The thing I'm going to miss about this dotcom crash is the lack of eBayable computer equipment. The market was flooded with oodles of cheap gear for years after the dotcom bust because of this. Now it's all Azure/AWS instances, and Microsoft or Amazon own it all.
Just looking at some of the reasons for failure, I see a potential problem: "WhatsApp for customer service" "Tinder for jobs" "Flash sales for toddlers"
I understand it's the '10s now, and companies can start up with an AWS account and big enough credit card limit, but it seems to me like the primary reasons for failure are (1) just a stupid idea that has no way to make money or gain customers, and (2) oversaturation and copying of "successful" companies' business plans or apps. That's one thing that hasn't changed since the 90s -- the only difference is that the companies get to hang around longer because they aren't blowing 6 figures on Sun servers and colo charges.
The offline analogue would be the frozen yogurt shop or cupcake bakery that have popped up in recent years. Nothing wrong with either, but I have seen so many of them come and go, and I feel bad because I know why. I'm sure most of those business owners read some article or listened to their friends describing the ultra-high margins to be made in the yogurt business, or living their dream of being a cupcake baker. They probably had visions of hordes of people descending on their perfectly-located shop and emptying their wallets on the counter. So, they quit their job, cash in their 401(k) and invest 6 figures to open up. Six months later, they're gone. The reason I feel bad is this -- sure, people make their own decisions and stuff, but after they've lost everything in a disastrous business venture, most peoples' lives are going to be significantly harder than if they hadn't wasted all that money. It's even worse if the owner is just a franchisee -- then the franchisee is getting rich off of the deal too.
Technology alone can't fix education problems. Applying it where it's useful is a good thing, but school districts shouldn't be wasting money on tech just for the sake of having it. That money can be better spent paying teachers a decent salary.
Public schools have to take everyone who comes their way, a problem charter and private schools don't have. Therefore, it stands to reason that you're going to get a close-to-normal distribution of abilities in your students. Some just aren't going to be as successful as others. On top of that, some of your students with the potential to do well can have horrible home lives that make concentrating on school impossible. How is buying an iPad for everyone and subscribing the district to an expensive electronic curriculum platform going to solve these problems?
Two things predict student success - involved parents (minus the helicoptering) and good teachers in good schools with solid infrastructure. My son is about to enter kindergarten, and we have intentionally been limiting his and his sisters' interactions with tablets/phones/computers as much as is practical. They still watch plenty of YouTube and stuff, more than I'd like, but we've focused on giving them other experiences. Am I a Luddite? Nope, I'm a happy IT person and my wife's in a technical field as well. I just see what happens when parents let their kids sit and stare at the tablet for hours on end. I can't imagine that gets better as the kids age, so why dump technology into a classroom that needs other things more urgently? I'd rather the kids spend this pre-kindergarten time learning to be good humans and picking up skills they'll need when it is time to sit down and learn something.
This thread has been surprisingly civil given the subject matter. One thing to note well is this -- the scope is changing. Usually, most wholesale IT outsourcings/offshorings have traditionally been done by three types of companies: - Extremely thin-margin companies that are trying to squeeze every nickel out of every process...because of the execs and shareholders mostly. Examples I can think of are retail chains, airlines, or professional services companies like law firms. These companies have labor costs as a very large chunk of their overall spending, and since good IT people are still expensive, it's a huge Target. - Companies who don't understand IT, don't do anything useful with it other than keep the lights on, and treat it like the janitor or the cafeteria staff. - Generally, just incredibly cheap, tight-fisted companies. Banks are a perfect example here.
Disney is neither of these: - I have two little kids - Disney makes tons of money off of our family, most of it profit. Except for maybe Vegas, I'm assuming Disney World/Disneyland has a larger daily cash inflow rate than any location on the planet. They seriously must need Uncle Scrooge's money bin to store it all. They're like Apple is now -- pretty much immune to market forces given the vast sums of money they take in. - Disney also does cool, if scary, stuff with IT. Their queue management systems, payment systems, etc. are good examples of taking cheap technology and using it to maximize revenue. Someone has to design stuff like this, _and_ a team of smart people need to be able to take care of it and fix it when it blows up.
So, this should be a wake-up call for the last of the holdouts who think this will never happen to them. I've had it happen to me twice, and I'm pretty decent at what I do. Yet, I constantly hear people say they couldn't possibly be affected by this because they're so super-brilliant or work for a solid company that would never pull something like this. It can happen to you, and $deity help you when you reach the magical age of 40...then you'll be dealing with two threats to your stability.
It would be interesting to hear from an actual employee (current or former) about what roles are being replaced. From what I've heard, Disney also enjoys slightly lower labor costs in many areas because people enjoy(ed) working for them, wanted the company name for the resume, etc. So, I would be really surprised if this is targeting anything other than run-of-the-mill DBA, coding or sysadmin work.
I think the reality is that all of the wiretapping, spying, etc. is going to continue, but the results will be much less visible. Countries have been spying on each other forever, and most spy on their own citizens to some extent.
One thing I have to wonder is this -- whether you like the President or not, he's pretty much the only person in the world who knows most of what is going on in the military and intelligence community. So I've always been curious about the real state of affairs...none of us have access to the information he does. It must be interesting getting back from the inaugural ball, waking up the next morning and walking into your first daily briefing where you find out the difference between what made the news that morning and what's actually going on in the world. "Good morning, Mr. President -- here's your nuclear launch codes, your security detail, and the four scenarios the Joint Chiefs have worked up for a possible land invasion of China...choose one." There's a reason heads of state age prematurely -- and I'm guessing this is a large part of it. I know I'd be a little worried about being the ultimate authority responsible for 300 million people. Like the sign on the desk says, "The buck stops here." So, for example, if the President chose to continue the Patriot Act data collection, there was probably a reason for doing so, especially since he campaigned on rolling back a lot of this. Whether this was done by his military/ntelligence advisors to keep things easy, or driven by something else is the question.
All I'm saying is that none of us knows what's actually being done with this information. I'm of the opinion that, while the threat may be overblown, some of the intelligence gathered through this program at least helped connect the dots on a few things. No one just walks into an Internet forum and announces they want to join ISIS and are looking for something to blow up. We'll see what happens...it's probably nothing, but it will be very interesting to go back late in my life and see what was declassified from this time period.
One thing to note is that "hyperscale public clouds" like Amazon, Microsoft and Google don't use off-the-rack HP, Lenovo or Dell hardware. They're using Open Compute Project-style designs contracted out to whitebox vendors. So, where's the demand for name brand servers coming from?
Even though we use virtualization extensively, everything is still in house. I wonder how much of a dent public cloud is actually making in corporate server infrastructure. Sure, some web startup supporting a phone app is a perfect use case for the cloud...but does it meet the needs of most companies?
One of the things that people seem to not realize is that, even though they are trade partners, there is another Cold War going on. It's not the nuclear kind, but it's definitely there in the form of Chinese state policy vs. the US's policy. China is willing to pour any amount of money into infrastructure and other projects to keep its economy growing...look at all the spending that is happening post-2008. (Google "ghost cities".) China is also able to do whatever it wants regardless of public opinion, which is directly opposed to the US way of doing anything. For example, they are literally picking up and moving millions of people from the countryside into the cities they have built to improve service delivery...try that here and see how far you get. These things, combined with a population advantage, guarantee China's success long-term absent any other forces.
The only thing that could tip the balance is ideology-driven races like this. The Apollo program was similar to current Chinese policy -- pour anything and everything into it as long as we win. Same went for all the Cold War spending, because people were convinced we would be destroyed otherwise. You can argue the military buildup was a waste, but look at the employment and technology transfer it enabled. It also hammered home the need to educate scientists and engineers, and real dollars were put behind that (see the 50s-70s buildup of the national labs and state university systems as an example.) In the current US political climate, funding education and fixing roads is evil socialism and money should never be spent on public projects. Focusing people's limited attention spans on an external power might be a good thing.
One of the things that bothers me about books like this is how they become primary reference material for MBAs and managers. I've lost count of how many times managers have referenced "Good to Great" or Jack Welch's book to implement very questionable policies. Some guy waxing poetic on what a wonderful job he's done is a lot different from a rigorous study.
One real world example about anecdotal evidence shaping global HR policy is the Google "open floor plan" office trend. Our company is moving from semi-private cubes and offices to a hideous Google-style design. This is for a professional services company where most people require quiet, and are taking phone calls and working on individual/small group projects, not for a software startup. We and countless other companies are doing this simply because Google does it, and has published many articles on how wonderful it is. Evidence is coming out against this (increased sick time, loss of concentration, people hating their co-workers more, etc.) but damnit, if it works for Google it must be right.
One big problem with equating CS with "coding" is the fact that low-skill and high-skill jobs get lumped into the same bucket. Same thing in my side (IT) where systems architects and help desk guys get painted with the same brush. If you teach a student to just "code" then all they're going to know is a few web front end tricks and they'll be difficult to train for the next thing. The students coming into the profession now need to have a science background, not just a 9-week coder bootcamp. Remember MCSE bootcamps from the late 90s/early 2000s? We in IT are _still_ working with some of the products of these.
If anyone is serious about fixing the skills problem, the following needs to happen: - Salaries need to be stabilized at a level that will attract new entrants to the field. No one is going to waste time and money studying something that doesn't pay off later on. Look at all the little private colleges that are going out of business after burning through their endowments. Lots of students know that they can no longer expect a job after graduating studying just anything.at any college. (I was one of the last graduation years where that was true.) Unfortunately, college is a trade school now for most people. - Jobs need to be available. Companies can't cry "skill shortage" while outsourcing their IT department to the lowest bidder or throwing people away when they turn 40. I think a technical career provides a very fulfilling job if you're lucky and choose your employers well. But, if I were faced with a choice of what to study, and saw stagnant wages, mass layoffs, and a career that can end at 40, I would probably pick something else. - A career progression needs to exist. My career progression was help desk monkey --> desktop support monkey --> data center guy --> system administrator --> the strange hybrid admin/designer/architect/integration combo I do now. Now, it doesn't exist to the same degree. Help desk is in India, desktop support is significantly reduced and the pay is much lower than it was, data center monkey jobs now consist of replacing parts in Google or Amazon or Microsoft data centers, and so on. Where are the next generation of IT people and software developers going to be trained? On the dev side, the QA and maintenance coder jobs are increasingly in India or automated. Getting rid of low level jobs means that new entrants can't grow into the better jobs.
I'm an advocate of taking the different tasks in IT and dev, and splitting them into "technician" and "licensed engineer" tracks. Licensing the top tiers of the job field might mean higher quality of systems and software, fewer major security hacks, etc. The technician track would allow people to grow into these jobs, steadily gaining responsibility and salary over time. The thing we would have to avoid is what lawyers are going through now...the Bar Association threw open the doors to the profession a while back, opened tons of law schools, and allowed the offshoring of routine legal work. Now, look online sometime -- lawyers who spent $250K on school and passed the bar exam can't find work. The only way to make money as a lawyer now is if you manage to graduate at the top of your class at Harvard, Yale or Stanford -- otherwise, don't even bother.
So yes, definitely find ways to keep students interested in STEM -- but don't be shocked if no one signs on for the long haul when they see what's coming at the end...
Some people might point to this as a good thing, but I disagree. When rich, influential people begin taking control over key aspects of our society, such as education, even small experiments like this run the risk of being trotted out as the antidote to all those evil government-run schools out there.
Look at political advertising pre- and post- Citizens United decision. Smart people can see though most BS that either side generates. However, the reality is that the masses are definitely swayed by political ads. Now, it's just a matter of who has the most money and can blanket people with their message. A lot of political advertising is "issue advertising" designed not to promote a candidate, but an ideology. Education sounds like a perfect place to get that message in early. (And yes, I'm aware that the conservatives will point out the evil liberal agenda that public schools have...anything that isn't American exceptionalism is an evil liberal plot.)
I'm not saying it would happen, but giving influential people access to educational institutions could just end up creating students in their own image.
I do a strange combination of admin/design/integration work, and one of the reasons I do a decent job is because I can also script and automate stuff. You wouldn't believe how many Windows (and some Linux) admins lack these skills or are very rusty on them. So I'm the admin who can do a little coding -- can you be the coder who can do admin work? I believe the new phrase is DevOps...
I feel your pain and I'm getting older too. The company I work for does industry specific IT work, in an industry with a huge amount of proprietary, barely-transferable knowledge. I've seen people in my group get sucked so far down the proprietary knowledge route that they might as well be in your spot. I've had to really work to keep up to date, and am always trying to rotate my responsibilities around as much as I can to avoid being labelled "The X Guy", where X is some crazy technology that is interesting, but not conducive to employment outside our industry.
One thing I'd recommend is to think twice about management if that's not what you want to do. Most companies try to force good techies into management simply because that's the only promotional path available. However, I've worked for some awful managers who were great techies, and I'm not liking the small amount of management duties that have started creeping into my job description. if you like computers because they're more predictable than people, just wait till your first management job. People are not predictable or easy to deal with unless you have the skills...and it's something you're born with, not something you can acquire.
I know very few people agree with me on this one, but this is a perfect example of where professional licensure of at least the design part of IT and SW development could prevent problems. No civil engineer with the PE designation would sign off on a dumb design because they and/or their firm would be personally responsible for faulty work, and companies couldn't pressure people into doing so. Engineering of real world systems involves using proven methods and thoroughly testing anything new or different before it gets anywhere near the real world. IT is famous for "oh well, it compiles, we're done" and "I want to implement this in LangDuJour On Rails because it'll look good on my resume." I'm not saying it will solve all problems, but that would certainly weed out most bad design and many bad practitioners. You would standardize the education requirements, and at least ensure that people who get the license to practice think twice about taking dumb shortcuts. Lots of people would complain, and yes, it would slow the insane pace of new technology introduction, but it's been decades...it's time for the profession to grow up.
Licensing would not fix the other part of this problem -- companies not devoting the right amount of resources to IT. IT is almost always considered a cost center, and not understood by anyone in the executive suite (including the CIO.) I don't know this for a fact, but I'll bet that at least some of CareFirst's IT is outsourced to a lowest-bidder contractor -- just because I know companies that aren't IT-centric don't care about what happens in IT. That outsourcing either has their entire infrastructure in a disinterested third party's hands, or a split that's painful enough to make in-house staff think twice about changing something.
Finally, the problem is that companies get away with this all the time. Credit card fraud is completely victimless in the eyes of companies as long as they passed their PCI audit...their insurance company just pays and the banks eat the rest of the losses. Same goes with personal data -- it's always "oops, here's some credit monitoring service for you." Any class action lawsuits end up settled 10 years later for a few dollars per claimant. Until companies get in serious trouble for this, it will continue to happen.
I work for a multinational private company and we see the same thing, not just with security breaches.
The reality is, in most labor environments now, why would anyone make an effort to point something out that would get them marginalized or fired? This is especially true in the "outsourcing countries" -- most of the people working in these locations are extremely happy to have stable employment and will do anything they can to protect it. As a result, huge problems are hidden for as long as possible until they really can't be hidden anymore. In the US, that fear is instilled by the scarlet letter of unemployment. Even with an improving economy, I still see unemployed people who can't even get an interview because they have a gap in their employment history. Unemployment in the US equals financial ruin for most people -- your credit will be destroyed once you can't meet your obligations and unemployment insurance doesn't come close to replacing most salaries. And once your credit is messed up, most companies will pass on hiring you anyway because they have 20 people with good credit and clean background checks.
Also, regarding public sector vs. private sector -- I know lots of people who work for our state university system. Even though these positions are technically permanent, there's nothing stopping the internal politics of the system from making your life so miserable that you might as well quit. It's very similar to the way private companies manage people out -- start enforcing rules more stringently, change work assignments to something awful, etc. The public sector just has due process with regards to getting rid of someone. Soon as someone shows up for work 3 minutes late more than X times, they have their excuse, just like a private company does. So yeah, I have no doubt that anyone with a shred of self-preservation instinct would keep their mouth shut about a security problem unless it was directly attributable to them.
Every "tech skill" most people talk about has a very short half-life. Look at how many languages, mobile platforms and frameworks appear every year. Some get picked up, some don't, and some live on in some obscure corner of the world.
Don't focus on "skills" -- focus on "fundamentals." I've had a reasonably good career for almost 20 years now, and falling back on strong fundamentals has always saved me when faced with a new challenge. Anyone can learn how to write code in Python or Ruby -- it takes a solid grounding to transfer that knowledge into different areas.
What fundamentals would I want to teach newbies now? - Logic and reasoning -- It's fundamental to software, and aids in the troubleshooting process - Methodical troubleshooting -- I do systems work and I have encountered so many people who troubleshoot using the shotgun method, changing 50 things at once hoping one of them will work. - Information management -- again, from the systems world, I see lots of people who google error messages, etc. (myself included) and get 20+ ways to solve the same problem. This is one place where instant information access can backfire. Learn to recognize what is relevant and what is not. - Systems integration -- a catch-all term, but basically "how to gather all the components together and make them work." I have had the opportunity to work on very interesting projects simply because I was willing to get my hands dirty in areas outside of my comfort zone and learn enough about them to be useful. - Social skills -- I'm not, and will never be, an extroverted salesperson type. However, there's a broad spectrum and you don't want to be on the "asocial nerd" side of it. Fair or not, people who don't at least try to work with others are increasingly marginalized in their careers. Management would much rather offshore some obscure technical skill than deal with someone they find unpleasant. If every interaction with you becomes an argument about who's right, that's a pretty good sign...and I see this time and time again with lots of people I work with (both technical and non-technical.)
On the technical side, I'd love to see a demystification of platforms-in-a-box. The tablet/phone world is a perfect example of abstracting a system so far that you can't see anything it's doing under the hood. There's no more filesystem, data access is handled for you, etc. If you grow up using systems like this, it's hard to come back down into the weeds and see the "magic" that makes all this stuff work end-to-end.
Fundamental stuff like this has been a very good skill set to build on. The rest is all learned as needed, forgotten about, and dusted off later on. For example, I've learned and re-learned Citrix 3 times when I've needed to for a project. I re-learn enough Linux for a project when the need arises (I do Windows stuff for work mostly.) And, I'm currently upgrading years of Windows scripting and automation knowledge by learning PowerShell.
In the US, one of the problems with the system is that there really are only two choices. Even if independents don't feel like they're throwing their votes away, realistically, they are. One of the things I like about European parliamentary systems is that minority parties do have a voice in the system, and the ruling parties have to play nice with them to get anything done. Congress since 2012 has been a mess with both parties digging their heels in, to the point where even the simplest routine business can't get done. And with the unlimited spending by businesses and wealthy individuals now part of the mix, there's no way anyone who doesn't align with one of the 2 parties can ever hope to get anything done.
One of the things I've noticed about the Republican side this election cycle is the effort to replace that older, whiter group of voters mentioned in the summary with Hispanics. It will be very interesting to see what happens. It makes sense; Hispanics are typically very religious and socially conservative, so Republicans probably see that as a way to offset the loss of religious whites. But, how do they square that with their economic policies, which basically boil down to giving business whatever they ask for, and the anti-immigration policies championed by the remaining older whiter crowd? We'll see...
Another demographic that Republicans may be losing is rural working class voters. Whatever political side you end up on, the fact is that available employment for middle/working class people is drying up due to automation and the downward pressure on wages. We in IT see this all the time with the H-1B program and offshoring. Lots of working class Republicans seem to think that if they just work harder, they can become successful, and they don't see that some policies actually hinder their progress, nor do they see that there really is no path to riches when you start at a certain level in society. If enough working class people finally realize this, they might tend to align with Democrats as a lever against the rich/business owners. This, plus the fact that religion is becoming less and less of a draw to people and social issues aren't as big a deal anymore, is the demographic shift they need to worry about.
The thing that does worry me is that younger people will continue to see politics as something they can't influence or participate in, and let the rich in both parties just use the system for their own gain. I tend to be a very left wing, big government type, but I think it would be interesting to see a _credible_ independent third party challenge the system, just to see what a difference it could make. The problem is that political minorities don't have the credibility among most voters. I'm certainly not a Libertarian, nor would i ever vote for a TEA party candidate...but I wouldn't vote for a Communist either. The problem is that in our system, any non-mainstream political view is treated as completely irrelevant. Look at how many times the president has been called a "socialist." If he were a true socialist, we wouldn't have the Affordable Care Act in its current form or the income inequality we have...yet the right wing guys are convinced of this.
I do systems engineering work for a professional services/software company. Development is fully Agile with a capital A, whether or not it makes sense for a particular project. On the systems side of the house, we have another particular religion called ITIL which lots of companies have jumped into with both feet. The problem with both of these concepts is that they are adhered to, almost to a comical level, even if it's painfully obvious that parts of it don't fit.
Adhering to all of ITIL, for example, is a really good way to ensure your production systems almost never change. The number of people and sheer volume of paperwork, tickets and meetings to get anything even scheduled for a change in a "true ITIL" system is beyond insane. The same goes for incident management -- we have so many single-task focused "resolver groups" that I have no idea how anyone knows how any of our systems operate end-to-end. ITIL is great for mainframe systems, safety sensitive stuff, and networks which never change.
"True Agile" and "True Waterfall" are opposite ends of the spectrum. Agile gets you very fast development, at the expense of pinning down any sort of architecture in the beginning. Waterfall often results in software you have to throw away because the requirements change out from under you. However, there are some things that require at least some discipline, both in systems and development. No systems guy would ever advocate just logging in and making random changes on a production system to see what happens. No smart developer/architect charged with writing something that underpins tons and tons of other things would advocate swapping out the core components without at least some backward compatibility thrown in. The prpblem is that "gurus" make their money selling management on these methods. In the case of both Agile and ITIL, it's a manager's dream -- everyone becomes a replaceable unit and business requests can get promoted to production in one Sprint.
From what I've seen, especially with math, the terms have changed but the entire way it's presented has also changed. For example, I have always been a poor math student unless what I'm learning can be applied to something real-world -- I have more of an engineer's brain than a mathematician's. All the algebra, trig, etc. that was force-fed into my brain in high school only started making sense when I started struggling through my college chemistry curriculum and finding out that it was actually useful for something.
My memories of elementary school math consist of endless repetition of arithmetic facts and simply memorizing procedures for things like solving ratio problems, working with fractions, etc. And every high school graduate instinctively remembers "x = (-b +/- sqrt(b^2 - 4ac))/2a" whether or not it made any sense at the time. It seems like the new curriculum acknowledges that computers exist and focuses more on developing the reasoning/estimating skills than the old-school math we were taught. I think parents are really confused by this.
My state (New York) which had semi-decent education standards to begin with, recently switched to the Common Core curriculum and it's really stirring up a mess. Partially, it's the mandatory testing that parents are opting their children out of, but it's also being tied to a bunch of other things. For example, teachers now have to deal with the same BS performance evaluations that corporate employees do, and a huge chunk of their rating is based on these test scores. They were evaluated in the past, but it was understood that there was no objective way to evaluate teacher performance with variable student performance. Now, new teachers will lose their jobs if their classes don't do well on these tests, with no regard for whether the teacher has a bunch of losers or geniuses in their class. I'm not a teacher, but I'm definitely on the teachers' side in this case. I would hate to spend the time to get a teacher certification (not impossible, but harder in NY than many states) and have my job be at risk due to factors I can't control. For example, most new teachers can't get jobs in the nice affluent school districts because there are tons more qualified applicants who want to work there, so they usually have to start off teaching in a crappy school district. Crappy districts tend to have kids who have crappy parents. (And yes, affluent districts have helicopter parents that make teachers' lives miserable, but that's another story.) If you have a class full of students who have bad home lives, parents who don't care, or have been socially promoted for years, they're going to do badly on these standardized tests and your performance rate will suffer through no fault of your own.
The other thing I've seen is that the material used to teach the common core curriculum is really different from stuff we saw in earlier times. I think that's another big thing -- parents feel they can't help their kids with homework. However, it's the material, not the curriculum itself. Blame the educational publishers for that, not the standards.
One thing I definitely don't agree with Bill Gates on is his love of charter schools. These just suck more money away from the public system and funnel it into corporate interests' pockets, making the public system weaker. What Gates or anyone doesn't understand is that education won't improve until it's valued by everyone. The reason China, India, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, etc. are ahead of us in test performance isn't the curriculum -- they push their students like crazy from both directions (teachers and parents.) Kids in these countries spend many more hours in school than US kids, and have information drilled into their heads. That's what needs to happen if we want to compete with these countries in the future. In the case of India and China, school performance is basically some kids' only ticket to a better life given the population and structure of society. Things might be a little different if students in the US who didn't excel in school were permanently doomed to a life of poverty...I think the parents might care a little more.
My experience, having worked with security "consultants" in the past, is that many of them are of the same stripe as the management consultants from Accenture, KPMG, etc. and just fly around the country giving PowerPoint presentations to scared executives trying to sell them a packaged appliance/solution. If these guys are part of the survey, I can easily see $200K+ -- their firm is billing them out at at least twice that. I know lots of young grads with zero or little experience routinely get jobs with the big consulting firms if they went to the right school, and are immediately put into service at large companies in positions of relatively high authority for their actual skill level. As long as they don't mind traveling 50 weeks a year, it can be a very lucrative first job for an Ivy League grad. I doubt their business model is any different with IT security.
People actually working on real day to day security see a lot less than that in most organizations, simply because most places don't care about security. If you're a retailer, your insurance company just pays out when you get hacked as long as you checked the PCI DSS auditing box. (That's another stripe of "security experts" who pull in the higher levels of salary.)
I'm not sure what it's like in places that actually need real security (intelligence, banking, etc.)
(Disclaimer: I'm the guy with 6 browser tabs open right now who _should_ be finishing something.)
I think that in the workplace, simple demand on knowledge workers' time is the reason for loss of focus. Fewer and fewer people are being hired to do things, and at the same time more things are being asked of the remaining individuals. I often find it hard to sit and actually solve a problem completely unless people leave me alone and let me work on the one or two hard problems. The thing that does keep me motivated is this -- now that I have children, I can't just spend forever getting things done at work. Once time is up, I need to head out and take care of family stuff. 10 years ago, I could stay an extra hour or two if I got stuck on something. Now, it's tough to even pull out the laptop after they go to bed, so I'm very motivated to do work at work. This keeps me out of most of the time-sinks -- Slashdot is not one of them though.:-) If I were 20-something, had no kids and nothing going on outside of work, I'd probably just work the 12-hour days that Google or other companies like it enable for their workers by providing free food, etc.
As far as society in general, anecdotal evidence seems to point to smart phones and social media as big distractions. I'm kind of in between on this -- I like my phone, but I also have the patience to, say, sit and wait for the train without constantly messing with it. A lot of people can't do that or don't want to. I've seen more than a couple of people bump into light poles on train station platforms because their noses were stuck in their phones. I still have enough patience to use most of my downtime to think about solutions to work problems, or just stare into space and think. But if I was a Facebook-addicted kid or Millennial, that might be harder to do.
I'm 40 this year, and therefore washed up, useless and unemployable.:-) Not really -- but I do have to choose my opportunities carefully.
I've posted about this before, but software development and IT have the same skillset regardless of age: - Attention to detail - Intelligent troubleshooting skills - Creative problem solving skills
The things that differentiate the older people are: - Experience with technology cycles, and the ability to see what is a fad, what's a rehash and what will stick around - Experience with doing things -- leading to less rework because we've already tried a lot of the ways that don't work - Most of us know how to play the working game now and aren't willing to kill ourselves for deadlines/projects that don't go anywhere - Most of us have responsibilities outside of work (kids, family, etc.) that a younger worker doesn't
In my personal case, my employers get a solid, committed employee who does great work and is able to go home on time. Younger employees tend to like startup culture or employers like Google because they continue the dorm atmosphere from college. Google provides free meals and other services to employees for the sole reason that many don't have a family or other out-of-work commitments yet. My employer doesn't provide free meals - I work for a professional services company. They pay me pretty well, keep feeding me interesting work, and I generally have a healthy balance of work and life. I haven't had to work any outside-of-hours time that hasn't been comped in some form -- after-hours conference call == late arrival/early leaving next day, for example. They do reserve the right to send me to a customer location on short notice in case of a real disaster -- but that's happened once in the 10 years I've worked here.
I guess my question is this -- would older workers even be happy working at EA or Google or similar? Not to say they should be denied the opportunity, but most 40-somethings and above have families or at least something going on outside of work to occupy their time. I think the best strategy for "old" people is to try getting hired onto a consulting firm (where your experience is an asset they can bill out) or something like local/state government work with a guaranteed retirement and benefits.
I think that most people understand there are a certain percentage of truly bad cops who will tamper with evidence, lie, etc. to get what they need. The thing that's new is the Internet, social media, and the ability for guys like these to collect and publish records. If a bystander hadn't taken (or published) the video of that guy in South Carolina being shot, the cop would still be working today and no one would have said a thing. It used to be extremely rare that something like this surfaced, and it often took a major news organization to do the kind of investigating and analysis.
You can't go into law enforcement without having at least some tendencies towards being a bully. I think that, plus the unlimited authority police get, plus the fact that they deal almost exclusively with "bad" people produce the police that make the headlines. I don't know how most are able to keep their bully tendencies in check when they never work with good people, plus racism and fellow officers reinforcing bad behavior probably have an effect over time as well. The end product of that is the stereotypical "bully with a badge" that gets the most media attention.
In the age when anyone can post video of bad police behavior, the only answer is to have tamper proof cameras on police every time they interact with the public. It's too easy for people to make false claims, and it used to be too easy for the police to sweep things under the rug.
Education is a fundamental public good and no public resources should ever go to a private company to run schools. By doing that, you take away resources from the public schools and further damage them.
I know everyone loves to point to charter schools and what a wonderful job they're doing, but there are two things people conveniently ignore: - Behind that charter school is a company/person getting insanely rich off of public funds and/or using their unique position to maximize profit. - All the other schools in the area get hurt because resources get funneled away from them. - You're basically corporatizing education -- I'm guessing Zuckerberg and Company will be influencing the curriculum to turn out a new generation of web code monkeys.
Everyone loves to bash teachers and teachers' unions, but that's not what we should be doing. Teaching needs to be a profession people want to go into, and people need to respect educators. Giving up and just selling the school system to the lowest bidder won't fix the long-standing problems a school district has. Nothing will -- there are always going to be poor kids with horrible home lives. Unless you go after that, education won't improve significantly in bad neighborhoods.
How is this possible anymore? Even the simplest front-line customer service jobs require some sort of computer use now. I haven't seen personal assistants below the senior VP level at any company for at least 15 years now. Only the CxOs get assistants now, and they're basically just managing their travel and personal schedules.
I could (and have) seen people who retired somewhere in the early 90s and haven't touched a computer -- they're why our local library still runs workshops on basic computer use. But even if the sample is the oldest of the old workers, where or in what industry has anyone seen anybody who has never used a computer before come into the workforce lately?
Granted, I have seen many people who absolutely can't do anything beyond what they're trained to do, but even those are very rare now. It's been a while since most people have absolutely required training on a new version of Windows or Office.
I am just about to hit that milestone 40th birthday this year. If things are as bad as they seem, I'm probably in for a rough couple of decades.
One thing that does bother me is that "digital natives" are no more or less capable of doing a good job in a technology job than older people. The skills are the same -- creative problem solving, troubleshooting, logical thinking and awesome communications skills. Older people do have different qualities in my opinion: - We've been around the block and seen technology fads appear, disappear and come back later on with better underpinnings. We've also seen how stuff like virtualization and application containers aren't actually new concepts...just way better now than they were. - Many/most of us have obligations outside of work and greater responsibilities. A 40 year old with two little kids [raises hand] has a little less flexibility than a recent grad who will move anywhere in the country in a week, doesn't mind sharing a 2-bedroom apartment with roommates and will willingly work 14-hour days for no extra pay. - Many/most of us have also figured out the game of working for a company, and prefer a healthier work/life balance to throwing all your energy into projects that can sometimes get trashed for no reason. - One advantage we do have is growing up with computers in a much more primitive state, where more about the actual machine was exposed to you. "Digital natives" grow up with packaged platforms and a lot of the underpinnings are permanently abstracted away unless you are sufficiently motivated to dig further.
For these reasons, among others, companies prefer younger workers because they're easier to control. I'm not saying that all of us oldsters are perfect -- I've worked with a lot of burnt out folks who do the bare minimum to keep their job. But, in my opinion it's not fair to paint everyone with the same brush. I won't kill myself for deadlines the way a 22-year-old working for EA might, but I have cranked out consistent good work over my career, and really want to continue doing so until I don't feel I can contribute anymore.
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The thing I'm going to miss about this dotcom crash is the lack of eBayable computer equipment. The market was flooded with oodles of cheap gear for years after the dotcom bust because of this. Now it's all Azure/AWS instances, and Microsoft or Amazon own it all.
Just looking at some of the reasons for failure, I see a potential problem:
"WhatsApp for customer service"
"Tinder for jobs"
"Flash sales for toddlers"
I understand it's the '10s now, and companies can start up with an AWS account and big enough credit card limit, but it seems to me like the primary reasons for failure are (1) just a stupid idea that has no way to make money or gain customers, and (2) oversaturation and copying of "successful" companies' business plans or apps. That's one thing that hasn't changed since the 90s -- the only difference is that the companies get to hang around longer because they aren't blowing 6 figures on Sun servers and colo charges.
The offline analogue would be the frozen yogurt shop or cupcake bakery that have popped up in recent years. Nothing wrong with either, but I have seen so many of them come and go, and I feel bad because I know why. I'm sure most of those business owners read some article or listened to their friends describing the ultra-high margins to be made in the yogurt business, or living their dream of being a cupcake baker. They probably had visions of hordes of people descending on their perfectly-located shop and emptying their wallets on the counter. So, they quit their job, cash in their 401(k) and invest 6 figures to open up. Six months later, they're gone. The reason I feel bad is this -- sure, people make their own decisions and stuff, but after they've lost everything in a disastrous business venture, most peoples' lives are going to be significantly harder than if they hadn't wasted all that money. It's even worse if the owner is just a franchisee -- then the franchisee is getting rich off of the deal too.
Technology alone can't fix education problems. Applying it where it's useful is a good thing, but school districts shouldn't be wasting money on tech just for the sake of having it. That money can be better spent paying teachers a decent salary.
Public schools have to take everyone who comes their way, a problem charter and private schools don't have. Therefore, it stands to reason that you're going to get a close-to-normal distribution of abilities in your students. Some just aren't going to be as successful as others. On top of that, some of your students with the potential to do well can have horrible home lives that make concentrating on school impossible. How is buying an iPad for everyone and subscribing the district to an expensive electronic curriculum platform going to solve these problems?
Two things predict student success - involved parents (minus the helicoptering) and good teachers in good schools with solid infrastructure. My son is about to enter kindergarten, and we have intentionally been limiting his and his sisters' interactions with tablets/phones/computers as much as is practical. They still watch plenty of YouTube and stuff, more than I'd like, but we've focused on giving them other experiences. Am I a Luddite? Nope, I'm a happy IT person and my wife's in a technical field as well. I just see what happens when parents let their kids sit and stare at the tablet for hours on end. I can't imagine that gets better as the kids age, so why dump technology into a classroom that needs other things more urgently? I'd rather the kids spend this pre-kindergarten time learning to be good humans and picking up skills they'll need when it is time to sit down and learn something.
This thread has been surprisingly civil given the subject matter. One thing to note well is this -- the scope is changing. Usually, most wholesale IT outsourcings/offshorings have traditionally been done by three types of companies:
- Extremely thin-margin companies that are trying to squeeze every nickel out of every process...because of the execs and shareholders mostly. Examples I can think of are retail chains, airlines, or professional services companies like law firms. These companies have labor costs as a very large chunk of their overall spending, and since good IT people are still expensive, it's a huge Target.
- Companies who don't understand IT, don't do anything useful with it other than keep the lights on, and treat it like the janitor or the cafeteria staff.
- Generally, just incredibly cheap, tight-fisted companies. Banks are a perfect example here.
Disney is neither of these:
- I have two little kids - Disney makes tons of money off of our family, most of it profit. Except for maybe Vegas, I'm assuming Disney World/Disneyland has a larger daily cash inflow rate than any location on the planet. They seriously must need Uncle Scrooge's money bin to store it all. They're like Apple is now -- pretty much immune to market forces given the vast sums of money they take in.
- Disney also does cool, if scary, stuff with IT. Their queue management systems, payment systems, etc. are good examples of taking cheap technology and using it to maximize revenue. Someone has to design stuff like this, _and_ a team of smart people need to be able to take care of it and fix it when it blows up.
So, this should be a wake-up call for the last of the holdouts who think this will never happen to them. I've had it happen to me twice, and I'm pretty decent at what I do. Yet, I constantly hear people say they couldn't possibly be affected by this because they're so super-brilliant or work for a solid company that would never pull something like this. It can happen to you, and $deity help you when you reach the magical age of 40...then you'll be dealing with two threats to your stability.
It would be interesting to hear from an actual employee (current or former) about what roles are being replaced. From what I've heard, Disney also enjoys slightly lower labor costs in many areas because people enjoy(ed) working for them, wanted the company name for the resume, etc. So, I would be really surprised if this is targeting anything other than run-of-the-mill DBA, coding or sysadmin work.
I think the reality is that all of the wiretapping, spying, etc. is going to continue, but the results will be much less visible. Countries have been spying on each other forever, and most spy on their own citizens to some extent.
One thing I have to wonder is this -- whether you like the President or not, he's pretty much the only person in the world who knows most of what is going on in the military and intelligence community. So I've always been curious about the real state of affairs...none of us have access to the information he does. It must be interesting getting back from the inaugural ball, waking up the next morning and walking into your first daily briefing where you find out the difference between what made the news that morning and what's actually going on in the world. "Good morning, Mr. President -- here's your nuclear launch codes, your security detail, and the four scenarios the Joint Chiefs have worked up for a possible land invasion of China...choose one." There's a reason heads of state age prematurely -- and I'm guessing this is a large part of it. I know I'd be a little worried about being the ultimate authority responsible for 300 million people. Like the sign on the desk says, "The buck stops here." So, for example, if the President chose to continue the Patriot Act data collection, there was probably a reason for doing so, especially since he campaigned on rolling back a lot of this. Whether this was done by his military/ntelligence advisors to keep things easy, or driven by something else is the question.
All I'm saying is that none of us knows what's actually being done with this information. I'm of the opinion that, while the threat may be overblown, some of the intelligence gathered through this program at least helped connect the dots on a few things. No one just walks into an Internet forum and announces they want to join ISIS and are looking for something to blow up. We'll see what happens...it's probably nothing, but it will be very interesting to go back late in my life and see what was declassified from this time period.
One thing to note is that "hyperscale public clouds" like Amazon, Microsoft and Google don't use off-the-rack HP, Lenovo or Dell hardware. They're using Open Compute Project-style designs contracted out to whitebox vendors. So, where's the demand for name brand servers coming from?
Even though we use virtualization extensively, everything is still in house. I wonder how much of a dent public cloud is actually making in corporate server infrastructure. Sure, some web startup supporting a phone app is a perfect use case for the cloud...but does it meet the needs of most companies?
One of the things that people seem to not realize is that, even though they are trade partners, there is another Cold War going on. It's not the nuclear kind, but it's definitely there in the form of Chinese state policy vs. the US's policy. China is willing to pour any amount of money into infrastructure and other projects to keep its economy growing...look at all the spending that is happening post-2008. (Google "ghost cities".) China is also able to do whatever it wants regardless of public opinion, which is directly opposed to the US way of doing anything. For example, they are literally picking up and moving millions of people from the countryside into the cities they have built to improve service delivery...try that here and see how far you get. These things, combined with a population advantage, guarantee China's success long-term absent any other forces.
The only thing that could tip the balance is ideology-driven races like this. The Apollo program was similar to current Chinese policy -- pour anything and everything into it as long as we win. Same went for all the Cold War spending, because people were convinced we would be destroyed otherwise. You can argue the military buildup was a waste, but look at the employment and technology transfer it enabled. It also hammered home the need to educate scientists and engineers, and real dollars were put behind that (see the 50s-70s buildup of the national labs and state university systems as an example.) In the current US political climate, funding education and fixing roads is evil socialism and money should never be spent on public projects. Focusing people's limited attention spans on an external power might be a good thing.
One of the things that bothers me about books like this is how they become primary reference material for MBAs and managers. I've lost count of how many times managers have referenced "Good to Great" or Jack Welch's book to implement very questionable policies. Some guy waxing poetic on what a wonderful job he's done is a lot different from a rigorous study.
One real world example about anecdotal evidence shaping global HR policy is the Google "open floor plan" office trend. Our company is moving from semi-private cubes and offices to a hideous Google-style design. This is for a professional services company where most people require quiet, and are taking phone calls and working on individual/small group projects, not for a software startup. We and countless other companies are doing this simply because Google does it, and has published many articles on how wonderful it is. Evidence is coming out against this (increased sick time, loss of concentration, people hating their co-workers more, etc.) but damnit, if it works for Google it must be right.
One big problem with equating CS with "coding" is the fact that low-skill and high-skill jobs get lumped into the same bucket. Same thing in my side (IT) where systems architects and help desk guys get painted with the same brush. If you teach a student to just "code" then all they're going to know is a few web front end tricks and they'll be difficult to train for the next thing. The students coming into the profession now need to have a science background, not just a 9-week coder bootcamp. Remember MCSE bootcamps from the late 90s/early 2000s? We in IT are _still_ working with some of the products of these.
If anyone is serious about fixing the skills problem, the following needs to happen:
- Salaries need to be stabilized at a level that will attract new entrants to the field. No one is going to waste time and money studying something that doesn't pay off later on. Look at all the little private colleges that are going out of business after burning through their endowments. Lots of students know that they can no longer expect a job after graduating studying just anything.at any college. (I was one of the last graduation years where that was true.) Unfortunately, college is a trade school now for most people.
- Jobs need to be available. Companies can't cry "skill shortage" while outsourcing their IT department to the lowest bidder or throwing people away when they turn 40. I think a technical career provides a very fulfilling job if you're lucky and choose your employers well. But, if I were faced with a choice of what to study, and saw stagnant wages, mass layoffs, and a career that can end at 40, I would probably pick something else.
- A career progression needs to exist. My career progression was help desk monkey --> desktop support monkey --> data center guy --> system administrator --> the strange hybrid admin/designer/architect/integration combo I do now. Now, it doesn't exist to the same degree. Help desk is in India, desktop support is significantly reduced and the pay is much lower than it was, data center monkey jobs now consist of replacing parts in Google or Amazon or Microsoft data centers, and so on. Where are the next generation of IT people and software developers going to be trained? On the dev side, the QA and maintenance coder jobs are increasingly in India or automated. Getting rid of low level jobs means that new entrants can't grow into the better jobs.
I'm an advocate of taking the different tasks in IT and dev, and splitting them into "technician" and "licensed engineer" tracks. Licensing the top tiers of the job field might mean higher quality of systems and software, fewer major security hacks, etc. The technician track would allow people to grow into these jobs, steadily gaining responsibility and salary over time. The thing we would have to avoid is what lawyers are going through now...the Bar Association threw open the doors to the profession a while back, opened tons of law schools, and allowed the offshoring of routine legal work. Now, look online sometime -- lawyers who spent $250K on school and passed the bar exam can't find work. The only way to make money as a lawyer now is if you manage to graduate at the top of your class at Harvard, Yale or Stanford -- otherwise, don't even bother.
So yes, definitely find ways to keep students interested in STEM -- but don't be shocked if no one signs on for the long haul when they see what's coming at the end...
Some people might point to this as a good thing, but I disagree. When rich, influential people begin taking control over key aspects of our society, such as education, even small experiments like this run the risk of being trotted out as the antidote to all those evil government-run schools out there.
Look at political advertising pre- and post- Citizens United decision. Smart people can see though most BS that either side generates. However, the reality is that the masses are definitely swayed by political ads. Now, it's just a matter of who has the most money and can blanket people with their message. A lot of political advertising is "issue advertising" designed not to promote a candidate, but an ideology. Education sounds like a perfect place to get that message in early. (And yes, I'm aware that the conservatives will point out the evil liberal agenda that public schools have...anything that isn't American exceptionalism is an evil liberal plot.)
I'm not saying it would happen, but giving influential people access to educational institutions could just end up creating students in their own image.
I do a strange combination of admin/design/integration work, and one of the reasons I do a decent job is because I can also script and automate stuff. You wouldn't believe how many Windows (and some Linux) admins lack these skills or are very rusty on them. So I'm the admin who can do a little coding -- can you be the coder who can do admin work? I believe the new phrase is DevOps...
I feel your pain and I'm getting older too. The company I work for does industry specific IT work, in an industry with a huge amount of proprietary, barely-transferable knowledge. I've seen people in my group get sucked so far down the proprietary knowledge route that they might as well be in your spot. I've had to really work to keep up to date, and am always trying to rotate my responsibilities around as much as I can to avoid being labelled "The X Guy", where X is some crazy technology that is interesting, but not conducive to employment outside our industry.
One thing I'd recommend is to think twice about management if that's not what you want to do. Most companies try to force good techies into management simply because that's the only promotional path available. However, I've worked for some awful managers who were great techies, and I'm not liking the small amount of management duties that have started creeping into my job description. if you like computers because they're more predictable than people, just wait till your first management job. People are not predictable or easy to deal with unless you have the skills...and it's something you're born with, not something you can acquire.
I know very few people agree with me on this one, but this is a perfect example of where professional licensure of at least the design part of IT and SW development could prevent problems. No civil engineer with the PE designation would sign off on a dumb design because they and/or their firm would be personally responsible for faulty work, and companies couldn't pressure people into doing so. Engineering of real world systems involves using proven methods and thoroughly testing anything new or different before it gets anywhere near the real world. IT is famous for "oh well, it compiles, we're done" and "I want to implement this in LangDuJour On Rails because it'll look good on my resume." I'm not saying it will solve all problems, but that would certainly weed out most bad design and many bad practitioners. You would standardize the education requirements, and at least ensure that people who get the license to practice think twice about taking dumb shortcuts. Lots of people would complain, and yes, it would slow the insane pace of new technology introduction, but it's been decades...it's time for the profession to grow up.
Licensing would not fix the other part of this problem -- companies not devoting the right amount of resources to IT. IT is almost always considered a cost center, and not understood by anyone in the executive suite (including the CIO.) I don't know this for a fact, but I'll bet that at least some of CareFirst's IT is outsourced to a lowest-bidder contractor -- just because I know companies that aren't IT-centric don't care about what happens in IT. That outsourcing either has their entire infrastructure in a disinterested third party's hands, or a split that's painful enough to make in-house staff think twice about changing something.
Finally, the problem is that companies get away with this all the time. Credit card fraud is completely victimless in the eyes of companies as long as they passed their PCI audit...their insurance company just pays and the banks eat the rest of the losses. Same goes with personal data -- it's always "oops, here's some credit monitoring service for you." Any class action lawsuits end up settled 10 years later for a few dollars per claimant. Until companies get in serious trouble for this, it will continue to happen.
I work for a multinational private company and we see the same thing, not just with security breaches.
The reality is, in most labor environments now, why would anyone make an effort to point something out that would get them marginalized or fired? This is especially true in the "outsourcing countries" -- most of the people working in these locations are extremely happy to have stable employment and will do anything they can to protect it. As a result, huge problems are hidden for as long as possible until they really can't be hidden anymore. In the US, that fear is instilled by the scarlet letter of unemployment. Even with an improving economy, I still see unemployed people who can't even get an interview because they have a gap in their employment history. Unemployment in the US equals financial ruin for most people -- your credit will be destroyed once you can't meet your obligations and unemployment insurance doesn't come close to replacing most salaries. And once your credit is messed up, most companies will pass on hiring you anyway because they have 20 people with good credit and clean background checks.
Also, regarding public sector vs. private sector -- I know lots of people who work for our state university system. Even though these positions are technically permanent, there's nothing stopping the internal politics of the system from making your life so miserable that you might as well quit. It's very similar to the way private companies manage people out -- start enforcing rules more stringently, change work assignments to something awful, etc. The public sector just has due process with regards to getting rid of someone. Soon as someone shows up for work 3 minutes late more than X times, they have their excuse, just like a private company does. So yeah, I have no doubt that anyone with a shred of self-preservation instinct would keep their mouth shut about a security problem unless it was directly attributable to them.
Every "tech skill" most people talk about has a very short half-life. Look at how many languages, mobile platforms and frameworks appear every year. Some get picked up, some don't, and some live on in some obscure corner of the world.
Don't focus on "skills" -- focus on "fundamentals." I've had a reasonably good career for almost 20 years now, and falling back on strong fundamentals has always saved me when faced with a new challenge. Anyone can learn how to write code in Python or Ruby -- it takes a solid grounding to transfer that knowledge into different areas.
What fundamentals would I want to teach newbies now?
- Logic and reasoning -- It's fundamental to software, and aids in the troubleshooting process
- Methodical troubleshooting -- I do systems work and I have encountered so many people who troubleshoot using the shotgun method, changing 50 things at once hoping one of them will work.
- Information management -- again, from the systems world, I see lots of people who google error messages, etc. (myself included) and get 20+ ways to solve the same problem. This is one place where instant information access can backfire. Learn to recognize what is relevant and what is not.
- Systems integration -- a catch-all term, but basically "how to gather all the components together and make them work." I have had the opportunity to work on very interesting projects simply because I was willing to get my hands dirty in areas outside of my comfort zone and learn enough about them to be useful.
- Social skills -- I'm not, and will never be, an extroverted salesperson type. However, there's a broad spectrum and you don't want to be on the "asocial nerd" side of it. Fair or not, people who don't at least try to work with others are increasingly marginalized in their careers. Management would much rather offshore some obscure technical skill than deal with someone they find unpleasant. If every interaction with you becomes an argument about who's right, that's a pretty good sign...and I see this time and time again with lots of people I work with (both technical and non-technical.)
On the technical side, I'd love to see a demystification of platforms-in-a-box. The tablet/phone world is a perfect example of abstracting a system so far that you can't see anything it's doing under the hood. There's no more filesystem, data access is handled for you, etc. If you grow up using systems like this, it's hard to come back down into the weeds and see the "magic" that makes all this stuff work end-to-end.
Fundamental stuff like this has been a very good skill set to build on. The rest is all learned as needed, forgotten about, and dusted off later on. For example, I've learned and re-learned Citrix 3 times when I've needed to for a project. I re-learn enough Linux for a project when the need arises (I do Windows stuff for work mostly.) And, I'm currently upgrading years of Windows scripting and automation knowledge by learning PowerShell.
In the US, one of the problems with the system is that there really are only two choices. Even if independents don't feel like they're throwing their votes away, realistically, they are. One of the things I like about European parliamentary systems is that minority parties do have a voice in the system, and the ruling parties have to play nice with them to get anything done. Congress since 2012 has been a mess with both parties digging their heels in, to the point where even the simplest routine business can't get done. And with the unlimited spending by businesses and wealthy individuals now part of the mix, there's no way anyone who doesn't align with one of the 2 parties can ever hope to get anything done.
One of the things I've noticed about the Republican side this election cycle is the effort to replace that older, whiter group of voters mentioned in the summary with Hispanics. It will be very interesting to see what happens. It makes sense; Hispanics are typically very religious and socially conservative, so Republicans probably see that as a way to offset the loss of religious whites. But, how do they square that with their economic policies, which basically boil down to giving business whatever they ask for, and the anti-immigration policies championed by the remaining older whiter crowd? We'll see...
Another demographic that Republicans may be losing is rural working class voters. Whatever political side you end up on, the fact is that available employment for middle/working class people is drying up due to automation and the downward pressure on wages. We in IT see this all the time with the H-1B program and offshoring. Lots of working class Republicans seem to think that if they just work harder, they can become successful, and they don't see that some policies actually hinder their progress, nor do they see that there really is no path to riches when you start at a certain level in society. If enough working class people finally realize this, they might tend to align with Democrats as a lever against the rich/business owners. This, plus the fact that religion is becoming less and less of a draw to people and social issues aren't as big a deal anymore, is the demographic shift they need to worry about.
The thing that does worry me is that younger people will continue to see politics as something they can't influence or participate in, and let the rich in both parties just use the system for their own gain. I tend to be a very left wing, big government type, but I think it would be interesting to see a _credible_ independent third party challenge the system, just to see what a difference it could make. The problem is that political minorities don't have the credibility among most voters. I'm certainly not a Libertarian, nor would i ever vote for a TEA party candidate...but I wouldn't vote for a Communist either. The problem is that in our system, any non-mainstream political view is treated as completely irrelevant. Look at how many times the president has been called a "socialist." If he were a true socialist, we wouldn't have the Affordable Care Act in its current form or the income inequality we have...yet the right wing guys are convinced of this.
I do systems engineering work for a professional services/software company. Development is fully Agile with a capital A, whether or not it makes sense for a particular project. On the systems side of the house, we have another particular religion called ITIL which lots of companies have jumped into with both feet. The problem with both of these concepts is that they are adhered to, almost to a comical level, even if it's painfully obvious that parts of it don't fit.
Adhering to all of ITIL, for example, is a really good way to ensure your production systems almost never change. The number of people and sheer volume of paperwork, tickets and meetings to get anything even scheduled for a change in a "true ITIL" system is beyond insane. The same goes for incident management -- we have so many single-task focused "resolver groups" that I have no idea how anyone knows how any of our systems operate end-to-end. ITIL is great for mainframe systems, safety sensitive stuff, and networks which never change.
"True Agile" and "True Waterfall" are opposite ends of the spectrum. Agile gets you very fast development, at the expense of pinning down any sort of architecture in the beginning. Waterfall often results in software you have to throw away because the requirements change out from under you. However, there are some things that require at least some discipline, both in systems and development. No systems guy would ever advocate just logging in and making random changes on a production system to see what happens. No smart developer/architect charged with writing something that underpins tons and tons of other things would advocate swapping out the core components without at least some backward compatibility thrown in. The prpblem is that "gurus" make their money selling management on these methods. In the case of both Agile and ITIL, it's a manager's dream -- everyone becomes a replaceable unit and business requests can get promoted to production in one Sprint.
From what I've seen, especially with math, the terms have changed but the entire way it's presented has also changed. For example, I have always been a poor math student unless what I'm learning can be applied to something real-world -- I have more of an engineer's brain than a mathematician's. All the algebra, trig, etc. that was force-fed into my brain in high school only started making sense when I started struggling through my college chemistry curriculum and finding out that it was actually useful for something.
My memories of elementary school math consist of endless repetition of arithmetic facts and simply memorizing procedures for things like solving ratio problems, working with fractions, etc. And every high school graduate instinctively remembers "x = (-b +/- sqrt(b^2 - 4ac))/2a" whether or not it made any sense at the time. It seems like the new curriculum acknowledges that computers exist and focuses more on developing the reasoning/estimating skills than the old-school math we were taught. I think parents are really confused by this.
My state (New York) which had semi-decent education standards to begin with, recently switched to the Common Core curriculum and it's really stirring up a mess. Partially, it's the mandatory testing that parents are opting their children out of, but it's also being tied to a bunch of other things. For example, teachers now have to deal with the same BS performance evaluations that corporate employees do, and a huge chunk of their rating is based on these test scores. They were evaluated in the past, but it was understood that there was no objective way to evaluate teacher performance with variable student performance. Now, new teachers will lose their jobs if their classes don't do well on these tests, with no regard for whether the teacher has a bunch of losers or geniuses in their class. I'm not a teacher, but I'm definitely on the teachers' side in this case. I would hate to spend the time to get a teacher certification (not impossible, but harder in NY than many states) and have my job be at risk due to factors I can't control. For example, most new teachers can't get jobs in the nice affluent school districts because there are tons more qualified applicants who want to work there, so they usually have to start off teaching in a crappy school district. Crappy districts tend to have kids who have crappy parents. (And yes, affluent districts have helicopter parents that make teachers' lives miserable, but that's another story.) If you have a class full of students who have bad home lives, parents who don't care, or have been socially promoted for years, they're going to do badly on these standardized tests and your performance rate will suffer through no fault of your own.
The other thing I've seen is that the material used to teach the common core curriculum is really different from stuff we saw in earlier times. I think that's another big thing -- parents feel they can't help their kids with homework. However, it's the material, not the curriculum itself. Blame the educational publishers for that, not the standards.
One thing I definitely don't agree with Bill Gates on is his love of charter schools. These just suck more money away from the public system and funnel it into corporate interests' pockets, making the public system weaker. What Gates or anyone doesn't understand is that education won't improve until it's valued by everyone. The reason China, India, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, etc. are ahead of us in test performance isn't the curriculum -- they push their students like crazy from both directions (teachers and parents.) Kids in these countries spend many more hours in school than US kids, and have information drilled into their heads. That's what needs to happen if we want to compete with these countries in the future. In the case of India and China, school performance is basically some kids' only ticket to a better life given the population and structure of society. Things might be a little different if students in the US who didn't excel in school were permanently doomed to a life of poverty...I think the parents might care a little more.
My experience, having worked with security "consultants" in the past, is that many of them are of the same stripe as the management consultants from Accenture, KPMG, etc. and just fly around the country giving PowerPoint presentations to scared executives trying to sell them a packaged appliance/solution. If these guys are part of the survey, I can easily see $200K+ -- their firm is billing them out at at least twice that. I know lots of young grads with zero or little experience routinely get jobs with the big consulting firms if they went to the right school, and are immediately put into service at large companies in positions of relatively high authority for their actual skill level. As long as they don't mind traveling 50 weeks a year, it can be a very lucrative first job for an Ivy League grad. I doubt their business model is any different with IT security.
People actually working on real day to day security see a lot less than that in most organizations, simply because most places don't care about security. If you're a retailer, your insurance company just pays out when you get hacked as long as you checked the PCI DSS auditing box. (That's another stripe of "security experts" who pull in the higher levels of salary.)
I'm not sure what it's like in places that actually need real security (intelligence, banking, etc.)
(Disclaimer: I'm the guy with 6 browser tabs open right now who _should_ be finishing something.)
I think that in the workplace, simple demand on knowledge workers' time is the reason for loss of focus. Fewer and fewer people are being hired to do things, and at the same time more things are being asked of the remaining individuals. I often find it hard to sit and actually solve a problem completely unless people leave me alone and let me work on the one or two hard problems. The thing that does keep me motivated is this -- now that I have children, I can't just spend forever getting things done at work. Once time is up, I need to head out and take care of family stuff. 10 years ago, I could stay an extra hour or two if I got stuck on something. Now, it's tough to even pull out the laptop after they go to bed, so I'm very motivated to do work at work. This keeps me out of most of the time-sinks -- Slashdot is not one of them though. :-) If I were 20-something, had no kids and nothing going on outside of work, I'd probably just work the 12-hour days that Google or other companies like it enable for their workers by providing free food, etc.
As far as society in general, anecdotal evidence seems to point to smart phones and social media as big distractions. I'm kind of in between on this -- I like my phone, but I also have the patience to, say, sit and wait for the train without constantly messing with it. A lot of people can't do that or don't want to. I've seen more than a couple of people bump into light poles on train station platforms because their noses were stuck in their phones. I still have enough patience to use most of my downtime to think about solutions to work problems, or just stare into space and think. But if I was a Facebook-addicted kid or Millennial, that might be harder to do.
I'm 40 this year, and therefore washed up, useless and unemployable. :-) Not really -- but I do have to choose my opportunities carefully.
I've posted about this before, but software development and IT have the same skillset regardless of age:
- Attention to detail
- Intelligent troubleshooting skills
- Creative problem solving skills
The things that differentiate the older people are:
- Experience with technology cycles, and the ability to see what is a fad, what's a rehash and what will stick around
- Experience with doing things -- leading to less rework because we've already tried a lot of the ways that don't work
- Most of us know how to play the working game now and aren't willing to kill ourselves for deadlines/projects that don't go anywhere
- Most of us have responsibilities outside of work (kids, family, etc.) that a younger worker doesn't
In my personal case, my employers get a solid, committed employee who does great work and is able to go home on time. Younger employees tend to like startup culture or employers like Google because they continue the dorm atmosphere from college. Google provides free meals and other services to employees for the sole reason that many don't have a family or other out-of-work commitments yet. My employer doesn't provide free meals - I work for a professional services company. They pay me pretty well, keep feeding me interesting work, and I generally have a healthy balance of work and life. I haven't had to work any outside-of-hours time that hasn't been comped in some form -- after-hours conference call == late arrival/early leaving next day, for example. They do reserve the right to send me to a customer location on short notice in case of a real disaster -- but that's happened once in the 10 years I've worked here.
I guess my question is this -- would older workers even be happy working at EA or Google or similar? Not to say they should be denied the opportunity, but most 40-somethings and above have families or at least something going on outside of work to occupy their time. I think the best strategy for "old" people is to try getting hired onto a consulting firm (where your experience is an asset they can bill out) or something like local/state government work with a guaranteed retirement and benefits.
I think that most people understand there are a certain percentage of truly bad cops who will tamper with evidence, lie, etc. to get what they need. The thing that's new is the Internet, social media, and the ability for guys like these to collect and publish records. If a bystander hadn't taken (or published) the video of that guy in South Carolina being shot, the cop would still be working today and no one would have said a thing. It used to be extremely rare that something like this surfaced, and it often took a major news organization to do the kind of investigating and analysis.
You can't go into law enforcement without having at least some tendencies towards being a bully. I think that, plus the unlimited authority police get, plus the fact that they deal almost exclusively with "bad" people produce the police that make the headlines. I don't know how most are able to keep their bully tendencies in check when they never work with good people, plus racism and fellow officers reinforcing bad behavior probably have an effect over time as well. The end product of that is the stereotypical "bully with a badge" that gets the most media attention.
In the age when anyone can post video of bad police behavior, the only answer is to have tamper proof cameras on police every time they interact with the public. It's too easy for people to make false claims, and it used to be too easy for the police to sweep things under the rug.
Education is a fundamental public good and no public resources should ever go to a private company to run schools. By doing that, you take away resources from the public schools and further damage them.
I know everyone loves to point to charter schools and what a wonderful job they're doing, but there are two things people conveniently ignore:
- Behind that charter school is a company/person getting insanely rich off of public funds and/or using their unique position to maximize profit.
- All the other schools in the area get hurt because resources get funneled away from them.
- You're basically corporatizing education -- I'm guessing Zuckerberg and Company will be influencing the curriculum to turn out a new generation of web code monkeys.
Everyone loves to bash teachers and teachers' unions, but that's not what we should be doing. Teaching needs to be a profession people want to go into, and people need to respect educators. Giving up and just selling the school system to the lowest bidder won't fix the long-standing problems a school district has. Nothing will -- there are always going to be poor kids with horrible home lives. Unless you go after that, education won't improve significantly in bad neighborhoods.
How is this possible anymore? Even the simplest front-line customer service jobs require some sort of computer use now. I haven't seen personal assistants below the senior VP level at any company for at least 15 years now. Only the CxOs get assistants now, and they're basically just managing their travel and personal schedules.
I could (and have) seen people who retired somewhere in the early 90s and haven't touched a computer -- they're why our local library still runs workshops on basic computer use. But even if the sample is the oldest of the old workers, where or in what industry has anyone seen anybody who has never used a computer before come into the workforce lately?
Granted, I have seen many people who absolutely can't do anything beyond what they're trained to do, but even those are very rare now. It's been a while since most people have absolutely required training on a new version of Windows or Office.
I am just about to hit that milestone 40th birthday this year. If things are as bad as they seem, I'm probably in for a rough couple of decades.
One thing that does bother me is that "digital natives" are no more or less capable of doing a good job in a technology job than older people. The skills are the same -- creative problem solving, troubleshooting, logical thinking and awesome communications skills. Older people do have different qualities in my opinion:
- We've been around the block and seen technology fads appear, disappear and come back later on with better underpinnings. We've also seen how stuff like virtualization and application containers aren't actually new concepts...just way better now than they were.
- Many/most of us have obligations outside of work and greater responsibilities. A 40 year old with two little kids [raises hand] has a little less flexibility than a recent grad who will move anywhere in the country in a week, doesn't mind sharing a 2-bedroom apartment with roommates and will willingly work 14-hour days for no extra pay.
- Many/most of us have also figured out the game of working for a company, and prefer a healthier work/life balance to throwing all your energy into projects that can sometimes get trashed for no reason.
- One advantage we do have is growing up with computers in a much more primitive state, where more about the actual machine was exposed to you. "Digital natives" grow up with packaged platforms and a lot of the underpinnings are permanently abstracted away unless you are sufficiently motivated to dig further.
For these reasons, among others, companies prefer younger workers because they're easier to control. I'm not saying that all of us oldsters are perfect -- I've worked with a lot of burnt out folks who do the bare minimum to keep their job. But, in my opinion it's not fair to paint everyone with the same brush. I won't kill myself for deadlines the way a 22-year-old working for EA might, but I have cranked out consistent good work over my career, and really want to continue doing so until I don't feel I can contribute anymore.