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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

#91

Post by chrisweekly »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #71
madlynormal wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 si…

> "The days of 'too few programmers to go around' are long past, there is now a surplus..."

Some of your other points were insightful, but this assertion contradicts my experience and intuition, and -- I believe -- labor market statistics.

Re: San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

#92

Post by ChuckMcM »

chrisweekly wrote: post #91
ChuckMcM wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 si…

> "The days of 'too few programmers to go around' are long past, there is now a surplus..." Some of your other points were insightful, but this assertion contradicts my experience and intuition, and -- I believe -- labor market statistics.

The last time I listed a $120K job opening I had hundreds of resumes thrown at me, over 10[1] of them were completely qualified and So perhaps it would be more accurate to say "$80K/yr programmers are scarce."

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.

Re: San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

#93

Post by DrScump »

vorg wrote: post #70

The article's headline says "stumble", whereas the HN link headline says "tumble". The two words have almost opposite meanings.

My personal connotation would be that "stumble" implies a misstep (e.g. one's own fault), but "tumble" can be due to outside influences. YMMV.

Re: San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

#94

Post by jopsen »

mst wrote: post #54
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.

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.

Pushing to heroku or something like it will get you pretty far.

With immutable infrastructure all defined in config file (cloudformation, terraform, etc), you don't have any pet servers sitting around.

Re: San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

#95

Post by ori_b »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #92
chrisweekly wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "The days of 'too few programmers to go around' are long past, there is now a surplus..." Some of your other points were insightful, but this assertion contradicts my experience and intuition, and -- I believe -- labor market statistics.

The last time I listed a $120K job opening I had hundreds of resumes thrown at me, over 10[1] of them were completely qualified and So perhaps it would be more accurate to say "$80K/yr programmers are scarce." 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 'select…

The last time I put my resume out ( about 3 months ago), my big problem was who to interview with, since I was flooded with requests.

It seems that there might be plenty of churn overall.

Re: San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

#96

Post by jimmywanger »

cat199 wrote: post #84
jimmywanger wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 t…

> if the rationale behind H1B program is designed to supplant a shortage in actual labor skills,

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.

Re: San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

#97

Post by sulam »

cat199 wrote: post #82
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.

So what were sysadmins before the term DevOps was invented ~5y ago? 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 br…

No one is going to check that your title matched at most companies I've worked. Yes if you list yourself as VP of Finance and you were actually an Accounts Payable administrator, you will have some trouble. But that trouble will start far before the background check. If you're in a DevOps role that happens to be called System Administrator, simply change what you call yourself. You will still have to interview as a DevOps person of course -- titles are not reality -- but you'll get far more inbound interest, guaranteed. And according to what you've written here, you won't be lying or even misleading the people who want to talk to you.

Re: San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

#98

Post by sulam »

aphextron wrote: post #14

So it isn't just me. Has anyone else in the east bay had a tough time finding work recently as a mid level front end developer?

When you say "in the east bay" that's confusing to me. Are you only considering companies with an East Bay office? I live in the East Bay and don't make any secret of it, but I get recruiters contacting me from all over the SF Bay Area (and outside of it too, for that matter). Would you not work in SF if someone wanted to hire you there?

Re: San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

#99

Post by foxhedgehog »

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 also doesn't correlate with hiring if there's increased automation driving it.

Re: San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

#100

Post by jorblumesea »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #71
madlynormal wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 si…

I think there's a misconception about performance some perception issues about the ability to do the job. In 6 months of training you might get someone who can sort of do the job, but probably not very well and not at the level of a "real" professional. A good example of this is code camps. They churn out a ton of programmers but very few people that are actual engineers or can carry out actual projects.

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.

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