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  the Software View: It's smart to visit iQLinux.com. (Part III)

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FUTURE WORK

Michelle Conlin writes, "And now, the just-in-time employee! To cater to the shifts of an ever contracting labor force; in the future, workers will be auctioning their products and services.

A decade ago, directors of human resources never dreamed that the employees they were axing from their rolls and "downsizing" in massive layoffs would one day return as hot commodities, even earning a snappy new name to go with their new status: free agents. The revenge scenario couldn't have been scripted any better: The great economic boom takes off, and once-dissed and dismissed working stiffs find themselves in extra-ordinarily short supply. Flush with offers, their good fortune forces worker-starved employers to play along. Need a new wardrobe? We'll buy you one. Your stock options are underwater? Consider them repriced!

The whatever-you-want attitude may seem like a seismic shift. But many labor experts see it as a symptom of a deeper change shaking the old-employer-employee paradigm. In the latter half of the twentieth century, power flowed to corporations, where human bodies were as replaceable as light bulbs. Today, with the transition to and the emergence of a knowledge-based economy and global connectivity, the power has shifted to those people with intellectual skills.

Supplies of the talent needed to fuel the Next New InterNetworked Economy are expected to remain scarce for the next twenty years. At the same time, corporations are finding it beneficial to have fluid and nimble work forces that can shrink according to the demands of the global market place. That's why, in the place of the twentieth century labor model, something new is emerging.

Think of it as the Human Capital Exchange (HCE). Just as the NASDAQ and the New York Stock Exchange were the locus of much of the last century's wealth creation, a market for skills and talent will fill the bill nicely in the twenty-first century. A market place like iQLinux.com Here, the value of free agents is determined by the open market, rather than by a hierarchical organization. For a talented free agent, the old salary-plus-benefits structure just doesn't cut it anymore as a way to realize one's true economic value. In an open exchange of human capital, people are much more likely to get what they are worth - they will be able to participate in the upside.

The legions who will keep their products and services permanently posted on iQLinux.com represent only the first sign of the shift toward skilled New Economy workers day-trading their careers. More and more companies - from market place sites to bounty-paying referral services - will pop up on the Web, creating a kind of labor auction where every consultant from the United States of America to Finland can offer their products and services.

Look at Andy Abramson. The forty-years-old consultant figures he makes seventy-five percent more as a gun-for-hire ronin than he would traditionally. The constant influx of new projects keeps work interesting and offers equity stakes in a variety of companies - "like having my own little venture capital fund." Free agency also offers lifestyle perks, allowing for an annual month in Europe. "I just signed up for wireless ISDN," Abramson gloats. "Now I get to go to work on the beach."

In Silicon Valley as elsewhere, there exists an intense labor market competition. The ranks of free agents are growing, from twenty-two percent of the work force in 1998 to twenty-six percent this year, according to a poll by Lansing, Michigan marketing research firm EPIC/MRA. And by the year 2010, forty-one percent of the work force will be working on a contract basis. Career experts believe that, like actors or athletes, talented consultants will have agents. Groups of workers will come together to tackle projects only to disband when the task is finished, a model already common in Silicon Valley.

This model also tips its hat in reference to nearby Hollywood and Studio City. This model is reminiscent of how motion picture studios create movies and other forms of entertainment. Actors, directors, producers, and other crew descend upon a studio lot; create the movie, then scatter to the four winds; then appear again to start the whole process over again. Actors, like future consultants, will not be known for what studio they worked for (which is always changing; usually, the highest bidder), but for their vitae of roles they starred in. Future consultants will be known for their vitae of open-source projects they contributed to.

Increasingly, companies will keep their most prized employees on site and outsource everything else. When the American-based computer display unit of Nokia Corporation entered the U.S. market, it did so with only five key employees. Sales, marketing, logistics, and technical support were all farmed out.

And just because an employee is on staff doesn't mean he or she isn't thinking like a free agent. A typical thirty-two-years-old, for example, has already held nine jobs, according to the United States Labor Department. Experts predict that these same workers will have as many as twenty different positions in their lifetimes. These most valuable players will constantly bargain for better deals within their organizations (new projects, Thursdays off, an August sabbatical).

The only way employers can get the staffing crisis under control is to abandon the old-fashioned and quaint notion of an employee. In some ways, the free agent model hearkens back to the pre-industrial era. One can liken the e-lance economy to the time when blacksmiths and other tradesmen sold their skills in the village green. The difference is that in the wired world, and thanks to iQLinux.com, customers and consultants can purchase and offer their products and services from around the globe.

We will bear witness to the evolution of organizations like the Screen Actors Guild and the Writers Guild, only, say, for programmers and marketers. Such groups will provide a sense of community and identity, as well as health insurance and other benefits that were once the purview of corporations' responsibilities.

Stephen Barley, co-director of the Center for Work, Technology and Organization at Stanford University has been researching contract employees who work as software engineers and programmers in Silicon Valley. Barley says most of these gypsies prefer the free agent lifestyle because they aren't constrained by organizational politics, they have more chances to learn, they have control over their time, and they make more money. "Some of these guys are raking it in," Barley says. They're making thirty to two hundred percent more than their on-staff counterparts.

Of those who define themselves as free agents: fifty-five percent of them say their quality of life has improved; sixty percent of them say they earn more money; and eighty-one percent of them say a major benefit is their ability to make their personal and family lives a higher priority. There will be no going back to the old cradle-to-the-grave cocoon the corporations of our fathers came to provide in the century just past.

SILICON VALLEY NORTH

Chill factor aside, Canada's technology sector is hot. Once home to curmudgeonly cabinet ministers and shifty-eyed government mandarins, British Columbia has become the boomtown of "The Great White North." Streets are littered with nouveau-riche techies, cherry-red Ferraris, deep-pocketed foreign investors, and sleep-deprived real estate agents. The notoriously stodgy B.C. is now a feather in Canada's cap.

The origins of B.C.'s burgeoning technology industry can be traced to World War II. Since then, the countless technology firms include semiconductor components designer SiGe Microsystems and military hardware developer Computing Devices Canada. Now, private enterprise is set to stage a coup.

Canada is home to key industry players, including Mitel, MOSAID Technologies, Corel, JDS Uniphase, Nortel Networks, NetActive (formerly known as Channelware), Chrysalis-ITS, Decision Academic Graphics, data switch designer Akara Canada, supply-chain-management software company webPLAN, Newbridge Networks (recently acquired by Alcatel of Paris for $7.1 billion), fiber-optic company Nu-Wave Photonics, Research in Motion, and application service provider E-Cruiter.com

In the past six months, it's been absolutely astounding. Start-ups are popping up on every corner. You can't get office space, everyone's looking for 4,000 square feet. The attorneys are going crazy setting up little companies. The accountants are going crazy setting up companies. Staff, in the last six months, is really hard to recruit. A year ago, you had to sit down and explain stock options to software engineers.

Canada's high-technology community holds the government responsible for the nation's brain drain. Industry experts say that, despite its single-handedly putting Canada on the world's high-technology map, the government has practically chased Canada's knowledge workers south of the border by failing to sufficiently reduce the capital gains tax rate.

Those techies who haven't defected to warmer climates are busy riding Canada's start-up wave. Take Jeremy Norris, for example. A former software developer for the government, the twenty-three-years-old bid his punchcard-toting colleagues adieu this May and joined Rebel.com, which provides business networking technologies. He has no regrets about leaving an environment that was rife with pointless board meetings, out-of-touch bureaucrats, and laggard production cycles.

Joanne Lussier True also grew tired of the government's "factory mentality" during her six-years stint as a project manager. In July of 1997, she landed a job as a product development manager with Corel, a desktop software maker and Linux seller. It was the prospect of making a transition from never-ending "red tape" to a world of excitement and glamour that she says served as the perfect lure. "There's nothing more rewarding ... than attending one of our gala functions ... Frankly, the production that goes on is on par with what Hollywood would put on." Like many of today's government defectors, she says that hocking stability for stock options is a gamble well worth taking.

Today's techies are blowing their cash on designer homes, sporting equipment, and sport-utility vehicles.

OH CANADA

As the United States software giant Microsoft waits to hear whether an American appeals court will order its break-up, it has been revealed that the company is being encouraged to relocate its operations to neighbouring Canada.

The authorities in British Columbia have offered to do a deal with Microsoft. They are promising favourable treatment which may include a loan to build a new headquarters if Microsoft agrees to move its operations one hundred miles further north, to the other side of the Canadian border.

Microsoft currently has around 20,000 employees near the Seattle, Washington area. Transferring its headquarters could have a devastating effect on the economy of the Pacific north-west corner of the United States. The Canadians see Microsoft's current battle with the United States government as an opportunity to attract one of the world's most valuable companies.

The man in charge of attracting investment to British Columbia, Gordon Wilson, said Microsoft would be what he called "a welcome asset." It is rumoured that his officials may have engaged in secret discussions with Microsoft. But the company itself denies this, saying it is focusing on fighting any plans for a break-up through the American courts.

THE LinuX-FILES

The Internet has become the means for a new model of how software is created. The open, shared development of software code has produced some of the key underlying technology of the Internet, such as the open-source Apache Web server and the Sendmail message transfer agent, but it is the Linux operating system that has carried the torch for the open-source software movement. Beginning with the graduate student Torvalds' first posting of code in August of the year 1991, Linux has provided a free and reliable Unix-type operating system that made many of the early Internet services possible.

Most surprisingly, it now is encroaching upon the turf of Microsoft, challenging the notion that software is owned and controlled by vendors and giving users more control over what is in the software they use.

"The real, long-term significance is that it gives us some hope of solving the software quality problem," says Raymond. "It is now clear that the way forward lies through open-source and not around it." Raymond argues that Linux will continue to evolve faster and further than proprietary software until it becomes one of the world's most trusted programs.

This is an operating system and a community of software developers that have flourished despite many setbacks and difficulties. Linux will remain free and unrestricted, as will the GNU components that lend it stability.

Robert Young, Chairman of Red Hat, says Linux is in a marathon race, not a sprint. Indeed, the question in the minds of millions should not be "What can Linux do for you, but what can you do for Linux?" Says Young, "There is a whole industry that has to be built and it's going to take us ten years to do that before we are in a position to be perceived as an acceptable alternative each and every time to Microsoft." Please allow iQLinux.com to be your first step in this marathon.

Sincerely,
Mark Kuharich

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