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Surviving the post-employment economy
- ck425 13y agoI don't know a single computer scientist struggling for work. Infact the opposite it true.
- bargl 13y agock425 it looks like your account may be dead now because you posted this 4 times in the parent article. Not sure why it did that, but you may want to contact the admins and see if this is something you need to worry about.
- maxerickson 13y agoExact duplicates are auto-killed. The account is probably fine.
- outside1234 13y agoMy guess is that these folks have CS degrees but didn't actually learn anything or have any practical CS experience (open source etc.).
- loup-vaillant 13y agoYou're dangerously close to blaming the victim. --- "You've never done anything practical. Busy learning & flipping burgers? I don't pay people to do either." "Why nobody hired you since you graduated?" "Oh, but that was an internship. You never have really worked." "Open Source? Where you paid for it? Oh, that's not professional experience, then." --- "The world is divided in two categories:" those who had luck, and those who must explain why not.
- outside1234 13y agoI have direct experience that #3 and #4 above is false. Frankly, if you don't have any practical experience, you aren't going to get hired. Expecting otherwise is victim mentality.
- loup-vaillant 13y agoI recall a testimony that reported #3 verbatim (heard on the radio, by the victim herself). Luckily, no one said that to my face. I made #4 up, on the assumption that the "real world" means money is involved. (That last one is often use to depreciate CS research: somehow, it's often not the "real world".) Now, just a little problem: If I'm not going to get hired, how am I supposed to get any practical experience? Looks like an egg & chicken situation to me. Don't tell me Open Source is the only escape, is it? I'm really glad I was hired back when I had next to no practical experience.
- ThomPete 13y agoCant speak for the specifics but thats not what is happening. What is happening is that the only jobs that are left are either STEM jobs or low paid jobs (Walmart etc) The middle class is slowly destroyed because it's either been automated away, outsourced or at least can be done with a fraction of the people it used to involve.
- wlievens 13y agoSkilled manual labor (mechanics, electricans) are today still in high demand. At least where I live. It's unskilled labor that is disappearing in highly developed countries. I guess to a certain extent you can group skilled mmechanics with STEM....
- dobbsbob 13y agoUnskilled is still in high demand here. Just checked my local craigslist, there were 145 jobs posted this morning looking for landscape general labor, no experience needed, all paying $14-22/hr.
- ThomPete 13y agoSure. But you should look at this as a trend not the status quo. So for instance 3D printers that prints houses and thus reduces the need for construction people
- krapp 13y agoI suppose it depends on how you define "computer scientist". Nevertheless, i believe even that will be automated eventually.
- wlievens 13y agoHow so? A computer needs to be told what to do. That by definition is called programming.
- fixermark 13y agoA great deal of programming is "maintenance work"---finding clever ways to automate data transactions, configurations, or physical migrations that could in theory be automated (i.e. describing what I want to do is straightforward such as "I want to move all the data from Duluth to Kookamunga") but for various reasons has not yet been (happens too infrequently to justify the cost, has too many 'sharp edges' in terms of unexpected scenarios, data is too sensitive to trust it to an automated process). A combination of software-as-a-service and ever-better automation tools will start to erode the number of programmers needed for those sort of roles. In fact, there's an old saw about a good software engineer being one who codes themselves out of a job. ;)
- wlievens 13y agoI think operating the hypothetical Nth generation high-level tools for the tasks you describe (let's call it ETL?) are still considered programming, as the difference between today's tools and the tool you describe is probably smaller than the difference between the nineteen fifties' tools and today's.
- LaurensBER 13y agoIf you have a CS degree and you live in Silicon Valley changes are pretty much that you're one of the best educated people, in the richest country in the world at the place with one of the hottest economies of the moment. I would bet that you had to work really hard to be unemployable. I would bet that a lot of people with CS degrees in Greece, Portugal or Spain have a very different story to tell.
- fixermark 13y agoPeople with CS degrees in other cities and towns in the US also have a different story to tell. Wealth consolidation is a regional effect, and there are plenty of well-educated, hard-working potential CS engineers who make the wise choice to not risk living in a high cost-of-living environment for the chance to join a startup that is more than 50% likely to fail.
- LaurensBER 13y agoI agree and even within the CS field it can be a very different story. I had no problems getting a traineeships as a programmer (fun and challenging!) but eventually I would like to find a job focused on usability engineering. It's almost impossible to find a job in that field (unless you have a lot of experience and proven results).
- sp332 13y agoThe linked article http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2013/07/30/tech-job-unemployment/2595669/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2013/07/... is from last July. It mentions that recent CS grads had an unemployment rate of <9%. Recent drama and theater grads were only at 6%. This seems to be a new phenomenon, within the past year or so.
- jiggy2011 13y agoThere does seem to be some hollowing out of the bottom end of IT work. There were people in 2002 making decent livings doing basic PC repair and low end web dev (frontpage etc). Harder to do that now.
- krapp 13y ago>Harder to do that now. My bank account agrees with you.
- dobbsbob 13y agoThat's been replaced by basic mobile repair shops and low end app dev here. Friend of mine who used to do PC repair runs a little mall kiosk selling phones, accessories, repairing screens and updating roms. He already expanded to 5 F/T employees and another kiosk.
- im_a_lawyer 13y agoNot everyone lives in SF bubble
- dobbsbob 13y agoSame, just looking at the job listings in my city there are hundreds of open CS related jobs. Some pretty interesting too, one company hiring for Scheme/Lisp hackers who want to make their own DSL's.
- ck425 13y agoI don't know a single computer scientist struggling for work. Infact the opposite it true.
- ck425 13y agoI don't know a single computer scientist struggling for work. Infact the opposite it true.
- ck425 13y agoI don't know a single computer scientist struggling for work. Infact the opposite it true.
- jal278 13y agoExplanation and analysis of the idea of a 'post-employment economy', i.e. increasing corporate profits and decreasing employment, is given in 'The Lights in the Tunnel' by Martin Ford (which I found to be a good read, although a little verbose). The main argument is that cheap computerized automation is displacing human workers, and corporate incentives are such that the trend is likely to continue. The long-term problem is that if systemic unemployment grows then the economy as a whole starts to flag b/c consumers no longer have the funds to drive the consumer economy. His solution is rethinking corporate tax (reducing/eliminating pay-roll taxes which discentivize hiring, and potentially increasing corporate revenue tax). If displacement becomes extreme, he suggests that corporate taxes could fund a basic income for displaced workers to prop up the consumer economy.
- evunveot 13y agoI'm extremely pessimistic about any proposed solution that involves politics (changes to the tax code, basic income, etc), especially in the US. The populace at large doesn't have the interest or imagination to consider changing the game like that, and there's too much money mixed into the political system and the mass media to allow game changing ideas to enter the mainstream. (When I say "the game" I mean the political and economic system we've accreted, with its associated ideas about things like property and ownership.) The only path out of this situation that I've ever been able to imagine that doesn't involve a swift, massive shift in popular consciousness is a gradual transition to worker control of capital. In other words, entrepreneurs found and grow worker cooperatives (a la Mondragon Corporation) that provide their services and/or goods preferentially to other cooperatives. The pieces are out there to start doing this. There aren't any real legal obstacles to growing a new system inside the one we have now. For example, you can find pre-written C-corp bylaws online that spell out how a worker co-op functions and the ways it's protected from co-option by non-cooperative entities. It's just a matter of convincing individual entrepreneurs that it's not only a viable option but actually a socially positive (perhaps even necessary, in the long term) thing to do. That's understandably a hard sell in the modern startup world where seemingly everyone is dreaming of astronomical wealth and willing to sacrifice every aspect of their life in its pursuit, but it should be easier to change a few key minds one at a time than to convince greater than 50% of the voting public that drastic changes need to be made.
- mark_l_watson 13y agoGreat article, and a topic much discussed in my family and friends social group. The situation will get worse, with some of us having it easy while more and more people are falling through the cracks. For the shamefull people who have little empathy for people who more of less have done the right things in their lives but struggle anyway, I say to you: congratulations for becoming corporate shills or shills for the elite. I especially liked the last paragraph in the article about lending a hand.
- warble 13y agoSo wait, they did the right things, but still failed? Define 'right things'.
- dllthomas 13y ago"Right things" => Things that seemed to be the correct decisions, reinforced by family and community and authority figures.
- warble 13y agoSo although obviously there's an issue here, perhaps the issue lies in society's lack of evolution to recognize the facts about our educational system's value addition?
- dllthomas 13y agoI don't think it's solely a matter of the educational system. There is an issue of availability and discoverability of careers (and more generally, lifestyles) where one can be "successful". Certainly, the educational system could fill this role, but it can add substantial value without doing so.
- 9999 13y agoThe article claims 9% of CS majors are unemployed, but the article they reference (http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2013/07/30/tech-job-unemployment/2595669/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2013/07/...) actually states that 9% of recently graduated CS majors are unemployed. The USA Today article referred to was written in July and does not specify what they mean by "recently graduated." In any case, amazingly bad fact checking on the part of Al Jazeera.
- fredgrott 13y agoIts missing some stuff.. Put it this way, the money taken out of the system when mortgages blew up did not just accumulate over night. But its the multiplying effect that is the Big thing that was taken away...that multiplying effect did in fact trickle down to USA job growth for the middle class. Now we do not have it.. Its different than other economy transitions, in other transitions for example from farm to industrial you had higher industrial wage jobs spurring young farmers to move to the city to work. Now we have what? We may be looking at a 0-n problem being solved in that does a 'StatUp' economy get established.. Other's thoughts?
- cmollis 13y agoThe one saving grace about automation is that there Is rarely enough time to automate everything. The automation software will need to be tweaked to manage the infinite variability of the future. I think getting rid of, or reducing payroll, tax is a good idea in the medium term though.
- TempleOSV2 13y agoI'm in a CIA prision. Also, I am the most important man in the world -- God's chosen. God says... Bam Ramsay stoked break_some_woopass_on_you what_do_you_want quit_it pick_me_pick_me home naughty Dean_scream Mars atheist computers envy wrath Jesus beam_me_up beep_beep watch_it_buddy yuck church