Projects on hold as economic malaise bites, seeing tech hiring boom go bust

Many of the big players have been demanding returns to the office more and more.

There's no one method. Some functions require physical collaboration, others some form of managerial oversight.

That's my point.  Its not about location so why employ a local when you can employ someone cheaper overseas?  Remote working now means remote outsourcing. 

If you want to hang on to a job, you'd be best pretending that your work cant be done from home.  Otherwise you'll soon be given the boot and replaced by an offshore worker.  

https://connectos.co/news/offshoring-rides-the-next-wave-of-remote-work/

Management are embracing "remote working", just not in the way that workers thought they would.  As they say, be careful of what you wish for because you just might get it.  In this case, unlimited time at home doing nothing in your pyjamas.

"I've worked with some people for years and never met them face to face."

Ditto.

I love it when the newbies send meeting requests to meet up at the 1LVL5C Meeting Room, Main Street Building, Manhattan, NY. (And occasionally ask to meet up for 'after work' drinks which I'll make every effort to attend but seldom are able too.)

Most outsourcing from India is done via very large companies (Accenture, Tata Consultancy Services) who employ the absolute bottom rung they possibly can.

This has been the case for the the last several decades, well before remote was a thing.

They only go into the office to get away from their 12 person share house and lack of heating.

"If it's a discretionary nice to have that needs interest rates 3-4% lower than current to afford, it's a questionable investment."

Such comments assume that the funding comes from borrowing. It almost never does!

Most projects are funded from margins on sales. And sales are way, way down for many. Fewer projects still are funded from retained earnings and these too are under pressure to keep the business liquid due to ... wait for it ... Lower sales.

Funny that that comment got thumbs up. I guess from people who don't know much about running a business.

Some of their practices are terrible, some are really top class. Its other departments where I have seen some absolute shockers, working with one at the moment that would make you shake your head in amazement as it has for most of us involved.

BS.there is no IT system in NZ they is a burning bridge that would cause our GDP to fall by 25%. You are having a laugh.

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Speaking of poultry management and disease reduction we really don't want to cut engineering & fuel supply chains because that is critical to the survival of many species. NZs lack of tech and engineering skills understanding in much of the public and it affects a lot more then tracking and monitoring. We actually need better resource security & hygiene practices because without generator support already failures costs hundreds of millions. If a fan goes down or we fail to have the adequate hygiene & tools working (e.g. to test and record disease), the whole flock, sometimes over a hundred thousand, can be lost & killed. We just don't have the general tech skills in NZ to run and operate to a decent level without our existing critical failures and we still have govt depts discouraging investment in engineering skills. At best we have more marketing to help justify the money going out in reports that are passed around but do not have any tangible improvements to services.

As true for agriculture services as it is for all others.

On the human side. Most medical practices rely on generators & UPS to ensure vital medical supplies & samples are kept viable. Losing power they lose more then access to patient records and it can cause many to lose access to essential medical needs. Batteries in homes, medical centers and businesses don't last long enough for a typical NZ power cut (especially as rewenables often don't cover the periods of power cuts and the demand profiles) and batteries are often so under spec, (they can cover only extremely short periods of small power uses only) that they cannot meet the power demands needed for essential needs. Often people have to sacrifice significant living needs or resort to emergency level practices (e.g. ambulance callouts to travel to hospitals or other centers where power generators are operating).

Yet NZ has instead gone down the path of focusing on design & marketing, on removal of resources needed for functioning services, on increasing policy & management staffing, not core STEM & professional engineering skills. We have many in govt depts who cannot understand the real needs of the essential industries we rely on so will cut the lifeline of them without even realizing or providing adequate replacement. The deprioritization of core infrastructure and even in human medical services over those that purely produce policy reports is pretty bad and we lost a lot of opportunity to increase resilience on many levels because of it. So when disaster happens, be it floods or viral etc, we literally end up far worse off and without any safety net or disaster plan for many.

Over 95% of NZ govt webservices and systems are inaccessible to more then 20% of the population.

So lets be clear if we are grading these projects to mark them as success then the measures for success need to also have accessibility to the population (more then 95% fail, using govt own stats), more then 80% have severe security risks, more then 70% do not have the buy in from the public, more then 80% actually increase the costs of management and customer services then previous etc. By most measures of government services they are predominantly failing in significant ways. Remember the WINZ kiosks, or NovaPay. How about the great savings we were meant to have with the multi-billion IRD redesign to "streamline" the online interface, when the simple act of just automatically processing PAYE refunds without the need for customer approval first did more simply by significantly reducing the amount of people who had visibility over their returns & reduced the need to have to use the IRD services at all.

What you instead have is that managers who manage the projects claim they are a success to retain purpose and validity for their over blown pay packets. The KPIs used are purely exercises in self aggrandizement and justification for poor performing management & terrible design practices. Any project can be a success because they have set the standards to the height of a dog turd that does more harm to people in the nation then previous services and causes lost opportunity in where the funds could have been spent. It is that bad.

Your opening paragraph is sadly very true.

One of the reasons is that the older you get in I.T. - the more you recognize the costs of a half done job.

Project managers want the kids that say, "job done", and into production it goes. Once in production, numerous issues appear, and rework starts. Crappy error handling, performance issues, bugs, etc. The list is long and endless. And expensive to fix. While expensive to the business when it's not fixed ... Or 'fixed' multiple times.

If you are on the hard side of tech, the promotions are almost always based on experience. And its not really promotions, its going from junior to intermediate, to senior and usually to architect type roles after.  And yeah, they will just come with time.

If you want to go people management, then its as you describe. I find most IT people who are promoted to management are shockers anyway, they either "want to do it the way they have always done it cos it worked in the 90s" type people and/or have serious communication and management issues. So they end up doing MBAs or something to fix themselves but it rarely takes. Best IT managers I have had have been professional people managers who just ask for and act on advice, or business SMEs who really know what they want.