Discussion on:

Should IT be unionized?

You agree with the article, then articulate the methods used to force the activities of the article?

Certifications (which I have several) do not guarantee professionalism, nor do they guarantee competence etc?

The greatest guarantee of competence is the employers ability to dismiss.

If you are dismissed wrongly, new work will find you, or versa vice, if you were dismissed for a reason, you can choose to improve or not.

The free market operation of IT is how it gains the most potency, by constantly growing, achieving, expanding etc.

What certification would you request of Mark Zuckerberg, or Sergei? How about Steve Jobs? Bill Gates?

Stability and innovation are truly the yin and the yang of IT. There must be balance, forcing a traditional structure reserved for the most formal examples merely imposes their overhead, without any true benefit.

I have had a successful career in electronics and software, working for companies at the leading edge in their fields. Only once have I been asked to produce my certificates and that was at an interview for a job which it turned out I didn't want once I learned more about it. I have voted with my feet when I felt my abilities weren't appreciated or sufficiently remunerated. I have been headhunted and also found jobs via social networking (no, not on the internet - in real life). I have been laid off 3 times - a risk of working for small enterprising companies with more enthusiasm than management ability - but I don't regret any of the jobs I've been employed to do. I must mention here a person I have worked with who had far more letters after his name (Microsoft Certified, etc.) than I, who was as much use as a chocolate teapot. Because he'd been on the official courses and got the certificates, he knew he was right (even when he was wrong).
I was a member of a union once - the Students Union - which was mandatory at British Unversities when I was a student - and I've never joined one since. My view of unions is that they're fine for workers who may be tied to a job through geography, tradition, family or other factors which prevent mobility. I have also found more than one incompetent management team which resulted in workers being laid off (myself included) but in these cases, (i.e. no money and no jobs) what good could a union do? The concept of a union is excellent; unfortunately, all too often the union proves as problematic as bad management. So my final vote is NO to a union for IT workers.

Readers outside the United Kingdom may not understand that the most important responsibility of a Students' Union is to run the bars and the canteen, and the second most important responsibility of a Students' Union is to pay for the University football and cricket teams. A students' union is not a trades union in the usual sense, and the TUC refused affiliation to the National Union of Students.

The are legal restrictions on who can claim to be in a specific specialized profession. Thus doctors, lawyers and engineers have licensing boards and laws covering them. I cannot call myself a Mechanical Engineer with out having my Professional Engineer(PE) License that requires an accredited degree, fundamental testing after graduation, experience in the field, professional recommendation from licensed peers in my field, advanced testing by a national testing board. ethics tests and continuing education. All of that followed up by responsibility for ones own work and legal recognition as an expert witness.

Certifications have moderate to weak value, for many reasons, including that they cannot keep up with the pace of IT.

Licenses would merely fall into that.

BTW, the original certifications were created to address the need you now are promoting licensing for. (Professional proof of competence, baseline knowledge etc).

Once you get past all that, please begin to answer what you feel the license should cover?

Should it cover say Basic Network Infrastructure? IEEE Standards for say Requirement gathering? How about Testing? Should it cover connector standards and what they are (By IEEE description?).

Should it cover hardware and software? What about policy? You will quickly find that you either cannot cover enough stable materials, or the scope is enormous and not relevant to IT on a day to day basis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_1394).

This is a question, not a complaint.

There is ITIL V3, PRINCE2, PMBOK, ISO/IEC, CobiT, Agile with Scrum and sprint, and proprietary standards and frameworks for organizations. Should we learn these first before we start? Which one should we learn? Should there be a series of certs for each one that cost $200 apiece? The entire idea of making educated IT people take other courses in skills is pathetic. It shows their disrespect for the education that they already possess. They may be referring to themselves when they think of how they goofed off in undergraduate courses just so they could go to work for daddy's company or one of his friends! Most techs that get a BS know a lot and should be given a chance first. This reminds a little of Mao's China, where they destroyed the educational system, supposedly to make it better! What the hell do these companies want, or do they even know, outside of creating chaos in the workplace, society, and educational institutions! Call it a Professional Organization, but get a union!

All of that followed up by professional responsibility for ones own work and legal recognition as an expert witness.

Every software EULA in the world is refusal to accept professional responsibility for one's own work.

People with certs may be more knowledgeable but many of them forgot what they learned in the boot camp or J.C. People with BS or MS degrees do not know everything about every new program that comes along so companies should not expect them to. They need to find people that have shown their competency by getting one of those degrees and then hire them long term, train them what their company needs, and let them upgrade on a timeline. This is much more profitable than letting the other employer teach personnel so that your company can hire them and get the payoff. The most competent workers in the construction industry bar none are the union workers, even though companies say that is not true. A company cannot hire off the street without knowing the competency that being in a union offers. In a union, it is known every job and the people that they worked on, including any problems or exceptional personnel. Union leaders have to make a living too, and invest the union money, which companies also complain about. Imagine that, workers making money through investment. I saw companies do that to workers in construction, where they went non-union and most of the tradesmen, except for union workers, ended up broke and without a pension when they hit 65. Companies don't care about the workers - they only will pay if they really need your skill, so skill based IT is bad for workers and maybe good for business, except that business is not stable that way. What if all of a sudden we need to apply 110% of all our resources in every company in America within a year, irregardless of whether they have the skills? Will they be able to take things that they have never seen and make em work?!

Can you imagine it requiring a 4 or 7 year degree, a standardized test for inclusion in the rolls of " licensed it professionals"? No thanks. IT covers too much territory. This field is very fast paced and doesn't lend itself well to traditional education models (just look at it related college curriculums for examples). Any enforceable licensing body or certification standards will just enrich the organization that creates and enforces the standard. You are guaranteed overall costs will go up and quality will go down as the incentives move from focusing on quality work to focusing instead onmatraining and maintaining licensure.

"Any enforceable licensing body or certification standards will just enrich the organization that creates and enforces the standard."

i guess, at this point, that would be M$, Cisco, et al - Do we really want these clowns as gatekeepers to the IT industry?

into the history of guilds, which is the alternative, you'll find they soon became less than clever real quick as well. Vendors, Guilds or Unions, all elevate mediocrity in one form or another and all have one thing in common. The boys who run them, don't like their authority challenged by new, or better, or just not theirs...

Just what IT needs....an army of MSCE's (which really stands for Must Call Someone Else) running around prescribing best practices and then scratching their heads wondering why everything isn't just working smoothly.

Focus on results, not tests. Let resumes be the testimony of a person's technical competence, not review boards.

The problem with the MSCE is that it's too easy. Not that I've gotten one, but when I reviewed it, it was lame.

A union would have the benefit of conferring certifications only after some number of hours of work. Say someone has clocked 4000 hours of work doing a specific range of tasks - then you can test them, and if they pass, they get some certification.

No "learning tree" or other test proctoring service is going to want to track your work for years before giving you a cert. That would be expensive, and most people wouldn't go along with it.

Doctors and Lawyers go to school and learn a profession where that knowledge can be pretty much used for the entire career. Sure there are changes and advancements, but for the most part they happen slowly. IT on the other hand changes so much in 5 years that it would be nearly impossible to go to school for eight years (like a lawyer or Doctor) and have the knowledge you need for the career. IT is a fast changing industry, Microsoft dumps main support for a product after 5 year and all support after 10 years. Then you have all the new technologies and languages.

When I started in IT PC's didn't even exist yet, let alone 'networking', WIFI wasn't even a dream. I was taught COBOL and RPG2 (bet you have never even heard of RPG) when I was in school. When I got out in the real world I never used RPG2 and only barely used COBOL. They were DOA by the time I got though school.

There are several keys to being good in IT. You need to be able to think logically. You need to know a little about a lot so you always know what is new and what is possible. You need to know a lot about a little, but that has to change fairly rapidly and frequently based on your current job, current company goals... You need to be able to see the big picture, but also the tiniest detail. You need to know not only what the company wants to accomplish, but you need to know what tools are at your disposal and you need to be able to adapt those tools to the task at hand.

I certainly agree that unions are no answer to IT, but truly there would be no way to license IT professionals like doctors or lawyers or even engineers. Are you truly expecting a state agency to administer license exams, continuing education, competency hearings...? Do you really want to have to carry professional mal-practice insurance like doctors and lawyers?

I mean a lawyer must have a good foundation to do his job. He must understand concepts in the law that he then extrapolates to apply to a given position. Doctors know there is a basic procedure to diagnose and treat nearly everything. But IT is a little different, it changes so fast, and more often than not you don???t need to understand the SMTP protocol or even the differences between SMTP and ESMTP let alone TCP to successfully setup and deploy a mail server. If I know an IP Address, Subnet mask and gateway and can setup (or have my provider set up) forward and reverse DNS, I am in business.

How often do I need to understand every bit in a TCP packet? Understand framing? For the most part even programmers don???t care, there is a library to handle that (this is even true on many microcontrollers). If I need to know, I know where to go look and I can quickly find out just how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Many of us know what the Best Practices are for a given situation, that doesn???t mean the company will be willing to pay for the best practice. I may have to come up with a different solution.

No, licensing IT professionals is not an answer. It would stifle innovation, and add un-needed costs to a system that already eats far too much from the company???s bottom line. If you don't believe me just ask any CEO if he is happy with the cost of IT in his organization. Then ask would they be willing to pay more.

"Doctors and Lawyers go to school and learn a profession where that knowledge can be pretty much used for the entire career."

Doctors spend as much time staying current as we do, lawyers significantly less. Also, the updating that lawyers have to do is mostly stored in a searchable form and otherwise well-documented. Doctors have to read between the lines, balance conflicting factors and results in various journals, make judgement calls on the state of the art/best practices. We tend to use a little bit of documentation and a lot of judgement based on/application of first principles (regardless of operating systems, programming languages, methodological schools, etc.).

But I agree that both unionizing and licensing are extremely distasteful.

I see them as undermining meritocracy. Co-workers and intelligent bosses recognize and respect knowledge, ability, and productivity. (If that were only the case with the B-school bozos and the HR gate-keepers, instead of getting worse and worse.)

I work for a law firm and the lawyers and paralegals need to have a certain number of CLE (Continuing Legal Education) hours every year to maintain their licence. I know Doctors do too.

The point I was making is that the base of information does not change for them like it does for IT, and the base of information is more important to them. We don't care about all the nuances of the SMTP protocol 99.99999% of the time. Do I care at all about COBOL or RPG? Will I ever use that knowledge again? Do I care about a token ring network, 10base2? Will I ever need to again?

Here they usually refer to them by the more generic CEUs (continuing education units).

The base information for IT does not change. Sure, we read the RFCs, recall the basic set-up, but we don't remember which bit goes where in this header, or where that bit goes in that trailer; that's what reference materials (well, OK, and standard classes) are for.

You don't need to care about any specifics of COBOL or RPG or SNOBOL or Spitbol or Algol or APL or Pascal or Python or Perl or PHP or Javascript or Java or Objective-C or C++ or the variant implementstions of "SQL" or even things like NIAM/ORM or state diagrams... except to remember which ones are (and always were) totally worthless for real-world work (I'm at my my nicer, gentler, most euphemistic and indirect best), and which ones are best for which kinds of work, and the kinds of notation and methods that work with each. You won't remember every specific aspect of the standard for every particular language, but, when working with each, you kind of sort of remember that this kind of way of doing things exists with most of them. You remember the alternatives so that, in a pinch, you can quickly try each one in turn, even though you may not precisely remember that with brand-name y version 5.4.7 the comma must go here instead of there.

The folks who try to nail down measures of productivity and such say that it generally takes 2 weeks to pick up a whole new programming language. Picking up a new paradigm -- which often uses old terms with new meanings as well as totally new terminology -- can take a month to become marginally productive and typically 18 months to reach mastery. That's not too far off the general rule of thumb that it requires 3 weeks to end a habit or start a new one, and 10K hours to develop top-tier expertise.

I am pro-licensing, though I don't have any certs or even a degree. The reason is that it makes it easier to hire, and to get hired. When I hire a tradesperson to fix something, I just have to look up their license. That's a certain amount of protection for me - I know they have passed a test, and have insurance.

Presently, I work in a place where not a single person there is qualified to assess my skills or my work. It's not an IT organization. Licensing and certification would be good for me, making it easier to change jobs, demand raises, etc.

We've subcontracted work out, and I ended up hiring a loser once - he knew what he was doing but bit off more than he could chew at the price we negotiated. My coworker hired someone to do our website, and the guy was just learning what an "if" statement is. In both cases, I had to pick up the mess and fix it. Licensing would have helped us avoid both situations.

Another time, we didn't complete a project. If the vendor had some kind of insurance to cover unexpected situations, we could have sued to get enough money to hire someone else to finish the project. But he didn't have that insurance or know of it. So the upshot, again, was that I had to pick up the pieces and finish the programming. If licensing required the vendor to purchase specific insurance to assure good business practices, that would have helped us avoid this problem.

(I love to program - but it's just stressful to finish off someone else's project well after the deadline.)

It's optional. It's like, if you want to hire someone to fix your house, you can get someone who is licensed, or you can call around and find someone who isn't.

Personally, I prefer to pay extra to get the qualified vendor. The reason being - I've gone unlicensed before, and it's really hit or miss. We had some concrete done by a friend, and it cracked in a year. We had concrete done by a bonded, licensed company, and it hasn't cracked in a decade.

Just so you know
there are industry groups and certification processes that claim to proffesionalize and license IT
Last time i checked - the BOKs is usually outdated and irrrelevant to IT operations.

I think the most universal certification is the comp sci degree.

TIA for any input

Law schools are churning out more grads than are needed. Too many doctors go into specialties, leaving a void in primary care. The Guilds control the practice of medicine/law but not in a way that necessarily makes economic sense. Thus, there are no guarantees even if spend the money and go through the pain of obtaining the license. Furthermore, the economics of the legal field is being impacted by offshoring, LegalZoom and other online resources, etc.

Mainly because (in Canada) vets are paid better than they are. You don't know how many times I've felt like handing $50 to my doctor and saying "here, this is what I pay my vet, could I please get treated as well as a dog?"

This is why the J visas were widened from "cultural exchange" to employment of foreign people (mostly students) at amusement parks, resorts, and now at factories... and then to bring in foreign doctors for "underserved" rural areas, which, in practice, has turned into urban areas within blocks of major hospitals. It's all about driving down compensation, increasing hours and generally worsening working conditions... the same as for H-1B and L and F with OPT visas.

I was thinking landfill.
In order to displace lawyers, you'd need legislation....

Labor should always be kept divided and weak, so as to keep costs down. Look how well it's worked to import foreign labor to undermine the growth in IT wages. If you let IT workers get the idea that they can band together to collectively bargain for better pay and job security, it'll cut into executive compensation!

Are you serious? Now i'm not discounting the fact some manager's or business's do outsource jobs to save overhead and money but rarely is it for compensation. It's to remain slim, effective and operate with a low overhead which allows for a company to expand, grow, remain competitive and put money into R&D. Now with that being said a trend I've noticed is companies now bringing many of those jobs that were outsourced back home. Not because it's cheaper (it very well could be) but it's because the customer support has suffered. The last thing anyone (whether it's business or the regular consumer) wants to deal with is a language barrier.
I'll give 2 examples:
Apple has a great on call support. Now I'm not an apple fan myself but I always tell people when I have to call in to get assistance with a phone their support is excellent. Why? (And I mean nothing bad by this to anyone who has English as their 2nd language) It's because they speak English as their 1st language and I don't' have to deal with a language barrier, specially when I have a hard time understand Indian accents.
The 2nd example is McAfee: Their 1st tier when I call in is most likely outsourced which is fine because all they ask for is my Grant number and the product i'm using. Then I'm transferred to Gold support and the person on the other line speaks English as his primary language. Plus every support tech was able to understand my problem quickly, effectively (without following some blasted tree of questions).
I've worked with several companies who have their support outsourced and getting anything understood or done is just extremely difficult and time consuming (which in the IT world Time is a luxury that I don't have).
So by getting cheap labor (by keeping cost down as you said earlier) the effectiveness that I mentioned earlier is actually lost and can result in lost revenue. Plus with IT forums sharing via word of mouth bad customer support reputations spread faster.
Also with your comment about "divide and weak" in a "General speaking" of most companies that is not how business is done (Now we can get into a debate about the history of mistreatment of workers but that's for a different forum and time). Companies don't go "let's keep everyone separate and wages as low as possible because I want a bigger check at the end of the year". Many companies are more then happy to pay for higher wages for more qualified individuals so their company can provide better support, help the company expand with their knowledge, etc.
Also I know what I should make, if a company is not willing to pay for my expertise, experience, knowledge and hard work ethic I will find another one that will. I know what I know and what i'm capable of doing much better then any collective bargaining agreement/union will ever know. Which give me the upper hand in my own negotiations of my pay/salary/contract.
All you have to support your little 2 sentence post is because executives want higher compensation? I'm sorry that's not good enough and a horrible generalization of the business world in the U.S. and how it operates.

Then get back to me they will cominto my email and I would like to hear what you have to say on my thinking of what the big corprate Ameica is doing and we can have an intelligent conversation about what is going on in this country.

When you take the time to pin them down it turns out to be cheap, pliant, young (hence cheap and pliant), generally foreign labor (hence people who are out of their element away from relatives and friends from countries with lower pay and standards of living, with a culture of subservience, i.e. cheap and pliant and generally young), with questionable ethics (i.e. willing to gen up whatever evil scheme the B-school bozos have in mind).

Vivek Wadhwa admitted it. Vandrevala admitted it. Several execs in the US have admitted it in unguarded moments. NSF admitted that driving down compensation was a goal. And the data and anecdotes, i.e. experiences, support it. Recruiting practices are consistent with it, and inconsistent with the "no talent in the USA" claims. It's perfectly consistent with all of the evidence.

"I know what I know and what i'm capable of doing much better (than) any collective bargaining agreement/union will ever know."

Agreed.

Every business does to some extent. Have you ever done any hiring or tried to make a payroll or subcontract out work? There's always pressure to cut wages, if possible. Sometimes, it's not possible - but that is totally contextual, and management has to evaluate what is critical and what can be squeezed.

So management cannot just squeeze human beings, as they do whenever they can. American education somehow skips the entire history of the labor movement, so ignorant people can complain about unions. And here you are all discussing the subject as if it had been invented yesterday.

As talented as we all are, and as loyal as we all have been, when it was possible to "offshore" the work, there it went.

Maybe you should worry more about doing your job than executive compensation. Why would it bother you how much your boss or your boss' boss makes. How silly. The foreign labor bit is a sham. Listen to what Phil Stossel has to say about it.

It would bother you if the board and the execs gave themselves lots of shares, and/or if the execs got big boosts in pay or bonuses, when the company was doing poorly and they were saying they have to cut your pay or dump you even when you'd been more productive. Even if they gave each employee 1 share and the execs 10 shares, it would be a scam.

If the CEO were doing great things there'd be no legitimate excuse to complain. If financial success floated all boats, as it were, there'd be no legitimate excuse to complain. But if we see an exec making stupid decisions, and still reaping out-sized rewards, something stinks.

Movie stars are highly compensated because they draw people through the box office and into the theaters (or pay-per-view or in front of the brain-draining box to be subjected to the advertising). Ditto "sports stars". They provide something many people want and are willing to voluntarily pay to get, and those particular individuals provide more of it to more people, wlling to pay more altogether than others in their fields (at any particular time 30%-50% of professional actors are unemployed, and one heck of a lot of sports wannabes ditto).

Now, I may not be a fan of team X, just as I'm not a fan of IBM or MSFT or the new HP, but I can see that they do have deluded fans willing to pay for their trash. To the extent that they're honest, and we have an open opportunity to criticize them, that's fine; to the extent that they're not honest, or that they try to squelch criticism, that's all the more reason to condemn them.

And I can see altogether too many people eager to lose their privacy to Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Grouply, Friendster, MySpace, GE, Lockheed Martin, Siemens. That's a different matter; they're being dishonest and coy about their flagrant abuses, their massive and extreme privacy violation schemes. And then there's Oracle/Sun who are honest about their evil intentions, and yet very determined and industrious about abusing people.

Yes, it does bother me if the workers who actually make things are on the minimum wage and the boss makes one hundred and forty times as much as they do for sitting in an office. That is the stuff of revolution.

Spoken like a union member - given the state of state and federal laws that protect employees, unions anymore are organized to extort higher wages and benefits at the cost of fellow employees (when laid off to keep benefits) and consumers, and, ultimate, the company or organization - they'd rather let it fail than negotiate. This is true for all industries, and It is no different.

I wish. To be fair, there may be laws, but as someone once said, they are "more honored in the breach than in the observance." But seriously, the only reason you should have a problem with a union "extorting" higher wages and benefits is if YOU AREN'T PART OF THE UNION. Quit complaining about those who get a bigger share of the pie they've contributed to, and go out and get union representation.

of the pie. Once upon a time, no workers could make it on their own, attempts to do so resulted in at best penury, more often than not, severe injury, including a large case of dead. That's why unions were created in the first place, so we couldn't be intimidated on an individual basis.
Once those brave an desperate people gained political reprsentation and enacted legislation, unions weren't really needed anymore. THis was a bit of downer for the boys at the top, so they invented a new reason for themselves. And what was that? To make sure the majority got more of the pie, and by definition, that majority always included those least valuable to the organisation...

absolutely technomom, i would lean much more towards the professionalization camp than unionization.

i was in a union when i was younger at a manufacturing plant, and the reason unionization and the seniority rules work for that environment is because anyone can start working regardless of education, experience or skill - you get trained on the job then start the trek up the seniority ladder.

there's no way IT professionals can be organized in that fashion. personally when i hire for positions on my IT team, the candidate better have one of those three things - skill, experience or education - before i consider hiring him or her. and yes, the new guys get exploited - that's the way it works in every industry. but IT techs also get paid hourly, so they're being compensated for their extra work, and that's how the majority of them learn their chops. i haven't seen many companies where non-management IT is on salary, where extra work for the "new kid" is actually exploitation.

on certifications - i know MCSE's for example that i wouldn't want to work with, because they crammed braindumps before every exam and slopped through it for a pass. i actually think certs like PMP is more valuable and has more street cred because you have to prove you've been doing PM work for 3 years before being allowed to take the exam, and have to maintain the credential with educational contact hours. we're an industry of standards, and it wouldn't kill us to be a little more strict with them.

I've met people in this field that I wouldn't trust to tie my shoelaces, and also people that thing that if you can't build a computer AND an OS from nothing but electronic components and the knowledge in your head, that you shouldn't be allowed to touch a computer at all! Granted, you'll get this situation on evaluation boards in any job field, but it seems to inhibit people more than it helps.

As for unionization, it doesn't work in this century in ANY sense. Look at how the established unions are stomped down and manipulated by big business (sometimes abetted by government) to get what they want anyway. In a lot of cases, if you save them money by NOT having a union, they're more likely to repay you on the back-end. But as always, you have to stand up for yourself and ASK for it. A lot of us are pretty complacent. I like my job, my pay is adequate, and I'm happy where I am. All it would take would be for me to sit down with my employer and push for more money, more vacation, etc... But those demands would also destroy the flexibility I now enjoy. Schedules would be more rigidly enforced, and some things would become 'demands' rather than 'nice to have dones'.

"if you can't build a computer AND an OS from nothing but"

It was a bucket of sand. You go into the final exam, senior year, and there's a bucket of sand beside each desk. You have to refine and separate the metals from the silicon, design the hardware...

What? Didn't you pass?

We need 'real' professionals.

Just sayin

Software is manufacturing, and it is 100% labor! We need more craftsmen and fewer PHDs in IT.

On the contrary, I think 99% of the people in IT could benefit from having a better theoretical grasp of what they're doing, instead of just slamming stuff together until it sticks. I'm an autodidact, but I still believe in the "didact" part.

However, I don't believe in certifications and regulations. The industry is far too fluid for that.