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San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble
- marvel_boy 10y agoMy feeling is that Bay Area’s overall economy remains in good shape, but who knows?
- wooyi 10y agoThese are likely seasonal job losses like retail or related. You have to do Year over Year comparisons for jobs. Month over month comparisons are misleading because of seasonality
- devingoldfish 10y agoFrom the article: the worst two-month stretch of job losses since the Great Recession.
- stult 10y agoIf there was an unusually high peak of seasonal jobs just prior to the months in question, that would be an utterly meaningless statistic. If it's a moderate random drop coinciding with the end of a somewhat high seasonal number, it's still not relevant to long-term outlook. That's why monthly numbers are difficult to use in isolation.
- CGamesPlay 10y agoIf January had the highest number of jobs since the Great Depression and we have returned to the March mean, this could still be true while there was absolutely nothing interesting going on.
- devingoldfish 10y agoJust took another look and the data in the article is seasonally adjusted.
- hartator 10y agoI suppose it won't follow on rent pricing unfortunately.
- jdavis703 10y agoRent prices actually are stagnant or falling: http://www.sfgate.com/rentals/article/Bay-Area-2017-rents-are-falling-everywhere-except-11023345.php http://www.sfgate.com/rentals/article/Bay-Area-2017-rents-ar...
- home_boi 10y agoIt's actually not that expensive in the South bay, at least compared to SF. I would say it's roughly Boston area rent prices
- epynonymous 10y agocould santa clara's large number be attributed to intel? also, cisco (san jose) seemed to do some layoffs along with the sun portion of oracle.
- tarr11 10y agoThis press release seems less link-baity, and has a lot more data and context. http://www.labormarketinfo.ca.gov/file/lfmonth/sjos$pds.pdf http://www.labormarketinfo.ca.gov/file/lfmonth/sjos$pds.pdf
- 11thEarlOfMar 10y agoYou need to read the whole article to get to the statement: “Unemployment rates throughout the Bay Area are among the lowest in the state. Almost anywhere else in the country, the Bay Area’s job trends would be the envy of that region.” Every downturn has to start somewhere, and maybe this is the beginning of a bad stretch, but the largest employers are doing fine based on stock prices. Apple, Alphabet, Cisco, Facebook all made new all-time highs within the last month (or week). Here is the March 2017 unemployment report. 3.5% for Santa Clara County. And states that jobs are + 2,000 from January to February. http://www.labormarketinfo.edd.ca.gov/file/lfmonth/sjos$pds.pdf http://www.labormarketinfo.edd.ca.gov/file/lfmonth/sjos$pds....
- mjfl 10y agoWhere would a typical SV "startup" fall under the categories in that link, "Computer Systems Design & Related Services"?
- brianwawok 10y agoI don't think stock price is a leading indicator. It goes something like Profits -> hiring decisions -> stock prices Stock price could be many months behind the profits as you don't do dialy earning reports.
- edoceo 10y agoForward P/E
- nostrademons 10y agoStock price does tend to be a leading indicator, because the major Wall Street analysts all do their best to independently derive a company's sales so they can front-run the stock before official earnings come out. Causality tends to run: Product announcements -> sales -> stock price -> reported profits -> hiring decisions (-> regional migration -> housing prices). A number of my college classmates went into equity analysis or management consulting positions, they would do things like canvas retail locations and count the number of shoppers walking out with the products of interest, or track search engine rankings, or sit on Google Trends to watch for changes in search volumes in the markets of interest. This is also why stock prices fall when a company "misses estimates", even if earnings are themselves up. Wall Street has a consensus estimate for how they expect the stock to do, and that estimate is priced into the stock. When the analysts are wrong (which isn't uncommon), the stock corrects based on the difference between the estimate and the reported earnings.
- futun 10y ago> "“Investors are seeing the problems with a lot of these tech companies. And at some point, tech companies have to cut jobs.”" This.
- JustSomeNobody 10y ago... is the time where if you don't have unique skills, it is time to find some.
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- aphextron 10y agoSo it isn't just me. Has anyone else in the east bay had a tough time finding work recently as a mid level front end developer?
- lightblade 10y ago...and we're hiring! Want to come work at Yahoo? Sunnyvale office :)
- city41 10y agoI'm not on the market, but I've not seen any change in the number of recruiters contacting me. A pretty weak signal for sure, but it's something.
- sulam 10y agoWhen you say "in the east bay" that's confusing to me. Are you only considering companies with an East Bay office? I live in the East Bay and don't make any secret of it, but I get recruiters contacting me from all over the SF Bay Area (and outside of it too, for that matter). Would you not work in SF if someone wanted to hire you there?
- dmix 10y ago> “Right now it’s tough to find a job in I.T.,” said Steve Satariano, a San Jose resident who has been working in contracted, temporary information technology jobs in recent years. “I’d prefer to find a full-time, permanent job, but in I.T., beggars can’t be choosers. It’s a little frustrating because tech companies always want to try before they buy.” The numbers don't really back the first part of the statement up... There are +3000 more I.T. jobs from 2016->2017 and I.T. only lost -500 jobs since last month, but that is a single month while the numbers are still higher than last year (down 0.7% monthly but up 4.1% overall yearly). And "Computer Systems Design & Related Services" also grew 3.7% year over year with 0% loss in the last month. The news is always looking for the negative 'sky is falling' angles and they will always be able to find someone to provide a sound bites to back up the story. But as usual the numbers say otherwise or are simply neutral/boring. Some people are obsessed with being the first one to call the new demise of tech, or the latest bubble. But if anything the industry has become more resilient. Which is what happens when industries mature and grow larger. With more diversity and a larger base of employers/employees then fluctuations are naturally going to be smaller and better contained. That plus greater domain expertise develops over time - companies/investors learn how to manage risk better and understand the nature of the marketplace so overall losses are smaller.
- philip1209 10y agoCorrect - if tech is still getting H1B visas, that means there are jobs that the companies claim were unable to be filled by US citizens. They have to go so far as to post two conspicuous notices of the application for visas in their workplaces [1]. https://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/FactSheet62/whdfs62M.pdf https://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/FactSheet62/whdfs62M...
- protomyth 10y agoWhen people end up training their replacement H1B worker (ask the Disney employees for one example), I don't think companies are following the spirit or the letter of the rules. The ease of skirting the issue shows up anytime someone looks at the top 10 H1B companies.
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- platz 10y ago> Some experts suggested the Bay Area’s slump in venture capital funding has contributed to the sluggish job trends in the region’s tech sector. Can safely ignore bubbles created by VC funding cash-flow injection and focus on business that bootstrap in a healthy way.
- mcguire 10y ago"During 2016, the VC sector provided $24.9 billion in financing, down 27.6 percent from the $34.4 billion in venture investing in 2015, according to the MoneyTree Report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and CB Insights." $10B and 28% are hard to ignore.
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- rubiquity 10y agoCould be that there were very large rounds in 2015 for companies that didn't need to re-raise in 2016?
- ben_jones 10y agoIt goes both ways. The 2016 number could've been bumped by the $3.5B raised by Uber [1]. [1]:https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/02/technology/uber-investment-saudi-arabia.html?_r=0 https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/02/technology/uber-investmen...
- empath75 10y agoI wonder how much of this is non-programming jobs going away. I think sysadmin jobs are going away, and those aren't coming back.
- hn_throwaway_99 10y agoFWIW, I am quite positive I heard that statement many, many times during the original dot com bust of 2000/2001.
- enjo 10y agoI simply have to believe that cloud services have taken a big bite of the sysadmin market. We currently employ zero admins (~25 employees, moderate traffic). In my previous ventures that'd be unthinkable, but we've effecticely outsourced the position to Amazon.
- jsmthrowaway 10y agoThat just means you've elected not to hire an operations person, not that Amazon is doing it for you. You're still doing it, you just don't realize it.
- zer00eyz 10y agoThis is very true: Dev/Op's has turned into an excuse to throw another job onto programers, one that in some circumstances they aren't really qualified to do. We spent years as an industry separating out roles and building walled gardens. The latter was bad but the former was correctly informed.
- dmourati 10y agoGood luck with that.
- mst 10y agoYou're presumably still handling package installation, deployment etc. via something handled in-house, no? Certainly the "tending hardware" part of sysadminry is outsourceable, but unless you're going full-serverless there's still a bunch of systems work to do - so it may be longer before a full time sysadmin is worth the money, but one will likely be value for money eventually.
- djrogers 10y agoWe're talking about 4,400 jobs here - how much of that can be attributed to one or two of he major layoffs announced in the past few quarters? If Intel or Cisco dropped a couple thousand of their layoff employees in San Jose, thats a pretty big chunk of the dip right there.
- bogomipz 10y ago>"Global Equities Research’s Chowdhry believes the squeeze on the region’s tech sector is only beginning. “Silicon Valley is bracing itself for literally a repeat of 2001,” Chowdhry said, referring to the dot-com meltdown that erupted with mammoth job losses that year. “This time it’s a social media bubble that will blow up." The sky is falling! People are literally bracing themselves with both hands as we speak! Nothing like using hyperbole to get you and your company's name in print. Global Equities Research? Seriously who the hell is that? How many of these 4,400 jobs that the local economy has shed in SV are HP and Cisco which are two old guard tech companies not startups. These are also two companies who have been struggling with their old business models.
- KeepTalking 10y agoCouple of random ramblings about the article - IT jobs as in do they mean IT admins/Biz Analysts or programmers and software engineers. There is a smaller market in the area for IT admins than for programmers and software engineers. additionally, It seems to mix data between tech jobs and hotels etc. - Why the random cheap shot at H1-Bs. Is this focused on employment or immigration ? typically in a healthy market employment trends follow immigration (employment based) trends. Seems like an effort to stir up some traffic to a poorly sourced article. - The social media bubble? This is the first time I have heard of that term. Appreciate if they did some basic homework to see 2016 investment trends https://www.wilmerhale.com/uploadedFiles/Shared_Content/Editorial/Publications/Documents/2016-WilmerHale-VC-Report.pdf https://www.wilmerhale.com/uploadedFiles/Shared_Content/Edit...
- jimmywanger 10y ago> Why the random cheap shot at H1-Bs. That was not a shot taken by the article, but by people who couldn't find jobs. H-1Bs are an easy scapegoat - certainly easier to explain your lack of success in finding a job because of H-1B visa holders rather than your own lack of in-demand skills.
- JBReefer 10y agoI think you should consider that they may well be right, and that they can't find work at a rate they expect due to H1Bs working for less. People tend to know more about their own lives than you do about theirs.
- jimmywanger 10y agoYou're missing/not addressing two important points. First, as I pointed out, it's much easier cognitively to blame an external circumstance than your own skills deficit. Second, any sort of expansion of the labor pool will tend to depress wages. If you can't find work at a rate you expect, you need to either lower your expectations or expect unemployment.
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- giardini 10y ago"The AI Winter Is Coming" (February 23, 2017) https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-winter-coming-sandro-skansi https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-winter-coming-sandro-skans... so I don't expect deep learning to save us.
- wamatt 10y ago> And Sandro Skansi says No one knows who that is. Namedropping in an authoritative tone about a random person, seems kind of odd.
- kabdib 10y agoDoubt it. I've seen a couple instances of experienced devs spooling up some interesting and objectively valuable machine learning systems, going from a lunchroom chat to production code in a very short amount of time. If there is a winter, it will be the result of AI becoming an off-the-shelf commodity; on the other hand, it should be easier to justify investments in research, given the demonstrated value of ML today. The AI winter of the 80s was caused by over-hype, hardware companies whose markets were too small and whose products quickly fell behind the Moore's Law curve, and funding cuts by the US government.
- tabeth 10y agoHow are you measuring the "objectively valuable" systems? How much money are we talking?
- ganfortran 10y ago> If you want a popular AI topic which does require a lot of inference, think of a general-purpose chatbot. General-purpose chatbot, almost equal to solve AGI. If that is how you define winter...where is summer!?
- JabavuAdams 10y agoWe're mining a rich vein of techniques that have been opened up by the deep learning revolution. There doesn't seem to be any near-term end in sight, and the pace of improvement is incredible. It's hard just to keep up with the best result in, say, computer vision or NLP. This is nothing like the 80's where techniques foundered on non-toy problems.
- krystiangw 10y agoI wouldn't worry too much. I can see 500 tech job openings in San Jose only: https://jobsquery.it/jobs;page=1;tags=;sortBy=PUBLISHED_AT_DESC;query=;location=San%20Jose%2C%20CA https://jobsquery.it/jobs;page=1;tags=;sortBy=PUBLISHED_AT_D...
- jrmg 10y agoWhat is the margin of error of these numbers?
- nwenzel 10y agoWe're in Mountain View and we're hiring [0]. I've certainly noticed commercial real estate going from completely nuts to merely really expensive. Anecdotal sure. But eventually all the anecdotal points add up to a trend. [0]We're 18 people, enterprise SaaS, started by 2 founders who have worked together for 15 years. https://www.simplelegal.com/careers https://www.simplelegal.com/careers Also looking for Head of Engineering and devs (senior front end dev, lead API dev, Django dev).
- azernik 10y agoThey specifically cite job losses in "IT" as a worrying indicator of the health of the tech industry. However, looking at the people quoted on LinkedIn, the problems seem to be for things like support/corporate IT - the people interviewed have worked at hospital helpdesks or as MS Access admins. More indicative of general poor economic health and possibly higher ease of use or automation in these fields than of tech-industry-specific problems. Note that general poor economic health could itself be a leading indicator of trouble for our particular set.
- Old_Thrashbarg 10y agoI wonder what impact the Bay Area's cost of living and out of control housing prices had on this. I believe the tech scenes in other cities like LA, Seattle, NYC, Austin, etc have higher growth rates than the Bay Area.
- TuringNYC 10y agoHuge impact. Housing costs put a floor on acceptable salaries. Even if you go way out to San Jose or beyond, the housing costs and resulting monthly mortgage makes pushes minimum salaries into mid-150s for the most meager of family accommodations. I haven't moved from NYC to SF/SV for that singular reason.
- vorg 10y agoThe article's headline says "stumble", whereas the HN link headline says "tumble". The two words have almost opposite meanings.
- dragonwriter 10y agoThey both mean fall, although "stumble" has a slight implication that the fall is temporary.
- jfoutz 10y agoEverybody uses words in their own way, but i'm pretty sure stumble is to almost fall. Like a momentary loss of balance. Tumble is worse, it's actually eating it. Metaphors suck though. I don't know if 'balance' has any real meaning in the context of a job market. Supply and demand can't ever really be out of balance, they can just be distorted by random effects. In this sense 'fall' must mean smaller market? Headlines are by nature vague and imprecise, they're just enough of a hook to make you decide to read the article or not. shrug
- DrScump 10y agoMy personal connotation would be that "stumble" implies a misstep (e.g. one's own fault), but "tumble" can be due to outside influences. YMMV.
- greesil 10y agoSince when did Oakland have a job market?