Is Web 2.0 A Bigger Threat Than Outsourcing? 331
An anonymous reader writes "According to InformationWeek, Web 2.0 is even worse than outsourcing for IT jobs. The article talks about corporations that have laid off IT staff and replaced them with technologies like mashups and wikis that can help people get things done without involving IT. Most IT people still think Web 2.0 is an overhyped buzzword, but that might not matter: So many Web 2.0 apps are sold (or given away for free) by software-as-a-service companies like Google that people can bypass IT altogether, and IT might not even know until it's too late."
Underlings (Score:2, Funny)
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If they wont hire you up front to keep their stuff working right so be it. It'll break.
Charge them to fix it and make it pay for you. Those who wont pay wont get their stuff fixed or it will be fix half@$$ed by some shyster.
Job security...
Next issue?
Automation is always a threat (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Automation is always a threat (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Automation is always a threat (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Automation is always a threat (Score:4, Insightful)
I reiterate: high-speed disks, redundant RAID array (SAN attached), UPSs, the ongoing costs of regular backups and Disaster Recovery, Electricity, Server Room AC, ect. Additionally there is an ongoing "Cost per year" for storage that has to be taken into account, like support contracts, licensing, and warranty costs. And I didn't even mention the cost of staffing.
So yes the ultimate cost to a company for high speed redundant storage that includes DR can indeed approach $3000.00 per gig.
Re:Automation is always a threat (Score:5, Informative)
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He was describing interdepartmental charges (i.e. corporate "funny money").
Which is why I tend to agree that his IT department is innocent; any time I have worked in a big company and had knowledge of interdepartmental charges, they have been obscene and had little basis in reality.
Just an example from one job I worked at - the head of security requested that they get a small filing cabinet to put beside the security desk. They were told that there was no problem approving the purchase, but to rent the space it would have to sit in would cost more than security's total budget.
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On one extreme, there's complete lack of procedures. On the other, there's 3k/GB. You must see both as absurd.
Get a proposal for two 100Mb/s lines for two different locations. Get a proposal for a IBM DS system targeted at 10TB with redundant FC, redundant controllers and NAS servers. Now, add a backup robot on each. Get GPFS to do point-in-time snapshots for 30 days, and have the robot pick one of these every week. All of it will cost about 50USD per GB. Two orders of magnitude less than 3k/GB.
Even
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I do know we are limited to 100mb of mail storage! (which runs out if someone sends you a few emails with pictures). Insane when hotmail and google have 5gb each.
You make the rest sound so easy, that I really doubt you've ever worked for a truly large corporation.
At my current corporation, required procedures have lowered our productivity by 75% since 2002. When I started here in 2000, we were about 1/20th as productive as I had been for 15 years at a tiny company. A "
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Last week they had to install 2 network drops. Just 2* CAT6 going from the network closet on the first floor to the network closet on the second floor, there are 10ths of cables already running so all they need to do is feed it. They were busy with 2 people not even 1 hour and then somebody came afterwards to reconfigure switches
Re:Automation is always a threat (Score:5, Insightful)
As IT your goal should be to be that path where ever possible. Charging 3K for a gig is blatantly ridiculous.
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Poor attitude among IT folk is a much bigger threat than Web2.0 or indeed anything else. [...] When everyone walks around with a dangling ring of USB flashdrives because trying to get networked fileshare space is a major hassle and ridiculously expensive ($3k for a 1 gig partition charged to your overhead budget!)
I wonder when the next story will come along about a huge data leak because someone at a big company didn't follow security procedures.
Does it occur to you that corporate IT may be responsible for things like keeping data stored securely and backed up, and that by taking your attitude you are undermining their efforts to handle data in a responsible, professional manner?
Yes, it's possible that the corporate IT people in this case are just incompetent. But it's also possible that they're just trying to
Re:Automation is always a threat (Score:5, Insightful)
At my last company, we had to lock things down with paperwork for self-defense. We were perfectly happy with just getting an email notice on things that needed done but dickish managers tried burning us to cover for their own mistakes. Ok, fine, wanna play that game? Now everything requires paperwork filled out and signed by two or three managers just to provide a papertrail and CYA in case someone tries to burn IT again. Website changes were a nightmare. Marketing would provide material that should have been vetted and wasn't, it would be a rush-rush to get up on the website, we'd do it, and lo and behold, it was all fucked up. Marketing then acts like IT was responsible for misspellings, factual misrepresentations, and typos. Oh no you don't, asshole. We put in a test server for you to review the content on, you're going to fucking use it. Request comes in, content is on test server for 24 hours of review, only then does it go on the live site. We have signatures from you each step of the way. Any fuckups were blessed by you.
It's a cumbersome system full of red tape and something I would never have put in place but for my own self-preservation. This marketing weasel had a history of throwing people under the bus to cover for his own fuckups and I wasn't going to be his next victim.
But back to your story, is there ass-covering involved or are your IT guys just ignorant mutants?
and how much do you think it should cost? (Score:2)
Fist off, gmail does NOT guarantee that your emails are secure. Several laws demand that business keeps all emails. Try explaining to judge that, ooops sorry, HD crashed, all the emails are gone.
Proper email and file servers need quality hardware. No matrox IDE here. They also need backup's. That costs money. Lots of money. Money that is almost always impossible to get.
I seen this problem WAY to often before, IT's budget can afford the ever increasing demands on its services, so people start going around
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Automation is always a threat to lazy pricks (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no "natural economy" favoring the IT guys. I've worked as one, and I know full well the combination of poor social skills combined with high self-regard for their own intelligence/expertise that leads to an arrogant "priesthood" mentality. Additionally, because of their responsibilty for the critical data plumbing of a modern business, the fear of being responsible for failure of what are, frankly, often fragile systems causes a bunker mentality. Their customers, namely the rest of the organization, is viewed as a threat - because anything they do could trigger failure. I've often felt that in many IT groups, the preferred infrastructure for the non-IT personnel would be un unplugged PC in a locked room. In these types of groups, the organization will eventually seize any viable alternative to eliminate the IT group. After all, they are usually relatively expensive staff.
Successful IT organizations know that they are purely a service business. The most important attributes are responsiveness and reliability. If these are not present, they will not survive.
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We had an employee here (a friend of mine) that quit. I replaced him with a series of scripts and now I 'do' his job and mine, too. There's still a little bit of manual stuff that isn't standard enough to be automated, but it's nowhere near the 40hr/wk job that he was doing. Just as
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It's very dilbertisque to say you replaced an employee with a
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Plenty of companies do plenty of stupid things. The market exists to weed them out. If it doesn't, perhaps it is your opinion of the service that is out of whack with the market, not the company's!
Many organizations want 12 year olds to build websites, many others a
Re:Automation is always a threat (Score:5, Funny)
Man, and I thought that was just an idle threat. You should get him a shirt that says "I was replaced by a series of scripts" and use his fate as a warning to others. Darth Vader ain't got shit on you.
correction (Score:3, Funny)
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If a robot takes your job (or in this case, a mashup) then your job was pointless.
Not necessarily. Your job is now pointless, but that doesn't mean it wasn't useful before. After all, if it wasn't, why are people bothering to automate it?
Of course, now that it can be automated, that leaves you as a good IT person free to work on more challenging things that still require human input, hopefully providing better support to the rest of your organisation as a result. The only people who will lose out here are poorly skilled IT workers who could serve the role of a machine in one area, bu
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Now, more automation means some people are going to have to train to do new jobs. I'm overseeing the final decline of an old MPE/iX mainframe, and we're trying to finally remove the need for a full time operator...a guy to schedule and maintain jobs. This is something that has to be explained to people who work with hardware made since
Re:Automation is always a threat (Score:5, Insightful)
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Every single moment in the post-industrial society has not devalued human beings. It's devalued automatons.
E.g. Industrialized farming didn't devalue farmers. It only devalued people whose only skill was picking fruit.
At the same time, it invented a previously non-existent pool of valued workers who could invent/build and maintain those planting, clearing and harvesting machines. And it opened up new industries for other still-valued workers to branch out into. (
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For example, the UAW ( United Auto Workers union ) had 1.5 million members in 1970 and have about 0.5 million members now.
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GM still employs about 250K people.
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1. They were able to get rid of their ActiveX & Java developers because their web developers, through ajaxy goodness, made them obsolete.
They can just find new jobs or retool themselves to learn a new language.
I dont think this is a threat to IT as a whole (someone still needs to keep the network and server and clients running), but I fully expect slashdot to turn this into another mindless bitchfest about how much their IT departm
By "worse" they mean "better" (Score:2)
Exactly. It is most tiresome to see these lamentations, when things actually improve.
For hundreds of years business communications consisted of paper letters. I doubt, anybody — including Zonk — would prefer writing and mailing a paper letter to an e-mail, even if that mean
Shifting of costs (Score:5, Interesting)
Bottomline: this is about a CIO who recently got hired and wants to put his stamp on his new department.
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Thank God (Score:5, Funny)
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Seriously, though, I've never met a decent IT pro who wouldn't welcome being made *a little* obsolete. I think we all generally understand that a lot of the stuff in our jobs could be easier, should be easier, and we'd prefer it if we didn't have to deal with that stuff. Most IT pros, or the good ones anyway, are people who really like for things to work "the right way". We get a kick out of slick solutions that actually work, especially when it makes our jobs easier.
Will it put me out of work? Somehow
The web 2.0 cloud blaghosphere (Score:3, Insightful)
Guilty as charged, sir.
This article is BS - someone needs to maintain the machines, network, reset passwords, update software, maintain databases, train clusers, etc. IT is changing? Hmmph, the sun is coming up tomorrow, too.
-mcgrew
Re:The web 2.0 cloud blaghosphere (Score:5, Funny)
If you think that's neat just you wait for the symantic web on handheld supercomputers. I hear that will be ready only 15 years from now!
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Re:The web 2.0 cloud blaghosphere (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:The web 2.0 cloud blaghosphere (Score:5, Insightful)
When an outsourced IT company does it:
a) it may not be illegal in their country of origin
b) it may not be covered in the contract you have with them
c) even if it is, it may not be covered in whatever deal is made if they're bought out
d) there may be no mechanism for (easily) recovering your data in the event of terminating service
e) if they go tits up there may be no way at all to recover your data
It's not a question of whether or not trusting mission-critical data or services to a third party is a risk, it's a question of whether it's a sensible or necessary risk to take.
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I'm
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Because I would not trust my institutional data to any of these 'Web 2.0' companies yet.
Not that I think they want to steal it, or that they would give it away. Either of those would be okay since I work in education anyway.
But do I want to invest the time, effort and money into a company who
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- The developers and managers at company X aren't exactly the sort of people who work at Flickr. Someone has read about Wikis, so they implement one in a way that's completely counterproductive.
- None of the employees under the age of 23 knows what to do with Web 2.0'ish features anyway.
So the whole thing winds up going the way of the CMS, and the Intranet HTML pages before that and the Lotus Notes nightmare before that.Re: (Score:2)
This article is BS - someone needs to maintain the machines, network, reset passwords, update software, maintain databases, train clusers, etc. IT is changing? Hmmph, the sun is coming up tomorrow, too.
Do you think it takes twice as many workers to maintain twice as many machines? If one large organization like Google or Salesforce takes over a significant portion of, say one hundred individual IT department systems, do you think they'll need to hire as many people as worked at those departments? Or, with the large degree of automation they can do over a large set of machines, do they perhaps not need to hire a single new person?
Google maintains a very large number of redundant, cheap, standardized serve
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It may not be useful for Google to spend any time on them, but it would be useful for SOMEBODY to spend some time on them.
(secretly wants a stack of low power servers for cheap)
Code (Score:3, Interesting)
Good for users, bad for security? (Score:5, Interesting)
Smart IT bosses anticipate user needs. We need to be saying "hey, have you seen how you could do your job better with this new thing?"... But many don't. So we're seen as a cost centre, rather than a profit centre. A hinderance, rather than an enabler.
Then we get outsourced...or control passes to the users and third parties. The risk is that corporate IT becomes an unstructured mess.
With no central authority, who then looks after the basics, such as corporate standards for storing and sharing information? What about security? Sure, some smart user can download the latest mashup, but will it play well with everything else? What's the upgrade path?
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Crying Wolf (Score:4, Insightful)
The sky is falling indeed Chicken Little....
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Until a web 2.0 app can replace a burned out motherboard, I will not worry about it too much.
I know that thin client has been the next big thing for about as long as Linux has been a year away from being ready for the desktop but they've kind of both arrived now. The thin clients I've used have connected to remote desktop and have been very snappy, responsible, and low-hassle. Oh, a thin client isn't working? Boo-hoo. Pull out the spare from the store closet, plug it in, no different from swapping out a broken phone. IT will RMA it next time they drop by the office.
Sure, not everyone will be able
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But even if we forget about contracted local help, the people who swap burned up computers are the lowest level of IT imaginable. Would /you/ want to li
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Your average cubicle drone machine usually runs in the neighborhood of $800 to $1200 depending on what is needed. Not to mention that a lot of com
What is IT for? (Score:5, Insightful)
Throwing your hands up and saying that improvements in IT are costing IT jobs is about as pointless as complaining that tractors and combine harvesters mean there's a relative lack of shovelling jobs available in agriculture these days.
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Tools for the job? (Score:4, Insightful)
In my experience, while there are IT departments (or individuals within IT departments) that give excellent service, there are also the control-freaks who think it is their job to decide what their users' requirements should be.
Anyone would think from the quotation above that the primary purpose of an IT department is its self-perpetuation.
Until it sleeps ... (Score:2)
Solving Problems (Score:5, Insightful)
Two men are standing beside the road watching the new backhoe dig a hole. "Look at that. Think of how many men with shovels could be working if we didn't have that thing," says the older man. "Think of how many men with spoons could be working if we didn't have the shovel," said the other.
If a problem is simple enough that it can be replaced by an automated system, then solve it and give me a more interesting problem to work on.
They'll come crawling back... (Score:2)
Sounds like more work for IT (Score:2)
And who is going to set up and maintain these "mashups" and "wikis", philosophy graduates?
Was it really an IT job? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sometimes I almost can't believe what is considered an "IT Job" these days. I've been in the IT industry for about 10 years. When I started if you were in the IT dept it meant that you knew the in's-and-out's of the most popular technologies, most importantly the workstation OS's that companies used.
These days so many of "IT Jobs" are just administrative positions which require more spreadsheet skills than they can find at the local temp agency.
What a troll! (Score:2, Informative)
Get a life!
I beg to disagree (Score:2)
The article talks about corporations that have laid off IT staff and replaced them with technologies like mashups and wikis that can help people get things done without involving IT.
I disagree because those so called Web 2.0 applications run on hardware and software that have to be maintained.
Though there might be some level of "hemorrhaging" of jobs in the "traditional" Web or Internet spheres, more jobs are created by this change alone.
As an example, Google alone has some pretty serious data centers across the African continent that are just as technologically advanced as in the UK or USA for example. This would not be the case if it were not for Web 2.0.
if web 2.0 gets rid of call centres (Score:2)
On a jobs front, since most of these positions are outsourced, there's no great loss (unless you're one of the estimated 3% of employees who work in a call centre).
As has already been said, if
This is idiotic (Score:2)
I work on the internal web based applications of a major telecom company. How exactly is a mashup going to replace software that I build? Will a mashup handle online trades? Will a mashup replace the vast amounts of backend software that works behind the scenes of most companies?
Move on, nothing to see here (Score:2)
Good luck with that guys (Score:2)
There's such thing as pointless redundancy (Score:4, Interesting)
When all this web crap was shiny and new, there were no established procedures, technologies, business methodologies, people were making it up as they went. Just consider the corporate website. If there's one functionality that should be universal but generally wasn't, it was the store locator. Just tell me where your goddamn store is! Pretty much every site has it now but there was a time when you couldn't count on it. Also, consider the HR portion of the typical corporate site. Sure, back in the day companies tried to write the scripts in-house but these days it's just as easy to buy the software to do it, either hosted on your server or embedded in an iframe so it looks like your server but is handled by a third party. You'll see this on restaurant websites where they have gift card programs, the only thing the restaurant's web guy has to do is drop in the link for the iframe and he's done.
The very very first web job I ever had was at a dot.bomb where the CTO did not know what server-side scripting was and thought that ASP would bog down the website too much. What was the upshot of that? A site indexing travel videos, all built by hand, every page static. They didn't even use HTML templates to replicate design changes across the site, all edits were made manually, either in notepad or Frontpage 98. Yes, the sound you hear is heads thunking desks in disbelief.
That was all incredibly stupid busywork. But I've seen that same level of stupidity in departments other than IT, overstaffed due to inefficient business practices. I hate hate HATE layoffs but I also feel that one of the biggest steps to avoiding them is not hiring too many people in the first place. I'd rather be understaffed and working hard than overstaffed and waiting for the guillotine to fall.
Getting back to the web stuff, it's silly to have to contact a web designer every time you want to change something on a website. Yes, major design changes will have to be done by a professional. But if you're talking about information that can be templatized and handled through web forms like job postings, company news, etc, then you really can let the secretary edit the site. I've seen some horrible tools for this where an understanding of html for formatting was required. The newer WYSIWIG interfaces make formatting as easy as any word processor. IT guys can set it up and move on to better challenges, they don't have to dick around with this sort of thing any longer.
Isn't that the point of technology.... (Score:2, Informative)
Whither the Webmeister? (Score:2)
Customer Service Nightmare (Score:4, Insightful)
And it's not just me: I wait in long lines, an audience for the customer abuse or indifference that they serve to each customer indiscriminately.
These people don't care about their jobs. They don't have even the basic human social compassion with their customers to treat us differently than they treat the objects where they work. They're liable to treat the boxes of products better, because damaging those can dock their pay. Why should I care about them? To the degree that I do, I want them replaced by a machine that can do their job without bothering them. Even when the machines do a crappy job, at least they reduce the prices, and lower expectations.
Lots of people should be replaced by machines. Freeing them to work on their people skills, so they're worth paying more than the electric bill.
that's like asking (Score:4, Insightful)
or if automobiles are a threat to the locomotive industry
well, duh
if it's a better way to do things, that's progress. get over it and move on
for a site which regularly bashes music, television, and movie execs for not seeing progress in digital content and fighting it with stupid legal maneuvers, this certainly is a case of utter hypocrisy here on slashdot
oh, and btw, what i just said applies to outsourcing too: if some guy can do what you do in india for half your salary, well then suck it up, shut up, and move on. and i say that as someone who works in IT
i hate people with a sense of entitlement. no, you are not entitled to absolute security in your job, sorry, not yours. life changes. deal with it, retrain, move on, get a better job. most of those who in fact do complain are dead weight who can't adapt to begin with. whining about entitlement is all they have for them, not real computer science skill. it's a suckers game in the end
It's the natural course of man (Score:4, Insightful)
a) A particular skill becomes a dominant part of mankind's livelihood (hunting, agriculture, tradework, computers.)
b) We teach all of our children the basic aspects of these skills in order to increase efficiency.
c) The children grow up and begin working on the major problems and issues within these skills.
d) Through technology and ingenuity, we slowly automate, simplify, and streamline those skills.
e) A new skill arises to replace the now-streamlined and unskilled skill.
f) Repeat.
And since all the kids coming out of high school and college now have a pretty thorough end-user understanding of computers (including the big 3: office suites, the Internet, and cell phones), a lot of IT tasks have just been rolled into the non-IT positions of a company. Remember when the CEO had to have his own IT guy just to work a spreadsheet or open a database? We've come a long way.
And ultimately part of mankind's ambition has to be to reach a point in our technology and civilization where machines and automata do most of our work - even complex things. And that's the way we like it, natch.
So when's Web 3.1? (Score:2)
Anyway I personally think this is a good thing as long as your own company isn't buying into that bullshit
They should outsource many of those CEOs too, given that they all sound about the same. Seems what lot of them do is is to basically sound confident and say lot of optimistic nothings with a PR firm standing by just in case. If they actually say anything substan
good! (Score:5, Insightful)
In a few years, many small and medium sized businesses will probably be able to get by without IT staff altogether; they'll be using mostly web-based services and outsourced remote management.
Of course, this means that a lot of IT people will need to find new jobs. So what? IT itself eliminated many jobs: typists, secretaries, customer service, filing clerks, mail handlers, etc. IT professionals really have even less business complaining about this than other professions.
Technology is stealing our jobs! (Score:4, Insightful)
Lets explore some other tragic job stealing moments in history:
the invention of the wheel - stole jobs from the carriers
the invention of the computer - stole jobs from the abacus users
the invention of Web 2.0 - stole jobs from IT
Seriously, our job as technologists is to make things more efficient. Efficiency inevitably means less resources are used. Using less resources inevitably leads to less need for manpower.
Efficiency is not to be feared. If you think about it, your life is better because of efficiency, think of what your life would be like without job killing efficient technology.
Observations From the Fortune 500 (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Most businesses larger than, say, fifty employees are going to have very complex problems -- problems that only dedicated IT personnel can solve. I fail to see how any outsourced "mashup" (whatever that *really* is) could tailor itself adequately to these problems. It's just a restatement of the common problem of customizing third-party vertical software for a specific business. In my experience, that endeavor tends to faily miserably, draining productivity as users are forced by the software into a non-intuitive mode. Eventually, the offending system is removed and replaced with something else. You need IT personnel for all of this.
2. In a large IT group, there are a lot of people who don't contribute value. You have your sycophants, ass-kissers, hiring mistakes, misassigned resources, bumbling managers, etc. The problem is that the corporate culture can make it very hard to get rid of these people. They may have influence with the powers that be, or they may even *be* the powers. If you see some downsizing, you have to ask *who* got downsized. Perhaps it wasn't the people actually adding value.
Horrors!!! The OBSOLETE are THREATENED!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
I have a coffee mug on my desk (copyright 1980) covered in computer sayings. In my mind, the most insightful one on it has always been, "Computers work. People should think." The fact that we're spending less time sitting around, grinding out custom one-off applications is a GOOD thing, just like it's a good thing banks don't have departments of people adding columns of numbers anymore.
Of course not! (Score:3, Insightful)
The only thing that will happen is that all IT will be provided by such companies in a more controlled way. Similar to law firms (sorry, no car analogy here), instead of having a lone lawyer, you will contract a law firm which will provide you the service. Therefore, all the IT professionals will get to work at those compa
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Evolution Of the IT Market (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.realmeme.com/roller/page/realmeme/?entry=evolution_of_the_it_market [realmeme.com]
"The IT Market can be considered, in gestalt, as being an S-curve market with the year 2000-2001 ( the Dot Com Crash ) as its inflection point...
"But in the post-Crash world, profit margins on mass-produced products have fallen. Niche markets with high profit margins are sought after, but many
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They automate a process that would have previously been done manually. Technology does not just apply to hardware.
You would call software that allowed faster gear changes on a car a new technology. In the same way, software that allows faster assimilation of information (mashups) is a new technology.
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Not sure how my explanation was marketing, but here it is in a different format.
technology:
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In managementese all buzzwords are a new technology.
Re:Mashups? (Score:4, Insightful)
In the sense that some companies, Microsoft included are *desperate* for them to be a launch pad into future profits. Cut out the middle man, go direct to the customer. Its a dream that is unlikely to succeed.
I've lost count of how many times I hear that IT workers or programmers will be obsolete because of new technology. It just aint so. Even if the average user can knock something together to do a job they want, they first have to want to do that.
Same goes for network and system maintenance, many people could do the job themselves with a little training, but don't see why they should. After all, if your business is selling non computer related products, you don't want to be bothered spending time doing anything but that at work, or you lose money and customers.
IT people/web designers and programmers get hired because people do not want to do those jobs themselves.
Hell I've been a programmer for 8 years, and I don't like fixing my own pc when it breaks, that's not something I want to bother with. I have people who are paid to do that for me. That might make me a bit odd, but to be honest I'm an algorithm designer, hardware, so long as its fast and working, really doesn't interest me.
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Re:Mashups? (Score:5, Funny)
Gigantic robotic arms with huge potato mashers. Once every year they set them loose around the office down here, and everyone screams and runs. The survivors get a raise, the widows of those who didn't make it get a ham. Best teambuilding event ever, especially when you're screaming "Every man for himself!" at the top of your lungs while avoiding the masher.
Re:Mashups? (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's fair enough in some respects; their job isn't to maintain websites, it's more mine. But there are some clients who e-mail me things to post to a CMS where they themselves can post.
That being said, you can now hire drupal experts as opposed to programmers to do day to day maintenance. I would expect those to come cheaper and be more interested and suited to the tasks of good aesthetic design.
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Customers get used to be treated like sub humans through HTML forms, tickets and the like. it seems that customers are considered as "pariah". They should be kept as far as possible of the company.
Onc