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Tech Unemployment Rising In Some Categories (dice.com)

Posted by timothy on from the constant-flux dept.

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.

8 of 182 comments (clear)

  1. H1B, L1B, etc Doing their job by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Great it's all going according to plan.

  2. And now you know ... by John+Jorsett · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    1. Re:And now you know ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:And now you know ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    3. Re:And now you know ... by oh_my_080980980 · · Score: 4, Informative

      Bernie Sanders has.

    4. Re:And now you know ... by radarskiy · · Score: 4, Informative

      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?"

  3. 5% unemployment is healthy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

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

  4. Seems fitting ... by Qbertino · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca