I really like working in IT - it's good to have a job where you're using your brain every day instead of just churning out reports or something similar. The major complaints I have are: - Age discrimination -- I haven't been looking for work lately, but I'm sure getting more paranoid about keeping a job when I see stories of people who are basically unhireable after 40. I just crossed that magic threshhold and although I have tons of experience and a solid reputation behind me, I do worry about companies just not even bothering to interview me because of a stupid set of unfounded beliefs. - Work visa program abuses -- I have absolutely no problem with companies using H-1B, L-1 or other visas to bring in super-intelligent people who are providing a key service to the company. I have a big problem with Tata, Infosys, Accenture, IBM, HP, etc. using them to bring in a cheap run-of-the-mill developer, DBA or sysadmin who could easily have been sourced locally if the company would pay reasonable rates. - Clueless employers -- This isn't something easy to solve, but outside of Silicon Valley and extremely high-tech or enlightened companies, IT is considered a janitorial-level service. This is why the Tatas and Infosys's of the world are called in. Everywhere I've worked that has done this has had IT productivity slow to a crawl because of change management paperwork, dealing with absolutely clueless remote employees and other factors.
The only long term solution I see is a guild system...heaven forbid you call it a union in front of Libertarian IT workers. If we want a career that continues to pay off and be enjoyable to work in, education has to be standardized in at least the fundamental level, and a career progression needs to be put in place. We need to fund some lobbyists to give Congress the brown paper bags full of money they need to pass limits on work visa programs, and most importantly it needs to be done as a group. Doctors have the AMA, and it keeps their salaries high by limiting the number of medical school graduates and lobbying for favorable insurance rules. Musicians, actors and writers have their guilds that ensure they don't get screwed by studios and keep getting royalties for their work. I just don't see why it's taking so long for people to realize they have no power against any of these forces we're seeing. No one is going to win an age discrimination suit against a corporation and their well-funded legal team. It's nice that people are trying, but it will never happen. At most they'll get a small payout and be blackballed from working in the industry ever again.
I'm only kidding, I know IBM does have a pretty big basic research program. I'm just shocked it's even operating anymore given how crazy things have been at IBM these days. Why does a white shoe management consulting firm (which is what IBM is trying to turn itself into) still have a lab?
Don't get me wrong - I want them to continue and hopefully they'll get through this crazy period. But now that IBM doesn't manufacture anything other than mainframes and p-series, and no longer owns its own semiconductor fabs, I'm sure semiconductor research will be next on the chopping block.
I know that's funny money pre-IPO valuation, but come on guys, why isn't ANYONE saying "it's the dotcom bubble all over again, run! Save your investments!" Most of us lived through the first dotcom bubble and watched the market for anything technology related go insane, then collapse completely. It's going to happen again.
Github is cool right now because it's at the nexus of these social media startups, that's it. It's a useful tool, sure, but trying a silly idea like "making everyone a coder" just sounds like pets.com 23-year-old CEO hubris again. I guess I just don't see the allure of working 80-hour weeks banging out webmonkey code for yet another phone app, but that's exactly what's going to happen when these new "coders" enter the world of work and find out it's not all that exciting for the most part.
I'd much rather see advances in semiconductor technology or energy conservation or space exploration than Yet Another Social App pushing ads to eyeballs...there's better places to spend money.
One thing about Microsoft these days is their relentless push to stop you using their software on-premises, or at least out of their control. "Cloud first" means local datacenter last, so I'm expecting that they're going to be slowly increasing prices to a point where the MBAs have every argument they need to move the company to Office 365. Their hosted email is admittedly very good, but it's still not "yours" and not reliable in the case of network failure, Azure hiccups, etc. I'm definitely not cloud-averse, but I do know that it really doesn't cost that much to run an Exchange server in house -- the architecture has changed enough such that it's not total black magic anymore, and the majority of the day to day admin can be done by regular help desk guys or automation tools. So, most normal-sized places with simple email requirements can get away with one guy who's good with Exchange, and it doesn't have to be their full time job until you get to a certain number of users.
Management accounting is weird -- it makes more financial sense for a company to pay and pay for years on end for a service in a subscription format, rather than buy and hold onto a software license. Same thing goes for assets -- every big company is falling all over themselves to sell real estate only to pay someone else for the privilege of occupying what was their building...all because of accounting tricks. It's so strange because it's backwards compared to personal accounting. People usually want to pay off their cars or houses and live in them without a mortgage or car loan, for example. Businesses seem to want to go to software companies and say, "Please, let me pay you forever to use your software."
I've been doing systems work of some kind since the early 90s. The technology changes a lot, but learning the fundamental concepts early on will allow any sysadmin to continue being productive even when entire platforms get swapped out from under you. Unix --> Linux, Windows GUI --> Windows PowerShell, Physical servers --> Virtual servers, Virtual on-site servers --> cloudy virtual servers -- all these transitions can be made successfully by falling back on the fundamental tasks of controlling access, dealing with failures, providing resources, etc. that are similar at their core no matter what you're running on.
The thing that trips up a lot of sysadmins is getting bogged down in the details of one particular platform or aspect of their job and not seeing the big changes that come up. For the right kind of crazy person, this job is actually fun. I hope I'm doing something like it years from now.
I'm from the gun-averse camp, but I'm well aware that nothing can be done to silence the gun lobby in this country. It's in the Constitution, and we're too diverse a country to ever support taking it out. You could have daily mass shootings of 50+ people and the NRA would still defend gun rights, with millions of owners right behind them. Even background check laws will never be strengthened beyond what's there already because people are going to assume the government will be coming for their guns.
So, it seems to me that the next best thing would be to fix mental health care and make sure everyone has equal access to it. Who knows what happened, but it's most likely someone with an ax to grind who just happened to get triggered today. Right now, there's virtually no state-run inpatient mental health treatment beds outside of maybe the psychiatric ERs. You basically have to be Hannibal Lecter to get committed to an asylum now. There's also not that much support available in the community. Deinstitutionalization was supposed to get people out of the hospital -and- treat them on an outpatient basis, but they forgot the second part when states closed all the asylums.
One of the reasons people buy iDevices (and Macs to a certain extent) is the fact that everything is provided in a neat little package that just works. The downsides are that you don't get to question how it works, and therefore Apple can just yank your app (and therefore your direct or ad revenue) if they decide they don't like you. Ironically, this is also a strength for the platform - they control the hardware and software. Android's wild west app store is a lot more chaotic, as is their hardware outside of the Samsung/Nexus flagship models. Microsoft's store is even stranger - back when they were paying developers to write apps, anyone who could open Visual Studio hacked up a skin for YouTube or created hundreds of apps that had different names but did the same thing. By contrast, you can give an Apple product to a knowledge-free consumer and be confident that they'll at least figure out the basics and won't be tripped up by weird problems.
The fact that everything is super-miniaturized and functionality is provided on non-repairable systems-on-chips makes things hard to repair, this is true. However, I don't understand why Apple refuses to let people see behind the curtain, even if they can't do board-level repairs. I agree that there is a lot of engineering and design that goes into stuffing all those components into a tiny rounded rectangle Jobsian (Iveian?) package with no buttons, but we're not talking trade secrets here.
I do think that people should have the right to repair. Not everyone wants a throwaway appliance that is made that way for no good reason other than to make money on the next model, or the ability to charge $100 for $2 worth of flash memory.
"it's just really hard to find qualified candidates"
I can't totally disagree, as I have been on the hiring side as well as the engineering side. I guess my question is how unqualified you feel they are -- and in the case of the visa programs, how every employer feels about this. I think it's somewhat unrealistic to find a drop-in replacement for someone who knows everything about how your company works and can be productive immediately. I do systems engineering work in the airline industry -- there is a huge amount of domain knowledge that you have to gain before you can tackle the technology side.
I think companies do need to bear some of the responsibility of training their workforce. Most used to do this with no issue - they'd take a completely green college graduate with no work experience and make them productive. The visa programs just remove another incentive for companies to do this.
"By the time I quit, those thousands of jobs had been cut to hundreds and the campus was a ghost town."
This is mainly what I'm worried about, and why the article was a good thing to get in front of everybody. I've spent a long time working either directly for very large companies, or as a contractor to them doing various IT jobs. These are the kinds of companies like you describe, with huge multi-floor buildings employing thousands of people. (Basically, you're not in the "very large" category until your building/campus has its own parking garage.) The problem that not everyone seems to get is that the entire economy is based around giving thousands of people like this a way to earn money and have a stable existence. Unless you want to throw out money and switch to a Star Trek utopian society, people need to work, earn money and spend it. People in favor of squeezing out every single inefficiency in the economy love to point to big employers and say how much waste there is, how much less they could be paying their workers, etc. And yes, large companies do have some completely dead wood and less productive people -- I've seen tons of dead wood over the years. I've also seen a lot of corporate jobs that involve little more than taking a stack of input work, performing some sort of process on it, and submitting it to the next person in the chain. But...here's something to think about: - A lot of those paper pushers own real estate and are paying property taxes. - Many have one or more children, and are using public education to educate them while they work, which requires property taxes. - Most, if not all, have had to purchase or lease one or more cars from car dealerships. - Everyone pays sales tax, and car owners pay gasoline taxes to keep the roads in driveable condition, so they can get to that 10,000 person corporate campus every morning. - Every W2 employee pays Social Security and Medicare tax, and most 1099 contractors pay it themselves as well. - The ACA as it currently stands means we will still be on the "insurance" model for healthcare regardless of who pays for a very long time, and large employers are able to get better deals from insurers than individuals can. - Employees who are happy and feel safe in their jobs are going to be willing to spend more money. This includes discretionary "treats" every now and then as well as vacations, and this spending powers a huge other side of the economy. Employees who are scared about being laid off next week are going to hang on to their money.
Given that large employers' employees affect a large portion of the economy, I'm all for some inefficiency. Otherwise, you're going to get the same effect that I saw growing up in the Rust Belt-- factories and steel mills that had the 70s equivalent of these corporate jobs all of a sudden stopped contributing to the economy, and everything just started grinding to a halt. Unless we want to flip the entire economy on its head, everyone is going to need a way to make money, and getting rid of these jobs is not the way to do that.
When I saw this in the Times yesterday, the thing that surprised me was that a major news outlet was reporting on this in very matter-of-fact terms. As we've seen, these discussions get heated, and for the record I'm not one of the "they took our jerbs" people for the most part. What I don't like is the abuse of the system by these offshoring companies, and the erosion of any sort of stability throughout the workforce.
As originally intended, there's nothing wrong with the H-1B and L-1 visa programs. I work for a multinational company and we often use these to bring in very talented employees who just happen to be citizens of another country. The difference here is that most of these people are designing products and providing the exceptional advanced-level knowledge that the visa was originally intended to allow. In the article, and indeed in most IT departments, this is just a flat-out replacement of a low level office job. Tata or Accenture or whoever is just bringing in the few people in their offshore centers who have the capability to learn the target job and teach it to the hundreds of other interchangeable workers they have back home. This is what I think has to be looked at; companies simply don't want to pay for any labor anymore if they don't have to and now we have an environment where they can easily avoid doing so. I like how the article puts it right in peoples' faces -- it's no longer the problem of some anonymous factory worker in the rust belt or an IT worker that makes a higher salary and has a higher perceived degree of stability than the accountants they were profiling.
What bothers me more about this is the loss of economic stability. People are going to avoid buying things if they aren't secure in their jobs, period. The 30-year mortgage was designed around the idea that people would at least stay in the house for 10 or 15 years, preferably for the full 30. Someone who's picking up stakes and moving every five years chasing the jobs around the country to the lowest-cost environments is wasting a huge amount of money in real estate transfer taxes, realtor commissions, loan fees, mortgage interest (since it's front-loaded), etc. It easily costs mid-5 figures when everything is added up to move, but most people just pay for it with their next mortgage and don't think about it. Not to mention the cost -- moving a family with kids around constantly does not make for a stable home life. Ask any military family about that; every military kid I've ever talked to says they hated moving every year or two because they never got to settle in somewhere and put down roots.
It sounds really mean to say this, but think about your average corporate worker. Not management, not a hotshot developer, just a random cubicle dweller producing reports or processing customer records. The jobs in the article, like low level corporate accounting tasks and such, were where the vast majority of average, C-student college graduates have wound up for the last 30+ years. The progression was thus - get into a big state university, party your way through 4 years and get a generic business or communications degree, show up at corporate recruiting events during your senior year, and get hired on for some sort of entry level task. If you kill off all the middle class jobs out there, what do you propose doing with these educated people who previously bought houses, paid property taxes, and felt secure enough in their lives to have a family? If there's no good answer for this, why are we bothering telling students that college is worth it in the long term? These are the questions that need to be asked, and no one is doing it because companies are only focusing on today, not 20 years from now.
I've worked in call centers, and done IT work for call centers. If you think you're being tracked at work, and you don't work in a call center, you shouldn't complain.:-) Seriously, I can't think of a more soul-crushing work environment. Every single customer interaction is timed, recorded, and used to rate performance. Some call centers make their employees ask if they can go to the bathroom, like they're back in school. And call centers are usually supervised by the worst micromanagers. Some of this is because the employees aren't exactly high level and will goof off otherwise, but a lot of the monitoring is done simply because they can, and they will use it to control every last aspect of a worker's job.
The problem with this is that the same kind of monitoring is trickling into "knowledge worker" territory. Companies hate paying high salaries, and a lot of them are very insecure, trying to make sure every single minute in the office is a productive one. I only expect this to get worse as the Milennial generation takes over, because they're used to things like gamification and "quantified self" kinds of monitoring. These technologies aren't inherently bad, but they can end up being used for purposes that people don't exactly think of. Take an example of a company giving away a health-related app or something to employees, and using it to track movement in the guise of lowering insurance costs. It's fine right up until the point it isn't...
I read "Quiet" a few years ago, and the author really does make a good point. Outgoing, gregarious people like salespeople, athletes, politicians, and so on are the ones who get the most attention simply because they're always out there. Likewise, the ultra-introverted (read: borderline autistic) also get noticed because they're so different from this norm that everyone has in their head.
The problem with rewarding extroverted behavior in education or the workplace comes when you're dealing with "normal" introverts. I'm one of these guys. I really dislike group work, and I'm not at my best working with others. However, I'm not staring at my shoes all the time either...I just -prefer- individual activities and pretend to enjoy office politics, etc. when it comes my way. I just think people need to understand that extroversion is not the default choice, and that there are people who thrive with others and people who do best on their own. For a workplace example, take the open office plan -- no quiet spaces at all, designed to encourage "collaboration." Extroverts like me who prefer to work alone find environments like this distracting, but HR dogma is pushing these through at every company lately.
I work for a professional services company. I have the title of "systems architect" which is just a fancy way of saying I have enough end-to-end knowledge to glue together software, hardware, network, storage, etc. to build a working product. I'm definitely not an "enterprise architect" which is another thing completely. EAs can almost be thought of academic positions. These are the guys who report directly to the CIO and basically keep up with all the goings-on in the field. Neither I, nor the EA, should have the title "architect" -- that implies designing a stable structure built to last hundreds of years. Nothing in IT Is stable or built to last.
When they're well trained, highly experienced, and provide relevant feedback, the EA position is a positive thing. However, I've seen it devolve into something less than positive. How many here work for large companies and see one or more of the following from the EA role? - Technology choice as religion: System X or Cloud Provider Y or Vendor Z is the EA's favorite, so therefore it will be force-fit into any situation. - "Gartner Rubber Stamp": Those guys at Gartner throw their chicken bones every year and come up with their Magic Quadrants. If Gartner or Forrester has not endorsed a technology, this type of EA will never let it surface anywhere in the organization. The big problem I have with this is that when I've seen it happen, the EA in question has no skills of their own and is simply falling back on these research firms to get their ideas. - Professional conference-goer and vendor schmoozer: Yes, you do need to do some of this as an EA. However, I've seen this taken to an extreme. These are the guys who are never actually in the office; they're always on the road at industry conventions and playing golf with the consulting firms who will be offshoring IT next year or selling a billion-dollar ERP package whose implementation will fail. All I'm saying is that the EA role is ripe for abuse by individuals who are so inclined...I've seen a large company's "Labs" division of their IT department burn through tons and tons of money and produce nothing of value whatsoever, while "regular IT" went for years with inadequate training. - Framework/process Nazi: What large-company IT denizen hasn't heard of ITIL, TOGAF, CMMI, ISO-whatever, horribly butchered Agile Waterfall dev processes, and other "enterprisey" stuff? Chances are that a lot of this is coming from the EA, advised by Reassuringly Expensive Consulting LLC. Don't get me wrong, process is good and necessary, but process taken to an extreme is horrible. - ADHD Architecture: Companies shouldn't stagnate, but they also shouldn't be pivoting towards whatever brand new, unproven, untested technology comes out every 2 months. This is the danger of the position basically being academic -- vendors are salivating at the chance to sell new shiny stuff all the time, and I in engineering have been the victim having to implement what an EA saw in a sales demo. "What do you mean it won't work in our environment? The nice sales guy who paid for my strip club visit in Vegas assured me everything would be fine! Oh, I guess we should just hire their professional services team if you aren't up to the task..."
An actual experienced, seasoned enterprise architect can help keep the ship from sinking even when new technology keeps shooting holes in the hull, as long as there's a CIO-level commitment to enforce at least some key choices made by the EA. When that EA is incompetent, or a tool of the consulting companies, or just a drain on resources, that's where the complaints surface.
It's too bad this reply is going to get buried, but this hits pretty close to home. I work for a medium size multinational in an engineering/architecture capacity. Everyone within our division works very well together, and the problems only happen when things move outside that boundary. Especially at the first level of management, where you interface with individual contributors, knowing the job is essential. I've been on both sides of the fence as both a manager of a few junior engineers and the lead architect for our team. I've also had experience with horrible managers that have had no clue what happens on a daily basis, yet they have the MBAs and the power to make multimillion dollar decisions.
If your boss doesn't know at least in broad strokes what you do, you're bound to have a bad experience. When your boss has done your job in the past or is doing a share of the team's work, they will be able to talk intelligently with both their reports and their managers, and be the "group champion" that is needed at the first layer of management. Bosses who don't know anything about the work are the ones that agree to unrealistic deadlines or dumb design decisions, and whip their subordinates to get what they want done.
Nontechnical bosses drive technical people nuts. Remember I said everyone in our division works fine together? The next layer up from that in our company might as well be political appointees for all they know about the actual work performed. Unfortunately for everyone below, this is the level where key decisions are made, like offshoring vs. in-house development, hiring permatemps vs. FTEs, etc. Stuff that looks good in MBA-land and on spreadsheets, but doesn't work out in the real world. This is why the management consulting firms target the upper-middle management layer -- none of them have a clue about anything and need consultants to back decisions that they should have just asked their lower-level managers about.
One thing I'm convinced of, based on my experience working with German companies, is that the audit trail *will* eventually lead one of two places -- the actual person who wrote the "benchmark mode" code and checked it in, or a black hole where records have mysteriously disappeared. German companies are fastidious record keepers, especially engineering companies. The CEO leaving is just to appease the shareholders -- the other departures are more telling, and if it got up to the VP of engineering level, there could be a lot more heads rolling.
Honestly, without trying to sound like a finger wagging do-gooder, this is going to be a really good case study in engineering ethics, or the lack of them. Especially in the software world, this is seriously lacking. Over-stressed corporate managers or crazy inexperienced 23-year-old Silicon Valley startup CEOs have software engineers over a barrel when it comes to ethical behavior. Without PE-style personal liability, every engineer is subject to the uncomfortable conversation that goes like, "Look, we need this feature in or the product can't ship/won't pass regulation tests/won't let us do something nefarious with customer data. And if you don't want to put it in, I have 500 H-1Bs and other hungry engineers who will be happy to."
It's too bad - most people can't afford to take a stand, and a lot just don't care enough to even if they could. They have families to feed, or debts to pay, or are worried about being blacklisted from the industry. I see a lot of posts saying the EPA was too strict with their limits -- VW has less than 3% of the US car market; they could have easily just expanded sales to China where emissions controls just don't exist at the same level. Unfortunately, the temptation is always there, and corrupt corporate executives always get away with these things, so I can see how some people think that if they just act like these guys they can join the party too.
How much of an idiot does someone have to be to invest with a guy whose nickname is "pirateat40" and who promises you returns of 7% per *week*? Doesn't anything seem fishy? Even Madoff had some people doubting his methods right up until the end, and he had a whole office dedicated to producing fake statements/trade confirmations.
It amazes me that there are people this dumb about money, AND that there's an even greater push to make people manage their own retirement accounts and health insurance purchases. Seriously people, what looks good on paper does not work well in the real world. This is how people lose their money to scam artist "financial advisers" all the time. I see at least one or two stories a month about some shady guy running off with an old widow's million dollar annuity -- most people should be forewarned to never trust independent financial advisers by now.
Hmmm, if the country weren't incorrect, I'd say you work where I do.:-) I'm in a similar boat -- lots of old stuff, lots of "don't fix what ain't broke," etc. Change does happen, but it's very slow compared to other places. I can give you some advice based on what I've been able to do:
First, for all the EoL hardware -- secure funding for an appropriately sized VMWare or similar cluster, and P2V everything that doesn't absolutely, specifically require physical hardware. (That list is getting shorter and shorter by the year, even major enterprisey software vendors like Oracle have dropped or relaxed the "must be physical kit for support" requirements.) This at least gets you on supportable hardware, and having the servers on VMs makes the next steps easier. The cost can be justified by some of the astronomical prices vendors charge for out of warranty parts and/or the cost of rolling in yet another physical box per application/function.
Next, once the hardware situation is stable, target OS upgrades. Build a test lab (realistically, just use some of the spare VMWare capacity) and work with each application owner to determine whether their app will run, won't run, or will run with tweaks on a more modern operating system. Again, OS upgrade costs can be justified by pointing out the potential cost of staying on an unpatched, unsupported OS.
Finally, once you're on stable infrastructure footing, _then_ you can look at consolidating applications, moving some work from Windows to Linux, etc. Like all the other posters mentioned, inertia will be your enemy, and especially if you come in with a "savior consultant" attitude, the entrenched IT team will never trust you or support anything you're doing. The key is to involve them, even if they're totally wrong, rather than issuing a blanket prescription for what's wrong with their stuff.
I think the work cycle is just about done evolving. For example: - Hunter-gatherers organized into agrarian societies - Mechanization and industrialization led to many farm workers transitioning to factory work - Societal pressures on education, etc. led to many factory workers transitioning to office and service work - Offshoring of all manufacturing from first world countries shifted smart people to office work, less-than-smart people to crappy service jobs - Offshoring of office work including IT shifted a bunch of the smart people to crappy service jobs or the "gig economy" - Automation or offshoring of the rest of the office work will lead to....chaos? Revolution? A country of people being paid to rate cat videos on YouTube?
Whatever it leads to, there isn't any work left for most people to move to. Smart people are still relatively OK, but there are A LOT of not-smart people holding down random corporate jobs and the few factory jobs that are left. When there's nowhere to go, and society still uses money to value things, basic income is a good idea. It also formally recognizes that there are people who just can't contribute to society at the same levels as others and provides a humane existence for them.
IBM has been doing these kinds of layoffs for decades. If you read the article, it looks like they're planning on rehiring some of the same positions. This can be either one of the following: - Jettisoning "expensive" older, experienced workers that just happen to not be working on today's buzzword set (cloud and mobile in today's case) and replacing them with fresh young "talented" Millenials - Dumping everyone overboard and just moving the work wholesale to India or similar low cost countries.
This is the MO for IBM nowadays. They're dumping hardware, but they're also trying to turn themselves into some kind of white shoe management consulting firm. To do this, you need to raise profit margins on service contracts, and this is the obvious choice,
I've worked in some very big companies and I've seen my share of dead wood. I've seen managers who no longer have a team but are still somehow on the payroll, I've seen people who literally do nothing all day because their job has been taken over by someone else, and all the other fun/scary examples. But when you're talking about 30,000 employees, that's not all dead wood. If I had to guess, they're killing off the remainder of the EDS guys who know mainframe stuff inside and out. I work in the airline industry and I'm sure those experienced guys look like a juicy target to an MBA or accountant, regardless of how much they know and how awful their Indian, Vietnamese or other replacement is going to be.
When I was in elementary school, eons ago, the most advanced computers we had were Apple ][e machines. High school gave us Macintosh SEs and IBM PS/2 model 30s. I think the difference then vs now is that we had to learn to do something useful (i.e. programming) on them to make them fun. There was LOGO, Oregon Trail and AppleWorks, but they were pretty primitive. Especially today, computers can be "consumer-only" devices and just another screen to stare blankly into.
One thing that isn't different is that the best predictor of student success is good teachers, a good school and a decent home life with caring parents. Adding computers into the classroom without a clear purpose or reason is just a waste of money. Not because it's some kind of Luddite fantasy, but because students need to learn fundamentals before they are put in front of the computer.
Take me for example -- I'm reasonably successful but have a serious math handicap that I developed in elementary school. Exactly how would a computer, especially a locked down one-way device like an iPad have helped me? I struggled though math all the way to a degree in chemistry, probably for the simple reason that I had crappy early math teachers that couldn't pound the basics into my thick skull. Good instruction is the key to good performance, especially in a subject like math where everything is cumulative. I have no idea how people are taught math in a way that makes it all make sense, but it would be interesting to see what's being tried now. I guess I'll find out soon since I have 2 kids about to enter elementary school!
The problem with exempting "autodidacts" from basic education requirements is that you can get people who claimed them learned everything themselves, but have huge holes in their fundamentals. How many "web architects" don't understand basic security? How many "systems engineers" leave huge holes open in infrastructure they build? The Anthem breach was caused by someone leaving anonymous FTP open to the Internet on a bunch of servers, for example. You can argue it was an oversight, but my opinion is that a lot of the low level basics just don't show up in people's training plans anymore. The abstraction level is so high for people starting out building apps on sanitized frameworks that people may never see the actual operations that occur under the hood.
If the classroom part of the apprenticeship covered the fundamentals that aren't covered by vendor classes, that would be good. It wouldn't eliminate problems, but it would eliminate the excuse that people didn't know. Unions run apprenticeship programs to ensure they have a future work force. Like I said before, if you eliminate the paths to the good jobs, you eliminate the ability for someone to progress from zero experience to "master craftsman." Say you get rid of all help desk and "ticket-crunching" run of the mill admin jobs and send them to India. How would you recommend someone get their start in IT once that stepping stone is eliminated?
Apprenticeship programs are exactly what is needed as the tech industry matures, for the following reasons: - Companies have an insatiable appetite for lower labor costs. Apprentices could provide this while being trained and staffing low level positions. Right now, the preferred method to get cheap labor is abuse of visa programs, where companies take advantage of foreign workers. - As a result of offshoring and outsourcing, a lot of low level positions in IT aren't as abundant as they once were, meaning that fewer opportunities exist for new entrants to learn and grow. When I started 20 years ago, I started at the help desk and moved into system admin work, then got an architect job. If you chop out the lower rungs of the ladder, no one can follow, and we're going to be relying on offshoring/outsourcing forever. - If the program is expanded industry-wide, this would _finally_ standardize entry requirements and education. This would be something that would need to be carefully researched, but limiting the supply of crap IT people ensures quality. - Something like this could ensure wage progression throughout a career. I know it's not exactly sexy to think about as a 20-something rockstar coder ninja, but older workers with experience employers like (but hate paying for) also have grown-up responsibilities to take care of.
I think the education and entry requirements are the most important. Especially in my subfields (end user computing and systems management,) the industry is loaded with snake oil "consultants", magic bullet products that get sold to CIOs, and total BS artists that jump from job to job undetected. Making sure someone knows what they're talking about and has experience is a good thing for everyone.
This is what I've found too. I know lots of contractors who parachute in someplace, get paid a huge hourly rate to fix a problem, but then disappear shortly. Most I have talked to agree that it's feast or famine and unless you're willing to accept body shop rates, you need to do your own sales and marketing constantly. And while you may be above the most petty of office politics, you still have to play the game to keep the gravy train rolling, but this time at a higher level politicking with the executives. I've heard a mix of opinions, some people say they like the money and freedom, some have such a niche skillset that they can't get "permanent" jobs anywhere, and some were forced into it because of age discrimination or similar.
It is attractive (high pay, ability to write off everything you own and buy as a business expense, etc.) I'd say any single person who loves to travel and has some significant savings would fit ideally. One guy I know does so well doing his particular thing over and over again at different companies that he just lives in hotels all year because he's never home long enough. I just don't think it's for everyone. Number one, you need to be highly skilled. Even typical BS artist consultants are skilled BSers. Second, unless you have a mail order bride or similar accommodating spousal relationship, spouses and family require attention; you can't be on the road 48 weeks out of the year. Like I said above, I like stability, knowing that I'm going to be paid in regular installments as long as I keep working hard.
There are all sorts of arguments about why Uber should or shouldn't have to act like a traditional taxi company. But in my opinion, that's less important than this question, for the broader economy and labor force. Social media, tech publications, and even the MBA rags have had all sorts of glowing stories about the "gig economy." Basically, they argue that the flexibility offered to workers by allowing them to string together contract jobs to make income outweighs the stability of traditional employment. Uber is cited as an example on the low end, day laborer style side, and of course, high flying "technology consultants" making $150+ an hour are put up as shining examples of why this should be the future of employment.
I'm far from a Luddite, but I'm a big believer in stability. Especially as you acquire a family and grown-up responsibilities, life in the US revolves around a steady income, health insurance and a way to save for retirement. The high-flying tech consultants can arrange for these things, but lately I've been seeing more of these cheerleading articles advocating for all employees to switch to this model. Most average employees don't have the motivation or skills to market themselves the way these consultants do, and they may lack the skills that would make them good contractor candidates.
It just seems to me that companies want a disposable labor force that they don't need to pay benefits, vacation, etc. for. Basically, they want to go back to a pre-Depression era where workers just turn up at the factory gates every morning and hope to get work. That may be appealing to Millenials who don't have any family ties and will move at the drop of a hat. If we have to go this way, then things like real estate transactions need to be streamlined, life has to be restructured around variable income levels, etc. and I think society isn't ready for it yet.
“It’s such a premier event in terms of young people and technology,” Mr. Barrett said. “But they appear to be more interested in applied things, like” Maker Faire, an all-ages event that showcases homemade engineering projects.
I see everyone jumping on the diversity bandwagon as an explanation, but I'm guessing one of the reasons they're not supporting this anymore is that it doesn't fit with their business model anymore. To a layman, technology is more about apps and social media now than the solid state electronics, physics and chemistry needed to power it. Of course, no one thinks about the fact that these fundamentals will have to keep advancing if we want cheaper, faster, smaller computers and phones to run those apps on. This is a pretty clear signal that Intel is an engineering company, not a science company.
Corporate basic research is pretty much dead now unfortunately -- Bell Labs is a tiny sliver of what it was, HP is almost entirely product-focused now, and who knows what's going on with IBM. Things like this, plus the fact that scientists are entering a shrinking market and treated badly, are only going to serve to reduce the number of students interested in science. US science students are seeing a lot of the same things IT workers are seeing now -- foreign students willing to work for any wage just to get the opportunity to study here, the slow demise of permanent solid employment, and a general lack of interest by the public.
It's going to take something like the Chinese colonizing Mars and extracting all its natural resources before a Soviet-style space race shocks the US out of its disinterest in science. This was one of the only good things to come out of the Cold War -- look how many state university systems were built up in the 60s and 70s and how much research got funded without griping about the cost.
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I really like working in IT - it's good to have a job where you're using your brain every day instead of just churning out reports or something similar. The major complaints I have are:
- Age discrimination -- I haven't been looking for work lately, but I'm sure getting more paranoid about keeping a job when I see stories of people who are basically unhireable after 40. I just crossed that magic threshhold and although I have tons of experience and a solid reputation behind me, I do worry about companies just not even bothering to interview me because of a stupid set of unfounded beliefs.
- Work visa program abuses -- I have absolutely no problem with companies using H-1B, L-1 or other visas to bring in super-intelligent people who are providing a key service to the company. I have a big problem with Tata, Infosys, Accenture, IBM, HP, etc. using them to bring in a cheap run-of-the-mill developer, DBA or sysadmin who could easily have been sourced locally if the company would pay reasonable rates.
- Clueless employers -- This isn't something easy to solve, but outside of Silicon Valley and extremely high-tech or enlightened companies, IT is considered a janitorial-level service. This is why the Tatas and Infosys's of the world are called in. Everywhere I've worked that has done this has had IT productivity slow to a crawl because of change management paperwork, dealing with absolutely clueless remote employees and other factors.
The only long term solution I see is a guild system...heaven forbid you call it a union in front of Libertarian IT workers. If we want a career that continues to pay off and be enjoyable to work in, education has to be standardized in at least the fundamental level, and a career progression needs to be put in place. We need to fund some lobbyists to give Congress the brown paper bags full of money they need to pass limits on work visa programs, and most importantly it needs to be done as a group. Doctors have the AMA, and it keeps their salaries high by limiting the number of medical school graduates and lobbying for favorable insurance rules. Musicians, actors and writers have their guilds that ensure they don't get screwed by studios and keep getting royalties for their work. I just don't see why it's taking so long for people to realize they have no power against any of these forces we're seeing. No one is going to win an age discrimination suit against a corporation and their well-funded legal team. It's nice that people are trying, but it will never happen. At most they'll get a small payout and be blackballed from working in the industry ever again.
I'm only kidding, I know IBM does have a pretty big basic research program. I'm just shocked it's even operating anymore given how crazy things have been at IBM these days. Why does a white shoe management consulting firm (which is what IBM is trying to turn itself into) still have a lab?
Don't get me wrong - I want them to continue and hopefully they'll get through this crazy period. But now that IBM doesn't manufacture anything other than mainframes and p-series, and no longer owns its own semiconductor fabs, I'm sure semiconductor research will be next on the chopping block.
I know that's funny money pre-IPO valuation, but come on guys, why isn't ANYONE saying "it's the dotcom bubble all over again, run! Save your investments!" Most of us lived through the first dotcom bubble and watched the market for anything technology related go insane, then collapse completely. It's going to happen again.
Github is cool right now because it's at the nexus of these social media startups, that's it. It's a useful tool, sure, but trying a silly idea like "making everyone a coder" just sounds like pets.com 23-year-old CEO hubris again. I guess I just don't see the allure of working 80-hour weeks banging out webmonkey code for yet another phone app, but that's exactly what's going to happen when these new "coders" enter the world of work and find out it's not all that exciting for the most part.
I'd much rather see advances in semiconductor technology or energy conservation or space exploration than Yet Another Social App pushing ads to eyeballs...there's better places to spend money.
One thing about Microsoft these days is their relentless push to stop you using their software on-premises, or at least out of their control. "Cloud first" means local datacenter last, so I'm expecting that they're going to be slowly increasing prices to a point where the MBAs have every argument they need to move the company to Office 365. Their hosted email is admittedly very good, but it's still not "yours" and not reliable in the case of network failure, Azure hiccups, etc. I'm definitely not cloud-averse, but I do know that it really doesn't cost that much to run an Exchange server in house -- the architecture has changed enough such that it's not total black magic anymore, and the majority of the day to day admin can be done by regular help desk guys or automation tools. So, most normal-sized places with simple email requirements can get away with one guy who's good with Exchange, and it doesn't have to be their full time job until you get to a certain number of users.
Management accounting is weird -- it makes more financial sense for a company to pay and pay for years on end for a service in a subscription format, rather than buy and hold onto a software license. Same thing goes for assets -- every big company is falling all over themselves to sell real estate only to pay someone else for the privilege of occupying what was their building...all because of accounting tricks. It's so strange because it's backwards compared to personal accounting. People usually want to pay off their cars or houses and live in them without a mortgage or car loan, for example. Businesses seem to want to go to software companies and say, "Please, let me pay you forever to use your software."
I've been doing systems work of some kind since the early 90s. The technology changes a lot, but learning the fundamental concepts early on will allow any sysadmin to continue being productive even when entire platforms get swapped out from under you. Unix --> Linux, Windows GUI --> Windows PowerShell, Physical servers --> Virtual servers, Virtual on-site servers --> cloudy virtual servers -- all these transitions can be made successfully by falling back on the fundamental tasks of controlling access, dealing with failures, providing resources, etc. that are similar at their core no matter what you're running on.
The thing that trips up a lot of sysadmins is getting bogged down in the details of one particular platform or aspect of their job and not seeing the big changes that come up. For the right kind of crazy person, this job is actually fun. I hope I'm doing something like it years from now.
I'm from the gun-averse camp, but I'm well aware that nothing can be done to silence the gun lobby in this country. It's in the Constitution, and we're too diverse a country to ever support taking it out. You could have daily mass shootings of 50+ people and the NRA would still defend gun rights, with millions of owners right behind them. Even background check laws will never be strengthened beyond what's there already because people are going to assume the government will be coming for their guns.
So, it seems to me that the next best thing would be to fix mental health care and make sure everyone has equal access to it. Who knows what happened, but it's most likely someone with an ax to grind who just happened to get triggered today. Right now, there's virtually no state-run inpatient mental health treatment beds outside of maybe the psychiatric ERs. You basically have to be Hannibal Lecter to get committed to an asylum now. There's also not that much support available in the community. Deinstitutionalization was supposed to get people out of the hospital -and- treat them on an outpatient basis, but they forgot the second part when states closed all the asylums.
One of the reasons people buy iDevices (and Macs to a certain extent) is the fact that everything is provided in a neat little package that just works. The downsides are that you don't get to question how it works, and therefore Apple can just yank your app (and therefore your direct or ad revenue) if they decide they don't like you. Ironically, this is also a strength for the platform - they control the hardware and software. Android's wild west app store is a lot more chaotic, as is their hardware outside of the Samsung/Nexus flagship models. Microsoft's store is even stranger - back when they were paying developers to write apps, anyone who could open Visual Studio hacked up a skin for YouTube or created hundreds of apps that had different names but did the same thing. By contrast, you can give an Apple product to a knowledge-free consumer and be confident that they'll at least figure out the basics and won't be tripped up by weird problems.
The fact that everything is super-miniaturized and functionality is provided on non-repairable systems-on-chips makes things hard to repair, this is true. However, I don't understand why Apple refuses to let people see behind the curtain, even if they can't do board-level repairs. I agree that there is a lot of engineering and design that goes into stuffing all those components into a tiny rounded rectangle Jobsian (Iveian?) package with no buttons, but we're not talking trade secrets here.
I do think that people should have the right to repair. Not everyone wants a throwaway appliance that is made that way for no good reason other than to make money on the next model, or the ability to charge $100 for $2 worth of flash memory.
"it's just really hard to find qualified candidates"
I can't totally disagree, as I have been on the hiring side as well as the engineering side. I guess my question is how unqualified you feel they are -- and in the case of the visa programs, how every employer feels about this. I think it's somewhat unrealistic to find a drop-in replacement for someone who knows everything about how your company works and can be productive immediately. I do systems engineering work in the airline industry -- there is a huge amount of domain knowledge that you have to gain before you can tackle the technology side.
I think companies do need to bear some of the responsibility of training their workforce. Most used to do this with no issue - they'd take a completely green college graduate with no work experience and make them productive. The visa programs just remove another incentive for companies to do this.
"By the time I quit, those thousands of jobs had been cut to hundreds and the campus was a ghost town."
This is mainly what I'm worried about, and why the article was a good thing to get in front of everybody. I've spent a long time working either directly for very large companies, or as a contractor to them doing various IT jobs. These are the kinds of companies like you describe, with huge multi-floor buildings employing thousands of people. (Basically, you're not in the "very large" category until your building/campus has its own parking garage.) The problem that not everyone seems to get is that the entire economy is based around giving thousands of people like this a way to earn money and have a stable existence. Unless you want to throw out money and switch to a Star Trek utopian society, people need to work, earn money and spend it. People in favor of squeezing out every single inefficiency in the economy love to point to big employers and say how much waste there is, how much less they could be paying their workers, etc. And yes, large companies do have some completely dead wood and less productive people -- I've seen tons of dead wood over the years. I've also seen a lot of corporate jobs that involve little more than taking a stack of input work, performing some sort of process on it, and submitting it to the next person in the chain. But...here's something to think about:
- A lot of those paper pushers own real estate and are paying property taxes.
- Many have one or more children, and are using public education to educate them while they work, which requires property taxes.
- Most, if not all, have had to purchase or lease one or more cars from car dealerships.
- Everyone pays sales tax, and car owners pay gasoline taxes to keep the roads in driveable condition, so they can get to that 10,000 person corporate campus every morning.
- Every W2 employee pays Social Security and Medicare tax, and most 1099 contractors pay it themselves as well.
- The ACA as it currently stands means we will still be on the "insurance" model for healthcare regardless of who pays for a very long time, and large employers are able to get better deals from insurers than individuals can.
- Employees who are happy and feel safe in their jobs are going to be willing to spend more money. This includes discretionary "treats" every now and then as well as vacations, and this spending powers a huge other side of the economy. Employees who are scared about being laid off next week are going to hang on to their money.
Given that large employers' employees affect a large portion of the economy, I'm all for some inefficiency. Otherwise, you're going to get the same effect that I saw growing up in the Rust Belt-- factories and steel mills that had the 70s equivalent of these corporate jobs all of a sudden stopped contributing to the economy, and everything just started grinding to a halt. Unless we want to flip the entire economy on its head, everyone is going to need a way to make money, and getting rid of these jobs is not the way to do that.
When I saw this in the Times yesterday, the thing that surprised me was that a major news outlet was reporting on this in very matter-of-fact terms. As we've seen, these discussions get heated, and for the record I'm not one of the "they took our jerbs" people for the most part. What I don't like is the abuse of the system by these offshoring companies, and the erosion of any sort of stability throughout the workforce.
As originally intended, there's nothing wrong with the H-1B and L-1 visa programs. I work for a multinational company and we often use these to bring in very talented employees who just happen to be citizens of another country. The difference here is that most of these people are designing products and providing the exceptional advanced-level knowledge that the visa was originally intended to allow. In the article, and indeed in most IT departments, this is just a flat-out replacement of a low level office job. Tata or Accenture or whoever is just bringing in the few people in their offshore centers who have the capability to learn the target job and teach it to the hundreds of other interchangeable workers they have back home. This is what I think has to be looked at; companies simply don't want to pay for any labor anymore if they don't have to and now we have an environment where they can easily avoid doing so. I like how the article puts it right in peoples' faces -- it's no longer the problem of some anonymous factory worker in the rust belt or an IT worker that makes a higher salary and has a higher perceived degree of stability than the accountants they were profiling.
What bothers me more about this is the loss of economic stability. People are going to avoid buying things if they aren't secure in their jobs, period. The 30-year mortgage was designed around the idea that people would at least stay in the house for 10 or 15 years, preferably for the full 30. Someone who's picking up stakes and moving every five years chasing the jobs around the country to the lowest-cost environments is wasting a huge amount of money in real estate transfer taxes, realtor commissions, loan fees, mortgage interest (since it's front-loaded), etc. It easily costs mid-5 figures when everything is added up to move, but most people just pay for it with their next mortgage and don't think about it. Not to mention the cost -- moving a family with kids around constantly does not make for a stable home life. Ask any military family about that; every military kid I've ever talked to says they hated moving every year or two because they never got to settle in somewhere and put down roots.
It sounds really mean to say this, but think about your average corporate worker. Not management, not a hotshot developer, just a random cubicle dweller producing reports or processing customer records. The jobs in the article, like low level corporate accounting tasks and such, were where the vast majority of average, C-student college graduates have wound up for the last 30+ years. The progression was thus - get into a big state university, party your way through 4 years and get a generic business or communications degree, show up at corporate recruiting events during your senior year, and get hired on for some sort of entry level task. If you kill off all the middle class jobs out there, what do you propose doing with these educated people who previously bought houses, paid property taxes, and felt secure enough in their lives to have a family? If there's no good answer for this, why are we bothering telling students that college is worth it in the long term? These are the questions that need to be asked, and no one is doing it because companies are only focusing on today, not 20 years from now.
I've worked in call centers, and done IT work for call centers. If you think you're being tracked at work, and you don't work in a call center, you shouldn't complain. :-) Seriously, I can't think of a more soul-crushing work environment. Every single customer interaction is timed, recorded, and used to rate performance. Some call centers make their employees ask if they can go to the bathroom, like they're back in school. And call centers are usually supervised by the worst micromanagers. Some of this is because the employees aren't exactly high level and will goof off otherwise, but a lot of the monitoring is done simply because they can, and they will use it to control every last aspect of a worker's job.
The problem with this is that the same kind of monitoring is trickling into "knowledge worker" territory. Companies hate paying high salaries, and a lot of them are very insecure, trying to make sure every single minute in the office is a productive one. I only expect this to get worse as the Milennial generation takes over, because they're used to things like gamification and "quantified self" kinds of monitoring. These technologies aren't inherently bad, but they can end up being used for purposes that people don't exactly think of. Take an example of a company giving away a health-related app or something to employees, and using it to track movement in the guise of lowering insurance costs. It's fine right up until the point it isn't...
I read "Quiet" a few years ago, and the author really does make a good point. Outgoing, gregarious people like salespeople, athletes, politicians, and so on are the ones who get the most attention simply because they're always out there. Likewise, the ultra-introverted (read: borderline autistic) also get noticed because they're so different from this norm that everyone has in their head.
The problem with rewarding extroverted behavior in education or the workplace comes when you're dealing with "normal" introverts. I'm one of these guys. I really dislike group work, and I'm not at my best working with others. However, I'm not staring at my shoes all the time either...I just -prefer- individual activities and pretend to enjoy office politics, etc. when it comes my way. I just think people need to understand that extroversion is not the default choice, and that there are people who thrive with others and people who do best on their own. For a workplace example, take the open office plan -- no quiet spaces at all, designed to encourage "collaboration." Extroverts like me who prefer to work alone find environments like this distracting, but HR dogma is pushing these through at every company lately.
I work for a professional services company. I have the title of "systems architect" which is just a fancy way of saying I have enough end-to-end knowledge to glue together software, hardware, network, storage, etc. to build a working product. I'm definitely not an "enterprise architect" which is another thing completely. EAs can almost be thought of academic positions. These are the guys who report directly to the CIO and basically keep up with all the goings-on in the field. Neither I, nor the EA, should have the title "architect" -- that implies designing a stable structure built to last hundreds of years. Nothing in IT Is stable or built to last.
When they're well trained, highly experienced, and provide relevant feedback, the EA position is a positive thing. However, I've seen it devolve into something less than positive. How many here work for large companies and see one or more of the following from the EA role?
- Technology choice as religion: System X or Cloud Provider Y or Vendor Z is the EA's favorite, so therefore it will be force-fit into any situation.
- "Gartner Rubber Stamp": Those guys at Gartner throw their chicken bones every year and come up with their Magic Quadrants. If Gartner or Forrester has not endorsed a technology, this type of EA will never let it surface anywhere in the organization. The big problem I have with this is that when I've seen it happen, the EA in question has no skills of their own and is simply falling back on these research firms to get their ideas.
- Professional conference-goer and vendor schmoozer: Yes, you do need to do some of this as an EA. However, I've seen this taken to an extreme. These are the guys who are never actually in the office; they're always on the road at industry conventions and playing golf with the consulting firms who will be offshoring IT next year or selling a billion-dollar ERP package whose implementation will fail. All I'm saying is that the EA role is ripe for abuse by individuals who are so inclined...I've seen a large company's "Labs" division of their IT department burn through tons and tons of money and produce nothing of value whatsoever, while "regular IT" went for years with inadequate training.
- Framework/process Nazi: What large-company IT denizen hasn't heard of ITIL, TOGAF, CMMI, ISO-whatever, horribly butchered Agile Waterfall dev processes, and other "enterprisey" stuff? Chances are that a lot of this is coming from the EA, advised by Reassuringly Expensive Consulting LLC. Don't get me wrong, process is good and necessary, but process taken to an extreme is horrible.
- ADHD Architecture: Companies shouldn't stagnate, but they also shouldn't be pivoting towards whatever brand new, unproven, untested technology comes out every 2 months. This is the danger of the position basically being academic -- vendors are salivating at the chance to sell new shiny stuff all the time, and I in engineering have been the victim having to implement what an EA saw in a sales demo. "What do you mean it won't work in our environment? The nice sales guy who paid for my strip club visit in Vegas assured me everything would be fine! Oh, I guess we should just hire their professional services team if you aren't up to the task..."
An actual experienced, seasoned enterprise architect can help keep the ship from sinking even when new technology keeps shooting holes in the hull, as long as there's a CIO-level commitment to enforce at least some key choices made by the EA. When that EA is incompetent, or a tool of the consulting companies, or just a drain on resources, that's where the complaints surface.
It's too bad this reply is going to get buried, but this hits pretty close to home. I work for a medium size multinational in an engineering/architecture capacity. Everyone within our division works very well together, and the problems only happen when things move outside that boundary. Especially at the first level of management, where you interface with individual contributors, knowing the job is essential. I've been on both sides of the fence as both a manager of a few junior engineers and the lead architect for our team. I've also had experience with horrible managers that have had no clue what happens on a daily basis, yet they have the MBAs and the power to make multimillion dollar decisions.
If your boss doesn't know at least in broad strokes what you do, you're bound to have a bad experience. When your boss has done your job in the past or is doing a share of the team's work, they will be able to talk intelligently with both their reports and their managers, and be the "group champion" that is needed at the first layer of management. Bosses who don't know anything about the work are the ones that agree to unrealistic deadlines or dumb design decisions, and whip their subordinates to get what they want done.
Nontechnical bosses drive technical people nuts. Remember I said everyone in our division works fine together? The next layer up from that in our company might as well be political appointees for all they know about the actual work performed. Unfortunately for everyone below, this is the level where key decisions are made, like offshoring vs. in-house development, hiring permatemps vs. FTEs, etc. Stuff that looks good in MBA-land and on spreadsheets, but doesn't work out in the real world. This is why the management consulting firms target the upper-middle management layer -- none of them have a clue about anything and need consultants to back decisions that they should have just asked their lower-level managers about.
One thing I'm convinced of, based on my experience working with German companies, is that the audit trail *will* eventually lead one of two places -- the actual person who wrote the "benchmark mode" code and checked it in, or a black hole where records have mysteriously disappeared. German companies are fastidious record keepers, especially engineering companies. The CEO leaving is just to appease the shareholders -- the other departures are more telling, and if it got up to the VP of engineering level, there could be a lot more heads rolling.
Honestly, without trying to sound like a finger wagging do-gooder, this is going to be a really good case study in engineering ethics, or the lack of them. Especially in the software world, this is seriously lacking. Over-stressed corporate managers or crazy inexperienced 23-year-old Silicon Valley startup CEOs have software engineers over a barrel when it comes to ethical behavior. Without PE-style personal liability, every engineer is subject to the uncomfortable conversation that goes like, "Look, we need this feature in or the product can't ship/won't pass regulation tests/won't let us do something nefarious with customer data. And if you don't want to put it in, I have 500 H-1Bs and other hungry engineers who will be happy to."
It's too bad - most people can't afford to take a stand, and a lot just don't care enough to even if they could. They have families to feed, or debts to pay, or are worried about being blacklisted from the industry. I see a lot of posts saying the EPA was too strict with their limits -- VW has less than 3% of the US car market; they could have easily just expanded sales to China where emissions controls just don't exist at the same level. Unfortunately, the temptation is always there, and corrupt corporate executives always get away with these things, so I can see how some people think that if they just act like these guys they can join the party too.
How much of an idiot does someone have to be to invest with a guy whose nickname is "pirateat40" and who promises you returns of 7% per *week*? Doesn't anything seem fishy? Even Madoff had some people doubting his methods right up until the end, and he had a whole office dedicated to producing fake statements/trade confirmations.
It amazes me that there are people this dumb about money, AND that there's an even greater push to make people manage their own retirement accounts and health insurance purchases. Seriously people, what looks good on paper does not work well in the real world. This is how people lose their money to scam artist "financial advisers" all the time. I see at least one or two stories a month about some shady guy running off with an old widow's million dollar annuity -- most people should be forewarned to never trust independent financial advisers by now.
Hmmm, if the country weren't incorrect, I'd say you work where I do. :-) I'm in a similar boat -- lots of old stuff, lots of "don't fix what ain't broke," etc. Change does happen, but it's very slow compared to other places. I can give you some advice based on what I've been able to do:
First, for all the EoL hardware -- secure funding for an appropriately sized VMWare or similar cluster, and P2V everything that doesn't absolutely, specifically require physical hardware. (That list is getting shorter and shorter by the year, even major enterprisey software vendors like Oracle have dropped or relaxed the "must be physical kit for support" requirements.) This at least gets you on supportable hardware, and having the servers on VMs makes the next steps easier. The cost can be justified by some of the astronomical prices vendors charge for out of warranty parts and/or the cost of rolling in yet another physical box per application/function.
Next, once the hardware situation is stable, target OS upgrades. Build a test lab (realistically, just use some of the spare VMWare capacity) and work with each application owner to determine whether their app will run, won't run, or will run with tweaks on a more modern operating system. Again, OS upgrade costs can be justified by pointing out the potential cost of staying on an unpatched, unsupported OS.
Finally, once you're on stable infrastructure footing, _then_ you can look at consolidating applications, moving some work from Windows to Linux, etc. Like all the other posters mentioned, inertia will be your enemy, and especially if you come in with a "savior consultant" attitude, the entrenched IT team will never trust you or support anything you're doing. The key is to involve them, even if they're totally wrong, rather than issuing a blanket prescription for what's wrong with their stuff.
I think the work cycle is just about done evolving. For example:
- Hunter-gatherers organized into agrarian societies
- Mechanization and industrialization led to many farm workers transitioning to factory work
- Societal pressures on education, etc. led to many factory workers transitioning to office and service work
- Offshoring of all manufacturing from first world countries shifted smart people to office work, less-than-smart people to crappy service jobs
- Offshoring of office work including IT shifted a bunch of the smart people to crappy service jobs or the "gig economy"
- Automation or offshoring of the rest of the office work will lead to....chaos? Revolution? A country of people being paid to rate cat videos on YouTube?
Whatever it leads to, there isn't any work left for most people to move to. Smart people are still relatively OK, but there are A LOT of not-smart people holding down random corporate jobs and the few factory jobs that are left. When there's nowhere to go, and society still uses money to value things, basic income is a good idea. It also formally recognizes that there are people who just can't contribute to society at the same levels as others and provides a humane existence for them.
IBM has been doing these kinds of layoffs for decades. If you read the article, it looks like they're planning on rehiring some of the same positions. This can be either one of the following:
- Jettisoning "expensive" older, experienced workers that just happen to not be working on today's buzzword set (cloud and mobile in today's case) and replacing them with fresh young "talented" Millenials
- Dumping everyone overboard and just moving the work wholesale to India or similar low cost countries.
This is the MO for IBM nowadays. They're dumping hardware, but they're also trying to turn themselves into some kind of white shoe management consulting firm. To do this, you need to raise profit margins on service contracts, and this is the obvious choice,
I've worked in some very big companies and I've seen my share of dead wood. I've seen managers who no longer have a team but are still somehow on the payroll, I've seen people who literally do nothing all day because their job has been taken over by someone else, and all the other fun/scary examples. But when you're talking about 30,000 employees, that's not all dead wood. If I had to guess, they're killing off the remainder of the EDS guys who know mainframe stuff inside and out. I work in the airline industry and I'm sure those experienced guys look like a juicy target to an MBA or accountant, regardless of how much they know and how awful their Indian, Vietnamese or other replacement is going to be.
When I was in elementary school, eons ago, the most advanced computers we had were Apple ][e machines. High school gave us Macintosh SEs and IBM PS/2 model 30s. I think the difference then vs now is that we had to learn to do something useful (i.e. programming) on them to make them fun. There was LOGO, Oregon Trail and AppleWorks, but they were pretty primitive. Especially today, computers can be "consumer-only" devices and just another screen to stare blankly into.
One thing that isn't different is that the best predictor of student success is good teachers, a good school and a decent home life with caring parents. Adding computers into the classroom without a clear purpose or reason is just a waste of money. Not because it's some kind of Luddite fantasy, but because students need to learn fundamentals before they are put in front of the computer.
Take me for example -- I'm reasonably successful but have a serious math handicap that I developed in elementary school. Exactly how would a computer, especially a locked down one-way device like an iPad have helped me? I struggled though math all the way to a degree in chemistry, probably for the simple reason that I had crappy early math teachers that couldn't pound the basics into my thick skull. Good instruction is the key to good performance, especially in a subject like math where everything is cumulative. I have no idea how people are taught math in a way that makes it all make sense, but it would be interesting to see what's being tried now. I guess I'll find out soon since I have 2 kids about to enter elementary school!
The problem with exempting "autodidacts" from basic education requirements is that you can get people who claimed them learned everything themselves, but have huge holes in their fundamentals. How many "web architects" don't understand basic security? How many "systems engineers" leave huge holes open in infrastructure they build? The Anthem breach was caused by someone leaving anonymous FTP open to the Internet on a bunch of servers, for example. You can argue it was an oversight, but my opinion is that a lot of the low level basics just don't show up in people's training plans anymore. The abstraction level is so high for people starting out building apps on sanitized frameworks that people may never see the actual operations that occur under the hood.
If the classroom part of the apprenticeship covered the fundamentals that aren't covered by vendor classes, that would be good. It wouldn't eliminate problems, but it would eliminate the excuse that people didn't know. Unions run apprenticeship programs to ensure they have a future work force. Like I said before, if you eliminate the paths to the good jobs, you eliminate the ability for someone to progress from zero experience to "master craftsman." Say you get rid of all help desk and "ticket-crunching" run of the mill admin jobs and send them to India. How would you recommend someone get their start in IT once that stepping stone is eliminated?
Apprenticeship programs are exactly what is needed as the tech industry matures, for the following reasons:
- Companies have an insatiable appetite for lower labor costs. Apprentices could provide this while being trained and staffing low level positions. Right now, the preferred method to get cheap labor is abuse of visa programs, where companies take advantage of foreign workers.
- As a result of offshoring and outsourcing, a lot of low level positions in IT aren't as abundant as they once were, meaning that fewer opportunities exist for new entrants to learn and grow. When I started 20 years ago, I started at the help desk and moved into system admin work, then got an architect job. If you chop out the lower rungs of the ladder, no one can follow, and we're going to be relying on offshoring/outsourcing forever.
- If the program is expanded industry-wide, this would _finally_ standardize entry requirements and education. This would be something that would need to be carefully researched, but limiting the supply of crap IT people ensures quality.
- Something like this could ensure wage progression throughout a career. I know it's not exactly sexy to think about as a 20-something rockstar coder ninja, but older workers with experience employers like (but hate paying for) also have grown-up responsibilities to take care of.
I think the education and entry requirements are the most important. Especially in my subfields (end user computing and systems management,) the industry is loaded with snake oil "consultants", magic bullet products that get sold to CIOs, and total BS artists that jump from job to job undetected. Making sure someone knows what they're talking about and has experience is a good thing for everyone.
This is what I've found too. I know lots of contractors who parachute in someplace, get paid a huge hourly rate to fix a problem, but then disappear shortly. Most I have talked to agree that it's feast or famine and unless you're willing to accept body shop rates, you need to do your own sales and marketing constantly. And while you may be above the most petty of office politics, you still have to play the game to keep the gravy train rolling, but this time at a higher level politicking with the executives. I've heard a mix of opinions, some people say they like the money and freedom, some have such a niche skillset that they can't get "permanent" jobs anywhere, and some were forced into it because of age discrimination or similar.
It is attractive (high pay, ability to write off everything you own and buy as a business expense, etc.) I'd say any single person who loves to travel and has some significant savings would fit ideally. One guy I know does so well doing his particular thing over and over again at different companies that he just lives in hotels all year because he's never home long enough. I just don't think it's for everyone. Number one, you need to be highly skilled. Even typical BS artist consultants are skilled BSers. Second, unless you have a mail order bride or similar accommodating spousal relationship, spouses and family require attention; you can't be on the road 48 weeks out of the year. Like I said above, I like stability, knowing that I'm going to be paid in regular installments as long as I keep working hard.
There are all sorts of arguments about why Uber should or shouldn't have to act like a traditional taxi company. But in my opinion, that's less important than this question, for the broader economy and labor force. Social media, tech publications, and even the MBA rags have had all sorts of glowing stories about the "gig economy." Basically, they argue that the flexibility offered to workers by allowing them to string together contract jobs to make income outweighs the stability of traditional employment. Uber is cited as an example on the low end, day laborer style side, and of course, high flying "technology consultants" making $150+ an hour are put up as shining examples of why this should be the future of employment.
I'm far from a Luddite, but I'm a big believer in stability. Especially as you acquire a family and grown-up responsibilities, life in the US revolves around a steady income, health insurance and a way to save for retirement. The high-flying tech consultants can arrange for these things, but lately I've been seeing more of these cheerleading articles advocating for all employees to switch to this model. Most average employees don't have the motivation or skills to market themselves the way these consultants do, and they may lack the skills that would make them good contractor candidates.
It just seems to me that companies want a disposable labor force that they don't need to pay benefits, vacation, etc. for. Basically, they want to go back to a pre-Depression era where workers just turn up at the factory gates every morning and hope to get work. That may be appealing to Millenials who don't have any family ties and will move at the drop of a hat. If we have to go this way, then things like real estate transactions need to be streamlined, life has to be restructured around variable income levels, etc. and I think society isn't ready for it yet.
“It’s such a premier event in terms of young people and technology,” Mr. Barrett said. “But they appear to be more interested in applied things, like” Maker Faire, an all-ages event that showcases homemade engineering projects.
I see everyone jumping on the diversity bandwagon as an explanation, but I'm guessing one of the reasons they're not supporting this anymore is that it doesn't fit with their business model anymore. To a layman, technology is more about apps and social media now than the solid state electronics, physics and chemistry needed to power it. Of course, no one thinks about the fact that these fundamentals will have to keep advancing if we want cheaper, faster, smaller computers and phones to run those apps on. This is a pretty clear signal that Intel is an engineering company, not a science company.
Corporate basic research is pretty much dead now unfortunately -- Bell Labs is a tiny sliver of what it was, HP is almost entirely product-focused now, and who knows what's going on with IBM. Things like this, plus the fact that scientists are entering a shrinking market and treated badly, are only going to serve to reduce the number of students interested in science. US science students are seeing a lot of the same things IT workers are seeing now -- foreign students willing to work for any wage just to get the opportunity to study here, the slow demise of permanent solid employment, and a general lack of interest by the public.
It's going to take something like the Chinese colonizing Mars and extracting all its natural resources before a Soviet-style space race shocks the US out of its disinterest in science. This was one of the only good things to come out of the Cold War -- look how many state university systems were built up in the 60s and 70s and how much research got funded without griping about the cost.