6-12-03 The Computer Job Economy

There's a lot of confusing information about the job market these days. On the one hand, a friend just told me his son-in-law got laid off from a computer job and that the prospects didn't look good. In this Fortune Magazine article they note that the "the job market now is the harshest it's been in decades" and "...there are more white-collar workers today, but joblessness among them has risen faster than their share of the overall job market." Sounds bleak indeed.

But in the LA Times May 25 "Employment Classified Advertising Section," they had an article that claims that the 20 fastest growing occupations in the US (according to the US Department of Labor, who predict that "Computer software engineers are projected to be the fastest growing occupation over the 2000-10 period") in order of decreasing demand, are:

1. Computer software engineers, applications
2. Computer support specialists
3. Computer software engineers, systems software
4. Network and computer systems administrators
5. Network systems and data communications analysts
6. Desktop Publishers
7. Database Administrators
8. Personal and home care aides
9. Computer systems analysts
10. Medical assistants
11. Social and human service assistants
12. Physician assistants
13. Medical records and health information technicians
14. Computer and information systems managers
15. Home health aides
16. Physical therapist aides
17. Occupational therapist aides
18. Physical therapy assistants
19. Audiologists
20. Fitness trainers and aerobics instructors

Until you get to point #7 it looks like this is only about the computer industry. And half the jobs here are related to the computer industry.

Of course, the US Department of Labor predictions have often been rather simplistic. Here, we see two factors: computers are important, and people are getting old and will require more health care. The Department of Labor makes their share of mistakes. In the 60s, for example, they predicted that there would be a tremendous need for architects to satisfy the needs of the baby boomers, without thinkng that most people would opt for a cheaper house designed by a builder rather than everyone getting their own architect (which would have been great, but unrealistic). But I think the above list is showing trends, not predictions, and even if a few of the computer jobs they list are wrong, computers still dominate job growth. And even if some of the predictions turn out to be wrong, it seems like enough will be right to still indicate good medium-term growth in computer jobs.

In addition, my brother Todd (who maintains computers for small companies in the San Diego area) and my Unix guy, Evan (I'd give you his email address but I don't want him to get any busier, for selfish reasons), never seem to have enough time to do things for me, and that hasn't changed over the last couple of years. The demand for their skills is still there despite the economy -- people still need computers, servers and networks that work.

Here's a very good story about the abundance of this kind of work. Because it was so popular, the author wrote a followup story.

So why the disparity between the Fortune article and the US DoL list? My guess is that it's a retrenchment and not a trend towards less computer jobs. What I mean by "retrenchment" is indicated in the Fortune article -- large and medium-sized companies have (finally) benefitted from computer technology enough to be able to not add some kinds of jobs and to actually eliminate others.

I don't think this means the jobs are lost, it's just that they are temporarily vanished in the process of migrating from large companies (who are not the traditional source of job growth) to smaller companies (who are). Some of those small companies haven't been created yet, because the problems they solve haven't been discovered yet.

Also, the dot-com boom created a lot of "programmers" who weren't. For example, in the midst of the boom we would have people show up at seminars who said that they "programmed in HTML" (and sometimes a little Perl) and felt like they knew enough about "programming" that they were ready for the big time. Naturally, they were swamped when faced with real programming because we assume competence in some C-like language, but these poor people had been fooled into the hubris of thinking "I don't need those prerequisites, programming is easy and I'm smart" (see Incompetence for more about this). But the dot-boom created a demand for anyone who could type any kind of code, even HTML, with, I'm sure, the idea that these folks could eventually be trained into more complex jobs. But now, the out-of-work ranks are filled with people who say they are programmers (because they were told so when they had their jobs), and yet don't have the skills necessary to do serious programming. Thus at least some of the jobless numbers come from artificial inflation of those who claim to be a programmer but aren't.

It would probably take a year of immersion in hard-core programming training in order to turn such folks into truly valuable programmers. That's better than what will be necessary to turn the typical college freshman into a valuable programmer, but it still represents a significant investment, and a company would certainly rather have someone who can do the job now.

Note: I am not suggesting here that everyone who is out of work right now is unqualified. That's obviously not the case; the economy is clearly down. However, in such times the competition will be tougher. I've been on both sides of the table: looking for a job, and interviewing people for a job. When I was looking, I know I wasn't the best example of what I look for now, and people I've hired have interviewed better than they've ended up producing (I've gotten a lot better at interviewing). And there are people in the job market who jumped in during the dot-boom and are not as experienced and valuable as people who've had more education and experience. Anyone who is hiring is going to try to get the best quality for the lowest cost regardless of the marketplace, and right now it's a buyer's market. The best thing to do as a seller in such a market is to find ways to make yourself more valuable and more unique (the very same thing that I'm doing now, too!).

In times of expansion, it's important to be able to look forward and create grand, long-term plans in conjunction with the basic process of "doing the job now" which brings in the day-to-day cash-flow that supports those bigger plans. But in times of contraction, a company must primarily get the job done. Ironically, contraction periods are ideal times to re-evaluate and invest in longer-term plans, but those decisions must be made in the context of searching for low-hanging fruit.

I've seen people who have worked for a company with the attitude that "I am intrinsically valuable and the company owes me a regular paycheck and a certain standard of living in exchange for showing up." Perhaps in good times you can live by the quote attributed to Woody Allen "90% of life is just showing up." But I've also seen people whose attitude is "this is an adventure I want to be on, what can I do, how can I participate, how can I make things better, what can I do to make your life easier, how can I make myself more valuable to you?" These are rare individuals, ones who are committed to their craft, and are probably now or will eventually be that mythical 5% of programmers who are 20 times more productive than the other 95% of programmers. These are people I want to work with, and I believe they are also people who are always in demand, and if they aren't in demand then they will go start their own companies.

What business are you in? This is an important question to ask yourself, not only because the answer will make you more valuable to other people, but also because it can increase your level of happiness.

What business am I in? I had to ask myself this question recently. Because seminars are a kind of plum that comes out of the efforts of learning and writing and speaking, and because people that work with me naturally want to give seminars because of the various rewards, it was easy to think of myself as "a seminar company." Giving seminars is fun, rewarding and stimulating. But many of the companies that have said "we only do seminars since that's where the big bucks are" have gone out of business. Seminars are one way to teach people, but they are not reliable enough to base an entire business upon.

Over the years I've slowly become aware of the importance of the business plan. It always sounded to me like some kind of hoop you had to jump through to get money from bankers or investors, and the attitude with which people treated a business plan made it sound like a trivial step in that process. But a business plan is a very essential document. It charts the course of where you want to go. If you treat it casually, don't expect your company to be on course. In fact, much of my skepticism of business plans came from reading the plans of companies which clearly had nothing to do with what that company was really doing, so they just looked like lies to me.

Even if you don't have your plan written down, you must be able to articulate it, if nothing more than your mission statement. If you're an individual, I've heard this called your "audio business card"; something you can say in one sentence if people ask what you do. I usually say "I write books and give seminars on computer programming" if I'm talking to someone who doesn't know anything in particular about computers. But the MindView mission statement is "Exceptional Learning Experiences." During my own re-evaluation, I was able to go back to that mission statement and realize that I was not in the seminar business, no matter what pushed me there. Sure, seminars are great when they happen, and if I can learn new ways to market that are easy and fun (like Marco Cantu's idea of giving free, one day seminars which provide value and showcase various speakers' abilities), that's great. But we can't make seminars happen if they don't want to. If we decide we're in the buggy-whip business and people change to cars, we're stranded, but if we are in the transportation motivation business then we add gas pedals to our repertoire, we can stay in business and still stock buggy whips for those who want them.

A reader suggested that I read the book Thinking Like an Entrepreneur: How to Make Intelligent Business Decisions That Will Lead to Success in Building & Growing Your Own Company by Peter I. Hupalo. I've added this to my next Amazon order and if it's as good as the reader claims, I'll report on it in a later weblog.

For my reevalution regarding seminars, there are two factors at work:

1. People are reluctant to travel now.
2. No matter what we say about the importance of investment in learning, it's always easiest to cut training budgets first.

If you're faced with laying people off vs. eliminating the training budget (with the intent of re-establishing it when things get better), the latter choice makes sense. There are lots of reductions that can be made rather than laying people off. It's really too bad that employees and companies couldn't get away from this terrible poker game of trying to maximize their own incomes and assuming that the other side is always trying to take advantage (yes, it's often true, but the whole cycle begins with that assumption). One could imagine the company being able to react to a recession with everyone taking a salary cut and searching for possible reductions in expenses before the first person is laid off.

In any event, the slowdown in seminars is understandable, and this cycle has happened before and will happen again. I can try to fight that, but it won't change things. In the meantime, people still need to improve their abilities -- can this be done without traveling and at costs that are low enough that they seem like bargains in comparison to a seminar? Of course, books are a first learning resource for many people, but regardless of what you may imagine, writing books is not a very good way to make a living. Naturally, MindView will continue to travel to do onsite seminars for companies when the need arises. However, people have appreciated the Hands-On Java CD ROM, and I am making progress on creating the new one corresponding to the 3rd edition of the book. More important, I've been working (with Evan's help) on a better build system for creating the CD, and (with Sharlynn's help) a better process for capturing and processing the audio for the CD. Because of this we hope to more easily and quickly create new CD titles.

Another direction that could allow cheaper training is the video project that I refer to in this weblog. Once the studio is set up and the problems are solved, it seems like I should be able to produce a fair number of video training experiences. These will certainly not replace the need for a live instructional experience, but they can supplement seminars and in some case be a reasonable substitute at a much lower cost.

Finally there's the web itself. I've gotten a number of suggestions that I try to use the web as if it were a TV broadcasting station. In one of Robert Cringely's columns he calls streaming media "a joke," and most of my experiences with it have supported this evaluation (for example, I gave a presentation to a conference in India via a dedicated 4-ISDN AV studio, and we had no end of trouble. The average connection is far worse than what we were using). We can't assume that the network is perfect, and because of that we can't expect it to behave as a real-time medium. Cringely's solution for his video show is for the viewer to download the whole show before they start watching it, thus they are not stuck with the usual Internet hang-ups and watching his show should be tolerable. But to get any kind of quality the downloads are huge -- for example, I went to Divx.com and downloaded a 3 minute movie which was 60 MBytes. This requires the kind of bandwith that isn't available to most, for a tiny movie.

On the other hand, there are technologies to distribute learning experiences on the web in a reliable fashion. Most of what I do when giving a seminar (apart from the exceptionally important exercise periods, of course), is to project various media on a screen and talk about it. This is effectively what's on the Hands-On Java CD ROM: you see the slides, you hear me talking, you just don't see me jumping around waving my arms and you don't get to ask me questions. However, a lot of people seem to get great value from this. So the next step up might be: you see the slides, you hear me talking, and you get to ask questions. How would this be accomplished given the unreliability of the web? The slides can be presented via the web and the customer can view them with any browser -- very low tech and reliable. The audio, however, would come via a phone bridge, which is a third- party service that allows you to call in with your telephone (old, reliable technology) and listen to someone speaking. Some of the phone bridges I've heard seem to have trouble if people in the audience want to talk, so it might be better to collect questions via some kind of instant messaging, but at least you'd be able to clearly hear me talk without the usual pauses and disconnects that you get with streaming audio. These phone-bridge seminars would also be cheaper to hold and thus the cost to the consumer would be lowered (of course, travel costs would also be eliminated). So this is another avenue I'm thinking of developing.

Seminars aren't the hot ticket right now, but that's OK. Since MindView isn't exclusively in the seminar business, we can develop other modes of learning in the meantime, and when seminars are in demand again, we'll be ready.

There is a bit of wisdom that says that a pullback is the best time to invest in your infrastructure. For one thing, reorganizations are certainly understood by everyone involved during economic down times -- it doesn't take much convincing to understand why we are rethinking the structure and direction of the company. But for companies who couldn't get enough good programmers during the dot-boom, now is an excellent time to be hunting for such people, since they are much more available now, and you can probably get far better programmers at this time. If you can create a good environment (see Demarco and Lister's great book Peopleware and some of the XP books to learn how), then it's far less likely that you'll lose people to higher salaries when the economy swings back upward.