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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

#61

Post by azernik »

They specifically cite job losses in "IT" as a worrying indicator of the health of the tech industry. However, looking at the people quoted on LinkedIn, the problems seem to be for things like support/corporate IT - the people interviewed have worked at hospital helpdesks or as MS Access admins.

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.

Re: San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

#62

Post by JBReefer »

jimmywanger wrote: post #51
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.

I think you should consider that they may well be right, and that they can't find work at a rate they expect due to H1Bs working for less. People tend to know more about their own lives than you do about theirs.

Re: San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

#63

Post by jacquesm »

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…

> DevOps/infrastructure is knowing how to glue together off the shelf tools and understanding how everything works.

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.

Re: San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

#64

Post by _m8fo »

kabdib wrote: post #58
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…

How are you measuring the "objectively valuable" systems? How much money are we talking?

Re: San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

#65

Post by nostrademons »

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.

Stock price does tend to be a leading indicator, because the major Wall Street analysts all do their best to independently derive a company's sales so they can front-run the stock before official earnings come out. Causality tends to run:

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.

Re: San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

#66

Post by johansch »

bante wrote: post #40
johansch wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unpopular opinion: Nah, it's an IQ issue. It's really not a (short-term) training issue, at least.

It's weird that people who claim unpopular opinions, often at the expense of others, so rarely can find the time to argue their excellent ideas. I have a number of friends that works in "IT" in Europe. The difference between working for a US and European "IT" company is night and day. It simply has very little status as a field in the US. If you had ever seen the things a systems administrators have to deal with from…

I agree. The sysadmin people I have worked with in Europe in have generally been very clever people that I loved to have on my team. The IT/sysadmin people I experienced in Silicon Valley in my next company though.. meh.

Re: San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

#68

Post by toomuchtodo »

Rapzid wrote: post #59
toomuchtodo wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Higher end roles are architecture. If it's development, you're a developer.

Re: San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

#69

Post by psyc »

bante wrote: post #40
johansch wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unpopular opinion: Nah, it's an IQ issue. It's really not a (short-term) training issue, at least.

It's weird that people who claim unpopular opinions, often at the expense of others, so rarely can find the time to argue their excellent ideas. I have a number of friends that works in "IT" in Europe. The difference between working for a US and European "IT" company is night and day. It simply has very little status as a field in the US. If you had ever seen the things a systems administrators have to deal with from…

Not that I agree with the specific opinion in question, but when it comes to cause-effect questions with a moral angle, you're going to convince literally nobody by arguing. I never take the time, because it doesn't bother me in the slightest whether others agree with me, or are wrong.
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