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With an unemployment rate of just 4% among tech professionals, and shortages in specific fields, flexibility shouldn't be a last resort. I would have guessed t
by atacrawl 15y ago
With an unemployment rate of just 4% among tech professionals, and shortages in specific fields, flexibility shouldn't be a last resort.
I would have guessed that tech unemployment would be lower than the national average, but 4% is really low.
- dasil003 15y agoEspecially considering how "lazy" programmers are.
- il 15y agoThe unemployment rate for college graduates as a whole is under 5%. White collar workers are not the ones feeling the brunt of the recession.
- braddunbar 15y agoWow. That's a statistic that doesn't get reported nearly enough. It puts an entirely different spin on the unemployment rate.
- hugh3 15y agoIt could probably afford to be aired in the "is college a waste of time and money?" threads which crop up here every day too.
- il 15y agoI doubt it, the correlation does not imply causation. My hunch is that the people graduating from college are the kind of people that would find it easier to find a job anyway.
- InnocentB 15y agoThere was actually an interesting study about this which got mentioned recently on the Freakonomics podcast (you can see a transcription of the segment at http://freakonomicsradio.com/does-college-still-matter-and-other-freaky-questions-answered.html http://freakonomicsradio.com/does-college-still-matter-and-o..., the original study is at http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/tlemieux/papers/unintended.pdf http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/tlemieux/papers/unintended.pdf). Basically, it uses men who were eligible for the Vietnam draft (who enrolled in college in greater numbers than they otherwise would have, to avoid military service) to demonstrate that success from college graduates is more than a "these people are the ones who were already going to succeed" thing.
- il 15y agoThanks for the link, that is interesting. Of course, there were no startups willing to eschew traditional hiring practices back then.
- keithba 15y agoKeep in mind that there's a natural unemployment rate in any economy. The natural unemployment rate is typically made up of two components: people in-between jobs and people with out-dated skills. In programming, we'll always have (in any month) some % of workers moving from one job to another (either because they quit, the company they worked for went out of business, or they were laid off - because the company performed badly or their own poor or poorly perceived performance.) And, in programming, there will always be some set of people who find themselves out of job because the company they were working for no longer needs their Delphi or COBOL or other outdated skill (not to say there are not jobs for those Delphi or COBOL programmers, but there are less and less of them, on average.) Those programmers have to get re-trained, etc. These two groups make up that 4% - which is around the natural unemployment rate for the economy as a whole on average over the last 70 years (it's around 4-5). If the unemployment rate was above this (basically at the national avg of close to 9) for programmers, then the difference would be cyclical - missing jobs based on the recession. Because it is so low, I;m wondering if it's we can conclude that programming (in today's economy, at least) is recession-proof.