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In SIlicon Valley: Profits up. Employment Down. 435

Posted by Hemos from the as-the-wheel-grinds-forward dept.
popo writes "The New York Times (free yada yada) has an interesting report on the changing landscape of Silicon Valley tech companies: Profits are soaring but employment figures are not. This dynamic points to significant future shifts down the road for Silicon Valley companies like Electronic Arts and Cisco. Interestingly, the culprit isn't just outsourcing. Huge leaps in worker productivity and automated processes are also responsible for the decreased need for new labor."
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In SIlicon Valley: Profits up. Employment Down. More

In SIlicon Valley: Profits up. Employment Down.

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  • Automating the automation? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by shadowcode ( 852856 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @07:53AM (#12978897) Journal
    I quote;
    ...and automated processes are also responsible for the decreased need for new labor...


    We're talking about Silicon Valley here, isn't that where most of the automation is coming from in the first place?

    I for one welcome our new self-automating IT-overlords.

  • Mandatory overtime (Score:5, Insightful)

    by EWIPlayer ( 881908 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @07:53AM (#12978899)
    Not to mention the recent trend (last 5 years or so) of mandatory overtime... If everyone works the equivalent of 1.5 people then employment doesn't need to go up. Profits are starting to match effort level, and that effort level will just equal burnout eventually. When that happens, employment will go back up or profits will start to go down.

    • That was my immediate reaction, too.

      Of course, that means in the long run employment will go up, because all the guys good enough to do the job before will be burned out in a couple of years, and the companies will have to hire 2-3 substandard guys to replace them since the smart ones will stay well away.

      Whether this is a good thing for either the industry or society as a whole is left as an exercise for the reader.

      • Re:Mandatory overtime (Score:5, Insightful)

        by malkavian ( 9512 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @08:13AM (#12978997)
        In the long term, it's more likely that profits go down. I've seen this mentality before. Push people to the limits to make more profit.
        In a tech team, one guy falls due to burnout, which means that load is spread around the remnants of the already overstressed team.
        New guy comes in to learn the code/system, so the whole job needs doing, and new guy needs to be taught (if he's going to be any more use than a chocolate teapot).
        Which leads to a second member falling, as there really is too much to do, and now less time to do it.
        Which leads to another new guy.
        More than once, I've seen this take out a whole team as management keep moving stuff onto the remaining originals who know the system, or the new guys who sometimes walk out one day and don't come back because of ridiculous pressure.
        Eventually nobody knows the whole system, or can use it all effectively.
        Then the product dies a long and messy death, possibly taking out the whole company surrounding it.
        Net result, lots of job losses.

        Working in the areas I have so long (systems and networks), I find it really odd, how companies are running around yelling "Resilience, reliability.. We need everything able to withstand emergencies", and buy two of every server, RAID the disks, redundant routing, offsite backups..
        Yet they have their tech team cut to the bone, with highly compartmentalised skills.
        One leaves, and for a significant time, they're shafted in one area (at least).
        There was a very good reason companies always used to have more staff than was strictly necessary to complete a task.
        It wasn't just morale, and making the job comfortable enough that people wanted to stay..
        It was for the ability to obtain an "emergency tolerant" skillset.
        You could lose a good few staff from any area, and your knowledge base wasn't significantly impacted.

        All this 'on the edge' company structuring isn't sustainable.
        And by the time the West has finally come full circle, and discarded all the bits that have cost if a fortune in the long term as it's chased short term gain for a few decades (until it can't get any more short term gain, and they hit the wall), they'll be facing a fully geared up Asia and China, who have taken the long term view, with fully staffed and skilled departments who can outmanoeuver and outperform any Western company going..

        • Re:Mandatory overtime (Score:5, Funny)

          by asdfghjklqwertyuiop ( 649296 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @09:14AM (#12979264)
          it is a misdeed
          how all your sentences
          end with a linefeed


          sort of like prose
          perhaps your intention
          or not i suppose

          :)

        • Redundant everything is cheaper than people. People like to make money every week/biweekly. Redundant stuff usually needs money only when it is bought or replaced.
          • Have you priced mandatory support contracts for commercial hardware? As in, if you don't buy our support contract, we don't sell you our hardware? They run 50-100% of the purchase price per year for up to 5 years.

        • Re:Mandatory overtime (Score:5, Interesting)

          by James Youngman ( 3732 ) <jay&gnu,org> on Monday July 04, 2005 @12:07PM (#12980285) Homepage
          It was for the ability to obtain an "emergency tolerant" skillset.
          You could lose a good few staff from any area, and your knowledge base wasn't significantly impacted.
          An important metric for any software project is its Truck Number [c2.com]. This is the minimum number of your staff that would need to be hit by a runaway truck hitting a bus queue in order to completely derail your project.

          So, if your project truck number is 2, you could afford to lose one member of staff due to a random event (sickness, quitting, etc.) but not two.

        • Re:Mandatory overtime (Score:4, Insightful)

          by vsprintf ( 579676 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @04:18PM (#12981386)

          Working in the areas I have so long (systems and networks), I find it really odd, how companies are running around yelling "Resilience, reliability.. We need everything able to withstand emergencies", and buy two of every server, RAID the disks, redundant routing, offsite backups.. Yet they have their tech team cut to the bone, with highly compartmentalised skills.

          And in software, management is running around yelling "reusability" like some mantra. This is of course just a keyword for "fewer programmers", but the managers are cluless enough to think that data conversion code can magically be used to run tape drives if it's written with "reusability" in mind. Like most problems, it boils down to managers being promoted to their level of incompetence. Seriously, being in a meeting where management is detailing their "vision" is enough to make me wonder what kind of hallucinogenics they're using.

    • Re:Mandatory overtime (Score:5, Insightful)

      by zerocool^ ( 112121 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @07:58AM (#12978920) Homepage Journal

      If everyone works the equivalent of 1.5 people then[...]

      In the Sysadmin world, we call this .5 of a person "shell scripts".

      It's a dichotomy - you get really good at shell scripts so that you can make your life easier, take care of some of the tedious stuff automatically, and then they expect you to fill your free time with more work! Whatever happened to "if I'm smart enough to make the system work for me, I deserve to do less work"?

      ~Will

      • Re:Mandatory overtime (Score:4, Insightful)

        by luvirini ( 753157 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @08:00AM (#12978928)
        ah.. then you are marking your time card wrong..

        You should mark all the time that the shell scripts do while you play computer games as worktime..

      • Re:Mandatory overtime (Score:5, Insightful)

        by EWIPlayer ( 881908 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @08:02AM (#12978933)

        My favourite T-shirt in my collection says, "Of course I don't look busy. I did it right the first time.".

        But you're totally right. I've written tons of scripts and cron jobs in the last 5 years, yet i still work 9.5 hours a day on average. Where's my raise? :)

      • It think it'd be easier to argue for extra pay\promotions based on your accomplishments?

      • Re:Mandatory overtime (Score:5, Insightful)

        by el_womble ( 779715 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @08:29AM (#12979066) Homepage

        This irks me. If somebody employees me to create a tool for them I am happy to do so and will hand it over to them copyright an all. If somebody employes me to do something for them, and I choose to automate that task using a tool, using skills that I have aquired to build that tool, then the tool should belong to me, not that company - so when I leave that company the tool leaves with me. Otherwise where is the bean counter incentive to keep me on?

        I once had a job in a call centre for Dell (groan). They job was tedious. I was told I had to take data from a disk, print it out, then input it into a seperate program. They employed me as a call centre grunt, so I wasn't getting paid geek wages. I created a macro, and did a weeks worth of work in under an hour (the restriction was bandwidth). What am I ethically obliged to do in that situation? I tried telling my super, but they weren't interested as it threatend their jobs. In essence I had made myself, and my coworkers redundant in a little under a morning. Should I ask for more work when I was already doing more than they were employing me for? When I left I took the macro with me.

        • Re:Mandatory overtime (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward
          I once had a job in a call centre for Dell (groan). They job was tedious. I was told I had to take data from a disk, print it out, then input it into a seperate program. They employed me as a call centre grunt, so I wasn't getting paid geek wages. I created a macro, and did a weeks worth of work in under an hour (the restriction was bandwidth). What am I ethically obliged to do in that situation? I tried telling my super, but they weren't interested as it threatend their jobs. In essence I had made myself,

        • Re:Mandatory overtime (Score:4, Interesting)

          by ERJ ( 600451 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @09:17AM (#12979279)
          I guess the question would be, did you create the macro on Dell time? If they were paying you for the time spent on the macro it would probably technically belong to them.

          However, if your supervisor wasn't interested in it then that is their loss. Sometimes people don't want what is best, only what is known.

          That is why I enjoy working for a small company (8 people). Every efficiency that we can come up with is quickly accepted and used.

          • Re:Mandatory overtime (Score:2, Interesting)

            by Anonymous Coward
            If they were paying you for the time spent on the macro

            They were paying him for dooing his job description: copying data entry by hand. Not for his programming. At worst, he should be fired for spending his time doing something else, but he should not have his IP stolen at data-entry wages.

        • Re:Mandatory overtime (Score:3, Insightful)

          by dubl-u ( 51156 ) *
          If somebody employes me to do something for them, and I choose to automate that task using a tool, using skills that I have aquired to build that tool, then the tool should belong to me, not that company - so when I leave that company the tool leaves with me.

          Legally, all work you do as an employee is owned by the company. If you give them something more than they expect, well, you've given it to them. Generally that's the case if you're on an hourly contract, too, although it depends on exactly what's in
        • I'd call that suck-ass management.

          I once had a job doing data entry. After I'd gotten used to the systems enough, I set up a bunch of macros to make myself more efficient (this was going over NCSA Telnet from a Mac to a VAX).

          After I'd used them enough to think they'd help others, I told my boss about them and set them up for all the other data-entry drones.

          Why did I do that, when I could have kept the macros to myself and been the most efficient data drone in the outfit while still getting a few hours o
      • If you're doing less work, then surely they should pay you less? Or did you think that because you've made one efficiency improvement, you should just get to sit back after that, i.e. one day's work, one year's pay?
      • Whatever happened to "if I'm smart enough to make the system work for me, I deserve to do less work"?

        You obviously have enough time to be posting on Slashdot... Or is that a shell-script, too?

      • We're talking about different stuff (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Moraelin ( 679338 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @10:09AM (#12979632) Journal
        As far as I can tell, your argument basically seems to be "if I do the same job in 2 hours (yes, via scripts or whatever) that a bad worker does in 8, I should get the rest of 6 hours free". Which is a strange request, seein' as it basically asks to set everyone's job requirements to the slowest possible worker.

        It's not how any other job works, nor how progress happened. E.g., the reason we have an abbundance of consumer goods today is that, yes, we can produce in 8 hours _more_, say, cloth than a 16'th century weaver could produce by hand. If the line of thinking had been, "yay, I produced 10 ft worth of cloth in 10 minutes, that someone would have needed all day to make by hand, therefore I can go home after 10 minutes" we'd still be living in the 16'th century kind of poverty. We'd have lots of free time, but wouldn't be an inch closer to having today's standard of living.

        Anyway, when the rest of us rant about overtime, we don't mean "waah, but they make me work a whole 8 hours a day." What we mean is more along the lines of having to work 12-14 hour days, 7 days a week.

        E.g., since Electronic Arts is mentioned, I can't help remember the recent story (you know, the employee's wife's blog) about EA over-working its employees to the maximum. In fact, until some of them couldn't even focus any more. And they were demanding that kind of hours not because the project was desperately over the deadline or over the budget, but from the start. Just because some greedy fuck figured out some version of "muahahaha, so I can get more than twice the work out of them for the same money. And if they burn out afterwards, who the f-word cares about them?"

        I find it inherently abhorrent to read about EA bragging about profits and _reducing_ the number of jobs, while demanding that kind of massive overtime.

        Now I can see some excuse in asking for short-term _temporary_ over-time to save a project in the final stages, or until more people can be hired to handle the unforeseen load. But actually planning to _fire_ some more, because, hey, you can overwork the rest to make up for it (and then fire them too when they get burned out), has a certain slimeball quality to it.

        • Re:We're talking about different stuff (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Atragon ( 711454 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @10:33AM (#12979775)
          I think the point is that because the person in question is working smarter, why should he wind up getting paid the same as his co-workers while being more productive?

          I don't think anybody is arguing that we shouldn't increase productivity, the argument here is that finding an innovative solution to a problem thus increasing your productivity should be rewarded.

          If you have an environment in which working smarter merely results in you doing more work for the same pay as the people who are doing less work where is the incentive to be more productive?

      • It's called an 8-hour work day. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Inoshiro ( 71693 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @07:57PM (#12982264) Homepage
        The problem is that, by and large, the software industry is stupid.

        If you work a 9.5hr shift regularly, you are not as productive. If you had just worked 8 hours, you'd notice that you'd do about as much work as in 9.5hr. That extra 1.5hr of labour at the end of the day, a day where you are already tired of work, and likely to make mistakes, is not good. At first you gain a benefit, but then the lack of leisure time cuts into sleep.

        At that point, you arrive for work less rested, and productivity keeps declining from there. You can't recover. It's why, over the 17th through early 20th century, labour hours decreased. The most recent being when Henry Ford proclaimed that thereafter the minimum wage in his industries would be five dollars for a day of eight hours.

        I don't know why there is this huge cult around working long hours, with no vacations, and killing yourself with overtime in the US and in tech jobs. I don't hear about people dieing from stress in th EU, where they have 6 weeks of vacation a year.

        "if I'm smart enough to make the system work for me, I deserve to do less work"

    • Re:Mandatory overtime (Score:5, Insightful)

      by bwalling ( 195998 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @08:00AM (#12978925) Homepage
      The idea that hours equates to productivity is ludicrous. As long as you get your stuff done, it shouldn't matter to your employer how long you work. My wife took over a job that took the previous person (actually, each of the last three) 70-80 hours per week to do. She was able to get it done in 40-45 hours. Her employer was thrilled. The point isn't how long you work, but whether you get your work done.
      • well this requires a employer that looks at actual results, unfortunately many companies forget to do this and focus the efforts of classifying the employee productivity as some sort of total productivity for all divided by hours they do as individuals.
      • I agree that it's ludicrous, but it's how a lot of employers think. Your wife is very very lucky that she has an employer who looks at what she actually gets done, not the amount of time she spends; there are a whole lot of employers out there who would look at her time vs. her predecessors' and conclude that she was only working 57% as hard.
        • But how do you measure productivity? It's not like you can do a factory style "number of widgets produced" measurement.

          It's a tricky problem, which is probably why most employers have ignored it.
          • Well, the way my employer does it -- and I'm another of the lucky ones, for the most part -- is by whether the applications I deliver have the features they need. It's not as simple as "number of widgets," I agree, but it's also not impossible. It does, however, require having a boss who a) understands the field, and b) pays attention to what his employees are actually doing. The problem is that a lot of managerial types (particularly those with nothing but "management education" who think they learned t

      • there are a whole lot of employers out there who would look at her time vs. her predecessors' and conclude that she was only working 57% as hard.

        But let's face it, companies like that are never going to be winners, so do you really want to work for them in the first place?

        Most research puts sustainable peak performance at around 35-40 hours per week, depending on industry, circumstances, etc. After that, you get rapidly diminishing returns.

        By 60 hours per weeks, the extra work since 40 cancels out

      • I agree completely, BUT there is one catch.

        How do you know how much work someone is supposed to "get done?"

        In a lot of industries there are long enough histories to have a good sense of that. In some industries (and especially in small companies) it's very much a seat-of-the-pants calculation.

        A lot of the time it's just whatever your people normally get done in 40 hours sitting at a desk where you can see them. If the person whose job your wife took over had been twice as efficient as your wife, would

      • Re:Mandatory overtime (Score:4, Interesting)

        by tourvil ( 103765 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @09:49AM (#12979486)
        The idea that hours equates to productivity is ludicrous. As long as you get your stuff done, it shouldn't matter to your employer how long you work. My wife took over a job that took the previous person (actually, each of the last three) 70-80 hours per week to do. She was able to get it done in 40-45 hours. Her employer was thrilled. The point isn't how long you work, but whether you get your work done.

        The problem is that at some of those companies that require overtime, if you are getting your work done in 40-45 hours, then they just give you more work.

        Last year I left a job like that. When I started (before they required overtime), I didn't mind the thought that I may have to work extra during crunch time to get the job done. The problem was that the company started mandating a minimum of 48 hours from everyone. So if you were someone who could "get the job done" in less than 48 hours, then management figured you weren't getting enough jobs.

        There was also an expectation that with more senority and skill, you should be working more and more hours, and they would plan projects for you as such. My boss actually told me (during a time when I was working 55+ hours) that by leaving at 5:00 most days, I was setting a bad example for the newer guys. This is in spite of the fact that I was coming in early and working weekends...

        Needless to say, I am now happy working in my new 40 hours-per-week job. :)

      • I'm so happy for your wife, but this isn't really the dynamic behind mandatory and uncompensated overtime.

        Productivity gains in labor statistics, especially for workers are almost always tied to making people work more hours for less money, it can be just more hours, just less money or both. The classic example is you lay off a percentage of your work force every year and each year the people who survive have to do more and more work to compensate for their fallen bretheren. They are also motivated to wo

    • Aren't most IT workers exempt from mandatory overtime? I'd say if anything the recent trend is away from mandatory overtime, as paying people one and a half times their base rate is rather expensive.

      If everyone works the equivalent of 1.5 people then employment doesn't need to go up.

      That's really a huge oversimplification there, as you're assuming nothing else changes. In reality, if everyone works the equivalent of 1.5 people, then demand for goods and services are likely to go up causing a demand fo

  • Alternative non NY Times version (Score:4, Informative)

    by eltoyoboyo ( 750015 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @07:54AM (#12978902) Journal
    Right Here [iht.com]

  • The real question (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Mad Merlin ( 837387 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @07:56AM (#12978911) Homepage
    Where are those profits going? To the low level workers that actually make it happen, or to the CEO who is already wildy rich? I wouldn't be surprised to see wages not going up for the majority of workers despite increased profits.

    • Re:The real question (Score:5, Informative)

      by the eric conspiracy ( 20178 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @08:05AM (#12978954)
      Where are those profits going?

      While CEO salaries are going up faster than lower level workers, the CEO salary is a cost to the corporation subtracted from the calculation of the amount of profits.

      Corporate profits are used in a number of ways - funding acquisitions, paying dividends, buying back stock, etc. Generally profits end up in the hands of the stockholders in the form of increased dividends or stock value.

      • the CEO salary is a cost to the corporation subtracted from the calculation of the amount of profits

        Very nice, but in most cases the CEO's salary is a negligible fraction of his compensation. Most CEOs have been compensated mostly in options, and until very recently accounting for options as expenses was practically unheard of in Silicon Valley. Historically, CEOs have had significant influence over the appointment of directors to the boards that are meant to oversee them. As it is the board that nominall
        • Very nice, but in most cases the CEO's salary is a negligible fraction of his compensation.

          until very recently accounting for options as expenses was practically unheard of in Silicon Valley

          Right. But now it is the normal practice to include options as expenses. Wall Street and the FASB are pretty much forcing accounting of options as expenses now. So CEO compensation IS being treated as an expense.

          So what exactly is your point?

      • Re:The real question (Score:2, Interesting)

        by rcs1000 ( 462363 ) *
        And at the risk of sounding wantonly capitalistic, share ownership - i.e. wealth - is far more widely spread than has historically been the case.

        Thanks to 401Ks, mutual funds and the like, corporate ownership has become *much* more widely spread.

        Some numbers to illustrate my point:

        In 1950, the top 10% of people owned more than 90% of listed companies' shares! Insane, but true.

        Now, the number is more like 50%. Fidelity's Magellan fund is open to all. The California Public Teacher's Pension Fund owns tens

        • That's fine, but.... (Score:5, Interesting)

          by King_TJ ( 85913 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @10:47AM (#12979848) Journal
          As a "30-something" myself, and realizing I have practically no savings - I think the problem runs a little bit deeper than "skipping the purchase of that 60" plasma screen".

          I know a surprising number of guys like myself, who worked hard in our 20's and started "getting ahead" in I.T. careers, only to start back at the bottom due to divorce. These often lead right into being forced to file for bankruptcy, compounding the problem.

          My 401K savings was wiped out with legal fees, and I haven't been able to get another job that even offers one since then.

          It's fine to talk about wealth being more "widespread" due to things like 401K's and mutual funds, but those of us who primarily work for smaller businesses don't often get in on any of that. You hear a lot of talk about the small businesses being the "real future" and "cornerstone" of America - but working for them seems to rarely connect someone to any of this wealth that's supposed being "spread around".

        • Owning the mean of production (Score:4, Interesting)

          by erice ( 13380 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @11:52AM (#12980196) Homepage
          n 1950, the top 10% of people owned more than 90% of listed companies' shares! Insane, but true.

          Now, the number is more like 50%

          Sure, but what percentage of workers were employed by listed companies in 1950 vs today?

          Joe's grandfather owned a hardware store in 1950. He might not have owned any stock but it's didn't matter that much becuase he owned the whole store.

          Joe doesn't own a hardware store. He works for Osh. As a corporate employee, he either owns stock or he owns nothing.

          Corporate America has expanded a great deal since 1950 at the expense of sole propriterships and partnerships. The rank and file now own more stock then they did in 1950. But do they actually own more of the means of production? That's not clear.

        • Re:The real question (Score:3, Insightful)

          by sgt_doom ( 655561 )
          Wow, magic numbers...COOL, DUDE!

          Reality check: today less than 1% control over 90% of the assets - for sure, dude, it may be difficult - but do the math! 99% make under $323,000 per year - the upper 1% make over $323,000 per year - we have reached the era of ultra-concentration of wealth - other countries have revolutions long before reaching this point. Perhaps we're clueless....

        • Re:The real question (Score:3, Informative)

          by h3llfish ( 663057 )
          I think you need to do more research on the distribution of wealth, because you contradict yourself. You say that it's "insane" for 10% of people to own 90% of listed companies shares. This implies that you believe that, in a larger sense, it would be wrong for a small minority of citizens to control the vast majority of wealth. On that much, we agree. But while more ordinary people own shares than before, this is not the same as having wealth. In the old days, owning shares literally meant a share of

        • Re:The real question (Score:3, Insightful)

          by incom ( 570967 )
          I don't think ANYONE(sane anyway) has a problem with people who have earned their fortunes, ethically. But the ill will is ussually directed at people born into wealth, or those who aquire it through illegal(even civilly illegal) means, or in ventures that are popularly accepted as being "bad" (such as excessively harming people or the environment). Please don't spread your utopian capitalist dellusions, the system isn't designed to make everybody responsible retire comfortably, it's not even a minor goal o
        • So you're saying we should all invest our pennies into corperate America now, and live a low class, poor life style until we're around 55 perhaps... where we can MAYBE buy a house?

          Is that the goal in life? Waste it investing, then cash out for 10 years of life and die?

          Hey its a plan... but is it really living?

          Frankly I find it a little scary that our government now wants us to hand over our money to corperations and allow them to generate our retirement wealth.

          The current administration almost seems lik

          • Re:The real question (Score:3, Insightful)

            by bnenning ( 58349 )
            Frankly I find it a little scary that our government now wants us to hand over our money to corperations and allow them to generate our retirement wealth.

            Actually, they want to give you the *choice* of diverting some of your payroll taxes to a personal account that you would actually own, as opposed to the current system where you get nothing except a vague promise that the government will tax the hell out of future generations and maybe give you some of it.

            The current administration almost seems like t
    • To the CEO of course. A company is driven from the top. Its success is because of its management, its failures because of its management. If a company makes higher profits because of laying people off, it's the management who decided to do that, so they get the rewards. In today's climate, the low-level workers are often expendable, so there's no need to reward them.

      If you're not happy with the current situation, perhaps you should be a CEO, or start your own company. Then you might find out that it's not

  • Well of course, and its going to get .... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by 3seas ( 184403 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @07:57AM (#12978913) Homepage Journal
    ... even more so.

    Programming is teh act of automating complexity, typically made up of less complex, but still the same...automations. It is done so that the user of the complexity can use and reuse the complexity thru a simplified (in relationship to the complexity) interface.

    With this it is inherent that the field of programming is something of a job intended to work itself out of a job... Otherwise there is a serious problem exposed in the software industry.

    There will always be jobs in programming but tasks will change and as programming automates more and more of its own field, simplifying the process, so will it allow more and more to do programming/automating, for themselves, perhaps not strickly as a programmer 9-5 but as a task to do as part of other main duties of onmes position at a company.

    Simply understand the inherent objective of progamming and carry it on out in its evolution..

    • Re:Well of course, and its going to get .... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Brave Guy ( 457657 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @08:05AM (#12978955)

      Your argument only holds if we only try to do the same jobs, but now with increased automation. A smart industry/society would realise that if the easy stuff just got easier, we have more resources to focus on harder stuff.

      • I don't know about doing the same job, because nobody in their work history really does that, but otherwise being able to move on to more difficult stuff, and more interesting stuff, Absolutely! Genuine software engineering will come into the lime light.

        But like Alchemy's evolution into Chemestry and the development of chemical megaplants, software development has to change its underlying base knowledge to allow it to more easily happen.

        Roman Numeral math has limitations that prevent it from being used to
      • A smart industry/society would realise that if the easy stuff just got easier, we have more resources to focus on harder stuff.

        Beautifully put, ABG.

        I often get into arguments with a good friend of mine who feels that the GPL and other open source licenses are anathema to capitalism. His argument is that if software is devalued and consumers expect software for free, the worth of software will diminish to zero.

        My rebuttal is precisely what you pointed to: It's not as if there is a finite quantity of

  • Several things causing this (Score:4, Insightful)

    by luvirini ( 753157 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @07:58AM (#12978917)
    Two of the trends causing this are clearly the increased automation and outsourcing.

    But also the much higher overtime in larger corporations on scales than was traditioally only seen in startups.

    And the fact that a lot of the new things are not outsourced as such, but still developped by small companies and then bought by these large ones.

  • Unemployment (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Citizen of Earth ( 569446 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @07:59AM (#12978923)
    "The prospect of technological leverage will of course raise the specter of unemployment. I'm surprised people still worry about this. After centuries of supposedly job-killing innovations, the number of jobs is within ten percent of the number of people who want them. This can't be a coincidence."
    -- Paul Graham (2004-09), What The Bubble Got Right

    (If the doom-sayers were right, then there would be a total of ten jobs in the world today.)

    • Re:Unemployment (Score:2, Insightful)

      by g0hare ( 565322 )
      Old job: Good wage, benefits, retirement, dignity. New Job: Delivering pizzas Both are jobs. One is better.
    • "This can't be a coincidence."

      Indeed it isnt. Should the gap ever threaten to increase beyond ten percent a fair number can expect getting reclassified as unsuitable for work, mandatory employed in highway cleaning or otherwise.

      The 'unemployment rate' number must be the most fudged statistic in the history of statistics, and no politician can afford to let it pass ten percent.

  • From TFA ... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Daniel Dvorkin ( 106857 ) * on Monday July 04, 2005 @08:02AM (#12978934) Homepage Journal
    In the last three years, profits at the seven largest companies in Silicon Valley by market value have increased by an average of more than 500 percent while Santa Clara County employment has declined to 767,600, from 787,200. During the previous economic recovery, between 1995 and 1997, the county, which is the heart of Silicon Valley, added more than 82,800 jobs.

    And this is happening all over the place, not just in Silicon Valley, and in all industries, not just IT. In other words, folks, whatever you call the current economic situation, it is not a recovery. Traditional aggregate measures like size of GDP, or GDP per capita, or total corporate income -- and the changes in them that have traditionally been used to define words like "depression," "recession," "recovery," and "boom" -- are meaningless if the number and quality of jobs don't keep pace. It really doesn't matter how much the executives and boardmembers are making. If the increased profits don't translate into good jobs at good pay for regular workers, nobody's recovering a damn thing.

    • Re:From TFA ... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by luvirini ( 753157 )
      I agree.. but onfortunately mot of the main stream media is owned by those said large corporations, thus they like to use the things you mention (GDP et all)

    • If the increased profits don't translate into good jobs at good pay for regular workers, nobody's recovering a damn thing.

      Has it ever occurred to you that maybe the loss in good job opportunities is offset by a gain in good entrepreneurial opportunities?

      I.e. instead of waiting around for someone else to provide you with a living, maybe you should become your own boss and hire yourself?

  • Spreading outside Santa Clara County (Score:5, Insightful)

    by eltoyoboyo ( 750015 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @08:03AM (#12978936) Journal
    A significant number of tech people were never attracted to the area since the cost of living increase exceeded the salary increase. Companies have moved to spread their tech base outside the main "Silicon Valley" proper. The jobs have spread up the East Bay to Sacramento, while headquarters remained in the Silicon Valley area. Jobs have also spread to other outlying cities. With the advent of cheap broadband in rural areas, software engineers and project managers can live anywhere from Alabama to Oregon and maintain a nice home instead of two bedroom apartment.

  • Translation (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Average_Joe_Sixpack ( 534373 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @08:03AM (#12978939)
    Huge leaps in worker productivity and automated processes are also responsible for the decreased need for new labor

    Employees are working longer hours and are expected to put in work during the weekends and holidays (yes, I'm bitter because I am putting in hours today)

  • SIlicon eh (Score:2, Funny)

    by DrSkwid ( 118965 )
    Ga, No Ca P, O K, Mo F O ?

  • Technology makes things easier and cheaper. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 04, 2005 @08:10AM (#12978981)

    Same thing happenned to machinists.

    You start off with a blacksmith. Lots of them are needed to do anything and it costs a lot and they are highly skilled and treasured.

    Then the blacksmith learns to build metal bending machines. You take a bar, put it in the machine, pull hard on the lever and it bends.

    Thus it makes more complex devices easier to build. The blacksmith becomes more highly educated, more refined. Becomes the inventor.

    He uses the metal bending machines to build complex machines. shavers, benders, cutters, drills, and such. Those in turn make making more and more complex machines that are larger, stronger, and at the same time more exact and easier to use.

    Then comes interchangable parts. Things that took generations to figure out, years of discipline hard work to learn how to build, can now be built in previously unimaginable large numbers AND be more exact AND be made by semi-skilled labor.

    Then they build entire factories. Machines the size of apartment complexes. Things so automated and exact that it boggles the mind.

    Were is the place for the original blacksmiths that started all this? No were. All you need is a highly educated guy at the top doing the design, and somebody with a IQ hirer then a 105 to stamp out the molds and feed the machines the raw materal.

    Such is the same thing with the programmer.

    The original blacksmiths were the guys that took individual transistors and designed thinking machines. They used wires coated in varnish and wrapped around metal pegs to build curcuits.

    They developed their own languages to go with the custom machines.

    Then along came wide use of intergrated curcuits. Discs and memory to store instructions. Machine language became well understood technology and people built and documented assembly.

    Then you had standardizations happenning. Fewer new unique machines were built and ones that were created were built with a eye on backward compatability with previous generations of computers.

    Then along came C and Unix to make realy portable programs. Fewer and fewer machine archatectures were built, with standardized abstractions and ISAs for compatability.

    All the computers resembled each other in operation and performance. They became faster and faster. Software that was not portable became obsolete as soon as it was finished written.

    Now we have a few archatectures. They resemble each other closely in theory and executions. Portable software is the norm. Nobody fucks around in assembly unless they absolutely have to and that's avoided as much as possible.

    Nobody is hand-making curcuits. Nobody is building memory from hand or wiring up peg boards. It's all done thru IDE's and thru standardized libraries provided by large monolythic system developers. The computer is disposable and faster then ever, the software can be gotten from the internet in minutes and new programs can be written in weeks that would of taken years to accomplish just a couple decades ago.

    That's how technology works. It makes doing complex things very easy.

    A person can go into Enlightenment 0.17 or use Python with Gstreamer framework to build a DVD player with fewer then 100 lines of code, and have it run on AIX, PPC, ARM, x86, x86-64, IA64, Sparc and others with almost the same level of effort.

    7 it was very expensive just to have a computer that could even play DVDs.

  • Designers/Administrators get paid (Score:5, Insightful)

    by putko ( 753330 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @08:10AM (#12978985) Homepage Journal
    From reading this, and another article by Richtel about US mom and pop businesses outsourcing their manufacturing, it seems that people who run things or design things still have jobs. That's just not many people.

    The assembly has moved to China. You probably don't want those jobs anyway -- when they were here they were lousy jobs, but now they are unthinkable (unless you like breathing lead). Design and prototyping still gets done in Silicon Valley.

    Even so, actual engineering is moving to Taiwan. Imagine you want to make a board. The assembly guys (Chinese, in Shanghai) need to talk to the engineer and ask some questions about a substitution. Better if he is Chinese in Taiwan, right?

    Even more disturbing (as a non-Chinese-speaking American) is that actual innovation (the stuff we are supposed to be good at) is getting done in Taiwan. E.g. stuff that allows a cheapo processor to have 5 fast ethernet interfaces. Your routers were probably designed in Taiwan, and labled "Cisco" or "D-Link". But Cisco didn't design it -- it was probably someone like these guys: Zyxel [zyxel.com] (Taiwan)

    Americans need to lose the laziness and start working harder (if they want to be able to pay for enough gas to fill a SUV). This is inevitable. As long as there was no China, the Taiwanese could make decent money on the bottom. Now that Red China is here, they are getting pushed up; they have to do fancier work, or they will live like the Chicoms.

    If the Africans ever get their act together, their wages will be lower than the Chinese, and that will be it for the rag trade. North Carolina will not make any textiles/clothing at that point.
    • China nowadays is about as red as a smurf.

      Chinese people are pouring over Mao's red book for business secrets.

      The whole country is separating back into classes.
    • Actually, you seem to miss the point of the article. Americans are MORE productive - We're getting the same or more production out of our technology workers with few people. How is that NOT working harder??????

      I'll use myself as an example. I just got of of a project, i.e. a chip design where the final place & route, timing analysis, etc. was handled by two people on my company's side (working 90 hour weeks for a month solid - I was one of them.) Did I receive overtime - Nope.

      The simple fact is - i
    • Americans need to lose the laziness and start working harder (if they want to be able to pay for enough gas to fill a SUV).

      It's not so much hard work that I think is required; it's useful work. Americans seem to care less and less whether they're creating value. The large corporations where I see the most outsourcing are also the ones where I see a ton of waste, and much more effort spent on marketing a crappy product than making a better one.

      This seems endemic to me. From Enron and Worldcom and the rise

  • TFA say employment rising (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Kohath ( 38547 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @08:19AM (#12979031)
    If you read TFA carefully, you'll see that employment picked up starting in March.

    Leave it to the NY Times to spin the story.

    "Profits Up, Productivity WAY Up, Employment Finally Starting to Increase Too" would be a reasonably accruate way to report this. Nevermind that though.

    NY Times is the official newspaper of half-truths and selective reporting. It's Micheal Moore without the showmanship.
  • This is a disturbing trend. Companies become more profitable, but because of the downward pressure on wages, that money goes to the few owners, rather than the people working for the company.

    The better we work, the harder we work, the smaller the middle class becomes. Jobs are "de-skilled" so they can be performed for minimum wage or less.

    Who are these companies going to sell to when no one can afford their wares?

    --grendel drago

  • Wake Up People! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by occamboy ( 583175 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @08:23AM (#12979042)
    This is why unions were invented - to protect the folks in the middle from getting screwed by the fruits of their own labor. Sure, unions cause trouble sometimes - so does anything else , e.g., laissez-faire capitalism results in politicians for sale, Halliburton, and so forth.

    In the final analysis, history clearly shows that America, and America's middle class, have done best when unions are strong.
  • "As more and more people are thrown out of work, unemployment results."
  • I am rolling better cash then I did in the valley elsewhere. From a worker prospective it's no place to be. Too much competition in the valley from experianced people who own houses and have their lives there.
  • Sheesh, I already see "greedy bastard" comments and "this proves the economy is in the toilet! Whaaa!"

    Why does anyone believe Silicon Valley represents the economy as a whole? SV was unbelievably inefficient during the dot bomb era. It's never going to be like it was.

    Quick story: I was involved in a company that got $19 million in VC capital. What did they spend it on? Employees. Lots of employees. What were they supposed to do? The idiots in charge didn't care what they did -- they just wanted to grow as fast as possible, and give the illusion of a large company so they could go public. This was the thinking during that period.

    You can't use SV to make ANY predictions about the overall economy. That area is too screwed up and too overpopulated.

  • Huge leaps in worker productivity and automated processes are also responsible for the decreased need for new labor.
    And that's a good thing! I don't care, how many people are employed by a company, I want their product/service to be cheap and good.

  • Harvard MBA's fsck'ing it up... again (Score:3, Informative)

    by bondjamesbond ( 99019 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @11:06AM (#12979959) Journal
    I don't mean to be inflamatory about this, but the way that companies are being run in Silicon Valley just WREAKS of the Harvard MBA way of doing things. Seriously guys and gals, if you ever have the priveledge of running your own company, don't ever ever hire one of these snakes. You'll find yourself drowning in the bad karma that they'll pump into your company/life. 'Nuff said.

  • I am seeing lots of employment in the valley (Score:3, Informative)

    by crucini ( 98210 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @01:20PM (#12980649)
    I live in Silicon Valley. It seems like everyone is hiring right now. Startups are springing up like mushrooms and huge companies are funding new efforts. In my recent job search, I got five offers locally. But you have to know your stuff. Most companies grilled me extensively on languages, databases and algorithms. It's fortunate that my ongoing interest in computers led me to keep learning while I was working at my last job.

    We are phonescreening a lot of candidates, and almost all are unsatisfactory.

    To combine my experience with the idea that "employment is not rising," I guess that the Valley still has many unqualified programmers. As companies get better at screening, these people will be unemployed more often.

    If you are a good programmer with the right skills, the Valley is a very exciting place to be right now.

  • 20 managers, 3 programmers (Score:3, Interesting)

    by heroine ( 1220 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @05:49PM (#12981771) Homepage
    At least in my silicon valley experience, in 2000 it was 5 programmers to every manager and we did real implementation. Today it's 1 programmer to every 5 managers. All the work is in developing specs for products and developing business relations with vendors, but not in implementing any product. The implementation of the products is done by Asian companies who pay fees to use our specs, so it's not officially outsourcing even though it is.

    It's efficient allright and writing specs for products is much more politically correct than outsourcing the product development.

    Whether you call it improved efficiency or outsourcing, improved efficiency is basically another way of saying outsourcing.

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