Nine Out of Every 10 Silicon Valley Jobs Pays Less Than In 1997, Report Finds (mercurynews.com) 354
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Mercury News: Nine out of every 10 Silicon Valley jobs pays less now than when Netflix first launched in 1997, despite one of the nation's strongest economic booms and a historically low unemployment rate that outpaces the national average. While tech workers have thrived, employees in the middle of Silicon Valley's income ladder have been hit hardest as their inflation-adjusted wages declined between 12 and 14 percent over the past 20 years, according to a study from UC Santa Cruz's Everett Program for Technology and Social Change and the labor think tank Working Partnership USA, which examined the economic impact of technology companies.
Technology workers saw a median wage increase of 32 percent over the past 20 years, the study found. But Silicon Valley workers in virtually all other areas lost ground during that time. Across all jobs, wages for even the highest-paid 10 percent increased just under 1 percent, the study found. Meanwhile, the region's economy has been booming. Since 2001, the amount of money generated per Silicon Valley resident -- the area's per person GDP -- has grown 74 percent, the study found. That's more than five times faster than the equivalent national growth. Also, a smaller percentage of wealth is going to workers. "In 2001, about 64 percent of the money generated in Silicon Valley went to workers," reports Mercury News. "By 2016, that was down to 60 percent. The drop translated to $9.6 billion -- about $8,480 in potential pay and benefits per worker -- that instead went to investors and owners, according to the study."
Technology workers saw a median wage increase of 32 percent over the past 20 years, the study found. But Silicon Valley workers in virtually all other areas lost ground during that time. Across all jobs, wages for even the highest-paid 10 percent increased just under 1 percent, the study found. Meanwhile, the region's economy has been booming. Since 2001, the amount of money generated per Silicon Valley resident -- the area's per person GDP -- has grown 74 percent, the study found. That's more than five times faster than the equivalent national growth. Also, a smaller percentage of wealth is going to workers. "In 2001, about 64 percent of the money generated in Silicon Valley went to workers," reports Mercury News. "By 2016, that was down to 60 percent. The drop translated to $9.6 billion -- about $8,480 in potential pay and benefits per worker -- that instead went to investors and owners, according to the study."
I bet "landlord" isn't one of them (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I bet "landlord" isn't one of them (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
I think you've got that backwards. Slumlords live far away from their shitholes. Gentrification is driven by people who want to live somewhere despite the current neighbors, because the scenery is nice or the commute is short.
Re: I bet "landlord" isn't one of them (Score:2)
Gentrification is driven by people who want to live somewhere...
... and often as not, they're renting at an astronomical rate and those rent checks are getting cashed nowhere near.
Capiche??
Re: (Score:3)
In most places they can just pay the Sheriff to do the "throw out on the street" part, they don't even need to come to town to have that done.
But OTOH, they do own the land.
If you want to fight gentrification, the first thing to do is figure out what your position on "private property" is, and then get the necessary changes made to that system in the US. Then you can hope to fight gentrification. With current property rights, most land owners hear "gentrification" and think "increasing land value, yay!" And
Re:I bet "landlord" isn't one of them (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I bet "landlord" isn't one of them (Score:4, Insightful)
All these gendrified areas tend to be places where the locals have built something appealing enough that wealthier people want it for themselves, now that it is built.
Re:I bet "landlord" isn't one of them (Score:4, Interesting)
Walk the Tenderloin and tell me what wealthier people want that was built there. Is it the tents and sleeping bags on the corners? Or perhaps the piles of feces in doorways? The scattered needles under the trees? Oh, I know, the stolen grocery carts piled by the parking meters!
The only good thing about the Tenderloin is that it is walking distance to a lot of the tech jobs in Civic Center and SOMA. Walk Nob Hill or Hayes Valley and compare...
Re:I bet "landlord" isn't one of them (Score:4, Interesting)
That's the key flaw in blaming it on the wealthy people. The locals willingly sold the properties to the wealthy people. If you sell something, of course you don't get a say in what happens to it anymore (political machinations to pass zoning ordinances and rent controls aside). If you don't like what they're gonna do after they buy it, don't sell it to them in the first place.
Re:I bet "landlord" isn't one of them (Score:5, Interesting)
"Gentrification" is just an attempt to create a pejorative that describes what society actually wants to happen; desirable areas have increasing value.
If you have no "gentrification" it means that everything is getting worse or staying the same, nothing is getting better. That isn't how progress works.
Re:I bet "landlord" isn't one of them (Score:4, Interesting)
No, that's not all it is. Gentrification happens when house values increase at a (much) higher rate than inflation. Houses become less affordable, meaning another area is created where people with lower incomes can't live.
Gentrification has other drawbacks too, as seen in e.g. San Francisco. Rich people move in, and start using their financial and political clout to shape the neighborhood to their wishes at the expense of the pre-gentrification inhabitants. Sometimes at the expense of the city as a whole too (e.g. the impossibility of building higher-density housing in SF).
Re: (Score:3)
and destroyed what little they had in their 401ks
401ks rarely get destroyed, just temporarily devalued. Eventually the market corrects itself and you're back to normal. Unless you decided to sell low and cash out during a crash, which is stupid. The value of my 401k nearly doubled during the 2008 crash, just by using the general "index" investment options. Market crashes are rare opportunities to buy really low.
All a scam (Score:3)
Re:All a scam (Score:4, Insightful)
I hate being a grammar nazi, but that article in the link looks like it was written by a third grader. There's enough misspellings to make an editor want to kill himself.
“High prices, which out to be a cost of doing business for them, are actually a key revenue driver,”
"is telling clients that the start-up economy is has turned into a sophisticated"
Makes it hard to take seriously.
Re: (Score:2)
Sounds like they attended the 4chan School of Economics.
Tell me again how controlling immigration is bad ? (Score:4, Insightful)
I never get tired of hearing people say that stuff.
Re:Tell me again how controlling immigration is ba (Score:5, Interesting)
It's got very little to do with immigration, and everything to do with development work getting easier and more common as a profession. Back in 1997 it was much harder than it is today, with modern frameworks and sandboxes to play in like the browser. Back then web apps were CGI scripts written in C++, and Javascript was only two years old and far from widely supported or standardized.
It would be strange if modern JS developers were getting paid as much as C++ people in 1997. There are far more JS developers, it's a far easier job. This is what happens as industries mature and the barriers to entry are lowered, and the skills required become more mainstream.
Today if you want the big bucks you need rare skills, like embedded or AI research.
Re:Tell me again how controlling immigration is ba (Score:5, Insightful)
When I worked in the valley, at a variety of places, there were never more than 5% of workers born in the US. 95% immigrants. Yeah, I think that affects wages just a little bit.
And don't forget, in the late 1990s you had "webmasters" and "HTML developers" who were fare less skilled than JS guys.
Re:Tell me again how controlling immigration is ba (Score:5, Interesting)
Can you give some examples of companies that have 95% immigrant worker populations?
I've heard his claim made about companies like Google and Intel, but their own stats paint a very different picture.
Re:Tell me again how controlling immigration is ba (Score:5, Interesting)
The big companies seem to be more like 80% (talking about developers, not employees). Not going to give my job history on slashdot, but one small company I worked at had, before I was hired, no native-born tech people of any kind, excepting the VP of development. At the time they got bought they had 30 US employees and about 100 in India (devs etc, not talking about support), and 2 of us were born in the US (plus one technical non-dev). The acquiring company forced out everyone senior who wasn't Indian in the most blatant racism I've yet seen. Even the Nepalese guy got pressured out.
In the large company I worked at before that the numebrs were about the same: 30/100 US/India split, with 2 US-born devs (plus 2 managers).
When I worked at Amazon (which was Seattle, not Silly Valley) our group of 50 or so needed 3 people who could get top secret clearance. Problem was, we only had 3 devs who were born in the US, and I wasn't interested. Amazingly, the "we're trying to recruit US citizens, we just can't find qualified people" hiring process suddenly found another 3 qualified US devs over the next 6 months. Amazing coincidence, really.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Interesting, because Amazon's numbers from 2014 suggest that 60% of their employees are "white". That of course includes people at all levels. Managers are 73% white.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/r... [forbes.com]
So either it's a problem very specific to development, which isn't born out in more detailed numbers we have from other companies, or you were extremely unlucky.
Excuse me for being skeptical, but I hear these 90%+ claims and never see a shred of evidence of it being true anywhere. When I ask people get evasive o
Re: (Score:3)
Employees, not contractors. Contractors are not Human Resources, they're literally counted as an expense like a computer or a software license subscription.
That's why companies love contractors, they don't have to do a bunch of paperwork like pension funding or worry about compliance to various frameworks. When it comes to liability it's a "third party vendor" to blame and it doesn't count towards your H1B and other statistics.
Re: (Score:3)
Don't conflate "white" with US-born.
... and don't conflate "brown" with foreign.
Santa Clara County was one of the main areas settled by refugees from the Vietnam War. That was over 40 years ago. Those refugees now have US-born adult children and grandchildren. So that Vietnamese guy in the next cubicle is most likely a native born US citizen.
Santa Clara County has a Chinese community that dates back to the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad, and a Hispanic community that goes back centuries before that.
Re: (Score:2)
What's wrong with trying to get a fair share? Also consider that the American dream is expensive; a house, 2 cars, properly funding retirement, college for the children, good health care etc. are all expensive.
Re: (Score:2)
It's worth noting that Google and companies like it have offices all over the world, and lots of their workers will move to the USA for promotions or to do other jobs, but they were employees to begin with. I know that people working at the Google office in Montreal decided to make the jump to the main campus at some point for various reasons, so even if there are a high number of immigrant workers, it's not like they were just scooped up off the street in India or China or something. These people aren't wo
No (Score:5, Insightful)
Anecdotally the last 4 places I've worked at are pushing 80%.
Re: (Score:3)
You sound like your starting to understand what we think of you?
Re: (Score:2)
Right and there was basically no tooling for JS either back then. To write in you had to know it. Not fumble your way thru with intelisense. Also you had be very aware of browser eccentricities and often implement mirror functionality in vbscript.
Re: (Score:3)
It's got very little to do with immigration, and everything to do with development work getting easier and more common as a profession.
If it had nothing to do with immigration, companies wouldn't work so hard to bring in cheaper employees from abroad. But they do.
If it had nothing to do with immigration, nobody would squawk when we said "OK, we have enough now. We don't need anymore H1Bs, etc." But they do squawk.
Tell me again how UNIONS are bad ? (Score:3, Insightful)
This is why you unionize. So workers get a larger share of the profits.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
I never get tired of hearing people say that stuff.
Well there's an invasion coming, apparently. Or at least there was before the mid-terms. I guess they got tired and gave up.
Re: (Score:3)
Tech jobs have seen wages grow, which suggests the problem is likely related in some way to an influx of low skill labor that will work cheap or even under the table for below minimum wage. This concern is hardly
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Itâ(TM)s kind of funny to read about how the U.S. is dying when you still have loads of people trying to come here.
Its a relativity problem. You see, if the whole continent is sinking into the sea, people clamour to the high land, even though its also doomed and sinking just as fast. Eventually everyone ends up crammed on the highest peak when that finally goes under.
You are watching people running for the highest hill and construing it as a sign of that hill's innate supremacy over the low-lands. The flood won't be nearly so impressed when it gets there.
In other terms: the US has accumulated an undue share of global we
That screed of yours recalls a Heinlein quote (Score:5, Insightful)
In other terms: the US has accumulated an undue share of global wealth (by a myriad of reasons, prominently featuring luck, malignancy, savagery, brutality and kleptocracy, which would take ages to go over) and therefore looks like the tallest peak where to shelter from the global disaster. Also many, if not most migrants only care about their next meal and long-term planning does not figure much in their actions.
VS Heinlein
“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
Robert A Heinlein
You are right about something. The U.S. is dangerously close to allowing that kind of bad luck here, and if we go it will be the collapse of Rome all over again.
Why do they reference Netflix when it covers all (Score:2)
Nine out of every 10 Silicon Valley jobs pays less now than when Netflix first launched in 1997, despite one of the nationâ(TM)s strongest economic booms and a historically low unemployment rate that outpaces the national average.
But if you read further down in the article, it references other companies.
Benner said big technology companies like Google and Facebook are so dominant in their respective markets that they have been able to direct a larger sha
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Benner said big technology companies like Google and Facebook are so dominant in their respective markets that they have been able to direct a larger share of revenues to investors and some top employees.
Google and Facebook do not pay a dividend, so unless he's talking about stock buybacks - investors aren't getting a share of revenue.
Lessons learned the hard way... (Score:5, Insightful)
I know there are a lot of "elementary rules" when it comes to running a business. "Location, location, location", "law of supply and demand", etc. But one corporations in today's day and age just don't seem to get is this one:
Invest in your employees, and your employees invest in you.
Modern corporations continue to fester this flawed mentality that every employee is just a cog in the machine; if one breaks, replace it with another. But humans aren't machinery. We have this subconscious that interferes with our ability to work at a constant rate of speed and productivity; it requires sleep for one thing, and it distracts our ability to focus continuously due to emotions which interrupt our concentration. Emotions, including feeling jaded by our employer who decided to give all the new employees a raise, but cut veteran employee bonuses and benefits. Or feeling depressed, because your employer is continually threaten to cut your position and move it to another part of the country if you fail to meet your quota. Et cetera, et cetera.
Most employers have forgotten now that when employees feel -valued-, their emotion doesn't impede their production, but rather boosts it.
Re:Lessons learned the hard way... (Score:5, Interesting)
Modern corporations continue to fester this flawed mentality that every employee is just a cog in the machine; if one breaks, replace it with another. But humans aren't machinery.
Not just modern companies. In a graduate software engineering class I took (mumble mumble) years ago we had a rather vigorous discussion about people versus process. That is, if you have a sufficiently sophisticated and well implemented process, do the people matter that much? And the reverse, if you have sufficiently excellent people, does the process matter that much?
Big companies seem to tilt heavily toward the process side, while small companies and especially start ups seem to tilt heavily toward the people side. Interestingly, start up that get big enough eventually succumb to the sirens of process over people.
Sadly, none of this is new, nor does it show any real signs of changing.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
There's a reason for that. People are fundamentally fallible, processes are designed to overcome these problems.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Big companies seem to tilt heavily toward the process side, while small companies and especially start ups seem to tilt heavily toward the people side. Interestingly, start up that get big enough eventually succumb to the sirens of process over people.
It's not really that interesting.
When a company is small, "key people" have huge impact--they will literally make or break the business. As a company grows, key people have less of an impact (because the amount of work that they do shrinks relative to the whole amount of work) and the need for consistency drives the company from "El Cubano will have it done by monday" to "All work needs to be executed according to the standard, which is defined by process X."
Small organizations that are defined by process
Re: (Score:3)
Everybody good and experienced has seen it happen from the inside. The senior managers can't turn down any growth, so they hire seat warmers, completely fucking the teams. It all starts when they hire 'professional HR', that's the kiss of death.
The growth in business doesn't continue, but staff growth sure does. Soon the technical debt is unsupportable, the original good people are gone and the staff are all gaming some stupid metric.
My take: Keep growth at a level you can staff for without serious com
Re: (Score:2)
Starts up are primarily concerned in building a big blob of technology that they can sell to a corporation and get bought out. That requires technical skills and design. As they get larger, there is more maintenance work and less design work, Once they get bought out, the corporation will impose formal project management structures like architects, project manager, team leaders, tech leads, all to make sure there isn't any code regression with bugs. The original founders and engineers will leave to found ne
Re:Lessons learned the hard way... (Score:5, Insightful)
Interestingly, start up that get big enough eventually succumb to the sirens of process over people.
Succumb? No. They realize that relying on individuals is how you go out of business. Processes are stable, and they can undergo a continuous improvement cycle to ensure that they are serving the business well. People aren't necessarily stable, and they can disappear at any time. Or you can find that their skillset no longer is sufficient to support your business.
We all have worked with "that guy" who was foundational to the company. That guy with the institutional knowledge that the company couldn't operate without. The few times I've seen that guy go, it was massively disruptive to the company.
Larger companies understand this and design processes to prevent individuals leaving from massively disrupting the company. Smaller companies often don't understand this, and they need to learn that painful and expensive lesson a few times before they truly do.
I'm all for hiring great people. I'm absolutely not for leaning on them so much that everything collapses when they leave. To prevent that you need processes to capture institutional knowledge and ensure that numerous people have the ability to do subsets of each other's jobs, so that one person leaving doesn't result in a giant hole in what the business can accomplish the next day.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
They don't need to invest in you (Score:5, Insightful)
This is what happens when workers get too confident in their abilities to start to think they can make it on their own. A single employee can't effectively negotiate with a mega corporation unless that employee is in the top 10% of geniuses, and, well, the reality is 90% of us aren't. If we were we'd know that, because 100-10=90...
Re: (Score:3)
Billions of them?
I've migrated for work myself, as well as working in my country of citizenship. Never really felt I was competing with these billions of self taught people... It was always down to my skills being a good fit for the company and us agreeing on a salary.
I don't think I'm exceptional, not in the top 10% of geniuses. The UK's immigration system is apparently too lax. I compete directly with people from eastern Europe, Poles and Bulgarians and Romanians who thanks to freedom of movement don't ev
Re: (Score:2)
But those H1B visa guys burn themselves out as well due to lack of knowledge. I know a company that did custom systems. They had a project that needed a vendor or customer splash screen that needed to appear upon power on. The task was split up into several parts using Agile methodology (#1 = display the splash screen, #2 provide a menu to select the splash screen, #3 write the selection to the display routine). Well, the boot loader took 50 milliseconds, the specification called for 15 milliseconds, so the
Re:Lessons learned the hard way... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Lessons learned the hard way... (Score:5, Interesting)
Employers are not there to coddle employees or provide mental health services to them. It is not a charity and it is most certainly not a hospital or some type of support system. Employers are there to earn a profit on someone's investment, and that is their sole and only function. If you need a support animal to function or constant ego stroking to feel important, consider that perhaps you belong in academia not the private sector.
Honestly, the idea that corporations exist solely to make a profit is part of what leads to this psychopathy. Corporations should exist to serve the public through the goods and services they can provide, making a profit in the process. If they exist solely to make a profit, or generate value for their shareholders, then they really serve no purpose.
Re:Lessons learned the hard way... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
This reminds me of Geroge Carlin's "Stuff" skit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
One could just as easily argue that for the majority of cases making "goods and services" serve no purpose either. "Serve the public" means a lot of different things to diff
Re:Lessons learned the hard way... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you deliberately break a machine that you bought for a lot of money by skimping on cheap maintenance, you're too dumb to deserve profits.
If you can get that machine cheaply for for free (Score:3)
Workers are now paying for their own educations thanks to massive cuts [fivethirtyeight.com] to state and federal college funding.
Also, cheap work visas let you get workers trained overseas. These workers are either trained by their governments or (again) often on their own time/dime because of the intensely competitive economies they come from. India is espe
That's not the point (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's just that they decided that they were going to ruin us to achieve them. It's working well so far.
Americans ruined themselves by voting hard right parties into office, the fact that someone like you claims elites sold you out when you gullibly believed in republican and democrats corporate bullshit tells us all we need to know. Nothing short of a movement of working folk from below would ever get the elites to look out for you. Your one of the most ignorant people on slashdot. A delusional right wing retard who doesn't seem to get, the more hard right you become, the more you are screwing yourself, r
Re: (Score:2)
Your one of the most ignorant people on slashdot. /
You don't have any room to talk, Mr. Anonymous Coward. I've seen the vile, disgusting, hateful ignorance that you've posted on this site.
Hardcore conservatives didn't want a bailout (Score:2, Informative)
Hardcore conservatives didn't want a bank bailout. The banks had made bad some decisions, which came back to bite them. Irresponsible companies deserve to bankrupt. The House Republicans vetoed the first bailout. Then the media started its panic and W said, "It's gonna blow." Banks spread their money across DC, and the second time, the bailout passed with BIPARTISAN support.
Re:That's not the point (Score:4, Insightful)
Elites basically came up with this: labor is commoditized as mobile capital is free to roam the globe for the lowest cost labor. In contrast, labor is far less mobile, and unable to shift as fluidly and frictionlessly as capital to exploit scarcities and opportunities.
Neoliberalism--the opening of markets and borders--enables capital to effortlessly crush labor. Our elites, in embracing globalism, have institutionalized a system that shreds the scarcity value of domestic labor in favor of lower cost foreign labor that serves capital's desire for lower costs.
For someone who is professional class, someone who has a nice income and who does NOT make their income from labor but from providing intellectual services (doctors, lawyers, teachers, white collar work in general) then moving production overseas is overall a plus. THEIR job is usually not threatened by factories closing and jobs being exported overseas and their costs go down as labor wages go down due to cheap crap from China. In other words, globalization leads to a net INCREASE in take home pay for the professional and upper classes. (Always has)
However, if you are an average working class American, then your incomes and your throats are being cut by the huge influx of new, cheap junk. Working class jobs are being destroyed by low income labor at one end and automation at the other, leaving working class voters angry and broke and with no place to go.
That's where the backlash is coming from, and that's why so many upper income people can't see any problem with it. It's the old old problem of the landed gentry and the nobility looking down their noses at all of those stinking deplorable peasants, all over again.
Re:That's not the point (Score:5, Interesting)
This makes no sense, what motivation would "American elites" have for benefiting "hostile people in distant lands"?
No, businesses did it to benefit themselves of course. It's been happening since about 1980, productivity has continued to rise but wages have not kept pace. Combined with tech being a relatively young industry which is still rapidly evolving (meaning that once rare skills are now more common, and things like Javascript frameworks on machines with 8GB of RAM dramatically lowered the bar to entry) and you have your explanation.
Speaking of political extremists, take a look at your own language. You probably didn't intend it, but you are echoing some very unpleasant people with those phrases.
Re: (Score:2)
No, businesses did it to benefit themselves of course. It's been happening since about 1980,
That's true. But it's also been happening since about 1580, and the early trading companies were brutal. Heck, the first recorded "corporation" was about 580.
You probably didn't intend it, but you are echoing some very unpleasant people with those phrases.
There's no one less pleasant than a communist, and you sound like those people often.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
What exactly are "the elites"? I keep hearing this title being used, but so far nobody could explain what exactly that's supposed to mean.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Hmm.... There's nothing about "elites" in Kernighan & Ritchie, the recent whitepaper from Schneier doesn't shed any light on them either ... I turned to the bible [knowing-jesus.com] for some insight and I found something about the "elites" in there, but mostly in the context of battles... is this some kind of military thing?
Are you against our brave fighting men and women? Why do you slander them? What kind of anti-patriotic yellow belly are you?
Re: (Score:3)
FTFY.
Things did NOT get better in Mexico with NAFTA. Our cheap corn imports wrecked their economy and the low paying manufacturing jobs are poisoning them. Meanwhile our drug war has made a mess of their country and their neighbor's countries.
China didn't get better because of us, they industrialized. Industrialization and the modernization that goes with it is overall a good thing. But the relentless dri
Population growth (Score:3, Interesting)
In that time period, SV has also added half a million people (2.5M -> 3M). It could be that those new residents represent an influx of lower-paid workers (remember, the SF boom happened after 2000). So it would be useful to know how the makeup of jobs has changed. If tech jobs are a lower percentage of total employment now than in 1997 (an increase in lower-paid jobs "diluting" the tech salaries), then it would appear that wages are declining in real terms.
A better study would consider whether the pay of specific job types has changed since 1997.
Bastille Day (Score:4, Insightful)
Not surprise... (Score:4, Insightful)
Corporate America is endeavoring to lead us into neo-Feudalism.
Re: (Score:2)
Good job AC's accuse me of ignorance when I specifically cite European serfdom. Given examples from Eastern Europe (different region) and China (different region and radically different culture). Fail and Double fail.
To round it out both the Chinese Civil war and the October revolution resulted in systems of governance that were arguable worse than the previous condition of serfdom for large parts of the population. Triple Fail! Even if those political systems don't resemble our own.
I stand by my commen
DotCom hysteria? (Score:2)
1997 - Peak Y2K (Score:5, Interesting)
Businesses were throwing wheel-barrels of money at Y2K conversions at that point.
Re:1997 - Peak Y2K (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, not really. I was well into a 15+ year career back then. I started at a new company just after the 1996 Olympics finished up. In 1997 it was on the company mind to start testing if things were going to break starting at Y2k, but all out rewrites of software didn't start happening until the start of 1999.
Oh, and I am only now starting to make the kind of money that I did in the late 1990's, almost another 20 years later. Within a month of September 2001 entire IT departments were being laid off at lots of companies. I went 9 months in 2002 without a single call back on a computer job. I took other retail jobs at 1/3 of what I was making just to survive. Finally in early 2005 I got a call for a computer job and took it at less than 1/2 of what I was making in the 1990's.
It has taken until now to claw my way back to making the money I did in the 90's.
Fear works (Score:2)
I'm not saying we should go back to isolationism and xenophobia. I don't think we could if we wanted to, cat's out of the bag on that. And it wasn't good for the 30% of the population that wasn't white (just ask a black person over 60 what life was like 40 years ago, bonus points if they're from the South).
The solution, at least for America, is more social
It isn't just Sillicon valley (Score:5, Insightful)
Real wages have been down for decades, and no, the Trump tax cut didn't change that https://www.bls.gov/news.relea... [bls.gov]
I have an MBA and I cannot afford to pay for the house I grew up in. My father paid for it on a single wage and hadn't finished college. It is easy to see where the culprits are: a high reliance on imports for manufactured goods and a significantly large share of earnings being diverted away from labour and going to the highest earners.
Re: (Score:3)
Shouldn't said house be paid off by now.....?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
When you effectively double the labor force, without increasing demand for large goods (homes, cars, appliances, etc), inflation skyrockets (1970/80's). Now most every household requires two incomes. Nice job feminist.
Re: (Score:3)
Why do manufacturing imports make the middle class poorer?
I know it's a popular idea that exports make us strong, imports make us rich, but that basically boils down to me
Re: (Score:2)
Why do manufacturing imports make the middle class poorer?
Because the imports replaced high-paying factory jobs making the same stuff. The jobs that replaced them pay far less. And below the savings from the availability of cheaper goods.
Re: (Score:2)
Why do manufacturing imports make the middle class poorer?
They don't by themselves.
It doesn't make financial sense for us to spend $25k making a car that we could import for $20k. That's effectively subsidizing the people who make those cars here. Better would be those people engaged in a trade that we can do better/cheaper here. The issue is that for a large percent of the (former) middle class, we haven't figured out what that trade is, if there even is one.
For awhile, we were transitioning jobs into technology and automation. The major issue with this is that w
And some friends wonder (Score:3)
Re:And some friends wonder (Score:5, Interesting)
This.
I now make about 2/3 of what I could earn in that Silly Valley. But I paid about 100k for my house and have living expenses of roughly 1000 bucks a month.
In other words, I have more money left at the end of the month. Despite our crazy high "socialist" taxes.
probably because (Score:2)
Silicon valley was overpaid in 1997. We call that a correction. I bet outside Silicon Valley, tech workers are earning more.
It was the .COM economy. (Score:3)
The late 1990's was full of stupid.
What was the real driving force was the Y2K scare. The Year 2000 was approaching. A lot of businesses running mainframes which were decades old had the choice, of updating their software to handle the 4 digit years, get new systems, or both.
BY the late 1990's with the 486 and the Pentium Chip in place as a solid 32 bit platform their decade(s) old mainframes needed to be upgraded anyways, and might as well go with the cheap Desktop systems which were arguable more powerful (in many aspects) and being cheaper then a Dumb Terminal, they could get more of them.
So A bunch of Companies and people were getting new computers having new computers all in the same same time. With everyone getting a new computer and finally upgrading their Old Apple II, Commodore 64, and IBM XT (And compatibles) (The big names in America) They now were on the Same OS (windows), with similar hardware, which supported TCP/IP and modem speeds exceeding the 14.4k with was enough to browse the internet with small pictures. This got people hooking onto the Internet. Often with Services such as AOL.
Now with the Consumers and Businesses all on similar protocols. Businesses could actually use the internet for commerce. So other then hiring tech workers to fix Y2k and get the new systems working for business, they were also trying to find people who could manage this new World Wide Web Thing.
So there was a shortage of Tech Workers, Companies bent over backwards to keep them hired, even if they couldn't afford it, because they hoped to get a strong foothold before they had to pay all the bills. Also a lot of these tech guys were starting their own businesses because it was so easy to get customers at the time. So there was a High Demand and Low supply. Thus high paying jobs. Like over 50k a year for a Microsoft Front Page web designer.
Now what happened?
The Clinton Administration seeing the low supply and high demand decided to open the H1B for more tech workers. While with hind sight this was a bad idea, but at the time, it seemed the only logical thing to do. Because there was so much demand that such shortage in tech workers could bring the economy to a halt, Especially if y2k turned out so bad.
So this increased supply, then after y2k people got all their new systems and everything was upgraded. So the economy Upgrade Schedule was in sync. and from 2002-2006 the Tech bubble popped. Demand dropped with extra supply from the H1B. Companies tried to save money, by prolonging their upgrades, and Trying to outsource all IT work with very cheap labor. Around the 2005-2010 time frame, Outsourcing had stabilized, realizing that outsourcing wasn't as cheap as it seemed, and also a lot of jobs didn't scale well. So the Tech industry recovered a bit, Then the great Recession of 2008 hit. While Tech workers were effected less then other sectors, it was still hit. The Recovery wasn't really in effect until around 2012. However now a few Tech Giants had firmly gained Ground, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. The big guys now hold a lot of the keys, and with Cloud being popular method of deployment The demand for the Little guy Tech worker was needed less and less. So while it is better then after the Tech Bubble pop, it isn't like it was during peak bubble of 1997.
Not surprising (Score:2)
By 2032 90% of Americans will have no wealth (Score:2)
Pick a more meaningful span of time .... (Score:2)
As others already pointed out, comparisons between pay today and in 1997 will be skewed because the late 90's was when investors were foolishing throwing money at every tech startup with a flashy name, creating an unsustainable tech bubble that burst a few years later on. You also had all of the Y2K crisis fears emerging, so again, a one-time panic mode that caused a flurry of spending to update major systems or do rewrites on older code.
I mean ... I was working in I.T. as a PC "support specialist" for a me
Not just Silicon Valley... (Score:2)
Salaries and contract rates are down in the Midwest, too. I can't recall how times I've been contacted by recruiters hawking contracts that are paying rates that would have been nice in the early '90s but are a joke with today's cost of living. Even contracts for periods for very short term (2-3 months) stints are paying crap rates. To be fair, the recruiters know that the compensation being offered by many employers today is a joke but also know that submitting someone at a higher salary/rate won't even ge
They aren't talking about tech workers (Score:3)
No point in thrashing about H1-B's. From TFA
"Technology workers saw a median wage increase of 32 percent over the past 20 years, the study found. But Silicon Valley workers in virtually all other areas lost ground during that time. Across all jobs, wages for even the highest-paid 10 percent increased just under 1 percent, the study found."
Re: Netflix launched in 1997? (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Why?
They don't listen. We don't have the $$$ to make them listen to us.
Re:Obama (Score:5, Funny)
Competition is always good.
Yep, that's why I'm sleeping with your wife! Step up your game, man!
Re: (Score:2)
Better yet, fund or start a charity with the money you are no longer having the government take. It will probably do a better job of using that money, and you don’t have to worry about any of it being wasted on government programs you don’t agree with.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:H1-B (Score:5, Informative)
RTFA. This is not caused by H1-Bs. Salaries for tech workers have gone up, and according to TFA they are "thriving". Tech salaries are up 32% after adjusting for inflation.
What TFA is talking about is everyone else. People that work in Sunnyvale grocery stores, or San Jose car dealerships, or Palo Alto restaurants. It is workers in the non-tech economy that are doing poorly, and those people aren't competing with H1-Bs.