Slashdot Mirror
Tracking the IT Job Market with a Bot
atlantageek writes "Is the
IT job market improving? Is the growth in Unix or Windows? Should I
study Data Warehousing or E-Commerce? Identify the recent trends with
CJ Miner, a small tool I've written that has been monitoring the Computer Jobs website for the
last year."
"track how the computerjobs.com website has been doing"?
Ive written an advanced bot, plz hire me.
1) How many of these ads are actually real?
2) What do these jobs mean in terms of disposable income?
A bot taking another IT related job! Where will it end?
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
One question though: Why computerjobs.com? I'm not real familiar with their site, but are they one of the sites that claims to consolidate complete listings of I.T. jobs from a number of other large job search sites (Monster, CareerBuilder, HotJobs, BrainBuzz, etc. etc.)?
If they really do get a pretty good number of I.T. related listings all collected up in one place, then yes - I think this is a pretty useful little graph/tool.
I've been out of work since the beginning of May, and living in the St. Louis area, it seems to me that there are currently very slim pickings. I keep hearing talk of the economic recovery, but at least around here - I'm not really seeing it.
According to your chart, that would be an accurate accessment too - since it clearly shows a sharp decline in I.T. jobs available in St. Louis since April of 2005. (And worse yet, I'm really mainly interested in the hardware side of things, but if you look at that specifically - you see that in my city, there were only a grand total of about 2 jobs fitting that category, at any given time!) In the whole U.S., it looked like I.T. hardware jobs only averaged around 1,200 *total*, for that matter. Not good... not good at all!
You know if you want to check out how tech jobs are doing why not go here?
Philosophy.
I'd assume it means the employer will sponsor you for an H1-B if you take the job.
However, whenever a shortage of labor occurs in the IT market, the government consistently intervenes by importing H-1B workers to fix this shortage. As a result, the growth in wages is damaged. Working conditions (like working 60+ hours per week) do not improve.
Any perceived shortage in the market for IT labor is illusory. If this shortage were real, it would be short-lived, due to government intervention.
By the way, we see the same phenomenon in the market for unskilled labor: e.g. picking vegetables and fruits. The government fixes this shortage by allowing illegal aliens to flood this market for unskilled labor. As a result, wages (hovering around $5.00 per hour for fruit-picking in Southern California) never rise. Working conditions (like standing for more than 9 hours per day in the strawberry fields) never improve.
The rub is that politicians do not care about Washington's gross tampering in and bludgeoning of a (relatively) free market like the USA. Washington is eager to fix shortages of labor. However, Washington rarely fixes shortages of jobs by, for example, creating more government jobs. The interests of Washington are not aligned with the hopes and aspirations of middle America.
We should close the American market to (relatively) non-free markets like India, China, and Mexico. Further, the American market should be flung wide open to (relatively) free markets like Eastern/Western Europe, Canada, and Japan. Free trade is good -- only when we are trading with other societies that maintain (relatively) free markets.
Should I study Data Warehousing or E-Commerce?
You should be studying Computer Science...
Ever wonder what happened to all those mainframe or COBOL folks? Knowing about E-commerce, Unix, Windows, Java, XML, or whatever the technology or trend du jour is might be impressive now, but in a few years, come the next thing, where will you be then? These things change at the blink of an eye.
On the other hand, algorithms, computability theory, formal languages, predicate logic, etc. don't.
A solid foundation of the theory will enable you to understand and learn whatever specific language or technology you need for the job, and allow you to be nimble enough to quickly pick up and go with the latest trends as the market changes.
-- Samir Gupta, Ph. D. Head, New Technology Research Group, Nintendo Co. Ltd., Kyoto, Japan.
Should I study Data Warehousing or E-Commerce?
You should learn how to provide vertically integrated e-commerce solutions providing dynamic interaction to customers in synergistic markets.
Knowing how to work a sock puppet also helps.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
The chart has an option for "Legacy Systems" which sounds way too general. I mean, isn't everything currently running in production legacy?
Speak truth to power.
Surely, you have to be a US citizen before you can join the military?
Nope. Non-citizens may enlist in the U.S. armed services. Think about it: France has a foreign legion; why can't the USA?
I'm a CS major, and frankly, it's disgusting to see how many people can get a degree and not know how to program at all.
That being said, a language is nothing more than a way to describe a concept. Ask the "trend du jour" people about programming concepts, and you'll probably get a bunch of software engineering babble in the reply. (an experiment of this would be interesting, given that the person wasn't mislead)
My basic belief in learning computer science is to learn how NOT to be a code-monkey. Any idiot with minor interest in the topic of languages or databases can become a code-monkey.
I think Dijkstra was wrong about the cruelty of computer science. The true creulty is that we teach students more than the watered down industry will ever demand. Kind of like putting a professional athlete in a little-league team.
Why is this? One thought that has crossed my mind is something that a prof of mine, who used to work at IBM, once said "Back in the 60s programmers were created, not hired." Because there weren't many programmers at the time.
Now, if people are being trained on the company dime, the employers are going to cheap out. They are going to set a bar of "getting it done" and only demand as much. (we see this today in many parts of the industry)
Steve Jobs once said that "A players hire A players, B players hire C players", where the question was posed "then how do you get B players?" I think that in this case, C players hired people that would become (on average) at best B players.
Over time, these B+C players set the industry standards, both in hiring and development. (for example, if you are a boss and only know COBOL, are you going to start projects that aren't COBOL, with the loss of job security as one consequence, and that the employees currently only know COBOL?)
Which leads us to today and the demand for the "trend du jour" which is just an extension. Where programmers have been forced to ride the wave for decades to maintain bare employability. Thus, the market asks for it, people looking to do the bare minimum supply it, and a de facto standard in the common language is created.
What I'm saying is that if one chooses to enter this industry on the "trend du jour", they better be willing to have to learn the latest fads well into their fifties.
As for what the next trend is, I've heard that the best way to gauge that is to go into any CS department. What they are doing is what you will most likely be doing in 10 years.
Am I open minded towards open source, or closed minded towards closed source?
Or you can use indeed.com, which lets you search all jobs within the last 30 days from almost a thousand job sites (including computerjobs.com).
You don't even have to visit the site to check for new jobs -- it has RSS feeds and email alerts for new jobs that match your search criteria.
Or if you're really ambitious, use their free XML API and do whatever you want with the data.
They'll probably start by scoring all the first posts....
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
Friends, local listings, and university career centers are good place to start. Monster.com usually has a fairly high ratio of people who are actually looking to hire, but you will still probably do better using the first 3 I mentioned.
But how many jobs have he gotten with his kiddie script monitoring one website? There's no alternative to updating your resume, prowling multiple websites for job listings, submitting your resume, and playing phone message tag until you land a job (or, more likely, a contract).
You don't understand. This is slashdot. We form burning urges to automate drudgery instead of live it. A true geek can only pull so many fake smiles and handshakes before going insane. When cornered, skunks spray; geeks code.
Table-ized A.I.
BTW, let me just point out that almost any kind of commoditization helps the economy, including the one of the workforce. For instance, post-WW2 Germany did benefit from cheap Turkish workforce, which contributed to their rebuilding effort. Well, they tend to forget that now :)
The Raven
Now one thing you learn after college a lot more than you learn in college is exactly how to differentiate between jobs. The real world isn't defined as much by the type of programming you do as much as the scope of your responsibility.
Resume readers don't care if you're a Windows programmer, a UNIX programmer, a hardware designer, or a secretary. They want to see if you're a programmer, project lead, project manager, marketing manager, director, etc.
Things like Google, open source, wiki have leveled the playing field to where it doesn't matter if you study hardware, windows, AS/400, or UNIX. These things can all be learned by anyone at any time. In modern companies the skills at any given level of responsibility are being learned on demand as they're needed. Hardware designers one day are being used as UNIX programmers the next day.
Todays differentiation is in how much responsibility you're capable of having. Most resumes are being divided into management, sales and programming and as far as we can tell from the 36 checkboxes, management is the place to be.
And yet if my stats are correct (I work for one of the largest IT resellers in Europe), the Insurance Industry are the #1 early adopters for virtualisation software. I think something like 18 of our top 20 VMware customers are all Insurance or Financial Services companies ;-}
Ian W.
Jobstats.co.uk has been doing this for years, and aggregating counts of listings from multiple sites.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog