It must also be tough for younger executives who are stuck with the idea that someone 40, 50, 60 or 70 is "old", near extinction, and so on.
These are the individuals who are dinosaurs. and they are dinosaurs for being incapable of realizing that employment ages are getting extended due to longer, healthy and vital lifetimes.
This is one of the crises of our time. That is the wholesale reevaluation of what work and careers are, how long they last, the effect on traditional workplaces, and so on. These companies are discriminating out of ignorance and because there is a ground-swell of pressure from younger generations to "move out" older workers so there's room for them to move up.
Shorter work weeks and flatter organizational structures can play a role in remediating some of these issues. But 21st century "life" reality seminars are critical - more so than the dross of diversity trainings.
Be careful not to confuse technical debt with technical entropy.
Technical debt may be nothing more than a prioritization strategy that is either intentionally or unintentionally blindsided by a technical asymmetry of attention to a rate of system degradation.
Smart organizations will throttle the degree to which development performs like an ever insatiable desire to maximize efficiency at the cost of mortgaging away the responsibility for system refreshment.
Just as "fitness functions" are desirable sensors for expiring licensing and contractual renewals so should an enterprise think about and implement ecosystem fitness functions that compare existing system state against the latest industry trajectories. Identifying, recognizing, and rectifying business ecosystem weaknesses will go a long way in preventative maintenance and reduced technical entropy and debt.
Almost thirty years ago, my wife and I were in the process of adopting our two sons (now in their thirties). I had defined my career at the time as a Software engineer for hire (consultant). Technical projects, then and now, really require full attention and devotion to getting things done so I had to find a way to step out of that for a while without losing too much money or technical chops.
I found a position as a Technical Writer having Software reverse-engineering skills which was a step off of the more intense technical treadmill. Over time I found that experience complemented my original trajectory as companies are always looking for better communicators.
Given the rate of change, managing your career in consideration to your life goals is worth curating.
Factual claims are not the same as fraud. Lots of people consume vitamin supplements. Why? Fraud? No, people believe what they want to believe about products that are legal to sell.
CASE tools were/are no different. You and I have our concerns but P.T. Barnum reminds us, "there's a sucker born every minute!"
The task of unifying and consolidating all of the worthwhile details required in Iconic notation to truly capture the complexity of the thing was never going to be easy nor a finite goal. (e.g. it's a whack-a-mole exercise that doesn't end)
But quite honestly, we are on the same page. If you liken it to fraud - not my monkey, not my circus.
Accenture is but one of many, already mentioned, such consulting firms. The particulars of their unique evolution are unimportant.
They bill $43B per year so being "worth" $140B is essentially three years billing. Prospective buyers who want to sell their own by-products more exclusively (say, Oracle, Microsoft, Alphabet,...) look at the price tag as an opportunity to lock in big ticket clients for decades of migration, integration, and insider green-field, money-sink projects.
Yes, consultancies like Accenture are copy-cat enterprises. A few decades ago they truly provided the brightest and the best of off-shore, inexpensive technical labor. But that changed with the H-1B tsunami that followed. The meme that America's social strengths could be used against it were not lost on these now global software powerhouses.
Many of the initial H-1B waves of individuals worked their way into America's corporate C-Suites. The technical waves were followed by well-to-do, class entitlement waves of individuals who co-opted the POC cohort required to satisfy equal opportunity hiring laws.
More recently, HR departments themselves have been out-sourced within the enterprises. The combination of the gutting of full-time technical staff AND the tight coupling of off-shoring to onshore expat cohorts completes the cycle of how Western enterprises were carved out of any capability to develop projects internally. They've been gutted.
In America, citizen POC were left on the outside looking in (aaaaaaaand, here we are in social crisis) in addition to bearing witness to the soft takeover of the corporate management ranks.
The Powerpoint slides are perfunctory. Our corporations are now as technically proficient as many dysfunctional outsourcing countries are at a functional level. The onshore benches represent the warehousing of local candidates to make way for politically and legally correct outsiders.
I think a great test case for these contextualization engines might be to parse a few years of MSNBC coverage of Trump's administration and look for balanced, accurate reporting of -cough- facts.
Ditto with any MSM publication, Washington Times, Fox news, New York Times,...
This is a fool's errand and the queue of fool's volunteering their expertise is staggering.
Exactly. A MSM outlet whose own content is dubious and is no stranger to exercising their own self-entitled "opinions". These opinions could be reasonably construed as slander in a world where an individual could stand up against them in court without going broke.
But let's play along and assume that everybody else's speech is the problem. Citizens don't need MSM fitted, woke muzzles.
The co-opting of internet providers to mete out draconian terms of service that strip the individual of their freedom to express ideas needs to be criminalized.
Executive summary: Cities must change. Sherlock.