Survey: Future IT guys will 'crowd-source' to fix stuff Dell and Intel expect that crowd-sourcing will be a challenge that IT managers and chief information officers will have to meet in the next 10 to 15 years. Businesses will want to do it, and IT managers will have to work out how deliver it, they predict in a survey about IT in the workplace commissioned from research group TMS …
Why oh why did the IT Crowd guy stop writing, so much new material. Jen sitting alone at her desk, pictures of the others next to a windows machine and the blue screen of death. Hunting for her little black book to find the phone number of someone qualified to tell the irate user on the phone to tell them to turn it off and on again.
Surely in the film world the product is fairly transient, but the skills needed aren't. How does this transfer to other business areas?
Will bob really have a large pool of experience to source from in his specific business area, or will experience and time breed the niche skills like they do now?
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All right, temporary contracts all round, no chance of a permanent job - yeah, way to go. This is just another employer-responsibility-avoidance model. Let's keep the prols hungry, frightened and above all obedient. If I have misunderstood this (which is quite possible) I would be delighted if someone would explain why my cynical response is mistaken.
Nope, you're not mistaken. Definitely an employer-responsibility-avoidance model. Contractors will be smiling, of course, but it's a final nail in the coffin for permies. Any company that goes for this approach will, unless it thinks seriously long and hard about how it is going to do it, find that at the end of the job it has exactly nothing left in terms of intellectual capital (all the knowledge is only transiently available from the contractors).
The popularity of this idea is symptomatic of companies losing the will/ability to properly develop systems and their staff, and I've yet to see a case where it has actually worked.
I forsee yet more serious and expensive cock-ups in the future.
My take was that they would want to hire less experienced staff and then use crowd sourcing the answers on the web as a way to handle the heavy lifting.
That's going to drive down the use of outside contractors because some maroon will think that they can just google for an answer, or post a question to a board and expect to get a serious answer quickly.
Their misguided thoughts are due to seeing people like us answering some simple questions that have a high 'Doh!' factor. Like someone who should know the answer but couldn't come up with it. Or its a newbie question and someone felt too kind to type RTFM in the response as not to discourage them...
Of course we're talking about the same dimwits who thing a programmer is a programmer, regardless of experience and training, and went to the offshoring model to save money.
This ain't never going to work - the companys would spend more time writing standards and documentation that actually going the work themselves.
In addition they would need people to review the code once completed, there is FAR too much overhead for this, in a real world software project. it might work for the cheaper IT stuff much like ofshoring only really works for menial and simple tasks.
> In addition they would need people to review the code once completed, there is FAR too much overhead for this, in a real world software project
Are you suggesting code reviews are a waste of time? Automated unit tests and peer review are the two most crucial (in my eyes) 'overheads' for any software development.
Ok...
If you have a question ... you just google the net for it.
If you want a good answer, you have to sift through that information and figure out how accurate and reliable is the post.
Also depending on the question, you may or may not even get an answer.
You want to try to crowd source... just hang out on some of the technical forums on LinkedIn. Ask a question and see how long it takes to get an answer.
But with IT? Your never done.
You could even argue this already happens in large infrastructure changes such as SAP - a "team" comes in. Changes stuff up abit, breaks things, tells your manager everything you ever did was wrong and "bad for business". Eventually they leave, 6 months late and waaaaaaay over budget.
Next day the boss realists he actually liked the old way things worked, and your the only one they still employ because you offer "support". Time to fix everything and secure your job for the next "big thing"
Does these mean we'll all be replaced with CGI and blue-screen technology? Surely each computer screen just needs a load of unintelligable computer gobble-de-gook scrolling down the screen (as in most movies).
It's a bit like getting a machine that goes BEEP for an operating theatre, you just gotta have one! The management expect it!
Relax everyone. Future business guys will think of crowd-sourcing the way current business guys think of access databases ... a way to bypass the IT guys. When (not if) it fails, the future business guys will do what current business guys do, which is to ask their IT guys for help. Future IT guys will do exactly what current IT guys do, which is come up with a proper design and then outsource the development and risk to an SI.
Given the tendency for companies to chase cost-reduction, I'm certain this "appealing future" will take place. Having said that And now I think about it, most major IT Services companies 'flow' their teams together in an ad-hoc manner that closely resembles Crowd-Sourcing anyway...
...and when the A-team finishes up, it's always left to some overworked bugger on the coal face (who is already booking 120% of their time) to pick up the pieces.
The downside (did I mention an upside? No? Ah, well that because there probably isn't one) in the IT Services world is that it always makes any change horribly expensive, as flexible teams need to carry their fully-loaded costs with them, wherever they go.
Wait a minute, isn't that how Hollywood works? Eureka!
Isn't this the approach used for most government IT projects run by the favoured corporates ?
Couple of directly employed consultants and the rest are contractors moved in and out depending on the profit margin per body (err, I mean depending on the project requirements).
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