Hard Work Is Irrelevant [audio]
npr.org
npr.org
It makes perfect political sense to have high turnover. What managers will typically do is turn over the workforce, but also scale down the thing they are trying to accomplish to meet the capabilities of their little league-ers. All they want is to be able to claim a 'success' so they can get promoted. They cut the workforce down, cut the work down, but when they build the n-millionth + 1 music service or chat app they claim it is a revolution. Executive management says, "wow you created a music service, here have $500k" and the process starts again. No one has the cojones to point out that the company has inadvertently started to play little league because the executives are trying to ride successes as well.
Actually, the real reason is usually financial. People with 15 years of experience tend to cost a lot more than new hires fresh out of college.
So in a sense you are right; it's just management is not very sure which experienced persons are worth it or not. Whereas that new grad is all potential: it's an opportunity to start over again and do it right this time (but they never do of course....).
If someone's getting to fifteen years, for example, and only then discovering that they've got to make cuts and don't know who to keep. Jesus Christ. That almost implies that they've made no investment, beyond money, in that relationship whatsoever. Which, considering people are expensive, is a bit like saying they've spent fifteen years burning the company's money.
Frankly, it's amazing that the system works at all.
I get that sometimes you have to fire people because you are running out of money. What I can't agree with is that you can just fire people and it's fine because people's careers are long and this is just another spot in their "journey". Sure, maybe a person will work at many companies over their life.
On the other hand, people work to make a living, sometimes for an entire family, and suddenly not having work can affect someone's livelihood very negatively for obvious reasons. Don't get me wrong, I understand that sometimes as a boss/manager you have to make difficult decisions for the sake of the company. But, you're just lying to yourself if you think it's not a big deal to fire someone.
The whole time I was listening to this, I was thinking: if a company is going to treat me like a de facto contractor, shouldn't I just ask for the (much higher) hourly risk-adjusted rate I'd demand as a contractor? Why bother with the charade of full-time employment at all?
The alternative is inherently unstable, socially: Once people think they have nothing to lose by tearing down the system, it gets torn down. The anti-safety-net capitalists are inadvertently creating a society which will have little to lose from destroying what they're working to build.
They, in turn, insure me against the risk of losing my job, becoming disabled and unable to work and a bunch of other things. They calculate the amount required based on how much I earn, and probably my age/risk profile. No need for a social safety net to protect me from losing my job there.
Sure, a safety net is all nice and dandy. And you could possibly argue that it'll benefit those that can't pay for it like I can, but I'd respond to that in saying that their insurance amount would be a whole lot less. Classic sliding scale. But to be fair, if I was that poor, I'd put more value into having such a fall-back as I'd probably be unskilled labor at that point.
On a side note, when I hear a lot of arguments against an "emergent behavior" system like relatively pure capitalism, I am reminded of the whole "evolution vs intelligent-design" debate. I guess, for me, emergent and self-correcting systems are inherently elegant just by themselves. There is no need for a "creator" (government in this case) to guide the lowly agents to do whats best for themselves within their local constraints.
I know way too many former Programmers who are in dire need of a good government safety net, even in these boom times. This profession has so many variables that scream out for good government safety nets--it's almost laughable: A low barrier to entry?(It's getting easier to learn this stuff monthly.), No unionization. A workplace that's constantly chuning. A really high level of failed companies. Eager workers who will work for free, and I probally forget a lot?
My point is I know way too many former Programmers. Some are even homeless. In fact, in my world, know two homeless individuals personally; they are both former Programmers. One played a big role in Word Star. Everything seems fine in the good times, but when the money gets tight/person gets older--it seems to get ugly. More ugly than pretty much any profession I can think of? All that The Fountainhead thinking kinda works in your twenties-thirties, but the world looks so much crueler after 45--at least for me? There's more than a few things I said/believed in my twenties that I wish I could take back. Basically, I wasen't as slick as I thought?
I do hope that monetization really changed the game, and these companies are becoming more mainstream? But mainstream is not mainstream anymore? I know very few professions that aren't in a remodel, or complete take down? It's about survival, the balance sheet, and a few guys at the top who are literally making a killing. To the guys at the top who aren't spreading it around, read The Price of Privlage, by Madeline Levine. Zero in on the sections about happiness and wealth. It's an eye opener! Even from a someone like myself--who never felt sorry for the wealthy?
I also fail to see how you can feel passion for Netflix (one of their company values) when, as an employee, you are basically treated like a commodity.
I guess this kind of culture must be great for C-level execs like Ms. McCord, but not so great for run of the mill engineers or salespeople that favor stability for themselves and their families over a 2% increase in Netflix' bottom line.
Karma is a "blame the victim for their own problems" system of oppression.
Only if everything that happens to everybody was just karma -- and whereas that might be the case in the original eastern theory about it, in the west we merely use it as a fancy way to say "payback time" and "she had it coming".
Or if you like another ancient fancy word that keeps the "she had it coming" vibe without implying that everyone she previously cut also had it coming: hybris/nemesis.
(Apparently Wikipedia is absolutely crap entry on the ancient Greek meaning of hubris -- where the term originated -- and its association with hateis and nemesis. This random blog entry does it better: http://wishthattheroadislong.blogspot.gr/2012/01/hubris-hate... ).
Investment banking and high-end consulting have worked on a simpler principle for a long time. When you're young you work crazy hours and get really at your job. Once you're no longer able to do that, you leave for a calmer environment.
It's essentially salesman and confidence skills. They're generally no better than in house people.
Sorry, but this is a very ignorant thing to say. The fact of the matter is that there's different types of consulting at different points along the problem-complexity spectrum.
At the low end, a consultant is no different than a contractor, and the point is not to hire those who are better than in-house people, but more efficient. For example, your in-house IT guy may have the skills to configure Kerberos, but maybe you'd rather have him work on a more important project (or maybe he is busy fighting fires, as helpdesk people usually are, and doesn't have the time), so you hire an outside contractor to do it, and he or she can get it done a lot faster (and with fewer errors) because they have done it many times before.
At the high end (which you don't sound like you have experience with), consultants are highly specialized and they are hired to solve very difficult technical problems that are of great importance to the firm. These problems tend to be well outside the competency of in-house people. For example, imagine a scenario where the firm is the target of a lawsuit and they need to perform e-discovery to gather each and every business record pertaining to the subject matter from a large variety of sources and office locations across the country. There are consulting companies that specialize in this type of complex service, and they charge very high fees for that reason.
So yeah, it's not "essentially salesman and confidence skills". It may look like that from the outside, but it just isn't.
They essentially run dedicated tools against computers and report and summarize?
The real technical skills are the people who wrote those tools.
I was thinking of applying but the recruitment process says they look for social skills, and not hard core techies. That put me off.
I.e they rather get history graduates , with social skills and teach them how to use the tools than say super skilled computer science graduate without salesmanship skills.
That says to me that technical skills arnt that important, its the sales part that is is important.
I know people that did apply, and after talking to them, its mostly writing SQL scripts, bash/powershell scripts, running dedicated forensics tools I.e not 'really' hard technical skills
Most of the value added for them comes from proposals, reports(templates) and presenting it.
Technical side is running premade tools and SQL. If you can present, sell and write good reports they'll teach you how to run the tools.
The big 4 accounting firms work in the middle of the complexity spectrum, and sometimes even towards the lower end. There's two ways this is apparent:
1. They are able to use dedicated tools other people have written. Those tools exist because the problems they solve have been faced with many other companies before, and someone sat down and developed a product for it.
2. They employ a lot of juniors (which is why they are big), and are able to offload a lot of the routine tasks in a project to those juniors (called "leverage" in professional services). Unless you're very high up in your organization yourself (e.g. C-level), it's likely that those juniors are the "consultants" you see. The types of tasks you describe (writing simple scripts and creating PowerPoint presentations) are exactly the types of things a junior would be charged with.
In contrast, high-end consultancies tend to be small, and they consist almost entirely of highly skilled and experienced people, who are often times partners or equivalent. They often have to write their own tools and develop their own processes and best practices due to the relatively unique nature of the issues they tackle.
Don't get me wrong: all good consultants are also very good salespeople. They have to be, since consulting is a very people-oriented business. But to say that consulting is about sales and confidence is a gross oversimplification.
Boutique consultancies tend to be a few skilled people who have known each other for years who decide start their own thing togother. They probably used to be in-house people who specialised in ERP, security, databases or whatever then started their own company. They have probably have doing it for years, and have geniune interest in the subject. I have respect for that.
In fact I've worked for companies like that. But as programmer writing those tools you talk about, and for deep technical problems the consultants can't solve. The consultants would then try sell and use those tools along with consutlancy services.
However when people think of consultancies they usually think of mckinseys, accentures, PWCs of the world.
They grab prestigious graduates, teach them how do routine work on training courses, then hire them out for a lot of money. I don't get that. I highly doubt these guys could compete with an in-house guy who has been doing that stuff for years.
If the job involves lots of working with people then social skills become more important. Even if your guys write great code, you need to be able to convince the people who write the check for it that it is great code.
In 1) there is an artificially limited number of slots (and money) in the "big leagues" that little leaguers are clamoring for. In 2) there is generally a shortage of people relative to the available jobs.
Applying the professional sports metaphor to category 2 merely demonstrates that as a manager you are a f---t--d, which is probably why they have ridiculously bad turnover (a HQ location that might as well be in Siberia being another).
Great workplace is not espresso, lush benefits,
sushi lunches, grand parties, or nice offices
We avoid "top 30%" and "bottom 10%"
rankings amongst employees
We want employees to help each other,
and they doJust my opinion of course, but I found it a bit strange.
..unless i'm missing something
e: nevermind, they talk about a case of someone getting sick from overworking