HPCwire: The Undervalued Tech Worker

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

Leading HPC
Solution Providers

HPCwire >> Blogs

Blog: From the Editor

From the Editor | Main Blog Index

November 27, 2008

The Undervalued Tech Worker

In our supposedly tech-driven economy, it's common to hear about computer professionals who have lost their jobs and are unable to find new work in their field. And this was occurring even before the recession. Is the IT industry really that much at odds with its own labor market? Surprisingly, yes.

In a recent InfoWorld advice column hosted by Bob Lewis, a reader talks about an increasingly hostile tech labor marketplace -- not only for workers with "legacy" skill sets, but even for those with more recent experience:

[I]t's not just the COBOL and Fortran programmers, the OS/360 and SCOPE dinosaurs. It's also the software architects; data-base architects; system and network administrators; PHP, Python, Ruby on Rails, and Objective-C software engineers; and heavy metal engineers who were presenting papers at national and international conferences one day, and pariah the next.

The reader follows up with a familiar observation about the industry's indifference to providing employment continuity for the workforce:

The industry [executives have] made it clear. [They are] not interested in re-training the current workforce, which is likely adequate for its needs. No, it wants fresh bodies, preferably young or beholden ones willing to accept entry-level wages for long hours and who are either burdened with few family obligations or willing to pass them over... for the most part, companies are unwilling to re-train experienced programmers to fill available slots...

I've written about this on a few occasions, myself, in the context of the H-1B visa program for non-U.S. workers. But something else struck me when I read Lewis' response:

Since I try to avoid recommending solutions that require legislation, and also try to avoid moralizing in my writing, I recommend courses of action based on this being how the world works right now. People are products in the employment marketplace. If someone can't find a job, that means for one reason or another that person isn't a competitive product. The problem might be marketing, packaging, pricing, or a perceived lack of quality. Whatever it is, this is no different from any other marketplace -- it's up to the seller to package, price and market a product people want to buy.

Lewis says he's not unsympathetic to the techie's plight; he's just trying to be honest. And he makes a good a point.

But casting people as products is not only demoralizing, it's wrong-headed, and it reflects some unfortunate attitudes in the IT community. Specifically, the conventional wisdom is that maximizing ROI takes precedence over maximizing innovation. While that philosophy may work in a more mature industry that isn't subject to a lot of technological turnover, like say bubble gum manufacturing, in the computing business it's just short-sighted.

Since tech workers are the ones that design hardware, write software, and provide services, under-investing in them has some regrettable effects. The most visible example of this is the permanent "software crisis," which is currently playing out in the industry's attempt to apply parallel programming to the new raft of multicore and multiprocessor platforms. Moore's Law continues to double raw processing power every 18 months or so, but only a fraction of that is realized at the application level. But wasting cheap CPU cycles seems to make more sense than applying more human ingenuity to the problem.

To be fair, firms like Intel and Microsoft, along with help from the government, are investing a ton of money in parallel programming R&D, but most companies are willing to let this be somebody else's problem. The answer for the industry is going to require the adoption of new software platforms and training (or retraining) workers. And that's going to filter down to everyone.

The relocation of computing into the cloud is another challenge that's going to require a lot of new software development, infrastructure buildout, and a whole new industry to service it. Hardware is the easy part. It's the extra labor that's going to be the bottleneck. If the IT community convinces itself and its customers that computing will be essentially free once it moves into the cloud, there will be little incentive to invest in human resources to make it happen.

I'm not suggesting that simply retraining old techies is going to be a magic bullet. But there has to be some realization that the industry cannot rely solely on cheap processors, "free" software, and disposable IT workers to create innovation. Ultimately, IT is a labor-intensive industry. The purpose of computer systems is not to eliminate jobs, it's to create value and increase productivity.

At the Supercomputing Conference and Expo last week, there was a panel discussion on disruptive technologies for exascale systems. It was revealing that the four technologies highlighted were all hardware-focused: flash storage, photonic communications, 3D chip stacking, and quantum computing. It's easy to become seduced by these inventions. Once they're designed and implemented, they can be mass-produced, with little human intervention. As expensive as semiconductor fabs are, they can work 24/7 and don't require health insurance and retirement benefits.

But clever software can make even great hardware humble. D-Wave CTO Geordie Rose, the panel's quantum computing advocate, argued that new algorithms can have a much bigger payoff than more powerful silicon. He noted that using Pollard's rho algorithm from 1977, it would take 12 years to factor a 90-digit number on a modern-day 400 teraflop Blue Gene supercomputer. But using the newer quadratic seive algorithm, it would take just 3 years to perform the same operation on a 1977 Apple II computer. When you consider the multi-million dollar investment that went into the Blue Gene supercomputer compared to the probable investment that went into developing the new algorithm, you can get some sense of the industry's misplaced priorities.

Posted by Michael Feldman - November 27 @ 9:04AM

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCwire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCwire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

Michael Feldman

Michael Feldman is the editor of HPCwire.

More Michael Feldman

Feature Articles

TeraGrid '09: OSG and TeraGrid Collaboration

Paul Avery, a recognized leader in advanced grid and networking for science, delivered the first keynote address at the recent TeraGrid '09 conference in Arlington, Virginia. A professor of physics at the University of Florida, Avery is co-principal investigator and founding member of the Open Science Grid (OSG). Avery talked about the history of OSG, some of the projects that leverage its resources, and OSG's relationship with TeraGrid.
Read More...

TeraGrid '09: Thriving in an Exponentially Changing World

Before he even took the podium, Ed Seidel was one of the buzz makers at the TeraGrid '09 conference. The day before his keynote, it was announced that he was stepping in as acting assistant director of the National Science Foundation's math and physical sciences directorate. For his talk at the conference, however, Seidel focused on the issues and efforts within his home at NSF, the Office of Cyberinfrastructure.
Read More...

TeraGrid '09: How HPC and Therapeutic Drug Design Have Grown Up Together

When it comes to a take-home from Tom Cheatham's keynote speech at the TeraGrid '09 conference in Arlington, Va., the subtitle says it all: "Chronicling the growth of a student to tenured professor in the NSF supercomputing center microcosm." In his talk, he acknowledged how his career has tracked the evolution of the NSF centers, now TeraGrid, and would not have been possible without it.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Top Headlines

NSA Plans Massive, 65MW, $2B Data Center in Utah

Jul 06 | The Register | NSA looks to tap into cheap electrical power for new supercomputers. Read more...

Building the Computer That Could Halt Nuclear Armageddon

Jul 06 | TechRadar | Breaking the exaflops barrier will help keep the nation's nuclear weapons safe. And that's just the start. Read more...

Cloudy With a Chance of HPC

Jul 01 | GenomeWeb Daily News | The popularity of cloud computing in the life sciences community was on full display at April's Bio-IT World conference. Read more...

HPC From the Beach

Jul 01 | Linux Magazine | How can getting to the ocean help with HPC computing? Read more...

DARPA Investigates Extreme Supercomputing

Jun 29 | GCN.com | Agency issues RFI for "Ubiquitous High Performance Computing" systems. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Building High Performance Computing in a Green and Modular Solution Building Block

Apr 14 | | Many HPC IT departments are feeling the rising pressure to deliver more capacity computing and performance while trying to reduce the total cost of ownership. This white paper discusses how an environmentally-friendly and open-standards HPC building block based computing system using flexible interconnect options helps address capacity computing needs.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Dell Expands HPC Access and Adoption with Intel Cluster Ready Program

Source: Addison Snell, GM/VP, Tabor Research; sponsored by Dell

Many organizations that could benefit from the use of HPC clusters find that it is complicated to get the systems up and running because of limited IT resources or the complexities of the clusters themselves. Learn how the Intel Cluster Ready program, for which Dell was an original partner, seeks to address this challenge for entry level and mid-range HPC users.

Video White Paper: Architecting a Better Network Storage Solution

BlueArc's Titan architecture represents an evolutionary step in file servers by creating a hardware-based file system that can scale bandwidth, IOPS, and overall data capacity well beyond conventional software-based devices. With its ability to virtualize a massive storage pool of up to four usable petabytes of tiered storage, Titan can scale with growing data requirements, offering a competitive advantage for businesses, researchers, or other enterprises seeking to better manage data growth while still ensuring optimal performance.

Webcast: HPC Development Solutions: Sun Studio & Sun HPC ClusterTools

Sun Studio Compilers and Tools and Sun HPC ClusterTools allow you to create high performance parallel applications for OpenSolaris, Solaris and Linux. Sun Studio Express 11/08 includes MPI performance analysis capabilities and full OpenMP 3.0 compiler support. Learn about all this and the latest in Sun HPC ClusterTools 8.1.

More Multimedia

Blogs by Topics

Blogs by Author

HPC Blogroll

Featured Events

July 08, 2009
Data Mining: Failure to Launch
WWW

July 13-16, 2009
WORLDCOMP'09
Las Vegas , NV
USA

August 24-28, 2009
Data Mining: Levels I, II, & III
Denver , CO
USA

HPCwire

Tabor Communications | Tabor Research | Tabor Publications & Events

Tabor Communications