The Dead Sea Effect In the IT Workplace 396
Alien54 notes a blog posting by old hand Bruce F. Webster on the current state of affairs in hiring in IT, focusing on what he calls the Dead Sea Effect. "Many large IT shops... work like the Dead Sea. New hires are brought in as management deems it necessary. Their qualifications... will tend to vary quite a bit, depending upon current needs, employee departure, the personnel budget, and the general hiring ability of those doing the hiring. All things being equal, the general competency of the IT department should have roughly the same distribution as the incoming hires. Instead, what happens is that the more talented and effective IT engineers are the ones most likely to leave -- to evaporate, if you will. They are the ones least likely to put up with the frequent stupidities and workplace problems that plague large organizations; they are also the ones most likely to have other opportunities that they can readily move to. What tends to remain behind is the 'residue' -- the least talented and effective IT engineers."
Re:Laminated talent (Score:4, Interesting)
Granted, I am not complaining, as sometimes there's really no other way to do this. However, my personal grumble is that the others don't truly seem like they have the time - or the initiative - to step up as I did......
But they still complain about not being promoted. I can lead a horse to water with the best of them, though...
where do they go (Score:1, Interesting)
I have seen this (Score:1, Interesting)
Since I started, I have increased efficiency dramatically by doing simple things like labeling devices ( computers, routers, ect... ), documenting passwords and usernames for network devices, and implementing document storage. And I am a peon, front level line worker. I still have to motivate my "peers" to get off their asses and get something done, elsewise it would be ignored until it blows up in our faces.
Chemical Reaction in that Sea (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Laminated talent (Score:2, Interesting)
How large is large? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Assuming there are other better jobs (Score:2, Interesting)
The sum up example would be the "star outsourcing employee" was stumped for two days on a project because he didn't know how to add a directory to his path and couldn't figure out why he couldn't run a certain binary. And for whatever reason didn't ask anyone for help.
Or how about the guy that locked out over 30 different systems from a gateway host because he forgot his password and tried 50 times from 30 different boxes before deciding to send an e-mail asking for a password reset.
Seriously. You get what you pay for. Cheap labor is... cheap.
Re:Assuming there are other better jobs (Score:3, Interesting)
Catastrophic failures are up. Staff productivity is way down.
Combination of SOX, offshoring & out-hosting of our hardware.
When things do fail- there is an increasingly small staff (last time one guy worked 48 hours straight to save the company (multi-billion dollar co)). If he had told them to shine on each day after putting in a 10 hour day, the company would have lost millions. And yet... they are still probably considering continuing to outsource to the people who could do nothing to help us when that happened.
They seem to think, if you looked at the code 2 years ago, you are going to be competent to keep it running in a crisis.
Re:Laminated talent (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:it's really simple (Score:3, Interesting)
They are called average.
Programming is my life. I work as a programmer because that is an easy way to pay the bills. If I had enough money I would probably stop working, but I wouldn't stop programming.
Re:not just IT (Score:1, Interesting)
Realize that HR is tasked with keeping the payroll down moreso than keeping great employees happy. Because of this, as an employee, one should always realize that the best raise is across the street.
Re:Assuming there are other better jobs (Score:3, Interesting)
To make it worse, while it can be argued that outsourcing IT abroad is not as cheap is it appears on paper, there is still downward pressure on wages/salaries because you have more local people pursuing a decreasing number of jobs.
In an analogy, it's like having a bunch of farmers, so some great, some good, and some not so good. When the soil is fertile and the climate is good for growing, everyone does well. But throw in a 5 year drought, and even the great farmers will find themselves out of work.
So, while I'm sure you're an excellent, innovative, and adaptable employee, once companies and even whole industries move abroad, there's not going to be much for you but to take a lower paying job, probably not even doing what you enjoy. If anything you'll get stuck where you are because you already cost too much to be promoted and you'll be surrounded by the dead-sea residue that this article talks about... at least until the economy finally starts to swing in a more active direction.
Re:Assuming there are other better jobs (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm in the same boat as the grand parent. For the last 8 years I've been employed by one of the top 50 in the fortune 500. I'd say there is a lot of truth to the article.
So why have I stayed for 8 years? Because for the first 7 I had a very good manager. She shielded us from a lot of the corporate bullshit. Because of this she was able to hold together a group of fairly skilled people. I enjoyed working with them, and that's why I stayed so many years even with the ever increasing corporate stupidity. But, last year she pissed off someone higher on the corporate ladder (fighting for us). Our team was disbanded, and she was tricked into leading a group that had already been selected for outsourcing.
I should have quit then. But, one of my former teammates convinced me to join his team on another application (he's just a team lead, not true management). I've been regretting that decision ever since. The distribution of skills in the new application follows that described in the article, and there is little shielding from the corporate bullshit. I've spent a large part of the last 6 months trying to push through a small tool that took around a week to write. In my previous group, it would have been a small side project that would have been handled outside of the usual process (it's just a small tool to aid the test team). I've held on as long as I have because my old teammate is a good friend, and he was convinced he could change things.
But, there have been rumors flying around for a week that upper management is looking to replace our application (actually longer, but there's been more substance lately). And now I have a meeting request on my calendar from our manager with a subject so vague there can't be any doubt about it's purpose. That's it, I'm out. I have my resume open in another window, time to get back to work.
Perhaps they start their own companies? (Score:4, Interesting)
As a developer, if you can put away enough money to survive half a year, you can start your own company with minimum risk.
Re:Assuming there are other better jobs (Score:1, Interesting)
The excuse given is that their contracts impose financial penalties on the contractors if the work doesn't meet set standards, whereas if it was done in-house (at 1/5 the cost) there wouldn't be anyone to blame for failures. No doubt this makes sense if you have an MBA instead of a brain.
Re:Privatization (Score:3, Interesting)
Typically this is done to cut bodycount, but we're already down 10-15% due to retirement and staff leaving the state.
One of the new tenets is 'internal service providers.' A talented internal staff will _always be_ cheaper than outsourcing, as they know the environment, have a desire to keep their house in order (ideally), and don't have the overhead of the golden parachutes and Sales-force of a consulting firm.
And frankly, the success rate of those huge, top tier contractors (the ones that advertise down entire terminals of airports) is hovering around 0% here.
Here's my collective response to comments. (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's a response to the main themes that I see coming up there.
The Dead Sea effect isn't unique to IT. True enough, though I could say the same thing about just about any project management issue regarding IT. What is unusual about IT (shared with other engineering disciplines) is the degree to which individual talent and other factors affect productivity and quality [brucefwebster.com]. And what is unique about IT (as opposed to, say, civil / mechanical / chemical engineers, architects, etc.) is that there is no standard (state-run) professional certification, so there is no assurance of minimum education and competency.
This is obvious/common sense/trivial. So are most of the problems in IT. Fred Brooks [amazon.com] and Jerry Weinberg [amazon.com] pretty much nailed down all the essential issues in IT project and personnel management more than 30 years ago; yet, amazingly, the problems haven't all gone away! There is a profound lack of professional and institutional memory in IT; almost everyone who writes about IT project/personnel management [bfwa.com] (myself included) is looking for new ways to cast or explain the core issues in a touching hope that maybe this time someone will actually listen and fix them.
The Dead Sea effect is just the Peter Principal (or a corollary thereof). No, it isn't. The Peter Principal [wikipedia.org] is that a given person rises to her/his level of incompetence (I'm actually old enough to remember when 'the Peter Principal' first came out). This has nothing to do with promotion within the IT organization; it has to do with self-selected removal from that IT organization, not due to a lack of promotion or opportunity, but just because there are greener pastures elsewhere.
Not all IT shops are like this . I would certainly hope so. In fact, there are IT organizations where just the opposite occurs; the quality of the IT engineers is quite high, and engineers who are mediocre or disruptive either don't get hired or don't last long if they are. I worked in one such IT group (Pages Software [brucefwebster.com]) for five years. During that time, we had only one voluntary departure (the network admin); we had two others who were dismissed due to problems, and a few others who were (painfully) cut in downsizing.
Not everyone 'left behind' is incompetent . Again, this syndrome doesn't apply to all IT groups, and it doesn't apply to the same extent to all IT groups. Turnover in IT personnel is common (though it can be reduced by intelligent management), and just because good engineers have left a given IT group doesn't mean that the rest are, in fact, residue. What I'm talking about here is a very real syndrome, typically found in large corporations and government organizations, but it's certainly not universal.
The IT hiring process is broken. Amen. Not only is the IT hiring process broken in many organizations, the entire approach to IT is often broken. It is rife with empire-building, 'heroic' project management, and an 'interchangeable code monkeys' mindset. As mentioned in the comments
Re:9-to-5'ism and allegedly "loving your job" (Score:3, Interesting)
Even if you are obsessed about your profession, it doesn't necessarily mean
that you want to do it for your corporate overlords 24/7. You may also want
to persue your own chosen projects in your field in your downtime.
Eventhough my "day job" is in my chosen profession, it still remains quite
distinct and separate from my chosen profession.
Re:Assuming there are other better jobs (Score:5, Interesting)
During that time period, I managed (and managed is just another word for led - we were all hands on) and trained 3 different teams in our IT group - server engineering, network engineering and one of our coding groups. I also worked two full time jobs for over a year in the company, starting a new division from scratch with only two other people to help. When the facilities department was gutted, I picked up the slack, spending nights going through facilities contracts with another IT director to save the company millions of dollars. All the while having the highest retention rate of any department in the company (we didn't have anybody leave the department for over 4 years).
But then management starting making even more brilliant decisions than usual. First they decided that with all the free time that IT had (first clue they were in fantasy land - they didn't even know were the IT offices were to have this discussion), we should be made into billable staff and start doing work for outside customers as well as our normal jobs. Then the company changed direction from commercial clients to government and started acquisitions. Which meant that we needed the person leading the IT department to come from a government contractor so the made the lead IT person from our first acquisitions (3 person IT department, 65 employees total) our CIO. That decision was rapidly followed by divesting the commercial entities. At this point I was among the longest serving employees in the company.
And then it happened. The last commercial division was sold, even though I was corporate I was included in the sale along with my senior server engineer and a senior support person. The new owners decided that outsourcing everything (and I mean everything - engineering, support, end user interaction, etc) to a datacenter was the way to go. For the 6 months that I worked for the new company I was basically tasked with how to migrate 400 people to a new network/domain/phone system. During that time I only dealt with consultants, never actually meeting my boss. Heck, I didn't even know who my boss was. As soon as I said something about what a mess the consultants were making to the head of IT of the acquiring company, I was terminated for failure to produce results (ie - I was termed because they didn't listen to me and continued to futz around with their $250/hr consultants who, for some reason, were unwilling to hurry up the transition). That was in November of last year.
Since then I've been unable to find equivalent work. I've now got my own startup going, but am still not making money. It's ugly out there for qualified people demanding a salary right now. Sure, I could pickup entry level positions somewhere, but those positions really don't pay the bills when you have a family with two very young children, housing prices that are so overinflated that people are burning them down so they don't have to pay their mortgages and gas prices that make it an extremely expensive proposition to commute any distance to work.
And I'm not looking for jobs in one of the "slow" markets, I'm in Seattle.
Don't be too cocky - I was and have now ended up at the bottom of the barrel believing that anything could happen to anyone.
It's about avoidance of responsibility... (Score:3, Interesting)
"It's NOT about making things better..."
It's about non-technical managers outsourcing so that they can say that technical things are no longer part of their responsibility. It's about avoidance of responsibility, and has nothing to do with improving anything or cutting costs.
The manager who outsources can blame someone else when projects fail. If things get really bad, the manager just goes to another company.
Re:Perhaps they start their own companies? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:thank you captain obvious (Score:3, Interesting)
I just don't see the benefit of working for startups, as the other poster talked about, unless you stand to really gain from it monetarily (by being a co-owner). You work really LONG hours, your pay sucks, and for what? Feeling like you've contributed something? If I have to live in a shitty apartment and get lousy pay, I don't care what I've contributed.
I've found that at big companies, the work is pretty steady. It's hard to get fired unless you're truly incompetent, or there's a big lay-off. And when that happens (the latter, not the former), you just go to one of the other big companies that's located right down the street and get a better-paying job there, rinse and repeat. When I worked at a small company right out of college and got fed up with the long hours, horrible pay, and and bad treatment, when I tried to leave, the only other company nearby was doing the exact same kind of work, and couldn't hire me because of a stupid non-compete, so I had to pack everything and move. Now, I stick with big companies, and don't sign non-competes (and big companies never ask this anyway, only stupid little small companies). The pay is good, the treatment of employees is exemplary (except when they lay off a whole division of course, but at the individual employee level, my observation has been that treatment always errs on the side of giving the employee the benefit of the doubt), and while you can't expect to stay at one company for your whole career, you can generally stay in the same city by moving around between the companies as they have lay-offs and hiring frenzies.
The whole situation really sucks, though, IMO, and if I didn't have a plan to start my own very small (1-man) company, and have a very supportive wife with a good career of her own, I'd be wishing I had never gone into a technical career at all. To me, the key to happiness is to get away from being a wage slave and become a contractor, or have a 1-man company at home (frequently the same thing), perhaps selling stuff on the internet.
Re:Assuming there are other better jobs (Score:2, Interesting)
What are you, some sort of a small fish in a small pond?
Re:Assuming there are other better jobs (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, there's some good parts about it like making more money and seeing other places... but in retrospect, whenever someone asks me what's to see in eg. Milan (Italy) where I spent about half a year, all I can give them is a list of some really great restaurants, tips about taxi's and the airports and some too-expensive-for-non-business-needs hotels. Apart from that I've seen the outside of most interesting buildings in the city, but never had the time to visit them during opening hours as I was at work right then.
Additionally, your social life comes to a grinding halt too as you usually arrive back home really late on Friday, try to make the most of Saturday to do chores and errants and get together with friends or family. On Sunday I usually tried to have a 'lazy day' (go to the library, cycle around, etc etc...), catch up with what I hadn't managed to do the day before and by the evening make sure to get at the airport again in time... Weekends quickly became too short & cramped, while weeks were slow and lonely.
Fun for a while, extremely boring (and even frustrating) in the long run...
Oh yeah, and I hope you like reading too, because you'll likely be doing a lot of it while waiting for planes, trains, people,