The responses to the article so far kind of miss one point. One man's new and exciting is not necessary everyone's. Every person who works in IT walks the line between the geek and the business world.
Theorem #1 of IT-Business Interaction: - "Normal" business people do not care _at all_ about the intricacies of computers. Corollary: - "IT people" care deeply about the intricacies of computers. Inference: - "Normals" and "IT people" do not find the same things exciting.
Business people could care less if their website was hosted in IIS, LAMP or whatever. As long as they can connect to it and customers can spend money on it, they're happy. Same thing with office software. Business users use Microsoft Office or some other package. They don't care that Linux has 5 or 6 YetAnotherCoolUltraRadOfficeSuite titles in the source repository. They care that Office functions exactly the way they learned it in training class, and what's going on tonight when they get home. Period. Anyone who says otherwise has never supported pure business users of computers.
IT people live for this stuff. We love tweaking and tuning our computers. We'll run 19 different Office applications and six different window managers/app frameworks because we can. That's why Linux has such a following in the geek community and on the server end of IT. It's less popular on the desktop simply because there's no reason for "normals" to switch.
If Microsoft ported Office to Linux, I could see business people considering a switch. Same thing goes for Autodesk porting AutoCAD or something similar. Until then, there's nothing compelling to get non-geeks to switch. On the other hand, there's tons and tons of cool stuff that geeks get excited over on the Linux side.
I work with Windows and Linux systems at work. When I come home, I do my computing on a Mac. I think Applie finally has a winning combo with OS X, an Intel-based platform that will also boot Windows, and peoples' change in computing habits. Some of the things Apple got right in OS X that they haven't done so well on in the past are going to help the transition. First, you've got the interoperability thing, which keeps getting better as versions of OS X increase. You have a powerful OS underneath a bulletproof wall of GUI eye candy. If you want the command prompt and unix-like functionality, it's there. Otherwise, you don't have to see it.
One other thing Apple seems to be doing is reducing the importance of a structured filesystem. If you open iPhoto, you see a set of photos, not a list of filenames. Same with iTunes. Something that I think computer people forget is that "normals" don't care about computers. Business users want to do their jobs and leave. Home users want to fill their iPods, and send pictures of the kids to Grandma. Making it so users don't have to remember how to navigate through a folder structure or other "computer stuff" really makes it easier to use.
I don't know what will make it into the final version of Vista, but I'm sure they're going to take a stab at this too. Now all Apple has to work on is convincing people that the Mac is worth the premium price they get for it. That seems to be the #1 argument I hear about why someone would choose a Windows box over a Mac.
I'm actually surprised to see one of these "company blogs" being used by someone not in the marketing or PR department. The poster should have been a little more cognizant of where she was posting this information. I thought that most people realized that internal blogs were strictly there for marketing/progaganda purposes.
I'm also kind of curious about why the poster didn't follow Rule #1 of contracting...do your job, stay invisible, and collect your paychecks. This has been true in every place I've worked where contractors were used. Any mistakes by a contractor meant they were instantly out the door, which explains why a lot of sysadmin jobs are contracted. Mail server went down for an hour? New sysadmin from the agency tomorrow.
Even with that though, I can't believe they'd go to the trouble of firing her. They're within their rights to delete the posting, since it's their blog on their intranet. It shows a little paranoia on their part about not letting unofficial opinions get out. Which is wierd, because that was what company blogging was supposed to be all about; "open, spontaneous communication" among the employees.
If file trading is measured in terms of ease of use, then the number of available outlets has dropped. Things like Napster and the WinMX utility used to make file swapping incredibly easy even for people who weren't computer savvy. Now it takes a little work to get what you want. Plus, the major public file sharing networks are full of incomplete files, viruses and other garbage that most people don't want to deal with. In that way, people are either turning to harder-to-use file sharing techniques or giving up and getting a "real" copy of the media from a service that you know is good.
Your average user is using LimeWare and used to typing words into a search box. Doing this these days will usually yield you one or two real copies, and hundreds of viruse files or trojans.
SO the moral of the story is that the people are to blame for a) not preventing your government for bringing in anti-social work ethics (a.k.a capitalism) and b) for accepting the situation enforced onto you by your employee (bring back the Unions).
Not as easy as you think...it's really tough to unionize the "new world" of work. There's nothing stopping an employer whose employees strike from moving the work to some other country. That, and the techie pupolation really doesn't think unions are a good idea (even after their fifth 80-hour week in a row.) You can't easily get a new construction crew overnight, or a new set of electrical contractors to work on your building after the other ones leave. However, there are offshore coding and sysadmin firms clamoring for business who would be more than happy to step in.
I would definitely like to see more vacation time and less invasion on personal time, but that costs money.
No one wants to come out and say it, but the outsourcing thing is probably driven a lot by our lack of work ethic. I think it's actually driven by a couple of things:
1. Cost (duh) 2. Lack of competence in existing labor pool 3. The outsourced labor pool is able to work harder than the existing one for less money.
When you outsource work to a culture where hard work and intelligence is superior to everyting else, it's hard to come back to your native labor pool and watch them leave exactly at 5 PM. Even when they've screwed up something, my experience is that the foriegn outsourcers will work non-stop to fix the problem. We just don't do that, for a variety of reasons. Partially, we're inherently lazy. More so, we don't see the point. People in this country who work hard don't get rewarded like they used to. Worse yet, those who spend the most time avoiding work tend to rise to the highest positions.
It's just a totally different situation in countries like India, Japan and China...you're pushed to the limit frmm an early age to succeed in those cultures. If you fail in school, it's a disastrous thing. Ever wonder why we can't produce competent scientists and engineers? That's why. We're not into pushing kids...but you can bet any kid I have will be a study-robot to keep up with the rest of the world.
Slacking is great, but it will eventually undo the entire technical labor force here.
If you're going to expect an IT paycheck, get hip to what it is that generates the demand for what IT does, and what it means to be worth the money. That sounds rather vague, but if you follow the other advice you're seeing here (about how to get acquainted with various languages, coding structures, etc) you're only partway into a successful scenario. You'll be far more likely to be paid to learn the interesting new things that come along if the organization you're working for sees that you're interested in the bigger picture.
Very important, and often overlooked. The way I often summarize this is "They're not really paying you to play with computers all day." You have to be smart on both the technology and the business side of the fence. I see great techies coming into the field I work in (transportation) and get frustrated because they really don't know what goes on behind the ticket counter and how they're connected to it. Consequently, IT departments get a bad reputation because they're just perceived as a necessary evil to keep the business running.
Good point you're making...it really is much harder for a total newbie to get a solid start from zero knowledge these days. I think it's partially due to the fact that so much of the earlier computing era is hidden behind well-crafted user interfaces designed to keep you out of trouble.
I'm really dating myself here, but my first exposure to computers was with an inexpensive Commodore home machine that shipped with manuals detailing the entire memory map of the system. With 4K of RAM and all the specs published, it would be very easy to write your own software, which was probably the point. Fast forward to today, and you get way too much to deal with when you get a computer. It used to be really simple to create a "Hello world" or even something more complex in BASIC or some other language. Now, at least on the Windows side, you have a development environment that, to me, is very hard to get going with in anything but Visual Basic. The document object model for web development makes sense to me, but Windows forms programming seems like way too much effort to learn. Besides, grunt coding work is all going to be overseas soon anyway...
Since computing is so pervasive now, you really have to pick a branch to learn more about and do as much hands-on research as you can. As an IT professional (sysadmin, non-developer type,) I could never possibly keep my focus on every single new system, new trend, etc. There's just too much information to digest and still have a life.
The way I always pick up something new is find a neat project online, or start from the perspective of solving an existing problem I have. It's a fun, challenging and often really frustrating way to learn stuff. THe fun thing is going back after a few years and shaking your head about the crazy, inelegant way you learned Technology X.
One other important thing...in the computing / IT world, you're always learning. Even if you end up doing the same type of thing, the way you do that type of thing can and does change overnight. Just ask anyone who's worked in corporate IT from the mainframe era to the PC era to the client/server era and now back to the mainframe-style centralized computing era. If constant change is what you're looking for, welcome!!
It's admirable to try to get students interested in science, but I don't think that's going to happen until a major change of some kind occurs. Not that it was ever "cool" to be a smart kid, but it seems like intelligence is more actively discouraged with kids these days. Here's the problems I see with science's image today:
1. Older kids aren't stupid. They see their techie parents losing jobs and having their salaries cut because people half a world away work for a lot less and have a better work ethic in most cases. Given those facts, would you work your butt off in school and grad school for years on end to end up with a low-paying job, if you could find one?
2. Kids also see that getting an MBA or a law degree is an instant ticket to success with much less hard work. Against that, science doesn't have a chance with anyone but the most hardcore types.
3. For whatever reason, schools don't seem to be attracting the world's best teachers. I had some really excellent math and science teachers in my school career who got me interested in the material. Unless you have a really good teacher in an intro. science class, you'll never enjoy the subject.
4. I'm probably going to piss off a lot of people now, but the trend towards religious fundamentalism in the US really hurts science as well. Religion and science don't mix. When enough of the religious crazies get into powerful positions, projects don't get funded. Examples of the problem are the whole evolution debate, stem cell research, etc. Until we get a moderate base of elected officials in office again, this will continue.
I don't know what it will take to fix the problem, but anything that can be done is better than nothing!
Sending an e-mail to someone takes very little effort. You open your e-mail program, type out a message, address it and send it. Submitting a document to a SharePoint site or composing a wiki article adds an extra set of steps, even if they're easy. The current version of SharePoint is especially bad for easy editing of content...people I know who do use it just use it as a document dump because they don't like the web editing details.
Collaboration software that can accept inpot in the form of e-mails addressed to different sections of the site might fix this problem. However, the current culture says you have to answer your e-mails within a few hours of receiving them. Do we expect people to take time out, open the collaboration site, log in, get into editing mode, compose their message in whatever formatting language the site requires, then submit it?
IT people would love to see desktop Linux take root. I know I would; it could potentially solve a lot of support headaches.
Here's one thing that's holding the Linux desktop back...standards. Non-technical users know a superset of the following things about their computer: - To log on in the morning, I press Ctrl+Alt+Del, enter my e-mail address and password, and click OK. To log off, I use Start -> Shut Down. - To read my e-mail, I use {Outlook | Notes | GroupWise | something else}. - Ctrl+O opens a file. Ctrl+S saves it. Alt+F4 closes a window. Alt+Tab switches apps, etc. - To write a document, I use Word. I know 500 key combimations and tricks to get my work done. - To use a spreadsheet, I open Excel. I also know 500 key combos and tricks. - To write a presentation, I use PowerPoint. If I'm in sales, I could practically code the next version of PowerPoint. If I'm a normal user, I know a few tricks to get slides written. - To browse the Internet, I use IE. - To use my USB flash drive / iPod / scanner / printer, I plug it in and go. (Microsoft really works with vendors to make sure devices work as advertised in all but the screwiest of configurations.)
What people in IT don't realize is that users do not care what technology is new or cool. Users want to do the job they are hired for, go home and spend time with the family. Their computer is a tool, nothing more. It's like a phone or copier to them. They learned Windows and Office, and if a replacement doesn't work exactly as the old one did, they'll resist it.
If the Linux distributions put their strength behind one core set of applications, and also made Linux all but invisible to users who don't want the command line, then a real contender against Windows will emerge. Even Microsoft is worried about people adopting Vista at the corporate level because of the huge system requirements. A well-organized, standard Linux with no complexities exposed to the end-user would be a welcome change in some companies.
"The IT department at my company (approximately some 500 people) is showing signs of incompetence"
On one hand, don't forget that IT people aren't all geniuses. We don't know everything, and those of us who proclaim to really need an attitude adjustment. Systems fail, downtime occurs. Good IT departments manage things well and fix failures quickly.
On the other hand, if your IT department really is a bunch of boobs, then you have a right to complain. Just keep complaining until those on top listen. It might take a board member experiencing a whole day without their e-mail or computer because of a screw-up, but incompetence is almost always revealed.
As a company grows, bad hiring is more probable. Bad hiring is made worse by the need to hastily replace IT people. Since most IT people still hop jobs with incredible frequency (2 years is the average, I think), they often leave their former employers with an immediate need, and few qualified people to fill the job for the salary they're asking. Also, the transient nature of IT workers means they don't necessaruily understand the way your business uses the commodity technology skills they have.
I firmly believe that the only US IT people who will have jobs in the future are those who can be responsive. It's definitely time to for us let go of some of the iron-fist, "we are God, you are stupid users" mentality. Those who do, and can play nice with the business side, will be rewarded with regular salary increases and stable employment. It's going to become even more important to retain IT talent in the "proprietary" sections of your business when you farm out all the commodity stuff (backups, server admin, etc.)
Sounds like the typical reaction to one or two isolated cases of game-induced violence.
When will people realize that kids don't need to be protected? When I was younger, it was normal to go around playing with (toy) guns, and most parents let their kids run around wherever they wished. Now parents lock their kids away, and they aren't allowed to be kids. Kids need to be desensitzied to things at an early age so that they don't turn out soft. Video game violence isn't going to hurt anyone other than the extremely stupid or mentally handicapped kids who can't separate reality from fantasy.
I tend to agree, although don't forget that cubicles are a huge imporvement over rows and rows of desks with zero privacy whatsoever. Personally, I'd rather have an office, or at least a cubicle-sized space with a door I can close. It's very distracting for some people to hear everyone's phone conversations, music choices, etc. When I work on a problem, I tend to go lock myself in a lab or some other closed space so I can have "alone time" and carefully consider things.
It wouldn't be hard at all to give current cubicles full-sized walls and doors. I think it would greatly improve productivity. Think of how many times you've had to listen to people talking two feet away from you while you're trying to concentrate.
One of the main barriers to adoption is the fact that you can't oversee your staff like you can in a cubicle farm or open office. But then again, if you have to constantly watch them, do you really want them as employees?:-)
Like it or not, the reason Microsoft has a foothold on the desktop market is because of its relative ease of use. A worker or home user can by taught the basics of checking their e-mail, writing documents, etc. in Windows and Office via memorization. They learned Office 95 back in the day, that training investment carries over to the latest version with just a few add-ons. If you really want to see how seriously important backward-compatible trainng is, turn on the "blue screen, white text" feature in Word as well as the WordPerfect compatible function key layouts. Or the "slash" menu in Excel for hardcore Lotus 1-2-3 users. Microsoft knows they have the lock because of this. Mac OS X, for example, is much easier to control centrally than Windows is, but no one switches to it because their staff is used to Windows. Even if Office si a work-alike, relearning keyboard shortcuts and other tricks is time-consuming.
Companies do not want to invest money retraining their staff. It was hard enough getting them to learn MS Office or WordPerfect the first time. There are a few things that need to happen before Linux makes a big push for the corporate desktop: -- Make it "just work." Windows' big strength is that I can go to CompUSA, buy any old crappy piece of hardware, plug it in, and have it work without having to load kernel modules, edit config files, etc. -- Standardize it. Pick an office suite. Pick a window manager. Pick _a few_ of the hundreds of obscure GNU applications and bundle them as a standard tool set. Wrap in some administration and deployment tools that are brain-dead simple to use. No normal user wants three office suites, four window managers, etc. -- Completely hide the guts from the end user unless they want to see it. Mac OS does a great job of this. I have the command line and access to the config files if I want it, but the GUI is more than adequate to tweak most items.
Dell's other big market is home users. The same rules apply, just more so. Home users do not have the patience to learn Linux internals. My advice would be to start with an Ubuntu-like base, and go to work making the OS just work for normal users.
One example of this theme from the consumer world is Quicken. I've been using it for ages, ever since it was a simple checkbook register for DOS. It's got the perfect mix of features that make it a really good tool for maanging personal finances.
Lately however, I've been a little pissed at Intuit. Intuit has steadily cut back on product support over the last few years and has not been doing a very good job with testing. Last year, it ate a large portion of my transactions. It was my own stupid fault for not backing up the file regularly, but Quicken's proprietary data format makes it nearly impossible to recover from data corruption. Add to this the fact that Intuit is forcing financial institutions to adopt its proprietary extensions to the OFX standard. Finally, if you do want to downgrade, you can't unconvert your old file; you'll lose everything you entered on the new version.
Given all this, I've considered switching, but found that I can't. Microsoft Money, their only real competition, is awful compared to Quicken, and is even more ad-laden. Open-source tools just aren't mature enough and don't have enough "personal finance smarts" built in for common transactions. Accounting packages have no personal finance smarts built-in; they're just a chart of accounts that you have to analyze yourself.
I'm all for vendors wanting to make money periodically, but we should get something in return instead of just being forced to pay up. I'd even pay double for "Quicken Pro" that linked to a DBMS on the back-end and was better supported.
You're just noticing a trend that's been going on for a little while now. IT has evolved into a service that most companies can't do business without. If you lose e-mail or your website goes down these days, you're pretty much out of business until it gets fixed. Accordingly, IT is being folded into the same kind of authoritarian rule that the rest of the business experiences. It's the same reason all the metrics and outsourcing have become so popular...upper management can't judge progress without measurements because they don't see what happens every day.
IT's natural progression has been something like this: - 60s, 70s and 80s -- BOFH era. Computer guys were scary nerd types, no one wanted to deal with them; they just kept the reports flowing and the paychecks printed. - Early 90s -- Transition era. PCs have fully caught on, and computer guys are starting to lose their grip on all things IT. - Late 90s -- "Free for all" era. Technology at all costs. IT departments were often allowed to run rampant. - 2000s -- Recession mode, massive IT staff and spending cuts. At the same time, IT is now absolutely essential, and increasingly visible on mamagement's radar.
Truth is, we have to get used to it. IT needs to be run more like an engineering discipline anyway.
...was AT&T and the Bell System's service really that bad? Or any worse than it is now?
Looking back, it seems like it would have been a good idea to keep telecom a monopoly for several reasons: - No Worldcom, Global Crossing, etc. scandals. - Reliable service. The pace of innovation might be a little slower, but it wouldn't take months to turn on a DSL line. - Bell Labs was able to produce much of their science because of the recurring revenue generated by phone company customers. Centralized research like this isn't possible without huge amounts of money, more than the regional Bells could generate on their own.
Other than the rates and renting phones, what else were people complaining so much about that they don't complain about now?
Fission reactors will always produce harmful waste, but we have been able to deal with that in the past quite effectively. The problem that will kill nuclear energy is people. Private citizens are freaked out about both meltdowns and terrorism, so they'll lobby to have new plants built in someone else's backyard. The other people problem is the people running the plants. If you hire an $8/hour rent-a-cop to guard your facility, you're asking for trouble. Also, both the Three Mile Island incident and Chernobyl were caused by inattention and lack of maintenance. I guarantee that turning over contol of nuclear facilities to the private sector will immediately trigger the hiring of low-wage bare minimum staffs to save money. Eventually, someone will screw up, trigger another disaster, and that'll be the end of nuclear power in the US forever once people start demanding a stop to it.
I agree that nuclear energy is probably one of the best choices for the future as coal, natural gas and oil run out, but it's got a lot of obstacles to overcome.
Most outsourcing decisions are made far up the corporate food chain. It's the job of the management staff to handle any difficulties before they are visible to those at the highest levels. As long as the work is passable and any damage canbe contained, no one hears anything and nothing gets fixed.
Also, those complaining about outsourcing are probably wasting their breath. The next round of outsourcing is going to be targeting all the "innovation" jobs in IT like systems architecture and design that we thought were safe. I'm planning to stay in for the long haul and hope that some of this comes back around. However, we need to adjust our expectations to the new reality. If it's cheaper, it will be done. Unless consumer prices and our rampant spending are adjusted, we have no way to compete with people who will do good enough work for 10% of the price.
The real hidden cost of outsourcing is the loss of a talent pool. If and when I have a kid, I'll encourage it to be smart and study, but I think I'll encourage it to be a lawyer or an MBA. They're not replaceable, and the professions (medical, law, etc.) have a very strong organization that keeps the barrier to entry and salaries high. A good example is pharmacy. Pharmacists don't make their own compounds anymore; they pour tablets from the big bottle to little ones, and get paid very high salaries to do it. All they have to be is careful.
Whenever a debate about outsourcing gets underway, things tend to polarize quickly. You get the one end saying that nothing should be outsourced, and the other saying that companies should go back to the old days of zero regulation. Those of us in the middle kind of get drowned out.
My worry has always been what will happen to the entry-level career path in IT. If every single help desk job or grunt code maintenance/QA job is outsourced, there's no way for a new graduate to break into the field like there was for me in the past. I still feel relatively comfortable with my situation; I've managed to get enough exposure to areas outside of IT, and kept myself from becoming way too specialized. I also have enough experience and am a fast enough learner to adapt to most changes. The only fear I personally have is of being forced to take a management or project management job simply because technical work doesn't exist anymore. The worry I have for the long term is where the rest of the smart techies are going to come from.
Just rememeber that computers are still a mystery for 90% of the population out there, and about 99% of all executives. If they see that they can get rid of their expensive, tempremental employees that everyone else hates dealing with, they'll do it. Usually, the replacement's work will be "good enough" to justify the cost savings. I've never heard of anyone being completely bowled over by the level of service they receive from outsourcing; they just like the price.
I still think we're stuck in a negative feedback loop. Students see they can't make gobs of money in computer-related fields anymore, so they don't study math and science. COmpanies still need talent, and can't find as much cheap new grad labor as they can overseas. And so on and so on.
I'll bet they're relying on the next wave of buyers. It's the same strategy the cell phone vendors rely on. Ever notice how cell phones are pretty much designed to mave at least one thing go wrong with them in 2 or 3 years? I think Motorola figured out that those monster grey flip phones, while built like tanks, didn't give them a recurring revenue stream. So they made them good enough to not break within a product's release cycle, and that's it.
Same with the iPod. Unless you sit on the couch listening to your music, your iPos is exposed to the elements. It's dropped, sat on, and just plain wears out in a few years. Time to buy a new device.
Now Samsung comes in the picture with feature X that the iPod doesn't have. They win the business even if they're not superior. Samsung is probably hoping to be everyone's iPod replacement device in a year or two.
It would actually be far more efficient to hire more scientists and to let them improvise things in their own sloppy way, than to hire managers and administrators who are supposed to be more efficient.
In the IT world, I used to agree with you. Then I saw what happens to very large organizations when their IT dept. is run like that. This works very well for a time, because projects do get completed faster and everything's "agile." Once it scales beyond some critical point, problems happen. Your chief technology wizards quit, or are sidetracked with a million other things. Becuase there was no discipline in the beginning, nothing was documented, and the systems were allowed to grow uncontrolled.
Now, the opposite extreme is to hire hundreds of PMI-certified Project Managers to implement a Project Management Office and centralize resource scheduling. This leads to endless bureaucracy, and nothing gets done. I used to think that project management was a good idea, but if left to its own devices, the paperwork alone can cut into productive work. Think of the differences in workflow in two organizations:
"Sloppy" unmanaged organization: - Someone comes in and says "we need X, Y and Z." - Technical guys know what to do, and do it. - Next project.
Rigid Project Management Office: - Someone comes in and says "we need X, Y and Z." - Submits a work request to PMO. - PMO coordinates a feasbility study meeting. - A group of techies sits with PMO and reviews X, Y, Z project proposal. - Inevitably, gaps are found, and PMO is sent back to get clarification. - Repeat last 3 steps n times, where n is proportional to project complexity. - PMO coordinates a meeting to draw up statement of work. - SOW presented and accepted. - Kick off meeting is arranged. - Resource scheduling occurs. Techies are assigned between dates a and b. - All the while, endless status meetings with the PMO. - Schedule slips. - More status meetings, and revisions to SOW. - Schedule slips more. - More status meetings... - Eventually, project is either somewhat completed, dropped, or some other disposition. - Mountains of documentation are written as part of the project plan.
Now, it's our jobs in the next evolution of IT to come up with a happy medium. I'm fully convinced that we don't need the same rigid framework as civil engineering projects have when they're building bridges, etc.
As several other posters mentioned, American students are becoming very worried about spending a lot of time in school and a lot of money pursuing a degree for which there will be a high supply and low demand. Doctors go into huge amounts of debt, but they know that the debt they incur now will more than pay for itself later. Same with lawyers...these two professions are immune to economic downturns, and we sure don't complain about a shortage of either!
Now consider a student who wants to do pure engineering or scientific research. PhD's just aren't drawing the same salaries or lifetime employment that they used to. Tenured professors are an exception, but corporate research labs (AT&T, IBM, Lockheed, etc.) would invest im employees for the long term and make sure they were able to continue producing research. Today, every employee, scientific or not, is interchangeable. If you don't want to work for $60K, someone else will. Add to this fact that there are some areas of the country whose housing prices and cost of living are way out of control (New York, California, Boston area, etc.) and they just happen to have the scientific jobs right in that area (pharmaceuticals, Silicon Valley, MIT, etc.) Another point to consider is that you're out of the workforce for an additional 4+ years. Traditional pensions which kept workers comfortable for life are gone, and you have to do it yourself with a 401K and such. If you don't start right when you're 21 and get your first job, you can miss out on huge amounts of money later on in life. This is part of the reason why PhD's demand higher salaries...some of them are starting their retirement savings at 30!
Ask yourself this: Would you be willing to watch your less-educated peers flip real estate or crawl their way up the MBA ladder, while you made comparatively less doing much more important work? For some, the answer is yes, and those are the people who should be in their chosen fields. I'm not a scientist, but I graduated with a scientific degree. I work in IT, and there's a definite difference between someone who took an MCSE course, and someone who takes the time to learn the systems they're working on inside and out. The second type of person would probably answer "yes" to this question, simply because they enjoy challenging work. Managers make more money, sure, but it is a totally different skill set. (If you think your boss isn't doing anything, look again. Good ones are constantly keeping their techies shielded from political battles so they can do their jobs.)
I also think the gap is made up by foriegn students, just an empirical observations by educators I know. Universities can't find enough good talent at home, but they still need to fill positions. Science in this country just isn't as important anymore, I guess.
One change that I'd like to see happen in general is a return to a stable workplace. Back in the day, it was unrealistic to switch jobs every few years and have to constantly worry about layoffs. A lot of technical people I know aren't buying houses or other things simply because they don't know whether their job will be yanked out from under them. If employers were forced to really think about their hiring as an investment, things would change for the better. The prosperity of the 50s and 60s was a result of a strong middle class with stable paychecks who could afford to buy things. Companies who hire someone with the intention of keeping them, giving them training, and putting them in places where they'll be productive will eventually see ROI. The other thing I'd like to change is the promotion structure in companies. Pure people management should not be the way to reward great technical people; it leads to ineffective management. Instead, identify your best leadership talent and technical talent, and compensate them on two parallel tracks. The more you produce, the better your compensation, in either track. That would be a fair way to go.
Think back many years to what the typical office job was in the 50s, 60s and even 70s. If you were in management, you wined and dined clients/vendors, and basically conventrated on your management job. There was an entire clerical staff to type your (paper, sent-by-regular-mail) memos, answer your phone calls and act as your gatekeeper. Computer generated reports (when they existed) came to you on green-bar paper for you to read at your leisure. It was expected that things took a lot longer to get done.
If you were on the non-management side, your job was very well defined. Secretaries typed, took memos, made coffee and answered the phone. Report-crunchers crunched reports and handed their results to the typing pool to be typed up. Those who ran the "IT department" were the scary guys in the basement data center caring for and feeding the magic box that spits out invoices and paychecks.
Flash forward to now. Everyone has and answers their own e-mail. Everyone has a BlackBerry and/or cellphone. Responses to reports and e-mails are expected in hours, not days. People are expected to be available 24 hours a day in some cases. Smarter workplaces know when you let you unplug, but they're hard to find, especially in IT. IT has it even worse, because they have to keep this whole show running for the 24/7 workaholic crowd.
These days, you're also expected to do your own work without assistance. You have to answer your phone, keep up with correspondence, analyze reports without the help of anyone else, and basically do way more jobs than the one you were hired for. I can see why it causes a lot of stress and why productivity suffers.
A really good example of what's happened is the very large insurance company I used to work for several years ago. They've been around forever and have two huge blocks in Manattan of office space. They had about 2000 people in that office space (very centralized company.) A guy I was working with who's been there since the early 70s told me that there were over 15,000 people in that same space, doing all the manual paperwork and other stuff. It's the ultimate "doing more with less" example.
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The responses to the article so far kind of miss one point. One man's new and exciting is not necessary everyone's. Every person who works in IT walks the line between the geek and the business world.
Theorem #1 of IT-Business Interaction:
- "Normal" business people do not care _at all_ about the intricacies of computers.
Corollary:
- "IT people" care deeply about the intricacies of computers.
Inference:
- "Normals" and "IT people" do not find the same things exciting.
Business people could care less if their website was hosted in IIS, LAMP or whatever. As long as they can connect to it and customers can spend money on it, they're happy. Same thing with office software. Business users use Microsoft Office or some other package. They don't care that Linux has 5 or 6 YetAnotherCoolUltraRadOfficeSuite titles in the source repository. They care that Office functions exactly the way they learned it in training class, and what's going on tonight when they get home. Period. Anyone who says otherwise has never supported pure business users of computers.
IT people live for this stuff. We love tweaking and tuning our computers. We'll run 19 different Office applications and six different window managers/app frameworks because we can. That's why Linux has such a following in the geek community and on the server end of IT. It's less popular on the desktop simply because there's no reason for "normals" to switch.
If Microsoft ported Office to Linux, I could see business people considering a switch. Same thing goes for Autodesk porting AutoCAD or something similar. Until then, there's nothing compelling to get non-geeks to switch. On the other hand, there's tons and tons of cool stuff that geeks get excited over on the Linux side.
I work with Windows and Linux systems at work. When I come home, I do my computing on a Mac. I think Applie finally has a winning combo with OS X, an Intel-based platform that will also boot Windows, and peoples' change in computing habits. Some of the things Apple got right in OS X that they haven't done so well on in the past are going to help the transition. First, you've got the interoperability thing, which keeps getting better as versions of OS X increase. You have a powerful OS underneath a bulletproof wall of GUI eye candy. If you want the command prompt and unix-like functionality, it's there. Otherwise, you don't have to see it.
One other thing Apple seems to be doing is reducing the importance of a structured filesystem. If you open iPhoto, you see a set of photos, not a list of filenames. Same with iTunes. Something that I think computer people forget is that "normals" don't care about computers. Business users want to do their jobs and leave. Home users want to fill their iPods, and send pictures of the kids to Grandma. Making it so users don't have to remember how to navigate through a folder structure or other "computer stuff" really makes it easier to use.
I don't know what will make it into the final version of Vista, but I'm sure they're going to take a stab at this too. Now all Apple has to work on is convincing people that the Mac is worth the premium price they get for it. That seems to be the #1 argument I hear about why someone would choose a Windows box over a Mac.
I'm actually surprised to see one of these "company blogs" being used by someone not in the marketing or PR department. The poster should have been a little more cognizant of where she was posting this information. I thought that most people realized that internal blogs were strictly there for marketing/progaganda purposes.
I'm also kind of curious about why the poster didn't follow Rule #1 of contracting...do your job, stay invisible, and collect your paychecks. This has been true in every place I've worked where contractors were used. Any mistakes by a contractor meant they were instantly out the door, which explains why a lot of sysadmin jobs are contracted. Mail server went down for an hour? New sysadmin from the agency tomorrow.
Even with that though, I can't believe they'd go to the trouble of firing her. They're within their rights to delete the posting, since it's their blog on their intranet. It shows a little paranoia on their part about not letting unofficial opinions get out. Which is wierd, because that was what company blogging was supposed to be all about; "open, spontaneous communication" among the employees.
If file trading is measured in terms of ease of use, then the number of available outlets has dropped. Things like Napster and the WinMX utility used to make file swapping incredibly easy even for people who weren't computer savvy. Now it takes a little work to get what you want. Plus, the major public file sharing networks are full of incomplete files, viruses and other garbage that most people don't want to deal with. In that way, people are either turning to harder-to-use file sharing techniques or giving up and getting a "real" copy of the media from a service that you know is good.
Your average user is using LimeWare and used to typing words into a search box. Doing this these days will usually yield you one or two real copies, and hundreds of viruse files or trojans.
SO the moral of the story is that the people are to blame for a) not preventing your government for bringing in anti-social work ethics (a.k.a capitalism) and b) for accepting the situation enforced onto you by your employee (bring back the Unions).
Not as easy as you think...it's really tough to unionize the "new world" of work. There's nothing stopping an employer whose employees strike from moving the work to some other country. That, and the techie pupolation really doesn't think unions are a good idea (even after their fifth 80-hour week in a row.) You can't easily get a new construction crew overnight, or a new set of electrical contractors to work on your building after the other ones leave. However, there are offshore coding and sysadmin firms clamoring for business who would be more than happy to step in.
I would definitely like to see more vacation time and less invasion on personal time, but that costs money.
No one wants to come out and say it, but the outsourcing thing is probably driven a lot by our lack of work ethic. I think it's actually driven by a couple of things:
1. Cost (duh)
2. Lack of competence in existing labor pool
3. The outsourced labor pool is able to work harder than the existing one for less money.
When you outsource work to a culture where hard work and intelligence is superior to everyting else, it's hard to come back to your native labor pool and watch them leave exactly at 5 PM. Even when they've screwed up something, my experience is that the foriegn outsourcers will work non-stop to fix the problem. We just don't do that, for a variety of reasons. Partially, we're inherently lazy. More so, we don't see the point. People in this country who work hard don't get rewarded like they used to. Worse yet, those who spend the most time avoiding work tend to rise to the highest positions.
It's just a totally different situation in countries like India, Japan and China...you're pushed to the limit frmm an early age to succeed in those cultures. If you fail in school, it's a disastrous thing. Ever wonder why we can't produce competent scientists and engineers? That's why. We're not into pushing kids...but you can bet any kid I have will be a study-robot to keep up with the rest of the world.
Slacking is great, but it will eventually undo the entire technical labor force here.
If you're going to expect an IT paycheck, get hip to what it is that generates the demand for what IT does, and what it means to be worth the money. That sounds rather vague, but if you follow the other advice you're seeing here (about how to get acquainted with various languages, coding structures, etc) you're only partway into a successful scenario. You'll be far more likely to be paid to learn the interesting new things that come along if the organization you're working for sees that you're interested in the bigger picture.
Very important, and often overlooked. The way I often summarize this is "They're not really paying you to play with computers all day." You have to be smart on both the technology and the business side of the fence. I see great techies coming into the field I work in (transportation) and get frustrated because they really don't know what goes on behind the ticket counter and how they're connected to it. Consequently, IT departments get a bad reputation because they're just perceived as a necessary evil to keep the business running.
Good point you're making...it really is much harder for a total newbie to get a solid start from zero knowledge these days. I think it's partially due to the fact that so much of the earlier computing era is hidden behind well-crafted user interfaces designed to keep you out of trouble.
I'm really dating myself here, but my first exposure to computers was with an inexpensive Commodore home machine that shipped with manuals detailing the entire memory map of the system. With 4K of RAM and all the specs published, it would be very easy to write your own software, which was probably the point. Fast forward to today, and you get way too much to deal with when you get a computer. It used to be really simple to create a "Hello world" or even something more complex in BASIC or some other language. Now, at least on the Windows side, you have a development environment that, to me, is very hard to get going with in anything but Visual Basic. The document object model for web development makes sense to me, but Windows forms programming seems like way too much effort to learn. Besides, grunt coding work is all going to be overseas soon anyway...
Since computing is so pervasive now, you really have to pick a branch to learn more about and do as much hands-on research as you can. As an IT professional (sysadmin, non-developer type,) I could never possibly keep my focus on every single new system, new trend, etc. There's just too much information to digest and still have a life.
The way I always pick up something new is find a neat project online, or start from the perspective of solving an existing problem I have. It's a fun, challenging and often really frustrating way to learn stuff. THe fun thing is going back after a few years and shaking your head about the crazy, inelegant way you learned Technology X.
One other important thing...in the computing / IT world, you're always learning. Even if you end up doing the same type of thing, the way you do that type of thing can and does change overnight. Just ask anyone who's worked in corporate IT from the mainframe era to the PC era to the client/server era and now back to the mainframe-style centralized computing era. If constant change is what you're looking for, welcome!!
Good luck!
It's admirable to try to get students interested in science, but I don't think that's going to happen until a major change of some kind occurs. Not that it was ever "cool" to be a smart kid, but it seems like intelligence is more actively discouraged with kids these days. Here's the problems I see with science's image today:
1. Older kids aren't stupid. They see their techie parents losing jobs and having their salaries cut because people half a world away work for a lot less and have a better work ethic in most cases. Given those facts, would you work your butt off in school and grad school for years on end to end up with a low-paying job, if you could find one?
2. Kids also see that getting an MBA or a law degree is an instant ticket to success with much less hard work. Against that, science doesn't have a chance with anyone but the most hardcore types.
3. For whatever reason, schools don't seem to be attracting the world's best teachers. I had some really excellent math and science teachers in my school career who got me interested in the material. Unless you have a really good teacher in an intro. science class, you'll never enjoy the subject.
4. I'm probably going to piss off a lot of people now, but the trend towards religious fundamentalism in the US really hurts science as well. Religion and science don't mix. When enough of the religious crazies get into powerful positions, projects don't get funded. Examples of the problem are the whole evolution debate, stem cell research, etc. Until we get a moderate base of elected officials in office again, this will continue.
I don't know what it will take to fix the problem, but anything that can be done is better than nothing!
Sending an e-mail to someone takes very little effort. You open your e-mail program, type out a message, address it and send it. Submitting a document to a SharePoint site or composing a wiki article adds an extra set of steps, even if they're easy. The current version of SharePoint is especially bad for easy editing of content...people I know who do use it just use it as a document dump because they don't like the web editing details.
Collaboration software that can accept inpot in the form of e-mails addressed to different sections of the site might fix this problem. However, the current culture says you have to answer your e-mails within a few hours of receiving them. Do we expect people to take time out, open the collaboration site, log in, get into editing mode, compose their message in whatever formatting language the site requires, then submit it?
IT people would love to see desktop Linux take root. I know I would; it could potentially solve a lot of support headaches.
Here's one thing that's holding the Linux desktop back...standards. Non-technical users know a superset of the following things about their computer:
- To log on in the morning, I press Ctrl+Alt+Del, enter my e-mail address and password, and click OK. To log off, I use Start -> Shut Down.
- To read my e-mail, I use {Outlook | Notes | GroupWise | something else}.
- Ctrl+O opens a file. Ctrl+S saves it. Alt+F4 closes a window. Alt+Tab switches apps, etc.
- To write a document, I use Word. I know 500 key combimations and tricks to get my work done.
- To use a spreadsheet, I open Excel. I also know 500 key combos and tricks.
- To write a presentation, I use PowerPoint. If I'm in sales, I could practically code the next version of PowerPoint. If I'm a normal user, I know a few tricks to get slides written.
- To browse the Internet, I use IE.
- To use my USB flash drive / iPod / scanner / printer, I plug it in and go. (Microsoft really works with vendors to make sure devices work as advertised in all but the screwiest of configurations.)
What people in IT don't realize is that users do not care what technology is new or cool. Users want to do the job they are hired for, go home and spend time with the family. Their computer is a tool, nothing more. It's like a phone or copier to them. They learned Windows and Office, and if a replacement doesn't work exactly as the old one did, they'll resist it.
If the Linux distributions put their strength behind one core set of applications, and also made Linux all but invisible to users who don't want the command line, then a real contender against Windows will emerge. Even Microsoft is worried about people adopting Vista at the corporate level because of the huge system requirements. A well-organized, standard Linux with no complexities exposed to the end-user would be a welcome change in some companies.
"The IT department at my company (approximately some 500 people) is showing signs of incompetence"
On one hand, don't forget that IT people aren't all geniuses. We don't know everything, and those of us who proclaim to really need an attitude adjustment. Systems fail, downtime occurs. Good IT departments manage things well and fix failures quickly.
On the other hand, if your IT department really is a bunch of boobs, then you have a right to complain. Just keep complaining until those on top listen. It might take a board member experiencing a whole day without their e-mail or computer because of a screw-up, but incompetence is almost always revealed.
As a company grows, bad hiring is more probable. Bad hiring is made worse by the need to hastily replace IT people. Since most IT people still hop jobs with incredible frequency (2 years is the average, I think), they often leave their former employers with an immediate need, and few qualified people to fill the job for the salary they're asking. Also, the transient nature of IT workers means they don't necessaruily understand the way your business uses the commodity technology skills they have.
I firmly believe that the only US IT people who will have jobs in the future are those who can be responsive. It's definitely time to for us let go of some of the iron-fist, "we are God, you are stupid users" mentality. Those who do, and can play nice with the business side, will be rewarded with regular salary increases and stable employment. It's going to become even more important to retain IT talent in the "proprietary" sections of your business when you farm out all the commodity stuff (backups, server admin, etc.)
Sounds like the typical reaction to one or two isolated cases of game-induced violence.
When will people realize that kids don't need to be protected? When I was younger, it was normal to go around playing with (toy) guns, and most parents let their kids run around wherever they wished. Now parents lock their kids away, and they aren't allowed to be kids. Kids need to be desensitzied to things at an early age so that they don't turn out soft. Video game violence isn't going to hurt anyone other than the extremely stupid or mentally handicapped kids who can't separate reality from fantasy.
I tend to agree, although don't forget that cubicles are a huge imporvement over rows and rows of desks with zero privacy whatsoever. Personally, I'd rather have an office, or at least a cubicle-sized space with a door I can close. It's very distracting for some people to hear everyone's phone conversations, music choices, etc. When I work on a problem, I tend to go lock myself in a lab or some other closed space so I can have "alone time" and carefully consider things.
:-)
It wouldn't be hard at all to give current cubicles full-sized walls and doors. I think it would greatly improve productivity. Think of how many times you've had to listen to people talking two feet away from you while you're trying to concentrate.
One of the main barriers to adoption is the fact that you can't oversee your staff like you can in a cubicle farm or open office. But then again, if you have to constantly watch them, do you really want them as employees?
Like it or not, the reason Microsoft has a foothold on the desktop market is because of its relative ease of use. A worker or home user can by taught the basics of checking their e-mail, writing documents, etc. in Windows and Office via memorization. They learned Office 95 back in the day, that training investment carries over to the latest version with just a few add-ons. If you really want to see how seriously important backward-compatible trainng is, turn on the "blue screen, white text" feature in Word as well as the WordPerfect compatible function key layouts. Or the "slash" menu in Excel for hardcore Lotus 1-2-3 users. Microsoft knows they have the lock because of this. Mac OS X, for example, is much easier to control centrally than Windows is, but no one switches to it because their staff is used to Windows. Even if Office si a work-alike, relearning keyboard shortcuts and other tricks is time-consuming.
Companies do not want to invest money retraining their staff. It was hard enough getting them to learn MS Office or WordPerfect the first time. There are a few things that need to happen before Linux makes a big push for the corporate desktop:
-- Make it "just work." Windows' big strength is that I can go to CompUSA, buy any old crappy piece of hardware, plug it in, and have it work without having to load kernel modules, edit config files, etc.
-- Standardize it. Pick an office suite. Pick a window manager. Pick _a few_ of the hundreds of obscure GNU applications and bundle them as a standard tool set. Wrap in some administration and deployment tools that are brain-dead simple to use. No normal user wants three office suites, four window managers, etc.
-- Completely hide the guts from the end user unless they want to see it. Mac OS does a great job of this. I have the command line and access to the config files if I want it, but the GUI is more than adequate to tweak most items.
Dell's other big market is home users. The same rules apply, just more so. Home users do not have the patience to learn Linux internals. My advice would be to start with an Ubuntu-like base, and go to work making the OS just work for normal users.
One example of this theme from the consumer world is Quicken. I've been using it for ages, ever since it was a simple checkbook register for DOS. It's got the perfect mix of features that make it a really good tool for maanging personal finances.
Lately however, I've been a little pissed at Intuit. Intuit has steadily cut back on product support over the last few years and has not been doing a very good job with testing. Last year, it ate a large portion of my transactions. It was my own stupid fault for not backing up the file regularly, but Quicken's proprietary data format makes it nearly impossible to recover from data corruption. Add to this the fact that Intuit is forcing financial institutions to adopt its proprietary extensions to the OFX standard. Finally, if you do want to downgrade, you can't unconvert your old file; you'll lose everything you entered on the new version.
Given all this, I've considered switching, but found that I can't. Microsoft Money, their only real competition, is awful compared to Quicken, and is even more ad-laden. Open-source tools just aren't mature enough and don't have enough "personal finance smarts" built in for common transactions. Accounting packages have no personal finance smarts built-in; they're just a chart of accounts that you have to analyze yourself.
I'm all for vendors wanting to make money periodically, but we should get something in return instead of just being forced to pay up. I'd even pay double for "Quicken Pro" that linked to a DBMS on the back-end and was better supported.
You're just noticing a trend that's been going on for a little while now. IT has evolved into a service that most companies can't do business without. If you lose e-mail or your website goes down these days, you're pretty much out of business until it gets fixed. Accordingly, IT is being folded into the same kind of authoritarian rule that the rest of the business experiences. It's the same reason all the metrics and outsourcing have become so popular...upper management can't judge progress without measurements because they don't see what happens every day.
IT's natural progression has been something like this:
- 60s, 70s and 80s -- BOFH era. Computer guys were scary nerd types, no one wanted to deal with them; they just kept the reports flowing and the paychecks printed.
- Early 90s -- Transition era. PCs have fully caught on, and computer guys are starting to lose their grip on all things IT.
- Late 90s -- "Free for all" era. Technology at all costs. IT departments were often allowed to run rampant.
- 2000s -- Recession mode, massive IT staff and spending cuts. At the same time, IT is now absolutely essential, and increasingly visible on mamagement's radar.
Truth is, we have to get used to it. IT needs to be run more like an engineering discipline anyway.
...was AT&T and the Bell System's service really that bad? Or any worse than it is now?
Looking back, it seems like it would have been a good idea to keep telecom a monopoly for several reasons:
- No Worldcom, Global Crossing, etc. scandals.
- Reliable service. The pace of innovation might be a little slower, but it wouldn't take months to turn on a DSL line.
- Bell Labs was able to produce much of their science because of the recurring revenue generated by phone company customers. Centralized research like this isn't possible without huge amounts of money, more than the regional Bells could generate on their own.
Other than the rates and renting phones, what else were people complaining so much about that they don't complain about now?
Fission reactors will always produce harmful waste, but we have been able to deal with that in the past quite effectively. The problem that will kill nuclear energy is people. Private citizens are freaked out about both meltdowns and terrorism, so they'll lobby to have new plants built in someone else's backyard. The other people problem is the people running the plants. If you hire an $8/hour rent-a-cop to guard your facility, you're asking for trouble. Also, both the Three Mile Island incident and Chernobyl were caused by inattention and lack of maintenance. I guarantee that turning over contol of nuclear facilities to the private sector will immediately trigger the hiring of low-wage bare minimum staffs to save money. Eventually, someone will screw up, trigger another disaster, and that'll be the end of nuclear power in the US forever once people start demanding a stop to it.
I agree that nuclear energy is probably one of the best choices for the future as coal, natural gas and oil run out, but it's got a lot of obstacles to overcome.
Most outsourcing decisions are made far up the corporate food chain. It's the job of the management staff to handle any difficulties before they are visible to those at the highest levels. As long as the work is passable and any damage canbe contained, no one hears anything and nothing gets fixed.
Also, those complaining about outsourcing are probably wasting their breath. The next round of outsourcing is going to be targeting all the "innovation" jobs in IT like systems architecture and design that we thought were safe. I'm planning to stay in for the long haul and hope that some of this comes back around. However, we need to adjust our expectations to the new reality. If it's cheaper, it will be done. Unless consumer prices and our rampant spending are adjusted, we have no way to compete with people who will do good enough work for 10% of the price.
The real hidden cost of outsourcing is the loss of a talent pool. If and when I have a kid, I'll encourage it to be smart and study, but I think I'll encourage it to be a lawyer or an MBA. They're not replaceable, and the professions (medical, law, etc.) have a very strong organization that keeps the barrier to entry and salaries high. A good example is pharmacy. Pharmacists don't make their own compounds anymore; they pour tablets from the big bottle to little ones, and get paid very high salaries to do it. All they have to be is careful.
Whenever a debate about outsourcing gets underway, things tend to polarize quickly. You get the one end saying that nothing should be outsourced, and the other saying that companies should go back to the old days of zero regulation. Those of us in the middle kind of get drowned out.
My worry has always been what will happen to the entry-level career path in IT. If every single help desk job or grunt code maintenance/QA job is outsourced, there's no way for a new graduate to break into the field like there was for me in the past. I still feel relatively comfortable with my situation; I've managed to get enough exposure to areas outside of IT, and kept myself from becoming way too specialized. I also have enough experience and am a fast enough learner to adapt to most changes. The only fear I personally have is of being forced to take a management or project management job simply because technical work doesn't exist anymore. The worry I have for the long term is where the rest of the smart techies are going to come from.
Just rememeber that computers are still a mystery for 90% of the population out there, and about 99% of all executives. If they see that they can get rid of their expensive, tempremental employees that everyone else hates dealing with, they'll do it. Usually, the replacement's work will be "good enough" to justify the cost savings. I've never heard of anyone being completely bowled over by the level of service they receive from outsourcing; they just like the price.
I still think we're stuck in a negative feedback loop. Students see they can't make gobs of money in computer-related fields anymore, so they don't study math and science. COmpanies still need talent, and can't find as much cheap new grad labor as they can overseas. And so on and so on.
I'll bet they're relying on the next wave of buyers. It's the same strategy the cell phone vendors rely on. Ever notice how cell phones are pretty much designed to mave at least one thing go wrong with them in 2 or 3 years? I think Motorola figured out that those monster grey flip phones, while built like tanks, didn't give them a recurring revenue stream. So they made them good enough to not break within a product's release cycle, and that's it.
Same with the iPod. Unless you sit on the couch listening to your music, your iPos is exposed to the elements. It's dropped, sat on, and just plain wears out in a few years. Time to buy a new device.
Now Samsung comes in the picture with feature X that the iPod doesn't have. They win the business even if they're not superior. Samsung is probably hoping to be everyone's iPod replacement device in a year or two.
It would actually be far more efficient to hire more scientists and to let them improvise things in their own sloppy way, than to hire managers and administrators who are supposed to be more efficient.
In the IT world, I used to agree with you. Then I saw what happens to very large organizations when their IT dept. is run like that. This works very well for a time, because projects do get completed faster and everything's "agile." Once it scales beyond some critical point, problems happen. Your chief technology wizards quit, or are sidetracked with a million other things. Becuase there was no discipline in the beginning, nothing was documented, and the systems were allowed to grow uncontrolled.
Now, the opposite extreme is to hire hundreds of PMI-certified Project Managers to implement a Project Management Office and centralize resource scheduling. This leads to endless bureaucracy, and nothing gets done. I used to think that project management was a good idea, but if left to its own devices, the paperwork alone can cut into productive work. Think of the differences in workflow in two organizations:
"Sloppy" unmanaged organization:
- Someone comes in and says "we need X, Y and Z."
- Technical guys know what to do, and do it.
- Next project.
Rigid Project Management Office:
- Someone comes in and says "we need X, Y and Z."
- Submits a work request to PMO.
- PMO coordinates a feasbility study meeting.
- A group of techies sits with PMO and reviews X, Y, Z project proposal.
- Inevitably, gaps are found, and PMO is sent back to get clarification.
- Repeat last 3 steps n times, where n is proportional to project complexity.
- PMO coordinates a meeting to draw up statement of work.
- SOW presented and accepted.
- Kick off meeting is arranged.
- Resource scheduling occurs. Techies are assigned between dates a and b.
- All the while, endless status meetings with the PMO.
- Schedule slips.
- More status meetings, and revisions to SOW.
- Schedule slips more.
- More status meetings...
- Eventually, project is either somewhat completed, dropped, or some other disposition.
- Mountains of documentation are written as part of the project plan.
Now, it's our jobs in the next evolution of IT to come up with a happy medium. I'm fully convinced that we don't need the same rigid framework as civil engineering projects have when they're building bridges, etc.
As several other posters mentioned, American students are becoming very worried about spending a lot of time in school and a lot of money pursuing a degree for which there will be a high supply and low demand. Doctors go into huge amounts of debt, but they know that the debt they incur now will more than pay for itself later. Same with lawyers...these two professions are immune to economic downturns, and we sure don't complain about a shortage of either!
Now consider a student who wants to do pure engineering or scientific research. PhD's just aren't drawing the same salaries or lifetime employment that they used to. Tenured professors are an exception, but corporate research labs (AT&T, IBM, Lockheed, etc.) would invest im employees for the long term and make sure they were able to continue producing research. Today, every employee, scientific or not, is interchangeable. If you don't want to work for $60K, someone else will. Add to this fact that there are some areas of the country whose housing prices and cost of living are way out of control (New York, California, Boston area, etc.) and they just happen to have the scientific jobs right in that area (pharmaceuticals, Silicon Valley, MIT, etc.) Another point to consider is that you're out of the workforce for an additional 4+ years. Traditional pensions which kept workers comfortable for life are gone, and you have to do it yourself with a 401K and such. If you don't start right when you're 21 and get your first job, you can miss out on huge amounts of money later on in life. This is part of the reason why PhD's demand higher salaries...some of them are starting their retirement savings at 30!
Ask yourself this: Would you be willing to watch your less-educated peers flip real estate or crawl their way up the MBA ladder, while you made comparatively less doing much more important work? For some, the answer is yes, and those are the people who should be in their chosen fields. I'm not a scientist, but I graduated with a scientific degree. I work in IT, and there's a definite difference between someone who took an MCSE course, and someone who takes the time to learn the systems they're working on inside and out. The second type of person would probably answer "yes" to this question, simply because they enjoy challenging work. Managers make more money, sure, but it is a totally different skill set. (If you think your boss isn't doing anything, look again. Good ones are constantly keeping their techies shielded from political battles so they can do their jobs.)
I also think the gap is made up by foriegn students, just an empirical observations by educators I know. Universities can't find enough good talent at home, but they still need to fill positions. Science in this country just isn't as important anymore, I guess.
One change that I'd like to see happen in general is a return to a stable workplace. Back in the day, it was unrealistic to switch jobs every few years and have to constantly worry about layoffs. A lot of technical people I know aren't buying houses or other things simply because they don't know whether their job will be yanked out from under them. If employers were forced to really think about their hiring as an investment, things would change for the better. The prosperity of the 50s and 60s was a result of a strong middle class with stable paychecks who could afford to buy things. Companies who hire someone with the intention of keeping them, giving them training, and putting them in places where they'll be productive will eventually see ROI. The other thing I'd like to change is the promotion structure in companies. Pure people management should not be the way to reward great technical people; it leads to ineffective management. Instead, identify your best leadership talent and technical talent, and compensate them on two parallel tracks. The more you produce, the better your compensation, in either track. That would be a fair way to go.
Think back many years to what the typical office job was in the 50s, 60s and even 70s. If you were in management, you wined and dined clients/vendors, and basically conventrated on your management job. There was an entire clerical staff to type your (paper, sent-by-regular-mail) memos, answer your phone calls and act as your gatekeeper. Computer generated reports (when they existed) came to you on green-bar paper for you to read at your leisure. It was expected that things took a lot longer to get done.
If you were on the non-management side, your job was very well defined. Secretaries typed, took memos, made coffee and answered the phone. Report-crunchers crunched reports and handed their results to the typing pool to be typed up. Those who ran the "IT department" were the scary guys in the basement data center caring for and feeding the magic box that spits out invoices and paychecks.
Flash forward to now. Everyone has and answers their own e-mail. Everyone has a BlackBerry and/or cellphone. Responses to reports and e-mails are expected in hours, not days. People are expected to be available 24 hours a day in some cases. Smarter workplaces know when you let you unplug, but they're hard to find, especially in IT. IT has it even worse, because they have to keep this whole show running for the 24/7 workaholic crowd.
These days, you're also expected to do your own work without assistance. You have to answer your phone, keep up with correspondence, analyze reports without the help of anyone else, and basically do way more jobs than the one you were hired for. I can see why it causes a lot of stress and why productivity suffers.
A really good example of what's happened is the very large insurance company I used to work for several years ago. They've been around forever and have two huge blocks in Manattan of office space. They had about 2000 people in that office space (very centralized company.) A guy I was working with who's been there since the early 70s told me that there were over 15,000 people in that same space, doing all the manual paperwork and other stuff. It's the ultimate "doing more with less" example.