Starting Over...

I recently had the pleasure of spending two hours with a bright group of six 40 to 60 year old unemployed New Yorkers trying to do “networking”. You know the crowd: college educated, went to work for the F500 right out of school, spent years in various jobs, worked hard, were promoted a few times, managed groups of people in various functions, honed their management skills and lost their knowledge worker skills.

Then the layoffs, the outsourcing and the cutbacks started, then the buyouts, and then they found themselves out of work with a “package” that turned out to be far less than what they needed. Today they collect unemployment insurance, apply for a job or two a week, sometimes feel they’ll never get back, explore and discard new opportunities regularly, and generally find themselves devalued and depressed. A number admit to crying when they ponder their situations. The tough love answer is: start over….

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics ( www.bls.gov/oco/ ) illustrates the issue beautifully: to get a good job today, you need to get a current education targeted to the fields where the 3+ million new high-paying job openings are.

For those of us in software, there are 175,000 jobs being created domestically for applications software engineers – mostly for web services development. (These jobs are beyond the 1.3 million US IT tech jobs still to be outsourced to developing countries by 2014, according to www.investors.com ).

Today, this means there are jobs for those getting familiar with the web services revolution: HTML5, CSS3, Javascript, PHP, MySQL, Drupal, and Apache – mixed together with the special sauce of User Experience design. If you really want to, you can read books and sign up for classes. Invest 4 hours a day - like you used to do when you were in college - and it should take you 6 months to become a competent apprentice with these technologies.

Then put yourself out there as a very low-level knowledge worker making $15 - 20 per hour, not great but much better than the $10 per hour you currently “earn” for unemployment and still less than the $22 per hour charged by outsourcing companies for non-college educated workers in China and India. It takes work, it takes patience, it ain’t easy, it means taking a hit to your ego, and you will have to re-discover that feeling you had when you started out – not sure whether you can really do it… but you will.

There are no easy answers for the unemployed, yet this we know: mobility, the web and cloud computing are going to fuel high tech job growth, just like an aging population will generate jobs for nurses and doctors. One in ten IT jobs created in the next 5 years will stay in the US. Kids graduating from college today with knowledge of web services development are getting $50k – 110k as starting salaries. Starting over is tough, but, if you try, you will rediscover the youth and energy you still have.

Cloud Computing

This blog is dedicated to those seekers with a passion to actually read and learn about those technologies that will bring the future of the Web to fruition and radically alter our lives.

So let's start with 4 simple things that will radically alter our world by 2015:

> data centers that morph into cloud computing centers;

> access networks that add more mobility and speed;

> consumers and “prosumers” in the industrialized world who are going from an average 2 to 6 devices that access the Net daily; and

> applications that meet needs we haven't thought of and run on the device we have handy at the moment.

The news in cloud computing is not only that it is growing spectacularly (> 40% per year through 2015). The real story is that 85% of the total costs of running data centers are dropping annually as we add users to the cloud. This creates what the economists call “economies of scale”, where the company that grows the fastest gets the lowest costs and the greatest control over setting pricing. Economies of scale in the auto industry over the last century brought huge drops in prices for users, and better lives for us all.

The news on the access network front is similar: more & faster ways to get to the Net from wherever we are. Mobility is the key, as well as the ability to get to an appropriate screen for the app we want to use – no movies or books on my iPhone – no phone calls on my HDTV. As choice rises in our access networks, prices for access will drop.

The news on devices is similar. Today my HDTV, car, phone, tablet, laptop, desktop, and alarm system all give me easy access to the Net via a browser. Within the next year, more devices will join this parade. The arrival of screens with browsers and Net access augurs a wider connectedness than we have ever experienced. It also causes huge drops in prices for consumers.

The news on apps just adds to this fast forward lurch. Literally a half million apps run on either an iPhone or Android phone today. But most apps only run on one screen, are optimized for only one operating system, and are not really meant to be shared. This all changes as we move to better, standards-based browsers and the HTML5 suite (HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript). In the next year, the explosion of cross-device gaming running on Facebook and other exciting new applications, such as www.thewildernessdowntown.com and www.webglsamples.googlecode.com/hg/aquarium/aquarium.html , will dramatically raise the bar for most websites.

And, finally, the way forward… The 3-D Metaverse was captured elegantly in a 23 pager written collaboratively in 2006 (www.metaverseroadmap.org/overview/ ). The place we will begin to inhabit starting around 2015… read and learn and comment and criticize.

DevCon5 on the horizon...