CIOs Say New Talent and Old Tech Don't Mix 229
StewBeans writes: Usually when an article references "what keeps IT leaders up at night," it's a chance to talk about "shadow IT," losing control of tech spending, hackers, or some other overly-hyped concept. Adam Dennison, publisher at IDG Enterprise, opposes this interview tactic and says that "reports of pain are greatly exaggerated." IT leaders don't mind shadow IT or sharing control of the IT budget (in fact, they want others in the business to have some skin in the game), and they understand that they are probably being hacked. What they DO care about is talent. Dennison points out gaps in data, security, and app development, based on IDG's recent survey, and he says CIOs tell him that finding the right IT talent that is also able to articulate what the business needs to succeed with technology is very difficult. He says, "They worry that they can't move fast enough to adopt the technology they need because the new IT talent doesn't want to work on the old stuff, and the old talent doesn't understand the new stuff."
Finally (Score:2, Insightful)
After all the SjW and "women in tech" stories, finally a story at least a bit related to age discrimination in IT. Unlike most slashdotters I guess, I'm still young myself, but I do think that both young and old should have the same chances to get a job.
The old talent doesn't understand the new stuff... (Score:5, Insightful)
...old talent doesn't understand the new stuff."
I have never understood that. Some people seem to reach a point in their professional lives where they stop bothering to learn new stuff and just expect to allowed to vegetate away in their jobs for the last 15-20 years until retirement. I've been coding since around the time than many of the younger developers I work with were still a twinkle in their father's eyes and I still manage to keep up with new developments.
Re:The old talent doesn't understand the new stuff (Score:5, Insightful)
...old talent doesn't understand the new stuff."
I have never understood that. Some people seem to reach a point in their professional lives where they stop bothering to learn new stuff and just expect to allowed to vegetate away in their jobs for the last 15-20 years until retirement. I've been coding since around the time than many of the younger developers I work with were still a twinkle in their father's eyes and I still manage to keep up with new developments.
People get tired and life's responsibilities get in the way, especially when they have kids. I love learning so I also manage to find the time but I do understand why people get this way.
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My father started with COBOL on the mainframe. He taught himself Delphi (on Windows, not the newer cross-platform stuff) and then Java. It took him a while to convince anyone he actually knows it, but he's been doing it for several years now, and he enjoys it.
Re:The old talent doesn't understand the new stuff (Score:5, Interesting)
You got by 30+ years doing the job you liked, but they also failed to think ahead and hoped to ride out the lifespan of the technology with the lifespan of their careers.
The "old" system offered people retirement and pension after 20 years, meaning many people could "retire" around age 40 with a modest pension. Not quite enough to live on, but definitely enough to support a dramatic change of career. And you could retire from your second career around age 60.
Turns out, a lot of people get bored, frustrated, or otherwise useless at their job in their 40s. Call it the mid-life crisis, if you like. Failure to adapt, if you like. It can be pretty useful to both the employee and the employer to have people change careers at that point, but it's pretty intimidating to do that if all you've got is a 401k that you're not allowed to touch until you're 59
Re:The old talent doesn't understand the new stuff (Score:4, Informative)
or you find out a few years after retirement the CEOs loot your retirement money to give themselves bonuses.
Re: The old talent doesn't understand the new stuf (Score:5, Insightful)
That's utterly full of generalizations and bullshit, which is typical. This whole debate is framed as 'young people don't want to' and 'old people can't', as if the young people could do anything if they just wanted to. Newsflash: They can't. I have an older person right now cleaning up an unbelievable mess that two younger people made because they didn't know what they were doing, and the people managing them didn't catch it because they assumed young people are always talented and get everything.
Know what else young people are terrible at? Recognizing when anything that already exists has value. That's why they waste energy, money, resources, etc. constantly reinventing the wheel and shouting to the world how great they are at it, while expecting to be a founder of a wildly successful startup because they have a decades old process a crappy UI that runs on a smartphone. The narcissism is unbelievable. That mega mainframe you speak derisively of had transactional and security capabilities that these cloud idiots are still trying to re-invent, and using them didn't require stitching together code in 4 languages with 100 libraries that all suck and which some alleged genius will reinvent next week anyway. Hell, even stuff 'in the cloud' is, in the vast majority of actual use cases, just a re-invention of timesharing systems, and there's a reason we got away from those too. (No, I am not nor have I been a mainframe developer. Worked with enough of them though...I use the tech I was just insulting so it comes honestly)
Do people get to where they haven't kept up with some things? Yep. Mostly that happens because you have a portfolio of things to keep running because that's your job. The notion of doing things you're good at may seem alien to people who allow themselves to be abused by 80 hour work weeks, but (having missed it myself) I think things worked better for actual human beings when it was that way.
When you're 20 and have nothing it's easier to experiment. That's normal. The other thing people with experience are saddled with is that business people suck at planning, and pretty much everything else. They never say 'we want to go in this direction so you guys should learn this'. Instead, they let existing systems be and then scramble to replace them with no warning. In that case, it doesn't even matter if you keep up with (alleged) advances in tech, you'd have to have randomly guessed which piece of tech the business people are going to throw at you this time because it's not like they ever ask anybody what will fit in with what they already use.
Of course, business people also don't like older tech people because they have a nasty habit of pointing out stupid ideas. There's a fine line between digging in and making something work and knowing when you shouldn't do that.
Have I met young talent with a clue? Of course I have. Older people who you just can't get to try anything? Yep. This stereotyping has to stop. We in tech need to stop fighting with each other over it.
The real problem is business owners and managers who have no idea how to evaluate talent and fall back on generalizations to cover up their own inadequacy.
Re: The old talent doesn't understand the new stuf (Score:5, Insightful)
The real issue here is that business has shifted its focus to low cost above anything else. Where it was once possible to have a lifelong career based on depth of knowledge on a particular system or vertical business - where technology was used to implement that knowledge, but the value was the knowledge itself, it is now virtually impossible to have such a career. Since there is going to be constant turnover, developers value experience in 'the latest thing' over experience at a particular company. And that's just self-preservation.
Of course, none of this works particularly well. Yes, companies get disposable, replaceable talent - but that talent is never particularly good at what they're asked to do - which is contribute significantly to a particular business. The end results are mediocre, and often barely supportable. You end up with layers of project management attempting to dot I's and cross T's in design specifications and testing plans - just so that the actual developers can be 'agile' in performing what is essentially gruntwork. In the 'old' model, the developers provided input into the designs - or at least were able to understand where a bad design ran into a wall. And those developers provided a pool of knowledgeable recruits for tech management. Nowadays, many software products are essentially as disposable as those interchangeable developers. They need to be rewritten every 5-10 years from scratch, because nobody can support them - and, I suppose, because it's 'necessary' to do that in order to chase the latest development fads.
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Wish you'd written this as a non AC. That covers a whole lot of valid territory.
A couple of points I'd like to add - young people refuse to work with "legacy" apps, rather wanting to rewrite that finely honed cluster as a bunch of web services using some scripting language. (I've actually seen this done, horribly, more than once).
I've see old people that just cannot seem to get their heads around anything that deviates from the narrow slice they've specialized in. That's sad, because they're definitely
Re: The old talent doesn't understand the new stuf (Score:4, Interesting)
I have an older person right now cleaning up an unbelievable mess that two younger people made because they didn't know what they were doing, and the people managing them didn't catch it because they assumed young people are always talented and get everything.
Somewhat related CSB. 15 years ago I was working at a startup writing Linux device drivers for our product. Things were going well, I was on schedule, no issues whatsoever. One day my boss' boss shows up with a consultant who was supposed to help me with my work, he was very experienced, I could learn from him, yadda yadda yadda. Ok. At the time I was writing a PCI driver and was hip deep in the read part, so I gave him the write part. A week or so later I got his first cut, he was using an ioctl() to write data to the board. Hmmm, thinks I. This is different. But he's an expert, maybe he knows something I don't. Another week later I get more code from him that just doesn't make sense. I take him to lunch to talk to him a bit. Turns out:
1) He's never used Linux before
2) He's never written a device driver before
3) He's never talked to hardware before
4) He's only been programming for a year
5) In his interview he never claimed to know Linux, hardware, nor device drivers.
6) I never saw him because not only was he on a different floor, but he spent his lunch breaks in his car studying up on Linux
I went to my boss with a WTF, the guy was gone the next day. I felt bad about that, the guy was actually nice and once the blinders were removed from my eyes I realized he was very trainable. I never did hear why he was brought in, who interviewed him, nor how he became a Linux device driver expert.
That company was full of management problems, one of the biggies was at the CXX level they were all snakes in the grass who stabbed people in the back on a regular basis.
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One of the reasons we slow down as we age is that most advances are cyclical. X-er here. Grew up with microcomputers. I'm less interested in the web because it really is just a way of reinventing the 3270 forms I beat on when I was get
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divorce is always an option....
Re:The old talent doesn't understand the new stuff (Score:5, Insightful)
They probably just get sick of seeing the same mistakes implemented over and over again. Or tired of the ever growing bloat required to implement the same old thing you already had 10 years ago under a different name.
Re:The old talent doesn't understand the new stuff (Score:5, Insightful)
This is what tires me the most. I've been through revisions of systems, and usually despite the marketing hype that sells the new systems they end up being used much like the old systems that replaced them. I won't deny that sometimes IT people drag their feet about upgrading when it really truly is time to upgrade, but there are far more times when someone that doesn't directly understand the technology makes a decision to make the change when it is change simply for its own sake. I guess I'm a borderline-cynic, but I want to see a demonstration of improvement before it's widely implemented.
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old pros drag their feet sometimes because they have been burned by half-baked crap too many times. I like to follow the "every other trlradr" or every other incarnation" rule. That's when you beat out many of the bugs and get something of value.
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Yeah we dumped JBOSS/Wildfly for that reason as well as license changes. We are using Jetty and exploring Docker.
Re:The old talent doesn't understand the new stuff (Score:5, Informative)
They probably just get sick of seeing the same mistakes implemented over and over again.
Or they're just sick of being asked to jump from one fad to another. A lot of times, the "new stuff" is the same old stuff with a new coat of paint and a bunch of flashy buzzwords. There was a recent story on Slashdot about the amazing new concept of "DevOps", and the only explanation I could get for what it was is, "Have developers work with operations." Wow. Big move there. You mean you don't want different departments within your business at each other's throats? You want them to work together seamlessly?
And I'm sick of programmers going on endlessly about how their brilliant new organizational and project management style will fix everything. "Agile" this and "waterfall" that. Oh, instead of having your project be one single big project, you're going to break your project into smaller projects? You've designed a new theme for your gantt chart? Slap a buzzword on it, and you have the hot new development method that's going to solve world hunger!
"Oh, you're on Friendster? That's lame, I'm on MySpace. Oh, you're on MySpace? That's lame, I'm on Facebook. Oh, you're on Facebook? That's lame, I only use Snapchat now." What are you doing with your lives. Whatever network you're on, you're just sending out pictures that nobody wants to look at.
This is why old people don't care. Young people see the hot new thing and think, "This is going to be the thing that changes the world and makes everything great!" Old people have been through that several times, and think, "This is another one of those things that's supposed to change the world and make everything great. Same as the last 50 things that were supposed to do that. And this one looks even stupider."
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I think you and I need to go have some beers and discuss the scars we have on our backs from being forced to go down the same roads.
If I hear one more person tell me about this great new frameworks that will solve all of the problems, I believe I might beat that someone to death with my stapler.If I hear one more project manager tell me about this great new development approach which will solve the delays, I will take my keyboard and beat them upside the head. What the heck ever happened to good engineering
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What the heck ever happened to good engineering practices.
Also, to be honest... I've never seen a project management approach or a development method that could outperform a good, smart, organized group of people working hard, talking to each other, and thinking about what they're doing. And I've never seen a piece of technology that couldn't make things more difficult.
I just don't know how else to put that. It might not be clear. But every time I'm asked to develop a new methodology, I'm like, "Great. Let's do that, for as much and as long as it makes sense,
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Personally, I haven't worked with any senior engineers that weren't opposed to new technologies. They were just very skeptical because they have been burned so many times by the empty promises and worse, dealing with unintended issues that result because very rarely is the happy path ever taken. As we all know, it it the edge conditions that cause the issues because a generic frameworks many times cannot anticipate all edge conditions so they just don't handle it.
The young engineers are always ready to chan
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And another fogie observation: use common tools in your tool stack because you are more likely to find support for them down the road.
I agree, and use the same basic principle in terms of configuration. As a rule of thumb, whenever you have the option, leave all the default settings/methods. You might be able to squeeze out slightly better performance by tweaking things a bunch, but it's generally not really worth it-- at least not for most environments.
For example: If you install the server with the most generic, out of the box settings there are, and things work? Leave them. Everything you change is another thing that could potenti
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THIS! Oh, so much this.....
Re:The old talent doesn't understand the new stuff (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay, I'll admit right off that I'm an old dude. I'm the oldest one in my group, but the rest of the group is roughly in the 35-45 range so they're not particularly young (from the perspective of this story).
Anecdotes are dangerous, but... with my coworkers, I rarely see any evidence that they don't "understand the new stuff". What is true, though, is they sometimes don't understand the appeal of the new stuff, nor why anyone would consider using it. After all, when it comes down to it most new approaches don't really accomplish anything that the "old way" cannot... at least from the perspective of an IT professional. But I think what they sometimes miss is that new ways of doing things sometimes actually might be more user-friendly for a particular set of end users - and there is value in that.
Why bother with ruby when perl has served us so well for so long? Or, further afield, why consider Wordpress when we already have wikis - or why not just keep maintaining a website with a text editor as your only tool? Sometimes I think it helps an IT person if they can learn to set aside their technical hat for a while, and try to see it from the other person's eyes.
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Why bother with ruby when perl has served us so well for so long? Or, further afield, why consider Wordpress when we already have wikis - or why not just keep maintaining a website with a text editor as your only tool? Sometimes I think it helps an IT person if they can learn to set aside their technical hat for a while, and try to see it from the other person's eyes.
As someone that first had a web page in 1994 through a BBS that decided to connect itself to the Internet and give us all SLIP accounts, I see the biggest advantage in advanced tools for website management is being able to commit changes on a large scale and to meet all dependencies without having to commit the same rote data entry dozens, hundreds, or thousands of times. I look at it as the same reason why I switched from Slackware to a package-based distribution and ultimately had settled on Debian, if I
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For Microsoft OSes, I was fine with XP. I didn't care for some of the UI changes that were done following Windows 2000, but it seemed quite stable.
You might be fine with win xp on at home (although you shouldn't) but it should have no place in proffessional environment. Windows 7 fixed some gaping security issues with XP. Here are some examples:
- in XP If something is started by a user with administrator rights, it automatically runs in administrator context, Win 7 has a much better structured User Access Control (though still not as good as even 80's era Unix)
- in XP the memory space for programs is alloted in sequential address spaces, which gr
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For Microsoft OSes, I was fine with XP. I didn't care for some of the UI changes that were done following Windows 2000, but it seemed quite stable.
You might be fine with win xp on at home (although you shouldn't) but it should have no place in proffessional environment. Windows 7 fixed some gaping security issues with XP. Here are some examples:
Note he wrote UI. The user interface. Not the underlying structure. We can make the OS as stable and secure as we like without messing with the look and feel. If Windows 8 taught us nothing else - and it has taught some nothing at all - huge changes in the user interface and system maintenance are not always appreciated nor wanted.
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If you think that Win7 on up doesn't suffer from the same issues
I am very positive that Win7 does not have the same issues as WinXP. It's got different ones. Even the one that you describe does not technically exist in WinXP because it does not even have an elevation of privileges mechanism - the privileges are simply all granted at the start.
I'd like some of what you're smoking
I do not smoke, but I do enjoy a glass of wine from time to time - I'd recommend an aromatic white from New Zealand - and stay away from the Malborough ones, they are hopelessly overpriced. Try something from Gisbourne or Napier...
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Take for example something like handbreak. Unless you *knew* what it was. You would have no idea what that thing did (video editing software).
And even if you know the name of the program, you still may not be able to find it. If you search for 'handbreak' you won't find what you are looking for because it is spelled 'handbrake'. That's something that's easy to see in a menu but hard to recognize when your search fails.
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No start menu because it's not needed. Search is faster than poking through the start menu in most cases. That's my understanding of why it was removed, MS engineers haven't used it themselves since Vista.
Well, Mrs Smith down the street have to model their preferences on what Microsoft engineers think, eh?
removal of features that customers use with the smug remarks that the experts don't use them so screw you outlook is a smart move?
Search? Good. Start Menu? Hey, I've used it myself, especially on someone else's computer. Why? Because it isn't my computer, and there, at my dirty liddle fingertips is a menu based report of what is on their computer.
After all, if it's there, and you don't want to use
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No start menu because it's not needed. Search is faster than poking through the start menu in most cases.
Sure, and that's great if you know what you're looking for. Other times you know there is something but you're not sure exactly what it is, and in that case a browse method is better than a search method.
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Recent Documents
One of the most helpful things that the Start Menu has that is gone is the quick ability to reopen a frequently used document or application without having to hunt through a screenful of things to find it. The Start Menu was good because it was small, hierarchical, and concise. Now that it's a full screen with scrolling, or several pages of scrolling, it is not concise or hierarchical.
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>Concise
IF you maintained it. If you didn't it was neither. It would rapidly become a sprawling, unruly pile of crap that could take several minutes to find what you were looking for. Hopefully you remember the publisher of the software you're looking for, because there's a good chance that's the sub-folder it's under.
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Why bother with ruby when perl has served us so well for so long?
Ruby is already a dead language and perl has always been a terrible language and should be murdered. I say this as a person who actually liked perl back when it was the first and only scripting language I knew.
What is true, though, is they sometimes don't understand the appeal of the new stuff, nor why anyone would consider using it. After all, when it comes down to it most new approaches don't really accomplish anything that the "old way" cannot... at least from the perspective of an IT professional.
I am a software developer. I do a lot of cutting edge stuff in my spare time (cloud, nosql, etc), and a lot of low level c++ 2003 at work. There are a lot of people at my work who work in C and don't even see the point of migrating to C++ as they can do everything they need to do in C, without all
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I'll fully admit that c++ has it's disadvantages but when you're writing object code in c, why no
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Nobody (at least not anyone I know) is arguing that C++ is a perfect language. But it's pretty good at getting things done in a way that is fairly pleasing to a lot of people which is why it's so popular. There's lots of nasty language features, but you don't have to use them. It's mostly backwards compatible with C. It's fast. It's versatile. And it has a lot of community support and 3rd party libraries and frameworks that remove a lot of the nastiness.
Nearly everyone who writes good C++ is using a su
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perl has always been a terrible language and should be murdered.
Perl is an awesome language for it's intended audience, which is not developers, rather it's for systems administrators. It's great at writing quick, dirty, powerful scripts that get stuff done and glue things together. If you're using it for something other than that you're doing it wrong.
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It's not bad for writing quick and dirty scripts. It's just that there are better alternatives. A car with no doors is not bad at doing it's job of getting you from point A to point B, but there are options that are better.
The things that make perl good are not unique, and the things that make perl unique are not good.
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... microservice architectures ...
So RPC's from the 1980's with an HTTP interface [wikipedia.org]?
Re:The old talent doesn't understand the new stuff (Score:5, Insightful)
What is true, though, is they sometimes don't understand the appeal of the new stuff, nor why anyone would consider using it.
This. Growth in the technology industry is heavily dependent on selling the same thing to the same people frequently. The "old dudes" start to see new versions quite often for what they are -- meaningless churn, designed to get support contracts renewed, all the required new licensing models enforced, and the vendors' quarterly results up.
Thus, the new versions are laden with all the new buzzwords, lots of bugs, some breakage from previous versions and all you end up with is the pain of implementing teh shiny to basically do what you did before.
EXACTLY! (Score:2)
I'm in my mid 40's myself (and I think one of the oldest ones in I.T. where I work currently), but the others are in the 35+ age range.
All of us are quite good at keeping up with the new stuff. Working for a marketing company, that's pretty much required, as the folks working in the core part of the business tend to be the Millennials who always want to find the latest, hardly yet known, new thing to use, so they can be seen as "trendy" and ahead of the curve.
As you said though, we have the collective wisdo
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...old talent doesn't understand the new stuff."
I have never understood that. Some people seem to reach a point in their professional lives where they stop bothering to learn new stuff and just expect to allowed to vegetate away in their jobs for the last 15-20 years until retirement. I've been coding since around the time than many of the younger developers I work with were still a twinkle in their father's eyes and I still manage to keep up with new developments.
Maybe because the "new stuff" is only superficially new and the old fogeys have seen it before with a different name. It gets really tiring to see the wheel reinvented for the nth time, sometimes discarding a lot of good ideas learned from previous wheels.
The other reason could simply be that your time is worthless. It has no value, not to you nor anyone else. When your time is worthless then you can spend as much time as you want learning "new" things that aren't, really. My time is valuable. My rates refl
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I'm *51*, and I've been around since before C++ existed.
I wouldn't trade angularjs for jquery ever.
Nor jquery via nuget vs. npm.
Nor Typescript for pure javascript.
Nor DbContext for SqlConnection.
I can go on for pages. As a consultant I drop into numerous client sites, some of which are very current, and some of which are staffed by dinosaurs headed to extinction. Source code as a living document must evolve or die the horrible death of design dead. Of course there are fads, but ripping out spaghetti and rep
Re:The old talent doesn't understand the new stuff (Score:5, Insightful)
There are both pros' and con's for both sides.
You missed the part where the older guys are tired of the latest buzzword of the week, some "SilverBullet" Library, and ad-hoc design.
There is no need to fix what isn't broken.
Some of the new guys love change just for the sake of change.
The weakness of the older guys is inflexibility, where it is a strength of the younger guys.
The strength of the older guys is stability; the younger guys lack experience and wisdom -- there weakness is instability.
Re: The old talent doesn't understand the new stuf (Score:2, Insightful)
True, and I would add in that the typical CIO doesn't know 1/3 of what he/she thinks they know.
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Also in some instances, why bother. I've been in the industry for only 15 years, but even I've seen entire technologies go from buzzworthy to obsolete in a few years.
Also it is likely that the "old guys" are kept busy trying to maintain existing systems, and CIO's don't want to invent money or resources necessary to keep training up on emerging technology, and would rather just get new hires as they are already trained... Yet they don't know how to maintain those old systems... Oh noes! the quandary!
To me t
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I'm also like you. I keep up with developments and make sure I'm always on top of my game. But arguably that needs to be done outside of work. As you're getting older and have family and other responsibilities, you don't want to go back home and work more on learning the new stuff. You just want to chill out and do other things. That being said, if you don't, given the pace things are moving in technology, you're soon going to be obsolete. And this goes back to the age-old question of what to do with the se
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I don't think of it as much a young vs old per say. But Baby Boomer logic vs. Gen XY logic.
The Baby Boomers have 80's culture stuck in their head. So their focus is on maintaining whatever power they have, so if that means they are the only one who know that old system and its years of undocumented workarounds, they will keep it, and make it theirs. It isn't that the new guys are unwilling to learn from them, many do, and find this older tech fassinating. But the old guys keep the secrets to themselves i
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There is a difference of known what is happening underneath the hood vs. having to recreate it every time.
Re:The old talent doesn't understand the new stuff (Score:5, Insightful)
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"I have never understood . Some people seem to reach a point in their professional lives where they stop bothering to learn new stuff"
(BTW, I tried to blockquote that, but ran afoul of some weird and inconsistent 50 character limit that seems to be applied only in even numbered minutes.)
Perhaps that's because after a decade or two, folks recognize that much, not all, new stuff is garbage that will die a horrible death in two to five years. I'd suggest that perhaps many of them actually will buy into things
Re:The old talent doesn't understand the new stuff (Score:4, Insightful)
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Part of it is us oldsters take the 'long view' - we've seen flash-in-the-pan technologies come and go, and see bleeding edge for the sake of coolness as a dalliance, not a proper business decision.
For example, most of us see javascript as a kludge to begin with, and javascript on the server as a massive failure, not a solution.
I've seen the client/server pendulum swing a few times - mainframe-centric TTYs, fat clients, thin clients/web-based apps, apps back out on devices, etc. Few of the 'new' paradigms ar
Too busy working (Score:2)
A more accurate statement would be "old talent is too busy working to learn new stuff" or "management thinks it's cheaper to hire new grads than invest in existing talent" or "management doesn't recognize self-taught skills that don't have a certification" or "old talent has been around long enough to know that currently trendy buzzword is not an appropriate solution".
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Any employee can use any technology AS LONG AS YOU TRAIN THEM.
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Yep. And the real issue is heavily HR departments, where there's a *lot* of age bias, along with a near-total lack of any clues as to what real qualifications the position they're looking to fill, as opposed to this set of acronyms, and must have already done a mind-meld with the two people who already left, and with the person now leaving before applying for the job.
Out of work? Oh, you're not "fresh", you're a rotting fruit.
mark "been there, got that, jumped down
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Lesson of story: CIOs are idiots (Score:3, Insightful)
Unwilling to invest in existing staff, they worry about whether or not they can chase the latest fad.
No wonder their pathetic attempts at security are a failure. And I'm looking at Target as a prime example of this.
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No gullible idiots. But +1 to above anyway.
KPMG and Gartner told them there will be no high cost IT permanents, and in ten years it will all be contractors and much much less money.
Based on this 'fact' older permies are placed into a holding pattern and encouraged to go so a contractor can come in.
I just overheard a senior architect say 'They have sacked or got rid of anyone who knows the existing system, the other department won't co-operate or even has the specs, and they want it on a firm delivery date'
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Hey now, you shouldn't make me snort my coffee from laughing too hard while at work!
As someone who contracts on the side of my 9-to-5 and some years makes more from that extra 10 hours a week than from the entire 9-to-5, I look forward to helping more clients "save" money.
investing in staff (Score:2)
When I first started in IT 20+ years ago, there was enough down-time that you could get your workload done, and have enough time to learn whatever the new greatest thing was. Hell, they'd even pay you to go to training to get up to speed on whatever they wanted you to implement next.
These days, it seems that the norm is to try to squeeze the maximum that you can out of each person until they burn out. If they're willing to fork out any money for training, they make you sign something so that if you leave
WTF (Score:4, Insightful)
So the people in Marketing know more about IT than those CIOs do?
Or is it that those CIOs do not understand computer security any better than the Marketing people do?
So when was the last time a CIO was fired because credit card info was leaked?
Have you tried looking in the Marketing department?
What "fast-moving"?
It's funny because, you see, it rhymes.
That is the CIO's job.
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That is the CIO's job.
You clearly don't get it. Management's job is always to blame the staff for everything.
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Bingo! Even from TFA:
It's not the fault of the CIO if they get cracked and spill customer credit card info all over the Internet. Because ... that's just something that happens.
Definitely not the fault of the CIO. It must be the fault of one of the techs. You
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"Please build me a website that is 100% secure for eCommerce."
The proper response to that is probably "I can't do that and neither can anyone else. If you could find someone who can do that, the user experience would be so horrible that people will stay away in droves. Now then, what are you willing to settle for?"
Nervous about older CIOs (Score:3)
Not sure if they can understand that human beings aren't terminators with their learning chips locked. Real programmers can learn anything, and their background can sometimes help make things work.
Just finished rewriting an interface to some devices and couldn't use the COM interface the vendor recommended to us, so I pulled out the vendor's documentation and used their 'old' C interface. When I said that was the way we went they said they didn't recommnend using that API, when I asked for clarification on why to not use their documented API they stated that they didn't have anyone who could help if we ran into issues as all their support staff only knew the COM interface.
.
Translation (Score:5, Insightful)
Old Talent: Any legal resident or citizen who makes more then $15/hour, has relevant work experience, a proven track record and knows what they are doing; i.e. someone management wants to lay off as soon as possible.
The old talent doesn't want to do the new stuff: Management would kill their families and pets with a straight razor while they sleep, butcher their bodies, cook the meat into tacos, then serve the tacos to the Sunday school kindergarten class before they would be willing to train anyone for anything ever.
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The old talent doesn't want to do the new stuff: Management would kill their families and pets with a straight razor while they sleep, butcher their bodies, cook the meat into tacos, then serve the tacos to the Sunday school kindergarten class before they would be willing to train anyone for anything ever.
Maybe I'm getting old, but the driving vision for a lot of these reboots nowadays seems to lack appeal to me. Well, here's hoping that at least in this version of Sweeney Todd they'll do something inventive or refreshing with the music.
Making talent irrelevant (Score:5, Insightful)
I got into technology to learn new stuff as much as possible, why is someone telling me I don't like to learn new stuff when I am learning new stuff.
Does anyone else get the feeling that this whole thing is a way to create a young vs old mindset in technologists so that they can work the young guys like slaves and coerce the older guys into taking smaller salaries? This 'vs' mindset produces the double whammy of reducing the career earnings of every technology person no matter what they do, no matter what their age is.
Anyone, young or old, in IT who has a 'commercial' mind set when evaluating whether a technology is worth learning and how long it will take, will have a rough idea if they can yield a return on the effort spent learning it, or if they just like that technology and want to for fun. Brainfuck is an interesting piece of technology however I doubt there is much return in learning it. Young and old have one thing in common, we all want to make money doing something we like and are good at.
The great thing about IT is if I teach a younger guy how to negotiate a higher salary, it pushes my salary up too. I actually want you to be a better negotiator and I want to teach and learn from you because I know increasing the popularity of a certain tech pushes all our salaries up as more companies adopt it. Knowledge isn't scarce however the talent to utilize it is. Talent *is* the scarcity in the technology economy that makes your age irrelevant.
Knowing how callous the management in IT organizations can be, I've got a feeling there was a conversation somewhere that went along the lines of 'how do we drive down the costs of acquiring the talent we need',,,, 'I know let's pit old and young against each other'.
What better way to yield a return on a technology person's career after working them like a slave for the duration of it. The only winners in this younger vs older thing are the companies that either have to pay the same for more hours out of a young person or pay less for the experience of the older people. I've got a sense that this will backfire big time as young people deciding on an IT career go 'Fuck that, its not worth the effort' and older people decide it's not worth dealing with assholes anymore resulting in lethargy and a stagnation of ideas.
Every time I see these stories I get an increased sense that this entire younger vs older thing is about making technology peoples *talent*, no matter what their age, irrelevant so that the ensuing divide drives down salary expenses for all technology people.
We need to stay focused on driving IT in the direction where all our salaries go up.
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Witness all the XP is God comments here when it went EOL with IT guys refusing to move to Windows 7 even though it was almost 5 years old last year??
Many do fear change. The argument if it ain't broke don't fix it and upgrades are tricks from the marketing departments at software companies are common from those over 40. I am near 40 and see the other argument too. I work at a call center company and we don't upgrade until it stops working. Exception was the XP upgrade. If you are not a .com company then the
re: fearing change (Score:2)
I don't think most I.T. people fear change so much as they fear the lack of support from higher-ups if things break and require time to sort out again.
I knew I.T. people reluctant to move to Windows 7 and it wasn't because they feared learning the new OS version. Many of them already used 7 on their personal machines! They simply knew their company ran applications that weren't updated to work with 7, or the new "7 compatible" editions were expensive upgrades that the company wasn't going to be happy about
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Instead, I've found that far, far too many companies have a "grass is greener" view of the IT landscape. Rather than recognize the talent they have in-house, they will outsource any cool new fun project they possibly can. I've seen this over
Young Talent - Lack of experience (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm one ofthe old dogs. I have to admit that App development and such is not my kind of things. But I do have experience. LOADS of it. When I see the fundamental mistakes by young "talented" programmers, it makes me cringe.
Just a few days ago, there was a kickoff meeting for a new project. This project needs multi-user support on the long run - everyone in the team admits that. And access control, with all its implications like "how to I check a password", "how do I store a password", "which kind of permission do I need to call this function". Which they never ever did before. None of them had ever heard of books like "Applied Cryprography". There is a copy here, on my shelf. Actually, it is my second book, the first was worn down due to heavy use. All they cared for was "Licence Management", but I'm not sure if they understand how this works properly. I offered them to ride piggyback on the existing licence management scheme I've implemented in my part of the system, but this was probably too unsexy, because it cannot add licences on the fly over the web, at least not "just so".
My experience tells me (and anyone who has been around for long enough) that any software that will need this kind of multiuser support needs to have this built-in from the very beginning. The very concepts of the software must be aware of the possibility that e.g. a call might fail for lack of permissions. Communication protocols must be designed in a way that they guarantee to a sufficient degree that one side has proper identification presented to the other side to be permitted to do this, and don't that. This is nothing that can be added lateron without SERIOUS headaches, problems, and, worst of all, risks. Windows9x was the living prrof of such a mistake.
Reply from the "young talent": Implementing multi-user is too time consuming at the moment, we will add it later. *FACEDESK*
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Agile is fine. What is irritating is youngsters pretending that it has no flaws (oh and when you really have to stand up during the 'standups', you are just showing off).
I know terms are prone to inflation (Score:2)
When you say:
"new IT talent doesn't want to work on the old stuff, and the old talent doesn't understand the new stuff."
Then your 'talent' isn't truly 'talented'.
It's no different in other proffessions (Score:2)
I don't see how IT is any different from other proffessions - technology brings change everywhere. Doctors have to keep up with the latest medicine tech and procedures, lawyers have to keep up with changes both in case laws and black letter laws - same goes for people like accountants or anybody in a regulated industry. Even assembly line workers have to keep learning new stuff - the ones that wouldn't need to have already been replaced by robots.
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Why if it ain't broke don't fix it! Old software works fine today the same as it did when it was 1st installed.
If your brains melted it was because you never worked from a non .com old school smoke stack company. They do not care about technology as long as it works. Why do you think the move to clouds and renting are becoming big now? My comment scares the crap out of software companies because I am right. Once a solution is placed. It takes,an act of god to replace or upgrade
Another attempt at manipulating the open market (Score:3)
Anecdotal evidence suggests old executive talent fails to understand new business.
Perhaps boards and stockholders should be creating an ageism story at the executive level if they want to influence the open market of compensation. More gains to be had at that level.
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Oh, that's a raw spanking! Well played.
Really, this piece should be titled, "Old execs can't find anyone young that is able to talk to them like their older buddies talk to them..."
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Oh, and that is a somewhat difficult skill set to find.
I have it, and guess what? I contract out for pre-sales work all the time. Enterprise B2B people are just drooling over people who can do this. No wonder the talent isn't available to the big companies.
If they are smart, they do what I'm doing, and that is leverage that ability to understand new and old tech, create visions, back them with a strategic business alignment and value, and then help the salesperson pitch that to the execs for new sales.
(t
I'm 58. In the last year, I've... (Score:5, Interesting)
1) Implemented a new automated web testing framework. Next year, I'll do the same thing for Android and Apple phones.
2) Migrated some of my control system apps to C#. Three months ago, I didn't know C#.
3) Migrated more system control software than I care to think about from VBScript (awful) to Powershell (slightly less awful).
Four years ago, I didn't know what virtualization was. Today, I'm in charge of the VMWare servers and couldn't do without it.
I have no idea why I can still do this. Like the other commenters here, however, I do regularly cringe at the latest business/software/process fad. They're inevitably retreads of something older and few add any actual improvement. Powershell, for example, although it packs more functionality into fewer characters than VBScript, made the skill set of thousands of system administrators obsolete. No thought was given to the human side of the system. A more useful solution would have been a rewrite of VBScript and the addition of useful function libraries and easier access to the net framework. It was yet another typically wrong Microsoft decision, but it says something about an industry that doesn't have enough of a balanced view to consider the cold, hard neurological facts of their user base.
Absolutely amazing... (Score:2)
Something stinks here... (Score:2)
Isn't the CIO the generalist who is able to articulate how the business can succeed with technology?
Ok then, get after it. Your new people and old people all have perspective. Get off your arse, talk to them, make some choices and go and sell that to management or prioritize the budget.
Delegating the budget is just fine, but even that needs a basic review. I understand how it is in very large enterprises, but I also understand companies of that size can afford to hire several CIO types too. Not all tech
That CIO is an idiot.... or..... (Score:2)
He only hires the incompetent.
If the New IT wont work on the old stuff, fire their lazy butts.
If your OLD IT wont work on the new stuff, Fire their lazy butts.
I'm a 47 year old IT professional and I work on the old stuff and the new stuff. Any of the new guys that refuse to touch the old gear are let go before their 30 days are up.
No (Score:2)
Or .. this is what happens. (Score:3)
Our company started up some Big Data projects. Well, no one at work knows Big Data, so they went out and hired a bunch of new people. There are no 'old people' on the team. So naturally, none of the 'old people' are going to know it, except possible by some book learning. It's the company's own fault that none of the 'old people' know Big Data, because they won't put them on the teams.
In our company, we do sprints, and only put people in projects that already have the skills necessary to do the work. There is one special team that does research into new tech, but nine times out of ten, we hire people to implement it rather than train internally. Why?? Because we are already all busy and we don't have time to wait for me to train my replacement and then for me to learn the new stuff.
And this crap about new people not knowing the old tech is the same thing. Back in the 'old days', we had a concept where we would rotate people through maintenance and new development. That way they learn multiple systems and skills. But we don't do that anymore because Johnny is a web developer and we need his skills on the web development team. We don't have time for him to learn back end development.
The largest blame for corporations not having 'talented' people is the corporate environment and it's stupid rules. However, there are also a lot of people that won't learn new things, or old things. Mostly because they just aren't as bright as they think they are, and it takes too much effort.
Now, I'm a 56 year old 38 year IT veteran, who started out hacking the college HP so I could get accounts with better priority. I'm the kind of person that says "I don't know it, but I can learn it" and over the years have seen my salary grow because I can just as easily write in COBOL as I can Java, and a host of other languages. I can hand wire serial and network cables, build windows and unix servers, run cables through ceilings, and even administer phone systems. Because I've been lucky enough to work for smaller companies that didn't have the luxury of hiring specialized talents. Or stupid rules about what a developer is allowed to have access to.
My advice to developers is stop working for the big guys, take a small cut in pay and go work for someone that doesn't have a big shop so you can learn lots of stuff. Because, when you can work in any aspect of the IT world, you become far more valuable to your company when they realize they can put you in any project and you can perform.
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Not resistant to change.
Just pointing out that the "new" thing has been done before. And before. And before.
Each time, a new "magic bullet" was promised. And each time it failed.
The wise learn from the mistakes of others.
The average learn from their own mistakes.
The foolish repeat their mistakes.
And no one likes it when someone else points to their latest failure and says "I told you it would not work".
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Those are green points.
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"Okay, I didn't RTFA,"
Didn't miss much. 'Content free drivel' would be a three word summary of the article.