Cloud centers bring high-tech flash but not many jobs • Hacker News Board

Re: Cloud centers bring high-tech flash but not many jobs

#41

Post by hackinthebochs » Sun, Nov 27, 2011, 5:28 AM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #28

msbarnett wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This data center likely created hundreds, if not thousands of jobs. It's just that most of them aren't in hicksville, NC. Well, yes. But it's worth taking note of the point that Governments subsidizing the creation of data centers in places like hicksville, NC with the idea that the jobs they create will become a huge boon to the local hicksville economy is fundamentally mistaken. Aside from a skeleton staff to mai…

According to the article, the government didn't subsidize Apple. Town Manager William “Todd” Herms said Apple’s presence boosts the town’s tax base and helps it lower overall taxes... Apple benefits from reduced taxes, and the town gets 50% of something rather than 100% of nothing.

That quote seems more like political-speak than actual hard numbers. The article also said that the state government gave Apple $46 million in tax breaks, while local government cut their property taxes by 50 percent and personal taxes by 85 percent. I'm hard-pressed to see how the taxpayers aren't subsidizing this datacenter.

Re: Cloud centers bring high-tech flash but not many jobs

#42

Post by myhf » Sun, Nov 27, 2011, 5:38 AM UTC

cousin_it wrote: post #36

marshallp wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can't beat them, join them. Figure out what technologies are destroying jobs and be one of the job destroyers.

If all but 20% of programming jobs will become redundant, what advice would you give to the remaining 80% of programmers? "Starve because there's too many of you to fit in the 20%"?

Work at a higher efficiency for someone who was unable to afford paying you to work at a lower efficiency.

Re: Cloud centers bring high-tech flash but not many jobs

#43

Post by politician » Sun, Nov 27, 2011, 5:43 AM UTC

georgieporgie wrote: post #35

balloot wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they're counting jobs at Apple HQ, there are FAR more than 50 jobs associated with this data center. They're talking about the people who report to work in the actual data center building. And that's an incredibly stupid way to measure the job creation of a cloud data center, given that its entire purpose in life is to allow remote access of its information.

To the small town which is giving tax breaks, it's a somewhat important thing to discuss.

True, but there are knock-on effects of creating 50 new jobs in a town of 3400. These 50 people now have money to spend locally which could result in the creation of many more low wage jobs to service the new business.

Re: Cloud centers bring high-tech flash but not many jobs

#44

Post by 10100101001 » Sun, Nov 27, 2011, 5:47 AM UTC

marshallp wrote: post #24

10100101001 wrote: post #10

Create your own job, instead of relying on someone else. Isn't that the idea of a startup?

What if your startup doesn't make any money

Not sure. My startup does not have that problem.

Re: Cloud centers bring high-tech flash but not many jobs

#45

Post by tlear » Sun, Nov 27, 2011, 5:52 AM UTC

hackinthebochs wrote: post #41

yummyfajitas wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the article, the government didn't subsidize Apple. Town Manager William “Todd” Herms said Apple’s presence boosts the town’s tax base and helps it lower overall taxes... Apple benefits from reduced taxes, and the town gets 50% of something rather than 100% of nothing.

That quote seems more like political-speak than actual hard numbers. The article also said that the state government gave Apple $46 million in tax breaks, while local government cut their property taxes by 50 percent and personal taxes by 85 percent. I'm hard-pressed to see how the taxpayers aren't subsidizing this datacenter.

They gave Apple those breaks to get them to build the facility there. No breaks 0 revenue, breaks some other > 0 revenue.

Re: Cloud centers bring high-tech flash but not many jobs

#46

Post by getsat » Sun, Nov 27, 2011, 6:08 AM UTC

politician wrote: post #40

getsat wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An alternative solution could be for the government to provide a base level of necessities to the entire population. I like this idea and the idea of the post-scarcity society in general, but one thing I've never seen explained or examined is how this is actually accomplished. How is the government producing these necessities and distributing them? Could you elaborate further?

Today, we have a government that distributes free money to people by spending money taken from other people -- social security moves income from the working class to the elderly, medicare moves income to the impoverished. These systems move money from haves to have nots, but money isn't the best thing to move because it's too indirect, too flexible, too fluid. The owner of money can buy food to feed their children or…

Wow, thanks for taking the time to write out your thoughts. There's a lot to think on here, but I'm liking what you've laid out.

Re: Cloud centers bring high-tech flash but not many jobs

#47

Post by notatoad » Sun, Nov 27, 2011, 6:20 AM UTC

ebiester wrote: post #4

notatoad wrote: post #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.

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.

The direct jobs will be given to qualified people. It's not apple's fault that (likely) nobody in town is qualified.

Re: Cloud centers bring high-tech flash but not many jobs

#48

Post by ippisl » Sun, Nov 27, 2011, 7:13 AM UTC

AlexMuir wrote: post #7

wavephorm wrote: post #5

I 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 worki…

It's true that new companies create less jobs than they used to. Previously they used to create 7.5 jobs/company, today only 4.5[1]. that means 2.3 million jobs instead of 3 million.

[1]http://www.kauffman.org/research-and-policy/starting-smaller...

Re: Cloud centers bring high-tech flash but not many jobs

#49

Post by Mvandenbergh » Sun, Nov 27, 2011, 7:17 AM UTC

marshallp wrote: post #21

jessedhillon wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 whic…

If you can't beat them, join them. Figure out what technologies are destroying jobs and be one of the job destroyers.

There's two different ways of looking at this sort of issue though.

One is from the perspective of a participant in the job market, from that point of view it isn't such a huge problem. Predicting where efficiency improvements will shift factor intensity from labour to capital is something that most people here are able to do for their own field. I'm sure, for instance, that every system administrator reading this has already taken into account the effect of cloud services on their career. Smart people will build their expertise in managing cloud systems, move into a tighter integration with developers (DevOps), or specialise in an area that is more resistant to being moved into the cloud for performance and security reasons.

That's great, but it's a little like developing an optimal musical chairs strategy, if there are 10 such jobs today and 9 tomorrow then one person isn't going to have a job. Even if he has also tried to adopt an optimal strategy.

That brings me to the second view, which is viewing the entire system from the outside. That can be in the role of an economist, a citizen, whatever. From that macro point of view, what is important is only the following: Will the net job losses in this particular job eventually be outweighed by countervailing job gains in other parts of the economy?

Historically, that has always been the case. Ever since this became a topic of discussion in the early industrial revolution it has happened time and time again that new jobs pop up that no-one could have imagined a generation ago. The question is though, is that inevitable? Will there come a point where job losses from efficiency will outpace the gain in new jobs? I have no idea what the answer to this is.

If it were to come to pass that huge swathes of the population simply don't have any valuable labour to exchange, then the basis of an economy and society based on the exchange of labour for resources would unravel.

Re: Cloud centers bring high-tech flash but not many jobs

#50

Post by ippisl » Sun, Nov 27, 2011, 7:35 AM UTC

jessedhillon wrote: post #9

wavephorm wrote: post #5

I 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 whic…

One thing is to deeply understand the business domain and how to work with business domain people. That always helps.and those skills seems much less prone to outsourcing and automation.