Lingering Job Insecurity of Silicon Valley:
Building software, he observed, is “becoming the equivalent of blue-collar work.”
Unemployment has risen sharply in computing, making it more like blue-collar work in that sense. The unemployment rate last year among computer scientists, for example, was 5.2 percent, the highest level since the government began tracking this work as an occupation two decades ago. In most of those years, the unemployment rate for computer scientists was under 2 percent [From my dim recollections of undergraduate economics, 4% is generally considered to be as good as it gets: a graph accompanying this article shows it dipping close to 1% — ed]. Similarly, unemployment among electrical engineers last year, at 6.2 percent, was the highest in 20 years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
[ . . . ]
The persistence of record high unemployment among skilled computer engineers suggests that something beyond the usual up-and-down cycle of business is at work.
Do tell.
The gist of this is that people are doing as much as they can with what they bought into in the 90s: nothing wrong with that, but it sure seems to be taking a long time to soak up all that extra capacity. One of the areas mentioned in the article is cutting down on the admin to machine ratio through better use of tools and automation: the smarter the monitoring systems, the less smart of an operator is required, to put it bluntly.
Thinking back to one of the optimistic trends of the late 90s, the sporadic efforts to make system administration a profession, I wonder if this helps or hurts it. My gut says it doesn’t help, or in the best case, you end up with a two-tiered admin corps: one group to watch the blinkenlights and one to actually understand what they mean and make decisions/take action.