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Tracking the IT Job Market with a Bot

Posted by timothy on from the up-up-down-A-B-B-A-down dept.

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."

12 of 166 comments (clear)

  1. Don't you mean by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "track how the computerjobs.com website has been doing"?

    1. Re:Don't you mean by Scoria · · Score: 4, Informative

      "track how the computerjobs.com website has been doing"?

      That was also my interpretation of this project. I'm afraid that computerjobs.com wouldn't necessarily represent the entire IT market, but rather a very small percentage of it. The software would be limited to indicating various demographics at computerjobs.com, perhaps arguably and tentatively serving to indicate the "competency level" of their members. Without data from many sources, however, you couldn't hope to provide an accurate impression of the overall market.

      Maybe the programmer should sell the collected data back to them. ;-)

      --
      Do you like German cars?
    2. Re:Don't you mean by superpulpsicle · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The bot concept does not make sense. Are we counting JOBS or POSITIONS?

      Some IT jobs make you the webmaster, network guy, database guy and janitor. Other jobs just leave you a single position and hit deep. How can the bot be intelligent enough to separate?!

  2. Dammit! by dancingmad · · Score: 4, Funny

    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)
  3. Very informative, I thought! by King_TJ · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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!

  4. Re-inventing the wheel by Umbral+Blot · · Score: 4, Interesting

    You know if you want to check out how tech jobs are doing why not go here?

    --

    Philosophy.
  5. Re:Quick... by Klar · · Score: 4, Funny

    I'm sorry sir, but the bot seems to be able to do your job better and faster than you can. No job for you!

    --
    Boxing Equipment Reviews
  6. IT Market Does Not Follow Economic Laws by reporter · · Score: 4, Insightful
    The market for information-technology (IT) jobs does not operate according to the laws of economics. Allow me to explain. A shortage of labor is a normal market force, and government should not intervene to counteract this force. Two of the effects of a shortage is (1) to boost wages and (2) improve working conditions.

    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.

    1. Re:IT Market Does Not Follow Economic Laws by Courageous · · Score: 4, Insightful

      A shortage of labor is a normal market force, and government should not intervene to counteract this force.

      Well, except for the fact that you have it all absolutely backwards! When the shortage appears, the government, which is already intervening elects to relax its interventions.

      A limited number of foreign workers (fixed number of H1-B's) is itself per se an intervention. Without this intervention, the market would freely correct itself, through unrestricted immigration.

      So what we have is a market where the government defacto creates shortages (through dejure immigration controls), but occasionally lets up on the shortage-creating phenonomenon, allowing normal market dynamics to function.

      C//

  7. Obviously by eclectro · · Score: 3, Funny

    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"
  8. or just use indeed.com by mthreat · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  9. Nothing new by StrawberryFrog · · Score: 3, Informative

    Jobstats.co.uk has been doing this for years, and aggregating counts of listings from multiple sites.

    --

    My Karma: ran over your Dogma
    StrawberryFrog