I have almost exclusively worked for large corporations. In almost every one of them, there has been a central purchasing department that does nothing more than forward orders to a pre-approved supplier. I think you become a pre-approved supplier by kicking back a certain percentage of sales to the purchasing manager.

When faced with this, every place I have worked at has had a shadow IT department. Back in the pre-cloud days, this was the department buying equipment that IT didn't know about simply because the quoted price was too much or it took too long. These days, it's a manager whipping out the credit card and putting company data out on AWS or Azure. The usual "better to ask for forgiveness than beg per permission" applies here, and IT ends up supporting it anyway. Centralized purchasing doesn't work for IT stuff -- it *may* save you money on toilet paper and light bulbs, but IT is too complex to reduce to a line item in a PO.

This is just the government equivalent. The only reason we know about it is because the records are public.

I just turned 40 and am a happily married guy, so I haven't been "on the market" lately. But, I do know a lot of people, men and women, who are increasingly desperate and affected with the "urge to merge." $300K is excessive, and I think most reasonable people would have seen the light sooner. But I can definitely see this demographic being a good target for con artists. This guy even pushed the Italy button -- what lovesick middle aged woman doesn't dream of some crazy Tuscan romance fantasy?

That said, things are different now and it is harder for older people to find suitable partners -- they're fishing in a dwindling pool full of:
- Unpleasant, bitter divorcees who have had their personalities permanently ruined
- The unmarryable -- men and women -- who haven't been able to attract anyone due to serious flaws of one kind or another
- The permanently single -- aka the creepy 55 year old guy still hitting on women in the bar with no intention of settling down or even being honest

Every woman around my age mentions this as their problem. Some might say they're being too picky, but I definitely see their point. If your choices are limited, and someone suddenly comes along who isn't a player, doesn't live in Mom's basement, and isn't an RMS clone, I could see being very vulnerable.

Sure, but this would be after getting rid of 90% of their IT department, selling the data center, and realizing they have to pay Amazon or Microsoft a not-insignificant sum to move petabytes of data/VMs back out. Data transfer to the cloud is free, transfers out cost a lot of money.

I have been through a couple of offshoring exercises. What usually happens is the company is sold a dream, the reality fails to materialize, and the company needs to just wait out the contract because they no longer have the expertise to run everything in house. They'll never admit that things failed - they'll just quietly rebuild things while the contract is running and try to mitigate damage. This is why offshore providers are still able to sell crappy service, no one who's been burned wants to talk about it. CIOs and other execs just see the lower number on the spreadsheet, say to themselves "Gsrtner thinks they're wonderful, so they must be!" and sign the contract.

I've been doing systems work for quite a while, and The Cloud isn't making things easier for IT workers -- it's making them more complex as there are now more moving parts you don't control to consider. Our company is still mainly an on-premises shop because we deploy stuff in areas where The Cloud can't be accessed at a reasonable speed for a reasonable price. But, I would say that virtualization in general has made things a lot more...fluid...than before. What's needed now is more people who know integration and the end-to-end nature of a system. I'm not talking about master black belt CCIE MCSE RHCE whatever savant experts...just people who have the ability to break a problem up into parts, troubleshoot what they can, and know who can help with what they can't.

In previous days, you had the Storage Guys (or Girls) that would do the magical incantations to convince a SAN to provision a LUN to your machine, the Server Guys who would manage the operating system, the Application Guys who would manage the program running on the server, the Network Guys who did all the connectivity magic, and the Data Center Guys who would install and fix physical equipment. Each one of those was a specialty, and still is to some extent. But, as more and more small VMs can be squeezed onto fewer and fewer boxes, there's less of a need for an infrastructure guy. As storage gets more virtual and easier to self-provision, the storage guys become more of a commodity. And if your company goes AWS, Azure or similar, all those Guys get replaced with a web interface and it becomes someone else's problem. I'm still totally amazed how many machines fit on a single HP DL380p physical server compared to what was possible even 5 years ago. And the public cloud services are even more interesting -- multi-football field size isolated rural data centers with thousands of machines and 4 employees to swap parts/install more nodes.

I think the future in IT is going to be less on the front lines and more cross-specialty, regardless of whether your data is onsite or offsite. In house coders are probably going to have problems because every single company is being sold the cloudy Salesforce or other ERP system as the cure for all its ills, so dev jobs are going to shift more towards software companies. Infrastructure guys will still be needed, but they'll be working at a higher level doing design/architecture rather than physical server management. There will still be analyst and project manager jobs, but I think those will be even less technical than they are now. Analysts will solely be an interface between "the business" and "the cloud guys". PMs will be secretaries who beg people to get things done. Add in the constant threat of offshoring, and salaries are definitely going to drop. I think they're probably going to go bimodal -- even lower pay for basic tasks, but similar or maybe even more pay for engineers/designers/architects who can successfully make the transition.

No one is capable of stopping The Cloud. The vendors will continue to sell companies on how wonderful it is, and the companies will find out after a while that it costs too much to get their data back and rebuild their own capacity on-site. I'm just hoping that good people will be allowed to work remotely so there won't be some massive migration that IT guys need to do to survive.

I think a lot of people are thinking about the 1950s style of institutionalizing the mentally ill as being the norm now. It's not. Mentally ill people are pretty much left to fend for themselves, and there is an extremely high bar to putting someone in a mental hospital. States closed almost all of their hospitals in the 70s through the 90s, mostly because of budget problems. (Long term patients used to work as part of their rehab, and when it was ruled they couldn't work for free anymore the model collapsed.) Personally I think some of the capacity should have been retained for medium term stays -- let people work their problems out without having to be put in prison where there is no chance of recovery.

Most truly disturbed people wind up in jail for acting out, or they are homeless on the street. Less disturbed people can be treated without locking them up these days. It's not like it was, when people would be sent away for years or lobotomized because of a panic attack or depression. This is happening because Scientologists don't believe in psychiatry or that mental illness is a physical disease. Most mentally ill people are fine living on their own - it's the occasional shooting, kidnapping or pushing people off subway platforms that gets the most attention.

How many of you run a small tech support department for your entire computer-illiterate extended family? How many times have you come into a situation to find a Windows XP SP1 laptop with no antivirus, logged on as the local administrator account, with all the data eaten by CryptoLocker?

This is why Microsoft is making updates to the Home edition of Windows 10 mandatory. PCs that are patched and not running 5000 phishing toolbars have less of a chance of being part of a botnet. This is also the key differentiator between Home and Pro. Pro users can join a domain, control their own updates, and run whatever they want. Home users are protected from themselves. The average idiot who buys the $299 PC from Best Buy is not concerned with managing their own updates, or to some extent how the machine even works. I sometimes do on the side work for local small businesses, and you wouldn't believe how many of them have all their vital business records stored on one of the 10-pound, 17", 2007-era blinged-out consumer laptops complete with bright blue LEDs and chrome stripes down the side. Invariably, they're running XP Home Edition because that's what it came with, and why spend any more money on it??

In my opinion this is a good thing. The mobile boom has basically made end user computing available to everyone. Computers aren't just geek toys anymore, and some people don't see much difference between their phone, tablet and PC. Phones (Apple and Android) are a walled garden -- people don't expect to be able to do anything the carrier or OS manufacturer doesn't let them do. Blame Apple or Google if you want, but this is the new trend in end user systems. Locked down is the norm for the average user, the power user can still have the Pro version.

The thing to watch is to make sure this stays in the Home camp and that they don't start forcing Pro users down this path.

"So put your cards on the table, then, what do you think they're going to do exactly? They're going to offer it for free and then send the leg-breakers around to people's houses in a year asking for protection money? They're going to spring a monthly fee rental on people after they've installed it, and when people complain and threaten to sue they're going to laugh maniacally?"

I don't think that's going to happen right away. I think they're going to use the next few years of rolling updates to get the average consumer used to the Windows as a Service model. Then, at least for the Home version, they're going to come out with Windows 365 when "Windows 11" is ready. The Pro and Enterprise versions will probably still be available in perpetual license format (They already committed to a long term stable (LTS) branch of 10 for companies.) The carrot for going to Windows 365 will be the availability of features. Look at Mac Office 2016 -- available now only if you have an Office 365 subscription, otherwise you need to wait till September to buy a licensed copy. The next step might be no more perpetual licensing.

I actually like Windows, but I'm not a fan of the constant rental fees for software. Adobe went that way with Creative Cloud, and people basically have no choice but to keep paying forever. AutoCAD is now rent-only as well.

Microsoft hasn't exactly lavished attention on downlevel operating system versions once the new one comes out. This is especially true with Windows 8 -- they're looking to bury that as quickly as possible. It's very similar to when Windows 7 / 2008 R2 came out. Anyone still running Vista or Server 2008 was "encouraged" to upgrade because no new features were being back ported to previous versions.

I expect the same thing is going to happen with Windows 7. For example, Server 2008 R2 has had a few 2012 features at least partially available to earlier operating systems. I expect this is going to stop, and the bare minimum level of patch support is going to be put in place for both 8.1 and 7.

Windows 10 really isn't all that bad. They brought back just enough of the classic desktop to keep people from revolting, and I really wish they would have done more. But it's very stable, and once Cortana/Microsoft account links/live tiles have been turned off, it's a good general purpose OS. I wish Microsoft would put the Store and Windows Phone out of its misery though. I know they're going to try to force all new development onto the Universal app platform, but hopefully they'll keep backward compatibility in for a long time.

I do systems integration work, and most of the companies I work with are airlines or somehow connected with air transportation. Besides banks, airlines were the first companies to computerize, and a lot of that legacy is still baked into modern systems.

I've read about MUMPS, never programmed in it, but I see huge parallels in my work. The language was written back when every single byte of memory was expensive, hence the need for single character keywords. Airline systems were built out at a time when every single byte of data transferred over a comm link was super expensive. This is why an experienced reservation agent can complete a flight booking in about a minute if they know all the parameters -- the command language they use on most res systems is extremely terse.

The other thing is that most industries outside of legacy-land don't have literally man-decades worth of prior systems work to support. Everything user-facing these days (kiosks, airline web sites, etc.) is built on a framework of message-passing to mainframes at one level or another. And it must work and continue to work. Your average Node.js coder has no such limitations -- they just open up an AWS account, take a database server here, a web server here, slap some glue code together, and presto...iPhone app! It gets way harder when your bottleneck is something that just can't be fixed because it needs to continue working that way, because 1000 other systems are depending on that component to stay the same.

I can definitely see MUMPS being something like that -- horrible to work with but nearly impossible to replace with something modern. You can't just swap out a mainframe if your availability or I/O requirements don't allow you to use anything else, for example. Most legacy stuff can and does have some of the components replaced or abstracted away, such as terminal session management or data access for chunks of the application that don't require the power or availability of the underlying mainframe. Maybe the main thing driving MUMPS still is that in-memory database paradigm they support or just the sheer volume of business logic that would have to be rewritten to work with a regular DBMS. Either way, I wouldn't want to be forced to program in it. Go download the source code for the VA's Vista system, written entirely in MUMPS. It made my brain hurt.

"Eventually everything except core expertise associated with your business identity will move out-of-house and be purchased as a service."

But guess what? All of those best of breed service providers need to make money and will charge accordingly. At the same time, they will maximize profit by squeezing every single inefficiency out of a process, leading to low wages and/or massive unemployment. Plus, it ends up costing a business more in the long run to outsource anything given that need to make money.

The economy on a macro scale needs some inefficiencies. I'm not touting myself as some uber-genius (pun intended,) but if you've ever worked for a large corporation, look at your co-workers. How many C-student folks have wandered out of college with a generic business degree in the last 40 years and landed in some random corporate department? At the micro scale, you say "That's terrible, we should fire everyone who doesn't contribute over 120% of their goal production every single year." At the macro scale, that argument gets way tougher to make. Each one of those C students pays employment taxes, many pay property taxes, and many are having little C students to keep society moving. Most use that nice comfortable job they have to purchase houses, cars, and other things that make the economy go around. The argument that the world is full of Supermen and Superwomen who could unleash their full potential if the system would just get out of their way is false when you expand it to a real population.

I know most techies are devout Ayn Rand fans, and love the idea of the invisible hand of the free market controlling everything with no more government in the way. However, let me play Devil's advocate for a second. What will you think when this invisible hand comes for your work? There is nothing stopping most companies from offshoring every single IT job out there, except for the communication and talent issue. Here's the stark reality - the entirety of society since the 50s has been set up around the following:
- A post-high school education of some kind, college or trade school followed by...
- A 40 to 45 year work life providing a living wage in a steady paycheck that increased with time/inflation
- A 20 or so year retirement life in which you would spend down a pension or savings while waiting to die
- A need to purchase housing and put down roots in a community, this engendering employer/employee loyalty

The "sharing economy" wants to drop all that, putting everyone on permanent day laborer status. Establishing roots in a community is replaced with transient living, moving every 2 years or so, and never building up equity in a house. This works great in your early 20s - you live in a hipster loft with 3 roommates in a large city, spend most of your paycheck on restaurants and bars/clubs, and don't mind contract work because you value flexibility. The game changes a lot when you settle down and have children. I'm not "that old", I just turned 40. I really like the idea of staying in one place and having a steady stream of income to pay for my family's expenses. I'm normally a very PC person, but the fact of the matter is that transient living negatively correlates with school district quality -- this applies in cities and migrant worker communities equally. Keeping kids in an environment that doesn't change abruptly all the time lets them focus on learning. Keeping parents gainfully employed and not worrying about where the next meal is coming from lets them focus on their family, a virtuous cycle.

I know there are plenty of contractors in IT and software dev pulling down huge hourly rates, and I can definitely see how they say "Hey, I love this gig economy, don't mess with it." I personally know a couple who don't even have permanent residences since it doesn't make any sense - they make bucketloads of money so they just live in hotels all year jumping from client site to client site. That's not the target of Clinton's remarks IMO -- she's most likely targeting the idea that companies can basically get low-level, poorly compensated employees without paying the costs associated with traditional employees. The macro-level society-level transition from a stable work life to a transient one is going to be pretty scary, possibly on the French Revolution scale. Unless it's managed properly, things will be very messy for the average worker.

Speaking of average workers -- other advocates of the gig economy like to tout how much value they add to their employers' businesses relative to others. People need to look in the mirror and realistically assess their value. Anecdote != data, but I just stayed at a business hotel over the weekend for a family trip. It was a lot of fun listening to the empty suit Accenture consultants bloviating about how awesome they were to each other in the bar. Come on man, you travel the country giving canned PowerPoint presentations to corporate executives who are too scared to make decisions without cover of a consulting firm. That's not value!

Am I saying that FTE work is the best option and no one should be allowed to be an itinerant worker? No way. I'm saying that the playing field should be level between both camps, and it's not right now. That's where that evil word regulation comes in.

I actually feel bad for lawyers/law students. Yes, yes, cue the lawyer jokes, but what's happening to law is a perfect example of what's coming for basically all white collar work in the future. Hopefully I'll be retired or dead before it fully takes over. It's also a preview of what's happening in IT, accelerated significantly, so it should be taken as a cautionary tale.

It used to be that even doing an OK job in law school and passing the bar was an absolutely guaranteed ticket to permanent employment at the very least, and firm partner/country club lifestyle at the top end. From what I've read, the American Bar Association has done exactly what is being done in IT in the last 20 years:
- Increased the supply of new grads by accrediting more and more law schools.
- Decreased the equilibrium price of legal services by allowing offshoring of routine tasks as well as expert systems like the article is talking about. Apparently you needed to pay a full lawyer salary previously to have case documents reviewed for discovery, etc. Now new law grads are doing this job for Starbucks wages.
- Encouraging more and more people to get into the lucrative field of law, failing to mention the lack of opportunities.

Sound familiar? Tech executives complaining about a labor shortage fund extra educational programs, they offshore work, and they have the H1-B to fall back on.

Apparently, there are still insanely lucrative law jobs out there. Big corporate firms start their associates at $160K a year in New York, plus bonus. If you stay on that track, you will never want for money again -- you'll be well into the luxury lifestyle forever. BUT - there's a catch. You have to go to one of the top 14 law schools in the country, preferably Harvard/Yale/Stanford, graduate in the very top of your class, and do activities like law review on top of all that. Otherwise, you might as well not even go to law school, because you'll never make back your investment. There are tons of pissed off law grads in this boat -- I would be too if I were told there would be guaranteed riches at the end of the rainbow and wasted 3 years of my life plus bar exam preparation time.

Right now, the only professions that are safe are medicine and pharmacy. Mostly this is due to a very strong lobbying group (AMA) and the regulations/licensure surrounding the profession. I think it's definitely time to license the engineering/design side of IT and make the operations side a trade with all the protections that entails. I know I'd be a lot more comfortable if new entrants into the IT field went through an actual apprenticeship as opposed to a Ruby on Rails coder bootcamp or MCSE certification mill. Plus, having the actual engineers/architects licensed would bring personal liability into the picture and result in higher quality work overall. Time for the profession to grow up and get out of Mom's basement, so to speak.

"For my money, anyone over 13 years old is aware of their actions and if they are defective enough to SWAT once, let alone multiple times, they should be incarcerated indefinitely in a mental health facility and banned from any phone or internet connected devices for life. "

There are no more mental health facilities the way you're thinking of them. All the institutions closed in the 80s and 90s. Now, you pretty much need to be Hannibal Lechter to get a mental health inpatient bed; you need to be so dangerous to yourself or others that the only choice is to keep you locked up and attempt to treat you. Prison is the new asylum for most mid-level mentally ill people.

When I can be bothered to install AdBlock on a machine, the responsiveness goes up significantly. I'm guessing most of the speed increase isn't in the downloading of resources, but the messy JavaScript that has to run in the browser to position everything.

On a related note, I also remember hearing something about when the new CEO of JCPenney took over, his team noticed that almost 1/3 of all network traffic coming out of their HQ was YouTube. That's a LOT of cat videos. It's enough trying to balance control and freedom on desktops; I can't imagine having to police the company Internet connection.