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

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.

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.

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.