7 Sep
2022
7 Sep
'22
10 a.m.
Marc,
the first I.T. Recession in Australia occurred in 1991.
It was the first economic recession where corporates couldn’t easily save money by
“automating” - all the low-hanging fruit - like Inventory, Payroll & Accounting - had
been computerised, at least by companies that’d survive.
Thanks for mentioning the IBM OCO - I’d left mainframe by then.
Your insight about the ’social contract’ ring true - never heard that before.
Since that first recession, the regard managers have for I.T. / Computing staff - embodied
in wages & conditions - has declined markedly outside business where software &
systems are their business.
The hype and over-expenditure on Y2K, then the Dot Crash, resulted in a 5 year I.T.
recession in Australia - and a very jaded attitude towards I.T. and their budgets within
the Corporates I know.
The deskilling and mediocre work of programmers and support staff alike doesn’t seem to
improve whole-of-enterprise productivity.
Your summation of the Professional response to the dissolution of the ’social contract’ is
very insightful. Explains the rapid rise and proliferation of OSS in the 1990’s.
stevej
On 7 Sep 2022, at 02:09, Marc Donner
<marc.donner(a)gmail.com> wrote:
By the mid-1980s the Microsoft folks established the notion that software was
economically valuable. People stopped giving away source code (IBM's change in
strategy was called OCO - "Object Code Only") and it totally shocked the
software developer community by destroying the jobs for programmers at user sites.
Combine that with the mid-1980s recession and the first layoffs that programmers had ever
seen and we saw the first horrified realization that the social contract between
programmers and employers did not actually exist.
We, the programmer community, woke up and committed ourselves as much as ever we could to
non-proprietary languages and tools, putting our shoulders to the OSS movement and hence
to UNIX and the layer of tools built on top of it.
--
Steve Jenkin, IT Systems and Design
0412 786 915 (+61 412 786 915)
PO Box 38, Kippax ACT 2615, AUSTRALIA
mailto:sjenkin@canb.auug.org.au http://members.tip.net.au/~sjenkin