[0] https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/IBM-Reviews-E354.htm#trend...
Technology jobs are very highly specialised. And I'm not just speaking of computer tech.
I'm old enough to have seen several generations of obsoleted "gold tickets". Nuclear Engineering, future destroyed March 28, 1979. Freeway engineers, the freeway protests of the 1960s/1970s. Big Three auto manufacturers, dream destroyed with the first oil embargo, and sudden onslaught of more fuel efficient, less expensive, and better quality imports from Japan and Germany. Petroleum engineers, dream destroyed as the oil market collapsed in the 1980s. Aerospace engineers, dream destroyed with the fall of the Soviet Union and redundancies in the military-industrial complex throughout NATO powers.
Travel agents, newspaper journalists, and Perl hackers are only more recent victims of the same levels of specialisation.
It's not that these people are dumb, many were brilliant. But they're also laden with a tremendous amount of arcane knowledge, that, unfortunately, gets in the way of learning new skills.
It's been painfully obvious for a long time that, individual success stories notwithstanding, retraining and "reskilling" typically does very little to alleviate this.
Yes, future generations get trained into new skills, some of which may still be germaine 4-8 years after they've completed schooling. But my observation is that job and skill cycles are iterating faster.
So that's a part of it.
Yes, there are other dimensions. Obligations, family ties, social ties, fears, the fact that the most mobile do jump ship first, and more.
But really, it's quite crushing. You may not understand it now, but you almost certainly will, eventually.
The worse when you realise everything that's up-and-coming is recapitulating all the mistakes you recognised from the last time.
I don't use the term "brilliant" for anyone who can't learn outside their narrow specialty.
Definitely such short sightedness and stubbornness can be associated with brilliance.
1. The opportunity costs for switching away are high. I suspect this comes into play in many areas -- say, emigrants to a new country who never develop a high functioning level of language skill (something I'll add applies just as much to English speakers abroad as those moving to English-speaking countries, if not more). And yes, there absolutely are exceptions, often many.
You're highly effective in using one language. You operate functionally at the level of a young child in another. Cross training to the new language is a massive investment of effort. Adult minds lose plasticity present in children, so the task is inherently harder. Plus you've got to do everything else necessary to keep going. It's a Red Queen's race.
Shifting tracks requires a very real sacrifice both in increased effort and reduced reward. It can be short-term satisficing to continue stretching out the lucrative current skill so long as possible. Situational awareness of that dead end may not dawn until late in the game as well.
2. Some skills are synergetic -- knowing one thing makes learning another easier. And yes, I see this all the time, particularly in metaphorical spaces. Thinking is I strongly suspect very much a matter of analogs, and collecting and applying appropriate analogs helps.
But ingrained knowledge is ... quite different. Changing handedness, or quitting habitual behavior (drugs, smoking, alcohol, gambling) is exceptionally difficult.
YouTube's "Smarter Every Day" has a great segement on learning to ride a backwards-engineered bicycle headset. Using gearing, the response of handlebars and wheels is reversed. It's all but impossible to ride this bike if you know how to ride a regular one, though you can learn, with sufficient time.
But: learning to ride the backwards bike makes riding a normal bike impossible. Until you've learned to context-switch between the two.
Fascinating bit of applied psychology.
> To Mr. Stephenson, it should be an easy choice for most workers: Learn new skills or find your career choices are very limited.
“There is a need to retool yourself, and you should not expect to stop,” he said in a recent interview at AT&T’s Dallas headquarters. People who do not spend five to 10 hours a week in online learning, he added, “will obsolete themselves with the technology.”...
By 2020, Mr. Stephenson hopes AT&T will be well into its transformation into a computing company that manages all sorts of digital things: phones, satellite television and huge volumes of data, all sorted through software managed in the cloud.
That can’t happen unless at least some of his work force is retrained to deal with the technology. It’s not a young group:
The average tenure at AT&T is 12 years, or 22 years if you don’t count the people working in call centers. And many employees don’t have experience writing open-source software or casually analyzing terabytes of customer data."
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/14/technology/gearing-up-for-...
I really really do hope that it works out though; my rational mind believes it otherwise.
But the bottom-up reality is that people coming into work at AT&T pushing open source, cloud, or data science agendas are perceived as threats, and are managed out.
So you learn on your own time. But since you're doing tutorials and what not, and your time isn't infinite, when you actually apply for a job with this new skill your potential employer is going to wonder why he should pay you expert wages for a skill with which you still have effectively no professional experience.
Solution: don't want to work for them anyway.
But generally, I see it as an advantage.
Should've seen the writing on the wall when it fell.
It's really, really easy to think you're one of God's Chosen (or Allahs, or Jehovas, or Buddha's, or ...) when you're at the top of the world, you've got a multi-trillion-dollar wind in your sails, you went to the best schools, and you make titanium and airaluminium dance on the wind and all that.
1980s aerospace engineers weren't the first to take that tumble. They won't be the last.
Fortunately nobody posting on Hacker News threads like these are relatively new engineers who think they're God's gift!
There's a good documentary about this period called Falling Down, by the way.
Up-and-coming tech frequently has a flood of talent. Dying: companies with vested systems (say, Cobol, or Solaris) are catching the tail-end of the curve. The truly good programmers have gotten out, or switched skills, or transferred to management.
Hopping on a sinking ship usually doesn't last long.
(Nothing against Perl. It's just a seriously fading language at this point.)
This also reminds me of a back-rationalisation I've seen for Linux adopting the penguin as mascot -- not the Australian zoo killer penguin story.
Antarctic penguins, when deciding where and when to enter the water mill about on the edge of the ice. The problem is that the first one in is taking a significant risk -- leopard seals, which eat penguins, may be lurking.
But once the brave pioneer takes the plunge (or rather more likely, is pushed, jostled, or slips in), the rest of the flock follows. There's safety in numbers ... and fish to eat.
I see parallels with techies choosing skillsets.
Could as well be Haskell or ... honestly, I'm not keeping track so much any more.
If you have n years of AS3 experience (n=7? Or what happened between 2012 and now?) and find yourself unable to compete with people with the same n years of iOS experience, I humbly submit that something else is wrong. Never mind that AS3 is a dialect of ECMAScript, which I hear is still used in a few remote pockets of the web, that hard things about programming isn't about the language and the framework, it's managing complexity. I struggle to see how retraining to iOS is going to take more than a few weeks of systematic reading and practising (possibly taken on your own time), and little more than a few months on the job to be on par with people who have several years of experience.
But more important is all the stuff that isn't about programming at all: Being good at organising your work, communicating well, testing, making sure you understand the entirety requirements as they are intended and that your delivery fully satisfies the requirement etc etc. Someone with n years of programming experience should master those things, and these count very heavily when picking people for lead roles.
Anyway, bottom line: the difficulty of switching from AS3 to iOS doesn't map to the difficulty of switching from nuclear engineering to environmental engineering.
The core concepts of every language are the same. If you acquired a certain amount of experience, switching is just looking for best practices in your new language. Of course it will take some time to ramp up but within a month you are somewhat productive within 3 months no one will see the difference.
Its all about problem solving.
I see 4 ways to mitigate this:
1 - Live somewhere that has many companies or be prepared to move.
2 - Keep in contact periodically with everyone who respects your work. (Don't make the "Hey it's been 5 years" call one where you're asking for a favor)
3 - Always keep learning.
4 - Communicate in your customer's language. If you are strictly an ActionScript expert, you are very narrowly pegged if you haven't learned iOS on the side. But if the buyers of technology view you as "A mobile expert who makes brands come alive across many devices" then you can survive technology switches.
4.5 - Help others before you need help.
In the grand scheme it's still better to be a laid off technology worker than a laid off steelworker. I still feel their pain though - it sucks to lose your job, especially if family is involved.
Link in a sec....
Benjamin Chintz came up with the theory. Edward Glaeser is the lecturer.
https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/3uGHCweF...
Although they should have had warning because a worse crash of aerospace happened in the early '70s, see my earlier response: https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=11222148
But I think this is partially their fault as well
A Nuclear plant engineer, while specialized in some element of that plant (and there are many elements, in civil, mechanical, chemical engineering) has knowledge that's applicable in a lot of different situations
Were the Automobile engineers content of designing more of the same poorly constructed vehicles? While the ICE is old technology I can't imagine the things that could come out of it if they really invested in rethinking it (also other parts like the drivetrain)
> But they're also laden with a tremendous amount of arcane knowledge, that, unfortunately, gets in the way of learning new skills.
That's true. But I think it's also a matter of attitude
You know, I can be the best specialist in some technology, let's say: installing Oracle, or even better, let's say I'm a top notch Golang programmer today
Tomorrow Golang won't exist, or won't be relevant. I am SURE of this
> But really, it's quite crushing. You may not understand it now, but you almost certainly will, eventually.
Yeah, I agree
I would argue that computer tech is kind of an exception.
I can see a Nuclear or Aerospace Engineer having trouble adapting his knowledge and skills to other professions, since that knowledge is deeply tied to the domain, but a Perl (or C++/Java or whatever) hacker should't really have too many problems in transitioning to another language.
That they would find difficulties in finding a new job because dumb HR recruiters see 10 years of Perl experience in the resume as opposed to the "10 years of Swift" (sic) they are looking for is another matter...
https://developer.ibm.com/apimanagement/2016/02/18/announcin...
Yes, there's a fair bit of specific domain knowledge, but it's also built on top of a bunch of common foundations: physics, calculus, chemistry, differential equations.
And the tools in much of technical work have been converging for years -- technical and scientific computing require rudiments of programming (Fortran, still, or more modern languages), source code management, project management, and a heavy helping of sociological people understanding (look up Charles Perrow's books). That can transfer, at least in theory.
Whether or not it does, of course, and whether or not firms, organisations, or government sector are interested in hiring is a whole 'nother question.
I'm reminded of a video on the old Soviet rocket motors with boosted performance (the fuel pump turbine exhaust was vented into the rocket combustion chamber rather than offboard, for another 10% or so gain in thrust) -- though attempted use resulted in an explosion only a few seconds after takeoff and loss of the mission.
In the video, however, several former Soviet rocket scientists talk about their experience after the Soviet space program was shut down. Rocket scientists, literally, with no place to turn for employment. That's where you start thinking about inefficiencies in usefully allocating talent. Neither the Soviet nor American economic systems seem to have a particularly good answer for that. Though in the US, Wall Street seems to have a capacity for sponging up some of the potential. I don't find that particularly useful.
The Egyptians built pyramids. I wonder if that wasn't in part a large skills-retention and problem-solving exercise.
[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-19/iowa-spent...
And if that means the next Dubuque company needs to be offering million dollar salaries to engineers to get commit themselves out there - since there would be no other opportunities and you would be stuck, so you better have a massive nest egg after five years - then so be it.
Can't blame someone for taking that risk.
Sounds like 1300 jobs paying 46K, double the local average, over the course of 6 years.
From a "paying taxes to buy higher salaries" point of view this is 1300 * (0.5 * 46K) * 6 ~= $180M. Sounds like a positive NPV transaction. But... How much of the increase does the city and state actually capture in Taxes? Let's call it 15% between city, state, local and sales. (This is very fuzzy math) Then you get 180M * 0.15 ~= 27M.
In the end it sounds like the city and state of Dubuque did a wealth transfer from taxpayers to a subset of local employees, many of whom are now jobless and will need to go back to $23K jobs or move.
These types of arrangements frequently end poorly. If the local market won't bear a certain wage rate, it's hard for one-off tax rebates to fix things. You need to go deeper - change the entire tax regime, improve the education system, etc.
Cringely [1] opines on this too.
[0] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-19/iowa-spent...
[1] http://www.cringely.com/2012/04/18/somethings-rotten-in-dubu...
My family is local, and as I get older that's more and more important. If I have to leave town it's going to have a big impact on my happiness. So much so, in fact, that I may take a huge pay cut and work at, I dunno, Starbucks or something so I can stay local.
I like living in cities, but I can understand it's not everyone's cup of tea, particularly if you or your upstairs neighbors have kids. And all my friends with kids say the secret to happiness is having local grandparents. Or an au pair.
Further, if you live in an economically depressed area, there's no guarantee you can easily or quickly sell your home. Family in CT a little over 2 hours outside of nyc had a house on the market for 8 months before it sold.
There's a boatload of reckless spending on developers and engineers right now. It's only a matter of time before financiers start pushing for headcount reductions.
This was a quick read, pretty illuminating to see how well the "family" at Starbucks treated a downsized mid-level exec and helped him.
http://www.amazon.com/How-Starbucks-Saved-Life-Privilege/dp/...
Why not?
Kids are mobile. Mortgages can be covered by tenants or by selling the property (usually).
I only have kid (singular) and lack a mortgage, but I'd definitely move my family to a place with more opportunity if the well ran dry where we're at now. I wouldn't even hesitate or think twice about it. The temporary pain of transition is going to be a lot easier than the long-tail of fruitless toiling and economic decay.
I was a spoiled kid, I admit, but I remember that back when I was 9 or 10 and my parents asked me if I'd be ok with us moving 4 or 5 blocks down the street, in a better area, my answer was a loud "no way!", because that meant losing my play-mates and God knows what else. We ended up not moving. I know it's anecdotal, but looking at what Hollywood is feeding us (with the latest example being the excellent animation "Inside Out") I get the feeling that is actually hard for kids being "mobile". Parents ignore that at their own risk.
Otherwise my family would just burn through all our money and assets to pay for eating ice cream three meals a day. And we'd end up diabetic, broke, and probably soon dead once we exhausted our resources.
When you're dealing with difficult economic realities that include supporting your family and paying your mortgage, do you deal with them by thinking like a kid? What would be the point of that?
It's important to have the necessary empathy to make the disruption as minimal as possible, but also to have the maturity and forsight to make the decision to move out of whatever soon-to-be ghost town you're living in. Or so I would think.
Example:
You're 22, straight out of college, you take a job at IBM in Poughkeepsie, NY because it was a great fit for you and you liked the area. You raise a family there, get friends there, establish a lot of roots over 10+ years. Now IBM is "transforming", what are you going to do? There are no other companies in the area
You're lucky if this is going to be less than 2.5 hours each way.
I live 38 miles north of the city; Poughkeepsie is 73.5. It takes me about an hour and 45 minutes door-to-door to get to work at 22nd street. 10-15 minutes to the train station, probably about 5 minutes of waiting [because if you miss one train, you have to wait 20-30 minutes or so for another depending on the time of morning], 60 minutes on the train, then about another 25 minutes of walking (or alternatively 5 minutes to get to the subway, 2-5 minutes to wait for it, then 5 minutes on the subway, and another 5 minutes of walking).
- pets like dogs/cats always tend to raise happiness levels - daily long commutes to work tend to make people more unhappy (and of course it helps if you have the time for yourself and are nto constantly stuck at traffic jam)
At least the trains have internet (or at least Amtrak does). If you can spin "they have wifi so they'll be part of my work day" into your job and work a virtually eight hour day including the commute as part of your time, that could be doable. If you have to commute on top of a normal eight hours, that's a non-starter.
However, given the new severance only being 1 month's salary leaves them with less incentive to wait. Of course, the really good ones have already left anyway (money isn't the prime motivation there), but the folks remaining there, especially the ones who will have to pick up the slack (more work, same pay) will have much less incentive then previously.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/02/resilient_sys...
I used to work there, and I can say that it's a lot like an abusive marriage: IBM is really, really good at convincing one that the IT job market is a tough place (!), that one got really lucky getting a job with IBM, and that one could never find another job anywhere else (!), and that $70,000 is a great salary for a world-class technical talent (!!!).
The sad thing is that there are so many smart, good people there, absolutely wasted in their positions. IBM could be an amazing, powerful company if it actually knew how to release the energy of its employees.
Purely anecdotal, but what I've heard is that chip jobs at IBM (and at Intel FWIW) are very narrow and silo-ed.
Good for the company in two ways:
1) employee gets really good at that particular job
2) IBM internal tools and procedures are different than general practice. Other companies that are looking for X don't want to hire an employee who has only done Y, even though X and Y aren't too different, and even though any smart person can quickly pick up X. Consequently, employee can't easily go elsewhere.