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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.'"
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.
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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.
I've done a brief survey of the jobs on offer and for your convenience here is a summary of the main qualifications being looked for this time round:
and most importantly:
They're farming out the lower end jobs overseas.
It used to be that a single mom could hop on the IT train and start out as a call center rep, then get trained within as a black box software tester, then a glass box tester (where you get more familiar with code), and then a program (er, design and development) manager.
You can't do that any more.
The kind of jobs they're hiring for now requires the kind of skills only a handfull of the human population can get into.
Web engineering? Product development? Creative and innovation services? That's highly competitive stuff, if everyone takes that as a course in college they're still only going to hire one out of ten: the best of the best. Hire mister second place web engineer or innovator and you are doomed to make a product your competition will eat alive in the marketplace. By nature these jobs can only be done well by the winner in a long line of competitors. Think: ten people and one chair in a game of musical chairs.
There is a lot of talent out there that will no longer be tapped. There are a lot of good workers who will no longer contribute to the tech industry at all because they didn't win the cut throat competition for #1 product designer; people who would be quite good at software bug hunting and even customer support. Someone is still doing those jobs, they will never be obsolete - it's just not us Americans any more.
Steve Levy is right - a lack of diversity in the job force puts you at a far greater risk during a downturn. Oh but if he had any idea how truly right he is.
Here is a clue for everyone. There is not a single job mentioned in that article that cannot be done equally as well overseas for pennies on the US dollar. As time wears on, look to see all those engineering, web engineering, product development, and all creativity related jobs, can be done overseas.
The defenders of offshoring also lie a little bit in this story. They imply that offshoring caused a rise in the number of higher end jobs. That is untrue. Technology caused that. There's nothing here that actually shows that offshoring caused a rise in higher end jobs. Offshoring or not, that was going to happen anyway. Their numbers (the replacement figures) were off, too. NetFlix was said to have 100 customer service jobs in 2000. The implication in the article is that we'd only have 100 cust service jobs in 2005. Hardly. Netflix's customer base has grown dramatically. They would have seen dramatic growth in customer service work if they hadn't, undoubtedly, gone overseas. Well, ladies and gentlemen, all I have to say to that is good luck finding a customer service rep at Netflix who will understand your English. And keep an eye on your credit report too. Whatever country whose data center is now processing your information for Netflix is not within the FBI's jurisdiction. If some goon sells your information offshore, guess what? The FBI will never have any authority to bust that sucker. You have to beg that country to arrest them. Good luck. Hope you like your rental movie.
On the other hand, rumor has it (and I cannot really substantiate this) that companies like DVD Empire outsource their customer support in the US to cheaper areas to cut costs. Again, that is what I heard from a self described employee. I say this is highly ethical.
Another alarming note? The article noted another truth: employers are now looking for Master's and PhD's. Soon you will need a post graduate degree to get into the field. What will you do when the water line moves up to PhD's? What degree is higher than a PhD?
Oh, and I forgot. This article does not mention the not so trivial percentage of lower paid H1B workers hired into silicon valley's work force.
This "solid" article is little more than a cosmic sieve with holes big enough for small moons to sift through...
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!