A new study by the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) apparently* indicates that US employers added 213,639 IT jobs between the first quarter of 2003 and the first quarter this year. However, the same report also indicates that hiring managers don’t plan to add nearly as many IT jobs this year.
Overall, the number of IT workers rose 2 percent this year to 10.5 million, according to ITAA. A News.comstory has more details. Here’s a bit:
ITAA said employers appear to be taking an increasingly cautious approach to hiring in light of factors including general economic conditions, the climbing cost of employee benefits and the economic efficiencies of sending work to lower-cost nations, frequently called offshoring.
The report comes amid conflicting information about the job scene for technology professionals. Unemployment rates have dropped for tech workers, but so have the numbers of people employed in tech occupations–suggesting that some workers may have left the field, possibly discouraged by grim forecasts or a lack of current jobs.
A monthly survey, though, has found that confidence among IT workers in the job market has been growing gradually.
* I say “apparently” only because I haven’t been able to get my hands on a copy of the free report yet. ITAA’s website lists the report as available for order, but requires registration. I’ve registered, but haven’t gotten any notice about getting the report…. Update: (Sept 9) — Just got the report via e-mail. May post more after I’ve perused it.
Thanks to Richard Jones at the American Institute of Physics for pointing outthis report put together by RAND on The U.S. Scientific and Technical Workforce: Improving Data for Decisionmaking. The report is an interesting collection of papers on the current controversy surrounding the adequacy of the science and engineering workforce and very relevant to current questions about projected shortages in the IT workforce specifically.
I’ll have more to comment on this as I dig in to the report, but I can say by way of preview that the most notable paper appears to be Michael S. Teitlebaum’s chapter “Do We Need More Scientists?” Teitelbaum, a demographer and program director at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, argues that recent history is littered with predictions of S&E workforce shortages that have failed to appear and that any current claim of shortage has to address how it’s possible given the relatively high levels of unemployment found in certain S&E occupations and the lack of increasing salaries.
More on this soon, but in the meantime, check out the report.
In an affirmation of fair use rights — at least, as long as they don’t conflict with any other rights — a federal court ruled yesterday that a company that makes interoperable remotes for other companies’ garage door openers isn’t violating federal copyright law. The law in question is the troublesome Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) (pdf), which among other things prohibits circumventing any technical measure that “controls access” to a protected work. Chamberlin, the garage door manufacturer, argued that Skylink, the company making the interoperable remote, violated the DMCA by reverse-engineering Chamberlin’s door opening software to create their remote.
In this case, the court appears to have ruled that Skylink’s circumvention was a legitimate fair use, and in the absence of any “foul” use Chamberlin could not use the DMCA to protect its product (the software contained in the remote and the garage door opener).
However, as Seth Finklestein points out, though it’s nice to see that, in some limited cases, companies won’t be able to use the DMCA for patent protection, this probably doesn’t do much to address the issues of DMCA reform and the chilling effect the law has on computing researchers. (See the ACMU.S. Public Policy Committee’srundown on DMCA’s chilling effect and some helpful links.)
You can also find the full Skylink opinion here (pdf). We’ve also covered efforts to solidify fair use rights — including the research exemption — previously. Update: Ernest Miller has a much more in-depth analysis of the decision that shows it’s much more complicated than our simple summary suggests.
See also Ed Felten’s summary.
ACM’sQueue has an article by Catherine L. Mann, of the Institute for International Economics here in DC, on the potential positive effect of the “global sourcing” trend in IT.
Mann argues that just as outsourcing IT hardware production during the 1990s lowered product costs (by 20%), encouraging increased IT investment throughout the economy, the current wave of outsourcing software and IT services will have a similar effect on costs. This will, in turn, encourage large sectors of the US economy that haven’t yet heavily invested in IT (health, education, and much of the small to medium size enterprises (SMEs) sector) to do so, creating a demand for IT workers in those sectors here in the US, as well as moving jobs “up the IT skills ladder.”
She recommends a two-prong approach for dealing with this situation. First, she says, the US needs to encourage foreign macroeconomic growth, because as foreign countries increase their GDPs, they become bigger markets for IT services, where US providers currently dominate. Second, she thinks we need to focus domestically on the displaced workers by providing “extended unemployment benefits (providing more time for adjustment), training assistance, wage insurance, and portable health insurance” to ease the transition to new jobs and careers. She also sees a “human-capital-investment tax credits” to achieve “abetter-functioning skills pipeline of IT workers, for incumbent as well as for entry-level workers.”
It’s an interesting article and I think it jives well with some of the IT job growth projections we’ve discussed herepreviously.
Internet email was invented in 1971. Back then, could you have found even one single person in Washington who would point to this fledgling technology as one day being important to the average American? No way — anybody who said that would have been dismissed as a nut. Even two decades later, very few policymakers recognized the eventual importance of email.
Often, we seem to be drifting toward a rule in which new technologies are, by default, banned, unless some functionary can be convinced that they have merit. That’s a dangerous rule, not least because we may never know which potentially world-changing technology was snuffed out at birth.
Wiredcovers remarks by DeForest B. Soaries Jr., chairman of the newly formed federal Election Assistance Commission, praising computer scientists for calling attention to security problems with e-voting machines and for helping develop new standards for building machines that might be more secure in the future.
CRA’s affiliate organization the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has been very successful through it’s U.S. Public Policy Committee (USACM) in making its membership aware of the controversy surrounding e-voting. They’ve got a good page detailing the issue and their activities, with good links to other resources.
CNet has this story on new employment figures released by the Department of Labor that shows a drop in the rate of unemployment for “computer and mathematical occupations” and “electrical and electronic engineers.” But the change might not be because of the most favorable reasons:
The unemployment rate for computer and mathematical occupations–a category that includes computer programmers, computer software engineers and computer scientists and systems analysts–fell from 5.7 percent in the first half of 2003 to 5 percent in the first half of this year, according to the Labor Department. Unemployment dropped even more dramatically for electrical and electronic engineers–from 6.7 percent in the first half of 2003 to 3.1 percent in the first half of 2004.
But unemployment levels alone don’t tell the whole story for workers still recovering from the dot-com bust. For example, the average number of people employed in computer and math jobs dropped by 72,000 from the first half of 2003 to the first half of this year, to 3,038,000. A similar trend occurred among electrical and electronic engineers over the same period. Their average employment fell by 39,000, to 339,000.
In other words, if employment and the jobless rate are both dropping, it may not mean better times in these tech-related fields. It may just mean that unemployed tech workers are giving up fruitless job searches.
It’s again worth pointing out the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statisticscontinues to project growth in IT fields through 2012 will outstrip all other science and engineering occupations.
An update to a story we mentioned way back in January, the Army’s inspector general found that an Army data-mining project using data offered by JetBlue and a private data broker didn’t violate federal privacy rules. This may say more about the need to update federal privacy rules than it does about the privacy implications of the project. Wired News has the story.
The White House Office of Management and Budget — the gatekeepers of agency budgets in the executive branch — and OSTP have issued guidance to federal science agencies (pdf, 360kb) directing them to make high end computing and cyberinfrastructure investments a priority in their FY 2006 budget requests, even at the expense of “lower-priority” research within the federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) initiative.
While the Administration’s focus on high-end computing and cyberinfrastructure research is welcome news, the thought that they may ask agencies to cannibalize other research within the NITRD program is very worrisome.
Here’s the relevant language from the memo:
The Networking and Information Technology R&D (NITRD) program is a high Administration priority. While the importance of each of the NITRD program areas continues, high-end computing (supercomputing) and cyberinfrastructure R&D should be given higher relative priority due to the potential of each in furthering progress across a broad range of scientific and technological application areas. The recent report of the High-End Computing Revitalization Task Force (HECRTF) describes a coordinated R&D plan for core high-end computing technology, as well as multi-agency approaches for addressing high-end computing capability, capacity, and accessibility issues. Agency plans in high-end computing should be consistent with the HECRTF plan, emphasize coordination, leverage the efforts of all agencies and, where appropriate, provide explicit benefit to multiple agencies through coordinated multi-agency investments. Cyberinfrastructure R&D encompasses research on hardware and software tools that is aimed at strengthening the connections between new and existing computers (including supercomputers), databases, scientific instruments, researchers and facilities. By providing secure, reliable, distributed computing environments and tools that allow the science and engineering communities to produce, collect, store, communicate, analyze and quickly share huge amounts of information, improvements in cyberinfrastructure will accelerated discovery. Agency requests should reflect these two program priorities by reallocating funds from lower priority efforts.
Federal Computer Week has a story on the memo and what it means for NITRD. The story quotes NITRD’s David Nelson as saying other research areas under NITRD may “receive lessened funding” as a result of the guidance.
Funding cuts are not a certainty, Nelson said. Although his office’s components compete for money to some extent, “it isn’t necessarily a zero-sum game within the NITRD program,” he said. “There’s no hard and fast rule that it can’t exceed the 2005 budget.”
Offsets for new fiscal year 2006 priorities could be found from other areas of research, Nelson said. Still, with federal deficits mounting, “higher-priority things will probably come at the expense of lower-priority things,” he added.
Though Congress stillhasn’tsettled the FY 2005 budget, this is our first peek at how the FY 2006 budget will play out for R&D. This priority-setting will likely have a significant impact on the discipline in the years to come, so it’s crucially important that the computing community work with the agencies and the administration to ensure the right balances are struck.
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Maybe They’ll Call it …
/In: Misc. /by Peter Harsha…the iSmell.
Smelly robot eats flies to generate its own power
Link via Slashdot.
U.S. Added IT Jobs This Year
/In: People /by Peter HarshaA new study by the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) apparently
*indicates that US employers added 213,639 IT jobs between the first quarter of 2003 and the first quarter this year. However, the same report also indicates that hiring managers don’t plan to add nearly as many IT jobs this year.Overall, the number of IT workers rose 2 percent this year to 10.5 million, according to ITAA. A News.com story has more details. Here’s a bit:
* I say “apparently” only because I haven’t been able to get my hands on a copy of the free report yet. ITAA’s website lists the report as available for order, but requires registration. I’ve registered, but haven’t gotten any notice about getting the report….Update: (Sept 9) — Just got the report via e-mail. May post more after I’ve perused it.
RAND S&E Workforce Report
/In: People /by Peter HarshaThanks to Richard Jones at the American Institute of Physics for pointing out this report put together by RAND on The U.S. Scientific and Technical Workforce: Improving Data for Decisionmaking. The report is an interesting collection of papers on the current controversy surrounding the adequacy of the science and engineering workforce and very relevant to current questions about projected shortages in the IT workforce specifically.
I’ll have more to comment on this as I dig in to the report, but I can say by way of preview that the most notable paper appears to be Michael S. Teitlebaum’s chapter “Do We Need More Scientists?” Teitelbaum, a demographer and program director at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, argues that recent history is littered with predictions of S&E workforce shortages that have failed to appear and that any current claim of shortage has to address how it’s possible given the relatively high levels of unemployment found in certain S&E occupations and the lack of increasing salaries.
More on this soon, but in the meantime, check out the report.
Court Rules 3rd Party Garage Door Openers Don’t Violate DMCA
/In: Policy /by Peter HarshaIn an affirmation of fair use rights — at least, as long as they don’t conflict with any other rights — a federal court ruled yesterday that a company that makes interoperable remotes for other companies’ garage door openers isn’t violating federal copyright law. The law in question is the troublesome Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) (pdf), which among other things prohibits circumventing any technical measure that “controls access” to a protected work. Chamberlin, the garage door manufacturer, argued that Skylink, the company making the interoperable remote, violated the DMCA by reverse-engineering Chamberlin’s door opening software to create their remote.
In this case, the court appears to have ruled that Skylink’s circumvention was a legitimate fair use, and in the absence of any “foul” use Chamberlin could not use the DMCA to protect its product (the software contained in the remote and the garage door opener).
However, as Seth Finklestein points out, though it’s nice to see that, in some limited cases, companies won’t be able to use the DMCA for patent protection, this probably doesn’t do much to address the issues of DMCA reform and the chilling effect the law has on computing researchers. (See the ACM U.S. Public Policy Committee’s rundown on DMCA’s chilling effect and some helpful links.)
You can also find the full Skylink opinion here (pdf). We’ve also covered efforts to solidify fair use rights — including the research exemption — previously.
Update: Ernest Miller has a much more in-depth analysis of the decision that shows it’s much more complicated than our simple summary suggests.
See also Ed Felten’s summary.
Outsourcing May Mean More IT Jobs for US?
/In: People /by Peter HarshaACM’s Queue has an article by Catherine L. Mann, of the Institute for International Economics here in DC, on the potential positive effect of the “global sourcing” trend in IT.
Mann argues that just as outsourcing IT hardware production during the 1990s lowered product costs (by 20%), encouraging increased IT investment throughout the economy, the current wave of outsourcing software and IT services will have a similar effect on costs. This will, in turn, encourage large sectors of the US economy that haven’t yet heavily invested in IT (health, education, and much of the small to medium size enterprises (SMEs) sector) to do so, creating a demand for IT workers in those sectors here in the US, as well as moving jobs “up the IT skills ladder.”
She recommends a two-prong approach for dealing with this situation. First, she says, the US needs to encourage foreign macroeconomic growth, because as foreign countries increase their GDPs, they become bigger markets for IT services, where US providers currently dominate. Second, she thinks we need to focus domestically on the displaced workers by providing “extended unemployment benefits (providing more time for adjustment), training assistance, wage insurance, and portable health insurance” to ease the transition to new jobs and careers. She also sees a “human-capital-investment tax credits” to achieve “abetter-functioning skills pipeline of IT workers, for incumbent as well as for entry-level workers.”
It’s an interesting article and I think it jives well with some of the IT job growth projections we’ve discussed here previously.
Nuturing Innovation
/In: Policy /by Peter HarshaJust a quick pointer to two interesting posts on innovation on Ed Felten’s Freedom to Tinker blog.
Nurturing Innovation
Nurturing Innovation II
Here’s a good bit:
Elections Chairman Thanks Computer Scientists for Work Raising E-voting Concerns
/In: Policy /by Peter HarshaWired covers remarks by DeForest B. Soaries Jr., chairman of the newly formed federal Election Assistance Commission, praising computer scientists for calling attention to security problems with e-voting machines and for helping develop new standards for building machines that might be more secure in the future.
CRA’s affiliate organization the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has been very successful through it’s U.S. Public Policy Committee (USACM) in making its membership aware of the controversy surrounding e-voting. They’ve got a good page detailing the issue and their activities, with good links to other resources.
Tech Employment Numbers Improve?
/In: People /by Peter HarshaCNet has this story on new employment figures released by the Department of Labor that shows a drop in the rate of unemployment for “computer and mathematical occupations” and “electrical and electronic engineers.” But the change might not be because of the most favorable reasons:
It’s again worth pointing out the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics continues to project growth in IT fields through 2012 will outstrip all other science and engineering occupations.
JetBlue Disclosure Didn’t Violate Federal Law
/In: Policy /by Peter HarshaAn update to a story we mentioned way back in January, the Army’s inspector general found that an Army data-mining project using data offered by JetBlue and a private data broker didn’t violate federal privacy rules. This may say more about the need to update federal privacy rules than it does about the privacy implications of the project.
Wired News has the story.
OMB Guidance to Agencies: High End Computing, Cyberinfrastructure are Priorities
/In: Funding /by Peter HarshaThe White House Office of Management and Budget — the gatekeepers of agency budgets in the executive branch — and OSTP have issued guidance to federal science agencies (pdf, 360kb) directing them to make high end computing and cyberinfrastructure investments a priority in their FY 2006 budget requests, even at the expense of “lower-priority” research within the federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) initiative.
While the Administration’s focus on high-end computing and cyberinfrastructure research is welcome news, the thought that they may ask agencies to cannibalize other research within the NITRD program is very worrisome.
Here’s the relevant language from the memo:
Federal Computer Week has a story on the memo and what it means for NITRD. The story quotes NITRD’s David Nelson as saying other research areas under NITRD may “receive lessened funding” as a result of the guidance.
Though Congress still hasn’t settled the FY 2005 budget, this is our first peek at how the FY 2006 budget will play out for R&D. This priority-setting will likely have a significant impact on the discipline in the years to come, so it’s crucially important that the computing community work with the agencies and the administration to ensure the right balances are struck.