
In some Bay Area counties, college grads have higher unemployment - samfisher83
https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/12/26/silicon-valleys-worker-shortage-creates-an-upside-down-labor-market/
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jseliger
Terrible headline but useful article. The real answer is about housing cost
and bad zoning policy:

 _“We’re seeing out-migration of many people from Santa Clara and San Mateo
counties, presumably because of the high housing costs,” Benner said. “That
out-migration is disproportionately from lower income residents.”

He added that housing costs driving out lower-wage workers “would have become
much more pronounced in the last year or two.” Lemus, who said he makes a
little more than $30 an hour now, is saving to buy a home — in Arizona, where
the cost of living is far lower._

[https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-
housing/](https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/) and
[https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-03-14/californi...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-03-14/california-
affordable-housing-is-no-mystery-just-build-more) are relevant and will remain
evergreen until we see state-level policy change.

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dang
Ok, we've changed the article title to the HTML doc title, which is more
factual. As is often the case.

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fmajid
A better title would be "college grads with useless majors like sociology
can't get jobs, but feel manual labor is beneath them".

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beatpanda
Wild how after years of scandal involving tech companies not thinking through
the impact of their products on society, people are still saying sociology is
a useless major.

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geezerjay
In your opinion what could be contributed by a sociology major to
realistically avoid any of those scandals?

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beatpanda
By working with a product team to develop worst-case scenarios for non-
technical abuse of a tool, like trolling, harassment, manipulation via
misinformation, blackmail, and so on. Especially as it concerns a tool
developed by people mostly embedded in one culture and releasing it to an
audience embedded in another. Soliciting feedback from people who study
society and social problems, to understand how a tool might be used by people
who are not like the people who are building it, might have helped to avoid a
lot of problems.

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pm90
I'm not sure why this is being downvoted. I know sociology was meant to be a
placeholder for any one of seemingly worthless degrees, but the commenter has
made a convincing case for how sociological analysis could have helped silicon
valley social media firms (at the very least) recognize the kind of impact
they have on society and be more responsive those impacts.

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masonic
In my experience, Sociology majors are no less prone to "trolling, harassment,
manipulation via misinformation, blackmail, and so on" than the general
population. More so, in fact.

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nradov
Apparently journalists still don't understand the meaning of the word
"shortage". There is no shortage. The supply and demand curves still meet. The
government hasn't imposed any wage controls or banned raises. If employers
want more workers then they can just pay more, or offer better working
conditions.

If raising wages means that some businesses will lose money then that's a
different problem. But it's not a _shortage_.

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jjeaff
More precisely, and the article alludes to this, there is a shortage of
workers willing to work for entry level wages.

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kurthr
I wouldn't be surprised if the big tech companies started bussing in some of
their contract labor outside of the bay. The commutes (>1hr each way) are
really terrible and there's no way to really live on less than $20/hr full
time as a single person... much less care for children. Plenty of those people
have an associates/bachelors degree, but without local family support they
can't survive.

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floatingatoll
I believe if they were to provide bus commute as a benefit to contractors, the
state would force-convert those contractors into employees.

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wutbrodo
I had a friend who worked at Google as a contractor and took the shuttle in to
work. I think there was some detail about having to badge in so her rides
could be reported and deducted from her pay[1]? The details are fuzzy, but as
I recall she just ignored the rule and nobody seemed to care much. The upshot
was that she used the cafe and ride services much the same as I (an FTE) did.
The existence of those hoops to jump through makes me think that you're
probably right that an official service for contractors would probably violate
their contractor status, legally speaking.

[1] I'm pretty sure I'm remembering part of this incorrectly, because us FTEs
were supposed to badge in too to avoid non-Googlers from riding.

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floatingatoll
You’re right about having it deducted from pay, by one other human report to
NYT anyways:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/10/technology/10google.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/10/technology/10google.html)

