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

IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 592 posts

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#321

Post by PeterisP »

linuxftw wrote: post #181
orochimaaru wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would unionizing help stop a company from setting up an offshore subsidiary? It may prevent layoffs in the short term - but even with big3 auto manufacturers it hasn’t prevented a move in manufacturing to Mexico and Canada. I think the solution here has to come from the federal government to explicitly increase sw development employment in the US. Just like we find ourselves in a bad place with scaling chip manuf…

Easy: The union can negotiate they don't have to train or work with anyone overseas (or non-union members generally).

The union can force an all-or-nothing decision, but some companies can and will easily choose "nothing" and keep only the overseas developers, not the local unionized ones.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#322

Post by bequanna »

acdha wrote: post #193
bequanna wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, so forcing a company to lock in high costs while non-union competitors can use offshore. Can you explain how this would even work? Why would any company agree to this?

Offshoring projects very commonly fail because companies dramatically overestimate the savings and underestimate the cost of communications, company culture, and experience. If you have a workforce which is delivering good results, there’s often a solid benefit to continuing that rather than chasing a mirage.

Not my experience at all.

I've been part of successful offshoring at a few different companies. It wasn't "one and done", that is, we had to try different countries, different subcontractors, etc but it is totally possible to maintain quality AND lower engineering costs by 50-75% by offshoring.

For those interested, my best experience has been with workers in LATAM countries. Pry 75% were Brazilians. Great timezone and culture match also most of them have good written/spoken english.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#323

Post by PeterisP »

pc86 wrote: post #131
toomuchtodo wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m okay with my fellow citizens being selfish and protecting their livelihood. No one else will. “Whose interests?” You’re advocating for shareholder returns (labor arb savings->profits). Ain’t nobody coming to save us. If we can mandate EV batteries be built in the US to get subsidies (Inflation Reduction Act), other protectionism mechanisms should be on the table. Otherwise, businesses will do their best to maximi…

I appreciate you telling me what I'm advocating for. Any basic macroeconomics class covers the effects of protectionism. Yes, in the short term wages may be artificially propped up, industries may be (temporarily) saved, but you do long-term damage to the economy, and the people are better off with free, open markets long term.

In the long term we're all dead.

Short and mid term matters a lot to people.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#324

Post by grogenaut »

kredd wrote: post #287
grogenaut wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many retire/quit/die each year

Relatively young industry, the population pyramid of workers would have more people at the bottom. So gaining only 700 jobs isn’t that fun. That being said, I feel bad for newgrads, since it feels like nobody wants to train them anymore. Any job posting I’ve seen is mostly 2-3 year minimum experience at a professional level.

No one wanted to hire new grads when I first started working in 2000... Except startups. And it was very slim pickings until you had 3 years under your belt. This isn't a new phenomenon.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#325

Post by boplicity »

yesiamyourdad wrote: post #252
lgleason wrote: post #113

Yet many still deny there is an issue with jobs and keep asking for more lenient immigration policies. There is no shortage of IT workers. There is/was a shortage of workers who were willing to work for peanuts.

This is the part that's left out of every statement that starts with "There's a shortage of workers in industry X" ... "willing to accept the current wages / working conditions". Similar for "jobs Americans won't do"... "at the wages being offered". It drives me insane that people freely accept the concept of supply and demand, except when it comes to labor.

There's a second part to this argument.

There would be riots, for example, if agricultural workers were paid rates that would make Americans willing to do this. If you think food inflation is bad now, that would be off the charts.

Like it or not, we benefit from cheap labor, across many, many different industries.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#326

Post by pavel_lishin »

nostrademons wrote: post #240
deadghost wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My previous company was doing this. I basically quit out of frustration. They weren't much better than picking random people off the street and pointing them at code. It bled into my work life when they took over a project I was on and was pinging me constantly with "hello" and "good morning" expecting to jump on calls with their teams to explain exactly how to do their jobs. An example to illustrate what I was worki…

My company's doing apprenticeships; take somebody with no CS education, not even a college degree, and teach them to code. It's an interesting model, I remember folks on HN calling for more companies to try it since it seems to have had some success in Germany, but I predict a lot more security bugs and unmaintainable code in the near future.

We've done this, and it's worked out pretty well - all of our apprentices were dedicated to learning to write software, about half were offered jobs at the end of the apprenticeships, and half of those accepted.

Remember that they're not just mashing code straight to the main branch; they're apprentices, so other engineers paired with them, others read their pull requests, etc. It wasn't a free-for-all, nor should it be.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#327

Post by hooverd »

nightski wrote: post #285
madsbuch wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am realising that this is what taxes pays for in Denmark. I have a masters in computer science (5 year, postgraduate + thesis, Aarhus University which is top 100 and even higher for PL + semantics, which is my thesis subject) that I received tuition free and I am continuing with a professional degree in business at a reasonable tuition at 10k USD for the entire degree . It appears like continual learning should be…

I don't necessarily think it needs to be government run. The best schools in America are private. Ironically government support (the federal student loan system) is imo largely responsible for crazy high tuition in the U.S. Maybe there is just less demand in Denmark? But I feel like demand surged here, and with easy access to capital it drove prices to absurd levels.

Direct education funding has been going down though.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#328

Post by causality0 »

unixfg wrote: post #271
pram wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pro tip: just don’t respond to the “good morning” messages. If they don’t follow up it wasn’t important anyway.

This is the reference I like: https://nohello.net

People, particularly family, calling me on the phone and then asking me what I'm doing as if it's any of their business and it's their decision whether what they need is more important than what I'm doing is such a pet peeve of mine.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#329

Post by wyclif »

deathanatos wrote: post #270
jncfhnb wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good news, I got rid of ALL the tickets!

You probably say that in jest, but I have seen — multiple times — someone just go and delete all the tickets. Boom! 0 tickets. No bugs, totes. /s

I've seen it too. Actually, I'm in SE Asia right now and the ISP I'm using routinely deletes tickets that haven't been resolved.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#330

Post by neilv »

tarxvf wrote: post #303
unixfg wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the reference I like: https://nohello.net

I like this one, it's a little more subtle: https://yeshello.org/

I fear that one would be misinterpreted by a significant percentage of American office workers.

And by an even higher percentage of overseas colleagues in some countries.

Post reply on HN