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San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

mercurynews.com

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Re: San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

#101

Post by neom »

jessaustin wrote: post #89
johansch wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now I'm really curious. What bell are you talking about and why is it relevant?

Since you brought up IQ, I'd guess this was something about the bell curve. It's not obvious what "nuance" could have to do with that, however. Perhaps that was an unhinged spell-correction of "variance"? Sometimes I wonder if people post with imprecision because they think that way...

Richard Herrnstein certainly never suggested that there was a chunky or sharp delineation built into the bell curve, It's probably fair to say the manifestation of capability and capacity of the human throughout the spectrum specifically in the context of the article would likely require to you see no "gradation".

Re: San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

#102

Post by stevenwoo »

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.

There's an interesting coincidence on the front page of the Mercury News today. http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/03/25/bay-area-tech-executiv...

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.

Re: San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

#103

Post by Spooky23 »

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…

Its easy to spot the difference.

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!

Re: San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

#105

Post by tehlike »

nostrademons wrote: post #75
brianwawok wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

With this logic, most of the bursts wouldnt happen, would they? In 2000 with the dotcom, why was it a bust and not a gradual decline? Same goes for 2007/8 bust. If it were not lagging, wouldnt you expect people would have realized this and bring market to its stable levels with similar shorting?

Re: San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

#106

Post by tehlike »

nostrademons wrote: post #75
brianwawok wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Also there are various indices that try to predict market overvaluation, that seem to give red alert on cirrent valuations.

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.

Re: San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

#107

Post by gozur88 »

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.

Mine too. We're having real problems filling contract positions. People are juggling multiple offers, and if we don't jump on a candidate right away they take another offer and we have to restart the process.

We've gone through surplus years before, and they don't look like this.

Re: San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

#108

Post by devingoldfish »

wooyi wrote: post #3

These are likely seasonal job losses like retail or related. You have to do Year over Year comparisons for jobs. Month over month comparisons are misleading because of seasonality

Just took another look and the data in the article is seasonally adjusted.

Re: San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

#109

Post by TuringNYC »

Old_Thrashbarg wrote: post #67

I wonder what impact the Bay Area's cost of living and out of control housing prices had on this. I believe the tech scenes in other cities like LA, Seattle, NYC, Austin, etc have higher growth rates than the Bay Area.

Huge impact. Housing costs put a floor on acceptable salaries. Even if you go way out to San Jose or beyond, the housing costs and resulting monthly mortgage makes pushes minimum salaries into mid-150s for the most meager of family accommodations. I haven't moved from NYC to SF/SV for that singular reason.

Re: San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

#110

Post by JabavuAdams »

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.

We're mining a rich vein of techniques that have been opened up by the deep learning revolution. There doesn't seem to be any near-term end in sight, and the pace of improvement is incredible. It's hard just to keep up with the best result in, say, computer vision or NLP.

This is nothing like the 80's where techniques foundered on non-toy problems.

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