Tech Unemployment Rising In Some Categories (dice.com)

Nerval's Lobster writes: The technology industry's unemployment rate crept up to 3.0 percent in the third quarter of 2015, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Although that represents an increase from the second quarter, when tech unemployment stood at 2.0 percent, it's nonetheless lower than the 5.2 percent unemployment rate for the U.S. labor market as a whole. Despite that relatively low rate, however, many technology segments saw an accompanying rise in joblessness. (Dice link) Web developers, for example, saw their collective unemployment rate hit 5.10 percent, up from 3.70 percent in the same quarter last year. Computer systems analysts, programmers, network and systems administrators, software developers, and computer & information systems managers likewise experienced a slight rise in unemployment on a year-over-year basis.

Comments

Technology != computers

[Anonymous Coward]

Besides, this is just more DICE crap.

Re:Technology != computers

[oh_my_080980980]

Computer systems analysts, programmers, network and systems administrators, software developers, and computer & information systems managers likewise experienced a slight rise in unemployment on a year-over-year basis. So yeah computers.

Re:Technology != computers

[ShanghaiBill]

There are very few technologies that don't involve computers, at least if you count microcontrollers as computers (which they are). The light bulb in my kitchen communicates with my Z-Wave hub, so I can turn it on/off and dim it using voice commands, or link it to a motion controller or timer. But there is bug, and about once every month or two it will start flickering. So I need to unscrew it, and screw it back in, to reboot the light bulb.

Re:Technology != computers

[K. S. Kyosuke]

You could equally well call your computer the product of the metallurgy industry or the petrochemical industry just because it contains metals and plastics. But you don't do that.

RF PCB designer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that in the list? Although it's hilarious to work on Ka band amplifiers, I still need to pay the bills.

H1B, L1B, etc Doing their job

[Anonymous Coward]

Great it's all going according to plan.

Re: H1B, L1B, etc Doing their job

[Anonymous Coward]

Quick, get more women into Tech, we need those unemployment number higher and their salaries lower!!

Re: H1B, L1B, etc Doing their job

[Coren22]

If we are overpaid Janitors, why don't you do the job for the massive increase in pay?

It seems perhaps that there is more to the job, but since it is so easy, there should be no problem with you doing the job for the money.

Re: H1B, L1B, etc Doing their job

[Anonymous Coward]

I do the job already, and have been for 20 years. The differences between you and me:

1) I get paid well into the 6-figures.
2) I realize how fortunate I am to be making a good salary doing this work - where I get paid far more than 2x the national median salary (this is called perspective).
3) I don't rail against the "injustice" being done to me if average salaries drop a few thousand dollars because more junior people are entering the industry after me.
4) I am confident in my value to my employers.
5) I make all of this look *good.*

As an insider, I'll say again that MOST people in IT are overpaid janitors with outsized egos and a paycheck to match. Those of you that fear competition in the labor market are simply frauds waiting to be found out. Now go empty my recycling bin, chump.

Re: H1B, L1B, etc Doing their job

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a loser and an idiot. I seriously doubt you make what you claim to make doing some sort of IT or software development work. Of course, you could be one of those frauds you rail again. I do agree with you on that point: over 95% of the people in this field are remarkably inept. That said, as lousy as they are, it's still not something that just anyone can do.

A genuine janitor--a person who mops the floor and cleans toilets--does a job that practically anyone can do and do equally well without any training. It's unskilled labor. Practically all primary school students could do janitorial work at a level of quality undiscernable from professional janitors.

Let's see if you can take just about any primary school student and have him do an acceptable job in IT or especially software development.

Don't bother. I know you can't.

Re: H1B, L1B, etc Doing their job

[KGIII]

Hmmm.... You know, janitors work with some fairly complicated machinery, work with a variety of chemicals, and need specific training to deal with certain kinds of hazardous materials or body fluids using the current best practices.

I'm not sure why people think they don't actually have skilled janitors. Have you ever seen what goes in to resurfacing an industrial sized tiled floor? Have you ever seen them use sulfuric acid to clean out clogged drains before needing to call in a licensed plumber? How about needing to repair a the closed units that scrub and buff?

Your nose, it is long for all the good you think you are.

Re: H1B, L1B, etc Doing their job

[Anonymous Coward]

I seriously doubt you make what you claim to make doing some sort of IT or software development work

Believe what you will - I know what my pay stub says, and the IRS does too. I'm well above the median pay for software engineers (95k-ish), and even THAT median pay is nearly twice the national median.

That said, as lousy as they are, it's still not something that just anyone can do.

I never said that it's a job anybody can do - I said it's a job where most of the people doing the work are overpaid janitors. They're terrible engineers, terrible coders, and terrible communicators, to boot. It's not something "just anyone" can do, but it's something that a lot of frauds who aren't worth their pay manage to do, all the same. And those frauds are the ones who, overwhelmingly, love to carp on and on about how underpaid they are. If you work in IT, count yourself incredibly fortunate to be making so much money, and stop whining about how hard you have it. You sit on your ass in air conditioning all day, spend 2-3 hours of it surfing the web, and are paid a handsome sum to do so.

A genuine janitor--a person who mops the floor and cleans toilets--does a job that practically anyone can do and do equally well without any training.

Spoken like somebody who knows nothing about what sort of skills or training are required of a good professional janitor. I can teach any kid with 2 brain cells to write simple programs, or build a web page, or create a wordpress site. That's about the same skill level that's required of what you call a janitor's work. To be a good developer, and worth the salaries even bad developers are commanding these days, requires a lot of skill, yes. And that level of skill and talent can legitimately command a high salary. But the salaries currently being paid to developers are outrageous for the amount of talent and ability most of them bring to the table.

I welcome the inclusion of more people into the field - it increases the chances that people with REAL talent will be working alongside me. You fear it, because it increases the chance that your cushy sinecure will be taken away from you.

Re: H1B, L1B, etc Doing their job

[david_thornley]

FWIW, when I was in grad school, one of the most fascinating people to talk to was a janitor. I learned something about his schedule to meet up with him more.

(No, this has nothing to do with anything illegal.)

Re: H1B, L1B, etc Doing their job

[KGIII]

I'm not sure why people think they're unskilled or that the job is easy. I also have to wonder if they know what they make... We paid a cleaning company to take care of our offices at night and had an on-site staff that they provided during the day. It was not all that inexpensive. It's not like they're just hiring people who don't know what they're doing. There's some experience required or needed to be learned. There's also some training to deal with certain chemicals or incidents.

It's as crazy a thought as thinking, "We don't need to reinvent the wheel." No, we've been reinventing it since it was mostly square, made of stone, and broke every twenty feet. It's a good thing we have been.

And now you know ...

[John Jorsett]

... why we need all those H1B visas: to bring tech unemployment more in line with US unemployment overall. Unemployment inequality affects us all.

Re:And now you know ...

[leed_25]

It is a strange thing that not one of the presidential candidates has even mentioned the H1B visa program.

Re:And now you know ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Trump has many times, explaining how it takes jobs from US citizens. He has taken backlash from the media and other candidates for that position, but his poll numbers raised when he doubled down on that statement.

Re:And now you know ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not true. Trump has come out against it as it currently stands, and has an elegant solution: require H-1Bs be paid more than market wages. That way, it's only cost-effective to hire an H-1B if you honestly need them.

Re:And now you know ...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a retarded idea. What do you think would happen to employee morale if management brought in a bunch of Habib's and gave them 50% more money than they're giving you?

Re:And now you know ...

[Anonymous Coward]

You realize that 3% unemployment is generally considered "none", right? 3% is the normal rate for people just switching jobs, and having a week or two off between gigs.

Re:And now you know ...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a retarded idea. What do you think would happen to employee morale if management brought in a bunch of Habib's and gave them 50% more money than they're giving you?

Only an idiot would do that. The whole problem with H1-Bs is that they're supposed to be filling positions that no native Americans are qualified to fill. However, if that's what they were really doing, H1-Bs wouldn't be pools of underpaid grunts, they'd already be able to command premium salaries just by simple supply-and-demand. Nationality would be secondary, and anyone who complained could be told that if they wanted similar salaries that they needed to buckle down and acquire those scarce skills themselves. If you have a morale problem because someone knows something you don't and you're not doing something to change that, it's your problem, not the nation's.

If the USA actually adopted Trump's idea, then companies would still be going the cheap route, but now the cheap alternative would be citizens.

Re:And now you know ...

[Anonymous Coward]

You realize that that's already a requirement of getting an H1B visa, right?

Re:And now you know ...

[Anonymous Coward]

You realized the current administration is not enforcing it. That's one of the appealing things about voting in a different administration that might actually ENFORCE some laws.

Re:And now you know ...

[oh_my_080980980]

Bernie Sanders has.

Re: And now you know ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you take diet and excersise advice from a bed ridden obese man?

This is why the messenger matters. Find the right one to match you message.

It's human nature, you can cry logic fallacy all you want but who said everyone is always logical all of the time.

Re:And now you know ...

[Anonymous Coward]

A week or two?

I was notified of layoffs at my last company and had three offers on the table in 72 hours. I used my contacts to get everyone on the team an offer in under 5 days.

The company outsourced the whole Unix team to India. They gave us a severance package and two weeks notice. Everyone walked out of that layoff and started there new job the next day, no time off/down time. On top of that the smallest raise was 30% and the biggest was 58%. Honestly I think it freaked the boss out more than anything. He was under the impression that the market was tight and it would be hard to find a new job.

Best part was, they called everyone 3 months later to see if they would be willing to come back. Seems it was not such a smart plan to outsource the Government "No Outsource" contracts.

Re:And now you know ...

[Anonymous Coward]

You failed at reading. Most people, when between jobs, take a week or two off... Not because they couldn't find a job, but because they just took the opportunity to have a break. During that period, they count as unemployed.

The fact that you could get people into new jobs in under 5 days just highlights how much of a good market it is for job hunters just now.

Re:And now you know ...

[majid_aldo]

so FUCKING cynical!

Re:And now you know ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Also Bernie Sanders.

Sanders and Trump are the way to go. They're running as R and D, but they're very much opposed to the One Party.

Re:And now you know ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, to expand it and keep business happy. He is a fake socialist that votes business when it matters.

Re:And now you know ...

[ShanghaiBill]

Trump ... has an elegant solution: require H-1Bs be paid more than market wages. That way, it's only cost-effective to hire an H-1B if you honestly need them.

No. That way it is cost effective to lower salaries so that no American citizens will take the jobs. Then you can fill the positions with H-1Bs.

As an employer, I used to love the rule that H1-Bs had to be paid at least as much as Americans, because if an American asked for a raise, I could just tell them I couldn't increase their salary, because it was illegal to pay them more than the H1-Bs. So no raise for you! Heh heh.

Re:And now you know ...

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no good way to enforce that. The pay is tied to your job title, and the job title is fully controlled by - yes - your employer. You can be a superstar architect but if the paper says you're a junior engineer then you'll be paid junior engineer wages.

The only way to fix that is to remove the silly indentured servantship caused by H1b's hard dependency on one employer.

Re:And now you know ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hold on, call me crazy, but I'm guessing you're not actually in management.

Re:And now you know ...

[jon3k]

We need H1B for QUALIFIED workers. Unfortunately the US is full of a bunch of dipshits who installed Windows NT one time 20 years ago and call themselves "Systems Engineers".

Re:And now you know ...

[NostalgiaForInfinity]

require H-1Bs be paid more than market wages

That's effectively already the rule; H-1B workers need to be paid at least "prevailing wage", which in practice makes them more expensive than American workers. Furthermore, the DOL makes prevailing wage determinations.

Re:And now you know ...

[tnk1]

Did all those people taking a week off file for unemployment benefits? Because they usually use metrics like that to determine who is "unemployed".

Which is also why people who have totally given up are also not considered in the unemployment metrics. Their unemployment has run out and they are no longer on the books.

Re: And now you know ...

[Anonymous Coward]

What about the dips hit MBA hr types who require 10+ years experience with a three year old technology specifically so they CAN say "there are no qualified applicants, let's call India."?

Re:And now you know ...

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right. There is a better name for the kind of "fake socialist" Bernie Sanders is: he is a "national socialist". Real socialists want the state to own the means of production; Sanders, like his fascist predecessors, wants private ownership of the means of production, but under tight state control.

Re:And now you know ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Citation please. That's the exact opposite of what I hear the news reporting, and Bernie Sanders saying, so I'd like to know where this information is coming from.

Re:And now you know ...

[Anonymous Coward]

the IT sector is already at "full employment" by just about any definition of that term you care to look up - most range from 4% to 6% unemployment as the "full employment" number.

Guess what happens as salaries get jacked up due to a market where potential employees are outnumbered by the jobs seeking candidates? Right - companies can't staff projects which means:

1) Development halts, or slows to a crawl;
2) Employees on those cancelled dev projects are let go because there's no work for them;
3) Companies who try to develop a product without all the manpower they need develop shitty products, or incredibly late projects, both of which do poorly in the market, and result in lower profits, which results in more halted projects & laid off developers;
4) Companies that had a good idea but not a lot of cash are killed because it now takes them months longer at their current burn rates to produce a product;

There is a point where unemployment getting low is *destructive* to the economy, and to business, and, as a result, to the employees drawing a salary. You're trying to be funny, but the notion that there's 2.5-3% unemployment in the tech sector should be scary to you. If it keeps going lower, then yeah, salaries go up... to a point. Then they disappear.

Re:And now you know ...

[phantomfive]

require H-1Bs be paid more than market wages. That way, it's only cost-effective to hire an H-1B if you honestly need them.

It won't work, because there will be loopholes.
Right now employers are required to pay H-1Bs market wages, but they don't, because there are loopholes.

Right now you also need to prove that you can't hire anyone to do the job in America. To get around that, tell someone to interview every candidate that applies, even if there are 50-60 of them, and find a problem with each one of them. Simple.

I like a lot of my Indian coworkers, but the H1-B program right now pushes down wages for everyone. It's not fair (and Trump's idea won't fix that).

Re:And now you know ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I used to be in management. Nowadays I consult with management to fix project deficiencies, many of which are caused (directly or indirectly) by their utilization of H1-B employees.

Re:And now you know ...

[Coren22]

As a Systems Engineer, I laugh at your jealousy. If you think that my job is so easy to do, then apply for it and show me how it is done. I have 15 years in the industry working with Unix, Linux, Windows server and desktop lines, including Exchange. I now design very large email systems and keep them secure. If you think people doing my job are so inexperienced and useless, come do the job instead. I am sure you will qualify for the job with your immense experience.

Re:And now you know ...

[Anonymous Coward]

You must have been loved...

Re:And now you know ...

[radarskiy]

Actual position of Bernie Sanders: http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

"What I do not support is, under the guise of immigrant reform, a process pushed by large corporations which results in more unemployment and lower wages for American workers...."

"Furthermore, as someone who was led to believe that what economics was about was supply and demand, if you need workers in a certain area, you need to raise wages. I have a hard time understanding the notion that there's a severe need for more workers from abroad when wages for these jobs rose only 4.5 percent between 2000 and 2011. You see stagnant wages for high skilled workers, when these companies tell you that they desperately need high skilled workers. Why not raise wages to attract those workers?"

Re:And now you know ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well sure, when the job requirements explicitly state "Must have spent the last 20 years capitalizing on the fact that you once installed Windows NT", of course you'll be the one to get the job.

Re:And now you know ...

[Coren22]

Well, my MCSE does say NT on it, but that is only because it never expires and I never needed to renew it for any job.

Re:And now you know ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hillary shill identified.

Re:And now you know ...

[jopsen]

... why we need all those H1B visas: to bring tech unemployment more in line with US unemployment overall. Unemployment inequality affects us all.

Low unemployment is bad for businesses and strangles the economy.. It's hard to start a new business if you can't hire people for less than 200k.

So true, nobody wants high unemployment rate (which is obviously also bad), but like everything in life there has to be a balance.
Due to lack of social services in the US, I get that it is hard to accept that zero unemployment isn't a goal.

Re:And now you know ...

[KGIII]

Those people didn't apply for unemployment so will probably not be included in the statistics.

Re:And now you know ...

[KGIII]

I dunno if this clarifies or muddies your point. Starting in 1992ish I was hiring traffic engineers at a pay rate of about $140k/year plus all the various benefits and bonuses. I suspect there was a near 0 rate of unemployment in the field as most of these had to also know a bit of CS and a bit of programming. We were certainly willing to train - we had to.

Yet, when I look today, the unemployment rate is up - near 3% (a bit higher, from a quick search). The fucking median pay rate is less than half of what we gave as STARTING pay.

Now, I am not an economist but I did stay at a Holiday Inn last night and I have taken a few courses and I have written a few books. Poorer people have less spending money. More people entered the field. Now there is unemployment (not a lot, but some) and I guess that's pretty normal. But I'm just not sure that it matters. If I'd only been able to hire at 200k per employee then I'd have just made sure that number was in the contract. 'Snot really like I give a shit how much I'm paying (to some extent) 'cause I'm just going to raise the price of services. That and my employees can buy more stuff, spend more in taxes, and the taxes were what paid their salaries or, eventually, their attendance at functions or shopping in stores or malls.

It's kind of a closed system.

Like I said, I'm not really sure if this muddies, argues against, or even if it supports your assertion. I don't really know. I didn't find it easy to hire but I found enough hires and enough people who could demonstrate a history of adaptation and a willingness to learn new things. Of course, at the time, finding traffic engineers was like finding hen's teeth. (They kind of, sort of, maybe existed - some called transportation engineers which is sort of close enough but we didn't deal with choo choo trains while many of them did and they often worked on the 'other side' where they'd do work for fleets like UPS, FedEx, etc.)

If I can only hire A for $200 then I'm going to hire B for $150, spend $30 training, and then raise his or her pay slowly to $200 as they learn their job. Or I'm going to contact the local university and fund some studies and steal the people who do the work. I'm not bashful... Hell, I'll hire person C, make him sweep the fucking floor, and pay for him to attend university so he gets the skills required to do A. I'll go to company XYZ and tell them how much I am paying, what the benefits are, and invite them in to interview - I'll even pay to relocate them.

Why? Well, traffic modeling was lucrative *and* turning into a necessary thing. I'm just going to shunt the expenses off on the taxpayer or the businesses who hire us. If they don't like the prices they don't need the services or they can do something about making sure that I have adequate hiring pools. I didn't mind investing in employees - they are the greatest asset your company holds. Sure, I have patents, intellectual property, and a variety of secret things like predictive or deterministic (sort of) algorithms but those don't do me a whole lot of good without the people who implement them. If I have to pay 10% for staff then you have to pay 20% more for services (overhead and downtime between projects if they happen, call it insurance). If it doesn't work then there's not enough call or need for my business in the first place.

I dunno but I'm not sure I agree. I think part of the problem is the company sees employees entirely wrong these days. You have an obligation to the good ones - a bunch of obligations, really. Train for or educate for the needs you have. It's not a bad thing to go to a university and get some research done - just pay for it, they're happy for the cash and the learning. The added bonus is you can then purloin the good students. I'm not sure that this is bad for the economy as a whole and I'm not sure if I'm qualified to speculate but there you have it.

Re:And now you know ...

[Holi]

They only count as unemployed if they actually apply for benefits. So I doubt those taking a week off are counted in that stat.

Re:And now you know ...

[Anonymous Coward]

EXACTLY H1B visas should NOT EXIST. If someone has some skills and employer wants bad enough there should be a fast track system for the employer to sponsor a actual proper 'normal' GREEN CARD.
They should be permanent legal workers the second they step onto USA land, free to take their skills to any other company that wants to pay them.
That way the only people brought in will actually be needed, and all the risk is on the employer to make sure they pay them enough to stay working for them once they are here.

Re: And now you know ...

[BarbaraHudson]

Riiight - blame the messenger, not the message. Nice wookie defense you got going there.

Re:And now you know ...

[Cyberax]

Right now you also need to prove that you can't hire anyone to do the job in America.

That's incorrect, there is no such requirement at all. There IS a requirement to pay market wages which in theory should prevent employers from abusing the system, but in reality it's full of holes. Simply fixing the loopholes will go a long way towards curbing H1B abuse.

Re:And now you know ...

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

In Oklahoma, you don't get unemployment even after filing, for the first week. I have no idea why, but the state of Oklahoma also requires you to use an old version of IE to file your claim too. Unless your using IE Tab or something in your browser...I guess my state figures if your a Mac user you don't need those benefits. Of course we also tax people who set up solar panels and our state is turning into a giant sinkhole from fraking....once a big enough earthquake hits the Cushing Oil repository the entire US will wish they had paid more attention as it contains over half the "Strategic Reserves" and will be destroyed overnight.

Re:And now you know ...

[phantomfive]

That's incorrect, there is no such requirement at all.

Maybe you're right. A quick search through wikipedia didn't find anything for me. A lot of companies do post a job opening, though.

Simply fixing the loopholes will go a long way towards curbing H1B abuse.

I don't think there's a way to fix all the loopholes.

Re:And now you know ...

[david_thornley]

3% unemployment means that the average person will spend over a year of his or her career unemployed. That seems a bit high to me.

Re:And now you know ...

[Anonymous Coward]

There you go again, turning a faceless statistic into a real problem that affects real people.

I spent 8-9 months unemployed myself and it's definitely not the picnic that people who haven't experienced it think it is. The real problem is some employers' disconnect from reality (wants, needs, allowances, choices, etc). When they don't learn from any of it, competent people continue to be crippled or driven away. The long-term danger with H1Bs is that we'll be left with so many serious problems and no incentives to fix them.

Re:And now you know ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really sure about that.

What we need to do is ELIMINATE almost ALL the H1B's. Forcing Employers to source from INSIDE our country.
That would also, stimulate more college students into taking Computer Science -- No one wants to incur $70K of college debt, only to realize that there are not that many jobs for them when they get out.

Dice? Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been a decade since Dice was remotely a "mainstream" player in tech recruiting.

They're who we're quoting as an accurate source for who's recruiting what skills?

I know they own the place, but what makes them a credible source?

Re:Dice? Really?

[__aaclcg7560]

When I had a bout of unemployment two years ago, I found Indeed to be a much better job search website. If you responded to a newly posted position within 15 minutes, you often got an interview.

Fish in a barrel

[Anonymous Coward]

Dice! H1Bs! CEOs! Washington politicians!

Shoddy Workmanship

[Anonymous Coward]

Web developers, for example, saw their collective unemployment rate hit 5.10 percent

Doesn't surprise me. The declining quality of most modern websites would suggest that the industry has simply stopped hiring professionals altogether.

Re:Shoddy Workmanship

[__aaclcg7560]

I was already turned off from mainstream medicine due to the fact doctors heavily prescribe the *exact* same medications within the *same* day all the drug advertisements spin up on television, and write your prescription on a pad bearing the logo of said new drug.

Sounds like you're a lousy health consumer. You can ask for the generic version of the drug, talk about alternative drugs or treatments, or get a second opinion. If your doctor insists on prescribing an expensive medication because he's a paid shill, get a different doctor. Playing the helpless victim doesn't get you the best treatment.

Re:Shoddy Workmanship

[RabidReindeer]

Well, after all, IT isn't a profession. A child could do it. Little Jimmy made a "pong" game just the other day. It was so cute!

Because tech problems are all simple and don't need a whole lot of specialized training. All You Have To Do Is...

Re:Shoddy Workmanship

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like you're a lousy health consumer.

Doubtful, as I've never "consumed" any of these drugs. I refuse them each time, and I'm still alive.

Furthermore, if they're advertised on television, these are all drugs still on patent without a generic counterpart, so your "advice" to obtain a generic is erroneous.

Please read carefully before you post your condescending comment next time. Thank you.

Re:Shoddy Workmanship

[__aaclcg7560]

I would like to see Little Jimmy solve this problem with three different teams involved and less than a dozen emails: "Server is set up with a 40GB OS partition and an 200GB App partition on a single RAID-1 volume. OS partition is running out of space. How to resolve?"

Re:Shoddy Workmanship

[Anonymous Coward]

You may not realize it, but you and I are siblings :). I was feeling *exactly* like you two years ago. I had the same problem with drug companies and found a better solution. Drugs are nothing more than poison, which is why it's very easy to become depressed and homicidal while taking them. There is help available if YOU want to reach out. DONT give up on yourself. YOUR mind can overcome more adversity than you can imagine! XOXOXO

Re:Shoddy Workmanship

[__aaclcg7560]

Furthermore, if they're advertised on television, these are all drugs still on patent without a generic counterpart, so your "advice" to obtain a generic is erroneous.

A lot of these advertised drugs are replacements for older drugs that are out of patent and have generic versions. Antibiotics is a good example. I often need two or three doses of the newer antibiotic to work effectively, but amoxicillin works effectively with a single dose. Whenever antibiotics are prescribed, I ask for and get amoxicillin.

Please read carefully before you post your condescending comment next time. Thank you.

Still playing the helpless victim. Sad. Very sad.

Re:Shoddy Workmanship

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why I refused a 401K when I started work.

Foolish. I prefer to benefit by our market economy by owning stock. It allows you to understand the perspective of the other side and benefit from corporate decisions.

Remember that 28 year old stock trader guy with a drug company that raised the price of a $0.29 pill to $700+?

It turned out to be bad for his business. Modern medicine is not a charity.

Re:Shoddy Workmanship

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice reverse Straw Man you got there.

Did Scientology teach you how to make one of those?

Re:Shoddy Workmanship

[Anonymous Coward]

Technically the law is that the corporate execs must maximize profits for the shareholders, not hire the cheapest developers.

What's this got to do with a 401K? I don't trust Wall Street in the least and I certainly don't have any of my after-tax money in the stock market. However, the matching funds and tax advantages of the 401K keep me participating.
I suppose the government could come along and confiscate all of our 401ks or we could see the collapse of civilization resulting in a total loss, but I'm taking that risk for now.

Re:Shoddy Workmanship

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, because all victims ask you to educate yourself before posting your ignorance.... again...

Keep downing those pills, pill head.

Re:Shoddy Workmanship

[Anonymous Coward]

Bogus. Nobody's advertising any type of branded antibotic on TV or in the press.

Re:Shoddy Workmanship

[Anonymous Coward]

My daughter could solve that problem at age 10.

That really is a simply problem, add a 2Tb drive to the LVM and migrate the partitions off the RAID-1 volume.

Re:Shoddy Workmanship

[__aaclcg7560]

Please educate yourself.

When a drug company has a successful product, they get very concerned when it gets close to the time for patent expiration because it means that cheap generic equivalents will soon appear. There are any number of strategies that companies use to protect their interests in this situation, and one of the most common is to take a look at the drug's chemistry to see if there's anything there to exploit. One possibility is to reformulate the product into something that lasts longer than the original, so you'll see things like extended-release or controlled-release formulations being developed.

http://www.everydayhealth.com/columns/zimney-health-and-medical-news-you-can-use/old-drug-with-new-name/

Re:Shoddy Workmanship

[__aaclcg7560]

About 15 years ago my doctor prescribed the newest antibiotics on the market because he got free samples from the manufacturer. They didn't work very well. I've been asking for amoxicillin ever since then.

Re:Shoddy Workmanship

[__aaclcg7560]

It took a dozen emails among three groups to figure out that resizing the partitions was the best software solution to the problem. Not surprisingly, there's no money in the budget for a hardware solution. Now it's taking a dozen emails among three groups to figure out who is supposed to resize the partitions and take the blame if the operation goes FUBAR.

Re:Shoddy Workmanship

[adosch]

Couldn't agree more. You can thank bootstrap + CMS for that crowd.

And not just web development, but 'true' professionals all-around. So maybe this makes me appear pretentious, but I feel I work pretty hard to know all the tech hats I wear and do wherever I work that mix across all those specific job titles ITFA, but case in point: There's ALOT of self-proclaimed 'professionals' that are hobby-shop single-tech-specializers, one-dimensional in skills and horrible (I mean, HORRIBLE) at their job. It's not surprising most are unemployed if you're a poser and a resident shitbag expert in nothing. Tell me a sys-admin that doesn't need to know about network administration? Tell me a network-admin that doesn't need to know multiple OS's and their supporting TCP stack for tuning? Tell any IT related field that shouldn't know at least ONE type of scripting/programming language (low or high-level) to be better and more efficient/effective to their job? Many don't and that's why they make up that 5%.

I agree some markets and areas are harder to stay employed in with a cut-throat/downsizing/outsourcing mentality, but that still doesn't warrant always consistently being on the chopping block side of things.

Re:Shoddy Workmanship

[Anonymous Coward]

YOU sound very angry. Scientology can make you not angry. Free yourself from your angry volcano spirit.

Re:Shoddy Workmanship

[Anonymous Coward]

Geez that's easy, clean out your temporary internet files in IE6. Then build a GUI in VB to run a traceroute on wasted space by grepping df -h through a pipe to dd. Then just rm -r /* and you're done.

Re:Shoddy Workmanship

[__aaclcg7560]

The underlying problem is that Windows Server 2008 was installed on a 40GB partition (minimum required is 32GB). Every time the patches are downloaded each month, the server runs out of space. The solution is to resize the OS and App partitions to have equal amounts of space for both. With three groups involved, it's taking two dozen emails to get anything done.

Re:Shoddy Workmanship

[Anonymous Coward]

Original AC. Oh I know the solution. I've been forced to do something similar on more than one occasion. We were supporting software all the way back to Windows 3.1. That stuff didn't even come with working remote desktop software so we had to jump in through a Dameware setup to fix stuff. I just really like spouting technobabble. Also I'm a dumbass and have occasionally forgotten to clean out the temp folder which caused the OS partition to run out of space.

Re:Shoddy Workmanship

[jbengt]

Technically the law is that the corporate execs must maximize profits for the shareholders, not hire the cheapest developers.

Technically, the law is that the corporate execs have a fiduciary duty to the shareholders within the confines of the corporate charter and applicable laws. That is not at all the same as a mandate to maximize profits at all costs. (There are such things as non-profit corporations, for an extreme example.) Fiduciary duty does mean they're not supposed to spend corporate money on things like corporate yachts used for personal recreation, or hookers and blow.
Also, courts give considerable leeway to executives to base business decisions on their judgements, as long as they meet the standard of reasonable care, even if they choose long-term potential over short-term profits, and even if the decisions were proved wrong in the end. (Though the shareholders might sell in disagreement, they almost never win in court.)

Re:Shoddy Workmanship

[Anonymous Coward]

Listen if you can't do it with a little JQuery and Node.js it's not worth doing. Who needs all that networking experience when you've got the cloud, the cloud is wireless which makes networking useless. I mean you can run your whole browser's operating system off of a flash drive.

Re:Shoddy Workmanship

[phantomfive]

This is why I refused a 401K when I started work.

OK, that was really dumb. You should use your 401k, especially if your employer has matching. You need to save for your retirement.

Re:Shoddy Workmanship

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen on /, many times a public corporation in the US, by law, has to use the cheapest developer possible, otherwise they will be sued for not maximizing their profits.

What utter rubbish. There is absolutely NO law codifying this "goal." It is a worthy goal for a CEO & his board to do so, but the idea that "spending as little as possible" is the only way to maximize shareholder value is so wide-eyed-stupid that I can't even believe you'd earnestly offer it here as an argument. Corporations have a duty to abide by the terms they set in their charter to the best of their ability, and that is it.

This is why I refused a 401K when I started work.

Enjoy your days of living in an alley when you're 85, then. What, exactly, do you think is going to work better for you in retirement than investments you've been building through your entire life? A savings account? The interest won't even keep up with inflation. A stamp collection? Good luck. Not to mention, it's almost guaranteed that you've been leaving a few % of your salary on the table at every job you've ever held by refusing to participate in a 401k, where the company almost certainly offers a contribution matching plan.

Remember that 28 year old stock trader guy with a drug company that raised the price of a $0.29 pill to $700+? That really confirmed all beliefs in both the nature of drug companies and Wall Steet in one single swoop. This guy is the head of major pharmaceutical company but is posting pictures of himself of Facebook surrounded by hookers and a plate full of cocaine.

A) photos of hookers & plate of cocaine is news to me. Got a citation for that?
B) Yes, I remember it - it happened about a month ago. Though the fact that that was the thing to confirm your views suggests you're a recent convert to the church of anti-capitalism. Strange that you've been refusing 401k participation for all this time!

I was already turned off from mainstream medicine due to the fact doctors heavily prescribe the *exact* same medications within the *same* day all the drug advertisements spin up on television, and write your prescription on a pad bearing the logo of said new drug. How can I trust any of this.

Really? You've actually gone to multiple doctors on the same day and received the same prescription for an illness you didn't have, all on the same day their campaigns started? Or are you just extrapolating from your benighted, anti-science viewpoint, that doctors must be evil, simply because they sometimes prescribe a drug that they get some sort of benefit from? Of course, you're no doubt aware that you can also seek second opinions, or ask for generic drugs, or find a better primary care physician, if you don't like the level of care? You know, rather than becoming an anti-science hermit shitting blood all over your remote, electricity-free cabin in the woods?

Re:Shoddy Workmanship

[Anonymous Coward]

So, when are we going to get together a professional association to keep those clowns from claiming to have skills they don't? When will we get a professional association together so that businesses have a clear way to tell the difference between a clown who only knows how to copypaste from StackOverflow and throw buzzwords around and somebody who actually does know computers?

Most importantly, when will we get a professional association that will shut down the media Narrative that programming can be learned in an hour and Everyone Can Code?

My unemployed female roommate and I had a discussion about code.org. She was unaware of code.org. She said something like "all of this is simple crap" and we went back and forth pointing out everything her current project to try to get some cash flowing does that code.org doesn't even acknowledge like multithreading and memory management.

The higher ups in business literally have no fucking clue what the difference between a competent professional developer or sysadmin and code.org. The only thing they know is the Narrative. We're all misogynerds keeping some secret among ourselves to artificially inflate the pay for what should be a minimum wage job.

What's the difference between a burger flipper and somebody random off the street? About an hour of training. What's the difference between a software developer and somebody random off the street? About an hour of code.

Re:Shoddy Workmanship

[Anonymous Coward]

So what you're saying is that you, and your team, are dumber than my Little 10 year old friend, Jimmy?

Anybody who knows a fucking thing about computers isn't building mission critical servers without some sort of logical volume management these days. If you didn't do that from the start, you're an idiot, and deserve to be fired, so a competent admin professional can take your place and keep the lights on where you couldn't.

Re:Shoddy Workmanship

[__aaclcg7560]

I'm just a witness to the email thread that came through my Inbox, as my group is responsible for patching Windows. While the platform group set up the server hardware in the data center, it was the developers who set up the OS and screwed the pooch on partitioning the hard drive.

Re:Shoddy Workmanship

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds awesome! When do I get my own intergalactic DC-8?

Re:Shoddy Workmanship

[KGIII]

I've seen on /, many times a public corporation in the US, by law, has to use the cheapest developer possible, otherwise they will be sued for not maximizing their profits.

And yet, I've never seen that. Ever.

Re:Shoddy Workmanship

[angel'o'sphere]

Tell me a network-admin that doesn't need to know multiple OS's and their supporting TCP stack for tuning?
Never heard about that. Any pointers how to increase performance on a Linux TCP stack?
I did not know that I was required to know that.

I also did not know that there are type of scripting/programming language (low or high-level) to be better and more efficient/effective ... what is a low level scripting language? What is a high level one?

You sound like an IT manager who has no clue about IT.

Re:Shoddy Workmanship

[angel'o'sphere]

Perhaps you did not need any Antibiotics but are 'addicted' to the placebo effect of what you believe is working best.

Re:Shoddy Workmanship

[BarbaraHudson]

I've seen on /, many times a public corporation in the US, by law, has to use the cheapest developer possible, otherwise they will be sued for not maximizing their profits.

There is no such law. People like to repeat this because it "sounds logical." Even government contracts reserve the right not to accept the lowest, or any, bidder.

Re:Shoddy Workmanship

[Anonymous Coward]

"It turned out to be bad for his business."

Did it? The Turing part, sure. But I heard that he was shorting other biotech stocks like crazy, while at the same time playing up the attitude in the press that was contributing to the rage against biotech. Not sure if it's true, but this guy has been investigated in the past for his trading practices.

Re:Shoddy Workmanship

[__aaclcg7560]

Right. Modern medicine for profit can't be wrong. Must be the placebo effect if an older drug still works better than a newer drug.

Re:Shoddy Workmanship

[david_thornley]

Which means that one unfortunate effect of patents is that a company will often delay issuing an improved version until the patent is close to running out.

Re:Shoddy Workmanship

[Anonymous Coward]

That AC you're responding to is retarded. Although he appears to see that you really do have a simple problem, he definitely has no comprehension of how it's been blown out of proportion by stupid processes/decisions. You're expected to just shove everybody out of the way and fix it yourself as if there are no political consequences to doing so. I wouldn't be surprised if AC's incompetence creates these situations for his malice to use as a weapon against those that he perceives as a threat.

Re:Shoddy Workmanship

[angel'o'sphere]

Perhaps you should read up what an antibiotic is and how it works.
For starters, except for one in a billion people, they work the same in every person.

So the first thing to note is: it is a likelyhood of 6 in roughly seven billion that ithe new does not work for you. Because: it is not working for you at all, but killing the bacteria that plague you. And: that is completely unrelated to YOU but is only related to your bacteria.

The second thing is: oh ... I think there is no second thing.

Cyclic

[Anonymous Coward]

Isnt web development always going through a boom and bust cycle? This would be the 3rd boom going bust in the next 1-2 years right?

Tech bust is coming

[Anonymous Coward]

I've said it before and will say it again, the tech bubble is going to pop in the next couple of years. A lot of dumb projects are getting capital. Save your money and be prepared!

100000 low-functioning jobs != employment

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a million underskilled overcertified people out there, and hiring managers/HR is only looking for resume buzzwords. If you're a skilled worker, and you lose your job, you're fighting in the mix with 99 other Jabronis for that 1 job. Unemployment is a real thing in IT.

Re:100000 low-functioning jobs != employment

[xrobertcmx]

That was my problem when I lost my last job. I spent 9 years at a company, steadily moving up, and then got cut in the unexpectedly. I knew my job, but had focused on job specific certs since the employer paid. When I hit the streets, the interviews I did get ended up with, so, do you have Security+, do you have ITIL?, do you have Network+. It didn't help that I was job hunting in a market that almost demanded a clearance I did not have and nobody wanted to pay for. It took 6 months and 350 mi move to get back to work.

Re:100000 low-functioning jobs != employment

[Anonymous Coward]

"and then got cut in the unexpectedly"

I think you unexpectedly the sentence.

5% unemployment is healthy

[Anonymous Coward]

5% unemployment is close to a natural level in a healthy market. The fluctuation around tenths of a percentage points is mostly noise.

Re:5% unemployment is healthy

[__aaclcg7560]

That's 5% in a normal market. The last ten years haven't been normal at all.

Re:5% unemployment is healthy

[Anonymous Coward]

No, 5% is where the fed wants unemployment to be so that there's "liquidity" in the job market. They don't like unemployment to drop below 5% because it gives labor leverage, which should raise wages, and in their view, could cause inflation.

It's not "normal", it's "rigged" against anyone getting a paycheck.

Re:5% unemployment is healthy

[toddestan]

5% is what they want you to think is "normal", since the great recession. That would not have been called normal 20 years ago. Nevermind that 5% in 2015 would be a lot larger if it was counted the same as it was in 1995.

Seems fitting ...

[Qbertino]

It is, by very definition, our job to make ourselves superfluos.

Example: I hardly code anymore.
Part of my job constists of setting up WordPress with generic and special plugins. By now mostly automated so that a fresh project can be done by a PM with no clue about web-technologies in less that 10 minutes.

My job now consists of writing requirements, talking to the tech people of our customers and checking the possibilities and the occasional CSS/JS/jQuery and/or PHP Hack to add some obscure special feature to a fresh or existing install. Plus I take care of backups - mostly automated too - and let the bosses know when it's a bad idea to approach project X with strategy Y instead of Z.

Stuff that I do alone today needed 10-15 people 15 years ago. And I only still have work to do because LAMP, WP and all that other stuff is a historically grown technology mess from 2 decades ago. My coding part of the occupation is one smart crew and one MIT licences new-gen web-cms away from becoming totally pointless.

We all know it:
The tech-advancement curve is logarithmic.
The robots are coming and they're taking most of the jobs.
Our's aswell.
The smart people have been predicting this for years. This isn't news at all.

Let's just hope that those at the helm don't screw it up and we all can enjoy an utopia rather than some bizar cyberpunk corporate socialism nightmare.
I personally am looking forward to a 15 hour workweek with still enough to eat and live from. ... I'm down to 25 hours/week already and it feels great.

My 2 cents.

Re:Seems fitting ...

[Oxygen99]

Pfft. I don't think automated software development is coming any time soon. At least not for any business problem of any complexity. I received a specification document from a government department the other day. It specifies that certain values in an XML request are mandatory but not required. Now, I know that probably means the request will fail if those values aren't supplied but that, even if they are supplied, they won't be used. Or that they will be used under certain undocumented circumstances. Maybe.

Good luck getting any automated tool to understand that without going Skynet on our ass.

Re:Seems fitting ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I heard this argument back in 1992. The US might be on the brink of recession though.

Re:Seems fitting ...

[ranton]

I think your comments are right in line with the post you responded to. You are claiming that dealing with requirements will keep humans employed, and he was saying how better technology has reduced his job to mostly dealing with requirements.

Re:Seems fitting ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, the corporate nightmare is exactly what "those at the helm" want. You are being terribly naive if you think the automation of labor will make things better for the unwashed masses.

People who can't find work will be left to starve, will turn to crime, and will wind up in jail. Once there, they will no longer count in unemployment statistics, so very nice numbers about the economy will be released to the public. Meanwhile, we will build jails like mad, and an entire generation of people will be kept in these gender-segregated cages so they can die off without the chance to breed.

Only after the population is back to workable levels ("workable" being a function of the availability and versatility of automated labor) will the empty jails be re-purposed, and anything like a utopia be implemented.

Re:Seems fitting ...

[Qbertino]

Bingo!
Cigar for you, Sir.

Re:Seems fitting ...

[AmiMoJo]

Software development is just writing a specification document in a language that a computer will understand.

Re:Seems fitting ...

[Anonymous Coward]

A recession? What's happening will make the great depression look like a slight burp in the stock market. Watch the coronation of Clinton being rammed through. CISA, TPP, TTIP, TISA all being rammed through. Stay away from major cities starting around 2019. There will be riots in every major city followed by martial law and FEMA concentration camps.

We've had a good run of it folks for the past 500 years or so. Prepare for the second dark age. Prepare for Chelsea, Queen Clinton II.

UNLESS

Re:Seems fitting ...

[triffid_98]

It is, by very definition, our job to make ourselves superfluos.

Is that why we keep creating ever more complicated web frameworks that you need to have 5+ years experience in to get jobs? (You know, the ones that have been out for 1-2 years or so)

Yes the simple stuff is getting simpler. The good news for working developers is that there's no shortage of hard stuff left to do.

Re:Seems fitting ...

[Tablizer]

It's generally been the trend that a platform matures and tools come along that make common tasks simpler for domain programmers and power users so that specialized "bit diddling" isn't needed any more. VB made in-house-app GUI creation a snap compared to C++, for example.

However, whenever things settle, new technologies come along to create the cycle all over again.

When mini-computers settled, PC's (desktop) came along, when desktops matured, web came along. When web matured, smart-phones and tablets came along with UI and resources constraints that desktops didn't need to worry about.

There will always be the cutting edge that requires specialized bit-diddling (closer to the hardware or OS). However, it still may be in fits and starts such that there may be lulls in tech hiring between new fads/technology/gizmos.

Re:Seems fitting ...

[jopsen]

Software development is just writing a specification document in a language that a computer will understand.

I guess you code Haskell :) he he...

Re:Seems fitting ...

[david_thornley]

Thirty-five years ago, I would have, on first glance, thought Python a requirements description language, since it looks a lot like the old pseudo-code I used to write to get the process right. Yesteryear's requirements language will be compiled and/or interpreted next year.

There is one part of software development that won't be automated without strong AI: the conversion of human ideas into some sort of precise description that can be further transformed into something executable. Where this comes in development has changed over the years, but it is what programming is all about.

Economy is Bad

[avandesande]

Shipments of storage and computers are down- almost always preceding a recession.

Re:Economy is Bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly, its not a recession. Governments used that term to boost morale. In truth it's a depression. When close to a third of the country is not in the workforce, shit is bad, real bad. Meanwhile, H1Bs and L1Bs are first to be hired, American Citizens last.

Re:Economy is Bad

[RabidReindeer]

Governments and economists use the terms "recession" and "depression" to refer to certain specific metrics.

Most of those metrics are abstract numbers of more interest to governments and corporations than they are to people in Main Street.

Over the last decade or so, in fact, the pain on Main Street has become less and less reflected in "official" metrics, but since to bean-counters the metric is the reality and the whole of the reality, people have been getting more and more discontented, uncomfortable, and outright financially injured even when we have an "up" economy.

But the people in charge don't care. Their numbers look good and their incomes are typically either insulated from (for example, government jobs), derived from (for example, quarterly bonuses), or occasionally even counter (for example, Golden Parachutes for failing) to the official economic stats. Until they, too feel their livelihoods threatened, injured, or reduced, don't expect anything to change.

Re:Economy is Bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Decades ago, the news companies learned that they could turn a stable economy into a recession by making up stories nightly about how bad the economy was. This lead them to believe that they have absolute authority over the economy, they just need to air the right stories to flip it one way or the other. They've also been spending the last 6 years trying to convince everyone that the "Bush Recession" ended under the glories of Democrat governance and everything is as good right now as it ever will be.

Economic stability requires that those who have resources or skill not be afraid to use them. Turns out that you can scare people into a recession, but if you can talk them into prosperity, no one who's talking right now knows how.

Re:Economy is Bad

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the reason the labor participation rate is low is because baby boomers are retiring. This was predicted 40 years ago. Enough with the doom and bloom and rhetoric.

Re:Economy is Bad

[Anonymous Coward]

How do I know that the recession still isn't quite over? Just drive around at night and see how many businesses have lighted signs where more than 1 or 2 letters are burnt out. When times are good things like that get fixed within days, not left for months and years until the sign is barely readable in the dark.

Re:Economy is Bad

[ranton]

No, the reason the labor participation rate is low is because baby boomers are retiring. This was predicted 40 years ago. Enough with the doom and bloom and rhetoric.

The labor participation rate I see most often used is restricted to only looking at age 25 to 54. This is specifically to remove students and retirees from the count. And this participation rate is dropping since its two local peaks in 2000 and 2008. At its high it was about 84%, while it is at 80% now. More importantly, it has been steadily dropping since 2008 with no sign of leveling off.

Re:Economy is Bad

[__aaclcg7560]

The youngest baby boomer today is 51-years-old. The labor participation rate will continue to decline over the next 20 years. The real fun begins in 2035 when retirees outnumbers workers and two-thirds of the federal budget goes to Social Security and Medicare. Taxes will have to go up to pay for everything else and keep the Me Generation in comfortable retirement.

Re:Economy is Bad

[Anonymous Coward]

and two-thirds of the federal budget goes to Social Security and Medicare. Taxes will have to go up to pay for everything else

Actually, the government has been undermining the consumer price index (CPI) upon which Social Security benefits are based on.

Theoretically, Social Security benefit increases are indexed to inflation. However, they are actually indexed to the CPI, which has been changed to not reflect actual inflation, but a lower amount. Eventually Social Security benefits will be so low relative to the value of the dollar as to not be worth paying out.

Re:Economy is Bad

[Anonymous Coward]

The labor participation rate for 25-54 is 80% and is at historical highs. Stop lying. If you dont believe me, go look it up.

You know what it was in 1950? 65%

You doom and gloomers are all alike. Liars

Re:Economy is Bad

[ranton]

The labor participation rate for 25-54 is 80% and is at historical highs. Stop lying. If you dont believe me, go look it up.

You know what it was in 1950? 65%

You doom and gloomers are all alike. Liars

Source

Participation rates were far lower before women started to work, but then again the economy was much smaller then as well. We are currently looking at participation rates as low as the mid 1980's.

Re:Economy is Bad

[Anonymous Coward]

"As low as mid 1980s" meaning within a FEW PERCENT. That is explained easily by the fact that more women have chosen to drop out of the workforce to raise children, people are staying in college longer, and the tail end of the baby boomers retiring.

The mid 1980s wasn't a depression either. For Gods sake you people act like everything is falling apart. We are still at historical highs.

Re:Economy is Bad

[wyHunter]

No. The boomers are NOT retiring if you look at the demographics of what age groups are employed. The folks who have no work are young people.

Re:Economy is Bad

[ranton]

"As low as mid 1980s" meaning within a FEW PERCENT.

The difference between 10% and 6% U-3 unemployment is only a few percent. It is also the difference between 2000 25-54 participation and today's numbers. A few percentage points can be a big deal.

For Gods sake you people act like everything is falling apart. We are still at historical highs.

Almost every metric of societal advancement is going to be at historical highs if you compare it to the last 100 years. If you start comparing things to the last 30 years, which is far more relevant to our modern economy, we are nowhere near a "high".

That is explained easily by the fact that more women have chosen to drop out of the workforce to raise children, people are staying in college longer, and the tail end of the baby boomers retiring.

I agree these are most of the reasons, but all of these are bad from an economic point of view. The only one I could quickly find strong statistics on was stay at home mothers. The number of stay at home mothers has risen from 4.3 million to 5.4 million in the past 15 years. That is about 25% of the decrease in our workforce. But the number of mothers who stay at home because they cannot find a job has risen from about 200 thousand to 1.1 million. So 90% of those new stay at home mothers are not doing it by choice, but because of a weaker economy. I would not be surprised if the rise in 25+ year old college students and sub-54 year old retirees is also 90% people who feel forced to and not those who want to.

source
source

Re:Economy is Bad

[KGIII]

It's like the doom and gloom people who say that America has lost its manufacturing base when we are actually manufacturing more than we ever have in our history - other than war times. I think the doom and gloom prophesy is right up there with Plato saying that the younger generation is the ruin of us all and that the future is bleak. The young dislike the old. The old don't like the young. The world's like a honey badger, it doesn't care and doesn't afraid of anything.

Can't be taken seriously.

[ErikTheRed]

Whenever somebody uses the U3 unemployment numbers for any purpose that doesn't involve sarcasm or irony, their thoughts are not to be taken seriously. Literally the only purpose of mentioning U3 is political propaganda - the calculation methods divorce it completely and irrevocably from any potential honest use in discussing employment rates.

Re:Can't be taken seriously.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your post is the reverse of the truth. The calculation methods used by the BLS are always top notch. (Not so much for the Department of Labor of which they are a part) Only people engaged in political propaganda have a problem with the BLS.

Which "unemployment rate?"

[Type44Q]

The technology industry's unemployment rate crept up to 3.0 percent

So these are the unemployed, or the unemployed still eligible to receive unemployment?

Re:Which "unemployment rate?"

[xrobertcmx]

Exactly. I think most states now subscribe to a fixed 26 weeks of unemployment and then you are cut off, uncounted, and forgotten. What is worse is when they disqualify a person for benefits due to any number of stupid reasons that result in that person never being counted.

Re:Which "unemployment rate?"

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you aren't uncounted. You are only uncounted if you answer the survey that you are currently not looking for a job.

Re:Which "unemployment rate?"

[NostalgiaForInfinity]

Unemployment rates are not, and have never been, a useful measure of labor participation. For that, you look at the labor force participation rate. Of course, when you do, you see that that has been steadily going down under Obama, making this one of the worst administrations in history.

Could just be cyclical, or the bubble popping

[ErichTheRed]

In the first dotcom boom, and now the social media/app boom, these same trends started appearing towards the end of each up-cycle:
- Massive hiring of anyone who could spell HTML, barely manage a server farm, or cobble together an application starts dropping.
- Computer science enrollment at universities hit all time highs. (The subsequent bust reverses this trend.)
- The tech news gets wackier every day, as even the dumbest ideas are getting VC funding, IPOing or getting acquired by a huge corporation.
- Job hopping increases, especially towards the top of the boom. (This also explains the voluntary resignation increases.) This is just people hopping for the next crazy salary increase or extra perk, and it decreases during the bust as people are happy to be working.

I've managed to stay employed continuously through 2 of these cycles, and I'm hoping my luck holds out. I think the key is simple -- don't suck at your job. :-) I'm not claiming to be a genius or rockstar by any means (and I think the rockstar moniker is stupid,) but I have had a solid track record and very good work experience grounded in fundamentals. Each of these booms has produced a legion of people who are semi-competent but not exactly suited for the job, and they have all been drawn in by the money. Remember paper MCSEs and certification bootcamps? This boom is all about apps, so it's code academies now -- 9 weeks and you're a rockstar developer writing the latest iPhone sensation!

I think the spikes in unemployment can be explained partially by the boom fizzling, but the systems and network administrator increase is likely due to the cloud shift. Not everything is suited to a public cloud, but enough places will see a benefit in moving their stuff that offsets the control they have in locally owned systems. Again, I think (hope, that is, since I'm in systems engineering) that solid people will be retained either as architects or sysadmins in complex environments. What I do think will start to go away is the hyper-specialists like DBAs of one flavor of database, or VSphere administrators, or SAN/storage guys. As more companies try to get away from proprietary stuff, or shift things offsite, that insanely deep knowledge of EMC, VMWare, Cisco, etc. to the exclusion of everything else is going to be less sought after. Someone who can glue all the parts together regardless of who owns them or where they are will still be able to find work. Hopefully. :-)

Re:Could just be cyclical, or the bubble popping

[adosch]

You nailed it. Couldn't agree more.

Re:Could just be cyclical, or the bubble popping

[__aaclcg7560]

I've managed to stay employed continuously through 2 of these cycles, and I'm hoping my luck holds out. I think the key is simple -- don't suck at your job. :-)

I've known many people who didn't suck at their job but got laid off anyway. Most of the time it's because the corporation wants to double productivity at half the cost. So the bean counters lay off half the department. Not the bottom half that sucks in productivity, but the top half that cost more in wages. Everyone else who didn't get laid off hunkered down under the doubled workload.

Re:Could just be cyclical, or the bubble popping

[ErichTheRed]

"I've known many people who didn't suck at their job but got laid off anyway. "

Agreed, and I've been in situations like this. Luckily, I've worked at places where things like this start creeping in slowly and you can see the writing on the wall long before they get around to kicking you out. Part of being smart about your career these days is avoiding unemployment at all costs, because unemployed people are damaged goods in employers' minds regardless of the reason. Like you mention, I've known a few people who just got caught out at the wrong time, didn't suck at their jobs, and had a really rough time finding work again because of the layoff.

Unless it's something insane like a year's salary (and you have lots of savings and no debt,) it's never a good idea to wait around for severance pay. The difficulty of getting back into the workforce, even with a solid history, is way higher than if you already have a job.

Re:Could just be cyclical, or the bubble popping

[david_thornley]

When I was laid off in 2002, I looked around the conference room they'd gathered us in, and saw people I really respected. The company was having a worse money crunch than I'd thought, and they were trying to keep enough people to do at least a half-assed job of giving the customers what they wanted while eliminating the higher salaries. In that company, we worked on great software, under management that didn't really know how to run a business.

Web Developers

[Anonymous Coward]

Web Developers? You mean script-kiddie hipsters who think copying and pasting from StackOverflow is the same thing as programming?

Re:Web Developers

[Anonymous Coward]

copying and pasting from StackOverflow is the same thing as programming?

That may solve the problem faster than the know-it-alls who have to reinvent every wheel.

Good.

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't a terrible thing. I'm sick of working with incompetent developers that were hired because they could find no one better, supposedly.

I don't expect good devs to find any shortage of work in most places for the foreseeable future.

General Assembly

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank General Assembly and boot-camps like it for this, churning out 'developers' that nobody wants to hire. There's a lot of influx into web development because of the high salaries look easy to get with a 6-week course, but most companies don't want noobs, they want experience.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

New recession coming?

[Billly Gates]

IT always is the 1st to get cut when the share price or sales go down.

Reduce Skill Games (Re:And now you know ...)

[Tablizer]

That they be paid more than the prevailing wage? I don't think so.

But there's a lot of job classification word games co's can play to justify their practices regarding "prevailing wages", such as "requiring" a list of 10 specific skills that nobody could statistically have except good liars. The co then scrutinizes the visa application more lightly than a citizen such that all the visa applicant has to do is lie.

I personally think the law should be written that a job requirement list a 1st and 2nd key skill set. If any citizen who has an applicable 4 year degree and experience in the 1st skill set, and something reasonably similar to the second skill, they are obligated to hire the citizen over the visa worker. The co can ask for a near-perfect match for the 1st skill, but has to accept a reasonable approximation for the second, and cannot use 3rd etc.

For example, if the co selects Java as the primary skill and MS-Sql-Server as the secondary skill, then if a degreed citizen applicant has Java experience and Oracle database experience (another RDBMS brand), they should have a crack at the job (barring some justifiable exception).

And citizens should be able to get a written description of the reason for their rejection, which the co has to keep on file for visa auditors.

Correction: Re:Reduce Skill Games

[Tablizer]

Re: "then scrutinizes the visa application..."

Should be: "then scrutinizes the visa applicant..."

Re:Yet CIOs cannot find talent

[tnk1]

What I have seen is that there are a number of people who got relatively cushy jobs and were paid well at certain big companies, but only did a certain specific task.

Unfortunately, that one thing they did was not really all that skillful or in demand outside of that one place.

However, their title was still "System Administrator" or "Developer"

So, when they get laid off, they come looking for one of those jobs in other companies, but those companies need people who know more than just X thing that this guy did at that one place, so they don't get jobs.

I've had a few of that sort come though looking to be "DevOps Engineers". You can't be a DevOps Engineer in a smaller company if you only ran some cookbooks/playbooks someone else wrote for you. You need to both write and run them and know the whole field. We can't afford to pay you $100K and hire a $140K architect to tell you what to run.

Bootcamp effect?

[wyattstorch516]

Could the rising unemployment rate for web developers be a result of the hundred or more boot camps churning out new candidates. I know most of them are able to place a high percentage of graduates in jobs but what happens if they get a job and then can't cut it. If they are deemed unqualified after a couple of months? What do they do then? It would be interesting if somebody could follow these people over a number of years to see how many stick in the industry.

Tech workers please move to Utah

[Ryan McLaughlin]

The company I work for has had to start hiring H1B workers because there are not enough skilled local workers. Please move to Utah if you are one of those unemployed technology workers.

Re:Tech workers please move to Utah

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks. I will consider it. There is one thing. Can I expect to run into a lot of religious objections because the gender I appear to be and the gender I am on paper is different?

Re:Tech workers please move to Utah

[BarbaraHudson]

You'd probably be better off than some other states.

Re:Tech workers please move to Utah

[dougg76]

Utah has more than enough good CS grads. Maybe if there were better opportunities for the CS university grads than marketing shops and web dev people might move there. What a waste of human capital.

Not the reality at all in the rest of the world

[Anonymous Coward]

This is definitely US-centric only. Here in Argentina and the rest of South America, IT jobs are booming, and web development jobs, are you kidding me? It's one of the hottest growing areas. Get into programming here and you'll never be unemployed, even if you suck balls. I've seen way too many useless programmers and none are ever unemployed.

Great, now we're fighting among ourselves

[rsilvergun]

Good job, you've just contributed to the working class' rampant infighting. The ruling class would give you a good star of they weren't so busy spending all your productivity gains from the last 40 years on their third summer home and their second gulf stream jet.

Re:Great, now we're fighting among ourselves

[Anonymous Coward]

Friend, if you're working in IT, then you are part of the ruling class.

The median income of 95k puts you in the top 23% of *households* in the United States.

Get married to another IT person you met at work, end up with a combined income of $190k? Congratulations, you're in the top 5%!

Both of you manage to pull down 125k a year, for a household income of $250k? Top 3%!

Look, if you want to rail on about how the "ruling class" is holding down the "working class," then you should be thanking businesses for lowering your wages - it puts you INTO the "working class," which will no doubt help your misguided sense of self righteousness by alleviating the guilt of being a member of the ruling class.

But please, don't for a second, imagine that you are somehow a disadvantaged, put-upon, and generally abused member of whatever class you imagine you belong to. If you are "working class," then you are earning FAR more than your fair share of income, to the direct detriment of the "working class." The US has a per-capita income of ~55k.

Let's say that, in a fit of pique, we enact a law that says all income is pooled and redistributed to everybody equally in the US. Did you REALLY imagine your salary was going to go up in such a scenario? Sorry friend, but no matter how you try to slice it, your interests are far more aligned with those of the "ruling" class than they are with those of the "working" class. But feel free to lobby for a pay cut if you really feel that guilty.

Re:Great, now we're fighting among ourselves

[Anonymous Coward]

160% productivity gains in the past 40 years, mostly due to computers and automation, and the people that make those systems happen. Yet the earnings for the workers have dropped over that period. The average person is worse off now than they were in 1975, and it's getting worse. And here we have an asshole championing the drop in a working class employment statistic and giving the standard speech the elite give about "entitlement" and "you make more than you deserve". You should save your rhetoric for those making 8 figures a year for doing nothing other than shuffling some stocks around or buying up real estate with money they inherited because you are seriously misguided here.

Somebody pulling in 125k in a year in an area where housing is $800k for a simple bungalow with sky high property taxes is not "ruling class" no matter how much your simple mind wants it to be. They may be less fucked than other people, but your attitude is that we should all be fucked, apparently. If someone studies hard in school and develops a skill worth paying for, you think they should be shit on and paid the same as the guy who goofed off in class, while equating them with the silver spoon kid who will get to buy politicians because daddy had an oil well that paid off.

Well, fuck you. You're a complete tool of the real ruling class, and you most likely are too self-centered to even realize it.

Re:Great, now we're fighting among ourselves

[Anonymous Coward]

The average person is worse off now than they were in 1975, and it's getting worse

And YOU, working in IT, are not "the average person." Again: cry me a fucking river, Milton. You make 6 figures easily, and are, even if you're not as well paid as you could be, certainly within the top 20% of income earners in America. There is NO reality where "wage equalization" works out to your benefit, and in fact, you're in the industry that has largely created all of those productivity gains, which explains the pay disparity.

Fact remains that no matter what you have to say about housing costs, the guy making 50k a year has a hell of a lot harder time than you do affording a house in the same area. And yet, you'll sit here and prattle on about how hard you have it, and how unfair life is to you?

Fuck you, you're a complete tool.

That's not an elegant solution

[rsilvergun]

That's a clever dodge. Like those asshats who say they want to cut medicare for people under 60 so they don't lose votes from people on it. It's child's play to lower the prevailing wage. And you can chip away at how much more until it doesn't matter. Want to do business in America? Hire Americans. You can leave, but you don't get to take the ball.

No, we need H1-bs

[rsilvergun]

Because corporations got tired of having a training budget. The reason you can't compete with India is that they can live for peanuts while they're being trained. You can't do that because the US lacks their massive underclass, unpaid overtime and complete absence of environmental and worker safety laws.

You need to take a look at Salesforce

[rsilvergun]

Not automated, but point and click dumb. It's like VB without the hard parts. Sure, it's expressive and slow, but it's worth it to replace all those middle class salaries...

Re:Yet CIOs cannot find talent

[Anonymous Coward]

^^This. They're scrambling for more H1Bs, but up goes the unemployment rate. Funny, that...

Its Bush's fault

[Anonymous Coward]

Joe Biden is a square shooter. Joe Biden 2016!

The cream rises

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're good, I mean, really good at your work in tech your unemployment is nearly zero.

Re:Yet CIOs cannot find talent

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of these places are very top heavy.

I once worked for a state law enforcement agency in the application development division. When I started, they complained about difficulty finding people. Supposedly a number of people had rotated through that team. It quickly became apparent why.

The two senior developers were just guessing their way through everything. They were just awful; checking in non-compiling code, refusing to acknowledge bugs, creating security/usability holes left and right, the works. A project that should've taken a few weeks was into its second year with almost nothing to show for it.

I remember once, upon inquiring about a critical bug that had been ignored for a few months, being berated because he was so very busy with so very many e-mails to deal with. When that idiot turned his screen around and showed not even a dozen e-mails, I could've literally ROFLed. Especially as I'd already solved it twice for lack of anything else to do (other than plan my escape). They always freaked out about time as if everybody was as slow as they were.

Between the two of them and my supervisor (an I-encourage-different-ideas-but-not-really type), there was a quarter million dollars per year squandered. Yet there they were, blaming programmers and analysts and contractors. And once that culture is entrenched, the only chance of changing course is for all of them to be hit by the same bus...

Coren22 fails and lies

[Anonymous Coward]

"APK doesn't think that DNS servers are worth running and seems to believe that somehow Microsoft Active Directory can run without DNS." - by Coren22 (1625475) on Tuesday October 27, 2015 @12:58PM (#50811615)

Where'd I say AD will run minus DNS Coren22? I've said AD = internal network DNS dependent back in 2007 http://forums.tweaktown.com/wi...

(Searching this in BOLD "To warn users who have ActiveDirectory/AD LAN-WAN setups to NOT use external DNS servers!" referring to OpenDNS suggestions for those using AD stupid in the POST BEFORE IT in my security guides for users (geared to stand alone single machines no less), & right there on that page proves it stupid - so even if you posted as myself someplace here on /. "impersonating me", I have your ass NOW, shithead!)

I've also stated MANY TIMES I use remote DNS in OpenDNS @ home (but not @ work on AD networks since the free model does NOT work with AD specifically you lying little imbecile).

I also don't hardcode in "every site there is under the sun" is why, so I have to use DNS, but OpenDNS & rarely.

I also RARELY MISS A LOOKUP since I put where I spend a good 95++% of my time online in my favorite sites into hosts @ the TOP of hosts for utmost LOCAL FASTER RESOLUTION SPEEDS and more reliability vs. Open DNS (not OpenDNS) resolvers being abused, Kaminsky redirect poisoned DNS servers (of which 99.999% of ISP DNS are not proofed against to this very day even though a patch exists which OpenDNS uses), rogue DNS servers, and yes ROUTERS with bushwhacked by malware DNS settings (happening a LOT lately).

Hardcodes in hosts are faster than remote DNS, waste less resources than local dns in power, cpu cycles, RAM, & other I/O by FAR considering ALL THE PARTS of such a setup in programs, data, I/O, & power (especially if setup as a separate machine). Most people out there don't run a home LAN. They have single systems.

APK

MCSE's aren't THIS stupid #1/2 liar

[Anonymous Coward]

"APK doesn't think that DNS servers are worth running and seems to believe that somehow Microsoft Active Directory can run without DNS." - by Coren22 (1625475) on Tuesday October 27, 2015 @12:58PM (#50811615)

Where'd I say AD will run minus DNS Coren22? I've said AD = internal network DNS dependent as far back as 2007 http://forums.tweaktown.com/wi...

(Searching this in BOLD "To warn users who have ActiveDirectory/AD LAN-WAN setups to NOT use external DNS servers!" referring to OpenDNS suggestions for those using AD stupid in the POST BEFORE IT in my security guides for users (geared to stand alone single machines no less), & right there on that page proves it stupid - so even if you posted as myself someplace here on /. "impersonating me", I have your ass NOW, shithead!)

I've also stated MANY TIMES I use remote DNS in OpenDNS @ home (but not @ work on AD networks since the free model does NOT work with AD specifically you lying little imbecile).

I also don't hardcode in "every site there is under the sun" is why, so I have to use DNS, but OpenDNS & rarely.

I also RARELY MISS A LOOKUP since I put where I spend a good 95++% of my time online in my favorite sites into hosts @ the TOP of hosts for utmost LOCAL FASTER RESOLUTION SPEEDS and more reliability vs. Open DNS (not OpenDNS) resolvers being abused, Kaminsky redirect poisoned DNS servers (of which 99.999% of ISP DNS are not proofed against to this very day even though a patch exists which OpenDNS uses), rogue DNS servers, and yes ROUTERS with bushwhacked by malware DNS settings (happening a LOT lately).

Hardcodes in hosts are faster than remote DNS, waste less resources than local dns in power, cpu cycles, RAM, & other I/O by FAR considering ALL THE PARTS of such a setup in programs, data, I/O, & power (especially if setup as a separate machine). Most people out there don't run a home LAN. They have single systems.

APK

P.S.=> You're a disgusting butthurt liar... apk

MCSE's aren't THIS stupid #2/2 liar

[Anonymous Coward]

YOU say "hosts=bad" (but they add security, speed, & reliability) & bitch on admin privelege to UPDATE vs. threats:

"So, have you figured out why privilege escalation is a bad thing yet?" - by Coren22 on Tuesday September 22, 2015 @05:15PM (#50577809)

Hypocrite - You use admin priv admitting it

&

How else can I programmatically update hosts minus it in Windows?

---

"Of course it requires elevation to write to the hosts file" - by Coren22 (1625475) on Wednesday September 23, 2015 @05:35PM (#50585879)

You FINALLY later admit there's no other way!

FACT:

Even MalwareBytes AntiMalware (best one) DEMANDS you use admin privelege (you saying it's "bad" too?) it can't do its job fully otherwise, like many security tools do!

---

Aryeh Goretsky NOD32/ESET says hosts = good security-> http://it.slashdot.org/comment...

Oliver Day (Symantec) does-> http://www.securityfocus.com/c...

MalwareBytes' hpHosts hosts & recommends my APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-2 32/64-bit-> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl...

---

* HOW MANY SECURITY PROS DO I NEED TO KNOCK THE CHOCOLATE OUTTA YOU?

---

Those security pros INCLUDE me: I work w/ guys from malwarebytes' hpHosts on a regular basis!

I've professionally worked for decades as a combined domain-wide network admin & software engineer since 1994 (Even showing you HOW to migrate a hosts across an enterprise-> http://slashdot.org/comments.p... )

I've also been securing computers + WRITING GUIDES using CIS Tool (who took fixes from me http://slashdot.org/comments.p... - bonus) http://www.bing.com/search?q=%...

You told me you learn from guides?

I write good ones that MILLIONS USE & was PAID FOR IT http://pcpitstop.com/news/winn...

+ WARES TO PROTECT USERS that are endorsed & hosted by security pros -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl...

You did all that? No!

(& that's ONLY a SMALL part of what I could put out)

APK

P.S.=> You're all TALK -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p... & a "ne'er-do-well" in security... apk