Believe it or not, there are still people who are loyal to the country and "believe in the mission." Lots of people in these agencies come from the military, so you're bound to have a committed core of individuals. But it's an organization like anywhere else...the place I work has serious faults but they're definitely not something to throw a temper tantrum about. Some people think differently about this, get fed up and leave. It's all up to personal choice, and I would think anyone smart enough to get a technical position at the NSA would be able to go work anywhere else...these aren't your typical Keyboarding Specialist III civil service workers who make a home for themselves deep in an agency's bureaucracy. I don't throw a fit and leave my position because I have the opportunity to do interesting work even if I have to work around dumb decisions above my level.
Just like businesses, government agencies outsource everything they can as well. I would think that some of the defection is to contractors, where they would trade job security for a higher salary. I imagine there's basically a few "Spies R Us" firms right in the DC metro area that does the same analysis work the official TLAs do.
Another place they could end up at is management consulting firms. I work for an IT services company and we respond to RFPs all the time -- there's a lot of pressure to keep up the credentials on the individuals presented as the "A Team" (who gets swapped out when the contract is signed.) There's a lot of cache in saying "Dude, this guy's ex-NSA" when referring to a security consultant. Even if they barely do any work, just having them is like the big tech companies employing Technical Fellows.
Still other employers are basically anywhere else math geniuses get jobs. Insurance companies still pay actuaries handsomely. Investment banks doing HFT would love to have a few NSA people on staff and would probably overlook some of their quirks. The private sector does pay much better than government work over the short term. And, post-Cold War and post-Snowden, there's less public acceptance of the spy agencies. I'm sure there's tons of issues they silently prevent or give advance notice of, and I'll bet that's what's keeping some people on staff...it's naive to think that other countries aren't spying on their citizens or foreign governments as well.
I would expect a company the size of Google to hire an army of tax accountants and lawyers to do this, but one thing that I think people overlook is that businesses in general get a huge advantage over typical wage-earners in the US tax system.
It drives me crazy when I hear small business owners whining about how expensive it is to do business and how they're being taxed to death. I'd love to see what entity owns their house, their cars, and incurs all their personal expenses...in almost all cases, these are easily passed through to the corporation or other business structure they own. All the complaints about high tax rates ring hollow when you can avoid it by offsetting revenue with expenses. Let's say you have $100K in revenue and maybe $20K in legitimate business expenses. Rent your house out as a place of business...that's thousands in rent, and of course your business needs cars, computers, business-related travel expenses, etc...and all of a sudden you're reporting a loss instead of a profit. Even better, if it's a corporation, you issue yourself a W-2 for a tiny salary, legitimizing the corporation's existence and further reducing your tax liability by paying tax on the salary at the personal rate.
The only way to fix this would be to switch to a consumption tax, or cut out every single deduction and charge a lower rate...but companies have already purchased their tax laws and aren't going to give them up without a fight.
I think the big test for us is coming up shortly. Technology is shifting from being a labor-saving device to a labor-eliminating device. And unlike previous shifts, the employment losses are going to be at all levels of intelligence. How we respond to this is going to be the difference between having a peaceful transition to a lower level of work and a revolution.
Take an example of a doctor. Doctors have a regulated profession and are therefore likely immune, but assume they don't. Right now, the selection criteria for medical school are a photographic memory (to ace the MCAT) and near-perfect academic performance in college. The current reason for this is to limit the number of medical students, and it makes sense to only take the best since they're in for a multi-year academic hazing. But in the age of Google, do doctors really have to have the entire body of medical knowledge accessible in their brains on demand?
At the low end, almost every middleman and paper-processing job will be eliminated. No great loss? How about the millions of people working for companies that have jobs like this? All of a sudden, they have zero income and zero ability to contribute to the workforce.
What I find frustrating is that anyone discussing this seems to get characterized as the Unabomber or similar, ranting against technology. Technology is fine...what we do with it needs to be looked at.
Police shooting unarmed people is way too common. I think it's time that the free pass they get comes to an end, and that officers who pull the trigger end up going to prison.
I think that's the only way to make police officers STOP for 5 seconds, and not instinctively pick up their gun and kill someone. SWAT teams wearing bulletproof vests and wielding military-level firepower against unarmed people shouldn't immediately assume they're in a bad situation. If you're wearing a bulletproof vest, you won't die. The SWAT team is practically invincible compared to their target in most cases. Instead of a single shot, which in this case really seems like a mistake by a jumpy cop, SWAT teams could turn that guy into a stain on the front porch with all the firepower they have access to, So why are they afraid??
I don't know what goes on in police academy training, but I imagine it's something along the lines of everyone being a potential threat. There's nothing wrong with keeping an eye out for danger, but assuming everyone is going to kill you is going to make you more likely to shoot first. Do they even teach police to try to diffuse the situation, or is the immediate response to start firing?
"First off, there's what, about a quarter million tech geeks in the area, mostly men, with lots of money and few prospects for finding women who will date them "
That's what I was thinking of too. Of any demographic, overworked tech company employees are probably the most likely to use these services. Even take away the nerd stereotype, which is increasingly rare, and you have a group who just doesn't have any spare time to find a mate. I've been learning Azure for a year now, and the pace of new service delivery is absolutely mind-boggling. Microsoft is pumping out entirely new categories of cloud services every week, along with major updates to existing ones. You can't work in an environment like that doing 40-hour 9-to-5 hours. They must be death-marching their developers to get that level of output...and they're doing this with traditional Windows and Office as well.
Back when I started in IT, the nerd culture was a little more reality than stereotype and I've run into a few people who have obviously had mail-order brides from Eastern Europe or Asia. With all that money floating around in the tech bubble, an increase in prostitution shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. Think of an Amazon or Microsoft employee toiling away but still getting $10K or $15K dumped in his bank account every 2 weeks. He has no time to use it, but also has needs...which are easily fulfilled with a cash transaction.
When I think of "tech bro" I think of the ex-fratboy culture among web developers in startups, rather than an Amazon or Microsoft employee. Amazon is known for working their employees insane hours, and Microsoft's culture favors working crazy hours if you want to get ahead. Maybe the tech bros are just well-paid staffers with no time on their hands and no desire to look for long-term companionship. I'm married and have a healthy relationship, but working in IT makes me well aware that some aren't interested in a normal relationship. I don't work in a super-innovative industry so we don't have too many of the hardcore basement-dwelling stereotypical nerds that an Amazon or Microsoft might have. Personally I think the nerd stereotype is outdated in most workplaces.
What I don't think a lot of people realize is that most men need an outlet of some sort and even if prostitution is illegal they will go for it if the conditions aren't right for a long-term relationship. Think of your average late-20s wunderknd making a quarter million or more at a tech company, but working 90 or more hours a week. Do they go to the bar and pick among the golddiggers coming after that tech salary or do they take the no-strings option?
This was a really stupid prank and hopefully they catch whoever did it. But one thing I've always wondered about police work in general is this...especially in SWAT situations, why is there such a level of fear? SWAT teams are wearing bulletproof vests...they might get hurt but won't die from gunfire. The other thing is that any criminal is massively outgunned by a SWAT team. They should go into these situations feeling determined they can win, not scared!
I just don't understand why the first reaction of a cop is to pull out their gun and start firing before figuring out what's going on. Just stopping for a few milliseconds would fix a lot of problems.
I see a lot of commenters crowing about how much more value they deliver than the people who got laid off. Pretty soon, the axe is coming for everyone who isn't an executive as companies figure out a way to automate or eliminate work done by people altogether. That's the big long-term thing we have to worry about.
I guess I'm one of those people who want a corporate class that's more loyal toward their employees. It was only a few decades ago that people didn't have to hop from job to job every few years, uprooting their families and dealing with uncertainty.
If I were running things, i think I'd concentrate tax reform on efforts that made it difficult to get rid of employees. Similar to the way the tax code used to encourage home ownership for individuals, it can be done with companies as well. make it so that retaining and paying employees is cheaper tax-wise than retaining the extra earnings you'd keep from firing them. I'm sure everyone will say this is a make-work program, but this is what we need. Unless we're willing to give up money as a store of value, those that can't produce at the same levels as others will revolt against those that can.
I've been doing IT work for over 20 years, and all this time it has been an uphill battle to get our chosen field taken seriously. People like this are a big contributor to the problem IMO. I could definitely see offshore outsourcing firms using examples like this as scare tactics when trying to take over a company's IT department. "Mr. Executive, our loyal staff will do the needful 24/7 with zero complaints and zero chance of your company ending up in the news like this." -- or something like that.
I think there's a lot of executives and other decision-makers who think the BOFH stories are a how-to manual for IT guys and don't trust that we won't go rogue om them. The guy who wrote that email, quite frankly, sounds like a butthurt nerd living in Mom's basement whining about how he wasn't chosen for a job. It's true that a lot of us don't derive extreme pleasure from socializing, me included, but most of us have figured out how to not come off as a total idiot like this guy.
The only silver lining I can see from the Great Consolidation to the Cloud coming up is that sysadmins/DevOps guys left on site are going to have to be even more engaged with the people they're supporting. Unless the trend totally reverses itself, and I only see it speeding up, it's going to be very hard to be the lone guy in the data center or lone developer locked in your office.
I see lots of comments complaining about how this isn't a hardcore CS course, but it isn't meant to be. It's basically a survey course, and apparently is widely attended by non-CS majors. I haven't had time to go through the entire course on edX, but I've browsed a few units over the years. They do things like explain the absolute basics of sort algorithms, control statements, etc. in a very accessible way. It sure beats getting a textbook read to you by a TA who can barely string 2 words together...or being told by the "real" CS students that you're trespassing in their little club.
Consider this as well -- the course is at Harvard. No one truly hardcore goes to Harvard for CS. It's the most expensive and exclusive university in the country. The Harvard grads taking this class are going to get some extremely cushy research job, inherit Daddy's business, or go into investment banking or management consulting...coding is that stuff they send over to India after the McKinsey MBA delivers the PowerPoint to the executives.
When you have money, regardless of the amount, just that you're better off than someone else, the money gives you options others don't have. Go way far up the spectrum, and you see wealthy people living in sealed enclaves with security to protect them from having to deal with anyone. Way down the spectrum, you get people scratching and hustling just to get by from day to day...and they have to navigate their way around situations. Wealthy people apply the amount of money necessary to make a situation disappear. Pierce Harrington III will probably get off with a warning if the police find a brick of cocaine in his car, but a poor person would really have to do some fancy dancing just to get a shorter prison sentence.
Even 20 years ago I saw this in academia as well. State university students (like me) had to deal with 20,000 person campuses and courses with 400 students in them. It was only when I got into the upper division of my major that class sizes started reaching sane levels. And on top of that, no one cares but you if you fail, don't go to class, etc...you also need to become good at navigating a bureaucracy similar to a state agency. The situation is a little different at small, $60K/year private schools...basically, getting into one of these elite schools is the prize and the ride is a lot smoother from that point on for students. IMO, coming from experience working with both types, I think the private school grads may have a broader education, but lack the ability to deal with people and day-to-day situations because a lot of this is abstracted away.
It's basically the difference between book smart and street smart. I interact with a lot of faculty and Ph. D. students (live in a college town,) and street smarts for some of these folks is extremely low.
Anyone who's done any work for typical small-to-medium businesses owned and dominated by one person could see this coming a mile away. When I was starting out I worked for a couple of MSPs that were quite obviously pet projects for the owner. People like this will chase after anything that looks like they can squeeze a few bucks out before the bubble pops. It's just a personality trait -- they're hard-wired to chase money and will bounce from thing to thing picking up the crumbs, and seem naturally attracted to scammy business models.
A perfect example where I live is solar panels. There are dozens of fly-by-night companies who've set up shop alongside the big boys like Harvest Power and SolarCity. Every single one is just trying to sell sell sell enough people on overpriced equipment and service until the tax credits get repealed. When that happens, oops, business goes bankrupt and they move on. Federal tax credit on solar is 30% on equipment and installation, so every single one of these companies is marking the price of systems up by at least a few percent beyond that, and are directly taking advantage of the fact that most people are too dumb to understand how their taxes are computed. They just see "OMG huge tax credit" and sign up...and people like this Long Blockchain guy get to live large another day.
Facebook has been sort of acknowledging its status as a primary source of news rather than a pure entertainment property lately. Issues like this test this status -- and other media outlets don't really have the ability to laser-focus ads. I've seen similar stories about Facebook allowing apartment owners to get around discrimination laws by using Facebook's targeting options when placing ads. A lot of people will argue that Facebook is just providing the tools and the companies are misusing them, but this is new ground IMO. Advertisers used to have to make an educated guess about their audience...why do you think almost every commercial on daytime cable news is a precious metal investment scam, a drug ad, or a personal injury lawyer? Now they can pinpoint exactly the type of people they want by location, race, habits, friends, etc.
What will be interesting in the coming years is that you're going to see a lot of older people kicked out of their jobs as they're automated, and they are going to have to start at the bottom of the pile again in a new field. Targeting these older workers might actually get the companies more responses from people even more desperate than recent college graduates. I guess the question is...will the nature of work change, or will we end up in a Logan's Run/Soylent Green situation where people just get thrown out after they turn 30?
Intel is a de facto monopoly. Yes, there's AMD and ARM is starting to gain a foothold, but x86 basically rules the industry for now. It sounds like the CEO is trying to figure out what to do about it. And when CEOs figure things out, the reality is that management consultants tell them what to do.
I've seen it happen a bunch of times. Management consulting firms are basically charging millions for a "digital transformation starter pack" for any company whose deployment processes aren't sufficiently DevOps-y. In Intel's case, I'm sure they're basically telling them to start acting like a startup, move fast and break things, etc. The MO is the same everywhere -- the uber-shark sales team sells the CEO the starter pack, a 25 year old with a fresh Ivy League MBA is put on a plane to deliver some PowerPoints, and a team in India is sent all the "work."
I'm sure Intel has its share of bloat, and there probably are a lot of people hiding out in nice safe positions. I know a bunch of people who work for HP (now HPE) who say that the ratio of useless to useful employees is still like 3:1, even after all the mass-firings. But one thing I worry about is that in the rush to be more agile, break things, etc. they're going to fire everyone who knows the fundamentals. After all, to look like a startup, your employees need to be under 30, wearing T-shirts and board shorts, and have product stickers all over their MacBook Pro lids. Any of those stuffy old electrical engineers who make things actually happen are overpaid and should be fired, amirite?:-)
They may have been born in the grind, but they were in college through the worst of the bubble. Around 2004 the Web 2.0 bubble and social media started inflating, then 2008 happened, but in technology smartphones started going crazy, followed by the DevOps and cloud/container/serverless pushes. Technology has pretty much been immune to the housing crash, IF you were working for a web startup or a software/cloud company.
So, I respectfully disagree - they really haven't had a good stomping yet overall. There are horror stories, and plenty of peoples' jobs have been sent to name-your-low-cost-country or eliminated, but for the subset who brag on social media about how productive they are, hardship has been elusive. It's been repeating itself the same way it did in 1998-1999...anyone who can spell DevOps and construct a deployment pipeline out of 20,000 open source tools has it made, is getting paid handsomely and can hop from job to job every 6 months for massive pay raises. Tech companies and startups are starting to roll out the ridiculous "keep you at work" perks like 3 free meals a day and "fun" workspaces to try winning the talent war.
If you spend your first few years out of school in an environment like this, you could be forgiven for assuming it works this way forever. The reality is that bubbles pop, employers who fell all over themselves to hire you suddenly pull back, and all the niceness disappears. I never worked in the startup world, but I sure put in a lot of crazy hours in my 20s. It took a few stompings to realize that you need to work hard and keep yourself valuable, BUT not let employers take advantage of you.
My problem as I'm getting older (42 now...) is that I have a life outside of IT/technology. I've got a family, house and 2 children. That doesn't mean I'm some lazy middle manager or project manager clawing my way up the ladder to a no-work position and abandoning life-long learning. The issue I have is that younger people who haven't had the benefit of a life outside of tech are pumping out thing after thing after thing...and they're just different enough from each other and what's come before that you have to spend time looking at all of it or risk falling behind. The first dotcom bubble had the 25-year-old CEO, and this time we have relentless social media and DevOps tool companies. Amazon, Microsoft, Google and name-your-startup must have their employees permanently connected to a Red Bull IV to get that much work out of them.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with hard work...I do it every day. What I don't think the Millennial crowd has had yet is a good stomping from their employers to give them some perspective. Just like the last bubble, the VC funding is going to dry up for the startups, and the established tech companies are going to pull back and wait for a recovery. The free meals, bring-your-dog-to-work environments and concierge service are going to be replaced with layoff notices. And while these people will have many accomplishments under their belt, I'll bet some of them are going to wake up, look around and realize they've been giving 90 or 100 hours a week to an employer who just threw them out on the street.
Don't live to work...companies are not going to be loyal to you anymore. Work hard, give good value for money, but slow down and enjoy your life while you can.
It makes sense that they'd try to convert this particular seized asset to cash ASAP. It's not mansions, paintings and a fleet of luxury cars...it's a highly volatile cryptocurrency. Turn it into cash, hold onto it until the trial and appeals are over, and you still have an asset worth something. If they wait and the bubble pops, they get nothing or a fraction of what they would get had they sold.
Sounds like whoever he outsourced his financial management to is in trouble...
It's interesting that so many of these scams involve massive wire transfers of funds. Wire transfers aren't too common for individuals in the US, but from what I understand it's the equivalent of handing over a bag of cash to the recipient. If the funds are taken out of the account, there's no way to get it back. Why would anyone, businesses included, rely on such an irrevocable form of payment? I can understand shady international payments to Cayman Islands bank accounts or spy agencies moving money around secretly, but normal everyday transactions? Why no safeguards?
I do a lot of end user computing work, and that includes supporting some of the "applications" written in Excel and Access that have somehow managed to insert themselves into the flow of millions of dollars. Adding another language, especially a more open-ended one like Python is going to be an interesting backwards-compatibility exercise.
The major problems we see with Office migrations are: - Add-ins, usually written by a long-gone consulting company and critical to some business process - VBA "applications" that rely on some quirky behavior of one particular version of Office or reach outside the VBA bubble to access the system in no-longer-supported ways - VBA that's so monstrous and complex that it's very difficult to debug and figure out why it only works on Access 97 or Excel 2003
If Microsoft does this, they'd need to commit to keeping up with a new level of back-compat issues. How badly do you think Microsoft wishes they could let VBA die and start over? This would be the same thing, except replacing VB with Python. Some team deep inside the Office development group at Microsoft is maintaining what is essentially VB6 from the late 90s, in 2017. Putting it in as a product feature means having to keep the support running for it.
It's very strange that the SPCA of all organizations is acting like that rich tech bro a few years back who published a diatribe about how the homeless people on his building's street weren't being sufficiently controlled by the city.
My idea for fixing the problem is to re-open state mental hospitals. Almost all of the homeless problem is due to mental illness and drug addiction. Where I live, there are 5 massive, closed mental hospital complexes within 50 miles that housed thousands of patients each before the deinstitutionalization wave of the 70s and 80s. Why not reopen them as voluntary treatment centers again? Instead of beating and lobotomizing patients, give them the help they need to fix whatever problem is interfering with them having a normal existence.
Living near NYC means I certainly shouldn't throw stones about expensive housing. But California real estate is completely out to lunch. If you don't already own a house, you're either paying over a million for the cheapest places that aren't a 2-hour commute to work, or thousands and thousands a month in rent. Outside of Manhattan and gentrified parts of Queens and Brooklyn, I haven't seen anywhere else in the country where everyone wants to live in the exact same location so badly and are willing to saddle themselves with huge mortgages or rents to do it.
I've often wondered how people with ordinary jobs and incomes live in bubble areas like this. Metro NYC is a good example, and there's a lot of stratification in the suburban towns because of it....some places are just "working class towns" while the next town over is a wealthy enclave. But what do you do when real estate is expensive everywhere you turn? How can a Starbucks barista making $12-15 an hour survive in an area where rents start in the thousands per month? No one is going to drive an hour to serve coffee. Same goes for other bubble areas...the rich parts of LA like Beverly Hills and Santa Monica, Miami Beach, etc. Anywhere you see people driving Lambos to the supermarket is probably not offering affordable rents.
I've been to SV/SF on business, and the weather is nice. It would also be nice to be able to just give the boss the middle finger if I got upset and walk across the street for a 20% raise while the bubble lasts. But, I don't understand the draw beyond that...it's a huge crowded sprawling suburb with obnoxious rich tech bros. There are so many more affordable places to start up a business!
The thing about social media isn't so much the power it gives anyone to say anything...it's the fact that everyone is exposed to it 24 hours a day. At the same time, the algorithms used by these services put people further and further into ideological bubbles where they only hear the opinions they want to hear.
For example, consider the Trump investigations. Whatever you think of them, I guarantee you that even if they find unequivocal, smoking-gun level, zero-bias evidence against him, his millions of fans will immediately brush it off as "fake news" because they've been convinced that only their opinions are correct...and we'll have a serious problem on our hands if any moves are made to force him out. That's why he's not worried...all he has to do is tell his fans that he's under attack and they will take to the streets.
The other danger is depression...almost no one posts negative or mundane aspects of their lives unless they're looking for sympathy. If you're prone to depression, looking around and seeing everyone else having a grand time has to take a toll.
At 42, I'm pretty much mid-career, and have spent a large amount of effort trying to stay flexible and skilled up. The problem is when you get into environments like the one described. Outside of family businesses, I've never seen private employers who can't fire their workers. But friends of mine work for the state university system and do experience this. The key factor here is that you're not going to get new workers and you have to play the hand you're dealt...and this is where that whole management thing comes in.
I guess my question would be whether they are even interested in retraining, or whether they want to coast the last few years into retirement. If they have any sort of interest, then feed it by all means. It's super-easy to get pigeonholed into one task or get so specialized in an arcane corner of technology, then wake up and realize the train's leaving the station. Those "old" people probably have a lot of institutional knowledge along with that departmental goodwill. One place where I worked had thousands of PCs in remote locations and we were replacing them with thin clients...there was a whole group of PC techs that would have a severe cutback because of it. What we did was offer them training in basic administration for XenApp and other subjects...those who took it wound up getting better jobs being our application support people and those who didn't want it had to find work somewhere else or were kept on the now much smaller PC tech group.
One thing I'd say is that there probably are plenty of people who just want to coast, but among us oldies there are plenty who would love the chance to learn another skill and do something different.
I'm not so sure I agree 100%. If the company allows you to get diverse experience and is a good place to work, I think it can work out. Problem is most companies aren't designed like this and want to pigeonhole people into the same thing year after year. I've been changing focus every 2-3 years within the same company, trying to pick something interesting and employment-generating just in case.
And yes, I know sticking around can make it harder to find another job...I think the key to fixing that is to keep contacts outside the company so that you don't have to rely on cold-calling for work. Cold-call resumes with long service are probably very difficult to get noticed.
Seconded...if you're not built for it, you will hate it. Been there, and have the scars. Plus, middle managers often just get hollowed out in "delayering" exercises, so there you are mid-career, unemployed, with no useful skills. Not a good place to be!
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Believe it or not, there are still people who are loyal to the country and "believe in the mission." Lots of people in these agencies come from the military, so you're bound to have a committed core of individuals. But it's an organization like anywhere else...the place I work has serious faults but they're definitely not something to throw a temper tantrum about. Some people think differently about this, get fed up and leave. It's all up to personal choice, and I would think anyone smart enough to get a technical position at the NSA would be able to go work anywhere else...these aren't your typical Keyboarding Specialist III civil service workers who make a home for themselves deep in an agency's bureaucracy. I don't throw a fit and leave my position because I have the opportunity to do interesting work even if I have to work around dumb decisions above my level.
Just like businesses, government agencies outsource everything they can as well. I would think that some of the defection is to contractors, where they would trade job security for a higher salary. I imagine there's basically a few "Spies R Us" firms right in the DC metro area that does the same analysis work the official TLAs do.
Another place they could end up at is management consulting firms. I work for an IT services company and we respond to RFPs all the time -- there's a lot of pressure to keep up the credentials on the individuals presented as the "A Team" (who gets swapped out when the contract is signed.) There's a lot of cache in saying "Dude, this guy's ex-NSA" when referring to a security consultant. Even if they barely do any work, just having them is like the big tech companies employing Technical Fellows.
Still other employers are basically anywhere else math geniuses get jobs. Insurance companies still pay actuaries handsomely. Investment banks doing HFT would love to have a few NSA people on staff and would probably overlook some of their quirks. The private sector does pay much better than government work over the short term. And, post-Cold War and post-Snowden, there's less public acceptance of the spy agencies. I'm sure there's tons of issues they silently prevent or give advance notice of, and I'll bet that's what's keeping some people on staff...it's naive to think that other countries aren't spying on their citizens or foreign governments as well.
I would expect a company the size of Google to hire an army of tax accountants and lawyers to do this, but one thing that I think people overlook is that businesses in general get a huge advantage over typical wage-earners in the US tax system.
It drives me crazy when I hear small business owners whining about how expensive it is to do business and how they're being taxed to death. I'd love to see what entity owns their house, their cars, and incurs all their personal expenses...in almost all cases, these are easily passed through to the corporation or other business structure they own. All the complaints about high tax rates ring hollow when you can avoid it by offsetting revenue with expenses. Let's say you have $100K in revenue and maybe $20K in legitimate business expenses. Rent your house out as a place of business...that's thousands in rent, and of course your business needs cars, computers, business-related travel expenses, etc...and all of a sudden you're reporting a loss instead of a profit. Even better, if it's a corporation, you issue yourself a W-2 for a tiny salary, legitimizing the corporation's existence and further reducing your tax liability by paying tax on the salary at the personal rate.
The only way to fix this would be to switch to a consumption tax, or cut out every single deduction and charge a lower rate...but companies have already purchased their tax laws and aren't going to give them up without a fight.
I think the big test for us is coming up shortly. Technology is shifting from being a labor-saving device to a labor-eliminating device. And unlike previous shifts, the employment losses are going to be at all levels of intelligence. How we respond to this is going to be the difference between having a peaceful transition to a lower level of work and a revolution.
Take an example of a doctor. Doctors have a regulated profession and are therefore likely immune, but assume they don't. Right now, the selection criteria for medical school are a photographic memory (to ace the MCAT) and near-perfect academic performance in college. The current reason for this is to limit the number of medical students, and it makes sense to only take the best since they're in for a multi-year academic hazing. But in the age of Google, do doctors really have to have the entire body of medical knowledge accessible in their brains on demand?
At the low end, almost every middleman and paper-processing job will be eliminated. No great loss? How about the millions of people working for companies that have jobs like this? All of a sudden, they have zero income and zero ability to contribute to the workforce.
What I find frustrating is that anyone discussing this seems to get characterized as the Unabomber or similar, ranting against technology. Technology is fine...what we do with it needs to be looked at.
Police shooting unarmed people is way too common. I think it's time that the free pass they get comes to an end, and that officers who pull the trigger end up going to prison.
I think that's the only way to make police officers STOP for 5 seconds, and not instinctively pick up their gun and kill someone. SWAT teams wearing bulletproof vests and wielding military-level firepower against unarmed people shouldn't immediately assume they're in a bad situation. If you're wearing a bulletproof vest, you won't die. The SWAT team is practically invincible compared to their target in most cases. Instead of a single shot, which in this case really seems like a mistake by a jumpy cop, SWAT teams could turn that guy into a stain on the front porch with all the firepower they have access to, So why are they afraid??
I don't know what goes on in police academy training, but I imagine it's something along the lines of everyone being a potential threat. There's nothing wrong with keeping an eye out for danger, but assuming everyone is going to kill you is going to make you more likely to shoot first. Do they even teach police to try to diffuse the situation, or is the immediate response to start firing?
"First off, there's what, about a quarter million tech geeks in the area, mostly men, with lots of money and few prospects for finding women who will date them "
That's what I was thinking of too. Of any demographic, overworked tech company employees are probably the most likely to use these services. Even take away the nerd stereotype, which is increasingly rare, and you have a group who just doesn't have any spare time to find a mate. I've been learning Azure for a year now, and the pace of new service delivery is absolutely mind-boggling. Microsoft is pumping out entirely new categories of cloud services every week, along with major updates to existing ones. You can't work in an environment like that doing 40-hour 9-to-5 hours. They must be death-marching their developers to get that level of output...and they're doing this with traditional Windows and Office as well.
Back when I started in IT, the nerd culture was a little more reality than stereotype and I've run into a few people who have obviously had mail-order brides from Eastern Europe or Asia. With all that money floating around in the tech bubble, an increase in prostitution shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. Think of an Amazon or Microsoft employee toiling away but still getting $10K or $15K dumped in his bank account every 2 weeks. He has no time to use it, but also has needs...which are easily fulfilled with a cash transaction.
When I think of "tech bro" I think of the ex-fratboy culture among web developers in startups, rather than an Amazon or Microsoft employee. Amazon is known for working their employees insane hours, and Microsoft's culture favors working crazy hours if you want to get ahead. Maybe the tech bros are just well-paid staffers with no time on their hands and no desire to look for long-term companionship. I'm married and have a healthy relationship, but working in IT makes me well aware that some aren't interested in a normal relationship. I don't work in a super-innovative industry so we don't have too many of the hardcore basement-dwelling stereotypical nerds that an Amazon or Microsoft might have. Personally I think the nerd stereotype is outdated in most workplaces.
What I don't think a lot of people realize is that most men need an outlet of some sort and even if prostitution is illegal they will go for it if the conditions aren't right for a long-term relationship. Think of your average late-20s wunderknd making a quarter million or more at a tech company, but working 90 or more hours a week. Do they go to the bar and pick among the golddiggers coming after that tech salary or do they take the no-strings option?
This was a really stupid prank and hopefully they catch whoever did it. But one thing I've always wondered about police work in general is this...especially in SWAT situations, why is there such a level of fear? SWAT teams are wearing bulletproof vests...they might get hurt but won't die from gunfire. The other thing is that any criminal is massively outgunned by a SWAT team. They should go into these situations feeling determined they can win, not scared!
I just don't understand why the first reaction of a cop is to pull out their gun and start firing before figuring out what's going on. Just stopping for a few milliseconds would fix a lot of problems.
I see a lot of commenters crowing about how much more value they deliver than the people who got laid off. Pretty soon, the axe is coming for everyone who isn't an executive as companies figure out a way to automate or eliminate work done by people altogether. That's the big long-term thing we have to worry about.
I guess I'm one of those people who want a corporate class that's more loyal toward their employees. It was only a few decades ago that people didn't have to hop from job to job every few years, uprooting their families and dealing with uncertainty.
If I were running things, i think I'd concentrate tax reform on efforts that made it difficult to get rid of employees. Similar to the way the tax code used to encourage home ownership for individuals, it can be done with companies as well. make it so that retaining and paying employees is cheaper tax-wise than retaining the extra earnings you'd keep from firing them. I'm sure everyone will say this is a make-work program, but this is what we need. Unless we're willing to give up money as a store of value, those that can't produce at the same levels as others will revolt against those that can.
I've been doing IT work for over 20 years, and all this time it has been an uphill battle to get our chosen field taken seriously. People like this are a big contributor to the problem IMO. I could definitely see offshore outsourcing firms using examples like this as scare tactics when trying to take over a company's IT department. "Mr. Executive, our loyal staff will do the needful 24/7 with zero complaints and zero chance of your company ending up in the news like this." -- or something like that.
I think there's a lot of executives and other decision-makers who think the BOFH stories are a how-to manual for IT guys and don't trust that we won't go rogue om them. The guy who wrote that email, quite frankly, sounds like a butthurt nerd living in Mom's basement whining about how he wasn't chosen for a job. It's true that a lot of us don't derive extreme pleasure from socializing, me included, but most of us have figured out how to not come off as a total idiot like this guy.
The only silver lining I can see from the Great Consolidation to the Cloud coming up is that sysadmins/DevOps guys left on site are going to have to be even more engaged with the people they're supporting. Unless the trend totally reverses itself, and I only see it speeding up, it's going to be very hard to be the lone guy in the data center or lone developer locked in your office.
I see lots of comments complaining about how this isn't a hardcore CS course, but it isn't meant to be. It's basically a survey course, and apparently is widely attended by non-CS majors. I haven't had time to go through the entire course on edX, but I've browsed a few units over the years. They do things like explain the absolute basics of sort algorithms, control statements, etc. in a very accessible way. It sure beats getting a textbook read to you by a TA who can barely string 2 words together...or being told by the "real" CS students that you're trespassing in their little club.
Consider this as well -- the course is at Harvard. No one truly hardcore goes to Harvard for CS. It's the most expensive and exclusive university in the country. The Harvard grads taking this class are going to get some extremely cushy research job, inherit Daddy's business, or go into investment banking or management consulting...coding is that stuff they send over to India after the McKinsey MBA delivers the PowerPoint to the executives.
When you have money, regardless of the amount, just that you're better off than someone else, the money gives you options others don't have. Go way far up the spectrum, and you see wealthy people living in sealed enclaves with security to protect them from having to deal with anyone. Way down the spectrum, you get people scratching and hustling just to get by from day to day...and they have to navigate their way around situations. Wealthy people apply the amount of money necessary to make a situation disappear. Pierce Harrington III will probably get off with a warning if the police find a brick of cocaine in his car, but a poor person would really have to do some fancy dancing just to get a shorter prison sentence.
Even 20 years ago I saw this in academia as well. State university students (like me) had to deal with 20,000 person campuses and courses with 400 students in them. It was only when I got into the upper division of my major that class sizes started reaching sane levels. And on top of that, no one cares but you if you fail, don't go to class, etc...you also need to become good at navigating a bureaucracy similar to a state agency. The situation is a little different at small, $60K/year private schools...basically, getting into one of these elite schools is the prize and the ride is a lot smoother from that point on for students. IMO, coming from experience working with both types, I think the private school grads may have a broader education, but lack the ability to deal with people and day-to-day situations because a lot of this is abstracted away.
It's basically the difference between book smart and street smart. I interact with a lot of faculty and Ph. D. students (live in a college town,) and street smarts for some of these folks is extremely low.
Anyone who's done any work for typical small-to-medium businesses owned and dominated by one person could see this coming a mile away. When I was starting out I worked for a couple of MSPs that were quite obviously pet projects for the owner. People like this will chase after anything that looks like they can squeeze a few bucks out before the bubble pops. It's just a personality trait -- they're hard-wired to chase money and will bounce from thing to thing picking up the crumbs, and seem naturally attracted to scammy business models.
A perfect example where I live is solar panels. There are dozens of fly-by-night companies who've set up shop alongside the big boys like Harvest Power and SolarCity. Every single one is just trying to sell sell sell enough people on overpriced equipment and service until the tax credits get repealed. When that happens, oops, business goes bankrupt and they move on. Federal tax credit on solar is 30% on equipment and installation, so every single one of these companies is marking the price of systems up by at least a few percent beyond that, and are directly taking advantage of the fact that most people are too dumb to understand how their taxes are computed. They just see "OMG huge tax credit" and sign up...and people like this Long Blockchain guy get to live large another day.
Facebook has been sort of acknowledging its status as a primary source of news rather than a pure entertainment property lately. Issues like this test this status -- and other media outlets don't really have the ability to laser-focus ads. I've seen similar stories about Facebook allowing apartment owners to get around discrimination laws by using Facebook's targeting options when placing ads. A lot of people will argue that Facebook is just providing the tools and the companies are misusing them, but this is new ground IMO. Advertisers used to have to make an educated guess about their audience...why do you think almost every commercial on daytime cable news is a precious metal investment scam, a drug ad, or a personal injury lawyer? Now they can pinpoint exactly the type of people they want by location, race, habits, friends, etc.
What will be interesting in the coming years is that you're going to see a lot of older people kicked out of their jobs as they're automated, and they are going to have to start at the bottom of the pile again in a new field. Targeting these older workers might actually get the companies more responses from people even more desperate than recent college graduates. I guess the question is...will the nature of work change, or will we end up in a Logan's Run/Soylent Green situation where people just get thrown out after they turn 30?
Intel is a de facto monopoly. Yes, there's AMD and ARM is starting to gain a foothold, but x86 basically rules the industry for now. It sounds like the CEO is trying to figure out what to do about it. And when CEOs figure things out, the reality is that management consultants tell them what to do.
I've seen it happen a bunch of times. Management consulting firms are basically charging millions for a "digital transformation starter pack" for any company whose deployment processes aren't sufficiently DevOps-y. In Intel's case, I'm sure they're basically telling them to start acting like a startup, move fast and break things, etc. The MO is the same everywhere -- the uber-shark sales team sells the CEO the starter pack, a 25 year old with a fresh Ivy League MBA is put on a plane to deliver some PowerPoints, and a team in India is sent all the "work."
I'm sure Intel has its share of bloat, and there probably are a lot of people hiding out in nice safe positions. I know a bunch of people who work for HP (now HPE) who say that the ratio of useless to useful employees is still like 3:1, even after all the mass-firings. But one thing I worry about is that in the rush to be more agile, break things, etc. they're going to fire everyone who knows the fundamentals. After all, to look like a startup, your employees need to be under 30, wearing T-shirts and board shorts, and have product stickers all over their MacBook Pro lids. Any of those stuffy old electrical engineers who make things actually happen are overpaid and should be fired, amirite? :-)
They may have been born in the grind, but they were in college through the worst of the bubble. Around 2004 the Web 2.0 bubble and social media started inflating, then 2008 happened, but in technology smartphones started going crazy, followed by the DevOps and cloud/container/serverless pushes. Technology has pretty much been immune to the housing crash, IF you were working for a web startup or a software/cloud company.
So, I respectfully disagree - they really haven't had a good stomping yet overall. There are horror stories, and plenty of peoples' jobs have been sent to name-your-low-cost-country or eliminated, but for the subset who brag on social media about how productive they are, hardship has been elusive. It's been repeating itself the same way it did in 1998-1999...anyone who can spell DevOps and construct a deployment pipeline out of 20,000 open source tools has it made, is getting paid handsomely and can hop from job to job every 6 months for massive pay raises. Tech companies and startups are starting to roll out the ridiculous "keep you at work" perks like 3 free meals a day and "fun" workspaces to try winning the talent war.
If you spend your first few years out of school in an environment like this, you could be forgiven for assuming it works this way forever. The reality is that bubbles pop, employers who fell all over themselves to hire you suddenly pull back, and all the niceness disappears. I never worked in the startup world, but I sure put in a lot of crazy hours in my 20s. It took a few stompings to realize that you need to work hard and keep yourself valuable, BUT not let employers take advantage of you.
My problem as I'm getting older (42 now...) is that I have a life outside of IT/technology. I've got a family, house and 2 children. That doesn't mean I'm some lazy middle manager or project manager clawing my way up the ladder to a no-work position and abandoning life-long learning. The issue I have is that younger people who haven't had the benefit of a life outside of tech are pumping out thing after thing after thing...and they're just different enough from each other and what's come before that you have to spend time looking at all of it or risk falling behind. The first dotcom bubble had the 25-year-old CEO, and this time we have relentless social media and DevOps tool companies. Amazon, Microsoft, Google and name-your-startup must have their employees permanently connected to a Red Bull IV to get that much work out of them.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with hard work...I do it every day. What I don't think the Millennial crowd has had yet is a good stomping from their employers to give them some perspective. Just like the last bubble, the VC funding is going to dry up for the startups, and the established tech companies are going to pull back and wait for a recovery. The free meals, bring-your-dog-to-work environments and concierge service are going to be replaced with layoff notices. And while these people will have many accomplishments under their belt, I'll bet some of them are going to wake up, look around and realize they've been giving 90 or 100 hours a week to an employer who just threw them out on the street.
Don't live to work...companies are not going to be loyal to you anymore. Work hard, give good value for money, but slow down and enjoy your life while you can.
It makes sense that they'd try to convert this particular seized asset to cash ASAP. It's not mansions, paintings and a fleet of luxury cars...it's a highly volatile cryptocurrency. Turn it into cash, hold onto it until the trial and appeals are over, and you still have an asset worth something. If they wait and the bubble pops, they get nothing or a fraction of what they would get had they sold.
Sounds like whoever he outsourced his financial management to is in trouble...
It's interesting that so many of these scams involve massive wire transfers of funds. Wire transfers aren't too common for individuals in the US, but from what I understand it's the equivalent of handing over a bag of cash to the recipient. If the funds are taken out of the account, there's no way to get it back. Why would anyone, businesses included, rely on such an irrevocable form of payment? I can understand shady international payments to Cayman Islands bank accounts or spy agencies moving money around secretly, but normal everyday transactions? Why no safeguards?
I do a lot of end user computing work, and that includes supporting some of the "applications" written in Excel and Access that have somehow managed to insert themselves into the flow of millions of dollars. Adding another language, especially a more open-ended one like Python is going to be an interesting backwards-compatibility exercise.
The major problems we see with Office migrations are:
- Add-ins, usually written by a long-gone consulting company and critical to some business process
- VBA "applications" that rely on some quirky behavior of one particular version of Office or reach outside the VBA bubble to access the system in no-longer-supported ways
- VBA that's so monstrous and complex that it's very difficult to debug and figure out why it only works on Access 97 or Excel 2003
If Microsoft does this, they'd need to commit to keeping up with a new level of back-compat issues. How badly do you think Microsoft wishes they could let VBA die and start over? This would be the same thing, except replacing VB with Python. Some team deep inside the Office development group at Microsoft is maintaining what is essentially VB6 from the late 90s, in 2017. Putting it in as a product feature means having to keep the support running for it.
It's very strange that the SPCA of all organizations is acting like that rich tech bro a few years back who published a diatribe about how the homeless people on his building's street weren't being sufficiently controlled by the city.
My idea for fixing the problem is to re-open state mental hospitals. Almost all of the homeless problem is due to mental illness and drug addiction. Where I live, there are 5 massive, closed mental hospital complexes within 50 miles that housed thousands of patients each before the deinstitutionalization wave of the 70s and 80s. Why not reopen them as voluntary treatment centers again? Instead of beating and lobotomizing patients, give them the help they need to fix whatever problem is interfering with them having a normal existence.
Living near NYC means I certainly shouldn't throw stones about expensive housing. But California real estate is completely out to lunch. If you don't already own a house, you're either paying over a million for the cheapest places that aren't a 2-hour commute to work, or thousands and thousands a month in rent. Outside of Manhattan and gentrified parts of Queens and Brooklyn, I haven't seen anywhere else in the country where everyone wants to live in the exact same location so badly and are willing to saddle themselves with huge mortgages or rents to do it.
I've often wondered how people with ordinary jobs and incomes live in bubble areas like this. Metro NYC is a good example, and there's a lot of stratification in the suburban towns because of it....some places are just "working class towns" while the next town over is a wealthy enclave. But what do you do when real estate is expensive everywhere you turn? How can a Starbucks barista making $12-15 an hour survive in an area where rents start in the thousands per month? No one is going to drive an hour to serve coffee. Same goes for other bubble areas...the rich parts of LA like Beverly Hills and Santa Monica, Miami Beach, etc. Anywhere you see people driving Lambos to the supermarket is probably not offering affordable rents.
I've been to SV/SF on business, and the weather is nice. It would also be nice to be able to just give the boss the middle finger if I got upset and walk across the street for a 20% raise while the bubble lasts. But, I don't understand the draw beyond that...it's a huge crowded sprawling suburb with obnoxious rich tech bros. There are so many more affordable places to start up a business!
The thing about social media isn't so much the power it gives anyone to say anything...it's the fact that everyone is exposed to it 24 hours a day. At the same time, the algorithms used by these services put people further and further into ideological bubbles where they only hear the opinions they want to hear.
For example, consider the Trump investigations. Whatever you think of them, I guarantee you that even if they find unequivocal, smoking-gun level, zero-bias evidence against him, his millions of fans will immediately brush it off as "fake news" because they've been convinced that only their opinions are correct...and we'll have a serious problem on our hands if any moves are made to force him out. That's why he's not worried...all he has to do is tell his fans that he's under attack and they will take to the streets.
The other danger is depression...almost no one posts negative or mundane aspects of their lives unless they're looking for sympathy. If you're prone to depression, looking around and seeing everyone else having a grand time has to take a toll.
At 42, I'm pretty much mid-career, and have spent a large amount of effort trying to stay flexible and skilled up. The problem is when you get into environments like the one described. Outside of family businesses, I've never seen private employers who can't fire their workers. But friends of mine work for the state university system and do experience this. The key factor here is that you're not going to get new workers and you have to play the hand you're dealt...and this is where that whole management thing comes in.
I guess my question would be whether they are even interested in retraining, or whether they want to coast the last few years into retirement. If they have any sort of interest, then feed it by all means. It's super-easy to get pigeonholed into one task or get so specialized in an arcane corner of technology, then wake up and realize the train's leaving the station. Those "old" people probably have a lot of institutional knowledge along with that departmental goodwill. One place where I worked had thousands of PCs in remote locations and we were replacing them with thin clients...there was a whole group of PC techs that would have a severe cutback because of it. What we did was offer them training in basic administration for XenApp and other subjects...those who took it wound up getting better jobs being our application support people and those who didn't want it had to find work somewhere else or were kept on the now much smaller PC tech group.
One thing I'd say is that there probably are plenty of people who just want to coast, but among us oldies there are plenty who would love the chance to learn another skill and do something different.
I'm not so sure I agree 100%. If the company allows you to get diverse experience and is a good place to work, I think it can work out. Problem is most companies aren't designed like this and want to pigeonhole people into the same thing year after year. I've been changing focus every 2-3 years within the same company, trying to pick something interesting and employment-generating just in case.
And yes, I know sticking around can make it harder to find another job...I think the key to fixing that is to keep contacts outside the company so that you don't have to rely on cold-calling for work. Cold-call resumes with long service are probably very difficult to get noticed.
Seconded...if you're not built for it, you will hate it. Been there, and have the scars. Plus, middle managers often just get hollowed out in "delayering" exercises, so there you are mid-career, unemployed, with no useful skills. Not a good place to be!