Joyce Davis: Replay of July community meeting - Future opportunities for Notes/Domino professionals
August 3 2010
Last week, my colleague Arthur Fontaine and I participated in the useful and engaging Lotus Technical Information and Education community open call. Our topic was "Future opportunities for Notes/Domino professionals", and we lead a good discussion on the topic. We know that with significant change in the IT market in general, and the Notes/Domino market specifically, admins and developers are thinking about how to align their personal interests with future career opportunities.
Joyce had the whole thing recorded and you can listen to the playback and watch the slides on her blog. We have good suggestions for both audiences for ways to lead, not follow and evolve your career with the changing market. I want to be clear that I know that no bit of advice is a panacea -- had a stark wake-up on that after the call when I learned that one of the call's participants had arrived at the office that day to learn that their job had been offshored -- but there are many opportunities out there and great ways to create ones for yourself.
Link: Joyce Davis: Replay of July community meeting - Future opportunities for Notes/Domino professionals >
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Michael | 8/3/2010 5:24:09 PM
Can't even find an UPDATED Notes 8.5 book about application development in the bookstore.
Have to say Microsoft has done a much better marketing job than IBM. What is Quickr? Sharepoint is much better than to remember and market...
IBM has been late and confusing in the marketing message for last ten years. It slowly kills Notes. Many organizations use Notes as just email platform, if haven't had plans to migrate.
And there are so many anti-Notes people in senior management. Everytime a senior VP comes on board, there starts a debate as to keep Notes...
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Removed | 8/3/2010 6:21:40 PM
Removed - edbrill.com policy is posting full real name and valid email address.
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Comment removed | 8/3/2010 9:28:22 PM
Removed - please use full name and valid email address.
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David (The Notes Guy in Seattle) | 8/4/2010 12:13:49 AM
His name is Ed, not Jesus.
In case some have forgotten, we are in a recession. That is just one of several causes for a tight job market, regardless of your profession.
Jobs are being off-shored (as was the case referenced in Ed's post), or eliminated entirely. Remember that IT staff are overhead. Overhead is the first thing to feel the impact of a recession. We are being driven to do more with less. IT budgets for new application development projects are being canceled or reduced. Software upgrades are delayed or executed more slowly so as to minimize the risks, costs and staff requirements.
The irony is that Notes environments often suffer from their own success. As the saying goes "The squeaky wheel gets the grease." How often have you heard of a Domino server left untouched for months or years aside from the occasional reboot? Thus, the organization will decide it can do without resources to support it. Alternatively, the Notes administration is rolled into other IT support roles. They're still there, but you had better know more than just Notes. The same goes for application development. You had better know more than one language. Also, as technology improves, IT staff can work from virtually anywhere. As companies allow people to work from home, they realize they can also work from other places like India where employee costs are 1/3 of what they are in the U.S.
The cliche' of the year is "In this economy..."
I have asked Ed before "So what can we soldiers on the front lines do to aid in the growth of Lotus Notes?" This open call was clearly intended to give some direction. I think there is much more that can be done on this topic and you will be able to read about it in my new blog soon. With many Millions of Notes users around the world, there is still a need for user support, server administration, and application development. Just expect the competition to be tighter. Adapt or perish.
It is human nature to look for a target to blame and to find comfort in commiserating with others. Don't fall into that trap. Avoid the mentality of victimization, self pity, or entitlement from the government (or IBM). Ed is not your guidance counselor. On a positive note, consider that half of all the different professions today didn't even exist 10 years ago and most of those are related to the Internet or computers.
@3, @4: Would you like some cheese with that whine?
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Axel | 8/4/2010 4:33:19 AM
Follow may be a good strategy too, sometimes. My nerves wouldn't be strong enough to allways lead.
At least from my personal endeavours to try to be a productive part of the human species I've learnt that aditional skills may well stabilize your prospects to land in a job. Projects get so heterogenous that people with skills in different areas are needed. Its about parelized knowledge in networks, linux, rdbms, IT architecture, OO-design, important openSource java projects, was Portal, webservices, SOA, javaScript frameworks, xslt, Enterprise IT infrastructure. Trying to learn all that stuff from books has its limits. So it might not be a bad idea to take a job in an area, where you are actually not very good at. You will learn quickly from in that area (or generally) smarter co-workers. This knowledge may make you more valuable for tasks in your core area of expertice. Well actually the core area of expertice does move.
I think there are jobs in Lotus products like Connections or Portal. They just require aditional skills to the things we've learnt as notes experts.
I've allways feared over-specialization.
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H Wilson | 8/4/2010 7:29:13 AM
Hold the presses! Maybe this is old news, but this morning I'm driving home from breakfast listening to the Albany, NY local talk station. An ad comes on talking about tying together collaboration, social networking, email, etc. in mid-sized businesses. As it's playing, I'm trying to figure out whose product is being pitched. Lo and behold, it's IBM pushing Lotus Live on a station that, at least in the AM, likely gets the right audience.
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Gerry S | 8/4/2010 11:00:02 AM
@8 That is a "Hold the presses!" moment. I almost fell out of my chair. LOL. Now if we could just get some press for that product that is the king of collaboration, you know the one with mail, scheduling, instant messaging, top of the line security, and RAD Applications with instant storage(nsf)...That would be something!
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James B | 8/4/2010 11:44:31 AM
I listened to the teleconference, and my problem with it is that all the onus is put on the developer/admin - lead not follow, develop better apps, learn xpages, be an advocate for Lotus software etc..etc.. and yet there was no talk about what IBM is going to do to stem the tide of domino to SharePoint migrations.
"Lead not follow" is a nice slogan, however I'm not going to lead myself into a dead end.
I dabbled in xpages when it came out, however learning it seemed like such a waste of time. Search the job boards for xpages sometime and see how many hits you get.
I'd like to stay with domino I enjoy working with it and have made a good living out of it for a long time, however unless you guys at IBM start selling Domino I can't imagine my next position having anything to do with it.
P.S. @6 This is not whining. Whining is complaining and not doing anything about it. I am doing something about it by gradually transitioning away from notes/domino.
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David (The Notes Guy in Seattle) | 8/4/2010 1:18:19 PM
@10 I didn't say you were. If you read those posts before they were deleted, you wouldn't feel the need to defend your post. In fact, I agree with you on all your points. If you want to see scarcity of Notes jobs, come to Microsoft, WA.
At least it happened in August. Time to enjoy the summer!
Remember that job security is not about making yourself indispensable at your current company. It's about keeping yourself marketable to other companies.