“The argument has been that you employ consultants and commercial providers to do this sort of work based on the fact they have skills you don’t, but had it not been for the fact we’ve lost so many skills we wouldn’t have needed to do that.”
This. How can companies/governments still think that you can "outsource" IT, when technology is not only tightly integrated into the fabric of what a modern company is, but nowadays a solid technology capability sets the high performers apart from the laggards. It's just as ludicrous as outsourcing the HR, sales team or the executive office.
Unfortunately unlike in the real world where these companies will become uncompetitive and dissolve, we are stuck with our government and their outdated operating models...
> you employ consultants and commercial providers to do this sort of work based on the fact they have skills you don’t
The irony is, it's nearly exactly backwards.
I have literally never seen effective use of consultants and outsourced work like this except in one situation: where you DO have the internal skills. Pretty much the only way to get any value is when you have highly knowledgeable and skilled people with strong engineering background managing the process.
Of course, convincing highly skilled engineers that it's a valuable use of their skills and time to simply manage a bunch of outsourced consultants when they could be directly managing a team somewhere else is a challenge in itself.
You are obviously right with needing local knowledge first. But I've seen two types of well-used consulting:
1. A small team needs to integrate with an external data source. They figure out it's better to keep own engineers focused on the business logic and bring external folk for the (hopefully) one-off task of figuring out the idiosyncrasies of the thing.
2. A large company needs to push the edges. They hire someone with a PhD in the general area, who then points at the exact professors needed on board to get the edges pushed.
I suspect that's why the department of works, well, works. If they order a bridge, they almost invariably end up with a nice looking bridge that carries cars, doesn't fall down, and generally meets expectations. Ditto for a building, a road, an airport ... Its not just the department of works either, when their private counterparts order a rail line spanning 1000km to carry millions of tons of coal, they generally end up with a working rail system that does the job.
But order when IT naive organisation orders new IT system from a third party and you usually get a cluster fuck. And the tribal claims here it's because "gobermant bad" notwithstanding, it's universally true, meaning it happens just as often to private organisations as it does government ones.
It does make you scratch your head and wonder why IT is different.
Regardless of whether it's a bridge or a IT system, there will be a consultant's marketing team spinning a very attractive vision of smoothly delivered sunshine and unicorns to someone who needs sunshine and unicorns to get a lift up the org chart. The only hope an organisation has against that is someone the leadership trusts, someone who can say "That beautiful and convincing power point presentation is like someone promising to delivery nuclear powered cars - they either have no idea what it would take, or are outright lying. If you fall for it you won't get a promotion, they will get you fired". And the people who count believe them. (We had a high profile politician in Australia who was sold a vision of nuclear powered cars - https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=216653896514005.)
My favoured theory at the moment is IT is too new for software engineers to earned that level of trust. An engineer's career lasts 40 or 50 years. 40 or 50 years ago, Uni's were churning out civil engineers, mining engineers, every conceivable sort of engineer except - software engineers. And worse, right now, we need a _lot_ of them. Not every org wants to build a road, or a bridge, but it really is true software is eating the world, so every org's beyond a certain size wins really does need a custom IT system to support their magic operational sauce. As a consequence, we are seeing IT salaries going through the roof.
It's a great time to be a software engineer, not a great time to be needing one.
When I consulted for Fortune 500s, I was regularly proposing in-house solutions that would be carefully tailored to and integrated with corporate KPIs.
They'd nod their heads in agreement, pat me on the back for the sage advice and themselves on the back for bringing in that sage advice, excited about things that would clearly bring in billions in revenue.
Which then never actually happened.
But you could have the crappiest most conartisty 3rd party offering at a ridiculous price tag that they'd gleefully throw money down the drain with, and then the next year I'd get brought in I'd be met with reluctance to work on whatever I was proposing because "oh, we tried that."
No, no you didn't.
Eventually I got tired of being a professional Cassandra and left the industry.
For software engineering, anecdotally the companies pushing for 100% in office are the more traditional enterprise organisations, that haven't embraced technology and agile practices.
While remuneration might be similar, there is a lot of red tape and working people willing to put up with bureaucracy are generally not as passionate and therefore try and palm off work or engage in politics.
I agree in principle that 100% in office roles are a red flag and not worth the hassle.
Yeah at my current company it's at leadership discretion. My group is permanent remote, but some of my companion groups are being forced back to the office.
Our pay across the board is dogshit though, and we're bleeding devs but the company won't let management pay what's needed to retain people.
On that note, if anyone's looking for a senior/staff full stack swe with 5 years of react plus a whole bunch of other stuff, let me know. Please.
Why wouldn't a simpler explanation be that the wires produce a radio/electromagnetic wave and that wave gets picked up and induces a current, which is how radio transmitters receivers work?
What's going on -in time- is a lot more complex than the 'steady-state, Occam's razor' simplicity most of us (outside of EE) were fed. One example: the math you'll see in the analysis of 'skin effect'.
I hope one of the outcomes of this discussion is that someone will tackle explaining how AC power gets from source to load, and what 'earth grounds' have to do with that ... and WHY. The usual hand-wavy 'simple' discussions leave out WAY too much.
Most people didn't have EE education at college level. Transmission line or radio wave carrying energy is a concept usually taught much later in ones schooling. Derek basically want to target mass market that receive basic electrical knowledge that actively tells you electric "only" flows in cable. A lot of people replying to his video subsequently demonstrate that Derek is right that these group of people have the not exactly right idea taught at school. Some people replying wishing to show he is wrong completely missed his message.
He's just leaving them with a different misconception, now he's told them to ignore the wires completely. I don't think this video helped anyone (for the various reasons stated in this whole topic).
>people have the not exactly right idea taught at school
could it not also be that some of these students didn't actually learn what was being taught, and just squeaked by with minimum grades to not have to take it again?
fwiw, I definitely was given the wires and electrons are like a pipe for water somewhere during schooling, and it was interesting to hear a deeper explanation.
and during this discussion of electrons flowing, did it now also contain discussion on the fields produced around the wire? did I just have an exceptional teacher (I know my high school physics teacher was one of those teachers and am indebted to him), or did I just pay attention?
To the point, during the time that I was learning fields produced around a wire carrying a current, I was also learning recording studio audio and how hums can be created by running cables in parallel and avoided by crossing them perpendicularly. I had a conversation about it with said physics teacher, and he gave a lecture about it the next day. Yeah, one of those teachers that sets one on a positive course.
The only constant is change, which is why you always need to modify what you are learning and keep learning and growing. I've seen far too many aspiring developers being held back because they stubbornly held on to fundamentals. Companies don't care about "global variables" or technical debt, they have to make a profit, look after employees, survive pandemics, maintain ISO accreditation etc.
Neglect is a loaded word. Children don't need hard working parents who earn lots of money though. What children need is your love and your time, along with support, security, food etc. It's all about having a work life balance, usually working hard comes at the expense of your family.
this. many people work hard to provide for their families, end up in a bad spiral of more-work-for-more-money and what they fail to see is child's view - they want their daddy and mommy to be with them as much as possible, talk to them, tech them, spend their time together. In this case it's not just quality, quantity matters too. this helps kid on so many levels that money just cannot buy, and forms their personality in one way or the other.
will kids survive neglect? of course they will. but if your idea of a good parent is that your kids just survive, think again. this world has already plenty of human beings ridden with all kinds of inner issues stemming from childhood
