Writer, Agilist, Elder Geek
Tech Girls Canada is an organization that advocates for women in STEM in Canada through various programs, advocacy, and events. I stumbled across it by accident in my CivicGeek work, and promptly discovered an amazing organization with fascinating people. Since we know there’s problems with female representation in STEM and related professions, let’s find out what people are doing to solve the problems. Julie Tyios, one of the co-founders, took the time to talk to us!
Let’s talk recycling your electronics.Now this is something we rarely think bout since we geeks don’t like to throw stuff away, and sometimes shiny new things distract us. It’s something I admit I didn’t think about much until my last move, when I had far less roommates (read zero) a mix of more and less space, and some unpacked boxes from my last move. There’s nothing like suddenly wondering “what the hell do I do with an old Tivo” to get you thinking.
Since the holidays have passed, except for the Celebration Of The New Year By Inebriation, and because I got curious about the issue of electronic recycling, Muse Hack is proud to present a guide to electronic recycling. It’s a chance to be a good geek citizen, learn more, and of course clean out that box of stuff you’ve really been meaning to clean out honest.
But first, let’s focus on why you do this.
OK, so why actually go out of our way to figure out how to dispose of that broken Nintendo DS, old cell phone, or broken computer? There’s plenty of good reasons, but let’s go with the obvious one.
Because E-Waste Is Insanely Toxic
Our friends at Electronics Take Back have a helpful guide as to all the things in electronics that can harm and kill you and destroy the environment. This is highly informative, a bit scary, and if you’re really clever, a source of horrific ideas for your next eco-apocalypse novel. Read through their helpful lists and you’ll star understanding why the EPA has so many rules on this.
If you really want to go hardcore science, then head over to EWaste and get a helpful list of all the hazardous substances in electronics. Honestly, at this rate it makes you want to use gloves whenever you dial your cell phone.
So what does all this toxicity mean? It means that finding proper ways to dispose of and reuse electronics is a damned good idea for our health. Just shoving stuff in a landfill is bad, however . . .
Remember, this stuff is hazardous and a lot of it is recycled legally or illegally in foreign countries. So let’s pick our recycling methods carefully so we’re not just dumping stuff on places that will become toxic hellholes.
If you’re gonna get rid of those old electronics, let’s do it in a way that minimizes the whole destroying the planet thing.
In fact, maybe we don’t need to break so much stuff down because . . .
Others Can Use It
That computer or phone that is out of date for you is probably a heck of a lot of useful to someone else who doesn’t need the latest gizmos. Which is probably more of us than we’d like to admit, but stick with me here.
Ever give someone an old computer? Ever donate a cell phone in one of those bins you see at electronics stories? Ever given old software to a school or museum? There’s plenty of ways to repurpose electronics without breaking them down. People can use this stuff.
It’s just that we don’t often think about it. Electronics are now a permanent part of first world life, a fixture we’re all to used to. We’re used to getting the latest thing. We’re used to them being everywhere.
We never think about how others can use it.
So when you start recycling your electronics, its a chance to do some good.
Make Some Money Back
Also to be brutally honest, you can sell some of the stuff you have. It’s not as noble an endeavor, but sometimes you sunk a lot of money into electronics and it seems fair to get something back.
There’s ways to sell of or reuse electronics to save or even get some money. Why not look into them rather than throw things away?
Now admittedly, I’m not exactly a supporter of this dollar-for-everything approach, but sometimes I think a person is entitled to at least its understandable for them to get some money back on an investment.
A Chance To Learn
No, really. When you stop dumping electronics in the garbage or in donation bins and start thinking of where to send them, how to repurpose them, it’s educational. It takes you out of the consumer cycle and into thinking about how to use it, employ it, and reuse it.
I repurposed an old Netbook into an Android box just to learn it. There’s fix-it shops at a local hackerspace a few miles from me where people gather to repair old devices. Plenty of people turn aged computers into light web servers.
Looking for innovative ways to recycle can teach you a lot of skills. Or be a conversation piece when you turn an old coffee maker into a fishbowl.
The Circle Of Life
OK, excuse me for getting mystical, but I find that recycling electronics is also a great way to keep aware of just how this stuff comes into being, is used, and what it means for the economy. Oh, and how the chemicals can kill you, but also in general the entire cycle of life thing.
You’ll learn how things are made and shipped, about chemicals and carbon footprints, about charities and refurbishing, and about skills and science. Trust me, just poking my nose into recycling from a purely practical point of view opened up an entire world to me that was rarely visible (especially in Silicon Valley) – where this stuff goes when it dies or gets reborn.
Now I know there’s recycling charities and corporate drives, EPA issues to be aware of, instruction guides for repurposing, and economic trends to watch for. For instance there’s certification programs for e-Recyclers in the US or you may find out about the life cycle of a cell phone.
So plenty of reasons to recycle. Now let’s dive into the resources I found on just how to do this.
Hang on, it’s gonna be an insane ride. Now by the way, this isn’t a complete guide, but it should be enough to get you started.
OK first of all you want to actually recycle this stuff safely. I was able to find a lot with a little searching and a visit to the EPA.
General Guides
A few quick guides to what to do, and where to look are here:
Where to Send it
A lot of donations and recycling can be done locally (which is often easier). Here’s some ways to find out what’s near you:
Charity Donations
You doubtlessly have many charities that take donations – some local, some national, and so on. Always be sure you check out what donations they do take. You might want to keep your devices in the local economy. So be it UNICEF or Goodwill or Oxfam, you can probably find someone local/international to take your stuff and put it to use.
Secondly, many charities have special focuses on given electronics such as how the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence takes cell phone donations. If there’s any charity or cause you’re involved in, do some research to see if you have a ready-made opportunity to donate your electronic devices while supporting your favorite cause. The more electronics become part of our daily lives, the more common I think this has become.
Third, a few even charities use electronic donations as a specific driver, taking donations to fund other causes – or local ones:
There’s also many causes that are dedicated to taking donations for electronics that reuse and repurpose them – excellent not just to donate for, but for we technically-inclined individuals to get directly involved in. That’s a hint. (of course this is in the Civic Geek Catalog too).
(Oh and these tend to be US-centric. Kind of focusing on what I know.).
There’s almost certainly more. Let me know what you find!
Plenty of for-profit companies will help buy, recycle, repurpose,or otherwise take care of your electronic waste. Now they each have their own ways of doing things, but still it’s useful – and a few give gift cards or other things for your donation.
First, your’ll want to look for local organizations. Silicon Valley is infamous for the Weird Stuff Warehouse which takes donations and will e-cycle if needed – If you’re in a tech hub, you probably have a few equivalents. Check your local listings – you might even make some friends or find a fun place to go to get odd technology.
Secondly some electronics and office companies do e-cycling. Some are limited to their own products, but still.
Also don’t forget many mobile phone carriers have a buyback program as part of your usual programs.
Well it’s easy to go on Craigslist or Freecycle and give things away – you can almost always find someone that wants and needs the things you don’t. Post to social media for that matter and see who may need it.
You can always sell things on:
Not to mention local options.
Why donate stuff when you can fix it up? Test out and improve your skills actually fixing stuff (and then maybe donating it anyway).
A local hackserspace near me has a repair shop once a month where people bring in devices and others try to fix them. I’m sure you could find – or organize – a similar event.
So now that you’ve thought about donating your electronics, recycling them, and avoiding terrifying confrontations with ecological reality, what’s next? Well I’ve got a few more resources to help you out.
As I said, diving into the world of e-recycling raises your awareness. What more are you going to learn as you move forward . . .
– Steven Savage
Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach. He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, publishes books on career and culture at http://www.informotron.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.
When last we met, I had decided, with dubious wisdom, to dive into the question “is there a hiring gap in IT.” In short, is it true that the wails that we can’t find anyone” are accurate when it comes to hiring in IT? Sort of vital for we geeks who work there or are “IT adjacent.”
What I found was:
So there might be a gap – but a recent one as far as I could tell. So I began wondering what else beyond lack of numbers could be out there to create a real – or perceived – lack of qualified senior IT people.
Now as I noted part of my goal here is not just research but to show what I did to inspire (or warn) people. So what did I do?
Simple, I began brainstorming what could be causing it based on what I’d heard, experienced, or seen others say. This, as they say, is where it gets interesting.
Because those numbers I had? They don’t tell the full story at all.
First up, bias against gender in tech – especially Silicon Valley – is a big story. In fact it appears to be all over in STEM professions, which from what I can gather is also taken to be representative of IT (little tip there, I see that a lot – more later).
The Center for Talent and Innovation did a fascinating study that looked into women in STEM and how they felt. In the US:
Also, a few more things came up.
So if 25% of your professionals are considering quitting within the year at a rate of 32%, and you’ve already got a problem just in this one sector. Especially if they’re, say, senior people which we supposedly need.
Finally in a study looking into bias of STEM hiring (which as you may guess I’m just using as a stand-in for IT), found that people have gender bias towards people doing math tasks. The bias, by the way, was that women were less than half likely to get the “job” (in this case a task) if only the gender was known. This could be mitigated, but didn’t go away.
This was extrapolated into assuming it says something about STEM – a little bit of a leap I must say – but it’s worth noting.
So let’s lay this one on the line here, courtesy of USA Today (Motto: Still here). In Silicon Valley:
However, as I noted last column we’re also churning out a hell of a lot of people with IT degrees, more than we need – so this might figure into some of these numbers, even though these numbers were on people form high-level universities. Still for overall graduation rates versus employment, these are exceptionally low numbers.
So roughly the amount of black and Hispanic employees is half that of their graduation rate for high-level universities, and less than 1/4 to 1/3 for overall graduates, respectively. That’s pretty low. Considering the amount of people with CS degrees we churn out, and those who don’t have CS degrees I might expect, 50%, but this is lower than that.
(Also this brings in an entire other issue with the fact that theres less representation of black and Hispanic Americans in IT graduation period)
Sigh. This is a weird area for me. As a Program Manager age is almost an advantage as long as you work the system and keep educating yourself, and keep career direction. It starts being a problem in some management career paths in the mid-50s.
I also encounter people who make wildely varied claims on age bias in technology. Experiences seem to differ radically. But what effect does Age bias have on IT hiring?
Fortunately a ComputerWorld article covered it for me:
* IT workers who are older do express more anxiety – something I’e seen personally, as a 40 year old who runs with both 30 year old and 50 year olds. The 50 year olds are a lot more anxious.
* This isn’t everywhere as it’s less of a factor for specialists, System Architects, Project Managers, or just general management. However the article suggests those staying in coding as one age may provide challenges.
So there seems to be some effects of bias towards older workers. Now if that seems a bit weird considering part of my past thesis was there were more senior jobs than entry level, then yes, that is weird. But if age bias is affecting the talent pool and there’s more senior jobs being reated than entry level, then you do have a problem. Another one.
You’re not making enough senior people and you’re biased against hiring older people sounds like trouble. I’m starting to smell a lot of stupid here.
One thing I hear in Silicon Valley is “how much it costs to live here” and rumblings that it might affect relocation of people. That got me thinking about how location might affect jobs.
Forbes did a look at the cities creating the most information technology jobs, which gave me a lot of great information.
The takeaways here that the big areas creating jobs (at least in 2014) are pretty obvious: Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Boston area, Austin area are the top four. However there are a few surprising spots – and jobs seem to be dispersing.
This makes me think about a few possibilities:
Despite complaints about living here from people I’ve met, despite the idea jobs may be scattering and impacting careers, I wasn’t able to dig up much else here, so I’m going to put this as more “interesting” It might be something worthy of deeper research in the future.
So as noted last time pay increases didn’t follow patterns that would indicate a lack. But I’ve occasionally hear people complain that offers weren’t good enough or that they couldn’t hire people as their pay rates were constrained.
Michael O Church, ever willing to get in the face of IT, has an entire article on bad IT hiring practices being, to put it mildly, like those of really bad poker players. The condensation of his thesis is that hiring managers try to win individual cases (like pots in poker) by paying as little as they can for the most – but in the long term they loose as they miss big wins.
Think of it this way – if a hiring manager is used to trying to get the most talent for the cheapest, thats all they do. But it doesn’t mean they’re hiring the right people, helping their reputation, or even getting the right people. He goes into far more detail here, so I’d read the article.
This however led me to this little look at what’s up in IT salaries. I found this little gem that notes things are a bit more complex than we may think:
This helped put a lot more into perspective – I was thinking too simplistically. With diverse IT companies, diverse location (as noted earlier), and various drivers to go to different companies, it’s really hard to expect a simple uniform pay increase due to demand – if the pay can even go up for some companies.
Try imagining diverse pay rates (cash or equity in the future),d iverse incentives (startup or big company), and now apply that to a possible hiring gap. Consider that senior people are probably more likely to look for something stable, and they might be avoiding entire sectors. I’ve experienced that myself.
Still, more to find. So I dived in a bit deeper on pressures that’d tell me more on the market.
Over at the Columbus Dispatch, Robert Samuelson notes that it looks like people don’t want to change jobs for obvious reasons. Not surprising in a tough economy, but consider this Forbes article that notes that people who stay at a job longer than two years get less raises than those who move. There’s two conflicting pressures right there – better raises if you leave but you’re afraid to do so.
However, the article from Forbes notes more than that:
Among people I know in Silicon Valley, certainly not representative, I’ve seen two trends that lead to higher pay rate – aggressive pursuit of personal growth and working a system in a company, or the latter and being willing or forced to leap. Combined with complaints I hear about inappropriate pay, I’m starting to think there’s something here
So what I can sort out here from my admittedly half-assed research, is that the idea that pay rates in IT are going to follow simple supply and demand is niave. OK, yes, I’m calling my last article naive in this regard, but hey part of this is exploration.
Now when we back up and take a look at the factors mentioned, I think we can see an issue.
So I’m prepared to say: It’s clear that IT wages don’t follow simple supply-and-demand and we can’t rely on wages to tell us if there’s an IT gap based on that model. There are also clearly issues of pay and willingness to leave companies that may not create a gap per se – but do make people far less willing to be mobile and more demanding so that it’s a lot harder to hire people. They may be there, but they don’t take chances or want your lousy pay rate.
But what about guest workers in all of this/ Certainly H1B Visas are issues that have come up again and again in the area of IT?
Fortunately, I found this article on Hal Salzman, who’s also written for our past friends, the EPI. His paper here calls out quite a few factors – including ones I wish I’d seen before. Once again, it’s on STEM, but that includes IT (in fact, the author notes it’s 59% of STEM so hey, we have an idea that’s pretty representative of IT).
This further tells me that the previous statement on wages is completely messed up. Really there’s no “market forces” at work here, but a variety of forces focused on cheapness that depress the market on one hand – and encourage people to move because if you can be agile (and are unbound by the concerns a visa brings) then it’s easier to leap jobs.
Think of us as having not one labor market for IT, but several, and it makes a lot more sense.
Oh and remember Church’s article on bad poker playing? I’d say this fits. Get Guest workers in, drive wages down, try to do it again or replace someone – but of course you can’t do it forever. Sound familiar?
Meanwhile wages keep going down and you’re less likely to get people unless they’re desperate.
So having explored these options, let’s ie it all together.
So what this seems to come down to for me?
First, as I noted I was suspicious there was an IT gap that was relatively recent but that we didn’t have a lot of evidence due to pay rates. Well pay rate information frankly isn’ that valid without deeper analysis – there’s no basic “market forces” here.
Going back to job creation rates, I then more lean towards “we probably are creating more senior positions than junior and it is a problem” – but pay rate information concealed this.
However no matter if/when this gap materialized, there’s enormous amounts of pressures that will either make it worse or actually create one. Bias against people for age, gender or race ends up ratcheting down available talent for a significant part of the population, in an area that may already have gaps, is a disaster as well as unethical.
Throw in insane prices and weird job distributions and you have further problems of people who can’t/don’t/won’t move. You just might not be able to get people to your area – there may be companies experiencing “personal gaps” as well. Individual companies may be making or experiencing their own unique gaps.
Finally, consider the fact that you may have downward wage pressure that kicks wages down . . . while encouraging people to leave jobs. Then you have the Visa issue which further drives wages down, while meaning people have to focus on other issues in their careers – leaping jobs, relocating, etc.
Oh and those people with Visas? They don’t necessarily stick around for obvious reasons. Trying to compensate for gaps, real or imagined, with guestworkers is just going to make things worse and require you to refill positions anyway.
So there still might be an IT gap, but there’s also plenty of things going on that would bloody well create one on the senior level as people aren’t hired, leave, move, quit, get disgusted, won’t relocate, etc. However various factors are obscuring it, mostly wages.
I think there is probably a senior gap just based on job creation, obscured by wage issues and bad hiring practices. The other issues beyond just job creation are enough to worry about on their own, but are making things worse.
Big Lesson? Right now anyone in IT who is navigating their career – or navigating hiring, has a hell of a job on their hand.
So here we are at then end of my exploration. It was one hell of a ride, and though it’s clear I’m not a professional statistician or researcher, it’s also clear that this research is worth it. Certainly I learned a lot.
My conclusions did not fit my original assumptions. I assumed I’d find a minor but real gap all throughout IT, bias a factor but less prominent than it was, and wage pressure being more general as opposed to widely variant. So I’m happy to say I proved myself wrong. Worth doing.
It’s also not clearly a thing a lot of people would do, or do so as obsessively as I. This is something with many layers, and it takes a lot of endurance to go through it – indeed I could have done a lot more than I did. This is what I did for a semi-hobby/semi-professional experience.
Finally, we need to do this. IT especially is a complex area with a lot of twists and turns, that is also a vital area of our economy. Understanding what it involves is important.
– Steven Savage
Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach. He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, publishes books on career and culture at http://www.informotron.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.