I am taking advantage of the holiday to reduce the backlog of reading I have piled on my desk. In deference to the holiday, I am favoring the ligher fare including my backlog of New Yorkers. Today's post will feature the highlights of this reading.
InformationWeek 2012 Salary Survey
As if to acknowledge my interest in software engineering culture, this survey not only provides economic documentation of the market for software engineering and management skills, it also provides more qualitative information. Given the survey methodology I don't take this too seriously but I will not dismiss it entirely.
As I've read elsewhere, there is a continued appreciation for the role of people with deep analytic, especially statistical skills in the marketplace. This seems to be driven by the enormous growth in the amount of data out there (big data, deep analytics, business intelligence, data integration, data warehousing) and the continual movement of media to the internet where new models of advertising continue to draw attention. Facebook's need to monitize the phone app is only one such push. This is in addition to the ever growing need in financial services and in particular capital markets where trading models continue to move toward highly complex math based technques.
While this sector has done well, there is evidence in this survey for what many have seen and talked about anecdotally; the erosion of the mainline job of programmer/programmer-analyst in favor of outsourced and off-shored models. The smart people appear to be leveraging their knowledge of the data to take these more analytic jobs in favor of the development jobs they held.
There are several comments about Chevron retraining people in place. Notable since they are a local employer of grads.
The survey cites general feelings of security in the market with employees feeling that they are in no danger of losing their jobs. But after salary, company security is the next most valued attribute of their job. This salary also calls out that staffers do not depend on their company to maintain their skills. More than a third of all staff receive no training and 15% paid their own way for training. Only 25% of respondents receive tuition reimbursement. Only 10% of staffers think college-level technology or business courses would "be useful" to their careers. Technology specific training is sought by 76% of staffers. Despite the market signals, only 6% of staffers see statistics or analytics training as "most useful" for their careers.
One slide that caught my attention was the reasons for working as a contractor/consultant. For staff, the answers ranked: higher pay (45%), couldn't find full-time IT job (32%), flexible hours (30%), variety of the work (27%), broaden experience/skills (22%), other (10%). Two responses were allowed. These sum to 166% so some only provided one response. N=333. The first two responses are purely economic in my opinion. The next three speak to an engineering mindset. Hours and variety were more highly prized by the management respondants than the staff (41% and 42% respectively) which I find surprising. But staff cited broadened skills and experience two to one over their managers as was true in the category of other.
There is a slide on training valued (What type of training would you fin dmost valuable to you in developing your career?, figure 43) The categories where staff had a higher demand than management was technology specific training (76/54), certification courses (43/26), and college courses in tech or business (10/7).
Fig 46: What Matters Most to Staffers lists mostly economic issues as you might expect (base pay, job/company stability, benefits, vacation/time off, commute distance, geographic location) but what is surprising is how highly rated many of the non-economic issues are. For example 40% checked "my opinion and knowledge are valued" versus 19% for "potential for promotion". This can be interpreted to mean that the average staffer is twice as motivated by an environment where they are asked to share their opinion and feel their knowledge is valued than the yearn for a promotion. Other non-economic issues to staffers include:
* "challenge of job/responsibility" - 39%
* "job atmosphere" - 36%
* "having the tools and support to do my job well" - 30%
* "working with highly talented peers" - 25%
* "corporate culture and values" - 19%
(N=7499, respondents allowed to select up to seven)
Barely a third of the staffers felt challenged intellectually with the IT projects they are on (35%)
Of the respondents, 2895 reported they were looking for a new job. (fig 73) Of them 70% cited compensation but 50% cited "more interesting work" and 43% cited "seeking more personal fulfillment and 41% cited "don't like present company's management/culture. (multiple responses were allowed. I think this it is telling that the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th reason cited were non-economic. When you consider that few people are likely to not check more compensation when they are changing jobs, I think they suggests that IT staffers are not overly concerned with the economic incentives they receive. When this is taken together with the next figure (fig 74, reasons to accept a lower position), I think the picture is even clearer. The number one reason given was "more job satisfaction" at 55% with location second at 40%.
87%male
23% work for a company that employs more than 20,000 workers.
ACM SigSoft Software Engineering Notes, Mar 2012 vol 37,no 2
The secret life of academic papers by Robert Schaefer
He talks about requests he's received to convert his qualitative analysis "int a more empirical form" and discusses his concern about reducing "complex issues to numbers". He says he has been told by his students that this is done all the time and referred to as Q-Methodology.
Surfing the Net for Software Engineering Notes by Mark Doernhoefer at MITRE corp
He gives two links to help in learning Google's MapReduce
http://research.google.com/archive/mapreduce.html
http://code.google.com/edu/submissions/mapreduce/listing.html
Also a brief mention of Hadoop http://hadoop.apache.org, Amazon Elastic MapReduce http://aws.amazon.com/elasticmapreduce.
He cites a project called Common Crawl (http://commoncrawl.org/) which sounds way cool. If I read this page correctly, you can use their Hadoop servers and extract information for free. I gotta try that!
Risks to the Public by Peter G. Neumann and contributors
I am so tired of rereading about the Thorak software glitch. This offers new ones. Of note was a failure of the Berlin Train System on 15 Dec 2011. There was a single point of failure which lost all power. The system was completely shut down and it took 3 hours after power was restored before a any traffic could start running again. Qantas experienced two sudden altitude drops of planes in flight. At least one was attributed to a failed airspeed sensor. My favorite bit is this:
"[There's] an (unverified) assertion that the Airbus flight control system will exercise uncommanded changes to throttle settings without moving the throttle handles in the cockpit. If true: bad robot, bad, bad robot. (The Boeing system supposedly has actuators on the handles and moves them when it decides to take over throttle control.)]"
Also reported, a programming error led to the loss of a Russian Mars probe.
The Internet Hysteria Index
No comments:
Post a Comment