By Nitasha Tiku 8/06/12 12:12pm

Talent Crunch

Job fair lines in Midtown from 2009 (Photo: wsws.org)

New York Techie Doesn’t Understand Why Everyone’s Upset About Unemployment

Wired.com published an interesting piece last week under the headline “Silicon Valley Creating Jobs, But Not For Everyone.” The article looked at how the Valley’s unemployment rate has ballooned beyond the national average–up to 8.8 percent in June–despite the growing number of jobs in the tech sector.

Estimates show a similar pattern in New York City. In June, the city’s unemployment jumped to 10 percent, the same abysmal peak we hit in the recession three years ago, even as employment in the tech sector grew 30 percent between 2005 and 2010.  Read More

By Ben Popper 11/03/11 8:15am

New Economy Blues

Not so funny t-shirts

Do Startups Create Jobs or Destroy Them?

Google, conceived in 1998, employs just north of 30,000 people and generates $35 billion in annual revenue. Facebook, founded in 2004, has around 3,000 staffers and $4 billion in revenue. Twitter, founded in 2006, has between 200-300 people working for it.

Each of these companies has achieved a global scale and it might be argued Read More

By Ben Popper 10/31/11 6:22am

Tech Talent Crunch

Ad-Tech Feels the Talent Crunch In Silicon Alley

Competition for engineers and developers in NewYork is fierce, as it is in tech hubs around the country. It’s a well worn story that Silicon Alley competes with Wall Street for the best programmers. But there is another multi-billion dollar industry in the Big Apple hungry for those mathematical minds: advertising.

Over the last year, reports the New York Times, the number of want ads for highly technical positions has nearly doubled on the industry job board AdExchanger. The wave of big data is rich soil for advertising companies to mine, but it requires some serious quants to seperate the signal from the noise.

“The demand has far outstripped the supply,” said Joe Zawadzki, chief executive of MediaMath, told the NY Times. “The number of things that you need to know is high and the number of people that have grown up knowing it is low.” Read More