My take is that they are getting desperate because of the corporate users. I know of at least one large enterprise that will replace Win7 with web-terminals when support runs out or becomes too expensive, because Win10 is just not an option with still no stable feature set and GUI and the LTSB-branch still unavailable. Many enterprise-landscapes are mostly web-apps anyways these days and adding a web-based office-replacement is often all that is needed to go web-only. The few people that need something else can always be accommodated with a special solution.
I mean, having a large amount of your top trade secrets stolen can only be one thing: The result of extreme incompetence. Sounds very much like some bean-counter felt smart saving a few $100k and now there is a loss some 1000x that as a result. Very low amateur level.
Too stupid to understand what I said I see. You are assuming countries would be leaving for rational reasons. That is obviously not the case, but too many leaving against their own best interests (e.g. because some really stupid politicians with huge egos and no loyalty to their country are fighting over personal issues, see for example Boris Johnson) can still destroy the EU.
Your reasoning is broken. Even if staying in the EU has significant advantages, stupid and/or selfish politicians may convince their country to leave against the best interest of that country. (See the UK for a recent example of that gross stupidity.) And that is why the UK has to be made an example of. And it will be.
I've done 100% of my work from home for the last 14 years, and many of the devs on my team work from home as well. It's not for everyone, and you have to have good active communication skills. For me, going to the office means getting on an airplane. I love it, and I guarantee that the company gets at least 25% more work out of me this way.
That matches my experience and that of my colleagues. And I also get paid something like 20% more because I do not spend time on getting to work and back. Overall a pretty big win for both sides.
It's not for everyone. The lack of social interaction is a killer for some people, and obviously some jobs can't be done remotely. When it does work it can be a big win for both employee and employer. Any company that rejects working from home as a matter of policy is being stupid, IMO.
I fully agree. Offer an office for those that want it, but do not force people to use it.
For others, not so much. For example, I work from home except for face-to-face meetings. Boils down to around 80% work from home. Will get a bit less in the near future, since I will be mentoring a new addition to our team and that requires some direct personal interaction. The advantages are that I am much more productive, since I do not get constantly interrupted, I work on my own infrastructure and I have a pleasant environment. But I do plan all of my work-time myself anyways (I am a very senior Technology and IT Security consultant), time-accounting is fully in my hands and I am simply trusted to do it right and I am fully self-motivated.
For people that are self-motivated and want to do a good job, this not only works well, it is much more productive. For all others, I am not sure. It may still be better to have them work remotely, because at least this cuts down on them decreasing the productivity of others. But then, getting rid of them may be even better.
What I see here is a long-term shift from workplaces targeted at the average person (who are usually not really self-motivated) to the, say, 30% of the workforce that will make a serious attempt to do a good job, regardless of circumstances. These you can let work however they prefer and for knowledge-workers that will mostly be from home. The rest decreases in value all the time, due to automation (weak "AI"), optimization and off-shoring. Long therm, I expect that only these 30% will have a job and that would be pretty nice for them, because finally the others will stop standing in their way. It will also be plenty to keep the economy going, as long as the others get some reasonable share of the wealth to be able to buy things.
Bottom line is that there basically is no choice. Force the cream of your staff to work on-site, and you will lose more and more of them and eventually that will kill your enterprise. Only a minority will prefer to work on-site for obvious reasons. At the same time, when you let go of the outdated idea that presence enforces productivity, you can save a lot of money. In fact, I see that large customers reduce their office space and they could not even fit in the full staff anymore if all were present at the same time.
We are in a massive transformation of work (again) and the outcome will be interesting.
Well, I really hope a second referendum will happen. The UK political class has lost all connection to reality, and the citizens may by now have realized that to some degree.
If you do not, no amount of "magic" management and tracking will help. If you keep them low, however, you do not need a lot of tracking, every bug will be unique enough to be memorable or fixed fast enough to not need tracking.
Of course that means you need to have really good architects, designers and coders. Hard to get but worth the price they will ask.
You do not understand how that works. MAD (that is the name of the doctrine) does not leave survivors on either side. If a small country, like the UK, enacts a MAD-based attack, then it gets eradicated, while the rest of the world merely gets hurt. Nukes are not practical weapons if you want to survive. And no, the US would not start WWIII to assist the Brits. They are not suicidal either.
You mean the UK would do a "suicide by cop"? Rather unlikely, that. I mean the mainstream political culture is "stupid" at the moment, but I do not think it is suicidal. Unless you think the UK could really believe it can win a war with NATO? Don't forget they are a member at this time and know all the other's capabilities.
Yes, and it is a shame. I mean stupidity should come with some penalties, but what is going to happen now is going to be more than deserved for those that voted for this and there are lots of people that were smarter and now get to suffer alongside.
Somehow this extremely obvious fact must be to simple and clear for a lot of people. How this can be is beyond me, except if a majority of people do understand exactly nothing. That would be hugely more catastrophic than all terrorism combined ever could begin to be.
Sanity and an actual understanding of how things work are not welcome by a political class that has lost all contact to reality and that has the press mostly in their corner or reality-denial.
I don't think there is _any_ chance of the Brexit negotiations not being catastrophic for the UK short-term. Long-term, the UK will have to re-apply to the EU, of course without all the special considerations they had before. But short-term, the EU needs to make an example out of the UK. It is a question of survival and the EU bureaucracy knows that. It is also very easy to do, just give the British the same conditions as any other non-EU country and they are massively screwed. I predict that is going to happen, because the whole British political landscape is living in a deranged fantasy about their worth to the EU and have done so for a long time. There is a large number of EU politicians that are glad to finally be rid of this petulant child that always needed something special in order to be satisfied and that never understood what teamwork means.
Thanks, that explains it. Also explains why this does not touch me in the slightest. Will give me a nice laugh every time it is used against me in the future though as it says far more about the person using the insult than the one being insulted.
Basically all terrorists in Europe of the last 10 years or so were _known_ to the state before. Did that help at all? No, it id not. And now they want to put everybody else under surveillance, despite it being completely clear that this will not help? That is at best utterly stupid, and at worst a preparation for the establishment of full-blown fascism.
It really depends. Small consulting businesses (say 2...20 employees) usually try very hard to send you the person you need, because they do not have a well-known name and need to compete on merit. Large consulting enterprises (IBM, etc.) send you however they have and often worse people than they could have sent because they will work more hours on a problem and hence bring in more money.
Caveat: I have experience with an IBM consulting team working for a large enterprise. "Incompetent and arrogant" sums it up pretty well. Initially I proposed to have regular meeting with them because I was working on something similar (I am from one of those small consulting companies) and I thought there could be synergies. We quietly decided to not have any meetings anymore after the first one after one of these pricks tried to explain to me how a web-server works and just managed to demonstrate his utter cluelessness. A few months later their project failed completely, because they could not deliver anything that worked within 4 years. For example, in all that time they never bothered to find out what load they needed to cope with (I know because I was asked for my numbers by the people that had to clean up that mess).
And that would just be wrong. Sure, employers can be ageist, but can you blame them looking at stagnant IT people that never were really good when they were current on things? The main problem is, I think, that IT is hard and many, many people got into it for the wrong reasons. These are now screwed. (Side note: All this "learn to code" nonsense will produce more of these 20 years down the road or so.) That is not to say I have no sympathy for them, but giving them jobs were they will do more harm than good is not the solution. (And I have seen such people time and again.) I think those that still have some drive should be given a chance to learn something else, and hopefully something they are actually passionate about this time. For the rest, I don't know. Give them an UBI and hope they find at least a hobby they care about?
That is a load of BS. Sounds like you are one of those that did not do anything to keep your skills current and you are now trying to promote that fantasy that it was not your fault.
A book, a boot camp or professional development courses was all they needed to jump start their careers.
That and a genuine interest in their chosen field of expertise. I find many IT people lack that these days. As it still if a fast-moving field, that will make non-learners obsolete eventually. I think this whole thing may not be ageism at all, but just too many that chose a fast-moving field and either could not keep up or did not even want to. In a slow-moving field, here your initial education stays useful for 50 years or longer and just getting a bit of experience makes you current, firing older workers could well be ageism, but in a fast-moving field it could well be primarily a problem with those that have fallen behind. Of course, many of those affected do not want to hear that and crying "Ageism!" and playing the victim-card is far easier.
That is not to say keeping up is not hard. Especially if you went into IT not because you love it, but for other reasons, keeping up can be very hard. But nobody can honestly say it was not clear what they were getting into in this regard.
So, sure, there is some ageism in the IT industry, and those practicing it pay for that. But I think it is nowhere near as bad as often claimed.
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My take is that they are getting desperate because of the corporate users. I know of at least one large enterprise that will replace Win7 with web-terminals when support runs out or becomes too expensive, because Win10 is just not an option with still no stable feature set and GUI and the LTSB-branch still unavailable. Many enterprise-landscapes are mostly web-apps anyways these days and adding a web-based office-replacement is often all that is needed to go web-only. The few people that need something else can always be accommodated with a special solution.
Otherwise I am exactly as interested as I was in Win10 up to now: Not at all.
I mean, having a large amount of your top trade secrets stolen can only be one thing: The result of extreme incompetence. Sounds very much like some bean-counter felt smart saving a few $100k and now there is a loss some 1000x that as a result. Very low amateur level.
Too stupid to understand what I said I see. You are assuming countries would be leaving for rational reasons. That is obviously not the case, but too many leaving against their own best interests (e.g. because some really stupid politicians with huge egos and no loyalty to their country are fighting over personal issues, see for example Boris Johnson) can still destroy the EU.
Your reasoning is broken. Even if staying in the EU has significant advantages, stupid and/or selfish politicians may convince their country to leave against the best interest of that country. (See the UK for a recent example of that gross stupidity.) And that is why the UK has to be made an example of. And it will be.
I've done 100% of my work from home for the last 14 years, and many of the devs on my team work from home as well. It's not for everyone, and you have to have good active communication skills. For me, going to the office means getting on an airplane. I love it, and I guarantee that the company gets at least 25% more work out of me this way.
That matches my experience and that of my colleagues. And I also get paid something like 20% more because I do not spend time on getting to work and back. Overall a pretty big win for both sides.
It's not for everyone. The lack of social interaction is a killer for some people, and obviously some jobs can't be done remotely. When it does work it can be a big win for both employee and employer. Any company that rejects working from home as a matter of policy is being stupid, IMO.
I fully agree. Offer an office for those that want it, but do not force people to use it.
For others, not so much. For example, I work from home except for face-to-face meetings. Boils down to around 80% work from home. Will get a bit less in the near future, since I will be mentoring a new addition to our team and that requires some direct personal interaction. The advantages are that I am much more productive, since I do not get constantly interrupted, I work on my own infrastructure and I have a pleasant environment. But I do plan all of my work-time myself anyways (I am a very senior Technology and IT Security consultant), time-accounting is fully in my hands and I am simply trusted to do it right and I am fully self-motivated.
For people that are self-motivated and want to do a good job, this not only works well, it is much more productive. For all others, I am not sure. It may still be better to have them work remotely, because at least this cuts down on them decreasing the productivity of others. But then, getting rid of them may be even better.
What I see here is a long-term shift from workplaces targeted at the average person (who are usually not really self-motivated) to the, say, 30% of the workforce that will make a serious attempt to do a good job, regardless of circumstances. These you can let work however they prefer and for knowledge-workers that will mostly be from home. The rest decreases in value all the time, due to automation (weak "AI"), optimization and off-shoring. Long therm, I expect that only these 30% will have a job and that would be pretty nice for them, because finally the others will stop standing in their way. It will also be plenty to keep the economy going, as long as the others get some reasonable share of the wealth to be able to buy things.
Bottom line is that there basically is no choice. Force the cream of your staff to work on-site, and you will lose more and more of them and eventually that will kill your enterprise. Only a minority will prefer to work on-site for obvious reasons. At the same time, when you let go of the outdated idea that presence enforces productivity, you can save a lot of money. In fact, I see that large customers reduce their office space and they could not even fit in the full staff anymore if all were present at the same time.
We are in a massive transformation of work (again) and the outcome will be interesting.
Well, I really hope a second referendum will happen. The UK political class has lost all connection to reality, and the citizens may by now have realized that to some degree.
You seem to suffer from a reversed perception.
Only if you personnel is mediocre. Which is the standard-situation, admittedly. That the result is not very good is also standard.
Nice bunch of failed human beings.
If you do not, no amount of "magic" management and tracking will help. If you keep them low, however, you do not need a lot of tracking, every bug will be unique enough to be memorable or fixed fast enough to not need tracking.
Of course that means you need to have really good architects, designers and coders. Hard to get but worth the price they will ask.
You do not understand how that works. MAD (that is the name of the doctrine) does not leave survivors on either side. If a small country, like the UK, enacts a MAD-based attack, then it gets eradicated, while the rest of the world merely gets hurt. Nukes are not practical weapons if you want to survive. And no, the US would not start WWIII to assist the Brits. They are not suicidal either.
You mean the UK would do a "suicide by cop"? Rather unlikely, that. I mean the mainstream political culture is "stupid" at the moment, but I do not think it is suicidal. Unless you think the UK could really believe it can win a war with NATO? Don't forget they are a member at this time and know all the other's capabilities.
But yeah, we're well fucked innit.
Yes, and it is a shame. I mean stupidity should come with some penalties, but what is going to happen now is going to be more than deserved for those that voted for this and there are lots of people that were smarter and now get to suffer alongside.
Somehow this extremely obvious fact must be to simple and clear for a lot of people. How this can be is beyond me, except if a majority of people do understand exactly nothing. That would be hugely more catastrophic than all terrorism combined ever could begin to be.
Even if true (and there are really not good indications it it), that may have some impact in the problem around 40 years in the future.
But I guess you are not capable of seeing how utterly demented your argument is.
Sanity and an actual understanding of how things work are not welcome by a political class that has lost all contact to reality and that has the press mostly in their corner or reality-denial.
I don't think there is _any_ chance of the Brexit negotiations not being catastrophic for the UK short-term. Long-term, the UK will have to re-apply to the EU, of course without all the special considerations they had before. But short-term, the EU needs to make an example out of the UK. It is a question of survival and the EU bureaucracy knows that. It is also very easy to do, just give the British the same conditions as any other non-EU country and they are massively screwed. I predict that is going to happen, because the whole British political landscape is living in a deranged fantasy about their worth to the EU and have done so for a long time. There is a large number of EU politicians that are glad to finally be rid of this petulant child that always needed something special in order to be satisfied and that never understood what teamwork means.
Thanks, that explains it. Also explains why this does not touch me in the slightest. Will give me a nice laugh every time it is used against me in the future though as it says far more about the person using the insult than the one being insulted.
Basically all terrorists in Europe of the last 10 years or so were _known_ to the state before. Did that help at all? No, it id not. And now they want to put everybody else under surveillance, despite it being completely clear that this will not help? That is at best utterly stupid, and at worst a preparation for the establishment of full-blown fascism.
It really depends. Small consulting businesses (say 2...20 employees) usually try very hard to send you the person you need, because they do not have a well-known name and need to compete on merit. Large consulting enterprises (IBM, etc.) send you however they have and often worse people than they could have sent because they will work more hours on a problem and hence bring in more money.
Caveat: I have experience with an IBM consulting team working for a large enterprise. "Incompetent and arrogant" sums it up pretty well. Initially I proposed to have regular meeting with them because I was working on something similar (I am from one of those small consulting companies) and I thought there could be synergies. We quietly decided to not have any meetings anymore after the first one after one of these pricks tried to explain to me how a web-server works and just managed to demonstrate his utter cluelessness. A few months later their project failed completely, because they could not deliver anything that worked within 4 years. For example, in all that time they never bothered to find out what load they needed to cope with (I know because I was asked for my numbers by the people that had to clean up that mess).
And that would just be wrong. Sure, employers can be ageist, but can you blame them looking at stagnant IT people that never were really good when they were current on things? The main problem is, I think, that IT is hard and many, many people got into it for the wrong reasons. These are now screwed. (Side note: All this "learn to code" nonsense will produce more of these 20 years down the road or so.) That is not to say I have no sympathy for them, but giving them jobs were they will do more harm than good is not the solution. (And I have seen such people time and again.) I think those that still have some drive should be given a chance to learn something else, and hopefully something they are actually passionate about this time. For the rest, I don't know. Give them an UBI and hope they find at least a hobby they care about?
That is a load of BS. Sounds like you are one of those that did not do anything to keep your skills current and you are now trying to promote that fantasy that it was not your fault.
A book, a boot camp or professional development courses was all they needed to jump start their careers.
That and a genuine interest in their chosen field of expertise. I find many IT people lack that these days. As it still if a fast-moving field, that will make non-learners obsolete eventually. I think this whole thing may not be ageism at all, but just too many that chose a fast-moving field and either could not keep up or did not even want to. In a slow-moving field, here your initial education stays useful for 50 years or longer and just getting a bit of experience makes you current, firing older workers could well be ageism, but in a fast-moving field it could well be primarily a problem with those that have fallen behind. Of course, many of those affected do not want to hear that and crying "Ageism!" and playing the victim-card is far easier.
That is not to say keeping up is not hard. Especially if you went into IT not because you love it, but for other reasons, keeping up can be very hard. But nobody can honestly say it was not clear what they were getting into in this regard.
So, sure, there is some ageism in the IT industry, and those practicing it pay for that. But I think it is nowhere near as bad as often claimed.