
Silicon Valley Is Not Driving Jobs Growth - prostoalex
http://fortune.com/2015/12/04/silicon-valley-is-not-a-job-creator/
======
rattray
This article doesn't actually seem to provide any evidence to support its
claim - the actual factoid at the heart of the article is that Total Factor
Productivity (TFP) has fallen since the 90's, which is irrelevant.

The only pieces of evidence supporting the "No Jobs Growth" claim are
Facebook's employee count from _2013_ (which has since grown by almost 50% to
12000 [0]), and the claim that "in 2010, only 0.5% of the US labour force is
employed in industries that did not exist in 2000", which has nothing to do
with "Silicon Valley" since the industry existed in 2000, too.

Remarkably low-quality reporting.

[0] - [http://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/](http://newsroom.fb.com/company-
info/)

~~~
rwmj
What do 12000 people do at Facebook?

Edit:

(Apart from sitting around and downvoting me).

Does it really take 12000 people to run a site where people write about what
they're doing, and upload some photos and videos? Instagram had 13 employees
when they were acquired by Facebook.

~~~
pconner
A huge amount of infrastructure is needed for Facebook's scale. People have to
create, manage, and maintain that infrastructure. And that's ignoring the
multitude of complex user-facing products Facebook has (the number of which
has grown significantly over the last few years).

------
augustocallejas
Here's a though experiment I came up with several years ago: Say one day you
created a copy of the Earth and with that copy, it had the same population as
the current Earth, and they were connected so you can travel between them
easily. I can see that these two worlds would need twice as many barbers as
the current world. Would these two new worlds need twice as many
Google/Facebook/etc. employees?

~~~
bko
People often forget that jobs are an expense, not a benefit. We should
celebrate that society can do more with less. If someone thinks that jobs need
to be created through artificial means to keep people busy and give them some
money, then that person has a rather dim view of human potential.

~~~
jjoonathan
Our current economic system holds that people don't deserve food, shelter,
medical care, or dignity if they don't have a job. If you believe that we
should stick with the current system then the proposition "everyone should
have a job" follows from "everyone should have food, shelter, medical care,
and dignity".

~~~
bko
Well that's a disagreement between positive and negative rights:

> A negative right is a right not to be subjected to an action of another
> person or group; negative rights permit or oblige inaction. A positive right
> is a right to be subjected to an action or another person or group; positive
> rights permit or oblige action.

You may believe in positive rights, like I have a right to food, shelter, etc.
Others may believe in only negative rights, like I have the right to not
provide you food, shelter etc. It's funny how so much of political debate can
boil down to this fairly simple idea.

~~~
chongli
_It 's funny how so much of political debate can boil down to this fairly
simple idea._

Not really, it's an irrelevant distinction. If you have the right deprive me
of food, shelter, etc. then I have the right to kill you in order to take
those things for myself.

~~~
bko
I respect your intensity, but if you were to come home one day finding your
home has been broken into by a unfortunate soul demanding that you house and
feed him, would you oblige? He may see you as depriving him of food and
shelter by not opening your home. Would you be willing to bare this burden?

~~~
knieveltech
Would you?

This is a ludicrous hypothetical in response to a very simple question: do you
or do you not believe all people have a right to the basics of survival and
some element of dignity?

~~~
codyb
I, personally, would like to think, given a nonthreatening human being being
discovered in my home, that I _would_ help said person.

I was arrested once, way too fucked up, in someones car. They eventually
lended me sandals because I had no shoes or socks.

I am, of course, far more understanding of those in ridiculous situations,
having been in many myself. I've calmed down a lot, but unless someone is
threatening to kill me, I'll treat a person as someone who has had decades of
experiences I have not had.

One day, I hope we can all do that for eachother. We're all human beings.
We're all animals. We all deserve to be able to eat, sleep, and have social
contact.

~~~
knieveltech
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_abi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_ability,_to_each_according_to_his_needs)

------
steverb
The lack of jobs growth doesn't seem that surprising, but the lack of
productivity growth does.

Is it just that new technologies aren't really all that relevant to increasing
productivity? Are we just not adopting technologies that would make us more
productive? I'd love to have a glimmer as to what the root cause of that is.

~~~
laotzu
It may be that the core problem of production is one that was already solved
by hardware at the end of the industrial revolution. Software can now be used
to solve the 2nd part of the problem, which is distribution.

>In technology's "invisible" world, inventors continually increase the
quantity and quality of performed work per each volume or pound of material,
erg of energy, and unit of worker and "overhead" time invested in each given
increment of attained functional performance. This complex process we call
progressive ephemeralization. In 1970, the sum total of increases in overall
technological know-how and their comprehensive integration took humanity
across the epochal but invisible threshold into a state of technically
realizable and economically feasible universal success for all humanity

-Buckminster Fuller, Grunch of Giants

Our means of production have already served to produce a renewable surplus of
all the physiological needs of humanity (food, water, shelter etc). The
problem is in distributing it fairly which is why almost 50% of the world
population struggles to obtain these necessities.

>The white man knows how to make everything, but he does not know how to
distribute it.

-Sitting Bull

------
myth_buster

      Optimists argue that throughout the history of capitalism, new technologies 
      have always led to new jobs in the long run. But pessimists say that this 
      trend isn’t guaranteed to continue, and the chance that we are in an era 
      where wealth is created without jobs raises very thorny questions about how 
      that wealth will be distributed fairly.
    

Nothing keeps the populace employed as good ol' agriculture does!

Sure there are "new jobs" but job creation doesn't have a fundamental law
analogous to the law of conservation of momentum. Efficient tech is at it's
very heart a job destroyer. So with growing population and shrinking
meaningful jobs what we end up with is civil unrest. Hence we have people
employed doing busy works who come home to constant stream of "news" and
"entertainment" and another section doing the busy work churning out these
contents! Apart from breeding inequality it also breed discontent. Perhaps
evolutionarily humans are wired to feel satisfaction at the end of a hard days
work.

------
mikelyons
It doesn't have to! In fact, it should be driving everyone OUT of a job. It
should be driving us to evolve away from the way we survived in the past, by
trading time for money.

------
jondubois
This article resonates with my observations. I think most of the companies
which have been making a lot of money are entertainment companies.

Facebook is an entertainment company, it probably delivers negative economic
efficiency growth - Today it's common for employees to check their Facebook
and instagram during work hours (which reduces their productivity).

People also spend more time playing games (there are so many options
available; social games, virtual reality, iPhone apps...). Then there is
YouTube which helps create jobs for more entertainers and at the same time it
lowers productivity efficiency in the workplace - It's a tool for
procrastination.

Even enterprise companies aren't delivering efficiency improvements. Docker
has gotten a lot of hype but I am yet to see it deliver efficiency
improvements in industry - Particularly on the deployment side. I dont see how
hiding complexity inside containers actually reduces the overall complexity of
the system. Maybe the real solution is to use fewer tools which have simpler
boot logic?

You could argue that Docker is great for PaaS, but then you have to ask the
question of whether PaaS itself delivers efficiency improvements? Maybe
platforms like Amazon Lambda will deliver, but so far what I've seen is that
big companies in general don't use PaaS.

I think companies which deliver real efficiency at the moment are being
ignored by the market in favour of companies which have a large marketing
budget.

~~~
garagemc2
Youtube, facebook, twitter, instagram have all created jobs in my
organisation. People are hired to create content and maintain the accounts.
They have made/forced the organisation to be more customer facing and
friendly.

------
pbreit
Considering the point of Silicon Valley is to eliminate jobs, that doesn't
seem entirely surprising.

------
austenallred
We're really using 24-year periods of time to determine what jobs were created
by technology? I mean, I didn't expect rigorous statistical analysis, but this
is nothing.

------
Apocryphon
Wall Street burned up a lot of its goodwill with the public with the various
financial scandals. Certainly, they're still in business and will be in for
the foreseeable future. But can Silicon Valley have the foresight to
preemptively defuse future backlash against job destruction brought upon by
automation? Perhaps it's time to get some major tech CEOs pushing forward
proposals for basic income. Certainly some VCs have already been making public
statements about it.

------
kiba
There's only so many jobs you need to create. The US have a population of
about three hundred million. Not all of them work.

So, let cut it in half. You have a labor force of one hundred fifty million
people.

But they're not all employed. Some of them have great jobs, some don't. Their
wages are sometime shit, the working condition's terrible. Some people sucks
at keeping a job. Some just don't have the skills.

Businesses aren't exactly the paragon of efficiency either. They find it
easier to just reject an entire category people, such as convicts.

So, you have this massive inefficiency where people who wants job can't get
them. High demand job can't be filled because they can't train the right
people or they reject too many suitable candidates, such as old programmers.

Other factors conspire to make living more difficult. For example, real estate
costs mean your cost of living is high, and you need to make X amount of money
to have a roof over your head. Pressure is often not relieved because of
housing policies and local politics.

Everything else gets cheaper to an approximation. Though it seemed that the
price of computer remain constant, meaning your dollars buy more bang for its
buck rather than decreasing in nominal price.

------
optimusclimb
If you had a chunk of savings and you invested in a business - would you
optimize on needing to hire more people as the business grows? Or prefer that
the growth of your business doesn't scale linearly with employee head count?

Every time I hear people make these complaints, I wonder, "Would you prefer to
get your cash from an ATM, or wait in line for a teller?"

------
jonesb6
With the latest trend of hiring employees who are already masters of their
craft, it really becomes a process of regurgitation. You don't train up new
employees, you hire them. Thus no job growth IMO.

------
bunnymancer
"The magnitude of workers shifting into new industries is strikingly small: in
2010, only 0.5% of the US labour force is employed in industries that did not
exist in 2000…"

Pretty sure we had computers prior to 2000... Considering the whole millennium
bug scare..

So "Software Developer" isn't part of the statistic.

------
homogeneous
> in 2010, only 0.5% of the US labour force is employed in industries that did
> not exist in 2000

Well that doesn't seem too surprising, I can't really think of many industries
that exist today that didn't in 2000.

~~~
staticint
For comparison, software developers make up about 0.7% of the labour force
(2012)[1]. It is always surprising to me how small the industry actually is.

[1] [http://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-
technology/s...](http://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-
technology/software-developers.htm)

------
programminggeek
Software does two things generally - automates things, and improves
information transportation (communication).

Neither of those create new jobs. If anything, they both seek to remove jobs
and displace existing middlemen.

------
zacharycohn
That first graphic is terrible data vis. Four columns. First one is for 80
years of data. Second is for 30 years. Last two are for 8 years.

Then they draw conclusions based on the differences??

------
matchagaucho
"Free" web services, such as Facebook, do not necessarily benefit from high
employee/end user ratios.

------
hwstar
Silicon valley doesn't produce much hardware like it did in the past. Instead
it creates businesses with questionable customer value such as social
networking, personal assistant services, short term house rental services, and
other software-as-a-service businesses. There will be an implosion of these
SAAS businesses at some point. After the dust clears, it will be interesting
to see if Silicon Valley still is able to produce goods which customers want,
or if some other area of the world will take over (e.g. Bangalore, Shenzhen).

~~~
kapilkale
There are so many faulty premises here

* silicon valley doesn't produce much hardware (evidence for this being true? obviously we hear a ton about software, but what about tesla, intel, nest, apple, google, etc?)

* businesses such as social networking, personal assistance services, short-term house rental services, and other saas have questionable customer value (why?)

* there will be an implosion of these saas businesses (why?)

~~~
laotzu
>silicon valley doesn't produce much hardware (evidence for this being true?
obviously we hear a ton about software, but what about tesla, intel, nest,
apple, google, etc?)

Consider the amount of hardware that a modern smart phone replaces such as the
calculator, phone, video camera, television, radio, clock...

They are producing less hardware because hardware is becoming increasingly
integrated as software:

>The hardware world tends to move into software form at the speed of light.

-Marshall McLuhan

