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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."
We're talking about Silicon Valley here, isn't that where most of the automation is coming from in the first place?
I for one welcome our new self-automating IT-overlords.
This is why unions were invented - to protect the folks in the middle from getting screwed by the fruits of their own labor. Sure, unions cause trouble sometimes - so does anything else , e.g., laissez-faire capitalism results in politicians for sale, Halliburton, and so forth.
In the final analysis, history clearly shows that America, and America's middle class, have done best when unions are strong.
Why does anyone believe Silicon Valley represents the economy as a whole? SV was unbelievably inefficient during the dot bomb era. It's never going to be like it was.
Quick story: I was involved in a company that got $19 million in VC capital. What did they spend it on? Employees. Lots of employees. What were they supposed to do? The idiots in charge didn't care what they did -- they just wanted to grow as fast as possible, and give the illusion of a large company so they could go public. This was the thinking during that period.
You can't use SV to make ANY predictions about the overall economy. That area is too screwed up and too overpopulated.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
And at the risk of sounding wantonly capitalistic, share ownership - i.e. wealth - is far more widely spread than has historically been the case.
Thanks to 401Ks, mutual funds and the like, corporate ownership has become *much* more widely spread.
Some numbers to illustrate my point:
In 1950, the top 10% of people owned more than 90% of listed companies' shares! Insane, but true.
Now, the number is more like 50%. Fidelity's Magellan fund is open to all. The California Public Teacher's Pension Fund owns tens of billions of dollars of shares. Owning corporates - through shares - is something that was practically unknown to our parents' parents' generation.
Of course, most Slashdotters are young and have few if any savings or shares. But over time - and assuming you save instead of buying a 60" Plasma Screen from South Korea - then you too will own your share of corporate America. And that share will pay for your retirement. (Yes, all those retirees are calling out for higher profits from companies, 'cause they care more about their pension than some valley bum's programming job.)
So... I guess what I'm saying is "stop blaming the rich people".
Cheers,
Robert
(Who does, admittedly, wish to become rich one day.)
--- My dad's political betting
I guess the question would be, did you create the macro on Dell time? If they were paying you for the time spent on the macro it would probably technically belong to them.
However, if your supervisor wasn't interested in it then that is their loss. Sometimes people don't want what is best, only what is known.
That is why I enjoy working for a small company (8 people). Every efficiency that we can come up with is quickly accepted and used.
If they were paying you for the time spent on the macro
They were paying him for dooing his job description: copying data entry by hand. Not for his programming. At worst, he should be fired for spending his time doing something else, but he should not have his IP stolen at data-entry wages.
The problem is that at some of those companies that require overtime, if you are getting your work done in 40-45 hours, then they just give you more work.
Last year I left a job like that. When I started (before they required overtime), I didn't mind the thought that I may have to work extra during crunch time to get the job done. The problem was that the company started mandating a minimum of 48 hours from everyone. So if you were someone who could "get the job done" in less than 48 hours, then management figured you weren't getting enough jobs.
There was also an expectation that with more senority and skill, you should be working more and more hours, and they would plan projects for you as such. My boss actually told me (during a time when I was working 55+ hours) that by leaving at 5:00 most days, I was setting a bad example for the newer guys. This is in spite of the fact that I was coming in early and working weekends...
Needless to say, I am now happy working in my new 40 hours-per-week job. :)
I work on an application that is now well into it's maintenance stage. I'm currently doing a feature freeze, and going through all the code, cleaning it up, refactoring APIs, modularising it better, this sort of stuff.
Something I notice while doing this; code quality from the same developer is wildly variable. The same person can write brilliant code in one class, and be writing incomprehensible drivel in another. And when I go to the coder in question, and ask them what it does, and why they did it that way, I hear again and again:
Oh yeah, that code, I was tired/rushed/up late.
And by the time I've had to go over all this code, and clean it up, how much time do you think has been wasted, that wouldn't have been if they'd paced themselves properly?
But that's not even half of the issue. In many cases, the sole goal of the Executives and Board of Directors is to maximize the profit made by the corporation, in order to create the maximum possible return on investment for the shareholder. Thus, regardless of who the shareholders happen to be, they will act in whatever way they feel will produce the most profit.
Basically, unless the employees of the corporation were collective owners of a large amount of the corporation (not necessarily majority owners, but it would make their power over the corporation unrivaled), there would still be a great likelihood that they will be layed off in order to maximize shareholder profits, even if they are shareholders
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As a "30-something" myself, and realizing I have practically no savings - I think the problem runs a little bit deeper than "skipping the purchase of that 60" plasma screen".
I know a surprising number of guys like myself, who worked hard in our 20's and started "getting ahead" in I.T. careers, only to start back at the bottom due to divorce. These often lead right into being forced to file for bankruptcy, compounding the problem.
My 401K savings was wiped out with legal fees, and I haven't been able to get another job that even offers one since then.
It's fine to talk about wealth being more "widespread" due to things like 401K's and mutual funds, but those of us who primarily work for smaller businesses don't often get in on any of that. You hear a lot of talk about the small businesses being the "real future" and "cornerstone" of America - but working for them seems to rarely connect someone to any of this wealth that's supposed being "spread around".
n 1950, the top 10% of people owned more than 90% of listed companies' shares! Insane, but true.
Now, the number is more like 50%
Sure, but what percentage of workers were employed by listed companies in 1950 vs today?
Joe's grandfather owned a hardware store in 1950. He might not have owned any stock but it's didn't matter that much becuase he owned the whole store.
Joe doesn't own a hardware store. He works for Osh. As a corporate employee, he either owns stock or he owns nothing.
Corporate America has expanded a great deal since 1950 at the expense of sole propriterships and partnerships. The rank and file now own more stock then they did in 1950. But do they actually own more of the means of production? That's not clear.
The bit in question:
Now, almost everyone agrees that Silicon Valley is coming back, and employment there grew from March to May, but the area still has about 10,000 fewer jobs than there were a year ago.
Come off it. You say everything but the two magical words: "liberal bias". They're reporting on a general trend. In the context, a slight upturn deserves a paragraph, but it's not the thrust of their (cogent, imho) point.
Okay, so a philosopher, a philologist, and a philatelist walk into a bar...
So, if your project truck number is 2, you could afford to lose one member of staff due to a random event (sickness, quitting, etc.) but not two.
I agree. I don't know any unemployed programmers in the valley right now. In fact, most of my friends are looking for good programmers to hire. My most unemployable friend (a sysadmin who never smiles) just got a job.
I'm not sure I blame political correctness - I just don't think NYT has picked up on that story. I do think they enjoy reporting some bad news about the economy.
At least in my silicon valley experience, in 2000 it was 5 programmers to every manager and we did real implementation. Today it's 1 programmer to every 5 managers. All the work is in developing specs for products and developing business relations with vendors, but not in implementing any product. The implementation of the products is done by Asian companies who pay fees to use our specs, so it's not officially outsourcing even though it is.
It's efficient allright and writing specs for products is much more politically correct than outsourcing the product development.
Whether you call it improved efficiency or outsourcing, improved efficiency is basically another way of saying outsourcing.