Slashdot Mirror
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.
Great it's all going according to plan.
... why we need all those H1B visas: to bring tech unemployment more in line with US unemployment overall. Unemployment inequality affects us all.
Doesn't surprise me. The declining quality of most modern websites would suggest that the industry has simply stopped hiring professionals altogether.
5% unemployment is close to a natural level in a healthy market. The fluctuation around tenths of a percentage points is mostly noise.
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'm down to 25 hours/week already and it feels great.
I personally am looking forward to a 15 hour workweek with still enough to eat and live from.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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. :-)