Cloud centers bring high-tech flash but not many jobs
washingtonpost.com
Cloud centers bring high-tech flash but not many jobs
1–10 of 52 posts
Re: Cloud centers bring high-tech flash but not many jobs
#2"not many jobs"? in a town of 3400 people, the new datacenter is expected to create 50 direct jobs and 150 contracting/maintenance positions. if we say the workforce comprises half the population, that means 10% of the jobs in town will be datacenter related. that sounds pretty good to me.
apple isn't going to magically turn your town from podunk, nowhere into some big metropolis.
Re: Cloud centers bring high-tech flash but not many jobs
#3I've just written an article (waiting for publication) lamenting the same thing from almost the exact opposite angle: Lots of jobs, no money.
Here in Scotland, the government has just given £10.6m in 'support' to Amazon to encourage them to open a distribution centre (actually they already had two, but anyway...) The Scottish government is trumpeting this as a recognition of Scotland's "highly skilled workforce". Actually it's 750 jobs (gov't estimate) mostly on 1% above the legal minimum wage, with no real prospects.
And to cap it all, Amazon don't even pay tax in the UK. All their sales go through a Luxembourg company. So it seems ridiculous that the taxpayer is subsidising the operations of a highly profitable, tax-avoiding company. Effectively we're buying jobs.
Meanwhile, Borders is bankrupt (loss of 1,200 jobs), and other booksellers (Waterstones paid £2m in corporation tax last year) are struggling.
Relating it back to this post - highly skilled work requires less people. Low skilled work requires less people AND pays less money. But it's progress, and I fear it's simply an economic reality. I don't know what the solution is.
Note: I don't want to litter this post with climbdowns, moderations etc. I'm not disparaging Amazon jobs, and 750 people working instead of unemployed is good. But we can't win in a race to the lowest paid unskilled labour. And Amazon's labour can't even be offshored anyway, so who are we bidding against?
Re: Cloud centers bring high-tech flash but not many jobs
#4"not many jobs"? in a town of 3400 people, the new datacenter is expected to create 50 direct jobs and 150 contracting/maintenance positions. if we say the workforce comprises half the population, that means 10% of the jobs in town will be datacenter related. that sounds pretty good to me. apple isn't going to magically turn your town from podunk, nowhere into some big metropolis.
Yes, but it's very likely the 50 direct jobs will be handled by people mostly brought in by Apple and some won't even live in the town.
Re: Cloud centers bring high-tech flash but not many jobs
#5I keep seeing new articles in this type of tone. Like they know what's wrong but are afraid to say what they want for fear it won't be published. What this article is describing is capitalism working effectively, maybe too effictively to be sustainable. Capitalsim is all about using technology to produce profits more efficiently. By building a data center in a small town Apple is efficiently using its techology to produce profits. This isn't something to be complaining to Apple for doing.
Technology's effictiveness is outstripping captialisms mechanism for job creation. The unemployment problem probably cannot be fixed without drastic socio-economic reform.
Re: Cloud centers bring high-tech flash but not many jobs
#6"not many jobs"? in a town of 3400 people, the new datacenter is expected to create 50 direct jobs and 150 contracting/maintenance positions. if we say the workforce comprises half the population, that means 10% of the jobs in town will be datacenter related. that sounds pretty good to me. apple isn't going to magically turn your town from podunk, nowhere into some big metropolis.
Yes, but it's very likely the 50 direct jobs will be handled by people mostly brought in by Apple and some won't even live in the town.
They contracted someone to build the thing in the first place. Whoever is there for the data centre will be renting or buying a place to live, or at least staying at hotels, shopping for food and going to restaurants.
It may not solve all of the town's problems but it probably does not do any harm either.
Re: Cloud centers bring high-tech flash but not many jobs
#7I keep seeing new articles in this type of tone. Like they know what's wrong but are afraid to say what they want for fear it won't be published. What this article is describing is capitalism working effectively, maybe too effictively to be sustainable. Capitalsim is all about using technology to produce profits more efficiently. By building a data center in a small town Apple is efficiently using its techology to pr…
I absolutely agree. And it's all well and good talking about startups creating jobs, but really, what YC startups have created any meaningful number of jobs (aside from highly paid developers (Dropbox, Heroku) or sales staff (Airbnb)? I'm not taking away from their success in any way, I just think we need to recognise that there's a fundamental problem on the horizon. I suspect the solution lies in fewer people working and contributing a greater proportion of their income. Obviously that's unpalatable to everybody.
Re: Cloud centers bring high-tech flash but not many jobs
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but it's very likely the 50 direct jobs will be handled by people mostly brought in by Apple and some won't even live in the town.
They contracted someone to build the thing in the first place. Whoever is there for the data centre will be renting or buying a place to live, or at least staying at hotels, shopping for food and going to restaurants. It may not solve all of the town's problems but it probably does not do any harm either.
You're right. But the problem is bigger than this. It's that the data centre eliminates a far greater number of jobs than it creates. Somewhere else in the US, there's a CD pressing factory which has just closed its doors with 150 jobs lost. And 10 retailers who sold those CDs. And the company that printed Road Atlases. It's an inevitability, but one that is overlooked by saying, "Well it's progress, we're creating skilled jobs in the businesses that are doing the displacing. Let's retool our workforce."
Re: Cloud centers bring high-tech flash but not many jobs
#9I keep seeing new articles in this type of tone. Like they know what's wrong but are afraid to say what they want for fear it won't be published. What this article is describing is capitalism working effectively, maybe too effictively to be sustainable. Capitalsim is all about using technology to produce profits more efficiently. By building a data center in a small town Apple is efficiently using its techology to pr…
This.
Every time I see articles like this -- pointing out how large full-time admin and operations teams are now replaced with smaller teams and easy-to-manage infrastructure -- I wonder if something similar will happen to software engineering.
In fact, I am sure that something like this must eventually happen to engineering. The cost involved in designing and developing new services will be reduced to only that which is essential. I just dont know what form it will take.
Will newer, easy-to-use libraries reduce the work of five engineers to one? Will basic application development knowledge become so ubiquitous that engineers are only needed for the harder, more obscure challenges? Will all of engineering be reduced to only the most creative work, with all the logic and plumbing provided automagically by intelligent programming environments?
Probably all of the above. What's a dev to do?
Re: Cloud centers bring high-tech flash but not many jobs
#10Create your own job, instead of relying on someone else. Isn't that the idea of a startup?