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Looking At Pretty Graphics Of Dot Com Demographics
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 "
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.
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.
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.
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"
--
There is no hatred more pure and true than that expressed by children.
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.
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.
--- I do not moderate.
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.
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.
There's definitely a difference in the quality of the emails I get from software engineers these days. They're much more technically adept.
.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.
Seems as if most of the computer scientists working for
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.
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.
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.
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?
Kevin Fox
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.
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.
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.
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