Timothy Taylor on the Tech Sector

He writes,

My own guess is that the applications for IT in the US economy will continue to be on the rise, probably in a dramatic fashion, and that many of those applications will turn out to be even more important for society than Twitter or Pokémon Go. The biggest gains in jobs won’t be the computer science researchers, but instead will be the people installing, applying, updating, and using IT in a enormously wide range of contexts. If your talents and inclinations lead this way, it remains a good area to work on picking up some additional skills.

This sounds right to me. The technological advances have been rapid, but the process of deploying applications goes more slowly.

4 thoughts on “Timothy Taylor on the Tech Sector

  1. From a natural market sense, IT is a good sector to work in, but from a political sense it isn’t. Unlike most other college grads, one must work in the context of specialized immigration programs where the immigrants have limited mobility (rights) in the labor market. For them, the employer-sponsored green card has a significant market value which is of no value to citizens, but this conditional value lowers average market compensation (immigrants willing to accept lower pay). Their limited rights and more docile native cultures (unlike uppity Americans) make them easier to package and bodyshop off to corporations as ‘consultants’. They frequently are the default worker in IT departments. Even if an American is a good IT worker, he/she won’t get a chance to interview for a given job because he/she isn’t part of this preexisting ‘consultant’ system. It’s interesting how the do-gooder Supreme Court can have a healthy imagination for rights but overlooks this obvious violation of the 13th amendment. Expectations in this line of work should be tempered because of the political considerations – note how compensation in this field has stagnated for 15 years even as productivity has improved and a number of innovations have been made.

  2. It’s not always easy to tell whether hardware advances while software applications take a while to use new capabilities, or whether software and applications are ready and waiting for the hardware to catch up to provide the intended / desired user experience.

    Consider: if the hardware was usually ahead, then as soon as the software and business implementation of an application was released, it should be really impressive on existing, available hardware.

    Instead, it seems to me that a lot of applications are released on barely adequate hardware, as soon as that hardware is plausibly functional at the proper price point, or at a high price point for early adopters who are usually also willing to forgo some quality to get something first.

    And then, after a generation or two of hardware upgrades, and without much obvious change in the application or software (though there is certainly lots of refinement going on in the background) the experience and capability of the application improves substantially, toward what one suspects is more faithful to the original vision or market demand.

    • I would say it is almost exactly the opposite: software deficiencies are due to software, not hardware. Indeed software manufacturers such as Microsoft have to invent ways to use the improvements that hardware manufacturers come up with — ways that are divined out of thin air rather than fulfilling apparent consumer demand.

      Consider: if the hardware was usually ahead, then as soon as the software and business implementation of an application was released, it should be really impressive on existing, available hardware.

      When software is not impressive, it is almost never due to deficiencies of hardware: it is due to deficiencies in usability or user adoption. These are not hardware problems. Usability is difficult. Training users is difficult. Software that is usable by untrained users is difficult. To a first order approximation, the next generation of improvement in hardware power simply doesn’t matter to solve these problems.

  3. What the first graph, and the figure given (24%) for the share of IT jobs held by the foreign-born are saying, is that there have been on net no new jobs in IT for the native-born for the last ten to fifteen years. That pretty much squares with the experience of anybody in the industry. Have a nice day.

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