On Friday, Jun 13, 2003, at 09:17 US/Eastern, Chris Magnus Hedemark wrote:
The sudden loss of IT jobs in this country is at least partly attributable to jobs moving to countries with cheap labor, like India or China. When I was at a big blue company a few years back I saw jobs moving to India that used to be in Raleigh. Maybe part of it was caused by IT guys hopping from job to job every 6 to 18 months in pursuit of higher pay, and employers scrambling to retain talent as long as they could. Loyalty in the workplace is *gone*, with blame falling on both sides of the employee/employer relationship.
Watching the movie last night made me realize a few things. Linus was asked, "Do you feel like you've lost out on the millions of wealth that Linux has generated?" (or something like that.) And Linus responded, "No, I'm happy that I and all these people who like to do Linux stuff can get jobs doing it." (or something like that.)
First, I realized is that Linux and Open Source software for a while was an economic growth package the likes of which any Governors, legislatures, and Presidents would jump at the chance to set up. Linus managed to do it, without intending to. But it burned very brightly and could not be sustained. While it burned, a lot of people got trained in IT, people who had no formal training. I know off-hand of two excellent network administrators who's college degrees had nothing to do with IT. One was history, the other sociology. If/when they get laid off, they don't often go back to their degrees. Maybe IT gets in your blood.
Second, the pushing of VC companies to invest in Open Source companies and their reluctance to do so... Joel on Software has a fantastic article on VC companies and how they work -- from the companies point-of-view. When I showed it to a VC friend of mine, he mentioned that some of the things are correct, some are not. Yes, it works out that 7 of 10 fail, 2 of 10 are marginally successful, and the last is The Big One. But they don't invest with that expectation. Every one they invest in is one they expect will be The Big One. The one that they cash out of in five years with enough to fund another 10 or 20.
Once they've invested, the VC's job is risk management. They're not looking to add as much risk as possible to the venture. If they do something that seems risky and dumb to the rest of the company, it's not because they want to have one of the 7 failures, it's because they see things differently. They see the risky thing as a reasonable gamble, or an opportunity. Maybe they know something you don't. Maybe you know something they don't.
Oh, and this precludes whatever the equivalent of "paper MSCEs" are in the VC world. As with any profession, some of them are simply incompetent. Can you tell the difference?
At any rate, today as an industry they've scaled waaay back the level of risk they're willing to manage. They're still in the business of making money by investing in companies, but they've learned to be leery. Stock prices that explode on opening day, then a year later are worth less than 1% of their high? Not what they consider one of their successes, even if the company is still around today.
And yet there are those that no one quite figures to be worth investing in. The canonical example: Pez dispensers. eBay started off as a site for buying and selling Pez dispensers. Who could envision what it would become? If the guy that started it went to some VC people and said, "I want to get people to sell Pez dispensers online." Well, would you have invested in it? Would you have thought, "Yes, sell Pez dispensers online, and maybe a town in California."
Third, when Richard Stalman was talking about the admins not sharing and the punishment he effected, I immediately thought of the Sports Night where Dan (half of the on-air talent) didn't tell Natalie (the associate producer) something -- didn't share -- and when she found out there was "punishment." She had wardrobe withhold their pants until the first commercial break.
jf -- John Franklin [EMAIL PROTECTED] ICBM: 35�43'56"N 78�53'27"W
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