When the original Surface Pro came out, iFixit did a teardown and declared it "extremely difficult" to repair. Basically, most surfaces in the case were attached by a huge layer of epoxy, making it nearly impossible to replace screens, batteries, etc.
I think this is mainly driven by consumer demand. Consumers want cheap, small, light portable devices that have impossibly long battery lives. They also will happily pay Apple every single time a new model comes out and just throw away the old one. A manufacturer isn't going to use a screw to secure a component if glue will work, and the consumer has no expectation of replacing the component.
That said, for things that can be fixed, manufacturers do need to make service manuals available at a reasonable cost. I don't expect free, but I also don't want to hunt everywhere for it and be forced to pay an arm and a leg. Perfect example from my life -- our washer's drain pump died. I was able to find a replacement online pretty easily. However, without a YouTube video explaining how to get everything apart, it would have been extremely difficult to just figure it out. It wasn't exactly intuitive that the entire front of the washer had to come off in order to access a pump that looked like it was inside its own little cabinet. I'm sure the procedure is well documented in the service manual. In today's throwaway society, I'll bet there are a lot of people that would toss the washer and spend another $1000 for a new one simply because they're used to non-repairable gadgets. Why do that when the thing is going on 7 years' trouble free operation in a household that has to do laundry basically every day?
The cloud as it is today is just a much more flexible version of colocation. The problems don't disappear, they're just moved around. Hardware management is just one piece of the puzzle -- the rest is getting the jumble of stuff working and keeping it running. The bigger challenges are getting the provider to care when something does go awry, and controlling costs which can balloon unexpectedly. Unfortunately, the MBAs are in control, and the cloud vendors are currently promising that all these problems disappear. Worse, naysayers appear like they're protecting their jobs to the average person from the business side, so any concerns are dismissed out of hand.
Either way, cloud or no cloud, what I see happening is the decline of traditional data center jobs and the rise of integration experts. I wear lots of hats - I'm in systems integration and so I have to know a little bit about everything; my specialty is end user systems. Just like coders who can only write for the web framework they learned in coder bootcamp, IT people who know only their little corner of the environment are going to have a tougher time finding work. Previously, you could have a very lucrative string of contract work just being an expert-level EMC administrator or Cisco network guy. I know someone who is a savant-level genius on Windows group policy, of all things. There was (and still is, for now) so much proprietary knowledge in just one of these little subfields that a full career could be built out of it. Is software-defined networking or storage just a buzzword? You might think that, but cloud providers and even on-premises equipment vendors are embracing it. I know a few Cisco engineers -- some are networking geniuses and will thrive in any environment, and frankly, some of them know the Cisco stuff and that's pretty much it.
Career-wise, I see a lot more turbulence as release cycles keep getting shrunk down, SaaS starts taking over completely, etc. Companies have been doing everything in their power to promote the "gig economy", cheered on by fans of Uber and others. This has led to a drop in the number of full time IT employees, so increasingly, people have had to resort to stringing contracts together to make a "career." My secret so far has been to be the "make it work" guy, knowing enough about the end to end system to know where a problem lies. Even if I don't know how to fix that piece, I can find who does and talk intelligently to them about it. All I know is this -- even if it's not totally stable, as long as it pays enough, I would much rather have a job where I'm constantly learning new things than a report-pusher job. Most people who are suited for IT work are like this. I'm not a 23-year-old newbie either, who will happily work 80 hour weeks because they don't know any better. In fact, being older has its advantages. I've worked very hard on long-term projects only to have them canned for stupid reasons. It sucks but as long as you acquired a new skill along the way, and can adapt, that makes it better.
I think it's that we're producing fewer goods that require unskilled manufacturing labor. US GDP is heavily skewed by high-ticket military equipment, cars and airplanes (Boeing, Lockheed, GM, Ford, etc.) So instead of millions of textile and toy factories employing a huge middle class, we have massive mostly automated factories that don't employ anyone from the unskilled pool and very few from the skilled pool. One $3 billion airplane doesn't add the same number of jobs that $3 billion worth of consumer goods does.
Growing up in a Rust Belt city, I saw exactly what the first loss of manufacturing did in the 80s. Factory work wasn't glamorous, but it paid well, had good benefits based on union membership, and it was stable. Low-skilled guys were able to live a middle class life, put their kids through school, and buy things occasionally to power the local economy. Even a local bar or pizza place was affected by 5000+ workers in 3 shifts working steel mills, car plants, etc. Now it looks like the entire country is going to turn into the Rust Belt, and I'm not a big fan of that idea.
The rise of automation is painfully obvious to anyone who cares to look around. At the same time, there are no jobs that the vast majority of those affected are qualified to do. I worry that a lot of people are going to be pushed into retraining as "techies" and further dilute the talent pool. Seriously, I'm no genius and don't claim to be a rockstar ninja whatever, but I've worked with people who just don't belong near anything technical, at all. Do we really need an influx of factory workers and office drones on top of that?
I've mentioned this before, but think of your typical C student that just barely partied their way through a degree program at Big State University. Traditionally, these C students have landed and held jobs such as (1) random cubicle dweller in the bowels of a large corporation shuffling reports around, (2) low to middle management in large corporations, and (3) state and local government, processing various forms of paperwork or electronic paperwork. Although not too exciting, these jobs are stable, pay decently and allow society to function as-is. There was a _massive_ cut in these paper handling jobs in the 90s, and another in the 2000s, and a lot of these people transitioned to "knowledge workers" or similar -- some found their way to IT also. The problem is that, this time, there are fewer open positions due to automation, offshoring or cloudification of traditional IT jobs. As the amount of intelligence and motivation required to do a job increases, you shut a segment of the workforce out of it, and I believe this is happening now faster than before.
This is even worse for factory workers. Just like the paper pushers, they have a completely uncomplicated job. The bigger problem is that they lack the intelligence to move up the "value chain" even more so than their service worker brethren. I don't know how we're going to solve this macro-level hollowing out of the workforce. Basic income and other proposals aren't going to be workable politically until the vast majority of the population is miserable and un/underemployed. Hopefully we figure something out before civil war breaks out.
One of the things I've noticed is that there's a huge glut of "original content" from Netflix, Amazon, Yahoo and other unlikely sources. As far as I can tell, this is a direct consequence of the latest tech bubble. Companies promoting tablet ecosystems or subscription services are increasingly in the TV production business as well. I kind of understand Netflix producing its own content, but Amazon?? Other than promoting Prime subscriptions, what possible economic sense does that make outside of bubble-land? I guess these companies see everyone else doing it and feel they need to be doing it also.
I guess my feeling on this is that it's not just other TV content competing for people's attention. I have a job and 2 little kids -- these things, plus maintaining the household take up pretty much any time I would spend watching new TV shows. Because of this, something has to be really good for me to invest the time to watch it. Even people who watch "normal" amounts of TV are too distracted by a billion other things to commit to a new show. The landscape has shifted -- it's not the 1970s anymore where the entire population was watching hours of prime time TV every night of the week from three content providers. Now it's Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, YouTube, the Internet at large, and other things competing for attention.
This piece sounds a lot like an advertisement from a SaaS salesman. I'm in systems integration, so I hear a lot of these. "Our framework is completely extensible! Open APIs! We'll talk to any of your existing systems! We do all the work for you! Fire all those IT nerds! Just sign here and all your problems will disappear!" Now it sounds like they're moving up the stack and trying to promote snap-together replacements for in house development as well.
There was just a piece yesterday on Slashdot about how you don't need math skills to code...this just seems like a logical extension of that. Someone has to understand how these things work under the hood, what happens when they're introduced into an already overloaded data center network, etc. Yes, most phone apps and CRUD applications can be written easily by someone who knows the bare minimum of how to glue frameworks and libraries together. I see this on a regular basis when I have to make crap applications from "best of breed" consulting firms and enterprisey software companies work in the real world. The trick comes in supporting the mess you build after you release it. I've seen applications that break horribly when various security patches to frameworks occur, as well as chains of dependent stuff stop working when one item in the chain undergoes a tiny change or is configured differently. Is this grand vision of pluggable components from hundreds of vendors taking into account how brittle systems built like this are in real life? Or is the grand vision just repackaging the idea of purchaseable library components being used in software projects when you don't want to write it yourself?
Here's what I'd like to see -- make software engineering an actual branch of engineering with professional licensing. Put new developers through the same fundamentals everyone else in the profession has, to ensure that they're at least starting out at a functional level. Make PEs liable for crappy designs and bad implementations. I guarantee that once someone's reputation is on the line, you'll see fewer "JQuery boot camp" graduates banging out low quality insecure junk code. Make it a quality revolution, not an industrial revolution. If a business could be reasonably assured of a quality software product, with actual penalties if they don't get it, that would be a much better idea than promoting a future of putting 1500 ill-fitting Legos together to build an "app."
"That, and the immense boost of worker value and thus power, is the natural consequence of eliminating all government support for college education, leaving the individual to find a job. "
But in the apprenticeship system, at least in union-strong states, companies don't hire trade labor directly; they go through the union and pay union rates. Businesses would benefit overall by increasing OJT, but they don't presently. Unions run apprenticeship programs to make sure they have a future workforce to bargain with employers over. Take, for example, the IBEW or steamfitters' union. A kid out of high school is hired on as an apprentice electrician for 4 years. During that time, they get a mix of OJT and classroom training to increase their skills. Companies that take on apprentices pay a much lower wage than to a journeyman, so they get the cost advantage. At the same time, the union benefits because they have a workforce that does lots of dirty work and will eventually be able to hire them out at the full rates.
That said, unless things change dramatically, I think support for college -- for those who would benefit from it -- needs to be maintained. You don't just learn random facts in college or a narrow trade -- if you do it right, you learn a lot about how to approach problems and grow up at the same time. Unless you plan on enforcing mandatory military service or something similar, I can't think of a better way to produce a skilled, well-rounded, mature workforce.
Airlines set their schedules months in advance based on previous passenger load data, so all the aircraft and crews are committed. Most can't just not fly planes at the last second because most airlines operate on very tight schedules, where having a plane not showing up somewhere on time bubbles through the entire system. Back when airlines hadn't figured out how to get 90+% load factors on planes, you would sometimes see (especially late night) planes fly nearly empty because they were needed at that airport for the next morning. I took a transatlantic flight 3 months ago that had only 60 people in economy class, less than 1/3 capacity. The FA said that was the strangest thing she had seen in a while and they're usually over 75% full. Domestic carriers on some routes are so full they are starting to have passengers complain about overcrowding (and airline employees can't standby travel easily anymore, or get to work in some cases because of it.)
Fare data for most airlines is considered a trade secret - each carrier knows the environment they operate in, the type of travellers they attract and want to attract, and they know their internal costs. Fares are published to ATPCO, SITA and other fares management services, so it's partly an open trade secret, but the secret part is how the airline arrived at those prices.
I guess this is the next logical step from HP chipping ink cartridges to enforce an expiration date.
This must have looked like an amazing idea on some MBA's PowerPoint presentation -- manufacture the exact same thing, sell it for more in the developed world, -and- increase market share in the developing world. Just have to hope the customers don't find out about it....oops.
Airlines do this all the time. They charge more for last minute purchases or travel over holidays even though the customer is getting the same service -- moving them from point to point. Why? Because they can!! The difference in this case is that Xerox can now force customers to keep paying the higher fare.
Here's the problem -- society in North America and Europe at least has been predicated for some time on the concept of full time employment. People buy houses and cars on monthly installment plans, and pay their other obligations monthly as they come due. In the US, unemployment is a disaster. Even if you're not living paycheck to paycheck, most people are hurt financially when that steady income dries up. Worse yet, these "gig economy" supporters are gaining traction and love the idea of having a disposable workforce with no fixed costs.
A plan like a basic income, along with controls that will prevent providers of essentials (landlords, grocery stores, etc.) from simply raising prices beyond attainable levels is a good way to handle this transition. Simply cutting off full time employment will gut the traditional pension/retirement systems, and you'll also have an angry set of retirees wondering why they've saved their whole working lives. The way to make the move to unstable income easier and keep retirees happy is to basically say their savings is for the sole purpose of not having to live on the basic income. No one is ever going to propose getting rid of money as a store of value, nor are we at the point of zero scarcity that would even allow for this to be considered.
What I worry about is that, on the way to the utopian Star Trek economy, we're going to have a few French Revolution style uprisings, where the previously middle class start attacking the super-rich who are immune to any of the forces in this discussion. Something like this would help prevent this possibility. It would also acknowledge that there are some people (drug addicts, mental patients, the disabled) who are not capable of taking care of themselves, and keep them from ending up on the street like many of them are now.
I've been through this on both sides, working for the outsourcer and the outsourcee (as a US citizen for US companies.) What I've seen happen in most instances of worker replacement is this -- CIO signs a huge outsourcing deal with Tata, Infosys, CSC, IBM, HP, Xerox, HCL or one of the other huge consulting companies. This company gets a fixed price per year to deliver the same services the customer's IT department delivered, and this price is usually significantly less than they previously paid for IT employees. (We'll ignore time and materials, change orders, rework, etc. etc. that push the price back up eventually.) Because the outsourcing company has to make a profit on the deal, their task is to provide the minimum service required to avoid contract cancellation, and drive the cheapest cost possible to make it happen. Usually, about 10% of the IT department remains with the company, mostly the business analysts, project managers and other touchy-feely roles that can't be easily done remotely. Some percentage is laid off immediately, and the balance transfers over to the outsourcer. Over time, these workers begin being replaced by H-1Bs or offshore labor because of cost pressures. H-1B labor is brought in to fill roles that absolutely can't be done from some call center environment, and the remaining ones (day to day administration, help desk, etc.) get sent offshore or into a sort of sweatshop "sysadmin farm." This is directly due to cost pressure, and service suffers because of it.
Companies might "create jobs" but they're generally not IT jobs in environments like this. I'm very lucky and now have a system architect level job that I've earned through years of experience in the trenches. What I worry about is that these low level jobs that new grads learn the ropes on are getting harder to find. As it is, I'm often in the position of just telling an offshore team what to do. I don't think arrangements like this are sustainable because you're not building up the next generation of techies to take the high level jobs later on.
I don't know what's taught in MBA school, but I guarantee a good portion of it is telling them that numbers on a spreadsheet are the only data that deserves any weight. I've seen IT outsourcing fail to produce the desired results far more often than it has succeeded. If your company does anything with IT beyond keeping the lights on, you'll be disappointed with an outsourcing arrangement -- but the numbers don't lie, at least in the short term.
Here's what I'd like to see happen: IT and dev workers should create a professional organization similar to the AMA, Screen Actors' Guild. It would have to be anything but a "union" because techies have this individualist streak that prevents them from wanting to associate with others in that way. This organization would do what the AMA does -- limit the number of new entrants, lobby for laws to be passed that favor its members, and ensure professional standards. Low level tech work would be on an apprenticeship basis, which would allow people to learn from experienced folks rather than the hodgepodge of self-teaching, vendor certification, etc. High level engineers/architects would be professionals, with responsibilities similar to actual, real PEs. I know most people think they're super-special and would never dare to compare themselves to their peers, let alone associate with them. But this is the best long-term solution -- it keeps tech a well-paying career, ensures that we can bribe Congressmen the same way businesses do, etc.
I've been doing end user stuff for years, and Microsoft Office is a de facto standard. It's not because it's the absolute best product out there, but because compatibility needs to be maintained. Most -simple- documents and spreadsheets will open in one or the other. The problem comes when you get documents created with a Word template that someone got very creative with while building it. This happens a lot in engineering organizations, places that have document control/management systems, and yes, governments. Word has never had the easiest-to-decode formatting methods; that crown still goes to WordPerfect for the closed source world, and some law firms still use it today. Little stuff like page breaks, font kerning, and special positioning that don't matter in a simple document but matter a lot in a formal contract are sometimes very hard to find and fix in Word, for example.
The reality is that even though the format sucks, everyone is used to it and works around the quirks. Is it right? No, but it happens. No one outside of scientific publication is going to advocate for regular users to write their documents in TeX for example, even though that's the perfect example of a completely open, known formatting standard.
I think open source office suites are fine as long as you don't have crazy formatting needs and you don't have to share complex documents with too many Microsoft Office users. Otherwise, like the article says, users will waste time tweaking little things in their documents instead of doing productive work. If you're a small shop that has standardized on Linux, that's fine. One of the lifeblood things the company I work for does is respond to RFPs from governments. The standard response usually needs to be added to their crazily-formatted Word docs and Excel spreadsheets, and $deity help you if your use of LibreOffice is even thought of as the reason that a bid is rejected.
I routinely have scenarios where I have to take entire environments "on the road" with me. Either the access to "The Cloud" isn't available at a reasonable rate, or I have to simulate something in an environment where I control all the variables, like WAN speeds and such. The single best way to make VMWare run better on desktop hardware is to feed it more memory. The less it needs to swap out to hard drives, the more responsive it is.
With the advent of cheap SSDs and multicore, multithread CPUs, the "responsiveness" factor requires less memory than it did for normal workloads. I put that in quotes, because responsiveness is a very fuzzy quantity, pretty much defined as "does the user notice how slow it is?"
I see a lot of posts blaming the "left-leaning liberal progressive New York Times" for this whole thing, but the reality is that there are really awful companies to work for out there. I would love to work on something like AWS -- it's super-interesting to a systems management nerd like myself. Here's the problem; I'm 40 and have a wife and 2 little kids that I'd like to see every now and then. Most older techies I know who either have no children or a very understanding spouse would have no problem in an environment like this. The younger folks are a little more enthusiastic about working 80+ hour weeks, simply because they have fewer commitments outside of work and haven't seen that every place doesn't operate like this.
The problem with both SV startups, and apparently, huge companies that haven't shaken the startup culture, is that they can't run on burned-out employees and starry-eyed newbies fueling their operations forever. I'll bet that's one of the reasons Google re-orged -- potential acquisitions of other companies that don't want to buy into the free food, free services, nerf toy techie preschool culture. I work in an environment that has almost no expectation of crazy hours, and we get things done. I and most of my colleagues are on the older side, have a lot of experience in our field, and don't usually have to work nights and weekends to fix problems. In the 8 years I've been here, I've had to work one very extended day, one weekend day, and was dispatched twice with less than a week notice to fix a mess halfway around the world. Given my salary and the insane flexibility the job offers me, I can live with that level of extra work. When it starts becoming constant because managers refuse to say no to their higher-ups, then that's another story.
Another problem is that techies promoted into management can fail spectacularly at this job. I'm a lead on a small team, and I -know- it's not my primary skill. People I've seen that get promoted into management because they're good workers either adapt, or their subordinates suffer greatly. My goal is to not be the a**hole or ineffective boss, plain and simple, because I've worked for a bunch. That said, even if you don't have a people problem, corporate policies like stack ranking are stupid. One complaint I do have about our company is that they're a big "trailing trend follower" when it comes to HR. We did stack ranking for a few years after Jack Welch promoted it as the greatest thing, and lost a lot of good people before it stopped -- try telling top performers in a 4 or 5 person team that one of them has to get a bad review. We're finally starting the first inklings of waking up to realize that offshoring development isn't producing results -- I expect that to take another couple of years. And of course, we're jumping on board the Google open office trend, years after implementation elsewhere, despite everyone's pleas to the contrary.
There's good and bad in every workplace, and a good workplace for a 23 year old new grad is not necessarily the right fit for a 45 year old mom or dad.
Forgot to post this also -- one place I could definitely see this being used is in government positions. I know a lot of state university employees, and the big downside they cite for their job is all the paperwork required for time tracking, timesheets, requesting days off, etc. According to them, you really need to balance this with the benefits and job security. Add in micromanaging bosses who are also scared about losing their positions, and it can really be a drain. One quote -- "I have to be in at 8:30 every morning, without fail. I could be watching cat videos on YouTube waiting for everyone else I need to talk to to come in, but I have to be doing it at my desk."
One of the reasons that's needed is all the transparency needed for government positions. Almost on a schedule, the local rag goes out, files FOIA requests, and drags local government workers over the coals for unofficial use of government cars, incorrect time sheets, etc. You know, all those lazy people stealing the taxpayers' hard earned money and all that... (Yes, I'm aware there's corruption, but low level workers aren't the ones who benefit most.)
That said, I don't know if even tenure-style job security and a pension are worth the hassle.
It's been my experience that implementing stuff like this only works if your workforce is totally undisciplined otherwise. Call centers operate almost exclusively in this manner -- relentless data obsession, micromanaging and basically providing the worst possible work environment. Some call centers I've had experience with actually make their employees ask a supervisor if they're allowed to go to the bathroom, rather than just making themselves unavailable. Maybe the Milennial twist of "gamification" makes it more palatable, I don't know. But I do know that employees in this environment who have a choice, are reasonably skilled, and have better employment available will take it at the earliest possible opportunity. I doubt even the most social media obsessed Milennial is going to be happy enough about earning badges for doing their job to keep them from seeking less horrific working conditions.
It's similar to introducing time tracking in a professional (salaried) environment. Professional services does need to track billable hours, as is common in consulting firms, but insisting that employees be warming their chairs for exact time frames and penalizing infractions just leads to a mess. Just like the call center workers, everyone who's good leaves for less abusive workplaces, and you're left with the broken people who can't get a job anywhere else.
I sound like a Luddite when I say this, I know, but the economy needs some inefficiency. Even factory workers, who are arguably performing the most robotic of tasks, shouldn't be expected to clock in, perform their tasks at 100% efficiency for the full shift and clock out.
I'm convinced that this phase of computer history is going to be remembered as the "UX Revolution." Seriously, even Linux distributions' GUIs have turned into iOS clones. Windows 10, while better than 8, is still a disaster because Microsoft is still convinced that people want to run a phone/tablet OS on their desktop PC.
It's the deadly combination of: - Everything is a touch screen, so UI elements have to be massive and convey no meaning unless you know what the symbol means. - Millions more "normal" people have computers in their pockets now, so even if "spotty nerds" want to use them, the UI can't be made functional because it has to be dumbed down for everyone.
I agree that just letting the developers do a user interface would probably leave us at slightly above the verbosity level of vi, and a complexity level of emacs, but there's a happy medium. Not everything needs to be rendered in a flat, featureless Jony Ive rounded rectangle style. Seriously, if people who are used to computers have to look at a user interface for more than a few seconds to figure out what performs an action, and where that action is located, than form has won over function.
I'd rather have an ugly, functional UI any day. AS/400 style green screens are hideously ugly and primitive, but they're laid out well, the intelligent use of color highlights important things, and they're easy to stare at for long periods of time. I'm absolutely sick of web pages and app screens that have bright white backgrounds and tiny light grey text, chosen simply because it's pretty.
I'm just glad they didn't totally abandon business customers. Running a constantly-changing OS is fine for a home machine that browses the web, makes Skype calls, and watches movies. It's even tolerable in some office situations where all the person is doing is Office documents with no systems interaction beyond email. When you build a software component on top of an OS, however, and come to rely on things working a certain way, that's where the Agile thing breaks down.
The company I work for sells a suite of middleware that relies heavily on some of the internals of Windows. Changing out anything is a risk that the product doesn't work as expected. It's one of those things where Windows Embedded might be a better choice, save for the fact that we need to run an actual end user system on top of this stuff. Microsoft's been really quiet about this, but it seems like the LTSB option is the closest thing to the old RTM/Service Pack model.
Absolutely. I work for a multinational that has to get equipment into...less than reputable...parts of the world. If you try to ship something yourself to some countries, you can guarantee that most of it will be "lost in transit" or stuck in customs for months and months while a whole network of people get paid to get it through.
Companies that do lots of international shipping have to rely on "freight forwarders" These are the companies that actually pay the bribes, know the right contacts to get stuff through customs, etc. This way, the company doing the shipping is "protected" from directly bribing officials. As you can imagine, shipping bulk goods this way is not at all cheap!
I know I sound cynical, but enterprise software vendors can't make these multimillion dollar deals happen without greasing a few palms. These software packages are so awful and require millions more in consulting beyond the license price -- I can't see any technically oriented person supporting their purchase without some inducement. In this case, it was a direct bribe that the sales team thought they could get away with.
Most software companies slip these things under the table through channels that don't legally qualify as bribes. Ever wonder why horrible expensive software packages are sometimes called "golf course ware?" It's a dirty business and things like paying for some kid of an exec's school tuition, or rounds and rounds of strip club visits, or golf, or "educational product seminars" in Aruba is just cost of sales for these companies. It's kind of like lobbyists -- they can't legally hand a Congressperson a paper bag full of money, but they can sure make things happen for them behind the scenes that are the equivalent of the paper bag.
Part of me wishes I was a CTO so I could just line up the vendors and collect bribe after bribe...oops, sorry, "favor" after "favor." Then again, I've worked with some of this horrible software (SAP, Oracle, etc.) and the awful botton-of-the-barrel offshored or H-1B management consultants they send in to "implement" them. No wonder everyone outside of large businesses wants nothing to do with big monolithic packages!!
What I'm finding is this: - Really good people with lots of experience are having an easy time finding work. (I get recruitment emails at least 2 or 3 times a week and haven't updated any of my resume/linkedin stuff in 3 years, nor have expressed any interest in a new job right now.) - Lower-skill people or those with less experience are really having difficulty, especially new grads.
I attribute this to a couple of things. First, the nature of the work is changing somewhat, and companies are increasingly looking to hire people who possess a lot of experience and multiple skills. Second and more ominous, the low level jobs are increasingly being offshored, outsourced or eliminated. As an experienced guy, I don't like this because it doesn't allow for succession planning. New grads and new entrants into the field need those jobs at the low end to learn and grow into the experienced peoples' roles. I was a help desk person and a desktop support guy for quite a while before I got my first system admin job, for example. Let's say everyone migrates all their data to the cloud. This means that all the data center jobs move to the cloud companies, who mainly roll their own hardware and have endless fields of servers that are just swapped out when they fail. Those data center jobs then become break/fix maintenance jobs, making it difficult to make the natural progression that data center operations guys normally go through -- system admin, architect, etc. once they learn the ropes and the end-to-end of everything.
It's definitely going to be a big change coming up. Wages are going to be driven down even further, and you're going to see a binomial distribution that's more pronounced than it is now. I think the layoffs the article is referring to are definitely hitting the lower end of the IT job spectrum harder than the higher end. The company I work for is notoriously stingy with headcount and even they are hiring experienced people right now.
I've had the fortune (or misfortune depending on your definiton) to work on a lot of companies' systems and have had a very "cross platform" career. Oracle's licesning, which has gotten worse in recent years, is just now starting to send most companies looking for other ways to do the same thing. The problem is that Oracle is still the de facto standard for "enterprisey" software projects. A lot of this is legacy -- for quite some time the only mainstream database systems were DB2 on AIX or pSeries/zSeries, and Oracle on Solaris. You might say that's ancient history and you're right -- SQL Server is good enough for most workloads that need a "fully supported" DB and Linux is a viable alternative to Solaris. But I can tell you that these applications don't just die -- they're alive and more functionality is being built on top of them. Most big enterprise applications (SAP, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and so on) are either Oracle products or are integrated to run on Oracle middleware/databases. Most of the big outsourcing firms' "standard stacks" revolve around Oracle DB running on Linux or Solaris, and J2EE running WebLogic. This makes perfect sense; outsourcers can pick up CS grads who know Java for cheap, and J2EE's nature lets you parcel out and offshore pieces to whoever is cheapest that week.
Since most government IT is outsourced both in the UK and the US, I would say that it would be very difficult to replace Oracle without re-architecting whole applications. Some stuff is easy - you don't need a Solaris license to run Apache for example. Some is not -- just like SQL Server, Oracle makes it very easy to slip into "Oracle-only" development mode when interacting with databases and middleware. Once that dependency is in place, it either has to be identified and pulled out, or it just keeps chugging along. And since systems like this are not sexy (customs processing, DMV records, tax collection, etc.) they don't get seen by the public very much.
I already see a lot of posts that basically say, "Why should I have to pay for someone else's paternity leave?" This is a good move that will definitely be controversial to the young, single techie set. If the demographics are to be believed, Millenials are having even fewer children, much of the reason being that they don't feel stable enough to settle down and, well, procreate. There is also a huge number of younger people who hate even the idea of having children, so you often hear complaints like, "Why don't I get to take a day off when you have to take care of your sick kid?" "Why can't you work 60 hours a week like the rest of the single people?" "Oh great, the procreators are raising prices for everyone."
I have 2 kids, 4 and 2, so I'm just climbing out of the early childhood no-sleep, constant work Twilight Zone of fatherhood. One of the reasons I stay with my current employer is flexibility. We don't have an official paternity leave policy, but I do have a boss and several colleagues who've been through this whole thing before. My boss has basically told me he knows I'll have to be out sometimes, and have days I'm not productive and is completely supportive of that because I more than make up for it later on. We're not a Silicon Valley startup managed and staffed by single 20-something males, so I think that accounts for some of the difference. The company I work for has a pretty long average tenure basically because the work we do means we can't just burn through developers and IT people on a revolving door basis. People need to stick around and learn/master the problem domain. The company isn't the most in-tune HR-wise, but line management knows what's needed to keep the ship moving.
I doubt a Scandinavian style parental leave policy will ever fly in Libertarianland, but it would be nice for more employers to do something other than "burn through all your vacation, then back to work" or basically do what mine does -- cutting new dads and moms slack when needed. As long as people don't abuse it, it works. If the economy has shifted to the point where both parents need to work to avoid a looming financial disaster and not be miserable, then this seems like a good compromise. I think a company putting this into official HR policy gives themselves a good recruiting tool.
I know/. is the home of social Darwinists on the Internet, but one of the things a pension does is shift the enormous responsibility of retirement planning off of ill prepared workers and onto a firm that's capable of managing long term risk.
Just because you or your colleagues can understand the differences between retirement plan types, the foolhardiness of cashing it in early, or what a 401(k) loan costs you in potential lost returns doesn't mean that everyone can. Yes, most large employers have simpler options with 401(k)s now, and you have the basic choice of age appropriate, stable, risky or "OMG scary" funds, but smaller employers can set up retirement accounts that can basically invest in whatever they want. I remember reading about a long-term employee of a dental practice who lost everything in the 2008 crash because their only retirement investment options involved the dentist's various real estate dealings.
Contrast this with a pension, usually invested by professionals using actuarial models, who have decades of time to fix screw-ups, and automatically manage peoples' contributions. It's similar to Social Security -- no matter what anyone says, there will be at least some benefits available to retirees. They won't be as generous as payouts from an incredibly lucky or financially savvy 401(k) investor, but they'll be there. The thing that bothers me is that people who don't understand finances are the best suited to pensions, but they're losing this as an option. If I were growing up in the 60s, and got a plumbers' apprenticeship out of high school, which do you think would appeal more to me? (a) "Contribute $x per week to the union pension fund, and when you retire, you are guaranteed receive at least $y * (years of service)." (b) "Here's a mound of paperwork with financial terms you won't understand. Choose a percentage of your income to save. (What's a percentage?) Choose a fund, here's the fees but don't worry about fees. Past performance is no guarantee of future results."
Sometimes, people who are techie and live/work around other techies lose sight of the fact that there are millions of other people in society with them that don't have the capability to understand these things.
Just because someone attends 4 years of college, doesn't mean they learn anything. I somewhat agree, and I agree with you that scholarships and loans can help someone who has talent but no money. The problem is early access to resources that would develop talented individuals. In other words, if you're smart but stuck in a crappy school, live in a bad neighborhood and have a bad home life, it's going to be significantly harder to get yourself to the point where you would even think about pushing yourself in the sciences.
One thing that I don't agree with is completely dismissing the worth of a well rounded degree and the college experience. Some of the best system admins I've known aren't CS students who went to MIT -- they're linguistics majors, economics majors, etc. I studied chemistry in school for the simple reason that I wasn't as good at math as my engineering peers and didn't want to risk flunking out of an engineering or CS curriculum. It's extremely possible for people to waste 4+ years of their parents' money attending frat parties and come out with a generic business degree to show for it. But in my case and a lot of other peoples' cases, that time between school and the real world makes people more mature, teaches them to deal with others, deal with aspects of a messed up system, and other life skills. I went to a large state university and this goes double in that case -- there, you're a number and you have to work to keep up and seek out help/opportunities. I would think this would be even more applicable in the age of helicopter parenting -- taking someone who has had everything fixed for them and suddenly dumping them into an apprenticeship or OJT wouldn't be the right thing to do. Plus, even if you learn very little in your general education courses, you're -slightly- more rounded than someone who did an electrician apprenticeship, or an ITT Tech style degree. This makes you, IMO, a better conversation partner, student of the world, etc. Yes, some people get nothing out of it, but that doesn't mean no one does. The thing that sucks is the massive debt it puts some people in. If you make it into the Ivy League universities, you're set for life and even if you do run up a big bill, that alumni network just doesn't let people fail. But running up $150K+ for a small private college degree with no name recognition is not as sustainable as it once was.
Slashdot Mirror
When the original Surface Pro came out, iFixit did a teardown and declared it "extremely difficult" to repair. Basically, most surfaces in the case were attached by a huge layer of epoxy, making it nearly impossible to replace screens, batteries, etc.
I think this is mainly driven by consumer demand. Consumers want cheap, small, light portable devices that have impossibly long battery lives. They also will happily pay Apple every single time a new model comes out and just throw away the old one. A manufacturer isn't going to use a screw to secure a component if glue will work, and the consumer has no expectation of replacing the component.
That said, for things that can be fixed, manufacturers do need to make service manuals available at a reasonable cost. I don't expect free, but I also don't want to hunt everywhere for it and be forced to pay an arm and a leg. Perfect example from my life -- our washer's drain pump died. I was able to find a replacement online pretty easily. However, without a YouTube video explaining how to get everything apart, it would have been extremely difficult to just figure it out. It wasn't exactly intuitive that the entire front of the washer had to come off in order to access a pump that looked like it was inside its own little cabinet. I'm sure the procedure is well documented in the service manual. In today's throwaway society, I'll bet there are a lot of people that would toss the washer and spend another $1000 for a new one simply because they're used to non-repairable gadgets. Why do that when the thing is going on 7 years' trouble free operation in a household that has to do laundry basically every day?
The cloud as it is today is just a much more flexible version of colocation. The problems don't disappear, they're just moved around. Hardware management is just one piece of the puzzle -- the rest is getting the jumble of stuff working and keeping it running. The bigger challenges are getting the provider to care when something does go awry, and controlling costs which can balloon unexpectedly. Unfortunately, the MBAs are in control, and the cloud vendors are currently promising that all these problems disappear. Worse, naysayers appear like they're protecting their jobs to the average person from the business side, so any concerns are dismissed out of hand.
Either way, cloud or no cloud, what I see happening is the decline of traditional data center jobs and the rise of integration experts. I wear lots of hats - I'm in systems integration and so I have to know a little bit about everything; my specialty is end user systems. Just like coders who can only write for the web framework they learned in coder bootcamp, IT people who know only their little corner of the environment are going to have a tougher time finding work. Previously, you could have a very lucrative string of contract work just being an expert-level EMC administrator or Cisco network guy. I know someone who is a savant-level genius on Windows group policy, of all things. There was (and still is, for now) so much proprietary knowledge in just one of these little subfields that a full career could be built out of it. Is software-defined networking or storage just a buzzword? You might think that, but cloud providers and even on-premises equipment vendors are embracing it. I know a few Cisco engineers -- some are networking geniuses and will thrive in any environment, and frankly, some of them know the Cisco stuff and that's pretty much it.
Career-wise, I see a lot more turbulence as release cycles keep getting shrunk down, SaaS starts taking over completely, etc. Companies have been doing everything in their power to promote the "gig economy", cheered on by fans of Uber and others. This has led to a drop in the number of full time IT employees, so increasingly, people have had to resort to stringing contracts together to make a "career." My secret so far has been to be the "make it work" guy, knowing enough about the end to end system to know where a problem lies. Even if I don't know how to fix that piece, I can find who does and talk intelligently to them about it. All I know is this -- even if it's not totally stable, as long as it pays enough, I would much rather have a job where I'm constantly learning new things than a report-pusher job. Most people who are suited for IT work are like this. I'm not a 23-year-old newbie either, who will happily work 80 hour weeks because they don't know any better. In fact, being older has its advantages. I've worked very hard on long-term projects only to have them canned for stupid reasons. It sucks but as long as you acquired a new skill along the way, and can adapt, that makes it better.
I think it's that we're producing fewer goods that require unskilled manufacturing labor. US GDP is heavily skewed by high-ticket military equipment, cars and airplanes (Boeing, Lockheed, GM, Ford, etc.) So instead of millions of textile and toy factories employing a huge middle class, we have massive mostly automated factories that don't employ anyone from the unskilled pool and very few from the skilled pool. One $3 billion airplane doesn't add the same number of jobs that $3 billion worth of consumer goods does.
Growing up in a Rust Belt city, I saw exactly what the first loss of manufacturing did in the 80s. Factory work wasn't glamorous, but it paid well, had good benefits based on union membership, and it was stable. Low-skilled guys were able to live a middle class life, put their kids through school, and buy things occasionally to power the local economy. Even a local bar or pizza place was affected by 5000+ workers in 3 shifts working steel mills, car plants, etc. Now it looks like the entire country is going to turn into the Rust Belt, and I'm not a big fan of that idea.
The rise of automation is painfully obvious to anyone who cares to look around. At the same time, there are no jobs that the vast majority of those affected are qualified to do. I worry that a lot of people are going to be pushed into retraining as "techies" and further dilute the talent pool. Seriously, I'm no genius and don't claim to be a rockstar ninja whatever, but I've worked with people who just don't belong near anything technical, at all. Do we really need an influx of factory workers and office drones on top of that?
I've mentioned this before, but think of your typical C student that just barely partied their way through a degree program at Big State University. Traditionally, these C students have landed and held jobs such as (1) random cubicle dweller in the bowels of a large corporation shuffling reports around, (2) low to middle management in large corporations, and (3) state and local government, processing various forms of paperwork or electronic paperwork. Although not too exciting, these jobs are stable, pay decently and allow society to function as-is. There was a _massive_ cut in these paper handling jobs in the 90s, and another in the 2000s, and a lot of these people transitioned to "knowledge workers" or similar -- some found their way to IT also. The problem is that, this time, there are fewer open positions due to automation, offshoring or cloudification of traditional IT jobs. As the amount of intelligence and motivation required to do a job increases, you shut a segment of the workforce out of it, and I believe this is happening now faster than before.
This is even worse for factory workers. Just like the paper pushers, they have a completely uncomplicated job. The bigger problem is that they lack the intelligence to move up the "value chain" even more so than their service worker brethren. I don't know how we're going to solve this macro-level hollowing out of the workforce. Basic income and other proposals aren't going to be workable politically until the vast majority of the population is miserable and un/underemployed. Hopefully we figure something out before civil war breaks out.
One of the things I've noticed is that there's a huge glut of "original content" from Netflix, Amazon, Yahoo and other unlikely sources. As far as I can tell, this is a direct consequence of the latest tech bubble. Companies promoting tablet ecosystems or subscription services are increasingly in the TV production business as well. I kind of understand Netflix producing its own content, but Amazon?? Other than promoting Prime subscriptions, what possible economic sense does that make outside of bubble-land? I guess these companies see everyone else doing it and feel they need to be doing it also.
I guess my feeling on this is that it's not just other TV content competing for people's attention. I have a job and 2 little kids -- these things, plus maintaining the household take up pretty much any time I would spend watching new TV shows. Because of this, something has to be really good for me to invest the time to watch it. Even people who watch "normal" amounts of TV are too distracted by a billion other things to commit to a new show. The landscape has shifted -- it's not the 1970s anymore where the entire population was watching hours of prime time TV every night of the week from three content providers. Now it's Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, YouTube, the Internet at large, and other things competing for attention.
This piece sounds a lot like an advertisement from a SaaS salesman. I'm in systems integration, so I hear a lot of these. "Our framework is completely extensible! Open APIs! We'll talk to any of your existing systems! We do all the work for you! Fire all those IT nerds! Just sign here and all your problems will disappear!" Now it sounds like they're moving up the stack and trying to promote snap-together replacements for in house development as well.
There was just a piece yesterday on Slashdot about how you don't need math skills to code...this just seems like a logical extension of that. Someone has to understand how these things work under the hood, what happens when they're introduced into an already overloaded data center network, etc. Yes, most phone apps and CRUD applications can be written easily by someone who knows the bare minimum of how to glue frameworks and libraries together. I see this on a regular basis when I have to make crap applications from "best of breed" consulting firms and enterprisey software companies work in the real world. The trick comes in supporting the mess you build after you release it. I've seen applications that break horribly when various security patches to frameworks occur, as well as chains of dependent stuff stop working when one item in the chain undergoes a tiny change or is configured differently. Is this grand vision of pluggable components from hundreds of vendors taking into account how brittle systems built like this are in real life? Or is the grand vision just repackaging the idea of purchaseable library components being used in software projects when you don't want to write it yourself?
Here's what I'd like to see -- make software engineering an actual branch of engineering with professional licensing. Put new developers through the same fundamentals everyone else in the profession has, to ensure that they're at least starting out at a functional level. Make PEs liable for crappy designs and bad implementations. I guarantee that once someone's reputation is on the line, you'll see fewer "JQuery boot camp" graduates banging out low quality insecure junk code. Make it a quality revolution, not an industrial revolution. If a business could be reasonably assured of a quality software product, with actual penalties if they don't get it, that would be a much better idea than promoting a future of putting 1500 ill-fitting Legos together to build an "app."
"That, and the immense boost of worker value and thus power, is the natural consequence of eliminating all government support for college education, leaving the individual to find a job. "
But in the apprenticeship system, at least in union-strong states, companies don't hire trade labor directly; they go through the union and pay union rates. Businesses would benefit overall by increasing OJT, but they don't presently. Unions run apprenticeship programs to make sure they have a future workforce to bargain with employers over. Take, for example, the IBEW or steamfitters' union. A kid out of high school is hired on as an apprentice electrician for 4 years. During that time, they get a mix of OJT and classroom training to increase their skills. Companies that take on apprentices pay a much lower wage than to a journeyman, so they get the cost advantage. At the same time, the union benefits because they have a workforce that does lots of dirty work and will eventually be able to hire them out at the full rates.
That said, unless things change dramatically, I think support for college -- for those who would benefit from it -- needs to be maintained. You don't just learn random facts in college or a narrow trade -- if you do it right, you learn a lot about how to approach problems and grow up at the same time. Unless you plan on enforcing mandatory military service or something similar, I can't think of a better way to produce a skilled, well-rounded, mature workforce.
Airlines set their schedules months in advance based on previous passenger load data, so all the aircraft and crews are committed. Most can't just not fly planes at the last second because most airlines operate on very tight schedules, where having a plane not showing up somewhere on time bubbles through the entire system. Back when airlines hadn't figured out how to get 90+% load factors on planes, you would sometimes see (especially late night) planes fly nearly empty because they were needed at that airport for the next morning. I took a transatlantic flight 3 months ago that had only 60 people in economy class, less than 1/3 capacity. The FA said that was the strangest thing she had seen in a while and they're usually over 75% full. Domestic carriers on some routes are so full they are starting to have passengers complain about overcrowding (and airline employees can't standby travel easily anymore, or get to work in some cases because of it.)
Fare data for most airlines is considered a trade secret - each carrier knows the environment they operate in, the type of travellers they attract and want to attract, and they know their internal costs. Fares are published to ATPCO, SITA and other fares management services, so it's partly an open trade secret, but the secret part is how the airline arrived at those prices.
I guess this is the next logical step from HP chipping ink cartridges to enforce an expiration date.
This must have looked like an amazing idea on some MBA's PowerPoint presentation -- manufacture the exact same thing, sell it for more in the developed world, -and- increase market share in the developing world. Just have to hope the customers don't find out about it....oops.
Airlines do this all the time. They charge more for last minute purchases or travel over holidays even though the customer is getting the same service -- moving them from point to point. Why? Because they can!! The difference in this case is that Xerox can now force customers to keep paying the higher fare.
Go read this: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse...
Here's the problem -- society in North America and Europe at least has been predicated for some time on the concept of full time employment. People buy houses and cars on monthly installment plans, and pay their other obligations monthly as they come due. In the US, unemployment is a disaster. Even if you're not living paycheck to paycheck, most people are hurt financially when that steady income dries up. Worse yet, these "gig economy" supporters are gaining traction and love the idea of having a disposable workforce with no fixed costs.
A plan like a basic income, along with controls that will prevent providers of essentials (landlords, grocery stores, etc.) from simply raising prices beyond attainable levels is a good way to handle this transition. Simply cutting off full time employment will gut the traditional pension/retirement systems, and you'll also have an angry set of retirees wondering why they've saved their whole working lives. The way to make the move to unstable income easier and keep retirees happy is to basically say their savings is for the sole purpose of not having to live on the basic income. No one is ever going to propose getting rid of money as a store of value, nor are we at the point of zero scarcity that would even allow for this to be considered.
What I worry about is that, on the way to the utopian Star Trek economy, we're going to have a few French Revolution style uprisings, where the previously middle class start attacking the super-rich who are immune to any of the forces in this discussion. Something like this would help prevent this possibility. It would also acknowledge that there are some people (drug addicts, mental patients, the disabled) who are not capable of taking care of themselves, and keep them from ending up on the street like many of them are now.
I've been through this on both sides, working for the outsourcer and the outsourcee (as a US citizen for US companies.) What I've seen happen in most instances of worker replacement is this -- CIO signs a huge outsourcing deal with Tata, Infosys, CSC, IBM, HP, Xerox, HCL or one of the other huge consulting companies. This company gets a fixed price per year to deliver the same services the customer's IT department delivered, and this price is usually significantly less than they previously paid for IT employees. (We'll ignore time and materials, change orders, rework, etc. etc. that push the price back up eventually.) Because the outsourcing company has to make a profit on the deal, their task is to provide the minimum service required to avoid contract cancellation, and drive the cheapest cost possible to make it happen. Usually, about 10% of the IT department remains with the company, mostly the business analysts, project managers and other touchy-feely roles that can't be easily done remotely. Some percentage is laid off immediately, and the balance transfers over to the outsourcer. Over time, these workers begin being replaced by H-1Bs or offshore labor because of cost pressures. H-1B labor is brought in to fill roles that absolutely can't be done from some call center environment, and the remaining ones (day to day administration, help desk, etc.) get sent offshore or into a sort of sweatshop "sysadmin farm." This is directly due to cost pressure, and service suffers because of it.
Companies might "create jobs" but they're generally not IT jobs in environments like this. I'm very lucky and now have a system architect level job that I've earned through years of experience in the trenches. What I worry about is that these low level jobs that new grads learn the ropes on are getting harder to find. As it is, I'm often in the position of just telling an offshore team what to do. I don't think arrangements like this are sustainable because you're not building up the next generation of techies to take the high level jobs later on.
I don't know what's taught in MBA school, but I guarantee a good portion of it is telling them that numbers on a spreadsheet are the only data that deserves any weight. I've seen IT outsourcing fail to produce the desired results far more often than it has succeeded. If your company does anything with IT beyond keeping the lights on, you'll be disappointed with an outsourcing arrangement -- but the numbers don't lie, at least in the short term.
Here's what I'd like to see happen: IT and dev workers should create a professional organization similar to the AMA, Screen Actors' Guild. It would have to be anything but a "union" because techies have this individualist streak that prevents them from wanting to associate with others in that way. This organization would do what the AMA does -- limit the number of new entrants, lobby for laws to be passed that favor its members, and ensure professional standards. Low level tech work would be on an apprenticeship basis, which would allow people to learn from experienced folks rather than the hodgepodge of self-teaching, vendor certification, etc. High level engineers/architects would be professionals, with responsibilities similar to actual, real PEs. I know most people think they're super-special and would never dare to compare themselves to their peers, let alone associate with them. But this is the best long-term solution -- it keeps tech a well-paying career, ensures that we can bribe Congressmen the same way businesses do, etc.
I've been doing end user stuff for years, and Microsoft Office is a de facto standard. It's not because it's the absolute best product out there, but because compatibility needs to be maintained. Most -simple- documents and spreadsheets will open in one or the other. The problem comes when you get documents created with a Word template that someone got very creative with while building it. This happens a lot in engineering organizations, places that have document control/management systems, and yes, governments. Word has never had the easiest-to-decode formatting methods; that crown still goes to WordPerfect for the closed source world, and some law firms still use it today. Little stuff like page breaks, font kerning, and special positioning that don't matter in a simple document but matter a lot in a formal contract are sometimes very hard to find and fix in Word, for example.
The reality is that even though the format sucks, everyone is used to it and works around the quirks. Is it right? No, but it happens. No one outside of scientific publication is going to advocate for regular users to write their documents in TeX for example, even though that's the perfect example of a completely open, known formatting standard.
I think open source office suites are fine as long as you don't have crazy formatting needs and you don't have to share complex documents with too many Microsoft Office users. Otherwise, like the article says, users will waste time tweaking little things in their documents instead of doing productive work. If you're a small shop that has standardized on Linux, that's fine. One of the lifeblood things the company I work for does is respond to RFPs from governments. The standard response usually needs to be added to their crazily-formatted Word docs and Excel spreadsheets, and $deity help you if your use of LibreOffice is even thought of as the reason that a bid is rejected.
I routinely have scenarios where I have to take entire environments "on the road" with me. Either the access to "The Cloud" isn't available at a reasonable rate, or I have to simulate something in an environment where I control all the variables, like WAN speeds and such. The single best way to make VMWare run better on desktop hardware is to feed it more memory. The less it needs to swap out to hard drives, the more responsive it is.
With the advent of cheap SSDs and multicore, multithread CPUs, the "responsiveness" factor requires less memory than it did for normal workloads. I put that in quotes, because responsiveness is a very fuzzy quantity, pretty much defined as "does the user notice how slow it is?"
I see a lot of posts blaming the "left-leaning liberal progressive New York Times" for this whole thing, but the reality is that there are really awful companies to work for out there. I would love to work on something like AWS -- it's super-interesting to a systems management nerd like myself. Here's the problem; I'm 40 and have a wife and 2 little kids that I'd like to see every now and then. Most older techies I know who either have no children or a very understanding spouse would have no problem in an environment like this. The younger folks are a little more enthusiastic about working 80+ hour weeks, simply because they have fewer commitments outside of work and haven't seen that every place doesn't operate like this.
The problem with both SV startups, and apparently, huge companies that haven't shaken the startup culture, is that they can't run on burned-out employees and starry-eyed newbies fueling their operations forever. I'll bet that's one of the reasons Google re-orged -- potential acquisitions of other companies that don't want to buy into the free food, free services, nerf toy techie preschool culture. I work in an environment that has almost no expectation of crazy hours, and we get things done. I and most of my colleagues are on the older side, have a lot of experience in our field, and don't usually have to work nights and weekends to fix problems. In the 8 years I've been here, I've had to work one very extended day, one weekend day, and was dispatched twice with less than a week notice to fix a mess halfway around the world. Given my salary and the insane flexibility the job offers me, I can live with that level of extra work. When it starts becoming constant because managers refuse to say no to their higher-ups, then that's another story.
Another problem is that techies promoted into management can fail spectacularly at this job. I'm a lead on a small team, and I -know- it's not my primary skill. People I've seen that get promoted into management because they're good workers either adapt, or their subordinates suffer greatly. My goal is to not be the a**hole or ineffective boss, plain and simple, because I've worked for a bunch. That said, even if you don't have a people problem, corporate policies like stack ranking are stupid. One complaint I do have about our company is that they're a big "trailing trend follower" when it comes to HR. We did stack ranking for a few years after Jack Welch promoted it as the greatest thing, and lost a lot of good people before it stopped -- try telling top performers in a 4 or 5 person team that one of them has to get a bad review. We're finally starting the first inklings of waking up to realize that offshoring development isn't producing results -- I expect that to take another couple of years. And of course, we're jumping on board the Google open office trend, years after implementation elsewhere, despite everyone's pleas to the contrary.
There's good and bad in every workplace, and a good workplace for a 23 year old new grad is not necessarily the right fit for a 45 year old mom or dad.
Forgot to post this also -- one place I could definitely see this being used is in government positions. I know a lot of state university employees, and the big downside they cite for their job is all the paperwork required for time tracking, timesheets, requesting days off, etc. According to them, you really need to balance this with the benefits and job security. Add in micromanaging bosses who are also scared about losing their positions, and it can really be a drain. One quote -- "I have to be in at 8:30 every morning, without fail. I could be watching cat videos on YouTube waiting for everyone else I need to talk to to come in, but I have to be doing it at my desk."
One of the reasons that's needed is all the transparency needed for government positions. Almost on a schedule, the local rag goes out, files FOIA requests, and drags local government workers over the coals for unofficial use of government cars, incorrect time sheets, etc. You know, all those lazy people stealing the taxpayers' hard earned money and all that... (Yes, I'm aware there's corruption, but low level workers aren't the ones who benefit most.)
That said, I don't know if even tenure-style job security and a pension are worth the hassle.
It's been my experience that implementing stuff like this only works if your workforce is totally undisciplined otherwise. Call centers operate almost exclusively in this manner -- relentless data obsession, micromanaging and basically providing the worst possible work environment. Some call centers I've had experience with actually make their employees ask a supervisor if they're allowed to go to the bathroom, rather than just making themselves unavailable. Maybe the Milennial twist of "gamification" makes it more palatable, I don't know. But I do know that employees in this environment who have a choice, are reasonably skilled, and have better employment available will take it at the earliest possible opportunity. I doubt even the most social media obsessed Milennial is going to be happy enough about earning badges for doing their job to keep them from seeking less horrific working conditions.
It's similar to introducing time tracking in a professional (salaried) environment. Professional services does need to track billable hours, as is common in consulting firms, but insisting that employees be warming their chairs for exact time frames and penalizing infractions just leads to a mess. Just like the call center workers, everyone who's good leaves for less abusive workplaces, and you're left with the broken people who can't get a job anywhere else.
I sound like a Luddite when I say this, I know, but the economy needs some inefficiency. Even factory workers, who are arguably performing the most robotic of tasks, shouldn't be expected to clock in, perform their tasks at 100% efficiency for the full shift and clock out.
I'm convinced that this phase of computer history is going to be remembered as the "UX Revolution." Seriously, even Linux distributions' GUIs have turned into iOS clones. Windows 10, while better than 8, is still a disaster because Microsoft is still convinced that people want to run a phone/tablet OS on their desktop PC.
It's the deadly combination of:
- Everything is a touch screen, so UI elements have to be massive and convey no meaning unless you know what the symbol means.
- Millions more "normal" people have computers in their pockets now, so even if "spotty nerds" want to use them, the UI can't be made functional because it has to be dumbed down for everyone.
I agree that just letting the developers do a user interface would probably leave us at slightly above the verbosity level of vi, and a complexity level of emacs, but there's a happy medium. Not everything needs to be rendered in a flat, featureless Jony Ive rounded rectangle style. Seriously, if people who are used to computers have to look at a user interface for more than a few seconds to figure out what performs an action, and where that action is located, than form has won over function.
I'd rather have an ugly, functional UI any day. AS/400 style green screens are hideously ugly and primitive, but they're laid out well, the intelligent use of color highlights important things, and they're easy to stare at for long periods of time. I'm absolutely sick of web pages and app screens that have bright white backgrounds and tiny light grey text, chosen simply because it's pretty.
I'm just glad they didn't totally abandon business customers. Running a constantly-changing OS is fine for a home machine that browses the web, makes Skype calls, and watches movies. It's even tolerable in some office situations where all the person is doing is Office documents with no systems interaction beyond email. When you build a software component on top of an OS, however, and come to rely on things working a certain way, that's where the Agile thing breaks down.
The company I work for sells a suite of middleware that relies heavily on some of the internals of Windows. Changing out anything is a risk that the product doesn't work as expected. It's one of those things where Windows Embedded might be a better choice, save for the fact that we need to run an actual end user system on top of this stuff. Microsoft's been really quiet about this, but it seems like the LTSB option is the closest thing to the old RTM/Service Pack model.
Absolutely. I work for a multinational that has to get equipment into...less than reputable...parts of the world. If you try to ship something yourself to some countries, you can guarantee that most of it will be "lost in transit" or stuck in customs for months and months while a whole network of people get paid to get it through.
Companies that do lots of international shipping have to rely on "freight forwarders" These are the companies that actually pay the bribes, know the right contacts to get stuff through customs, etc. This way, the company doing the shipping is "protected" from directly bribing officials. As you can imagine, shipping bulk goods this way is not at all cheap!
I know I sound cynical, but enterprise software vendors can't make these multimillion dollar deals happen without greasing a few palms. These software packages are so awful and require millions more in consulting beyond the license price -- I can't see any technically oriented person supporting their purchase without some inducement. In this case, it was a direct bribe that the sales team thought they could get away with.
Most software companies slip these things under the table through channels that don't legally qualify as bribes. Ever wonder why horrible expensive software packages are sometimes called "golf course ware?" It's a dirty business and things like paying for some kid of an exec's school tuition, or rounds and rounds of strip club visits, or golf, or "educational product seminars" in Aruba is just cost of sales for these companies. It's kind of like lobbyists -- they can't legally hand a Congressperson a paper bag full of money, but they can sure make things happen for them behind the scenes that are the equivalent of the paper bag.
Part of me wishes I was a CTO so I could just line up the vendors and collect bribe after bribe...oops, sorry, "favor" after "favor." Then again, I've worked with some of this horrible software (SAP, Oracle, etc.) and the awful botton-of-the-barrel offshored or H-1B management consultants they send in to "implement" them. No wonder everyone outside of large businesses wants nothing to do with big monolithic packages!!
What I'm finding is this:
- Really good people with lots of experience are having an easy time finding work. (I get recruitment emails at least 2 or 3 times a week and haven't updated any of my resume/linkedin stuff in 3 years, nor have expressed any interest in a new job right now.)
- Lower-skill people or those with less experience are really having difficulty, especially new grads.
I attribute this to a couple of things. First, the nature of the work is changing somewhat, and companies are increasingly looking to hire people who possess a lot of experience and multiple skills. Second and more ominous, the low level jobs are increasingly being offshored, outsourced or eliminated. As an experienced guy, I don't like this because it doesn't allow for succession planning. New grads and new entrants into the field need those jobs at the low end to learn and grow into the experienced peoples' roles. I was a help desk person and a desktop support guy for quite a while before I got my first system admin job, for example. Let's say everyone migrates all their data to the cloud. This means that all the data center jobs move to the cloud companies, who mainly roll their own hardware and have endless fields of servers that are just swapped out when they fail. Those data center jobs then become break/fix maintenance jobs, making it difficult to make the natural progression that data center operations guys normally go through -- system admin, architect, etc. once they learn the ropes and the end-to-end of everything.
It's definitely going to be a big change coming up. Wages are going to be driven down even further, and you're going to see a binomial distribution that's more pronounced than it is now. I think the layoffs the article is referring to are definitely hitting the lower end of the IT job spectrum harder than the higher end. The company I work for is notoriously stingy with headcount and even they are hiring experienced people right now.
I've had the fortune (or misfortune depending on your definiton) to work on a lot of companies' systems and have had a very "cross platform" career. Oracle's licesning, which has gotten worse in recent years, is just now starting to send most companies looking for other ways to do the same thing. The problem is that Oracle is still the de facto standard for "enterprisey" software projects. A lot of this is legacy -- for quite some time the only mainstream database systems were DB2 on AIX or pSeries/zSeries, and Oracle on Solaris. You might say that's ancient history and you're right -- SQL Server is good enough for most workloads that need a "fully supported" DB and Linux is a viable alternative to Solaris. But I can tell you that these applications don't just die -- they're alive and more functionality is being built on top of them. Most big enterprise applications (SAP, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and so on) are either Oracle products or are integrated to run on Oracle middleware/databases. Most of the big outsourcing firms' "standard stacks" revolve around Oracle DB running on Linux or Solaris, and J2EE running WebLogic. This makes perfect sense; outsourcers can pick up CS grads who know Java for cheap, and J2EE's nature lets you parcel out and offshore pieces to whoever is cheapest that week.
Since most government IT is outsourced both in the UK and the US, I would say that it would be very difficult to replace Oracle without re-architecting whole applications. Some stuff is easy - you don't need a Solaris license to run Apache for example. Some is not -- just like SQL Server, Oracle makes it very easy to slip into "Oracle-only" development mode when interacting with databases and middleware. Once that dependency is in place, it either has to be identified and pulled out, or it just keeps chugging along. And since systems like this are not sexy (customs processing, DMV records, tax collection, etc.) they don't get seen by the public very much.
I already see a lot of posts that basically say, "Why should I have to pay for someone else's paternity leave?" This is a good move that will definitely be controversial to the young, single techie set. If the demographics are to be believed, Millenials are having even fewer children, much of the reason being that they don't feel stable enough to settle down and, well, procreate. There is also a huge number of younger people who hate even the idea of having children, so you often hear complaints like, "Why don't I get to take a day off when you have to take care of your sick kid?" "Why can't you work 60 hours a week like the rest of the single people?" "Oh great, the procreators are raising prices for everyone."
I have 2 kids, 4 and 2, so I'm just climbing out of the early childhood no-sleep, constant work Twilight Zone of fatherhood. One of the reasons I stay with my current employer is flexibility. We don't have an official paternity leave policy, but I do have a boss and several colleagues who've been through this whole thing before. My boss has basically told me he knows I'll have to be out sometimes, and have days I'm not productive and is completely supportive of that because I more than make up for it later on. We're not a Silicon Valley startup managed and staffed by single 20-something males, so I think that accounts for some of the difference. The company I work for has a pretty long average tenure basically because the work we do means we can't just burn through developers and IT people on a revolving door basis. People need to stick around and learn/master the problem domain. The company isn't the most in-tune HR-wise, but line management knows what's needed to keep the ship moving.
I doubt a Scandinavian style parental leave policy will ever fly in Libertarianland, but it would be nice for more employers to do something other than "burn through all your vacation, then back to work" or basically do what mine does -- cutting new dads and moms slack when needed. As long as people don't abuse it, it works. If the economy has shifted to the point where both parents need to work to avoid a looming financial disaster and not be miserable, then this seems like a good compromise. I think a company putting this into official HR policy gives themselves a good recruiting tool.
I know /. is the home of social Darwinists on the Internet, but one of the things a pension does is shift the enormous responsibility of retirement planning off of ill prepared workers and onto a firm that's capable of managing long term risk.
Just because you or your colleagues can understand the differences between retirement plan types, the foolhardiness of cashing it in early, or what a 401(k) loan costs you in potential lost returns doesn't mean that everyone can. Yes, most large employers have simpler options with 401(k)s now, and you have the basic choice of age appropriate, stable, risky or "OMG scary" funds, but smaller employers can set up retirement accounts that can basically invest in whatever they want. I remember reading about a long-term employee of a dental practice who lost everything in the 2008 crash because their only retirement investment options involved the dentist's various real estate dealings.
Contrast this with a pension, usually invested by professionals using actuarial models, who have decades of time to fix screw-ups, and automatically manage peoples' contributions. It's similar to Social Security -- no matter what anyone says, there will be at least some benefits available to retirees. They won't be as generous as payouts from an incredibly lucky or financially savvy 401(k) investor, but they'll be there. The thing that bothers me is that people who don't understand finances are the best suited to pensions, but they're losing this as an option. If I were growing up in the 60s, and got a plumbers' apprenticeship out of high school, which do you think would appeal more to me?
(a) "Contribute $x per week to the union pension fund, and when you retire, you are guaranteed receive at least $y * (years of service)."
(b) "Here's a mound of paperwork with financial terms you won't understand. Choose a percentage of your income to save. (What's a percentage?) Choose a fund, here's the fees but don't worry about fees. Past performance is no guarantee of future results."
Sometimes, people who are techie and live/work around other techies lose sight of the fact that there are millions of other people in society with them that don't have the capability to understand these things.
Just because someone attends 4 years of college, doesn't mean they learn anything.
I somewhat agree, and I agree with you that scholarships and loans can help someone who has talent but no money. The problem is early access to resources that would develop talented individuals. In other words, if you're smart but stuck in a crappy school, live in a bad neighborhood and have a bad home life, it's going to be significantly harder to get yourself to the point where you would even think about pushing yourself in the sciences.
One thing that I don't agree with is completely dismissing the worth of a well rounded degree and the college experience. Some of the best system admins I've known aren't CS students who went to MIT -- they're linguistics majors, economics majors, etc. I studied chemistry in school for the simple reason that I wasn't as good at math as my engineering peers and didn't want to risk flunking out of an engineering or CS curriculum. It's extremely possible for people to waste 4+ years of their parents' money attending frat parties and come out with a generic business degree to show for it. But in my case and a lot of other peoples' cases, that time between school and the real world makes people more mature, teaches them to deal with others, deal with aspects of a messed up system, and other life skills. I went to a large state university and this goes double in that case -- there, you're a number and you have to work to keep up and seek out help/opportunities. I would think this would be even more applicable in the age of helicopter parenting -- taking someone who has had everything fixed for them and suddenly dumping them into an apprenticeship or OJT wouldn't be the right thing to do. Plus, even if you learn very little in your general education courses, you're -slightly- more rounded than someone who did an electrician apprenticeship, or an ITT Tech style degree. This makes you, IMO, a better conversation partner, student of the world, etc. Yes, some people get nothing out of it, but that doesn't mean no one does. The thing that sucks is the massive debt it puts some people in. If you make it into the Ivy League universities, you're set for life and even if you do run up a big bill, that alumni network just doesn't let people fail. But running up $150K+ for a small private college degree with no name recognition is not as sustainable as it once was.