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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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

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.

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!