All the analysis in the world on cloud computing boils down to a simple fact -- someone else owns your infrastructure and data. If you want to go down this road, your company has to answer these questions: - Are we comfortable with letting someone else have our data, if they promise not to let it get stolen or use it themselves? Do we really trust that promise? - Contracts and SLAs are all important, but will getting a payment or free service from a vendor for a 5-hour outage make up for all the lost business? If not, how big does that payout need to be? - Is the vendor really competent enough to handle the service you're outsourcing to them? Vendors have been known to hire the lowest-possible-cost staff to manage things like this... - How easy is it to get your data back if you want to leave? Are you stuck with the vendor forever? - If any sort of app deployment is involved, is your dev, QA and engineering organization good enough so that rolling out to production isn't a messy "oops, let's fix that by manually tweaking the system while it's running" scenario? Vendors generally don't let you do that.
I think the concept really works well for commodity stuff like mail hosting. Whether you trust core business apps to the cloud really depends on your comfort level!
I have worked in a lot of IT positions, and every company I have worked for has always done all of their "real" decision-making on hacked-together spreadsheets. The truth is that the spreadsheet was one of the first "business analysis" tools that was intuitive enough for an end-user to really do power-user things.
That said, Excel and Access "applications" that glue organizations together are the bane of IT's existence. Despite what the sales guys say, all of the company's numbers come out of SAP, Oracle Financials, etc. and into one of these programs to do any useful work with them. I know I'm working on making Office 2007 available to those who want it, and getting some of these Excel and Access 97-era macros carried forward can be...challenging. Access is another horror story -- once a database hits 2 GB in size, file corruption is extremely likely, especially if multiple users are hitting the same database over a network.
If you ever get sick of software development or sysadmin work, and like pain, I guarantee there will be work available for anyone willing to wade through a million lines of VB spaghetti code written by an MBA who took an Excel class in 1996.
A lot of people might laugh at something like this, but I'm not. I don't work with tons of people who might be considered "nerds" but that's mainly because my industry is a little less tech-heavy than a typical IT company. But, I have worked with tons of nerdy consultants/contractors.
There's two main types -- the first is the cultural nerd. Many people in IT have different backgrounds and come from all over. Some may not be used to American culture or know how to act in certain situations. The second is the typical native-born stereotypical basement-dweller nerd. Working with one of these tends to be very difficult just because they annoy most "normals." I'm not a social genius either, but I know what is and is not appropriate in a work setting. I show up to work in clean clothes, shower regularly and really try to take an interest in whatever topic a coworker wants to talk about. Some people I work with really don't make this effort.
Even a class on "what to do in a work environment" would be a huge plus. How many times have you had to cut off a colleague who kept interrupting in business meetings and saying "No, you're wrong, that'll never work."
Anyone left stateside in IT in the next ten years or so is going to have a really hard time finding work if they can't at least interact with people.
These days, it's pretty much guaranteed that any PC you buy at retail will have Vista on it. Microsoft has done a pretty good job of addressing Vista performance concerns. I hear the newest service pack is pretty good.
However, how many IT people out there are dealing with a large number of older systems? For us, it really comes down to this -- we can potentially run Vista on a fair number of our systems. Others are right in the middle of the XP system requirements (P4, 512 MB RAM.) So which do we choose?
Continue to run XP everywhere. The older systems will perform acceptably, and newer systems will be incredibly fast.
Switch to Vista completely. Junk tons of old hardware (yay recession!) and buy more memory for the ones that barely make the cut.
Run and support two operating systems (not my favorite idea.)
We're just small enough to not really have a formal hardware refresh cycle, so this is a major concern for us. Windows 7 will probably have the same problems regarding hardware resources. Do you put up with lousy performance on some of your machines, or stick with good performance overall?
I've always wondered how some countries are consistently able to produce tons of qualified scientists and engineers while the US and UK can't do it even with access to many more resources.
I've definitely seen some counter-examples from India and China, but the majority that I've worked with are at least passably intelligent, can troubleshoot and seem to have a better grasp of their subject than comparable Americans. Is it truly just a culture thing, or is their education system better?
I admit it, I'm an old geezer at 34. I write in complete sentences and check my spelling before sending out important communications. Most of my peers do not. I have seen many e-mails and other casual messages going out to our customers with tons of Web 2.0 speak in them.
I understand the fact that the world is moving on and communication is getting less formal. After all, most people don't send out formal business memos anymore; they write e-mail and use IM software. However, I still think people need to be able to spell and write clearly. Exposing kids to more of the Web 2.0 stuff before teaching them how to write formally is just going to make things worse IMO. Feel free to disagree, but how many times have you gotten an e-mail from a co-worker with one or more of the following:
No upper-case characters
Incorrect or nonexistent punctuation
Misspellings, even of basic words
IM/text messaging shortened-spelling words
I'm really just curious how much of my concern is due to the fact that I'm "between generations," and how much of it is the geriatric fool stuck in the 1980s/90s talking...
And no, I'm not a grammar Nazi. Readable is just fine for me -- grammatically perfect is less of a concern.
There are a couple of reasons a company has an IT department: 1. Provide technology more efficiently by letting specialists handle it. This is the kind of maintenance work and break/fix stuff that most end-users associate with IT. 2. Utilize specialists to do stuff with all the company data that goes beyond the basics. For example, if you can write automate a process that eliminates someone doing full-time manual work, you've just saved a bunch of money.
Companies without formal IT departments are grouped around two extremes. Most are small businesses these days. One side is the "clueless" side. This is the company where the boss goes out and buys PCs from Best Buy, consumer-grade hardware/software, etc. and has a cobbled-together network environment. Usually, the boss's nephew who's "real good with computers" has set the place up and let it fester for years. Any small-business contractor can give you a million horror stories like this. The other extreme is the "tech-savvy wild west" environment. Everyone is allowed to bring in their own machines, their own software, etc. Both of these extremes tend to have a lot of downtime. The ones in the middle strike a happy balance -- they'll often bring in a consultant to help them get up and running, and follow most recommendations.
Places with IT departments tend to take things a little slower, and they frustrate users who come from environments like the above. Having IT do simple things like not let you load your own software so they can keep track of who owns what is just the first step. The next reason you're there is to help the company do useful things with the technology they've bought. (This is a huge disconnect with a lot of IT people. When everything is over with, it's all about how much you actually contribute. If you're just doing maintenance, you're always going to be looked on as an expense, not an asset.)
I've never been a big-time political activist, and I'd say I have a healthy skepticism of _anything_ having to do with politicians. However, I really do think we'll be better off with Obama in the long run. Here's why:
On education, one of the things Obama did say that I agree with is that there's "no government program that can replace an involved parent." This is 100% true. However, government also needs to fund education properly to ensure schools are teaching what employers want for the future. Look at China and India, they're turning out science and tech graduates faster than ever. Take some of the tax money being wasted on wars, corrupt contractors, etc. and use it to fund education.
For education to work, you have to stop encouraging the creationists and other similar anti-science people. Giving the Republicans another 4 years is going to encourage more of this kind of thinking.
Also in education, some ideas need to be explored that may be controversial. One idea is having multiple tracks for students...sending only the smart kids to college and giving the non-smart ones jobs appropriate to their abilities. Recognizing that there is a distribution of smart and stupid people is very important so you can help the best succeed.
I truly believe trickle-down economics doesn't work. You can't just give every tax break and advantage to the rich and assume they'll be nice and help the less fortunate. It doesn't work. Wealthy people may buy the occasional house, car or boat, but most of that money just sits in the bank/market for decades. Taking some of that huge sum and using it to fund public projects (roads, transportation, healthcare subsidies, etc.) is not stealing. You're buying a more stable society.
No matter what they say, McCain/Palin is just another retread of the same politicians we've been getting for years. McCain is a Cold War relic, back from the days when we were the #1 country on Earth by a huge margin. I know I'm going to get dinged for this, but that's not going to be the case in the 21st century. I think that either China or India will become the dominant power because (a) we fell behind in education, (b) we gave China all our manufacturing capacity and India all our white-collar work, and (c) China/India both have huge populations, and China's government can do whatever it sets its mind to. We need someone who can recognize that we might be #2, #5 or #9 in 20 years' time and learn to live alongside everyone else.
Obama's healthcare idea of basically creating the assigned-risk pool for health insurance companies is the best he can do in the current climate. Until costs really get bad and more people are telling stories of bankrupting illnesses, there's no way to get universal health care passed.
I'm actually hoping for a bigger social change than any one person can do, but we'll see how well that goes. My hope is that credit will continue to be difficult to get, forcing people to cut back on consumption. Once that happens, people won't be scrambling for that next promotion at work because they need more money to feed the debt monster. People will then spend less time at work, and maybe pay attention to their kids again. Education may improve as a result, or it may not. Long-run, if wages go lower and people spend less, maybe we can actually compete with the foriegn labor markets (at least after you consider things like the time it takes to clean up a project after it's been delivered by an outsourcer.) This would be an extremely harsh transition -- we've been used to having access to anything we want for so long. However, the rest of the world lives this way, so we should be able to adapt.
Anyone who says that the President can't really do anything on his own is correct. But, I think voting in McCain is just inviting more conflict with the rest of the world.
This always seems to go in 5-to-7-year cycles, but this time it might actually stick given the always-on, always plentiful bandwidth we're getting now.
Thin clients are amazing in situations where you have an average office-worker PC doing a single task (call center, POS, reservations agents, etc.) You can connect them to the terminal server of your choice. If the users really need a true computer, you can give them a virtual desktop or blade PC (By virtual desktop, cutting through the hype I mean access to a sufficiently-powered VM.) When you have many hundreds of these same PCs doing the exact same task, it's stupid not to at least consider thin clients.
The only drawback is that you actually have to start managing your network like people did back in the mainframe days. You can't have a bunch of hacks throwing in whatever updates, applications and patches they want whenever they want. Companies typically don't want to hear about this -- they hear "get rid of 10000 PCs" from the salesman on the golf course and don't realize it means you just shift all the complexity to the back end. If you're ready for it, it's definitely a cost and time saver. If you're not, you're bound to have a day where users go home early because they don't have a "computer" that works.
Arguably, most PCs aren't very useful without a network connection. However, having a device with some offline storage makes my train commute bearable. I can catch up on reading articles, edit a document, etc. without having to be on the network.
Thin clients are definitely overhyped now, but I can definitely see the day where most computing devices in end-user hands look more like a cell phone than a laptop. I dread that day because I hate typing and reading on a 4-inch LCD. Eithe way, like I said above, it might stick now that network access is less of an issue for most people.
The answer is, you really have to design your systems in a secure way so that some new kid can plug in his iPhone and not cause havoc. It's a totally new world and I'm even trying to get used to it. Feeling like a fuddy-duddy in your early 30s is scary sometimes.
I work in the client-side computing world, taking care of standards-setting for client systems in a large company. For the most part, gone are the days of an IT department absolutely mandating configurations and software choices. Even if you try, people will work around the mandates.
The flip side? A lot of productivity is lost, especially if you don't protect your client PCs. University campuses are probably the worst, but I'm sure there's a bunch of medium-to-large businesses out there who let their users have full control of their machines.
The things that work for us so far are:
Keep track of all company-bought licenses. Try to force department heads to not buy software on their own. (This sometimes works and sometimes doesn't.)
Set the expectation that we only support what's on the list, anything beyond that is your problem but we'll be happy to give you a fresh disk image.
Don't let users have admin access on company-owned machines.
Limit some time-wasters like IM software (for the groups that can't be trusted) but be pretty liberal on most things.
Two words - User Education. Some may not listen, but others, especially in the tech-savvy crowd, tend to understand when we explain why they can't just bring in CDs from home and load up their own software.
I'll repeat a sentiment that I posted previously -- the new generation of workers understands technology. That doesn't mean they know exactly how computers work, but the support emphasis has definitely shifted from "I know nothing. Help me figure this out." to "My machine is busted" or "I've gotten myself in a bad spot. Help!" Growing up with easy-to-use computers and the web makes for a different mindset.
Coming down on this group of tech-savvy workers is just going to make your company look like a stick-in-the-mud, 1960s style authoritarian workplace. You won't get them to stay very long. I really think the only solution is to protect the network the best you can, and only limit behaviors that have clear potential dangers.
This is definitely a topic I can comment on. I'm one of the folks in charge of our client-side computing platforms where I work. So far, we've only limited our web browsing by blocking porn and gambling sites. Doing anything more than that is extremely difficult to explain to people. You can hit them over the head with it and tell them "no personal stuff at work" but they won't understand why.
All the pretty bandwidth piecharts showing MySpace as the #4 or #5 site by traffic volume don't mean a thing to newer, younger workers. They expect the ability to multitask, check 9 things at once, and keep their social networking profiles updated when worktime is slow. If you disallow it on your corporate network, they'll just goof off using their iPhones. Everyone who's graduated from school recently is a member of the "perceived infinite bandwidth" generation, has no idea how much a network connection costs ($49 a month like my DSL, right?) and isn't going to stay very long at a place with strict 1960s-style work rules.
That being said, there's definitely a dark side. It looks especially bad when your employees are in a public-facing area goofing off on YouTube when there's a line of customers forming in front of them. We're actually working on blocking access to social network from just customer service positions, but even that's a tough fight.
Especially if you have a lot of people working long hours, you just need to expect that people will get their personal stuff done during business hours. The nature of work is a little different now. You're not sitting for a nonstop 8-hour day processing a stack of papers, especially if you're in IT.
You can't win. If you block it, you're an evil slave driving old-school organization. If you don't, you either have to buy huge amounts of bandwidth or deal with slow performance of business applications. Even with QoS, sometimes you just can't get good network connections in some places to begin with.
Unfortunately, a lot of these systems have been based on the premise that end users either didn't have the technology or weren't sufficiently interested in hacking them. Most subway fare collection systems are the same way -- the manufacturer puts in some safeguards by storing data in a different way but it's all eventually hackable.
Security by obscurity only works until you can buy the technology your system is based on at Best Buy. Back in the '80s, when New York established EZPass, your garden variety hacker didn't have access to the proto-RFID technology that those tags are based on.
The bad thing is that once devices like toll passes are issued to drivers, it's expensive and really difficult to do an across the board replacement. If you make the device expensive enough to be field-upgradable, you risk making it too expensive to provide universally. Worse yet, you give hackers all sorts of fun possibilities when you include a flash device.
I guess the only fix is to store very little on the device and do all the processing server-side. This is especially important with stored-value cards like transit passes. The question then becomes how little data you can actually store and make the system work and identify only you.
I guess this could be split up into different groups -- IT professionals vs. IT security professionals.
IT professionals, unless they work in a particularly good situation, often deal with a lot of job dissatisfaction. They do a lot of behind-the-scenes work that no one ever sees, but is necessary to keep things up and running.
However, I'm friends with our security team, and they do deal with a lot more than the average IT person. First, they're constantly helping our legal department conduct investigations into whatever illegal thing one of our employees did. Second, they're always the ones right in the crosshairs when a system breach occurs. Third, they're universally hated. Whenever they enforce a requirement (no flash media devices, stronger password policies, etc.) it's always a hassle. No one ever says, "What a great job the security department is doing."
I've heard a lot of security people look at some of the crazy exploits that are out there and lament that people have way too much time on their hands. I agree with that one...
I think it's sort of like being a cop or an ER doctor. Both pay relatively well, but you're constantly dealing with the worst side of people.
This is a touchy subject for everyone, I'm sure. However, you have to admit there's some good nuggets of advice in there.
My background is in systems administration and engineering. We're not as bad off as software developers...yet. But I do know the day will come when it will be deemed too expensive to hire anyone but the best from my field locally too. Right or wrong, short-sighted or not, no one can compete with the greater numbers of lower-paid workers in other parts of the world. Look at what happened to manufacturing -- that's coming for almost every non-management job in the US and Europe. It's a done deal, we let it happen, and now we have to work with the resulting landscape.
So, if you want to stay employed, you have a couple of choices.
You could get out of the IT field and into something else, technical or non-technical. This country desperately needs good math and science teachers, for example.
You could go into management. It's stable, and you'll never be out of work if you can do the whole politics thing. (Not my bag though -- to me, IT project management is all about meetings, conference calls and bugging people you don't control to get things done.)
You could constantly improve your skills and become a true expert at what you do. That's one of the things the review of the book is advocating, and I think it's critical.
I freely admit that I'm not a big fan of outsourcing...projects take way too long because of the language barrier, incomplete requirements, and the difficulty of coordinating efforts. BUT...it's here. Instead of fighting and complaining about it, work within the system you're given. Become really good at what you do. Study. Keep learning outside of your skill set. Get yourself a reputation for being a problem solver.
Why do I say this? One of the tips was to never put your eggs in one basket. That's excellent advice. I'm constantly learning outside of my specialty because I know Microsoft isn't going to be the king forever.
Anyone who's tried hiring people lately knows that the field is still full of people who truly don't understand things beyond the narrow scope of duties they have. These are the "eggs in one basket people" and the most likely to be replaced if they are deemed too expensive. I would much rather hire a natural troubleshooter and problem solver who can figure out the details of a system after reading the manuals and playing a little. The innate ability has to be there. Everything else is teachable.
Some specialization is good too. You have to balance the need to be a good generalist with having a current, in-depth subset of your skills that you can market. Look at all the OpenVMS and IBM mainframe consultants out there. They print their own paychecks going from one weird specialist project to the other. Along the way, they pick up skills.
In summary, stay educated to stay employed. Never assume your job situation won't change, and be ready for anything.
I wonder what Microsoft's thinking. Vista does have _some_ nice features, but a very long list of things to worry about. Every one of my IT peers I've talked to (I'm a desktop systems guy) has said their large company is putting off Vista migrations and waiting for Windows 7. We are too, not because we hate it, but because it's just not necessary yet.
It's been a pretty bad combination of factors: - Features cut from the original Vista release that might have made it worth the pain - IT departments who just spent 6 years getting XP stable enough - Bad economy means that IT departments are cutting back, so it's not feasable to implement Vista even if you're a volume license customer. No one has time to research it properly with a reduced staff. - XP SP3 is out, and is looking really good. - Just a general "Oh no, here we go with a new OS again" malaise across IT departments in general.
Small businesses, on the other hand, are perfect Vista candidates. 3-user companies who don't run anything more complex than QuickBooks are Vista's target market right now. And now that it's on every computer you buy at any retail store, there's no reason for a small business to switch back. Large companies are basically not affected by June 30th because we can just buy Vista licenses and downgrade, which explains the inflated sales numbers.
On the "big company" side, I have lots of fun stuff to deal with. Internal web-based apps that were written when ActiveX was king. Business critical software last updated in 1996 and sometimes even before that. A constant mix of brand-new and 8-year-old hardware. Plus a user population that's not necessarily the earliest adopters.
I really hope Microsoft has something big planned for the next release. Swithing to Linux or Mac is totally not feasable for us (again, when you don't have 20 years of legacy Windows code to deal with, it's definitely a consideration.) It would take another major flop on their part to even think about migrating some of our business apps away from Windows.
I'm not surprised this happened...well, maybe I'm surprised that a security company would leave that kind of data on a laptop.
Fact is, this happens everywhere and it's going to get harder to manage. Unless you start taking people's laptops and even their desktop PCs away from them, you'll never stop it. Add to that the fact that you can get 16 GB flash drives and 80 GB iPods. The only ways to stop this are to (a) encrypt data, or (b) take users' toys away. Neither happens without a huge fight.
Encrypting laptops is a really big challenge. If you let users do it themselves (using vendor software, Windows EFS or others,) then they hold all the encryption keys and could make it impossible for you to get the data back in the event they get fired or quit. Implementing enterprise encryption is another road, but has its own set of problems. You have to have a full-time admin to keep the public key infrastructure up, revoke and reissue certs, etc. You also need to spend a large sum of money -- RSA and others make huge bucks every year selling enterprise-level disk encryption software. This is a very hard fight to win until something bad like this happens. And even if you get the software purchased, convincing the execs that you also need someone to look after it is tough.
Plus, you cannot stop a developer from taking the customer database home on a 1 TB disk drive to write/test software against. Unless you're disciplined enough to scrub any dev data of any customer information, it will be used. Even if you tell them they're fired if they take home data, being fired isn't the permanent black mark it used to be. Not everyone's a professional.
So, either completely limit access to data, or take toys away. Everything else is just a band-aid. I odn't mean to sound defeatist, but unless you give employees some incentive to protect customer privacy, they won't do it. Security is a major pain in the butt...even I think so. The key is to make security "not a pain."
Having worked for European companies in the States, I think it's a "business culture" thing. Europeans tend not to be as price-conscious when making business related purchases. US companies will fight until the bitter end negotiating over a few dollars, so software companies know they have to price competitively.
Not quite sure what drives it though; Europeans can be tough negotiators on most contracted services.
Take an example from my line of work -- air transport. Business class tickets sell very well in Europe, mainly because it's considered a perk once you get to a certain level. With the exception of consulting companies and others that can bill away expenses, most staffers and lower managers in the US ride in coach. Business and first are reserved for senior management, and even that requires justification when times get bad. If you're a road-warrior staff member, and fly legacy carriers, you'll eventually get to a point where (through FF miles) you're upgraded to business, but I've never worked for a company that would pay the extra money for a business class ticket, even on 17-hour torture flights!
I'm sure anyone in IT can relate to the concept of someone you'd rather not talk to, but have to leave a message for. I have several people like this that I need to work with. Having a conversation with them is like root canal therapy sometimes. Being able to leave them messages and not actually speak to them would definitely lower my daily stress levels.
Call me anti-social, but these people could drive anyone nuts.
Yes, it is true that large companies spend some money on research. It's not the same kind of spend we used to have though, and that won't change until companies don't have to constantly scramble to post big numbers every quarter.
Since this pressure is going to be there from now on, all research will continue to focus on a product the company can sell in a very short time. (Look at multi-touch surfaces rumored to be included in Windows 7 for example.)
There are two problems that will keep this short term focus going forever. The first is that everyone depends 100% on the stock market for their retirement now -- this wasn't the case in the 60s and 70s when Bell Labs, IBM, etc. were able to invest huge amounts of money in research. The second problem is that because everyone's responsible for their own retirement, they're constantly watching the market, making it impossible for a company to think long term. If you miss your numbers as CEO for more than a quarter or two, you're fired, even if you're doing the right things long-term.
I can't imagine a CEO being able to address a shareholder meeting and explain that research is important. Everyone would start shouting "Shut up and gimme my money!"
But isn't that what insurance is all about? If you insure 1000 people who never use your plan other than their yearly checkups, and 10 people who have heart transplants, cancer and other wacky chronic illnesses, then you use the premiums of the healthy people (plus wise investing on your part) to pay for the care of the heavy users. In addition, you build in enough in everybody's premium to make your profit.
Things like auto insurance use a modified version of this model. If you've had three DWIs in the past 5 years, you bet you'll pay much more than a safe driver. Even so, the court settlements from any one claim can cost an insurance company many millions of dollars. In this case, it makes sense to charge people with verifiably bad driving habits more. But, even safe drivers can have a tree fall on their car. Or that DWI guy can drive the wrong way on a road and cause a 50-car accident with 10 fatalities. Randomness is a factor, otherwise insurance plans would be nothing more than discount cards for the body shop.
In your model, insurance companies could set whatever price they want for something that's basic to survival in the modern world. Driving isn't a basic right, but being healthy is prety damn important! The problem comes when the insurance company tries to wiggle out of this model and just take everyone's money across the board.
Having your records online and available anywhere is great, but also requires that you trust the third party hosting them. This is one of the hurdles that hosted software companies have to overcome to get companies to sign up. In the case of something like Salesforce.com, you give up control of your CRM data, pay them a fee and hope that they don't get hacked or decide to start selling your data under the table.
This issue gets thorny when you deal with personal data like medical records. Insurance companies would love to get their hands on something like this, even on an unoffical basis. For most people covered by group health plans at work, insurers have to take the risk and insure everybody who applies from that group. Individual life and health insurance is a whole different matter. In many states, your insurer is allowed to charge more to insure sicker people. In the case of life insurance, certain conditions make it nearly impossible to buy insurance.
On the flip side, having a comprehensive electronic medical record would lower the cost of care significantly by eliminating all the paper shuffling and processing needed to check someone's history.
Think about what might happen if Google decides to sell Google Health to Aetna or United Healthcare someday in the future. They couldn't deny you officially, but could have a look at what you're posted in the past and find some other reason to deny you coverage.
That's not to say the idea of an electronic medical record is bad. It's just more comparible with a non-free-market health care system. If there was no incentive for someone to use the records to determine cost of care, then it would work. Public services are for the most part run with no expectation that you get back anything except social benefits -- look at public transport. For an example from the health community, look at the VA's EMR system. That agency's primary focus is providing the lowest cost care possible, and it's a publically funded plan. So an EMR makes sense because it saves the plan time and money.
This basically sounds like he's rationalizing in order to legitimize the fact he's making money from other peoples' misfortune. You are correct in your observation, I think. I've seen plenty of lazy IT workers who just do the minimum to keep their (very high salary) job, and I've seen committed workers who produce good quality stuff. He's probably colored by the fact that the lazy ones tend to complain very loudly while the good ones keep quiet and do their job. In my experience, there's also a lot more lazy people, adding to the observation.
The central problem is that we're stuck in the middle. We have to convince management that we're worth the extra money. This is sometimes impossible due to the very large salary difference. In addition, lower-level IT managers do their best to shield the top decision makers from things like missed deadlines, over-budget projects, etc. These major problems get rolled up into 2 or 3 bullet points on a PowerPoint slide. Similarly, all these cost numbers are rolled up into one line in a balance sheet. 100K for a developer vs. 20K for what seems to be an interchangeable developer is a no-brainer.
This is actually a big pet peeve of mine in the systems world. Ever since the Internet made patching software super-easy, every vendor on the planet has been rushing software out the door with major bugs in it. I've had big vendors tell me the same thing -- "Yep, we know about this bug. It's going to be fixed in the next service pack, due out next February." Some of them are real rookie bugs too, stuff like driver crashes due to memory access violations.
What's your solution though? There's no way universites are going to raise the barrier in their CS programs. I actually came into IT from the science field, so I'm not really well versed in what they teach. However, people like you have been complaining a lot lately that there's a lack of fundamentals. How do we improve the quality of CS graduates?
Many arguments about offshore development often are nothing more than xenophobic rants from people who have been displaced by cheaper workers. One of my relatives works for a large consulting firm who does tons of IT outsourcing engagements for large companies. He's got a different take on things...He told me that most of the people complaining about quality of offshore work is done by the same people sitting around on IM and surfing the web for 7 out of 8 hours a day.
Obviously, these two extremes aren't 100% indicative of the whole issue. The actual facts are:
Employers are shifting a lot of work offshore to take advantage of cheap labor. This is almost always the reason for doing this.
Workers in these countries do tend to have a better work ethic than Western programmers. Questions remain as to why -- my opinion is that there's a higher focus on education and a greater motivation to make money.
Even though the work ethic is better, projects tend to come in late. Maybe it's language, maybe it's the distance, whatever.
Quality tends to suffer. Why? Part of it has to do with skill level, but I think the other part is that requirements are filtered through several layers of project managers and analysts.
With these facts in mind, what's next? I'd hate to think that there will be no more purely technical jobs here. I'm not a project manager, and don't want to live in a country that can't do anything other than manage projects. On the other hand, how do you convince an employer that you can do a better job than someone who makes 10% of your salary? This is especially hazy in the enterprise software realm, where you have to build something that "just works", not "works great."
Part of me really wants to see the US IT workforce shrink. Getting people who are just not suited for the work into other jobs would probably be the best thing yet for code and system quality. Example pet peeves from my side of the house (systems) are developers who have no clue about things like code optimization and don't know the code they're working on inside and out.
The other part of me is a little worried about what I'm going to be doing in 10 years. I love problem solving and don't really want to give up an IT career!
I seriously believe that one of the reasons throwing money at the problem hasn't been working is that people who are implementing these things aren't the best possible candidates.
How many IT projects have you worked on where the company hires one of these huge consulting firms, spends millions of dollars, and still has problems after all is said and done? I think one of the problems is the business model of these firms. The head schmooze crowd takes the CIO for a round of golf or two, and convinces them that the firm is the answer to all their security questions. The next day, a bunch of barely-trained "security consultants" descend on the company and begin making all sorts of recommendations/purchases. Sounds cynical, but I've seen it many many times. It's also applicable for any system replacement project, development project, etc.
The other problem is marketing of security products. How many times have you heard from a relative, "Oh, I've got Norton Internet Security, I'm safe." Vendors have a lot of people convinced that if they install their toolset, they can totally drop their guard.
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All the analysis in the world on cloud computing boils down to a simple fact -- someone else owns your infrastructure and data. If you want to go down this road, your company has to answer these questions:
- Are we comfortable with letting someone else have our data, if they promise not to let it get stolen or use it themselves? Do we really trust that promise?
- Contracts and SLAs are all important, but will getting a payment or free service from a vendor for a 5-hour outage make up for all the lost business? If not, how big does that payout need to be?
- Is the vendor really competent enough to handle the service you're outsourcing to them? Vendors have been known to hire the lowest-possible-cost staff to manage things like this...
- How easy is it to get your data back if you want to leave? Are you stuck with the vendor forever?
- If any sort of app deployment is involved, is your dev, QA and engineering organization good enough so that rolling out to production isn't a messy "oops, let's fix that by manually tweaking the system while it's running" scenario? Vendors generally don't let you do that.
I think the concept really works well for commodity stuff like mail hosting. Whether you trust core business apps to the cloud really depends on your comfort level!
I have worked in a lot of IT positions, and every company I have worked for has always done all of their "real" decision-making on hacked-together spreadsheets. The truth is that the spreadsheet was one of the first "business analysis" tools that was intuitive enough for an end-user to really do power-user things.
That said, Excel and Access "applications" that glue organizations together are the bane of IT's existence. Despite what the sales guys say, all of the company's numbers come out of SAP, Oracle Financials, etc. and into one of these programs to do any useful work with them. I know I'm working on making Office 2007 available to those who want it, and getting some of these Excel and Access 97-era macros carried forward can be...challenging. Access is another horror story -- once a database hits 2 GB in size, file corruption is extremely likely, especially if multiple users are hitting the same database over a network.
If you ever get sick of software development or sysadmin work, and like pain, I guarantee there will be work available for anyone willing to wade through a million lines of VB spaghetti code written by an MBA who took an Excel class in 1996.
A lot of people might laugh at something like this, but I'm not. I don't work with tons of people who might be considered "nerds" but that's mainly because my industry is a little less tech-heavy than a typical IT company. But, I have worked with tons of nerdy consultants/contractors.
There's two main types -- the first is the cultural nerd. Many people in IT have different backgrounds and come from all over. Some may not be used to American culture or know how to act in certain situations. The second is the typical native-born stereotypical basement-dweller nerd. Working with one of these tends to be very difficult just because they annoy most "normals." I'm not a social genius either, but I know what is and is not appropriate in a work setting. I show up to work in clean clothes, shower regularly and really try to take an interest in whatever topic a coworker wants to talk about. Some people I work with really don't make this effort.
Even a class on "what to do in a work environment" would be a huge plus. How many times have you had to cut off a colleague who kept interrupting in business meetings and saying "No, you're wrong, that'll never work."
Anyone left stateside in IT in the next ten years or so is going to have a really hard time finding work if they can't at least interact with people.
These days, it's pretty much guaranteed that any PC you buy at retail will have Vista on it. Microsoft has done a pretty good job of addressing Vista performance concerns. I hear the newest service pack is pretty good.
However, how many IT people out there are dealing with a large number of older systems? For us, it really comes down to this -- we can potentially run Vista on a fair number of our systems. Others are right in the middle of the XP system requirements (P4, 512 MB RAM.) So which do we choose?
We're just small enough to not really have a formal hardware refresh cycle, so this is a major concern for us. Windows 7 will probably have the same problems regarding hardware resources. Do you put up with lousy performance on some of your machines, or stick with good performance overall?
I've always wondered how some countries are consistently able to produce tons of qualified scientists and engineers while the US and UK can't do it even with access to many more resources.
I've definitely seen some counter-examples from India and China, but the majority that I've worked with are at least passably intelligent, can troubleshoot and seem to have a better grasp of their subject than comparable Americans. Is it truly just a culture thing, or is their education system better?
I admit it, I'm an old geezer at 34. I write in complete sentences and check my spelling before sending out important communications. Most of my peers do not. I have seen many e-mails and other casual messages going out to our customers with tons of Web 2.0 speak in them.
I understand the fact that the world is moving on and communication is getting less formal. After all, most people don't send out formal business memos anymore; they write e-mail and use IM software. However, I still think people need to be able to spell and write clearly. Exposing kids to more of the Web 2.0 stuff before teaching them how to write formally is just going to make things worse IMO. Feel free to disagree, but how many times have you gotten an e-mail from a co-worker with one or more of the following:
I'm really just curious how much of my concern is due to the fact that I'm "between generations," and how much of it is the geriatric fool stuck in the 1980s/90s talking...
And no, I'm not a grammar Nazi. Readable is just fine for me -- grammatically perfect is less of a concern.
There are a couple of reasons a company has an IT department:
1. Provide technology more efficiently by letting specialists handle it. This is the kind of maintenance work and break/fix stuff that most end-users associate with IT.
2. Utilize specialists to do stuff with all the company data that goes beyond the basics. For example, if you can write automate a process that eliminates someone doing full-time manual work, you've just saved a bunch of money.
Companies without formal IT departments are grouped around two extremes. Most are small businesses these days. One side is the "clueless" side. This is the company where the boss goes out and buys PCs from Best Buy, consumer-grade hardware/software, etc. and has a cobbled-together network environment. Usually, the boss's nephew who's "real good with computers" has set the place up and let it fester for years. Any small-business contractor can give you a million horror stories like this. The other extreme is the "tech-savvy wild west" environment. Everyone is allowed to bring in their own machines, their own software, etc. Both of these extremes tend to have a lot of downtime. The ones in the middle strike a happy balance -- they'll often bring in a consultant to help them get up and running, and follow most recommendations.
Places with IT departments tend to take things a little slower, and they frustrate users who come from environments like the above. Having IT do simple things like not let you load your own software so they can keep track of who owns what is just the first step. The next reason you're there is to help the company do useful things with the technology they've bought. (This is a huge disconnect with a lot of IT people. When everything is over with, it's all about how much you actually contribute. If you're just doing maintenance, you're always going to be looked on as an expense, not an asset.)
I've never been a big-time political activist, and I'd say I have a healthy skepticism of _anything_ having to do with politicians. However, I really do think we'll be better off with Obama in the long run. Here's why:
I'm actually hoping for a bigger social change than any one person can do, but we'll see how well that goes. My hope is that credit will continue to be difficult to get, forcing people to cut back on consumption. Once that happens, people won't be scrambling for that next promotion at work because they need more money to feed the debt monster. People will then spend less time at work, and maybe pay attention to their kids again. Education may improve as a result, or it may not. Long-run, if wages go lower and people spend less, maybe we can actually compete with the foriegn labor markets (at least after you consider things like the time it takes to clean up a project after it's been delivered by an outsourcer.) This would be an extremely harsh transition -- we've been used to having access to anything we want for so long. However, the rest of the world lives this way, so we should be able to adapt.
Anyone who says that the President can't really do anything on his own is correct. But, I think voting in McCain is just inviting more conflict with the rest of the world.
This always seems to go in 5-to-7-year cycles, but this time it might actually stick given the always-on, always plentiful bandwidth we're getting now.
Thin clients are amazing in situations where you have an average office-worker PC doing a single task (call center, POS, reservations agents, etc.) You can connect them to the terminal server of your choice. If the users really need a true computer, you can give them a virtual desktop or blade PC (By virtual desktop, cutting through the hype I mean access to a sufficiently-powered VM.) When you have many hundreds of these same PCs doing the exact same task, it's stupid not to at least consider thin clients.
The only drawback is that you actually have to start managing your network like people did back in the mainframe days. You can't have a bunch of hacks throwing in whatever updates, applications and patches they want whenever they want. Companies typically don't want to hear about this -- they hear "get rid of 10000 PCs" from the salesman on the golf course and don't realize it means you just shift all the complexity to the back end. If you're ready for it, it's definitely a cost and time saver. If you're not, you're bound to have a day where users go home early because they don't have a "computer" that works.
Arguably, most PCs aren't very useful without a network connection. However, having a device with some offline storage makes my train commute bearable. I can catch up on reading articles, edit a document, etc. without having to be on the network.
Thin clients are definitely overhyped now, but I can definitely see the day where most computing devices in end-user hands look more like a cell phone than a laptop. I dread that day because I hate typing and reading on a 4-inch LCD. Eithe way, like I said above, it might stick now that network access is less of an issue for most people.
The answer is, you really have to design your systems in a secure way so that some new kid can plug in his iPhone and not cause havoc. It's a totally new world and I'm even trying to get used to it. Feeling like a fuddy-duddy in your early 30s is scary sometimes.
I work in the client-side computing world, taking care of standards-setting for client systems in a large company. For the most part, gone are the days of an IT department absolutely mandating configurations and software choices. Even if you try, people will work around the mandates.
The flip side? A lot of productivity is lost, especially if you don't protect your client PCs. University campuses are probably the worst, but I'm sure there's a bunch of medium-to-large businesses out there who let their users have full control of their machines.
The things that work for us so far are:
I'll repeat a sentiment that I posted previously -- the new generation of workers understands technology. That doesn't mean they know exactly how computers work, but the support emphasis has definitely shifted from "I know nothing. Help me figure this out." to "My machine is busted" or "I've gotten myself in a bad spot. Help!" Growing up with easy-to-use computers and the web makes for a different mindset.
Coming down on this group of tech-savvy workers is just going to make your company look like a stick-in-the-mud, 1960s style authoritarian workplace. You won't get them to stay very long. I really think the only solution is to protect the network the best you can, and only limit behaviors that have clear potential dangers.
This is definitely a topic I can comment on. I'm one of the folks in charge of our client-side computing platforms where I work. So far, we've only limited our web browsing by blocking porn and gambling sites. Doing anything more than that is extremely difficult to explain to people. You can hit them over the head with it and tell them "no personal stuff at work" but they won't understand why.
All the pretty bandwidth piecharts showing MySpace as the #4 or #5 site by traffic volume don't mean a thing to newer, younger workers. They expect the ability to multitask, check 9 things at once, and keep their social networking profiles updated when worktime is slow. If you disallow it on your corporate network, they'll just goof off using their iPhones. Everyone who's graduated from school recently is a member of the "perceived infinite bandwidth" generation, has no idea how much a network connection costs ($49 a month like my DSL, right?) and isn't going to stay very long at a place with strict 1960s-style work rules.
That being said, there's definitely a dark side. It looks especially bad when your employees are in a public-facing area goofing off on YouTube when there's a line of customers forming in front of them. We're actually working on blocking access to social network from just customer service positions, but even that's a tough fight.
Especially if you have a lot of people working long hours, you just need to expect that people will get their personal stuff done during business hours. The nature of work is a little different now. You're not sitting for a nonstop 8-hour day processing a stack of papers, especially if you're in IT.
You can't win. If you block it, you're an evil slave driving old-school organization. If you don't, you either have to buy huge amounts of bandwidth or deal with slow performance of business applications. Even with QoS, sometimes you just can't get good network connections in some places to begin with.
Unfortunately, a lot of these systems have been based on the premise that end users either didn't have the technology or weren't sufficiently interested in hacking them. Most subway fare collection systems are the same way -- the manufacturer puts in some safeguards by storing data in a different way but it's all eventually hackable.
Security by obscurity only works until you can buy the technology your system is based on at Best Buy. Back in the '80s, when New York established EZPass, your garden variety hacker didn't have access to the proto-RFID technology that those tags are based on.
The bad thing is that once devices like toll passes are issued to drivers, it's expensive and really difficult to do an across the board replacement. If you make the device expensive enough to be field-upgradable, you risk making it too expensive to provide universally. Worse yet, you give hackers all sorts of fun possibilities when you include a flash device.
I guess the only fix is to store very little on the device and do all the processing server-side. This is especially important with stored-value cards like transit passes. The question then becomes how little data you can actually store and make the system work and identify only you.
I guess this could be split up into different groups -- IT professionals vs. IT security professionals.
IT professionals, unless they work in a particularly good situation, often deal with a lot of job dissatisfaction. They do a lot of behind-the-scenes work that no one ever sees, but is necessary to keep things up and running.
However, I'm friends with our security team, and they do deal with a lot more than the average IT person. First, they're constantly helping our legal department conduct investigations into whatever illegal thing one of our employees did. Second, they're always the ones right in the crosshairs when a system breach occurs. Third, they're universally hated. Whenever they enforce a requirement (no flash media devices, stronger password policies, etc.) it's always a hassle. No one ever says, "What a great job the security department is doing."
I've heard a lot of security people look at some of the crazy exploits that are out there and lament that people have way too much time on their hands. I agree with that one...
I think it's sort of like being a cop or an ER doctor. Both pay relatively well, but you're constantly dealing with the worst side of people.
This is a touchy subject for everyone, I'm sure. However, you have to admit there's some good nuggets of advice in there.
My background is in systems administration and engineering. We're not as bad off as software developers...yet. But I do know the day will come when it will be deemed too expensive to hire anyone but the best from my field locally too. Right or wrong, short-sighted or not, no one can compete with the greater numbers of lower-paid workers in other parts of the world. Look at what happened to manufacturing -- that's coming for almost every non-management job in the US and Europe. It's a done deal, we let it happen, and now we have to work with the resulting landscape.
So, if you want to stay employed, you have a couple of choices.
I freely admit that I'm not a big fan of outsourcing...projects take way too long because of the language barrier, incomplete requirements, and the difficulty of coordinating efforts. BUT...it's here. Instead of fighting and complaining about it, work within the system you're given. Become really good at what you do. Study. Keep learning outside of your skill set. Get yourself a reputation for being a problem solver.
Why do I say this? One of the tips was to never put your eggs in one basket. That's excellent advice. I'm constantly learning outside of my specialty because I know Microsoft isn't going to be the king forever.
Anyone who's tried hiring people lately knows that the field is still full of people who truly don't understand things beyond the narrow scope of duties they have. These are the "eggs in one basket people" and the most likely to be replaced if they are deemed too expensive. I would much rather hire a natural troubleshooter and problem solver who can figure out the details of a system after reading the manuals and playing a little. The innate ability has to be there. Everything else is teachable.
Some specialization is good too. You have to balance the need to be a good generalist with having a current, in-depth subset of your skills that you can market. Look at all the OpenVMS and IBM mainframe consultants out there. They print their own paychecks going from one weird specialist project to the other. Along the way, they pick up skills.
In summary, stay educated to stay employed. Never assume your job situation won't change, and be ready for anything.
I wonder what Microsoft's thinking. Vista does have _some_ nice features, but a very long list of things to worry about. Every one of my IT peers I've talked to (I'm a desktop systems guy) has said their large company is putting off Vista migrations and waiting for Windows 7. We are too, not because we hate it, but because it's just not necessary yet.
It's been a pretty bad combination of factors:
- Features cut from the original Vista release that might have made it worth the pain
- IT departments who just spent 6 years getting XP stable enough
- Bad economy means that IT departments are cutting back, so it's not feasable to implement Vista even if you're a volume license customer. No one has time to research it properly with a reduced staff.
- XP SP3 is out, and is looking really good.
- Just a general "Oh no, here we go with a new OS again" malaise across IT departments in general.
Small businesses, on the other hand, are perfect Vista candidates. 3-user companies who don't run anything more complex than QuickBooks are Vista's target market right now. And now that it's on every computer you buy at any retail store, there's no reason for a small business to switch back. Large companies are basically not affected by June 30th because we can just buy Vista licenses and downgrade, which explains the inflated sales numbers.
On the "big company" side, I have lots of fun stuff to deal with. Internal web-based apps that were written when ActiveX was king. Business critical software last updated in 1996 and sometimes even before that. A constant mix of brand-new and 8-year-old hardware. Plus a user population that's not necessarily the earliest adopters.
I really hope Microsoft has something big planned for the next release. Swithing to Linux or Mac is totally not feasable for us (again, when you don't have 20 years of legacy Windows code to deal with, it's definitely a consideration.) It would take another major flop on their part to even think about migrating some of our business apps away from Windows.
I'm not surprised this happened...well, maybe I'm surprised that a security company would leave that kind of data on a laptop.
Fact is, this happens everywhere and it's going to get harder to manage. Unless you start taking people's laptops and even their desktop PCs away from them, you'll never stop it. Add to that the fact that you can get 16 GB flash drives and 80 GB iPods. The only ways to stop this are to (a) encrypt data, or (b) take users' toys away. Neither happens without a huge fight.
Encrypting laptops is a really big challenge. If you let users do it themselves (using vendor software, Windows EFS or others,) then they hold all the encryption keys and could make it impossible for you to get the data back in the event they get fired or quit. Implementing enterprise encryption is another road, but has its own set of problems. You have to have a full-time admin to keep the public key infrastructure up, revoke and reissue certs, etc. You also need to spend a large sum of money -- RSA and others make huge bucks every year selling enterprise-level disk encryption software. This is a very hard fight to win until something bad like this happens. And even if you get the software purchased, convincing the execs that you also need someone to look after it is tough.
Plus, you cannot stop a developer from taking the customer database home on a 1 TB disk drive to write/test software against. Unless you're disciplined enough to scrub any dev data of any customer information, it will be used. Even if you tell them they're fired if they take home data, being fired isn't the permanent black mark it used to be. Not everyone's a professional.
So, either completely limit access to data, or take toys away. Everything else is just a band-aid. I odn't mean to sound defeatist, but unless you give employees some incentive to protect customer privacy, they won't do it. Security is a major pain in the butt...even I think so. The key is to make security "not a pain."
Having worked for European companies in the States, I think it's a "business culture" thing. Europeans tend not to be as price-conscious when making business related purchases. US companies will fight until the bitter end negotiating over a few dollars, so software companies know they have to price competitively.
Not quite sure what drives it though; Europeans can be tough negotiators on most contracted services.
Take an example from my line of work -- air transport. Business class tickets sell very well in Europe, mainly because it's considered a perk once you get to a certain level. With the exception of consulting companies and others that can bill away expenses, most staffers and lower managers in the US ride in coach. Business and first are reserved for senior management, and even that requires justification when times get bad. If you're a road-warrior staff member, and fly legacy carriers, you'll eventually get to a point where (through FF miles) you're upgraded to business, but I've never worked for a company that would pay the extra money for a business class ticket, even on 17-hour torture flights!
Maybe there's some parallels to software too.
I'm sure anyone in IT can relate to the concept of someone you'd rather not talk to, but have to leave a message for. I have several people like this that I need to work with. Having a conversation with them is like root canal therapy sometimes. Being able to leave them messages and not actually speak to them would definitely lower my daily stress levels.
Call me anti-social, but these people could drive anyone nuts.
Yes, it is true that large companies spend some money on research. It's not the same kind of spend we used to have though, and that won't change until companies don't have to constantly scramble to post big numbers every quarter.
Since this pressure is going to be there from now on, all research will continue to focus on a product the company can sell in a very short time. (Look at multi-touch surfaces rumored to be included in Windows 7 for example.)
There are two problems that will keep this short term focus going forever. The first is that everyone depends 100% on the stock market for their retirement now -- this wasn't the case in the 60s and 70s when Bell Labs, IBM, etc. were able to invest huge amounts of money in research. The second problem is that because everyone's responsible for their own retirement, they're constantly watching the market, making it impossible for a company to think long term. If you miss your numbers as CEO for more than a quarter or two, you're fired, even if you're doing the right things long-term.
I can't imagine a CEO being able to address a shareholder meeting and explain that research is important. Everyone would start shouting "Shut up and gimme my money!"
But isn't that what insurance is all about? If you insure 1000 people who never use your plan other than their yearly checkups, and 10 people who have heart transplants, cancer and other wacky chronic illnesses, then you use the premiums of the healthy people (plus wise investing on your part) to pay for the care of the heavy users. In addition, you build in enough in everybody's premium to make your profit.
Things like auto insurance use a modified version of this model. If you've had three DWIs in the past 5 years, you bet you'll pay much more than a safe driver. Even so, the court settlements from any one claim can cost an insurance company many millions of dollars. In this case, it makes sense to charge people with verifiably bad driving habits more. But, even safe drivers can have a tree fall on their car. Or that DWI guy can drive the wrong way on a road and cause a 50-car accident with 10 fatalities. Randomness is a factor, otherwise insurance plans would be nothing more than discount cards for the body shop.
In your model, insurance companies could set whatever price they want for something that's basic to survival in the modern world. Driving isn't a basic right, but being healthy is prety damn important! The problem comes when the insurance company tries to wiggle out of this model and just take everyone's money across the board.
Having your records online and available anywhere is great, but also requires that you trust the third party hosting them. This is one of the hurdles that hosted software companies have to overcome to get companies to sign up. In the case of something like Salesforce.com, you give up control of your CRM data, pay them a fee and hope that they don't get hacked or decide to start selling your data under the table.
This issue gets thorny when you deal with personal data like medical records. Insurance companies would love to get their hands on something like this, even on an unoffical basis. For most people covered by group health plans at work, insurers have to take the risk and insure everybody who applies from that group. Individual life and health insurance is a whole different matter. In many states, your insurer is allowed to charge more to insure sicker people. In the case of life insurance, certain conditions make it nearly impossible to buy insurance.
On the flip side, having a comprehensive electronic medical record would lower the cost of care significantly by eliminating all the paper shuffling and processing needed to check someone's history.
Think about what might happen if Google decides to sell Google Health to Aetna or United Healthcare someday in the future. They couldn't deny you officially, but could have a look at what you're posted in the past and find some other reason to deny you coverage.
That's not to say the idea of an electronic medical record is bad. It's just more comparible with a non-free-market health care system. If there was no incentive for someone to use the records to determine cost of care, then it would work. Public services are for the most part run with no expectation that you get back anything except social benefits -- look at public transport. For an example from the health community, look at the VA's EMR system. That agency's primary focus is providing the lowest cost care possible, and it's a publically funded plan. So an EMR makes sense because it saves the plan time and money.
The central problem is that we're stuck in the middle. We have to convince management that we're worth the extra money. This is sometimes impossible due to the very large salary difference. In addition, lower-level IT managers do their best to shield the top decision makers from things like missed deadlines, over-budget projects, etc. These major problems get rolled up into 2 or 3 bullet points on a PowerPoint slide. Similarly, all these cost numbers are rolled up into one line in a balance sheet. 100K for a developer vs. 20K for what seems to be an interchangeable developer is a no-brainer.
This is actually a big pet peeve of mine in the systems world. Ever since the Internet made patching software super-easy, every vendor on the planet has been rushing software out the door with major bugs in it. I've had big vendors tell me the same thing -- "Yep, we know about this bug. It's going to be fixed in the next service pack, due out next February." Some of them are real rookie bugs too, stuff like driver crashes due to memory access violations.
What's your solution though? There's no way universites are going to raise the barrier in their CS programs. I actually came into IT from the science field, so I'm not really well versed in what they teach. However, people like you have been complaining a lot lately that there's a lack of fundamentals. How do we improve the quality of CS graduates?
Many arguments about offshore development often are nothing more than xenophobic rants from people who have been displaced by cheaper workers. One of my relatives works for a large consulting firm who does tons of IT outsourcing engagements for large companies. He's got a different take on things...He told me that most of the people complaining about quality of offshore work is done by the same people sitting around on IM and surfing the web for 7 out of 8 hours a day.
Obviously, these two extremes aren't 100% indicative of the whole issue. The actual facts are:
With these facts in mind, what's next? I'd hate to think that there will be no more purely technical jobs here. I'm not a project manager, and don't want to live in a country that can't do anything other than manage projects. On the other hand, how do you convince an employer that you can do a better job than someone who makes 10% of your salary? This is especially hazy in the enterprise software realm, where you have to build something that "just works", not "works great."
Part of me really wants to see the US IT workforce shrink. Getting people who are just not suited for the work into other jobs would probably be the best thing yet for code and system quality. Example pet peeves from my side of the house (systems) are developers who have no clue about things like code optimization and don't know the code they're working on inside and out.
The other part of me is a little worried about what I'm going to be doing in 10 years. I love problem solving and don't really want to give up an IT career!
I seriously believe that one of the reasons throwing money at the problem hasn't been working is that people who are implementing these things aren't the best possible candidates.
How many IT projects have you worked on where the company hires one of these huge consulting firms, spends millions of dollars, and still has problems after all is said and done? I think one of the problems is the business model of these firms. The head schmooze crowd takes the CIO for a round of golf or two, and convinces them that the firm is the answer to all their security questions. The next day, a bunch of barely-trained "security consultants" descend on the company and begin making all sorts of recommendations/purchases. Sounds cynical, but I've seen it many many times. It's also applicable for any system replacement project, development project, etc.
The other problem is marketing of security products. How many times have you heard from a relative, "Oh, I've got Norton Internet Security, I'm safe." Vendors have a lot of people convinced that if they install their toolset, they can totally drop their guard.