Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

mercurynews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 114 posts

Re: San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

#71

Post by ChuckMcM »

madlynormal wrote: post #21
dmix wrote: post #15

> “Right now it’s tough to find a job in I.T.,” said Steve Satariano, a San Jose resident who has been working in contracted, temporary information technology jobs in recent years. “I’d prefer to find a full-time, permanent job, but in I.T., beggars can’t be choosers. It’s a little frustrating because tech companies always want to try before they buy.” The numbers don't really back the first part of the statement up.…

There is a significant difference within different roles in I.T. As someone who's worked in the cost center side of the industry, I can relate with the author. It's a problem not limited to Oakland or San Jose. Helpdesk, Desktop Support, and related jobs are commonly temp to perm with horrible pay for the amount of stress.

Exactly, the role of the 'IT person' as the system administrator and keeper of updates on things like the Novell server, has given way to Google Apps and Microsoft's Office 365. Small businesses who could barely afford to pay someone before can now eliminate that role and still have email, shared files, back end inventory management and accounts management, and the occasional web developer contract to keep the web site up to date.

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.

Re: San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

#73

Post by brianwawok »

nostrademons wrote: post #65
brianwawok wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

The things you say are true, but your conclusion is not quite right.

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

Re: San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

#74

Post by toomuchtodo »

jacquesm wrote: post #63
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…

> 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.

Agreed.

Re: San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

#75

Post by nostrademons »

brianwawok wrote: post #73
nostrademons wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

The things you say are true, but your conclusion is not quite right. 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

Sure, it's never perfect, but in context here it's relevant. Grandparent's point is that there is no evidence of a broad-based downturn in Silicon Valley, based on stock prices of major tech companies. Yours is that stock prices tend to be lagging indicators. I don't believe this is true in the general case (certainly it can be in specific ones), but if you believe that it is - how big is your short? If you believe that stock prices are lagging indicators and market consensus doesn't reflect reality, this is your chance to make money off that belief.

Re: San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

#76

Post by johnvega »

dmix wrote: post #15

> “Right now it’s tough to find a job in I.T.,” said Steve Satariano, a San Jose resident who has been working in contracted, temporary information technology jobs in recent years. “I’d prefer to find a full-time, permanent job, but in I.T., beggars can’t be choosers. It’s a little frustrating because tech companies always want to try before they buy.” The numbers don't really back the first part of the statement up.…

There are still a "significant number" of I.T. tech job openings that finding a job should not be tough, but "getting" those job is another matter. Poor interviewing skills may make it more difficult to get jobs, but "try before you buy" is how I got my job over 10 years ago and now is being called "Job Auditions" by Ron Friedman, which is basically a contract with option to hire. I think it is a good additional approach for companies to get the best possible team and good for highly qualified candidates who are not so great at job in-person interviews.

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+

Re: San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

#77

Post by empath75 »

qaq wrote: post #57
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.

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.

Yeah but the aws ops guys are split between many many companies. I was thinking more of the 'office it guy' sort of job.

Re: San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

#78

Post by ex_amazon_sde »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #68
Rapzid wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google and Amazon have plenty of SRE / System engineers and roles with "developer" in it. All of them write code.

And, thankfully, no architects.

Re: San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

#79

Post by danans »

madlynormal wrote: post #21
dmix wrote: post #15

> “Right now it’s tough to find a job in I.T.,” said Steve Satariano, a San Jose resident who has been working in contracted, temporary information technology jobs in recent years. “I’d prefer to find a full-time, permanent job, but in I.T., beggars can’t be choosers. It’s a little frustrating because tech companies always want to try before they buy.” The numbers don't really back the first part of the statement up.…

There is a significant difference within different roles in I.T. As someone who's worked in the cost center side of the industry, I can relate with the author. It's a problem not limited to Oakland or San Jose. Helpdesk, Desktop Support, and related jobs are commonly temp to perm with horrible pay for the amount of stress.

This was true even 14 years ago, especially after the dot-com bust when many former developers took jobs as help desk techs when the job market fell apart. I was one of them.

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.

Re: San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

#80

Post by jimmywanger »

JBReefer wrote: post #62
jimmywanger wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You're missing/not addressing two important points.

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.

Post reply on HN