Hiring Is Up in Silicon Valley for High-Skill Jobs

Carl Bialik writes to tell us the Wall Street Journal is reporting that five years after the dot-com burst, job growth is finally returning to Silicon Valley. From the article: "Doug Henton, an economist and co-author of the report, says with the growth in these creative engineering jobs, a new face of Silicon Valley is emerging. 'Ten years ago, this was an engineering Valley that pumped out chips and computers,' he says. 'Now it's all about creative tech and staying on the cutting edge.'"

Comments

Yes, for High-Skilled Experienced Workers

[bigsexyjoe]

The market has never been that bad for people with plenty of experience. Our recovery isn't providing jobs for the entry-level people who have been having trouble getting in. Therefore, if you ask should I major in CS or whatever for good job opportunities, the answer is still no. When there are more experienced people in India, I suppose most of those jobs will go over, too.

Re:Yes, for High-Skilled Experienced Workers

[guacamole]

Really? What other major do you suggest other than Business Administration? According to UC Berkeley's career center, CS grads are still some of the most employable majors with starting salaries comparable to EECS and actually higher than Bus.Adm and most of engineering varieties. In any case, I hope there will be around more people like you trying to convice the dumb "get rich fast" types that CS is not good for them. Then the CS departments will be a much better place to be in without them. All of my friends who are recent graduates not only in CS but also some other major + CS minor got decent jobs after at most a few months of job search.

San Francisco isn't the Valley

[Yeechang Lee]

I moved from NYC to the Palo Alto area in May 2000. That's right, just one month after the start of the long stock-market collapse and two months after the NASDAQ's peak, although of course no one knew these things at the time. I thus got to experience both the highs (insane traffic on 101, Sand Hill Road absolutely packed for two hours each afternoon) and the lows (significantly-better traffic on 101--admittedly a good thing in and of itself--and hordes of people losing jobs and moving back home each month).

It's important to distinguish between San Francisco and Silicon Valley. The Valley has recovered--traffic on 101 has long since become awful again, as today reminded me--but San Francisco still hasn't regained the equivalent of all those bubble-related jobs that vanished into the wind in the 2001-2002 time period, and probably never will. (I've been living in San Francisco for going on two years now and have yet to meet anyone who is working in a "Web" or "e-commerce" job up here. It's like a neutron bomb; the people went away but the buildings stayed.) By contrast, yes, the Valley lost tons of jobs, too, but at least the Valley had, and has, a longtime core of companies that made real products that do real thing dating back to the Fairchild/HP/Intel days. And on the Web side, of course, Google and Yahoo! are leading the charge. They're down there, though, and not up here. Unless and until another bubble develops, I expect San Francisco will remain a remarkably tech jobs-free (but with plenty of finance, retail, and other non tech-related companies) city on the edge of the world's greatest concentration of tech jobs.

Re:San Francisco isn't the Valley

[beowulfy]

"I've been living in San Francisco for going on two years now and have yet to meet anyone who is working in a "Web" or "e-commerce" job up here."

have you meet anyone? I work at a "web/e-commerce" job, and so do half the people I know here in SF. Your right about there being fewer jobs, but there's still a lot compared to most cities in the US.