The Wetware Crisis: The Dead Sea Effect (2008)
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The Wetware Crisis: The Dead Sea Effect (2008)
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Re: The Wetware Crisis: The Dead Sea Effect (2008)
#2TL;DR: more talented people tend to move on to more lucrative gigs, leaving less talented people behind. The title draws an analogy to the Dead Sea, where water evaporates and leaves salt behind.
Really, that's all the article has to say. You're welcome.
Re: The Wetware Crisis: The Dead Sea Effect (2008)
#3After college, I lived with a friend who worked in the IT department at our college. He got called in on a Sunday once, and came back around lunchtime quite flustered.
"What's wrong?"
"Sam asked me what a traceroute was."
Sam was the longtime Novell admin. Yes this was a while ago...
"The worst part was, I patiently explained it to him, and he just asked me why that was useful?"
Just one example. There was more, of people of low competence who were very entrenched.
Re: The Wetware Crisis: The Dead Sea Effect (2008)
#4TL;DR: more talented people tend to move on to more lucrative gigs, leaving less talented people behind. The title draws an analogy to the Dead Sea, where water evaporates and leaves salt behind. Really, that's all the article has to say. You're welcome.
I know it’s bad form to comment on articles without reading them, but my guess from the title was that this was allegorical to shepherds burning Dead Sea scrolls because they didn’t know what they were/how valuable they were to the historical research community.
Re: The Wetware Crisis: The Dead Sea Effect (2008)
#5TL;DR: more talented people tend to move on to more lucrative gigs, leaving less talented people behind. The title draws an analogy to the Dead Sea, where water evaporates and leaves salt behind. Really, that's all the article has to say. You're welcome.
I see what you did there... I guess one can write 7 seas of text that might one day be useful to a man looking to eat a fish.
Re: The Wetware Crisis: The Dead Sea Effect (2008)
#6I've job hopped a lot over the years and now i make about 30x what i did at my first software job. Now I'm sticking around though despite some of the craziness that i'd prefer not to deal with mostly just to prove to myself i can stick around at a job for more than 2 years.
Re: The Wetware Crisis: The Dead Sea Effect (2008)
#7It's thinkpieces like this that make me believe that IT professionals specifically and white collar workers generally would benefit greatly from a mandatory 24 month stint on a construction crew. One of the most important lessons any job foreman can learn is that every crew needs at least one lame duck.
A single talented carpenter with an energetic but otherwise totally unskilled helper can accomplish more in a shift than two talented carpenters together. If you don't have someone to run to the truck for nails, hold shit, move ladders, etc. productivity suffers because your talent is wasting time on menial tasks.
Same thing applies to IT departments. The folks the author is busy sneering at are at least as valuable as the engineers they're actively trying to retain because (among other things) they soak menial tasks that would otherwise cut into their rockstar's productivity.
Re: The Wetware Crisis: The Dead Sea Effect (2008)
#8After college, I lived with a friend who worked in the IT department at our college. He got called in on a Sunday once, and came back around lunchtime quite flustered. "What's wrong?" "Sam asked me what a traceroute was." Sam was the longtime Novell admin. Yes this was a while ago... "The worst part was, I patiently explained it to him, and he just asked me why that was useful?" Just one example. There was more, of p…
Well, it was Novell. So not that entrenched after all.
Re: The Wetware Crisis: The Dead Sea Effect (2008)
#9It's thinkpieces like this that make me believe that IT professionals specifically and white collar workers generally would benefit greatly from a mandatory 24 month stint on a construction crew. One of the most important lessons any job foreman can learn is that every crew needs at least one lame duck. A single talented carpenter with an energetic but otherwise totally unskilled helper can accomplish more in a shift…
Yet I’ve worked in two types of places, the ones that had a lot of menial labourers and thus lots of shuffling of stairs and carrying of nail buckets, and in places that had very few to no menial labourers and just automated away the menial tasks or designed the systems to never need menial labour in the first place.
If you want to keep the metaphor some plasterers use ladders, others use stilts. In any case plenty of ways to skin a cat and people adapt to the workforce available to them.
Re: The Wetware Crisis: The Dead Sea Effect (2008)
#10After college, I lived with a friend who worked in the IT department at our college. He got called in on a Sunday once, and came back around lunchtime quite flustered. "What's wrong?" "Sam asked me what a traceroute was." Sam was the longtime Novell admin. Yes this was a while ago... "The worst part was, I patiently explained it to him, and he just asked me why that was useful?" Just one example. There was more, of p…
Well, it was Novell. So not that entrenched after all.
It was longer ago than you might think. Novell was a big deal back in the 90's and early 2000's.