Everywhere I've worked, companies go out of their way to try to avoid firing people purely for performance. It's hard to stop vindictive individual managers from singling people out for...special attention...but I've never worked in mandatory-firing environments. This is most likely a cost-cutting measure. Everywhere I've been, people have been more than made aware of their poor performance before being let go...no one doesn't see it coming. Once you get put on a performance improvement plan, you're on notice that it's nearly time to leave.
SolarCity might be trying to shed workers as the solar bubble dries up. We looked into solar systems for our house recently, and all of the companies are charging way too much for them, for any purchase option (loans, leases, outright purchase.) They're relying on the tax breaks to cloud the real cost of the equipment and maintenance, and (IMO) banking on the fact that most people don't know how their taxes are calculated. They just see they're getting a "huge" tax credit, resulting in a "huge" tax refund, and not taking the calculation to the next level and seeing how much the equipment cost is marked up. When the tax credit goes away, only a few of these companies are going to survive. The whole bubbly nature of this shows too -- you can tell that some of the local companies are these fly-by-night outfits with owners who jump from scheme to scheme and are just latching onto the latest way to make money.
I like the idea of solar, but I'm not going to pay massively marked up rates for a system. Most people just shovel a shoebox full of receipts to their "accountant" and can't figure out their own taxes, or just punch numbers into TurboTax. I think the solar companies have run through these people and are having trouble selling/renting solar panels to the rest of the homeowning population.
Here's another thought about why it happened -- is it possible that NSA treats some of their more brilliant analysts the same way companies treat executives? Everywhere I've worked, security policies apply to absolutely everyone except the C-level and senior VP ranks. Execs just tell IT to plug whatever new shiny thing they got at a conference or Best Buy into the network, override password policy so they don't have to log in to their machines, and a whole bunch of other things that would get ordinary workers fired. Maybe if you're a super-brilliant borderline autistic cybersecurity genius, the NSA decides it's not worth it to try to enforce policy?
I'm sure a lot of the safeguards around classified information are the equivalent of "security theatre" but I'm kind of surprised NSA would let their analysts casually walk out the door with unreleased exploit code and bring it home with them. People I know who work for defense contractors on much more mundane stuff can't even mount USB drives on their computers read-only, let alone copy files, but it seems like they just let things like this happen once you get a certain level of access beyond the perimeter. Some of the things I've heard described are totally security theatre, like covering whiteboards when the janitor comes through or insisting that every piece of garbage be burned _and_ shredded...but at least they have the common sense to prohibit employees from taking confidential data home and employees I've spoken with are well-trained to not talk about exactly what they're working on. I have a feeling we'd never know about this if it hadn't gotten to a machine without Internet access.
Almost all companies work like this too -- once you're inside everything is trusted and can talk to everything else. That's absolutely the wrong thing to do, but rebuilding the network and walling things off to an "assumed-compromised" posture is super expensive and hard to implement. Lots of companies don't even have internal PKI right yet so port-level authentication on network gear isn't even possible. And the app landscape is so vast and much of it is so old that totally locking down some things would take tons of research and effort...all of which the company won't pay for. You would think NSA would be all over that though, given what they work on.
If the tech firms want cleared people so they can get more government contracts, then they have to draw from the same pool that all the defense contractors, TLAs and military do. But if they want that level of background check, why not just spend some of their resources, hire a PI and do similar levels of vetting?
An acquaintance of mine was in the Navy on a nuclear submarine and had TS clearance. From what he's told me and what I've read about it, the difference between a clearance investigation and a simple background check is that they're trying to figure out why they might have a problem with you _later on_, and less about why you have the problem _now_. Someone who's a problem gambler or always in trouble with the law is a reasonable risk for being compromised by a foreign agent. Someone who has chronic financial disasters is a huge red flag because all a spy has to do is wave enough money in their face. And more importantly, having something in your past that's embarrassing or that you would do anything to hide would need to come out in an investigation as well, to ensure you won't do what a spy asks to keep your dirty little secrets hidden. The point is to trace down all these avenues and determine whether or not the individual is worth the risk to trust. (I'm sure military professions requiring clearances have this issue too...especially in the enlisted ranks you probably have a...diverse... range of credit problems, criminal histories, etc.)
It seems that Facebook et al, with access to all sorts of private-ish info on you, would be well-positioned to conduct their own secret-equivalent clearance checks.
This happened at the height of the last Dotcom Bubble, except the bootcamps were for MCSE or Java/Solaris certification. Now that everything's code and in the cloud, the people running the schools are just changing the advertisement a little bit.
The thing that sucks is that just like ITT Tech, U of Phoenix and other for profit schools, these places live on student loans and GI Bill education grants. Back in the early 2000s I went to one of these bootcamps because a consulting company I worked for at the time paid for it. It was obvious that a lot of people in the classes had just gotten out of a low-level job fixing tanks in the military, or were total newbies with zero experience or desire to learn beyond "make lots of money in tech!"
What I think is even worse this time around is that everything is so abstracted that coming in from the level of a JavaScript framework is going to produce not only people who aren't useful without using the framework they were taught, but also ignorant of what's actually going on inside the abstraction. It's way easier to understand this stuff if you start at a first-principles level and build up, but coming in at the top or near top of the abstraction tower ensures you'll never know what's happening inside the magic box. In this way, coder schools who just pump out Node.js or JQuery robots are doing their students a real disservice.
I'm 42, and although I haven't knowingly experienced ageism, I foresee a day in the future when I draw the short straw, get laid off and become another statistic in this "can't get hired past 45" environment. Every other real profession values experience, and in IT and development it seems like it's being actively ignored lately in the pursuit of new and shiny. Doctors don't have this problem...they can practice as long as they're able. Professors can do the same, but when you suggest that IT people have a similar career they look at you like you have 2 heads.
I admit that there are _plenty_ of older workers who feel that they don't need to keep current in IT, or that their knowledge as it is today will continue to be relevant throughout their career. I know that's not the case and spend a large amount of time both inside and outside work keeping up to date. The problem is that potential employers paint all older workers with the same brush: "They can't learn, they're too expensive, they want too much time off,..."
I guess the problem is that IT and development are fields where things are constantly changing, and you need to keep learning at the same pace you were when you started, throughout your career. Yes, we have lives outside of work, we can't work 100 hour weeks, we don't want to live in the office, and we have more obligations than the average 25 year old. But, some of us have valuable experience that will prevent the younger workers from going down a dead end and redoing all that work. Personally, I still really enjoy the technical aspect of my job. Management isn't for everyone, and companies should recognize that...that's usually where they stuff the older burnt-out IT workers.
I have no idea how to solve this either. Silicon Valley worships youth and cheap labor. I would love to go work for AWS or Microsoft doing cloudy stuff, but I'm not going to abandon my family for a job. I know way too many IT folks who are on their second or third marriage or are just perpetually alone because they're constantly trying to impress their employer. I think my advice would be to be a generalist who's willing to change direction as needed, learn constantly, live within your means so you're not the guy begging for raises every year, and find an employer that has figured out that a healthy mix of youth and experience works best.
The problem is that it's very difficult to resolve "move fast and break things" developers with anything approaching information security. If you run an extension of a college campus like Facebook does, you're going to get a college campus mentality.
I can see why they are concerned though...Facebook has become the de facto identity provider for almost every consumer website. That "sign in with Facebook" button lets developers assume that Facebook will keep login details for millions of users safe. Microsoft has this same problem with Office 365/Azure AD and they've gone to great pains to explain what they're doing around security. Any time you are providing a vital service that others are counting on, and you have people's personally identifiable information stored, you can't put that in a college campus environment.
"Unions put management and workers in an unnecessarily adversarial relationship."
That's what people don't get -- there has to be an adversarial relationship on both sides. It's the only sustainable way to do things. Sooner or later, management is going to try to take away a benefit or get yet another helping of free work out of employees. And workers are going to do everything they can to get out of doing it. Without the union brokering the negotiations, and each side limited to a set of rules they agree on, employers will encroach too far on the employee side of the equation because they have the power to do so. Individual workers and management don't have equal bargaining power, and they should definitely not get into a buddy-buddy relationship.
I would certainly like to hear examples of how bad unions are in environments you've worked...or are these just talking points?
Anything that prevents companies from playing HR compensation games when they hire new employees or promote from within is a good thing. Most big company HR departments absolutely will not entertain offers if the salary is over x% of what the person says they were previously making. Almost all companies enforce this rule when promoting someone too -- they want to pay as little as possible, not how much the job is worth.
I imagine this rule comes from California due to the extremely distorted labor market that SF/SV has now. I know the official reason is gender equality, which does need to be addressed, but the side effect is a more level playing field for all job applicants. If you can convince an employer that you're worth $250K as a rockstar Rust developer, but you're making $100K doing JavaScript, then companies will just have to do a better job figuring out whether the candidates are lying.
This is the biggest problem. It's not just the "lifers," it's what we're going to do with the pipeline of college-educated new graduates. I've mentioned this before, but colleges are graduating millions of students with a generic "management" degree or something similarly vague. The previous social contract was that large companies would take these new grads and find...something...for them to do. I see this a lot working in IT for large companies. If we have nothing to do for all these new grads, and all the lifers you're talking about...then the consumption cycle is going to grind to a halt.
Those lifers you're talking about are part of the cycle too. I'm sure the person with all the knicknacks on her desk has a family, probably owns a house, pays taxes, buys things, and once in a while takes a vacation to get away from their mind-numbing job. Back around 2000, I worked for a large life insurance company in NYC, who had a headquarters that spanned 2 Manhattan city blocks and several offices around the country. It was eerily empty even back then, and some of the old timers in IT told me that they had done a huge purge through the 90s dumping thousands of the workers you're talking about. According to them, it was so crowded that they had to stagger start and end times to get people in and out of the buildings efficiently.
I know it's not the best solution, but I think there has to be some sort of make-work policy for everyone. We're not set up for a world that doesn't revolve around the work, earn, consume cycle and having an employer of last resort could be the best way to stop a revolution from happening.
I live near New York City. NYC, London and maybe Hong Kong are the investment banking capitals of the world, and there are billions floating around because of it. Banks don't worry when their rank and file employees don't have jobs anymore due to automation, but that changes a lot when we start talking about the elite ranks.
For those who don't know, an associate job at an investment bank is an extremely common congratulatory gift for graduating from Ivy League and other elite schools' MBA programs. It's a closed club because the jobs (for new grads with zero work experience) start at a crazy six-figure salary and have bonus potential going way beyond that. The banks work the associates to the bone doing what basically amounts to number crunching in Excel and preparing pitch books for potential investors. If you live through this without getting fired, you will never worry about money again in your life once you graduate to the management and director/partner ranks. These are guys in their late 20s who own several cars, a condo in Manhattan and a Hamptons beach mansion...the amount of money floating around investment banking is unimaginable to regular humans.
If the elite don't have a place to put their kids after they get out of MBA school that gives them the same standard of living they have, you can bet they'll be privately worried, but they also have to publicly cheer for the automation of work because it's great for their clients. I hope we figure out the right balance, because otherwise someone is going to suggest killing off anyone who doesn't get over 120 on an IQ test, and that's not going to end well.
I highly doubt they'll ever have one. People have been totally brainwashed against unions. Companies tout over and over again how everyone needs to come together and be buddies. Prima donna rockstar IT guys and developers loudly proclaim that they would never stoop to the level of their peers. And people wonder why there's no job security.
Things are going to have to get REALLY bad for unions to make a comeback. Bad enough for the average people to tune out the propaganda, like 50% unemployment bad. I personally have zero issues with seniority-based job security as long as the person is performing at an acceptable level. Too many people I know are getting thrown out of the IT field in their 40s and 50s, and it's nearly impossible to get rehired due to age discrimination. I think my next career move is going to have to be "cashing in my chips" and taking a lower-paying stable job.
Maybe I'm lucky, but I've generally worked in places where they've never fired anyone for poor performance. Like the summary suggests, firings are usually based on salary and it's just a dumb HR thing. Are performance-based firings really a thing?
Just to be clear, I don't work exclusively with rockstars either. There are plenty of mediocre performers. But I've never experienced having someone get so bad at their job that they had to be removed.
There's no easy fix either...you basically have to not be the top guy on the salary spreadsheet when they decide to cut.
I totally agree, and this is the eternal problem. Employers want instant drop-in replacements for job candidates, and it's totally impossible to do it all anymore. You have to have a focus -- mine has been on systems and end user stuff, and I've been shifting as needed over to Azure stuff, mainly focusing on IaaS. The problem, like you said, is making a wrong bet. My solution has been to learn a lot in my core field and sample from others, being ready to learn as much as needed. You have to choose how you use your valuable time for learning and how far down each rabbit hole you need or want to go.
My real-world example is as follows...I've shifted from end user computing to systems engineering, and a couple years back I started hearing more and more "web developer-y" talk. Web dev is something I just haven't been involved in -- beyond standing up the odd Apache server or putting an app into IIS and tweaking a web.config file. But with the "API economy," and cloud providers using RESTful interfaces to manage resources, I had to get semi-skilled. I had to learn enough about certificates to be dangerous, scripting and PowerShell imprvement, how REST works, some provider-specific syntax stuff, etc...all while keeping my feet in the day to day stuff I was working on. When it came time to start working with Azure, I had to ramp up extremely fast but having at least some clue about "how to learn" everything really helped me out. AWS and Azure and GCP have documentation aimed squarely at "dudebro developers" cranking out JavaScript apps at startups. Coming at it from an infrastructure side means having to learn a few new skills, new vocabulary, etc. before you're truly productive.
I'm not saying it's an easy problem to solve. What I am saying is that keeping your eyes open is important. Learning to spot what's a fad, what's a rehash and what's going to require massive time investment to keep up is important. There's tons of "fear of missing out" especially now that people are starting to call 4 year old technology "legacy". If you let yourself become too narrow-focused an expert on one particular field, it can leave you in a bad position if you miss a key shift.
I'm 42, so I'm officially an old fart when it comes to my IT job. I'm in a senior engineering/systems architect job and one of my favorite aspects of it is my unofficial duty to impart wisdom on the newbies. My "hard truth" about IT that surprisingly few people truly grasp is that you can't get comfortable being the expert at one particular thing and coast. Even 10 years ago you could do that...I know so many people who make more than I do jumping from contract to contract doing CCNP-level router work or being the "EMC/HPE/IBM storage wizard." The formula for success used to be to pick a vendor, steep yourself in the technology, then get and keep certifications while learning what's new every few years. This is rapidly going away...regardless of what you think of cloud, CIOs hear the magic word "OpEx" and suddenly all that on-premises hardware and knowledge is out the window. For years, I did a combination of Windows Server, Citrix XenApp and System Center as my core skills, while trying to learn as much as I could about other areas. Even that has changed so much in the past couple of years...desktop apps are being replaced with web apps, containers, APIs, anything that abstracts the client layer and makes it look and act like a smartphone.
These days, one of my jobs is to do the systems design for a huge project in Azure. Anyone thinking they can just pick up a cloud provider's stack of tools overnight is in for a bit of a shock. Couple that with the fact that all the cloud vendors are releasing whole new features every week and existing features change almost as often. Part of my job has been trying to get as many of our engineering staff on board for learning cloud stuff, and it's been a challenge with a couple of people.
Keeping up with all the knowledge needed to be the guy they keep on staff when all the routine work is offshore is hard. I have had to dedicate a lot of off-work time to it, because no company trains their staff anymore...one of the things I hate about IT not being recognized as a real profession. The reward for doing this is a very interesting job and, not surprisingly, a higher-pressure firehose to learn from.:-) Being a dad on top of this is tough also...it requires lots of time management, late night reading and watching videos at 2x speed to do this and be a functioning parent.
So yeah...if you want to keep an IT job, especially as things get more and more abstract, broaden your skill set and learn as much as you can get your brain around.
I agree...Our medium IT services and software provider just got the Google open office religion. So far our satellite office has been spared, but other offices around the world are being transformed into a hideous white, orange, blue and green preschool workspace. The ostensible goal is to attract Millenials, but IMO it alienates people who don't want to be treated like preschoolers.
For those who weren't paying attention back then (or born, ye gods..) the late 90s had a very similar ramp up during the first dotcom bubble. Every workplace was trying to copy perk after perk of the startup down the street. It's where we got the foosball table, free meals, free concierge services, etc. trends we see at the Googles and Microsofts of the world today. I think the idea is that you need to have all these crazy perks to attract brilliant creative people...but I don't get it. Yes, I don't want to work in a soulless gray cubicle, but I don't want to sit at a cafeteria table with 10 of my coworker buddies listening to conversations, or get shot with Nerf guns, etc. It really is a culture shift if they can't attract employees with good salaries and interesting work - and have to resort to toys and brightly colored workspaces.
Google, Microsoft and others are famously "all-inclusive" workplaces designed to continue the college campus atmosphere. The question is whether treehouse work spaces are just a by-product of the tech bubble and trying to attract people with interesting personalities, or whether Millenials really prefer working in these conditions.
Microsoft is famous for giving its developers very nice office space and very little reason to leave campus. If I were a 20-something computer science grad, this might have some appeal to me. I probably wouldn't have much of a life outside of work, my apartment would be small and lack all the amenities of "campus life," etc. Problem is, once those 20-somethings reach their 30s or so, a fraction of them are going to have families and lives outside of work.
The only problem is what to do with the grown-ups who don't want to work 100 hour weeks anymore. If Microsoft is simply saying they're not welcome, then they will run into maturity issues down the line once every large MS-focused corporate workload is running in Azure. Maybe they're banking on keeping the fraction of 30+ workers who will continue working crazy hours. When you think about it it makes sense...app development and infrastructure is so abstracted now that all of he truly geeky CS people are going to gravitate towards the OS and cloud providers to keep all the real hardware and software living under all those layers and wrappers going. Everyone else is going to be a "developer" gluing JavaScript libraries together.
People who are somewhat career-minded in the IT field should take this as a "what not to do when you're fired" lesson. Our field is surprisingly small, more so once you get into a specialized industry. Nothing good will ever come of some stupid revenge you get on a bad employer...walking away and getting another job is the mature, grown-up thing to do.
If a doctor got fired from a hospital, would his last action be to order a fatal dose of medication for all his patients? Probably not, if he didn't want to get buried in malpractice suits and criminal charges. Incidents like this in IT are pretty common...a company close to where I live got all of its VMs and backups deleted when the admin found out they had offshored the IT department. He was caught and ended up in jail, but it just goes to show you that people trusted with IT systems are often not professional. The problem with that is that executives see stories like this, and are told by the offshore IT firms that their companies are vulnerable to "evil rogue admins" -- and their company's admins would never do anything like that!
Sure, it might be nice to live out the BOFH fantasy, especially if your company is treating you like garbage up to the point they fire you, but shouldn't professionals realize they'll be caught and also realize they probably won't get a job if anyone finds out?
One of the things I really dislike about IT is that people can just go from place to place, screw up, and walk into their next employer as if nothing happened. It's the equivalent of joining the French Foreign Legion, fighting for a few years and receiving a new identity on the other end. No one in IT would ever agree to a licensed profession, so how do we prevent this from happening?
What a lot of people aren't seeing is that Amazon is slowly working towards removing all of the overhead involved in distribution of goods. Eventually, Amazon's private air cargo service can pick up a few pallets of Chinese manufactured goods directly from a supplier it practically controls, ship them on their own carrier to their own warehouses, and eventually use their own delivery service to get them to your door. At every step in this process, they've removed overhead and labor form the process. The supplier is under similar terms that Walmart extracted from them years ago, so they're making a tiny profit on their finished goods or selling at a loss to get product placement. If Amazon isn't paying shipping companies to send their goods to the US, then those shipping company employees don't have jobs. Once the goods are in the warehouses, Amazon uses their near monopoly power on low-skilled labor to drive the box-packers as hard as possible. And of course, there aren't any store employees or stores in Amazon's system (yes, they now own a grocery chain, I know...that's going to be a whole new universe of disruption.)
It's just end-stage capitalism. No one will be able to afford any goods once all their jobs are gone. I just don't think we're ready for the level of hardship everyone is going to experience. The vast majority of jobs are middle-man in nature. Some are huge wastes of money- just look at realtors and insurance brokers - but that doesn't mean their industry doesn't support millions of good-paying jobs. It's going to be a big culture shock when these jobs move to minimum wage in a warehouse from a nice office and a decent middle class living.
Consider the source of this advice...McKinsey and the other white shoe management consulting firms make obscene amounts of money convincing companies to pay them for advice. These companies are the entry level job for Ivy League MBA students; it's a reward for getting into the club. The nature of the job itself is to get these "consultants" into key leadership positions in customers so they can then funnel more service business to the firm later on...and so the cycle of disruption continues.
Telecoms need to concentrate on one thing...operating their network efficiently. That's their job and everything else is a distraction. They're operating a utility that everything else rides on top of. The main focus should be operating the most reliable network and doing it cheaply enough to earn a profit. If they try to become an entertainment company, content provider, device manufacturer or whatever, they're just going to take away from that because other companies do these jobs better. Running a network might be a boring job, but look how much money the traditional telcos make just by keeping connections up and pumping services into peoples' homes and phones.
This would explain Amazon's proposal to build a second "headquarters" that's been having every low-cost municipality begging for the chance to host it lately. Maybe they want to continue poaching AWS talent from Microsoft in Seattle and Google in SV, and send all the "B players" in the retail division to some cheap locale. The problem with e-commerce vs. traditional retail is that all your employment funnels up into warehouses and back-office campuses, and the jobs in every smallish area of the country dry up. And over time, those back-office campus jobs will get eliminated as well, so I'm guessing this consolidation is temporary. An example I personally know of is the company that manages my retirement account. Headquarters is in Boston, and I'm sure that's where they have all the super-smart traders, fund managers and executives. But my statements and customer service calls from from some back office in Dallas.
The problem I see in general with the labor market is that the entry level positions are being eliminated, and there's a big gap between zero experience and expert in terms of requirements for jobs. Retail used to fill that gap at the low end, and entry-level corporate work used to fill the need to soak up all the generic college students with a generic BS in management. I remember 20 years ago seeing people who partied their way to a degree doing as little work as possible just show up to group interviews senior year and get picked for some random corporate function. The world will be a very different place if the only entry level position is at Amazon's fulfillment center packing boxes 12 hours a day...in previous times these students I'm referring to would be able to become senior paper pushers, then managers and directors and have a good life. When you kill that career ladder for anyone except those who can write web front ends in Node.js, you're setting society up for a huge disruption.
Am I advocating make-work? Yes, I think I am because the alternative of massive unemployment is not something we're set up to deal with. If you live in one of the middle-tier cities (think places like Atlanta, Dallas, Charlotte, SLC, etc.) you most likely have some huge company's back-office functions located there. Drive by their campuses sometime - they probably occupy one or more huge office buildings and employ thousands of people. Each one of those thousands of people is supporting a household, buying things, paying taxes and having kids. What will we do when every one of their jobs is eliminated either due to automation or offshoring?
The ThinkPad is still my favorite laptop brand, even with the changes Lenovo has done to it in the past. I liked them even when they were ridiculously expensive IBM machines and I couldn't get employers to buy them for me. Yes, it's boxy and boring compared to a MacBook Pro or other consumer laptops, but having that extra build quality helps when you're travelling. Lenovo did cheapen it a little bit in the name of margin, but it's not nearly as flimsy as other laptops in its class. When they were IBM laptops, you really got what you paid for in terms of rugged design (along with all the extra weight that entailed.)
The eternal problem with a classic design is knowing when to modernize it, what people like about it and what should/shouldn't change. A few years ago, they moved to a more industry-standard keyboard layout and people lost their minds. Getting rid of the older IBM keyboard turned a lot of people off, but I adjusted. What I hated was when they got rid of the physical trackpoint buttons in favor of this huge clickable trackpad button. That took only one generation for Lenovo to say "oops" and put them back...you had people swearing they would never give Lenovo another cent if they didn't address it.
Product designers should take note of the ThinkPad. Instead of trying to cater to hipsters at the expense of everyone else, there should at least be some consultation when deciding what features to add or drop. Some people don't care that their machine weighs and extra pound if it means that someone sitting on it won't totally destroy it. Lenovo makes a lot of money off ThinkPad customers compared to their incredibly low margin consumer models, so I'm sure that's the only reason they keep the classic design...but I know I'll be buying them until they're no longer useful for me.
"The only thing worse than this is equating money with happiness and / or satisfaction in life."
I've never understood this. If I ever got to a point where I could do whatever I wanted and never worry about paying another bill or forgoing any sort of activity, I'd be pretty happy. I've even seen studies that show ultra-wealthy people aren't happy and wonder how that could possibly be. These people can literally do anything at the drop of a hat...If they don't like their house, just buy another one. If they want to go to Tahiti for a month on one of several yachts, just make a phone call. If they're bored, any number of distractions are available to them 24/7. Normal people would kill each other for a life like that if it were somehow attainable. For example, I was really surprised when that guy from Soundgarden killed himself a while back...with adoring fans, money to do whatever, access to recreational substances of all kinds, how is it possible to be depressed?
Anyone who says money doesn't buy happiness doesn't have imagination.:-)
Realizing you can't fix things, for an altruistic individual, could be a huge contributor to depression. Caring about other people and coming to the realization that nothing you do can make any sort of lasting difference would be a huge crushing blow to a lot of people. On the flip side, selfish people tend to me more successful because they only look out for themselves, so maybe the reason they don't get depressed is because their brains don't have to deal with the disappointment. Take it to the extreme -- the psychopath executives of large companies don't succeed by helping their employees out...they succeed by squeezing them as much as they can and taking the profit that results for themselves. They're a special case because they're physically incapable of feeling compassion for others, and the worldly rewards they have access to as a result mute out almost any negative feelings.
For the altruistic among us, religion used to provide a buffer against this depression that occurs when finding you can't fix things or people. Religion lets you say, "it's in God's hands" and teachings of most religions tell people to spend their lives helping others regardless of how much impact they make. That's becoming less of a draw these days, and I don't know what average people are going to do about it. Maybe they'll get more selfish. If you don't believe you'll be rewarded after a lifetime of self-sacrifice, maybe the logical step is to try to get as much out of life while you can.
Expecting the CEO to know _anything_ about what goes on in the IT department is expecting too much. Executives have no clue what's going on outside of the boardroom, and the only time they ever get any sort of information is from management consultants or the odd 'red alert' that bubbles up to the CFO/CIO/COO/CSO. There is absolutely zero chance that the CEO of Equifax has any idea what patch level of Apache Struts is running on their Internet-facing services.
I wonder if he just went to the CIO and said, "give me a name, anyone remotely responsible for patching, so I can say I fired someone over this." I've never had it happen to me, but I have worked with people who were scapegoats in a major incident. Sucks when you're the one holding the bag...
The problem isn't Facebook or Google themselves -- it's how people use them. People with an agenda of any kind love this new world of instant communication because their views can have just as much weight as anyone else's, including what most people would consider mainstream. I'm of the opinion that this brings out the worst in people, and the anonymity of the Internet makes it even worse because people don't feel typical societal pressures to behave nicely.
For ages, society operated on a more or less even keel because fringe opinions were marginalized and information didn't spread across the entire country in seconds. Before TV, it wasn't well known that FDR had polio and was confined to a wheelchair, for example...try running for President with a condition like that today, in a world where every syllable coming out of political figures and every muscle movement they make is tracked 24/7 by multiple news sources. Even after TV, there were only a few news sources and newspapers of record covering goings-on, and by and large the public didn't get a front-row seat to see "how the sausage is made." For example, it baffles me when I hear that people are surprised that political corruption exists. It's been going on forever, and it was just well-hidden from the public. The only time anyone ever got to see anything was when it got too big to keep under wraps. Everyone in public office from the lowest town councilman to the Senate accepts direct bribes and other favors; just because it's easier to uncover now doesn't mean it didn't happen.
That's what I think will eventually bring us down...the constant infighting generated by the ability for anyone to craft an official looking "article" on social media that is specifically targeted to anger a certain group. We're already fragmented as it is and social media makes it worse. For example, I'm a lefty who thinks gun control is a bad idea for the simple reason that it will give every gun nut out there free reign to post their paranoid anti-government fantasies and start a redneck revolution. We have to find some way to keep the peace in a world where it's so easy to upset it.
Slashdot Mirror
Everywhere I've worked, companies go out of their way to try to avoid firing people purely for performance. It's hard to stop vindictive individual managers from singling people out for...special attention...but I've never worked in mandatory-firing environments. This is most likely a cost-cutting measure. Everywhere I've been, people have been more than made aware of their poor performance before being let go...no one doesn't see it coming. Once you get put on a performance improvement plan, you're on notice that it's nearly time to leave.
SolarCity might be trying to shed workers as the solar bubble dries up. We looked into solar systems for our house recently, and all of the companies are charging way too much for them, for any purchase option (loans, leases, outright purchase.) They're relying on the tax breaks to cloud the real cost of the equipment and maintenance, and (IMO) banking on the fact that most people don't know how their taxes are calculated. They just see they're getting a "huge" tax credit, resulting in a "huge" tax refund, and not taking the calculation to the next level and seeing how much the equipment cost is marked up. When the tax credit goes away, only a few of these companies are going to survive. The whole bubbly nature of this shows too -- you can tell that some of the local companies are these fly-by-night outfits with owners who jump from scheme to scheme and are just latching onto the latest way to make money.
I like the idea of solar, but I'm not going to pay massively marked up rates for a system. Most people just shovel a shoebox full of receipts to their "accountant" and can't figure out their own taxes, or just punch numbers into TurboTax. I think the solar companies have run through these people and are having trouble selling/renting solar panels to the rest of the homeowning population.
Here's another thought about why it happened -- is it possible that NSA treats some of their more brilliant analysts the same way companies treat executives? Everywhere I've worked, security policies apply to absolutely everyone except the C-level and senior VP ranks. Execs just tell IT to plug whatever new shiny thing they got at a conference or Best Buy into the network, override password policy so they don't have to log in to their machines, and a whole bunch of other things that would get ordinary workers fired. Maybe if you're a super-brilliant borderline autistic cybersecurity genius, the NSA decides it's not worth it to try to enforce policy?
I'm sure a lot of the safeguards around classified information are the equivalent of "security theatre" but I'm kind of surprised NSA would let their analysts casually walk out the door with unreleased exploit code and bring it home with them. People I know who work for defense contractors on much more mundane stuff can't even mount USB drives on their computers read-only, let alone copy files, but it seems like they just let things like this happen once you get a certain level of access beyond the perimeter. Some of the things I've heard described are totally security theatre, like covering whiteboards when the janitor comes through or insisting that every piece of garbage be burned _and_ shredded...but at least they have the common sense to prohibit employees from taking confidential data home and employees I've spoken with are well-trained to not talk about exactly what they're working on. I have a feeling we'd never know about this if it hadn't gotten to a machine without Internet access.
Almost all companies work like this too -- once you're inside everything is trusted and can talk to everything else. That's absolutely the wrong thing to do, but rebuilding the network and walling things off to an "assumed-compromised" posture is super expensive and hard to implement. Lots of companies don't even have internal PKI right yet so port-level authentication on network gear isn't even possible. And the app landscape is so vast and much of it is so old that totally locking down some things would take tons of research and effort...all of which the company won't pay for. You would think NSA would be all over that though, given what they work on.
If the tech firms want cleared people so they can get more government contracts, then they have to draw from the same pool that all the defense contractors, TLAs and military do. But if they want that level of background check, why not just spend some of their resources, hire a PI and do similar levels of vetting?
An acquaintance of mine was in the Navy on a nuclear submarine and had TS clearance. From what he's told me and what I've read about it, the difference between a clearance investigation and a simple background check is that they're trying to figure out why they might have a problem with you _later on_, and less about why you have the problem _now_. Someone who's a problem gambler or always in trouble with the law is a reasonable risk for being compromised by a foreign agent. Someone who has chronic financial disasters is a huge red flag because all a spy has to do is wave enough money in their face. And more importantly, having something in your past that's embarrassing or that you would do anything to hide would need to come out in an investigation as well, to ensure you won't do what a spy asks to keep your dirty little secrets hidden. The point is to trace down all these avenues and determine whether or not the individual is worth the risk to trust. (I'm sure military professions requiring clearances have this issue too...especially in the enlisted ranks you probably have a ...diverse... range of credit problems, criminal histories, etc.)
It seems that Facebook et al, with access to all sorts of private-ish info on you, would be well-positioned to conduct their own secret-equivalent clearance checks.
This happened at the height of the last Dotcom Bubble, except the bootcamps were for MCSE or Java/Solaris certification. Now that everything's code and in the cloud, the people running the schools are just changing the advertisement a little bit.
The thing that sucks is that just like ITT Tech, U of Phoenix and other for profit schools, these places live on student loans and GI Bill education grants. Back in the early 2000s I went to one of these bootcamps because a consulting company I worked for at the time paid for it. It was obvious that a lot of people in the classes had just gotten out of a low-level job fixing tanks in the military, or were total newbies with zero experience or desire to learn beyond "make lots of money in tech!"
What I think is even worse this time around is that everything is so abstracted that coming in from the level of a JavaScript framework is going to produce not only people who aren't useful without using the framework they were taught, but also ignorant of what's actually going on inside the abstraction. It's way easier to understand this stuff if you start at a first-principles level and build up, but coming in at the top or near top of the abstraction tower ensures you'll never know what's happening inside the magic box. In this way, coder schools who just pump out Node.js or JQuery robots are doing their students a real disservice.
I'm 42, and although I haven't knowingly experienced ageism, I foresee a day in the future when I draw the short straw, get laid off and become another statistic in this "can't get hired past 45" environment. Every other real profession values experience, and in IT and development it seems like it's being actively ignored lately in the pursuit of new and shiny. Doctors don't have this problem...they can practice as long as they're able. Professors can do the same, but when you suggest that IT people have a similar career they look at you like you have 2 heads.
I admit that there are _plenty_ of older workers who feel that they don't need to keep current in IT, or that their knowledge as it is today will continue to be relevant throughout their career. I know that's not the case and spend a large amount of time both inside and outside work keeping up to date. The problem is that potential employers paint all older workers with the same brush: "They can't learn, they're too expensive, they want too much time off, ..."
I guess the problem is that IT and development are fields where things are constantly changing, and you need to keep learning at the same pace you were when you started, throughout your career. Yes, we have lives outside of work, we can't work 100 hour weeks, we don't want to live in the office, and we have more obligations than the average 25 year old. But, some of us have valuable experience that will prevent the younger workers from going down a dead end and redoing all that work. Personally, I still really enjoy the technical aspect of my job. Management isn't for everyone, and companies should recognize that...that's usually where they stuff the older burnt-out IT workers.
I have no idea how to solve this either. Silicon Valley worships youth and cheap labor. I would love to go work for AWS or Microsoft doing cloudy stuff, but I'm not going to abandon my family for a job. I know way too many IT folks who are on their second or third marriage or are just perpetually alone because they're constantly trying to impress their employer. I think my advice would be to be a generalist who's willing to change direction as needed, learn constantly, live within your means so you're not the guy begging for raises every year, and find an employer that has figured out that a healthy mix of youth and experience works best.
The problem is that it's very difficult to resolve "move fast and break things" developers with anything approaching information security. If you run an extension of a college campus like Facebook does, you're going to get a college campus mentality.
I can see why they are concerned though...Facebook has become the de facto identity provider for almost every consumer website. That "sign in with Facebook" button lets developers assume that Facebook will keep login details for millions of users safe. Microsoft has this same problem with Office 365/Azure AD and they've gone to great pains to explain what they're doing around security. Any time you are providing a vital service that others are counting on, and you have people's personally identifiable information stored, you can't put that in a college campus environment.
"Unions put management and workers in an unnecessarily adversarial relationship."
That's what people don't get -- there has to be an adversarial relationship on both sides. It's the only sustainable way to do things. Sooner or later, management is going to try to take away a benefit or get yet another helping of free work out of employees. And workers are going to do everything they can to get out of doing it. Without the union brokering the negotiations, and each side limited to a set of rules they agree on, employers will encroach too far on the employee side of the equation because they have the power to do so. Individual workers and management don't have equal bargaining power, and they should definitely not get into a buddy-buddy relationship.
I would certainly like to hear examples of how bad unions are in environments you've worked...or are these just talking points?
Anything that prevents companies from playing HR compensation games when they hire new employees or promote from within is a good thing. Most big company HR departments absolutely will not entertain offers if the salary is over x% of what the person says they were previously making. Almost all companies enforce this rule when promoting someone too -- they want to pay as little as possible, not how much the job is worth.
I imagine this rule comes from California due to the extremely distorted labor market that SF/SV has now. I know the official reason is gender equality, which does need to be addressed, but the side effect is a more level playing field for all job applicants. If you can convince an employer that you're worth $250K as a rockstar Rust developer, but you're making $100K doing JavaScript, then companies will just have to do a better job figuring out whether the candidates are lying.
This is the biggest problem. It's not just the "lifers," it's what we're going to do with the pipeline of college-educated new graduates. I've mentioned this before, but colleges are graduating millions of students with a generic "management" degree or something similarly vague. The previous social contract was that large companies would take these new grads and find...something...for them to do. I see this a lot working in IT for large companies. If we have nothing to do for all these new grads, and all the lifers you're talking about...then the consumption cycle is going to grind to a halt.
Those lifers you're talking about are part of the cycle too. I'm sure the person with all the knicknacks on her desk has a family, probably owns a house, pays taxes, buys things, and once in a while takes a vacation to get away from their mind-numbing job. Back around 2000, I worked for a large life insurance company in NYC, who had a headquarters that spanned 2 Manhattan city blocks and several offices around the country. It was eerily empty even back then, and some of the old timers in IT told me that they had done a huge purge through the 90s dumping thousands of the workers you're talking about. According to them, it was so crowded that they had to stagger start and end times to get people in and out of the buildings efficiently.
I know it's not the best solution, but I think there has to be some sort of make-work policy for everyone. We're not set up for a world that doesn't revolve around the work, earn, consume cycle and having an employer of last resort could be the best way to stop a revolution from happening.
I live near New York City. NYC, London and maybe Hong Kong are the investment banking capitals of the world, and there are billions floating around because of it. Banks don't worry when their rank and file employees don't have jobs anymore due to automation, but that changes a lot when we start talking about the elite ranks.
For those who don't know, an associate job at an investment bank is an extremely common congratulatory gift for graduating from Ivy League and other elite schools' MBA programs. It's a closed club because the jobs (for new grads with zero work experience) start at a crazy six-figure salary and have bonus potential going way beyond that. The banks work the associates to the bone doing what basically amounts to number crunching in Excel and preparing pitch books for potential investors. If you live through this without getting fired, you will never worry about money again in your life once you graduate to the management and director/partner ranks. These are guys in their late 20s who own several cars, a condo in Manhattan and a Hamptons beach mansion...the amount of money floating around investment banking is unimaginable to regular humans.
If the elite don't have a place to put their kids after they get out of MBA school that gives them the same standard of living they have, you can bet they'll be privately worried, but they also have to publicly cheer for the automation of work because it's great for their clients. I hope we figure out the right balance, because otherwise someone is going to suggest killing off anyone who doesn't get over 120 on an IQ test, and that's not going to end well.
I highly doubt they'll ever have one. People have been totally brainwashed against unions. Companies tout over and over again how everyone needs to come together and be buddies. Prima donna rockstar IT guys and developers loudly proclaim that they would never stoop to the level of their peers. And people wonder why there's no job security.
Things are going to have to get REALLY bad for unions to make a comeback. Bad enough for the average people to tune out the propaganda, like 50% unemployment bad. I personally have zero issues with seniority-based job security as long as the person is performing at an acceptable level. Too many people I know are getting thrown out of the IT field in their 40s and 50s, and it's nearly impossible to get rehired due to age discrimination. I think my next career move is going to have to be "cashing in my chips" and taking a lower-paying stable job.
Maybe I'm lucky, but I've generally worked in places where they've never fired anyone for poor performance. Like the summary suggests, firings are usually based on salary and it's just a dumb HR thing. Are performance-based firings really a thing?
Just to be clear, I don't work exclusively with rockstars either. There are plenty of mediocre performers. But I've never experienced having someone get so bad at their job that they had to be removed.
There's no easy fix either...you basically have to not be the top guy on the salary spreadsheet when they decide to cut.
I totally agree, and this is the eternal problem. Employers want instant drop-in replacements for job candidates, and it's totally impossible to do it all anymore. You have to have a focus -- mine has been on systems and end user stuff, and I've been shifting as needed over to Azure stuff, mainly focusing on IaaS. The problem, like you said, is making a wrong bet. My solution has been to learn a lot in my core field and sample from others, being ready to learn as much as needed. You have to choose how you use your valuable time for learning and how far down each rabbit hole you need or want to go.
My real-world example is as follows...I've shifted from end user computing to systems engineering, and a couple years back I started hearing more and more "web developer-y" talk. Web dev is something I just haven't been involved in -- beyond standing up the odd Apache server or putting an app into IIS and tweaking a web.config file. But with the "API economy," and cloud providers using RESTful interfaces to manage resources, I had to get semi-skilled. I had to learn enough about certificates to be dangerous, scripting and PowerShell imprvement, how REST works, some provider-specific syntax stuff, etc...all while keeping my feet in the day to day stuff I was working on. When it came time to start working with Azure, I had to ramp up extremely fast but having at least some clue about "how to learn" everything really helped me out. AWS and Azure and GCP have documentation aimed squarely at "dudebro developers" cranking out JavaScript apps at startups. Coming at it from an infrastructure side means having to learn a few new skills, new vocabulary, etc. before you're truly productive.
I'm not saying it's an easy problem to solve. What I am saying is that keeping your eyes open is important. Learning to spot what's a fad, what's a rehash and what's going to require massive time investment to keep up is important. There's tons of "fear of missing out" especially now that people are starting to call 4 year old technology "legacy". If you let yourself become too narrow-focused an expert on one particular field, it can leave you in a bad position if you miss a key shift.
I'm 42, so I'm officially an old fart when it comes to my IT job. I'm in a senior engineering/systems architect job and one of my favorite aspects of it is my unofficial duty to impart wisdom on the newbies. My "hard truth" about IT that surprisingly few people truly grasp is that you can't get comfortable being the expert at one particular thing and coast. Even 10 years ago you could do that...I know so many people who make more than I do jumping from contract to contract doing CCNP-level router work or being the "EMC/HPE/IBM storage wizard." The formula for success used to be to pick a vendor, steep yourself in the technology, then get and keep certifications while learning what's new every few years. This is rapidly going away...regardless of what you think of cloud, CIOs hear the magic word "OpEx" and suddenly all that on-premises hardware and knowledge is out the window. For years, I did a combination of Windows Server, Citrix XenApp and System Center as my core skills, while trying to learn as much as I could about other areas. Even that has changed so much in the past couple of years...desktop apps are being replaced with web apps, containers, APIs, anything that abstracts the client layer and makes it look and act like a smartphone.
These days, one of my jobs is to do the systems design for a huge project in Azure. Anyone thinking they can just pick up a cloud provider's stack of tools overnight is in for a bit of a shock. Couple that with the fact that all the cloud vendors are releasing whole new features every week and existing features change almost as often. Part of my job has been trying to get as many of our engineering staff on board for learning cloud stuff, and it's been a challenge with a couple of people.
Keeping up with all the knowledge needed to be the guy they keep on staff when all the routine work is offshore is hard. I have had to dedicate a lot of off-work time to it, because no company trains their staff anymore...one of the things I hate about IT not being recognized as a real profession. The reward for doing this is a very interesting job and, not surprisingly, a higher-pressure firehose to learn from. :-) Being a dad on top of this is tough also...it requires lots of time management, late night reading and watching videos at 2x speed to do this and be a functioning parent.
So yeah...if you want to keep an IT job, especially as things get more and more abstract, broaden your skill set and learn as much as you can get your brain around.
I agree...Our medium IT services and software provider just got the Google open office religion. So far our satellite office has been spared, but other offices around the world are being transformed into a hideous white, orange, blue and green preschool workspace. The ostensible goal is to attract Millenials, but IMO it alienates people who don't want to be treated like preschoolers.
For those who weren't paying attention back then (or born, ye gods..) the late 90s had a very similar ramp up during the first dotcom bubble. Every workplace was trying to copy perk after perk of the startup down the street. It's where we got the foosball table, free meals, free concierge services, etc. trends we see at the Googles and Microsofts of the world today. I think the idea is that you need to have all these crazy perks to attract brilliant creative people...but I don't get it. Yes, I don't want to work in a soulless gray cubicle, but I don't want to sit at a cafeteria table with 10 of my coworker buddies listening to conversations, or get shot with Nerf guns, etc. It really is a culture shift if they can't attract employees with good salaries and interesting work - and have to resort to toys and brightly colored workspaces.
Google, Microsoft and others are famously "all-inclusive" workplaces designed to continue the college campus atmosphere. The question is whether treehouse work spaces are just a by-product of the tech bubble and trying to attract people with interesting personalities, or whether Millenials really prefer working in these conditions.
Microsoft is famous for giving its developers very nice office space and very little reason to leave campus. If I were a 20-something computer science grad, this might have some appeal to me. I probably wouldn't have much of a life outside of work, my apartment would be small and lack all the amenities of "campus life," etc. Problem is, once those 20-somethings reach their 30s or so, a fraction of them are going to have families and lives outside of work.
The only problem is what to do with the grown-ups who don't want to work 100 hour weeks anymore. If Microsoft is simply saying they're not welcome, then they will run into maturity issues down the line once every large MS-focused corporate workload is running in Azure. Maybe they're banking on keeping the fraction of 30+ workers who will continue working crazy hours. When you think about it it makes sense...app development and infrastructure is so abstracted now that all of he truly geeky CS people are going to gravitate towards the OS and cloud providers to keep all the real hardware and software living under all those layers and wrappers going. Everyone else is going to be a "developer" gluing JavaScript libraries together.
People who are somewhat career-minded in the IT field should take this as a "what not to do when you're fired" lesson. Our field is surprisingly small, more so once you get into a specialized industry. Nothing good will ever come of some stupid revenge you get on a bad employer...walking away and getting another job is the mature, grown-up thing to do.
If a doctor got fired from a hospital, would his last action be to order a fatal dose of medication for all his patients? Probably not, if he didn't want to get buried in malpractice suits and criminal charges. Incidents like this in IT are pretty common...a company close to where I live got all of its VMs and backups deleted when the admin found out they had offshored the IT department. He was caught and ended up in jail, but it just goes to show you that people trusted with IT systems are often not professional. The problem with that is that executives see stories like this, and are told by the offshore IT firms that their companies are vulnerable to "evil rogue admins" -- and their company's admins would never do anything like that!
Sure, it might be nice to live out the BOFH fantasy, especially if your company is treating you like garbage up to the point they fire you, but shouldn't professionals realize they'll be caught and also realize they probably won't get a job if anyone finds out?
One of the things I really dislike about IT is that people can just go from place to place, screw up, and walk into their next employer as if nothing happened. It's the equivalent of joining the French Foreign Legion, fighting for a few years and receiving a new identity on the other end. No one in IT would ever agree to a licensed profession, so how do we prevent this from happening?
What a lot of people aren't seeing is that Amazon is slowly working towards removing all of the overhead involved in distribution of goods. Eventually, Amazon's private air cargo service can pick up a few pallets of Chinese manufactured goods directly from a supplier it practically controls, ship them on their own carrier to their own warehouses, and eventually use their own delivery service to get them to your door. At every step in this process, they've removed overhead and labor form the process. The supplier is under similar terms that Walmart extracted from them years ago, so they're making a tiny profit on their finished goods or selling at a loss to get product placement. If Amazon isn't paying shipping companies to send their goods to the US, then those shipping company employees don't have jobs. Once the goods are in the warehouses, Amazon uses their near monopoly power on low-skilled labor to drive the box-packers as hard as possible. And of course, there aren't any store employees or stores in Amazon's system (yes, they now own a grocery chain, I know...that's going to be a whole new universe of disruption.)
It's just end-stage capitalism. No one will be able to afford any goods once all their jobs are gone. I just don't think we're ready for the level of hardship everyone is going to experience. The vast majority of jobs are middle-man in nature. Some are huge wastes of money- just look at realtors and insurance brokers - but that doesn't mean their industry doesn't support millions of good-paying jobs. It's going to be a big culture shock when these jobs move to minimum wage in a warehouse from a nice office and a decent middle class living.
Consider the source of this advice...McKinsey and the other white shoe management consulting firms make obscene amounts of money convincing companies to pay them for advice. These companies are the entry level job for Ivy League MBA students; it's a reward for getting into the club. The nature of the job itself is to get these "consultants" into key leadership positions in customers so they can then funnel more service business to the firm later on...and so the cycle of disruption continues.
Telecoms need to concentrate on one thing...operating their network efficiently. That's their job and everything else is a distraction. They're operating a utility that everything else rides on top of. The main focus should be operating the most reliable network and doing it cheaply enough to earn a profit. If they try to become an entertainment company, content provider, device manufacturer or whatever, they're just going to take away from that because other companies do these jobs better. Running a network might be a boring job, but look how much money the traditional telcos make just by keeping connections up and pumping services into peoples' homes and phones.
This would explain Amazon's proposal to build a second "headquarters" that's been having every low-cost municipality begging for the chance to host it lately. Maybe they want to continue poaching AWS talent from Microsoft in Seattle and Google in SV, and send all the "B players" in the retail division to some cheap locale. The problem with e-commerce vs. traditional retail is that all your employment funnels up into warehouses and back-office campuses, and the jobs in every smallish area of the country dry up. And over time, those back-office campus jobs will get eliminated as well, so I'm guessing this consolidation is temporary. An example I personally know of is the company that manages my retirement account. Headquarters is in Boston, and I'm sure that's where they have all the super-smart traders, fund managers and executives. But my statements and customer service calls from from some back office in Dallas.
The problem I see in general with the labor market is that the entry level positions are being eliminated, and there's a big gap between zero experience and expert in terms of requirements for jobs. Retail used to fill that gap at the low end, and entry-level corporate work used to fill the need to soak up all the generic college students with a generic BS in management. I remember 20 years ago seeing people who partied their way to a degree doing as little work as possible just show up to group interviews senior year and get picked for some random corporate function. The world will be a very different place if the only entry level position is at Amazon's fulfillment center packing boxes 12 hours a day...in previous times these students I'm referring to would be able to become senior paper pushers, then managers and directors and have a good life. When you kill that career ladder for anyone except those who can write web front ends in Node.js, you're setting society up for a huge disruption.
Am I advocating make-work? Yes, I think I am because the alternative of massive unemployment is not something we're set up to deal with. If you live in one of the middle-tier cities (think places like Atlanta, Dallas, Charlotte, SLC, etc.) you most likely have some huge company's back-office functions located there. Drive by their campuses sometime - they probably occupy one or more huge office buildings and employ thousands of people. Each one of those thousands of people is supporting a household, buying things, paying taxes and having kids. What will we do when every one of their jobs is eliminated either due to automation or offshoring?
The ThinkPad is still my favorite laptop brand, even with the changes Lenovo has done to it in the past. I liked them even when they were ridiculously expensive IBM machines and I couldn't get employers to buy them for me. Yes, it's boxy and boring compared to a MacBook Pro or other consumer laptops, but having that extra build quality helps when you're travelling. Lenovo did cheapen it a little bit in the name of margin, but it's not nearly as flimsy as other laptops in its class. When they were IBM laptops, you really got what you paid for in terms of rugged design (along with all the extra weight that entailed.)
The eternal problem with a classic design is knowing when to modernize it, what people like about it and what should/shouldn't change. A few years ago, they moved to a more industry-standard keyboard layout and people lost their minds. Getting rid of the older IBM keyboard turned a lot of people off, but I adjusted. What I hated was when they got rid of the physical trackpoint buttons in favor of this huge clickable trackpad button. That took only one generation for Lenovo to say "oops" and put them back...you had people swearing they would never give Lenovo another cent if they didn't address it.
Product designers should take note of the ThinkPad. Instead of trying to cater to hipsters at the expense of everyone else, there should at least be some consultation when deciding what features to add or drop. Some people don't care that their machine weighs and extra pound if it means that someone sitting on it won't totally destroy it. Lenovo makes a lot of money off ThinkPad customers compared to their incredibly low margin consumer models, so I'm sure that's the only reason they keep the classic design...but I know I'll be buying them until they're no longer useful for me.
"The only thing worse than this is equating money with happiness and / or satisfaction in life."
I've never understood this. If I ever got to a point where I could do whatever I wanted and never worry about paying another bill or forgoing any sort of activity, I'd be pretty happy. I've even seen studies that show ultra-wealthy people aren't happy and wonder how that could possibly be. These people can literally do anything at the drop of a hat...If they don't like their house, just buy another one. If they want to go to Tahiti for a month on one of several yachts, just make a phone call. If they're bored, any number of distractions are available to them 24/7. Normal people would kill each other for a life like that if it were somehow attainable. For example, I was really surprised when that guy from Soundgarden killed himself a while back...with adoring fans, money to do whatever, access to recreational substances of all kinds, how is it possible to be depressed?
Anyone who says money doesn't buy happiness doesn't have imagination. :-)
Realizing you can't fix things, for an altruistic individual, could be a huge contributor to depression. Caring about other people and coming to the realization that nothing you do can make any sort of lasting difference would be a huge crushing blow to a lot of people. On the flip side, selfish people tend to me more successful because they only look out for themselves, so maybe the reason they don't get depressed is because their brains don't have to deal with the disappointment. Take it to the extreme -- the psychopath executives of large companies don't succeed by helping their employees out...they succeed by squeezing them as much as they can and taking the profit that results for themselves. They're a special case because they're physically incapable of feeling compassion for others, and the worldly rewards they have access to as a result mute out almost any negative feelings.
For the altruistic among us, religion used to provide a buffer against this depression that occurs when finding you can't fix things or people. Religion lets you say, "it's in God's hands" and teachings of most religions tell people to spend their lives helping others regardless of how much impact they make. That's becoming less of a draw these days, and I don't know what average people are going to do about it. Maybe they'll get more selfish. If you don't believe you'll be rewarded after a lifetime of self-sacrifice, maybe the logical step is to try to get as much out of life while you can.
Expecting the CEO to know _anything_ about what goes on in the IT department is expecting too much. Executives have no clue what's going on outside of the boardroom, and the only time they ever get any sort of information is from management consultants or the odd 'red alert' that bubbles up to the CFO/CIO/COO/CSO. There is absolutely zero chance that the CEO of Equifax has any idea what patch level of Apache Struts is running on their Internet-facing services.
I wonder if he just went to the CIO and said, "give me a name, anyone remotely responsible for patching, so I can say I fired someone over this." I've never had it happen to me, but I have worked with people who were scapegoats in a major incident. Sucks when you're the one holding the bag...
The problem isn't Facebook or Google themselves -- it's how people use them. People with an agenda of any kind love this new world of instant communication because their views can have just as much weight as anyone else's, including what most people would consider mainstream. I'm of the opinion that this brings out the worst in people, and the anonymity of the Internet makes it even worse because people don't feel typical societal pressures to behave nicely.
For ages, society operated on a more or less even keel because fringe opinions were marginalized and information didn't spread across the entire country in seconds. Before TV, it wasn't well known that FDR had polio and was confined to a wheelchair, for example...try running for President with a condition like that today, in a world where every syllable coming out of political figures and every muscle movement they make is tracked 24/7 by multiple news sources. Even after TV, there were only a few news sources and newspapers of record covering goings-on, and by and large the public didn't get a front-row seat to see "how the sausage is made." For example, it baffles me when I hear that people are surprised that political corruption exists. It's been going on forever, and it was just well-hidden from the public. The only time anyone ever got to see anything was when it got too big to keep under wraps. Everyone in public office from the lowest town councilman to the Senate accepts direct bribes and other favors; just because it's easier to uncover now doesn't mean it didn't happen.
That's what I think will eventually bring us down...the constant infighting generated by the ability for anyone to craft an official looking "article" on social media that is specifically targeted to anger a certain group. We're already fragmented as it is and social media makes it worse. For example, I'm a lefty who thinks gun control is a bad idea for the simple reason that it will give every gun nut out there free reign to post their paranoid anti-government fantasies and start a redneck revolution. We have to find some way to keep the peace in a world where it's so easy to upset it.