In SIlicon Valley: Profits up. Employment Down.

popo writes "The New York Times (free yada yada) has an interesting report on the changing landscape of Silicon Valley tech companies: Profits are soaring but employment figures are not. This dynamic points to significant future shifts down the road for Silicon Valley companies like Electronic Arts and Cisco. Interestingly, the culprit isn't just outsourcing. Huge leaps in worker productivity and automated processes are also responsible for the decreased need for new labor."

Comments

Mandatory overtime

[EWIPlayer]

Not to mention the recent trend (last 5 years or so) of mandatory overtime... If everyone works the equivalent of 1.5 people then employment doesn't need to go up. Profits are starting to match effort level, and that effort level will just equal burnout eventually. When that happens, employment will go back up or profits will start to go down.

Re:Mandatory overtime

[zerocool^]

If everyone works the equivalent of 1.5 people then[...]

In the Sysadmin world, we call this .5 of a person "shell scripts".

It's a dichotomy - you get really good at shell scripts so that you can make your life easier, take care of some of the tedious stuff automatically, and then they expect you to fill your free time with more work! Whatever happened to "if I'm smart enough to make the system work for me, I deserve to do less work"?

~Will

Re:Mandatory overtime

[bwalling]

The idea that hours equates to productivity is ludicrous. As long as you get your stuff done, it shouldn't matter to your employer how long you work. My wife took over a job that took the previous person (actually, each of the last three) 70-80 hours per week to do. She was able to get it done in 40-45 hours. Her employer was thrilled. The point isn't how long you work, but whether you get your work done.

Re:Mandatory overtime

[luvirini]

ah.. then you are marking your time card wrong..

You should mark all the time that the shell scripts do while you play computer games as worktime..

Re:Mandatory overtime

[EWIPlayer]

My favourite T-shirt in my collection says, "Of course I don't look busy. I did it right the first time.".

But you're totally right. I've written tons of scripts and cron jobs in the last 5 years, yet i still work 9.5 hours a day on average. Where's my raise? :)

Re:Mandatory overtime

[malkavian]

In the long term, it's more likely that profits go down. I've seen this mentality before. Push people to the limits to make more profit.
In a tech team, one guy falls due to burnout, which means that load is spread around the remnants of the already overstressed team.
New guy comes in to learn the code/system, so the whole job needs doing, and new guy needs to be taught (if he's going to be any more use than a chocolate teapot).
Which leads to a second member falling, as there really is too much to do, and now less time to do it.
Which leads to another new guy.
More than once, I've seen this take out a whole team as management keep moving stuff onto the remaining originals who know the system, or the new guys who sometimes walk out one day and don't come back because of ridiculous pressure.
Eventually nobody knows the whole system, or can use it all effectively.
Then the product dies a long and messy death, possibly taking out the whole company surrounding it.
Net result, lots of job losses.

Working in the areas I have so long (systems and networks), I find it really odd, how companies are running around yelling "Resilience, reliability.. We need everything able to withstand emergencies", and buy two of every server, RAID the disks, redundant routing, offsite backups..
Yet they have their tech team cut to the bone, with highly compartmentalised skills.
One leaves, and for a significant time, they're shafted in one area (at least).
There was a very good reason companies always used to have more staff than was strictly necessary to complete a task.
It wasn't just morale, and making the job comfortable enough that people wanted to stay..
It was for the ability to obtain an "emergency tolerant" skillset.
You could lose a good few staff from any area, and your knowledge base wasn't significantly impacted.

All this 'on the edge' company structuring isn't sustainable.
And by the time the West has finally come full circle, and discarded all the bits that have cost if a fortune in the long term as it's chased short term gain for a few decades (until it can't get any more short term gain, and they hit the wall), they'll be facing a fully geared up Asia and China, who have taken the long term view, with fully staffed and skilled departments who can outmanoeuver and outperform any Western company going..

Re:Mandatory overtime

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

there are a whole lot of employers out there who would look at her time vs. her predecessors' and conclude that she was only working 57% as hard.

But let's face it, companies like that are never going to be winners, so do you really want to work for them in the first place?

Most research puts sustainable peak performance at around 35-40 hours per week, depending on industry, circumstances, etc. After that, you get rapidly diminishing returns.

By 60 hours per weeks, the extra work since 40 cancels out and you only get the same amount done.

By 70-80 hours per week, you're actually doing negative work: the amount of extra work you create through your mistakes and inability to function effectively outweighs the amount of extra work you get done.

It's staggering that so many managers in IT today haven't worked out what Ford found for himself nearly a century ago, a conclusion that plenty of other successful companies across a range of industries have reached for themselves since. It's not like this is some big secret or anything! So do yourself a favour, and find a job working for enlightened management. The others have no future anyway.

Re:Mandatory overtime

[91degrees]

But how do you measure productivity? It's not like you can do a factory style "number of widgets produced" measurement.

It's a tricky problem, which is probably why most employers have ignored it.

Re:Mandatory overtime

[el_womble]

This irks me. If somebody employees me to create a tool for them I am happy to do so and will hand it over to them copyright an all. If somebody employes me to do something for them, and I choose to automate that task using a tool, using skills that I have aquired to build that tool, then the tool should belong to me, not that company - so when I leave that company the tool leaves with me. Otherwise where is the bean counter incentive to keep me on?

I once had a job in a call centre for Dell (groan). They job was tedious. I was told I had to take data from a disk, print it out, then input it into a seperate program. They employed me as a call centre grunt, so I wasn't getting paid geek wages. I created a macro, and did a weeks worth of work in under an hour (the restriction was bandwidth). What am I ethically obliged to do in that situation? I tried telling my super, but they weren't interested as it threatend their jobs. In essence I had made myself, and my coworkers redundant in a little under a morning. Should I ask for more work when I was already doing more than they were employing me for? When I left I took the macro with me.

Re:Mandatory overtime

[digidave]

It's one thing for a single male like you to say that, but try working 80 hours a week and remaining a good husband and father. It won't happen.

The main point that the GP didn't quite make isn't that a person can't work an 80 hour week, but that consistently doing so results in burnout and a less productivity. Very few people can work 60 - 80 hours a week for five years. It's not just that the extra 20 - 40 hours per week will be less productive, but that the first 40 will be as well.

It's one thing to call someone lazy because they don't like work, but quite another to call them lazy because they don't want to spend every waking hour at work. For most people, work is not their lives.

Re:Mandatory overtime

[Anonymous Coward]

I once had a job in a call centre for Dell (groan). They job was tedious. I was told I had to take data from a disk, print it out, then input it into a seperate program. They employed me as a call centre grunt, so I wasn't getting paid geek wages. I created a macro, and did a weeks worth of work in under an hour (the restriction was bandwidth). What am I ethically obliged to do in that situation? I tried telling my super, but they weren't interested as it threatend their jobs. In essence I had made myself, and my coworkers redundant in a little under a morning. Should I ask for more work when I was already doing more than they were employing me for? When I left I took the macro with me.

Ah, the insanity of the managers and office politics.

Ideally, someone who finds an efficiency like that should get a whopping bonus plus a party for the whole group (just to keep them happy too).

I guess you don't need to be told that the situation you found is common in large organizations, and appears in small ones too (just less waste since small groups don't have other groups to fall back on or to blame).

Associated note: Ever delt with budgets? If you don't spend it, you don't get it. If you don't get it, you can't spend it later...so you better spend a minimum of your budget or you will end up screwing yourself later...thus the reason for this twisted -- or simply incomplete -- line of reasoning in this thread;

Re:Mandatory overtime (Score:2) by drsquare (530038) on Monday July 04, @09:37AM (#12979101)

If you're doing less work, then surely they should pay you less? Or did you think that because you've made one efficiency improvement, you should just get to sit back after that, i.e. one day's work, one year's pay?

Re:Mandatory overtime

[dubl-u]

If somebody employes me to do something for them, and I choose to automate that task using a tool, using skills that I have aquired to build that tool, then the tool should belong to me, not that company - so when I leave that company the tool leaves with me.

Legally, all work you do as an employee is owned by the company. If you give them something more than they expect, well, you've given it to them. Generally that's the case if you're on an hourly contract, too, although it depends on exactly what's in your contract.

If you want the right to own the IP and want to be able to turn a profit on being smart about the way to do the work, arrange a contract that pays you by the piece completed. It's better if the contract is between Dell and El Womble Inc rather than between Dell and Mr. El Womble. I don't think it's legally better; rather it fits people's prejudices.

Re:Mandatory overtime

[frostman]

I'd call that suck-ass management.

I once had a job doing data entry. After I'd gotten used to the systems enough, I set up a bunch of macros to make myself more efficient (this was going over NCSA Telnet from a Mac to a VAX).

After I'd used them enough to think they'd help others, I told my boss about them and set them up for all the other data-entry drones.

Why did I do that, when I could have kept the macros to myself and been the most efficient data drone in the outfit while still getting a few hours of free time a day to read, train, e-mail, whatever I could do while appearing to work?

First, because it would have been unethical not to share the macros.

Second, because the people I worked with were nice enough I wanted to treat them ethically.

Third, because the company and my direct manager both made it clear that showing that kind of initiative would lead to less-tedious work and more opportunities.

So I'd say your manager was an asshat. Either for not creating a good enough environment to make you *want* to help the company beyond your specific tasks, or for hiring you in the first place if you weren't that kind of person.

Re:Mandatory overtime

[GoMMiX]

120 Hours in a 5 day work-week.

80 Hours worked.
10 Hours drive-time. (30 minutes to, 30 minutes from)
10 Hours maintenance time. (shower, shave, whatever)

That leaves 20 hours to sleep. What about your family? Wife, kids? Yeah right!

Sure, an 80 hour workweek once or twice a year can be ok. Really, it's bull -- but tolerable. The employer SHOULD be responsible for managing their resources better to prevent such things - or be forced to pay mandatory overtime (which Bush saw to it that doesn't happen - specifically for IT people).

But it's not just one or two weeks a year. It's EVERY week. I've worked at one of these 80-hour-week companies before. It's all promises and lies when you're being hired on - then you are slowly introduced into the 'emergency' firefighting atmosphere and before the end of your first month you're on STEADY 70-80 hour work-weeks.

Anyone who has worked these insane hours for prolonged periouds can tell you the things that happen to your body and your life are cruel, to say the least. Cruel, very cruel.

The first thing you notice is memory loss. Constantly losing things, can't remember what you worked on earlier, sometimes you can't even remember what PROJECT you are CURRENTLY working on. You start forgetting peoples names, etc.. Your family? HA! Just a distant memory, they don't even come to mind.

Eventually, you end up with this glazed look on your face. These are the people you can tell a great joke too and they won't get it for several minutes - and even then probably won't laugh because they don't have the energy.

Bush saw to it IT people could be abused like this, now the US Government scrables to get enough IT people in the military.

Most of my friends have moved to other COUNTRIES to work, because working in IT in the US is a joke. Unless you are among the lucky few - your job belongs to an H1-B visa worker, invloves insane overtime, or involves being in another country. And I must say, many of my friends work in Japan now.

That or they've gone for a career change. Which is what I'm doing right this moment. I'm working with my old college counsellors to work up a masters in education. Yaup, I'm going to teach.

Sure, I'm not going to get rich teaching - but I will get to spend time with my family -- my son. I'll have two solid months off during the summer, I _will_ have Christmas off. I won't have to attend my sons birthday parties via telephone call.

$50,000 a year starting is awesome for me.

I must say, 10 years in IT has tought me one thing -- free time IS more important than making more money. I'm going to live my life, rather than working massive overtime so some genocidal executives can have more money.

One day these people will be exposed for the trash they are, and I hope they pay dearly.

Re:Mandatory overtime

[sgt_doom]

While an intelligent thought, not actually a new one. There's an ancient Sumerian saying:

It's not how many hours one works in a day, but how much work one performs in those hours. It's no wonder the pyramids were built under budget....

Re:Mandatory overtime

[demachina]

I'm so happy for your wife, but this isn't really the dynamic behind mandatory and uncompensated overtime.

Productivity gains in labor statistics, especially for workers are almost always tied to making people work more hours for less money, it can be just more hours, just less money or both. The classic example is you lay off a percentage of your work force every year and each year the people who survive have to do more and more work to compensate for their fallen bretheren. They are also motivated to work harder to avoid the next round of layoffs, though if you do this enough it eventually devestates morale, everyone starts praying to get laid off and get the comp package, and it destroys the company. The exec who initiates the annual layoffs often look like a superstar for the improved productivity and profitibility, or at least decresaded losses, as long as they bail before the company implodes.

You wife's boss sounds like an exception. If your wife is super productive great for her but in most high tech sweatshops she would still be compelled to improve her productivity each year, year in and out and eventually she will be pushed in to large amounts of uncompensated overtime, the more productive she the more work will eventually be piled on her. How many years has she been in this position?

You are also glossing over the rationale for the "death march", the time when a product needs to get out the door and was for whatever reason behind schedule, badly planned, overly ambitious, redesigned and rescoped in the middle or all the way through, or some percentage of management or programmers are just bad at what they do.

In the death march there are more bugs to fix than the staff can possibly fix in the time left on the schedule, and there is a large, and zealous QA staff, finding bugs at or in excess of the rate they can be fixed. Some bugs are futured to try to stay on schedule but you do to much of that and the product ships as bugg crap. The companies bottomline depend on shipping the product in a certain quarter so if the schedule misses the company stock craters.

The one, nearly inevitable, solution is the entire staff is put on 70-80 hours weeks, it doesn't matter if your wife is super productive, and all those salaried programmers ain't gonna get paid overtime for the extra 30-40. If they are lucky they might get some comp time after the product ships when they are completely fried and tettering on the edge of burn out and permenent damage. If they company's execs are enlightened and the product does well they will profit share, and everyone gets stock and bonuses that makes it almost seem worth while. If they are normalthe lion's share of the bonuses land in the pockets of the executives, and the staff will probably be blessed with layoffs or reorganization after they product ships. This encourages them to be grateful to just be happy they still have a job, and be happy that that executive compensation packages now average 400 times that of the average worker versus the 30-40X it was 10-20 years ago. They still have their job so they have the opportunity to repeat the death march as much as once or twice a year.

Your exceptionally productive wife can't just "get her work done" in a death march. As soon as she fixes all the bugs in her queue it will just be refilled.

Re:Mandatory overtime

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you read what he posted? What good are these "massive wages" you believe in (like the tooth fairy) if you can't spend it because you are working all the time? And if you think doing non-physical work constantly, day in and day out, is not exhausting, please try it. Google and Microsoft are the exception, not the rule.

I have had a couple of months where I was working 80 hour weeks, and let me tell you, physically, mentaly and emotional, I was a wreck afterward, and I am not even married or have children.

I am not saying a factory job is easy, but to say that an IT job is easy is bullshit.

Re:Mandatory overtime

[vsprintf]

Working in the areas I have so long (systems and networks), I find it really odd, how companies are running around yelling "Resilience, reliability.. We need everything able to withstand emergencies", and buy two of every server, RAID the disks, redundant routing, offsite backups.. Yet they have their tech team cut to the bone, with highly compartmentalised skills.

And in software, management is running around yelling "reusability" like some mantra. This is of course just a keyword for "fewer programmers", but the managers are cluless enough to think that data conversion code can magically be used to run tape drives if it's written with "reusability" in mind. Like most problems, it boils down to managers being promoted to their level of incompetence. Seriously, being in a meeting where management is detailing their "vision" is enough to make me wonder what kind of hallucinogenics they're using.

The real question

[Mad Merlin]

Where are those profits going? To the low level workers that actually make it happen, or to the CEO who is already wildy rich? I wouldn't be surprised to see wages not going up for the majority of workers despite increased profits.

Re:The real question

[aurelien]

>In 1950, the top 10% of people owned more than 90%
>of listed companies' shares! Insane, but true.

...and they really controlled the companies.

>Now, the number is more like 50%.

Do you believe the new 40% have real control ? I'd bet control is still in the hands of the 10%.

Re:The real question

[sgt_doom]

Wow, magic numbers...COOL, DUDE!

Reality check: today less than 1% control over 90% of the assets - for sure, dude, it may be difficult - but do the math! 99% make under $323,000 per year - the upper 1% make over $323,000 per year - we have reached the era of ultra-concentration of wealth - other countries have revolutions long before reaching this point. Perhaps we're clueless....

Re:The real question

[incom]

I don't think ANYONE(sane anyway) has a problem with people who have earned their fortunes, ethically. But the ill will is ussually directed at people born into wealth, or those who aquire it through illegal(even civilly illegal) means, or in ventures that are popularly accepted as being "bad" (such as excessively harming people or the environment). Please don't spread your utopian capitalist dellusions, the system isn't designed to make everybody responsible retire comfortably, it's not even a minor goal of the system.

Re:The real question

[sgt_doom]

Wow, sanctimonious dude! You actually know people who still own cars! I've got to make friends and network with you guy. BTW, ever create anything of value for this economy? Ever fulfill your citizenship duty and serve in the military? Ever donate blood (my lifetime record is 220 times, to date)? You sound way toooo neoconservative for me with the predictable - but our poverty isn't as bad as their poverty line. I pay for my internet with day labor - how about you, rich dude?

Re:The real question

[bnenning]

Frankly I find it a little scary that our government now wants us to hand over our money to corperations and allow them to generate our retirement wealth.

Actually, they want to give you the *choice* of diverting some of your payroll taxes to a personal account that you would actually own, as opposed to the current system where you get nothing except a vague promise that the government will tax the hell out of future generations and maybe give you some of it.

The current administration almost seems like they would force us at gun point to hand over our money to the rich

Um, that's what the current SS system does. Warren Buffett receives welfare checks funded by regressive taxes on burger flippers.

But my view on investing is that it's a game for the rich. The rich benefit greatly in the game, while the poor really cant play the game to its fullest.

To its fullest, no. But dollar cost averaging with even a small periodic investment works surprisingly well. And a large percentage of the poor would be able to do that if they didn't have 15% of their income seized to perpetuate a vote-buying Ponzi scheme.

Well of course, and its going to get ....

[3seas]

... even more so.

Programming is teh act of automating complexity, typically made up of less complex, but still the same...automations. It is done so that the user of the complexity can use and reuse the complexity thru a simplified (in relationship to the complexity) interface.

With this it is inherent that the field of programming is something of a job intended to work itself out of a job... Otherwise there is a serious problem exposed in the software industry.

There will always be jobs in programming but tasks will change and as programming automates more and more of its own field, simplifying the process, so will it allow more and more to do programming/automating, for themselves, perhaps not strickly as a programmer 9-5 but as a task to do as part of other main duties of onmes position at a company.

Simply understand the inherent objective of progamming and carry it on out in its evolution..

Re:Well of course, and its going to get ....

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Your argument only holds if we only try to do the same jobs, but now with increased automation. A smart industry/society would realise that if the easy stuff just got easier, we have more resources to focus on harder stuff.

Re:Well of course, and its going to get ....

[3seas]

I don't know about doing the same job, because nobody in their work history really does that, but otherwise being able to move on to more difficult stuff, and more interesting stuff, Absolutely! Genuine software engineering will come into the lime light.

But like Alchemy's evolution into Chemestry and the development of chemical megaplants, software development has to change its underlying base knowledge to allow it to more easily happen.

Roman Numeral math has limitations that prevent it from being used to do advanced math, but the base knowledge upon changing to the hindu-arabic decimal system, removed these limitations and made it possible for even kids to do math beyond teh limits of the decimal system.

The software industry has yet to fully and honestly recognize the simpler but inherent base knowledge for this to happen.

I am far from a supporter of the Marketing company known as Microsoft, but in understanding the mechanics of taking the works of other and altering it to create machinery that feeds the conpany... Microsoft in its collection of the works of other and evaluation and integration ... etc... stumbled upon the summing of programming concepts and datatypes and came up with the Common Language Infrastructer (what amounts to being just short of making a genuine step in teh direction of computer science.)

But they didn't stop there they took that (half step) and more ideas and works of others and came up with what they call "software factories" but yet again polluting the genuiness of the base knowledge with self promotion and other distortions and injections of unneeded complexities (in their gears to make people think they need Microsoft)

Smart industry/society? Being dishonest isn't very smart and doesn't help the society get smart.

For if it were smart, then the base knoweldge would have already changed and we would already have better focus on harder and more interesting stuff. But at is not the way of a marketing company, it is instead to get maximum profit for teh least effort.

Little by little, is probably the way this evolution from software alchemy to "end user" applied chemestry is going to happen.

The only way to stop it (end user software chemestry) is to have a conspiracy which all programmers participate in knowingly.
Something that is neither probable or likely, even if disguised as "certified" or other such clasification of having to have, or otherwise being called a programming industry terrorist, as some have tried to call Free Open Source Software movement.

I suspect that if it weren't for FOSS this change in the landscape of silicon valley wouldn't be happening at the rate it is, if at all.

But even still the base knowledge has to change, and not just for industry internal use, but for everyone, especially the end users. There is simply to many smaller things in automation to do then to hire a programmer or software engineer for, which freed up time will contribute to allowing the programmers becomming genuine software engineers the time to do the more difficult and interesting things.

Long winded responce perhaps, but trying to point out the road hazards, fake road blocks and detours that never intend on allowing one to getting back on genuine course, to be smart enough to see past the marketeers goals.

Re:Well of course, and its going to get ....

[Anonymous Coward]

Your argument only holds if we only try to do the same jobs, but now with increased automation. A smart industry/society would realise that if the easy stuff just got easier, we have more resources to focus on harder stuff.

Agreed. To add to that, here's what I've learned.

I'm often asked to automate processes and procedures on contracts. I point out that automation...

1. Takes time and care to implement.

2. For complex projects, usually takes time and specialists to maintain.

3. Increases the time per remaining task since the things that are automated are usually the simple tasks.

This means that the number of people might not go down, and that the skill level required might go up, though the quality of the results will go up substantially and the amount of work possible will go up.

Managers, CEOs, and clients don't get it and are confused by this. 'OK...' they say '...but can we use fewer people?' I reply 'Maybe. Maybe not.' and they hear 'you can use fewer people'.

The reason why this doesn't work is that if you are too lean and too specialized chances are that your remaining people will backtrack on #2 above and do the remaining tasks from #3 incorrectly or ineffeciently. At that point, you are a prisioner to the automated system instead of using it as a tool for a job.

Nobody is happy, everyone is frustrated, and you put out crap.

Several things causing this

[luvirini]

Two of the trends causing this are clearly the increased automation and outsourcing.

But also the much higher overtime in larger corporations on scales than was traditioally only seen in startups.

And the fact that a lot of the new things are not outsourced as such, but still developped by small companies and then bought by these large ones.

Re:Several things causing this

[luvirini]

Well.. yes.. it seems that only in Frnace do they have democracy with theit 35 hour work weeks.. rest of of the world seems to be sliding to corpocracy.

Unemployment

[Citizen of Earth]

"The prospect of technological leverage will of course raise the specter of unemployment. I'm surprised people still worry about this. After centuries of supposedly job-killing innovations, the number of jobs is within ten percent of the number of people who want them. This can't be a coincidence."
-- Paul Graham (2004-09), What The Bubble Got Right

(If the doom-sayers were right, then there would be a total of ten jobs in the world today.)

Re:Unemployment

[g0hare]

Old job: Good wage, benefits, retirement, dignity. New Job: Delivering pizzas Both are jobs. One is better.

From TFA ...

[Daniel Dvorkin]

In the last three years, profits at the seven largest companies in Silicon Valley by market value have increased by an average of more than 500 percent while Santa Clara County employment has declined to 767,600, from 787,200. During the previous economic recovery, between 1995 and 1997, the county, which is the heart of Silicon Valley, added more than 82,800 jobs.

And this is happening all over the place, not just in Silicon Valley, and in all industries, not just IT. In other words, folks, whatever you call the current economic situation, it is not a recovery. Traditional aggregate measures like size of GDP, or GDP per capita, or total corporate income -- and the changes in them that have traditionally been used to define words like "depression," "recession," "recovery," and "boom" -- are meaningless if the number and quality of jobs don't keep pace. It really doesn't matter how much the executives and boardmembers are making. If the increased profits don't translate into good jobs at good pay for regular workers, nobody's recovering a damn thing.

Re:From TFA ...

[luvirini]

I agree.. but onfortunately mot of the main stream media is owned by those said large corporations, thus they like to use the things you mention (GDP et all)

Spreading outside Santa Clara County

[eltoyoboyo]

A significant number of tech people were never attracted to the area since the cost of living increase exceeded the salary increase. Companies have moved to spread their tech base outside the main "Silicon Valley" proper. The jobs have spread up the East Bay to Sacramento, while headquarters remained in the Silicon Valley area. Jobs have also spread to other outlying cities. With the advent of cheap broadband in rural areas, software engineers and project managers can live anywhere from Alabama to Oregon and maintain a nice home instead of two bedroom apartment.

Translation

[Average_Joe_Sixpack]

Huge leaps in worker productivity and automated processes are also responsible for the decreased need for new labor

Employees are working longer hours and are expected to put in work during the weekends and holidays (yes, I'm bitter because I am putting in hours today)

Choosing a carrer in IT is like...

[Anonymous Coward]

...choosing a career as a robot assembler.

You're bound to be replaced.

Technology makes things easier and cheaper.

[Anonymous Coward]

Same thing happenned to machinists.

You start off with a blacksmith. Lots of them are needed to do anything and it costs a lot and they are highly skilled and treasured.

Then the blacksmith learns to build metal bending machines. You take a bar, put it in the machine, pull hard on the lever and it bends.

Thus it makes more complex devices easier to build. The blacksmith becomes more highly educated, more refined. Becomes the inventor.

He uses the metal bending machines to build complex machines. shavers, benders, cutters, drills, and such. Those in turn make making more and more complex machines that are larger, stronger, and at the same time more exact and easier to use.

Then comes interchangable parts. Things that took generations to figure out, years of discipline hard work to learn how to build, can now be built in previously unimaginable large numbers AND be more exact AND be made by semi-skilled labor.

Then they build entire factories. Machines the size of apartment complexes. Things so automated and exact that it boggles the mind.

Were is the place for the original blacksmiths that started all this? No were. All you need is a highly educated guy at the top doing the design, and somebody with a IQ hirer then a 105 to stamp out the molds and feed the machines the raw materal.

Such is the same thing with the programmer.

The original blacksmiths were the guys that took individual transistors and designed thinking machines. They used wires coated in varnish and wrapped around metal pegs to build curcuits.

They developed their own languages to go with the custom machines.

Then along came wide use of intergrated curcuits. Discs and memory to store instructions. Machine language became well understood technology and people built and documented assembly.

Then you had standardizations happenning. Fewer new unique machines were built and ones that were created were built with a eye on backward compatability with previous generations of computers.

Then along came C and Unix to make realy portable programs. Fewer and fewer machine archatectures were built, with standardized abstractions and ISAs for compatability.

All the computers resembled each other in operation and performance. They became faster and faster. Software that was not portable became obsolete as soon as it was finished written.

Now we have a few archatectures. They resemble each other closely in theory and executions. Portable software is the norm. Nobody fucks around in assembly unless they absolutely have to and that's avoided as much as possible.

Nobody is hand-making curcuits. Nobody is building memory from hand or wiring up peg boards. It's all done thru IDE's and thru standardized libraries provided by large monolythic system developers. The computer is disposable and faster then ever, the software can be gotten from the internet in minutes and new programs can be written in weeks that would of taken years to accomplish just a couple decades ago.

That's how technology works. It makes doing complex things very easy.

A person can go into Enlightenment 0.17 or use Python with Gstreamer framework to build a DVD player with fewer then 100 lines of code, and have it run on AIX, PPC, ARM, x86, x86-64, IA64, Sparc and others with almost the same level of effort.

7 it was very expensive just to have a computer that could even play DVDs.

Designers/Administrators get paid

[putko]

From reading this, and another article by Richtel about US mom and pop businesses outsourcing their manufacturing, it seems that people who run things or design things still have jobs. That's just not many people.

The assembly has moved to China. You probably don't want those jobs anyway -- when they were here they were lousy jobs, but now they are unthinkable (unless you like breathing lead). Design and prototyping still gets done in Silicon Valley.

Even so, actual engineering is moving to Taiwan. Imagine you want to make a board. The assembly guys (Chinese, in Shanghai) need to talk to the engineer and ask some questions about a substitution. Better if he is Chinese in Taiwan, right?

Even more disturbing (as a non-Chinese-speaking American) is that actual innovation (the stuff we are supposed to be good at) is getting done in Taiwan. E.g. stuff that allows a cheapo processor to have 5 fast ethernet interfaces. Your routers were probably designed in Taiwan, and labled "Cisco" or "D-Link". But Cisco didn't design it -- it was probably someone like these guys: Zyxel (Taiwan)

Americans need to lose the laziness and start working harder (if they want to be able to pay for enough gas to fill a SUV). This is inevitable. As long as there was no China, the Taiwanese could make decent money on the bottom. Now that Red China is here, they are getting pushed up; they have to do fancier work, or they will live like the Chicoms.

If the Africans ever get their act together, their wages will be lower than the Chinese, and that will be it for the rag trade. North Carolina will not make any textiles/clothing at that point.

Re:Designers/Administrators get paid

[stevew]

Actually, you seem to miss the point of the article. Americans are MORE productive - We're getting the same or more production out of our technology workers with few people. How is that NOT working harder??????

I'll use myself as an example. I just got of of a project, i.e. a chip design where the final place & route, timing analysis, etc. was handled by two people on my company's side (working 90 hour weeks for a month solid - I was one of them.) Did I receive overtime - Nope.

The simple fact is - if you want to keep yourself employed, even though your "hourly" rates drops in half due to the required hours, you'll likely work them.

Others earlier mentioned burn-out. That is result of these kind of hours will cause.

Yet the proposition is still the same. The engineer in the Valley is working HARDER than his counterparts in other places in the measurable area of productivity. (Note that the typical engineer in the valley will be of european decent or from India of China or Korea or..., i.e. the place is VERY metropolitan!)

Re:Designers/Administrators get paid

[drsquare]

First, I don't think the average worker is lazy. They're just not dirt poor and have to work 90 hours a week at $.10 an hour to survive.

Well, if someone in a sweatshop in the Far East is working 90 hour weeks at $0.10 an hour just to pay off their family's debts, they yeah, in comparison you're incredibly lazy, especially considering what you get for your work.

The general attitude in this discussion seems to be:
If you're born in America, you deserve an easier job, more money and a better standard of living than someone who wasn't born in America.

If someone in a third world country is working all the hours God gives, just to keep his family fed living in a mud hut, surely it's not too much to ask for a spoilt American to put in a comparable amount of hours for his life in a large, air-conditioned house with fresh food, electricity, indoor plumbing, Internet, SUV and all the luxuries associated with living in America.

The current situation is, you're doing less, and getting MUCH more, and you're complaining because the people getting less might be getting a bit more, and you might be getting less and having to do a bit more. I think this is actually a fair situation. Just because you're an American citizen doesn't mean you're of a higher race, with everyone else existing to be your servant. You're no more important or special than anyone else, and if the advantages that were given to you by birth, which you did nothing to earn or deserve, are eroded, and given to those who don't have a thousandth of the advantages and opportunities you have, then so be it.

It's amazing how people on this site, who are supposedly progressive and fair and open-minded, suddenly become greedy and nationalistic when their cosy existence is under threat. No matter how much you complain, you have no right to a better existence than anyone else on this planet just because of which country you were born in. If this were a discussion about restrictions on international Internet traffic and trade, all the slashbots would be saying how it's a terrible thing, that borders between countries are an obsolete concept, and they should be allowed to download and import all the obscene anime they want. But as soon as their employer thinks their job would be done better by someone overseas, they want 3-mile high walls erected around the borders whilst waving the stars and stripes.

Re:Designers/Administrators get paid

[dubl-u]

Americans need to lose the laziness and start working harder (if they want to be able to pay for enough gas to fill a SUV).

It's not so much hard work that I think is required; it's useful work. Americans seem to care less and less whether they're creating value. The large corporations where I see the most outsourcing are also the ones where I see a ton of waste, and much more effort spent on marketing a crappy product than making a better one.

This seems endemic to me. From Enron and Worldcom and the rise of the MBAs to the long-term reduction in graduating scientists and engineers and the huge reduction in long-term R&D, it seems like we now favor people who get a bigger slice of the pie, rather those who make the pie bigger. Exhibit A is our president: a nominal businessman who, as far as I can tell, never created any business value at all.

Hopefully the deserved ass-kicking we're starting to get from India and China well help us get back to basics. But our car industry never really learned the lesssons they should have from the Japanese ass-kicking that they got, so we'll see.

Re:Designers/Administrators get paid

[Rinikusu]

Uh... wrong.

What's "wrong" is the fact that many workers in these countries "taking our jobs" do not compete on an even level as ourselves. They do not have an equivalent of OSHA to keep the working environment somewhat safe, and chains/locks off the doors in case of a fire. They do not have the equivalent of the EPA to regulate the release of toxins into the communities around them. They do not have things like "labor rights" that ensure they can go home on the weekend, or even a paid vacation every once in a while, and forget about medical benefits. And the governments in place are determined to keep their "labor" advantage, so they squash any mention of unions, which exist precisely for these reasons.

What I don't understand is how a so-called "enlightened" slashdotter can be in such a hurry to race towards the bottom of the barrel. How someone can sit there and point to some schmuck working 90 hours a week and say that's some sort of nobility in that. To not understand that labor comes with a price, and humans do not live to just perform some mundane labor. At least we'd hope not. When you finally get a family (good luck with that and your 90 hour weeks for nothing) to support, let us know how many hours you enjoy working.

For me, work is a necessary "evil" that I do so I can afford to do things in my spare time. I learned a long time ago that working 100 hours a week didn't do anything but waste my life.

Re:Designers/Administrators get paid

[imgumbydammit]

It's amazing how people on this site, who are supposedly progressive and fair and open-minded, suddenly become greedy and nationalistic when their cosy existence is under threat.

1. I've never seen a claim anywhere that slashdotters are progressive, fair or open-minded.
2. Of course people get "greedy and nationalistic" when they see the elites in their country shipping off jobs to the third world with carefree abandon, esp. as many of those jobs were created through American ingenuity and American tax dollars. Are you new to the human race or something?

Re:Designers/Administrators get paid

[torokun]

It's not about rights. It's about whether or not you think it's wise to give away an advantage that you currently have.

If you think that letting jobs go overseas will redound to our benefit in the end, then you're making sense. If you think we may permanently lose out if this goes too far, but you still support outsourcing because it's good for your competitor employees in these other countries, then you're not thinking rationally.

If I have bread and someone else doesn't, I'm just not going to give it away. That would be dumb, unless I'm going to get something of at least equal value in return.

Re:Designers/Administrators get paid

[drsquare]

So the 'bread' that americans get for their efforts, and through the efforts of their ancestors, should be given away just because other people don't have bread?

They didn't get the bread through efforts. They work no harder than anyone else. They only get it because of where they were born:

1. American works, gets large loaf of bread.
2. Malaysian works harder, gets tiny slice of bread.
3. Company decides instead to give more bread to the Malaysian.
4. American sits on the dole wondering why the gravy train's dried up.

The world is equalising. No longer will you get guaranteed a higher standard of living and massive wages just because you're born in the right country. And that's a good thing. Unless you're biased because you're an American, but tough shit. America has never given a shit about the rest of the world, and now you're crying because the rest of the world doesn't give a shit about you.

Hoisted by our own IP

[Anonymous Coward]

The trend seems to be get rid of your labor (what good are people except for Soylent Green) and become a pure intellectual property enterprise. The problem, besides only benefiting a relatively small portion of the population, is your stragey is reduced to owning intellectual property and nothing else. What will happen is those other countries will buy all of the US's intellectual property by virtue of their huge trade surplus, leaving the US with nothing. And there won't be a damn thing the US will be able to do at that point, since those intellectual property laws which the US worked so hard to make invincible will work against us.

TFA say employment rising

[Kohath]

If you read TFA carefully, you'll see that employment picked up starting in March.

Leave it to the NY Times to spin the story.

"Profits Up, Productivity WAY Up, Employment Finally Starting to Increase Too" would be a reasonably accruate way to report this. Nevermind that though.

NY Times is the official newspaper of half-truths and selective reporting. It's Micheal Moore without the showmanship.

You are correct, you'd make a decent CEO.

[elucido]

The problem is, most CEOs don't think long term, they think in the short term only. The majority of businesses don't have long term thinking ability, they want to profit right now and get get out of dodge before the business collapses.

The problem is most businesses arent sustainable, most corporations arent operating in a sustainable way, hell the damage we do to our country, our economy, and our enviroment all come second to generating maximum short term profits. Short term profits are more important than long term sustainability.

Re:But where are the people?

[Ubergrendle]

Catch 22. If your company is not in the mode of hiring young unexperienced workers and developing your own internal resource pool, then this is the quandry you face.

Some point over the past decade corporate america decided that employees were 100% expendable, you could hire them part time or on contract if you needed them desperately. Longevity in a company is becoming a rare experience.

Never mind that contractors cost 2x as much as an internal employee; never mind that in specialised industries you can't find the skills you need no matter the price; never mind the fact that it takes on average 3-6 months for a new employee to understand his environment and become productive (its called 'corporate memory').

My favorite bit is that if every corporation behaves the same way and attempts to 'steal' resources developed by other companies, in the end the whole industry has cannibalised itself. No-one is developing the workforce as an asset, so it stagnates. There's only so much 'personal improvement' someone can do with personal resources to develop their careers...

For example: if you're a seasoned developer or operator of MVS or Tandem I'm sure you won't have a hard time finding work. Too bad most companies don't have succession planning in place for their 55+ year old staff...and lots of colleges are teaching MVS skills nowadays, right? It is unreasonable to assume the labour market can respond to this need on its own.

We're talking about different stuff

[Moraelin]

As far as I can tell, your argument basically seems to be "if I do the same job in 2 hours (yes, via scripts or whatever) that a bad worker does in 8, I should get the rest of 6 hours free". Which is a strange request, seein' as it basically asks to set everyone's job requirements to the slowest possible worker.

It's not how any other job works, nor how progress happened. E.g., the reason we have an abbundance of consumer goods today is that, yes, we can produce in 8 hours _more_, say, cloth than a 16'th century weaver could produce by hand. If the line of thinking had been, "yay, I produced 10 ft worth of cloth in 10 minutes, that someone would have needed all day to make by hand, therefore I can go home after 10 minutes" we'd still be living in the 16'th century kind of poverty. We'd have lots of free time, but wouldn't be an inch closer to having today's standard of living.

Anyway, when the rest of us rant about overtime, we don't mean "waah, but they make me work a whole 8 hours a day." What we mean is more along the lines of having to work 12-14 hour days, 7 days a week.

E.g., since Electronic Arts is mentioned, I can't help remember the recent story (you know, the employee's wife's blog) about EA over-working its employees to the maximum. In fact, until some of them couldn't even focus any more. And they were demanding that kind of hours not because the project was desperately over the deadline or over the budget, but from the start. Just because some greedy fuck figured out some version of "muahahaha, so I can get more than twice the work out of them for the same money. And if they burn out afterwards, who the f-word cares about them?"

I find it inherently abhorrent to read about EA bragging about profits and _reducing_ the number of jobs, while demanding that kind of massive overtime.

Now I can see some excuse in asking for short-term _temporary_ over-time to save a project in the final stages, or until more people can be hired to handle the unforeseen load. But actually planning to _fire_ some more, because, hey, you can overwork the rest to make up for it (and then fire them too when they get burned out), has a certain slimeball quality to it.

Re:We're talking about different stuff

[Atragon]

I think the point is that because the person in question is working smarter, why should he wind up getting paid the same as his co-workers while being more productive?

I don't think anybody is arguing that we shouldn't increase productivity, the argument here is that finding an innovative solution to a problem thus increasing your productivity should be rewarded.

If you have an environment in which working smarter merely results in you doing more work for the same pay as the people who are doing less work where is the incentive to be more productive?

The reason is lack of innovation

[cullenfluffyjennings]

Silicon valley produces things where you spend most your time developing them before you sell the first one, then a little time supporting and improving them. Right now they are supporting and improving stuff and selling what they already created long ago. The number of totally new things being developed is lower and thus the lower cost of running the company is lower - pretending this is because of increased productivity is totally bogus. In the long term, companies are trading off "productivity" now for loss of innovation and products in the future. No one is doing cool long term stuff, if an project can't make money in 3 quarters, it's not being done. The VC are investing in things with a short time to return (about 2 years). Start ups are not doing ideas that might take 10 years but could change the world if they worked. And the big companies are doing small incremental changes to existing products.

Re:But where are the people?

[HarryCaul]

I left. Right at 8 years of writing multithreaded high-reliability software for the financical industry, so I'm someone employers look for.

But I got tired of being filtered out by recruiters and clueless HR departments for not having exactly the right buzzwords. And then the jobs that did come up having ridiculously low salaries attached.

I just quit the field, left it. Doing a stable, low-work-level, 40 hour a week for the same money as the low-ballers wanted to pay.

I code in my spare time, and maybe I'll do something with that, but I'm never coding for someone else again.

You pushed it too far, asking for too much for too little.

Re:Where is the bad?

[mi]

So does Wal-Mart when they force US manufacturers to move production to China to meet their low price demands....

And I have no problems with that either.

so the US consumers require even lower prices, so offshore more goods and services so there are still fewer jobs

US, heck, ALL consumers require lower prices anyway... This was always the case. Can't blame Walmart for it.

It's a vicious circle.

Why is it "vicious"? Why does an American schmuck deserve higher pay than a Thai or a Mexican one? By birthright?..

That said, Americans still benefit the most. Shedding the mind-numbing jobs to the less developed countries, we have more opportunities for new, cutting edge, challenging professions.

Silicon Valley may have lost many sysadmin jobs to automation and/or off-shore outsourcing, but the remaining ones are, actually, interesting and -- according to the article -- well paying.

Pittsburgh miners went through this last century. I sympathize with their pain, but I'm glad it is over.

Re:Darn open source..

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. Except that it doesn't. Some people get paid for work on open-source software, both in development and support.

Whats your malfunction son?
I love the head-in-the-sand attitude of the Open Souce apologist. Some people get paid to work on open-source, but some people don't. If it wasn't open source in the first place everyone involved would be employed, and at a good rate as well. Its as simple as that. Let me spell it out to you: If I can get something free (say, Apache) then thats something I didn't support jobs to produce. If its developers starve to death its neither here nor there to me once I have the source. Perhaps I'll hire someone to modify it a bit. If Apache didn't exist then I'd be buying the alternative (and thus paying salaries, health insurance etc. of people who'd worked on it) and then hiring someone to modify it. There seems to be this myth that OSS leads to more jobs but that notion is under any kind of analysis utterly bogus. Its blatant rot but the proponents with a vested interest will keep spewing spurious nonsense and FUD to perpetuate the kind of argument a small child can see through. Its not free as in speech, its free as in IBM don't have to pay for it and can give more money to their shareholders. You cry freedom but you can't see that the Man has pulled off his ultimate coup; getting mugs to work for free so they can scrape up the profit.

The Open Source software community has absolutely no idea of decency or social responsibility. What is the Apache Foundation doing for unemployed former writers of http server software for example? Where's the FSFs love for the people it chucked onto the scrapheap? A cadre of basement nerds put people out of a job and don't give a flying fuck about it. No wonder social security is creaking with people like that coniving noon and night to put hard working Americans out of a job. I'm hardly surprised apologists like yourself don't want to hear it.

Outsourcing

[Anonymous Coward]

What really I find funny about the IT profession, is that all the programming will soon go to outsourcing. Yet Everyone getting Computer Science degrees now, will be waiting in the unemployment line tomorrow. It's really sad, but I'm sure you will all find it true. Why hire someone in the United States for a high salary, when you can just go to another country and hire someone who can do that same amount of work, but for a less salary. The more dangerous thing, is, they can just import code and programming without paying tariffs or shipping. You can simply just transmit it over the internet, because programs are a untangiable object. So think about that, I dropped out of Computer Science, because of the loss of work in the field.

That's why Open Source isn't anti-capitalist

[Infonaut]

A smart industry/society would realise that if the easy stuff just got easier, we have more resources to focus on harder stuff.

Beautifully put, ABG.

I often get into arguments with a good friend of mine who feels that the GPL and other open source licenses are anathema to capitalism. His argument is that if software is devalued and consumers expect software for free, the worth of software will diminish to zero.

My rebuttal is precisely what you pointed to: It's not as if there is a finite quantity of software that can be created. As sophisticated software becomes a commodity, more sophisticated software gets developed. The average consumer doesn't have to pay for the software that runs home computers, but large organizations have to pay for the effort required to build and support specialized software.

The correlary to that is that no technology stays on top of the heap forever. Many Americans seem to think that binary computer technology is going to reign forever as the engine of economic growth. Instead, we should be paying a lot more attention to biotechnology, quantum computing, green energy, and other technologies that have tremendous growth potential.

It's called an 8-hour work day.

[Inoshiro]

The problem is that, by and large, the software industry is stupid.

If you work a 9.5hr shift regularly, you are not as productive. If you had just worked 8 hours, you'd notice that you'd do about as much work as in 9.5hr. That extra 1.5hr of labour at the end of the day, a day where you are already tired of work, and likely to make mistakes, is not good. At first you gain a benefit, but then the lack of leisure time cuts into sleep.

At that point, you arrive for work less rested, and productivity keeps declining from there. You can't recover. It's why, over the 17th through early 20th century, labour hours decreased. The most recent being when Henry Ford proclaimed that thereafter the minimum wage in his industries would be five dollars for a day of eight hours.

I don't know why there is this huge cult around working long hours, with no vacations, and killing yourself with overtime in the US and in tech jobs. I don't hear about people dieing from stress in th EU, where they have 6 weeks of vacation a year.

"if I'm smart enough to make the system work for me, I deserve to do less work"