Taken from Gartner Says the World of Work Will Witness 10 Changes During the Next 10 Years. Very true and very interesting read.. ...snip...
"The workplace is becoming more and more virtual, with meetings occurring across time zones and organizations and with participants who barely know each other, working on swarms attacking rapidly emerging problems. But the employee will still have a "place" where they work. Many will have neither a company-provided physical office nor a desk, and their work will increasingly happen 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In this work environment, the lines between personal, professional, social and family matters, along with organization subjects, will disappear. Individuals, of course, need to manage the complexity created by overlapping demands, whether from the new world of work or from external (non-work-related) phenomena. Those that cannot manage the underlying "expectation and interrupt overloads" will suffer performance deficits as these overloads force individuals to operate in an over-stimulated (information-overload) state."
Comments on this blog are now disabled. They are nothing but annoying thanks to comment spammers and abusive people. I'm tired of it so they are toast. If you have a comment, email it to me (txs@donkeyonawaffle.org) and I'll respond/post as appropriate.
For those that don't know, I keep an updated list of books (novels mostly) read and my reviews of them at this link. Have fun and let me know what you think.
I mirrored what papers and presentations I could find that I've done over the last 10 years to my home page www.atarininja.org/~txs. If you happen to have any of my presentation slide decks or papers that I don't have uploaded please send them to me. I'm very poor at saving these things for posterity.
With regard to this blog. I'm going to be updating less frequently, but the blog is still alive. I've moved a lot of my shorter posts over to my twitter feed @txs_. Please follow that for the less detailed and shorter updates. Some more research will be posted here soon.
We all know the economy is continuing to take the proverbial plan b all over the tech job industry. The question really isn't "will it effect me?", my guess is yes, the question really is "how is this going to effect me". It may not directly cost you your job, but it will effect you in other ways, stifling innovation, limiting new technologies to hit the market, and generally causing a downturn in "cool stuff" going on.
According to the Techcrunch Layoff Tracker there were 317,000+ laid off tech employees through today. Will the gloom and doom ever end? Layoffs tend to be a trailing indicator of economic downturn, so don't use this as a prediction of future trends, but I doubt we've seen the bottom as of yet. For those of you still with a job, congratulations, and for those of you currently on the employment sidelines, good luck.
My question to my loyal reader is: How will this effect the information security landscape? Will budgets be cut in this area thus highly effecting the service and product providers in the space, or is security such a necessity that we will be immune to the economic slump? Please leave thoughts and ideas in the comments, this is an open forum post today. There is no right answer.
My brother pointed me to this link today. It's not the most high tech talk you'll ever see, but it is very funny and very inspirational. Mike Rowe is the host of the show dirty jobs on the Discovery Channel. He has a very interesting past including being a late night pitchman for the QVC channel as well as being a professional Opera singer with the Baltimore Opera. On the show Dirty Jobs he has done some of the most menial and dirty jobs in history and, with few exception, did the job with a smile on his face. He has some very interesting and valuabel insights into what "work" really is and how it has degraded within today's high tech society. Take 20 minutes and watch this video.
This just in from the desk of Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO:
From: Steve Ballmer
To: All Microsoft FTE
Subject: Realigning Resources and Reducing Costs
In response to the realities of a deteriorating economy, we.re taking important steps to realign Microsoft.s business. I want to tell you about what we.re doing and why.
Today we announced second quarter revenue of $16.6 billion. This number is an increase of just 2 percent compared with the second quarter of last year and it is approximately $900 million below our earlier expectations.
The fact that we are growing at all during the worst recession in two generations reflects our strong business fundamentals and is a testament to your hard work. Our products provide great value to our customers. Our financial position is solid. We have made long-term investments that continue to pay off.
But it is also clear that we are not immune to the effects of the economy. Consumers and businesses have reined in spending, which is affecting PC shipments and IT expenditures.
Our response to this environment must combine a commitment to long-term investments in innovation with prompt action to reduce our costs.
During the second quarter we started down the right path. As the economy deteriorated, we acted quickly. As a result, we reduced operating expenses during the quarter by $600 million. I appreciate the agility you have shown in enabling us to achieve this result.
Now we need to do more. We must make adjustments to ensure that our investments are tightly aligned with current and future revenue opportunities. The current environment requires that we continue to increase our efficiency.
As part of the process of adjustments, we will eliminate up to 5,000 positions in R&D, marketing, sales, finance, LCA, HR, and IT over the next 18 months, of which 1,400 will occur today. We.ll also open new positions to support key investment areas during this same period of time. Our net headcount in these functions will decline by 2,000 to 3,000 over the next 18 months. In addition, our workforce in support, consulting, operations, billing, manufacturing, and data center operations will continue to change in direct response to customer needs.
Our leaders all have specific goals to manage costs prudently and thoughtfully. They have the flexibility to adjust the size of their teams so they are appropriately matched to revenue potential, to add headcount where they need to increase investments in order to ensure future success, and to drive efficiency.
To increase efficiency, we.re taking a series of aggressive steps. We.ll cut travel expenditures 20 percent and make significant reductions in spending on vendors and contingent staff. We.ve scaled back Puget Sound campus expansion and reduced marketing budgets. We.ll also reduce costs by eliminating merit increases for FY10 that would have taken effect in September of this calendar year.
Each of these steps will be difficult. Our priority remains doing right by our customers and our employees. For employees who are directly affected, I know this will be a difficult time for you and I want to assure you that we will provide help and support during this transition. We have established an outplacement center in the Puget Sound region and we.ll provide outplacement services in many other locations to help you find new jobs. Some of you may find jobs internally. For those who don.t, we will also offer severance pay and other benefits.
The decision to eliminate jobs is a very difficult one. Our people are the foundation of everything we have achieved and we place the highest value on the commitment and hard work that you have dedicated to building this company. But we believe these job eliminations are crucial to our ability to adjust the company.s cost structure so that we have the resources to drive future profitable growth.
I encourage you to attend tomorrow.s Town Hall at 9am PST in Café 34 or watch the webcast.
While this is the most challenging economic climate we have ever faced, I want to reiterate my confidence in the strength of our competitive position and soundness of our approach.
With these changes in place, I feel confident that we will have the resources we need to continue to invest in long-term computing trends that offer the greatest opportunity to deliver value to our customers and shareholders, benefit to society, and growth for Microsoft.
With our approach to investing for the long term and managing our expenses, I know Microsoft will emerge an even stronger industry leader than it is today.
Thank you for your continued commitment and hard work.
Steve
And while we are at it, I'll link my tech layoff tracker of choice. http://www.techcrunch.com/layoffs/
Let's hope that 2009 starts to spin this thing around.
In retrospect, I didn't need teachers to teach me things; I needed teachers to force me to get out of my comfort zone, and partners to get me unstuck.
Kragen Javier Sitaker, March 1, 2007.
Taken from "my evolution as a programmer"
Blogging is out, "Tweeting" is in. Twitter is the new black, it's the latest and greatest, it's.. well weird. I've posted on my thoughts regarding microblogging in the past (here). "At first I was afraid, I was petrified", but then I realized just how useful this type of medium can be. I've since found myself adopting this technology as a way to keep up with the latest and greatest information security minutia directly from the people that are creating it. With groups of people such as the Security Twits along with the researchers I know personally, it's a very useful 1:Many discussion medium. The down side of the microblogging thing is that it's been taking away from my time/energy to create real blog entries for my reader(1). I promise this will change soon.
In the mean time, follow me on twitter (txs_) if you wish to join in the interesting conversation. I'm always keen to hear what my reader(1) has to say.
To quote a great song by the band Fort Minor: "Where'd ya go, I miss you so. Seems like it's been forever, since you've been gone". Well it hasn't quite been forever, but it has been nearly a month. I have all sorts of good reasons why I've been too busy to give you kind reader (note the intentional use of singular) the type of interesting infosec jibber jabber that you deserve... BUT.. I'm not going to tell you about them. Frankly it's none of your business.
Instead I'm going to give you a pointer to an interesting piece of research journalism conducted by business week. In a previous post to this blog (here) I commented on the dangers of fake chips and hardware entering the market from China and the potential security implications of these pieces. Well now business week has conducted a multiple week research piece tracking back the origin of a number of chips that caused malfunctions in equipment provided through BEA to the US military. With an interesting video and five fact filled pages of story, this is a very good read indeed. (*Thanks to Chris Eng for pointing this story out to me*).
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