Tech Unemployment Rising In Some Categories (dice.com) 182
Nerval's Lobster writes: The technology industry's unemployment rate crept up to 3.0 percent in the third quarter of 2015, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Although that represents an increase from the second quarter, when tech unemployment stood at 2.0 percent, it's nonetheless lower than the 5.2 percent unemployment rate for the U.S. labor market as a whole. Despite that relatively low rate, however, many technology segments saw an accompanying rise in joblessness. (Dice link) Web developers, for example, saw their collective unemployment rate hit 5.10 percent, up from 3.70 percent in the same quarter last year. Computer systems analysts, programmers, network and systems administrators, software developers, and computer & information systems managers likewise experienced a slight rise in unemployment on a year-over-year basis.
H1B, L1B, etc Doing their job (Score:4, Insightful)
Great it's all going according to plan.
Re: H1B, L1B, etc Doing their job (Score:1)
Quick, get more women into Tech, we need those unemployment number higher and their salaries lower!!
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If we are overpaid Janitors, why don't you do the job for the massive increase in pay?
It seems perhaps that there is more to the job, but since it is so easy, there should be no problem with you doing the job for the money.
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I do the job already, and have been for 20 years. The differences between you and me:
1) I get paid well into the 6-figures.
2) I realize how fortunate I am to be making a good salary doing this work - where I get paid far more than 2x the national median salary (this is called perspective).
3) I don't rail against the "injustice" being done to me if average salaries drop a few thousand dollars because more junior people are entering the industry after me.
4) I am confident in my value to my employers.
5)
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Hmmm.... You know, janitors work with some fairly complicated machinery, work with a variety of chemicals, and need specific training to deal with certain kinds of hazardous materials or body fluids using the current best practices.
I'm not sure why people think they don't actually have skilled janitors. Have you ever seen what goes in to resurfacing an industrial sized tiled floor? Have you ever seen them use sulfuric acid to clean out clogged drains before needing to call in a licensed plumber? How about n
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FWIW, when I was in grad school, one of the most fascinating people to talk to was a janitor. I learned something about his schedule to meet up with him more.
(No, this has nothing to do with anything illegal.)
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I'm not sure why people think they're unskilled or that the job is easy. I also have to wonder if they know what they make... We paid a cleaning company to take care of our offices at night and had an on-site staff that they provided during the day. It was not all that inexpensive. It's not like they're just hiring people who don't know what they're doing. There's some experience required or needed to be learned. There's also some training to deal with certain chemicals or incidents.
It's as crazy a thought
Great, now we're fighting among ourselves (Score:2)
And now you know ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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It is a strange thing that not one of the presidential candidates has even mentioned the H1B visa program.
Re:And now you know ... (Score:4, Informative)
Trump has many times, explaining how it takes jobs from US citizens. He has taken backlash from the media and other candidates for that position, but his poll numbers raised when he doubled down on that statement.
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Also Bernie Sanders [washingtonpost.com].
Sanders and Trump are the way to go. They're running as R and D, but they're very much opposed to the One Party.
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Re:And now you know ... (Score:5, Informative)
Not true. Trump has come out against it [cnn.com] as it currently stands, and has an elegant solution: require H-1Bs be paid more than market wages. That way, it's only cost-effective to hire an H-1B if you honestly need them.
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You realize that that's already a requirement of getting an H1B visa, right?
Reduce Skill Games (Re:And now you know ...) (Score:2)
That they be paid more than the prevailing wage? I don't think so.
But there's a lot of job classification word games co's can play to justify their practices regarding "prevailing wages", such as "requiring" a list of 10 specific skills that nobody could statistically have except good liars. The co then scrutinizes the visa application more lightly than a citizen such that all the visa applicant has to do is lie.
I personally think the law should be written that a job requirement list a 1st and 2nd key skill
Correction: Re:Reduce Skill Games (Score:1)
Re: "then scrutinizes the visa application..."
Should be: "then scrutinizes the visa applicant..."
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Trump ... has an elegant solution: require H-1Bs be paid more than market wages. That way, it's only cost-effective to hire an H-1B if you honestly need them.
No. That way it is cost effective to lower salaries so that no American citizens will take the jobs. Then you can fill the positions with H-1Bs.
As an employer, I used to love the rule that H1-Bs had to be paid at least as much as Americans, because if an American asked for a raise, I could just tell them I couldn't increase their salary, because it was illegal to pay them more than the H1-Bs. So no raise for you! Heh heh.
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That's effectively already the rule; H-1B workers need to be paid at least "prevailing wage", which in practice makes them more expensive than American workers. Furthermore, the DOL makes prevailing wage determinations.
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require H-1Bs be paid more than market wages. That way, it's only cost-effective to hire an H-1B if you honestly need them.
It won't work, because there will be loopholes.
Right now employers are required to pay H-1Bs market wages, but they don't, because there are loopholes.
Right now you also need to prove that you can't hire anyone to do the job in America. To get around that, tell someone to interview every candidate that applies, even if there are 50-60 of them, and find a problem with each one of them. Simple.
I like a lot of my Indian coworkers, but the H1-B program right now pushes down wages for everyone. It's not fa
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Right now you also need to prove that you can't hire anyone to do the job in America.
That's incorrect, there is no such requirement at all. There IS a requirement to pay market wages which in theory should prevent employers from abusing the system, but in reality it's full of holes. Simply fixing the loopholes will go a long way towards curbing H1B abuse.
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That's incorrect, there is no such requirement at all.
Maybe you're right. A quick search through wikipedia didn't find anything for me. A lot of companies do post a job opening, though.
Simply fixing the loopholes will go a long way towards curbing H1B abuse.
I don't think there's a way to fix all the loopholes.
That's not an elegant solution (Score:2)
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That's a retarded idea. What do you think would happen to employee morale if management brought in a bunch of Habib's and gave them 50% more money than they're giving you?
Only an idiot would do that. The whole problem with H1-Bs is that they're supposed to be filling positions that no native Americans are qualified to fill. However, if that's what they were really doing, H1-Bs wouldn't be pools of underpaid grunts, they'd already be able to command premium salaries just by simple supply-and-demand. Nationality would be secondary, and anyone who complained could be told that if they wanted similar salaries that they needed to buckle down and acquire those scarce skills themse
Re:And now you know ... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:And now you know ... (Score:5, Informative)
Actual position of Bernie Sanders: http://www.washingtonpost.com/... [washingtonpost.com]
"What I do not support is, under the guise of immigrant reform, a process pushed by large corporations which results in more unemployment and lower wages for American workers...."
"Furthermore, as someone who was led to believe that what economics was about was supply and demand, if you need workers in a certain area, you need to raise wages. I have a hard time understanding the notion that there's a severe need for more workers from abroad when wages for these jobs rose only 4.5 percent between 2000 and 2011. You see stagnant wages for high skilled workers, when these companies tell you that they desperately need high skilled workers. Why not raise wages to attract those workers?"
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You realize that 3% unemployment is generally considered "none", right? 3% is the normal rate for people just switching jobs, and having a week or two off between gigs.
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Did all those people taking a week off file for unemployment benefits? Because they usually use metrics like that to determine who is "unemployed".
Which is also why people who have totally given up are also not considered in the unemployment metrics. Their unemployment has run out and they are no longer on the books.
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3% unemployment means that the average person will spend over a year of his or her career unemployed. That seems a bit high to me.
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Those people didn't apply for unemployment so will probably not be included in the statistics.
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so FUCKING cynical!
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As a Systems Engineer, I laugh at your jealousy. If you think that my job is so easy to do, then apply for it and show me how it is done. I have 15 years in the industry working with Unix, Linux, Windows server and desktop lines, including Exchange. I now design very large email systems and keep them secure. If you think people doing my job are so inexperienced and useless, come do the job instead. I am sure you will qualify for the job with your immense experience.
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Well, my MCSE does say NT on it, but that is only because it never expires and I never needed to renew it for any job.
No, we need H1-bs (Score:2)
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... why we need all those H1B visas: to bring tech unemployment more in line with US unemployment overall. Unemployment inequality affects us all.
Low unemployment is bad for businesses and strangles the economy.. It's hard to start a new business if you can't hire people for less than 200k.
So true, nobody wants high unemployment rate (which is obviously also bad), but like everything in life there has to be a balance.
Due to lack of social services in the US, I get that it is hard to accept that zero unemployment isn't a goal.
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I dunno if this clarifies or muddies your point. Starting in 1992ish I was hiring traffic engineers at a pay rate of about $140k/year plus all the various benefits and bonuses. I suspect there was a near 0 rate of unemployment in the field as most of these had to also know a bit of CS and a bit of programming. We were certainly willing to train - we had to.
Yet, when I look today, the unemployment rate is up - near 3% (a bit higher, from a quick search). The fucking median pay rate is less than half of what
Shoddy Workmanship (Score:3, Interesting)
Doesn't surprise me. The declining quality of most modern websites would suggest that the industry has simply stopped hiring professionals altogether.
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Well, after all, IT isn't a profession. A child could do it. Little Jimmy made a "pong" game just the other day. It was so cute!
Because tech problems are all simple and don't need a whole lot of specialized training. All You Have To Do Is...
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Tell me a network-admin that doesn't need to know multiple OS's and their supporting TCP stack for tuning?
Never heard about that. Any pointers how to increase performance on a Linux TCP stack?
I did not know that I was required to know that.
I also did not know that there are type of scripting/programming language (low or high-level) to be better and more efficient/effective ... what is a low level scripting language? What is a high level one?
You sound like an IT manager who has no clue about IT.
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I was already turned off from mainstream medicine due to the fact doctors heavily prescribe the *exact* same medications within the *same* day all the drug advertisements spin up on television, and write your prescription on a pad bearing the logo of said new drug.
Sounds like you're a lousy health consumer. You can ask for the generic version of the drug, talk about alternative drugs or treatments, or get a second opinion. If your doctor insists on prescribing an expensive medication because he's a paid shill, get a different doctor. Playing the helpless victim doesn't get you the best treatment.
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Furthermore, if they're advertised on television, these are all drugs still on patent without a generic counterpart, so your "advice" to obtain a generic is erroneous.
A lot of these advertised drugs are replacements for older drugs that are out of patent and have generic versions. Antibiotics is a good example. I often need two or three doses of the newer antibiotic to work effectively, but amoxicillin works effectively with a single dose. Whenever antibiotics are prescribed, I ask for and get amoxicillin.
Please read carefully before you post your condescending comment next time. Thank you.
Still playing the helpless victim. Sad. Very sad.
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Please educate yourself.
When a drug company has a successful product, they get very concerned when it gets close to the time for patent expiration because it means that cheap generic equivalents will soon appear. There are any number of strategies that companies use to protect their interests in this situation, and one of the most common is to take a look at the drug's chemistry to see if there's anything there to exploit. One possibility is to reformulate the product into something that lasts longer than the original, so you'll see things like extended-release or controlled-release formulations being developed.
http://www.everydayhealth.com/columns/zimney-health-and-medical-news-you-can-use/old-drug-with-new-name/ [everydayhealth.com]
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Which means that one unfortunate effect of patents is that a company will often delay issuing an improved version until the patent is close to running out.
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Perhaps you did not need any Antibiotics but are 'addicted' to the placebo effect of what you believe is working best.
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Perhaps you should read up what an antibiotic is and how it works.
For starters, except for one in a billion people, they work the same in every person.
So the first thing to note is: it is a likelyhood of 6 in roughly seven billion that ithe new does not work for you. Because: it is not working for you at all, but killing the bacteria that plague you. And: that is completely unrelated to YOU but is only related to your bacteria.
The second thing is: oh ... I think there is no second thing.
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This is why I refused a 401K when I started work.
OK, that was really dumb. You should use your 401k, especially if your employer has matching. You need to save for your retirement.
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I've seen on /, many times a public corporation in the US, by law, has to use the cheapest developer possible, otherwise they will be sued for not maximizing their profits.
And yet, I've never seen that. Ever.
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I've seen on /, many times a public corporation in the US, by law, has to use the cheapest developer possible, otherwise they will be sued for not maximizing their profits.
There is no such law. People like to repeat this because it "sounds logical." Even government contracts reserve the right not to accept the lowest, or any, bidder.
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Technically, the law is that the corporate execs have a fiduciary duty to the shareholders within the confines of the corporate charter and applicable laws. That is not at all the same as a mandate to maximize profits at all costs. (There are such things as non-profit corporations, for an extreme example.) Fiduciary duty does mean they're not supposed to spend corporate money on t
100000 low-functioning jobs != employment (Score:1)
There's a million underskilled overcertified people out there, and hiring managers/HR is only looking for resume buzzwords. If you're a skilled worker, and you lose your job, you're fighting in the mix with 99 other Jabronis for that 1 job. Unemployment is a real thing in IT.
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5% unemployment is healthy (Score:5, Informative)
5% unemployment is close to a natural level in a healthy market. The fluctuation around tenths of a percentage points is mostly noise.
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5% is what they want you to think is "normal", since the great recession. That would not have been called normal 20 years ago. Nevermind that 5% in 2015 would be a lot larger if it was counted the same as it was in 1995.
Seems fitting ... (Score:5, Interesting)
It is, by very definition, our job to make ourselves superfluos.
Example: I hardly code anymore.
Part of my job constists of setting up WordPress with generic and special plugins. By now mostly automated so that a fresh project can be done by a PM with no clue about web-technologies in less that 10 minutes.
My job now consists of writing requirements, talking to the tech people of our customers and checking the possibilities and the occasional CSS/JS/jQuery and/or PHP Hack to add some obscure special feature to a fresh or existing install. Plus I take care of backups - mostly automated too - and let the bosses know when it's a bad idea to approach project X with strategy Y instead of Z.
Stuff that I do alone today needed 10-15 people 15 years ago. And I only still have work to do because LAMP, WP and all that other stuff is a historically grown technology mess from 2 decades ago. My coding part of the occupation is one smart crew and one MIT licences new-gen web-cms away from becoming totally pointless.
We all know it:
The tech-advancement curve is logarithmic.
The robots are coming and they're taking most of the jobs.
Our's aswell.
The smart people have been predicting this for years. This isn't news at all.
Let's just hope that those at the helm don't screw it up and we all can enjoy an utopia rather than some bizar cyberpunk corporate socialism nightmare. ... I'm down to 25 hours/week already and it feels great.
I personally am looking forward to a 15 hour workweek with still enough to eat and live from.
My 2 cents.
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I think your comments are right in line with the post you responded to. You are claiming that dealing with requirements will keep humans employed, and he was saying how better technology has reduced his job to mostly dealing with requirements.
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Bingo!
Cigar for you, Sir.
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It's generally been the trend that a platform matures and tools come along that make common tasks simpler for domain programmers and power users so that specialized "bit diddling" isn't needed any more. VB made in-house-app GUI creation a snap compared to C++, for example.
However, whenever things settle, new technologies come along to create the cycle all over again.
When mini-computers settled, PC's (desktop) came along, when desktops matured, web came along. When web matured, smart-phones and tablets came
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Thirty-five years ago, I would have, on first glance, thought Python a requirements description language, since it looks a lot like the old pseudo-code I used to write to get the process right. Yesteryear's requirements language will be compiled and/or interpreted next year.
There is one part of software development that won't be automated without strong AI: the conversion of human ideas into some sort of precise description that can be further transformed into something executable. Where this comes in
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Software development is just writing a specification document in a language that a computer will understand.
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Software development is just writing a specification document in a language that a computer will understand.
I guess you code Haskell :) he he...
You need to take a look at Salesforce (Score:2)
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I heard this argument back in 1992. The US might be on the brink of recession though.
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Is that why we keep creating ever more complicated web frameworks that you need to have 5+ years experience in to get jobs? (You know, the ones that have been out for 1-2 years or so)
Yes the simple stuff is getting simpler. The good news for working developers is that there's no shortage of hard stuff left to do.
Economy is Bad (Score:3, Interesting)
Shipments of storage and computers are down- almost always preceding a recession.
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Honestly, its not a recession. Governments used that term to boost morale. In truth it's a depression. When close to a third of the country is not in the workforce, shit is bad, real bad. Meanwhile, H1Bs and L1Bs are first to be hired, American Citizens last.
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Governments and economists use the terms "recession" and "depression" to refer to certain specific metrics.
Most of those metrics are abstract numbers of more interest to governments and corporations than they are to people in Main Street.
Over the last decade or so, in fact, the pain on Main Street has become less and less reflected in "official" metrics, but since to bean-counters the metric is the reality and the whole of the reality, people have been getting more and more discontented, uncomfortable, and
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No, the reason the labor participation rate is low is because baby boomers are retiring. This was predicted 40 years ago. Enough with the doom and bloom and rhetoric.
The labor participation rate I see most often used is restricted to only looking at age 25 to 54. This is specifically to remove students and retirees from the count. And this participation rate is dropping since its two local peaks in 2000 and 2008. At its high it was about 84%, while it is at 80% now. More importantly, it has been steadily dropping since 2008 with no sign of leveling off.
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The labor participation rate for 25-54 is 80% and is at historical highs. Stop lying. If you dont believe me, go look it up.
You know what it was in 1950? 65%
You doom and gloomers are all alike. Liars
Source [stlouisfed.org]
Participation rates were far lower before women started to work, but then again the economy was much smaller then as well. We are currently looking at participation rates as low as the mid 1980's.
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"As low as mid 1980s" meaning within a FEW PERCENT.
The difference between 10% and 6% U-3 unemployment is only a few percent. It is also the difference between 2000 25-54 participation and today's numbers. A few percentage points can be a big deal.
For Gods sake you people act like everything is falling apart. We are still at historical highs.
Almost every metric of societal advancement is going to be at historical highs if you compare it to the last 100 years. If you start comparing things to the last 30 years, which is far more relevant to our modern economy, we are nowhere near a "high".
That is explained easily by the fact that more women have chosen to drop out of the workforce to raise children, people are staying in college longer, and the tail end of the baby boomers retiring.
I agree these are most of the reasons, but all of these are bad f
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It's like the doom and gloom people who say that America has lost its manufacturing base when we are actually manufacturing more than we ever have in our history - other than war times. I think the doom and gloom prophesy is right up there with Plato saying that the younger generation is the ruin of us all and that the future is bleak. The young dislike the old. The old don't like the young. The world's like a honey badger, it doesn't care and doesn't afraid of anything.
Can't be taken seriously. (Score:3, Insightful)
Whenever somebody uses the U3 unemployment numbers for any purpose that doesn't involve sarcasm or irony, their thoughts are not to be taken seriously. Literally the only purpose of mentioning U3 is political propaganda - the calculation methods divorce it completely and irrevocably from any potential honest use in discussing employment rates.
Which "unemployment rate?" (Score:3)
The technology industry's unemployment rate crept up to 3.0 percent
So these are the unemployed, or the unemployed still eligible to receive unemployment?
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Unemployment rates are not, and have never been, a useful measure of labor participation. For that, you look at the labor force participation rate. Of course, when you do, you see that that has been steadily going down under Obama, making this one of the worst administrations in history.
Could just be cyclical, or the bubble popping (Score:4, Insightful)
In the first dotcom boom, and now the social media/app boom, these same trends started appearing towards the end of each up-cycle:
- Massive hiring of anyone who could spell HTML, barely manage a server farm, or cobble together an application starts dropping.
- Computer science enrollment at universities hit all time highs. (The subsequent bust reverses this trend.)
- The tech news gets wackier every day, as even the dumbest ideas are getting VC funding, IPOing or getting acquired by a huge corporation.
- Job hopping increases, especially towards the top of the boom. (This also explains the voluntary resignation increases.) This is just people hopping for the next crazy salary increase or extra perk, and it decreases during the bust as people are happy to be working.
I've managed to stay employed continuously through 2 of these cycles, and I'm hoping my luck holds out. I think the key is simple -- don't suck at your job. :-) I'm not claiming to be a genius or rockstar by any means (and I think the rockstar moniker is stupid,) but I have had a solid track record and very good work experience grounded in fundamentals. Each of these booms has produced a legion of people who are semi-competent but not exactly suited for the job, and they have all been drawn in by the money. Remember paper MCSEs and certification bootcamps? This boom is all about apps, so it's code academies now -- 9 weeks and you're a rockstar developer writing the latest iPhone sensation!
I think the spikes in unemployment can be explained partially by the boom fizzling, but the systems and network administrator increase is likely due to the cloud shift. Not everything is suited to a public cloud, but enough places will see a benefit in moving their stuff that offsets the control they have in locally owned systems. Again, I think (hope, that is, since I'm in systems engineering) that solid people will be retained either as architects or sysadmins in complex environments. What I do think will start to go away is the hyper-specialists like DBAs of one flavor of database, or VSphere administrators, or SAN/storage guys. As more companies try to get away from proprietary stuff, or shift things offsite, that insanely deep knowledge of EMC, VMWare, Cisco, etc. to the exclusion of everything else is going to be less sought after. Someone who can glue all the parts together regardless of who owns them or where they are will still be able to find work. Hopefully. :-)
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I've managed to stay employed continuously through 2 of these cycles, and I'm hoping my luck holds out. I think the key is simple -- don't suck at your job. :-)
I've known many people who didn't suck at their job but got laid off anyway. Most of the time it's because the corporation wants to double productivity at half the cost. So the bean counters lay off half the department. Not the bottom half that sucks in productivity, but the top half that cost more in wages. Everyone else who didn't get laid off hunkered down under the doubled workload.
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"I've known many people who didn't suck at their job but got laid off anyway. "
Agreed, and I've been in situations like this. Luckily, I've worked at places where things like this start creeping in slowly and you can see the writing on the wall long before they get around to kicking you out. Part of being smart about your career these days is avoiding unemployment at all costs, because unemployed people are damaged goods in employers' minds regardless of the reason. Like you mention, I've known a few people
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When I was laid off in 2002, I looked around the conference room they'd gathered us in, and saw people I really respected. The company was having a worse money crunch than I'd thought, and they were trying to keep enough people to do at least a half-assed job of giving the customers what they wanted while eliminating the higher salaries. In that company, we worked on great software, under management that didn't really know how to run a business.
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What I have seen is that there are a number of people who got relatively cushy jobs and were paid well at certain big companies, but only did a certain specific task.
Unfortunately, that one thing they did was not really all that skillful or in demand outside of that one place.
However, their title was still "System Administrator" or "Developer"
So, when they get laid off, they come looking for one of those jobs in other companies, but those companies need people who know more than just X thing that this guy d
New recession coming? (Score:2)
IT always is the 1st to get cut when the share price or sales go down.
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There are very few technologies that don't involve computers, at least if you count microcontrollers as computers (which they are). The light bulb in my kitchen communicates with my Z-Wave hub, so I can turn it on/off and dim it using voice commands, or link it to a motion controller or timer. But there is bug, and about once every month or two it will start flickering. So I need to unscrew it, and screw it back in, to reboot the light bulb.
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