The High-Tech Job Capital Is…The Big Apple?
Ref: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/24/the-high-tech-job-capital-isthe...
f you’re looking for a tech job in the United States, the best place to go is not Silicon Valley.
It’s New York.
According to a report released Tuesday from AeA, a tech industry trade group, New York and its surrounding metropolitan area leads the nation when it comes to the number of high-tech jobs. Rounding out the top five in order were Washington; San Jose/Silicon Valley; Boston; and Dallas-Fort Worth.
New York had 316,500 high-tech jobs, while Silicon Valley had 225,300, according to the AeA.
The study looked at employment throughout 2006; it was the first city-level report created by the AeA since 2000, before the tech bubble burst.
Silicon Valley does have the highest density of high-tech workers, with 28.6 percent of private sector jobs in the high-tech field. As a much larger metro area with a more diverse set of industries, New York does not even make the top five. (The AeA defines a “high-tech” job as being in one of 49 categories culled from the standardized North American Industrial Classification System that involve creating high-tech products or services.)
If it’s money you’re after, the Valley is the best place to find the highest-paying high-tech jobs, with salaries averaging $144,800. Seattle, number five on the salary list, pays an average of $96,197, while New York–not exactly the cheapest place to live–pays its high-tech workers $91,451.
Coming in at the bottom of the tech-salary scale is San Juan, P.R. High-tech workers there make just $38,422 on average.
Not every city has the same types of high-tech jobs. Silicon Valley leads in semiconductor manufacturing, while Seattle is the software publishing capital. Computer system design is Washington’s purview. And New York has the highest concentration of Internet services jobs.
But all is not rosy in high-tech land. The report warns that the United States is in danger of losing its high-tech edge due to the federal government’s policy not to grant visas or green cards to many foreign students studying here, resulting in a “tremendous number of unfilled jobs,” said Christopher Hansen, AeA’s president and chief executive officer, in an interview Monday.
At the same time, the United States educational system is not producing a sufficient number of graduates to fill those slots. “Our public schools are not generating the kinds of people who can go into engineering and math and compete,” Mr. Hansen said.
The result is that many high-tech companies are forced to relocate their operations abroad, where they can find the skilled help they need. Mr. Hansen said that allowing foreigners to work in the high-tech industry here would only generate more jobs. His proof: eBay, Google, Intel, Sun and Yahoo have either a founder or co-founder who was not American-born.
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The AeA's numbers are
The AeA's numbers are somewhat suspect, and it is blatantly obvious they are an industry shill for increased H1B visas to drop the bottom out of tech wages.
What they don't tell you is that NONE of the foreign born founders of companies like Google, Intel or Sun came to the US under H1B visas. The guy from Intel came after WWII as a refugee, Google co-founder Sergey Brin came as a child with his parents and Sun co-founders Vinod Khosla and Andy Bechtolsheim came as students and completed their degrees here. So there is little to no evidence that H1B holders come here and create companies that generate more jobs.
As for blaming things on the US educational system... college enrollments in tech majors is indeed down by 60+% since the .com crash, but it is still above the level it was in the mid 1990s and all evidence is that kids are choosing to stay away not because they aren't capable, but because there are not sufficient good paying jobs for graduates -- the opposite of what the AeA wants you to think. If there was a real lack of recent tech grads we'd see salaries increasing and we wouldn't hear about students who go 6+ months after graduation with no job offers or find recent grads working as wait staff or bartenders to make ends meet because they can't even get a job at geek squad due to the glut of experienced workers.
Thanks for the insight &
Thanks for the insight & feedback. I concur with your conclusion about tech jobs (supply and demand should work here).
As a somewhat recent
As a somewhat recent graduate (3 years ago), I agree with your assessment. I have friends who had a very hard time finding jobs where they could use their technical degrees, and the job I took has been reduced to outsourcing vendor babysitting. Very disappointing...
Shelley, remember, the
Shelley, remember, the pendulum swings BOTH ways. It may be doom and gloom now, but tech WiLL come back. Hard to believe a female techie would have a hard time finding a job, with all the diversification and parity going on???
I didn't have any trouble
I didn't have any trouble finding a job straight out of school: some of my male classmates did, yes. I've only just recently begun job hunting again, so I can't speak to the effects of diversification in the current job market. I do get a decent amount of networking and community involvement through our local professional section of the Society of Women Engineers (not an exclusive organization, guys!), which is a great resource and a nice resume extra.
I hope you're right about tech coming back, but I worry about how long it will take. Right now it seems that the push for outsourcing is creating an entire generation of engineers (MY generation!) who don't get opportunities to learn by doing their own designs, but are expected to supervise someone overseas implementing our architectural specs. The industry is shooting itself in the foot if/when tech comes back: my generation will have to relearn how to use our engineering skills because we've been stuck doing project management all these years...not to mention the dwindling number of students pursuing technical professions. All I can say is that I'm trying my best to stay away from job descriptions that contain the words "global," "supervise," and "vendor management." :-P Don't get me wrong, experience with international teams is great, but I want to use my technical skills too. Use 'em or lose 'em!
That's an interesting
That's an interesting insight. So in your current role, you're essentially supervising someone offshore and not really using your engineering/technical skills?
Given that situation, your supervisory role is needed for a reason; otherwise the babysitting wouldn't be required. In your particular case, are the folks overseas not as technically qualified, or is because of the language/cultural barrier, or other reasons? Are your coworkers (stateside) in the same situation?
Again, I thought you had an key insight: If you don't use your skills, you lose them. So if you're not doing "tech stuff" in your career day to day, do you attempt to keep them current?
I don't really want to
I don't really want to divulge too many details about my employer's outsourcing practices, but suffice to say that I am not using my technical skills as much as I would like to or expected to when I joined up straight out of college. Incidentally, I do an excellent job of "babysitting," I just don't ENJOY doing it! I have expressed to my management my frustration with the lack of technically challenging tasks and, in lieu of opportunities on my team I am actively pursuing projects outside of my immediate team to get any kind of learning experience I can. Those projects are few and far between, there is a lot of competition within my organization because there's not enough engineering to go around, and time to market often drives junior engineers with more experience than I to take over high profile projects. Outside of work I attempt to (at the very least) maintain my skills from college and keep up on the cutting-edge of technologies that affect the industry in which I currently reside. It's sometimes difficult to focus my efforts when I haven't had enough experience to really be sure of where I want my career to head next. However, I'm excited about some of the jobs I've found in my recent searches and am looking forward to any new challenge I can get my hands on! An eagerness to learn and pride in one's own work aren't skills one can be taught, so I'm confident that I'm a marketable resource to any company (including my current one, if technical opportunities present themselves there). Sorry, shameless plug!
Bottom line: I want a chance to be technically challenged and learn from my own mistakes already. I'm not convinced that I can fulfill that career necessity where I am now despite my efforts to create my own opportunities... I can't seem to defeat outsourcing all by my lonesome!
Edited to add: I am not the only engineer at my company in this situation -- not by a long shot! I just happen to be the youngest on my team by 7-10 years which means that other "junior" engineers on my team got in before the outsourcing hit and have thus gotten plenty of engineering OJT already. They are frustrated too! Many engineers my age have already left for greener pastures...
At times I've got stuck in
At times I've got stuck in similar roles over the past few years when I had to work with off-shore developers. They required extensive hand-holding because they didn't understand specs that on-site developers could have run with. Part of it was the language barrier, part of it was them being 12 hours off, so to talk to things we'd either have to come in early and them stay late or vice versa. Otherwise you had delays responding to emails. And even when you got them on the phone the quality of the VOIP connections was poor so it was hard to understand them even when we had a native Telgu speaker on this end of the line. Add on to the fact that they weren't immersed in the culture of the organization, that they were not very experienced on average and that they had a lot of turn over because the job market in Bangalore is booming and it was a big disaster. Admittedly one of the problems was that like most organizations, fully and accurately specifying problems and specs is a big problem, but we found that attempting agile processes with remote people was just not possible due to the slow communication turnaround. We got a little better results when we could chop of project sized coding chunks and fully spec them out (waterfall) but even then often the results didn't match what the spec was (supposed to be) or the result took a lot of debugging and integration on this side to implement.
As for losing your tech skills because you've been relegated to a custodian for offshore developers? You sure would. I didn't only because I was expected to do all that on top of my normal work. But otherwise I'd have likely been SOL.
The problem is that at some point if business is successful in off-shoring everything that there really won't be any talent left here because it will have all fled to other fields or atrophied.
One of the biggest problems
One of the biggest problems I've run into is their inability to prioritize without being handed an ordered list of responsibilities. When every task is assigned the same level of importance, none of them get done in a timely fashion!! The other huge one is a severe lack of debug skills and a lower standard of good design practices. Those failings require an enormous amount of hand holding on our part by someone who really know what they're doing: how can I, as a new engineer, be expected to successfully supervise something I've never done myself?
I completely agree. One of
I completely agree. One of the problems that developers face here is the every issue is critical problem and worse than that, when you are in development everyone is your boss. It is easier to deal with those things when you are local because you can negotiate directly with people and when you are immersed in the culture of the organization because you know who to talk to in order to sort priorities. That is tougher for freshers of course as you note, and even for people who are experienced but new to an organization or industry. All this is one of the reasons it is crazy that organizations have gutted themselves by laying off so many of the people with skills and knowledge honed through many years in the industry and organization. But that is exactly what I've been through after surviving > 50% downsizing over the past few years.
thnx! Outsourcing is
thnx! Outsourcing is starting to fade as an alternative to true Yankee know how and ability. I am working with a company now that may use coders to do basic programming, but insists on having US programmers to understand the issues in real time.
For every company that has
For every company that has figured that out it seems like there are still five others that haven't jumped into outsourcing/off-shoring and are still anxious to do so. Every company thinks that they are managed so much better than anyone else and that even if outsourcing/off-shoring fails for others they can make it work. For that matter, companies tend to under-recognize or under-report such failures, especially to the outside. But even inside, lower level managers often don't report problems to upper management and for good reason -- they don't want to hear it and will often kill the messenger. Instead the few remaining in-house employees are usually expected to pick up the pieces and make it work so that off-shore doesn't look bad. We even get blamed for off-shore's failures because we "didn't work hard enough to ensure their success". Yeah, like we should be expected to gladly help ship our jobs overseas.
You hit the nail on the
You hit the nail on the head! This is my experience exactly.
I think that a lot of other
I think that a lot of other people have run into exactly the same thing. If you peruse techie and job forums you will see similar stories all over.
Didn't people say that steel
Didn't people say that steel working and auto industry jobs would come back? If I was a young person now I don't know that I'd be willing to bet on tech coming back in the US. Thus the declining enrollments.
When corporate taxes and
When corporate taxes and government regulations are high, business will always go elsewhere, no matter how nicely workers and politicians ask for jobs to be created here in the states. I've also found that even when quality suffers due to outsourcing, the business incentive almost always outweighs the engineering consequences. We're left holding the pieces and explaining why, at least for some things, outsourcing just doesn't work. The business solution to an outsourcing failure is to choose a different company to ousource to: and around and around we go!!
You are absolutely correct.
You are absolutely correct. Despite all the failures the answer selected has basically been to fire the outsourcing company and try someone else. Why they think that will lead to different results I don't know.
Outsourcing became the fad d
Outsourcing became the fad d jour for companies trying to explain why they could not compete with better companies. Rarely did they look at their overall strategy and positioning and leadership, and instead just said if we got "cheaper" labor, we will have better products. NOT!
Oh, I should add that with
Oh, I should add that with the meltdown in financial sector jobs, I would suspect that the Big Apple's numbers may slip pretty badly next time they are tabulated.
No Doubt!
No Doubt!