Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Tech Jobs Took a Big Hit Last Year (fortune.com)

Posted by msmash on from the how-did-we-do dept.

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.

73 of 119 comments (clear)

  1. Mostly thanks to H1Bs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    We're about to fix that problem, PTL

    Time for these folks to go bye bye

    1. Re:Mostly thanks to H1Bs by Altus · · Score: 4, Informative

      No, as the summary stated its mostly due to layoffs from large floundering companies... of course this is only about layoffs and doesn't take into account any new hiring which may or may not outpace the layoffs.

      --

      "In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson

    2. Re:Mostly thanks to H1Bs by GrumpySteen · · Score: 2

      Data like the shitload of news stories about how Disney laid off workers and required them to train their H1B replacements or lose their severance pay?

      There have been any number of stories that follow the same pattern. It's very easy to find them if you actually look.

      The regulations meant to stop companies from replacing workers with H1B workers simply caused the companies to outsource the work to companies that, coincidentally, are staffed almost exclusively with H1B workers.

    3. Re:Mostly thanks to H1Bs by geekmux · · Score: 1

      No, as the summary stated its mostly due to layoffs from large floundering companies... of course this is only about layoffs and doesn't take into account any new hiring which may or may not outpace the layoffs.

      While this report is rather one-sided, gut feeling tells me if the end result of hiring and firing was a net gain, we wouldn't be talking about this.

      At all.

    4. Re:Mostly thanks to H1Bs by tomhath · · Score: 1

      gut feeling tells me if the end result of hiring and firing was a net gain, we wouldn't be talking about this

      Your gut should tell you that if this was real news the reporter would state the net change, not layoffs without mentioning hires.

      In other words, article is total BS.

    5. Re: Mostly thanks to H1Bs by IMightB · · Score: 1

      Honestly OK by me I've been laid off twice in 20 years, and each time I found a better higher paying job in a few weeks and my Severence was just a bonus.

    6. Re:Mostly thanks to H1Bs by HappyPsycho · · Score: 1

      What does this have to do with H1B1s? If they get laid off they go back home and get hired there, the people this hurts are US workers.

      Even if you kick out every H1B1 do you really believe these companies will hire in the US or will they outsource to another country? You can only raise tariffs so far before they hurt the US more than the intended recipient.

  2. computer companies != Tech jobs per se by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    these mergers result in redundancies. HR, accounting, sales etc are not the same as tech jobs just because they are at technology firms.

  3. Obviously by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Outsourcing and H1B.

  4. They're screwed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    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.

    1. Re:They're screwed by Octorian · · Score: 1

      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.

      This is something that really pissed me off early in my career. It didn't matter how much I learned/tinkered/grew on my own. My knowledge and ability was basically irrelevant unless I could qualify it by related job experience. This was even more frustrating at the time, because I had a stable job I didn't want to leave, but which wasn't giving me that "qualified" experience necessary to get the job I actually wanted.

    2. Re:They're screwed by Penguinisto · · Score: 1

      ...that's where side projects come in.

      If it weren't for doing little side projects that involved the new skills/goodies, I'd still be an AIX sysadmin*. Ugh.

      Go find something that needs done (but no one is really doing) in the company using those fancy new/cool/marketable skills, then go do it in your spare cycles, learning as you go.

      * Funny thing, I became the sysadmin because I had a known habit of side-projects that required using the computer systems. That's how I got into this biz 22+ years ago (the previous sysadmin had flunked his drug test, and my boss at the time thought that his fresh-outta-school EE who tinkered on the work computers would be a perfect replacement).

      --
      Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
    3. Re:They're screwed by Octorian · · Score: 1

      Um... side projects aren't "jobs to qualify experience" when talking to HR.

      For the right kind of company, they can certainly help. Especially if its a small company and/or startup that looks at you as an individual, not just as a name in a stack of resumes. But for the normal way you go through "the process" earlier in your career? I wish someone would have noticed.

    4. Re:They're screwed by sethstorm · · Score: 1

      AIX and "startup" do not mix well.

      --
      Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
    5. Re:They're screwed by tbuskey · · Score: 1

      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.

      This is something that really pissed me off early in my career. It didn't matter how much I learned/tinkered/grew on my own. My knowledge and ability was basically irrelevant unless I could qualify it by related job experience. This was even more frustrating at the time, because I had a stable job I didn't want to leave, but which wasn't giving me that "qualified" experience necessary to get the job I actually wanted.

      I've always learned at home as well as at work. The key is to be able to get noticed so you can sell your non-job experience to your future employer. You also need to apply to places that value new skills.

      If you want to keep learning, why are you trying to work at a company that doesn't value that?

    6. Re:They're screwed by Penguinisto · · Score: 1

      Um... side projects aren't "jobs to qualify experience" when talking to HR.

      Sure it does - your resume can specifically state "I also implemented $buzzword as an early adopter to provide $somethingOfGoodValue to the company." It gives you the provable experience you can point to.

      --
      Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
  5. Leading Indicator by sdinfoserv · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Leading Indicator by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      We're overdue for a recession. However, I don't think Wall Street got the memo yet. Bonds are oversold as everyone and their mother jumped into the stock market. When the bandwagon drives past you, that's when you make a U-turn in the market. I've been buying up oversold bond funds since the election. Looking forward to buying stock shares on the way down after the market crashes.

    2. Re:Leading Indicator by ctilsie242 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The problem is that since the 1990s, everyone feels the crash. Only a few see the recovery. When the economy tanked in 2000, for a lot of the US, it stayed tanked because the manufacturing jobs and steel mills went overseas. In 2008 when we had the economy crash, tech sector jobs have improved, but in reality, for most other sectors, there has not been that much, if any improvement. If other sectors see it, it is spillover from the tech sector (new BMWs, housing going up), or from other countries buying up land in the US.

      I would say the economy peaked last summer, when in June and early July, there were hundreds of DevOps job postings for the local area I am in (Austin, TX). In six weeks, the number of those was reduced by over 90%.

      We do have a few bubbles that may pop. First, the only thing that VCs are spending a dime on are companies that either push ads, suck data (analytics), or both. Even cloud computing hit a zenith in the past year where HP left the cloud market, and Rackspace got bought out. The uncertainty about the elections has also shaken people, and that might just have been enough to start an economic slide. To boot, OPEC is back with a vengence, and oil is climbing, which is also a drag on the economy.

      Then, there is the final nail in the coffin. The Fed waiting to raise interest rates.

      I'm seeing an across the board belt tightening. Public places have hiring freezes. Private companies are looking at technologies like Amazon Lambda [1], serverless technologies, and wholesale, "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead" moves to AWS. AWS may be more expensive, but in a lot of PHB's heads, even if it costs more, reducing headcount is more important, because of the immediate cost savings.

      I think as uncertainty goes on and it goes to outright unrest, the economy is going to not fare well. Especially with so many people disliking the current administration and are willing to monkeywrench to see that it doesn't do well.

      [1]: The main attraction for Amazon Lambda is that companies can fire their OS, DBAs, and hardware guys, and just have someone doing IAM as the "IT department" with devs doing everything else.

    3. Re:Leading Indicator by lgw · · Score: 1

      The economy cycles every 8-10 years. We're 9 years into a growth phase.

      No, it really doesn't. 2000-2013 were like the 70s: one economic cycle moving sideways, with minimal growth. We're about 3 years out of the "great recession", just getting comfortable with the growth phase. People are buying durable goods that they were putting off before out of fear. It will be a few more years before we see the start of real tech sector growth ("social" bubble nonwithstanding)..

      Outside of companies that sell tech, IT is just an expense.

      "IT" is the new buggy whip manufacturer. It's not so much cyclic any more as fading, as much of "IT" moves into the cloud.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    4. Re:Leading Indicator by Penguinisto · · Score: 1

      I would say the economy peaked last summer, when in June and early July, there were hundreds of DevOps job postings for the local area I am in (Austin, TX). In six weeks, the number of those was reduced by over 90%.

      Minor point of order: The term is overused, and passe'. Christ sakes, every sysadmin I know in Portland quickly ran to LinkedIn and tacked the word "DevOps" to his resume last year, even if they never professionally touched any of the common tools or processes involved with the job. Doesn't matter though: Everyone and his dog knows how to run/use Puppet** these days, and thanks to the Forge and hiera, you don't even have to really know how to write a module these days (unless you need to do something unique/niche/etc). Toss in Docker, Consul, Ansible, etc, and you really don't need near as many people who get in there and do grunt-work for your company. Now getting people who can actually put together a usable automation process and who knows how to make it all work at a production level of reliability... different story. That said, you don't need nearly as many of those to make that happen either.

      Anyrate, that's not exactly a usable metric (and neither is any other buzzword, really. I mean, c'mon, that's like gauging the economy in 1996 by how many MCSE job postings were open...)

      ** Let's be honest here: to 90% of PHBs, "DevOps" == "Guy who knows how to use Puppet". Never meant anything else, common sense be damned.

      --
      Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
    5. Re:Leading Indicator by scatbomb · · Score: 1

      I think this last 9 years of "growth" has some major differences with the past. Interest rates are still low which maybe encourages jumping into the stock market. There hasn't been much change in productivity, earnings, or salaries though so it doesn't seem like anything grew except the stock prices. Isn't that odd? I think when the Fed put the banks on life support they just delayed the crash. We've been limping along for 9 years during the slowest recovery ever, and I think maybe it's because we didn't let the crash happen. Maybe these prices are artificial. Maybe it's because the Fed bought up all the bad assets.

    6. Re:Leading Indicator by sdinfoserv · · Score: 2

      Yes, which is why so many prepers are stocking beans, rice and bullets. The fed has been artificially keeping the economy alive with unrealistically low interest rates and silly QE-# programs. So many jobs have been shoved overseas there's not much room left to work outside of tech, medical and fast food. (programmers, nurses and minimum wage) .
      That's where the robot prognosticators fail - it's working people that buy all the crap made by the rich. Throw enough workers out of jobs via automation and there's no $$ to buy the goods and services the rich are trying hock.
      Eventually there will be another crash and with interest rates where they are, there's no tools in the fed box to fix it. The GOP is going to have to jump on the Dem band wagon for massive public works project bailouts - huge infrastructure upgrades, bridges, highways and the electric grid will all get billions just to put people to work. Then will be in a place for things like wide scale electric cars and home electrical generation. but not till then.

    7. Re:Leading Indicator by ljw1004 · · Score: 1

      The economy cycles every 8-10 years. We're 9 years into a growth phase, it's only natural another recession is coming.

      That doesn't seem right. Look at the historical record this century: http://www.macrotrends.net/131...

      Recessions have been in 1920, 1923, 1927, 1929, 1937, 1945, 1949, 1953, 1957, 1960, 1970, 1974, 1980, 1981, 1990, 2001, 2008. That's an average of one recession every 5 years, usually plus/minus 2 years.

      If you limit your view of the economy to just the last three recessions, then you do indeed get an average of one every 9 years plus or minus 3 years. But then you'll need to tell us why you think the last three recessions are a better predictor of the future than any other possible interval.

    8. Re:Leading Indicator by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      What will you do when/if inflation kicks in, and interest rates jump?

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    9. Re:Leading Indicator by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 1

      What will you do when/if inflation kicks in, and interest rates jump?

      Reassess, readjust and buy for the long term.

    10. Re:Leading Indicator by zifn4b · · Score: 1

      The economy cycles every 8-10 years. We're 9 years into a growth phase, it's only natural another recession is coming.

      Are you completely insane? We're talking about the United States here. In case you didn't know we've been going through a LONG economic BUST owing to The Great Recession. We are just now starting to see the job creation come back. I'm hoping we're about to hit a BOOM for a few years. Do you even understand Boom Bust economic cycles? There is a certain line that we have to cross before it can be considered a BOOM as opposed to a RECOVERING. By your logic, you would consider the period during World War 2 to be a BOOM following The Great Depression. The boom came later in the 50's.

      --
      We'll make great pets
    11. Re:Leading Indicator by zifn4b · · Score: 1

      We're overdue for a recession. However, I don't think Wall Street got the memo yet.

      Dow Jones != GDP

      --
      We'll make great pets
    12. Re:Leading Indicator by luis_a_espinal · · Score: 1

      In my experience, that is completely different. If you interview for a DevOps role, you will be asked a laundry list of programs like Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Bamboo, Jenkins, TeamCity, Vagrant, Terraform, Saltstack, Kubernates, Katello, Foreman, and Rake. If you don't know one of those programs (say you know the ins and outs of GitHub Enterprise, but not BitBucket), the interview stops -right there-, you are shown the door, and they call for the next candidate.

      Second you are asked is what is in your GitHub account. For example, I have some custom Puppet and Ansible stuff. It gets checked, and the interviewers will ask questions about it.

      Third, you likely will get asked how you set up a CI/CD structure. Unit tests on code after merge, a test environment, etc.

      Of course, there is a lot of interest in serverless offerings like Amazon Lambda, as the grandparent poster states, just because management can say that they run an "IT-less" shop, touting the fact that they have saved the company by closing down one of the biggest and unprofitable divisions by moving it to AWS.

      To me, that's a horrible way of hiring: If I look for someone for a DevOps job, if you know one (say, Puppet, Chef or Ansible) and you show the architectural mind to actually implement an automation solution, that's gold. Say, we use Ansible, but you know Puppet. Well, if you can demonstrate to be a developer with an analytical mind with a sufficiently good understanding of systems and networks and a self-learner, you are in.

      The most important thing for DevOps in the majority of cases is not deep knowledge of a variety of tools, but understanding things like "infrastructure as code", automation, working with processes and standards, release cycles, and business analysis with development as the driving business. The rest, that's tool minutia.

    13. Re:Leading Indicator by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 1

      Dow Jones != GDP

      Your point is meaningless when everyone's retirement account is invested in the stock market. What goes up must come down. As people found out in 2009, the value of retirement accounts can easily drop 50% in a stock market crash.

    14. Re:Leading Indicator by Penguinisto · · Score: 1

      In my experience, that is completely different. If you interview for a DevOps role, you will be asked a laundry list of programs like Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Bamboo, Jenkins, TeamCity, Vagrant, Terraform, Saltstack, Kubernates, Katello, Foreman, and Rake. If you don't know one of those programs (say you know the ins and outs of GitHub Enterprise, but not BitBucket), the interview stops -right there-, you are shown the door, and they call for the next candidate.

      *sigh* - it's a troll, but I'm currently waiting for something, so...

      I can count only a few companies that interview that way, and you're right... the interview would stop right there, because *I* would walk out of it, telling them in so many kind words to go fuck themselves on my way out. What you described is a laundry-lister, and any company which still (in this century!) interviews like that is either going to hire an incompetent or a liar.

      Let me explain for the studio audience why your premise is bullshit and pick through a few of these: Puppet/Chef(or cfengine)/Salt are similar enough that finding experience in one means you can quickly train your candidate in the others at very little cost if they have the skills/drive to learn them. Bamboo/Jenkins/TeamCity? Same-same (though SCM tasks are more and more being automated into oblivion, handed off to the dev teams to do their own housekeeping, or still run by a dedicated team as a service to the devs). Few folks use Foreman anymore (you get what you pay for, no?), Kubernetes (- note proper spelling) is primarily for Docker (which curiously you did not mention), and Fleet (which you also did not list) still competes with it. You only list one language of sorts, and it's an extension set to Ruby, which you did not list. You also left out service discovery (e.g. Consul), process security (e.g. Vault, also a Hashicorp product), and totally left out deployment methodologies (though you did casually mention CI/CD), which is fucking *primary* if you want to fit into a new company (e.g. a company that is still religious about gitflow isn't going to cotton so well towards the GitHub feature/master branching model). Also left out are process methodologies, which often are akin to religion in the dev world.

      TL;DR, you have no idea how this whole thing works, do you?

      --
      Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
    15. Re: Leading Indicator by luis_a_espinal · · Score: 1

      I interviewed for a DevOps position last year, and referenced over a decade worth of continuous integration tools, configuration management, business analysis, team management, and engagement, in including many of the watch words such as Puppet, Fireman, Jenkins, was turned down as I had not been actively using Puppet in the previous few months. Sometimes the job requirements are strict.

      Oh, don't get me wrong, these things happen. For me it's been a couple of times : more than a decade work with WebLogic, Tomcat, JBoss and GlassFish, but nope, no Websphere, no job (for purely front end jobs.) Or like this: 12 years doing Java/JEE, then I *took a break* and went to do embedded C/C++ work for 4 years. Trying to come back to Java? Nope, you are a C/C++ developer the interviewer or headhunter says.

      So it happens, but to me when it happens, I see it as a blessing, a bullet that I dodged. Think of the kind of organization that pigeonholes roles over absurd trivial shit like that? Do you think *you* could not have pumped it up back to Puppet in a few days? Those aren't requirements but some bozo doing word matching against a list of keywords.

      Very rarely a stringent requirement like that is really valid, like you need to know PIC assembly to implement this urgent hotfix before our delivery date, you know, shit like that that does not give the person ramp up time.

      But something like that is for a consultant position, for an emergency, get-in/get-out kind of a job. For anything more than 6 months, it is ridiculous. Obviously we need to get a paycheck every other week, but in general, not getting picked up for some bullshit like that, I consider that a blessing.

    16. Re: Leading Indicator by Penguinisto · · Score: 1

      [...] was turned down as I had not been actively using Puppet in the previous few months. Sometimes the job requirements are strict.

      There's a massive diff between Puppet 3.x and 4.x (or 2016-x), which likely explains why if they indeed gave you that reason (for example, roles and profiles are dead, and R10k became something entirely different along the way). It's a bullshit reason, but maybe they had a candidate who had demonstrated a more current and complex grasp of it?

      --
      Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
    17. Re:Leading Indicator by zifn4b · · Score: 1

      Your point is meaningless when everyone's retirement account is invested in the stock market. What goes up must come down. As people found out in 2009, the value of retirement accounts can easily drop 50% in a stock market crash.

      Your point is meaningless when you consider the amount of retirement savings the average American has. Translation: Dow Jones matters to you not the majority of Americans. Majority of Americans are primarily concerned with GDP and actual economic opportunity. You're probably well educated in an in demand field. It's not surprising why you would be out of touch with reality. I am also well educated in an in demand field but I actually keep in touch with reality. You should try it some time. At a minimum, it makes you more thankful for what you have.

      --
      We'll make great pets
    18. Re:Leading Indicator by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 1

      Translation: Dow Jones matters to you not the majority of Americans.

      Did you bother to read your own link: one in three have zero in retirement savings. Let's look at the infographic since your math skills are deficient.

      http://cdn.gobankingrates.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/main_overall.jpg

      One-third (1/3 or one in three) have zero retirement savings. Two-thirds (2/3 or two in three) have retirement savings that ranges from between $1 to $300K+. Translation: a majority of Americans have retirement savings and those retirement savings are likely invested in the stock market.

      You're probably well educated in an in demand field.

      When I was a 18-year-old construction worker, I bought 10 shares of General Dynamics for $200 ($20 per share) after reading an article in The Wall Street Journal in the early 1990's. Two years later I made $80 in dividends ($10 per quarter) and $600 in profits when I sold the stock at $800 ($80 per share). I used that money to go to community college and get an A.A. degree in General Education. (BTW, I never went to high school.) A decade later I would go back to community college to get an A.S. degree in computer programming with a 4.0 GPA on a $3,000 tax credit that George W. signed into law after 9/11. Today I'm a virtual ditch digger making $50K per year in Silicon Valley.

      It's not surprising why you would be out of touch with reality.

      Says the person who can't do fractions.

      I am also well educated in an in demand field but I actually keep in touch with reality.

      My late father who graduated from the sixth grade and joined the Army in the 1950's could do math better than you. He routinely ran circles around college educated architects when in found mistakes in the blueprints and often astonished them by pulling out the pencil to do the calculations to prove that a wall was out of spec by 1/8th of an inch. In construction, small errors often become expensive errors.

    19. Re:Leading Indicator by scatbomb · · Score: 1

      I don't know if it's all that bleak. I think after a correction we could rebound, and automation will be a part of the rebound. People are scraping by because wages aren't going up. Wages aren't going up because productivity hasn't gone up. Productivity hasn't gone up because we're outsourcing jobs instead of investing in needed infrastructure e.g. automation and modern equipment and factories in the US. Pres. Trump has a shot to fix some of these issues if he can get anything through congress.

  6. Re:Good by smelch · · Score: 1

    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.
  7. oddly by buddyglass · · Score: 1

    Where I am, Austin, recruiters are saying it's a candidate's market.

    1. Re:oddly by rickb928 · · Score: 1

      It is *always* a good candidate's market.

      It is sometimes an *average* candidate's market.

      It is rarely a *poor* candidate's market.

      The recruiters are being kind, or perhaps avoiding the truth.

      --
      deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
    2. Re:oddly by Altus · · Score: 3, Informative

      Same in Boston. I had 3 job offers when I was looking back in October and got a very significant raise from my previous position. I remember 2002, this is not a rough job market at all.

      --

      "In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson

    3. Re:oddly by computational+super · · Score: 1

      It is *always* a good candidate's market.

      You're giving hiring authorities too much credit, assuming that they can tell good candidates from bad ones. They look at: a) where you went to college and b) the reputation of the companies that you've worked for in the past. Beyond that, they'll bring you in for a couple of string-reversal-on-the-white-board brainteasers.

      --
      Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
    4. Re:oddly by thinkwaitfast · · Score: 1

      Remember fuckedcomany.com? I was never unemployed, but used to read it every night.

  8. Yes, the Cloud, but other factors too by ErichTheRed · · Score: 5, Informative

    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...

    1. Re:Yes, the Cloud, but other factors too by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      . 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

      This one is easy for you to solve: get a book about AWS, call yourself DevOPs, and suddenly with your skills and experience people will think you are a genius. Recruiters will be falling all over themselves to hire you.

      Putting operations in the cloud doesn't mean 'magic.' A lot of it doesn't even change. You still have to engineer for HA, you still need plans for what happens when a server fails, you need to plan for what happens when a data center fails. The main difference is that requisitioning a new server takes minutes instead of days (or weeks).

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    2. Re:Yes, the Cloud, but other factors too by Neuronwelder · · Score: 1

      Do you actually trust you stuff with the cloud??

    3. Re:Yes, the Cloud, but other factors too by mlts · · Score: 1

      The ironic thing is that when I interviewed at one place last summer, the CTO personally started asking me questions. When I asked them about their disaster recovery plan, as the company was 100% AWS based, the reply from the CTO was, "Asking a cloud based company about 'backups' or 'uptime' is like asking a Tesla owner about the type of buggy whip they use."

      Needless to say I decided to look elsewhere for work.

    4. Re:Yes, the Cloud, but other factors too by tommeke100 · · Score: 1

      They sharded with replication factor 3, nothing can go wrong !!!

  9. What's the net? by bluefoxlucid · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:What's the net? by Baron_Yam · · Score: 1

      I'd add that you need to know the loss, the growth, and the churn rate (the average duration of a position's existence).

      A small number of jobs appearing and disappearing every year isn't as bad as ALL jobs only lasting a few years, unless you keep finding yourself getting those self-destructing positions of course.

  10. Re:Good by XxtraLarGe · · Score: 1

    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.
  11. Re:Hardware jobs by rickb928 · · Score: 1

    Is there any reason to believe that available candidates represent the best and brightest? If so, they would be either happily (I hope) challenged at their current opportunity, if not of course they are on the market.

    And changes have interesting effects. C programmers are not so widely needed according to some of the recruiters I know, and lots of C jockeys who learned the basics of other languages or environments were let go rather than be kept on doing minimal work. This is not new, but the pace is picking up a bit, and the industry has no steep demand curve for the foreseeable future.

    Not good. Lots of displacement. Changes. The Cloud is going to cause a lot of problems. I know a few sysadmins who have figured out virtualization (what we called The Cloud once) is reducing the need for their services, either changing them into 'virtual' SAs with new skills and mindsets needed, or just displacing them as the hardware stacks shrink and shrink.

    My work is plainly in the sights of the automators and robotics teams. The real question will be what happens when they can automate 80% of what I do. the last 20% is going to be tough to defend, unless they measure it as impact v incidents. Then it will become the 80% of impact they cannot quite automate. Yet.

    My retirement plan is self-employment.

    --
    deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
  12. Re:Ok, but how many people were hired in that span by Altus · · Score: 1

    But context gets in the way of panic and outrage

    --

    "In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson

  13. Re:Ok, but how many people were hired in that span by pr0fessor · · Score: 1

    I guess it's better than a textile factory where they read the hidden binary code in the flawed weaves to find out who fate has determined must go next.

  14. Re:Well, "tech" is dead in the West by Tablizer · · Score: 1

    Anyone who chooses a STEM career path in the Western world needs to examine his or her priorities.

    The problem is that the alternatives are also risky. First-world workers in general are taking it in the nuts due to offshoring, outsourcing, and automation.

    I would note that plumbing, HVAC, and household appliance repair seems a relatively good option right now, being harder to offshore or automate.

    But you never know, maybe remote-controlled repair bots controlled by $2/hr workers in Timbuktu will take over much of that, although some suspect that a sense of small, touch, dexterity, etc. is needed to do it right. Still, it could replace some repair tasks.

    --
    Table-ized A.I.
  15. Re:Good by XxtraLarGe · · Score: 1

    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.
  16. Just waking up are you? by SuperKendall · · Score: 1

    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
    1. Re:Just waking up are you? by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 1

      Incorrect - we've been HAVING the recession for years.

      The recession ended in 2009. That's when I lost my job, was out of work for two years (2009-10), underemployed for six months (working 20 hours per month, and filing for Chapter Seven bankruptcy. Today I'm back to where I was financially ten years ago before the economy tanked.

      We are now entering an expansion phase.

      It's the exuberance phase before the crash. When money suddenly comes off the sidelines to flood the market while the underlying data indicates a downturn, it's a blinking red light that signals, "Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!"

      Everyone else knows this (especially the markets), why do you not understand this?

      Because my dividend-paying stock portfolio is unimpressed by this market — or Trump farting around on Twitter. The Dow Jones index can rise or fall on every tweet, but my stocks maintain their own course and dividends are reinvested every month.

      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.

      When growth kicks off, so will inflation. The feds will be right there to choke inflation back under 2%. When the recession hits and markets crash, I'll be buying stocks all the way down.

    2. Re:Just waking up are you? by Neuronwelder · · Score: 1

      Agreed. They just soften it so the public does not panic. SuperKendall you got it right!

    3. Re:Just waking up are you? by luis_a_espinal · · Score: 1

      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.

      Err no, the recession ended in 2009. There was a small dip in 2013, and then it bounced back. Salaries have gone up and hiring has also gone up. I've been tracking this shit for years (since my first bubble-burst layoff in 2000.) I'd say there are big cycles of 8-10 years that interlace with smaller 4-5 year cycles.

      We could be hitting a dip again at the end of 2017 (if we use 2009 as the start of this cycle), or 2019-2020 (if we assume 2013 reset the chronometers for a big cycle, or as as start of a mini-cycle.)

      Either way, anyone worth a shit in this industry banks on a dip cycle ever 4-5 years and 3-6 months of unemployment every 8-10 years, and plans accordingly.

      TLDR; don't rest on your damned laurels.

    4. Re:Just waking up are you? by SuperKendall · · Score: 1

      Err no, the recession ended in 2009.

      Err, no;it did not really end in 2009.

      If the recession had really ended Trump would not have won. Trump won because he was willing to call out everyone on bullshit, including the absolute mountain of bullshit that is the claim the recession "ended" in 2009...

      Either way, anyone worth a shit in this industry banks on a dip cycle ever 4-5 years and 3-6 months of unemployment every 8-10 years, and plans accordingly.

      You should really have funds for a year off at all times, but I agree that everyone should be ready for cycles... so save up during the next eight years of prosperity.

      --
      "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
    5. Re:Just waking up are you? by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 1

      If the recession had really ended Trump would not have won.

      Never mind the FBI reopening and closing the investigation into Hillary while sitting on evidence that the Trump campaign was in bed with the Russians just before the election.

      Trump won because he was willing to call out everyone on bullshit [...]

      The same Trump who struggles like a baby when people calls him on his own bullshit?

      [...] including the absolute mountain of bullshit that is the claim the recession "ended" in 2009.

      You mean the 96 million Americans who are out of work because they are too young or too old to work? I haven't seen any executive orders that repealed the child labor and retirement laws to put everyone back into the coal mines.

  17. Re:Well, "tech" is dead in the West by GLMDesigns · · Score: 1

    There will be soon; along with financial analysts. Many of those positions are soon going to be replaced with AI (as it's foolishly being called).

    --
    If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
    Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
  18. Re:Well, "tech" is dead in the West by phantomfive · · Score: 1

    A few years back I read a book on education that said,

    "The future doesn't belong to those who find a job and keep it. The future belongs to those who can adapt."

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  19. Distracting name, for a firm by ItsJustAPseudonym · · Score: 1

    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.

  20. Re:Well, "tech" is dead in the West by Tablizer · · Score: 1

    Sounds like vague fluff, follow the synergy

    --
    Table-ized A.I.
  21. Re:Well, "tech" is dead in the West by phantomfive · · Score: 1

    Well, the book was an education book, and it was aimed at helping your students learn to adapt, so I would say it was more than fluff. To really answer that question we'd have to look at the book in detail and its particular advice. That would mean I'd have to go find the book, which is probably not worth the effort.

    In our world though, meaning the world of software developers, it's definitely true. The worst about it is that the new technologies are worse than the old ones. I think I'd rather use PHP than an Angular stack, even though my knowledge of Angular is greater than my knowledge of PHP. And PHP is a mess compared to what came before it.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  22. Kill the first two, tax the fuck of the 3rd. by sethstorm · · Score: 1

    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.
  23. Look ma! Worker shortage! by zifn4b · · Score: 1

    Better hire some H-1B visas! Americans are lazy and won't get trained in STEM!

    --
    We'll make great pets
  24. Re:Well, "tech" is dead in the West by gatkinso · · Score: 1

    >> There is no such thing as an unemployed lawyer

    False.

    --
    I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
  25. Re:Good by Greystripe · · Score: 1

    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".

  26. It's up in Canada by marclijour · · Score: 1

    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...

  27. EOL by SuperKendall · · Score: 1

    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
    1. Re:EOL by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 1

      It's funny you liberal simpletons have such a problem with Trump communicating with Russians [...]

      I'm a moderate conservative. I don't support Trump.

      [...] do you even understand how diplomacy is done?

      Do you understand that it's illegal for private citizens to represent themselves as the U.S. government when talking to a foreign power?

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan_Act