Our company has a Premier Support account manager at Microsoft, and I can't even get a straight answer out of him, so either the communications are really screwed up about this or they're being very tight-lipped.

I'm guessing that this is part of their new "no frozen releases" cloud-enabled release cycle. It's no secret that Microsoft wants people off the on-premises software because they want to collect recurring revenue. Constantly rolling in new features is going to be the way they get customers used to the idea. Apple does it with iOS, and most people (consumers) are comfortable with constantly-changing software. Businesses are a whole different story.

I still am trying to figure out how Microsoft is going to support enterprise customers with the constant release of patches plus feature changes. (August's Internet Explorer patch broke Java on enterprise desktops, and while it's a good idea for consumers who never update the bug-ridden JRE, it makes for a lot of headaches. There is no end to crappy IE-only, JRE 1.4-only, hastily thrown together "enterprise" Java applets.) Speaking as an end user computing person, targeting master images around SP1 of an OS release has been a pretty good standard. Service Packs or at least Update Rollups have been a convenient point to stop the integration work at, make all the desktop apps hang together, and concentrate on regression testing of patches. Without these big milestones anymore, it's going to get harder to roll out a stable platform for people.

Microsoft's in an interesting spot. They could just ignore business customers and force everyone onto the cloud, which I doubt they'll do right away. I also doubt they'll have the courage to backtrack and give people back all the features in Windows 7. However small it is, they now have a whole App Store ecosystem to support, and it's apparently going to be even more important since they're merging Windows and Windows Phone. Whatever happens, I'm sure someone has said that Windows 9 is going to have to be a huge hit with both the desktop and the tablet crowd. 8.1 is now usable with keyboard and mouse...hopefully Windows 9 will allow desktop-only users to not have to switch between Metro and desktop to do things like use the control panel. I hear the Charms thing is going away-- that's a huge help for desktop users. I think if Microsoft actually listened to customers, then they'll be in a good spot. Traditional desktop users don't want change as drastic as the 7-to-8 transition -- you have to introduce stuff like this slowly. Everyone hated the Ribbon in Office 2007, and some people still do, but most people are used to it now.

I think my #1 feature request would be to put Aero Glass back into the OS, plus better theme support in general. The 2D Windows 2.x look is really awful if you're not on a tablet. The OS under the hood is actually quite good...unfortunately performance and stability enhancements don't sell licenses.

The problem is that you can't call it a union, even though programming is closer to a skilled trade than a profession. Most tech workers are lone wolves, Ayn Rand devotees, etc. who feel there's absolutely no benefit to something like this. I've heard lots of arguments where people's sole experience with unions boiled down to something like "I was at a trade show/hotel/construction site, and the IBEW guy refused to let me plug in my own equipment." They conveniently forget that those electricians are getting paid a decent wage and have work.

I think the only thing that will work in IT is a professional organization like the AMA. Doctors are never going to have their salaries reduced, and there will never be an oversupply of labor because of this organization. The AMA and the various specialist boards keep salaries high, make entry into the profession very difficult, and lobby for their members. Imagine if the IT profession were able to buy Congresspeople the same way large companies do...you would probably start seeing a lot more worker-friendly legislation coming out.

(Side note, I really wonder what happens in the "lobbying" process. If you're elected to Congress, do you just get a never-ending stream of free trips, gifts and prostitutes? Do the companies doing the lobbying just hand them money over in brown paper sacks? Or is it all "in kind" gifts?)

Anyone who has worked in the IT field long enough knows this truth -- there are rockstar, mediocre and just plain awful tech workers in both the foreign and domestic camps. However, other than people complaining in general about how awful people they have to work with are, I've never heard anyone say anything like "All US engineers/programmers/IT guys are universally bad and so my company should hire foreign workers so I get to work with the best of the best." (I've seen a lot of people who *think* they're the best of the best and aren't. I'm pretty good and would *never* give myself the label "rockstar" like some of these idiots do.)

The central argument against something like this isn't "I want my job protected at all costs against competition." It's the fact that large employers are working to reduce the baseline salary for everyone regardless of talent level. It sounds like the "vast, vast majority of tech engineers" interviewed for this aren't really workers -- they're probably startup founders given the lobbying org this guy works for (fwd.us). The guy who came up with Snapchat probably isn't coding anymore -- he's busy trying to convince people that Snapchat is worth 44 billion dollars.

I've worked in a few different companies, and been on lots of projects (I'm in IT services.) I've seen lots of perspectives. I was on the systems integration team for a very large offshored dev project to replace a critical system that basically had to be thrown out, taken back in house and reworked. I've also seen situations where offshore coding and H-1B holders end up doing decent work. The same goes for the US as well...I've been very fortunate to work with a few people who *really* knew their stuff in the little niche I work in. They're few and far between, and very expensive, but worth it. There's also horror stories...I remember one guy who basically BS'd his manager for over 3 years that he was administering a systems management application, but in reality he was doing the absolute bare minimum to keep it from falling over (and yes, I wound up having to clean up the mess.) I've dealt with systems guys who have absolutely no concept of troubleshooting, and just lack a grasp of the basics. Everyone starts out that way, but there are some people (domestic AND foreign) who don't put the effort into getting better. This is why arguments like this are so hard to completely refute, but on the other hand are mostly BS.

I think companies need to get back to investing in their employees and keeping them around for a while to see a return on that investment. If they did that, employees would be more loyal and employers wouldn't feel like (a) training money is "wasted" and (b) they need to hire a ready-made rockstar with every single skillset they could possibly need. Job descriptions are crazy -- they want everything, when in reality a good systems engineer can jump between hardware, software, operating systems, etc. pretty easily given enough time to learn the basics.

This is a big issue for me as well (I'm in systems integration, not dev, but we have very similar problems.)

- There's no equivalent of an ABET accreditation for training standards. I know lots of awesomely talented self-taught IT guys, but I also know a lot of people who just don't have the troubleshooting skills or discipline. (I would qualify as self-taught, coming from a science background.)
- Training is left up to vendors with an interest in selling products, as well as making IT professionals think their products are the only way to accomplish something. (Every OS, every packaged product, every database, is like this -- even for open source stuff.)
- There's no professional standards. Standards are extremely hard to nail down in a fast paced world, but I'm talking minimum stuff like secure coding and the low-level plumbing of network communication.
- There's no barrier to entry and no progression within the profession. It would be great if we could make sure people start out as technicians, then lead technicians, and THEN they start to get calling themselves senior, architect, whatever. How many Senior Systems Architects do you know who have amazingly huge gaps in their knowledge?
- Because there are no standards, or professional qualifications, there's no basis on which to hold someone accountable for a bad design. Their responsibility ends with "sorry."

I think some maturity and standards would do the software and systems worlds a lot of good. Employers wouldn't have to guess whether a candidate is lying to them regarding their abilities, professionals would be able to push back on stupid decisions based on a body of standards, etc. I think too many people think the equivalent of a P.E. is too much like a union, or they don't want the responsibility that a designation like that brings with it.

Your parents and grandparents were able to buy a house, two cards, and send 2 children to college on a single income. You can't.

I think there are two main factors driving this:
- Up until about the 70s, there was no competition for labor...the US was its own market and very few people ever even left the country for extended periods.
- The labor/management balance has shifted dramatically in favor of management.

The other component of your nostalgia moment was that your parents or grandparents were typically employed either for life by the same company, or by a small number of companies. Jobs were stable and employers invested in their employees, who in return had more loyalty. In the case of factory work, unions kept management in check and ensured their members got a decent middle class wage. I know this because I grew up in a Rust Belt city in the 70s/80s, and saw exactly what happens when this support structure is kicked out from under employees.

The problem today is that management is in the drivers' seat, and has convinced labor that they can be exactly like them if they just work harder and complain less. The "job creator" meme is very strong, even among the poor/unemployed, which is surprising. Not every employer is like this, I agree, but enough of them are that it affects everyone. I happen to be very lucky and working for a good employer, but when competitors start putting downward pressure on wages and benefits, it takes a very strong company with a good market position to hold the line.

It's interesting to watch how things oscillate from one extreme to the other. In computers, it's the shift from terminals connected to mainframes, to PCs, to terminals that look a lot like a smartphone, and now a little bit back towards PCs. I'm guessing this insourcing trend will start swinging back the other way once labor here gets too far above the price levels it's at now.

The company I work for basically the opposite of leading edge -- we do IT services for a very staid, downtime-averse, risk-averse industry segment. They're just starting to figure out that offshoring whole development groups isn't giving them the savings they predicted, a fact that most companies realized a lot sooner. So not every industry oscillates in phase, but the pattern is everywhere.

Serious question though, for those with experience...one of the most often cited problems US manufacturers complain about is the lack of skilled factory workers. What exactly do people need in the way of skills that they didn't have 20-30 years ago when the manufacturing was offshored originally? If it's just running CNC equipment or similar, isn't all the programming and such done by the engineers? What is the skill they need?

The problem with implementing something like this in a US company is the staffing model. European companies tend to have more people doing similar jobs, so that one person actually can fill in for another. Most out of office messages say something like "I'm not here, please contact my manager XYZ for assistance." 9 times out of 10, there's no backup person who can actually provide an answer, simply because there's no backup staff that knows enough to solve a problem.

The other issue is that at least in IT, most places still allow individuals to knowledge-hoard. Often it's unintentional (see understaffing above) because there's simply no time to ensure someone else knows about what you do. But sometimes people do this in a misguided quest for job security. Also, a very small number of people do it to cover something up -- there stories out there about people who found loopholes in purchasing/accounting systems and used them to write checks to themselves or divert equipment...and only got caught when someone else started reviewing things they had been handling themselves.

In my opinion, a lot of the knowledge-hoarding would stop if people were able to trust their employers to keep them employed, or to at least treat them fairly if they had to be laid off. Sure, implementing worker-friendly policies would probably be expensive in the short run, but I can't tell you the number of times I've walked into a new job where the previous individual held all the tribal knowledge about a system or process. I think this policy is a very good one -- especially for employees who work a stressful job and have family commitments, etc. Being able to completely ignore everything during a vacation would be something many employees would stick around to keep. Personally, I have a very busy work schedule and 2 little kids at home. Between not sleeping normally and often having to use my downtime to finish extra work, I would _love_ to be able to say "here, this is your problem now" for 2 weeks. (I wouldn't even have to go anywhere...just put me somewhere to turn off my brain for a couple days.)

It'll never happen here though -- there are too many people who buy into the "job creators" meme and let their employers walk all over them...everyone who even suggests a worker-friendly policy is a lazy entitled socialist here.

I think one of the things they're missing about college is the overall experience. Adults going back for a degree might want a stripped down experience like this, but I think that students going through their first post-high school education experience benefit from "being somewhere." I graduated about 15 years ago, but even with all the change in the world, there's still no shortage of immature, directionless high school seniors.

Going somewhere to college and dealing with all that this entails gives a student that bridge into the real world. Especially if a student was helicoptered over by their parents and wasn't challenged by K-12 education, gaining experience with failure, stress and dealing with people is very important so you don't get fired from your first job. Some of the things a student has to do during their college career that an online classroom can't provide are:
- Dealing with dorm living and roommates (interpersonal skills, uncomfortable situations, etc.)
- Working to hard deadlines that don't get extended just because you ask
- Getting that first awful set of exam results that makes you realize you actually have to study for the first time in your life
- Getting exposed to classes outside their comfort zone
- Dealing with bad professors, toxic classmates, etc (perfect prep for a real world job)
- Navigating social situations, drinking, partying, drugs, all that stuff
- Learning basic self-care if they live away from home (laundry, cooking)
- Most likely, learning how to hold down a job while balancing all your other responsibilities
- Living on an incredibly limited budget (I remember thinking I was the richest man alive when I got my first real world job after school.)
- Especially if you're at a large state university like I was, learning how to work within a system. (Everything outside the classroom is similar to dealing with a state agency...if you approach it like that it becomes a lot less frustrating.)

So, yes college is incredibly expensive, tuition has to come down, etc. etc. -- but other than the military, how does a high school student make the transition from being a dumb kid to being a responsible adult?

Nope. Our customers have experienced all of the bad things you've heard about with Wipro and their ilk.

And yes, there are plenty of stereotypical brogrammer worker bees as well. I was just highlighting the fact that putting these types in charge just breeds more of them over time as they try to act like the boss.

Hmm, let's put thousands and thousands of socially maladjusted techies together in one region, appoint a bunch of hypersocialized "brogrammer" types as their bosses, and see what happens. What could possibly go wrong???

I work in the "tech industry" but I work for a specialized IT services firm, which is almost the polar opposite of a bubble-fueled Internet startup. I watched the dotcom bubble inflate and pop, and now this one's on the way out too. By contrast, the people I work with are totally normal. Some have their quirks, but we have very few jerks. Steve Jobs may be the poster child for "tech visionary" but people conveniently forget that he was an absolute jerk and people hated to work for him. In my mind, anyone who emulates that is someone I definitely don't want to work with.

The "techie asshole" personality really does feed on itself. Take a bunch of recent grads with no real world experience and put them under someone trying to channel Jobs, Zuckerberg or similar. Pretty soon, everyone starts acting like that. I'm not surprised at how much sexual harassment goes on in these environments given this fact. It doesn't help that the press is falling all over itself to pump these guys up and give them superhuman status. Yes, smartphones are cool. Yes, people are walking around with $800 touchscreen computers in their pockets that let them do more than they used to. But in my mind, all these late-bubble-stage startups are doing is creating one-off websites competing for everyone's attention. No one's really inventing much new -- it's all about advertising, page views and the sale of your personal data. Some stuff that has come out in the last few years is extremely cool, but a lot of it seems a lot like the very late 90s when the bubble was the frothiest it had been and everyone is piling on hoping to cash out before the big pop.

When the original Panama Canal was built, there were huge engineering problems that couldn't be easily solved. What will be interesting to see is how quickly this one will be completed with modern technology, modern medicine against tropical diseases, etc. I thought there were plans to widen the existing Panama Canal - were those scrapped?

The other interesting thing to see is China making these huge investments in other countries. Having a competitor for the Panama Canal would really change international trade. I also heard China is investing heavily in Africa and the Middle East, basically for leverage against the US and Europe. It may be one telecom billionaire making the investment, but I'm sure the Chinese government is going to do anything it can to help.

One of the things most people see as a bug but I see as a feature with China is their ability to just do things. There's no debate, no fighting with Congress, etc...they can just tell millions of people to move out of the way of an infrastructure project (e.g. Three Gorges Dam.) That's going to be a huge advantage they have over the West during this century. Another big shift that China is basically just making happen by fiat is the forced urbanization of the country...moving peasant farmers off their land and into cities (which is what those "Ghost Cities" are supposed to be for.) Just look at the fights that happen when someone's land is claimed by eminent domain for a construction project in the US...none of that happens there, and anyone who complains is marginalized.

On one hand, some people might say they paid a huge amount of money for a product that had this (locked) functionality built in, and they have the right to hack it. On another, it's not a trivial amount of effort to write the software that does the analysis, so I could see why a company wants to protect its intellectual property. Otherwise, why would they bother? They would have to ship the device at a higher price to cover the cost of developing the features.

I think the solution here is for the companies to implement reasonable security. Cisco is famous (at least lately) for shipping crippled hardware that is fully capable of performing the functions that are unlocked by various licenses. They implement it as a soft key that ties in with the device serial number (i.e. pay your money, go online to Cisco, give them the license code and your serial number, and they give back another code to enter into the device. And presto, instant feature. Another example I have right here at work is an IBM DS3500 disk array. There are feature keys for everything -- volume snapshots, remote copy, SSD support, increased number of hosts, and a very mysterious, strangely named "Turbo Performance" option [1]. So this is nothing new -- my disk array is running the base configuration and I'm fully aware the controllers in it are shipped with these capabilities. It's weird having to buy $10K pieces of paper, but I see why they do it.

It seems like Tektronix was relying on security through obscurity and they assumed no one would try to build hardware keys to work around their feature protection. HP recently did something similar with the ProLiant and Integrity server line that Oracle/Sun did a while back -- they simply stated that no firmware upgrades would be available on their machines without a warranty or service contract. As someone why buys old hardware for fun, it makes it difficult to get it to the last firmware that HP released for it. But, fixing firmware isn't free, so there's that angle as well. I think the HP/Sun/Oracle stuff is aimed more at forcing you to buy service from them, so it's a little different.

[1] Side note - even the reseller who sold us the device couldn't tell us what Turbo Performance did. After a lot of digging, I figured out that this option is used when you add tons of disk shelves to the array, and it lifts an artificial performance cap on the controllers.

The current culture in IT is a breeding ground for problems like this. LinkedIn is a public company now, but I'm sure they still operate in Silicon Valley start up mode trying to grind 80-hour weeks out of everyone without paying for them or staffing appropriately.

I know it's a total pipe dream, but I have an idea that would get IT the representation it needed without the Randian folk getting upset about unions...a professional organization. The AMA ensures high salaries for physicians by limiting the number of spots in medical school as well as setting a high bar for licensure. Professional Engineers (the actual licensed kind) are liable for their work and can refuse to sign off on things that they deem unsafe. Law is a bad example (the ABA went down the same roads we in IT are traveling.) Professional organizations would bring at least a minimum level of universal training to the field. Right now, what passes for education beyond a CS degree is provided by vendors with a vested interest in you buying their product. Projects that you see all over the IT press that blow up after millions of wasted dollars were flushed down the toilet probably would have a better chance of getting shot down right away.

The problem is that there would have to be a split in the field with regards to job duties, and I don't know how that would be easily separated. Things like tech support, documentation and basic systems administration might be better classed as paraprofessional jobs so that things like OT and on-call hours would be easier to ensure compliance on. And on the other side, systems architects and engineers would need to step their game up...mandatory continuing education, etc. Right now, skill levels and education experiences vary wildly. Hiring someone involves either giving them ridiculous tests to see if they're lying about their experience or just hoping you can smell BS. It would be a good thing for employers as well in the long run.

I'm sure things will have to get very bad indeed for anything to happen given the culture in IT. IT people have really done a good job convincing themselves that they're white collar professionals, lone wolves and would never need any leverage against an employer. Having a professional organization rather than a union would probably quiet some of this, espeically when people see that they could increase their income and improve working conditions for everyone by doing it. The problem is the toxic "job creators vs. lazy entitled workers" meme -- people need to realize that business owners aren't just going to welcome you into their club if you play by their rules. It's an adversarial relationship, always has been, and people need to treat it that way. Workers will always try to get more for their labor, and management will always try to squeeze as hard as they can. The only way to balance that out is to organize.

I'm in systems engineering/administration, so the vast majority of my "coding" experience is focused on automation and scripting. Predictably, stuff like this is very procedural and different from application development. However, the biggest shift I've seen is not really in the complexity of tools, but the shift in focus to gluing together pre-defined parts. Sure, languages have always had standard libraries, but development (especially in the mobile OS or web framework environments) often leaves me trying to figure out how much I would have to code from scratch and how much work has been done for me simply by including Massive Functional Library X. Don't get me wrong, it's a good thing to not have to do everything yourself, but I sometimes wonder how much control one gives up when they just write an app by putting someone else's code together.

One example from my side of the fence is Windows PowerShell. It's amazing, but it really requires a complete shift in thinking if you're used to writing VBScript. JavaScript or batch language automation. With the other languages, you have to write lots of code to parse command output or iterate through a WMI structure. Some of the stuff is so complex that sysadmins who don't really know the under-the-hood workings just cargo cult the whole thing and make a mess. PowerShell became useful to me when I realized I no longer had to write chunks of code solely dedicated to reading the contents of formatted CSV files. Lots of the complexity of that rolls up into a line or two of script. Again, it's not a bad thing, but if you're used to DIY, it makes you wonder how the "magic" is being done. When you move up the stack (iOS, Android, etc.) that abstraction is even more stark...as in, just call this library which handles the entire database-access layer that used to be huge amounts of coding.

The last dotcom boom seemed to be mostly about eyeballs and getting people on the web. Now the popular meme is that Millenials are the new hot group to market to, and they are constantly glued to their smartphone of choice 24/7. However, just like the popular images of the fedora-wearing tech hipster and others, how much does this picture of a hyper-connected, distracted, wants-to-be-advertised-to-24/7 Millenial match with actual people?

Sure, you can easily point out tons of people watching movies on their 4" screens, listening to music through tiny earbuds and devouring social media. I'm just not sure _everyone_ under 30 is like that. Stories like this that predict a relatively small technology enhancement will fundamentally change the nature of commerce were pretty common at the end of the last boom too. Couple that with some of the (admittedly less insane) IPOs lately and billion dollar valuations on websites that don't make money right now, and you're looking at the last gasps of inflation for Bubble 2.0. My prediction is that social media, tablets, apps and so on will live on, but they're going to be less front-and-center in peoples' lives as people get tired of it. Everyone I've ever talked to who has an iPad or other tablet says the same thing -- it's a good content consumption device but they still need a computer for anything more complex than email.

The security implications of hotel room access through smartphone could be interesting. Done properly, it's probably as safe as Prox badges or traditional keys. However, given that this is a large hotel chain, I guarantee they're going to farm the app development out to the rock-bottom bidder. This happens all the time with large companies that say, "OMG we need tablet and phone apps NOW!!" It's kind of a given that version 1.0 is going to have problems...plus, I'm not sure everyone is so averse to dealing with people that they would want to check into a hotel without stopping at the front desk. (Hint: If you're not a jerk to the front desk staff, and ask for something cheap like a room upgrade, you're likely to get it, which is something an app's business logic won't do unless you're Triple Executive Platinum 1K Plus.)