Greyfox's Journal: Trend in the IT Industry

I was just talking to a fellow I worked with a couple years back. He was (somewhat) forcibly retired from the company he worked for after 35 years of service to them. It wasn't a performance issue, rather he was "retirable" and the company was downsizing. They lost a lot of very specialized knowledge when they got rid of him, from a project that was a pretty big component of their sales process a few years ago.

There's a trend in the industry to treat employees as hot-pluggable resources. One person is viewed as just as good as another with no consideration of experience or ability. If you can get rid of one person and load twice the amount of work on someone else in his team (And let THEM figure out how to complete it all on time) that does fine.

This makes the industry a shitty place to work, drives the more experienced people out of the market and encourages the 90s style job-hopping that let a lot of people with no business in the industry inflate their salaries to outrageous levels without actually doing any work. I've had to clean up after a few of those people.

It takes a while to learn a job and the business practices and processes of the company you're working for. From what I've seen, most people need three to six months to get comfortable in the environment and learn their way around a code base if they're programming. After that the productivity goes up dramatically. The current practices of the industry makes for a lot of turn-over before you hit that point and views someone with years of experience in that position as being easily replaced by a fresh college graduate. This, in my view, is a mistake.

So what to do about this? I think eventually the market might sort this out. If it's a bad thing, I think that any company that comes along with different attitudes could end up out-producing and out-maneuvering its more clueless competition.

If anyone works for such an enlightened company I'd love to hear your views on the subject. And... um... are you guys hiring?