Slashdot Mirror
Tech Jobs Are Replacing Tech Jobs in Silicon Valley
An anonymous reader writes: More than 22% of the jobs in Silicon Valley are now in the technology sector, reports the San Jose Mercury News, while the area has lost nearly 156,000 factory jobs over the last 15 years. But 59% of those lost manufacturing jobs were at tech companies, indicating that "the hardware has faded in importance compared with the software," says economist Christopher Thornberg. "It's all about the applications these days." Over the last 15 years employment gains happened in "information" areas characterized as mobile/internet/social media as well as software and tech services -- for example, at companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Salesforce -- and at hotels and restaurants catering to high-tech workers. "It's not just that tech is replacing other industries," reports the San Jose Mercury News. "Tech is replacing itself."
It's just being built in China now; cheaper labor, fewer environmental regulations. (Obviously)
You should replace the person with the tech job of writing headlines with a new person with the tech job of writing headlines.
One interesting thing we're now seeing is how a lot of software is getting worse. This includes not only commercial software like Windows 8 (and 10, to some extent), but also a lot of open source software. Firefox, GNOME 3, systemd and the Slashdot Beta site are good examples of how inferior software is being forced on users, without any benefit in quality, price, capability, or any other traditional metric.
Something else that's interesting about this situation is how it is being driven by hipsters/Millennials. In the past, technical changes would have to be backed up with a strong technical argument. A change just wouldn't happen if it didn't bring some important benefit to the users. But hipsters/Millennials have taken a different approach. They tend to ram through changes, "justifying" the changes by pretty much just telling the users that they are "wrong" when they object to such changes because such changes don't bring any benefit.
Firefox is perhaps the best example of unwanted changes being forced upon unwilling users. Nearly every release of Firefox features some unnecessary UI change that reduces its usability, or the removal of useful configuration options, or the addition of unwanted functionality (like Pocket and Hello), or even the inclusion of ads that are built into the browser itself. Now we're hearing that Firefox will be switching to a Chrome-like extension model, which will no doubt break many existing extensions. When the users of Firefox scream in pain, "No! We do not want these changes!", the Firefox developers ignore their pleas and force the changes on the few remaining Firefox users anyway. After being treated so poorly, we've seen many Firefox users flee to alternate browsers, leaving Firefox with only about 7% of the market.
All of this is contrary to what we'd expect to be seeing, and what we in fact did see for many years. From the advent of computing up until around 2005, when hipsters/Millennials started getting involved with industry, we did see continual improvement. Software would get better as it aged, as is developers learned more about what users actually needed, and what techniques worked best. Then the hipsters/Millennials came along, chose to ignore all of this accumulated knowledge, and in just a few short years they have trashed so much software and ruined the experience for so many users.
We can only hope that the generation that comes after the hipsters/Millennials will be able to undo all of the damage the hipsters/Millennials have caused. This is unfortunate, because instead of this subsequent generation being able to improve things, they will just waste their effort bringing us back to where we were in 2005. So not only do we have to contend with the wasted generation that the hipsters/Millennials are responsible for, we'll also have to contend with the waste they forced on the next generation(s)! The saddest part is that it's all so unnecessary.
That's what I like being an old school EE doing RF/Microwave hardware. It's still high tech, but a slower pace. Things don't change for the sake of change, rather when you can improve upon something using quantative measurements.
I've been working as a contractor in industrial automation for the past 15 years; not in Silicon Valley, though. Purely based on personal experience by working daily on the production floor of a manufacturing plant (machines are developed, constructed and implemented in situ), I'd say that few people have been replaced by the technology that we create. Some people have retired and have not been replaced, some people have been let go, some job descriptions have changed - but most of the people are still there. Actually, technology has allowed the company to expand into new markets, and whole new departments and jobs have been created.
In this specific case, hardware and software is developed in-house, employees (and contractors!) that are willing to learn are nurtured and given opportunities to grow. No in-house gym or similar perks, just solid jobs, an open mind and a certain level of trust that people know how to do their jobs and don't need to be micromanaged. I thinks that's a good recipe. Of course a lot depends on the sector the company is working in.
Everything from 1991 Radio Shack ad I now do with my phone Ray Kurzweil also wrote about this happening in one of his books (mid ninety's).
Obviously "editor" is one of those lost jobs.
And Privacy Badger blocked 41 trackers, this is a record for any web page I've visited.
Editors no longer need hardware in their heads, they rely on software instead.
It should not matter if the employee is adaptable. Schools aren't teaching that anymore though. Corporations have been putting pressure on schools to graduate entry-level ready candidates instead of wasting the corporations time with graduates who know theory and a broad cross section of knowledge and skills.
They are going to have to change their name from "silicon" to something code-ish.
How about Recursion Valley?
Table-ized A.I.
The world is changing faster, that's for sure. After the dot-com crash, and the glut of IT workers in the west, along with H1B's everywhere, I looked at getting out of IT altogether. But, it looked like nothing was safe as I looked for other careers. It's going to be a bumpy ride for our children.
Table-ized A.I.
. . .about 10 years ago, I went back and did grad school (frankly to check a block for promotion. I learned almost nothing I didn't already know in Grad School, with the exception of mind-numbing detail of a technology ('distributed databases') which had already been obsoleted years before.
But the real shock was my fellow students. We were roughly 50-50, older students coming back for a Masters, and "kids" fresh out of undergrad. And uniformly, I noticed that the "kids" had absolutely horrible language skills: they could not spell, EVEN with spell-check. They could not write coherently, they had serious problems articulating a reasoned argument from evidence. In two memorable cases, I was told to accept the opinion from a student on an objective technical issue because they "felt" it was correct, even though it was an EASY dead lock to prove otherwise.
I now teach part-time at night at a local college. I've found that my experience in Grad School was NOT an isolated incident. OK, I'm a Baby Boomer. But you would THINK that basic skills would still be taught. From the evidence, I conclude that is not the general case anymore. . .