Lawyers are a good example of your complaint, but not doctors...not by a long shot. Doctors were smart enough to create professional organizations that actually have teeth. Through these orgs, they pay for the laws that will keep them employed when every other knowledge job is done by automation.
Part of the reason why it's so hard to become a doctor is that the supply of medical school slots is closely protected. The Bar Association did the reverse and allowed tons of new law schools to open up, resulting in those lawyers with unrecoverable debts because there just isn't enough work to go around anymore. Becoming a doctor requires the closest thing possible to a photographic memory even to pass the MCAT, and you have to be even more hard-wired in an academic mode to make it through the classroom part of the training. So yeah, if my kids are capable of it I would certainly encourage them to at least try...I don't know of any non-rich doctors in the US!
During normal operations, I did notice Japanese trains run to the second when I was there a while back. There's no similar sense of urgency here in the US.
I don't know if a society so focused on punctuality is a good thing though...not being allowed to be late (or early) means that there's no room for error in other parts of one's life either. I imagine it's very difficult to come back from a personal failure in Japanese culture. In the US, it's certainly not impossible...I know tons of people who just weren't ready to grow up when they turned 18, and they either drifted or joined the military and grew up, then got their lives on track. That must be way harder in Japan if you can't even leave 20 seconds early without triggering an apology.
I'm not sure i agree with that. First, any business who can't afford to pay an employee $15 an hour shouldn't be hiring employees...let the owner do all the work if they don't want to cut into their profits. Second, outside of the technology bubble live millions of people exactly like you describe. Don't forget that IQ is normally distributed and even people with potential for intelligence grow up in some really crappy circumstances that interfere with their ability to succeed.
Seriously, low-end employers make enough to pay a decent minimum wage. A pizza place can charge $15 for a single pizza and makes hundreds a day. McDonald's takes in tons of money every day and only a fraction of that goes out as labor costs.
Forget about the automation itself -- if there is a sudden massive drop in employment then the economy as a whole is toast. In the developed world, the entire economy is based around the idea that people sell their labor for money, which is then used to buy goods produced by people working for money. Even the Great Depression had unemployment numbers in the 25% range -- that was a mess and automation is poised to put way more people out of work. Deindustrialization has been devastating to parts of the US and Europe, but it's been slow-ish. The next wave of job removal is not just multiple times faster, but affects more of the economy as well. And this time, it doesn't matter how educated you are...doctors and lawyers will only be able to keep their jobs because they have professional organizations that will never allow them to be unemployed. What about everyone else?
I think that if you want to keep the status quo, you're going to have to figure out a way to keep giving money to people via a variety of means. Either you go the basic income route and make work an add-on to the essentials, or you establish a New Deal era program to provide an employer of last resort, or a combination of the two.
A personal example I would like to cite is drawn from my experience doing IT work in large organizations. Even with companies pushing to offshore and outsource everything, there are still tons of full time employees drawing decent salaries doing work that is basically a shell script plus knowledge of organizational politics. What worries me is that we're still pumping out tons of college graduates every year who are going to be expecting a job like this. I got a science degree, but hung out with tons of people in various soft subject degrees in college. Those people did the bare minimum level of work and just showed up to group interviews for large companies their senior year. Those big companies gave them some kind of random entry level job with a career path that might make them managers, directors and VPs someday. If companies don't need tons of C-student psychology or business majors, then the educational system breaks down too.
Globally, English in general is dominant because of previous colonial activities by the British Empire and the prevalence of American entertainment and Internet properties. Having most of the Internet Anglo-centric is a big driver...most online discussions are in English unless it's very region-specific. Software development is a kind-of-English activity for the most part...even if someone isn't a native speaker, they're usually communicating with colleagues in English.
What remains to be seen is whether the US will continue dominating global politics, culture and the Internet. China and India have over a billion people. I do think that as these societies mature, they present a pretty big challenge to English as the dominant language. India has an official language of English but that doesn't mean most of the population speaks it natively or is even bilingual. I think that a combination of the US and UK becoming more insular and the rise of China as a world power will shift the balance...not right away but slowly. One thing China has that the US/UK doesn't, for better or worse, is a semi-authoritarian government. They can basically make whatever they need to happen, happen -- look at how much money they threw into infrastructure to blunt the force of the 2008 financial crisis. Their current plan seems to be reaching out to developing countries in sort of a soft colonialism, doing infrastructure projects and other activities to gain influence. If these activities bring the language along with them, then I could definitely see the balance tipping away from English somewhat.
End-user wise, most OSes today are fine for client devices because web browsers work well on all of them. The killer is the actual business applications...I imagine a city government builds up quite a large portfolio of applications over time, both current and legacy, packaged and home-grown. I work in a non-government but very similar vertical market, where there are really only 2 or 3 vendors supporting any particular system. Getting those entrenched vendors to adapt to anything is hard because they want to keep collecting license fees without having to modernize the applications. There also might be a lot of software that costs an arm and a leg to rewrite, or can't realistically be rewritten.
If you have lots of these applications, especially if they're Windows applications or web apps that only work with older web browsers, that adds the expense of VDI or XenApp-style application virtualization. They don't go away - and you have to move the complexity off the desktop machine for a fee. Most governments operate on a transactional basis -- pay my consulting company $bagofmoney and I will deliver you Solution X tailored to your problem statement. Adding more $bagsofmoney on top for rewrites usually is frowned upon, and that's how these big, old application stables build up.
Linux and LibreOffice are a fine choice for users who don't have tons of these entanglements. But working in end-user computing in a series of niche industries, I see a lot of barriers to full adoption. Just off the top of my head, I can think of: - Crappy web apps tied to IE, or worse yet, to internal HTML rendering behavior of a specific Windows version (yes, this exists.) - ActiveX (though this this thankfully finally starting to die off.) - Office add-ins written by consultingfirmofthemonth that are now integral to the business - Office "applications" coded in VBA that inexplicably have become the way for departments to handle millions of dollars in business and are extremely fragile
I think these are going to go away as Windows becomes less critical on desktops and new CRUD style apps are 100% web based, but they're definitely still lurking in locations not covered by the press who fawns over SV startups.
Employers use this system to wash their hands of the idea of a "reference call." Since most employers (in policy, at least) will only verify dates of employment and previous salary if called for a reference, this system basically publishes this information and has been in existence for years. It's only coming to light now because of the Equifax breach. Employers love it because it gives them the legal check box of not empowering a "rogue manager" to divulge anything about previous employment. (This is why I think we see a lot of jokers bouncing from place to place and screwing things up with no consequences.)
Beyond the info security aspect, the other problem with a system like this is the ability for companies to deny job offers or reduce salaries based on what you previously made. I've actually had situations where HR offered salary X and then pulled back the offer and countered with a lower salary because of what they found in a potential employee's background search. I don't like this because it encourages the exact behavior we see in the tech industry now...get your first job, then jump as quickly as possible from employer to employer to get higher salary increases. Honestly this is fine if you're a drop-in replacement coder cranking out work to spec and have no clue what the business need for it is, but I work for an employer where you really need to know the industry a bit before you're truly useful. Just getting up to speed can take 8 months or so and you're not really capable of understanding the work until about a year. We can't have people cycling in and out on 6-month contracts...some of our best employees have been around for 15 or more years and sticking around is encouraged because training is so expensive. This is in our little group however, and HR is HR no matter what you tell them you need.
I think the best solution to fix wage stagnation would be to tax profits at a rate where it makes more sense to pay people and invest in the business than to just give the money to the shareholders. That, and get rid of systems like this. Along with automated resume scanners, this is just another HR tool to ensure they minimize the cost of hiring someone. (Seriously, I've never seen the back end of Taleo, but every company I've ever applied to with Taleo handling applications seems to auto-reject people at a very high rate. I wonder if they have pre-defined filters like "no one over 40" or "must match 95% of the words in the job description" or "give me the top 5 resumes by match.")
"You mean, exactly like the American tech industry which only hires new graduates, only promotes laterally, and refuses to hire anyone over 30."
I certainly don't disagree that this is a problem in the US also, but managed to keep some employers interested in me past 40. It's not as easy as if I was just graduating, but my point was that a system where NO employer will touch you must lead to some difficult situations...such as doing anything the company asks to avoid getting fired, or ending up permanently disqualified from certain jobs or industries just because you didn't make the cut at graduation, or having to do something like hiring someone to be your partner to impress your boss.
The ageism in technology does have to stop, but I don't really think I want to go work at a web startup and work 100 hour weeks anyway...and I certainly wouldn't want to work anywhere that had a preconceived notion that I was "too old" and therefore the first to go when things got bad. My opinion is that things will improve once the startups' millennial "executives" find a life outside of work and suddenly realize why their older engineers have to disappear in the middle of the day for school things or to tend to a sick kid. Either that, or it'll get worse and the vocally anti-work/life balance crowd will make things bad for everyone. (It still amazes me how many people will defend a bad employer to the death...it seems to take everyone one or two bad jobs to figure this out.)
I'm no expert on Japanese culture, but the glimpses Westerners get to see are...quite interesting. Between this and robotic female companions going semi-mainstream, it seems like there may be a couple of social screws that need tightening. I wonder if selling human interactions, beyond the obvious oldest profession, will be a thing when people don't have manual labor to fall back on.
In my opinion, and it's just an opinion, this is what happens when you have a culture where high achievement is celebrated, but not everyone gets to participate fully. You're just expected to have an outward appearance of success, and I can imagine that can be hard for someone who really isn't meeting expectations. I've heard of this among Ivy League college students...they act like nothing fazes them even if they're struggling like mad to keep up with their peers. The ones who were the smartest kids in their high school get dropped into an environment where _everyone_ is either the smartest or most well-connected kid in their peer group.
I read about an interesting trait of Japanese society...that of lifetime employment. Apparently, large corporations only hire new graduates and if you miss out on it, you never get another chance because they do not hire experienced employees. Talk about having to keep up appearances...imagine not meshing with the crowd for whatever reason and ending up working in a convenience store the rest of your life even if you were an engineering student.
iPhone users (in the US at least, not sure what's going on elsewhere) are conditioned to upgrade their devices. Even though carrier subsidies are gone, they've been replaced by a series of "lease/loan/trade-up" programs that keep people in contracts with their carriers until the equipment loan is satisfied. That, and iOS users tend to have more disposable income to go upgrade their shiny devices, so even if the cost of the device is hidden they don't really care.
Software-wise, it's the same thing driving the Windows-as-a-Service thing that Microsoft is doing with Windows 10. People are just conditioned to click "Restart Now" and accept whatever update appears because all of the complexity has been hidden away. One thing I can say about Windows 10 is that upgrades are much safer than they were back in the Windows 7 days...but that comes with the drawback of not knowing much about what is in those update packages. Microsoft used to break out exactly what changed in each update but they are increasingly tight-lipped and reverting to Apple-style "makes your PC faster, easier and more enjoyable! (...and fixes these 247 security holes)"
It'll never get off the ground because "OMG socialism" but I think we're going to need something like this. If we're truly ready to say there are no more manual labor assembly line type jobs, the majority of people in the US are suddenly unable to sell their labor. This includes white-collar assembly line jobs as well...think about all the paperwork processing type jobs you may support in IT and wonder why they still exist.
Not everyone is capable of training for a higher-level job. Consider the assembly line worker who has been doing the exact same job for 25 years. The odds are that they don't have the capability, intelligence or motivation to be full-stack web developers or data scientists or marketing managers.
The reason I like the New Deal analogy is that we're basically saying that if you can't find work that pays what you want, the government is the employer of last resort and has projects that need doing. It would keep the staunchest opponents of universal basic income at bay because the workers would have to work for their pay, but it would protect the population least able to make the transition to knowledge work...and IMO it would sure beat violent revolution once things get bad enough for enough people. Unemployed, uneducated workers with nothing to do and nothing to lose aren't going to sit around waiting for the upper class to share the wealth; you may see the return of the guillotine within our lifetimes.
When are managers gong to decide? Are we employees independent, creative, productive individuals who work 100% of the time we're at work? Or are we a bunch of time and resource thieves that have to be monitored to make sure we're not dipping below our productivity goals?
So much of HR and employee management is rooted in this 70s notion of factory production work. Even white collar jobs were like that back in the day...you'd clock in, work on your paperwork, have a pre-defined set of breaks, and clock out. All that time, the supervisors would watch people to make sure they were working, and there was no trust. There have been times where employees were a little more empowered, but it came at the expense of zero work/life balance. I think managers just don't feel they can exercise enough control unless they're right on top of all their employees. Maybe they're not taught any other way in MBA school, I don't know.
We're going to have to figure this out sooner or later...the only jobs that are going to be left in a couple decades are knowledge worker jobs. I personally think it's time to drop the monitoring...treat workers like adults unless they truly won't work without supervision. Knowledge workers should be goal-driven, not production quota-driven.
I'm an IT guy with a background in science...got a BS in chemistry way back in the day. The problem is that science is losing a lot of smart domestic people to investment banking, web startups, management consulting, etc. Foreign students come from places where scientists are revered, and that just doesn't happen in the US. When I graduated, there still was some room for a good career in the sciences, and I did consider it. But ultimately, I was kind of done with school at that point, had relevant work experience and chose to go with IT -- rather than slog through years of Ph. D. work to maybe possibly get a tenured faculty position.
Tell your average 22 year old that they have the choice of spending years as a researcher and a tiny sliver of hope for a permanent position, OR, go spend 2 years getting an MBA, work for Goldman Sachs and never worry about money again, OR, go work for Facebook/Google and devise new algorithms for getting people to click on ads, OR, go work for Accenture/PwC/other management consulting firm and get paid handsomely to deliver PowerPoints to executives. Which would you choose?
The only thing I can think of that might change this is a major world war with China or India that cuts off the supply of scientific talent willing to pursue this path.
(OK, I found one occurrence.) But seriously, this is what's being sold in management consulting "corporate DevOps transformation" packages. The first rule is almost always, "Go fire your QA department and make your developers write automated tests." This is exactly what the executives paying the management consulting firm for their "digital transformation strategy" want to hear, and that's magnified by a bunch of Google "visionaries" touting the same. Not every business is Google, and IMO DevOps works only when you can swap out everything, not just pieces.
If QA is just mindlessly pushing buttons and seeing what breaks, maybe that makes a little sense. But, I do systems integration work, meaning our team gets to figure out how hundreds of different modules from various dodgy offshore contractors fit together. I'm of the opinion that devs doing their own testing works well when there's little component interaction and the consqeuence of failure is a 400-series or 500-series HTTP response. When you're talking about a system made up of tons of components, no matter how microservice-y you make ti, there are still plenty of opportunities to introduce issues, and someone needs to be able to catch them.
I tend to agree with this. My wife has a good job that pays well, but has a crazy commute and the company has an absolute rigid no-work-from-home policy, with work hours that are actually enforced. They're essentially stuck in the 70s when it comes to management of personnel...if you're not there, you're not working because I can't see you. So she has to drive almost an hour each way and is basically one step away from leaving because it's rapidly becoming not worth it anymore.
Part of it is the nature of the work...the company she works for has lots of front-line workers who do actually need to be there, and lots of call center type jobs where a large fraction of people can't really be trusted to work without supervision. I get that...I used to work for an airline and back-office positions like IT were heavily influenced by the fact that there were pilots, flight attendants, airport agents and mechanics working on location 24/7/365...we never got "holidays", it was only a PTO bucket so you could pick the holidays you weren't working.
I do think a lot of it is senior management hanging onto the old ways. I wouldn't mind some of the job security of working back in that era, but certainly having to come into an office, wear a suit and crank out manual paper pushing tasks all day would drive me nuts. I think that constant supervision would drive anyone who was slightly independent to drink, but I don't know if _everyone_ can handle not being watched at least some of the time.
The company I work for allows _some_ WFH days, but you can tell they're not happy about it. The only reason they do it is because they're trying to remake themselves as "hip" and "with it" so they can attract Millenials. The company used to have a very liberal work-from-anywhere policy, but it turned out that a very large percentage of people abused it and never showed up to the office.
Management still doesn't believe people can be productive without sitting on top of one another in an open office setting. That's because of "collaboration" and "synergy" but IMO bad managers are still hanging on to the idea that you need to be present during working hours, or they can't trust you to produce on your own. In my case, they get plenty of out-of-hours work from me...just yesterday I left early to attend a school thing and worked on my stuff after everyone went to bed.
Personally, I like a mix. I'm not exactly an extrovert so commuting just to talk to colleagues doesn't have the same effect it would on a hyper-outgoing type-A management or marketing person. But, I can also see how someone who isn't as self-directed would just WFH as an excuse to slack. I think management is stuck in the old days when office work involved getting off the train, walking to your desk in a sea of hundreds of desks, and working on the piles of paperwork in your inbox until your shift was over.
In my case, I actually accept a lower salary so I don't have to commute crazy distances. I live "near" NYC but the train ride to the city is almost 90 minutes and driving is nearly out of the question. I've done it in the past, and will only do it again if I have no choice or really need the extra money.
I feel like no one has learned anything from the first dotcom bubble. Cloud, software-defined anytthing, AI, machine learning, IoT, robots, cryptcurrency, blockchain...everyone is throwing massive amounts of money at anything remotely linked to these buzzwords. It's not so crazy as to have infected the entire stock market yet, but I have a feeling it's coming.
Is it possible that sites like Upwork who connect freelance web guys and coders with individuals or small businesses are seeing an uptick in blockchain stuff because of get-rich-quick schemers? Think of your typical scheme-chaser trying to make a few bucks, maybe he hears about Bitcoin from a friend but has no idea how to mine coins or even invest in them...maybe it's those types trying to hire people?
Here's a non-blockchain example of why I think this may be...right now in my area there are -tons- of fly-by-night home improvement companies trying to sell homeowners solar power systems for their roofs. There's a huge 30% federal tax credit on the installation costs, so it's impossible to get solar for a price that isn't marked up by at least that much now. These companies are riding this scheme until it dies (when the tax credits expire.) They're banking on the fact that 90% of homeowners have no idea how their taxes are calculated and just see a massive credit coming their way. The homeowner doesn't take the next logical step to understand that they're going to have to pay the solar company that credit back, and more, for a (slowly) depreciating asset. From my casual dealings with other people, the vast majority don't even know how withholding works and are happy if they get a refund...how or why is a mystery to them. So, if you're a schemer with a few hundred grand to invest, you're going to find people to help you and squeeze as much as you can until there's nothing left.
I think there will be plenty of room for generalists who can do a lot of different things in IT and who can handle the abstractions that cloud services provide. I do agree that there will be less need for people, but those who make it over the next hump are going to have to have a greater ability to adapt quickly. SaaS stuff is a good example of this...how many VMs does it take to stand up and run a reliable SharePoint farm on-site these days, compared with click-to-buy SharePoint backed by an SLA?
Right now, the rapid development of cloud-related stuff is causing a lot of "fear of missing out." In some cases this is warranted...almost every organization I've run into that isn't heavily regulated has moved to Exchange Online for email and Office 365 or Google Apps. Being an Exchange admin used to be a very highly-paid skill and in demand...not as much now. Other parts of it are very much bubble-driven and (I think) will slow down a bit when the tech bubble pops and you don't have so many SV startups pumping out framework after framework, new container ecosystems every 6 months, etc. You'll probably also see the cloud providers slow down as feature sets mature and they begin the task of convincing people in "regular IT" jobs to move their stuff to their cloud. What I think the cloud people are missing is that not every IT person works at a startup writing phone apps in a cloud-native world. Not every company is ready to move at the pace of a startup. But knowing enough about both worlds will help when it does come time to move to a cloud provider, or run a private cloud on-site.
My plan for my entire career (over 20 years now) has been to keep up as best I can and be ready to change direction instantly. The place I work makes it very easy to get so far down in a technology/industry niche and specialize way more than is healthy. I've been working here forever but keep myself fresh by rotating duties every few years, learning brand-new stuff, etc. You're already ahead if you're keeping up...I know tons of Cisco, EMC and similar super-experts who are suddenly finding their skill sets diminished if the only thing they know is the vendor-specific implementation details.
Specific recommendations: - Learn about the absolute basics of SW development and web development. Every new project is web-based and accessed via a RESTful API these days...once you learn how this works a lot of the mystery will go away and it won't just be a "dev thing" anymore...it's simpler than it seems. - If you find yourself getting too far down into the technical details of one narrow thing, stop and diversify your learning a little. The future IT jobs are going to be more about gluing pre-made blocks of functionality together rather than knowing every single parameter to tweak. - Scripting and automation...if you don't know it, learn it immediately.' - Don't fight SaaS and the cloud...it's a battle you can't win. CIOs hear the word "OpEx" and suddenly don't care that they're handing control of IT over to another company. Until MBAs are taught something else in business school, the only focus will be to minimize costs and the cloud is cheaper from an accounting perspective. - Save like crazy while you can...salaries are going to decrease for everyone at some point regardless of specialty. Don't be the person begging for raises every year.
This extends beyond financial matters, but credit and insurance are huge examples, and things that actually can be semi-regulated. The banks or insurance companies will be incentivized to pay their "AI company" a premium to perform analyses on data that they wouldn't normally be allowed to, and could say with a straight face that they weren't the ones who did it. And since "AI algorithms" would be a trade secret of that company, they wouldn't be under any obligation to reveal what kinds of data crunching the banks were paying them to do.
Two real-world examples I can think of where this arms-length transaction thing happens include the following: - I work for a multinational company that often has to ship physical equipment to places where getting that equipment through customs is a huge challenge, requiring either bribes or accepting the fact that you won't see it for months, or maybe it might get "lost in transit." Obviously the company can't bribe the customs officials, but international logistics is full of "freight forwarder" companies. Those companies have the contacts needed, and can get your cargo through for a fee...which unsurprisingly includes the bribe you would have to pay. - I've also seen more times than I can count in my career where a new CIO comes in and announces they're outsourcing IT to Tata, Infosys, Wipro or similar. At that point all in-house employees become Wipro employees, and Wipro fires them the second their offshore counterparts are trained. The company who hired them can then say "We're not responsible for how our IT partner provides the service they're contracted to provide."
It's the equivalent of Pontias Pilate washing his hands of the messy business...because it's abstracted away under someone else's control.
One of the nice things Outlook Premium lets you do was host email at a vanity domain, but with Hotmail/Outlook.com levels of reliability and therefore a lower cost. Doing the same thing with Exchange Online is much more money, and works well for those who don't want Office 365. (I have free or cheap access to Office 365 from at least 3 different programs that I can think of.)
I guess it's another example of Microsoft figuring out the maximum level of revenue extraction they can get and balancing that with offering "gateway services" that get people hooked. Office 365 was/is the hook for companies to move to Azure. The company I work for went through the transition to 365 last year, and it's pretty obvious what the plan is when you look at it from a distance. First, establishing Office 365 makes your company establish an Azure Active Directory. Next step is to get rid of OWA and allow your users Exchange access, thereby getting you to federate your classic Active Directory. Once you're there, it's a short leap to letting developers build Azure stuff. And once the Shadow IT people are reined in, they make it incredbly easy to move workloads to Azure. It's all about getting people to stop buying software and start paying their Microsoft bill monthly.
That's interesting. My impression was that since medical school slots were so tightly controlled and that the selection process ensures that entrants basically have a voracious memory, the quality of graduates was pretty uniform. Are there differences in quality?
I figured that was the reason doctors always seem to have all the answers...because the basic stuff is in a textbook they memorized during medical school and had it reinforced by seeing the same thing on the job. (I also figured the selection process selecting for super-academic types was why most doctors I've met have planet-sized egos.)
I do systems integration work, so I work with the output of developers rather than doing coding -- our group gets their creations working in the real world outside the dev's laptop. What I see driving this is a mix of super-complex frameworks and other abstractions layered on top of what was designed to be a very simple system. Because the development they do is so abstract, there's very little understanding of what's going on 4 levels below their code...a database query (probably not even a SQL query these days) gets passed with user input from client-side JavaScript code to whatever MVC framework is popular this month, and a data set is returned for the client code to parse and display. You don't have to know anything about how SQL or whatever NoSQL data source works, how HTTP works, how the TLS session that is hopefully securing your session is set up, or how the message gets from one system to another. I'm sure lots of people are going to say "dude, that's old school graybeard stuff...the frameworks do it all for us!" But, I'm of the opinion that at least some first-principles instruction is needed and most new developers are coming in at a level way higher than this.
A personal example from my world is that I've started working a lot with cloud computing, automating deployments and such. The cloud providers have done a very good job abstracting the insane amount of details that go into deploying a cloud resource, but the documentation is aimed squarely at web developers...it's all "insert properly formatted JSON file into our magic box and out pops what you asked for." This is good, but it gives zero insight into how things work, and new developers coming into the cloud-first mobile-first world won't get this education at all. Form my perspective, the only way I've been able to get my head around REST and all that stuff is to start from first principles and work up...not starting from the top of a framework call.
I think that this will be even more interesting to watch as more and more apps are written by non-Netflix, non-Facebook, non-Google developers as microservices. Suddenly one app is hundreds of tiny ones, each with potential vulnerabilities. The skill level has to go way up when you start working this way, because speed of release isn't going to help solve security problems developers don't know they have.
Dotcom Bubble 1.0 was pretty easy to detect the top of...the 1999/2000 Super Bowl ads, pets.com sock puppet and the AOL-Time Warner merger come to mind. I wonder if this transaction will be the top of this one. 540,000 employees in what's basically a conglomerate at this point seems like a lot, and I'm sure they're going to get around to firing as many as they can ASAP.
I also wonder if Amazon is going to find a way to jettison its low-margin retail business and concentrate on AWS. That's probably the business they want to keep...Internet startups pay them handsomely to run everything IT-related, as do some large companies, and a lot of that is profit. Apple and Google basically create money out of nothing by selling apps and ads and subscriptions, so AWS isn't quite like that but is probably extremely profitable.
Getting rid of retail, or at least distancing themselves from it, may be the reason Amazon is looking to build a "second headquarters" in a cheaper location. It'll make the employees and/or operating costs cheaper for the low-margin parts of the business while allowing them to build a hipper Microsoft-esque campus in Seattle to compete with Azure. And then when Amazon announces the split, or sale to a hedge fund or something, they can just cut the entire second HQ loose in a package deal. It's funny because cities around the country are bending over backwards begging to have Amazon build there...zero taxes, free utilities, custom-built infrastructure and housing, whatever it takes. It'll suck for whatever jurisdiction gives them the 99-year tax holiday after they fire everyone or the jobs turn out to be back-office drone jobs at slightly over minimum wage instead of hipster developers.
I've worked in big companies for a long time and I'm not surprised. The IT security people are usually in-house, but I wouldn't be shocked if they were offshore or totally outsourced. When the IT security team is contacted by a "researcher" telling them somehting's vulnerable, big IT departments will take forever to put anything into place. First the security team has to run it up the flagpole to their management, then their management has a meeting to decide what course of action to recommend to the server team. The server team (who also may be offshored or outsourced, which introduces more delays) will be told that they have a vulnerability to patch. Application owners affected will need to be contacted to determine when a good time to patch will be. Worse still, if it's a shared service like a service bus or core application component, you have to coordinate that among all the systems' users. Only then can a change management notice be raised, then discussed at the Change Approval Board meeting, then scheduled. At any point, this can also be delayed by the application owner saying they can't take the downtime.
I'm sure all the DevOps kids will say "dude, just put it in the cloud and CI/CD it...we release 20 times a day!" Legacy financial systems are a different animal. You might be able to release the web front-ends to a system like that 20 times a day, but big company IT's complexity and culture make it hard to apply this to the core.
Large companies don't seem to have these issues because they have a whole legal and HR team advising every single action. Also, every place I've worked has had a zero tolerance policy when things like sexual harassment are involved. Basically unless you're an executive or top salesman or connected in some other way, they don't mess around when they start getting complaints about people. (Sales always gets a free pass in my experience, however.)
Maybe as Uber has been growing so quickly, and were built on disrupting everything, they felt they didn't need to go this route. But look at companies like IBM...they've been dismantling their entire US workforce and firing everyone over a certain age, and have been doing it all legally from what it seems.
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Lawyers are a good example of your complaint, but not doctors...not by a long shot. Doctors were smart enough to create professional organizations that actually have teeth. Through these orgs, they pay for the laws that will keep them employed when every other knowledge job is done by automation.
Part of the reason why it's so hard to become a doctor is that the supply of medical school slots is closely protected. The Bar Association did the reverse and allowed tons of new law schools to open up, resulting in those lawyers with unrecoverable debts because there just isn't enough work to go around anymore. Becoming a doctor requires the closest thing possible to a photographic memory even to pass the MCAT, and you have to be even more hard-wired in an academic mode to make it through the classroom part of the training. So yeah, if my kids are capable of it I would certainly encourage them to at least try...I don't know of any non-rich doctors in the US!
During normal operations, I did notice Japanese trains run to the second when I was there a while back. There's no similar sense of urgency here in the US.
I don't know if a society so focused on punctuality is a good thing though...not being allowed to be late (or early) means that there's no room for error in other parts of one's life either. I imagine it's very difficult to come back from a personal failure in Japanese culture. In the US, it's certainly not impossible...I know tons of people who just weren't ready to grow up when they turned 18, and they either drifted or joined the military and grew up, then got their lives on track. That must be way harder in Japan if you can't even leave 20 seconds early without triggering an apology.
I'm not sure i agree with that. First, any business who can't afford to pay an employee $15 an hour shouldn't be hiring employees...let the owner do all the work if they don't want to cut into their profits. Second, outside of the technology bubble live millions of people exactly like you describe. Don't forget that IQ is normally distributed and even people with potential for intelligence grow up in some really crappy circumstances that interfere with their ability to succeed.
Seriously, low-end employers make enough to pay a decent minimum wage. A pizza place can charge $15 for a single pizza and makes hundreds a day. McDonald's takes in tons of money every day and only a fraction of that goes out as labor costs.
Forget about the automation itself -- if there is a sudden massive drop in employment then the economy as a whole is toast. In the developed world, the entire economy is based around the idea that people sell their labor for money, which is then used to buy goods produced by people working for money. Even the Great Depression had unemployment numbers in the 25% range -- that was a mess and automation is poised to put way more people out of work. Deindustrialization has been devastating to parts of the US and Europe, but it's been slow-ish. The next wave of job removal is not just multiple times faster, but affects more of the economy as well. And this time, it doesn't matter how educated you are...doctors and lawyers will only be able to keep their jobs because they have professional organizations that will never allow them to be unemployed. What about everyone else?
I think that if you want to keep the status quo, you're going to have to figure out a way to keep giving money to people via a variety of means. Either you go the basic income route and make work an add-on to the essentials, or you establish a New Deal era program to provide an employer of last resort, or a combination of the two.
A personal example I would like to cite is drawn from my experience doing IT work in large organizations. Even with companies pushing to offshore and outsource everything, there are still tons of full time employees drawing decent salaries doing work that is basically a shell script plus knowledge of organizational politics. What worries me is that we're still pumping out tons of college graduates every year who are going to be expecting a job like this. I got a science degree, but hung out with tons of people in various soft subject degrees in college. Those people did the bare minimum level of work and just showed up to group interviews for large companies their senior year. Those big companies gave them some kind of random entry level job with a career path that might make them managers, directors and VPs someday. If companies don't need tons of C-student psychology or business majors, then the educational system breaks down too.
Globally, English in general is dominant because of previous colonial activities by the British Empire and the prevalence of American entertainment and Internet properties. Having most of the Internet Anglo-centric is a big driver...most online discussions are in English unless it's very region-specific. Software development is a kind-of-English activity for the most part...even if someone isn't a native speaker, they're usually communicating with colleagues in English.
What remains to be seen is whether the US will continue dominating global politics, culture and the Internet. China and India have over a billion people. I do think that as these societies mature, they present a pretty big challenge to English as the dominant language. India has an official language of English but that doesn't mean most of the population speaks it natively or is even bilingual. I think that a combination of the US and UK becoming more insular and the rise of China as a world power will shift the balance...not right away but slowly. One thing China has that the US/UK doesn't, for better or worse, is a semi-authoritarian government. They can basically make whatever they need to happen, happen -- look at how much money they threw into infrastructure to blunt the force of the 2008 financial crisis. Their current plan seems to be reaching out to developing countries in sort of a soft colonialism, doing infrastructure projects and other activities to gain influence. If these activities bring the language along with them, then I could definitely see the balance tipping away from English somewhat.
End-user wise, most OSes today are fine for client devices because web browsers work well on all of them. The killer is the actual business applications...I imagine a city government builds up quite a large portfolio of applications over time, both current and legacy, packaged and home-grown. I work in a non-government but very similar vertical market, where there are really only 2 or 3 vendors supporting any particular system. Getting those entrenched vendors to adapt to anything is hard because they want to keep collecting license fees without having to modernize the applications. There also might be a lot of software that costs an arm and a leg to rewrite, or can't realistically be rewritten.
If you have lots of these applications, especially if they're Windows applications or web apps that only work with older web browsers, that adds the expense of VDI or XenApp-style application virtualization. They don't go away - and you have to move the complexity off the desktop machine for a fee. Most governments operate on a transactional basis -- pay my consulting company $bagofmoney and I will deliver you Solution X tailored to your problem statement. Adding more $bagsofmoney on top for rewrites usually is frowned upon, and that's how these big, old application stables build up.
Linux and LibreOffice are a fine choice for users who don't have tons of these entanglements. But working in end-user computing in a series of niche industries, I see a lot of barriers to full adoption. Just off the top of my head, I can think of:
- Crappy web apps tied to IE, or worse yet, to internal HTML rendering behavior of a specific Windows version (yes, this exists.)
- ActiveX (though this this thankfully finally starting to die off.)
- Office add-ins written by consultingfirmofthemonth that are now integral to the business
- Office "applications" coded in VBA that inexplicably have become the way for departments to handle millions of dollars in business and are extremely fragile
I think these are going to go away as Windows becomes less critical on desktops and new CRUD style apps are 100% web based, but they're definitely still lurking in locations not covered by the press who fawns over SV startups.
Employers use this system to wash their hands of the idea of a "reference call." Since most employers (in policy, at least) will only verify dates of employment and previous salary if called for a reference, this system basically publishes this information and has been in existence for years. It's only coming to light now because of the Equifax breach. Employers love it because it gives them the legal check box of not empowering a "rogue manager" to divulge anything about previous employment. (This is why I think we see a lot of jokers bouncing from place to place and screwing things up with no consequences.)
Beyond the info security aspect, the other problem with a system like this is the ability for companies to deny job offers or reduce salaries based on what you previously made. I've actually had situations where HR offered salary X and then pulled back the offer and countered with a lower salary because of what they found in a potential employee's background search. I don't like this because it encourages the exact behavior we see in the tech industry now...get your first job, then jump as quickly as possible from employer to employer to get higher salary increases. Honestly this is fine if you're a drop-in replacement coder cranking out work to spec and have no clue what the business need for it is, but I work for an employer where you really need to know the industry a bit before you're truly useful. Just getting up to speed can take 8 months or so and you're not really capable of understanding the work until about a year. We can't have people cycling in and out on 6-month contracts...some of our best employees have been around for 15 or more years and sticking around is encouraged because training is so expensive. This is in our little group however, and HR is HR no matter what you tell them you need.
I think the best solution to fix wage stagnation would be to tax profits at a rate where it makes more sense to pay people and invest in the business than to just give the money to the shareholders. That, and get rid of systems like this. Along with automated resume scanners, this is just another HR tool to ensure they minimize the cost of hiring someone. (Seriously, I've never seen the back end of Taleo, but every company I've ever applied to with Taleo handling applications seems to auto-reject people at a very high rate. I wonder if they have pre-defined filters like "no one over 40" or "must match 95% of the words in the job description" or "give me the top 5 resumes by match.")
"You mean, exactly like the American tech industry which only hires new graduates, only promotes laterally, and refuses to hire anyone over 30."
I certainly don't disagree that this is a problem in the US also, but managed to keep some employers interested in me past 40. It's not as easy as if I was just graduating, but my point was that a system where NO employer will touch you must lead to some difficult situations...such as doing anything the company asks to avoid getting fired, or ending up permanently disqualified from certain jobs or industries just because you didn't make the cut at graduation, or having to do something like hiring someone to be your partner to impress your boss.
The ageism in technology does have to stop, but I don't really think I want to go work at a web startup and work 100 hour weeks anyway...and I certainly wouldn't want to work anywhere that had a preconceived notion that I was "too old" and therefore the first to go when things got bad. My opinion is that things will improve once the startups' millennial "executives" find a life outside of work and suddenly realize why their older engineers have to disappear in the middle of the day for school things or to tend to a sick kid. Either that, or it'll get worse and the vocally anti-work/life balance crowd will make things bad for everyone. (It still amazes me how many people will defend a bad employer to the death...it seems to take everyone one or two bad jobs to figure this out.)
I'm no expert on Japanese culture, but the glimpses Westerners get to see are...quite interesting. Between this and robotic female companions going semi-mainstream, it seems like there may be a couple of social screws that need tightening. I wonder if selling human interactions, beyond the obvious oldest profession, will be a thing when people don't have manual labor to fall back on.
In my opinion, and it's just an opinion, this is what happens when you have a culture where high achievement is celebrated, but not everyone gets to participate fully. You're just expected to have an outward appearance of success, and I can imagine that can be hard for someone who really isn't meeting expectations. I've heard of this among Ivy League college students...they act like nothing fazes them even if they're struggling like mad to keep up with their peers. The ones who were the smartest kids in their high school get dropped into an environment where _everyone_ is either the smartest or most well-connected kid in their peer group.
I read about an interesting trait of Japanese society...that of lifetime employment. Apparently, large corporations only hire new graduates and if you miss out on it, you never get another chance because they do not hire experienced employees. Talk about having to keep up appearances...imagine not meshing with the crowd for whatever reason and ending up working in a convenience store the rest of your life even if you were an engineering student.
iPhone users (in the US at least, not sure what's going on elsewhere) are conditioned to upgrade their devices. Even though carrier subsidies are gone, they've been replaced by a series of "lease/loan/trade-up" programs that keep people in contracts with their carriers until the equipment loan is satisfied. That, and iOS users tend to have more disposable income to go upgrade their shiny devices, so even if the cost of the device is hidden they don't really care.
Software-wise, it's the same thing driving the Windows-as-a-Service thing that Microsoft is doing with Windows 10. People are just conditioned to click "Restart Now" and accept whatever update appears because all of the complexity has been hidden away. One thing I can say about Windows 10 is that upgrades are much safer than they were back in the Windows 7 days...but that comes with the drawback of not knowing much about what is in those update packages. Microsoft used to break out exactly what changed in each update but they are increasingly tight-lipped and reverting to Apple-style "makes your PC faster, easier and more enjoyable! (...and fixes these 247 security holes)"
It'll never get off the ground because "OMG socialism" but I think we're going to need something like this. If we're truly ready to say there are no more manual labor assembly line type jobs, the majority of people in the US are suddenly unable to sell their labor. This includes white-collar assembly line jobs as well...think about all the paperwork processing type jobs you may support in IT and wonder why they still exist.
Not everyone is capable of training for a higher-level job. Consider the assembly line worker who has been doing the exact same job for 25 years. The odds are that they don't have the capability, intelligence or motivation to be full-stack web developers or data scientists or marketing managers.
The reason I like the New Deal analogy is that we're basically saying that if you can't find work that pays what you want, the government is the employer of last resort and has projects that need doing. It would keep the staunchest opponents of universal basic income at bay because the workers would have to work for their pay, but it would protect the population least able to make the transition to knowledge work...and IMO it would sure beat violent revolution once things get bad enough for enough people. Unemployed, uneducated workers with nothing to do and nothing to lose aren't going to sit around waiting for the upper class to share the wealth; you may see the return of the guillotine within our lifetimes.
When are managers gong to decide? Are we employees independent, creative, productive individuals who work 100% of the time we're at work? Or are we a bunch of time and resource thieves that have to be monitored to make sure we're not dipping below our productivity goals?
So much of HR and employee management is rooted in this 70s notion of factory production work. Even white collar jobs were like that back in the day...you'd clock in, work on your paperwork, have a pre-defined set of breaks, and clock out. All that time, the supervisors would watch people to make sure they were working, and there was no trust. There have been times where employees were a little more empowered, but it came at the expense of zero work/life balance. I think managers just don't feel they can exercise enough control unless they're right on top of all their employees. Maybe they're not taught any other way in MBA school, I don't know.
We're going to have to figure this out sooner or later...the only jobs that are going to be left in a couple decades are knowledge worker jobs. I personally think it's time to drop the monitoring...treat workers like adults unless they truly won't work without supervision. Knowledge workers should be goal-driven, not production quota-driven.
I'm an IT guy with a background in science...got a BS in chemistry way back in the day. The problem is that science is losing a lot of smart domestic people to investment banking, web startups, management consulting, etc. Foreign students come from places where scientists are revered, and that just doesn't happen in the US. When I graduated, there still was some room for a good career in the sciences, and I did consider it. But ultimately, I was kind of done with school at that point, had relevant work experience and chose to go with IT -- rather than slog through years of Ph. D. work to maybe possibly get a tenured faculty position.
Tell your average 22 year old that they have the choice of spending years as a researcher and a tiny sliver of hope for a permanent position, OR, go spend 2 years getting an MBA, work for Goldman Sachs and never worry about money again, OR, go work for Facebook/Google and devise new algorithms for getting people to click on ads, OR, go work for Accenture/PwC/other management consulting firm and get paid handsomely to deliver PowerPoints to executives. Which would you choose?
The only thing I can think of that might change this is a major world war with China or India that cuts off the supply of scientific talent willing to pursue this path.
(OK, I found one occurrence.) But seriously, this is what's being sold in management consulting "corporate DevOps transformation" packages. The first rule is almost always, "Go fire your QA department and make your developers write automated tests." This is exactly what the executives paying the management consulting firm for their "digital transformation strategy" want to hear, and that's magnified by a bunch of Google "visionaries" touting the same. Not every business is Google, and IMO DevOps works only when you can swap out everything, not just pieces.
If QA is just mindlessly pushing buttons and seeing what breaks, maybe that makes a little sense. But, I do systems integration work, meaning our team gets to figure out how hundreds of different modules from various dodgy offshore contractors fit together. I'm of the opinion that devs doing their own testing works well when there's little component interaction and the consqeuence of failure is a 400-series or 500-series HTTP response. When you're talking about a system made up of tons of components, no matter how microservice-y you make ti, there are still plenty of opportunities to introduce issues, and someone needs to be able to catch them.
I tend to agree with this. My wife has a good job that pays well, but has a crazy commute and the company has an absolute rigid no-work-from-home policy, with work hours that are actually enforced. They're essentially stuck in the 70s when it comes to management of personnel...if you're not there, you're not working because I can't see you. So she has to drive almost an hour each way and is basically one step away from leaving because it's rapidly becoming not worth it anymore.
Part of it is the nature of the work...the company she works for has lots of front-line workers who do actually need to be there, and lots of call center type jobs where a large fraction of people can't really be trusted to work without supervision. I get that...I used to work for an airline and back-office positions like IT were heavily influenced by the fact that there were pilots, flight attendants, airport agents and mechanics working on location 24/7/365...we never got "holidays", it was only a PTO bucket so you could pick the holidays you weren't working.
I do think a lot of it is senior management hanging onto the old ways. I wouldn't mind some of the job security of working back in that era, but certainly having to come into an office, wear a suit and crank out manual paper pushing tasks all day would drive me nuts. I think that constant supervision would drive anyone who was slightly independent to drink, but I don't know if _everyone_ can handle not being watched at least some of the time.
The company I work for allows _some_ WFH days, but you can tell they're not happy about it. The only reason they do it is because they're trying to remake themselves as "hip" and "with it" so they can attract Millenials. The company used to have a very liberal work-from-anywhere policy, but it turned out that a very large percentage of people abused it and never showed up to the office.
Management still doesn't believe people can be productive without sitting on top of one another in an open office setting. That's because of "collaboration" and "synergy" but IMO bad managers are still hanging on to the idea that you need to be present during working hours, or they can't trust you to produce on your own. In my case, they get plenty of out-of-hours work from me...just yesterday I left early to attend a school thing and worked on my stuff after everyone went to bed.
Personally, I like a mix. I'm not exactly an extrovert so commuting just to talk to colleagues doesn't have the same effect it would on a hyper-outgoing type-A management or marketing person. But, I can also see how someone who isn't as self-directed would just WFH as an excuse to slack. I think management is stuck in the old days when office work involved getting off the train, walking to your desk in a sea of hundreds of desks, and working on the piles of paperwork in your inbox until your shift was over.
In my case, I actually accept a lower salary so I don't have to commute crazy distances. I live "near" NYC but the train ride to the city is almost 90 minutes and driving is nearly out of the question. I've done it in the past, and will only do it again if I have no choice or really need the extra money.
I feel like no one has learned anything from the first dotcom bubble. Cloud, software-defined anytthing, AI, machine learning, IoT, robots, cryptcurrency, blockchain...everyone is throwing massive amounts of money at anything remotely linked to these buzzwords. It's not so crazy as to have infected the entire stock market yet, but I have a feeling it's coming.
Is it possible that sites like Upwork who connect freelance web guys and coders with individuals or small businesses are seeing an uptick in blockchain stuff because of get-rich-quick schemers? Think of your typical scheme-chaser trying to make a few bucks, maybe he hears about Bitcoin from a friend but has no idea how to mine coins or even invest in them...maybe it's those types trying to hire people?
Here's a non-blockchain example of why I think this may be...right now in my area there are -tons- of fly-by-night home improvement companies trying to sell homeowners solar power systems for their roofs. There's a huge 30% federal tax credit on the installation costs, so it's impossible to get solar for a price that isn't marked up by at least that much now. These companies are riding this scheme until it dies (when the tax credits expire.) They're banking on the fact that 90% of homeowners have no idea how their taxes are calculated and just see a massive credit coming their way. The homeowner doesn't take the next logical step to understand that they're going to have to pay the solar company that credit back, and more, for a (slowly) depreciating asset. From my casual dealings with other people, the vast majority don't even know how withholding works and are happy if they get a refund...how or why is a mystery to them. So, if you're a schemer with a few hundred grand to invest, you're going to find people to help you and squeeze as much as you can until there's nothing left.
I think there will be plenty of room for generalists who can do a lot of different things in IT and who can handle the abstractions that cloud services provide. I do agree that there will be less need for people, but those who make it over the next hump are going to have to have a greater ability to adapt quickly. SaaS stuff is a good example of this...how many VMs does it take to stand up and run a reliable SharePoint farm on-site these days, compared with click-to-buy SharePoint backed by an SLA?
Right now, the rapid development of cloud-related stuff is causing a lot of "fear of missing out." In some cases this is warranted...almost every organization I've run into that isn't heavily regulated has moved to Exchange Online for email and Office 365 or Google Apps. Being an Exchange admin used to be a very highly-paid skill and in demand...not as much now. Other parts of it are very much bubble-driven and (I think) will slow down a bit when the tech bubble pops and you don't have so many SV startups pumping out framework after framework, new container ecosystems every 6 months, etc. You'll probably also see the cloud providers slow down as feature sets mature and they begin the task of convincing people in "regular IT" jobs to move their stuff to their cloud. What I think the cloud people are missing is that not every IT person works at a startup writing phone apps in a cloud-native world. Not every company is ready to move at the pace of a startup. But knowing enough about both worlds will help when it does come time to move to a cloud provider, or run a private cloud on-site.
My plan for my entire career (over 20 years now) has been to keep up as best I can and be ready to change direction instantly. The place I work makes it very easy to get so far down in a technology/industry niche and specialize way more than is healthy. I've been working here forever but keep myself fresh by rotating duties every few years, learning brand-new stuff, etc. You're already ahead if you're keeping up...I know tons of Cisco, EMC and similar super-experts who are suddenly finding their skill sets diminished if the only thing they know is the vendor-specific implementation details.
Specific recommendations:
- Learn about the absolute basics of SW development and web development. Every new project is web-based and accessed via a RESTful API these days...once you learn how this works a lot of the mystery will go away and it won't just be a "dev thing" anymore...it's simpler than it seems.
- If you find yourself getting too far down into the technical details of one narrow thing, stop and diversify your learning a little. The future IT jobs are going to be more about gluing pre-made blocks of functionality together rather than knowing every single parameter to tweak.
- Scripting and automation...if you don't know it, learn it immediately.'
- Don't fight SaaS and the cloud...it's a battle you can't win. CIOs hear the word "OpEx" and suddenly don't care that they're handing control of IT over to another company. Until MBAs are taught something else in business school, the only focus will be to minimize costs and the cloud is cheaper from an accounting perspective.
- Save like crazy while you can...salaries are going to decrease for everyone at some point regardless of specialty. Don't be the person begging for raises every year.
This extends beyond financial matters, but credit and insurance are huge examples, and things that actually can be semi-regulated. The banks or insurance companies will be incentivized to pay their "AI company" a premium to perform analyses on data that they wouldn't normally be allowed to, and could say with a straight face that they weren't the ones who did it. And since "AI algorithms" would be a trade secret of that company, they wouldn't be under any obligation to reveal what kinds of data crunching the banks were paying them to do.
Two real-world examples I can think of where this arms-length transaction thing happens include the following:
- I work for a multinational company that often has to ship physical equipment to places where getting that equipment through customs is a huge challenge, requiring either bribes or accepting the fact that you won't see it for months, or maybe it might get "lost in transit." Obviously the company can't bribe the customs officials, but international logistics is full of "freight forwarder" companies. Those companies have the contacts needed, and can get your cargo through for a fee...which unsurprisingly includes the bribe you would have to pay.
- I've also seen more times than I can count in my career where a new CIO comes in and announces they're outsourcing IT to Tata, Infosys, Wipro or similar. At that point all in-house employees become Wipro employees, and Wipro fires them the second their offshore counterparts are trained. The company who hired them can then say "We're not responsible for how our IT partner provides the service they're contracted to provide."
It's the equivalent of Pontias Pilate washing his hands of the messy business...because it's abstracted away under someone else's control.
One of the nice things Outlook Premium lets you do was host email at a vanity domain, but with Hotmail/Outlook.com levels of reliability and therefore a lower cost. Doing the same thing with Exchange Online is much more money, and works well for those who don't want Office 365. (I have free or cheap access to Office 365 from at least 3 different programs that I can think of.)
I guess it's another example of Microsoft figuring out the maximum level of revenue extraction they can get and balancing that with offering "gateway services" that get people hooked. Office 365 was/is the hook for companies to move to Azure. The company I work for went through the transition to 365 last year, and it's pretty obvious what the plan is when you look at it from a distance. First, establishing Office 365 makes your company establish an Azure Active Directory. Next step is to get rid of OWA and allow your users Exchange access, thereby getting you to federate your classic Active Directory. Once you're there, it's a short leap to letting developers build Azure stuff. And once the Shadow IT people are reined in, they make it incredbly easy to move workloads to Azure. It's all about getting people to stop buying software and start paying their Microsoft bill monthly.
That's interesting. My impression was that since medical school slots were so tightly controlled and that the selection process ensures that entrants basically have a voracious memory, the quality of graduates was pretty uniform. Are there differences in quality?
I figured that was the reason doctors always seem to have all the answers...because the basic stuff is in a textbook they memorized during medical school and had it reinforced by seeing the same thing on the job. (I also figured the selection process selecting for super-academic types was why most doctors I've met have planet-sized egos.)
I do systems integration work, so I work with the output of developers rather than doing coding -- our group gets their creations working in the real world outside the dev's laptop. What I see driving this is a mix of super-complex frameworks and other abstractions layered on top of what was designed to be a very simple system. Because the development they do is so abstract, there's very little understanding of what's going on 4 levels below their code...a database query (probably not even a SQL query these days) gets passed with user input from client-side JavaScript code to whatever MVC framework is popular this month, and a data set is returned for the client code to parse and display. You don't have to know anything about how SQL or whatever NoSQL data source works, how HTTP works, how the TLS session that is hopefully securing your session is set up, or how the message gets from one system to another. I'm sure lots of people are going to say "dude, that's old school graybeard stuff...the frameworks do it all for us!" But, I'm of the opinion that at least some first-principles instruction is needed and most new developers are coming in at a level way higher than this.
A personal example from my world is that I've started working a lot with cloud computing, automating deployments and such. The cloud providers have done a very good job abstracting the insane amount of details that go into deploying a cloud resource, but the documentation is aimed squarely at web developers...it's all "insert properly formatted JSON file into our magic box and out pops what you asked for." This is good, but it gives zero insight into how things work, and new developers coming into the cloud-first mobile-first world won't get this education at all. Form my perspective, the only way I've been able to get my head around REST and all that stuff is to start from first principles and work up...not starting from the top of a framework call.
I think that this will be even more interesting to watch as more and more apps are written by non-Netflix, non-Facebook, non-Google developers as microservices. Suddenly one app is hundreds of tiny ones, each with potential vulnerabilities. The skill level has to go way up when you start working this way, because speed of release isn't going to help solve security problems developers don't know they have.
Dotcom Bubble 1.0 was pretty easy to detect the top of...the 1999/2000 Super Bowl ads, pets.com sock puppet and the AOL-Time Warner merger come to mind. I wonder if this transaction will be the top of this one. 540,000 employees in what's basically a conglomerate at this point seems like a lot, and I'm sure they're going to get around to firing as many as they can ASAP.
I also wonder if Amazon is going to find a way to jettison its low-margin retail business and concentrate on AWS. That's probably the business they want to keep...Internet startups pay them handsomely to run everything IT-related, as do some large companies, and a lot of that is profit. Apple and Google basically create money out of nothing by selling apps and ads and subscriptions, so AWS isn't quite like that but is probably extremely profitable.
Getting rid of retail, or at least distancing themselves from it, may be the reason Amazon is looking to build a "second headquarters" in a cheaper location. It'll make the employees and/or operating costs cheaper for the low-margin parts of the business while allowing them to build a hipper Microsoft-esque campus in Seattle to compete with Azure. And then when Amazon announces the split, or sale to a hedge fund or something, they can just cut the entire second HQ loose in a package deal. It's funny because cities around the country are bending over backwards begging to have Amazon build there...zero taxes, free utilities, custom-built infrastructure and housing, whatever it takes. It'll suck for whatever jurisdiction gives them the 99-year tax holiday after they fire everyone or the jobs turn out to be back-office drone jobs at slightly over minimum wage instead of hipster developers.
I've worked in big companies for a long time and I'm not surprised. The IT security people are usually in-house, but I wouldn't be shocked if they were offshore or totally outsourced. When the IT security team is contacted by a "researcher" telling them somehting's vulnerable, big IT departments will take forever to put anything into place. First the security team has to run it up the flagpole to their management, then their management has a meeting to decide what course of action to recommend to the server team. The server team (who also may be offshored or outsourced, which introduces more delays) will be told that they have a vulnerability to patch. Application owners affected will need to be contacted to determine when a good time to patch will be. Worse still, if it's a shared service like a service bus or core application component, you have to coordinate that among all the systems' users. Only then can a change management notice be raised, then discussed at the Change Approval Board meeting, then scheduled. At any point, this can also be delayed by the application owner saying they can't take the downtime.
I'm sure all the DevOps kids will say "dude, just put it in the cloud and CI/CD it...we release 20 times a day!" Legacy financial systems are a different animal. You might be able to release the web front-ends to a system like that 20 times a day, but big company IT's complexity and culture make it hard to apply this to the core.
Large companies don't seem to have these issues because they have a whole legal and HR team advising every single action. Also, every place I've worked has had a zero tolerance policy when things like sexual harassment are involved. Basically unless you're an executive or top salesman or connected in some other way, they don't mess around when they start getting complaints about people. (Sales always gets a free pass in my experience, however.)
Maybe as Uber has been growing so quickly, and were built on disrupting everything, they felt they didn't need to go this route. But look at companies like IBM...they've been dismantling their entire US workforce and firing everyone over a certain age, and have been doing it all legally from what it seems.