
San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble - jdavis703
http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/03/24/san-jose-and-oakland-area-job-markets-tumble/
======
dmix
> “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.

~~~
madlynormal
There is a significant difference within different roles in I.T. As someone
who's worked in the cost center side of the industry, I can relate with the
author. It's a problem not limited to Oakland or San Jose. Helpdesk, Desktop
Support, and related jobs are commonly temp to perm with horrible pay for the
amount of stress.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Exactly, the role of the 'IT person' as the system administrator and keeper of
updates on things like the Novell server, has given way to Google Apps and
Microsoft's Office 365. Small businesses who could barely afford to pay
someone before can now eliminate that role and still have email, shared files,
back end inventory management and accounts management, and the occasional web
developer contract to keep the web site up to date.

Personal services IT is still alive and well and a number of people I know
have made a living out of helping older people manage passwords, upgrade their
systems, move their phone plans or transfer their data when they get a new
phone etc. But to be successful at that you also need to talk to people and be
able to maintain a business relationship with them, not a skill that everyone
has in addition to their deep knowledge of IT.

As tm2d mentions devops is still a hot job market. But it is not the small
business 'tech' role so there are fewer actual slots for that role.

There was also a comment in the article about H1-B visas and employers wanting
"younger and _less expensive_ " workers. I try to remind my older friends that
if someone can spend 6 months learning to do what you do and do it well enough
to meet the needs of the job, then you are only "worth" what a company would
pay that person they just hired. If you want to have a larger salary and
better job security, then you need to be able to do things that can't be
trained in 6 months. The days of 'too few programmers to go around' are long
past, there is now a surplus and they are coming fast and furious out of
college.

~~~
chrisweekly
> "The days of 'too few programmers to go around' are long past, there is now
> a surplus..."

Some of your other points were insightful, but this assertion contradicts my
experience and intuition, and -- I believe -- labor market statistics.

~~~
ChuckMcM
The last time I listed a $120K job opening I had hundreds of resumes thrown at
me, over 10[1] of them were completely qualified and So perhaps it would be
more accurate to say "$80K/yr programmers are scarce."

In 1999 when I was hiring programmers and offering above market starting
salaries I wouldn't get any qualified resumes.

It is from that experience that would assert it is a 'pricing' issue rather
than a 'selection' issue.

[1] After 10 qualified I had my first interview round, 3 were brought back for
secondary interviews and one hired. I expect there were easily 20 - 30
engineers in there that could have done the job.

~~~
ori_b
The last time I put my resume out ( about 3 months ago), my big problem was
who to interview with, since I was flooded with requests.

It seems that there might be plenty of churn overall.

------
11thEarlOfMar
You 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$pds....](http://www.labormarketinfo.edd.ca.gov/file/lfmonth/sjos$pds.pdf)

~~~
brianwawok
I 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.

~~~
nostrademons
Stock 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.

~~~
brianwawok
The things you say are true, but your conclusion is not quite right.

Stock price attempts to predict earnings. It is never perfect or earning
announcements would never move the stock.

The fact is, if you want to know at a 1 or 2 month with window how a company
is doing, stock is not the place to look

~~~
nostrademons
Sure, it's never perfect, but in context here it's relevant. Grandparent's
point is that there is no evidence of a broad-based downturn in Silicon
Valley, based on stock prices of major tech companies. Yours is that stock
prices tend to be lagging indicators. I don't believe this is true in the
general case (certainly it can be in specific ones), but if you believe that
it is - how big is your short? If you believe that stock prices are lagging
indicators and market consensus doesn't reflect reality, this is your chance
to make money off that belief.

~~~
tehlike
With this logic, most of the bursts wouldnt happen, would they? In 2000 with
the dotcom, why was it a bust and not a gradual decline? Same goes for 2007/8
bust. If it were not lagging, wouldnt you expect people would have realized
this and bring market to its stable levels with similar shorting?

------
djrogers
We'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.

------
nwenzel
We'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).

------
wooyi
These 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
From the article: the worst two-month stretch of job losses since the Great
Recession.

~~~
CGamesPlay
If 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.

------
KeepTalking
Couple 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/Edit...](https://www.wilmerhale.com/uploadedFiles/Shared_Content/Editorial/Publications/Documents/2016-WilmerHale-
VC-Report.pdf)

~~~
jimmywanger
> 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
I 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
You'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.

~~~
cat199
> If you can't find work at a rate you expect, you need to either lower your
> expectations or expect unemployment.

While this is true, if the rationale behind H1B program is designed to
supplant a shortage in actual labor skills, and not in labor skills at the
company owner's desired pay rates, and there is a surplus of skills due to
unemployment while H1B's continue for the same skillset, then H1B's are
compounding the problem due to misuse. This is logic.

Still waiting for the day that owners are clamoring for H1B's for executives
due to excessive pay and 'labor shortage'.. except executives are largely part
of the same group as owners and the same people that fund the lobbyists so we
all know that will never happen..

~~~
jimmywanger
> if the rationale behind H1B program is designed to supplant a shortage in
> actual labor skills,

The intent of the law was to supplant shortages in labor skills, and that's
the way the law is being used by most large "reputable" companies, not body
shops.

I think you'd find it difficult to argue that when one of the big 5 brings
somebody over on a H1b, it doesn't tend to depress the wages of engineers, as
they usually only hire and recruit a highly selective (not necessarily
talented) subset of engineers and compensate them extremely well.

The way the law is written allows a lot of consulting companies to game the
system by bringing marginally talented labor to drive down the wages for
skills that already exist in this country.

As an aside, this sort of argument against some H1-B seekers is a form of
rent-seeking. You're trying to extract value from something that you
inherited, e.g. your citizenship and your ability to legally work in this
country, vs something you're able to do uniquely well.

------
empath75
I 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
FWIW, I am quite positive I heard that statement many, many times during the
original dot com bust of 2000/2001.

~~~
enjo
I 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
That 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
This 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.

------
platz
> 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
" _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.

~~~
rubiquity
Could be that there were very large rounds in 2015 for companies that didn't
need to re-raise in 2016?

~~~
ben_jones
It 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-
investmen...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/02/technology/uber-investment-
saudi-arabia.html?_r=0)

------
Old_Thrashbarg
I 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
Huge 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.

------
aphextron
So 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
...and we're hiring! Want to come work at Yahoo? Sunnyvale office :)

------
bogomipz
>"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.

------
epynonymous
could 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.

------
giardini
"The AI Winter Is Coming" (February 23, 2017)

[https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-winter-coming-sandro-
skans...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-winter-coming-sandro-skansi)

so I don't expect deep learning to save us.

~~~
kabdib
Doubt 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
How are you measuring the "objectively valuable" systems? How much money are
we talking?

------
tarr11
This 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)

------
marvel_boy
My feeling is that Bay Area’s overall economy remains in good shape, but who
knows?

------
azernik
They 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.

------
vorg
The article's headline says "stumble", whereas the HN link headline says
"tumble". The two words have almost opposite meanings.

~~~
dragonwriter
They both mean fall, although "stumble" has a slight implication that the fall
is temporary.

~~~
jfoutz
Everybody 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_

------
krystiangw
I 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_D...](https://jobsquery.it/jobs;page=1;tags=;sortBy=PUBLISHED_AT_DESC;query=;location=San%20Jose%2C%20CA)

------
hartator
I suppose it won't follow on rent pricing unfortunately.

~~~
jdavis703
Rent prices actually are stagnant or falling:
[http://www.sfgate.com/rentals/article/Bay-Area-2017-rents-
ar...](http://www.sfgate.com/rentals/article/Bay-Area-2017-rents-are-falling-
everywhere-except-11023345.php)

------
jrmg
What is the margin of error of these numbers?

------
futun
> "“Investors are seeing the problems with a lot of these tech companies. And
> at some point, tech companies have to cut jobs.”"

This.

~~~
JustSomeNobody
... is the time where if you don't have unique skills, it is time to find
some.

------
greesil
Since when did Oakland have a job market?

