. I think teachers should have a strong union, be paid and treated like professionals, and not be subject to capricious corporation-style evaluation systems. For those of you who work in large companies, think of the idiotic HR evaluation/performance review systems you have been subject to over the years. Now imagine you're a new teacher. In New York, and probably elsewhere, new teachers have to start out in crappy schools. This means a perfect combination of poor students, disinterested or absent parents, and no support from anyone. On top of this, you now have to get the majority of your students to pass a standardized test battery of dubious quality, _and_ convince your principal and other administrators that you deserve tenure after 3 years. When the majority of your students are below grade level, and have zero interest in doing better, the deck is stacked against new teachers. Oh, and the charter school crowd is trying to siphon off any kids who have a chance of increasing your class's pass rate, because of course the free market is the best way to run an education business.
I'm not a teacher, but I definitely support them on this one. Even if I do pay a lot in property taxes, it's worth it to not have the bottom of the barrel teaching kids. Taking away the one thing teachers have -- stability and guaranteed career progression via tenure, and offset by lower pay -- just to satisfy a political constituency is a bad idea, and you certainly won't attract the best people.
"You can't simply crank out an MBA and put that person in charge of a bunch of cheap programmers and expect innovation."
This. It boggles my mind that no one has stood up and said "this is stupid" over the last decades. Having worked in big corporations almost exclusively, I've seen a lot of this:
- Management by spreadsheet, exclusively. (If you can't measure it you can't manage it.)
- MBAs being put in charge of divisions they know nothing about. (A good manager can manage anything.)
- CxOs listening to McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Accenture, Gartner, etc. exclusively. (They're the most expensive so they give the best advice.)
The last one is particularly funny -- I've experienced a lot of white-shoe consulting firm employees coming in and telling veteran execs 20 years their senior what to do. All of these firms' business models are to take newly minted MBAs, fly them to client sites and dazzle executives with sales PowerPoints. As you can imagine, the problem continues until the consulting firm can't extract any more fees for those former students.
(Yes, HP is capable of smart moves. Sometimes.)
It isn't a question of whether HP can pull something like this off - it's whether it makes sense to even try. Amazon AWS and Windows Azure are well entrenched in the public cloud market, and currently locked in a pricing death spiral. Have you looked at how cheap storage is in either of these clouds? I basically built myself an Azure filer with massive amounts of space that does personal backups for a few bucks a month and could do the same with Amazon -- cheaper than it would cost to buy a home JBOD box (at least in the short term.) This pricing thing is going to spiral down to near-zero until both vendors have their customers, then they'll slowly be able to turn it up notch by notch as leaving the cloud becomes less of an option. It's the same business model as outsourced IT -- come in cheap, and as the customer becomes more and more helpless without you, add in change orders and increase rates.
Even if it funny-moneys the hardware from one division to another, HP can't compete with Amazon or Microsoft rolling out stadium-sized data centers with cheap disposable whitebox hardware. The best they could hope for is to give away the cloud capacity and add "services" on top. And most IT people are familiar with the former EDS and their ability to "deliver" "services." :-)
I think the hardware vendors would be wise to concentrate on making kick-ass hardware for companies to implement their own private clouds. Our company has customer data that can't live in the cloud, and a potential service-wide outage like the Azure certificate failure last year would mean that our redundancy requirements would make us pay for 2 vendors. In addition, we deploy stuff to locations that don't have cheap abundant Internet connectivity yet. Use cases like this will always exist, but the virtualization benefits (ugh, "cloud") are great for internal use as well.
I think HP is totally messed up and has lost its way, but somehow they still manage to produce a few good products. Their servers are still solid, as well as some of their storage stuff. The problem is that they're like IBM -- cutting their way to growth and playing with financial engineering to make shareholders happy. Both companies need a serious clean-out, and I'm not talking about laying off 30,000 more product engineers and talented people who actually do things. They have the same dead wood and inertia problems any big organization has.
This isn't limited to the scientific community, although the insanely expensive journal subscriptions magnify the problem in that area. The problem is that content is increasingly not "printed" and therefore the journals' role is less relevant now. This happens with interlibrary loan of things like eBooks and media, as well as journals. The problem is that wherever you get it from, and whatever DRM timebombs the content, some library has to buy the journal subscription to get the content in the first place.
I'm not sure what the solution is. It's another one of those disruptive things that could put a lot of people out of work and change the scientific landscape. If everyone just publishes whatever they want, where's the quality bar set for research? Don't the journals curate content submissions? This would also force academics to be graded on a different scale for tenure, etc. if "number of accepted submissions" doesn't mean anything anymore.
From a business perspective, this sounds like China wants some assurance that IBM's mainframe software, DB2 and other stuff doesn't have any detectable backdoor code in it. The same thing happened with Microsoft a while back, and other governments including ours audit source code for the same reason.
I think the difference between the US and China in this case is how closely Chinese companies are tied to the government. I doubt there's too much in the way of trade-secret code that a foreign government couldn't reverse engineer given enough time and resources. But, it's much more likely that any information gained will make its way back to state-funded/supported companies in the Chinese environment. IBM isn't stupid, but they probably are greedy, and didn't want to lose access to the Chinese market.
My opinion is that China seems to have the right ingredients in place to be the dominant global player in this century. They have a mix of authoritarian control and an insane focus on economic growth, and are willing to do whatever it takes, popular or not, to achieve their goals. Look at their massive infrastructure build-out during the financial crisis, or their direct intervention in the stock market to fix volatility. We (the US and Europe) aren't there yet, but we'll have to get there at some point.
In my experience, the term DevOps is thrown around by two types of companies:
- Startups who use it to tout their agility and fast deployment
- Large company CIOs who want to get rid of their sysadmins or abstract all the complexity away into the cloud
What I do like about it is the fact that, when done right, it forces developers to know a little about the environments their creations will need to run reliably in. As a systems guy, my experience has been that developers don't really understand how stuff they works scales beyond their own computer or dev environment. Conversely, my development experience is limited to automation and scripting, and I know I could do much more with some formal programming training.
The problem is that DevOps is used the same way Agile is -- a magic bullet that will fix the problem of expensive sysadmins, expensive QA, production outages and delays in deployment all at once. DevOps works for startups because you're usually dealing with a single product, a small team who all know most of its features, and a group of people who are 100% focused on making it work correctly in production. For bigger companies it can work, but you need that level of focus that you might not have in a large organization juggling hundreds of different deployments.
What I don't like is DevOps being used as an excuse to remove any systems discipline. The cloud is great and you can spin up a million servers if you want, but just handing developers the keys and saying "go nuts" isn't the answer. Nor is locking down the environment so much that processes kill any hope of moving quickly. Like everything, the balance is in the middle, and sysadmins who know a little about the products they're taking care of, plus developers who know a little about the metal their code is running on make for much smoother deployments.
I work in a decidedly legacy field -- airline IT. I'm not a mainframe programmer, but I do work a lot with these systems and see what it takes to care for and manage business-critical processes. I certainly wouldn't recommend learning COBOL as a primary skill these days, but having some diverse systems experience is useful. I have been very lucky and have been able to steer my IT career into very "cross-platform" companies that has given me tons of knowledge that I otherwise wouldn't have. It can't hurt to at least have some familiarity with different technology; I've gotten interviews and jobs simply because I have at least seen a few systems that employers have used and needed someone with a passing knowledge of.
Hanging out with mainframe guys, I hear the contracting job market is actually semi-decent. It's shrinking and not stable by any means, but people who really know both systems programming and a business domain can make tons of money on contracts. The problem is that, for better or worse, companies are stuck with the mainframe for quite some time to come. Ancillary stuff is being migrated off to save on processing -- IBM leases you the hardware and charges you monthly by the MIPS to use it. However, for a lot of companies, decades of business logic is buried in the core transaction processing code. Their choices are to try to pull all this COBOL logic out into something Java-y or just keep it running. Often, keeping it running is seen as cheaper and less risky. In particular, the airline stuff I work with has layers and layers of upstream stuff relying on the base system never changing. The systems integration work that will be needed to eventually pull this stuff out into a different environment is going to be enormous when it does happen, and it will be a fun project for the right kind of insane people.
That said, CIOs and the like are always trying to get rid of or offshore mainframe work. It's seen as legacy crusty stuff, not sexy like phone apps and the like. That contract market I talked about often has work for seasoned mainframe guys to come back and fix the disaster that HP or Tata or Infosys made when they took over mainframe operations, often the same people the company fired. There are also the "onshore hand-holders" that help the offshore guys when things get crazy. Regardless, there will always be pressure to get off the mainframe, and the workforce is retiring right now. The move will happen one day, but it will be extremely painful for some companies and industries. So, having a tiny bit of experience, even if it's "I've seen this before" kind of experience, can be useful in the long run. Not all of IT is exciting or cutting edge -- there are plenty of systems that are just -there- and just have to run.
So it looks like Dell is doing what HP did on the storage front -- buy up a few competitors, merge the technology with the core line, and (possibly) have a big mess while everything consolidates. HP still sells production, ready-to-buy SANs from 3 different "vendors" (HP, 3Par, LeftHand) all while folding the features into something more unified. These consolidations are messy until they're finished, and I expect EMC with all its legacy stuff will be especially hard to merge with Compellent and Equalogic.
What's more interesting is the fact that they now control VMWare. VMWare's the de facto standard for consolidation/vritualization, kind of like Java being the standard for enterprisey applications. Let's just say it would be very difficult for most large companies with on-premises hardware to move away from it. Hyper-V keeps getting more capable, but each of these big platforms has its issues. It sounds like Dell has 2 nice big cash cows -- VMWare licensing, where the vendor lock-in resembles IBM's mainframes or Microsoft Windows., plus EMC, whose reassuringly expensive storage boxes are actually unlimited ATMs connected to the customers' bank accounts. Like I posted previously, that trip through privatization must have washed away a whole lot of sins. That, or they're going into this using insane levels of debt, in which case stupid short term MBA moves might kill the company in an attempt to make the spreadsheets balance.
"We need kids who will become carpenters, electricians, plumbers and other skilled trade workers. "
Agreed, but the construction industry isn't unionized everywhere, and the only way to ensure a pipeline of skilled workers vs. "the guy down the street with a reciprocating saw" is apprenticeship programs. This, plus middle-class pay wages will bring people back into the trades. Right now, the anti-union rhetoric is very strong outside of the Northeast and California. Without training, a career path and salary progression, and worker protections, the field will continue to be filled with low skilled foreign workers, just like we're seeing in dev/IT.
My phone is paid for by the company I work for, so data is Someone Else's Problem for now. My wife's phone is paid for by us, and she's been on the AT&T unlimited plan for ages. Every single time she's done equipment swaps, upgrades, any plan changes whatsoever, they very subtly try to sneak her out of the unlimited data plan. She's extremely savvy when it comes to this stuff, but it's amazing how slick they are when describing the change, and once you sign for the changes, you lose access to the old plan forever.
Metered data is going to be the next thing that will force a change in the industry. Once the carriers start turning the prices up just a little too high, and as the massive amounts of data required for even basic Internet usage skyrocket, people will eventually complain.
Honestly, seeing what I'm seeing as a "veteran" with 20+ years of experience, I feel this is probably the last gasp for average developers and IT people to command a good salary. Offshoring, visa programs, coder bootcamps and yes, these "everyone must learn to code" programs are going to mean a flooded market. This, along with most development centering around locked-down walled garden environments like phone apps, will reduce salaries over time because the _average_ skill level required to get something _working_ will drop. Since Agile development breaks up tasks into neat little packages, and makes code quality a secondary feature, and users are willing to accept low-quality code, you can just farm out a dev project to average people and get something that "works" back.
Good developers are still going to be in demand for non-throwaway systems, and good IT people will still be needed to manage things well. But sending everyone to a mandatory Ruby on Rails or whatever course just doesn't make any sense. Almost no one will make a career out of it. Why not teach basic life skills, like how not to get fooled by lenders into getting stuck in debt, or how to cook/clean for yourself, or basically live on your own? I'd argue you need those skills more than anything else, and kids from crappy households don't get this kind of education from their parents sometimes.
EMC, Cisco and VMWare are tied up in a sort of loose alliance to sell cloudy boxes to large companies (VBlock.) I wonder what would happen with that, and also whether Dell would own VMWare. That would be a pretty huge reversal of fortune for Dell. I guess that trip through privatization let them fix the company without being under the microscope every quarter. It seems to me that this would be a lesson for companies looking to IPO -- unless you need access to billions and billions of dollars in funding, being out of the public eye can be a good thing.
I honestly haven't looked at Dell hardware for a very long time, since most of the physical stuff we deploy is outside of the US and they have horrible international warranty service. Their low end consumer PCs are garbage and always have been, but I've heard the business lines of desktops, laptops and servers are still halfway decent.
I'm guessing the name of the company is also a color between red and yellow in the rainbow. Good guess?
I also work for a not-to-be-named European company and the management culture is very strong in European organizations. It's very confusing to American employees on first brush. I'm not defending it because it's stupid, but the reasoning behind it is that companies in Europe are much more insular -- a lot of them almost exclusively promote from within. People tend to have much longer tenures with the same company and slowly rise in the ranks, so you are more likely to have a manager who knows the job function they're managing. This is not always the case of course. In addition, European companies have been increasingly adopting US-style MBA management tactics. They sometimes mix and match these styles resulting in a messy organization. Finally, in European companies, management below the executive level is a much more privileged class than in American ones. In countries like the UK and France where private car ownership is expensive, management are the ones given a car allowance for example. The privilege tends to feed a "we know best" attitude, and it can work well or be quite toxic given the company's situation.
Not to speculate, but this may have led to the situation at VW. Given my experience I could definitely see one or two managers convincing the rest of the organization to go along with something like this simply based on the culture difference.
OK - I've recently been "promoted" to a Senior Lead position in a small group. This means, in addition to the work I have been doing and continue to do, I now have to deal with the management and HR stuff for a bunch of coworkers. Even though we have a "technical career track," at this point in the track I'm expected to take on some management duties. I'm of the opinion that management by socially promoted workers isn't the way to go. Despite all the complaints from workers, first-line management is an essential function and needs to be performed by people who are good at it, period. I really am trying to make a go of it, and I consider my mandate to be something along the lines of "don't be one of the numerous idiot managers I've had in my lifetime." That said, management is a completely separate skill than just about anything technical. It's not "better," it's just "different" and therefore it shouldn't be held out as something to achieve after working as an individual contributor for X years. I think the fact that management is sometimes much better compensated than their workers leads to people ill-suited for it fighting to be promoted into it.
That said, unless you have a universally motivated workforce, the Zappos no-management thing can't work. There really are people who will do the absolute minimum to avoid getting fired. I've always been a good worker; no one would ever call me a workaholic, but I do put in extra effort consistently and have been recognized for it. It is a huge eye opener to be in the management seat and see that (a) not everyone is like this, (b) those who are not motivated need to be pushed along constantly, and (c) very little can be done to motivate said people beyond keeping their jobs. That's one of the fundamental realizations new bosses should get early on.
I agree that many companies have changed since the authoritarian style of management was the most effective everywhere. Some companies really are capable of having their staff do a good job without being helicoptered constantly. Some (law firms, consulting firms, etc.) have kept the authoritarian and up-or-out style, mainly because they only hire new graduates and indoctrinate them completely. It'll be interesting to see where this experiment ends up in the MBA case study book.
The company I work for, who is late to everything, is now starting to get the Agile religion and is trying to apply it to systems work. (Yes, DevOps.) My honest opinion, having really given it a try, is that Agile is designed for the lowest common denominator engineering teams. Everything has to be broken up into small enough tasks that no one takes on too much, and sometimes more time is spent planning than actual working on stuff, forcing tasks to fit into this model. It's perfect if you are a big offshoring shop and are performing run of the mill development tasks that don't involve any business understanding. It's a whole lot easier to say "code me this service with these interfaces in 2 weeks, don't worry about the rest of the project" than to get developers thinking about the bigger picture.
It seems like Agile and DevOps culture was designed for this kind of "we add developers at web scale" approach to development. If you're doing something that's more complex than the back end for a phone app, that's where it can break down. With Agile you _can_ split tasks up such that no one developer knows anything beyond their own little piece, but that doesn't scale because you can't quickly train new guys in a codebase or operational environment without any context.
This is precisely what a guild would have to focus on first. I don't know much about the lobbying process, but I do see that politicians are very well compensated by other sources of income than their legislative salaries. You don't see very many Congresspeople living simple lives. However wrong it is, it's time people admit that the only way to get something you want passed is to pay for it. Every other trade/industry group does this. I say form a guild, take up a massive collection, hire lobbyists and basically tell them "we want visa reform and worker protection laws, and here's $XXX million for your "re-election campaign"
You can't win the game if you don't play...and the IT employers are playing the game.