Pretty impressive all things considered!
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IBM Turns 100
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· Score: 3, Interesting
So far, the comments are the predictable ones I'd expect -- the recent love of offshoring, sell-off of products, etc. But it's pretty amazing to see what they did after almost dying in the late 80s after they missed the client/server and PC boat. I don't agree with a lot of their short sighted moves, but changing from a hardware to a consulting company without people realizing it is an interesting feat.
Stories I've been told describe the IBM prior to this period as a pretty amazing place to work in terms of benefits and the tech you were able to work on. Don't forget that all of that was possible because back in the day, margins on hardware were orders of magnitude higher than they were now. Plus, IBM had a total lock on the mainframe market (still does pretty much, but less work needs to be done in this space now.) When they could get a much higher margin for selling boxes, they could lavish R&D money on the people who designed those boxes, training and salaries on the people who supported them, AND still have plenty left over for the execs and shareholders. You know, the "golden age of computing".... Now, most hardware is in the single-digit percent margin category (except for Apple stuff) and there's no money to be made in it. "Consulting" and managed services will bring in millions more than a hardware purchase; they can throw half the population of India at a customer and still make billions even if it takes longer to get results...which is where we US techies are stuck right now. In particular, the stories of older IBM techies being told to move to India or Brazil or leave paint a pretty sad state of affairs. (Side note, this trend will never reverse until we can kick everyone's hyperfocus on the stock market and corporate earnings. No public company is able to do anything that isn't guaranteed to instantly pay off anymore.)
That said, the hardware they do still make (or at least OEM) is pretty good. And, if you're willing to pay the premium for this gear, System x and BladeCenter support is still done in the US. Documentation is horrible because of the huge decentralized nature of the company, but I've been able to call these guys up and get an answer in 5 minutes. Still, it's kind of ironic that IBM hires teams of customers to come in and basically rewrite the documentation for some of their products (see Redbooks.)
Also, don't forget that IBM is one of the only companies big enough to put serious money into research anymore. In my mind, that's really important. Where are all the CS, physics and EE Ph. D's going to work now that Bell Labs is gone and HP only does product research?
If the president is leaning on the private sector to do this, he might want to consider passing along a little advice. Students will major in subjects that can get them stable, good-paying jobs. Yes, engineering is one of those fields that pays well, but there are some huge problems with the field:
Real pay is dropping because of outsourcing and various visa programs that the private sector asked for and got.
There are fields that are 10x easier to do well in (MBA, finance, etc.) and get high paying jobs in (manager/exec, investment banker, management consultant) that involve much less actual work.
Companies with a legitimate need for engineering talent have a tendency to kill the career path for people as they age. Anecdotal evidence presented all the time tries to paint older engineering/IT workers as lazy and unable to keep up with the rapid technology change and 24/7 schedules.
Also due to outsourcing and reductions in staff, there are fewer entry-level jobs for students to take when they get out to get experience.
That said, I also don't know if shoveling more engineering grads into the fire is a good idea either. Our group is in the process of hiring IT systems engineers for an integration role (think a little bit lab monkey, a little bit project coordinator, a little bit documentation writer, some passing familiarity with SW development, and someone who can learn something new that a customer wants incredibly fast.) It's a good solid job with an established company. We're willing to pay market rates for the position (we're not an IT bodyshop.) We can't find anyone ready to fill it, and have only found a couple people who are trainable. What have we seen so far?
- People who can't write complete English sentences (kills the documentation requirement right there)
- Lack of any sort of troubleshooting ability (and this is with a simple test)
- Very little desire to learn anything new (and we provide as much training as you're willing to put the effort into)
- Unreasonable salary demands (and we're talking outrageous, not "wah, I can't hire an H1-B for 40% of the cost")
So, maybe the problem has something to do with the education itself. Or, IT has just become that pigeonholed that everyone is reduced to button-pushers in large companies, so they don't get the experience needed. I'm all for making more smart people, since that's where the world is heading, but I think we need to make sure we're actually giving these students some useful skills to sell to future employers.
It's definitely a two-way street. Employers need to play ball too...there are still a fair number of us who want a long term, stable job with real benefits and without the need to move every 3 years. But being on the inside trying to help hire a co-worker, I kind of see their points as well.
Every time the college vs. no college debate comes up, examples of highly successful dropouts or people who didn't ever go to college are rolled out. The default assumption is that everyone is destined to be a successful entrepreneur. In his defense, he does mention further down in the article that not everyone is cut out for this.
Think about it this way -- to be a successful business owner, you can't just be smart or a hard worker. You have to have some sort of entrepreneurial spark that most people don't have. Every business owner that I've dealt with who is reasonably successful is also a type-A nutjob (mostly meant in a good way...) who works 130 hour weeks and never lets up. Sending the message that everyone can do this if they just try is wrong in my opinion. It produces a lot of small business failures and subsequent bankruptcies as people keep trying to make their business float despite obvious signs it'll never work. It also produces a lot of rhetoric that standard employees are a bunch of lazy people who have no drive and can't cut it in the "real world." Also, there's only so many small businesses that the economy can absorb -- if everyone is out running a frozen yogurt shop or pizza place or small-time startup company, larger companies don't have a workforce. Finally, the entrepreneur class plays the rugged individualist card a little too much IMO when pushing for things such as reduced regulations on business. Example: States who try to enforce sick time requirements on medium-sized small businesses are labeled socialist and hostile to business.
I will be the first to admit I'm not an entrepreneur. I have a good job doing systems engineering work for a large employer, I work hard, and my contribution is valued (after all, they keep paying me.) A smaller company could run rings around this one, but there would be a problem making that transition: - I can't sell. Period. - I'm not your typical "slimy used car salesman" personality that most small business owners tend to be - I'm not willing to risk my livelihood or work insane hours for something that will probably fail. (Isn't it 90% of small businesses failing within a year still?) What would I fall back on?
For everyone else who isn't these things, the formal education route is the way to go. Just like your average unemployed factory worker would be ill-advised to cash out his retirement to go buy a Subway franchise, high school grads would be ill-advised to completely ignore the safer path to a decent living.
I don't agree with this. First, anyone interested in CS has probably at least had some rudimentary exposure to programming. Either they taught themselves, or had high school courses that touched on it. The weed-out course serves as a first-pass filter to make sure those who really don't belong in CS don't waste their time on more courses and switch to something more suited for them. It's also a "last-chance" for those who didn't have any prior experience but may be talented to try this field out.
I'm on the IT side of things, and given both my exposure to new IT hires and freshly-minted CS grads, I wish there was a stronger weed-out system for both sides of the house. From the IT side, we have technical certifications (Cisco, Microsoft, Sun, etc.) instead of degrees in most cases. There is a huge difference between someone who is truly suited for IT work and the person who just barely passed a certification course and can't figure things out once they go "off-manual."
I ended up studying chemistry in school, and our weed-out class was organic chem. Same for the medical and pharmacy students...if you couldn't pass that class easily, it was pretty much a given that you wouldn't be successful. Engineering students had a combination of the higher-level math courses and (in our school) thermodynamics. Business majors had accounting. In the chemistry case, the 101-level course gave enough background for all the non-chemistry majors who needed a grounding in chem for the rest of their studies. Soon as you hit the next course though, the expectations ramped up. Especially in a subject like CS where you have millions of people trying to get in on the action because they're "good with computers," there needs to be a filter to drop out everyone who can't understand basic logic, how a loop or conditional works in a program, etc. Otherwise you get more grads that write stuff that ends up on thedailywtf.com.
Disclaimer: I'm a systems engineer who spent many years as an admin. I don't do as much daily firefighting as I used to, but I sure have tons of experience in that department.
How many of you (good natured) IT folk looked at the Terry Childs case and said, "Hey, that sounds like X, the total jerk I used to work with!" I know I did... We had a guy like this who (a) did the passive-aggressive thing when asked to take care of something, (b) kept all the secrets in his head so that it would be hard for anyone to take over, and (c) got fired because management/staff had finally had enough of him and decided it would be worth it to just get a consultant in to put everything right.
Stories like this, and unfortunate stereotypes, are what keep IT work "in the basement" and prevent us from being recognized as professionals, IMO. We don't get respect from the MBA crowd because we can't justify our existence...but I think we could change that by changing the typical attitude.
Obviously, most IT people aren't like Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons, but those who are sure make it hard for the rest of us.
Now that computers are totally pervasive, maybe it's time to set some standards and get the various branches of IT work (development, network admin, systems admin, etc.) recognized as professions. At least there would be some kind of code of conduct and minimum education standard so employers would be sure of what they're getting.
In my experience, non-IT companies are falling all over themselves to move to (at the very least) hosted IT services. The true answer to this question will come out when the first major provider flames out. Think about this with a cynical eye towards the situation. CIOs and other decision makers are under immense pressure to cut costs, especially in companies where IT is not seen as a strategic investment. For every software company or non-IT company that uses IT to its advantage, there are 10x as many who use IT for file/print/email only, and see it as a cost like paying the janitor and building staff to keep the place running. Cloud providers win business by doing a shiny PowerPoint with animated graphics showing all those power-eating servers and local IT staff fading into "the cloud." At the same time, they promise the ability to get rid of your IT staff and replace the current IT spend with a monthly charge that can be completely written off as an operational expense. MBAs are seemingly taught on Day 1 that human resources are a necessary evil to be minimized, and that operational expenses are preferable to fixed asset spending. Therefore, this PowerPoint resonates with them and the decision is made.
The problems come behind the PowerPoint. Every IT problem the business had before now becomes the provider's problem, including data storage/retention, bandwidth issues, server provisioning and all that stuff. How well does it work out? Everything depends on the competence of your provider. Even with ironclad SLAs in place, (a) Really Bad Stuff can still happen that makes them null and void, and (b) SLAs are only a piece of paper guaranteeing you free service or a payment in the event of an outage.
Any business considering The Cloud needs to think of the following:
Do I trust my provider to handle my data? Is there anything so proprietary that I wouldn't mind having exposed on the Internet by a disgruntled cloud provider employee?
How much does it actually cost me to be down for X minutes? Am I willing to pay to have the provider properly architect the solution to work around this or am I willing to eat that much money? Is any SLA they can provide me going to compensate me for the full losses that downtime generates?
The Cloud can also be achieved locally through server consolidation, investing in more flexible network infrastructure and increasing internal operations efficiency. Would I be more comfortable doing that?
(If this sounds like the list of questions to ask when considering an outsourcing agreement, it is. Cloud is just IT outsourcing without a directly accountable staff at the provider.) Businesses who want data integrity and decent service need to realize that they have to pay for it, just like they do in a traditional outsourcing/hosting scenario. If a CIO chooses to go with the equivalent of GMail for their internal messaging, just 'cause it was cheaper than the fully-hosted, DR'd, off-site backed up, SOX-compliant managed email service, then they deserve what they get.
I'm the submitter, so I figured I'd reserve my comments for here so this wasn't rejected with the comment "tl; dr".:-)
Here's how I feel -- I'm not 100% sold on the argument that everything is crashing down, but I do have some serious concerns for the future. Some of them could be easily fixable if people would just get on board, and others will take a long time and tons of investment to fix. Here's my list of issues:
Lack of economic diversity -- We still lead the world in manufacturing output last time I checked, but one problem is that this is mainly due to the export of big-ticket items like airplanes. Boeing only has so many jobs available for a massive population. Previous generations had a large, decently-compensated middle class and a good chunk of those people worked in domestic factories. Now, your only hope seems to be to go to college, get a degree even if you don't need one, and hopefully get a white-collar service job. Sounds great, right? What if you can't handle college? Not everyone is brilliant, but a lot of non-brilliant people in the past had a good shot at a decent wage. Bottom line: We need more work for the other half of the population who isn't cut out for knowledge work, and that work needs to pay more than minimum wage like it used to.
Lack of R&D spend -- The transistor and UNIX were invented at Bell Labs, AT&T's pure research arm. Larger companies may pay lip service to R&D now, but such spend rarely survives market downturns. Increasingly, even companies with large R&D operations are being pressured to focus on things that will immediately turn a profit or produce patents that the company can license. AT&T might be an outsized example -- for you kiddies, that rinky-dink cell phone provider used to have a monopoly on any kind of phone service, and set the world's telecom stanards. That gave them some serious money to play with. But companies of all sizes are cutting back funding for pure research in pursuit of short term profits.
Focus on short term goals and profits -- The nature of the markets and individual compensation forces companies to focus on next quarter's profits instead of the future. Tell the average board that you might possibly produce a 5-fold ROI in 4 years vs. a 2-fold guaranteed ROI next quarter, and you know what wins. This kind of thinking leads to some of the dumber things companies do, like giving up control of proprietary processes to third parties for a one-time cash hit.
Always-on stock markets -- Following on the last point, everyone's retirement is tied up in the markets either directly or indirectly through mutual funds. Because of this, investors demand constant rising stock prices and will not tolerate anything that could possibly impact profitability. IMO, if we returned control of the markets to companies and the ultra-rich, and had individuals a little more removed from it through pensions, annuities or other less volatile investments, companies might get slack they need to actually pour money into something that may pay off in the future. Equities markets should be reserved for billionaires to fund business ventures, not be a person's sole source of later-life income.
Education -- Put the anti-intellectualism debate aside for a bit; one of the reasons it exists is the poor quality of education. Taxpayers refuse to fund it, only a lucky minority of students are in good schools, and the rest are stuck. Getting students interested in something other than business or the "soft squishy" stuff is difficult when (a) you don't have a good pre-college foundation to work off of, and (b) the payoff for business and soft-squishy stuff is astronomical compared to STEM fields. I know a few science Ph.D's who went into management consulting and crank out spreadsheets and PowerPoints all day because the compensation is so much higher than staying in their field.
So -- all we need to do is break companies' addiction to short te
I'm surprised about this statistic as well as happy. I was pretty much sure CS and other science work was completely written off by US students as nonviable. After all, it's easier to go into investment banking or management consulting, and the course load is much easier for a bigger payoff.
Some people have posted sentiments along the lines of -- "is this actual CS being studied, or a checkbox for an IT job?" Being in IT, I can say that having a background in a science or engineering discipline (doesn't matter which one) is a huge asset. The abiltiy to logically break down a system or problem, analyze dependencies and troubleshoot separates a really good IT guru from the guy who just got out of a certification class. (If you have this ability naturally, then great...but most people need to actually practice on something to get good at it, hence the degree.) This also can lead to more job satisfaction -- I enjoy my job because my company gives me interesting problems to solve, partially because they know I'll be able to deal with the "interesting" stuff better than someone who can just follow directions. I have a non-CS background (chemistry,) but the same scientific, logical reasoning applies. For example, when ýou're trying to figure out a poorly documented application with no access to the developers or support, and something goes wrong, this kicks in. Someone who just took a certification class will (may!) know how to drive the product's GUI or CLI, and often changes six things at a time in the vague hope that something will work. A science-trained individual is much more likely to methodically approach troubleshooting, and understand how what they do possibly affects connected systems. There are huge exceptions in both cases, and I've seen them, but it's a good rule of thumb that someone with a science/engineering background is going to be a better candidate for a job. Maybe my judgement is a little clouded since I'm in systems integration, where this skillset is even more important to have. Anything outside of a formulaic procedure, or a situation where you actually have to come up with the procedure is better staffed by someone who can deal with the higher-level work.
One interesting side effect of this is that if enrollment in good CS programs gets high enough, employers will no longer be able to sell the "we can't find qualified Americans to do our jobs." Like I said, I only agree with them to a point -- there's a lot of bozos in our field that don't belong and are better suited to other professions. However, there are a lot of good, qualified people out there...they just don't work cheap and are usually employed unless a major layoff/restructuring leaves you without a seat.
One thing I've noticed is that social media in general has made computer technology somehow more accessible. Remember, just a few years ago, basic computer literacy was being able to boot up your PC, drive an office application and produce "work." Social media use now appears to be the basic computer literacy unit -- the UIs are simple enough for most people to pick up and the draw of social interaction is irresistable for most people. And now that smartphones that don't suck as user input devices are out, it's even more generally available.
That said, there's a lot of hype -- tons in fact. Everyone is hailing FB, Twitter and the like as the conduit of democratic change in the Middle East. Let's be real for a sec -- it was the platform. The 80% unemployment rate among young people certainly had something to do with it, and something would have happened without FB as the organizing tool.
It's neat for sharing pictures, or posting silly status updates. I do think that people are going to come to a realization that all of their data, likes, check-ins, connections, pokes, message contents and contact lists are (a) for sale, and (b) publically searchable in some cases. Or maybe not - maybe privacy is a stupid, archaic 20th Century concept. I'm no Luddite, but I'm really not that interested in being expected to constantly interact with my social circle 24/7...people really need to unplug sometimes. Privacy may be dead, but I'm sure at least a few people (beyond the overhyped media stories on that subject) will inexplicably not be called for a second job interview, or get a promotion, etc. simply because they're a social networking blabbermouth. I'm sure there's at least someone under 30 who doesn't like the idea of always-on, forever-remembered social media content that you can't reliably scrub. That someone may have a hiring manager job someday...
Social media really does look poised to be the second Internet bubble. Businesses of every kind, including the stodgiest of stodgy companies are hiring high-dollar consultants to plug them into the social network. Replace that phrase with "get on the Internet" and you've got the makings of a huge stock run based on vaporware IPOs...oh wait, that's happening!;-) And just like the last bubble, things will improve. There's plenty of good stuff that came out of the dotcom boom, and these social media properties will remain...they just won't be as pervasive and inserted into every single casual conversation.
Every time I see a life insurance salesman, car repair shop or scrap metal dealer tell me to "join them on Facebook and Twitter", I have two thoughts -- (1) that's pretty dumb, and (2) maybe I should just jump in and make some money off this while it lasts.:-)
One of the things I use Google for extensively is the ability to search for wierd error messages, return codes, etc. that appear in commercial software I use for work. It's very frustruating when your very specific search query returns 45 different sites, all of which are rehosting the same forum post or newsgroup article. These get ranked higher up than other unique posts, causing a lot of scrolling through results and wasting time. Also, these aren't queries like "bmw 335i" or "" that are guaranteed to return millions of unique hits. I'm looking for the one other guy in the world who's found this issue and has a workable answer. Google used to be pretty good for that, especially if your query was well formed and incredibly specific.
Real world example - I got an error message trying to install Windows 7 SP1 last week, with a long hex number and a very specifically-worded message. I typed the query into google, and the first hit was some idiot who had no idea what he was talking about on a support forum. The next 5-6 hits were that exact same idiot's post rebroadcast to sites like eggheadcafe.com, techarea.in, etc. I eventually found the answer, but it was on page 3 of the search results.
On another topic, how and why do these content farm sites exist? How does eggheadcafe.com, which just copies newsgroup and forum data, able to pay to keep the site going? Are they all just looking to cash in on ad revenue? Do they really get that much in revenue to justify the site-crawling they must have to do?
I wonder how long this can keep up. In my experience, as soon as you graduate and get your first job, almost every future employment prospect is based on how well you perform in the "real world." Getting that first job is tougher if you are a state school graduate (like me,) but if you majored in something marketable, you do eventually get hired. My first 2 jobs were awful, but I was able to gain enough experience to eventually get the job I have today. No one has ever asked me where I went to school or what my grades were, unless it was just out of curiosity.
If you're truly headed for an academic career, elite schools can give you a leg up also - but if you're good, you will be able to go somewhere for grad school also. Same goes for the professions (law & medicine.)
Contrast this with someone who pays the price, gets past admissions and graduates from a top-tier school. From what I've seen, the price of the school gives you access to opportunities you wouldn't normally have, such as:
The investment banks generally recruit from the top 25 schools. That's an instant ticket to a six-figure income right out of school.
The top-of-the-top-tier management consulting firms (Bain, Booz, Boston Consulting, McKinsey, etc.) also recruit out of the Ivy League, and also lead to an instant six-figure salary.
Your classmates tend to be more well off and more connected than the anonymous guys like me who went to BigStateU. I guess that can help you in the future with political/business/personal connections.
You also tend to have a much easier time getting that first job, and it may pay better.
As far as any other benefits go, I can't see them. You may have some very famous professors and top experts in their fields, but you may never see them, and that may not matter to you if you are not pursuing the subject as a career.
It's a big shift - even when I graduated 15 years ago, it was pretty much a given that you would at least be employed if you went to any college and got a bachelors' degree. If you went to an elite school, you were revered by future employers as if it was an infallable indicator of your abilities. Now, you hear all these stories of students taking out $150K+ in loans and not finding work even remotely related to their field or paying enough to cover the huge investment they made.
I think kids and parents are really going to have to take a hard look at whether it's worth it for the kid to go to the most expensive school they can get into. It's going to have to be seen as an investment rather than a rite of passage. If you hate investment banking or consulting, or can't hack medical or law school, you may never get out from under the debt you rack up for yourself.
I'm in the unenviable position of getting older (35) and am starting to see the beginnings of this trend.
The three suggestions the author offers are sage advice. Keeping your skills up and taking on higher-level roles are really good ways to ensure you'll at least stay employed. Point 2 is equally important - save like crazy during your prime earning years, so you aren't forced to be that 50-year-old guy who demands $125K for a $70K position because you actually need the income. The reality is that there is little hope you'll convince an employer that paying more for your skills is worth it. Management only sees you as a cost, and wants to maximize the amount of value they get out of you. Even if the 22-year old screws up a few times, the 80-hour weeks he's going to be able to pull to fix things will offset the extra salary. Counterintuitive? Yes, but it's standard Business School 101 fare, so we have to deal with it.
It really stinks that you can't have a full career with a path laid out for you like you used to. if you're not the entrepreneurial sort (which I definitely am not,) you're going to be stuck either bouncing around in short full-time stints or even shorter contracting stints. I'm a systems person, and really enjoy solving tough integration/sysadmin problems. I hate people management and project management, so I've concentrated on keeping my knowledge current and not being the person constantly begging for raises. It's worked well so far - I have a pretty good reputation within my smallish specialty field. My next plan is to ditch full-time employment and start contracting - but even that's dangerous. Like the article says, those of us who are older have families counting on us; we don't live alone in a one-bedroom apartment with no financial concerns beyond next month's rent.
The more entrepreneurial types among us older folk would clean up if they started a contracting firm based on the concept of companies paying for experience. I can't tell you how many projects (both business-related and IT-related) I've been on where a company hires one of the big-name consultancies (Accenture, Bain, Booz, McKinsey, etc). These firms hire Ivy-league graduates (early 20s, typically very little work experience) on the premise that they're smart and have a good reputation. Unfortunately, I've found their skills lacking, and they tend to learn on the job, causing downtime, wasted meeting time, etc. If some slick sales guy could convince a company that a bunch of people who have seen all the tech industry hype cycles, know what's really going on, and know how to solve problems based on having done it before, we'd have a working business model.
Being a technical person, I'm happy to see any attempt at showing students that science and engineering are interesting.
However, the reality is that there are only a few "growth" professions left on our side of the world:
Law
Medicine (debatable now, but the professional organizations should keep things stable for a while)
Executive management
Investment banking
To a lesser extent, project management and "consulting"
Entertainment and sports
Until "someine" stems the tide of outsourcing, and actually gets people to care about science and engineering again, very few students are going to pursue technical careers. I think it's sad, but the reality is that no one with any decision making authority respects job roles that aren't in the list above.
I don't mean to sound negative - I'd love to see a resurgence of smart, technically minded students come out of school and want to do interesting work. If there aren't jobs and opportunity though, what will come of this? It sucks fo rme too - in my mind people management = adult babysitting, and project management = checking boxes off a Gantt chart and endless begging of people to do things. Increasingly, it looks like that's what will be available to us techies in the future.
I'm a big proponent of not forcing people through college. The problem is the lack of economic diversity now.
Think about this from a historical perspective:
100 years ago, only the wealthy and very intelligent went to college, and it was considered a life experience. The intelligent went on to become academics, and the wealthy would inherit their parents' business or land, so an immediate employment payoff wasn't really necessary. Everyone else went into a skilled or unskilled trade. Either they farmed, or started an apprenticeship as a carpenter, plumber, etc.
50 years ago, college was still pretty much reserved for the smartest of the bunch. Thanks to union labor, and a very large manufacturing base, there was no problem if you weren't college material. If you worked your butt off, you would get paid a living wage in a factory and have a career progression that ensured your earnings kept up with your life-stage. If you were college material, a huge number of white-collar jobs opened up in large companies, and those tended to be very stable too. So, whether you were college material or you weren't, you were still covered. Academic life, or vocational school, you still came out OK.
20-25 years ago, the bottom fell out of manufacturing, and with it went all the reasonably comfortable factory jobs. Suddenly, you couldn't get a decent job that paid a living wage. Because of this and an idea that "I dont' want my kid working in a factory forever," people started getting forced through college. At the same time, a lot of those white collar jobs went away too. There was a time where middle managers were required just to route reports around to people, and typing/secretarial work was way more important than it is now. With the advent of the PC and email, who needs hundreds of staff to process paper? So around the late 80s/early 90s, the downsizing began. Edna from the typing pool who worked at IBM for 20 years was suddenly out of a job. Because of both the blue and white collar job loss, people went back to school for retraining or higher degrees.
Today, there are even fewer low-skilled jobs out there, and almost none in the private sector offer union protection. So, when a mediocre high school student gets to 12th grade, he has 2 choices:
Work in a very unstable service job for not much more than minimum wage. Hope that you can string enough of these jobs together to fill a 45 year career.
Struggle through college, have a mountain of debt, and maybe you'll find work in some company.
And oh yeah, every job above service-level requires a bachelors' degree now. So the office receptionist needs a degree in communications, and the HVAC guy needs a degree in engineering.
This really is the dirty little secret of globalization. Some people just are NOT built for further study. There is a normal distribution of IQ. These people can often do a great job as a general contractor, skilled tradesman, etc. Instead, we force-feed everyone into the white collar world. It makes no sense. And for those who really do want the life experience, and are built for further study, they either have to deal with lower-skilled peers holding up college classes, or go to a private school and rack up mountains of debt for no guaranteed payoff.
I really think our leaders need to take a step back and see that a country that can do nothing but manage projects and do other white collar tasks isn't healthy. I'm in the IT field, and I'm decent at what I do. But I also realized as I was getting my degree that I wasn't sailing through the material like my peers. Every grade I got, I worked hard for. Maybe 50 years ago, I would have been better off taking on an electrician's apprenticeship or something similar. Bottom line is that the lopsided economy we have is not good for society, and everyone's addicted to cheap labor, so there's not much to do about it.
There are some big reasons why this might be a good idea: 1. Vendors have every incentive to pull the rug out from under you support-wise and make you buy their product again every few years. 2. Having people in-house who _actually know_ everything about how a system works really helps with debugging. Oracle, for example, is the king of finger-pointing when it comes to blaming some other part of the system for crashing a database. 3. Custom code would still have holes, but at least they wouldn't be the exact same ones being exploited in the private sector.
There's also some really good reasons not to do it: 1. You will still need to source an OS from somewhere. Whether $LinuxDistribution, IBM, Sun/Oracle, HP or Microsoft, ti wouldn't make sense to build a single purpose OS unless you were working on embedded systems. This OS would still have the same problem of limited-time support, publically available security exploits, and crappy support when you do get it. 2. Government organizations are very bad with communication. At the state level, practically every department sets their own standards. How could you get agencies with very different priorities to sign on to something that centralized? 3. Quality of code (see below.)
I work in systems integration, and have done so for many large companies. This is the place where we take applications, figure out how they can fit together, and merge them into a platform of clients/servers/network connections/databases. Software written by in-house IT is often the biggest bug-filled, resource hogging mess to get working. This goes double if the dev work is outsourced to a provider that doesn's know about the environment the app will run in. Think about the in-house apps you use -- the order entry client that requires a dual core processor and 2 GB of RAM, or the app that crashes with no explanation or a dialog box that says "You should never see this message." It's not all that bad, and some apps actually work really well. But developer training and skill levels are all over the map. At the very least, a vendor is responsible for their code, and can be persuaded/paid to fix bugs instead of letting them fester. A vendor specializes in building software meant to be used outside of their little corner of the world, so some companies do take time to make sure bugs are fixed.
This would work well when the field of software development matures a little more, and best practices aren't dictated by companies trying to sell you something. That's why IT has a very hard time being recognized as a branch of engineering - there's very few standard ways of doing anything. On the OS front, you have major vendors, hundreds of Linux distributions and other small players. On the database front, you have a few huge vendors that take totally different approaches.
This is weird coming from a gadget freak, but people really are bomarded by way too much information at once. I can think of a lot of examples:
Probably the root of Obama's complaint - the news cycle is constant, 24/7 and jumps on the tiniest thing like piranha. It's hard to formulate a response to something big like the Gulf oil spill when you have news networks breathing down your neck listening for every syllable coming out of your mouth, then bringing in a ton of "experts" to pick apart everything you say. On one hand, it's very good to have a responsive media that can investigate things and bring them to light. It's a very bad thing to have them going 24 hours a day and pumping up ratings/readership by bringing the screaming heads into it. It's also really bad that traditional journalism is being replaced with thousands of random bloggers, all with their own agendas. Random bloggers have no obligation to report the facts, and don't really have the backing needed to do real investigative journalism. The latest iPhone prototype is very different from a local government's kickback scandal that costs taxpayers millions of wasted dollars.
A lot of the current financial turmoil and volatility is caused by instant access to the stock market by everyone. Almost everyone in the US is connected to the market at least through their 401(k). Now, the iPhone and other handhelds let them react instantly to the tiniest shred of news. Your company swung to a loss after 40 profitable quarters? SellSellSell, fire the CEO and get someone else in. Company just laid off 5,000 workers and sent their jobs overseas? BuyBuyBuy, that company's on a roll. This is a big problem for people who count on the market for retirement. It's also a huge problem for public companies, who can no longer make long term investments and are forced to make rash decisions in the name of share price. There was a time where the stock market was only accessible to companies and the insanely wealthy, and that's how they funded business ventures. Now anyone can buy stocks cheaply, and it's adding a large amount of volatility to the mix. I see that as a huge problem, and an advantage that a traditional pension plan had. Investment firms running pensions have to be realtively conservative to balance potential losses, plus they have years and years to fix any mistakes. One financial crisis can wipe out your savings, and the new "personal responsibility" mantra says you deserve to retire broke.
I also think that people are much more distracted today. The constant influx of information means that most people don't have as long an attention span as they used to, and i don't think it's just a generational thing. As a result, it's really hard to get someone to sit and actually think about an issue. This is probably a big part of Obama's argument too. I'm sure he's more concerned about keeping a Congressional majority, but the idea that people are more influenced by sound bites than actual thought on an issue is kind of scary. Think about it, during the healthcare reform debate, it was veyr hard to hear stories of how people get dropped by their insurance companies when they get sick, or how Medicare is going to be wiped out if we don't put some limits on the cost of healthcare. It was all drowned out by "death panels", "unmanageable deficits" and "government takeover" talking points.
I'm not some Luddite who thinks we need to go back in time - we just need to learn as a society when to turn down the huge amount of noise coming in. Some noise is good, but when it means you can't sit still for 20 seconds, something has gotten out of whack.
For the vast majority of end users, especially those who don't care what's running their devices, the iPad is a good enough substitute for a full laptop PC. The screen is big enough to do serious browsing (unless you use Flash...) and it doubles as a book reader/media player. The major problems I've always had with netbooks is the desktop OS (Linux or Windows) crammed onto a too-small screen, the speed and the tiny keyboards. I've tried to like them - I really have. But that form factor really stinks if you have bad eyes and big fingers.
(And no, I don't own an iPad. I'm the old fogey in the corner with a 14" laptop.)
Even with the lack of Flash,a keyboard and a mainstream OS, the iPad as a netbook replacement is not totally out to lunch. There are some situations where netbooks work well, usually they involve field workers in non-harsh environments who have to run full desktop apps but want a 2 pound laptop instead of a 5 pound one.
Is anyone getting flashbacks of that Westwood College advertisement where the two losers are "working" at a video game production house, and explain to their boss that they need to "tighten up the graphics on Level 3?" (They've taken down the copy on YouTube, otherwise I'd post a link.)
I wonder if this is going to be similar to what happened in the late 90s in the field of systems administration. During the dotcom run-up, salaries went pretty high for anyone who had even the slightest clue about computers. TONS of places were pumping out certified but unqualified network and systems admins, and we're still dealing with a lot of them now. Now given that this is an actual college, and they get a real degree out of the deal, it might not be as bad. And I'm sure the video game houses appreciate at least a minimal amount of training. From what I've heard, there are legions and legions of folks who don't mind the low pay and 100 hour work weeks just so they can say they design video games for a living. Providing a games publisher with a steady stream of newbies who are qualified beyond, "I like video games and want to be involved in "the business." (Replace video games with computers, and you get what happened during the dotcom boom.
The problem with PowerPoint is not that it makes us stupid...we're good at that already. It just allows people to build bad meeting presentations that look good on the surface. People have a need to feel like they put together a good presentation, so they spend all sorts of time twiddling around making things just perfect. The problem is that you get something that looks totally polished but is useless.
In IT, I've seen that "spaghetti bowl" diagram over and over, except the end nodes are routers, servers, PCs, clouds, extranets, etc. etc. I work for a services/development firm doing niche-market projects, and colleagues of mine will just dump everything from a design doc onto a bunch of PPT slides to show to the higher ups. Especially as you get higher, you have about 10 seconds to get and keep their attention; after that they go back to checking their BlackBerry or reading something else. The message needs to be tailored. A CIO does not care one bit about the internal support processes of an outsourcing deal, they want a pretty diagram with maybe 5 elements and a bunch of connectors showing how things interrelate. An Army general can't be bothered with all the stuff in that diagram; his job is to take input from his commanders and say "make it so".
In addition, there are some things that are just too complex to bulletize if you're talking about a technical audience. Some people really are obsessed with the "just give me the short version" mindset and do not have the ability to sit still for 5 minutes and read a carefully-written message or document. Boiling it down to a single bullet causes it to lose all meaning. Imagine a presentation on a technical topic like how LDAP works, or how you implemented disaster recovery for a customer. You need a little more meat than "* Directory service * Lets users authenticate * Stores extended information" if you are below the management level.
I know Apple is famous for "accidentally" leaking hints of upcoming technologies out to generate buzz, but this is strange. If I were in a highly-competitive market and wanted to not give the Chinese knockoff makers a head start on my design, the last thing I'd do is let it out of the building.
I could see Apple anonmyously leaving photos or spec sheets around. Maybe they might even take a -mock-up- out in the wild like car companies do when they are track-testing a new model. (iPhone in a Samsung case?:-) ) But there's no real reason for them to "field-test" a device like that. Apple has a large corporate campus, and I guarantee they have the strongest ATT signal in the entire country. Plus, if you're testing stuff like GPS, you don't have to go across town, you just have to go across the building. Nah, this guy just had to show his buddies, and he lost it. That really sucks for him, because no matter what actually happened, he's never going to be trusted to work on secret products again. Even if Steve Jobs himself said, "Go take this phone for a spin." and he can prove it, there's always going to be the doubt that he has the self-control to keep quiet about what he's doing.
I know people who work in high-security environments, where they design products in a race to be the first to the Patent Office. Most are absolutely forbidden from even talking about what they're working on. I highly doubt that Pfizer or Bristol-Myers allows their researchers to take their lab notebooks anywhere outside their labs. People desiging the next netbook or mobile phone are in a similar situation -- 10 seconds after a prototype gets out, it will be glommed up, reverse-engineered, and a cheaper faster version will be out a week before yours.
Given all the draconian stuff I've heard about Apple being a wierd place to work, I'm sure they have an incredibly strict policy about secrecy...that is, they control the message, not the employee working on it.
Here's a thought...most pure data retrieval tasks don't require a huge amount of compute power on the device making the request. If I were operating a datacenter with thousands of hits a second, I'd want to optimize for the ability to hold a session open, then offload the request to either a monster data layer or a midrange layer that brokers requests and caches frequent search results.
Something like a single-board computer (or a really scaled-up thin client:-) ) running a low-power processor dedicated to driving network interfaces that also have their own offloading processors would allow them to scale the access layer way up for less power costs. Reliability would be less of a concern too, because you could have tons of cheap devices for the same costs as a fraction of full servers.
When you scale out, you often don't need the overhead that full servers would give you, because you're limiting the tasks that layer of access has to do.
Or...they just want to see how many smartphones it would take to replace layer one of Bing.:-)
I'm waiting for the announcement of Windows Embedded CE 2011 Datacenter Edition.
I'm guessing this this really only applies to the high-level, superstar tech talent, right? Especially with firms like Microsoft and IBM, what could they possibly be losing when IBM hires someone who's been working on the grammar checker for the Norwegian version of Word? Or the lower-level code monkey keeping an obscure feature of WebSphere MQ up to date?
These kinds of agreements would work in environments where talent tends to stay put. Unfortunately, the invisible hand seems to think that job stability is a stupid, backward 20th Century concept. After all, who doesn't like looking for a new job every 2 to 6 years?? In an environment like this, even the big guys are going to have trouble holding onto employees.
I think a much better investigation would deal with the well-publicized claims of IBM laying off senior US techs, replacing them with Indians or Brazillians, and forcing the laid off person to train the n00b to get their severance package. I'd also like to see the H-1B program users under some scrutiny for things like not paying prevailing wages, or employers intentionally not pursuing the hiring of US workers so they can get their work cheaper.
All of these things would be less of an issue with some kind of professional standards body in the IT realm. Unfortunately, too many people I know think this is evil and doesn't allow the full brilliance of their talent to shine. I don't think that's valid...lawyers sure like the Bar Association and doctors like the AMA. These organizations give them the power to influence laws and maintain educational standards...exactly what we need.
If done right, this might not be a bad idea. The traditional education system in the US has changed a lot in the past 50+ years:
There are way more distractions than before, and those distractions have the capability to pretty much take over people's lives (WoW, social networking, tons more entertainment options.)
In many cases, there's a lack of or much less parental involvement. Sounds old-fashioned, but a lot of what pushed me to do well came from my parents. If your parents are divorced, you only have one, or they're too busy working, you get less attention.
Negative feedback isn't there anymore. Teachers can't discipline for fear of parents lashing back, social promotion means students can't fail, etc.
The old model of Good Education = Stable, Good Job doesn't always hold anymore.
Adding another carrot to the arsenal can't be too bad, given all the problems students face now.
I know the Digital Economy Bill has some really far-reaching restrictions that could be imposed, but I can't say I'm surprised.
When you think about it, the US, the UK and most of Europe are 100% dependent on intellectual property now for their economic survival. Almost nothing at the consumer level is manufactured in these countries. All we produce is software, music, movies, video games and hardware designs. Protecting copyright when viewed through this lens makes a lot more sense now. It gives IP-related companies an advantage, but I'd say that's better than turning the entire country into an unemployed wasteland because companies don't want to produce material that's just going to get stolen.
Personally, I'd love it if someone woke up and realized that all of our eggs are in one basket, and took steps to diversify the economy...but I doubt that's gonig to happen. I'm for just enough of an import tarriff to balance things out and make manufacturing in this country make sense. Not everyone can be a "knowlege worker," the service sector is a crappy place to work, and we need manufacturing jobs for those who don't fit the office mold.
I honestly think free trade isn't a good idea when you have 300 million people with a grossly outsized standard of living competing with billions of others who live on way less. No one is going to give up their standard of living, so without some controls, we're totally screwed in the long run.
One problem with IT in general, and especially its little niche subfields, is the lack of formal training. Skilled trades get apprenticeships to teach newbies the ropes on the job. Professions like medicine, pharmacy, engineering, etc. have standard accredited training and licensure requirements.
We have none of that. The field is still so wild-westy that vendors largely control training and education. Universities provide grads a CS or a "vocational" IT degree, but it's all theory. Lots of us didn't even go to school. I'm a science guy by education, and wound up here. Other people I know were educated in something not even close to IT. Still others took the "Get Certified and Make $100K In 10 Days!!!!" training courses.
When a software developer or IT guy gets out in the real world, the education side of things is usually left up to vendors, who are desperately trying to push their latest product. It takes a new guy a long time to realize that (a) VendorX doesn't have a completel lock on FieldY, and (b) VendorX is trotting out the exact same thing as 10 years ago, this time with an improved support structure. (Example: VDI is "OMG -drool- brand new hot technology" but VMs have been around in the mainframe world for eons, and thin clients have been...OK...for years. The difference now is that bandwidth is cheap and fast, which it wasn't 10 years ago.)
So what do the Feds want as "cybersecurity experts?" Are they thinking of capturing virus writers and forcing them to work for us? Are they thinking the guy installing Symantec Antivirus from vendor instructions is an expert? And what could universities possibly do about it? Courses like "CYS 425 - Introduction to SQL Injection Attacks?" In my mind, anyone who really belongs in the "IT profession" should be grounded so well in the fundamentals that they can be crafty enough to find security flaws in their own software. If they're systems guys (like me,) they should be smart enough to test vendor assertions.
Instead of just giving scholarships for CS degrees, I think the profession should rally around making sure everyone is qualified for an IT job at the level they're working at. And I think that some of this needs to be general enough to transcend vendors. Someone should know "operating systems" instead of "Windows" or "Linux". it shouldn't be an absolute culture shock to take a person working in a Windows environmnent and put them in front of RHEL with a small amount of introduction. How many of you guys work in Windows-centric place that has one Linux box everyone is afraid to touch? THAT'S what we have to fix!
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So far, the comments are the predictable ones I'd expect -- the recent love of offshoring, sell-off of products, etc. But it's pretty amazing to see what they did after almost dying in the late 80s after they missed the client/server and PC boat. I don't agree with a lot of their short sighted moves, but changing from a hardware to a consulting company without people realizing it is an interesting feat.
Stories I've been told describe the IBM prior to this period as a pretty amazing place to work in terms of benefits and the tech you were able to work on. Don't forget that all of that was possible because back in the day, margins on hardware were orders of magnitude higher than they were now. Plus, IBM had a total lock on the mainframe market (still does pretty much, but less work needs to be done in this space now.) When they could get a much higher margin for selling boxes, they could lavish R&D money on the people who designed those boxes, training and salaries on the people who supported them, AND still have plenty left over for the execs and shareholders. You know, the "golden age of computing".... Now, most hardware is in the single-digit percent margin category (except for Apple stuff) and there's no money to be made in it. "Consulting" and managed services will bring in millions more than a hardware purchase; they can throw half the population of India at a customer and still make billions even if it takes longer to get results...which is where we US techies are stuck right now. In particular, the stories of older IBM techies being told to move to India or Brazil or leave paint a pretty sad state of affairs. (Side note, this trend will never reverse until we can kick everyone's hyperfocus on the stock market and corporate earnings. No public company is able to do anything that isn't guaranteed to instantly pay off anymore.)
That said, the hardware they do still make (or at least OEM) is pretty good. And, if you're willing to pay the premium for this gear, System x and BladeCenter support is still done in the US. Documentation is horrible because of the huge decentralized nature of the company, but I've been able to call these guys up and get an answer in 5 minutes. Still, it's kind of ironic that IBM hires teams of customers to come in and basically rewrite the documentation for some of their products (see Redbooks.)
Also, don't forget that IBM is one of the only companies big enough to put serious money into research anymore. In my mind, that's really important. Where are all the CS, physics and EE Ph. D's going to work now that Bell Labs is gone and HP only does product research?
If the president is leaning on the private sector to do this, he might want to consider passing along a little advice. Students will major in subjects that can get them stable, good-paying jobs. Yes, engineering is one of those fields that pays well, but there are some huge problems with the field:
That said, I also don't know if shoveling more engineering grads into the fire is a good idea either. Our group is in the process of hiring IT systems engineers for an integration role (think a little bit lab monkey, a little bit project coordinator, a little bit documentation writer, some passing familiarity with SW development, and someone who can learn something new that a customer wants incredibly fast.) It's a good solid job with an established company. We're willing to pay market rates for the position (we're not an IT bodyshop.) We can't find anyone ready to fill it, and have only found a couple people who are trainable. What have we seen so far?
So, maybe the problem has something to do with the education itself. Or, IT has just become that pigeonholed that everyone is reduced to button-pushers in large companies, so they don't get the experience needed. I'm all for making more smart people, since that's where the world is heading, but I think we need to make sure we're actually giving these students some useful skills to sell to future employers.
It's definitely a two-way street. Employers need to play ball too...there are still a fair number of us who want a long term, stable job with real benefits and without the need to move every 3 years. But being on the inside trying to help hire a co-worker, I kind of see their points as well.
Every time the college vs. no college debate comes up, examples of highly successful dropouts or people who didn't ever go to college are rolled out. The default assumption is that everyone is destined to be a successful entrepreneur. In his defense, he does mention further down in the article that not everyone is cut out for this.
Think about it this way -- to be a successful business owner, you can't just be smart or a hard worker. You have to have some sort of entrepreneurial spark that most people don't have. Every business owner that I've dealt with who is reasonably successful is also a type-A nutjob (mostly meant in a good way...) who works 130 hour weeks and never lets up. Sending the message that everyone can do this if they just try is wrong in my opinion. It produces a lot of small business failures and subsequent bankruptcies as people keep trying to make their business float despite obvious signs it'll never work. It also produces a lot of rhetoric that standard employees are a bunch of lazy people who have no drive and can't cut it in the "real world." Also, there's only so many small businesses that the economy can absorb -- if everyone is out running a frozen yogurt shop or pizza place or small-time startup company, larger companies don't have a workforce. Finally, the entrepreneur class plays the rugged individualist card a little too much IMO when pushing for things such as reduced regulations on business. Example: States who try to enforce sick time requirements on medium-sized small businesses are labeled socialist and hostile to business.
I will be the first to admit I'm not an entrepreneur. I have a good job doing systems engineering work for a large employer, I work hard, and my contribution is valued (after all, they keep paying me.) A smaller company could run rings around this one, but there would be a problem making that transition:
- I can't sell. Period.
- I'm not your typical "slimy used car salesman" personality that most small business owners tend to be
- I'm not willing to risk my livelihood or work insane hours for something that will probably fail. (Isn't it 90% of small businesses failing within a year still?) What would I fall back on?
For everyone else who isn't these things, the formal education route is the way to go. Just like your average unemployed factory worker would be ill-advised to cash out his retirement to go buy a Subway franchise, high school grads would be ill-advised to completely ignore the safer path to a decent living.
I don't agree with this. First, anyone interested in CS has probably at least had some rudimentary exposure to programming. Either they taught themselves, or had high school courses that touched on it. The weed-out course serves as a first-pass filter to make sure those who really don't belong in CS don't waste their time on more courses and switch to something more suited for them. It's also a "last-chance" for those who didn't have any prior experience but may be talented to try this field out.
I'm on the IT side of things, and given both my exposure to new IT hires and freshly-minted CS grads, I wish there was a stronger weed-out system for both sides of the house. From the IT side, we have technical certifications (Cisco, Microsoft, Sun, etc.) instead of degrees in most cases. There is a huge difference between someone who is truly suited for IT work and the person who just barely passed a certification course and can't figure things out once they go "off-manual."
I ended up studying chemistry in school, and our weed-out class was organic chem. Same for the medical and pharmacy students...if you couldn't pass that class easily, it was pretty much a given that you wouldn't be successful. Engineering students had a combination of the higher-level math courses and (in our school) thermodynamics. Business majors had accounting. In the chemistry case, the 101-level course gave enough background for all the non-chemistry majors who needed a grounding in chem for the rest of their studies. Soon as you hit the next course though, the expectations ramped up. Especially in a subject like CS where you have millions of people trying to get in on the action because they're "good with computers," there needs to be a filter to drop out everyone who can't understand basic logic, how a loop or conditional works in a program, etc. Otherwise you get more grads that write stuff that ends up on thedailywtf.com.
Disclaimer: I'm a systems engineer who spent many years as an admin. I don't do as much daily firefighting as I used to, but I sure have tons of experience in that department.
How many of you (good natured) IT folk looked at the Terry Childs case and said, "Hey, that sounds like X, the total jerk I used to work with!" I know I did... We had a guy like this who (a) did the passive-aggressive thing when asked to take care of something, (b) kept all the secrets in his head so that it would be hard for anyone to take over, and (c) got fired because management/staff had finally had enough of him and decided it would be worth it to just get a consultant in to put everything right.
Stories like this, and unfortunate stereotypes, are what keep IT work "in the basement" and prevent us from being recognized as professionals, IMO. We don't get respect from the MBA crowd because we can't justify our existence...but I think we could change that by changing the typical attitude.
Obviously, most IT people aren't like Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons, but those who are sure make it hard for the rest of us.
Now that computers are totally pervasive, maybe it's time to set some standards and get the various branches of IT work (development, network admin, systems admin, etc.) recognized as professions. At least there would be some kind of code of conduct and minimum education standard so employers would be sure of what they're getting.
In my experience, non-IT companies are falling all over themselves to move to (at the very least) hosted IT services. The true answer to this question will come out when the first major provider flames out. Think about this with a cynical eye towards the situation. CIOs and other decision makers are under immense pressure to cut costs, especially in companies where IT is not seen as a strategic investment. For every software company or non-IT company that uses IT to its advantage, there are 10x as many who use IT for file/print/email only, and see it as a cost like paying the janitor and building staff to keep the place running. Cloud providers win business by doing a shiny PowerPoint with animated graphics showing all those power-eating servers and local IT staff fading into "the cloud." At the same time, they promise the ability to get rid of your IT staff and replace the current IT spend with a monthly charge that can be completely written off as an operational expense. MBAs are seemingly taught on Day 1 that human resources are a necessary evil to be minimized, and that operational expenses are preferable to fixed asset spending. Therefore, this PowerPoint resonates with them and the decision is made.
The problems come behind the PowerPoint. Every IT problem the business had before now becomes the provider's problem, including data storage/retention, bandwidth issues, server provisioning and all that stuff. How well does it work out? Everything depends on the competence of your provider. Even with ironclad SLAs in place, (a) Really Bad Stuff can still happen that makes them null and void, and (b) SLAs are only a piece of paper guaranteeing you free service or a payment in the event of an outage.
Any business considering The Cloud needs to think of the following:
(If this sounds like the list of questions to ask when considering an outsourcing agreement, it is. Cloud is just IT outsourcing without a directly accountable staff at the provider.) Businesses who want data integrity and decent service need to realize that they have to pay for it, just like they do in a traditional outsourcing/hosting scenario. If a CIO chooses to go with the equivalent of GMail for their internal messaging, just 'cause it was cheaper than the fully-hosted, DR'd, off-site backed up, SOX-compliant managed email service, then they deserve what they get.
I'm the submitter, so I figured I'd reserve my comments for here so this wasn't rejected with the comment "tl; dr". :-)
Here's how I feel -- I'm not 100% sold on the argument that everything is crashing down, but I do have some serious concerns for the future. Some of them could be easily fixable if people would just get on board, and others will take a long time and tons of investment to fix. Here's my list of issues:
So -- all we need to do is break companies' addiction to short te
I'm surprised about this statistic as well as happy. I was pretty much sure CS and other science work was completely written off by US students as nonviable. After all, it's easier to go into investment banking or management consulting, and the course load is much easier for a bigger payoff.
Some people have posted sentiments along the lines of -- "is this actual CS being studied, or a checkbox for an IT job?" Being in IT, I can say that having a background in a science or engineering discipline (doesn't matter which one) is a huge asset. The abiltiy to logically break down a system or problem, analyze dependencies and troubleshoot separates a really good IT guru from the guy who just got out of a certification class. (If you have this ability naturally, then great...but most people need to actually practice on something to get good at it, hence the degree.) This also can lead to more job satisfaction -- I enjoy my job because my company gives me interesting problems to solve, partially because they know I'll be able to deal with the "interesting" stuff better than someone who can just follow directions. I have a non-CS background (chemistry,) but the same scientific, logical reasoning applies. For example, when ýou're trying to figure out a poorly documented application with no access to the developers or support, and something goes wrong, this kicks in. Someone who just took a certification class will (may!) know how to drive the product's GUI or CLI, and often changes six things at a time in the vague hope that something will work. A science-trained individual is much more likely to methodically approach troubleshooting, and understand how what they do possibly affects connected systems. There are huge exceptions in both cases, and I've seen them, but it's a good rule of thumb that someone with a science/engineering background is going to be a better candidate for a job. Maybe my judgement is a little clouded since I'm in systems integration, where this skillset is even more important to have. Anything outside of a formulaic procedure, or a situation where you actually have to come up with the procedure is better staffed by someone who can deal with the higher-level work.
One interesting side effect of this is that if enrollment in good CS programs gets high enough, employers will no longer be able to sell the "we can't find qualified Americans to do our jobs." Like I said, I only agree with them to a point -- there's a lot of bozos in our field that don't belong and are better suited to other professions. However, there are a lot of good, qualified people out there...they just don't work cheap and are usually employed unless a major layoff/restructuring leaves you without a seat.
One thing I've noticed is that social media in general has made computer technology somehow more accessible. Remember, just a few years ago, basic computer literacy was being able to boot up your PC, drive an office application and produce "work." Social media use now appears to be the basic computer literacy unit -- the UIs are simple enough for most people to pick up and the draw of social interaction is irresistable for most people. And now that smartphones that don't suck as user input devices are out, it's even more generally available.
That said, there's a lot of hype -- tons in fact. Everyone is hailing FB, Twitter and the like as the conduit of democratic change in the Middle East. Let's be real for a sec -- it was the platform. The 80% unemployment rate among young people certainly had something to do with it, and something would have happened without FB as the organizing tool.
It's neat for sharing pictures, or posting silly status updates. I do think that people are going to come to a realization that all of their data, likes, check-ins, connections, pokes, message contents and contact lists are (a) for sale, and (b) publically searchable in some cases. Or maybe not - maybe privacy is a stupid, archaic 20th Century concept. I'm no Luddite, but I'm really not that interested in being expected to constantly interact with my social circle 24/7...people really need to unplug sometimes. Privacy may be dead, but I'm sure at least a few people (beyond the overhyped media stories on that subject) will inexplicably not be called for a second job interview, or get a promotion, etc. simply because they're a social networking blabbermouth. I'm sure there's at least someone under 30 who doesn't like the idea of always-on, forever-remembered social media content that you can't reliably scrub. That someone may have a hiring manager job someday...
Social media really does look poised to be the second Internet bubble. Businesses of every kind, including the stodgiest of stodgy companies are hiring high-dollar consultants to plug them into the social network. Replace that phrase with "get on the Internet" and you've got the makings of a huge stock run based on vaporware IPOs...oh wait, that's happening! ;-) And just like the last bubble, things will improve. There's plenty of good stuff that came out of the dotcom boom, and these social media properties will remain...they just won't be as pervasive and inserted into every single casual conversation.
Every time I see a life insurance salesman, car repair shop or scrap metal dealer tell me to "join them on Facebook and Twitter", I have two thoughts -- (1) that's pretty dumb, and (2) maybe I should just jump in and make some money off this while it lasts. :-)
One of the things I use Google for extensively is the ability to search for wierd error messages, return codes, etc. that appear in commercial software I use for work. It's very frustruating when your very specific search query returns 45 different sites, all of which are rehosting the same forum post or newsgroup article. These get ranked higher up than other unique posts, causing a lot of scrolling through results and wasting time. Also, these aren't queries like "bmw 335i" or "" that are guaranteed to return millions of unique hits. I'm looking for the one other guy in the world who's found this issue and has a workable answer. Google used to be pretty good for that, especially if your query was well formed and incredibly specific.
Real world example - I got an error message trying to install Windows 7 SP1 last week, with a long hex number and a very specifically-worded message. I typed the query into google, and the first hit was some idiot who had no idea what he was talking about on a support forum. The next 5-6 hits were that exact same idiot's post rebroadcast to sites like eggheadcafe.com, techarea.in, etc. I eventually found the answer, but it was on page 3 of the search results.
On another topic, how and why do these content farm sites exist? How does eggheadcafe.com, which just copies newsgroup and forum data, able to pay to keep the site going? Are they all just looking to cash in on ad revenue? Do they really get that much in revenue to justify the site-crawling they must have to do?
I wonder how long this can keep up. In my experience, as soon as you graduate and get your first job, almost every future employment prospect is based on how well you perform in the "real world." Getting that first job is tougher if you are a state school graduate (like me,) but if you majored in something marketable, you do eventually get hired. My first 2 jobs were awful, but I was able to gain enough experience to eventually get the job I have today. No one has ever asked me where I went to school or what my grades were, unless it was just out of curiosity.
If you're truly headed for an academic career, elite schools can give you a leg up also - but if you're good, you will be able to go somewhere for grad school also. Same goes for the professions (law & medicine.)
Contrast this with someone who pays the price, gets past admissions and graduates from a top-tier school. From what I've seen, the price of the school gives you access to opportunities you wouldn't normally have, such as:
As far as any other benefits go, I can't see them. You may have some very famous professors and top experts in their fields, but you may never see them, and that may not matter to you if you are not pursuing the subject as a career.
It's a big shift - even when I graduated 15 years ago, it was pretty much a given that you would at least be employed if you went to any college and got a bachelors' degree. If you went to an elite school, you were revered by future employers as if it was an infallable indicator of your abilities. Now, you hear all these stories of students taking out $150K+ in loans and not finding work even remotely related to their field or paying enough to cover the huge investment they made.
I think kids and parents are really going to have to take a hard look at whether it's worth it for the kid to go to the most expensive school they can get into. It's going to have to be seen as an investment rather than a rite of passage. If you hate investment banking or consulting, or can't hack medical or law school, you may never get out from under the debt you rack up for yourself.
Thoughts?
I'm in the unenviable position of getting older (35) and am starting to see the beginnings of this trend.
The three suggestions the author offers are sage advice. Keeping your skills up and taking on higher-level roles are really good ways to ensure you'll at least stay employed. Point 2 is equally important - save like crazy during your prime earning years, so you aren't forced to be that 50-year-old guy who demands $125K for a $70K position because you actually need the income. The reality is that there is little hope you'll convince an employer that paying more for your skills is worth it. Management only sees you as a cost, and wants to maximize the amount of value they get out of you. Even if the 22-year old screws up a few times, the 80-hour weeks he's going to be able to pull to fix things will offset the extra salary. Counterintuitive? Yes, but it's standard Business School 101 fare, so we have to deal with it.
It really stinks that you can't have a full career with a path laid out for you like you used to. if you're not the entrepreneurial sort (which I definitely am not,) you're going to be stuck either bouncing around in short full-time stints or even shorter contracting stints. I'm a systems person, and really enjoy solving tough integration/sysadmin problems. I hate people management and project management, so I've concentrated on keeping my knowledge current and not being the person constantly begging for raises. It's worked well so far - I have a pretty good reputation within my smallish specialty field. My next plan is to ditch full-time employment and start contracting - but even that's dangerous. Like the article says, those of us who are older have families counting on us; we don't live alone in a one-bedroom apartment with no financial concerns beyond next month's rent.
The more entrepreneurial types among us older folk would clean up if they started a contracting firm based on the concept of companies paying for experience. I can't tell you how many projects (both business-related and IT-related) I've been on where a company hires one of the big-name consultancies (Accenture, Bain, Booz, McKinsey, etc). These firms hire Ivy-league graduates (early 20s, typically very little work experience) on the premise that they're smart and have a good reputation. Unfortunately, I've found their skills lacking, and they tend to learn on the job, causing downtime, wasted meeting time, etc. If some slick sales guy could convince a company that a bunch of people who have seen all the tech industry hype cycles, know what's really going on, and know how to solve problems based on having done it before, we'd have a working business model.
Being a technical person, I'm happy to see any attempt at showing students that science and engineering are interesting.
However, the reality is that there are only a few "growth" professions left on our side of the world:
Until "someine" stems the tide of outsourcing, and actually gets people to care about science and engineering again, very few students are going to pursue technical careers. I think it's sad, but the reality is that no one with any decision making authority respects job roles that aren't in the list above.
I don't mean to sound negative - I'd love to see a resurgence of smart, technically minded students come out of school and want to do interesting work. If there aren't jobs and opportunity though, what will come of this? It sucks fo rme too - in my mind people management = adult babysitting, and project management = checking boxes off a Gantt chart and endless begging of people to do things. Increasingly, it looks like that's what will be available to us techies in the future.
I'm a big proponent of not forcing people through college. The problem is the lack of economic diversity now.
Think about this from a historical perspective:
And oh yeah, every job above service-level requires a bachelors' degree now. So the office receptionist needs a degree in communications, and the HVAC guy needs a degree in engineering.
This really is the dirty little secret of globalization. Some people just are NOT built for further study. There is a normal distribution of IQ. These people can often do a great job as a general contractor, skilled tradesman, etc. Instead, we force-feed everyone into the white collar world. It makes no sense. And for those who really do want the life experience, and are built for further study, they either have to deal with lower-skilled peers holding up college classes, or go to a private school and rack up mountains of debt for no guaranteed payoff.
I really think our leaders need to take a step back and see that a country that can do nothing but manage projects and do other white collar tasks isn't healthy. I'm in the IT field, and I'm decent at what I do. But I also realized as I was getting my degree that I wasn't sailing through the material like my peers. Every grade I got, I worked hard for. Maybe 50 years ago, I would have been better off taking on an electrician's apprenticeship or something similar. Bottom line is that the lopsided economy we have is not good for society, and everyone's addicted to cheap labor, so there's not much to do about it.
There are some big reasons why this might be a good idea:
1. Vendors have every incentive to pull the rug out from under you support-wise and make you buy their product again every few years.
2. Having people in-house who _actually know_ everything about how a system works really helps with debugging. Oracle, for example, is the king of finger-pointing when it comes to blaming some other part of the system for crashing a database.
3. Custom code would still have holes, but at least they wouldn't be the exact same ones being exploited in the private sector.
There's also some really good reasons not to do it:
1. You will still need to source an OS from somewhere. Whether $LinuxDistribution, IBM, Sun/Oracle, HP or Microsoft, ti wouldn't make sense to build a single purpose OS unless you were working on embedded systems. This OS would still have the same problem of limited-time support, publically available security exploits, and crappy support when you do get it.
2. Government organizations are very bad with communication. At the state level, practically every department sets their own standards. How could you get agencies with very different priorities to sign on to something that centralized?
3. Quality of code (see below.)
I work in systems integration, and have done so for many large companies. This is the place where we take applications, figure out how they can fit together, and merge them into a platform of clients/servers/network connections/databases. Software written by in-house IT is often the biggest bug-filled, resource hogging mess to get working. This goes double if the dev work is outsourced to a provider that doesn's know about the environment the app will run in. Think about the in-house apps you use -- the order entry client that requires a dual core processor and 2 GB of RAM, or the app that crashes with no explanation or a dialog box that says "You should never see this message." It's not all that bad, and some apps actually work really well. But developer training and skill levels are all over the map. At the very least, a vendor is responsible for their code, and can be persuaded/paid to fix bugs instead of letting them fester. A vendor specializes in building software meant to be used outside of their little corner of the world, so some companies do take time to make sure bugs are fixed.
This would work well when the field of software development matures a little more, and best practices aren't dictated by companies trying to sell you something. That's why IT has a very hard time being recognized as a branch of engineering - there's very few standard ways of doing anything. On the OS front, you have major vendors, hundreds of Linux distributions and other small players. On the database front, you have a few huge vendors that take totally different approaches.
This is weird coming from a gadget freak, but people really are bomarded by way too much information at once. I can think of a lot of examples:
I'm not some Luddite who thinks we need to go back in time - we just need to learn as a society when to turn down the huge amount of noise coming in. Some noise is good, but when it means you can't sit still for 20 seconds, something has gotten out of whack.
For the vast majority of end users, especially those who don't care what's running their devices, the iPad is a good enough substitute for a full laptop PC. The screen is big enough to do serious browsing (unless you use Flash...) and it doubles as a book reader/media player. The major problems I've always had with netbooks is the desktop OS (Linux or Windows) crammed onto a too-small screen, the speed and the tiny keyboards. I've tried to like them - I really have. But that form factor really stinks if you have bad eyes and big fingers.
(And no, I don't own an iPad. I'm the old fogey in the corner with a 14" laptop.)
Even with the lack of Flash,a keyboard and a mainstream OS, the iPad as a netbook replacement is not totally out to lunch. There are some situations where netbooks work well, usually they involve field workers in non-harsh environments who have to run full desktop apps but want a 2 pound laptop instead of a 5 pound one.
Is anyone getting flashbacks of that Westwood College advertisement where the two losers are "working" at a video game production house, and explain to their boss that they need to "tighten up the graphics on Level 3?" (They've taken down the copy on YouTube, otherwise I'd post a link.)
I wonder if this is going to be similar to what happened in the late 90s in the field of systems administration. During the dotcom run-up, salaries went pretty high for anyone who had even the slightest clue about computers. TONS of places were pumping out certified but unqualified network and systems admins, and we're still dealing with a lot of them now. Now given that this is an actual college, and they get a real degree out of the deal, it might not be as bad. And I'm sure the video game houses appreciate at least a minimal amount of training. From what I've heard, there are legions and legions of folks who don't mind the low pay and 100 hour work weeks just so they can say they design video games for a living. Providing a games publisher with a steady stream of newbies who are qualified beyond, "I like video games and want to be involved in "the business." (Replace video games with computers, and you get what happened during the dotcom boom.
The problem with PowerPoint is not that it makes us stupid...we're good at that already. It just allows people to build bad meeting presentations that look good on the surface. People have a need to feel like they put together a good presentation, so they spend all sorts of time twiddling around making things just perfect. The problem is that you get something that looks totally polished but is useless.
In IT, I've seen that "spaghetti bowl" diagram over and over, except the end nodes are routers, servers, PCs, clouds, extranets, etc. etc. I work for a services/development firm doing niche-market projects, and colleagues of mine will just dump everything from a design doc onto a bunch of PPT slides to show to the higher ups. Especially as you get higher, you have about 10 seconds to get and keep their attention; after that they go back to checking their BlackBerry or reading something else. The message needs to be tailored. A CIO does not care one bit about the internal support processes of an outsourcing deal, they want a pretty diagram with maybe 5 elements and a bunch of connectors showing how things interrelate. An Army general can't be bothered with all the stuff in that diagram; his job is to take input from his commanders and say "make it so".
In addition, there are some things that are just too complex to bulletize if you're talking about a technical audience. Some people really are obsessed with the "just give me the short version" mindset and do not have the ability to sit still for 5 minutes and read a carefully-written message or document. Boiling it down to a single bullet causes it to lose all meaning. Imagine a presentation on a technical topic like how LDAP works, or how you implemented disaster recovery for a customer. You need a little more meat than "* Directory service * Lets users authenticate * Stores extended information" if you are below the management level.
I know Apple is famous for "accidentally" leaking hints of upcoming technologies out to generate buzz, but this is strange. If I were in a highly-competitive market and wanted to not give the Chinese knockoff makers a head start on my design, the last thing I'd do is let it out of the building.
I could see Apple anonmyously leaving photos or spec sheets around. Maybe they might even take a -mock-up- out in the wild like car companies do when they are track-testing a new model. (iPhone in a Samsung case? :-) ) But there's no real reason for them to "field-test" a device like that. Apple has a large corporate campus, and I guarantee they have the strongest ATT signal in the entire country. Plus, if you're testing stuff like GPS, you don't have to go across town, you just have to go across the building. Nah, this guy just had to show his buddies, and he lost it. That really sucks for him, because no matter what actually happened, he's never going to be trusted to work on secret products again. Even if Steve Jobs himself said, "Go take this phone for a spin." and he can prove it, there's always going to be the doubt that he has the self-control to keep quiet about what he's doing.
I know people who work in high-security environments, where they design products in a race to be the first to the Patent Office. Most are absolutely forbidden from even talking about what they're working on. I highly doubt that Pfizer or Bristol-Myers allows their researchers to take their lab notebooks anywhere outside their labs. People desiging the next netbook or mobile phone are in a similar situation -- 10 seconds after a prototype gets out, it will be glommed up, reverse-engineered, and a cheaper faster version will be out a week before yours.
Given all the draconian stuff I've heard about Apple being a wierd place to work, I'm sure they have an incredibly strict policy about secrecy...that is, they control the message, not the employee working on it.
Here's a thought...most pure data retrieval tasks don't require a huge amount of compute power on the device making the request. If I were operating a datacenter with thousands of hits a second, I'd want to optimize for the ability to hold a session open, then offload the request to either a monster data layer or a midrange layer that brokers requests and caches frequent search results.
Something like a single-board computer (or a really scaled-up thin client :-) ) running a low-power processor dedicated to driving network interfaces that also have their own offloading processors would allow them to scale the access layer way up for less power costs. Reliability would be less of a concern too, because you could have tons of cheap devices for the same costs as a fraction of full servers.
When you scale out, you often don't need the overhead that full servers would give you, because you're limiting the tasks that layer of access has to do.
Or...they just want to see how many smartphones it would take to replace layer one of Bing. :-)
I'm waiting for the announcement of Windows Embedded CE 2011 Datacenter Edition.
I'm guessing this this really only applies to the high-level, superstar tech talent, right? Especially with firms like Microsoft and IBM, what could they possibly be losing when IBM hires someone who's been working on the grammar checker for the Norwegian version of Word? Or the lower-level code monkey keeping an obscure feature of WebSphere MQ up to date?
These kinds of agreements would work in environments where talent tends to stay put. Unfortunately, the invisible hand seems to think that job stability is a stupid, backward 20th Century concept. After all, who doesn't like looking for a new job every 2 to 6 years?? In an environment like this, even the big guys are going to have trouble holding onto employees.
I think a much better investigation would deal with the well-publicized claims of IBM laying off senior US techs, replacing them with Indians or Brazillians, and forcing the laid off person to train the n00b to get their severance package. I'd also like to see the H-1B program users under some scrutiny for things like not paying prevailing wages, or employers intentionally not pursuing the hiring of US workers so they can get their work cheaper.
All of these things would be less of an issue with some kind of professional standards body in the IT realm. Unfortunately, too many people I know think this is evil and doesn't allow the full brilliance of their talent to shine. I don't think that's valid...lawyers sure like the Bar Association and doctors like the AMA. These organizations give them the power to influence laws and maintain educational standards...exactly what we need.
If done right, this might not be a bad idea. The traditional education system in the US has changed a lot in the past 50+ years:
Adding another carrot to the arsenal can't be too bad, given all the problems students face now.
I know the Digital Economy Bill has some really far-reaching restrictions that could be imposed, but I can't say I'm surprised.
When you think about it, the US, the UK and most of Europe are 100% dependent on intellectual property now for their economic survival. Almost nothing at the consumer level is manufactured in these countries. All we produce is software, music, movies, video games and hardware designs. Protecting copyright when viewed through this lens makes a lot more sense now. It gives IP-related companies an advantage, but I'd say that's better than turning the entire country into an unemployed wasteland because companies don't want to produce material that's just going to get stolen.
Personally, I'd love it if someone woke up and realized that all of our eggs are in one basket, and took steps to diversify the economy...but I doubt that's gonig to happen. I'm for just enough of an import tarriff to balance things out and make manufacturing in this country make sense. Not everyone can be a "knowlege worker," the service sector is a crappy place to work, and we need manufacturing jobs for those who don't fit the office mold.
I honestly think free trade isn't a good idea when you have 300 million people with a grossly outsized standard of living competing with billions of others who live on way less. No one is going to give up their standard of living, so without some controls, we're totally screwed in the long run.
One problem with IT in general, and especially its little niche subfields, is the lack of formal training. Skilled trades get apprenticeships to teach newbies the ropes on the job. Professions like medicine, pharmacy, engineering, etc. have standard accredited training and licensure requirements.
We have none of that. The field is still so wild-westy that vendors largely control training and education. Universities provide grads a CS or a "vocational" IT degree, but it's all theory. Lots of us didn't even go to school. I'm a science guy by education, and wound up here. Other people I know were educated in something not even close to IT. Still others took the "Get Certified and Make $100K In 10 Days!!!!" training courses.
When a software developer or IT guy gets out in the real world, the education side of things is usually left up to vendors, who are desperately trying to push their latest product. It takes a new guy a long time to realize that (a) VendorX doesn't have a completel lock on FieldY, and (b) VendorX is trotting out the exact same thing as 10 years ago, this time with an improved support structure. (Example: VDI is "OMG -drool- brand new hot technology" but VMs have been around in the mainframe world for eons, and thin clients have been...OK...for years. The difference now is that bandwidth is cheap and fast, which it wasn't 10 years ago.)
So what do the Feds want as "cybersecurity experts?" Are they thinking of capturing virus writers and forcing them to work for us? Are they thinking the guy installing Symantec Antivirus from vendor instructions is an expert? And what could universities possibly do about it? Courses like "CYS 425 - Introduction to SQL Injection Attacks?" In my mind, anyone who really belongs in the "IT profession" should be grounded so well in the fundamentals that they can be crafty enough to find security flaws in their own software. If they're systems guys (like me,) they should be smart enough to test vendor assertions.
Instead of just giving scholarships for CS degrees, I think the profession should rally around making sure everyone is qualified for an IT job at the level they're working at. And I think that some of this needs to be general enough to transcend vendors. Someone should know "operating systems" instead of "Windows" or "Linux". it shouldn't be an absolute culture shock to take a person working in a Windows environmnent and put them in front of RHEL with a small amount of introduction. How many of you guys work in Windows-centric place that has one Linux box everyone is afraid to touch? THAT'S what we have to fix!