Slashdot Mirror
Tech Jobs Took a Big Hit Last Year (fortune.com)
Barb Darrow, writing for Fortune: Tech jobs took it on the chin last year. Layoffs at computer, electronics, and telecommunications companies were up 21 percent to 96,017 jobs cut in 2016, compared to 79,315 the prior year. Tech layoffs accounted for 18 percent of the total 526,915 U.S. job cuts announced in 2016, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a global outplacement firm based in Chicago. Of the 2016 total, some 66,821 of the layoffs came from computer companies, up 7% year over year. Challenger attributed much of that increase to cuts made by Dell Technologies, the entity formed by the $63 billion convergence of Dell and EMC. In preparation for that combination, layoffs were instituted across EMC and its constituent companies, including VMware.
Amiright?
We're about to fix that problem, PTL
Time for these folks to go bye bye
Context! Need more context!
these mergers result in redundancies. HR, accounting, sales etc are not the same as tech jobs just because they are at technology firms.
Outsourcing and H1B.
No, last year is all on Obama.
Thanks Obama!
Thousands more job cuts are coming "as companies shift focus to cloud-based computing and smartphones," Challenger warned.
Those folks who are canned won't be able to move over to the cloud and smartphone shit.
And what sucks is that if you're not doing that on the job, taking classes or learning on your own means nothing. You have to have on the job experience to get a job.
That's one of the things I really hate about this field. It's like no one thinks skills transfer.
It's always a race to the bottom with Minimally Viable Product.
I thought the diversity being forced upon Silicon Valley was bringing it to STRONG new heights?!
Anyone who chooses a STEM career path in the Western world needs to examine his or her priorities.
The economy cycles every 8-10 years. We're 9 years into a growth phase, it's only natural another recession is coming. Tech workers are a good early indicator. Outside of companies that sell tech, IT is just an expense. An expense that's the last to get hired in good times and the first to get cut in tough times. I in many areas corporate controllers are starting to tighten the check book - frozen hiring in some jobs, halted projects and consolidation are happening. Some industries were waiting for the election to strategic plan the next 36 months. They have it now and are belt tightening. Tech survived before and it will always survive. Be conservative with money and plan for a rainy day. It's the prudent life strategy.
We're trying to develop technologies to divert the next asteroid, survive a super-volcano and make it so we all can live well even in our 15th decade. I think we do need to work every day.
If I can just reach out with my words and touch a butthole, just one, it will all be worth it.
Seems like the headline should be that hardware jobs "took it on the chin". The term "tech jobs" encompasses so much more. As a hiring software manager with offices in primarily Southern California and Chicago, I can attest to how hard it is to find good candidates. Job seekers in the software industry have a lot of choice. And no, we are not trying to pay a fraction of market salaries, nor are we interested in outsourcing to other countries or take on H1B folks for the short haul at reduced rates (just to ward off the standard complaints on this forum when the job market for developers is discussed)
Where I am, Austin, recruiters are saying it's a candidate's market.
One of the things mentioned is the jobs lost to mergers. When two big companies join up, generally one IT department wins and the other gets thrown in the trash. Dell is in Texas and EMC was in Massachusetts -- I wouldn't be surprised if they just emptied out EMC's offices in one day and sent maybe 2 or 3% of them to Austin. Big companies are the source of a lot of good-paying, middle and upper middle class jobs, and they tend to acquire a lot of people over time. It's inevitable that big clean-outs happen every few years or so. Another huge one the article didn't mention is the HP and HPE demerger, then split-sale of EDS to CSC. That must have been an absolute bloodbath, because I know people who work for the former EDS, HP Services and CSC. All of them are absolutely packed with layers and layers of project managers, account executives, etc. that can hang on for years because customers pay for them. The problem is that big companies have gotten so big that these mass-firings affect an entire industry. What happens when 30,000 people are competing for the same 100 jobs in an area, for example?
And yes, the other thing is the cloud. This one drives me nuts as a systems engineering guy, because the reality is that the cloud just shifts the same issues around in many cases. Your IT guys are not suddenly useless dinosaurs, as some DevOps consultants would have you believe. You still need people with a good grounding in the fundamentals of computing even if you completely rebuild your apps to be RESTful, microservice-y and fully buzzword compliant. Even with access to "infinite" computing resources, you have to deal with new problems like accounting for downtime you can't control, dealing with network latency, huge bills for using services you don't need, and integrating old-world applications with new stuff. The problem is this -- we have tons of people in the systems world who could easily be trained on this stuff. Shifting your focus from managing systems to automating stuff is a big shift, but it's doable; I'm working on it right now. What I'd like to see is the cloud providers work on bringing the IT side of the house into the tent, not just the developers. Microsoft's been doing an OK job with Azure, but they could improve and write documentation that doesn't assume decades of software dev experience. AWS is almost completely focused on developers. I'd write a book, but it would be out of date before it was published. Maybe I should start a video series or something...
Having actually RTFA, big shock: Companies that are getting their shit in markets they were late in entering are laying off people rather than continuing to throw money down the rabbit hole.
Meanwhile, the rest of the industry is throwing money around like a trust fund baby in a strip club.
This is like saying I spent $30,000 last year, so my finances took a big hit. I actually had income, so you know... my debts were paid down, savings were built, and I spent $30,000.
The U.S. Technology Industry surpassed 6.5 million employees in 2014, and 6.7 million in 2015. TFA and TFS say there were 79,000 tech jobs cut in 2015, but there were 200,000 more jobs at the end of 2015 than there were at the end of 2014. Now TFA and TFS say there were 96,000 tech jobs cut in 2016, so I guess we're looking at a job growth of 243,000 in the sector?
Support my political activism on Patreon.
It's over, folks. The capitalist/technological system is self-defeating; on the one hand you have the weird notion that you have to work every day to survive, yet technology increases all of our productivity.
We can't have both at the same time.
Sure you can. It's called doing new things. I'm currently involved in business process improvement at my workplace. I'm converting all of our paper forms into electronic forms. Additionally, I write automation & workflows for those forms. Multi-part forms automatically get routed from one person to another to perform different tasks after each part is completed. Once that's all finished, everything goes into our document management system automatically. So no printing, shuffling paperwork from department to department, or scanning. And it's done in a fraction of the time. That allows the people who worked on those tasks to do other things that we've wanted to do here but haven't had the time.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
We neeeeeds them!!!
I believe they were assigned to kill one another.
So sad, you're too dumb to recognize the shuffling of papers was so much busy work. Your electronic forms don't need to be filled either.
All else being equal, if the supply is more restricted than ever, and the value is higher than ever, then the number of rejections would be lower than ever.
Economics says that STEM jobs are either 1) not more candidate hungry than every, or 2) not higher in value by employers than ever.
If the law of supply and demand are as Microsoft, google, facebook, apple, .... spin it, then those people instead of being laid off would have been "gulped up" by the other companies quickly and had no lapse in employment and no need to put "laid off" on their resume. The non-layoff voluntary severance would have been more than enough to reduce headcount.
It hurts both the employee and the company when a "layoff" has to happen vs. when "natural reduction in headcount" through other means can happen.
So sad, you're too dumb to recognize the shuffling of papers was so much busy work. Your electronic forms don't need to be filled either.
Actually, a lot of them do, due to state or federal requirements.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
${BUSY_WORK} is necessary because ${REGULATORY_BODY} said so.
Brilliant retort.
We're overdue for a recession.
Incorrect - we've been HAVING the recession for years. We are now entering an expansion phase. Everyone else knows this (especially the markets), why do you not understand this?
When the tax rate drops hit you are going to see an unprecedented growth spree from businesses that have been choking on the U.S. largest corporate tax rate for the last decade or so.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I was totally distracted from the topic by the name of the outplacement firm "Challenger, Gray & Christmas". As in (shuttle) Challenger, (Fifty Shades of) Gray, and (Merry) Christmas.
It's like being a super-villain named Casanova Frankenstein.
I see some things that does not add up here.
Instead crying for a ban on H1B why not give H1B more freedom? No one sane will agree to work for less if he can compete at the same level. This way not only H1B will not cut down the salaries but also minimize the outsourcing because people could freely come and work here.
Second thing. I see a lot of claims that H1B are far less qualified. Okay then lets say that is true. Then going with this logic, for someone who has to find a job he would at least temporarily for a gig below qualifications. The lowest you the more appealing you get to the point when one will out compete H1B. Going with this we should expect probably the same amount of complaining but about being forced to work below qualification but WORK!. This is not happening though.
So it seems like the problem is not exactly with H1B or outsourcing at least not entirely. It seems more like someone feels entitled to a job that do not qualify in a field that he obviously is not cut for.
What do you think?
First-world workers in general are taking it in the nuts due to offshoring, outsourcing, and automation.
Nothing says that has to continue.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
As more as more companies use technology in every part of their business, soon nearly every job will become a tech job. This will make the layoffs appear higher, even though as a percentage of the total tech jobs, it's lower.
Better hire some H-1B visas! Americans are lazy and won't get trained in STEM!
We'll make great pets
When that regulatory body has the means to enforce their requirements are met then it is not "busy work". It is "keeping the wolves at bay work".
Canada, although with higher unemployment overall, is trending up. +8.6% in natural & applied sciences and related (category including software developers) http://www.tcu.gov.on.ca/eng/l... See codes http://www23.statcan.gc.ca/imd... Alberta and Quebec are doing better lately. There are wide variations by provinces. http://www.etalentcanada.ca/pr...
sitting on evidence that the Trump campaign was in bed with the Russians
Ahh, Russians - the modern Goodwin law comes into effect.
It's funny you liberal simpletons have such a problem with Trump communicating with Russians - do you even understand how diplomacy is done? It involves talking to foreign governments.... DUH.
Couldn't find our message complaining about Obama telling Putin he would have more flexibility after the election... No "Red" flags there (har har!), no sir!
I'll let you have the last word since you conspiracy nuts cannot help but dig a deeper hole.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley