Are Information Technology's Glory Days Over? 333
Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that computer science students with the entrepreneurial spirit may want to look for a different major, because if Thomas M. Siebel, founder of Siebel Systems, is right, IT is a mature industry that will grow no faster than the larger economy, its glory days having ended in 2000. Addressing Stanford students in February as a guest of the engineering school, Siebel called attention to 20 sweet years from 1980 to 2000, when worldwide IT spending grew at a compounded annual growth rate of 17 percent. 'All you had to do was show up and not goof it up,' Siebel says. 'All ships were rising.' Since 2000, however, that rate has averaged only 3 percent. His explanation for the sharp decline is that 'the promise of the post-industrial society has been realized.' In Siebel's view, far larger opportunities are to be found in businesses that address needs in food, water, health care and energy. Though Silicon Valley was 'where the action was' when he finished graduate school, he says, 'if I were graduating today, I would get on a boat and I would get off in Shanghai.'"
Obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
It's just obvious. The reason for IT's growth during late 90's and early 2000's was because it was new, great technology. Now its getting common.
In Siebel's view, far larger opportunities are to be found in businesses that address needs in food, water, health care and energy.
This doesn't really make sense. IT has lots of opportunities too. Its true that "sure ways to get rich" times might be over, but its not like the other indrustries have those anymore.
whatever business, IT will be there (Score:4, Insightful)
guess which field in these businesses will address those challenges? the Information Technology field is my guess.
Kondratief cycles (Score:2, Insightful)
At some point, the efficiencies of a new technology will be fully achieved. Then it's time for a new technology.
I would say microcomputers have largely gone through their cycle. The internet not so much.
Tehnology evolution goes in streaks (Score:5, Insightful)
His explanation for the sharp decline is that 'the promise of the post-industrial society has been realized.'
Evolution and transformation in technology doesn't happen on a linear time line. It goes in streaks, followed by times where the previously disruptive technologies retrench and normalize. That lasts until the next transformative technology comes along.
Just because we're in a phase of technology normalization doesn't mean it's going to stay that way. I think he's taking kind of a short view of tech history.
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)
Because you need to have certain personality to become great SysAdmin. You cannot be too introvert, nor extrovert. You need to be social enough to provide sufficient local tech/application support to the rest of the staff, and still "geek" enough to handle the more technical aspects of the job.
In a sense, good SysAdmin is like successful project manager, you must schedule tasks and prioritize them, if possible allocate tasks to jr. sysadmins. If done properly, IT becomes invisible in most organizations. (and you have more time to read slashdot)
Patience is also a virtue. If you can tolerate stupid users and explain the same thing 10 times over, you will succeed.
Theres not much glorious in SysAdmin job actually. Most sysadmins are underpaid, underrespected and rarely loved, but still our love for the technology (or sufficient amounts of single malt after hours) keeps us doing our thing and keeping the industry running.
Post Industrial??? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:good riddance (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly - he's only talking about people with "entrepreneurial spirit", i.e. those people who only care about getting as filthy rich as possible, as fast as possible, and not about working in an industry they enjoy. If they all decide to piss off to China then good luck to them.
Re:What would that do (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is it moderated as troll ? It is NOT good advice to tell people : "China is where the business is, go there and you'll be rich".
Think about the reasons why a company would want to hire you instead of a local engineer : you don't speak mandarin well, you don't understand the culture, you often ask for a bigger salary... Some people do really well in Shanghai, but it is not easy.
Short sighted (Score:4, Insightful)
Bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
...we can't find enough people. ... So few are able to really learn on their own...
Bullshit. Either you're in east buttfuck or your company has unreasonable expectations. I bet the latter.
I bet your company has the laundry list of a shit load of skills and yet, if a candidate walked in and told you that they'd learn on their own time any skills they don't have, you'd send them packing.
I had once an interview with a manager who asked me what would I do if I had to change a technology or something on the job or make up for lack of a skill. I replied that I would head down to my local Border's (they have the best tech section) and buy a book and start cramming. He said that was the correct answer. He moved on before the hiring was done and they got a new manager who wanted the laundry list. Of course, he says "He can't get enough "qualified" people.
There are plenty of qualified people. You people just need to get your heads out of your ass and hire people not skills. Because, if you keep that up, your organization will never keep up with the times.
IBM used your excuse and it was just a cover to move all their technical people overseas.
Perhaps true with enterprise software apps . . . (Score:4, Insightful)
. . . like the one which made Siebel his fortune. I'm an ex-enterprise software sales guy myself, and have many friends still in the business, some of whom worked for Siebel "back in the day" and have been on sales calls with Siebel (the man, not the company) himself. Most are of the consensus that the "glory days" are indeed long behind us (as in ten years behind us). In fact, one of my mentors recently told me, "enterprise software is dead." I certainly wouldn't tell a young college grad to go get rich selling software to big companies these days (though maybe to the federal government). It's easy to understand his myopic statement when you consider his background (former Larry Ellision disciple and ex-Oracle guy who pioneered selling "value selling" CRM apps into big business for mega dollars).
Here, however, Siebel is ignoring continuing advances in computing hardware, raw processing power and storage (multi-core architectures, SSDs, 64-bit OSes and gobs of fast memory, and other things which software has yet to really take advantage of), as well as other related things like nanoelectronics and continued innovation in materials sciences. The software just hasn't caught up yet to allow developers to take full advantage of these things and build out the next generation of applications.
In short, the more connected our world becomes, and the more people inhabit it, the more data we will create. There will always be a needs to collect, organize, and process this data, and attempt to draw meaningful conclusions from it, because that is what people do when they try to understand the nature of things. Perhaps IT from Siebel's world view (first generation enterprise software applications) is on the downslope, but I guarantee you that within the next decade you will see new ways of working with information that Siebel and co. could never have imagined.
I remember the first time they said this. (Score:4, Insightful)
After 15 years.. IT is "boring" (Score:2, Insightful)
As a multitime CTO, I can assure you now that IT is now "just" another business arm.... it is hard, boring, unrewarding and accusatorial. Overly accountable, ultra bureaucratic, under-resourced and now infested with leaches. On my 17th year in this gig, I gave it up for online retail? Why? PROFIT.
Pay me 180k as a senior tech guy working bullshit hours with bosses who are basically fuckwits, retarded morons who call themselves "programmers" and useless sysadmins.... or give me decent Human hours, a GREAT PROFIT and some decent people with personalities (not corporate zombies on a brain-eat fix) and Im outta hear.... see-ya IT....
The door will not be hitting me on the way out.
Tell your children to avoid a job in IT like the Black Death. It is not funny.
Re:good riddance (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly - he's only talking about people with "entrepreneurial spirit", i.e. those people who only care about getting as filthy rich as possible, as fast as possible, and not about working in an industry they enjoy. If they all decide to piss off to China then good luck to them.
Your definition of "entrepreneurial spirit" is very, uhmmm, strange to say the least. It is as if "getting as filthy rich as possible" and "working in an industry they enjoy" were somehow mutually exclusive. They are not.
As surprising as it might seem to you, it isn't a black and white thing. The most successful entrepreneurs are those who make it big in doing what they enjoy. And entrepreneurial spirit is not necessarily driven by the desire of (what some ideological tards consider as) obscene financial success. If you are a good entrepreneur and do something that you like well, financial success will almost inevitably follow.
Surprising, I know!
Re:Sigh (Score:4, Insightful)
I've been a sysadmin for a long time. As long as you like tech and know how to do your job, you'll be fine. There are a lot of shit admins out there, for a while the ratio of good sysadmins was quite low which makes your job all the harder, you have to pick up the slack. But when you've got a good team, it's a great job.
As a HS sophomore, I was told to not major in CS (Score:5, Insightful)
At age 15 my college plan was to major in computer science. This was in 1978. My father had me meet with some people who worked in the field. They all told me to find another interest, that by the time I graduated from college there would be nothing to do... all the computer programs would be written, all maintenance would be automated, etc. Lucky for me I snicker at crusty old fuckers, ie. anybody 20 years older than my current age.
Shanghai, yeah right (Score:2, Insightful)
"if I were graduating today, I would get on a boat and I would get off in Shanghai."
Here's a protip for Mr. Siebel and all those people who are sending their kids to chinese lessons: the chinese aren't any more likely to give you a good job than you would a chinese getting off the boat. It's not like they're starved for people willing to work. So you'd better get off your ass and innovate over here instead of playing patent and copyright games.
Re:What would that do (Score:4, Insightful)
If I was, today, to look at myself in the mirror and decide that I was born to manufacture buggy whips, I would move in that direction in the smartest way I could. Maybe that means I would make props for movies, or maybe that means I would end up moving to a small town where they hold buggy-driving contests every year. But with what I know now, I would never say, "China is the next big place" and just park myself there. Some of my worst career moves have been the result of exactly that sort of thinking.
Re:Obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
This approach to resume construction is limited to a (potentially very small) subset of the software development jobs in the market, and is therefore riskier than keeping your general development skills sharp and learning new domains as needed.
This assertion is interesting. I think there's more of a blended balancing of concerns than you're thinking about, and in my experience, knowing how software needs to be developed to work in the real world (whether embedded, desktop, multi-tier, SAAS, whatever) is the really hard stuff to teach, where the relevant business details are usually pretty straightforward. Again, in my experience, being expert in a kind of software is of more importance than the specific domain, though having experience in both aspects of a particular job will obviously be better than being experienced in only one.
In your case (and here's where I think the confusion lies), you're not doing the same variety of "stored data shuffling" that most of the rest of us do, your code is much more analytical and algorithmic. It's quite possible that you're actually doing what a CS degree prepares BSCS graduates to do (extremely unusual in my experience). That means that your "kind of software" is algorithms, so being an expert in that kind of software development IS the more general skill for you. I would personally label that set of skills as distinct from the specific application domain (fixed income, market predictors, risk analysis, etc.).
Further, I absolutely think you're being short-sighted if you're not keeping up to date on other aspects of software development so that if demand for your current skills declines, you can still return to the larger market of software developers. In late 2002, as I was looking for a job in a crap market, I sent applications to both coasts (New York and Los Angeles) feeling that I could interview strongly for jobs in finance or in the various kinds software being developed in LA. I got offers from both coasts and I'd like to think that it was because I successfully argued that my fundamentals were strong and I could quickly get up to speed on anything that was missing.
I have no idea what's behind Siebel's statements. In my continuing experience as a software developer and as someone who's hired software developers, he's completely full of it. I suspect that, like many others who hire software developers, he's frustrated by the price he has to pay for highly skilled people (the 10x developers) and he's just venting. He's entitled to do that, of course. I'm just as entitled to ignore him.
Out of curiosity, which languages are these? I've been writing commercial software for 15 years. I try to learn a new language each year (ruby in 2006, php in 2008, python in 2009). But I currently have very little idea what "more safe" or "less safe" mean when describing a computer language. Any pointers?
Re:As a HS sophomore, I was told to not major in C (Score:3, Insightful)
all the computer programs would be written
Wow, that's quite a statement. I bet they never thought there'd be a program that lets you tell the world stupid things about yourself in 140 characters or less. Sometimes old people just don't have any imagination.
Eventually, maturity is reached. (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course.
Consider aviation. Aviation had an age of rapid advance from about 1910 to 1970. In those sixty years, aviation went from the Wright Brothers to the Boeing 747 and the Apollo program. Every decade completely obsoleted the aircraft of a decade earlier. Then, suddenly, it was all over. Advances since then have been minor compared to any ten-year period in those first sixty years.
Re:He's missed the boat, in fact (Score:3, Insightful)
... California is suffering economically. Despite the apparent opportunities of boundless land, minerals and eventually oil, the East leveraged its installed base of civilisation, knowledge and business relationships to stay dominant.
You do realize that in a listing of "World" economies California bounces between 6th and 7th. That would take three eastern states to match (NY, PA & NJ) assuming that you're talking north-eastern and not including Florida, then it's only NY & FL. And talk about leveraging power, without California there would not be a single democratic presidential candidate in recent history. Most of California's economic woes come from social programs such as one of the nation's highest minimum wages, increased health care provisions, etc. that are quite costly and have little to do with the business in the state and more with the political/social wills of the people. People from outside of California bash on it a little too much without realizing exactly what it provides this nation.
A lack of imagination (Score:2, Insightful)
Claims that IT is mature are the result of a lack of imagination.
At the turn of the 20th century there were similar claims that the automobile was mature and could not be improved any more.
What about the fact that Moore's Law has no end in sight?
What about the need to shift the focus on design instead of programming, in order to finally be able to create secure and reliable systems?
What about the prospect of autonomous robots - getting more credible every day?
What about the likelihood that CPU-based systems will see their last days when it becomes feasible to reprogram hardware architecture dynamically, in real time?
What about the emergence of massive parallelism on the desktop (and laptop), leading to real-time ray traced graphics and simulation?
What about the prospect of real-time 3D displays?
What about the prospect of intelligent machines? (In this area, there is much to fear.)
If anything, IT is dynamic, and what will come is likely to be more transforming than what has already occurred.
Re:Progress shaped like an S-curve (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Amazing how blind slashdot is (Score:3, Insightful)
You'd think for a tech site, people would have a passion for tech. I guess not.
We do. We also don't proclaim every tiny change to be a revolution, unlike some people, who get overly excited. The GP is right. The iPhone has brought some nice advancements (very good touch interface, sea of apps available from a central location), but to say it's "completely changed the mobile landscape" is ludicrous. People are still using their phones in 90% the same way as they were 3 years ago.
The days of *shitty* programmers are numbered. (Score:3, Insightful)
My employer insists on retaining an outsourcing group in India. The code we get from them is of marginal and inconsistent quality. This is probably because most of their developers are in it only for the money (and probably planned on moving on before the global economy tanked), and some sadly deluded executive over here really thought that cost-cutting constituted a business strategy.
We really do get what we pay for. But guess which groups do NOT get new feature development or requirements specification as tasks anymore?
As a younger man, I used to rant about management's willingness to accept crap code so long as it worked. These days, I just smile, knowing full well some jackass across the ocean (who probably now hates his job) is keeping me highly valued and very busy.
Re:Sigh (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't know whether this was a rhetorical question or not. Either way, it is an excellent observation.
I'd say that there are two big reasons that those SA openings are there.
The first, (and obvious reason) is that people don't really want them as much. Having worked as both a full time Systems Administrator in a end-user setting, a datacenter setting and a full time Developer, I can tell you that end-user sysadmins are the blue-collar of the IT world.
Working as a datacenter SA is a much better job, but still comes with the on-call duties and the infrequent periods of very high-stress when systems fail (as systems will).
Either way, the only time anyone ever thinks about you is when things go wrong. I always make sure to give a shout out to all my old SA buddies whenever Systems Administrator appreciation day comes around; it's truly a thankless job.
I'd posit that the second reason that those SA positions are 'available' more than dev positions is not because there are more available, but that they are more visible; those are the positions that get advertised in classifieds. The 'good old boy' network is still the primary source for recruiting new people within most organizations. It's really just how things work. Good people often know other good people. So many openings for new positions never make it to the classifieds simply because someone knows someone who is a good fit for the job. But to get those people, an organization needs to offer compensation worth leaving the old job for. But companies are spending less for IT, which means less money for salaries, which means that they can't offer the attractive salaries that it would take to get SA Bob's friend to leave the old job and come over to work with SA Bob.
The Systems Administrator will always be necessary, but as systems automation and software become more mature, the role of the SA in the organization becomes less and less that of wizard and more that of whipping-boy.
Re:Obvious (Score:3, Insightful)
I self-identify as a jack-of-all-trades whose primary skill is learning things quickly and whose second skill software development. I didn't start out knowing a darned thing about any of the domains that I've worked in through the years (DSP design, bioabsorbable polymers, CAD/CAM, sales force management, flood map evaluation, microwave WAN's, social web analysis, network security, contract management, Disney (ugh), online storage, cloud storage, etc.). Didn't slow me down. Am I an expert in any of them? Well, in two or three I knew more about the underlying issues than the business people by the end of the project. Don't know if that's enough to make me an expert.
This is why excellent developers are worth the cost and effort of hiring them. Really good software developers can learn about X (whatever it is) to the point that they can discuss details and balance trade-offs with the business people and then develop the best possible system to do X. There isn't a domain that can't be taught to a new highly skilled learner. If you're talking to developers through a spec, either you didn't hire the really good ones, or you're wasting their capabilities.
My (very self-serving) opinion, of course :)