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 Wednesday, August 14, 2002
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An evening with Regis McKenna
Tonight I went to an event put on by The Entrepreneurs Resource Network, where Regis McKenna was the featured speaker, promoting his new book, Total Access. He is a good speaker, funny, and and a good storyteller. He also comes across as being very smart. I don't think that I can do justice to his ideas in a late night blog post, but suffice it to say that I had a new perspective on marketing after the night was over. Part of that is the history of marketing that he carries around in his head -- he spent a long time talking about what marketing was all about in the early 1900's -- distribution and enabling the consumer to buy. He also talked about how many more choices consumers have today than they had even 15 years ago. The statistic that stuck in my head was that WalMart now has 300,000 SKU's that they carry, and that WalMart updates the database of what people have purchased nationwide every 90 minutes. Holey Moley!
Regis McKenna closed with a funny story to illustrate how different the buying experience is today from the past, and what assumptions our kids are growing up with. He was driving somewhere with his two granddaughters, 7 and 9, and his father-in-law. His granddaughters were lobbying to have him buy them an iMac. McKenna said to his grandchildren, "but does the iMac come with enough software? - Maybe we should look into computers that have more software bundled in with them." The 7 year old replied, "But if I need more software, I can always get it over the internet", and the father-in-law chimed in with "Yeah, Dummy".
I don't know enough to recommend buying the book Total Access, at this point, although I plan to, but I can highly recommend going to see him talk while he is on the book tour circuit. Hearing him speak reminded me of what I miss most about not having a full-time job -- not getting to spend the day interacting in person with really smart people. Also, I was reminded how everybody is connected, especially towards the top of social and financial networks. While chatting with him after the talk, I discovered that he is having dinner tomorrow night with my old boss at GO Corporation, Bill Campbell aka "Coach", currently chairman of Intuit. They worked together at Apple almost 20 years ago. Small World.
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| Monday, August 12, 2002
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Just mean
Business 20 reports that somebody lured 50 out-of-work high tech job hunters to a supposed job interview at a Palo Alto Starbucks, where they all found out it was a hoax. Whoever played this prank should be sentenced to a week sharing an cube with John Ashcroft. It is rough enough out there without people intentionally making it harder.
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| Wednesday, August 07, 2002
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What does the future hold for software developers?
Some people seem to love bad news. And I must confess, reading the news and blogging every night probably hasn't made me a cheerier person. If it isn't terrorism, it's the war on civil liberties. If it isn't war, it's the economy. At least the job market is going great guns <g>.
A couple days ago I ran into this gem, a depressing riff on the future of software developers by Phil Wolff, which he wrote after reading an InfoWorld column by Bob Lewis. Lewis talked about how programming jobs are being exported to India and other countries where there are high quality programmers who will work for substantially lower wages than American developers. Lewis' advice to software engineers: Find a different field of endeavor. Unless you're in the top rank, there's little future for you in IT. [of course that doesn't explain how to deal with engineers' seemingly congenital belief that they are all in the top rank.]
Phil Wolff's riff has a lot of good reasoning as to why it is easier than it has ever been to export programming jobs overseas, which can be summarized in one word - Internet. Plus there are an increasing number of good software engineers overseas. While he makes the point that technical people with so-called soft skills (like project management) or jobs that require a lot of face time don't face as much competition, he basically concludes that Lewis is right, and that American software engineers are going to face rapidly increasing competition and downward wage pressure from overseas engineers.
I've been noodling on this for a little while and decided to try to get some unformed thoughts on this out there into the blogosphere to see what others think (one of the advantages of writing for free is that you can do stuff like this, instead of waiting until you have all the loose ends tightened up.)
It seems crazy to be predicting a long-term surplus of software engineers when three years ago I was offering newly minted college grads what seemed to me to be obscene amounts of money plus bonuses to come work for my company (and they thought they had somehow earned the right to that much money). And we have heard this warning before -- I have a book in my bookshelf (unread, I confess) called The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer, published in 1992, that warned of exactly this future. It certainly didn't come true in the late 1990's. I have learned to be very wary of trying to predict the future using reasoning - there are always factors that you don't account for which end up having huge effects. People thought the internet would be big in 1996, but who would have predicted the excesses of the internet boom before Netscape went public? Finally, my career in high-tech has all been with startups working on new products and new technologies, where the spec and the dates get revised frequently, and the ability to communicate and to change rapidly when new data comes in (or the boss gets some bright idea :-) is critical to success. Attempts to outsource that kind of work seem doomed for failure. I can't imagine having outsourced the development of a new embedded OS for instance, although I did successfully outsource things like the IrDA stack, and had an outside company do a great job. In my experience, one of the keys to success in outsourcing is tightly defining the deliverable, and understanding the costs, direct and indirect of making changes to the deliverable. In running a consulting business, one of the most lucrative though frustrating situations is having a client who constantly changes his or her mind. But when you develop something that really is new, you have to change a lot on the way.
It seems to me that there will be downward wage pressure from the availability of qualified software engineers overseas, as well as from the availability of high quality Open Source software, which none of these authors mention. But the likelihood that the American Programmer will "decline" is dependent on how fast the rate of change in the software business is, and if it remains led by the US. I have worked through two booms, the rise of PC software in the mid-1980's and the rise of the net in the latter half of the 1990's, and in both cases the rate of change in everything that a developer needed to know was extremely high. New tools, new languages, and new platforms rose and fell by the wayside rapidly. Large numbers of new products for users were imagined, developed, marketed, copied and sometimes sold. Companies grew rapidly and failed rapidly. These were not conditions under which managers could outsource work, and it is hard to imagine that changing. I also worked through the doldrums of the early to mid 1990's, where it seemed like most development was incremental or me-too, and the lawyers were the one who got to be creative (remember the Lotus-Borland and Apple-Microsoft look and feel lawsuits?). A lot of that development could easily be outsourced. So which is the future going to look like? I don't know, although I fear that given the economy and the excesses of the internet boom, for the immediate future it will look a lot more like the doldrums. However, I'm betting that the roller coaster will come back around again in a while, and I'm ready for another ride.
Sorry about the length. I'm gonna learn how to do that >>>more<<< thing.
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| Friday, August 02, 2002
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The state of the Bay Area economy
Articles like Silicon Valley mood worsens seem designed to depress job hunters, especially with quotes like"For the grizzled, experienced CEOs in Silicon Valley who have seen every downturn, this is by far the deepest. Time will tell if this is the longest" and "the job market resembles one with 12 or even 15 percent unemployment. He's seen laid-off engineers applying for jobs that pay $8 an hour, and people in their 40s competing with teen-agers for entry-level positions".
The Economist has a more balanced article, Still Fizzy, with different conclusions. The bust is real, as are the Bay Area's three biggest problems: astronomical housing prices, mediocre to terrible public schools, and traffic. However, the Bay Area still "has an unusual number of America's most productive industries; it also has many of the better companies within those industries; and it boasts the best-educated workforce in the country...it would be hard to describe the Bay Area's mood as disconsolate. Most people seem to realise that the dotcom extravaganza was not going to last."
I find the Economist's article truer to my own experieince. It can be pretty depressing if you are looking for work now. Anecdotal stories abound of hundreds or even thousands of resumes sent in reponse to job ads. One person told me "I heard that nobody will post jobs on Craig's List any more because when people post jobs, their servers go down from the load of email that they get in response." (Not true, although there certainly are a lot less jobs posted on Craig's List than there used to be.) I always thought that the dotcom boom was too good to be true, I just didn't realize how far the economy had to fall.
I find that I need to remind myself that some companies are still hiring, startups are still forming, and that there is always a demand for people who are good at what they do, and I'm very good. The company that needs my services is out there, I just have to find it or create it.
In the meantime, I am having a blast being a father, learning by teaching myself Perl and PHP, and amusing myself acting as an amateur journalist here at www.geodog.us. I am putting some of the energy I would normally put into working into weblogging. It's fun and blows off steam. I always wanted to write -- now I don't have to worry that it doesn't pay much :-) And the Bay Area is still a great place to live, except for the fog.
Thanks (I think) to Scott Loftesness for the links.
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| Tuesday, July 16, 2002
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Jobs I am qualified for, but have no intention of applying for.
One of the job boards I'm signed up for sent me these two listings:
Lead Program Manager, Microsoft Corporation, US-CA-Mountain View
Development Manager, Microsoft Corporation, US-CA-Mountain View
As my friend Tony said "Commuting [2 hours] to Mountain View to work for Microsoft on a TV product. A trifecta." He knows how I feel about TV, Microsoft, and wasting time commuting.
The sad thing is, I am extremely well qualified for those jobs -- I have exactly the experience they are looking for. Now if I can just find someone else in the East Bay who is working on something socially worthwhile who wants a Program or Development Manager...
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Largest Oracle shared database project
Today I was looking at jobs at Kaiser Permanente, the giant HMO. I saw this listing:
Director of Network Services
With the name, National Operations, you can assume that our focus is huge - not to mention, 24/7 - and you'd be right. In a nutshell, NOPS is a group of 850-plus people who provide the day-to-day automation services necessary to support Kaiser Permanente's many medical groups, business partners and millions of members. With 6,000 servers, NOPS is one of the largest Oracle shared database projects in the world.
Wow. Well, I have to say - I'm not qualified for that job, and I don't think that I would like it even if I was. Can you imagine the phone call if 6,000 servers went down?
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© Copyright 2002 Tim Bishop aka Geodog.
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