The Bell Curve and your chances of success, part I
This article takes a fairly dystopian view of employment, frankly admitted up front. The purpose is to try to educate job holders and job seekers in some of the most important realities of the job marketplace, true anywhere, not just Austin, Texas.
We'll use the ubiquitous Bell Curve as our paradigm, since your employers are almost certain to use it, even if only intuitively. Here is what most people think it looks like, from the standpoint of employment:
The narrative is that the low performers eventually get laid off, and the high performers get promoted. I suspect there is some dirt behind this daydream.
Here is the likely result, seen from the viewpoint of employers:
The employers know they can get results with the people in the middle. These are results that suit them and make for standard business progress. These people also do not scare management.
There are a few exceptions. For example, both IBM and Oracle, very large corporations with extremely technical products as their mainstay profit centers, have on staff super-totally-nerd-ultra-experts who can read stack dumps in about a minute and debug a serious problem in a few minutes more.
These folks are expensive, rare, busy, likely underpaid, and the corporations have as few of them on staff as they can get away with. They need them, but not many of them. The corporations can be depended upon to trim this cohort of staff as soon as they can. It's just a reality of business.
Similarly, the new "robber barons", who are the providers of massively automated cloud services, AKA managed services and many other euphemisms, need a few highly qualified, experienced and ultra-nerdy experts to create and maintain their services. These providers are few in number, and are careful to hire only employees whenever possible. They don't like contractors, and use them only when absolutely necessary, and for a limited time.
I submit to you that highly technically qualified individual contributors are singularly unqualified for management. Most of them have an engineering mentality and just don't get people, and cannot learn it. Only a few of them take the necessary time and effort to really understand people well enough to manage successfully. I've been doing it, for years now, and I guarantee you it is a huge change.
For these reasons, most very technical people eventually run out of options and find themselves unemployed and unemployable. I'd like to make some important points to these unfortunate people.
First, you believed in narratives, rather than reality, and thought there was a nearly infinite career ladder waiting for you, if only you could increase your competence and credentials enough. In real life, your value to a corporation is in how they can make money by hiring you and keeping you. The less you cost for what you do, the more money they make. It's that simple.
As you get older and more expensive, the number of companies that can profitably hire you shrinks. It is crazy of you to expect much more than slave-level wages, especially if you were unwise enough to acquire large amounts of debt. Debt is a bet where you really need to know what you are doing. It helps if you have a pretty good idea of the future, too, since it will take time to pay off the debt.
Second, all careers have a beginning, a middle, and an end. All of you, however competent, will eventually arrive at a situation where only one in a hundred job opportunities even pay your current bills. At that point, your career is effectively over. It is better that you anticipate this years before it happens, because:
Third: Once you have exhausted your employment opportunities, the only real option is starting your own business. While I heartily recommend this option, it is not for the faint of heart, nor will it ever work for nerds. You've gotta understand people, as they are, not as you believe them to be. Worse, it always takes years to start a successful business. Learning to market a real business is almost always a trial and error situation, long effort, and is enormously difficult and painful. You have no choice but to take it up before your other options evaporate, and I guarantee they will. Cloud computing will burn up a large fraction of the available jobs in the coming years.
Conclusion: About 80% of the older, current high-tech workers really need to be setting up an online business now. Given a long enough runway, you might get your business profitable enough to replace your job. There will be lots of trial and error, and you must not be afraid of failure. All self-made rich people got there by trail and error, including lots of failures, and were not afraid to do so.
Now you have your marching orders. I hope you will act in your own interests.
We'll use the ubiquitous Bell Curve as our paradigm, since your employers are almost certain to use it, even if only intuitively. Here is what most people think it looks like, from the standpoint of employment:
Here is the likely result, seen from the viewpoint of employers:
There are a few exceptions. For example, both IBM and Oracle, very large corporations with extremely technical products as their mainstay profit centers, have on staff super-totally-nerd-ultra-experts who can read stack dumps in about a minute and debug a serious problem in a few minutes more.
These folks are expensive, rare, busy, likely underpaid, and the corporations have as few of them on staff as they can get away with. They need them, but not many of them. The corporations can be depended upon to trim this cohort of staff as soon as they can. It's just a reality of business.
Similarly, the new "robber barons", who are the providers of massively automated cloud services, AKA managed services and many other euphemisms, need a few highly qualified, experienced and ultra-nerdy experts to create and maintain their services. These providers are few in number, and are careful to hire only employees whenever possible. They don't like contractors, and use them only when absolutely necessary, and for a limited time.
I submit to you that highly technically qualified individual contributors are singularly unqualified for management. Most of them have an engineering mentality and just don't get people, and cannot learn it. Only a few of them take the necessary time and effort to really understand people well enough to manage successfully. I've been doing it, for years now, and I guarantee you it is a huge change.
For these reasons, most very technical people eventually run out of options and find themselves unemployed and unemployable. I'd like to make some important points to these unfortunate people.
First, you believed in narratives, rather than reality, and thought there was a nearly infinite career ladder waiting for you, if only you could increase your competence and credentials enough. In real life, your value to a corporation is in how they can make money by hiring you and keeping you. The less you cost for what you do, the more money they make. It's that simple.
As you get older and more expensive, the number of companies that can profitably hire you shrinks. It is crazy of you to expect much more than slave-level wages, especially if you were unwise enough to acquire large amounts of debt. Debt is a bet where you really need to know what you are doing. It helps if you have a pretty good idea of the future, too, since it will take time to pay off the debt.
Second, all careers have a beginning, a middle, and an end. All of you, however competent, will eventually arrive at a situation where only one in a hundred job opportunities even pay your current bills. At that point, your career is effectively over. It is better that you anticipate this years before it happens, because:
Third: Once you have exhausted your employment opportunities, the only real option is starting your own business. While I heartily recommend this option, it is not for the faint of heart, nor will it ever work for nerds. You've gotta understand people, as they are, not as you believe them to be. Worse, it always takes years to start a successful business. Learning to market a real business is almost always a trial and error situation, long effort, and is enormously difficult and painful. You have no choice but to take it up before your other options evaporate, and I guarantee they will. Cloud computing will burn up a large fraction of the available jobs in the coming years.
Conclusion: About 80% of the older, current high-tech workers really need to be setting up an online business now. Given a long enough runway, you might get your business profitable enough to replace your job. There will be lots of trial and error, and you must not be afraid of failure. All self-made rich people got there by trail and error, including lots of failures, and were not afraid to do so.
Now you have your marching orders. I hope you will act in your own interests.
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