San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble
mercurynews.com
mercurynews.com
The numbers don't really back the first part of the statement up...
There are +3000 more I.T. jobs from 2016->2017 and I.T. only lost -500 jobs since last month, but that is a single month while the numbers are still higher than last year (down 0.7% monthly but up 4.1% overall yearly).
And "Computer Systems Design & Related Services" also grew 3.7% year over year with 0% loss in the last month.
The news is always looking for the negative 'sky is falling' angles and they will always be able to find someone to provide a sound bites to back up the story. But as usual the numbers say otherwise or are simply neutral/boring.
Some people are obsessed with being the first one to call the new demise of tech, or the latest bubble. But if anything the industry has become more resilient. Which is what happens when industries mature and grow larger. With more diversity and a larger base of employers/employees then fluctuations are naturally going to be smaller and better contained. That plus greater domain expertise develops over time - companies/investors learn how to manage risk better and understand the nature of the marketplace so overall losses are smaller.
Personal services IT is still alive and well and a number of people I know have made a living out of helping older people manage passwords, upgrade their systems, move their phone plans or transfer their data when they get a new phone etc. But to be successful at that you also need to talk to people and be able to maintain a business relationship with them, not a skill that everyone has in addition to their deep knowledge of IT.
As tm2d mentions devops is still a hot job market. But it is not the small business 'tech' role so there are fewer actual slots for that role.
There was also a comment in the article about H1-B visas and employers wanting "younger and less expensive" workers. I try to remind my older friends that if someone can spend 6 months learning to do what you do and do it well enough to meet the needs of the job, then you are only "worth" what a company would pay that person they just hired. If you want to have a larger salary and better job security, then you need to be able to do things that can't be trained in 6 months. The days of 'too few programmers to go around' are long past, there is now a surplus and they are coming fast and furious out of college.
Some of your other points were insightful, but this assertion contradicts my experience and intuition, and -- I believe -- labor market statistics.
In 1999 when I was hiring programmers and offering above market starting salaries I wouldn't get any qualified resumes.
It is from that experience that would assert it is a 'pricing' issue rather than a 'selection' issue.
[1] After 10 qualified I had my first interview round, 3 were brought back for secondary interviews and one hired. I expect there were easily 20 - 30 engineers in there that could have done the job.
It seems that there might be plenty of churn overall.
We've gone through surplus years before, and they don't look like this.
But to management/high ups, they "can do the job" and are cheaper. It's like outsourcing. You save in costs but there are hidden downsides and risks.
I'd probably argue that very few engineer jobs can be done competently with a few months of training.
Coding is a cheap easy skill that 15-20 years old can do.
Executing and managing a project from start to finish is a rare skill that cannot be acquired in school or the internet.
Coding Monkey => Cheap and easy to find.
Coder who has successfully led and executed projects => Expensive and rare.
I think training is part of the problem. More importantly, workers need consulting help around how to take existing skills and use them to apply to upmarket jobs with higher pay.
Unless you are arguing that people never did large scale automation of processes around deploying systems and software until this term existed...
In my personal vocabulary - there were always 2 kinds of sysadmins:
- Real sysadmins- which is now the term 'DevOps'
- IT System Technicians - which is what sysadmin is being perverted into
The old-style breakdown typically depended on how systems/development minded the company was - with more forward looking companies seeing their sysadmins as the former category and people who "administered" e.g. 'tended to' the IT "system", and the reactive companies who viewed IT as some foreign expense to be managed viewing their sysadmins as advanced IT techs who were 'admins' (in the administrative assistant sense) for the various 'systems' (e.g. computers) that they purchased.
As someone who always operated in the mindset of the former category, but unfortunately has operated mostly in the latter type of company, it is difficult to make the transition into 'DevOps' roles since this term has been subsequently invented to describe the work that I always did, using tools that I would have written from scratch myself in the old days, or deployed myself in the current days, but unfortunately due to crappy management and backwards modes of thinking, don't have the proper 'current' job-title on my resume (e.g. sysadmin)
If you talk to someone about their day and it revolves around tickets, they are the techs that you're talking about. The real "sysadmins"/devops understand systems and own things.
It's ok to realign your title with function. Every company handles this sort of thing differently. I was a "Computer Systems Programmer 3" for two years. In that organization, that rank was roughly equivalent to a Staff Engineer. My resume says "Lead DBA", as that was my primary function... the formal title assigned was just whatever was available when I was promoted... the title description was written for mainframe people!
DevOps/infrastructure is knowing how to glue together off the shelf tools and understanding how everything works. Great that as a dev you can probably bolt these tools together with docs, but your lack of context with the underlying fundamentals will eventually bite you.
That's actually not that much removed from quite a few programming jobs. It's mostly different manuals and the occasional plug to fit into a socket but other than that the differences are smaller than the similarities and debugging skills are important for both of them.
And, thankfully, no architects.
Your comments convey a very narrow perspective of the job market that falls under "DevOps". That is to say, the sphere of roles looking to be filled by companies who believe they are filling a "DevOps" role is much larger than what you believe. It almost seems as if you are limiting yourself and projecting that onto the entire job market.
Now, I'm not sure you consider your current position as "limiting".. However, I can say that there are MANY roles being filled for "DevOps" candidates that extend beyond writing Ansible roles or Chef cookbooks. Speaking as someone 6 years into their engineering career and as the person who wrote the initial powershell(as a linux cloud engineer!) feature provider for Chef, I would not have taken a role such as you describe after year 1.
Now, you may be in a position where writing Ansible or Chef resources long term sounds swell. That's fare! But there are many, MANY roles that fall into the systems engineer/SRE bucket that are labeled at DevOps! Honestly, they are a matter of degree! The higher-end roles are senior, lead, unique, and require heavy development skills. If it's not the provisioning platform you are developing and supporting, it's the performance characteristics of the product itself.
> DevOps/infrastructure engineer is basically a programming position
sysadmin/network admin ==>> DevOps
IT manager => Manager or lead.
DevOps is not a programming position at all. It is usually cheap system administration (that replace the term sysadmin) and it does NOT require coding. Pay attention to the name and the place you joins, you're can easily be burnt by joining a team of operations monkeys while thinking they were the dev and system type persons.
Nah, it's an IQ issue. It's really not a (short-term) training issue, at least.
I think a great piece of advice for life is, "Never assume you are the smartest person in the room." Remember that everyone brings something to the table.
I eventually figured out there were very limited opportunities for someone with my skills and interests in that role so I studied and worked to build the skills to get a software engineering job.
I think that Helpdesk roles in general should be seen as stepping stones toward careers in more advanced roles. I actually think my experience doing that work has made me a better engineer and coworker.
To backup my "significant number" claim, here's a 3 months old info: "Bay Area unemployment rates fall to lowest in 15 years" http://www.mercurynews.com/2016/12/16/south-bay-jobs-surge-e...
A more specific example: close to a thousand job openings at Apple Inc. with specific search as "software engineer" and location as "Santa Clara Valley" -> Showing 921-939 of 600+
https://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/FactSheet62/whdfs62M...
“Unemployment rates throughout the Bay Area are among the lowest in the state. Almost anywhere else in the country, the Bay Area’s job trends would be the envy of that region.”
Every downturn has to start somewhere, and maybe this is the beginning of a bad stretch, but the largest employers are doing fine based on stock prices. Apple, Alphabet, Cisco, Facebook all made new all-time highs within the last month (or week).
Here is the March 2017 unemployment report. 3.5% for Santa Clara County. And states that jobs are + 2,000 from January to February.
http://www.labormarketinfo.edd.ca.gov/file/lfmonth/sjos$pds....
Profits -> hiring decisions -> stock prices
Stock price could be many months behind the profits as you don't do dialy earning reports.
Product announcements -> sales -> stock price -> reported profits -> hiring decisions (-> regional migration -> housing prices).
A number of my college classmates went into equity analysis or management consulting positions, they would do things like canvas retail locations and count the number of shoppers walking out with the products of interest, or track search engine rankings, or sit on Google Trends to watch for changes in search volumes in the markets of interest.
This is also why stock prices fall when a company "misses estimates", even if earnings are themselves up. Wall Street has a consensus estimate for how they expect the stock to do, and that estimate is priced into the stock. When the analysts are wrong (which isn't uncommon), the stock corrects based on the difference between the estimate and the reported earnings.
Stock price attempts to predict earnings. It is never perfect or earning announcements would never move the stock.
The fact is, if you want to know at a 1 or 2 month with window how a company is doing, stock is not the place to look
The problem is, can you exactly time when it is supposed to bust? Not likely. Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
[0]We're 18 people, enterprise SaaS, started by 2 founders who have worked together for 15 years. https://www.simplelegal.com/careers
Also looking for Head of Engineering and devs (senior front end dev, lead API dev, Django dev).
- IT jobs as in do they mean IT admins/Biz Analysts or programmers and software engineers. There is a smaller market in the area for IT admins than for programmers and software engineers. additionally, It seems to mix data between tech jobs and hotels etc.
- Why the random cheap shot at H1-Bs. Is this focused on employment or immigration ? typically in a healthy market employment trends follow immigration (employment based) trends. Seems like an effort to stir up some traffic to a poorly sourced article.
- The social media bubble? This is the first time I have heard of that term. Appreciate if they did some basic homework to see 2016 investment trends https://www.wilmerhale.com/uploadedFiles/Shared_Content/Edit...
That was not a shot taken by the article, but by people who couldn't find jobs. H-1Bs are an easy scapegoat - certainly easier to explain your lack of success in finding a job because of H-1B visa holders rather than your own lack of in-demand skills.
First, as I pointed out, it's much easier cognitively to blame an external circumstance than your own skills deficit.
Second, any sort of expansion of the labor pool will tend to depress wages. If you can't find work at a rate you expect, you need to either lower your expectations or expect unemployment.
While this is true, if the rationale behind H1B program is designed to supplant a shortage in actual labor skills, and not in labor skills at the company owner's desired pay rates, and there is a surplus of skills due to unemployment while H1B's continue for the same skillset, then H1B's are compounding the problem due to misuse. This is logic.
Still waiting for the day that owners are clamoring for H1B's for executives due to excessive pay and 'labor shortage'.. except executives are largely part of the same group as owners and the same people that fund the lobbyists so we all know that will never happen..
The intent of the law was to supplant shortages in labor skills, and that's the way the law is being used by most large "reputable" companies, not body shops.
I think you'd find it difficult to argue that when one of the big 5 brings somebody over on a H1b, it doesn't tend to depress the wages of engineers, as they usually only hire and recruit a highly selective (not necessarily talented) subset of engineers and compensate them extremely well.
The way the law is written allows a lot of consulting companies to game the system by bringing marginally talented labor to drive down the wages for skills that already exist in this country.
As an aside, this sort of argument against some H1-B seekers is a form of rent-seeking. You're trying to extract value from something that you inherited, e.g. your citizenship and your ability to legally work in this country, vs something you're able to do uniquely well.
That's a new type of H1-B visa fraud that I had never heard of as far as I can tell from the article.
In my previous ventures that'd be unthinkable, but we've effecticely outsourced the position to Amazon.
We spent years as an industry separating out roles and building walled gardens. The latter was bad but the former was correctly informed.
Certainly the "tending hardware" part of sysadminry is outsourceable, but unless you're going full-serverless there's still a bunch of systems work to do - so it may be longer before a full time sysadmin is worth the money, but one will likely be value for money eventually.
With immutable infrastructure all defined in config file (cloudformation, terraform, etc), you don't have any pet servers sitting around.
Can safely ignore bubbles created by VC funding cash-flow injection and focus on business that bootstrap in a healthy way.
$10B and 28% are hard to ignore.
[1]:https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/02/technology/uber-investmen...
“Silicon Valley is bracing itself for literally a repeat of 2001,” Chowdhry said, referring to the dot-com meltdown that erupted with mammoth job losses that year. “This time it’s a social media bubble that will blow up."
The sky is falling! People are literally bracing themselves with both hands as we speak!
Nothing like using hyperbole to get you and your company's name in print. Global Equities Research? Seriously who the hell is that?
How many of these 4,400 jobs that the local economy has shed in SV are HP and Cisco which are two old guard tech companies not startups. These are also two companies who have been struggling with their old business models.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-winter-coming-sandro-skans...
so I don't expect deep learning to save us.
No one knows who that is.
Namedropping in an authoritative tone about a random person, seems kind of odd.
The AI winter of the 80s was caused by over-hype, hardware companies whose markets were too small and whose products quickly fell behind the Moore's Law curve, and funding cuts by the US government.
General-purpose chatbot, almost equal to solve AGI. If that is how you define winter...where is summer!?
This is nothing like the 80's where techniques foundered on non-toy problems.
More indicative of general poor economic health and possibly higher ease of use or automation in these fields than of tech-industry-specific problems. Note that general poor economic health could itself be a leading indicator of trouble for our particular set.
Metaphors suck though. I don't know if 'balance' has any real meaning in the context of a job market. Supply and demand can't ever really be out of balance, they can just be distorted by random effects. In this sense 'fall' must mean smaller market?
Headlines are by nature vague and imprecise, they're just enough of a hook to make you decide to read the article or not. shrug
https://jobsquery.it/jobs;page=1;tags=;sortBy=PUBLISHED_AT_D...
This.