I see your point, but there's a flip side to that argument. Just wait until you get older and have to find work.
The classical career arc that was in place from the late 40s until maybe the mid to late 90s went like this for college graduates: - Graduate high school - Graduate college - Get a company to hire you in some kind of traineeship - Work your entire 40-year career for the same or related companies, with a series of progressively responsible positions that were designed to meet your need for more income and responsibility - Make progressively more money in a safe job, and not be afraid to do things like buy a house or car. - Get a gold watch and retire with full benefits and heartfelt thanks from a company who was happy to have the institutional knowledge preserved for that long.
For non-college graduates, you could get a job in a factory, work your butt off for 40 years and still come out OK due to union negotiation of wages and benefits. A bachelors' degree wasn't a mandatory admission ticket to a job, so fewer people were burdened by student loans for degrees they didn't even need.
During this time, there was a huge middle class that was able to spend more money on goods and services. People weren't constantly in fear of layoffs or downsizing. And yes, it came with a price of higher wages and a stronger labor movement.
Today, the pendulum is back near the other extreme. In IT it's worse, because there's no career path for most people above a certain age. Your example of the mainframe guy is valid...but too many employers think that everyone over 40ish is unwilling to learn anything. I know incredibly talented colleagues have had to get lucky and find companies who value experience over the willingness to work 80-hour weeks to compensate for sloppy processes or bad work. On top of that, inflation of education requirements means that more people are being force-fed through college. That's good for the university system, but bad for the economy. To make an economy flow smoothly, you need jobs tailored for different intelligence levels. A secretary doesn't need a BA in Communications to answer the phone. A factory worker doesn't need an engineering degree.
I actually like the model of state employment, which follows the classic model. You may not be able to be as much of a rock star in front of your colleagues, but nothing beats job security and safety. The problem, as you point out, is that people do tend to abuse the system as they progress. However, having a steady stream of consumers who aren't afraid to spend real (non-credit) money is what actually drives business.
While this might just be the typical "we don't have enough qualified candidates" complaint to get around H1B requirements, I actually see the point here.
Some or all of these might be influencing this thinking: - Fewer people are taking IT jobs because of the employment prospects, meaning they actually do have an applicant shortage, - Companies keep paying less for IT work due to the economic situation and a general erosion of perceived value. This would translate to fewer people wanting to work for that company unless they really needed a job. - Especially in data center support, with the advent of PCI, ITIL, HIPAA, SOX, and other standards, IT has become a lot more regimented. Couple that with sometimes unattainable SLAs, and the job becomes more paperwork than process...there's just less to actually do. - The study is sponsored by Symantec, who makes truckloads of money selling data center automation products.:-) - Companies now see that they don't need their data centers, or at least they don't need them to be right next to headquarters. So let's say the company is in New York or Boston or Seattle - they're going to jump at any chance they can to move their data center to Middle of Nowhere, US. Fewer people want to work in Middle of Nowhere, where the wages are half that of New York. They also don't want to live 100 miles from the nearest city.
I actually went through the last one...my last company relocated their IT department to the south and I chose not to go. If you've lived in the Northeast your whole life, you might not like living in a place where the weather never goes below 80 degrees and it's 90+ five months out of the year. On the flip side, real estate is half the price there. But in my mind, what good is a huge house if you hate where it's sitting??
You're right - I was referring to medicine as part of the professions. Medicine is science, but a lot of it is applied science instead of basic research. At least for now, it's also a very lucrative path if you have the talent and can deal with people and the insane amount of training you have to do.
Just as an example, if you were about to graduate with a 4.0 from MIT, you'd have options open to you. Medicine is one...8+ years of training, incredible amounts of work and debt, and a huge payoff at the end. Law is 3 years of training with a semi-guaranteed huge payoff at the end depending on where you go to law school. An MBA is 2 years of training, and an almost-guaranteed huge payoff. Getting an Ivy League MBA is pretty much a free ticket into one of the high-end consulting companies, investment banks or management at a corporation. A science Ph. D. is 5-6 years of research, with the only guarantee being medium-level pay and tenure at a university if you can get it. Add in the job security being in one of the professions gives you (AMA, ABA, etc.) and you can see why people might not pick the science path.
I'd probably be silly and pick the Ph. D. route for love of the game.....but would you? I'd never call medicine and law "shortcut paths to riches" given the training requirements, but compared to the alternatives, they're attractive.
People mentioned the immigration policies and other factors, but I think the #1 reason long-term pursuits like science have faded from the forefront is the shift everywhere to short term thinking.
Students are staying away from science and math because of a short term (or maybe a long term) worry about employability. They also realize that law, medicine and MBA-type pursuits are much more lucrative if they're smart.
Companies are increasingly run by groups of investors who put intense pressure on boards to make the quarterly numbers any way possible. This kind of thinking can kill innovation at a company -- it's always wasier to license and resell someone else's product in the short term, but in the long term you're nothing but a middleman.
Universities are under even greater pressure to focus research on things that can be immediately turned into products or patents.
IBM, AT&T, HP, etc. have all cut back their research labs and divisions. That's not a total surprise; can you imagine trying to explain to some hedge fund guy who holds 10% of the company stock why he's spending money on research?
The general public is also caught up in the market driven short term thinking. Everyone depends on the stock market for their retirement. Now that they have instant access to it, volatility goes way up and the public is making the same demands as the hedge fund guys...make money for me NOW or you're fired!
Personally, I think we should deemphasize the amount of attention paid to the stock market, and give it back to the billionaire's club. Invest your retirement money in something safe that gives reasonable returns....ror better yet, demand that they bring pensions back (the ultimate long term planning tool.)
I'm a client systems integration guy, so IMO it would be a good thing to not give developers admin rights by default. In reality though, they do have them. In a bureaucratic IT world, it just makes them more productive. We've been trying to eliminate admin-by-default for ages, but the supporting stuff isn't in place yet.
Modern versions of Windows do work a lot better with limited rights, and Microsoft has done a decent job in trying to make the limited-user experience a little more transparent. In a perfect world (which I don't work in,) all software distribution, upgrades and removal would be fully automated through SMS or something similar. Every relevant system setting someone would want to change would be open to non-admins. However, if you work in previous versions of WIndows (XP, 2003, etc,) then some key things a developer might want to do (i.e. start and stop services, install drivers and make registry changes,) require elevated privileges or relaxing system security. Plus, even with compatibility hacks, some older software just won't run reliably without privileges.
I think developer accounts should be limited rights by default, but they should be allowed access to a privileged account for installations and system changes. The caveat is that developers need to realize they're writing software that won't be used by admins, and have to test anything they write in a limited rights environment. I can't tell you how many (large) vendors I've called while trying to integrate client software into our limited-rights environment. Some are totally shocked that we even have users running without full rights. I've found this to be the case most often with "niche" vendors who aren't making a consumer product, and training companies. The latter seem to just assume that everyone has full control over their web browser settings, can install whatever plugins they want, etc.
One of the ways we're working around this is using virtual machines for lab work. The developers can mess these up all they want, and restore them if something happens. The catch is that they don't have direct Internet access, which is the main reason why admin rights are so dangerous.
The problem with running admin-by-default is the amount of damage someone can do, even unintentionally, by using an account that has rights to make any changes. How many people do you know that actually read the UAC or download warning prompts while they're browsing the web?
"IT failure" is a very broad term and can happen for a lot of reasons:
Poor requirements definition
Poor project management (not keeping scope creep in check, not being semi-flexible and delivering a useless piece of software, etc.)
Execs or IT management desperate to make schedules and forcing release dates
System failure due to poor planning (no redundancy, poor-quality outsourced hosting, etc.)
Lack of, or incomplete testing
Bad code quality
My take on this is that the main cause of failure is the fact that IT still hasn't settled on a set of engineering principles to deliver projects. Things change way too fast still -- over the life of a 2-year project, your hardware platform may be changed out from under you, for example. PHP,.NET or Java may be swapped out for YetAnotherCoolLanguage0.1alpha4. This is made worse by unscrupulous vendors, poorly-trained consultants, and lack of acceptance by the user base of the software.
I think the author is referring to the direct cost of a failure. Every few months, the technical publications run an article or two about a large company or government agency writing off millions of dollars for a failed SAP/Oracle Financials/similar package deployment. Whenever I see one of these, it's interesting to see what happened. Usually it has something to do with one or more of the causes I listed above. Generally, the more expensive, tranformational and long a project is, the worse the results are. It's not just vendors either - I've seen in-house projects spiral down the same way. The other thing that comes to my mind when I read articles like this is why they didn't see it coming. Don't IT executives talk to each other over golf or something and say, "Yeah, SAP screwed us out of $100M in consulting fees. I'd watch them if I were you..."?
Other branches of engineering aren't immune to this though. Construction and infrastructure projects often run over time and budget. The difference is that a construction project gets finished one way or another. A software project failure means throwing away two years of work and putting the hardware on eBay.
I've noticed a lot of these kinds of outages lately, not just with RIM but with other network providers. They usually seem to follow a failed routine-maintenance cycle. Do carriers really not design their networks and systems to support rolling upgrades and the like? More importantly, has there been a breakdown of the test-and-release cycle that's supposed to catch these things before service dies for everyone?
I guess the other thing might be all the third-party hosting and outsourcing that goes on in IT...how many people want to bet that half the outage time was trying to figure out where exactly the fault was? From experience, that gets a billion times harder when your system is hosted by a third party who won't say a word to you so they can avoid taking blame (and SLA hits) for it.
Makes me wonder about cloud computing...the technology concept is great, but how many large organizations will trust all their data to machines they don't directly control? These days it doesn't make sense to host everything yourself, but companies really have to be careful to choose competent service providers!!
I've worked in large and small companies, and the one unifying truth of executive communication is that they do not want details. In their mind, they hired you to take care of the details, If you say you need $100,000 to increase bandwidth at remote locations, you had better have a one or two sentence explanation about how this is going to make them money or help them make money. If they want to see a utilization chart or two, have that ready, but you're going to be tuned out if you launch into a long explanation.
I'm not an MBA, but my guess would be that they teach MBAs to focus on strategy and leadership, and to hire people to do the nuts-and-bolts work. Same goes for small business owners, but double -- they're doing crazy 120 hour weeks growing the business - why would they want to listen to a report from the guy they hired to make sure they wouldn't have to deal with "all that IT stuff?"
As long as you keep that in mind, reports to executives will go well. Short, simple, money- or productivity-focused explanations, very little technical information, etc. Think like they are thinking -- "Why am I paying for this?" "How does this make me money or keep me from losing money?"
I definitely agree with a lot of the items on that list. This time around, however, thin clients are definitely in the running because of all the amazing VDI, virtual app stuff and fast cheap networks. However, anyone who tells you that you can replace every single PC or laptop in your company needs to calm down a little. Same goes for the people who explain thin clients in a way that makes it sound like client problems go away magically. They don't - you just roll them all up into the data center, where you had better have a crack operations staff who can keep everything going. Why? Because if the network fails, your users have a useless paperweighr on their desk until you fix it.
I'm definitely surprised to not see cloud computing on that list. This is another rehashed technology, this time with the fast cheap network connectivity thrown in. The design principles are great -- build your app so it's abstracted from physical hardware, etc. but I've seen way too many cloud vendors downplay the whole data ownership and vendor lock-in problems. In my opinion, this makes sense for people's Facebook photos, not a company's annual budget numbers.
If you're in IT long enough, you've probably seen a million sites and software packages like this in use at large companies. In my experience, this is usually the result of a low-bid IT contractor getting a last-minute request to slap something together. Of course, in-house resources can screw things up badly too, but high-dollar consulting/contracting deals seem to have a special knack for it. Some places have great results with outsourcing/contracting, but others make it impossible to get high-quality work done in a reasonable time.
It sucks that something as public as the federal spending-accountability website has obvious problems, but how much time do you think whoever won that contract got to get the site live?
I'd be interested in hearing from an MBA-type about what the actual rationale for hiring third party IT help is. I know it's usually driven by raw costs and the fact that "IT's not strategic." But what is it that's actually taught in business school that has every executive that drives the whole outsourcing push? Or is it really just "my golf buddy is doing it at his company."?
Disclaimer: In the government case, I can definitely see the need for contract help. Projects would probably have a really hard time surviving administration changes, internal squabbles, etc.
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OK, back to the real world...there's something a little fishy about this study. The article says that the study author surveyed academic papers, essays and class assignments for writing samples. That's a lot different from everyday communication -- you're writing in a formal style that is usually dictated to you by the assigning teacher/professor.
I'd love to see a study on corporate e-mail communications, or even written documentation. I admit that I'm getting older, but you can definitely tell a person's age from the formality level of their communications. People who are almost ready to retire remember writing memos by hand and physically mailing them or handing them to colleagues. For them, writing was something that required effort, and the content reflects this fact. Even e-mail messages are carefully crafted. People my age (mid-30s) grew up with written communication first, then e-mail shortly after. As a result, we tend to be less formal than the older crowd, but most of us still put some effort into writing coherent documents or messages. For example, it's normal for me to be brief in an e-mail message, but I would never let it go out without proofreading it for spelling, grammar and punctuation. The next generation grew up with e-mail first, then texting. The only "formal" writing most of them do seems to be in school. I'm mentoring a junior systems engineer right now, and trying to explain to him that you cannot send out messages or write documents with texting-speak or other problems in them. I can't tell you how many messages I have received from vendors that look like the author is talking to his friend on an iPhone. In my mind, it's not being an old fuddy-duddy to make yourself sound as polished as possible. You win more arguments than the lolspeak crowd if you can intelligently get your point across.
Damn kids.:-)
Seriously, lolspeak is fine for text messaging, but we should continue to teach formal writing techniques. Sure, the sky won't fall if everyone stops writing formal essays and moves towards a blogging format. However, the death of print journalism is really going to put a damper on news reporting, historical accounts, etc. In my mind, journalism is one of the things keeping traditional writing with the careful thought that goes along with it alive.
Agreed. I know practically everyone in the IT industry is agianst unions. In some cases that's for good reason. However, I really think that most IT people think they're not "standard blue-collar workers" because they sit in front of a computer instead of a manufacturing line.
This, plus the belief that nothing bad is ever going to happen to them, is probably the biggest reason for anti-union sentiment. In my opinion, however, this kind of thinking is dangerous. There are some really crappy workplaces out there, and in some cases people don't have much of a choice when it comes to working there. The dirty little secret no one is talking about is the fact that most IT jobs are or are going to be the next blue-collar trade that's outsourced to the cheapest labor pool.
Think about it, how many times have you listened to someone get riled up by a conservative news figure/talk show host railing against creeping socialism or the fact that we need to support the poor? I don't think a lot of "conservatives" realize that they're not actually on the same side as the super-rich "management class" teaching them to fear the liberal crowd. It's a bad combination when everyone's retirement is tied up in the market, so everyone advances policies that are tilted towards businesses. What they don't get is that demanding higher stock prices all the time is going to lead companies to make decisions that are bad for them in the long run. I think unions represent a good counter-balance to this, and have a different role in the 21st century than they did in the 20th.
It's wierd - I used to think IT projects were the only projects that were impossible to accurately estimate. A lot of PMs I run into at work seem to think a software project is the same as a construction project, but I think they're totally different. There is little change in the time it takes to pour a certain amount of concrete, run standard electrical for a commercial building, or other construction/product build tasks. In software-land, since everything's so fluid, it's anyone's guess how much time it'll take to fix some crazy bug, install hardware, debug a hardware or software installation, or write documentation. And even when a construction project over-runs its time, you pretty much know exactly how far off you are and how long until you're on track again.
Now this 787 project comes out and blows my assumptions away! Apparently you CAN overrun a construction or build project's time and budget just as easily as IT projects.
From what I've been reading, the fact that Boeing basically outsourced everything but final assembly of the plane to different contractors has come back to bite them. One of my IT specialties is integration work -- and I've worked on a lot of contracted software products that totally don't work when you get their individual parts back and mash them together.
Part of me really wants to gloat and say, "Ha ha, you listened to a bunch of retarded MBA consultants who convinced you that lean production and lowest-bidder subcontracting was the way to go!". BUT, I really can't. Boeing's in a lot of trouble if they can't pull off a major integration/rework effort right away. Airplanes are one of the last things the US actually makes and exports from a manufacturing perspective, so it's important that they just drop everything and figure out what's wrong. Airbus will be more than happy to sell A340s, A350s and A380s to all the waiting airlines.
But deep down, I still think those MBAs should have thought a little bit about how many thousands of parts and systems a typical plane has...
I'm not too sure what your startup does, but it sounds like you're working with some things that you're very worried about losing, and are easy to steal. My guess is unpatented formulas or inventions, or maybe a complex bit of code...am I right?
The only problem with this is that you gave up control of your network to save money. If you force the admins to come on site for everything, you will probably be charged a higher rate because of the travel involved, etc.
On the other hand, a full time employee is just as likely to be tempted to steal your intellectual property, and probably have an easier time of it since they're insiders. The real solution is to hire people, insiders or outsiders, who you are comfortable trusting. I've seen a lot of local small businesses basically outsource their IT to "mini Geek Squad" rinky-dink little IT shops just because they're the cheapest around. That' s fine if the most complex thing the company uses is e-mail and their web site. If you actually use your network for sensitive information-handling, it may not be the smartest idea in the world to have the $10/hr PC techs straight out of A+ school managing your devices.
The truth is, with exceptions, system administrators are a trustworthy lot...at least the ones I work with. Since we really don't have a formal "profession" yet, our self-made reputations are important to uphold. This goes triple in small industries. where you need specific skills to do related IT work--I regularly bump into people I worked with several jobs ago. Trust me, in my industry you'd never get another IT job if you were caught stealing customer data, credit cards, safety-sensitive info, etc. Everyone knows you and the work you do, or can easily find out.
I'd say my advice would be to pay your outsourcer a fair rate and really get to know who's doing work for you. Do you trust your own employees? If you can't say that about your service provider, go get another one.
First, I've never been a big fan of these side deals that state and local governments make to entice businesses to relocate or expand to their area. I understand why they do it, but there's a flip side that a lot of people don't realize.
Several posts have already pointed out instances where a company moves in, sets up, then closes their operation as soon as the free power/zero taxes run out. This means that all the people who were employed are either unemployed or (if they're lucky) forced to move somewhere else. Companies can play this game as many times as municipalities will allow them to.
Especially in economically depressed areas, where the company may be one of the only high-wage employers, what happens when a worker at the company loses their job? If the spouse works, is there any employment opportunity beyond your company and retail/service jobs?
On the local front, an employer coming to town and increasing average wages may sound good, but it's only good for the employees of that company. Locals who don't work there have to deal with higher housing, food and other prices. Local businesses have to raise wages to keep up with the newcomer, which means they have to charge customers more.
I know a lot of people claim that the rich pay a lot of taxes, but it seems to me that reducing their companies' tax rate makes local budget problems even worse. As good as it would be, running a local government is not free. You need to pay for roads, schools, police, etc. Economically depressed areas that don't spend money on these things stay economically depressed (bad infrastructure, crappy schools and teachers, high crime due to the underfunded police.) Instead of forcing middle class taxpayers to pay more taxes, share the burden with those who can afford it more.
Second, I actually have reverse experience with this. I live in the Northeast, which is not the cheapest place in the country to do business by a long shot. The company I work for has decided to relocate a lot of their work down South. That's great if you love the heat and don't care about moving. Tech workers are often the first to consider in any move like this -- I seriously think executives believe a stereotype that all tech workers live in a one-bedroom apartment or with Mom, have posessions that fit in half a U-Haul, don't care if they live in Boston, MA or Branson, MO and will move wherever the company tells them to. This has happened to me at 2 companies before (I'm on Offered Relocation #3 now,) and I'm not going (again.) That decision boiled down to a few things for me. First, I really like living where I live -- I don't think I could be happy where they're relocating. Second, if I did move, it'd be one-way. Sure, you can sell your house in the Northeast and buy 2.5 of them in the South, but you'll never be able to move back without huge sacrifice. Third, even if I kept my salary, there' s no guarantee I'll keep my job. Companies aren't the same way about their employees anymore -- even if you do an awesome job and have a long tenure with the company, they won't blink at the idea of letting you go. Then what? The local market salaries are 50% less than they are back home. Fortunately, I'd have savings from not spending all my money on a new house, but I know way too many people who would move down and live like kings on the salary differential.
As I said, I definitely get why municipalities jump at the chance to get a new employer in town, and why employers pursue these tax incentive deals. But just like they taught the MBAs in Economics 101, everything has externalities and nothing is free!
I agree that medical records should be electronic for the most part. However, there are some big challenges that our current IT business model can't solve:
1. How do you prevent Oracle, IBM, SAP or some other large vendor from getting a permanent lock on the market for EMRs? If this happens, a closed standard will develop and mo one will ever be able to make changes without paying mullions of dollars.
2. Opposite problem -- if there is no standard, or it's so loose that it might as well not exist, what's to prevent a million small companies from developing EMR, EMR 2.0, OpenEMR, StarEMR, YetAnotherCoolEMR 3.2.10.23alpha8, and so on? How do you get providers using different standards to share? (The answer, I think, is open protocols, but that way lies 800 MB XML files and crappy J2EE applications written by developers who don't understand optimization.)
3. Privacy. In the US, healthcare and insurance are for-profit businesses. How much do you think a life insurance company would love it if they were able to see your entire birth-to-present health history? Insurance would be even less affordable than it is now. In countries where everyone's on the hook for medical costs, privacy is much less of an issue. But when it can cost you the ability to get treatment that doesn't bankrupt you, it's a big problem!
4. The huge "obfuscated mess" problem -- Go look at the system the Veterans' Administration uses for EMRs. It was written years and years ago in a language called M, and the source code (publically available) looks like line noise. It works fine from the front-end, but I can imagine it's a disaster to administer, make improvements, etc. How do you prevent a system from getting so stale that no one knows how to modify it anymore?
From what I've read, EMRs work well for the VA, precisely because they have to keep costs lower than for-profit hospital systems. Their patients are also ex-military. When you join the military, you give up the right to privacy.
I'd recommend starting out with the PMI body of knowledge...start here: PMI. ITIL is a very good framework for designing an ideal operational environment, but it's huge and very bureaucracy-centric if you're not careful. The ITIL content is not free, but you can take training courses or buy it yourself.
All that said, don't underestimate what you're getting into. Project management is not IT work. The job you do as a PM is totally different from anything you're going to do in your IT job. For one, you can't do any of the work yourself. A PM's job (in my estimation) seems to be begging and pleading workers and their managers to get things done on time.
Also, project management, like people management is a skill. You can either do it or you can't. I've seen IT guys promoted to project managers who fail horribly at it. Remember that you're not the "doer" anymore, all you do is keep records, hold meetings and yell at people who miss their dates. On the flip side, a truly good PM with IT skills is a godsend. Being able to understand that an IT project is NOT a construction project is a key skill. Traditional PMs will tell you that a project is a project. However, you know EXACTLY how long it takes a carpentry crew to frame a house, a plumber to lay pipe, and a drywall crew to put up walls. You sometimes have no idea how long it will take to find $obscure_bug[n]. Construction projects have at least a chance of coming in on time, and IT projects really don't unless they're totally simplistic. Keep that in mind and you'll do well!
Good move...for Oracle
on
Oracle Buys Sun
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I remember seeing Oracle rebranding high-end server hardware recently, and tweaking Oracle to run ultra-fast on that particular configuration. Now they have a hardware platform (Sun's x86 and Sparc lines), a software infrastructure (Java) and a marketing lock (Sun hardware and Oracle database purchases seem to go hand in hand, even now.)
So it's a good move for them. We'll see how well it works out for everyone else. Oracle hasn't been known for developing products that don't require an army of Oracle consultants to get working. If they use the Sun acquisition to build their "database in a box" product, then customers face lock-in on the hardware and software fronts, just like back in the mainframe/midrange days.
It might be the cynic in me talking, but Oracle has been one of the major causes of large-scale IT failures you read about in the industry press. It's helped along by bad requirements and idiotic lowest-bidder consulting firms, but Oracle is sometimes forced to pay large settlements for running a project over budget. That's just a natural side effect of designing products that are so complex that you have no choice but to buy support. Also, you have to wonder what Oracle's going to do with MySQL now...
Oracle consumed J.D. Edwards, PeopleSoft and BEA. Let's see how well they digest this one!
That brings up a good point. Even though the survey may not be totally scientific, I can definitely see a negative correlation between any outside activity and grades. Anything like Myspace, Facebook, World of Warcraft, or any time-wasting activity robs study time.
However, here's a thought. Current coursework focuses on constant cycles of memorization and testing in most fields. Is that really relevant anymore given the supposed "new world of work" we're about to enter? When I studied chemistry many moons ago, most of the non-lab coursework could only be aced if you studied relatively hard. Has that changed, given the fact that:
Increasingly, tasks that require technical expertise are being offshored, and students are focusing on more "touchy-feely" stuff like marketing and business
It seems like it's going to be tougher for true technical people to find jobs involving the kind of problem solving that a student used to the testing cycle is suited for
Absolutely everyone in the US is being pushed to go to college, reducing the percentage of "really smart" people in school and therefore reducing grades overall
So, how much of this is Facebook and how much is just the changing college demographic? Should we change the coursework offered in schools?
To be fair, my opinion is that we should definitely not be forcing everyone through college. Previously, we had a good mix of job opportunities for different education levels, and everything worked out. Only people who were smart enough went to college, and it wasn't an admission ticket for entry-level work like it is today. The crass way to say this is "the world needs ditch-diggers too" but it's true. Having a mix of jobs for a mix of skill levels definitely makes society better.
I've had an interesting run through IT environments so far. Each one of my employers has successfully used what would be called a "legacy system" to do core business transactions. I'm not old by any means, but I definitely see no reason to get rid of systems that are performing well.
The qualification for that statement, of course, is "performing well." The side effect to using older systems is all the bolt-ons you have to use to get newer functionality working. My current employer uses a midrange system from the early 80s to run the core of the operation, and it has tons of extra software and hardware riding on top of it to do modern things like access without terminal emulators and message queuing. The time to consider a replacement is when these systems become too unwieldy or brittle to manage. For example, if a transaction-processing system needs a daily FTP feed from some source, and it doesn't get it, will that blow up the whole system? If the answer is yes, it's time to fix the problem or replace the underlying system if it's bad enough.
I'm very skeptical of anyone who comes in and says, barely looking at the existing system, that it needs to be ripped and replaced. A lot of it stems from the fact that IT hasn't matured all the way yet. People still come into the field knowing little more than the Java they were taught in school, and don't have the big-picture attitude you need to really understand IT. You may think I'm an old fart, but I'm really not. I've learned the basic rule of IT -- you're not there to play with computers and have fun. You're there to make sure the business you support is able to do their work, preferably without calling you in every night to fix something.
They finally killed OS/2, huh?? I never thought that OS would die since it was so prevalent in banking and other niche industries. Companies I've worked for were using it for some new dev right up until 2001 or so, and keeping existing systems barely alive for customers.
I still see a few supermarket POSs, ATMs and airline systems running OS/2. Bad memories.
I was reading about this earlier in the week, and remembering when IBM and Sun were arch-rivals in the high-end Unix market. I'm guessing IBM's going to kill AIX and maybe even the p-series servers now.
My question is, does IBM want Solaris, the hardware business, Java, or do they just want to get rid of a competitor?
Every IBM product I've seen in the past few years has had its user interface written in Java. Every piece of middleware they write now is Java. So it seems like they just want to consolidate the market.
That said, they got a good deal in this market, but what a lousy time to do this. How many thousands of employees on both the IBM and Sun side are going to get kicked out over this? I guess it all depends on how many products this kills. Worse still, IBM hasn't been known to be keen on keeping jobs in the US and Europe lately...
While interest in the field is good, there are still some major barriers to entry that need to be considered.
1. Unlike previous downturns, we currently have tons of IT/CS people out of work. I'm very lucky to have work; according to all my colleagues, hiring is extremely limited, especially in large public companies. In addition, competition for these jobs is incredibly tough.
2. Outsourcing has not gone away. IBM's a perfect example, as are many of the other professional services firms. India is rapidly moving up the food chain, and even advanced dev jobs are moving elsewhere very quickly. The best strategy is to get involved with a small company who doesn't have the resources to manage an outsourcing engagement.
3. A corollary to #2 - Lots of companies are "discovering" they don't need an IT department anymore. Most of the programming jobs will be for vendors, if the whole "cloud computing" fad turns out to be more than a fad.
4. Don't assume you can choose where you work, if that's important to you. Companies are shifting their support functions to cheaper locations within the US, so keep that in mind unless you don't care about living in Boston vs. Omaha.
So, as always IT and programming are fun fields to be in, but just keep in mind that the employment prospects are still unstable. If you're the kind who doesn't mind bouncing from one 6-month contract to another, you'll do fine. Full time work might be harder to come by.
Being a systems guy, I've worked a lot with quirky developers. I also work an industry that is a haven for crazy proprietary standards. The description of "Josh" in the article is very close to some people I've had experience with. The "extreme niche" of my industry makes things worse -- newbies are useless for months until they can begin picking up how things work. Once they learn, they're highly-prized, which makes it really hard to get rid of lousy developers.
At least for the present and in the past, IT work has been all about being a hero and pulling insane hours to fix something. I've always been a fan of doing the engineering and documentation up front rather than staying up all night messing around with a problem. For every one of me, there's 10 Joshes. And since Josh is constantly fixing the mistakes as they appear, he's the one that ends up the hero. Management declares Josh the wunderkind, and the rest of the IT staff ends up second-class citizens.
Does that sound bitter? Not in my mind. I actually don't mind going along and doing my work. However, companies that embrace Joshes set themselves up for a big problem later on. What happens when Josh leaves (and he will)? The rest of your IT staff now has to pick through his undocumented code and figure out what he did. Also, if Josh is an offensive jerk, no one is going to want to talk to him, which makes the problem of no documentation worse.
Companies do need really smart developers. However, management needs to realize that parts of IT naturally attract "socially challenged" but really smart people. They need to keep on top of what they're doing and set appropriate limits.
The next generation of IT work *may* limit the appeal of the lone wolf/nerd brilliant developer, but I don't see that happening anytime soon. Until then, I have to put Josh's untested code into production because he doesn't need any QA people looking over his shoulder.:-)
The author is right that Itanium never caught on the way Intel expected it to, but to say it's totally dead isn't exactly correct.
After their huge round of acquisitions in the late 90s/early 2000s, Compaq and HP pretty much killed all of their high-end processor lines and standardized the platforms by porting them to Itanium. Compaq/DEC brought HP the Alpha, and HP stopped making that line and ported OpenVMS to Itanium. Compaq/Tandem brought in NonStop/MIPS and HP folded that product line into Itanium. Finally, HP has killed its PA-RISC line of processors and ported HP-UX onto Itanium.
Itanium does have a place, but it's at the very high end of the server market. As long as these platforms exist, it proabably will as well.
(Side note, this is why I'm able to buy older Itanium boxes on eBay for $200 -- no one understands that they'll run Linux just fine and the commodity x86 market gets so much more attention!! Thanks everyone for unloading these cheap, fast boxes!)
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I see your point, but there's a flip side to that argument. Just wait until you get older and have to find work.
The classical career arc that was in place from the late 40s until maybe the mid to late 90s went like this for college graduates:
- Graduate high school
- Graduate college
- Get a company to hire you in some kind of traineeship
- Work your entire 40-year career for the same or related companies, with a series of progressively responsible positions that were designed to meet your need for more income and responsibility
- Make progressively more money in a safe job, and not be afraid to do things like buy a house or car.
- Get a gold watch and retire with full benefits and heartfelt thanks from a company who was happy to have the institutional knowledge preserved for that long.
For non-college graduates, you could get a job in a factory, work your butt off for 40 years and still come out OK due to union negotiation of wages and benefits. A bachelors' degree wasn't a mandatory admission ticket to a job, so fewer people were burdened by student loans for degrees they didn't even need.
During this time, there was a huge middle class that was able to spend more money on goods and services. People weren't constantly in fear of layoffs or downsizing. And yes, it came with a price of higher wages and a stronger labor movement.
Today, the pendulum is back near the other extreme. In IT it's worse, because there's no career path for most people above a certain age. Your example of the mainframe guy is valid...but too many employers think that everyone over 40ish is unwilling to learn anything. I know incredibly talented colleagues have had to get lucky and find companies who value experience over the willingness to work 80-hour weeks to compensate for sloppy processes or bad work. On top of that, inflation of education requirements means that more people are being force-fed through college. That's good for the university system, but bad for the economy. To make an economy flow smoothly, you need jobs tailored for different intelligence levels. A secretary doesn't need a BA in Communications to answer the phone. A factory worker doesn't need an engineering degree.
I actually like the model of state employment, which follows the classic model. You may not be able to be as much of a rock star in front of your colleagues, but nothing beats job security and safety. The problem, as you point out, is that people do tend to abuse the system as they progress. However, having a steady stream of consumers who aren't afraid to spend real (non-credit) money is what actually drives business.
While this might just be the typical "we don't have enough qualified candidates" complaint to get around H1B requirements, I actually see the point here.
Some or all of these might be influencing this thinking: :-)
- Fewer people are taking IT jobs because of the employment prospects, meaning they actually do have an applicant shortage,
- Companies keep paying less for IT work due to the economic situation and a general erosion of perceived value. This would translate to fewer people wanting to work for that company unless they really needed a job.
- Especially in data center support, with the advent of PCI, ITIL, HIPAA, SOX, and other standards, IT has become a lot more regimented. Couple that with sometimes unattainable SLAs, and the job becomes more paperwork than process...there's just less to actually do.
- The study is sponsored by Symantec, who makes truckloads of money selling data center automation products.
- Companies now see that they don't need their data centers, or at least they don't need them to be right next to headquarters. So let's say the company is in New York or Boston or Seattle - they're going to jump at any chance they can to move their data center to Middle of Nowhere, US. Fewer people want to work in Middle of Nowhere, where the wages are half that of New York. They also don't want to live 100 miles from the nearest city.
I actually went through the last one...my last company relocated their IT department to the south and I chose not to go. If you've lived in the Northeast your whole life, you might not like living in a place where the weather never goes below 80 degrees and it's 90+ five months out of the year. On the flip side, real estate is half the price there. But in my mind, what good is a huge house if you hate where it's sitting??
You're right - I was referring to medicine as part of the professions. Medicine is science, but a lot of it is applied science instead of basic research. At least for now, it's also a very lucrative path if you have the talent and can deal with people and the insane amount of training you have to do.
Just as an example, if you were about to graduate with a 4.0 from MIT, you'd have options open to you. Medicine is one...8+ years of training, incredible amounts of work and debt, and a huge payoff at the end. Law is 3 years of training with a semi-guaranteed huge payoff at the end depending on where you go to law school. An MBA is 2 years of training, and an almost-guaranteed huge payoff. Getting an Ivy League MBA is pretty much a free ticket into one of the high-end consulting companies, investment banks or management at a corporation. A science Ph. D. is 5-6 years of research, with the only guarantee being medium-level pay and tenure at a university if you can get it. Add in the job security being in one of the professions gives you (AMA, ABA, etc.) and you can see why people might not pick the science path.
I'd probably be silly and pick the Ph. D. route for love of the game.....but would you? I'd never call medicine and law "shortcut paths to riches" given the training requirements, but compared to the alternatives, they're attractive.
People mentioned the immigration policies and other factors, but I think the #1 reason long-term pursuits like science have faded from the forefront is the shift everywhere to short term thinking.
Personally, I think we should deemphasize the amount of attention paid to the stock market, and give it back to the billionaire's club. Invest your retirement money in something safe that gives reasonable returns....ror better yet, demand that they bring pensions back (the ultimate long term planning tool.)
I'm a client systems integration guy, so IMO it would be a good thing to not give developers admin rights by default. In reality though, they do have them. In a bureaucratic IT world, it just makes them more productive. We've been trying to eliminate admin-by-default for ages, but the supporting stuff isn't in place yet.
Modern versions of Windows do work a lot better with limited rights, and Microsoft has done a decent job in trying to make the limited-user experience a little more transparent. In a perfect world (which I don't work in,) all software distribution, upgrades and removal would be fully automated through SMS or something similar. Every relevant system setting someone would want to change would be open to non-admins. However, if you work in previous versions of WIndows (XP, 2003, etc,) then some key things a developer might want to do (i.e. start and stop services, install drivers and make registry changes,) require elevated privileges or relaxing system security. Plus, even with compatibility hacks, some older software just won't run reliably without privileges.
I think developer accounts should be limited rights by default, but they should be allowed access to a privileged account for installations and system changes. The caveat is that developers need to realize they're writing software that won't be used by admins, and have to test anything they write in a limited rights environment. I can't tell you how many (large) vendors I've called while trying to integrate client software into our limited-rights environment. Some are totally shocked that we even have users running without full rights. I've found this to be the case most often with "niche" vendors who aren't making a consumer product, and training companies. The latter seem to just assume that everyone has full control over their web browser settings, can install whatever plugins they want, etc.
One of the ways we're working around this is using virtual machines for lab work. The developers can mess these up all they want, and restore them if something happens. The catch is that they don't have direct Internet access, which is the main reason why admin rights are so dangerous.
The problem with running admin-by-default is the amount of damage someone can do, even unintentionally, by using an account that has rights to make any changes. How many people do you know that actually read the UAC or download warning prompts while they're browsing the web?
"IT failure" is a very broad term and can happen for a lot of reasons:
My take on this is that the main cause of failure is the fact that IT still hasn't settled on a set of engineering principles to deliver projects. Things change way too fast still -- over the life of a 2-year project, your hardware platform may be changed out from under you, for example. PHP, .NET or Java may be swapped out for YetAnotherCoolLanguage0.1alpha4. This is made worse by unscrupulous vendors, poorly-trained consultants, and lack of acceptance by the user base of the software.
I think the author is referring to the direct cost of a failure. Every few months, the technical publications run an article or two about a large company or government agency writing off millions of dollars for a failed SAP/Oracle Financials/similar package deployment. Whenever I see one of these, it's interesting to see what happened. Usually it has something to do with one or more of the causes I listed above. Generally, the more expensive, tranformational and long a project is, the worse the results are. It's not just vendors either - I've seen in-house projects spiral down the same way. The other thing that comes to my mind when I read articles like this is why they didn't see it coming. Don't IT executives talk to each other over golf or something and say, "Yeah, SAP screwed us out of $100M in consulting fees. I'd watch them if I were you..."?
Other branches of engineering aren't immune to this though. Construction and infrastructure projects often run over time and budget. The difference is that a construction project gets finished one way or another. A software project failure means throwing away two years of work and putting the hardware on eBay.
I've noticed a lot of these kinds of outages lately, not just with RIM but with other network providers. They usually seem to follow a failed routine-maintenance cycle. Do carriers really not design their networks and systems to support rolling upgrades and the like? More importantly, has there been a breakdown of the test-and-release cycle that's supposed to catch these things before service dies for everyone?
I guess the other thing might be all the third-party hosting and outsourcing that goes on in IT...how many people want to bet that half the outage time was trying to figure out where exactly the fault was? From experience, that gets a billion times harder when your system is hosted by a third party who won't say a word to you so they can avoid taking blame (and SLA hits) for it.
Makes me wonder about cloud computing...the technology concept is great, but how many large organizations will trust all their data to machines they don't directly control? These days it doesn't make sense to host everything yourself, but companies really have to be careful to choose competent service providers!!
I've worked in large and small companies, and the one unifying truth of executive communication is that they do not want details. In their mind, they hired you to take care of the details, If you say you need $100,000 to increase bandwidth at remote locations, you had better have a one or two sentence explanation about how this is going to make them money or help them make money. If they want to see a utilization chart or two, have that ready, but you're going to be tuned out if you launch into a long explanation.
I'm not an MBA, but my guess would be that they teach MBAs to focus on strategy and leadership, and to hire people to do the nuts-and-bolts work. Same goes for small business owners, but double -- they're doing crazy 120 hour weeks growing the business - why would they want to listen to a report from the guy they hired to make sure they wouldn't have to deal with "all that IT stuff?"
As long as you keep that in mind, reports to executives will go well. Short, simple, money- or productivity-focused explanations, very little technical information, etc. Think like they are thinking -- "Why am I paying for this?" "How does this make me money or keep me from losing money?"
I definitely agree with a lot of the items on that list. This time around, however, thin clients are definitely in the running because of all the amazing VDI, virtual app stuff and fast cheap networks. However, anyone who tells you that you can replace every single PC or laptop in your company needs to calm down a little. Same goes for the people who explain thin clients in a way that makes it sound like client problems go away magically. They don't - you just roll them all up into the data center, where you had better have a crack operations staff who can keep everything going. Why? Because if the network fails, your users have a useless paperweighr on their desk until you fix it.
I'm definitely surprised to not see cloud computing on that list. This is another rehashed technology, this time with the fast cheap network connectivity thrown in. The design principles are great -- build your app so it's abstracted from physical hardware, etc. but I've seen way too many cloud vendors downplay the whole data ownership and vendor lock-in problems. In my opinion, this makes sense for people's Facebook photos, not a company's annual budget numbers.
If you're in IT long enough, you've probably seen a million sites and software packages like this in use at large companies. In my experience, this is usually the result of a low-bid IT contractor getting a last-minute request to slap something together. Of course, in-house resources can screw things up badly too, but high-dollar consulting/contracting deals seem to have a special knack for it. Some places have great results with outsourcing/contracting, but others make it impossible to get high-quality work done in a reasonable time.
It sucks that something as public as the federal spending-accountability website has obvious problems, but how much time do you think whoever won that contract got to get the site live?
I'd be interested in hearing from an MBA-type about what the actual rationale for hiring third party IT help is. I know it's usually driven by raw costs and the fact that "IT's not strategic." But what is it that's actually taught in business school that has every executive that drives the whole outsourcing push? Or is it really just "my golf buddy is doing it at his company."?
Disclaimer: In the government case, I can definitely see the need for contract help. Projects would probably have a really hard time surviving administration changes, internal squabbles, etc.
OMG WTF iz he tlkin about lolz :-D i can rite good 4 realz
OK, back to the real world...there's something a little fishy about this study. The article says that the study author surveyed academic papers, essays and class assignments for writing samples. That's a lot different from everyday communication -- you're writing in a formal style that is usually dictated to you by the assigning teacher/professor.
I'd love to see a study on corporate e-mail communications, or even written documentation. I admit that I'm getting older, but you can definitely tell a person's age from the formality level of their communications. People who are almost ready to retire remember writing memos by hand and physically mailing them or handing them to colleagues. For them, writing was something that required effort, and the content reflects this fact. Even e-mail messages are carefully crafted. People my age (mid-30s) grew up with written communication first, then e-mail shortly after. As a result, we tend to be less formal than the older crowd, but most of us still put some effort into writing coherent documents or messages. For example, it's normal for me to be brief in an e-mail message, but I would never let it go out without proofreading it for spelling, grammar and punctuation. The next generation grew up with e-mail first, then texting. The only "formal" writing most of them do seems to be in school. I'm mentoring a junior systems engineer right now, and trying to explain to him that you cannot send out messages or write documents with texting-speak or other problems in them. I can't tell you how many messages I have received from vendors that look like the author is talking to his friend on an iPhone. In my mind, it's not being an old fuddy-duddy to make yourself sound as polished as possible. You win more arguments than the lolspeak crowd if you can intelligently get your point across.
Damn kids. :-)
Seriously, lolspeak is fine for text messaging, but we should continue to teach formal writing techniques. Sure, the sky won't fall if everyone stops writing formal essays and moves towards a blogging format. However, the death of print journalism is really going to put a damper on news reporting, historical accounts, etc. In my mind, journalism is one of the things keeping traditional writing with the careful thought that goes along with it alive.
Agreed. I know practically everyone in the IT industry is agianst unions. In some cases that's for good reason. However, I really think that most IT people think they're not "standard blue-collar workers" because they sit in front of a computer instead of a manufacturing line.
This, plus the belief that nothing bad is ever going to happen to them, is probably the biggest reason for anti-union sentiment. In my opinion, however, this kind of thinking is dangerous. There are some really crappy workplaces out there, and in some cases people don't have much of a choice when it comes to working there. The dirty little secret no one is talking about is the fact that most IT jobs are or are going to be the next blue-collar trade that's outsourced to the cheapest labor pool.
Think about it, how many times have you listened to someone get riled up by a conservative news figure/talk show host railing against creeping socialism or the fact that we need to support the poor? I don't think a lot of "conservatives" realize that they're not actually on the same side as the super-rich "management class" teaching them to fear the liberal crowd. It's a bad combination when everyone's retirement is tied up in the market, so everyone advances policies that are tilted towards businesses. What they don't get is that demanding higher stock prices all the time is going to lead companies to make decisions that are bad for them in the long run. I think unions represent a good counter-balance to this, and have a different role in the 21st century than they did in the 20th.
It's wierd - I used to think IT projects were the only projects that were impossible to accurately estimate. A lot of PMs I run into at work seem to think a software project is the same as a construction project, but I think they're totally different. There is little change in the time it takes to pour a certain amount of concrete, run standard electrical for a commercial building, or other construction/product build tasks. In software-land, since everything's so fluid, it's anyone's guess how much time it'll take to fix some crazy bug, install hardware, debug a hardware or software installation, or write documentation. And even when a construction project over-runs its time, you pretty much know exactly how far off you are and how long until you're on track again.
Now this 787 project comes out and blows my assumptions away! Apparently you CAN overrun a construction or build project's time and budget just as easily as IT projects.
From what I've been reading, the fact that Boeing basically outsourced everything but final assembly of the plane to different contractors has come back to bite them. One of my IT specialties is integration work -- and I've worked on a lot of contracted software products that totally don't work when you get their individual parts back and mash them together.
Part of me really wants to gloat and say, "Ha ha, you listened to a bunch of retarded MBA consultants who convinced you that lean production and lowest-bidder subcontracting was the way to go!". BUT, I really can't. Boeing's in a lot of trouble if they can't pull off a major integration/rework effort right away. Airplanes are one of the last things the US actually makes and exports from a manufacturing perspective, so it's important that they just drop everything and figure out what's wrong. Airbus will be more than happy to sell A340s, A350s and A380s to all the waiting airlines.
But deep down, I still think those MBAs should have thought a little bit about how many thousands of parts and systems a typical plane has...
I'm not too sure what your startup does, but it sounds like you're working with some things that you're very worried about losing, and are easy to steal. My guess is unpatented formulas or inventions, or maybe a complex bit of code...am I right?
The only problem with this is that you gave up control of your network to save money. If you force the admins to come on site for everything, you will probably be charged a higher rate because of the travel involved, etc.
On the other hand, a full time employee is just as likely to be tempted to steal your intellectual property, and probably have an easier time of it since they're insiders. The real solution is to hire people, insiders or outsiders, who you are comfortable trusting. I've seen a lot of local small businesses basically outsource their IT to "mini Geek Squad" rinky-dink little IT shops just because they're the cheapest around. That' s fine if the most complex thing the company uses is e-mail and their web site. If you actually use your network for sensitive information-handling, it may not be the smartest idea in the world to have the $10/hr PC techs straight out of A+ school managing your devices.
The truth is, with exceptions, system administrators are a trustworthy lot...at least the ones I work with. Since we really don't have a formal "profession" yet, our self-made reputations are important to uphold. This goes triple in small industries. where you need specific skills to do related IT work--I regularly bump into people I worked with several jobs ago. Trust me, in my industry you'd never get another IT job if you were caught stealing customer data, credit cards, safety-sensitive info, etc. Everyone knows you and the work you do, or can easily find out.
I'd say my advice would be to pay your outsourcer a fair rate and really get to know who's doing work for you. Do you trust your own employees? If you can't say that about your service provider, go get another one.
First, I've never been a big fan of these side deals that state and local governments make to entice businesses to relocate or expand to their area. I understand why they do it, but there's a flip side that a lot of people don't realize.
Second, I actually have reverse experience with this. I live in the Northeast, which is not the cheapest place in the country to do business by a long shot. The company I work for has decided to relocate a lot of their work down South. That's great if you love the heat and don't care about moving. Tech workers are often the first to consider in any move like this -- I seriously think executives believe a stereotype that all tech workers live in a one-bedroom apartment or with Mom, have posessions that fit in half a U-Haul, don't care if they live in Boston, MA or Branson, MO and will move wherever the company tells them to. This has happened to me at 2 companies before (I'm on Offered Relocation #3 now,) and I'm not going (again.) That decision boiled down to a few things for me. First, I really like living where I live -- I don't think I could be happy where they're relocating. Second, if I did move, it'd be one-way. Sure, you can sell your house in the Northeast and buy 2.5 of them in the South, but you'll never be able to move back without huge sacrifice. Third, even if I kept my salary, there' s no guarantee I'll keep my job. Companies aren't the same way about their employees anymore -- even if you do an awesome job and have a long tenure with the company, they won't blink at the idea of letting you go. Then what? The local market salaries are 50% less than they are back home. Fortunately, I'd have savings from not spending all my money on a new house, but I know way too many people who would move down and live like kings on the salary differential.
As I said, I definitely get why municipalities jump at the chance to get a new employer in town, and why employers pursue these tax incentive deals. But just like they taught the MBAs in Economics 101, everything has externalities and nothing is free!
I agree that medical records should be electronic for the most part. However, there are some big challenges that our current IT business model can't solve:
1. How do you prevent Oracle, IBM, SAP or some other large vendor from getting a permanent lock on the market for EMRs? If this happens, a closed standard will develop and mo one will ever be able to make changes without paying mullions of dollars.
2. Opposite problem -- if there is no standard, or it's so loose that it might as well not exist, what's to prevent a million small companies from developing EMR, EMR 2.0, OpenEMR, StarEMR, YetAnotherCoolEMR 3.2.10.23alpha8, and so on? How do you get providers using different standards to share? (The answer, I think, is open protocols, but that way lies 800 MB XML files and crappy J2EE applications written by developers who don't understand optimization.)
3. Privacy. In the US, healthcare and insurance are for-profit businesses. How much do you think a life insurance company would love it if they were able to see your entire birth-to-present health history? Insurance would be even less affordable than it is now. In countries where everyone's on the hook for medical costs, privacy is much less of an issue. But when it can cost you the ability to get treatment that doesn't bankrupt you, it's a big problem!
4. The huge "obfuscated mess" problem -- Go look at the system the Veterans' Administration uses for EMRs. It was written years and years ago in a language called M, and the source code (publically available) looks like line noise. It works fine from the front-end, but I can imagine it's a disaster to administer, make improvements, etc. How do you prevent a system from getting so stale that no one knows how to modify it anymore?
From what I've read, EMRs work well for the VA, precisely because they have to keep costs lower than for-profit hospital systems. Their patients are also ex-military. When you join the military, you give up the right to privacy.
I'd recommend starting out with the PMI body of knowledge...start here: PMI. ITIL is a very good framework for designing an ideal operational environment, but it's huge and very bureaucracy-centric if you're not careful. The ITIL content is not free, but you can take training courses or buy it yourself.
All that said, don't underestimate what you're getting into. Project management is not IT work. The job you do as a PM is totally different from anything you're going to do in your IT job. For one, you can't do any of the work yourself. A PM's job (in my estimation) seems to be begging and pleading workers and their managers to get things done on time.
Also, project management, like people management is a skill. You can either do it or you can't. I've seen IT guys promoted to project managers who fail horribly at it. Remember that you're not the "doer" anymore, all you do is keep records, hold meetings and yell at people who miss their dates. On the flip side, a truly good PM with IT skills is a godsend. Being able to understand that an IT project is NOT a construction project is a key skill. Traditional PMs will tell you that a project is a project. However, you know EXACTLY how long it takes a carpentry crew to frame a house, a plumber to lay pipe, and a drywall crew to put up walls. You sometimes have no idea how long it will take to find $obscure_bug[n]. Construction projects have at least a chance of coming in on time, and IT projects really don't unless they're totally simplistic. Keep that in mind and you'll do well!
I remember seeing Oracle rebranding high-end server hardware recently, and tweaking Oracle to run ultra-fast on that particular configuration. Now they have a hardware platform (Sun's x86 and Sparc lines), a software infrastructure (Java) and a marketing lock (Sun hardware and Oracle database purchases seem to go hand in hand, even now.)
So it's a good move for them. We'll see how well it works out for everyone else. Oracle hasn't been known for developing products that don't require an army of Oracle consultants to get working. If they use the Sun acquisition to build their "database in a box" product, then customers face lock-in on the hardware and software fronts, just like back in the mainframe/midrange days.
It might be the cynic in me talking, but Oracle has been one of the major causes of large-scale IT failures you read about in the industry press. It's helped along by bad requirements and idiotic lowest-bidder consulting firms, but Oracle is sometimes forced to pay large settlements for running a project over budget. That's just a natural side effect of designing products that are so complex that you have no choice but to buy support. Also, you have to wonder what Oracle's going to do with MySQL now...
Oracle consumed J.D. Edwards, PeopleSoft and BEA. Let's see how well they digest this one!
That brings up a good point. Even though the survey may not be totally scientific, I can definitely see a negative correlation between any outside activity and grades. Anything like Myspace, Facebook, World of Warcraft, or any time-wasting activity robs study time.
However, here's a thought. Current coursework focuses on constant cycles of memorization and testing in most fields. Is that really relevant anymore given the supposed "new world of work" we're about to enter? When I studied chemistry many moons ago, most of the non-lab coursework could only be aced if you studied relatively hard. Has that changed, given the fact that:
So, how much of this is Facebook and how much is just the changing college demographic? Should we change the coursework offered in schools?
To be fair, my opinion is that we should definitely not be forcing everyone through college. Previously, we had a good mix of job opportunities for different education levels, and everything worked out. Only people who were smart enough went to college, and it wasn't an admission ticket for entry-level work like it is today. The crass way to say this is "the world needs ditch-diggers too" but it's true. Having a mix of jobs for a mix of skill levels definitely makes society better.
I've had an interesting run through IT environments so far. Each one of my employers has successfully used what would be called a "legacy system" to do core business transactions. I'm not old by any means, but I definitely see no reason to get rid of systems that are performing well.
The qualification for that statement, of course, is "performing well." The side effect to using older systems is all the bolt-ons you have to use to get newer functionality working. My current employer uses a midrange system from the early 80s to run the core of the operation, and it has tons of extra software and hardware riding on top of it to do modern things like access without terminal emulators and message queuing. The time to consider a replacement is when these systems become too unwieldy or brittle to manage. For example, if a transaction-processing system needs a daily FTP feed from some source, and it doesn't get it, will that blow up the whole system? If the answer is yes, it's time to fix the problem or replace the underlying system if it's bad enough.
I'm very skeptical of anyone who comes in and says, barely looking at the existing system, that it needs to be ripped and replaced. A lot of it stems from the fact that IT hasn't matured all the way yet. People still come into the field knowing little more than the Java they were taught in school, and don't have the big-picture attitude you need to really understand IT. You may think I'm an old fart, but I'm really not. I've learned the basic rule of IT -- you're not there to play with computers and have fun. You're there to make sure the business you support is able to do their work, preferably without calling you in every night to fix something.
They finally killed OS/2, huh?? I never thought that OS would die since it was so prevalent in banking and other niche industries. Companies I've worked for were using it for some new dev right up until 2001 or so, and keeping existing systems barely alive for customers.
I still see a few supermarket POSs, ATMs and airline systems running OS/2. Bad memories.
I was reading about this earlier in the week, and remembering when IBM and Sun were arch-rivals in the high-end Unix market. I'm guessing IBM's going to kill AIX and maybe even the p-series servers now.
My question is, does IBM want Solaris, the hardware business, Java, or do they just want to get rid of a competitor?
Every IBM product I've seen in the past few years has had its user interface written in Java. Every piece of middleware they write now is Java. So it seems like they just want to consolidate the market.
That said, they got a good deal in this market, but what a lousy time to do this. How many thousands of employees on both the IBM and Sun side are going to get kicked out over this? I guess it all depends on how many products this kills. Worse still, IBM hasn't been known to be keen on keeping jobs in the US and Europe lately...
While interest in the field is good, there are still some major barriers to entry that need to be considered.
1. Unlike previous downturns, we currently have tons of IT/CS people out of work. I'm very lucky to have work; according to all my colleagues, hiring is extremely limited, especially in large public companies. In addition, competition for these jobs is incredibly tough.
2. Outsourcing has not gone away. IBM's a perfect example, as are many of the other professional services firms. India is rapidly moving up the food chain, and even advanced dev jobs are moving elsewhere very quickly. The best strategy is to get involved with a small company who doesn't have the resources to manage an outsourcing engagement.
3. A corollary to #2 - Lots of companies are "discovering" they don't need an IT department anymore. Most of the programming jobs will be for vendors, if the whole "cloud computing" fad turns out to be more than a fad.
4. Don't assume you can choose where you work, if that's important to you. Companies are shifting their support functions to cheaper locations within the US, so keep that in mind unless you don't care about living in Boston vs. Omaha.
So, as always IT and programming are fun fields to be in, but just keep in mind that the employment prospects are still unstable. If you're the kind who doesn't mind bouncing from one 6-month contract to another, you'll do fine. Full time work might be harder to come by.
Being a systems guy, I've worked a lot with quirky developers. I also work an industry that is a haven for crazy proprietary standards. The description of "Josh" in the article is very close to some people I've had experience with. The "extreme niche" of my industry makes things worse -- newbies are useless for months until they can begin picking up how things work. Once they learn, they're highly-prized, which makes it really hard to get rid of lousy developers.
At least for the present and in the past, IT work has been all about being a hero and pulling insane hours to fix something. I've always been a fan of doing the engineering and documentation up front rather than staying up all night messing around with a problem. For every one of me, there's 10 Joshes. And since Josh is constantly fixing the mistakes as they appear, he's the one that ends up the hero. Management declares Josh the wunderkind, and the rest of the IT staff ends up second-class citizens.
Does that sound bitter? Not in my mind. I actually don't mind going along and doing my work. However, companies that embrace Joshes set themselves up for a big problem later on. What happens when Josh leaves (and he will)? The rest of your IT staff now has to pick through his undocumented code and figure out what he did. Also, if Josh is an offensive jerk, no one is going to want to talk to him, which makes the problem of no documentation worse.
Companies do need really smart developers. However, management needs to realize that parts of IT naturally attract "socially challenged" but really smart people. They need to keep on top of what they're doing and set appropriate limits.
The next generation of IT work *may* limit the appeal of the lone wolf/nerd brilliant developer, but I don't see that happening anytime soon. Until then, I have to put Josh's untested code into production because he doesn't need any QA people looking over his shoulder. :-)
The author is right that Itanium never caught on the way Intel expected it to, but to say it's totally dead isn't exactly correct.
After their huge round of acquisitions in the late 90s/early 2000s, Compaq and HP pretty much killed all of their high-end processor lines and standardized the platforms by porting them to Itanium. Compaq/DEC brought HP the Alpha, and HP stopped making that line and ported OpenVMS to Itanium. Compaq/Tandem brought in NonStop/MIPS and HP folded that product line into Itanium. Finally, HP has killed its PA-RISC line of processors and ported HP-UX onto Itanium.
Itanium does have a place, but it's at the very high end of the server market. As long as these platforms exist, it proabably will as well.
(Side note, this is why I'm able to buy older Itanium boxes on eBay for $200 -- no one understands that they'll run Linux just fine and the commodity x86 market gets so much more attention!! Thanks everyone for unloading these cheap, fast boxes!)