IT

Corporate IT has had me scratching my head for years. For some odd reason it seems that just about everywhere I look corporate IT is fumbling and dropping the ball, leading to the obvious question of why is it so difficult to implement a rational and functional IT setup in an organization. There are so many dimensions to this, but if we scope the discussion to a tool perspective and put the end-user in the center, we can try to paint some type of a picture.

The common thing about all of the jobs I've ever held is that my main tool is my computer, which in my case has always been a laptop. A common policy in organizations is typically that the computer can be replaced once every three years (some more enlightened organizations may even allow cycles of only two years). But somehow it is not at all uncommon for organizations to provide their employees with laptops which are the cheapest money can buy. Or actually not. For instance I recently received a new laptop from work, which is an HP ProBook 4320s. It weighs very much, sports a relatively sluggish processor, a relatively bad battery life and worst of all it freezes more often than not. Apparently it costs somewhere in the region of 500 euros, give or take a bit. My personal preference at the moment is the new 13" MacBook Air, which I bought recently for about 1200 euros. Assuming that the machine is held for the typical three years, that means an extra cost of 233 euros per year, or about 19.44 euros per month. Of course that may sound a lot for the bean counters, but the device is better in every way I can measure: it is lighter, it is more powerful, it has a better resolution, it has an SSD drive (=it boots up faster, loads programs faster, ...), it has better battery life, it has OS X, and so on.

If we look at the boot up times, the MacBook Air boots up in, oh, 15 seconds. The HP boots up and runs through all of the associated startup procedures to get the system working in 3-5 minutes or so. Assume I work on 21 days in a month, with 3 minutes that's 63 minutes of boot time per month, with 5 minutes that's 105 minutes. With 15 seconds that's 5.25 minutes. So even with the low end estimate of 63 minutes for boot ups per month, if I cost more than 19.44 euros per hour or more to my employer, the rational option would be to go for the MBA. In fact, I would gladly pay 20e per month to my employer to be able to opt for an MBA over the HP.

The argument against high-specced machines has traditionally been that the average employee does not need the high specs because they only need to be able to use basic MS Office tools and such. But even in that case, it would be much more rational to look at e.g. netbooks or these days the new Chromebook-type computers. Acer's Chromebook is selling for about 300 USD, meaning that it significantly reduces the price when compared to the HP I was given. And I will venture a guess that that is a better machine than the HP. Of course in the Chromebook's case one could argue that it is more limited in functionality than a full-fledged PC. I haven't used one so I don't know, but I do know that the laptops leased by the NGO I'm working with are locked down so strictly that it is impossible for employees to install anything on them. And in that respect I think the Chromebooks would be more than comparable.

Now, the big question is why this sort of stuff is still going on in IT organizations and it's nearly 2012. This is just one part of the bigger puzzle of WTF. Other parts include "Why the heck is someone paying large amounts of money for email systems that don't work when GMail is free?"

Degree lengths

Continuing on the theme of education, unfortunately it seems that the politicians are also very much clueless in regards to education. A big problem that is often cited as the reason for stricter control over students is that the time it takes the average student to graduate from university has been apparently growing. So obviously the logic goes that this must be bad because if students are in school longer they must cost society more directly and also if they are in school, that must mean that they are not working and hence are also causing losses for the society in terms of lost tax income. That may be slightly simplified, but my understanding is that that's the crux of it.

But, if you actually think about it, coming from an IT background we've often been criticized for taking jobs during our studying and then forgetting to graduate. For some reason it seems that competent software people tend to be dragged out of school very quickly after they enter school. So if you think about the case where a student de facto drops out of school to get full-time employment writing software, you in fact have a situation where the student isn't causing costs for the school (s/he's not taking up the time of the teaching staff, no need for expending material resources, no subsidies, ...). And most likely ending up in software means that the person will be making a decent living, at least in the region of the median income in the country. So a productive part of society. Of course one could argue that the lack of degree may come back to kick the person in the ass later down the line because for some odd reason having a piece of paper makes you a better person. But again the world has changed so that in technology, for instance, the time horizons have shortened to such an extent that because I dropped off the bleeding edge of web development in about 2005-2006, I'm already an ancient dinosaur, degree or no degree.

One angle to think about this might be the per student costs. The current academic system relies still too heavily on mass lectures, which cost a fixed amount to produce regardless of the number of attendants. So if people drop out of school and aren't replaced with new students, the average cost of producing the lecture for a smaller amount of students goes up, despite the cost remaining constant in absolute terms. But again this can be tackled either by shifting away from mass lectures (which I never liked anyway) or then opening up the application process and enabling more students to enroll thus mitigating the effect of the disappearing students.

However, this still does not really explain why everyone is so grumpy about students taking long to graduate. One of the most central reasons, I believe, is that there is a constant game of resource allocation going on. The government runs the universities in Finland and despite recent attempts to change the system to set up universities as foundations and attract funding from the industry and other sources the raw truth is that to a great extent universities get funded based on the amount of graduates they are able to produce. So there we go, there may not be any concrete benefit for anyone in getting students to graduate quicker, but there is a very clear link to resource allocation. So if the resource allocation mechanism would be changed, I think schools would also change their attitudes and not care too much about the invisible and costless students hanging around as an entry in a student database.

Now, looking at the situation from the other perspective, there might actually be very many benefits for students and the universities to keep a link between each other for as long as possible. Reflecting on my own career and studies so far, it's quite clear that taking a job at a multinational was quite possibly one of the best decisions I've made during my studies. It gave a fairly solid and concrete link to the otherwise somewhat disconnected subjects from school. How do you expect a person to truly understand about strategy based on lectures and articles without actually providing the individual with an opportunity to be a part of a strategy process and see for themselves what these things are about. And on the other hand being in a company but also hanging around on campus enables the student-employee to actually go to professors to discuss about potential problems that the student is working on in his career and actually brings potential work to the university and may help in applied research.

This subject could of course be discussed at greater lengths and deepened a lot, but even at a fairly shallow level it's quite clear that the whole perceived problem of students not graduating fast enough is just silly.

Income inequality

It seems that an underlying driver in the dissatisfaction that the Occupy movement has stems from a certain level of inequality in regards to income and wealth. Hence the resentment towards the top 1% (which in the US nowadays means a yearly income of roughly 300-400k or total assets of 5-10M dollars).  There is actually a fairly interesting podcast which was published recently by EconTalk on the inequality and the top 1%, although one should bear in mind potentially biases considering its a fairly libertarian publication.

But that got me thinking in a tongue-in-cheek fashion. I was recently lectured to by some people who wished to save the world that inequalities are bad and they showed some very convincing-looking diagrams which apparently prove that social problems stem from financial inequality. Or at least that there is a significant correlation if not a causality link. Can't really argue with the data, but I think there may be more going on than a single snapshot in time can capture.

Anyway, if we accept at face value that inequality is bad per se, then obviously we should try to decrease inequality. I'm always slightly hesitant of taxing the hell out of people since that gives the politicians too much money to do silly things with. So if there is a natural way of decreasing inequality, it would be nice. And it turns out that there is. It's called the recession. We now have data from the last credit crunch and the years following which shows that inequality has decreased, which must be good. And apparently the recession and all the fuss is driving it. The conclusion then must be that to make the world a better place for everyone (by making it a more equal place), we must create a sustained state of recession whereby the financial inequality would sort itself out.

Now, the sharper sticks in the crowd will no doubt already start thinking about different types of scarcity effects which may emerge as well as innovation and its links to crisis situations. And of course there is a very real risk that something very innovative might come out of this. Unfortunately, however, innovations tend to get productized and someone may get very wealthy from creating something useful. This in turn will widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots, and this time the recession might have created this. So what the politicians could do is ensure that none of these heroes who might innovate themselves out of the recession can actually do so. And considering the track record of politicians in general, I feel very confident that they would be able to kill off all innovation.

So, there we go. Instead of worrying too much about reducing GDP numbers, prolonged recession or the fall of the euro, we should instead embrace all the chaos as it will reduce inequality and let's face it, inequality is supposedly the result of all evil. Ergo, the world will become a better place.

Tongue still in cheek.

Student subsidies follow-up

Since my latest blog entry, the Facebook group demanding the demolishing of income thresholds tied to student subsidies has more than doubled in size to about 60 000 members, which is increasingly worrying due to the blatant greed and self-centeredness which is obvious from the statements being thrown around. Anyway, my viewpoint was already presented in the previous blog entry and the entry from September 2010 where I did the math with a few example cases, so let's not get stuck on that anymore.

At the same time SYL, the National Union of University Students in Finland has also posted their stance in a blog entry. It is fairly encouraging that they also essentially say that while they to an extent understand why the discussion has erupted in this way, they view the student subsidies in a similar fashion as other social benefits: they should be aimed at the people who in fact need support and shouldn't be treated as "reward".

Another interesting point in their post were the costs they had calculated which will arise from various types of changes to the system. You can find the details from the post, but to give some perspective to the discussion, the overall costs arising from supporting students run in the range of 800 million per year. The demands that the students are now putting forth would cost an additional 300 million per year. To contrast this, more targeted changes to e.g. support students with children by increasing their allowance by 145 euros per month would cost in the region of 23 million per year. This type of change I can agree with as I can imagine that supporting a family with children during your studies is something which demands not only time, but also resources in a completely different way than being single.

A friend of mine also linked an interesting article from Canada, where some people had talked to the local Occupy movement. Combine this article with another one on how college has been oversold and a picture starts emerging. I recall I've previously blogged about how the education system will be in turmoil and how essentially inefficient it is to run a system to highly educate people who end up doing routine tasks which don't essentially need high education only to provide businesses with one criteria with which to filter applicants with. Of course it's nice to give everyone a university education, but ultimately I think people should put into perspective what the education actually is and what the impacts realistically will be on their lives. It's completely ridiculous to assume that merely obtaining a university degree will automatically guarantee bliss. There's always a certain amount of shoveling excrement involved in establishing yourself and your career and, let's face it, with the increased amount of uncertainty on every level in the world, chances of failing a couple of times are fairly high.

This in fact links back to the original discussion on income thresholds in respect to student allowances. The system is a social welfare system meant to ensure that people are able to survive. Think of it as an air bag. The intention of the system isn't to provide you with a comfortable setup with which you can cruise through life without having to compete and create value. The purpose is to ensure that if you crash, you stay alive and can get back up again. If air bags in cars provided a near 100% survival rate and also provided a very comfortable pillow, there wouldn't be much of an incentive to be too careful in traffic as the worst-case scenario would involve a comfortable nap after and collecting insurance money...

In fact, amusingly enough in Finland students are very risk averse and tend not to even finance their studies with debt or if they do, it is only to a very limited extent. This means that unlike the people in the Occupy protests, graduating Finns very often have little or no debt to speak of, so from that perspective as well I think what will happen is that the demands will not be met with on any level and that the silly movement of greedy students will gradually deflate when people hopefully realize how silly the bitching and moaning actually is. But that still leaves the question of what exactly is the value and use of university education today and how will it be repositioned as it is increasingly clear that the landscape has changed in such a drastic way that the old system is very much ill-positioned and the drift must be addressed in some way. Hopefully it will be done intelligently, but I'm not putting my money on the politicians being able to do anything good with it.

Here we go again... Finnish students feel that they are treated unjustly...

Oh dear lord, it's that time of the year again when the liberal arts students get their undies in a knot and decide that they're being treated very unfairly because they only get free education, free money, free healthcare, and to a fair degree the freedom to earn some money before the benefits begin to gradually get decreased as a function of income. A year or few back the cry was to adjust the allowance and housing subsidies upwards, and yes, to an extent there was a point in that: over a course of a decade or two the other social benefits given to poor had gone up but the students had been neglected. But that wrong was set right and the allowances were raised.

Now in the time of austerity measures and hell in the labor market the free-money loving (ok, who doesn't love free money...) students have decided that it is unfair that in some circumstances if they've earned too much, they are asked to return a part of the payouts handed to them in the form of allowances and housing subsidies (check out my post from September 2010 on financing studies for detailed calculations on how wealthy students actually can be before getting slowly cut off...). So a virtual mob of irrational (in a systemic sense, but on a personal level they are of course very rational for being greedy) students has showed up demanding various things. In fact the demands are not quite clear and in the good nature of Occupy Wall Street, it may have something to do with the fact that they are grumpy because they feel entitled to something and the universe has given them the middle finger. But unlike in the case of the Americans, in Finland the situation is ridiculously good for the students.

Apparently the demands are two-folded. Firstly the students feel that the limits for how much they can earn before they start losing benefits need to be raised. In practice the current situation is that you can live off of about 20k or so per year of income and benefits before you are cut completely off. To be honest, with that amount of money I don't frankly think that you should be subsidized. You're already given free healthcare from a dedicated foundation which focuses only on students and what is in practice a free university education. I think that after you are making 20k a year as a student, you can stand on your own two feet without the need for extra subsidies.

The second point which seems even more outrageous, and this seems to divide the students, is that they feel they are unjustly being punished in the form of taxes for working during the semester. I don't know who came up with this mind fart, but I don't think it needs any more countering. Of course it would be quite nice for me to abuse my unlimited (time-wise) student status and get my income tax-free for the rest of my life in Finland. Yeah...

Of course the Finnish student support system isn't bad, as can be easily proven by just looking at the amount of support and comparing it with other countries. That isn't to say that there aren't problems in the system. One valid point is that in certain cases students need to optimize their earnings so they don't go over certain threshold limits. In practice it is possible that by going over a limit by 200 euros on a yearly level will result in you having to pay back 500 euros. But again, this problem has nothing to do with the demands the students are making. This is merely a matter of having threshold levels instead of merely implementing a linear model of decreasing benefits, which I guess could be rather easily implemented.

Another problem is that the argument that life on merely the student allowance and housing subsidies is impossible in certain regions of Finland, e.g. Helsinki, where the housing costs are so high that only a small portion of the allowances are left to be disposed to non-housing related costs. If students actually take out a loan and/or do even a minimum amount of work on the side, the situation, however, isn't all that bad as can be seen from the calculations I referred to earlier. But if something must be done, I think it would potentially be ok to adjust the benefits at the lower end of the spectrum, i.e. give support to those who need it the most. But again, this is not what the students are demanding. They are demanding that they be rewarded for performing their studies.

Think about the logic of the demand a bit. It is essentially the same as saying that it is ok to cut social benefits from the lowest classes based on arbitrary criteria such as them having an alcohol problem and failing to show up for meetings but at the same time arguing that people who make, say 100k or more a year contribute in such great fashion to the economy and society that they should be given free money in the form of allowances and housing subsidies. That makes no sense at all and considering that people who are being educated at university levels in e.g. social sciences fail to see this flaw just begs the question of whether free education and all student subsidies should be cut altogether as apparently the years and years of state-subsidized education has still kept people at a, shall we say, intellectually handicapped level despite all efforts.

Sorry, I may have been quite harsh, but honestly I am disgusted by the blatant greed behind this.