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from the you-can-start-tomorrow...-and-finish-next-friday dept.
Over at the Harvard Business Review there's speculation that the paradigm of people working full-time for a single employer has outlived its usefulness:
Our vision is straightforward: most people will become independent contractors who have the flexibility to work part-time for several organizations at the same time, or do a series of short full-time gigs with different companies over the course of a year. Companies will maintain only a minimal full-time staff of executives, key managers, and professionals and bring in the rest of the required talent as needed in a targeted, flexible, and deliberate way.
There are two reasons such a flexible work system is now plausible. The first is societal values. Work-life balance and family-friendly scheduling are much more important to today's workers, and companies are increasingly willing to accommodate them. The second is technology. Advances in the last five years have greatly improved the ease with which people can work and collaborate remotely and companies and contract workers can find each other.
The opinion piece goes on to list how workers, employers and society in general will benefit from this shift. What seems to be missing is speculation on the down sides, both to employers and contractors. Originally spotted on The Eponymous Pickle.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 06 2015, @06:23PM
1. This sounds like something straight out of a Dice-spoonfed Slashdot article, where 50% of the submitted articles are laser-focused on career topics. I assumed that one of the founding principles of SoylentNews was to get away from that.
2. This is coming from the echo chamber of Harvard Business Review, the same ultra-for-profit organization (you have to pay a hefty subscription to read most of their articles in full) that is attempting to force-feed these concepts to society to bolster their fees.
3. It is disgusting to think that the answer to work-life balance is to make everyone a perma-contractor, flitting between contracts that constantly expire, resulting in many months per year spent in unemployment, putting an extra, unnecessary strain on Unemployment Insurance, simply because whiny MBAs don't want to have as many full-time permanent employees.
4. There's already one industry that has been leading the charge on a "majority contractor" field: IT system administration. It is a dying field, strangling itself due to the short-sightedness of turning its workforce into an ephemeral pool, never able to amass proper documentation, letting tribal knowledge leak out, and never building a solid pool of subject matter experts. Trevor Pott at The Register wrote an outstanding piece on it (channelling Scotty of Star Trek): "I cannae dae it, cap'n! Why I HAD to quit the madness of frontline IT: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/09/why_i_quit_it_sysadmin_overloads/ [theregister.co.uk]
In an ideal world, a proper rebuttal would be posted on somewhere with greater or equal press exposure that Harvard Business Review receives, but it won't, partially because entities like HBR are far more interested in a full-court press of their agenda (see also the Clayton Christensen Institute, the ultra-for-profit offshoot of Harvard Business School). In actuality, we won't see the true extent of the damage of this "perma-contractor" concept until a decade or two down the road, much like we're only starting to see the repercussions of "No Child Left Behind", the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, and not properly educating our children about how to use technology (something went horribly wrong between "teach them how to program BASIC and LOGO on the Apple II while throwing in a healthy dose of Oregon Trail and other educational Apple II titles" and "Facebook! AfterSchool app! Apps everywhere!").
(Score: 3, Insightful) by n1 on Sunday September 06 2015, @08:06PM
1) It could well be a Dice spoon-fed article, if the summary was presented differently.
We have a topic for Career & Education, sadly sticking our heads in the sand about the changing landscape of the working environment wont stop it changing. We should be paying attention, this change of attitude has a high probability of directly affecting you/me/the next guy at some point in the near future, if it hasn't already.
2) HBR is an echo chamber, and we can call them out for it right here. We should be calling them on it, because it's not just an echo chamber, it's an echo chamber for powerful and influential people who actually make the decisions. The summary contains a quote from the article, but is finished with pointing out the flaws of the article, noting that it lacks any negative perspective to illustrate potential downsides. The article itself is completely unbalanced and that should not be ignored.
3) Agreed. Part of the reason I accepted this story, and took the opportunity to use it as the 1000th story I have edited, is because I think the topic is very important and needs discussion. We can ignore the HBR and what they're trying to push, but that wont stop it happening. They dont need our consent or approval, that's why it's in the HBR not on a widely read publication.
4) Agreed again. Your comment really proves the point about why I accepted this story. The points you made are ones that needed making, and that's what it's all about, having a discussion on the article. We should be prepared to be presented with views we do not agree with, especially when they have potential to affect our lives. We should be able to have a reasonable discussion about it and not become our own echo chamber.
I agree with the article in that it's going to happen, it's already begun. I strongly disagree that it's a good thing, we're not all entrepreneurs with vision and a never ending adaptable skill-set, some people just want to live a quiet life and have a family and have some semblance of financial security for themselves and their family. Believe it or not (HBR crowd probably wont), some people actually want to spend quality time with friends and family, not just send money their way each month.
Life is not defined by our job or career. We should be actively fighting against the idea that it is, we can do that by confronting articles like this head-on and explaining to people that are unaware, "this is where we are headed," and not to be fooled by the propaganda. It will not make things better or more flexible for average Joe and Jane. The consequences will be severe for the average family, more stress, less stability, no employment benefits, less money coming in overall, more tax obligations, more forms of insurance, regulatory hurdles, the list could go on.
Tell people about this, share your opinion and perspective, don't ignore it just because you dislike the concept or where it came from.
(Score: 2) by fliptop on Monday September 07 2015, @01:30AM
It wasn't.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 07 2015, @03:49PM
If you had not stopped reading the sentence at that point, you would have noticed that it continued with: "if the summary was presented differently."
So the comment you replied to already said "it wasn't", except that it also said why it couldn't actually be.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 06 2015, @11:53PM
There's already one industry that has been leading the charge on a "majority contractor" field: IT system administration. It is a dying field, strangling itself due to the short-sightedness of turning its workforce into an ephemeral pool, never able to amass proper documentation, letting tribal knowledge leak out, and never building a solid pool of subject matter experts.
This topic NEEDS a dedicated thread someday.
Here's my ten cents.
I got into this biz as a sysadmin and made great money doing it. People with deep knowledge of Operating Systems, Networking, Capacity Planning, etc. did quite well for a time. What happened? Everything became a commodity. Learn Chef and AWS over the weekend, and you can pretend you're a big-time organization with no need for a real system administrator.
Lots of those jobs have disappeared, being co-opted by "DevOps" hipsters who don't think they need anything more than a configuration management tool and a credit card.
Of course, even though the same thing has happened on the programming side of the house, it's probably showing up later.
At the end of the day, cheap, "just good enough" technologies will end up displacing a lot of tech workers.
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Monday September 07 2015, @01:01AM
I like the discussion generated regarding articles like these.
There are those of us that are not reading these sites; maybe we are in the trenches. Maybe we don't notice because when they came and took the older programmers, we weren't old.
I am also worried about when the time comes and that they have come for me, the only people to speak up will be those that want my job, and no one will bother to speak up for me. Maybe they don't care. Maybe they were busy trying to make their own careers work. Maybe they already made their millions and have cashed in their chips.
The distinction is that, while yes, this can be used as fodder to get fear involved in the dice holdings job application and recruitment process, that is not the only role such information has.
It gives us insight into how those types at the top think--the ones that don't really have to worry about technical things ("those people" or "the eggheads" deal with those unpleasant things. They are more likely to be aware of their toner being low on their personal printer than what a print operator may do down near the mail room. and why can't he be replaced anyway, it's not like he's the one typing it all out).
Those people are making strategic business decisions that affect all of our bottom lines.
Having sat with, guided, and helped, and recoiled from those types, I can assure you that ignorance is not the solution. Not for them, and not for the problem we're discussing.
I have said I am a consultant--I am. I run my own business and take on stints of employment. I did not do that because an employer made me. I did that because I thought I could earn more, doing what I want. It takes more effort than being a typical employee (marketing oneself can be challenging, but word of mouth always helps. Only being one person greatly limits my availability, and I can only make so many promises and...)
Not everyone will be able to do it, and clearly not at the level of comfort many full time workers are experiencing now.
One thing I think people should value more is how they can turn off the notifications on their phones. If they did that, perhaps they wouldn't be doing free work after hours, and perhaps that'd properly display how much work a person can do in 8 hours, and better address the value of people.
People that give their work away for free when they are supposed to be paid shouldn't be too surprised to learn that additional cuts are coming. They already accepted cuts--cuts on their time. People need to learn to hang up the phone or not tie it into work if they don't have to.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 07 2015, @02:59AM
I don't agree that stories concerning career prospects in IT are out of bounds for SN.
What we *don't* want are Dice-style articles offering advice on how to prepare for a resume, how to follow up with thank you's after the interview, that kind of thing. That is fluff that doesn't belong on either site.