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San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

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Re: San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

#51

Post by jimmywanger »

KeepTalking wrote: post #30

Couple of random ramblings about the article - 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 emp…

> Why the random cheap shot at H1-Bs.

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.

Re: San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

#52

Post by zer00eyz »

jsmthrowaway wrote: post #41
enjo wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I simply have to believe that cloud services have taken a big bite of the sysadmin market. We currently employ zero admins (~25 employees, moderate traffic). In my previous ventures that'd be unthinkable, but we've effecticely outsourced the position to Amazon.

That just means you've elected not to hire an operations person, not that Amazon is doing it for you. You're still doing it, you just don't realize it.

This is very true: Dev/Op's has turned into an excuse to throw another job onto programers, one that in some circumstances they aren't really qualified to do.

We spent years as an industry separating out roles and building walled gardens. The latter was bad but the former was correctly informed.

Re: San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

#53

Post by edoceo »

brianwawok wrote: post #31
11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #7

You need to read the whole article to get to the statement: “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, Facebo…

I don't think stock price is a leading indicator. It goes something like Profits -> hiring decisions -> stock prices Stock price could be many months behind the profits as you don't do dialy earning reports.

Forward P/E

Re: San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

#54

Post by mst »

enjo wrote: post #39
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I am quite positive I heard that statement many, many times during the original dot com bust of 2000/2001.

I simply have to believe that cloud services have taken a big bite of the sysadmin market. We currently employ zero admins (~25 employees, moderate traffic). In my previous ventures that'd be unthinkable, but we've effecticely outsourced the position to Amazon.

You're presumably still handling package installation, deployment etc. via something handled in-house, no?

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.

Re: San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

#55

Post by nwenzel »

We're in Mountain View and we're hiring [0]. I've certainly noticed commercial real estate going from completely nuts to merely really expensive. Anecdotal sure. But eventually all the anecdotal points add up to a trend.

[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).

Re: San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

#56

Post by wamatt »

giardini wrote: post #44

"The AI Winter Is Coming" (February 23, 2017) https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-winter-coming-sandro-skans... so I don't expect deep learning to save us.

> And Sandro Skansi says

No one knows who that is.

Namedropping in an authoritative tone about a random person, seems kind of odd.

Re: San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

#57

Post by qaq »

enjo wrote: post #39
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I am quite positive I heard that statement many, many times during the original dot com bust of 2000/2001.

I simply have to believe that cloud services have taken a big bite of the sysadmin market. We currently employ zero admins (~25 employees, moderate traffic). In my previous ventures that'd be unthinkable, but we've effecticely outsourced the position to Amazon.

Yes but the ops teams at aws are not manned by magic unicorns. Also do be honest I have noticed that on teams where most ops are handled by devs if you convert that time to money it would have being at least break even to have an ops person even if part time with a much better results.

Re: San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

#58

Post by kabdib »

giardini wrote: post #44

"The AI Winter Is Coming" (February 23, 2017) https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-winter-coming-sandro-skans... so I don't expect deep learning to save us.

Doubt it. I've seen a couple instances of experienced devs spooling up some interesting and objectively valuable machine learning systems, going from a lunchroom chat to production code in a very short amount of time. If there is a winter, it will be the result of AI becoming an off-the-shelf commodity; on the other hand, it should be easier to justify investments in research, given the demonstrated value of ML today.

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.

Re: San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

#59

Post by Rapzid »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #49
woah wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DevOps/infrastructure engineer is basically a programming position, which sysadmin/IT types may not have strong skills in.

I wouldn't call Ansible and Terraform programming languages. In two and a half years at a well known startup, I've written less than 1000 lines of code in a senior DevOps/Infra role. 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 fund…

Some of the more junior/limited roles amount to that. Higher-end roles involve a much, much broader skillet including development.

Re: San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

#60

Post by ganfortran »

giardini wrote: post #44

"The AI Winter Is Coming" (February 23, 2017) https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-winter-coming-sandro-skans... so I don't expect deep learning to save us.

> If you want a popular AI topic which does require a lot of inference, think of a general-purpose chatbot.

General-purpose chatbot, almost equal to solve AGI. If that is how you define winter...where is summer!?

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