Most prominently, the technology industry has felt this tension as it finds itself on the other side of the massive influx of hiring that the pandemic encouraged. 

Now with the sheer magnitude of tech layoffs making headlines, technology professionals are left to scramble and fight to find new opportunities in the field. 

Jake Cooper, CEO and co-founder of the tech-enabled mental health provider Grow Therapy, explained that these layoffs are an unforeseen consequence of the rapid growth that the tech sector experienced at the beginning of the pandemic. 

“The most obvious change that was precipitated was the transition of services from in-person to virtual, and we also saw the transformation of advertisements from subway ads to digital ads,” said Cooper. “That really gave temporary tailwinds to many tech companies that these companies assumed would be more permanent in nature.”

This led to mass hiring by tech companies in order to meet the heightened demand for virtual services. However, now that things are settling into a more normal state, these companies can no longer sustain this hiring acceleration.

Slowing demand led to layoffs

Kalani Leifer, founder and CEO of the nonprofit company COOP Careers, emphasized this point, explaining that in the first year of the pandemic, tech companies became overzealous because they believed that this spike in demand would be a long-term state for the industry. 

“Unfortunately the thing about capitalism and publicly traded companies is when push comes to shove, they’re going to lay off who they have to or who they believe they have to,” Leifer said. “It’s striking that a lot of people went towards tech because tech could pay so much more, but tech was not committed to them in any meaningful way. So, once that intense consumer demand started to level off… they let them go.”

Cooper also cited a transition in the way employers are looking at their teams and considering the current trajectory of the market. He said that he believes this has had an even bigger impact as the massive correction in the capital markets has led to a total mindset shift for the tech industry. 

He explained, “For companies that are high growth and now losing money, their valuations in the public markets have declined 70-80%.” He expanded on this, saying that this has caused organizations to reassess their cost base significantly.

In the presence of a less forgiving market, the mindset of tech companies has flipped from the desire to add more talent to encourage further growth, to the reverse of that, leading to organizations laying off team members that they view as non-essential. 

“The reality is, much like everyone rushed to hire when the going was good, they are now quick to fire because the going is not as good,” said Eric Riz, founder and CEO of the data analytics firm Verified. 

According to Riz, the way that governments were quick to hand out loans through the pandemic along with the misspending and mismanagement of those loans have also played a hand in the current state of the tech industry. 

He explained that, while these loans had good intentions, they also led to a fair amount of fraud and mishandling of the money. 

“Businesses were doing great because it is a circular relationship and when consumers have money, they’re spending money… and now that cash just isn’t there and because of that circular relationship it comes back around to the companies and the employees,” Riz said. 

How diverse, low-income, and first-generation grads could be affected 

While layoffs pose a pretty equal threat to tech professionals across the board, Kalani Leifer, founder and CEO of COOP Careers, believes that the playing field for finding new opportunities after the fact may not be as even.

He explained that because so much of finding a new job comes down to who you know rather than what you know, the starting line can often be much further back for diverse, low-income, and first-generation college graduates.

“I think it is deeply dependent on huge socioeconomic forces… It doesn’t matter what you know if you don’t  know someone who can get your resume on the top of the pile or give you a referral or get you an informational interview or even tell you that an opportunity exists,” Leifer said. 

He continued, saying that because of this, first-generation college grads who come from a lower-income family may be feeling a disproportionate impact from these layoffs. 

According to Leifer, most of these cases involve people who attended public colleges, worked while in school, and opted to commute over on-campus boarding. With that comes a reduced network of friends and peers with industry connections who can help them out when it comes to finding their next role. 

“I think the ability to bounce back is entirely dependent on social capital, which is really unevenly distributed in the United States,” Leifer said.

Because of this, he touted peer connections and interpersonal communication as key skills for tech professionals to foster when trying to bounce back from a layoff. He explained that, particularly for underserved communities, seeking out peer groups to learn new skills and grow with could be immensely helpful.

Once these connections are made, Leifer said there is a very good chance that jobs will be found through that person or their connections.

“Doing this journey together, even if it is organized around skill building, is in fact a relationship-building endeavor,” he said. “So, when you focus on personal growth in partnership with others… you get the skills, you get the relationships, and you get their connections without really doing any artificial networking.” 

The misconception around hiring

Cooper continued, saying that another reason behind these layoffs is the misconception that hiring more people automatically equals faster growth and heighted development. 

He explained that organizations are now realizing that there is not only a diminished marginal utility for each new hire, but also that they could harm productivity if they are not integrated properly into the existing team. 

“If you don’t position them well to succeed, if you over hire, if you don’t have properly skilled jobs, there is a negative impact on your ability to actually get things done,” Cooper said. 

With more employees comes heightened cognitive overhead, increased communication challenges, and a decrease in defined ownership over different problem areas. Therefore, Cooper explained that when additional employees start to cause more trouble than they are worth, companies are quick to lay them off. 

Finding new opportunities 

As far as where tech folks can go to find jobs, Riz cited health care and insurance as spaces where he has seen opportunities arise in recent months. Additionally, he said that seeking out new startups looking to hire will most likely yield positive results.

Cooper also said that the health care space is one full of opportunities because there has been no decrease in the demand for quality care; if anything, it has only increased. 

“For certain sectors like ours, we have seen no decline in the amount of clients looking for a high-quality and affordable mental health provider and we have seen an increase in demand for providers looking for more meaningful professional opportunities,” Cooper explained. “And because of that, our growth and hiring plans have really not been impacted.” 

According to Leifer, finance is another area that tech professionals could explore to find exciting new opportunities.

He explained that if you take away the industry and just read the job descriptions, many jobs in the finance sector resemble tech jobs in a lot of ways.

“And I think that it is really exciting for people who want to build careers in tech that they can take their skills and their curiosity and their ambition really into any field and any application, and I think that finance is a big one,” Leifer said. 

Riz also stressed the importance of seizing the opportunities that are in front of you. Technology is a constantly evolving field, lending itself to frequently finding new problems to solve, and with that, new positions open up. 

Cooper agreed, saying that while tech layoffs are a very real thing, assuming there are no jobs left in the industry is a mistake. 

“I think it is underappreciated how many companies are still hiring. Maybe not at the euphoric pace they were during COVID, but there are many tech companies who are still hiring,” Cooper said. “We have seen a fair amount of tech workers find new opportunities within a two- to three-month period at other tech companies.” 

The post How tech professionals can survive amidst the looming threat of layoffs appeared first on SD Times.

At the start, some developers struggled with remote work, while others thrived. Initial struggles included setting up and getting used to a distributed environment for the first time, feeling isolated from co-workers, and balancing work and home life — especially for those with young children when normal childcare options weren’t there or they had to help their kids with remote schooling alongside working their normal job. 

Benefits included the ones normally associated with working from home: increased productivity, more free time due to not having a commute, and the convenience of not having to go anywhere. 

RELATED CONTENT: How you organize your development teams matters

One year later, the benefits might have remained the same, but the negatives have compounded themselves for some. Those feeling isolated from coworkers at the start of the pandemic are now dealing with the mental toll of having been isolated not only from coworkers for a full year, but also from family and friends. 

“A couple days in a month or a week, no problem, but forever? Well, that just requires a lot more intention from yourself, your team, and your coworkers,” said Anthony Tran, software engineer  at Rollbar, a company that provides a continuous improvement platform. 

In fact, a survey released by Harness in August—5 months into remote working—revealed that 12% of developers were less happy in their roles than they were pre-pandemic. 

There are some who either didn’t like or struggled with working from home at the start, but have changed opinions over time as they’ve gotten more used to it and experimented and figured out things that worked for them. 

“During the beginning of the pandemic it was a struggle to stay motivated at home, there were so many distractions that it made it difficult work,” said Tyler Corwin, a developer at digital marketing company Figmints. “I was still able to hit all of my deadlines, but I didn’t get the same drive to get things done as I did while I was still in the office.  After the first month things got much better as my time management and organization got better.” For example, one thing he started doing was creating “fallback” tasks that he could work on while he waited on answers from his teammates on Slack or email. “This kept me working more efficiently and it’s something that I’ll continue to do even after we resume work back at the office,” Corwin said. 

Corwin added that while at the start he struggled with motivation, communication with team members, and keeping his kids from running into his workspace, now that the vaccine is here, he finds himself not wanting to return to the office five days a week. 

Maxime Basque, a developer at Unito, said that working remotely has been more good than bad. “While I do miss the camaraderie and things like being able to just ask something to someone directly without going the async route, as a generally anxious person I feel a lot calmer these days; not wasting 1h+ in transport every day, being able to concentrate with no distractions when I need to, having almost full control over my schedule, not having to think about lunch, etc. Eliminating the small things that caused a lot of stress were really beneficial for me,” he said.

Daniel Valdivia, an engineer at Kubernetes-native object storage company MinIO, appreciated the extra time he was able to spend with his family. “As the father of a 2-year-old, it has been awesome to get as much time as I have had with my child at such a young age.” 

Sachin Goyal, a principal engineer at Rollbar, also has had mostly positive experiences with working remotely. “I was able to use my time much more efficiently. Cutting down commute, lunch, and room-hopping is a huge time saver. Apart from that, I spent much more time with my 2-year-old and my wife,” he said. The one complaint he has, like many, is not being able to see colleagues regularly. 

Goyal feels that his team and manager have been very accommodating throughout this time. For example, since his daughter’s daycare is closed, he and his wife plan their day and meetings around making sure one of them is always with their daughter, and his company allowed him to have a more flexible schedule. “The ability to work at flexible hours is a huge benefit for me. Open communication was really helpful. Clearly stating the accommodations I wanted from my team and my manager and working with them to create a win-win was actually a ‘win’ for all us,” Goyal said.

Tran also noted that his managers have put in a lot of effort in trying to make remote work a positive experience, such as having lunch meetings on working efficiently and ergonomically, Zoom hangouts with trivia, group yoga, or playing whatever the latest popular Internet game was. “Also, I’d like to emphasize being candid with my managers and coworkers at Rollbar and sharing that I was losing motivation and focus, and feeling distant from the company and team was very helpful because they related that this was a common symptom of working remote and being able to share that, we were able to put more events/meetings/activities in place to help mitigate this feeling,” Tran said. 

Rico Pamplin, a lead process engineer at Lincoln Financial Group, also sees positive steps being taken by management to ensure employees are doing okay. “My manager also heavily promotes maintaining a healthy work/life balance and we have scheduled 1:1 sessions to ensure our professional requirements aren’t overstepping the personal ones.” He said that one way he ensures he’s maintaining his work/life balance is scheduling activities that require him to leave his workspace, because otherwise he’s found himself with days where he’s gotten super focused on a project and then suddenly realized it was 10 pm. 

As more people get vaccinated, many companies are in the process of discussing what that means for future plans, whether that means fully reopening offices, staying fully remote, or adopting a hybrid model. 

Valdivia said that for most of his career he’s been in a physical office and preferred it—because he doesn’t feel that the collaborative process of problem solving on a whiteboard translates to Zoom meetings, and in-person conversations can help build relationships that advance your career—but now has begun to rethink his views and see the value in a hybrid model. “I think it can recharge you, allow for deep work and add a few hours a week of family time without negatively impacting your productivity or the culture.” 

Basque said his company, Unito, will be adopting a hybrid model once the pandemic ends, where employees will be able to work from home two to three days per week. “The company believes this will allow us to maintain our strong culture, foster collaboration, but also adapt to the new reality and new needs of the team.”

Pamplin also sees the value in a hybrid model. “Now that I’ve been remote for a while, the luster has worn off a bit, but I definitely wouldn’t want to go back to primarily working in an office. I don’t mind the cubicle setting occasionally, but to do my job effectively it’s not a necessity, especially given that most of what I do is virtual, and my team is geographically distributed.”

The post Developers reflect on challenges, feelings about remote work in pandemic year appeared first on SD Times.

Then we hit March. The explosion of the novel coronavirus would redefine how, when and where we work. The virus forced organizations to close and workers to stay home, requiring businesses to quickly get tools into everyone’s hands, adopt new collaboration software and figure out VPN access to and security of their assets on the fly. With entire organizations working remotely, companies like Zoom and Cisco benefitted from office meetings going digital, while new platform players sprung up to host virtual events that became ubiquitous in 2020. 

Meanwhile, workers struggled to find a balance between working from home and NOT working. Many, in fact, reported that because there were no places to go and not much else to do, they found they were working many more hours than they normally would.

As we look back at various sectors of the industry, it’s important to note that most of the year’s efforts were aimed at keeping businesses going even as they were turned on their heads. 

It’ll be interesting to see how many of these changes in how we work remain in place once a vaccine has been distributed and things could return to what we used to know as normal.

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2020: Security issues increase as the world suddenly becomes more digital

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“The role of security in remote work is having a direct impact on security budgets and staffing in 2020 as businesses scale existing solutions, enabling critical new capabilities like MFA, and implement a Zero Trust strategy,” Andrew Conway, general manager of security at Microsoft, wrote in a post. 

Additionally, the data found COVID-19 has lead to two years-worth of digital transformations.

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Hiring in a remote-first world
New challenges and greater demands for cybersecurity

“Microsoft Threat Intelligence teams reported a spike in COVID-19 attacks in early March as cybercriminals applied pandemic themed lures to known scams and malware,” Conway explained. 

In that same time frame, business leaders reported phishing threats as the biggest risk to security. Ninety percent of the respondents indicated that phishing attacks impacted their organization and 28% indicated that attackers had successfully phished their users. 

Notably, successful phishing attacks were reported significantly higher from organizations that described their resources as mostly on-premises with 36% on-premises and 26% in mostly cloud based architectures. 

“For many businesses, the limits of the trust model they had been using, which leaned heavily on company-managed devices, physical access to buildings, and limited remote access to select line-of-business apps, got exposed early on in the pandemic,” Conway wrote. “This paradigm shift has been most acute in the limitations of basic username/password authentication.”

That’s why multi-factor authentication was the largest cybersecurity investment since the beginning of the pandemic, followed by endpoint device protections, anti-phishing tools, VPNs, and end-user education, according to the data. 

The pandemic has already changed the way organizations approach cybersecurity in the long-term, Microsoft explained.

Companies were reminded that security technology is fundamentally about improving productivity and collaboration through inclusive end-user experiences. 

Also, the zero-trust model became one of the top business priorities in the early days of the pandemic with 51% of businesses speeding up the deployment of zero-trust capabilities. 

“The Zero Trust architecture will eventually become the industry standard, which means everyone is on a Zero Trust journey,” Conway stated. 

Also, diverse data sets mean better threat intelligence as was demonstrated when automated tools and human insights helped to identify new COVID-19 themed threats before they reached customers – sometimes in a fraction of a second. 

Lastly, the cloud is a security imperative with cyber resilience a key priority to regularly evaluate the risk threshold and the ability to execute cyber resilience processes through a combination of human efforts and technology products and services, according to Microsoft. 

The post Microsoft reveals new cybersecurity issues in a remote world appeared first on SD Times.

Many technology outsourcing companies have felt this impact first-hand. These outsourcing firms were simply not prepared for a pandemic and the ensuing lockdown. And who could blame them? It caught almost every brand and sector off-guard and unprepared. Unlike other industries, though, the pandemic exposed pre-existing cracks in the offshoring model.

RELATED CONTENT: Hiring in a remote-first world

When the pandemic hit, the supply chain broke. Testing and product development facilities built on product teams working collaboratively in close proximity struggled to keep up with the most basic needs of their customers. Outsourcing companies and their employees lacked the infrastructure to work remotely, negatively impacting the business continuity of their clients. 

This new reality leaves companies that are used to the offshoring model for testing and QA with one big question: what is the best way to test software and digital experiences in a post-COVID-19 world?

Crowdtesting: An alternative to the offshoring model
Crowdtesting is when remote, distributed groups of testers from a vetted community are curated to form a testing team. While crowdtesting has been a factor in application and digital testing for over a decade, it has taken on increased importance as internal QA teams can no longer maintain business continuity while working remotely and the offshoring model has faltered amid the pandemic.

The reason the crowdtesting model remains a reliable answer even during COVID-19 is that it is always done remotely, via a community of testers who already work in remote environments. This setup allows testing teams to maintain business continuity, while often improving test coverage across devices, operating systems, geographies, demographics and more. 

While offshoring models simply move testing activities from one office to another, the crowdtesting approach uses a global distributed and fault-tolerant network of testers in an infrastructure ready-built for remote work. The differences between the offshoring and crowdtesting draw comparisons to the management of IT systems. While they used to be managed strictly in-office, co-location facilities soon became the standard, until the cloud came along as a more distributed, flexible, higher-performing and scalable approach.

Also of note, crowdsourced communities of vetted QA testers use their personally owned devices, so there is no issue of sending them laptops or mobile devices in order to maintain business continuity.

It’s likely this increased interest and usage of remote, distributed testing will continue even after the COVID-19 pandemic ends, as more and more businesses embrace remote work as a regular part of the employee experience. Crowdtesting also provides the added benefit of bringing digital experiences and new software releases into the real world, on personally owned devices and in actual user locations. This can help testing teams identify issues that would have gone unnoticed in a traditional lab environment.

This is because traditional QA labs are typically sterile environments with ideal or contrived conditions. While a new mobile app, for example, can be tested on different devices in a QA lab, the testers do not have to account for differing WiFi strengths or older operating systems that are outdated but still used by many end users in the real world. Crowdtesting uses real devices and real people in their daily environments, which accounts for all these variables that are not seen in traditional labs and offshoring facilities, making it a valuable testing approach even after the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting lockdown ends.

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Because your phone likely goes with you wherever you go, on paper this seems like a good method for stopping the spread of the virus. Some countries, like South Korea, have actually gotten the virus under control while using contact tracing apps, while others have apps in use or are in the process of creating them, such as Italy, France, and Australia.

However, despite the potential benefits of this technology in helping us combat coronavirus, many people are concerned about the privacy of such apps. Even if the creators of the apps aren’t abusing them, malicious actors can — and already have in some countries. For example, there was already a vulnerability (CVE-2020-12856) detected in Australia’s app COVIDSafe that allows an attacker to silently bond with a phone running the app. This vulnerability has been fixed, but like with any software, it’s possible that there are people who are still running the vulnerable version. 

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There are a number of privacy and security concerns surrounding these apps. First is the question of what data the app is actually collecting. And as a follow-up to that, how can users ensure that the app isn’t collecting more than what it says it’s collecting? 

Anne Hardy, CISO at Talend, believes this is an impossible thing to know. As a user, she explained, you can’t really track where your data is going. “You just trust what companies tell you they do and then you hope that they do what they say,” Hardy said. “So I don’t think there is much that the consumer can do just to make sure that this is not happening, except counting on people to monitor that the app is not doing things right. Me or any user cannot really look at the traffic that the app is sending and check that no personal information is actually sent without you knowing.”

Something else to keep in mind is how privacy and security are incorporated into the development process under normal circumstances. Even during normal times these things tend to not be top of mind, Kelvin Coleman, executive director of the National Cyber Security Alliance, explained. “So you can imagine as you rush to create some of these things, security, privacy protocol, probably are still not at the very top of the list,” said Coleman.

He explained that it’s a bit of a double-edged sword. There is a case for getting these apps out into the public as soon as possible to help deal with the current situation and prevent as many deaths as possible. “You want to contain it and make sure that people have an opportunity to know that they’re in the vicinity or have been in the vicinity of someone who’s had the virus, and so there is a rush to get it out there,” said Coleman. “But we have to make sure that security and privacy protocols are thought of not second, third on the priority list. It needs to be at the top.”

Hardy believes that given the accelerated timeline, it’s likely these apps will have privacy and security flaws. She said that this will lead to a lot of suspicion around these apps, which might lead to many people refusing to download one. 

Tom Pendergast, chief learning officer at MediaPro, added that in order for people to be willing to download contact tracing apps, there is a need to build trust between people whose data is being collected and those who will later gain access to that information. “We’ve seen that people will do rational things—like isolate themselves from loved ones—when they believe it will lead to good outcomes. We’ll need people with high levels of trust and authority—we’ll need more Anthony Fauci’s—to support this contact tracing system, and then it stands a good chance of working,” said Pendergast.

There are a number of parties who will need to establish that trust, Pendergast explained. These include API makers, like Apple and Google; public health authorities; application developers, pen testers, and application analysis companies; and more. “This list could and should go on, and we should expect transparency and visibility from all parties,” said Pendergast.

Another concern is the potential for a government to misuse this information. “We’ve known throughout history that sometimes a government can use [something that has] an official purpose to help people, and then they find this other mission-creep purpose,” said Coleman. It will be important to make sure that government agencies stay in their lane and don’t use contact tracing apps as a mechanism for surveillance, unrelated to COVID-19.

In a similar vein, it’s important to think about a kill switch for when an app would no longer be needed. “It can’t fall into the wrong hands and it can’t be used for mission creep by the government,” Coleman continued. “Who’s gonna have the kill switch to say that’s done, it’s served its purpose and now we have to go back to where we were in terms of not tracing folks.”

The technology underneath
Google and Apple have solved some of these concerns with their contact tracing exposure API. This API can be used by public health agencies to build apps for Android and iOS devices. It works by using rotating keys and identifies, and doesn’t collect location data. Only when a person confirms that they are sick is their key shared with anyone they might have been around. 

“Each user gets to decide whether or not to opt-in to Exposure Notifications; the system does not collect or use location from the device; and if a person is diagnosed with COVID-19, it is up to them whether or not to report that in the public health app. User adoption is key to success and we believe that these strong privacy protections are also the best way to encourage use of these apps,” Google and Apple wrote in a joint statement. 

Hardy believes that from a privacy perspective, Google and Apple’s approach is better than some others because of the fact that privacy information stays on the device until a person reports that they are sick. However, at least in the United States, it doesn’t seem many states are leveraging this API, or are planning to. An analysis done by 9to5mac.com found that only four states in the U.S. currently had plans to leverage the API. These states include Alabama, North Dakota, South Carolina, and Virginia. 

As far as database models underlying these apps, distributed databases will likely be the model used for a majority of these apps. According to Asya Kamsky, principal engineer at MongoDB, a distributed database is a database that is “designed to store massive amounts of data across thousands of servers.”

This model is beneficial for contact tracing because it provides low latency and high availability of data. “Your reads and writes will be faster if data is closer to where the queries are taking place,” said Kamsky. 

Distributed databases also allow for apps to comply with different countries’ data regulations because where the data is stored can be specified based on each individual requirement, Kamsky added. 

The fact that data is being stored in multiple different locations using this model shouldn’t have an impact on privacy. “From a privacy standpoint, it’s important the person or team writing the app follow best practices. You can utilize end-to-end encryption to make sure your data is secure before it hits the cloud,” said Kamsky. 

Are apps like these effective?
Given the privacy concerns surrounding a data collection app like this, there is likely to be a lot of risk-benefit analysis. For example, a person might be willing to give up some of their privacy if there is the potential to save lives. But there are a lot of issues with these apps that could reduce the effectiveness of them.

Just like vaccines only protect a population from a particular disease if enough people get that vaccine, thus creating herd immunity, a contract tracing app will only work if a majority of the population are properly using it. If not a lot of people are downloading or using these apps effectively, then this might not be the   best chance of stopping the spread of coronavirus, compared to current tactics like social distancing, wearing masks, and testing.

Apart from people just not wanting to download such an app, Hardy brings up a number of technical reasons why these apps might not work 100% of the time: unreliable Bluetooth, the fact that not everybody has a phone that could handle the app, or the potential that your phone battery could be dead while you’re out and about. 

If the app can’t properly track a person’s whereabouts and know who they’ve encountered, then it won’t be able to tell them if they need to get tested. 

“I think contact tracing apps seem to be a very reactive way to look at COVID,” said Hardy. “I think there are probably better things to do, like making sure that people are tested frequently instead of giving them the opportunity to be notified that they have been close to someone, and then what’s next? They have to be tested. I have some doubts about the usefulness of those apps … We need to continue to educate people as we discover how this virus is transmitted from one to the other. So I think communication and education is probably more important.”

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There’s no simple fix available here. Supplier relationships must be renegotiated or replaced, and existing facilities repurposed or built over from scratch, at great cost. Money and expertise may not be readily available to coordinate the changes needed.

In the software industry, we tend to think of constraints in project management terms: with productivity or features delivered, as governed by a budget function of time and resources, minus failures. Feed plans and component ‘designs and materials’ in one end of the software factory, and depending on how many skilled developers and testers are working together over time, excellent software ‘products’ roll out the other end.

Valuable innovation has never been achieved by treating the development shop like such a factory. This is why Agile methodologies were born, and the DevOps movement later took hold, to enable greater collaboration and buy-in, higher levels of customer-centricity and quality, and an automation mindset that accelerates delivery.

The software supply chain — coordinating a complex web of the right people, systems and data, all contributing at the right time to deliver software for customers — is now experiencing its own Black Swan moment in these unprecedented times.

Freeing teams for remote work, and forever abandoning live scrums and late-night Ops war-rooms won’t get us there by itself either. This useful trend was already in the works anyway, as many of the most successful startups of the last decade have relied on virtual teams of global talent to outpace geo-centric competitors.

It also doesn’t matter that instead of real boxes and containers, we’re moving ones and zeroes around in virtualized containers, with applications and services running on ever-more ephemeral cloud infrastructures. 

The software supply chain may still have ineffable constraints in common with supply chains of other industries, besides time and resources.

1. Liquidity. This is the #1 issue for any other supply chain — how efficiently does money flow through the system? Whole suites of financing, factoring and settlement solutions try to solve this in the conventional supply chain world, where margins are thin and the time value of money is critical.

In today’s SaaS and cloud-based IT world, customers buying on a monthly (MRR) basis may ask for leniency during a crisis, when funding for innovative new ventures is scarce. Partners will also be asked to step up and ease the burden. Budgets aren’t idealistic exercises for accountants to deal with anymore, as IT executives will become more conscious of cash flow than ever.

2. Collaborative forecasting. Supply-and-demand forecasting is never an internal exercise — it requires analysis, requests and promises among all parties before orders are issued and goods assembled and delivered. 

Any IT business unit would do well to evaluate its own ability to not only forecast customer demand, but understand the readiness of all of its services partners, component software vendors and infrastructure providers to successfully deliver on customer promises.

3. Inventory and WIP. Most ‘real’ companies maintain inventory buffers of both parts and finished goods, as well as a certain amount of work-in-process (WIP) in order to deal with volatile supply and demand, which represents an ongoing cost of business.

While the DevOps movement has it right that technical debt is a primary bottleneck to progress, there’s still a lot of code and software that has productive value and can’t possibly be replaced, especially if it is maintained by other parties. To top it off, the modernization work itself is inventory in the pipeline.

4. Quality and compliance. Meeting standards and delivering products that work as promised to meet SLAs and internal SLOs that avoid customer churn, penalties and risk is universal to all industries.

5. Life cycle service. In the automotive industry, it’s assumed that 60% or more of the total cost paid by customers for a vehicle will be spent on fuel, maintenance and parts, and not the initial purchase – so the necessity of capturing customer support and service revenue is more important than ever for software, even if some of that work is conducted by valued partners.

The Intellyx Take
These constraints seem like old hat to an old supply chain hack. Not that supply chain software vendors avoid hoarding inventory better than the rest of the software world — most wouldn’t retire a product even if it has one remaining install in a china factory in Timbuktu.

In all industries, the profitability of upgrading an existing customer is three to five times higher than that of capturing a new one. This is why some vendors take a pause on new deals or projects in favor of eliminating constraints in their software supply chains to deliver for existing customers.

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“A near-constant flow of data from research studies, news outlets, social media, and health organizations make the task of analyzing data into useful action nearly impossible. Developers and data scientists need answers to their questions about data sources, tools, and how to draw meaningful and statistically valid conclusions from the ever-changing data,” Fred Reiss, chief architect at IBM’s CODAIT, wrote in a blog post. 

The project handles some mundane tasks such as obtaining authoritative data about the outbreak, cleaning up serious data-quality problems, collating data, and building a set of example reports and graphs. “Taking care of these tasks frees developers and data scientists to focus on advanced analysis and modeling tasks instead of worrying about things like data formats and data cleaning. Our repository uses developer-friendly Jupyter notebooks to cover each of these initial data analysis steps,” Reiss wrote. 

According to IBM, it’s extremely challenging for data scientists and developers to answer important questions such as what regions are the most affected or what can we tell from the patterns because the data is changing daily. The toolkit enables users to update data and notebooks frequently with Elyra Notebook Pipelines VIsual Editor and KubeFlow Pipelines. The project will also include authoritative data sources from the COVID-19 Data Repository by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University, the New York Times Coronavirus (Covid-19) Data in the United States repository, European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control’s data on the geographic distribution of COVID-19 cases worldwide, and more. Additionally, the notebooks within the repository are Jupyter notebooks, and the company uses common Python data libraries such as Pandas, Numpy, Matplotlib, seaborn and scipy.optimize.

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A recent Bitglass report indicated widespread support for continued remote work. They found that 84% of survey respondents would continue to support remote work even after stay-at-home orders are lifted. 

The coronavirus has also resulted in a significant number of layoffs and unprecedented numbers of unemployment in the United States, with the U.S. Department of Labor reporting that the unemployment rate hit 14.7% as of April. Still, there are a lucky few companies who are looking to bring on more employees, and they will need to navigate changes to the onboarding process. And as the economy recovers, companies might need to rehire for roles that had been eliminated. Likewise, there are a number of considerations for those looking for new positions as well. 

RELATED CONTENT: Software development at home: balancing life, retaining compliance

Traditionally, most interviews for technical roles consist of multiple stages. First there is a phone screen, which may include some technical questions. That likely will remain the same, as it was already done remotely. Then, there is the traditional behavioral interview that everyone goes through, often conducted by someone from HR. 

“In thinking through the differences, hiring in-person carries the benefit of being in the same room as the candidate, allowing you to interpret physical cues, get that ‘gut’ feeling about someone, and determine a cultural fit based on their behavior and interactions. On the flip side, candidates can see how the company presents itself and operates on any particular day,” said  Ken Schnee, general manager of the Media, Entertainment, and Hospitality group at New York-headquartered background screening and identity services company Sterling.

According to Schnee, hiring managers traditionally would say: “I would never hire someone without meeting them face-to-face.” This had been changing due to the rise of the gig economy, digital nomads, and remote workers, and the COVID-19 crisis has been another tipping point, Schnee explained. 

“In addition, improvements in technology have conditioned the hiring process to become streamlined such that most of the elements of the in-person experience are now covered. Hiring managers can conduct interviews via online video tools and engage candidates with their teams to drive cultural interaction,” said Schnee. 

The next stage of the interview process for a technical role would probably be a technical interview, or whiteboard interview, where candidates are given a problem to solve on the spot. With remote interviews, a whiteboard interview isn’t possible on a physical whiteboard. Online coding challenges are another approach to the technical interview that had been gaining popularity even before the forced switch to remote work. 

Matt Mead, CTO of consulting group SPR, believes companies will turn to standardized tests to supplement remote interviews. He noted that for a while, fewer than 50% of companies he worked with utilized such tests, though there had been spikes in popularity every so often over the years. He predicts they will now be used as a failsafe if things like whiteboard interviews can’t be conducted. 

As soon as it is safe to meet in person, Mead wouldn’t be surprised if face-to-face meetings continue, even for fully remote positions. This will especially be true for candidates that are local to the area the position is located in. Employers will want to meet with prospective employees face-to-face to get a sense of their interpersonal skills. 

New methods of identify verification
Another one of the considerations for online interviews is identity verification. Schnee recommends identity verification be done early in the process, on top of background checks to ensure trust and safety for their employees, customers, community, and brand. 

According to Schnee, it is possible to do identity verification remotely by leveraging mobile phones and AI. For example, candidates can take a photo of their government-issued ID along with a selfie. Then, machine learning can be used to validate their documentation and match the individual in the photo with their photo ID. 

“We employ mobile phones, secure data connections, smart web applications, artificial intelligence, machine learning, optical character recognition, and rich databases of known good identity document patterns to enable rapid remote identity verification that is highly accurate and reliable. Many of these services are available now to companies who conduct hiring and onboarding remotely,” said Schnee.

On-site perks for attracting talent won’t translate to remote perks
If remote work persists long-term, it will likely change the way companies attract talent. Top tech companies often set themselves apart with special perks, like on-site fitness facilities, catered meals, or gaming consoles in the office, to name a few. While the main goal of perks is to keep employers in the office for longer hours, prospective employees might also consider them when choosing between roles. 

“I think the problem is when you take these perks and you try and extrapolate them in a virtual way and I can do them on my own in my own home, I don’t think the employer benefits remain,” said Mead. As a result, those types of perks are likely to fade, though some, such as those related to health, and in particular mental health, may remain. “While I’m not a mental health expert, I can see with COVID and the anxiety and the stress it’s creating that we can see some perks in the area of mental well-being,” he said. 

Mead believes that the new way to attract and retain talent is to connect with their passions. For example, younger developers are often interested in working for a company that they perceive to be doing good for the community and the world. “They will trade salary for this greater good. So I think making sure that organizations have identified, have documented, and are projecting the way that they create greater good in the economy and within the world is a way — rather than these perks that were geared towards on site — of attracting and maintaining talent,” said Mead. 

He also added that talent attracts talent. For years companies have tried to utilize their own employees’ professional networks to attract talent, through the use of employee referral programs. 

“Perks were nothing other than a way to attract and retain talent and I think those perks, honestly I don’t think they really work in this new remote work, and certainly not as well,” said Mead. “And so we’re going to have to look for other ways to differentiate. And I think they’re harder. I think it’s harder to do some of these examples that I’m throwing out than it is to bring in food for an office or set up some way to provide physical health for the employees.”

Advice for job hunters
While job seekers can’t utilize conferences to network currently, there are a number of ways they can set themselves apart from the competition. 

Mead recommends they demonstrate their involvement in the IT community somehow. Applicants should be staying up to date on the latest technologies, in whatever way works best for them. “I think a red flag has always been and will always be a technologist or someone in IT that’s not keeping up with new technologies or has no familiarity, has done nothing to prepare themselves,” said Mead. “Even if their current job doesn’t require them to use aspects of the cloud, if they’ve taken no steps whatsoever to educate themselves on the cloud, to me that would be a bit of a red flag.”

In terms of the interview itself, applicants should also show they’re capable of using remote collaboration software by putting their best foot forward in an online interview. This means not only making sure that audio and video actually work, but ensuring that the lighting looks good, the camera looks good, and that there is no echo.

“I think in any interview, whether virtual or not, we assume that the candidate is putting their best foot forward, so if a candidate is unable to use virtual technologies to communicate, if they’re unable to communicate through the camera and express things in a coherent way, if you can’t do that through the camera and through a virtual environment during an interview, then I’m not going to assume as an interviewer that you’re going to be able to do that once I hire you and you’re part of a team,” said Mead. 

What happens to the tech hubs?
The tech industry is heavily located in Silicon Valley and New York City, but if everyone is working remotely, will those tech hubs be eliminated?  Louis Cornejo, managing broker and president at Urban Group Real Estate, a San Francisco-based commercial realtor, doesn’t think so. 

Cornejo finds it hard to believe that the collaborative nature of tech can be recreated virtually. He believes that eventually companies will want to get back to the office. Currently, Urban Group Real Estate isn’t seeing San Francisco-based companies wanting to downsize or not renew their leases. 

This might not be the case for much longer as large tech giants embrace the work-from-home model. Earlier this month Twitter announced that its employees can work from home permanently. Immediately after Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s announcement, Mark Zuckerberg also made the announcement that Facebook employees can do the same. Google employees can work from home for the rest of the year, and Amazon and Microsoft employees through at least October, CNET reported. 

If remote work continues long-term, and living in San Francisco or New York is no longer a prerequisite for a high-paying tech job, it could open up the tech industry to a much wider talent pool. In the immediate future, this could mean people from lower salary markets having the potential to significantly increase salaries by finding high-paying remote jobs in those higher cost-of-living markets, Mead explained. Mead does believe, however, that over time the markets will begin to fix themselves and that might not be the case anymore. For example, already Facebook has language in their remote work policy that implies salary adjustments if an employee is moving to a lower cost area, the Washington Post reported. 

“While I do expect that employees will gradually begin returning to physical work locations as the world recovers from the COVID-19 crisis, we have also witnessed many companies creating policies that allow their employees to work remotely,” said Schnee. “Some hiring will inevitably transition back to in-person due to the requirements of the role and company interest; however, virtual recruitment will have a steep increase. Prior to the coronavirus, remote hiring had already started to grow. Our experiences during this crisis, combined with technology improvements, have increased comfort levels around hiring and placing someone remotely.”

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AppDynamics, a Cisco company, released “The Agents of Transformation Report,” which looks at how organizations are dealing with the pressures of COVID-19 and the accelerating rate of digital transformation.

“Our world changed almost overnight. With no chance to prepare, IT departments are facing a brand new set of priorities and challenges, and technologists are suddenly under immense pressure to deliver the infrastructure, applications and security required to maintain world-class digital experiences, both internally and externally. And they’re having to do this in real-time, through a period of massive change, often while working remotely,” the company wrote in a blog post. 

Respondents report the pandemic has highlighted some weaknesses in their digital strategies causing enterprises to speed up digital transformation projects.

“Organizations are urgently having to adapt their go-to-market strategies, as well as create and launch new digital services and applications in the current environment. As a result, technologists are being asked to deliver major transformation projects in previously unthinkable timeframes – all the while ensuring flawless customer experience,” the company wrote.

According to the report, digital customer experience is now the business priority with 88% of technologists agreeing. The problem is getting the resources and support to make that priority shift. The biggest challenges teams have faced in the wake of the pandemic include managing spikes in website traffic, lack of unified visibility and insight into performance, and managing mean time to resolution. In order to get the support and resources they need, technologists pointed to needing clear goals and objectives, real time data at the point of need, autonomy and accountability, and the freedom to experiment and take risks. 

Eighty percent of technologists stated that the ability to quickly respond has positively changed the perception of IT within their organization. 

Other key findings of the report include: 81% believe COVID-19 is the biggest technology pressure they have ever had to deal with; 61% feel under more pressure than ever before; and about 64% are being asked to perform tasks they never had to before. 

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