Posted on 07/25/2024 8:37:43 PM PDT by Cronos
We need to stop treating technology and those who know how it works like a commodity. Because when you do that, you're quietly creating an elaborate and expensive mess down the road.
..asking tech to code itself seems like a great idea. On paper. But it's only when you ask AI to code something that's going to generate the revenue needed to pay for itself and the company's future growth that you'll realize that AI doesn't know how to shrug.
.. Techies, especially software developers, are terrible at marketing. Especially when marketing themselves.
So when the boom cycles in the tech industry reach a peak, like they did in 2021 and 2022, people who don't know better start asking questions like: 1. Is there any substantial difference between a programmer with 10+ years' experience and someone just out of an online code school? 2. Does off-shoring really come with all those management issues? 3. Can't we just use ChatGPT to code our entire next release with all this year's roadmap features packed into it?
In fact, I just said "people who don't know better" do this, but the shitty thing is that they do know better.
If you think the interest rates are scary on plain old regular money right now, wait until you see what the payback terms are for tech debt.
I'm all for low-costs and scrappy engineering solutions, but I'm also confident we haven't escaped the velocity in technology where elegance doesn't matter.
(Excerpt) Read more at inc.com ...
Warning noted. Your story has probably played out multiple times. When I was a road warrior consultant, I made GOOD money remediating bad implementations due to use of lowest bid outsourcing and automated code generation. Many times I wondered as I reviewed the situation how such a good conceptual design could be so horribly implemented. I think I have my answer.
“.. Techies, especially software developers, are terrible at marketing. Especially when marketing themselves.”
They really are. I run a team of techies and they are all brilliant. Take them to a restaurant with a large menu and ask them to order and their heads explode. What young techies do not understand is the knowledge and wisdom of more mature techies are what fuels their careers. We help develop their soft skills, challenge them into using critical thinking skills and demonstrate for them the tips and techniques they didn’t learn in coding school.
Unfortunately, companies are looking at cheaper resources, but do not understand the costs associated with losing that knowledge and wisdom.
I’m surprised my former company who will apparently cheap out on anything has never hired an H1B.
I left a while back like a few others due to an ever growing toxic environment and gutless wonders of management who would probably contemplate hari-kiri before doing one tiny thing to improve life a little bit to make good people stay.
That goes double for the IT management. Those people are about as selfish as they come. Several of us regular people found that out a few times. The good ones that cared long since retired or moved on.Those
I had zero sympathy when I read about the Crowdstrike outage.
And let’s be honest — us code jockeys can be a bit full of ourselves about our IQ’s and our ability to solve problems that most people can’t. We’re the last people that’d fit in a union and let other people decide our salaries and benefits. Most programmers I know tend to take the attitude of it being better if we solve problems ourselves.
I try to educate them, but the little shits think they know everything.
People forget that systems hang around longer than anticipated...COBOL and FORTRAN running even today.
Over the last 15 years the number of application frameworks available to choose from has exploded and the languages have also advanced to the point of almost looking like a different language (e.g. JavaScript).
Put this together, many companies are creating unmaintainable systems - we’re already in a place where job descriptions ask for frameworks A,B,C and others asking for X,Y,Z, that often accomplish similar goals. It’s a mess of competing technologies. Many of them aren’t going to continue to be popular years from now and companies won’t be able to find anyone that has the background to work on their combination of frameworks they chose.
I hope I’m wrong but that’s what it’s looking like from my perspective.
the biggest problem in any job is that management doesn’t have a way to measure institutional knowledge. This is especially true in a tech environment in which both infrastructure and applications can be orders of magnitude more complex than management think they are.
Tech workers are screwed regardless. Too many people believe the AI hype.Anyone who believes that hiring warm bodies out of India to do anything but rote work is a good idea is delusional.
Why do so many millennials use the phrase “these days”? It is common in their illiterate world.
Solutions to work visa abuse should include:
- require visa employees be paid a substantial margin over the median wage including visa workers;
- allow visa portability without penalty for job hopping;
- exclude visa workers from hiring decisions;
- enacting ( and enforcing ) penalties for recruiting visa workers fraudulently;
- outlawing foreign recruiters placing visa workers;
- not allowing visa workers on government projects without specific legislative authorization for specific projects;
- corporate death for work visa abuse enablers;
- tar and feathers for a lot of people who should have known better.
I’m sure there’s more.
NO! They are supposedly recruited to fill a specific job that a company claims there were no Americans available for. Once they leave that job, their visa expires and they go home.
And for that company to claim no Americans, there needs to be a public record and scrutiny. They should be required to show the resumes of the hundreds of people that might have applied and explain why each is not qualified. Put the onus on the company to prove no American was available and give American workers the public ability to dispute that!
Good post.
It was a very enjoyable read, for a person like myself that isn’t employed in the Technology Sector.
IMO Tech shows a lot of similarities to how railroad & railway capitalization & expansion operated in the past.(Pre automobile)
> NO! They are supposedly recruited to fill a specific job that a company claims there were no Americans available for. Once they leave that job, their visa expires and they go home.
That’s just one of the rationales for worker visas. Your particular solution however is faulty because it would make the visas equivalent to indentures. A population of indentured employees could also cause harm to the citizen workforce. Employers could use firing as leverage against the visa worker. For example they might extort the visa workers to do work that normally would pay more but with a different job title. This in turn could be leveraged to drive down pay for citizens in both job categories. Similarly for working conditions, white collar crime, etc.
Micromanagement of business to prevent these negatives is likely to be inefficient. Better we just avoid enabling a lever for unscrupulous business practices.
JMO, but I’ve got 40+ years of experience competing with H1 visa abuse. The abuse is real, but some of the people I’ve worked with are awesome and we would be the worse for them not coming. I’d rather find the best solution that puts a damper on visa abusers and employer-gov’t collusion against citizens.
It’s probably best if we make worker visas an honest path for countries to send us their best, keep the function honest, and try to keep them as legal immigrants. W/honesty required from the gov’t, employers, and visa workers. Then we don’t have to debate the necessity/public good of worker visas, which is a 55-gallon barrel of worms.
I don't care about the indentured aspect, though I can see it leads to abuse. I'd rather they be abused than the abuse American workers go through every day because of them.
Maybe put a 100% tariff on their labors, and index that to the prevailing rate for an American employee. Require the end pay to the H1B be at that same prevailing wage. Make the companies pay 2-3x the rate of an American to import each H1B. That way, they will only do it when really and seriously desperate for the worker.
...and lets get back to the original idea that they go home once done. We need to allow zero overstays or conversions. Twenty-five to thirty years ago there are only a hundred or so thousand Indians in the US, mostly running old hotels and a few restaurants. Now there are 10s of millions of them, especially their kids.
He starts off wrong in the first sentence. Technology and the people who know how to work it ARE a commodity and things work best when they’re treated as such. When you know they’re a commodity you know their value. When you stop acting like they’re a commodity you start acting like it’s magic.
And the relative value between experienced coders and young is largely random. Because things change so much your experienced coder can fall behind, but they might not. Depends on them. And sure the young doesn’t have the years of mistakes to have learned from, but he’s up on all the new hotness (which isn’t new hotness to him, it’s just what he learned).
And for AI. It can be useful. But like all tools it’s use depends on the user. It is neither panacea nor albatross, it’s just there.
> I don’t care about the indentured aspect, though I can see it leads to abuse. I’d rather they be abused than the abuse American workers go through every day because of them.
The abuse I gave as an example impacts American citizen workers by depressing compensation.
Im not a socialist or a union activist, but IMHO US labor law is based on a pile of cow flop handed down to us from fuzzy-brained socialists and would-be feudal lords. Just set standards, decentralize it and make it possible for individuals to easily establish a plain cause for action and recover from bad actors. Some happy-go-lucky attorneys will win tons of money beating up on said bad actors and we’ll all be the better for it without complex political machinations easily jumbled up by deep pockets.
> Now there are 10s of millions of them, especially their kids.
I don’t think the number of legal immigrants of Indian origin even reaches 10 million. The demographic is mostly unmarried working age people. People with permanent residency do bring kids and family; there is also some unquantified population of illegally resident aliens of Indian origin...
I’ve seen plenty of people age out on H1 and have to leave. Some of the other worker visas may be indefinite term.
My main concern is employers using worker visas to harm the citizen workforce by gaming the system against them. I’m adverse to tariffing - it will create a new class of perverse incentives. Just force employers to pay people a little more of what they’re worth and stop gaming recruiting to create a bogus “need” to justify hiring. It’s creating massive inefficiencies and hurting US Citizens, especially older workers.
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