Looking At Pretty Graphics Of Dot Com Demographics 195
I'm unemployed and bored.
With all the talk about dotcom booms and people moving away and all these really general statements people are making; i was curious as to what's really going on now, what went on four years ago and what effect did the boom really have on this community.
So.. i wrote a script that went through the craigslist archive on egroups and tallied the number of postings each day for each category then i stuffed it in a database and made a grapher tool.
It's kinda neat cos you can basically see some somwhat hard data on what the san francisco bay area has been doing over the past four years. you can graph job postings from various industries against things like apartments for rent or housing wanted postings, also for sale postings and resumes.
Some of the interesting things I found is that the number of housing wanted postings seems to be slightly down recently but pretty much unaffected by the drop in jobs. perhaps people are always in a state of wanting to move to a city.
One thing to bear in mind, this data isn't one hundred percent accurate for a few reasons... people do repost their information multiple times in a given month, sometimes people post a number of avaliable apartments in a single posting and craigslist has become significantly more popular over the years in question. however, I do still think that it makes for a decent general indicator of trends in our community. (I'm considering doing some kind of normalizing based on the total volume of posts- I need to think about it some more)
(Unfortunately, personal listings aren't archived. I guess that's a good thing... but I guess it also would have been cool to graph activity on the personals categories against some of the categories that reflect the general state of the economy. (maybe when people aren't tied up in career they start to think about more important things, or maybe not...) )
Either way, the data is there, you can look at it for different time periods and categories. draw your own conclusions and have fun!
The url is here:
http://www.signal11.com/charts/chart-o-m atic.cgi
take it easy..
--adam "
Not just silicon valley (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not just silicon valley (Score:3, Informative)
I make this claim based only on a report in the Wall Street Journal on Friday (7 Sept 2001) morning that claimed that almost every stock market in the world closed down at least 1%, and that if the trend continues through the next quarter, that this would "meet the classic definition of a recession". And not just a recession, but a global recession. Of course, the value of this claim is proportional to how much you trust the WSJ to accurately report financial news and how much you believe that the stock markets influence employment rates.
Sorry, I don't have a link: I get my WSJ fix through my palm pilot with AvantGo.
Re:Not just silicon valley (Score:2)
The Austin TX economy is heavily tied to tech as well, I advise anyone looking for work there to move back home or to settle for Taco Bell until things get better, and if you are thinking of moving to Austin, don't waste your time.
Re:Not just silicon valley (Score:1)
(been in Austin for not quite a year, and that's exactly what I discovered when I got here. I did find something, but it took about six months. ):
krenshala
Re:Not just silicon valley (Score:1)
in austin is pretty good right now. If it takes more than 2-3 weeks to find a new job here, you need to make some changes in your job search techniques.
Re:Offtopic but,Not just silicon valley (Score:1)
If you have REAL talent (Score:1)
Those who REAL talents will not wait for jobs.
Rather, jobs will be waiting for those who have
REAL talents.
In essence - those complaining about being unemployed, and still think that they have _talents_, usually have none.
I may sound cruel, cold, and ruthless, but we all live in REAL WORLD, and REAL WORLD demands REAL talents, not fake "talents", or tinie punie tricks.
It takes next to no talent to build a database. Whoever brags of his or her "talents" on the basis of building a database ought to take a good look of him/herself in front of a mirror, preferably not the "smokey" type, puhleeees.
Re:If you have REAL talent (Score:2, Insightful)
I've known plenty of companies that lay off not based on "lack of talent" but because of high pay scales...
so those complaining about being unemployed are often unemployed because they won't take a 30-40% cut in their asking price.
(I have a friend who was a web producer who was looking for a year, and didn't find anything until he chopped his asking price and broadened his job objective... he was hired pretty soon after that).
I bet there aren't a whole lot of CEOs out there who've taken a 30-40% cut in what they get paid.
(IMHO, the "REAL WORLD" prefers "tinie punie" tricks... for example sales people are highly paid for the "punie" trick of being likeable and persuasive. More highly paid than those who have the REAL talents of making the things they're selling.)
-marsh
Salary-Based Layoffs (Score:2)
This is also the basis of much age-based discrimination -- older and more senior workers cost more. Illegal, but so what?
Here's a prime example that any slashdotter can relate too, even though it's not in our industry. Back in 1994, Paramount had an extremely successful syndicated series. But it had been on the air for seven years, all the regular actors had huge fan bases and plenty of leverage to demand higher and higher salaries. The solution must have seemed obvious: cancel the series and start something close enough to grab the same viewer base. So The Next Generation (not great TV, but it had its moments) was replaced by the putrid Voyager.
Nice one, but some oddities. (Score:4, Interesting)
Now, enough praise...
There seems to be some data missing - most notably the "people" data, which would have been interesting to plot the migration of people to and from the area as opposed to housing availability, jobs availability, etc. The other thing is that the server sometimes seems to return an error for some reason or another, although this may be due to the
But other than that, a good attempt, and certainly some good ideas there.
Yeah (Score:2, Flamebait)
Re:Yeah (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Yeah (Score:1, Interesting)
Compainies like HP, Lucent, and JDSU
Read my post. I said "dotcom casualties"... are those companies dotcoms?
Re:Yeah (Score:3, Insightful)
More importantly, the 60s was a boom time if you were an aerospace engineer, but it all fell slowly apart during the 70s. The world changes and what it wants out of people changes as well. We never have had the same demand for AEs since. But we have had a huge demand for CS people.
Who knows what the Next Big Thing will be, but I doubt that it will be in the computer industry. The world will go from CS to something else. I wish I knew what, but that's part of the fun, isn't it? Don't know what that old world is going to do next.
In the end, you have to look at what the world wants, and what you have to offer it, and try to do something that will make you both happy. Otherwise, it's all been a waste of time.
Beauty and Truth -- I wish I had mod points (Score:2)
More realistically, though, thinks UptownGuy...
You'll just have to settle for my high praise, anonymous coward, whoever you are. There is so much truth in what you wrote above... I actually took the time to read it and re-read it over 5 times. Especially the last paragraph. Truth with a capital "T" my friend. Techie or not, dot-com casualty or not, they are still words of wisdom!
jobs - housing. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:jobs - housing. (Score:2, Interesting)
NYC is bad too (Score:5, Interesting)
Since there are over 300,000 MCSEs here, and the companies that want them are disappearing, they need a new skill set.
There was always a minority of *NIX people, and THEY are the ones who can still be picky about the pay/job they want.
Since the financial industry is a UNIX world, AIX and HP/UX guys are in HIGH demand.
At the job I got a month ago, they were looking for a good UNIX admin for 10 months before they hired me! That's why their infrastructure in in such a state of disarray.
They hired me on the spot and wanted me to start same day. I am not even the best UNIX admin out there. (I still can't get the UNIX printing system
The market is flooded with Java guys from India who will work for less (Nothing against the East Indians..I'm just stating fact)
I now lead a department. Out of 100 in the department, 97 are from India/Pakistan.
They had NO trouble finding a job.
They all have UNIX skills, DB2 or Oracle and they all have Siebel skills.
Re:NYC is bad too (Score:1)
Re:NYC is bad too (Score:1)
Re:NYC is bad too (Score:1)
In fact , it varies just like among natives.
Re:NYC is bad too (Score:1)
Onepoint
Maybe it's just jealosy (Score:4, Interesting)
Like I said, this is just jealously, bitterness.. but a social group which lacks the basics of humbleness, and toots its own horn shamelessly, becomes a prick in the side of this lowly helpdesk worker.
oh, hell. I'm posting anonymously.
Re:Maybe it's just jealosy (Score:4, Insightful)
But, as much as it's PC to say that the lowliest of the low is (Surprise!) smarter than everyone who thinks they're smart because of their college education, I'd have to differ. Surely, there are some very talented agricultural engineers and biologists who create GE crops. But I don't take it this is what you mean by "farmer". If you think the average construction worker, or welfare recipient, or farmer, has deep reserves of intelligence that they are just not willing to show to people on their high horses, you should try hanging out with some of these people.
I've met many such people in my life. One thing is clear. Most of them would've taken dot-com jobs if they could have. But they lacked the skill set, and they lacked the drive to obtain the skill set.
The reason why people thought the dot-commers were so smart is because, as much as it seems counterintuitive today, many of them were in fact smart. They were not smart because of what they did. Once you learn http protocols and the principles of servers and templates, etc, it's not that difficult. They were smart because they picked up these things faster than anyone else.
To be the first to move on to the moderately complex world of internet programming, that is why they stood out. It is the same reason that we John Carmack, who always pushes the envelope, and that we don't worship John Romero, who spent three years trying to play catch-up and finally releasing a shitty game.
I'll also admit that many of these people were egomaniacs. But many of them were not. You can't lump all of these people together.
Dot-commerce gave us much great technology, this is good. The internet is not going away, but the adoption rate of this technology fell sorely behind the amount of technology that was being produced. It will be a shame that the technology created by many of these companies will simply be re-done in the future when sufficient demand actually exists for it.
Another good thing is that most of the people left aren't money chasers. What sickened me the most about the dot-commers was the fact that many of them were only there to get rich. Most of these people have since been disenfranchized, their high and mighty (and lucrative!) position is now no longer what it used to be.
So now we are left with people who do this because it is what they love to do. That is why I program, and why I continue to take an interest in internet technology.
Re:Maybe it's just jealosy (Score:2)
construction worker = welfare recipient = farmer?
Wow, that's remarkably myopic and insensitive.
You can't lump all of these people together.
You don't say? So, you're saying that on one hand, they're all really smart, but on the other hand, they're not really that smart -- they just happened to be in the right place at the right time (and have grown up with measurably greater access to the trappings of technology than the "average" welfare recipient). I'm always blown away by the failure to recognize that most people have neither the economic connections nor opportunities to obtain high-paying or high-prestige jobs -- to say at the same time that people both lack the "skill set" and the "drive" is to doubly condemn them to marginality. It turns out that skill set has very little to do with "drive" and very much to do with class. Farmers and construction workers lack neither skills nor drive; can you frame a house? Do you know what working on a farm is like? I think the dot-com revolution is much more egotistical than you're willing to admit.
-schussat
Re:Maybe it's just jealosy (Score:2, Insightful)
Also, my grandfather was a farmer, so I know what farming is like. He also happens to be an engineer, and a fairly good one. After retiring he returned to the farm. Farm life does not have much opportunity for intellectual stimulation, I'm sorry, but it just doesn't.
And no, it is not the case that farming == construction worker == welfare recipient. In fact, I was arguing against the original poster who seemed to assume that one's intelligence is inversely related to their "social status". And I'm arguing that certain positions do not have as much intellectual stimulation as others. There are certainly exceptions, I'm sure there's at least one or two people on welfare with 300 IQs, but it is rare.
I also had a step father who was a construction worker. Not a nice fellow, ended up in jail many times and beat my mother. Not all construction workers are so bad, but hanging out them makes you realize that it is much different from hanging out with technology workers.
And I've known people on welfare, and many of them lack the drive to continue. It is sad, and I have sympathy for them. But many of them are where they are because of bad decisions they have made, not because of their previous socio-economic status.
I talk from experience. You seem to have no experience of these situations. I myself am liberal, but I do not romanticize the menial worker, because I know there is nothing romantic about their position. Everyone should be respected as a human being, but we should also recognize that different people excel at different things. I'm sorry if this truth disturbs you, but the mere psychological pain of the inevitable conclusion does not render it false.
Re:Maybe it's just jealosy (Score:1, Insightful)
If that is the case, try a little experiment when the new week begins. Assuming your school was a public school in a low-income area, make a list of your friends from your schooldays. Attach to their names their occupations, or at least the post-secondary instituition they attended (if any). Ask some co-workers to do the same; try to get co-workers from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Adjusting for sample size, perform a rough analysis of your results - what percentage of school-day amigos attended post-secondary institutions for each person? Are there significant (±10%, say) discrephancies as regards socioeconomic status? I would guess that there are.
The point of this exercise is to demonstrate to you that, although you may have a rags-to-riches story where you and your hard work have starring roles, to get a useful idea of the effect of socioeconomic status during youth on socioeconomic status during adulthood you have to look at a larger picture. Being born into a poor family is not a ironclad sentance to lifetime poverty, but it does make an adulthood in the middle class much harder to achive than it would be were the same individual born into the middle class. There are a myriad of reasons for this, but the simple truth is that it's easier to get a well-paying job if your parents can afford to pay for your food, shelter, education, and suchwhat than if your parents are poor.
PS - since you've given your story, let me tell you mine. I was born into the middle class; one parent being a mining engineer, the other a staff member at the academic computing center at a local university. I went to a clean school with happy students, competant teachers, and many and varied after-school programs. I went to scouts (the geek in me); I had access to a computer at school and at home since I was 10; I never went hungry at night; I lived near several open parks where I could frolic in the sun. I've had access on a personal level to many professionals in may fields,as befits my parental units. I entered university, even though I never worked too hard in high school; I never needed to get a scholership, as my university education has been paid for by my parents, negating the need for me to hold a job for anything other than spending-money. The point of all of this is to demonstrate that, although you may have been able to ascend the social ladder through hard work, I have been on the middle of the social ladder by default. This is why I find that social status has no bearing - either in a positive or negative way - on an individual, including their intelligence. There _are_ many smart people on welfare; they have no drive because, I would bet, they've had little opportunity or encouragement from society. What you've done speaks volumes about the quality of charecter you possess, but it says nothing about the person who fills my car with gas.
Re:Maybe it's just jealosy (Score:1)
But you make these sweeping generalizations about "technology workers" versus "construction workers" that simply don't stand up. Your two pieces of evidence are from your own experience and I sure don't begrudge you that, but your experience is happens to be incredibly unrepresentative.
Do you really think "*everyone*" had exactly the same educational opportunities that you did, and that they thought they were too cool for school? Or that people "chose" poverty and welfare? It's not about romanticizing the menial worker; I think that's the farthest thing from what I'm doing here. I'm trying to make the argument that, while the tech sector boomed, it was easy for "tech workers" to have a pretty high self-opinion of the skill and uniqueness of their work. While it certainly involves a pretty specialized set of skills, that doesn't necessarily mean that the workers are any more "intellectual" or even more intelligent than people in other jobs -- and as another poster pointed out, with the changing market value of some of those skills, that reality will probably become more apparent. Given the thunderous crashing down of the market lately, it seems to me that the sooner that kind of realization actually makes its way through the tech sector, the sooner the economy will take a more realistic tack.
-schussat
Re:Maybe it's just jealosy (Score:1)
Intelligence is not a sufficient condition to ensure high social status or pay, but, statistically speaking, it is necessary. Unfortunately, a lot of dot-com workers are about to discover their market valuation has changed considerably with the bursting of the high-tech bubble.
Re:Maybe it's just jealosy (Score:1)
Farmers and construction workers lack neither skills nor drive; can you frame a house? Do you know what working on a farm is like?
Why yes, even though I'm not the guy you're replying to, yes, I have worked on a farm. All summer for a couple of years. (And yes, it is at least as hard as it looks, maybe harder.)
I think the dot-com revolution is much more egotistical than you're willing to admit.
On that we can agree.
Heck, all of the Internet is still just bits going around a network. There is very, very little that is fundamentally new. Practically nothing you couldn't have read in the classic CS literature. It's just that today the hardware and money has caught up to what everybody (every knowledgeable person) already knew could be done with software.
I think I'm saying that even the most highly skilled hackers are mainly putting one intellectual foot in front of the other. So much of what we do as geeks every day is minor variations on well-known themes. It's just that most people lack either the logical thinking skills, the opportunity to apply them here, or the "aha!" that tells them how to find the answer.
Re:Maybe it's just jealosy (Score:1)
<<If you think the average construction worker, or welfare recipient, or farmer, has deep reserves of intelligence that they are just not willing to show to people on their high horses, you should try hanging out with some of these people. >>
Well, my brother is a union electrician. Quite smart, has two years of college. Also hates college, loves working with his hands, enjoys working outdoors in the summer (note: he doesn't do houses - he does major stuff like power plants, coal plants, chip manufacturing plants, etc). None of this prevents him using his brain (you try doing some of the calculations he does on equipment choices - it's harder than it looks, trust me).
You should learn not to judge people by their jobs. It's more than intelligence, it's also aptitude and what you love. Oh, and if it weren't for people like him, there would be not computer chips to run your programs.
Re:Maybe it's just jealosy (Score:1)
If you know anything about statistics, you'll know that when X% of some group measures higher on some scalar value than 100% of another group, that as X increases marginally, the averages between the two groups wildly diverge.
That is, if there exist 3000 farmers (from every state no less) "smarter" than every single dot commer, then this implies that farmers are on average much much smarter than dot commers. I would wager that the farmers would have to have at least twice the "smartness" than the dot commers, on average, for your statement to be true. This is simply statistical inference. And it shows the absurdity of your statement.
It would be equally false for me to say that there exist 3000 dot commers more intelligent than any farmer. It's simply not true, nor is almost any statement of its kind. You were indeed implying that farmers are vastly more intelligent than dot commers, whether you realized it or not.
As for "skill sets", I am simply saying apples are not oranges, and you seem to disagree. That is, I said that farmers do not have the skill set or the drive to obtain it. The skill set I am referring to is that of programming commerce. I am not referring to "skill" as some scale from 1 to a 100 where every single worker of every single occupation can be ranked.
There are many very skilled artisans who have no desire to do much, if anything, with a computer. They don't have the skill set to program internet related applications, and they do not have the drive to obtain these skills. This does not mean that they lack *all* skill, or that they have *no* drive. You are attacking a strawman.
Some people do have more enjoyment of menial work than the more "white collar" jobs. There are times myself when I long for the simplicity of the days I worked in fast food. But the simple truth is, if someone is given the choice between investing their time in being skilled in a white or blue collar occupation, they will almost always don the white collar.
The reasons are varied and numerous. And not everyone thinks this way. There is a great strand of anti-intellectuallism among those you describe as having superior intellect. I'm tempted to describe it as "sour grapes" but I'd hate to use an ad hominem.
You don't often hear of child geniuses saying, "My ultimate plan is to settle down to the simple life on a farm." Perhaps the nature of their curiosity causes them to want to avoid situations that are not rich in intellectually stimulating factors. The relative simplicity of the tasks can be easily gauged. The average programmer seeing the workings of a farm for the first time will not be as confused as a farmer seeing the workings of a computer for the first time. If computers were trivial and required no intelligence to use or learn, then there never would have been a demand for those knowledgable with them.
Not all dot-commers are capable. (Score:5, Interesting)
There are/were thousands of silly dot-coms, with stupid business plans and cobbled-together technology. Many of these shops were not part of any "talent pool".
I remember this one guy who I worked with. Marc was a nice guy. Marc thought of himself as a strong manager who was helping to fuel the dot-com revolution.
But the fact is that Marc didn't have a clue about management OR technology - he was just caught up in a ball of momentum. Marc was in a high-profile position in a very high profile organization. But that fact alone didn't make Marc a capable guy.
Marc left us for the dot coms of Atlanta. The last I heard, Marc was still looking for a job. Not because of the economy, but because he didn't have any skills.
Re:Not all dot-commers are capable. (Score:4, Insightful)
It was almost as if people found the pot of gold a the end of the rainbow.. Problem was that the sun disappeared behind the clouds and only the miserable rain was left.
I do feel bad for those that were employed. Just b/c they didn't have the skills necessary does NOT mean that they were the ones at fault. It was those that were sinking in millions to get a company off the ground knowing that it was near worthless.
Re:Not all dot-commers are capable. (Score:2)
Thank your lucky stars!
Re:Not all dot-commers are capable. (Score:2, Interesting)
I agree with that statement, but isn't that one of the basic human instincts? Hoarding, scrounging, going out there to get more stuff and stash it, repeat. One could say that the whole length of the "dot-com era" or just the huge IT boom we experienced was based on human greed and human gullibility.
Of course, the reasons for wanting more money are ranging from "just to feed the family", through "to pay off my loans", to get a nice car, a nice house.. but soon afterwards the line is deteriorating and people begin to make money just to have more money. You don't need a 7 bedroom house for you and your wife, you don't need a 100k BMW.
But overall, where I am going with this is that humans striving for more stuff and money created the situation in which people were gullible enough to believe that anything that is "e-something" or has to do with computers/internet will bring millions for each cent you put into it. Of course it worked for a while, when the first ones on this path made the money to be made and innovated the ways that were there to be improved.
I know a few of people that went from 12 years of experience in Emergency Medicine into Java by reading a few books because they wanted more money, or 40-year old construction workers that became instant "expert Web specialists." And another dozen of corporate "company representative speaking.. JUST a moment" office space-like lady workers who knew how to put together a memo or a company policy filled to the brim with meaningless bullshit.
A very interesting fact supporting this theory is that as of today a number of CS classes in University of Berkeley in California is 70-80% full, which differes from last few years when there was 20-30% more people than seats in the classes (quoting a co-worker who goes there right now).
Another words, people will go where the hen laying golden eggs is at, and they will make it lay as many as it can a day before they will kill it off by doing so. And unfortunately, those of us who are content with a golden egg once in a while will have to find another ways of doing what they like/love/want to do.
Hopefully, the hen is not dead yet, just out of eggs. ;)
Re:Not all dot-commers are capable. (Score:3, Insightful)
1. looking for a top management position
2. looking to make $250,000+ per year
3. looking for my job, not the job offered.
So many of these people just don't understand that their experience at the former employers weren't in line with what we're looking for. I'd rather take the old COBOL program and convert him, than take a dot-commer. The old COBOL programmer will be willing to learn, and will have an understanding of project plans and production quality. The dot-commer? Some do, many do not.
site slowness (Score:5, Informative)
if you can't get to it, please bear with us and try again in a few hours.
thanks again
--adam
on the IT job or worker shortage (Score:5, Insightful)
Ralph Castain of Fort Collins, Colorado wrote the following, which began on the same page (12) as Google's ad, "Google Seeks Expert Computer Scientists"
Re:on the IT job or worker shortage (Score:2, Insightful)
Source of figures (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:on the IT job or worker shortage (Score:2)
And your point is? This is how global markets work. This has happened to many industries: agriculture, cars, steel, etc.
Programmers from foreign countries are willing to work for much lower wages than their U.S. counterparts, especially if they stay overseas. The inefficiencies caused by such remote operations are more than covered by the savings in compensation.
What makes you think it's "inefficient"? Right now, many information technology companies are located in the US because skilled foreign labor can come to the US and work here. If skilled foreign labor can't come to the US, those jobs won't go to US citizens. Instead, more and more of US-based operations and management would move to Europe and the more developed parts of Asia. See, no inefficiencies there.
This upsets me (Score:4, Interesting)
So now what I have to say to all the people who flocked here, threw high-test gasoline on the fires of the economy, burned everything to a crisp then took off, Thanks a whole lot from someone who was here a long time before you! I feel no pain for any of the dot.com loosers.
Re:This upsets me (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously look in the north bay, east bay and to some extent at the south bay. You will notice tons of completely new properties offering discounts as extreme as 2.5 months off your yearly rate. They are hurting... and this is good for us.
Home prices on the other hand are still absurb. 350k for a small 2 bedroom in an ok neighborhood is just fricken robbery.
Re:This upsets me (Score:2)
You can get a pretty impressive castle in Woodside for $8,900,000, though. That's not much different from a similar castle in Malibu.
Curiously enough, you can get a prestigeous 94062 zip code (Woodside) for as little as $399,950, even if the name on the envelope is Redwood City. Being an outsider, I can't figure that one out, especially since I went all the way up to $1,650,000 and saw some very nice looking houses, but no Woodside. Last time I looked, entry level in Woodside was something like $ 560,000, but that kind of house probably doesn't go on the market that often and is most likely snapped up immediately when it does. My snap judgement from looking is that if anything, Woodside real estate is continuing to go up; I found nothing in Woodside under US$ 1.6 million or so, while last time I looked there were maybe ten or so properties cheaper. Or have they renamed half the place Redwood City? I'm a bit confused.
Ah well. No doubt someone will be willing to straighten me out.
D
Re:This upsets me (Score:2)
Re:This upsets me (Score:2)
Don't worry, one day "the big one" is going to hit and reduce the whole area to rubble and ashes. After that, your real estate prices will be nice and cheap.
Me too. (Score:1)
-Parts of Tool, "Ænema"
Slashdot Job Referral Service (Score:4, Interesting)
Everyone bitches about issues, how about using
--
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973)
Re:Slashdot Job Referral Service (Score:3, Funny)
How about starting a head hunting service linked to the /. amount of people in the techincal field.
Available for hire: Perl, Apache, Linux programmer. Have only built l33t sites of a few thousand lines of spaghetti code. Will only work for "free" software company. Company must not use any Microsoft software. Regular Quake breaks a plus. Minimum salary requirement: $150K/year.
Reminds me of a local job (Score:1)
When I called up to find out what was wrong with their machine (it would just roll over to another line most of the time) they said they were getting applications all over the State of Oregon and as far away as San Francisco all day long.
Their talent was wasted during the *boom* (Score:5, Insightful)
interesting choice of vars in PERL (Score:1)
http://charts.signal11.com/chart-o-matic.cgi?yo
Re:interesting choice of vars in PERL (Score:1)
Re:interesting choice of vars in PERL (Score:1)
Re:interesting choice of vars in PERL (Score:1, Offtopic)
Because of him, they set a karma cap of 50, made the karma hidden from the user page and apparently deleted a lot of signal11's karma from his account.
He was the original karma whore.
(I should note I am still way above the 50 karma limit -- which is interesting because if you're a low UID and posted decent messages it was easy to do. But because you can't go above 50, it never credits for +1 when comments get modded up. But it DOES subtract when you get -1 on a comment!! So you're guaranteed to slowly watch your karma go down until you hit 50, which for me should be another year or two I guess)...
OT: karma (Score:1, Offtopic)
THe only thing worse is some low UID persons who assume that everything they say is Interesting or Insightful, simply based on their early arrival.
Your post was Informative.
It'll stabilize at 50 (Score:1)
Not that I really care. I thought they should have included a filter which would allow you to "tune out a UID" rather than restrict it arbitrarily at 50. I toyed with writing such a feature myself and then submitting a patch. But then work intruded and I was too busy to breathe.
I do really like the messages feature. It allows one to see replies without having to get a high enough score to let the post pass the original poster's filters (I read at +1, and sometimes +2). So I suppose my goal of the reply being seen has been met.
And just to keep this on topic: I wonder what effect /. had on the "I'm a 1337 geek because I read slashdot" during the whole tech expansion. I personally know more than a couple people that should never have worked in a tech industry (and I'm sure a few would argue that my Geology background precludes me from membership into the geek club). Mostly artists and the like. The fellas who called writing web pages "coding".
Anyway, interesting graphics. Did you hear about the Uhaul shortage in Silicon Valley/Bay Area? That's a metric I'd like to see explored.
-B
Re:interesting choice of vars in PERL (Score:1)
We both worked out of his apartment for a number of months on a contract job together, so I should know.
Armchair engineers have moved out. (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems as if most of the computer scientists working for
You might say the quality of software being written today is slightly up compared to the 90's because the only people programming are the ones who really want to do it.
Computer scientists??? WTF? (Score:1)
First it was programmer, then it was programmer/analyst, then it was software developer, then it was software engineer, then it was architect...
... now its Computer Scientist?
Puhleeze... anyone who uses that term so loosely needs to read one of Knuth's books to understand what a computer scientist really is.
Another employment graph/script (Score:3, Interesting)
Another unemplyed geek here. I wrote a set of perl scripts that graphed the # of Jobs available on computerjobs.com for several cities. It is on the main page of AtlantaGeek.com [atlantageek.com]
Dotcom mentality and how it relates to Linux (Score:2, Interesting)
Long time reader, first time poster.
Just got my WIRED magazine subscription a short time ago, and what do I see on the cover "Why Linux will lose the desktop war: page 134".
Now before you tell me this has nothing to do with the dotcom boom and subsequent bust, I think you would do well to note these quotes from the article.
If that doesn't relate to the dot-com bust, I don't know what does. He goes on to state the following on the same page:
Pretty damming commentary from someone who supports Linux, don't you think? Or at least he still does, but on the server platform where it has gained the most ground.
Comments?
I'm sure that this will take forever to become a proper thread unto itself, that is why I've bothered to post it here today.
Desiato_Hotblack
Re:Dotcom mentality and how it relates to Linux (Score:2)
Zealots like these are the people killing Linux on the desktop. Is it any wonder so many companies don't take Linux (or its users) seriously? Would you hire a self-confessed Linux advocate having read this story? He might go crazy and delete all your files...
Re:Dotcom mentality and how it relates to Linux (Score:1)
Maybe damning if you believe that guy, but it doesn't have much to do with the dot-bomb crash.
People are going to pick one operating system or another, or they'll mix 'em, but stock and housing prices don't have much effect on either.
Maybe you could tighten up what you're trying to say. There's probably a good point in there but you're leaving a bit to the imagination.
Re:Dotcom mentality and how it relates to Linux (Score:1)
You said:
The "hook" was that the author had been laid off due to the dot-com crash, the "meat" was the fact that although he uses inflammatory commentary to state it, he is essentially correct that Linux supporters have not done the right thing, namely concentrate on the server side versus the desktop, which is still in fragmented disarray.
In that context, I think I've related it to the dot com bomb fairly well, as I admitted the main "meat" of what I was talking about would merit its own thread, but would take forever to appear (if it even did) due to the lopsided article submission/posting policy of this board.
It's okay though, the responses I've gotten pretty much have satisfied me on this subject -- as meager in number as they were.
Thanks for playing.
Hotblack_Desiato
Re:Dotcom mentality and how it relates to Linux (Score:1)
I would suggest reading it and submitting an opinion on it, instead of your fantasy of what you *thought* it would contain.
Desiato_Hotblack
Re:Dotcom mentality and how it relates to Linux (Score:1)
I would have to agree with this, it seems that in the pursuit of technical dominance, what has been forgotten is that you will have to eventually reach out to the end-user that has little expertise in operating a computer system.
The author in the article does give good references to this, where Open Source advocates do admit that you have to go where the money is, and at this point, the dollars are in the hands of "Aunt Tilly" as it were.
Although not a true Linux derivative, QNX impressed me with its ease of setup and the package management. It was truly like using something streamlined for the end-user. If only it had more applications to appeal to the masses.
Desiato_Hotblack
Better data anyone? (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyone wanna get Craig's archived logfiles?
Re:Better data anyone? (Score:1)
Fascinating... (Score:1, Redundant)
According to this [signal11.com], that's within two months of the point at which marketing people got more popular than engineers (with employers.)
Yes, fascinating.
Interesting correlations (Score:2)
- March '98 to August '01
- apartments avaliable
- housing wanted
- resumes
- for sale
You can see that these all tracked each other fairly well up to December '99, when resumes/for-sale went off on their own, and apartments/housing stayed fairly even for a while.Then, apartment availability started shooting up around August '00, kind of tracked resumes/for sale for a while, and then shot through resumes in February, picking up for-sale which has tracked it ever since.
I'll leave it as an excercize for the reader to correlate all this with external economic factors, but I think it's pretty clear that for a while people were selling stuff to make the rent while they were looking for work, and then between August and February people started selling stuff because they were leaving the area.
Funny variable in the URL... (Score:2, Funny)
when to buy a house in the Silicon Valley? (Score:1)
Living in the valley and not being tempted by the big $ offers of startups has meant that my fiancee and I are still employed and ready to upgrade from the 1-bedroom condo to someplace to start the family life, now that the market should be more sane...
(Admittedly, we're starting to see $500k 3-bedroom places in the valley but they're few and not in the best neighborhoods...and we'd much rather pay $400k. Then again, my condo has appreciated ~3x since I bought it in '95 so I suspect there'll be a fixed delta between the sale price of it and the purchase price of the new place.)
Re:when to buy a house in the Silicon Valley? (Score:1)
All of the cyclical markets go up and down...
It's very difficult to tell the peaks and valleys. However, the rule is to jump in (or out) when the slope (the derivative for you folks taking AP Calc.) of the curve starts to get really, really steep. For example, the best time to sell your investment property was in April 2000 when rents and property values shot waaaaaaaay up. The best time to buy is probably Q2 next year. The tech bottom is right now. However, the real estate will lag about 2 quarters.
It's mostly my opinion, but I predicted a 2001 fallout back in 1997 so don't knock me too badly...
Re:when to buy a house in the Silicon Valley? (Score:1)
Far be it from me to knock you - when will things start to improve?
Re:when to buy a house in the Silicon Valley? (Score:2)
Internal Server Error (Score:1)
Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, adam@signal11.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have
done that may have caused the error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Re:Internal Server Error (Score:1)
ho ho ho he claims Graphics copyright (Score:2)
correct me if I am wrong but he is redistributeing the database in a differant format
he is not doing any analysis or changeing the data in any way but redisplaying it
so he has no copyright claim at all as far as I can see bit of a joke really
regards
john jones
Re:ho ho ho he claims Graphics copyright (Score:2)
there was a case in the early 20th century in Britain where test answers got "unofficially" released. this is for a standardized test.
copyright was successfully claimed. for test answers.
he made the graphics. that's all he has to do really. the source data, he has no copyright on, true enough... the graphics though: he's got it.
thoughts on dotcom booms and busts (Score:2, Interesting)
while the boom sucked in a number of ways: computer jobs became glamourous and attracted a lot of goldrushers or hollywood ego types, which made working in these types of jobs a little obnoxious. the people who i hated in high school who were stuck up and going to fancy colleges found themselves getting rich in marketing and management positions, riding on the backs of the geeks who actually did the work. the talent pool was suddenly flooded with people who weren't really into what they were doing but they were doing it because that is where the money was. etc..
it also did a few cool things: it provided a way for slackers, artists, writers, etc to actually earn a living wage. (not exemplary salaries, but salaries that actually made it possible for them to live reasonably comfortably in the bay area) suddenly people that had been making peanuts could make a decent salary 30-50K and live comfortably knowing that they could pay their bills and some were gaining a skill that could turn into a career.
unfortunately, things got out of hand when the aforementioned fancy college educated folks had a little too much money to play around with and traders saw a wave of hype which they could ride to grow their assets. idiotic companies with pathetic business plans, idiot management and stupid ideas were recieving insane amounts of venture capital, which they were happy to spend the majority on things like office adornments, lame marketing and other things irrelevant to the core products they were building.
when this all was happening, the rest of the economy grew to support all these new businesses needing services and now that they're all gone, not only is the technology industry affected, but also the industries they relied upon and the industries those industries relied upon. hopefully the ripple won't be catastrophic.
personally, i was happy to see the bubble burst at first for the reasons i listed above. i was sick of hollywood ego internet types and this sudden 'coolness' that surrounded all things internet. i was also sick of seeing people who had no real interest in technology at all get filthy rich off of the hype.
however, now my opinion has changed a little. a lot of my friends are in fairly gnarly positions as a result of the layoffs. they weren't trying to get rich, and never were. they just wanted a honest living wage for a days work. they had the promise of a career and living wage for the years to come laid out before them and now it's all vanished into thin air.
in one way, i think it's a good thing, because the boom distracted people from what they really wanted to do with their lives. while doing operations for a dotcom may pay decent, it's not the most productive thing to do with one's eight hours a day in the grand scheme of things. (given that someone is not completely a geek at heart) now people are being forced to reevaluate themselves and their master plans for life, some are going back to college, some are persuing art, others are getting involved in vocations that they've been meaning to do for a while and i think that that is a very good thing.
i think that it is also a good thing for technology. now that there are less distractions and promise of riches for geeks working on bunk technologies, there will a decent talent pool of geeks looking to work for a decent wage on something that is technologically cool. that is also pretty exciting. while venture capitalists may be stopping the handouts, they're not going to stop completely and now they're not going to have nearly as many proposals to review. i'm hoping that in the next couple years we'll see a number of new companies that are doing stuff that is truly innovative.
I would never hire you (Score:1)
Re:I would never hire you (Score:2)
Re:I would never hire you (Score:1)
HOW does THIS reflect ON you?
to ME, pretty DAMN badly.
(Also note that "To me, pretty damn badly" is absolutely horrid grammar)
Re:I would never hire you (Score:1)
It's got to be easier to teach someone how to use the shift key than how to write.
dave
Here's a multi-state jobs availability chart (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Here's a multi-state jobs availability chart (Score:2)
What's the change over the past year? Given the number of colleges and universities here, I wouldn't be surprised to find a big peak in May/June, for hiring both recent graduates and summer interns, and a corresponding valley in August/September.
Self-inflicted. (Score:2, Insightful)
Those companies has not had a working business-model. The major part of the dot-coms have lived on banners and thats just unrealistic.
In you put ads in a newspaper you can get nice big ad-space that really draws attension to your products. Compare that to a banner at the top of a site, do even someone look at them?
And for other IT-related companies I think the focus on market-share instead of revenue just makes it impossible to keep companies alive. Many seems to have thought "market share is everything, revenue is something we deal with then the VC money is gone".
Many has given their products away for free and have thought that later down the line they are going to be able to charge for it. Personally I think it's very hard to make people pay for something that they got for free before. If not impossible.
it takes more than that (Score:2)
Fair enough... (Score:1)
I read the letter, and I admit not knowing who he wrote it to, but if he describes his work like that in a job application i'm not surprised he's not getting a job.
"....kinda neat cos....."
Sorry mate, but that just doens't work.....
it's time to open new markets (Score:1)
I refuse to believe that all those people did not learn anything, and new nations *need* IT people.
Think about going to Africa, Europe, or another country. The world is big, there's room for everybody, and there are new markets to create. Move on, Americans!
So what about me? (Score:1)
WELL, now what do I do?? With under two years left it seems kind of late to switch my major, and with little actual experience in the computer industry my future looks bleak, to say the least.
How quickly one's future outlook can change...
Re:Blame Adequacy! (Score:1)
BTW, is there a tune to go with this?
Re:Blame Adequacy! (Score:1, Offtopic)
Re:Chart doesn't mean much... (Score:5, Informative)
The resume is on there at the suggestion of someone on craigslist who said that I should put it on there. I thought it was a bit slimey but at the same time I figured that it couldn't hurt.
As far as it getting posted to Slashdot, I didn't post it and I *do* know the guy who posted it but I did not ask him to do so, nor did he tell me before he did it. (and his text is a bit cheesy, no?)
As far as useful statistics and normalizing based on total number posted. I am planning on adding that stuff. For the second version, I'm planning on adding normalizing, moving averages by day (right now it's only tallied by month) and possibly some other stats. (I've recieved a few good ideas from a few people and I've got some emails out to some math folks about how I might be able to do some interesting forecast graphs)
--adam
Re:Chart doesn't mean much... (Score:1)
If you figured that linking "hire me!" on the bottom of the results could be interpreted wrong ("I thought it was a bit slimey") then you should have gone with your instincts.
Sorry you feel the need to defend yourself but the original comment above was more directed at Slashdot for this combo "sensationalism/advertorial" posting under the heading of "News for Nerds". This was a sampling from a mailing list that, while interesting, does not take much into account and holds as much water as those '"it sucks" vs "it rocks"' sampling via a search engine.
Hagabard
Just realized something... (Score:1)
You just stated above that you had no idea that this was being posted to Slashdot yet in this posting you state the above. Which comment is true?
HagabardRe:Just realized something... (Score:1)
when it initially got bogged down due to a mis-tuned apache, i posted the above comment.
Re:Chart doesn't mean much...but... (Score:3, Interesting)
The source(s) and limitations are stated on the site and any one knowing statistics knows aswell how to use this one.
Good luck on the job hunt!