Looking At Pretty Graphics Of Dot Com Demographics

chris_robison writes "A talented guy wrote a great example of the quality of talent that is going to waste in these economic "hard times". An unemployed friend of mine put together a kickass tool which lets you query a database of craigslist statistics and generate graphs comparing various things such as job postings and apartments for rent. Although the stats are geared toward San Francisco and the Bay Area, it does make for some interesting reading, even if you aren't from around there. Here's his explaination of what he did (included below)" "hey kids.

I'm unemployed and bored.

With all the talk about dotcom booms and people moving away and all these really general statements people are making; i was curious as to what's really going on now, what went on four years ago and what effect did the boom really have on this community.

So.. i wrote a script that went through the craigslist archive on egroups and tallied the number of postings each day for each category then i stuffed it in a database and made a grapher tool.

It's kinda neat cos you can basically see some somwhat hard data on what the san francisco bay area has been doing over the past four years. you can graph job postings from various industries against things like apartments for rent or housing wanted postings, also for sale postings and resumes.

Some of the interesting things I found is that the number of housing wanted postings seems to be slightly down recently but pretty much unaffected by the drop in jobs. perhaps people are always in a state of wanting to move to a city.

One thing to bear in mind, this data isn't one hundred percent accurate for a few reasons... people do repost their information multiple times in a given month, sometimes people post a number of avaliable apartments in a single posting and craigslist has become significantly more popular over the years in question. however, I do still think that it makes for a decent general indicator of trends in our community. (I'm considering doing some kind of normalizing based on the total volume of posts- I need to think about it some more)

(Unfortunately, personal listings aren't archived. I guess that's a good thing... but I guess it also would have been cool to graph activity on the personals categories against some of the categories that reflect the general state of the economy. (maybe when people aren't tied up in career they start to think about more important things, or maybe not...) )

Either way, the data is there, you can look at it for different time periods and categories. draw your own conclusions and have fun!

The url is here:

http://www.signal11.com/charts/chart-o-m atic.cgi

take it easy..

--adam "

Comments

Not just silicon valley

[jchristopher]

Not just Silicon Valley is being affected by the job crunch - there are a lot of GOOD people out of work in the Los Angeles area too. Not FrontPage monkeys either, real designers and coders.

Re:Not just silicon valley

[sinster]

The job crunch must be pretty close to global. I'm sure there are isolated areas with employment spurts, but in average, everyone is having trouble.

I make this claim based only on a report in the Wall Street Journal on Friday (7 Sept 2001) morning that claimed that almost every stock market in the world closed down at least 1%, and that if the trend continues through the next quarter, that this would "meet the classic definition of a recession". And not just a recession, but a global recession. Of course, the value of this claim is proportional to how much you trust the WSJ to accurately report financial news and how much you believe that the stock markets influence employment rates.

Sorry, I don't have a link: I get my WSJ fix through my palm pilot with AvantGo.

Re:Not just silicon valley

[NumberSyx]

The Austin TX economy is heavily tied to tech as well, I advise anyone looking for work there to move back home or to settle for Taco Bell until things get better, and if you are thinking of moving to Austin, don't waste your time.

Re:Not just silicon valley

[Anonymous Coward]

Here in Atlanta, things are just as bad.

I'm just out of school w/ a degree in Computer Science. I've been looking for 4 months now, and have had no luck whatsoever.

Very Grim.

Re:Not just silicon valley

[krenshala]

Oh, NOW you tell me! ;)

(been in Austin for not quite a year, and that's exactly what I discovered when I got here. I did find something, but it took about six months. ):

krenshala

Re:Not just silicon valley

[orb]

The job market for non entry level tech people
in austin is pretty good right now. If it takes more than 2-3 weeks to find a new job here, you need to make some changes in your job search techniques.

Re:Not just silicon valley

[Anonymous Coward]

It's so true. I spent a good hard month in San Diego looking for work and not only did I not get hired, I got only ONE single phone call as a result of sending out dozens of resumes and cover letters per work week.

I couldn't understand why someone such as me, who has a CS degree and a good 4 to 5 years of experience could not find a job. After I got an email from a potential employer with everyone who sent in their resume in the CC field, I noticed that it's not that I wasn't qualified - it's that there are SO many good people out there looking for work that the people hiring have the pick of the litter.

Luckily I managed to land a position doing stuff I actually like because of some weird circumstances involving people I know.

Once again it proved the point that it's not what you know, but who you know.

Nice one, but some oddities.

[Joel Rowbottom]

This is quite a nice tool which could be used as an example to create "live" management statistics for various applications - certainly doing live plotting of figures against each other. I know I'll try a few new things now I've seen the advantage of using checkboxes ;)

Now, enough praise... ;)

There seems to be some data missing - most notably the "people" data, which would have been interesting to plot the migration of people to and from the area as opposed to housing availability, jobs availability, etc. The other thing is that the server sometimes seems to return an error for some reason or another, although this may be due to the /. effect - I can't imagine the live plotting of data will have a positive effect on the resources ;)

But other than that, a good attempt, and certainly some good ideas there.

Yeah

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of people have been laid off - a few of them are talented hackers. But really, the vast majority of dotcom casualties were overpaid frontpage monkeys who will never get a real job outside of bagging groceries or serving fries.

Re:Yeah

[rchatterjee]

Last month 118,000+ people lost their jobs. Compainies like HP, Lucent, and JDSU laid off thosands each. How many frontpage monkeys could any of these have? maybe 100 - 200 tops? What do you think all the other layoffs were? I agree most dotcom refugees are frontpage monkeys but right now a lot of the unemployed in the tech sector aren't from dotcoms.

Re:Yeah

[Anonymous Coward]

Compainies like HP, Lucent, and JDSU

Read my post. I said "dotcom casualties"... are those companies dotcoms?

Re:Yeah

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention those companies are only laying off excess people they had hired to deal with the dotcom bubble economy. Thousands of startups needed fancy new computers, routers, switches, software, etc. Those needs vanished quickly when the bubble burst so those people are being laid off. Look at Cisco, IBM, Dell, HP, Microsoft, etc. These are companies that are anything but dotcom but they are hurting just the same. When things finally settle down they'll start hiring again and the stock market will inch steadily upwards as it has for centuries. Remember, there are always recessions and even an occassional depression, but over the course of the history of the stock markets they have always gone up.

Re:Yeah

[Anonymous Coward]

But you may have to wait quite a long while for the next bull market. The last real bear market back in the late 60s-70s took over 10 years to finally play out. What if you were 60 yrs old when the '70s started? Can you survive a 10 year long bear market? What about a 20 or 30 year bear?

More importantly, the 60s was a boom time if you were an aerospace engineer, but it all fell slowly apart during the 70s. The world changes and what it wants out of people changes as well. We never have had the same demand for AEs since. But we have had a huge demand for CS people.

Who knows what the Next Big Thing will be, but I doubt that it will be in the computer industry. The world will go from CS to something else. I wish I knew what, but that's part of the fun, isn't it? Don't know what that old world is going to do next.

In the end, you have to look at what the world wants, and what you have to offer it, and try to do something that will make you both happy. Otherwise, it's all been a waste of time.

jobs - housing.

[garcia]

just b/c you lost your job does not mean that you are quite ready to pick up and leave immediately. Most people are going to try and find a job in the general vicinity *first*, then if they cannot find anything a relocation would be necessary. I would assume that is why there is little change in that department.

Re:jobs - housing.

[Tide]

Maybe elsewhere in the country that would be a fine philosophy, but in the bay area where your paying $1400 a month for a studio, its not that easy. Ive had several friends that were laid off just immediately leave. Just like rats, we all know that the ship is sinking. Just my 2 cents. :)

Re:jobs - housing.

[rsimmons]

This is where one of the most fundamental things to _own_ not rent comes into play. If you own a house and land (I'm not talking about all the Frontpage monkeys with mortgages out their ass), you have somewhere to fall back on. This is one of the basic principles, but it only works if you actually own it, not with a bank as co-owner.

NYC is bad too

[xtremex]

The guys who are MCSEs and FrontPage Monkeys will be out of work for a LONG time. It seems the trend here in NYC is towards the UNIX/Linux world (seriously).
Since there are over 300,000 MCSEs here, and the companies that want them are disappearing, they need a new skill set.
There was always a minority of *NIX people, and THEY are the ones who can still be picky about the pay/job they want.
Since the financial industry is a UNIX world, AIX and HP/UX guys are in HIGH demand.
At the job I got a month ago, they were looking for a good UNIX admin for 10 months before they hired me! That's why their infrastructure in in such a state of disarray.
They hired me on the spot and wanted me to start same day. I am not even the best UNIX admin out there. (I still can't get the UNIX printing system :))

The market is flooded with Java guys from India who will work for less (Nothing against the East Indians..I'm just stating fact)
I now lead a department. Out of 100 in the department, 97 are from India/Pakistan.
They had NO trouble finding a job.
They all have UNIX skills, DB2 or Oracle and they all have Siebel skills.

Re:NYC is bad too

[asv108]

300,000 MCSE's in NYC alone? I don't think there are 300,000 CURRENT MCSE's in the whole country.

Re:NYC is bad too

[mimbleton]

I know some people from India and they definately do not work for less.
In fact , it varies just like among natives.

Re:NYC is bad too

[onepoint]

I was wondering when someone was going to state something that everyone knows in NYC. Not that anybody could get a job, but if you are a sysadmin in Unix, the odds are that you'll get a job ( decent paying ) within 3 weeks. High paying if your willing to wait 2 months.

Onepoint

Re:NYC is bad too

[xtremex]

True..it just SEEMS like there are 300,000 :)

Re:NYC is bad too

[dairypope]

There's some of that in LA too, I've been pretty lucky. Got laid off twice in the past 8 months and might have another one coming, but so far I've been able to land on my feet and get a job relatively easily, if only because I'm a Linux/UNIX guy and they don't need to teach me anything, help admin my box, or anything like that.

But why, for the love of everything good and true, would you mention Siebel, that foul scourge on the face of everything honest and beautiful.

I do miss the the old days though...just got Dance Dance Revolution today and at this company I can't just start playing it when I get back from the store like I used to ;)

Re:NYC is bad too

[xtremex]

Siebel is about as useful as tits on a bull. I happen to see it everywhere. I've always wondered what exact PURPOSE it server. My company got something called ClearWorld(I think) that allows Siebel to talk to Oracle! A separate $300,000 package just so The gross software that is siebel can talk to a standard database. (Never mind we have DB2 as well!) But thats another story

Maybe it's just jealosy

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's probably just jealosy, but the one thing that really got me about the whole dot-com thing, and the people who identified themselves with it, was the constant repetition of the article of faith that dotcommers were exceptionally talented, smart, or worthy of praise. What about chemical engineers? Ingenious construction workers? (God forbid) Politicians? Accountants? And as for the revelattion that talent goes to waste when the invisible hand gets moody, well, welcome to the real world. I would bet all that I own that there are hundreds if not thousands of farmers in any given state who could out-think the best of the dot-commers; that there are people in your city right now on welfare who are smarter, more inventive, and wittier than you. And me, it goes without saying.
Like I said, this is just jealously, bitterness.. but a social group which lacks the basics of humbleness, and toots its own horn shamelessly, becomes a prick in the side of this lowly helpdesk worker.

oh, hell. I'm posting anonymously.

Re:Maybe it's just jealosy

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone can be talented at their job, their is no doubt about that. And I'd agree that dot-commers were probably paid more than people in other industries of the same talent level.

But, as much as it's PC to say that the lowliest of the low is (Surprise!) smarter than everyone who thinks they're smart because of their college education, I'd have to differ. Surely, there are some very talented agricultural engineers and biologists who create GE crops. But I don't take it this is what you mean by "farmer". If you think the average construction worker, or welfare recipient, or farmer, has deep reserves of intelligence that they are just not willing to show to people on their high horses, you should try hanging out with some of these people.

I've met many such people in my life. One thing is clear. Most of them would've taken dot-com jobs if they could have. But they lacked the skill set, and they lacked the drive to obtain the skill set.

The reason why people thought the dot-commers were so smart is because, as much as it seems counterintuitive today, many of them were in fact smart. They were not smart because of what they did. Once you learn http protocols and the principles of servers and templates, etc, it's not that difficult. They were smart because they picked up these things faster than anyone else.

To be the first to move on to the moderately complex world of internet programming, that is why they stood out. It is the same reason that we John Carmack, who always pushes the envelope, and that we don't worship John Romero, who spent three years trying to play catch-up and finally releasing a shitty game.

I'll also admit that many of these people were egomaniacs. But many of them were not. You can't lump all of these people together.

Dot-commerce gave us much great technology, this is good. The internet is not going away, but the adoption rate of this technology fell sorely behind the amount of technology that was being produced. It will be a shame that the technology created by many of these companies will simply be re-done in the future when sufficient demand actually exists for it.

Another good thing is that most of the people left aren't money chasers. What sickened me the most about the dot-commers was the fact that many of them were only there to get rich. Most of these people have since been disenfranchized, their high and mighty (and lucrative!) position is now no longer what it used to be.

So now we are left with people who do this because it is what they love to do. That is why I program, and why I continue to take an interest in internet technology.

Re:Maybe it's just jealosy

[schussat]

But, as much as it's PC to say that the lowliest of the low is (Surprise!) smarter than everyone who thinks they're smart because of their college education, I'd have to differ. Surely, there are some very talented agricultural engineers and biologists who create GE crops. But I don't take it this is what you mean by "farmer". If you think the average construction worker, or welfare recipient, or farmer, has deep reserves of intelligence that they are just not willing to show to people on their high horses, you should try hanging out with some of these people.

construction worker = welfare recipient = farmer?

Wow, that's remarkably myopic and insensitive.

You can't lump all of these people together.

You don't say? So, you're saying that on one hand, they're all really smart, but on the other hand, they're not really that smart -- they just happened to be in the right place at the right time (and have grown up with measurably greater access to the trappings of technology than the "average" welfare recipient). I'm always blown away by the failure to recognize that most people have neither the economic connections nor opportunities to obtain high-paying or high-prestige jobs -- to say at the same time that people both lack the "skill set" and the "drive" is to doubly condemn them to marginality. It turns out that skill set has very little to do with "drive" and very much to do with class. Farmers and construction workers lack neither skills nor drive; can you frame a house? Do you know what working on a farm is like? I think the dot-com revolution is much more egotistical than you're willing to admit.

-schussat

Re:Maybe it's just jealosy

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhh, you don't know what you are talking about. I grew up poor, single child of a single parent working at McDonald's. I became technically proficient because I wanted to be, not because of my "class". I took advantage of the opportunities presented in school. These are opportunities that *everyone* has, but most people feel too "cool" to pursue.

Also, my grandfather was a farmer, so I know what farming is like. He also happens to be an engineer, and a fairly good one. After retiring he returned to the farm. Farm life does not have much opportunity for intellectual stimulation, I'm sorry, but it just doesn't.

And no, it is not the case that farming == construction worker == welfare recipient. In fact, I was arguing against the original poster who seemed to assume that one's intelligence is inversely related to their "social status". And I'm arguing that certain positions do not have as much intellectual stimulation as others. There are certainly exceptions, I'm sure there's at least one or two people on welfare with 300 IQs, but it is rare.

I also had a step father who was a construction worker. Not a nice fellow, ended up in jail many times and beat my mother. Not all construction workers are so bad, but hanging out them makes you realize that it is much different from hanging out with technology workers.

And I've known people on welfare, and many of them lack the drive to continue. It is sad, and I have sympathy for them. But many of them are where they are because of bad decisions they have made, not because of their previous socio-economic status.

I talk from experience. You seem to have no experience of these situations. I myself am liberal, but I do not romanticize the menial worker, because I know there is nothing romantic about their position. Everyone should be respected as a human being, but we should also recognize that different people excel at different things. I'm sorry if this truth disturbs you, but the mere psychological pain of the inevitable conclusion does not render it false.

Re:Maybe it's just jealosy

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm, no, there are no people on welfare with 300 IQs (nor not on welfare) :)

Re:Maybe it's just jealosy

[FrostedChaos]

All people deserve respect, no matter what their social or economic status is. But to argue that every profession requires the same amount of intelligence or skill is ridiculous. I've worked at a grocery store before, and the work there was menial and boring. The workers found their intellectual stimulation, such as it was, outside their jobs. And however anti-progressive, autocratic, reactionary, or "ungood" you may feel it is to lump all blue-collar workers together as lower-paid and less skilled, it is true.

Intelligence is not a sufficient condition to ensure high social status or pay, but, statistically speaking, it is necessary. Unfortunately, a lot of dot-com workers are about to discover their market valuation has changed considerably with the bursting of the high-tech bubble.

Re:Maybe it's just jealosy

[Anonymous Coward]

(I'm the original poster). You seem to have taken me the wrong way. I wasn't arguing for a generalized relation between social status/job and intelligence, I was saying that there are exceptional people in all walks of life, and that was is unwarrented and silly of dotcommers to go on ad nausium about the exceptional intellignce of their ilk.

One thing I wasn't doing was making a value judgement about the different possible occupations of people in life. Something you have done: But I don't take it this is what you mean by "farmer". If you think the average construction worker, or welfare recipient, or farmer, has deep reserves of intelligence that they are just not willing to show to people on their high horses, you should try hanging out with some of these people.

I've met many such people in my life. One thing is clear. Most of them would've taken dot-com jobs if they could have. But they lacked the skill set, and they lacked the drive to obtain the skill set.

You begin by insinuating that people in the named occupations don't have a profound intelligence, and you end by saying they don't have drive. Which is it? Are they stupid or lazy? Or have you considered that, with the exception of those on welfare, that people in lower-class jobs either like the employment they have, irregardless of their intelligence, or that - and I assure you, this can happen - the barrier to entry into mid- or upper-class employment was too high for them to get over? See my reply to your next post for a rant on that...

Re:Maybe it's just jealosy

[Anonymous Coward]

I grew up poor, single child of a single parent working at McDonald's

If that is the case, try a little experiment when the new week begins. Assuming your school was a public school in a low-income area, make a list of your friends from your schooldays. Attach to their names their occupations, or at least the post-secondary instituition they attended (if any). Ask some co-workers to do the same; try to get co-workers from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Adjusting for sample size, perform a rough analysis of your results - what percentage of school-day amigos attended post-secondary institutions for each person? Are there significant (±10%, say) discrephancies as regards socioeconomic status? I would guess that there are.
The point of this exercise is to demonstrate to you that, although you may have a rags-to-riches story where you and your hard work have starring roles, to get a useful idea of the effect of socioeconomic status during youth on socioeconomic status during adulthood you have to look at a larger picture. Being born into a poor family is not a ironclad sentance to lifetime poverty, but it does make an adulthood in the middle class much harder to achive than it would be were the same individual born into the middle class. There are a myriad of reasons for this, but the simple truth is that it's easier to get a well-paying job if your parents can afford to pay for your food, shelter, education, and suchwhat than if your parents are poor.

PS - since you've given your story, let me tell you mine. I was born into the middle class; one parent being a mining engineer, the other a staff member at the academic computing center at a local university. I went to a clean school with happy students, competant teachers, and many and varied after-school programs. I went to scouts (the geek in me); I had access to a computer at school and at home since I was 10; I never went hungry at night; I lived near several open parks where I could frolic in the sun. I've had access on a personal level to many professionals in may fields,as befits my parental units. I entered university, even though I never worked too hard in high school; I never needed to get a scholership, as my university education has been paid for by my parents, negating the need for me to hold a job for anything other than spending-money. The point of all of this is to demonstrate that, although you may have been able to ascend the social ladder through hard work, I have been on the middle of the social ladder by default. This is why I find that social status has no bearing - either in a positive or negative way - on an individual, including their intelligence. There _are_ many smart people on welfare; they have no drive because, I would bet, they've had little opportunity or encouragement from society. What you've done speaks volumes about the quality of charecter you possess, but it says nothing about the person who fills my car with gas.

Re:Maybe it's just jealosy

[etymxris]

You originally said, " I would bet all that I own that there are hundreds if not thousands of farmers in any given state who could out-think the best of the dot-commers".

If you know anything about statistics, you'll know that when X% of some group measures higher on some scalar value than 100% of another group, that as X increases marginally, the averages between the two groups wildly diverge.

That is, if there exist 3000 farmers (from every state no less) "smarter" than every single dot commer, then this implies that farmers are on average much much smarter than dot commers. I would wager that the farmers would have to have at least twice the "smartness" than the dot commers, on average, for your statement to be true. This is simply statistical inference. And it shows the absurdity of your statement.

It would be equally false for me to say that there exist 3000 dot commers more intelligent than any farmer. It's simply not true, nor is almost any statement of its kind. You were indeed implying that farmers are vastly more intelligent than dot commers, whether you realized it or not.

As for "skill sets", I am simply saying apples are not oranges, and you seem to disagree. That is, I said that farmers do not have the skill set or the drive to obtain it. The skill set I am referring to is that of programming commerce. I am not referring to "skill" as some scale from 1 to a 100 where every single worker of every single occupation can be ranked.

There are many very skilled artisans who have no desire to do much, if anything, with a computer. They don't have the skill set to program internet related applications, and they do not have the drive to obtain these skills. This does not mean that they lack *all* skill, or that they have *no* drive. You are attacking a strawman.

Some people do have more enjoyment of menial work than the more "white collar" jobs. There are times myself when I long for the simplicity of the days I worked in fast food. But the simple truth is, if someone is given the choice between investing their time in being skilled in a white or blue collar occupation, they will almost always don the white collar.

The reasons are varied and numerous. And not everyone thinks this way. There is a great strand of anti-intellectuallism among those you describe as having superior intellect. I'm tempted to describe it as "sour grapes" but I'd hate to use an ad hominem.

You don't often hear of child geniuses saying, "My ultimate plan is to settle down to the simple life on a farm." Perhaps the nature of their curiosity causes them to want to avoid situations that are not rich in intellectually stimulating factors. The relative simplicity of the tasks can be easily gauged. The average programmer seeing the workings of a farm for the first time will not be as confused as a farmer seeing the workings of a computer for the first time. If computers were trivial and required no intelligence to use or learn, then there never would have been a demand for those knowledgable with them.

Re:Maybe it's just jealosy

[Anonymous Coward]

What girth for a slashdiscussion.. let me parse and pontificate on your most worthy response. You begin with three paragraphs demonstrating quite accuratly that my original post did, indeed, insinuate that farmers were, as a generalized group, 'smarter' (though my original phrasing was that they could 'out-think') than dot-commers. Touche. This statement is indeed absurd, though I must say that what you took to be an general implication was in point of fact a simple turn of phrase. Perhaps if you'd read the entire paragrpah of the original posting, you would have noticed a slightly different description of the mental prowress of those on welfare: that there are people in your city right now on welfare who are smarter, more inventive, and wittier than you. Unless you find yourself to be i) a dotcommer and ii) the smartest of the dotcommers, your pointed analysis of my opinion surrounding the aptitude of farmers dulls. So, to put this whole disorganized scene of randomized confusion behind us both, let me clarify my meaning: no particular industry or occupation can be said to employ no people of notable intelligence; further, in every industry and occupation, there are some individuals who have the mental capacity to be considered among the most adept of any other particular industry or occupation. That is, no defninative value-judgements can be made as regards individual intelligence for all people of a particular group, and an individual's membership in a particular group in and of itself is not conclusive proof of their cerebral capacity.

As for the final five paragraphs, there has again been a lamentable confusion. You see, when in your original reply you stated that (and I hate to have to repeat myself..) ..the average construction worker, or welfare recipient, or farmer, ... I've met many such people in my life. One thing is clear. Most of them would've taken dot-com jobs if they could have. But they lacked the skill set, and they lacked the drive to obtain the skill set.

You see, the phrase Most of them would've taken dot-com jobs if they could have implies that the said workers wanted such jobs, but lacked the necessary skills. Why did they lack the skills? Well, you seem to think it is because they lacked the necessary drive to obtain the skill sets. So, the inference a rational being takes from this set of misleading statements is that a vast cross-section of America's lower-classes wanted to work in dot com back in the day, but they were unfortunatly lacking in drive to make their dreams a reality; a trait known, in my homecity, as 'lazyness'. Keep in mind - this term does not denote an absolute, but rather a quality which exists in different proportions in different individuals.

All of which deviates widely from the point of the original post, which was to make wine of my sour grapes towards self-aggrandizing dot-commers. To which I will add: I do think that, on an average, engineers at dot-coms were more intelligent than, say, those in the groups used as examples throughout this discussion. Why? Because an idiot can't be an employable perl monkey, while an idiot can be a farmhand. An individual with intelligence can do both. This seperation often does not hold for many other professional job categories, and does not hold when one compares dotcommers to engineers in other disciplines. Thus, the jealous sour grapes.

Re:Maybe it's just jealosy

[catfood]

Farmers and construction workers lack neither skills nor drive; can you frame a house? Do you know what working on a farm is like?

Why yes, even though I'm not the guy you're replying to, yes, I have worked on a farm. All summer for a couple of years. (And yes, it is at least as hard as it looks, maybe harder.)

I think the dot-com revolution is much more egotistical than you're willing to admit.

On that we can agree.

Heck, all of the Internet is still just bits going around a network. There is very, very little that is fundamentally new. Practically nothing you couldn't have read in the classic CS literature. It's just that today the hardware and money has caught up to what everybody (every knowledgeable person) already knew could be done with software.

I think I'm saying that even the most highly skilled hackers are mainly putting one intellectual foot in front of the other. So much of what we do as geeks every day is minor variations on well-known themes. It's just that most people lack either the logical thinking skills, the opportunity to apply them here, or the "aha!" that tells them how to find the answer.

Re:Maybe it's just jealosy

[schussat]

Yours is certainly not representative of the experience of most people who grow up poor, the children of a single parent. It's clear that some jobs don't have the intellectual stimulation as others -- which explains partly why some slaughterhouse workers and auto plant workers are frequently alientated from their jobs, while dot-commers feel invested in their work.

But you make these sweeping generalizations about "technology workers" versus "construction workers" that simply don't stand up. Your two pieces of evidence are from your own experience and I sure don't begrudge you that, but your experience is happens to be incredibly unrepresentative.

Do you really think "*everyone*" had exactly the same educational opportunities that you did, and that they thought they were too cool for school? Or that people "chose" poverty and welfare? It's not about romanticizing the menial worker; I think that's the farthest thing from what I'm doing here. I'm trying to make the argument that, while the tech sector boomed, it was easy for "tech workers" to have a pretty high self-opinion of the skill and uniqueness of their work. While it certainly involves a pretty specialized set of skills, that doesn't necessarily mean that the workers are any more "intellectual" or even more intelligent than people in other jobs -- and as another poster pointed out, with the changing market value of some of those skills, that reality will probably become more apparent. Given the thunderous crashing down of the market lately, it seems to me that the sooner that kind of realization actually makes its way through the tech sector, the sooner the economy will take a more realistic tack.

-schussat

Re:Maybe it's just jealosy

[Anonymous Coward]

Intelligence is not a sufficient condition to ensure high social status or pay, but, statistically speaking, it is necessary.

So that fucking dolt in the White House is the exception that proves the rule, eh?

Re:Maybe it's just jealosy

[jeffry_smith]

I shouldn't respond to an anonymous coward, but what the heck - you said:
<<If you think the average construction worker, or welfare recipient, or farmer, has deep reserves of intelligence that they are just not willing to show to people on their high horses, you should try hanging out with some of these people. >>

Well, my brother is a union electrician. Quite smart, has two years of college. Also hates college, loves working with his hands, enjoys working outdoors in the summer (note: he doesn't do houses - he does major stuff like power plants, coal plants, chip manufacturing plants, etc). None of this prevents him using his brain (you try doing some of the calculations he does on equipment choices - it's harder than it looks, trust me).

You should learn not to judge people by their jobs. It's more than intelligence, it's also aptitude and what you love. Oh, and if it weren't for people like him, there would be not computer chips to run your programs.

Re:Maybe it's just jealosy

[Anonymous Coward]

And now you feel guilty. Ha ha!

Re:Blame Adequacy!

[Fauverjo]

To the A.C. who posted this great piece of prose: Come out of the Anonymity closet and take credit or give credit for this. It's worthy of saving ... if there's a credit and so on!

BTW, is there a tune to go with this?

Not all dot-commers are capable.

[standards]

I don't feel sad for every one of the dot-com unemployed. Many of them were dreamers, who never lived in the real world.

There are/were thousands of silly dot-coms, with stupid business plans and cobbled-together technology. Many of these shops were not part of any "talent pool".

I remember this one guy who I worked with. Marc was a nice guy. Marc thought of himself as a strong manager who was helping to fuel the dot-com revolution.

But the fact is that Marc didn't have a clue about management OR technology - he was just caught up in a ball of momentum. Marc was in a high-profile position in a very high profile organization. But that fact alone didn't make Marc a capable guy.

Marc left us for the dot coms of Atlanta. The last I heard, Marc was still looking for a job. Not because of the economy, but because he didn't have any skills.

Re:Not all dot-commers are capable.

[garcia]

most of the people were caught up in a seemingly endless supply of capital.. There was so much out there and it just seemed like there were too few people to fill all the spots.

It was almost as if people found the pot of gold a the end of the rainbow.. Problem was that the sun disappeared behind the clouds and only the miserable rain was left. :(

I do feel bad for those that were employed. Just b/c they didn't have the skills necessary does NOT mean that they were the ones at fault. It was those that were sinking in millions to get a company off the ground knowing that it was near worthless.

Re:Not all dot-commers are capable.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm working for a place that's growing well and is in a hiring mode. I'm tired of hearing from job candidates who are:

1. looking for a top management position
2. looking to make $250,000+ per year
3. looking for my job, not the job offered.

So many of these people just don't understand that their experience at the former employers weren't in line with what we're looking for. I'd rather take the old COBOL program and convert him, than take a dot-commer. The old COBOL programmer will be willing to learn, and will have an understanding of project plans and production quality. The dot-commer? Some do, many do not.

Re:Not all dot-commers are capable.

[garcia]

many people are desperate for jobs and these companies were promising great salaries, nice relocation spots to live, and promising growth. As a student about to graduate I have been searching endlessly for a decent job to pay my way through life after I am finished. Remember that these people were doing the same exact thing. It is not their fault that they were caught up in the job-boom. Please do not take it out on them, they were/are just as desperate as the rest of us...

Thank your lucky stars!

Re:Not all dot-commers are capable.

[Anonymous Coward]

Where I work, we had to remove the word "Java" from our positions available list.

We do mostly Java work, but we were being flooded with Servlet/EJB "programmers" who know nothing about real software development.

It takes about a week for a C++ programmer to get going with Java. And in return we save far more than a week just culling through idiotic candidates.

Re:Not all dot-commers are capable.

[thanq]

many people are desperate for jobs and these companies were promising great salaries, nice relocation spots to live, and promising growth.

I agree with that statement, but isn't that one of the basic human instincts? Hoarding, scrounging, going out there to get more stuff and stash it, repeat. One could say that the whole length of the "dot-com era" or just the huge IT boom we experienced was based on human greed and human gullibility.

Of course, the reasons for wanting more money are ranging from "just to feed the family", through "to pay off my loans", to get a nice car, a nice house.. but soon afterwards the line is deteriorating and people begin to make money just to have more money. You don't need a 7 bedroom house for you and your wife, you don't need a 100k BMW.

But overall, where I am going with this is that humans striving for more stuff and money created the situation in which people were gullible enough to believe that anything that is "e-something" or has to do with computers/internet will bring millions for each cent you put into it. Of course it worked for a while, when the first ones on this path made the money to be made and innovated the ways that were there to be improved.

I know a few of people that went from 12 years of experience in Emergency Medicine into Java by reading a few books because they wanted more money, or 40-year old construction workers that became instant "expert Web specialists." And another dozen of corporate "company representative speaking.. JUST a moment" office space-like lady workers who knew how to put together a memo or a company policy filled to the brim with meaningless bullshit.

A very interesting fact supporting this theory is that as of today a number of CS classes in University of Berkeley in California is 70-80% full, which differes from last few years when there was 20-30% more people than seats in the classes (quoting a co-worker who goes there right now).

Another words, people will go where the hen laying golden eggs is at, and they will make it lay as many as it can a day before they will kill it off by doing so. And unfortunately, those of us who are content with a golden egg once in a while will have to find another ways of doing what they like/love/want to do.

Hopefully, the hen is not dead yet, just out of eggs. ;)

Re:Blame Adequacy!

[SuiteSisterMary]

That would be sung to the tune of 'Blame Canada' from South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut.

site slowness

[ajdub]

the slashdot effect is in effect. we underestimated the traffic it would generate and are moving the script to a bigger machine now.

if you can't get to it, please bear with us and try again in a few hours.

thanks again

--adam

Re:site slowness

[Anonymous Coward]

This is *not* the real guy. Please give credit where credit is due, and mod this guy back into the backwater scum-pond he came from.

Chart doesn't mean much...

[Hagabard]

This is more like a resume for an out-of-work perl-monkey. If he'd really like to do statistical analysis he should should take into account growth of list members, number of postings total, etc.

So what do we have here? Some fellow who just posted a "hey, look at me" resume onto slashdot; not much meat and a sorry excuse for a story.

Shame on you, slashdot...

Re:Chart doesn't mean much...

[dynamite d]

very good point

Re:Chart doesn't mean much...

[ajdub]

Well...

The resume is on there at the suggestion of someone on craigslist who said that I should put it on there. I thought it was a bit slimey but at the same time I figured that it couldn't hurt.

As far as it getting posted to Slashdot, I didn't post it and I *do* know the guy who posted it but I did not ask him to do so, nor did he tell me before he did it. (and his text is a bit cheesy, no?) :)

As far as useful statistics and normalizing based on total number posted. I am planning on adding that stuff. For the second version, I'm planning on adding normalizing, moving averages by day (right now it's only tallied by month) and possibly some other stats. (I've recieved a few good ideas from a few people and I've got some emails out to some math folks about how I might be able to do some interesting forecast graphs)

--adam

Re:Chart doesn't mean much...

[Hagabard]

If you figured that linking "hire me!" on the bottom of the results could be interpreted wrong ("I thought it was a bit slimey") then you should have gone with your instincts.

Sorry you feel the need to defend yourself but the original comment above was more directed at Slashdot for this combo "sensationalism/advertorial" posting under the heading of "News for Nerds". This was a sampling from a mailing list that, while interesting, does not take much into account and holds as much water as those '"it sucks" vs "it rocks"' sampling via a search engine.

Hagabard

Re:Chart doesn't mean much...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've recieved a few good ideas from a few people and I've got some emails out to some math folks about how I
might be able to do some interesting forecast graphs)

These the same people who did all the forecast graphs for the dot coms?

on the IT job or worker shortage

[diamond0]

This month's issue of Communications of the ACM features a reader forum titled "How to Address the Global IT Worker Shortage."

Ralph Castain of Fort Collins, Colorado wrote the following, which began on the same page (12) as Google's ad, "Google Seeks Expert Computer Scientists"

As someone who has been involved in industry and academia over the last few years, I find the current IT "shortage" to be somewhat self-inflicted due to several factors:

• Super-specialized requirements. Many companies express no interest in investing in employee training. Hence, we are treated to job listings requiring a combination of skills unlikely to be held by anyone outside that specific company. For example, a recent local job ad required candidates to have at least five years of experience with a highly specialized, industry-specific software package; three years of experience with a specific software-development package; and one to three years experience in that particular industry. When contacted, the human resource manager blamed the IT shortage for her difficulty filling the position.
• Low salaries/limited experience. A scan of recent job ads at one popular Web site showed an average salary range (where quoted) well below industry standards in the U.S. In addition, experienced programmers (for example, those with more than five years) report being rarely contacted for interviews, even when meeting all other knowledge requirements. This raises the question of whether there really is a shortage within the industry, or a shortage only of entry-level personnel willing to work for below-standard wages.
• Inflated job listings. Companies have become notorious for the placement of job listings on popular Web sites they have no real intention of filling. For example, a large multinational company recently placed more than 100 IT job openings on a Web site over the course of a two-week period. At the same time, the company announced massive layoffs, salary reductions, and forced vacations due to declining sales. How likely is it that any of these listings will ever be filled? Yet the IT shortage studies include such listings in their statistics, thereby distorting the overall picture.

As opposed to a shortage of IT professionals in the U.S., the recent experience of a local headhunter is much closer to the norm. After placing a job listing on a Web site for a SQL server DBA, the headhunter was deluged with more than 300 resumes and 100 phone calls within a 24-hour period. A similar experience followed another listing for a C++ programmer.

The fact is many of us in the corporate world outsource our IT needs to foreign companies and professionals simply because this practice is cheaper. Programmers from foreign countries are willing to work for much lower wages than their U.S. counterparts, especially if they stay overseas. The inefficiencies caused by such remote operations are more than covered by the savings in compensation.

IT shortage? Rather than trusting questionable statistics, I'd recommend asking the people in the job market and the head-hunters.

Ralph Castain, Fort Collins, Colorado

Re:on the IT job or worker shortage

[towatatalko]

"The fact is many of us in the corporate world outsource our IT needs to foreign companies and professionals simply because this practice is cheaper..." - I read studies that show "cheaper" is misleading in case of outsourcing, perhaps in the short run it might be cheaper and only when that is possible by hitring out of the coutry vendor, but when you ousource you give up control of your tech. support or professional services to other entities. Obviously, outside vendors will not have the same level of loyalty to that company's product line as it is the case with native support. The real reason companies outsource is that their managers commit over and over again mismanagement mistakes by dogmatically believing outsourcing is the answer to everything. It is not, and it is usuly cheaper to train a person internally than to have outsources be paid double that especially in the US. It so happens that I know some figures. One ousourcing position can cost up to $5-6k/month for the 1st level support, wile native support engineer by taking the same pay can provide 1, 2 and often 3rd level support that includes software and custom developement. At the same time ousourcing inflicts problems often related to customer satisfaction. They aren't as polite or diplomatic to customers as native support and can't answer more sophisticated questions that come up. In short, don't relay on outsourcing to be the answer to everything or even most problems.

Re:on the IT job or worker shortage

[mj6798]

The fact is many of us in the corporate world outsource our IT needs to foreign companies and professionals simply because this practice is cheaper.

And your point is? This is how global markets work. This has happened to many industries: agriculture, cars, steel, etc.

Programmers from foreign countries are willing to work for much lower wages than their U.S. counterparts, especially if they stay overseas. The inefficiencies caused by such remote operations are more than covered by the savings in compensation.

What makes you think it's "inefficient"? Right now, many information technology companies are located in the US because skilled foreign labor can come to the US and work here. If skilled foreign labor can't come to the US, those jobs won't go to US citizens. Instead, more and more of US-based operations and management would move to Europe and the more developed parts of Asia. See, no inefficiencies there.

Re:on the IT job or worker shortage

[Anonymous Coward]

"Inflated job listings. Companies have become notorious for the placement of job listings on popular Web sites they have no real intention of filling. For example, a large multinational company recently placed more than 100 IT job openings on a Web site over the course of a two-week period."

Many of these websites have quotas for their clients to fill. If you buy so many ads per month you get a cheaper rate. These deals are usually based on a yearly timeframe. So, they post ads that will not get filled, 'cause it is cheaper than paying for only the ads they need.

This upsets me

[litewoheat]

After playing with the chart for a while and noticing the indication of an exodus from the bay area I began to get upset that all these "dot.com" people came to to bay area, jacked up the median rental and home prices, then bailed after things started going bad. Although rentals and home prices have started to level off they have, for the most part, not gone down. If they did that would accelerate our decent into resession. That sad thing is that's inevitable. Foreclosure rates have already gone up.


So now what I have to say to all the people who flocked here, threw high-test gasoline on the fires of the economy, burned everything to a crisp then took off, Thanks a whole lot from someone who was here a long time before you! I feel no pain for any of the dot.com loosers.

Re:This upsets me

[juuri]

Are you kidding? Rental prices other than inside SF have started to plummit. There are tons of new condos/apartments that just got finished where the prices are damn good for the area. Even downtown prices on smaller units are only slightly more than they were 3 years ago and if the drops continue they will reach the rates they were in 97.

Seriously look in the north bay, east bay and to some extent at the south bay. You will notice tons of completely new properties offering discounts as extreme as 2.5 months off your yearly rate. They are hurting... and this is good for us.

Home prices on the other hand are still absurb. 350k for a small 2 bedroom in an ok neighborhood is just fricken robbery.

Re:This upsets me

[heroine]

Housing prices continue to rise because the guys who didn't bother looking 2 years ago have replaced the guys who left. $1.1 million is still bargain basement for a bay area house.

Re:This upsets me

[Waffle Iron]

I began to get upset that all these "dot.com" people came to to bay area, jacked up the median rental and home prices, then bailed after things started going bad. Although rentals and home prices have started to level off they have, for the most part, not gone down.

Don't worry, one day "the big one" is going to hit and reduce the whole area to rubble and ashes. After that, your real estate prices will be nice and cheap. :-)

Re:This upsets me

[daviddennis]

And you don't even get a detached house (I just looked at Daly City, which is the only OK Bay Area neighborhood I could remember off the top of my head). They start at a bit over $300k. In contrast, homes in a similarly mediocre neighborhood, Culver City, range from $230k.

You can get a pretty impressive castle in Woodside for $8,900,000, though. That's not much different from a similar castle in Malibu.

Curiously enough, you can get a prestigeous 94062 zip code (Woodside) for as little as $399,950, even if the name on the envelope is Redwood City. Being an outsider, I can't figure that one out, especially since I went all the way up to $1,650,000 and saw some very nice looking houses, but no Woodside. Last time I looked, entry level in Woodside was something like $ 560,000, but that kind of house probably doesn't go on the market that often and is most likely snapped up immediately when it does. My snap judgement from looking is that if anything, Woodside real estate is continuing to go up; I found nothing in Woodside under US$ 1.6 million or so, while last time I looked there were maybe ten or so properties cheaper. Or have they renamed half the place Redwood City? I'm a bit confused.

Ah well. No doubt someone will be willing to straighten me out.

D

Slashdot Job Referral Service

[BrookHarty]

How about starting a head hunting service linked to the /. amount of people in the techincal field.

Everyone bitches about issues, how about using /. as a portal for answers. And OSDN could even charge a small subscription fee for all the new services.

--
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973)

Re:Slashdot Job Referral Service

[Reality Master 101]

How about starting a head hunting service linked to the /. amount of people in the techincal field.

Available for hire: Perl, Apache, Linux programmer. Have only built l33t sites of a few thousand lines of spaghetti code. Will only work for "free" software company. Company must not use any Microsoft software. Regular Quake breaks a plus. Minimum salary requirement: $150K/year.

Reminds me of a local job

[Skuld-Chan]

It was an IT monkey position at a local shop called Powell's books http://www.powells.com - the fax machine to submit applications was sooo busy I couldn't get through.

When I called up to find out what was wrong with their machine (it would just roll over to another line most of the time) they said they were getting applications all over the State of Oregon and as far away as San Francisco all day long.

Their talent was wasted during the *boom*

[Anonymous Coward]

You have it backwards. It was during the boom when people were wasting their talent, creating useless software and websites, justified by insane business plans. These hard times are a correction. Their unemployment is a sign to people laid off from the boom that they have wasted their previous years, and they need to find something next that truly will be useful.

Re:Their talent was wasted during the *boom*

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. I used to see brilliant physics and math Phd's who were writing scripts instead of working in university research departments as they would have done in less than boom times.

interesting choice of vars in PERL

[metalhed77]

here's the URL

http://charts.signal11.com/chart-o-matic.cgi?you rm om=1&from_month=0&from_year=98&c-art=on&to_month=0 &to_year=101&c-eng=on&c-peo=on&c-web=on&c-mar=on

Re:interesting choice of vars in PERL

[b0r1s]

the signal11 should have given it away ... except your UID is about 150,000 too high to realize who he is, or what's going on ...

Re:interesting choice of vars in PERL

[underpaidISPtech]

For those of who are too green to know... care to elaborate on signal11?

Re:interesting choice of vars in PERL

[conform]

signal11.com has nothing to do with the slashdot user signal11. signal11.com is run by slashdot user ajdub, who has never been very involved as a slashdot user.

We both worked out of his apartment for a number of months on a contract job together, so I should know.

Re:interesting choice of vars in PERL

[NMerriam]

signal11 proved that the karma system was easy to abuse (which was more of a social experiment than anything he proved about slashdot itself), and he racked up thousands of karma I believe.

Because of him, they set a karma cap of 50, made the karma hidden from the user page and apparently deleted a lot of signal11's karma from his account.

He was the original karma whore.

(I should note I am still way above the 50 karma limit -- which is interesting because if you're a low UID and posted decent messages it was easy to do. But because you can't go above 50, it never credits for +1 when comments get modded up. But it DOES subtract when you get -1 on a comment!! So you're guaranteed to slowly watch your karma go down until you hit 50, which for me should be another year or two I guess)...

Armchair engineers have moved out.

[heroine]

There's definitely a difference in the quality of the emails I get from software engineers these days. They're much more technically adept.

Seems as if most of the computer scientists working for .coms neither had the interest nor the ability to solve real computer science problems and have now switched to non-technical, and for them, more interesting careers. Wired ran a story about how many armchair engineers from the 90's went back to school and followed their true passion to become actors, artists, and writers.

You might say the quality of software being written today is slightly up compared to the 90's because the only people programming are the ones who really want to do it.

Another employment graph/script

[atlantageek]

Hi All,
Another unemplyed geek here. I wrote a set of perl scripts that graphed the # of Jobs available on computerjobs.com for several cities. It is on the main page of AtlantaGeek.com

Just realized something...

[Hagabard]

the slashdot effect is in effect. we underestimated the traffic it would generate and are moving the script to a bigger machine now.

You just stated above that you had no idea that this was being posted to Slashdot yet in this posting you state the above. Which comment is true?

Hagabard

Re:Just realized something...

[ajdub]

hemos emailed me yesterday and asked if it was cool that it be posted. i moved it to a machine with better bandwidth/cpu and said sure. then of course, i watched for it to happen and have been watching the performance/logs of the script. how it would fare under the well-known "slashdot effect" was definitely one thing i wanted to watch.

when it initially got bogged down due to a mis-tuned apache, i posted the above comment.

Dotcom mentality and how it relates to Linux

[Desiato_Hotblack]

Long time reader, first time poster.

Just got my WIRED magazine subscription a short time ago, and what do I see on the cover "Why Linux will lose the desktop war: page 134".

Now before you tell me this has nothing to do with the dotcom boom and subsequent bust, I think you would do well to note these quotes from the article.

After 20 years as a business and technology journalist, [Russ Mitchell] joined Red Hat for nearly a year at the height of the tech stock craze. I was editor in chief of Wide Open News. Tough economics led to layoffs and I got whacked; I left with three months' severance and enough stock options to make a down payment on a house in San Francisco."

If that doesn't relate to the dot-com bust, I don't know what does. He goes on to state the following on the same page:

"Like the Japanese soldiers on Guadalcanal who refused to surrender years after the bomb ended World War II, Linux zealots remain obsessed with beating Microsoft in desktop computing. Desktop computing? Don't they know? The war is over. Microsoft has won."

Pretty damming commentary from someone who supports Linux, don't you think? Or at least he still does, but on the server platform where it has gained the most ground.

Comments?

I'm sure that this will take forever to become a proper thread unto itself, that is why I've bothered to post it here today.

Desiato_Hotblack

Re:Dotcom mentality and how it relates to Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw that Wired on the newsrack the other day. The only thing I could imagine was that page 134 was a two-page radiation yellow and neon silver Wired-style 172pt graphic design spread reading DUH, IT SUCKS!

Re:Dotcom mentality and how it relates to Linux

[Desiato_Hotblack]

I would suggest reading it and submitting an opinion on it, instead of your fantasy of what you *thought* it would contain.

Desiato_Hotblack

Re:Dotcom mentality and how it relates to Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

In order to capture more desktop marketshare
Linux will have to at least match Window's ease of installation & management, today a non-technical person can download most Windows program from the net, install and run it without too much hassle.

The same is not true for linux, even with KDE and GNOME a non-techie will be completely lost when problem occurs. For example if they download an rpm and it would not install for one reason or another wouldn't have a clue about how to fix this. If their network card or modem stop
working they're dead meat..

Re:Dotcom mentality and how it relates to Linux

[Desiato_Hotblack]

I would have to agree with this, it seems that in the pursuit of technical dominance, what has been forgotten is that you will have to eventually reach out to the end-user that has little expertise in operating a computer system.

The author in the article does give good references to this, where Open Source advocates do admit that you have to go where the money is, and at this point, the dollars are in the hands of "Aunt Tilly" as it were.

Although not a true Linux derivative, QNX impressed me with its ease of setup and the package management. It was truly like using something streamlined for the end-user. If only it had more applications to appeal to the masses.

Desiato_Hotblack

Re:Dotcom mentality and how it relates to Linux

[szcx]

If I had to deal with the kinds of techs he described in his article, I'd be pretty pessimistic about the future as well;

Speedie, preparing for a business trip, turned her laptop over to a technician to get some dialup software installed. When he returned the machine, Windows was gone -- along with all Microsoft applications and Speedie's work files. Outraged, she complained, and when her boss (that would be me) confronted the technician -- a stringy little guy in a black trailer-trash T-shirt -- he simply stared back and smiled."

Zealots like these are the people killing Linux on the desktop. Is it any wonder so many companies don't take Linux (or its users) seriously? Would you hire a self-confessed Linux advocate having read this story? He might go crazy and delete all your files...

Re:Dotcom mentality and how it relates to Linux

[catfood]

"Like the Japanese soldiers on Guadalcanal who refused to surrender years after the bomb ended World War II, Linux zealots remain obsessed with beating Microsoft in desktop computing. Desktop computing? Don't they know? The war is over. Microsoft has won."
Pretty damming commentary from someone who supports Linux, don't you think? Or at least he still does, but on the server platform where it has gained the most ground.

Maybe damning if you believe that guy, but it doesn't have much to do with the dot-bomb crash.

People are going to pick one operating system or another, or they'll mix 'em, but stock and housing prices don't have much effect on either.

Maybe you could tighten up what you're trying to say. There's probably a good point in there but you're leaving a bit to the imagination.

Re:Dotcom mentality and how it relates to Linux

[Desiato_Hotblack]

You said:

Maybe damning if you believe that guy, but it doesn't have much to do with the dot-bomb crash. People are going to pick one operating system or another, or they'll mix 'em, but stock and housing prices don't have much effect on either. Maybe you could tighten up what you're trying to say. There's probably a good point in there but you're leaving a bit to the imagination.

The "hook" was that the author had been laid off due to the dot-com crash, the "meat" was the fact that although he uses inflammatory commentary to state it, he is essentially correct that Linux supporters have not done the right thing, namely concentrate on the server side versus the desktop, which is still in fragmented disarray.

In that context, I think I've related it to the dot com bomb fairly well, as I admitted the main "meat" of what I was talking about would merit its own thread, but would take forever to appear (if it even did) due to the lopsided article submission/posting policy of this board.

It's okay though, the responses I've gotten pretty much have satisfied me on this subject -- as meager in number as they were.

Thanks for playing.

Hotblack_Desiato

Re:Dotcom mentality and how it relates to Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Not that some people don't deserve that :)

Re:Dotcom mentality and how it relates to Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

The idiot wasn't even a real Linux geek and he thinks that Microsoft won the desktop battle.

Sorry folks, this guy is another opprotunist hack journalist who made a bad decision and then blames someone else for it.

Re:Dotcom mentality and how it relates to Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Your post is totally OT. It seems that some /.ers
cannot make a coherent sentence without the word "Linux" jumping out of their stinking holes.

Sheesh!

Re:Dotcom mentality and how it relates to Linux

[Desiato_Hotblack]

You cowered anonymously and bleated:

Your post is totally OT. It seems that some /.ers cannot make a coherent sentence without the word "Linux" jumping out of their stinking holes.

[sarcasm] OT? On Topic? Thanks, must be why it was scored a +2 while you're lingering here in anonymous hell...[/sarcasm]

And my holes are none of your business.

Hotblack_Desiato

Computer scientists??? WTF?

[javabandit]

Excuse me. But we're getting a little ridiculous about our titles.

First it was programmer, then it was programmer/analyst, then it was software developer, then it was software engineer, then it was architect...

... now its Computer Scientist?

Puhleeze... anyone who uses that term so loosely needs to read one of Knuth's books to understand what a computer scientist really is.

Source of figures

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

I could really make good use of those figures that show that an outsourced 1st level support position can cost $5k-$6k. I would be very grateful if you could post a citation on those numbers.

Better data anyone?

[KFury]

As astounding as this data is, it would be infinitely more useful (and accurate) if it were normalized againt actuall traffic usage on craigslist, so the growing/weaning popularity of the site wouldn't skew the demo data.

Anyone wanna get Craig's archived logfiles?

Re:Better data anyone?

[KFury]

'scuse me? That's offtopic how?

Fascinating...

[Chops]

I asked the guy at the next machine, "If you had to give a date, when would you say the dot-com collapse happened?" He said, "November '99."

According to this, that's within two months of the point at which marketing people got more popular than engineers (with employers.)

Yes, fascinating.

Re:Chart doesn't mean much...but...

[Teun]

Still a neat project and interesting to play with for someone from 'out of town' (Europe)
The source(s) and limitations are stated on the site and any one knowing statistics knows aswell how to use this one.

Good luck on the job hunt!

Adam, the silent Xinger

[Josuah]

Anyone else look at Adam's resume and notice that he worked at Xing and was part of both Q&A and their MPEG library development? Perhaps he had some small part in the ultimate release of DeCSS. Just a thought. ;P

He needs to open source his code

[Anonymous Coward]

If he GPL'd his code, numerous people could download and install his scripts, get things messed up, bombard him (and newsgroups) with clueless questions, and then resort to some prebuilt binaries (obviating the need for source in the first place).

Oh, wait... where have I seen this development model before?

The complete story on Signal11????

[Anonymous Coward]

Definitely, I would like to have the complete story about Signal11.

I thought his posts were often interesting. However, there was some hassle between him and Slashdot officers that I didn't understand.

Re:The complete story on Signal11????

[Anonymous Coward]

He posted not because he believed in what he wrote, but to see who he could get to believe him. The sole reason for every one of his posts was to get people to vote his posts up, and he would craft his opinion accordingly. If you took any of his posts seriously, well, Sig11 succeeded with you.

Interesting correlations

[webmaven]

Hmm. Try this combination:

• March '98 to August '01
  
• apartments avaliable
  
• housing wanted
  
• resumes
  
• for sale

You can see that these all tracked each other fairly well up to December '99, when resumes/for-sale went off on their own, and apartments/housing stayed fairly even for a while.

Then, apartment availability started shooting up around August '00, kind of tracked resumes/for sale for a while, and then shot through resumes in February, picking up for-sale which has tracked it ever since.

I'll leave it as an excercize for the reader to correlate all this with external economic factors, but I think it's pretty clear that for a while people were selling stuff to make the rent while they were looking for work, and then between August and February people started selling stuff because they were leaving the area.

Funny variable in the URL...

[Nymus]

Anyone else notice the "yourmom=1" that is inserted in the URL when you use this? If you set it to zero or remove it, the graph won't use your start/end dates...funny.

Me too.

[serial frame]

Here in this hopeless fucking hole we call LA
The only way to fix it is to flush it all away.
Any fucking time. Any fucking day.
Learn to swim, I'll see you down in Arizona bay.
Here in this hopeless fucking hole we call LA
The only way to fix it is to flush it all away.
Any fucking time. Any fucking day.
Learn to swim, I'll see you down in Arizona bay.

...

Fuck smiley glad-hands
With hidden agendas.
Fuck these dysfunctional,
Insecure actresses.

...

Cuz I'm praying for rain
And I'm praying for tidal waves
I wanna see the ground give way.
I wanna watch it all go down.
Mom please flush it all away.
I wanna watch it go right in and down.
I wanna watch it go right in.
Watch you flush it all away.

-Parts of Tool, "Ænema"

when to buy a house in the Silicon Valley?

[claud9999]

My question is, we're just about ready to upgrade to a larger condo or house and I'm wondering if anyone has URL's for historical perspectives of the time lag between unemployment jumps, "for sale" jumps, and drops in prices...

Living in the valley and not being tempted by the big $ offers of startups has meant that my fiancee and I are still employed and ready to upgrade from the 1-bedroom condo to someplace to start the family life, now that the market should be more sane...

(Admittedly, we're starting to see $500k 3-bedroom places in the valley but they're few and not in the best neighborhoods...and we'd much rather pay $400k. Then again, my condo has appreciated ~3x since I bought it in '95 so I suspect there'll be a fixed delta between the sale price of it and the purchase price of the new place.)

Re:when to buy a house in the Silicon Valley?

[Alfthemack]

Wait another year...

All of the cyclical markets go up and down...

It's very difficult to tell the peaks and valleys. However, the rule is to jump in (or out) when the slope (the derivative for you folks taking AP Calc.) of the curve starts to get really, really steep. For example, the best time to sell your investment property was in April 2000 when rents and property values shot waaaaaaaay up. The best time to buy is probably Q2 next year. The tech bottom is right now. However, the real estate will lag about 2 quarters.

It's mostly my opinion, but I predicted a 2001 fallout back in 1997 so don't knock me too badly...

Re:when to buy a house in the Silicon Valley?

[heroine]

I don't believe there was ever a time housing prices dropped in the bay area. Even in the recessions of 1992 and 1980 prices continued to rise, though at a slow rate. The key is to lock in a down payment while you're still young, before the inflation curve leaves you behind forever. Most of my college friends either got a house as soon as they graduated or forever paid rent.

Re:when to buy a house in the Silicon Valley?

[Pinball Wizard]

...The tech bottom is right now...It's mostly my opinion, but I predicted a 2001 fallout back in 1997...

Far be it from me to knock you - when will things start to improve?

Re:when to buy a house in the Silicon Valley?

[Anonymous Coward]

***yawn***

Last time I checked, prices dropped 20% in the early 90's.

Housing is a trailing indicator of the economy by about 9 months. When the market starts to turn in a noticable way, you'll have about 3 months to jump into the housing market before the prices begin to rise again.

BTW, the bottom will fall out of the real estate market in SF in Nov and people will be freaking out in Feb 02. Count on it.

Re:when to buy a house in the Silicon Valley?

[ChiefCrazyTalk]

Are you implying that 500k is CHEAP? I think you could buy my entire block of single family homes for that amount of money. (only slight exageration - houses run 50-100k) San Fran has a long way to go before real estate prices there hit reality again.

Re:when to buy a house in the Silicon Valley?

[Anonymous Coward]

When you're 50 and have saved for 25 years

thanks, government land use restrictions

Re:when to buy a house in the Silicon Valley?

[claud9999]

I agree that early next year will likely see the prices seriously drop. One site had sales averages over the past few months and "summer moving season" definitely hit, with the # of sales much higher and prices jumping up a bit but dropping over the summer. I can dig it up if people are interested...

I'm starting the process of talking to agents at this point in the hopes of being able to take advantage of the serious downturn when it happens. I just have to hope the % loss on my place is less/equal to the larger/more expensive place I'll be buying.

Thanks for all of the comments and wish me luck!

Internal Server Error

[jelle]

Ok, we'll call it slashdotted...

Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, adam@signal11.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have
done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

Re:Internal Server Error

[ajdub]

hehehe. fixed. :)

ho ho ho he claims Graphics copyright

[johnjones]

the guy whop put the up the CG/webpage claims that the graphics are his copyright

correct me if I am wrong but he is redistributeing the database in a differant format

he is not doing any analysis or changeing the data in any way but redisplaying it

so he has no copyright claim at all as far as I can see bit of a joke really

regards

john jones

Re:ho ho ho he claims Graphics copyright

[hearingaid]

there was a case in the early 20th century in Britain where test answers got "unofficially" released. this is for a standardized test.

copyright was successfully claimed. for test answers.

he made the graphics. that's all he has to do really. the source data, he has no copyright on, true enough... the graphics though: he's got it.

Re:ho ho ho he claims Graphics copyright

[Anonymous Coward]

Ungh. Your writing format is terrible.

those f**king atomic vision a**holes...

[Anonymous Coward]

... completely ripped off Red Hat. Some lame journalist works for 6 months to a year on a lame portal that never gets off the ground, and gets tens of thousands of options? I declined an engineering position at Red Hat, mostly because of the insanity of the offer: they offered 2,000 shares for a non-junior engineering position, and a pitiful salary. Knowing your in the same boat as everybody else, this is ok but when the truth comes out a year later, that idiots were making/getting far more only justifies my rejection of that pissy offer. I'm still insulted.

I got sick of seeing license plates like THX IPO on clementina when Red Hat still had their offices in SF. The web-design company that they acquired, Atomic Vision, was very puffed-up, full of self-flattery, and not especially good. For all I know, they bunch of them, headlined by Mattew Butterick, subsisted for a year on a constantly-shifting sand of improvised assignments and high-faluting job titles. I once went in to those offices and swear everybody was reading about soap operas on the web.

A quick gander at Butterick's exercise history on biz.yahoo.com shows that he did indeed cash out. What an ass.

I'm convinced it was a shell company to rip off shareholders. A lot of these people were savvy ex-Wired people accustomed to delusional investors.

Too bad Matthew S. CEO of Red Hat, bought into the hype. Wither, Bob Young?

Re:those f**king atomic vision a**holes...

[Anonymous Coward]

(Note I haven't gotten this latest Wired. I basically stopped reading it once it landed in the bland Conde Naste maw...)

I worked in the office with the people that you scorn so much. Came in after Atomic Vision was absorbed to do redhat.com engineering.

Did I get rich off it? No, I did not. Some people did. Am I bitter about that? No, not at all. I think a little background helps.

Anyway, the real reason Red Hat aquired Atomic Vision was because the underwriters basically said they needed it to have a successful IPO. Remember, every business plan needed a portal those days. Enter Atomic Vision... Bunch of former Wired designers who were pretty good for their day. You'd be suprised the number of the really early sites they designed and built.

The management of Red Hat knew exactly what they were doing. With Atomic Vision they had a successful IPO and a successful 2nd round of financing before Wall Street blew up.. Atomic Vision fulfilled it's end of the bargain and now the few that are left are working in small offices in Oakland.

So, the only people who were really ripped off were the lemmings who invested at $70+/share..

Remember WideOpen.com? That was Russ Mitchell's baby. He's an okay guy, and eventually went on to be Editor in Chief at Business 2.0. Just remember, he was a big time journalist working for a technology company that wasn't really interested in editorial stories, advertising and all that non-core business.

Alas the sum of parts didn't quite add up business wise. Once the portal hype wore off there wasn't much reason to keep a lot of folks around. Communication was poor and expectations didn't match.

I was witness to many battles between east and west coast culture, many flame wars on proprietary vs. open source software, Applix vs MS word, and even advertising on redhat.com (let me tell you about the day www.redhat.com had ads for Denny's and Hairnets... :)

Anyway, I just want to say that Atomic Vision was a real design boutique with good folks. The wideopen.com stuff came after the aquisition, and they were good hard-working folks too. The engineering team I worked on did some great things with a very small staff. We all helped Red Hat in one way or another and some were lucky enough to get in on the IPO or case options...

Anyway, Red Hat SF is dead, long live Red Hat SF..

Re:those f**king atomic vision a**holes...

[Anonymous Coward]

What about the blowjob incident in the john?

thoughts on dotcom booms and busts

[ajdub]

while i don't have too much knowledge as to the effects of the dotcom boom and bust nationally and globally, i have formed a few opinions on what has happened locally.

while the boom sucked in a number of ways: computer jobs became glamourous and attracted a lot of goldrushers or hollywood ego types, which made working in these types of jobs a little obnoxious. the people who i hated in high school who were stuck up and going to fancy colleges found themselves getting rich in marketing and management positions, riding on the backs of the geeks who actually did the work. the talent pool was suddenly flooded with people who weren't really into what they were doing but they were doing it because that is where the money was. etc..

it also did a few cool things: it provided a way for slackers, artists, writers, etc to actually earn a living wage. (not exemplary salaries, but salaries that actually made it possible for them to live reasonably comfortably in the bay area) suddenly people that had been making peanuts could make a decent salary 30-50K and live comfortably knowing that they could pay their bills and some were gaining a skill that could turn into a career.

unfortunately, things got out of hand when the aforementioned fancy college educated folks had a little too much money to play around with and traders saw a wave of hype which they could ride to grow their assets. idiotic companies with pathetic business plans, idiot management and stupid ideas were recieving insane amounts of venture capital, which they were happy to spend the majority on things like office adornments, lame marketing and other things irrelevant to the core products they were building.

when this all was happening, the rest of the economy grew to support all these new businesses needing services and now that they're all gone, not only is the technology industry affected, but also the industries they relied upon and the industries those industries relied upon. hopefully the ripple won't be catastrophic.

personally, i was happy to see the bubble burst at first for the reasons i listed above. i was sick of hollywood ego internet types and this sudden 'coolness' that surrounded all things internet. i was also sick of seeing people who had no real interest in technology at all get filthy rich off of the hype.

however, now my opinion has changed a little. a lot of my friends are in fairly gnarly positions as a result of the layoffs. they weren't trying to get rich, and never were. they just wanted a honest living wage for a days work. they had the promise of a career and living wage for the years to come laid out before them and now it's all vanished into thin air.

in one way, i think it's a good thing, because the boom distracted people from what they really wanted to do with their lives. while doing operations for a dotcom may pay decent, it's not the most productive thing to do with one's eight hours a day in the grand scheme of things. (given that someone is not completely a geek at heart) now people are being forced to reevaluate themselves and their master plans for life, some are going back to college, some are persuing art, others are getting involved in vocations that they've been meaning to do for a while and i think that that is a very good thing.

i think that it is also a good thing for technology. now that there are less distractions and promise of riches for geeks working on bunk technologies, there will a decent talent pool of geeks looking to work for a decent wage on something that is technologically cool. that is also pretty exciting. while venture capitalists may be stopping the handouts, they're not going to stop completely and now they're not going to have nearly as many proposals to review. i'm hoping that in the next couple years we'll see a number of new companies that are doing stuff that is truly innovative.

Re:thoughts on dotcom booms and busts

[Anonymous Coward]

that's the most intelligent thing i've seen posted
here. congrats.

Marc

[Anonymous Coward]

Andreesen, perhaps?

We both worked out of his apartment...

[Anonymous Coward]

We both worked out of his apartment for a number of months on a contract job together, so I should know.

Into programming, eh? XP? A little of the ol' buddy programming? swapping vars; very good, very good. Contract jobs...rim jobs?

wink, wink, nudge, nudge...

Say no more!

what do you expect from sig11

[Anonymous Coward]

yep, good old signal 11, showing his intelligence. Check out the "hire me" link.. it's him.

Beauty and Truth -- I wish I had mod points

[uptownguy]

...Anyone who just skimmed the above and has some mod points to spare, re-read the above post and mod it up.

More realistically, though, thinks UptownGuy...

You'll just have to settle for my high praise, anonymous coward, whoever you are. There is so much truth in what you wrote above... I actually took the time to read it and re-read it over 5 times. Especially the last paragraph. Truth with a capital "T" my friend. Techie or not, dot-com casualty or not, they are still words of wisdom!

Hemos

[Anonymous Coward]

hemos is such a dumb bitch she sucks more than dot coms do

Here's a multi-state jobs availability chart

[Fulton Green]

If you go to Atlanta Geek's home page, someone has been tracking the number of job postings for various cities around the USA, with data taken from ComputerJobs.com. If this is reflective of the actual IT market (when in fact it's also reflective of third-party recruiter activity), it would appear that most cities have lost 20% of their jobs in the past month, but Boston! They've leaked 30%!

Re:Here's a multi-state jobs availability chart

[sethg]

it would appear that most cities have lost 20% of their jobs in the past month, but Boston! They've leaked 30%!

What's the change over the past year? Given the number of colleges and universities here, I wouldn't be surprised to find a big peak in May/June, for hiring both recent graduates and summer interns, and a corresponding valley in August/September.

I Know Who I Am

[Anonymous Coward]

I own a file with the following MD5SUM:

75fe6d69fcc353c35d5b355d107e7323

If I ever wish to prove my identity, I'll simply present that file, and when the MD5s match, you'll know I'm telling the truth.

Prices have fallen before; are falling now

[Anonymous Coward]

Incorrect.

Prices fell in the early nineties and stayed down until 1996. If you had to leave the bay area during that time, you took a loss.

SOMA properties in SF are down on average 20%. The rest of the bay area housing prices are soon to follow.

OT: karma

[Pope]

Which of course, brings up the most obvious question: once you have enough karma to post at +1, what's the point of knowing or caring about how much you have?
THe only thing worse is some low UID persons who assume that everything they say is Interesting or Insightful, simply based on their early arrival.
Your post was Informative.

I would never hire you

[Pope]

You just wrote a 9 paragraph statement without using proper capitalization ONCE. How does this reflect on you? To me, pretty damn badly.

Re:I would never hire you

[sigwinch]

You hire people based on how good their Slashdot posts are? I've heard of weird interview techniques, but this takes the cake!

Re:I would never hire you

[reverius]

YOU just WROTE a ONE sentence statement withOUT using PROPER capitalization ONCE!

HOW does THIS reflect ON you?

to ME, pretty DAMN badly.

(Also note that "To me, pretty damn badly" is absolutely horrid grammar)

Re:I would never hire you

[odaiwai]

Oh I don't know, apart from capitalisation, his grammar and spelling and pucntuation were acceptable and his expression and use of English was good.
It's got to be easier to teach someone how to use the shift key than how to write.

dave

Re:I would never hire you

[ajdub]

you just read a nine paragraph statement and the only response you were able to muster was a complaint about the lack of capitalization. did you even read the paragraphs you're complaining about?

how i do think this reflects upon you? well... let's just say that you're definitely not a manager that i would ever want.

you may wish to consider a career in government.

--adam

ps. in case you don't know; all lowercase is a style device, not an ignorance of the rules of punctuation.

Re:I would never hire you

[Anonymous Coward]

A "style device"? Uh, yeah. The style device of a sloppy egotistical idiot. Your "style" screams prima donna. I would also steer clear of you. There are hundreds of other engineers who might have to use the man page for an obscure tar options, but would be infinitely better employees.

You may choose to keep your head in the sand, but it is actually a plus to be able to get along with other people.

Let me know when your next "style device" becomes "driving on the wrong side of the road".

Re:I would never hire you

[ajdub]

i don't really understand how whether or not i properly use capitalization in postings on a message board convey whether or not i read through documentation when working, but regardless...

i've always thought the purpose of writing is to convey meaning. there are formal rules for spelling, punctuation and grammar - but these rules only serve the purpose of helping the author to convey the message they are attempting to convey. they are tools, nothing more.

in the above example, i was stating an opinion on something that affects a lot of different people in different ways. since it was an opinion, i specifically chose to use all lowercase to help create a tone and inflection of "an informal offering of an opinion" rather than a "stark, institutional bequeathment of knowledge to the minions" in my opinion, i do not judge quality of writing based on proper adherance to the applicable spelling, grammar and punctuation rules but rather whether or not the message itself was of quality and how well it was conveyed.

--adam

ps. bequeathment is not a real word. but i used it anyway - and guess what, people will understand what i was trying to convey.

It'll stabilize at 50

[Wee]

And then it will go back up and hit 50. And then it will go slightly below again. I remember back when they introduced karma. I had just submitted an AMD story right about then and so it shot up. It's been going down every since. It took me quite a while to hit 50 but I did.

Not that I really care. I thought they should have included a filter which would allow you to "tune out a UID" rather than restrict it arbitrarily at 50. I toyed with writing such a feature myself and then submitting a patch. But then work intruded and I was too busy to breathe.

I do really like the messages feature. It allows one to see replies without having to get a high enough score to let the post pass the original poster's filters (I read at +1, and sometimes +2). So I suppose my goal of the reply being seen has been met.

And just to keep this on topic: I wonder what effect /. had on the "I'm a 1337 geek because I read slashdot" during the whole tech expansion. I personally know more than a couple people that should never have worked in a tech industry (and I'm sure a few would argue that my Geology background precludes me from membership into the geek club). Mostly artists and the like. The fellas who called writing web pages "coding".

Anyway, interesting graphics. Did you hear about the Uhaul shortage in Silicon Valley/Bay Area? That's a metric I'd like to see explored.

-B

Self-inflicted.

[codeforprofit2]

The economic hardtimes that the dotcom (and other IT-related) companies are seeing now it quite self inflicted.

Those companies has not had a working business-model. The major part of the dot-coms have lived on banners and thats just unrealistic.

In you put ads in a newspaper you can get nice big ad-space that really draws attension to your products. Compare that to a banner at the top of a site, do even someone look at them?

And for other IT-related companies I think the focus on market-share instead of revenue just makes it impossible to keep companies alive. Many seems to have thought "market share is everything, revenue is something we deal with then the VC money is gone".

Many has given their products away for free and have thought that later down the line they are going to be able to charge for it. Personally I think it's very hard to make people pay for something that they got for free before. If not impossible.

it takes more than that

[mj6798]

Extracting data from a web site and graphing it is a useful skill, but I would expect any reasonably smart college student to be able to figure this stuff out. It takes a lot more than that to succeed and innovate when it comes to computers.

Fair enough...

[Jayman2]

yeah sure it's neat enough, but like others have said, it's not really something that is so mind-blowingly new that companies would line up to hire this guy.
I read the letter, and I admit not knowing who he wrote it to, but if he describes his work like that in a job application i'm not surprised he's not getting a job.

"....kinda neat cos....."

Sorry mate, but that just doens't work.....

Re:Fair enough...

[Anonymous Coward]

he's not trying to show off, jackass!
this is the stuff he does when you're
JERKING OFF and EATING CHEETOS
stuck up slashdot fuckin losers.

it's time to open new markets

[kipple]

learn a new language, and go in another country (Europe is -as usual- slowly catching up with technology) to *start* a new market and use whatever you learned during those dot-com years to avoid the same mistakes, and create something useful.

I refuse to believe that all those people did not learn anything, and new nations *need* IT people.

Think about going to Africa, Europe, or another country. The world is big, there's room for everybody, and there are new markets to create. Move on, Americans!

Re:it's time to open new markets

[Anonymous Coward]

Please don't!
Stay in your own country and continue fucking it up.
Don't bother coming over to Europe, after all we're so far behind we'll probably never catch up with all your American technology.

Re:Offtopic but,Not just silicon valley

[CAVE^MAN]

absolutly, I live in central texas and thgouth about looking for a job is austin, I took a look at the statesman and found: ONE admin job with a minimum 5 years xp and a degree, one programming job with similar req's, and a few (computer)graphic artists positions. This was quite a shock so I did some searching on the web in a few job listing sites and found more job postings but nowhere near what I expected, even after concidering the economy.

If you have REAL talent

[Taco Cowboy]

Those who REAL talents will not wait for jobs.

Rather, jobs will be waiting for those who have
REAL talents.

In essence - those complaining about being unemployed, and still think that they have _talents_, usually have none.

I may sound cruel, cold, and ruthless, but we all live in REAL WORLD, and REAL WORLD demands REAL talents, not fake "talents", or tinie punie tricks.

It takes next to no talent to build a database. Whoever brags of his or her "talents" on the basis of building a database ought to take a good look of him/herself in front of a mirror, preferably not the "smokey" type, puhleeees.

Re:If you have REAL talent

[Anonymous Coward]

Web monkeys make me puke.

Re:If you have REAL talent

[mrobin604]

Hey, you mind letting me know when you get laid off, so I can remind you of your post and laugh at you??

I've known plenty of companies that lay off not based on "lack of talent" but because of high pay scales...

so those complaining about being unemployed are often unemployed because they won't take a 30-40% cut in their asking price.

(I have a friend who was a web producer who was looking for a year, and didn't find anything until he chopped his asking price and broadened his job objective... he was hired pretty soon after that).

I bet there aren't a whole lot of CEOs out there who've taken a 30-40% cut in what they get paid.

(IMHO, the "REAL WORLD" prefers "tinie punie" tricks... for example sales people are highly paid for the "punie" trick of being likeable and persuasive. More highly paid than those who have the REAL talents of making the things they're selling.)

-marsh

Re:If you have REAL talent

[Anonymous Coward]

arrogant prick.
the guy who put that together is currently
telemarketing for 6 bucks an hour.
why is it that only you stuck up pricks think
that EVERYONE ELSE has too high of standards.
projection at its finest.

Re:If you have REAL talent

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, grow up.

If you think all it takes is a better product to win, think again. Look at the DEC Alpha, two years ahead of Intel and where is it now? Selling is more important than having the best product. Companines can do just fine with crappy product if they can push the sales - think McDonalds hamburgers.

As far as CEO's, I'll bet they are taking a lot bigger hit than just a 30-40% cut. Since their compensation is tied to stock, I would guess that most will only make a fraction this year compared to what they cleared last year or eighteen months ago. And beleive it or not, there is a *huge* difference between working for a company with good leadership and even mediocre leadership. Coming up with new ideas isn't easy, especailly when it bleading edge tech....

So what about me?

[mister sticky]

I'm a student in third year computer science. Before entering university I was told of the vast need for jobs in the IT sector and endless opportunities. So, coinciding with my interest in computers (not really programming however) I decided to take the plunge with the understanding that I would be hired right out of fourth year, and driving a BMW before I knew it.

WELL, now what do I do?? With under two years left it seems kind of late to switch my major, and with little actual experience in the computer industry my future looks bleak, to say the least.

How quickly one's future outlook can change...

And to this I'd like to add...

[mrobin604]

"Youuuuuuuu... with your fancy clothes....
Dance all night, till your heart explodes..."

(not posting the link because I don't wanna give Adam more headaches with 2 slashdot effects... hahahah. but look for "club drugs" on morpheus)

-marsh

Another Confounding Variable

[Max Entropy]

This charting is more of an indication of the grown popularity of Craig's List over that period, which bumps up some numbers and keeps others from being more depressing than they are.

Not the computer industry

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember, dot-coms WEREN'T the computer industry, they were the internet industry.

If, totally hypothetically, chemicals were to somehow become the NEXT BIG THING, there would still be an upsurge in demand for programmers cause so much chemistry/physics/biology is now computer-based as is just about every technical field.

Moreover, there has generally been a strong demand for programmers outside of booms - booms just add gusto to this. Course, if you had enough H1Bs to the mix, then you can get the saleries down again. But it's still not a boom-bust thing for real programmers (front-page monkeys though...?).

I think I know that guy

[Anonymous Coward]

Was his last name Andreessen?

Salary-Based Layoffs

[fm6]

I've known plenty of companies that lay off not based on "lack of talent" but because of high pay scales...

All too true. I think this tends to happen most often in market-value-fixated companies that try too hard to improve their numbers. The idea is, "if we can get salary costs down, the street will like us better and our options will be worth something." Logical as far as it goes, but not usually in the long-term interest of the company. After all, there's usually a reason some people get paid more!

This is also the basis of much age-based discrimination -- older and more senior workers cost more. Illegal, but so what?

Here's a prime example that any slashdotter can relate too, even though it's not in our industry. Back in 1994, Paramount had an extremely successful syndicated series. But it had been on the air for seven years, all the regular actors had huge fan bases and plenty of leverage to demand higher and higher salaries. The solution must have seemed obvious: cancel the series and start something close enough to grab the same viewer base. So The Next Generation (not great TV, but it had its moments) was replaced by the putrid Voyager.