Here's what I don't get... If you have any options at all, why stay at a company with sub-par technology that abuses their workers? They've been stuck in low 3 Glassdoor [0] range for a while. It's layoff after layoff as they slowly dismantle the company. Why stay? Geographic limitations? Narrow skillsets?
Among other factors mentioned: employer-specific skillsets.
Technology jobs are very highly specialised. And I'm not just speaking of computer tech.
I'm old enough to have seen several generations of obsoleted "gold tickets". Nuclear Engineering, future destroyed March 28, 1979. Freeway engineers, the freeway protests of the 1960s/1970s. Big Three auto manufacturers, dream destroyed with the first oil embargo, and sudden onslaught of more fuel efficient, less expensive, and better quality imports from Japan and Germany. Petroleum engineers, dream destroyed as the oil market collapsed in the 1980s. Aerospace engineers, dream destroyed with the fall of the Soviet Union and redundancies in the military-industrial complex throughout NATO powers.
Travel agents, newspaper journalists, and Perl hackers are only more recent victims of the same levels of specialisation.
It's not that these people are dumb, many were brilliant. But they're also laden with a tremendous amount of arcane knowledge, that, unfortunately, gets in the way of learning new skills.
It's been painfully obvious for a long time that, individual success stories notwithstanding, retraining and "reskilling" typically does very little to alleviate this.
Yes, future generations get trained into new skills, some of which may still be germaine 4-8 years after they've completed schooling. But my observation is that job and skill cycles are iterating faster.
So that's a part of it.
Yes, there are other dimensions. Obligations, family ties, social ties, fears, the fact that the most mobile do jump ship first, and more.
But really, it's quite crushing. You may not understand it now, but you almost certainly will, eventually.
Regarding skill sets. I have only been in software 12 years or so, but I noticed a type of tech 'gamble'. Basically, when you decided to learn something in tech you are basically gambling that the tech will last. In 2007 many faced a simple decision: AS3 or iOS. Supposed you chose AS3. Then, worked on it from 2009-2012, quite profitably. Currently the AS3 job outlook is horrific, and all that knowledge is a waste. Now, iOS people are skilled, wanted and are taking lead roles. (Oh yeah, now you are old). Want to learn GO? Be careful.
There are gambles, yes, but they are microscopic compared to retraining from one kind of engineer to another.
If you have n years of AS3 experience (n=7? Or what happened between 2012 and now?) and find yourself unable to compete with people with the same n years of iOS experience, I humbly submit that something else is wrong. Never mind that AS3 is a dialect of ECMAScript, which I hear is still used in a few remote pockets of the web, that hard things about programming isn't about the language and the framework, it's managing complexity. I struggle to see how retraining to iOS is going to take more than a few weeks of systematic reading and practising (possibly taken on your own time), and little more than a few months on the job to be on par with people who have several years of experience.
But more important is all the stuff that isn't about programming at all: Being good at organising your work, communicating well, testing, making sure you understand the entirety requirements as they are intended and that your delivery fully satisfies the requirement etc etc. Someone with n years of programming experience should master those things, and these count very heavily when picking people for lead roles.
Anyway, bottom line: the difficulty of switching from AS3 to iOS doesn't map to the difficulty of switching from nuclear engineering to environmental engineering.
Quite. I like the "Tech Gamble" concept. May well borrow that.
This also reminds me of a back-rationalisation I've seen for Linux adopting the penguin as mascot -- not the Australian zoo killer penguin story.
Antarctic penguins, when deciding where and when to enter the water mill about on the edge of the ice. The problem is that the first one in is taking a significant risk -- leopard seals, which eat penguins, may be lurking.
But once the brave pioneer takes the plunge (or rather more likely, is pushed, jostled, or slips in), the rest of the flock follows. There's safety in numbers ... and fish to eat.
I chose the things I learn not by what I think might be most profitable, but what I feel is most fun. If I wanted a job with boring but profitable technology I'd learn COBOL or MUMPS.
I agree that switching from nuclear scientist to something else might be hard but with programming languages after a certain amount of years the gamble is gone.
The core concepts of every language are the same.
If you acquired a certain amount of experience, switching is just looking for best practices in your new language. Of course it will take some time to ramp up but within a month you are somewhat productive within 3 months no one will see the difference.
In up markets it's easy to say, "I'm a mobile developer" but in a down market, only iOS will do. You're right there are gambles.
I see 4 ways to mitigate this:
1 - Live somewhere that has many companies or be prepared to move.
2 - Keep in contact periodically with everyone who respects your work. (Don't make the "Hey it's been 5 years" call one where you're asking for a favor)
3 - Always keep learning.
4 - Communicate in your customer's language. If you are strictly an ActionScript expert, you are very narrowly pegged if you haven't learned iOS on the side. But if the buyers of technology view you as "A mobile expert who makes brands come alive across many devices" then you can survive technology switches.
4.5 - Help others before you need help.
In the grand scheme it's still better to be a laid off technology worker than a laid off steelworker. I still feel their pain though - it sucks to lose your job, especially if family is involved.
There's a professor, Economics at Harvard IIRC, who points out some telling characteristics of cities in this regard. Those with large numbers of smaller firms are far more creative in the long run than those with small numbers of large ones. Specific contrast were NYC and its garment district vs. the large industrial cities of Pittsburgh (steel) and Detroit (autos). Ironically, it's the cities which most successfully employ division of labour and assembly-line techniques which are penalised most harshly.
Link in a sec....
Benjamin Chintz came up with the theory. Edward Glaeser is the lecturer.
Perhaps IBM has more workers that are like the workers at AT&T than we would have expected. AT&T is in a difficult position as its extremely large workforce is being attacked into irrelevance by new technology upstarts.
> To Mr. Stephenson, it should be an easy choice for most workers: Learn new skills or find your career choices are very limited.
“There is a need to retool yourself, and you should not expect to stop,” he said in a recent interview at AT&T’s Dallas headquarters. People who do not spend five to 10 hours a week in online learning, he added, “will obsolete themselves with the technology.”...
By 2020, Mr. Stephenson hopes AT&T will be well into its transformation into a computing company that manages all sorts of digital things: phones, satellite television and huge volumes of data, all sorted through software managed in the cloud.
That can’t happen unless at least some of his work force is retrained to deal with the technology. It’s not a young group:
The average tenure at AT&T is 12 years, or 22 years if you don’t count the people working in call centers. And many employees don’t have experience writing open-source software or casually analyzing terabytes of customer data."
That's a great top-down message from the AT&T CEO.
But the bottom-up reality is that people coming into work at AT&T pushing open source, cloud, or data science agendas are perceived as threats, and are managed out.
It is a really nice thing that they are taking the right steps, but personally, I am very very pessimistic. Just encouraging people to take classes is one thing, but them actually applying those skills to solve the problems that at&t faces...that is a different question.
I really really do hope that it works out though; my rational mind believes it otherwise.
"Technology jobs are very highly specialised. And I'm not just speaking of computer tech."
I would argue that computer tech is kind of an exception.
I can see a Nuclear or Aerospace Engineer having trouble adapting his knowledge and skills to other professions, since that knowledge is deeply tied to the domain, but a Perl (or C++/Java or whatever) hacker should't really have too many problems in transitioning to another language.
That they would find difficulties in finding a new job because dumb HR recruiters see 10 years of Perl experience in the resume as opposed to the "10 years of Swift" (sic) they are looking for is another matter...
Yes, there's a fair bit of specific domain knowledge, but it's also built on top of a bunch of common foundations: physics, calculus, chemistry, differential equations.
And the tools in much of technical work have been converging for years -- technical and scientific computing require rudiments of programming (Fortran, still, or more modern languages), source code management, project management, and a heavy helping of sociological people understanding (look up Charles Perrow's books). That can transfer, at least in theory.
Whether or not it does, of course, and whether or not firms, organisations, or government sector are interested in hiring is a whole 'nother question.
I'm reminded of a video on the old Soviet rocket motors with boosted performance (the fuel pump turbine exhaust was vented into the rocket combustion chamber rather than offboard, for another 10% or so gain in thrust) -- though attempted use resulted in an explosion only a few seconds after takeoff and loss of the mission.
In the video, however, several former Soviet rocket scientists talk about their experience after the Soviet space program was shut down. Rocket scientists, literally, with no place to turn for employment. That's where you start thinking about inefficiencies in usefully allocating talent. Neither the Soviet nor American economic systems seem to have a particularly good answer for that. Though in the US, Wall Street seems to have a capacity for sponging up some of the potential. I don't find that particularly useful.
The Egyptians built pyramids. I wonder if that wasn't in part a large skills-retention and problem-solving exercise.
I agree. Actually it's interesting to see
how IBM is trying very hard to stay relevant as far as programming languages in their products. If you look at the video in this "API Connect" demo, you can see support for microservices in Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, Node.js, Go, and Swift. As an old time C/C++ guy it's difficult to determine which of these are fads. Also no C# support, but maybe this will change with the opening of .net.
>It's not that these people are dumb, many were brilliant. But they're also laden with a tremendous amount of arcane knowledge, that, unfortunately, gets in the way of learning new skills.
I don't use the term "brilliant" for anyone who can't learn outside their narrow specialty.
There's a middle ground to what he's saying. Once you MASTER something that all your life has been in demand and incredibly lucrative, it becomes hard to believe that completely pivoting away from that knowledge is your best course of action. I believe in most cases these down turns seem temporarily, a short storm to weather with a small reduction in pay until things get going again (see Big 3 auto). Unfortunately things just keep spiraling downwards and by the time you realize it, it is too late.
Definitely such short sightedness and stubbornness can be associated with brilliance.
It's not a matter of not being able to learn. Of course they can learn. It's a matter of not being able to instantly re-specialize in the next "in demand" skill.
1. The opportunity costs for switching away are high. I suspect this comes into play in many areas -- say, emigrants to a new country who never develop a high functioning level of language skill (something I'll add applies just as much to English speakers abroad as those moving to English-speaking countries, if not more). And yes, there absolutely are exceptions, often many.
You're highly effective in using one language. You operate functionally at the level of a young child in another. Cross training to the new language is a massive investment of effort. Adult minds lose plasticity present in children, so the task is inherently harder. Plus you've got to do everything else necessary to keep going. It's a Red Queen's race.
Shifting tracks requires a very real sacrifice both in increased effort and reduced reward. It can be short-term satisficing to continue stretching out the lucrative current skill so long as possible. Situational awareness of that dead end may not dawn until late in the game as well.
2. Some skills are synergetic -- knowing one thing makes learning another easier. And yes, I see this all the time, particularly in metaphorical spaces. Thinking is I strongly suspect very much a matter of analogs, and collecting and applying appropriate analogs helps.
But ingrained knowledge is ... quite different. Changing handedness, or quitting habitual behavior (drugs, smoking, alcohol, gambling) is exceptionally difficult.
YouTube's "Smarter Every Day" has a great segement on learning to ride a backwards-engineered bicycle headset. Using gearing, the response of handlebars and wheels is reversed. It's all but impossible to ride this bike if you know how to ride a regular one, though you can learn, with sufficient time.
But: learning to ride the backwards bike makes riding a normal bike impossible. Until you've learned to context-switch between the two.
I've been simultaneously waiting for and dreading the same future for rails engineers, since so many are under the belief that web development is the ticket...
Yeah, I've started seeing occasional queries on HN about what the Next Big Thing will be. Which raises another challenge: chasing the tech curve. It's one thing to have found the right tech, another to correctly anticipate the market's next move.
The worse when you realise everything that's up-and-coming is recapitulating all the mistakes you recognised from the last time.
This is why I think learning new marketable skills should be everyone's hobby. Also, in our field or any professional field, you really should be very financially secure after 50 so that a job loss doesn't hurt you.
The problem is learning new skills is kind of a catch-22. After you've been doing something for a few years, assuming you're reasonably intelligent, you get to be an expert and command expert wages. Your employer is paying for an expert. He doesn't want to pay you expert wages to learn a a new, marketable skill. He can hire someone who already knows it. Or he can hire a new college grad for a fraction of what you make.
So you learn on your own time. But since you're doing tutorials and what not, and your time isn't infinite, when you actually apply for a job with this new skill your potential employer is going to wonder why he should pay you expert wages for a skill with which you still have effectively no professional experience.
You can, but only if someone's willing to hire you. Employers are leery of hiring you for substantially less money than you made in the last job. The fear is you're still looking, and a few months down the road (before you've really accomplished anything) you'll quit.
I think a much more likely scenario is that you won't get an interview at all. An employer is unlikely to consider you for a junior role that requires < 5 years of experience when you've had > 10 years experience in another field.
Software is highly unusual in that you can learn marketable skills as a hobby. It's not like a chemical engineer can learn marketable skills in civil engineering on the side. And not everyone can do software for a living.
There is that advantage, though some skills are harder to pick up (stuff relating to hardware, commercial software packages, etc.). This also means more competition as there are fewer barriers to entry.
That's a nice dream but most people are probably too busy staying relevant in their current profession to be concentrating on learning skills for another career that may never happen.
Exactly. Or there's no time. I get up at 6:30AM to work and get home around 8:30PM exhausted. Maybe get an hour or two to play with the kid, then it's off to bed for all of us. When I do actually have a weekend, it's spent taking care of all the shit that didn't get done during the week. Exactly when do I sit down to learn AngularJS?
Except that the rate of change is picking up so the likelihood that the value of new skills is diminishing as quickly as you learn them. We need to refocus society on providing a minimal viable income.
Up-and-coming tech frequently has a flood of talent. Dying: companies with vested systems (say, Cobol, or Solaris) are catching the tail-end of the curve. The truly good programmers have gotten out, or switched skills, or transferred to management.
Hopping on a sinking ship usually doesn't last long.
(Nothing against Perl. It's just a seriously fading language at this point.)
This is a very interesting angle of discussion, really
But I think this is partially their fault as well
A Nuclear plant engineer, while specialized in some element of that plant (and there are many elements, in civil, mechanical, chemical engineering) has knowledge that's applicable in a lot of different situations
Were the Automobile engineers content of designing more of the same poorly constructed vehicles? While the ICE is old technology I can't imagine the things that could come out of it if they really invested in rethinking it (also other parts like the drivetrain)
> But they're also laden with a tremendous amount of arcane knowledge, that, unfortunately, gets in the way of learning new skills.
That's true. But I think it's also a matter of attitude
You know, I can be the best specialist in some technology, let's say: installing Oracle, or even better, let's say I'm a top notch Golang programmer today
Tomorrow Golang won't exist, or won't be relevant. I am SURE of this
> But really, it's quite crushing. You may not understand it now, but you almost certainly will, eventually.
It's really, really easy to think you're one of God's Chosen (or Allahs, or Jehovas, or Buddha's, or ...) when you're at the top of the world, you've got a multi-trillion-dollar wind in your sails, you went to the best schools, and you make titanium and airaluminium dance on the wind and all that.
1980s aerospace engineers weren't the first to take that tumble. They won't be the last.
> It's really, really easy to think you're one of God's Chosen (or Allahs, or Jehovas, or Buddha's, or ...) when you're at the top of the world, you've got a multi-trillion-dollar wind in your sails, you went to the best schools, and you make titanium and airaluminium dance on the wind and all that.
Fortunately nobody posting on Hacker News threads like these are relatively new engineers who think they're God's gift!
Say you're a support person working at IBM in Dubuque, Iowa, where local and state taxpayers spent $50M to lure IBM in a delusion of becoming a tech hub. [1] You specialize in Lotus Notes support for local businesses like Hormel. Last year, IBM laid off 2/3 of their Dubuque workforce, 700 people, in a city of 60,000. More than 1% of the population. Your only skill is Notes, same as dozens of other people that were laid off. The nearest cities of any note are Cedar Rapids and Madison, both more than an hour away. You know you need to get out, but where and how?
Very good point - the human toll is tough. Did Dubuque get anything in writing about the jobs to be provided? $50M in tax breaks to support 1000 jobs is very expensive!
Sounds like 1300 jobs paying 46K, double the local average, over the course of 6 years.
From a "paying taxes to buy higher salaries" point of view this is 1300 * (0.5 * 46K) * 6 ~= $180M. Sounds like a positive NPV transaction. But... How much of the increase does the city and state actually capture in Taxes? Let's call it 15% between city, state, local and sales. (This is very fuzzy math) Then you get 180M * 0.15 ~= 27M.
In the end it sounds like the city and state of Dubuque did a wealth transfer from taxpayers to a subset of local employees, many of whom are now jobless and will need to go back to $23K jobs or move.
These types of arrangements frequently end poorly. If the local market won't bear a certain wage rate, it's hard for one-off tax rebates to fix things. You need to go deeper - change the entire tax regime, improve the education system, etc.
A gentle point - Here is the value of statying in a large city like NYC. Despite its downfalls, and there are many of those, one thing it does not lack is a spectrum of jobs.
But you take that risk moving to a no-tech area. The best solution is to not put yourself in a position you need to get out of.
And if that means the next Dubuque company needs to be offering million dollar salaries to engineers to get commit themselves out there - since there would be no other opportunities and you would be stuck, so you better have a massive nest egg after five years - then so be it.
Or reverse it, what if you're a blue collard worker in a disadvantaged community that IBM just moved into, they lure you into training at IBM in a narrow skill set with the promise of becoming white collard.
But there are many situations what you get yourself into that seem like a good idea at the time. It's impossible to make predictions about future events. The IBM employees getting laid off here are not responsible for the corporate decisions to outsource their jobs, and don't deserve the blame.
Geographic limitations are a big deal. I'm in the same sort of position as the IBM'ers, in that my company is slowly farming out what used to be internal apps to SaaS companies and moving the remaining jobs to a contractor in India.
My family is local, and as I get older that's more and more important. If I have to leave town it's going to have a big impact on my happiness. So much so, in fact, that I may take a huge pay cut and work at, I dunno, Starbucks or something so I can stay local.
And before someone suggests moving to silly valley, consider doing so requires accepting a 98%+ chance you will never own a home unless you're willing to put up with a horrific commute. In most of sf/peninsula detached homes cost $1.5m+. And even a condo is difficult to afford on the salaries available. Home ownership for most of us requires a startup win giving you at least $0.5m after taxes plus you and your spouse both having good incomes.
I like living in cities, but I can understand it's not everyone's cup of tea, particularly if you or your upstairs neighbors have kids. And all my friends with kids say the secret to happiness is having local grandparents. Or an au pair.
Further, if you live in an economically depressed area, there's no guarantee you can easily or quickly sell your home. Family in CT a little over 2 hours outside of nyc had a house on the market for 8 months before it sold.
Plus there's no guarantee that moving to the Bay Area will prevent similar problems.
There's a boatload of reckless spending on developers and engineers right now. It's only a matter of time before financiers start pushing for headcount reductions.
Fear of the unknown? Atrophy of key interviewing skills? Comfort with their position? There are a lot of reasons that people stay, even when a position or company is not optimal.
Fear guides all of us in some way, and striving to live means taking chances. The myth of the 'stable big company' that you can work at, and get your kid a job at after college, is past history. The U.S. changed directions when they closed a lot of the vocational schools, and the luxury afforded by being the first world economy, drove low to mid-level wages up. Dinosaurs like IBM cannot feed the machine. Manufacturing, though a different industry from IBM, disappeared, although it is making somewhat of a small team, or maker comeback. I've always struck out on my own. Getting laid off sucks, but I think most of them are just unhappy about the compensation, and most people I know who have 'overstayed' their usefulness at big corporations, usually own up and admit they weren't happy there, and they were not producing. I've been on both ends, and it never feels right, but change drives the world and life. The myth of stasis is one most humans embrace illogically. This dialogue will manifest itself in the reincarnation of xenophobia - 'Foreigners taking U.S. jobs!' - wait for Trump to chime in...
People with mortgages and kids don't move to new places where there's more, or at least more immediate, economic opportunity?
Why not?
Kids are mobile. Mortgages can be covered by tenants or by selling the property (usually).
I only have kid (singular) and lack a mortgage, but I'd definitely move my family to a place with more opportunity if the well ran dry where we're at now. I wouldn't even hesitate or think twice about it. The temporary pain of transition is going to be a lot easier than the long-tail of fruitless toiling and economic decay.
I was a spoiled kid, I admit, but I remember that back when I was 9 or 10 and my parents asked me if I'd be ok with us moving 4 or 5 blocks down the street, in a better area, my answer was a loud "no way!", because that meant losing my play-mates and God knows what else. We ended up not moving. I know it's anecdotal, but looking at what Hollywood is feeding us (with the latest example being the excellent animation "Inside Out") I get the feeling that is actually hard for kids being "mobile". Parents ignore that at their own risk.
Kids are hardly mobile. Remember that they're kids and may not be capable of coping fully with losing their friends and familiar surroundings to a different place with no guarantee of things being better for them. Minor anecdote, when I moved from Canada to USA in my childhood, my little brother who was 12 at the time tried to run away to avoid losing all his friends he had made.
A kid living in a household where neither parent can adequately provide for them because the economic opportunities are shrinking and offering no signs of ever improving, which often results in other toxic environmental conditions (stress about money, substance abuse, divorce, etc.), seems to me to be almost always worse than relocating to a new place in the long-term.
That's an adult view of things, not a kid's view. Most kids would rather stay and be a little poorer. What kids don't know is how bad things could get. They have no idea yet what it's like to live without safety nets.
Yes, and I'm an adult making decisions as an adult, not making decisions like a child would.
Otherwise my family would just burn through all our money and assets to pay for eating ice cream three meals a day. And we'd end up diabetic, broke, and probably soon dead once we exhausted our resources.
When you're dealing with difficult economic realities that include supporting your family and paying your mortgage, do you deal with them by thinking like a kid? What would be the point of that?
It's important to have the necessary empathy to make the disruption as minimal as possible, but also to have the maturity and forsight to make the decision to move out of whatever soon-to-be ghost town you're living in. Or so I would think.
I don't see how this relates to my point in that children are not necessarily mobile (interpreted as moving easily with minimal stress or effort) because of the scope of thinking a child trends to be limited to.
let me tell you, moving away from all friends can be tough for a kid. some cope with it well, some not at all, most are somewhere in the middle. I know I didn't enjoy my experience to say at least...
Satisfying mortgage/kid constraints actually works better if planned and executed in light of the truth of the situation; the lack of stasis. Skipping the philosophy leads to pleasant fantasies and irrational decisionmaking and planning that only hinders the ability to fulfill them.
Some of these locations don't have any other companies in the area.
Example:
You're 22, straight out of college, you take a job at IBM in Poughkeepsie, NY because it was a great fit for you and you liked the area. You raise a family there, get friends there, establish a lot of roots over 10+ years. Now IBM is "transforming", what are you going to do? There are no other companies in the area
You can commute to NYC. It's a 1 hour ride on the Metro-North. It's not ideal but when times are hard you survive by any means necessary. It's also quite enjoyable. I get so much reading and personal time commuting on the train.
People do commute to NYC; but it sucks from Poughkeepsie. The train is not 1 hour, it is 1 hour 45 minutes. You need to drive to the station and park, figure at least 15 minutes. That also assumes you're going to be working very close to 42nd street. Otherwise add another 20 minutes for the subway/walking.
You're lucky if this is going to be less than 2.5 hours each way.
I live 38 miles north of the city; Poughkeepsie is 73.5. It takes me about an hour and 45 minutes door-to-door to get to work at 22nd street. 10-15 minutes to the train station, probably about 5 minutes of waiting [because if you miss one train, you have to wait 20-30 minutes or so for another depending on the time of morning], 60 minutes on the train, then about another 25 minutes of walking (or alternatively 5 minutes to get to the subway, 2-5 minutes to wait for it, then 5 minutes on the subway, and another 5 minutes of walking).
some time ago I read a study (sorry no links around) that people get used to almost anything, positive or negative, over time. With 2 clear exceptions:
- pets like dogs/cats always tend to raise happiness levels
- daily long commutes to work tend to make people more unhappy (and of course it helps if you have the time for yourself and are nto constantly stuck at traffic jam)
It's about an hour and 45 minutes to Grand Central, not an hour. I live near there and have taken both the Metro North and the Amtrak (from Rhinecliff) many times.
At least the trains have internet (or at least Amtrak does). If you can spin "they have wifi so they'll be part of my work day" into your job and work a virtually eight hour day including the commute as part of your time, that could be doable. If you have to commute on top of a normal eight hours, that's a non-starter.
Most IBMers get great benefits (great 401K plan, great health insurance, etc), and the running joke was to rather wait and get laid off to receive the generous severance package (which used to be 6 month's salary plus 12 months continued health insurance).
However, given the new severance only being 1 month's salary leaves them with less incentive to wait. Of course, the really good ones have already left anyway (money isn't the prime motivation there), but the folks remaining there, especially the ones who will have to pick up the slack (more work, same pay) will have much less incentive then previously.
As someone who works at IBM currently: because they have the best technology in my area of expertise. Some of their tech in dying industries is sub-par, sure, but you're hard pressed to find a better security appliance than QRadar. Couple that with the many, many security acquisitions they've made over the last year or so, and it's easy to see why someone would go there and stay there for a few years. It's hard to say no when your coworker is Bruce Schneier, for example.
If you're working in startups, you're used to expecting everyone to do a bit of everything. In large companies, however, you're expected to specialize within a specific area. The problem is, even if you're spending a few hours a week outside of work learning new things, you're not likely to have many opportunities to show off your other skills, which makes it harder and harder to move not only within the company, but to other companies.
> If you have any options at all, why stay at a company with sub-par technology that abuses their workers?
I used to work there, and I can say that it's a lot like an abusive marriage: IBM is really, really good at convincing one that the IT job market is a tough place (!), that one got really lucky getting a job with IBM, and that one could never find another job anywhere else (!), and that $70,000 is a great salary for a world-class technical talent (!!!).
The sad thing is that there are so many smart, good people there, absolutely wasted in their positions. IBM could be an amazing, powerful company if it actually knew how to release the energy of its employees.
I needed a job. You make it sounds incredibly easy to find work. I have less than 2 years experience in the industry. After getting fired from a startup, I was desperate to get my foot in the door anywhere. I was also desperate to pay my rent. IBM have filled both those needs.
Purely anecdotal, but what I've heard is that chip jobs at IBM (and at Intel FWIW) are very narrow and silo-ed.
Good for the company in two ways:
1) employee gets really good at that particular job
2) IBM internal tools and procedures are different than general practice. Other companies that are looking for X don't want to hire an employee who has only done Y, even though X and Y aren't too different, and even though any smart person can quickly pick up X. Consequently, employee can't easily go elsewhere.
[0] https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/IBM-Reviews-E354.htm#trend...