do you mean will "cloud" (i wrote clod initially, by mistake ... or perhaps not?) access encourage more part-time contract work ? as opposed to full-time staff ??

Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati

yep

It's more of the idea of outsourcing as one needs the expertise/resource. It's really been going on for a long time in some professions. For example, I only hire a plumber when I need one.

For engineers and some other professions it's been a little different due to the need for interacting with others on the team, access to databases, infrastructure, etc. The computing cloud and the internet enables many of these needs to be handled within the confines of the business but outside the confines of the brick and mortar part of the business. What will slow the move in this direction will be the unease of management in their perceived loss of control.

Further potentially driving this trend are other business/cultural/political policy shifts such most US companies having moved away from defined retirement plans and the eventual move away from bennies like healthcare make the incentives for employees to be locked to an employer less attractive as well.

Have Fun!

James A. Pike
www.xl4sim.com
www.erieztechnologies.com

have they lost control or gained it (by tuning who they hire and when)?

outsourcing is a curse in my industry, 'cause everyone who counts (and doesn't have to deal with the crap) loves it, and the poor soldiers in the trenches have to sort out the crap (to save the general's asses).

mind you, it came home to roust with Boeing and their B787; but i think they learnt the wrong lesson. they hoped "out of house = cheaper" but they learnt "out of house = out of control"; i think they should've learnt out of house will probably cost more in total but it might be cheaper for us, and we can use more resources than just our own, but we'll have to watch them like a hawk, herd them like a sheepdog, manage them like parents ... teach them how to do our work (oh, do we want to do that?).

in my mind the biggest problem with outsourcing is ...
1) it's your name on the tail of the plane (not their's), and
2) you probably won't see the problems (or the value) until a long time downstream, and
3) ultimately you're grooming your competitor.

Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati

With people changing jobs more frequently (no more womb-to-tomb employment), the rapid changes in technology both in terms of things that impact whatever you were initially trained to do and the fact that totally new technologies show-up seemingly overnight (take 3D printing or the Internet as examples) as well as social changes, such as self-directed retirement accounts, guaranteed availability of private medical insurance (how many people stay working at one job because they already have coverage but also have some condition that would, until now, make them uninsurable on the outside), etc. Now when you consider that it will be even easier for people to take jobs that will NOT require them to be collocated or that will allow them more flexible hours and working situations (working from home or while on the move), I think this will be a natural evolution of what makes up a 'job'. I already work from home at least one day a week and when I'm on the road, I don't have to set stuff aside on my desk that has to wait until I get back.

Now whether this will all be painless, of course not, at least not in some people's mind, but it's inevitable. If you had ever read say Alvin Toffler's 'The Third Wave' or John Naisbitt's 'Megatrends' or something more recent, like David Weinberger's 'Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder' or even more on point, 'Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything', by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, then your saying "I already see it starting in my world" should not have come as a big shock or even a revelation as the so-called experts have been ringing the clarion bell for years. In fact, my having read these and many other books at least tangential to this topic, I'm only disappointed that it's taken this long. But since I'm on the verge of retiring (as if even that will not be impacted by the changes taking place) after nearly 50 years working in the field of engineering, I'm somewhat envious of what it will be like for my granddaughters (our three SONS have managed to only produce a generation of GIRLS) and their peers as it's impossible to know what it will be like for them in 10 or 20 years when they're part of the workforce in this country. I just hope that I'm still around to at least enjoy vicariously what it is that they have choosen to make of themselves and how they are contributing to our world. And since a couple of them are showing some particular interest in science and technology, I'm hoping that perhaps there'll be at least one engineer in the bunch (my wife and I have only 'produced' a pair of executive chefs and an systems manager).

Anyway, this is an interesting topic and one that I'm sure will be debated well beyond the confines of E-Tips, for years to come, but I hope not too long.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

Not unless internet speeds increase, and costs go down. Just try to get good internet outside the city limits.

Otherwise cloud will be only a city thing.

"I'm sure will be debated ... for years to come, but I hope not too long." ... just link to Climate Change as see how long it'll spin ! (sort of seriously, have you noticed an epic decline in CC posts ? maybe we've agreed to differ or realised it doesn't matter anyway).

but back on topic ... this is an extension of telecommuting. wasn't that supposed to cure grid-lock? not in my town!
but then wasn't the electronic office supposed to be paperless? the Only way to make it paperless is to remove all the paper (and the photocopiers).

i wonder if that's a skill for the future .. organising a virtual desk? or search engines for finding things in your virtual desk?

i've noticed that these days about 50% of the time i navigate to sites by searching for part of the name (rather than using a bookmark) ... ie the power of search engines.

how about a desktop that looks like, well, a desktop

Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati

You have to ask yourself:
Can a Cloud be Hacked?
What does that do for Corporate Secrets?

prognosis: Lead or Lag

how often are credit cards hacked?

how often are military sites hacked? sure some hackers have gotten in, 'cause the front door wasn't locked; but how often have drones been hacked (except on TV)?

you can have security if you pay for it. probably the biggest security problem would come from people having dumb passwords.

Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati

I spent 23 years as "the company guy" and the last 11 years as "the contractor". The work is not much different (a LOT fewer meetings, less tolerance for errors, less certainty) but the pay sure is different (I pay more taxes today than my gross salary was the last year I worked). A model that says that it good business to pay me $180/hour to do the same work I was happy doing for less than $50/hr is a model that has to fail. There is low hanging fruit, quick hits, easy gains and those will be widely touted as proof that the new model works. Then the reality (i.e., the bottom line) will come to the fore.

I see this outsource/cloud-Engineering as a knee-jerk reaction to two characteristics of the Baby Boomers: (1) there were so damn many of us; and (3) we started having children later than our parents did (my oldest was born when I was 31, all of the folks I knew in my age group were having kids, my older brother was born when my dad was 19). Right now Baby Boomers are leaving the workforce in droves. Taking huge blocks of knowledge/experience with us. The generation behind us was just a tick behind the curve in their start dates, so in many industries/companies there is a gap (the 30-50 year-experience guys are retiring and the next generation has 15-30 years--solid folks, but too many of them still see the world as black and white, experience lets you see that nothing is black and white). In 20 years, most of these issues will have balanced themselves out and the bulk of experience will have returned to inside companies instead of companies clinging to the retired white hairs (at outrageous consulting fees) who will be mostly in the ground by then.

The current upsets in the Engineering workforce are just the last twitch of the outcomes of WWII.

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

Law is the common force organized to act as an obstacle of injustice Frédéric Bastiat

Quote (rb1957)

i've noticed that these days about 50% of the time i navigate to sites by searching for part of the name (rather than using a bookmark) ... ie the power of search engines.

That's precisely the theme of one of the books I mentioned previously, 'Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder', by David Weinberger. It's all about how search engines have replaced the old methods of organizing data, or for that matter, even the need to organize data in the first place. But that being said, it still takes a bit of 'skill' to know how to properly word a search string so that it both finds what you're looking for yet avoids creating a total blizzard of useless hits.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

yes, it helps knowing the answer of the search ! to find it in the haystack.

Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati

Quote (zdas04)

...we started having children later than our parents did (my oldest was born when I was 31, all of the folks I knew in my age group were having kids, my older brother was born when my dad was 19).

That wasn't our situation. I was married by 19 and our oldest was born when I was 22 (the youngest when I was 31). In my case, I'm the oldest in my family and my father was 27 when I was born, but then there was that little dust-up in Europe that keep him out-of-pocket for a few years, however, I almost made the first class of boomers (my wife is actually the quintessential baby-boomer having been born in early 1946, better than a year ahead of me). But I guess our sons are following the newer trend. Our first grandchild was born when our oldest was 28 (his wife was 36) and our middle son is just now having his first and he's already 43.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

There are exceptions to everything and anecdotes are certainly not data (even though I use them to illuminate data). The census data that I saw a few years ago showed your parents to be way on the right hand side of the bell curve (for The Greatest Generation) and you to be pretty close to the peak of the Baby Boom bell curve. As I recall, the mean of the Baby Boom generation was around 22-24 years old at the birth of a first child and for the Greatest Generation it was 19-21, just a bit shifted to the right, but the data I was looking at showed it to be a fairly large gap in entry-to-the workforce population. That data also showed a couple of tenths fewer children per couple than their parents (seems like it was 2.3 for the Baby Boomers and 2.5 for their parents, something like that). A slight shift in birth year and a slight shift in number of entrants to the workforce resulted in a lot of companies having an 8-10 year gap (or serious reduction) in hiring. All of my clients show this gap where 10 years ago the senior guy had 30 years experience and today the senior guy has 15 years experience (for example). The workforce age-curve is never smooth for a single company, but for an industry it can be a pretty smooth bell curve. Right not it isn't for my industry. It will be again.

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

Law is the common force organized to act as an obstacle of injustice Frédéric Bastiat

As I have heard, it is better to hire the number of people a company needs for there normal work, and hire consultants for the extra work you have once in a while.

It's not like they are going to pay in-house engineers overtime.

But on the other hand, it's not uncommon for companies to get bitten by the young consultant. So they will tend to the older consultant.

Yea, the birth rate trend is holding-up, both my wife and I are the oldest of four and we had only three sons, and between them, there are currently six, soon to be seven grandchildren (five blood related, two not). And looking at their current situations, I suspect that that will just about be it. And of for my siblings, my next oldest brother has two and my sister has one and my kid brother's a priest so... And the trend is about the same for my wife's siblings. However, I have two cousins who were just a couple of years older than me and between them, they've something like 16 kids and by now, several dozen grandchildren and even a few great-grandchildren.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

So is the birth rate from educated people higher or lower than uneducated people? Just interested to see if there is a trend for more or less educated people?

I never saw the statistics broken down that way, but from reading the comments under articles on the interwebs I have to think that it is higher among the stupid.

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

Law is the common force organized to act as an obstacle of injustice Frédéric Bastiat

The peak population of the baby boom here in Canada was around 1960. Those folks aren't even scheduled to retire for another 10 years, and given current trends, many of the white collar fraction in that group won't retire for at least 15 years.

Birth rate was above the average between 1950 and 1970. The ones born in 1950 are just reaching legal retirement age.

As far as the great demographic shift everybody has been fearing, it hasn't happened yet. And I'm of the opinion that it won't amount to much, aside from the well-deserved demise of some dumb businesses who can't handle succession planning, are too cheap to hire young people and train them, or are in such marginal businesses to start with that they can't do anything other than react to whatever the market dumps on them.

As to the "cloud", my only question is how the hell anybody is supposed to find you in the cloud- especially if you're a kid fresh out of school! The "cloud" is just fine if you're an established consultant who can build some profile for himself, i.e. someone who has either retired by choice or has been "greyed" out of employment. It's insane to expect businesses, or professions, to exist without a mentorship and training aspect. And it only works for service "industries"- what we call "stationery engineers" - people whose product is paper, or the electronic facsimile thereof. Yeah, I can work from home a day a week, but I need to be on the shop floor the other four.

As to this delayed retirement business, it's understandable given how much longer, and healthier, people are living now. But it will have consequences for opportunities for young people - it already has. Raising the mandatory retirement age? Yeah, sure- I guess I'm OK with that. Hiring retirees as consultants? Sure - great - then you get to choose who is still productive and useful. But I'd keep mandatory retirement in place. Nobody, except perhaps some of the HR sadists who make a living of it, wants to be the one who has to set the old guys adrift on an ice floe when they can't chew the leather any more. An arbitrary age limit lets people depart with at least a modicum of dignity- and gives the young people who have to put up with the unproductive old duds (of which there are DEFINITELY some) something to look forward to.

"As I have heard, it is better to hire the number of people a company needs for there normal work, and hire consultants for the extra work you have once in a while." .. in my experience it goes in cycles, usually dictated by a change in HR director.

one state is "staff good, contractors bad". this state (i won't use the word paradigm) says staff are good becasue they have the interest of the company at heart (at least as far as pensions, etc are concerned; certainly there is a proportion that want to be associated with a famous brand name, "i work at Boeing/Airbus/..."). contractors are bad 'cause they have their self-interet at heart ... they'll sit on a job as long as we let them. so this state hires staff, and despices contractors.

the other state is "staff bad, contractors good". now staff are a long term cost, hard to adjust (down or up) and a little too comfortable in the "permanent" jobs ... something like public service. contractors are good because it a workforce you can tailor in size to your demands, and their self-interest means they want to doa good job in order to build a good reputation. Of course, you may not be able to get the contractors you want when you want them.

Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati

There absolutely are more than a few unproductive old duds in the workplace. As competent old guys leave the workforce (mostly before mandatory retirement age, I was 50 when I started my consulting business), too many of their positions are taken by the "unproductive old duds". I see a lot of 30 year old guys that should be the lead hand (through competence and personal drive to learn more about stuff outside their narrow scope) that are frustrated by the idiot who claims to have 30 years experience when in fact he has 6-months experience 60 times. I keep getting e-mails from younger guys who've taken my 5-day class asking if there is any way (short of murder) to get around the Luddites that they work for. So far the only advice I've been able to give them has been to work to broaden their scope of influence until they can ease around the old guy (make him irrelevant), it is never easy, but it is often doable.

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

Law is the common force organized to act as an obstacle of injustice Frédéric Bastiat

rb1957, Interesting to read that some managers you have met may view contractors as defined by your state, "staff good, contractors bad". 'cause they have their self-interet at heart. I think this is a rare case.
I have worked with a handful of other contract engineers, hired due to a schedule crunch. ALL of these contractors had at-heart, the goals of a quality product. I don't know a contract engineer who has a priority of some selfish goals as defined in that first case.

David, Yes. That $180 seems like a lot more than $50 but as you know, the cost of a $50 employee is a lot more than $50. Several years into my consulting career I had an aerospace manager complain, "you get to KEEP all that money." He had no understanding that I had double the FICA tax that he did, additional state business tax, my own insurance, 20% of the time looking for the next client, writing bids, proposals, etc. He never sat and thought about things like paid vacation and 401K matching which he always got for free, if they were actually "free".

The business model of $180 vs $50 for the same work has quite a few caveats.

Darrell Hambley P.E.
SENTEK Engineering, LLC

It does have many caveats, but I was looking at it from the other side. If I could pay $50/hr (OK, with benefits, office space, vacations, etc call it $100/hr) to get the same work as my having to pay (all in) $180/hr for a contractor, only an idiot would prefer the latter. The reason I'm busier than I really want to be is that Engineers are not a commodity product and all things are never equal and you never get "the same work".

What amazed me was that my old company was one of my first clients and they never made any moves to keep me around when I decided to take [really] early retirement at 50 years old and were anxious to have me back as a consultant. Doesn't seem rational to me, but it did to them and they are fully grown.

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

Law is the common force organized to act as an obstacle of injustice Frédéric Bastiat

You may forget that several contractors don't actually do the work. They have youngerlings do the work and they only give a quick glance before they stamp it.
Often the drawings look really bad, with things missing, and it typically required a person 25% of his normal time to manage a contractor vs doing the work himself.

It also takes more time in some cases because of the time it takes to rework because the job wasen't done correctly the first time.

It's much easer to just hire retired people to just come back.

Now and again you will find a contractor that does a good job, then you don't let them go because it is so difficult to find another good one (maybe you should just hire him).

Cloud is like a fog between you and the person you hired.

Quote (zdas04)

...I have to think that it is higher among the stupid.

I'm sorry, but 'stupid' is a pejorative term. It would have been much more accurate to have used the term un- or undereducated, particularly when you consider the question that you were responding to:

Quote (cranky108)

So is the birth rate from educated people higher or lower than uneducated people? Just interested to see if there is a trend for more or less educated people?

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

Go to that life sucking hole called "FaceBook" Pick any article and read the comments under it. The word is "stupid". If you insist I can go with "uneducatable", but not "uneducated".

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

Law is the common force organized to act as an obstacle of injustice Frédéric Bastiat

You still seem to have completely missed what was being asked. Your response was uncalled for, pure and simple. Or are your prejudices so ingrained in your psyche that you can't help yourself?

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

You start off by lecturing me? When that is ineffective you insult me? I just don't get who you actually think you are. Dad's dead. So's mom. But even with that I'm not in the market for a new parent.

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

Law is the common force organized to act as an obstacle of injustice Frédéric Bastiat

I don't really give a damn, one why or the other.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

Quote (JohnRBaker)

I'm sorry, but 'stupid' is a pejorative term. It would have been much more accurate to have used the term un- or undereducated

I used to work with a few people who didn't have a chance to get formal education, but were very bright and more talented than myself.
I also encountered several "educated" creatures who can only be described as "stupid" despite their diplomas.

Sometimes you have to call things the way they really are.

OK I tried to be nice and use the tearm educated to imply people of a higher IQ, knowing full well some of the educated did not fit that description.
I also intended to imply people with a higher IQ but that were uneducated fit into the catigory of educated.

So I come to the least common phrases, stupid, and not stupid. I don't like these tearms, but if you must demand that I use them i will.

I also don't believe everyone who is educated remains in the higher IQ status through there whole life. And that educated in some liberal arts dosen't mean a higher IQ.

I was using the term uneducated to be nice, and more PC than stupid.

However the question hasen't recieved any answers yet.

I'm sorry but IQ is technically not related to one's level of education but rather measures a person's potential to learn or at least being able to comprehend complex principals. I believe that for the topic being discussed and particularly with respect to the question as asked by cranky108, we should really stick to original inquiry, does EDUCATION level play a role in the birthrate of a society. And I say yes, but only if you look at a large enough sample since there are always exceptions when dealing with individuals and even when looking at certain sections of society. Take for example America. Over the years, as both industrialization and public education has changed the face of the country, the actual birth rate has declined due to the effect of BOTH trends. In the case of moving from an agricultural based economy to when where most of the people were employed in manufacturing pursuits the need for large families was reduced. This was further impacted by raising levels of literacy and education particularly as it applied to girls and women attending school and getting an education, and this trend accelerated when more and more women started to attend colleges and delayed marriage as they pursued first a higher education and then the careers that they now were qualified for.

But even now there are exceptions to this due to cultural and in some cases even ethnic or religious norms. You can all remember when it used to joked about how Catholics always had big families and while that has NOT held true for me personally as I didn't come from a big family and neither did my parents and both sides of my family have been of Catholic stock for several generations, but there were some, like my two cousins with their combined 16 kids. And even today there parts of this country where those situations still apply at least antidotally. Take Utah for example or any local with a significant LDS population. You will find large families and one could hardly say that this was the result of a lack of education or even lower intelligence, since I work with many Mormons and I have yet to find any whom I would say have chosen to have large families out of ignorance or a lack of education.

Anyway, I think the original question, as asked, was absolutely an appropriate one since I believe that there are social factors at work which are related to education and educational opportunities, and the responses should have stuck to that topic.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

Thank you.
I still see a large group of people who are uneducated (nothing to do with IQ), that are in the work place. And as it appears, more and more jobs are being created for educated people (in this I include tech schools). So what are we doing with providing benifits that keep these people from looking for jobs, and limiting the number of these jobs being created?

I read about automating farming jobs. So what will that do to the jobs market? It will end up with making a whole class of people who because of a lack of education will become unemployable.
An under class of people.

In some way we do need to consiter making manual labor as an option, as these people who might just start demanding more and more. Automation should have it's limits.

Hireing people who are "here" will still have it's place, but maybe some rain is to be expected.

Tax the robots the same as you would the workers. That might even the playing field a little.

“Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively.”
-Dalai Lama XIV

Quote (cranky108)

In some way we do need to consiter making manual labor as an option...

I saw that first hand once on my second or third visit to India. We were meeting with a potential customer and when we walked into the building we noticed perhaps a half-dozen or so men digging what looked like a trench to lay what I assume was going to be some pipes or electrical conduit between two of the factory buildings. When we were leaving I asked the person we had been meeting with, who was the managing director of the company, as to why they didn't use a back-hoe to dig that trench since I had seen several in other parts of the city. His response was that yes, they could have done that and the final costs wouldn't have been all that much different, other than perhaps the time it was going to take, but this way six or seven families will have been fed as opposed to only one or two if he had hired someone with a back-hoe.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

During the construction of the railways, there were times where there wasen't enough work for all the workers. The builders noticed more fights during those times, so they started making work to keep the workers busey. So in places along the railroads you would see a stone wall that seemed to have no purpose. The purpose was to keep the workers busey so they woulden't fight.

Maybe that is a solution for crime, and wealfare. We could all have stone walls around our yards.

Cranky,

I completely agree..."You want your gov't check, what are you good at? Here's a broom." But that is socialist and 'Marica ain't no commi' state.

Cranky, I don't want any of that socialist Keynesian stimulus type economics talk around here thank you very much.

So you think I was serious about stone walls around our houses? So many of the people on welfare would not be worth $10 an hour, but maybe if we cutoff there welfare they might be a little more enticed to do some actual work.

Many other countries where work is hard to find, the streets are so full of street venders, and taxies. But because of our laws requireing licences for these, we don't have them. The only way our goverment can keep those people from rioting is to pay them not to work. We have created a mess. Make work sounds much better than goverment handouts.

The real solution is to make changes to the laws that allow those people to work, or make jobs (street venders), and to get rid of the welfare.
But at $10 an hour, I'm not hiring a handyman, or yard worker. It's cheeper to buy a new one, or a machine so I can do it faster.

Bottom line is there needs to be an income disparity between poor and middle class to create enough jobs for the poor.

My short answer to this question is:

Yes.

And it's absolutely how I built my business from the ground up. I have Google Voice bounce to my cell phone, Google Apps manage my email, and Dropbox stores my corporate files. I can work from anywhere, share information with anybody, and my entire office infrastructure costs me a hundred bucks a year, which I more than make up for with my home office deduction.

I think as the future unfolds, the people in big companies who are actually making the bread and butter are going to steadily get sick of watching two thirds of their work get payed up the flagpole for no good reason other than to support people who aren't actually doing any work. ("Gotta get that TIMES THREE MULTIPLIER BOYS!")

All a "multiplier" on billable hours is, is another form of taxation. And it doesn't go towards things that people actually need to be productive anymore. It used to. Typists, receptionists, plotters, libraries, yadda yadda. Bosses of the typists and bosses of their bosses. It no longer does. All that money dumped into IT and other corporate BS just impedes your ability to do work.

Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East - http://www.campbellcivil.com

"libraries" in the list of defunct overhead items? Not everything is on the WWW. Hopefully historical client-confidential documents aren't.

- Steve

PDF sir.

And on the cloud.

Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East - http://www.campbellcivil.com

"IT and other corporate BS"?

OK beej67, a sole proprietor has low overhead. Great observation of the obvious. What exactly is your point?

A bill-out rate equals salary plus payroll burden plus overhead plus profit. Salary and payroll burden (payroll taxes, benefits etc.) are real costs. So is most of the overhead: insurance, heat and light for the office, promotion/marketing so customers know who you are etc. Drop your overhead by eliminating typists etc. and making better use of technology, and you can either choose to drop your rate and hopefully pick up more business, or keep it where it is and make more profit.

If your argument about the "multiplier" as "taxation" is that the overhead is staying the same despite the decrease in admin staff etc. because the professional management are paying themselves more, or wasting the money on stupid unproductive corporate BS, I guess that's the shareholders' business and they should hire better directors or invest in something else. It's also the customers' business: they can shop for lower rates if they want.

As a company we'll use sole proprietors for some things, while others we'll want a firm with some assets and some depth to do for us. That's unlikely to change due to the "cloud".

Quote:

OK beej67, a sole proprietor has low overhead. Great observation of the obvious. What exactly is your point?

Cloud computing, office automation, and office decentralization open a new window to allow organizations of any size to have the same relative overhead as a sole proprietor.

Large engineering firms could jump to this new model of business *today*. They choose not to purely out of organizational inertia and fear of change.

That's my point.

Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East - http://www.campbellcivil.com

OK, I got you. You're saying that new firms don't need an office or cube for every employee. Yep, that's true- but not having that does have down-sides too, which have to be borne in balance. Many organizations are reconsidering the telecommuting model because they've discovered that they don't know how to manage it. Any organization STILL won't have the same relative overhead as a sole proprietor, though in your model it should grow less quickly- though such an organization also has limited maximum practical size in my opinion. Overhead increases to some extent with organizational size irrespective of where the people physically work- you don't get the power of the group for zero cost. Then again, none of us is as dumb as all of us sometimes.

Hey, I get you.

Whoever cracks that "scaleability" nut first is going to be hailed as a genius while all those who fail to crack it will be conveniently forgotten.

I personally think it's a nut that can be cracked.

Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East - http://www.campbellcivil.com

Some interesting articles on the subject:

http://www.virgin.com/entrepreneur/in-focus-the-ri...

Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East - http://www.campbellcivil.com

I still say, go back and read your Toffler and Naisbitt. In spite of they having written their stuff years ago, in the case of Toffler at least 30 years ago with Naisbitt being a bit more recent, as they came pretty close on some issues and of course missed by miles on others, like not having foreseen the invention of the PDA nor the ubiquitous nature of wireless technology.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

I still say there can be some local bandwith issues that hender this.

Also some jobs just can't be phoned in field engineering for example).

But at the same time, with more telaconferencing it can have an impact on travel for meetings (as can be seen from the pie chart).

However there can be some issues with special software.

I use broadband by cellphone at home. It works OK for videoconferences and is more than adequate for license pinging, costs me about 15 bucks per gig. A typical work day is around 0.4 Gb. Admittedly if I have a large file transfer (a big data file might be 2Gb) it'd be quicker to drive into town and do it over the company intranet but luckily I don't do much of that and plan it in advance.

However I am about to switch to a Catia based product that will probably insist on downloading CAD data every morning, my opinion may change rapidly.

Cheers

Greg Locock


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You cannot pass knowledge (train young engineers) by being in the cloud.
The senior dude is the go-to-guy at the office who gives the right answer in 5 seconds instead of spending 5 days for the wrong answer.

The go-to-guy is also the ont that will retire next week, and really dosen't care if things fall apart after he leaves. This is more true since they no longer support his pension.