Getting what you pay for
Here’s a very insightful post from a Slashdotter on the subject of the recent and seemingly unstoppable trend of hiring cheap labour in the IT market. As you know it’s not often that I recycle stuff straight out of Slashdot so when I do you know that it’s special:
I entirely agree that individually you need to be as valuable as possible. That’s why all the CCNPs I know are working to finish their CCIEs and the CCIEs are working on their Juniper/Avaya certs. All of this is on top of their technical degrees.
The problem is that you and your “invaluable” skills really aren’t being taken into account. It doesn’t matter if firing you would cripple the company because we’re typically thinking 90 days at a time. If you replace a $150K CCIE with a $20K wanna-be, then you as a manager can claim a $130K dollar “savings.” Hooray for you, here’s your bonus.
When that $20K wonder takes all of your customers down — and here’s the beauty part — you aren’t blamed for it. No one is currently drawing the line between your $130K savings and the customers that walked with their millions of dollars.
The really scary part? I frequently work on municipal, hospital and 911 systems. Infrastructure disasters here can cost lives. I’ve watched the cheap guys take down emergency systems, and I tried not to think about the calls that were getting dropped as I fought to get them back online. I push the frantic calls for help out of my mind, because if I let my imagination run with what an unanswered 911 call could mean…
The cheap guy’s response as I berated him for putting lives at risk? Basically, what do I care? It’s not my country.
Every one of the guys I know are putting in 60-hours weeks routinely. Hours like that mean divorces. They mean early heart attacks. They mean neglected children left to raise themselves. They mean broken homes with the societal carnage that goes with it.
It’s the classic tragedy of the commons. The people who lead our country are insulated from the carnage associated with gutting our workforce. In the meantime, my country is falling apart. I’ve got a CS degree from a prestigious college, a CCIE, and a decade of international experience and even I am feeling the heat. I weep for those not as lucky as I.
We’re gutting our middle class. We just are, and if you don’t see it, it’s probably because you’re young. I hear your “Well, it’s not a problem if you’re the best of the best” bravado, and I wonder what you propose to do with the other 99% percent of the population, because they’re not just going to just disappear.
I was downtown during the LA Riots of ’92. Rodney King and Daryl Gates might have been the spark that set it off, but that riot burned on the fuel of unemployed people. Last time I was in LA, more than a decade later, the damage still hadn’t been repaired.
I’d really prefer not to see that happen on a country-wide scale. But me and the other gray-hairs are worried, especially the people I know out in LA. We’re getting that “vibe” again.
Things are stretched beyond breaking. Our teachers have flat-out given up. Our cops are showing the sort of violent and unstable behavior you would expect from PTSD. The wave of earnest enlistees that flooded the military after 9/11 have become the sort of weary jaded bastards that could put the most burned-out Vietnam Vet to shame.
We are, for the first time in history, routinely using mercenaries in almost every level of our military and law enforcement. I’m seeing military families, families with generations of service, hang up their uniforms and forbid their children from serving.
Our hospitals are literally allowing people to die from neglect in the ER. Our bridges are falling down. Our electrical grid is one snapped breaker from going dark.
Katrina should have been our moment of clarity. The fact that it so clearly wasn’t scares me to death.
But you go ahead, and keep humming that “I’m the best, I’m the best, I’m the best” mantra. Keep closing your eyes as tight as you can and shut your ears tighter. Find a good teddy bear, because the old man, the old man has seen all this before.
I’m terrified of where this train is going.