...but I'm glad it finally passed. Unfortunately, Obama sacrificed his entire presidency to get this through - the tea party crowd is going to go on an insane campaigning binge and take away the Democratic majority in Congress. As of November, nothing will get done for the next 2 years; the Republicans will see to that.
Anyone who disagrees with these new rules has clearly never been in a situation where they're self-employed, or unemployed, or have a pre-existing illness, and therefore can't get affordable health insurance. Or, they are/have been, and are just so anti-government that they don't understand that this helps people. I actually see this a lot among peers...they're well-educated, grew up in wealthy households, and have never been unemployed a day in their life. They also work for companies that have reasonably decent health insurance. Insurance companies do a really good job of hiding actual costs...you actually have to dig into those statements they send you to find out how much the provider billed and was paid. If you didn't do this, you would have no idea how much that $1000 MRI cost you -- you might think it only cost the $20 copayment.
This law isn't for people who have good insurance through stable companies. It's for the people that work crappy jobs with no insurance benefits, are self-employed, or work for a tightwad small business owner who refuses to buy adequate health insurance.For those who think that's a minority of the population -- just wait until all those nice safe white-collar jobs get outsourced as well. Everyone complaining about this will be in the same boat that today's uninsured are.
That said, it has flaws. It's expensive, it only reins in the insurance companies instead of replacing them, and it doesn't address the actual cost of care. The expensive part can be taken care of by taxes -- although everyone in this country seems to have a problem with that unless they're getting direct beneifts. Cost of care is going to be the hard one - there are so many inefficient niches in the medical world that are all trying to protect their turf (malpractice lawyers, medical billing people, larger-than-needed office staffs at healthcare providers.)
if it were me, I would have proposed extending Medicare coverage to everyone, raising the Medicare tax appropriately, and leaving the insurance companies to fight over the 20% of cost that doesn't get covered by Medicare. But it's not me, so this is what we have to work with. At least it's better than nothing.
A lot of people are saying that human nature is the problem, but I think it's that combined with technological limitations.
First, the human nature factor is getting to be less and less of an issue. Younger people in the workforce don't seem to care about permanent records not being printed, and the number of filing cabinets in most offices has gone way down. The human "need" for having a piece of paper in-hand has decreased, but people are (understandably) worried about some of the technology related issues:
Archival and Storage - Even the most staunch advocate of paperless recordkeeping understands that digital formats come and go. Just try to find a way to read data off 8" or even 5.25" floppies these days. And even if you get the files off, good luck finding the software that created them. Open file formats are a good remedy to the first problem, and I think their adoption is going to drive a lot of archiving projects. However, someone has to remember to turn over the media every n years (I forget how long CD-ROMs are supposed to be good for, but to keep something for >100 years, you need to convert it from CD-ROM to BluRay to GreenRay+ to SuperFlexiDisk2.0 to EQM (Embedded Quantum Memory.) Paper, if stored in a cold dry place, is still readable after hundreds of years unless someone burns the place down. So yeah, finding self-renewing and error-compensating storage media is a big one.
Lack of IT Competence - Face it, even good system admins forget about backups every now and then. Home users never back up, which explains the long lines at the Geek Squad counter at Best Buy of nervous people clutching their precious 2 TB external storage tank that has every photo they ever took on it. Until IT evolves a little and establishes archival standards that aren't some storage vendor's flavor of the week, we'll always have the "all data lost" kind of system failure.
Screen technology still sucks. - There's a reason optometrists invented the term "computer glasses." We're a long way from flickering CRTs, but even the best LCD will ruin your eyes staring at the backlight for 8 hours a day. A lot of people either can't or don't want to stare at the monitor to read long-form stuff. The Kindle screen is a good start (no backlight,) but the text can be fuzzy compared to a 1200 dpi printout.
"Important" stuff still gets printed. - Anything you need to keep (citizenship records, real estate deeds, tax information, etc.) gets printed out for the simple reason that it would be a huge pain to try replacing it. Here's a really good example - I just changed jobs a few months ago, and my employer has switched to electronic paystubs. My access to all that information is now gone. If I want my paystubs, I have to call the HR department, they'd have to print out each one and mail it to me.
I'd say given one more generation and some major improvements, we could get rid of most printed documents. Until then, HP is still going to rake in the bucks on printers and toner. We already have way less paper floating around - the legal and medical professions are the only ones still "innovating" in the paper filing arena. Electronic bank statements, loan payments, and all that stuff means a whole lot less paper being mailed from place to place.
As much as this raises privacy concerns, it's a good step towards eliminating paper check processing. Everyone knows checks are pretty much things of the past - most people in the current generation pay all their commercial bills with electronic paymens. Only person-to-person debt settlements or gifts are done through checks by anyone under 35 or so. Remote deposit capture has been around in large businesses forever, and is even more prevalent with Check 21 now.
Checks are old-fashioned, but what can replace them in the US? In the current banking system, giving out your account number for wire transfers isn't secure. I think Europe has figured out a way to do EFTs securely (chip and pin cards? PIN-based wire transfers?) Here in the US, I think a lot of people don't think of wire transfers as a way to settle "normal" debts. The image that comes to my mind is of secret numbered Swiss bank accounts and multi-million dollar transactions, and I'm all for getting rid of checks. Plus, wire transfers in the current banking system cost a lot of money to perform. You have to find an easy, safe way, including authentication of both parties, to transfer funds that is just as easy as writing someone a check.
Banks probably love this too. They have to process even fewer paper checks, and there will no longer be an excuse to have as many bank branches.
Global free trade in services allows American workers to take on more productive roles, which is good for the economy and leads to further job growth.
Here's the problem with that...we're at the end of the value chain, and most people won't have anywhere to go in the next phase. I'd agree that free trade is good, but when it leaves out so many people, you have a recipe for disaster.
In any country, and especially one as big as ours is, you have to have work for every level of ability. Not everyone is or should be college-educated. Humans have a normal distribution of IQs and different talents/abilities. If you can't provide work for low-achieving people, you have to subsidize them, or else you'll eventually get French Revolution 2.0.
Think about it this way...the Industrial Revolution got peasants off the farms and into low-skill factory jobs. One similar level job was replaced with another. Unionization came about and instantly built a stable middle class. Even people who weren't well educated but worked hard could make a good living for their families. Outsourcing of manufacturing started happening in the 70s, and we told all the blue collar workers to go get educated and become white collar workers. We kept this up in the 80s as seemingly every manufacturing job disappeared. Then, in the late 80s/early 90s, huge swaths of white collar workers got wiped out. A lot of this was due to computerizing basic office tasks that would have been suited for those factory workers -- think typists, file clerks, middle managers who only filed and delivered reports, etc. So we told all the white collar workers to get more education and go into emerging technology fields. Lots of people did - and this led to a huge number of certification-mill operations that put barely qualified people into the IT universe. Now, in the 90s and 2000s, offshoring of technolgy work is in vogue. What do we tell the people now? Most people are saying you should go into project management or some other kind of management.
What's the problem with that? Not everyone can manage, and bad managers make life miserable for their workers. And most people lack the education to become doctors, lawyers and other well-paid professionals. In other words, there's no more rungs on the value ladder. Pretty soon, there's going to be two huge peaks in an income chart - one at $8/hr for lousy service jobs, and one for the professional ranks.
How do we keep society going when we're removing people's ability to support themselves?
Honestly, I have mixed feelings about this. IBM is a huge tech giant, similar to Oracle or maybe even HP. They produce rock-stable, less-than-exciting products that run the back end of most businesses. Microsott is even heading this direction. The problem is, when you get that huge and have shareholders/executives constantly demanding lower costs, eventually the offshoring lever gets pulled. It's awful that these large companies are contributing to unemployment in the process, but do you really think they can be stopped?
I'd call myself left of center, and would support measures to at least discourage companies from moving jobs offshore. This wouldn't be appropriate in most cases, but when you have 300 million people competing against a huge labor pool that costs 90% less, the stabilizers need to be kicked on. However, I know it's not realistic. Why? Most IT people I know are incredibly conservative/Libertarian/Ayn Rand followers. Mention a union, professional organization, or other stabilizer to these people, and most go off into a Fox News-style tirade about socialism or how unions are evil and corrupt.
If our own profession doesn't stand up for itself, we can't expect anyone else to. (My opinion: People need to get out of this "rugged individualism/entrepreneurial" fantasy that they seem to have. You're not a superstar, you're not going to start a business and become an overnight billionaire, and you're never going to be one of the outsized celebrities or business tycoons that you celebrate. It just isn't a realistic dream to base your life around. But that's my opinion.)
Another problem is this - the computing and IT workforce has still not decided on a direction. Do we want to be a profession? If so, then we need to start standardizing education of new members, and do a better job at defining fundamentals of development, systems engineering, etc. Do we want to be a skilled trade? If so, then we need to set up an apprenticeship-style training system that gives new recruits a decent broad background, consider a union ^Ubargaining unit ^U^Upolitical influence committee and think about a real career ladder that doesn't end at age 40. Or, do we want to be a branch of traditional engineering? That's almost like a profession - and I'm all for the idea of people being responsible for their work like PEs are.
I would definintely go for the traditional-engineering or profession route, but there's another problem. Skill sets in IT vary wildly. I've worked with absolute geniuses and...umm...less-than-geniuses. It drives me nuts when less-than-geniuses get hired as contractors for triple my salary and I wind up having to tell them how to solve something. Since there's no set way to validate skills, people can fake their way through interviews and wind up on staff causing havoc while they learn. Same goes in reverse...someone who's really smart but bad at selling themselves can wind up not getting a job, or a much lower salary than they're entitled to.
Anyway, back to the offshoring problem. Everyone's still in love with cheap goods and cheap labor, and hasn't learned much from the recent economic downturn. People are still spending way too much, even though the contraction in the credit markets has helped a lot. So we have a choice - either cut back the spending so we don't have to demand raises of our already-high salaries, or find some way to differentiate ourselves. That's never going to happen - too many IT problems get buried by lower-level managers before the decision makers ever see them.
I'm not a teacher, but I've seriously considered it as a second career after the entire stateside IT industry collapses. Everyone loves to blame teachers and the teachers' unions for causing all the problems. There has been a lot of talk recently about "paying for performance." In other words, the teacher would get a different salary or a bonus based on how well the students perform on various tests, the graduation rate, etc. Others, especially around my area have gotten extremely worked up over high property taxes, citing the lazy greedy teachers and their union for "stealing their tax money."
There are some parents who really care about their kids' education. Others use school as a free babysitting service, and do nothing outside of the school day to motivate their kids to do well. If your school has tons of the second kind of kid, pay-for-performance does not work well. No matter what the teacher does, if the student decides they don't care what kind of grades they get, nothing is going to make the kid improve. The teachers in crappy schools will get crappy pay, the profession won't attract smart people, and the cycle continues.
Here's my two thoughts on the subject.
First, teachers deserve to be paid well, especially those who have put up with peoples' kids for many years. You wouldn't deny a mid-career to end-of-career corporate professional a decent salary, would you? If you don't pay your teachers well, you're not going to get good people wanting to do the job. If you've been interviewing or hiring IT folks for the last 5-7 years, you may have noticed quality issues. I think that's totally attributable to the lower salaries people are paying. If you were smart and had your choice of jobs, wouldn't you choose something more stable than IT, even if you really enjoyed it? There are still really good people making decent IT salaries, but those jobs are getting harder and harder to come by. If you set the bar too low, recruiting gets tougher. "Hey, want to work a job that's high stress, sometimes 60 hours a week, where you get no respect?" Not a good sales pitch...
Second, time-in-grade is still the fairest way to pay people. You may get some lazy hangers-on, but you see this in companies as well. I've noticed a couple people in my various corporate jobs who carved out a comfortable niche for themselves and just stopped working. Yet, these people continue to get raises while new hires with similar experience levels are paid less. This pay for performance scheme will backfire on people...instead of attracting the best and the brightest, you're going to burn them out of the profession.
Although the format change is a big part of this, the real change afoot is the amount of effort it takes to publish something. In the past, with the exception of self-publishing, the only way to get your work out there was to pitch your idea to a book publisher, who would then decide what was and was not print-worthy. Today, I can go to blogspot.com, sign up for an account, and spout off about anything I want, making it accessible for the world to see.
That means big changes for the publishing business. I'm actually not thrilled about paper books going away; it's not easy for me to read a sceen, even a Kindle screen, for hours on end. But the publishers and bookstores are really terrified. I could defintiely see Barnes and Noble or Borders turning into something like a coffeehouse/social club, marketing e-books and e-media, and still making money off of ancillary stuff. Problem is that you can't support thousands of places like that. Time, Random House, McGraw-Hill and all those guys in New York are probably shaking in their boots. Eventually, they're going to have to find a way to make money on something that's easy to disseminate and hard to resell. It's similar to the music industry...they've been on the same talent search --> contract --> album --> hit song(s) --> concert revenue --> album business cycle forever. Now publishing has to switch to something else from talent search --> contract --> book --> sales revenue --> book.
It's also going to be extremely difficult to make a living writing material. I really love to write, but I know it's not a sustainable career. Those of us with the itch to write have had magazines to submit articles to, but even that might dry up. The worst change IMO is going to be journalism. Instead of a newspaper of record, we're going to have thousands of bloggers, all with their own agenda, Twittering and blogging all over the Web about current events. I really think investigative journalism is going to go downhill, which is bad. You need to pay reporters to go out and spend the time digging up actual facts, not posting opinions. That's how we get the conspiracy theorists sneaking into the mainstream with things like Obama's citizenship being questioned.
For some companies, people are stuck on IE 6 for a variety of reasons:
ActiveX - I can't tell you how many poorly-designed browser-interface applications (made by large vendors in fact) rely on IE 6's specific way of downloading, handling and instantiating ActiveX controls. This is especially true for the crazy ones like a VPN app that downloads and installs an entire network driver and stack.
Apps - see above, these are often vertical market apps with very few customers. There's little incentive to upgrade them. Plus when the vendors offer new versions, companies don't take them because it costs huge bucks to upgrade.
Inertia
Rendering problems. This is going on at a company I used to work for. They bought into a hugely-expensive content management system for their intranet, and the page templates it creates don't render in IE 7 or 8. Same problem as above...huge money for an upgrade, no reason to do so as far as the people in charge of the intranet are concerned. So the choice is - do we make the site look like crap by upgrading the browser, or do we stick with what we have and deal with the security mess?
I know web designers can't stand developing for IE 6, Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc. etc., but I'll bet you there are way more corporate IE 6 users than you think!
Anyone who's been a systems administrator for many years has probably dealt with Novell at one point or another in their career. Before Windows NT came on the scene, NetWare was pretty much THE PC file-and-print server solution. I remember one of the good things about it was that it was lightweight - command line UI, simple admin tools. Microsoft brought back this idea of command-line-only server consoles with Windows Server Core in the last version. Novell also has some pretty neat tools like ZenWorks. That said, it's interesting to see this potential deal on the table. Even 10 years ago, you'd never see Novell ready to throw in the towel.
I wonder why their acquisition of SuSE and the interoperability initiative with Microsoft didn't change their fortunes...they had a good plan for migrating all their NetWare customers to Linux. I know NetWare is still heavily used in European companies and in the health care sector, so you would think they have a willing customer base to pay the bills with. I guess they couldn't compete with Red Hat for distirbutions and IBM for support services in the Linux world.
It's a good lesson though -- no matter how much of a market dominator you are, you're always a few steps away from being destroyed.
Coming from the systems integration side of things, I don't view this as a surprise. Developers are great at writing software, but in my experience they have no idea about how the platform they're deploying it on actually works beyond the API function calls they make. This leads to internal applications that I have to throw back because part of the requirements are, "User must be a member of the Administrators or Power Users group." Most dev guys just don't get that it's very dangerous to give the end user full rights to an Internet-connected Windows box. There's just too many holes in Windows to safely allow it.
To be fair, there are a lot of reasons for stuff like this...not the least of which is deadlines for deploying "something that works." I've been there on the systems side too...scrambling at the last second to get hardware and operating systems deployed because of a deployment date. There are also a lot of apps coded in C++ and other unmanaged languages that open the system up for all sorts of buffer overrun attacks. Not much you can do there except vigilant code checking.
I think a little education on both sides of the fence would be useful. Developers should get some kind of training in "systems administration and internals for developers" and systems guys should definitely be educated in what holes are safe to open up on their systems. (That's a big cause of this too -- there's a lot of low-skilled systems admins out there who take the developer's instructions at face value without checking to see if full access is really needed.)
I've actually done a lot of smaller server consolidation projects. In most cases, the results are great...those lonely database and file servers that get hits 5 or 6 times a day are all combined into one big box that actually uses all the hardware capacity.
The biggest problems I've seen with VMs are the project managers who treat it as magic, never-ending capacity. The new favorite phrase in IT project management circles seems to be, "Oh, we'll just build a VM for it." Problem is, unless someone else is hosting your data center, you can't just call up and order more capacity without paying for more hardware.
Second-biggest with a consolidation like this is incomplete requirements. Lowest-bidder contractors are not going to do a good job of gathering every single requirement...even high-bidder contractors have problems with this. And the problem is that the more they miss, the worse the fallout. A certain large company I used to work for found this out the hard way moving their inhouse data center to one of the big IT services companies. I'm a systems guy, and had all my stuff well documented. Others were pissed off they were losing their jobs and intentionally withheld information...the contractors didn't follow up, and a lot of last minute scrambling had to be done to complete the migration.
Third problem for a government IT consolidation? Some huge services company like Accenture or IBM is going to win the bid and staff the project with dumbasses they pulled off the street in order to maximize profits. (Yes, this happened in my case in point #2 above...the sales staff presented the A Squad and swapped them out as soon as the contract was signed.) Not that government employees are rockstars, but they at least have a vested interest in keeping the data safe. IBM will probably win the contract too, given their involvement with government systems already. IBM has been so India-happy over the last ten years that I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the (non security critical) work ends up there.
Just like PMs treat VMs as magic hardware, CIOs treat outsourcers as magic black boxes that flawlessly run their IT operations. Unfortunately, the reality is not as sunny beneath the surface!
All of us know (and some are) high-paid consultants who fly to work in some distant city on Monday, work from noon Monday to Thursday and fly back on Friday. This is a little bit different. It shows how messed up the economy is though, and this is a great example.
Put yourself in this guy's shoes. If you graduate high school and don't want to or can't spend the time and money on college, the best thing to do is get a nice safe manufacturing job. He has union protection, what he thought was a guaranteed job, and guaranteed retirement. If my plant closed and I was a year away from a full pension, I think I'd do the commute. Some people can't move, and it would be stupid to lose the biggest retirement income stream he probably has. (Defined benefit pension plans cover a percentage of your salary in retirement...they're what used to make up the difference that Social Security didn't pay. Now everyone's betting their own future and money in the stock market casino...no wonder market volatility is so bad.)
Despite what you think, it's not too far a leap to this scenario... You're a high-earning IT professional living in New York, Boston, Chicago or (pick your high-cost-of-living city.) Your company says, "Sorry, we're outsourcing most of our IT work to India, and the rest is moving to our contractor's East Redneckland, AL office. You can hire on with the contractor, but you'll have to move to East Redneckland." You might say, "OK, I guess I'll get another job." But what happens when every single company in your area moves their operations to East Redneckland? This very scenario has happened to me several times, and I'm running out of companies to jump to. Luckily I'm not completely tied to my employer like this guy is, but I definitely don't want to move unless there's no other way to make money in the future. I'm just saying that those who scoff and say this will never happen to them are not thinking things through to their logical conclusion.
People who make economic policy decisions need to understand that not everyone is a highly-skilled corporate employee, and when people's jobs are taken away, not everyone is an entrepreneur-type. I hate it when people say, "Why can't these lazy idiots start their own businesses?" If you don't have the skills, starting a business is a huge waste of time and a ticket to bankruptcy court. Small retail businesses are a total dead end due to large competitors, restaurants are a dead end because no one has the money to eat out anymore, etc. etc. I say we go back to a previous era where large,, well established businesses provide guaranteed jobs for an entire career. We should also stop encouraging 401(k)-style savings, and go back to pension funds. Fund managers in a pension have 30, 40, 50 years to make up for any losses they have in the market...once your 401(k) is gone, you're broke.
At least here in North America, our general aversion to unions is entirely rational. Unions here do not foster creativity - they foster group think. Did you ever want to work a couple extra hours because you were really into what you were doing? Try doing that in a union shop - you'll have a very unhappy experience. I've had unionized jobs (albeit not programming jobs). I cannot imagine a unionized programming job being anywhere near as enjoyable as a non-union programming job. Unions suck.
I've never understood this thinking. Unions do tend to even out the stand-out employee, but I'm thinking that that's less of a concern as I age. The whole reason why there was a huge middle class in the 50s through the 70s was the fact that people had steady jobs that paid well. People who aren't freaked out about losing their job constantly will go out and buy cars, buy houses, take vacations and all the other stuff that fuels consumer spending.
Now we're back at the other extreme. Management has done a great job convincing the labor at all levels, skilled and unskilled, that they're your buddies. Without any protections against abuses, it becomes easy to demand extra unpaid work or toss people out when they've outlived their short-term usefulness. The adversarial split between labor and management needs to make a comeback - maybe in a less overt form, but with enough teeth to make employee demands count for something.
Call me mediocre, but I'd rather give up the potential for being a total rock star employee for a fixed-hour work week, a contract that eliminates the salary shell game seen in corporate jobs, guaranteed raises, work rules and stability.
(Disclaimer: I'm a systems guy, not a programmer, but a very similar truth holds for us as well when it comes to age discrimination.)
I'm only 35, and I'm starting to see this creeping in on me also. Here's a couple of random observations I've actually (not anecdotally) experienced:
Companies absolutely believe the stereotype that older workers are less productive. Usually, this is because management gets promoted out of the tech ranks, where they were used to younger workers. I've heard more than one boss say something like "Oh, so-and-so's kid is sick AGAIN, what a waste of time." The deadly spiral of "willing to work longer hours, no committments, and they can be paid less" does not help.
A corrolary to the above...younger tech workers tend to have much less of an "out of work" life. This is why you don't see too many older people working at video game production houses...you just can't hold a marriage together on nonstop 90-hour weeks. If you're single, and have nothing but a one bedroom apartment and XBox to come home to, you're going to complain less about constant overtime and that pesky pager duty us systems guys deal with.
After being filtered through 2 line managers, and who-knows-how-many project managers, IT executive leadership just doesn't see the impact of less-experienced people working on projects. Messes are cleaned up at lower levels, usually by spending a buttload of money on consultants, and only show up at the senior level as "minor overages". Had the job been done right, the higher salary paid to more experienced people would far outweigh paying experts $xxx/hr to unravel some mess put together by someone who just learned Java.
Even worse, people at the C-level believe that all IT people are whiny nerds who can be pushed around with very little pushback. This leads to the belief that nothing they do will be questioned.
I only see a couple solutions. A concerted effort could be made to make managerment aware of the actual cost of a project vs. the salary differential. I doubt that will work. You can also become one of those consultants, and get paid loads of money to clean up messes. However, that's not for everyone...it requires tons of hard work, business savvy and is not at all stable. Try raising a family with no health insurance and a non-guaranteed income stream, especially in a high-cost-of-living area.
I admit that I'm pretty lucky. I've managed to land at companies that don't seem to mind paying a little extra for someone who really knows their stuff. The price of admission for jobs like that is the willingness to invest in yourself constantly. Taking classes or buying software/hardware/books for training, even on your own time, is the best way to keep current. That way, companies get the best of both worlds...someone who knows the latest tech, and knows enough not to implement something half-baked because they want their weekends free.:-) Unfortunately, that stereotype of the COBOL guy sitting in the corner has a little bit of truth to it, and it means we end up gettting painted with the same brush.
One other choice would require a much different mindset than there is now...accept a lower salary and make up the difference by saving and investing carefully. I've been doing this anyway, because I know there will come a time where companies stop paying for IT talent and I'm going to be forced to take a huge paycut. Everyone I know, young or old, spends money like their income is never going to decrease. Live within your means so you can last through the bad times that are coming with the next wave of globalization.
Imagine if this wasn't censorship of search results that we were talking about. Instead, imagine that the Chinese government looked the other way while local officials demanded bribes for keeping the office utilities running. If you're a multinational company, those are the kind of things you need to deal with...and reconcile with a different set of ethics.
Companies need to decide whether or not they are willing to play by the local rules when they jump into an international market. Those bribes they pay may not be a good ethical choice, but they may make the company much more profitable. Since company shareholders are the only concern for most companies, they need to set aside their feelings and do what the local government says.
Personally, I think what they're doing is fine, simply because it's not our place to tell a foriegn government what to do. It's their country, and human rights abuses, censorship, Taiwan and the Dalai Lama shouldn't really matter to American citizens. That's how China chooses to keep their country in line (and growing economically at 10%+ per year, I might add.) It seems to work well for them, and even if it didn't, we can't tell them otherwise. Doing so puts us on the same Cold War era "keeping the world safe for democracy" bandwagon that hasn't worked for us in four wars since WW2. I've long held the belief that once we solve 100% of our social problems at home, then we can go lecture people around the world about how to behave.
This happens a lot with any large company where revenue is dependent on keeping a few cash cow products generating income. First, you don't want to do anything to upset what's making you money, so you start really playing it safe. Vista was a horrible flop, but Microsoft spent a ton of time and money polishing it up and rolling out Windows 7. But imagine Microsoft throwing out all the 20 years of Windows backward compatibility and totally starting over. It won't happen until the product absolutely cannot be supported anymore. Windows 7 including "XP mode" is a really good example - they desparately want to avoid angering enterprise customers who are still running custom software that relies on Windows 98's quirks 12 years later. Heck, there's still a couple of places I know running the core of their business using a 16-bit screen scraper app and an equally-old terminal emulator!
Second, you have the organizational problem. Microsoft is huge, so huge that enterprise customers need a Technical Account Manager just to handle their support calls and make sure they can find resources. I know they have a Research arm, but I can't see how an individual developer's idea might possibly make it high enough up the food chain to make much difference. To make things worse, the management structure is probably so deep within product lines that multiple product VPs are clamoring for Ballmer's attention. These guys are fighting for their jobs, so I imagine there's tons of poltics involved. I would bet that early-90's Microsoft was a lot more collaborative.
I definitely see Microsoft progressing towards IBM and Oracle territory as far as products go. They'll deliver nice safe products for business, but the consumer will be left out. XBox is another story...but just look at the mess that is Zune!
I've actually worked for large organizations, both IT and non-IT. (I haven't worked for a software company.) I can tell you that smaller organizations are better, up to a point. Once you get too small, say in the medium business category, you have to deal personally with a potentially psychopathic owner or CEO. If they're benevolent, it's great, but most entrepreneur-y types are nuts to begin with, and tend to treat employees like "the help." But once you grow too big, such that communication becomes a problem and politics start entering into every decision, the situation can be just as bad.
But yeah, I can't see Microsoft creating another "category-killer" product with their current structure. My dealings with them as a Premier Support customer have been interesting....it takes them several days to admit that a problem exists, log it, and "officially" tell me that they're working on a hotfix.
I got to see this first-hand in my last job. The place started off like a startup, got big, and all of a sudden people were doing the CYA thing that I've seen all over the large-business world. Everyone was way too panicked about getting chewed out by our crazy CIO to be focused on doing good work.
So, NASA's jumping on the same bandwagon as private companies now - outsourcing everything they can get away with. I'm not totally anti-outsourcing, but I do think it goes way too far. Executives love the idea of having as few things in-house as possible, especially when a business partner can do it cheaper. The problem is that they don't care how the partner manages to do it cheaper! This happens in every field. Outsource manufacturing, and you get poor product quality. Outsource software development, and you get crappy code that has to be rewritten anyway. Outsource IT, and satisfaction levels go down as the people who knew what was happening get replaced by the cheapest people they can find. How would this apply to space travel?
Also, here's another thought. In not too many years, China, India or one of the other developing economies is going to be the dominant country on Earth. It's just a fact - they have governments who pursue growth at all costs, and we've decided to stop trying to stay ahead. One of the things that kept the US and the Soviet Union on their toes during the Cold War was the run-up in their space programs. The US push to be first on the moon was basically a government mandate, along with the massive amount of funding that it took. Let's say we wanted to do something like that again - maybe to prove a point to China or something. Now, instead of using unlimited money and power to make things happen, NASA has to go beg/bribe 500 subcontractors to do the job instead of hiring the scientists and engineering staff themselves.
...you can make that argument for other things, not just current events. Once you start limiting people's exposure to things outside of their interest, it closes their mind off. Ask your average World of Warcraft addict about anything other than World of Warcraft, and they'll say they have a guild meeting to go to or that you're interrupting their grinding. I'm a technology nut, but even I know when to get off the computer and keep an eye on what's going on around me.
The problem is that feeding someone a steady diet of personalized content means that eventually they stop seeing other points of view. For example, I'm a left-leaning person, but I occasionally listen to the conservative talking heads screaming about what's going on. It may be comic relief for me, but at least I'm informed. Anyone who isn't becomes more and more entrenched in their belief system. Your average conservative hears nothing but Fox News, the conservative talk show crowd and the Tea Party Movement people, and refuses to believe that anyone else has a better idea. It's the same kind of groupthink that goes on in poorly-managed companies. I may think the conservative side of the house has things totally backwards, as I'm sure they think I do. But, I have both sides...once you start homing in on people's interests, their interests become narrower because of the lack of exposure.
I wonder what the motivation here is. Oracle isn't exactly known as a warm and fuzzy employer. Every time I've had to deal with Oracle products, it's painfully obvious that the people they have intentionally design their software to be difficult to support...and then they hire armies of low-skill consultants to "help" customers install their systems.
(And yes, I understand enterprise-grade software is complex. However, needing someone to guide you through all the quirks in the products or documentation just to get a proof of concept going is sad. I think SAP may be the only worse company in this "doesn't work out of the box" category.)
My guess? Larry is going to wipe out the current long-tenure Sun employees who know everything about Sun's products and replace them with low-skilled, low-salaried n00bs. My further guess would be that these employees would be in lower-wage countries as well.
IBM has been doing stuff like this for a while, from what I've heard...including offering people permanent one-way transfers to India along with the appropriate salary cut. Every time one of these crazy schemes comes to light, I really wonder what I should do with the rest of my career...I have at least 30 years until I retire!!
Being a Windows systems guy, I've kept my Microsoft certifications current over the years. (Say what you will...it gets you past the first resume filter if you ever find yourself in need of a job.) Back when the NT 4.0 certifications were rolling over into the Win2K versions, Microsoft introduced the concept of an expiring cert. Personally, I think part of this was due to the fact that Microsoft significantly increased the difficulty level of the Win2K exams to reduce piracy and try to revalue the credential.
People who had the NT 4.0 certifications freaked, saying that Microsoft had no right to invalidate their credentials. Microsoft reversed the decision, and made the certifications last as long as support for the product did. They still stop offering exams for new people, but people who have the cert keep it.
Does this matter? In my mind, no way. I can think of only one place NT 4.0 skills might be valuable today, and it involves embedded systems with no typical Windows user interface. (The New York subway system uses NT 4 for their fare collection machines.) Most places aren't using it for the general file-and-print server work that the certification was aimed at.
I think it's just the perception of value. Even in 2010, there are a lot of people paying certification mills...I mean, training schools...many thousands of dollars for certification classes so they can "break into the lucrative field of IT." Community colleges regularly integrate the A+, Microsoft and Cisco cert classes into their degree programs. Some of those thousands of dollars are still being paid for long after the cert is achieved. People just don't want to feel they're holding worthless paper. In reality though, things change way too fast to declare that someone is "certified for life" on PC hardware. I find that if I take a couple months to focus on some piece of software, I turn around and hardware platforms have completely changed while I wasn't looking. Imagine an A+ cert holder from 1995 put in front of a quad-core machine with SAS drives, a huge video card that's basically a mini-computer, and other interfaces that didn't even exist in 1995.
I thnk one of China's strong points is that they identify talent at an early age, and put those students on a fast track, educational-robot program. You need to develop intelligence; it doesn't just come out of nowhere. If we separated the education systems here to cater to the smart at one level and the oxygen thieves at the other, we might start getting the same calibre of university graduates. This would probably be wildly unpopular here, and for good reason - everyone needs access to basic education. But not providing the really smart people appropriate challenges will reduce their standing against similar smart people from education-heavy countries.
It also doesn't help that students who could go either way aren't encouraged. Science is a really tough career choice for someone to make in the US today. All the smart people become doctors, lawyers, bankers or MBAs. I don't blame them - there's no job security and very low material rewards in most science careers.
(Disclaimer: I'm a systems integration guy at an IT services and engineering firm. I work with tons of developers, but I'm not one myself.)
From what I've observed, the best programmers/developers/coders/whatever are the ones who specialize in understanding their problem domain. The industry I work in has a lot of specialized, semi-proprietary knowledge that takes work to learn. It's the kind of stuff you can't just pick a programmer off the street for -- to do a good job you need to know more than the actual mechanics of writing software. My company pays those who wish to specialize pretty well, and the work atmosphere is much better. By default, you're dealing with a different class of developer who is able to think beyond the code they're hacking together in Visual Studio or Eclipse. By means of comparison, we also have a set of lower-level "grunt" coders who write test code and other things that don't require the extra business-side thought.
Another lucrative area, albeit less secure, is contracting. I know Indian outsourcing firms have gotten better over the years, but I still hear stories from my developer friends of how they made a years' salary in a few months basically rewriting some of the disasters that have come back from the offshore teams. Again, you have to be smart and have a strong stomach for risk or a huge bank account to back you up during the bad times.
I think it's the same in my area of speciality (systems administration, integration and engineering.) Good people are still being hired. Companies need an engineering staff that can think for itself, design things that don't randomly die, and not be at the mercy of a vendor when they do. In the sysadmin ranks, most of the unemployment is caused by data center consoldation or outsourcing....and that directly affects the lower-level admins who do backups, operate the console, etc. It's a killer for entry-level people -- how do we grow new sysadmins if we can't start them somewhere? Same thing goes for developers...no one comes out of college understanding high level systems design, and you have to give them a few projects to get them thinking.
It's getting harder and harder in the US to find jobs at these "good places to work." I happen to work at one that never made this list...it's a European company with significant US operations. They have their problems, but one thing they do know how to do is keep engineer types happy and producing decent-quality work.
One thing that might help SAS is that it looks like they're a private company. They also have a huge niche market in academia, government and high-end business analytics. These two things appear to be what it takes to keep the pressure off the board to cut salaries, jobs and perks every time they need to top up the quarterly numbers. If you either always make money, or have a founder/CEO who's willing to dig into his own deep pockets during a downturn, this means you can spend a few extra bucks to attract and retain non-idiot employees. In turn, those employees will work harder for you, and make more money for the company.
I've seen (and worked in) the converse of this also. Companies that treat their employees like dirt generally experience high turnover unless the employees don't have a choice. I worked at an outsourcer at the beginning of my career who was like that...they kept burning through the same pool of low-skilled contractors who end up causing more problems than they fix, especially in a managed-services environment. Everyone who was smart realized they were a crappy place to work, got skilled and moved on.
Companies are social structures as well as business structures. In the past, there was a completely paternal relationship -- just do your job and everything will be taken care of for you. Some employers now take the role of "abusive parent" when it comes to employment. People at the top need to realize that if morale is in the dumps, their employees are either going to leave or not produce results for them.
A lot of people will say that all these perks are designed to squeeze every minute of productivity out of someone...and they're right! If someone doesn't have to sit in traffic to go to lunch because the cafeteria's right there, or be late to work because they had to drop their kid off at daycare, that's more productive work time. I think it works out, especially when you consider that happier employees tend to be more stable and less likely to disappear on you.
At the Federal level, this would work out pretty nicely. States and US Territories have totally different tax laws and it wouldn't work out there -- some people live in one state and work in another, some states have no tax, etc. Having less paperwork to process would help too. We get a property tax bill in the mail every December, with all of the amounts charged listed on it, and a total due at the bottom. Federal taxes would require some adjustments, but having a starting point would be less of a burden for the average taxpayer.
I think this would go a long way towards ensuring at least basic tax compliance. When you think about it, the tax system is very voluntary. If you're a wage earner, or get dividends/interest, or sell stocks and get capital gains, the IRS knows about all those transactions. They don't know about all the other stuff you report voluntarily - income from businesses you own, houses you rent, etc.
Most taxpayers' returns are incredibly simple, and contain some of the following:
Income from wages, interest, dividends, capital gains, farming, rental property, self-employment
Deductions for dependents, standard or itemized deduction, Earned Income Credit (a tax reduction for very low wage workers.)
Tax prepaid through withholdings from your banks and employers
Your tax due is figured as the income, minus deductions, minus tax already withheld. if the value is negative, you get a refund. If it's positive, you haven't prepaid enough of your tax and need to send in money. With the exception of your deductions and business income, the IRS knows almost all of these numbers based on the reporting from your financial institutions and employer. Why shouldn't they send you a starter return, basically saying "we think you owe this, if you have anything to add or deduct, provide proof and send us a check or collect your refund."
This might help crack down on the shady tax preparer services out there like H&R Block, Jackson Hewitt and any number of guys working out of their car. They advertise to the poor and ignorant that they'll keep the IRS off their back and get them the biggest refund possible. In reality, someone with basic education in arithmetic can fill in a wage-earner's return. Look at Form 1040EZ on the IRS's website - it's one page. Form 1040 for more complex returns is two pages and neither of these require more than basic math and reading skills. TurboTax is great for filling in the forms, but a lot of people are scared of math, or the government, or filling in forms, and so they run to a tax preparer. If they had a "tax bill" with clear instructions showing how to claim deductions, it would eliminate a lot of needless preparer fees and also reduce the practice of way overwithholding taxes during the year so you get a huge refund. If people had that money during the year, maybe they wouldn't be in debt or be able to save something. As it is, they get a huge refund check and blow it on a TV or other large ticket item.
But anyway, back to the voluntary part. The IRS has millions of tax returns to process, and only so many revenue officers to do audits. The reality is that they go after the people they're going to get the most noncompliance from - high earners, small business owners and people with significant non-traceable income. For the majority of taxpayers, if you don't report it, and they don't have the numbers from another source, then they don't know about it. If you don't file a return they probably will leave you alone too. The bad part is when the audit does come and you haven't filed a return in 7 years...
It's also a good idea to simplify the tax code anyway. Limiting loopholes for high earners is a good thing. And remember that I said most tax returns are simple. Some parts of the tax law dealing with the timing of earnings, limits on certain deductions, etc. are very confusing and require a lot of reading to get right. That's a legitimate use of tax preparers...but the vast majority of people would be served well with a pre-filled tax return.
...and I don't think it's entirely out of greed. The simple truth is that you can't pay columnists, reporters and other staff unless you have sufficient revenue. If people are abandoning the print version of the paper, and advertisers don't see the return they expect from ads, you lose a lot of per-copy revenue and ad revenue.
The truth is that the old model of "sell a paper for $1.00 a day, collect $XM in ad revenue per year, and your profit is that less your employment and other costs" is going away. Now, quality media outlets are faced with a tough choice. (Yes, I know, we can debate quality, but I happen to like the Times.) They have to choose to provide their content free, while only recouping part of their costs from ad sales, or charging for content and hoping enough people like the paper enough to pay.
I see this causing two problems:
For journalism in general: When are people going to realize that actual journalism, investigative reporting, and other well-researched pieces cost money? Call me an old fogey if you want, but I think this transition we're going through is going to make it much tougher to get well-written, well-research, less-biased content. Look at how CNN has jumped in with both feet on the whole Web 2.0/Twitter/Facebook user-generated content. Some of the well-written stuff actually makes the television news, but the vast majority of it is a garbage dump compared to a legitimate news organization. Can you imagine the historical record of the Haitian earthquake filled with stuff like "OMG OMG teh quakez suX0rz dude" ? That's overblown, but you get the idea... Same thing goes for the reporting of both sides of an issue. Would you rather have a news organization making some attempt to neutrally report, or would you rather have the Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh blogs against the ACORN and ELF blogs? Investigative reporting is even more important, and I'm not talking about papparazzi stalking celebrities. Would Watergate have ever been uncovered without a news organization paying to cover it?
For employment: I've seen this kind of rationalization of every single penny of cost happening over the last few years. Outside of journalism, it happens every day...a software developer in India is 10% the cost of a US one, or we can eliminate this raft of manual processes by automating the whole thing. Some of this is good...I'm glad I'm not a file clerk at a huge insurance company, for example. But, it has to stop somewhere. There are some people who need mundane work. Manufacturing used to provide that, now it's gone. Not everyone can be a manager, or sell things, or manage projects. If you eliminate everyone's job, especially those at the low end of the skill spectrum, you're going to have a lot of unemployed consumers who can't buy your product.
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...but I'm glad it finally passed. Unfortunately, Obama sacrificed his entire presidency to get this through - the tea party crowd is going to go on an insane campaigning binge and take away the Democratic majority in Congress. As of November, nothing will get done for the next 2 years; the Republicans will see to that.
Anyone who disagrees with these new rules has clearly never been in a situation where they're self-employed, or unemployed, or have a pre-existing illness, and therefore can't get affordable health insurance. Or, they are/have been, and are just so anti-government that they don't understand that this helps people. I actually see this a lot among peers...they're well-educated, grew up in wealthy households, and have never been unemployed a day in their life. They also work for companies that have reasonably decent health insurance. Insurance companies do a really good job of hiding actual costs...you actually have to dig into those statements they send you to find out how much the provider billed and was paid. If you didn't do this, you would have no idea how much that $1000 MRI cost you -- you might think it only cost the $20 copayment.
This law isn't for people who have good insurance through stable companies. It's for the people that work crappy jobs with no insurance benefits, are self-employed, or work for a tightwad small business owner who refuses to buy adequate health insurance.For those who think that's a minority of the population -- just wait until all those nice safe white-collar jobs get outsourced as well. Everyone complaining about this will be in the same boat that today's uninsured are.
That said, it has flaws. It's expensive, it only reins in the insurance companies instead of replacing them, and it doesn't address the actual cost of care. The expensive part can be taken care of by taxes -- although everyone in this country seems to have a problem with that unless they're getting direct beneifts. Cost of care is going to be the hard one - there are so many inefficient niches in the medical world that are all trying to protect their turf (malpractice lawyers, medical billing people, larger-than-needed office staffs at healthcare providers.)
if it were me, I would have proposed extending Medicare coverage to everyone, raising the Medicare tax appropriately, and leaving the insurance companies to fight over the 20% of cost that doesn't get covered by Medicare. But it's not me, so this is what we have to work with. At least it's better than nothing.
A lot of people are saying that human nature is the problem, but I think it's that combined with technological limitations.
First, the human nature factor is getting to be less and less of an issue. Younger people in the workforce don't seem to care about permanent records not being printed, and the number of filing cabinets in most offices has gone way down. The human "need" for having a piece of paper in-hand has decreased, but people are (understandably) worried about some of the technology related issues:
I'd say given one more generation and some major improvements, we could get rid of most printed documents. Until then, HP is still going to rake in the bucks on printers and toner. We already have way less paper floating around - the legal and medical professions are the only ones still "innovating" in the paper filing arena. Electronic bank statements, loan payments, and all that stuff means a whole lot less paper being mailed from place to place.
As much as this raises privacy concerns, it's a good step towards eliminating paper check processing. Everyone knows checks are pretty much things of the past - most people in the current generation pay all their commercial bills with electronic paymens. Only person-to-person debt settlements or gifts are done through checks by anyone under 35 or so. Remote deposit capture has been around in large businesses forever, and is even more prevalent with Check 21 now.
Checks are old-fashioned, but what can replace them in the US? In the current banking system, giving out your account number for wire transfers isn't secure. I think Europe has figured out a way to do EFTs securely (chip and pin cards? PIN-based wire transfers?) Here in the US, I think a lot of people don't think of wire transfers as a way to settle "normal" debts. The image that comes to my mind is of secret numbered Swiss bank accounts and multi-million dollar transactions, and I'm all for getting rid of checks. Plus, wire transfers in the current banking system cost a lot of money to perform. You have to find an easy, safe way, including authentication of both parties, to transfer funds that is just as easy as writing someone a check.
Banks probably love this too. They have to process even fewer paper checks, and there will no longer be an excuse to have as many bank branches.
Global free trade in services allows American workers to take on more productive roles, which is good for the economy and leads to further job growth.
Here's the problem with that...we're at the end of the value chain, and most people won't have anywhere to go in the next phase. I'd agree that free trade is good, but when it leaves out so many people, you have a recipe for disaster.
In any country, and especially one as big as ours is, you have to have work for every level of ability. Not everyone is or should be college-educated. Humans have a normal distribution of IQs and different talents/abilities. If you can't provide work for low-achieving people, you have to subsidize them, or else you'll eventually get French Revolution 2.0.
Think about it this way...the Industrial Revolution got peasants off the farms and into low-skill factory jobs. One similar level job was replaced with another. Unionization came about and instantly built a stable middle class. Even people who weren't well educated but worked hard could make a good living for their families. Outsourcing of manufacturing started happening in the 70s, and we told all the blue collar workers to go get educated and become white collar workers. We kept this up in the 80s as seemingly every manufacturing job disappeared. Then, in the late 80s/early 90s, huge swaths of white collar workers got wiped out. A lot of this was due to computerizing basic office tasks that would have been suited for those factory workers -- think typists, file clerks, middle managers who only filed and delivered reports, etc. So we told all the white collar workers to get more education and go into emerging technology fields. Lots of people did - and this led to a huge number of certification-mill operations that put barely qualified people into the IT universe. Now, in the 90s and 2000s, offshoring of technolgy work is in vogue. What do we tell the people now? Most people are saying you should go into project management or some other kind of management.
What's the problem with that? Not everyone can manage, and bad managers make life miserable for their workers. And most people lack the education to become doctors, lawyers and other well-paid professionals. In other words, there's no more rungs on the value ladder. Pretty soon, there's going to be two huge peaks in an income chart - one at $8/hr for lousy service jobs, and one for the professional ranks.
How do we keep society going when we're removing people's ability to support themselves?
Honestly, I have mixed feelings about this. IBM is a huge tech giant, similar to Oracle or maybe even HP. They produce rock-stable, less-than-exciting products that run the back end of most businesses. Microsott is even heading this direction. The problem is, when you get that huge and have shareholders/executives constantly demanding lower costs, eventually the offshoring lever gets pulled. It's awful that these large companies are contributing to unemployment in the process, but do you really think they can be stopped?
I'd call myself left of center, and would support measures to at least discourage companies from moving jobs offshore. This wouldn't be appropriate in most cases, but when you have 300 million people competing against a huge labor pool that costs 90% less, the stabilizers need to be kicked on. However, I know it's not realistic. Why? Most IT people I know are incredibly conservative/Libertarian/Ayn Rand followers. Mention a union, professional organization, or other stabilizer to these people, and most go off into a Fox News-style tirade about socialism or how unions are evil and corrupt.
If our own profession doesn't stand up for itself, we can't expect anyone else to. (My opinion: People need to get out of this "rugged individualism/entrepreneurial" fantasy that they seem to have. You're not a superstar, you're not going to start a business and become an overnight billionaire, and you're never going to be one of the outsized celebrities or business tycoons that you celebrate. It just isn't a realistic dream to base your life around. But that's my opinion.)
Another problem is this - the computing and IT workforce has still not decided on a direction. Do we want to be a profession? If so, then we need to start standardizing education of new members, and do a better job at defining fundamentals of development, systems engineering, etc. Do we want to be a skilled trade? If so, then we need to set up an apprenticeship-style training system that gives new recruits a decent broad background, consider a union ^Ubargaining unit ^U^Upolitical influence committee and think about a real career ladder that doesn't end at age 40. Or, do we want to be a branch of traditional engineering? That's almost like a profession - and I'm all for the idea of people being responsible for their work like PEs are.
I would definintely go for the traditional-engineering or profession route, but there's another problem. Skill sets in IT vary wildly. I've worked with absolute geniuses and...umm...less-than-geniuses. It drives me nuts when less-than-geniuses get hired as contractors for triple my salary and I wind up having to tell them how to solve something. Since there's no set way to validate skills, people can fake their way through interviews and wind up on staff causing havoc while they learn. Same goes in reverse...someone who's really smart but bad at selling themselves can wind up not getting a job, or a much lower salary than they're entitled to.
Anyway, back to the offshoring problem. Everyone's still in love with cheap goods and cheap labor, and hasn't learned much from the recent economic downturn. People are still spending way too much, even though the contraction in the credit markets has helped a lot. So we have a choice - either cut back the spending so we don't have to demand raises of our already-high salaries, or find some way to differentiate ourselves. That's never going to happen - too many IT problems get buried by lower-level managers before the decision makers ever see them.
I'm not a teacher, but I've seriously considered it as a second career after the entire stateside IT industry collapses. Everyone loves to blame teachers and the teachers' unions for causing all the problems. There has been a lot of talk recently about "paying for performance." In other words, the teacher would get a different salary or a bonus based on how well the students perform on various tests, the graduation rate, etc. Others, especially around my area have gotten extremely worked up over high property taxes, citing the lazy greedy teachers and their union for "stealing their tax money."
There are some parents who really care about their kids' education. Others use school as a free babysitting service, and do nothing outside of the school day to motivate their kids to do well. If your school has tons of the second kind of kid, pay-for-performance does not work well. No matter what the teacher does, if the student decides they don't care what kind of grades they get, nothing is going to make the kid improve. The teachers in crappy schools will get crappy pay, the profession won't attract smart people, and the cycle continues.
Here's my two thoughts on the subject.
First, teachers deserve to be paid well, especially those who have put up with peoples' kids for many years. You wouldn't deny a mid-career to end-of-career corporate professional a decent salary, would you? If you don't pay your teachers well, you're not going to get good people wanting to do the job. If you've been interviewing or hiring IT folks for the last 5-7 years, you may have noticed quality issues. I think that's totally attributable to the lower salaries people are paying. If you were smart and had your choice of jobs, wouldn't you choose something more stable than IT, even if you really enjoyed it? There are still really good people making decent IT salaries, but those jobs are getting harder and harder to come by. If you set the bar too low, recruiting gets tougher. "Hey, want to work a job that's high stress, sometimes 60 hours a week, where you get no respect?" Not a good sales pitch...
Second, time-in-grade is still the fairest way to pay people. You may get some lazy hangers-on, but you see this in companies as well. I've noticed a couple people in my various corporate jobs who carved out a comfortable niche for themselves and just stopped working. Yet, these people continue to get raises while new hires with similar experience levels are paid less. This pay for performance scheme will backfire on people...instead of attracting the best and the brightest, you're going to burn them out of the profession.
Although the format change is a big part of this, the real change afoot is the amount of effort it takes to publish something. In the past, with the exception of self-publishing, the only way to get your work out there was to pitch your idea to a book publisher, who would then decide what was and was not print-worthy. Today, I can go to blogspot.com, sign up for an account, and spout off about anything I want, making it accessible for the world to see.
That means big changes for the publishing business. I'm actually not thrilled about paper books going away; it's not easy for me to read a sceen, even a Kindle screen, for hours on end. But the publishers and bookstores are really terrified. I could defintiely see Barnes and Noble or Borders turning into something like a coffeehouse/social club, marketing e-books and e-media, and still making money off of ancillary stuff. Problem is that you can't support thousands of places like that. Time, Random House, McGraw-Hill and all those guys in New York are probably shaking in their boots. Eventually, they're going to have to find a way to make money on something that's easy to disseminate and hard to resell. It's similar to the music industry...they've been on the same talent search --> contract --> album --> hit song(s) --> concert revenue --> album business cycle forever. Now publishing has to switch to something else from talent search --> contract --> book --> sales revenue --> book.
It's also going to be extremely difficult to make a living writing material. I really love to write, but I know it's not a sustainable career. Those of us with the itch to write have had magazines to submit articles to, but even that might dry up. The worst change IMO is going to be journalism. Instead of a newspaper of record, we're going to have thousands of bloggers, all with their own agenda, Twittering and blogging all over the Web about current events. I really think investigative journalism is going to go downhill, which is bad. You need to pay reporters to go out and spend the time digging up actual facts, not posting opinions. That's how we get the conspiracy theorists sneaking into the mainstream with things like Obama's citizenship being questioned.
For some companies, people are stuck on IE 6 for a variety of reasons:
I know web designers can't stand developing for IE 6, Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc. etc., but I'll bet you there are way more corporate IE 6 users than you think!
Anyone who's been a systems administrator for many years has probably dealt with Novell at one point or another in their career. Before Windows NT came on the scene, NetWare was pretty much THE PC file-and-print server solution. I remember one of the good things about it was that it was lightweight - command line UI, simple admin tools. Microsoft brought back this idea of command-line-only server consoles with Windows Server Core in the last version. Novell also has some pretty neat tools like ZenWorks. That said, it's interesting to see this potential deal on the table. Even 10 years ago, you'd never see Novell ready to throw in the towel.
I wonder why their acquisition of SuSE and the interoperability initiative with Microsoft didn't change their fortunes...they had a good plan for migrating all their NetWare customers to Linux. I know NetWare is still heavily used in European companies and in the health care sector, so you would think they have a willing customer base to pay the bills with. I guess they couldn't compete with Red Hat for distirbutions and IBM for support services in the Linux world.
It's a good lesson though -- no matter how much of a market dominator you are, you're always a few steps away from being destroyed.
Coming from the systems integration side of things, I don't view this as a surprise. Developers are great at writing software, but in my experience they have no idea about how the platform they're deploying it on actually works beyond the API function calls they make. This leads to internal applications that I have to throw back because part of the requirements are, "User must be a member of the Administrators or Power Users group." Most dev guys just don't get that it's very dangerous to give the end user full rights to an Internet-connected Windows box. There's just too many holes in Windows to safely allow it.
To be fair, there are a lot of reasons for stuff like this...not the least of which is deadlines for deploying "something that works." I've been there on the systems side too...scrambling at the last second to get hardware and operating systems deployed because of a deployment date. There are also a lot of apps coded in C++ and other unmanaged languages that open the system up for all sorts of buffer overrun attacks. Not much you can do there except vigilant code checking.
I think a little education on both sides of the fence would be useful. Developers should get some kind of training in "systems administration and internals for developers" and systems guys should definitely be educated in what holes are safe to open up on their systems. (That's a big cause of this too -- there's a lot of low-skilled systems admins out there who take the developer's instructions at face value without checking to see if full access is really needed.)
I've actually done a lot of smaller server consolidation projects. In most cases, the results are great...those lonely database and file servers that get hits 5 or 6 times a day are all combined into one big box that actually uses all the hardware capacity.
The biggest problems I've seen with VMs are the project managers who treat it as magic, never-ending capacity. The new favorite phrase in IT project management circles seems to be, "Oh, we'll just build a VM for it." Problem is, unless someone else is hosting your data center, you can't just call up and order more capacity without paying for more hardware.
Second-biggest with a consolidation like this is incomplete requirements. Lowest-bidder contractors are not going to do a good job of gathering every single requirement...even high-bidder contractors have problems with this. And the problem is that the more they miss, the worse the fallout. A certain large company I used to work for found this out the hard way moving their inhouse data center to one of the big IT services companies. I'm a systems guy, and had all my stuff well documented. Others were pissed off they were losing their jobs and intentionally withheld information...the contractors didn't follow up, and a lot of last minute scrambling had to be done to complete the migration.
Third problem for a government IT consolidation? Some huge services company like Accenture or IBM is going to win the bid and staff the project with dumbasses they pulled off the street in order to maximize profits. (Yes, this happened in my case in point #2 above...the sales staff presented the A Squad and swapped them out as soon as the contract was signed.) Not that government employees are rockstars, but they at least have a vested interest in keeping the data safe. IBM will probably win the contract too, given their involvement with government systems already. IBM has been so India-happy over the last ten years that I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the (non security critical) work ends up there.
Just like PMs treat VMs as magic hardware, CIOs treat outsourcers as magic black boxes that flawlessly run their IT operations. Unfortunately, the reality is not as sunny beneath the surface!
All of us know (and some are) high-paid consultants who fly to work in some distant city on Monday, work from noon Monday to Thursday and fly back on Friday. This is a little bit different. It shows how messed up the economy is though, and this is a great example.
Put yourself in this guy's shoes. If you graduate high school and don't want to or can't spend the time and money on college, the best thing to do is get a nice safe manufacturing job. He has union protection, what he thought was a guaranteed job, and guaranteed retirement. If my plant closed and I was a year away from a full pension, I think I'd do the commute. Some people can't move, and it would be stupid to lose the biggest retirement income stream he probably has. (Defined benefit pension plans cover a percentage of your salary in retirement...they're what used to make up the difference that Social Security didn't pay. Now everyone's betting their own future and money in the stock market casino...no wonder market volatility is so bad.)
Despite what you think, it's not too far a leap to this scenario... You're a high-earning IT professional living in New York, Boston, Chicago or (pick your high-cost-of-living city.) Your company says, "Sorry, we're outsourcing most of our IT work to India, and the rest is moving to our contractor's East Redneckland, AL office. You can hire on with the contractor, but you'll have to move to East Redneckland." You might say, "OK, I guess I'll get another job." But what happens when every single company in your area moves their operations to East Redneckland? This very scenario has happened to me several times, and I'm running out of companies to jump to. Luckily I'm not completely tied to my employer like this guy is, but I definitely don't want to move unless there's no other way to make money in the future. I'm just saying that those who scoff and say this will never happen to them are not thinking things through to their logical conclusion.
People who make economic policy decisions need to understand that not everyone is a highly-skilled corporate employee, and when people's jobs are taken away, not everyone is an entrepreneur-type. I hate it when people say, "Why can't these lazy idiots start their own businesses?" If you don't have the skills, starting a business is a huge waste of time and a ticket to bankruptcy court. Small retail businesses are a total dead end due to large competitors, restaurants are a dead end because no one has the money to eat out anymore, etc. etc. I say we go back to a previous era where large,, well established businesses provide guaranteed jobs for an entire career. We should also stop encouraging 401(k)-style savings, and go back to pension funds. Fund managers in a pension have 30, 40, 50 years to make up for any losses they have in the market...once your 401(k) is gone, you're broke.
At least here in North America, our general aversion to unions is entirely rational. Unions here do not foster creativity - they foster group think. Did you ever want to work a couple extra hours because you were really into what you were doing? Try doing that in a union shop - you'll have a very unhappy experience. I've had unionized jobs (albeit not programming jobs). I cannot imagine a unionized programming job being anywhere near as enjoyable as a non-union programming job. Unions suck.
I've never understood this thinking. Unions do tend to even out the stand-out employee, but I'm thinking that that's less of a concern as I age. The whole reason why there was a huge middle class in the 50s through the 70s was the fact that people had steady jobs that paid well. People who aren't freaked out about losing their job constantly will go out and buy cars, buy houses, take vacations and all the other stuff that fuels consumer spending.
Now we're back at the other extreme. Management has done a great job convincing the labor at all levels, skilled and unskilled, that they're your buddies. Without any protections against abuses, it becomes easy to demand extra unpaid work or toss people out when they've outlived their short-term usefulness. The adversarial split between labor and management needs to make a comeback - maybe in a less overt form, but with enough teeth to make employee demands count for something.
Call me mediocre, but I'd rather give up the potential for being a total rock star employee for a fixed-hour work week, a contract that eliminates the salary shell game seen in corporate jobs, guaranteed raises, work rules and stability.
(Disclaimer: I'm a systems guy, not a programmer, but a very similar truth holds for us as well when it comes to age discrimination.)
I'm only 35, and I'm starting to see this creeping in on me also. Here's a couple of random observations I've actually (not anecdotally) experienced:
I only see a couple solutions. A concerted effort could be made to make managerment aware of the actual cost of a project vs. the salary differential. I doubt that will work. You can also become one of those consultants, and get paid loads of money to clean up messes. However, that's not for everyone...it requires tons of hard work, business savvy and is not at all stable. Try raising a family with no health insurance and a non-guaranteed income stream, especially in a high-cost-of-living area.
I admit that I'm pretty lucky. I've managed to land at companies that don't seem to mind paying a little extra for someone who really knows their stuff. The price of admission for jobs like that is the willingness to invest in yourself constantly. Taking classes or buying software/hardware/books for training, even on your own time, is the best way to keep current. That way, companies get the best of both worlds...someone who knows the latest tech, and knows enough not to implement something half-baked because they want their weekends free. :-) Unfortunately, that stereotype of the COBOL guy sitting in the corner has a little bit of truth to it, and it means we end up gettting painted with the same brush.
One other choice would require a much different mindset than there is now...accept a lower salary and make up the difference by saving and investing carefully. I've been doing this anyway, because I know there will come a time where companies stop paying for IT talent and I'm going to be forced to take a huge paycut. Everyone I know, young or old, spends money like their income is never going to decrease. Live within your means so you can last through the bad times that are coming with the next wave of globalization.
Imagine if this wasn't censorship of search results that we were talking about. Instead, imagine that the Chinese government looked the other way while local officials demanded bribes for keeping the office utilities running. If you're a multinational company, those are the kind of things you need to deal with...and reconcile with a different set of ethics.
Companies need to decide whether or not they are willing to play by the local rules when they jump into an international market. Those bribes they pay may not be a good ethical choice, but they may make the company much more profitable. Since company shareholders are the only concern for most companies, they need to set aside their feelings and do what the local government says.
Personally, I think what they're doing is fine, simply because it's not our place to tell a foriegn government what to do. It's their country, and human rights abuses, censorship, Taiwan and the Dalai Lama shouldn't really matter to American citizens. That's how China chooses to keep their country in line (and growing economically at 10%+ per year, I might add.) It seems to work well for them, and even if it didn't, we can't tell them otherwise. Doing so puts us on the same Cold War era "keeping the world safe for democracy" bandwagon that hasn't worked for us in four wars since WW2. I've long held the belief that once we solve 100% of our social problems at home, then we can go lecture people around the world about how to behave.
This happens a lot with any large company where revenue is dependent on keeping a few cash cow products generating income. First, you don't want to do anything to upset what's making you money, so you start really playing it safe. Vista was a horrible flop, but Microsoft spent a ton of time and money polishing it up and rolling out Windows 7. But imagine Microsoft throwing out all the 20 years of Windows backward compatibility and totally starting over. It won't happen until the product absolutely cannot be supported anymore. Windows 7 including "XP mode" is a really good example - they desparately want to avoid angering enterprise customers who are still running custom software that relies on Windows 98's quirks 12 years later. Heck, there's still a couple of places I know running the core of their business using a 16-bit screen scraper app and an equally-old terminal emulator!
Second, you have the organizational problem. Microsoft is huge, so huge that enterprise customers need a Technical Account Manager just to handle their support calls and make sure they can find resources. I know they have a Research arm, but I can't see how an individual developer's idea might possibly make it high enough up the food chain to make much difference. To make things worse, the management structure is probably so deep within product lines that multiple product VPs are clamoring for Ballmer's attention. These guys are fighting for their jobs, so I imagine there's tons of poltics involved. I would bet that early-90's Microsoft was a lot more collaborative.
I definitely see Microsoft progressing towards IBM and Oracle territory as far as products go. They'll deliver nice safe products for business, but the consumer will be left out. XBox is another story...but just look at the mess that is Zune!
I've actually worked for large organizations, both IT and non-IT. (I haven't worked for a software company.) I can tell you that smaller organizations are better, up to a point. Once you get too small, say in the medium business category, you have to deal personally with a potentially psychopathic owner or CEO. If they're benevolent, it's great, but most entrepreneur-y types are nuts to begin with, and tend to treat employees like "the help." But once you grow too big, such that communication becomes a problem and politics start entering into every decision, the situation can be just as bad.
But yeah, I can't see Microsoft creating another "category-killer" product with their current structure. My dealings with them as a Premier Support customer have been interesting....it takes them several days to admit that a problem exists, log it, and "officially" tell me that they're working on a hotfix.
I got to see this first-hand in my last job. The place started off like a startup, got big, and all of a sudden people were doing the CYA thing that I've seen all over the large-business world. Everyone was way too panicked about getting chewed out by our crazy CIO to be focused on doing good work.
So, NASA's jumping on the same bandwagon as private companies now - outsourcing everything they can get away with. I'm not totally anti-outsourcing, but I do think it goes way too far. Executives love the idea of having as few things in-house as possible, especially when a business partner can do it cheaper. The problem is that they don't care how the partner manages to do it cheaper! This happens in every field. Outsource manufacturing, and you get poor product quality. Outsource software development, and you get crappy code that has to be rewritten anyway. Outsource IT, and satisfaction levels go down as the people who knew what was happening get replaced by the cheapest people they can find. How would this apply to space travel?
Also, here's another thought. In not too many years, China, India or one of the other developing economies is going to be the dominant country on Earth. It's just a fact - they have governments who pursue growth at all costs, and we've decided to stop trying to stay ahead. One of the things that kept the US and the Soviet Union on their toes during the Cold War was the run-up in their space programs. The US push to be first on the moon was basically a government mandate, along with the massive amount of funding that it took. Let's say we wanted to do something like that again - maybe to prove a point to China or something. Now, instead of using unlimited money and power to make things happen, NASA has to go beg/bribe 500 subcontractors to do the job instead of hiring the scientists and engineering staff themselves.
...you can make that argument for other things, not just current events. Once you start limiting people's exposure to things outside of their interest, it closes their mind off. Ask your average World of Warcraft addict about anything other than World of Warcraft, and they'll say they have a guild meeting to go to or that you're interrupting their grinding. I'm a technology nut, but even I know when to get off the computer and keep an eye on what's going on around me.
The problem is that feeding someone a steady diet of personalized content means that eventually they stop seeing other points of view. For example, I'm a left-leaning person, but I occasionally listen to the conservative talking heads screaming about what's going on. It may be comic relief for me, but at least I'm informed. Anyone who isn't becomes more and more entrenched in their belief system. Your average conservative hears nothing but Fox News, the conservative talk show crowd and the Tea Party Movement people, and refuses to believe that anyone else has a better idea. It's the same kind of groupthink that goes on in poorly-managed companies. I may think the conservative side of the house has things totally backwards, as I'm sure they think I do. But, I have both sides...once you start homing in on people's interests, their interests become narrower because of the lack of exposure.
I wonder what the motivation here is. Oracle isn't exactly known as a warm and fuzzy employer. Every time I've had to deal with Oracle products, it's painfully obvious that the people they have intentionally design their software to be difficult to support...and then they hire armies of low-skill consultants to "help" customers install their systems.
(And yes, I understand enterprise-grade software is complex. However, needing someone to guide you through all the quirks in the products or documentation just to get a proof of concept going is sad. I think SAP may be the only worse company in this "doesn't work out of the box" category.)
My guess? Larry is going to wipe out the current long-tenure Sun employees who know everything about Sun's products and replace them with low-skilled, low-salaried n00bs. My further guess would be that these employees would be in lower-wage countries as well.
IBM has been doing stuff like this for a while, from what I've heard...including offering people permanent one-way transfers to India along with the appropriate salary cut. Every time one of these crazy schemes comes to light, I really wonder what I should do with the rest of my career...I have at least 30 years until I retire!!
Being a Windows systems guy, I've kept my Microsoft certifications current over the years. (Say what you will...it gets you past the first resume filter if you ever find yourself in need of a job.) Back when the NT 4.0 certifications were rolling over into the Win2K versions, Microsoft introduced the concept of an expiring cert. Personally, I think part of this was due to the fact that Microsoft significantly increased the difficulty level of the Win2K exams to reduce piracy and try to revalue the credential.
People who had the NT 4.0 certifications freaked, saying that Microsoft had no right to invalidate their credentials. Microsoft reversed the decision, and made the certifications last as long as support for the product did. They still stop offering exams for new people, but people who have the cert keep it.
Does this matter? In my mind, no way. I can think of only one place NT 4.0 skills might be valuable today, and it involves embedded systems with no typical Windows user interface. (The New York subway system uses NT 4 for their fare collection machines.) Most places aren't using it for the general file-and-print server work that the certification was aimed at.
I think it's just the perception of value. Even in 2010, there are a lot of people paying certification mills...I mean, training schools...many thousands of dollars for certification classes so they can "break into the lucrative field of IT." Community colleges regularly integrate the A+, Microsoft and Cisco cert classes into their degree programs. Some of those thousands of dollars are still being paid for long after the cert is achieved. People just don't want to feel they're holding worthless paper. In reality though, things change way too fast to declare that someone is "certified for life" on PC hardware. I find that if I take a couple months to focus on some piece of software, I turn around and hardware platforms have completely changed while I wasn't looking. Imagine an A+ cert holder from 1995 put in front of a quad-core machine with SAS drives, a huge video card that's basically a mini-computer, and other interfaces that didn't even exist in 1995.
I thnk one of China's strong points is that they identify talent at an early age, and put those students on a fast track, educational-robot program. You need to develop intelligence; it doesn't just come out of nowhere. If we separated the education systems here to cater to the smart at one level and the oxygen thieves at the other, we might start getting the same calibre of university graduates. This would probably be wildly unpopular here, and for good reason - everyone needs access to basic education. But not providing the really smart people appropriate challenges will reduce their standing against similar smart people from education-heavy countries.
It also doesn't help that students who could go either way aren't encouraged. Science is a really tough career choice for someone to make in the US today. All the smart people become doctors, lawyers, bankers or MBAs. I don't blame them - there's no job security and very low material rewards in most science careers.
(Disclaimer: I'm a systems integration guy at an IT services and engineering firm. I work with tons of developers, but I'm not one myself.)
From what I've observed, the best programmers/developers/coders/whatever are the ones who specialize in understanding their problem domain. The industry I work in has a lot of specialized, semi-proprietary knowledge that takes work to learn. It's the kind of stuff you can't just pick a programmer off the street for -- to do a good job you need to know more than the actual mechanics of writing software. My company pays those who wish to specialize pretty well, and the work atmosphere is much better. By default, you're dealing with a different class of developer who is able to think beyond the code they're hacking together in Visual Studio or Eclipse. By means of comparison, we also have a set of lower-level "grunt" coders who write test code and other things that don't require the extra business-side thought.
Another lucrative area, albeit less secure, is contracting. I know Indian outsourcing firms have gotten better over the years, but I still hear stories from my developer friends of how they made a years' salary in a few months basically rewriting some of the disasters that have come back from the offshore teams. Again, you have to be smart and have a strong stomach for risk or a huge bank account to back you up during the bad times.
I think it's the same in my area of speciality (systems administration, integration and engineering.) Good people are still being hired. Companies need an engineering staff that can think for itself, design things that don't randomly die, and not be at the mercy of a vendor when they do. In the sysadmin ranks, most of the unemployment is caused by data center consoldation or outsourcing....and that directly affects the lower-level admins who do backups, operate the console, etc. It's a killer for entry-level people -- how do we grow new sysadmins if we can't start them somewhere? Same thing goes for developers...no one comes out of college understanding high level systems design, and you have to give them a few projects to get them thinking.
It's getting harder and harder in the US to find jobs at these "good places to work." I happen to work at one that never made this list...it's a European company with significant US operations. They have their problems, but one thing they do know how to do is keep engineer types happy and producing decent-quality work.
One thing that might help SAS is that it looks like they're a private company. They also have a huge niche market in academia, government and high-end business analytics. These two things appear to be what it takes to keep the pressure off the board to cut salaries, jobs and perks every time they need to top up the quarterly numbers. If you either always make money, or have a founder/CEO who's willing to dig into his own deep pockets during a downturn, this means you can spend a few extra bucks to attract and retain non-idiot employees. In turn, those employees will work harder for you, and make more money for the company.
I've seen (and worked in) the converse of this also. Companies that treat their employees like dirt generally experience high turnover unless the employees don't have a choice. I worked at an outsourcer at the beginning of my career who was like that...they kept burning through the same pool of low-skilled contractors who end up causing more problems than they fix, especially in a managed-services environment. Everyone who was smart realized they were a crappy place to work, got skilled and moved on.
Companies are social structures as well as business structures. In the past, there was a completely paternal relationship -- just do your job and everything will be taken care of for you. Some employers now take the role of "abusive parent" when it comes to employment. People at the top need to realize that if morale is in the dumps, their employees are either going to leave or not produce results for them.
A lot of people will say that all these perks are designed to squeeze every minute of productivity out of someone...and they're right! If someone doesn't have to sit in traffic to go to lunch because the cafeteria's right there, or be late to work because they had to drop their kid off at daycare, that's more productive work time. I think it works out, especially when you consider that happier employees tend to be more stable and less likely to disappear on you.
At the Federal level, this would work out pretty nicely. States and US Territories have totally different tax laws and it wouldn't work out there -- some people live in one state and work in another, some states have no tax, etc. Having less paperwork to process would help too. We get a property tax bill in the mail every December, with all of the amounts charged listed on it, and a total due at the bottom. Federal taxes would require some adjustments, but having a starting point would be less of a burden for the average taxpayer.
I think this would go a long way towards ensuring at least basic tax compliance. When you think about it, the tax system is very voluntary. If you're a wage earner, or get dividends/interest, or sell stocks and get capital gains, the IRS knows about all those transactions. They don't know about all the other stuff you report voluntarily - income from businesses you own, houses you rent, etc.
Most taxpayers' returns are incredibly simple, and contain some of the following:
Your tax due is figured as the income, minus deductions, minus tax already withheld. if the value is negative, you get a refund. If it's positive, you haven't prepaid enough of your tax and need to send in money. With the exception of your deductions and business income, the IRS knows almost all of these numbers based on the reporting from your financial institutions and employer. Why shouldn't they send you a starter return, basically saying "we think you owe this, if you have anything to add or deduct, provide proof and send us a check or collect your refund."
This might help crack down on the shady tax preparer services out there like H&R Block, Jackson Hewitt and any number of guys working out of their car. They advertise to the poor and ignorant that they'll keep the IRS off their back and get them the biggest refund possible. In reality, someone with basic education in arithmetic can fill in a wage-earner's return. Look at Form 1040EZ on the IRS's website - it's one page. Form 1040 for more complex returns is two pages and neither of these require more than basic math and reading skills. TurboTax is great for filling in the forms, but a lot of people are scared of math, or the government, or filling in forms, and so they run to a tax preparer. If they had a "tax bill" with clear instructions showing how to claim deductions, it would eliminate a lot of needless preparer fees and also reduce the practice of way overwithholding taxes during the year so you get a huge refund. If people had that money during the year, maybe they wouldn't be in debt or be able to save something. As it is, they get a huge refund check and blow it on a TV or other large ticket item.
But anyway, back to the voluntary part. The IRS has millions of tax returns to process, and only so many revenue officers to do audits. The reality is that they go after the people they're going to get the most noncompliance from - high earners, small business owners and people with significant non-traceable income. For the majority of taxpayers, if you don't report it, and they don't have the numbers from another source, then they don't know about it. If you don't file a return they probably will leave you alone too. The bad part is when the audit does come and you haven't filed a return in 7 years...
It's also a good idea to simplify the tax code anyway. Limiting loopholes for high earners is a good thing. And remember that I said most tax returns are simple. Some parts of the tax law dealing with the timing of earnings, limits on certain deductions, etc. are very confusing and require a lot of reading to get right. That's a legitimate use of tax preparers...but the vast majority of people would be served well with a pre-filled tax return.
...and I don't think it's entirely out of greed. The simple truth is that you can't pay columnists, reporters and other staff unless you have sufficient revenue. If people are abandoning the print version of the paper, and advertisers don't see the return they expect from ads, you lose a lot of per-copy revenue and ad revenue.
The truth is that the old model of "sell a paper for $1.00 a day, collect $XM in ad revenue per year, and your profit is that less your employment and other costs" is going away. Now, quality media outlets are faced with a tough choice. (Yes, I know, we can debate quality, but I happen to like the Times.) They have to choose to provide their content free, while only recouping part of their costs from ad sales, or charging for content and hoping enough people like the paper enough to pay.
I see this causing two problems:
For journalism in general: When are people going to realize that actual journalism, investigative reporting, and other well-researched pieces cost money? Call me an old fogey if you want, but I think this transition we're going through is going to make it much tougher to get well-written, well-research, less-biased content. Look at how CNN has jumped in with both feet on the whole Web 2.0/Twitter/Facebook user-generated content. Some of the well-written stuff actually makes the television news, but the vast majority of it is a garbage dump compared to a legitimate news organization. Can you imagine the historical record of the Haitian earthquake filled with stuff like "OMG OMG teh quakez suX0rz dude" ? That's overblown, but you get the idea... Same thing goes for the reporting of both sides of an issue. Would you rather have a news organization making some attempt to neutrally report, or would you rather have the Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh blogs against the ACORN and ELF blogs? Investigative reporting is even more important, and I'm not talking about papparazzi stalking celebrities. Would Watergate have ever been uncovered without a news organization paying to cover it?
For employment: I've seen this kind of rationalization of every single penny of cost happening over the last few years. Outside of journalism, it happens every day...a software developer in India is 10% the cost of a US one, or we can eliminate this raft of manual processes by automating the whole thing. Some of this is good...I'm glad I'm not a file clerk at a huge insurance company, for example. But, it has to stop somewhere. There are some people who need mundane work. Manufacturing used to provide that, now it's gone. Not everyone can be a manager, or sell things, or manage projects. If you eliminate everyone's job, especially those at the low end of the skill spectrum, you're going to have a lot of unemployed consumers who can't buy your product.