falcone@erlang.DEC (Joe Falcone, HLO2-3/N03, dtn 225-6059) (09/24/84)
CC: Lately, there seems to have been a "yahoo backlash" of articles knocking the computer industry and high-technology industries in general for allegedly not delivering on their "promises" of employment. These articles are pretty ridiculous when you consider that firms such as Digital and Hewlett-Packard each employ over 70,000 people in jobs which largely did not exist before WWII. Plus if one considers the high-tech component of the defense-industrial complex, we are talking about an awful lot of jobs. For several weeks this summer newspapers and magazines were running tables from the Labor Dept (or some like agency) predicting the number of new jobs among the various standard categories (nurse, systems analyst, ...) for the next few years. Many of these tables had associated stories which (once again) criticized the high-tech industries for not placing any occupations in the top 10. For some reporters, it was only a short walk from that point to the old Luddite diatribe about machines only stealing jobs - one enterprising reporter even described Apple's new automated Mac factory as an example of people-less high-tech manufacturing! However, the table itself had problems. The occupation categories for computers/electronics were so numerous that no single classification could have possibly made the top 10 (systems analyst, programmer, computer operator, computer scientist, electronic technician, electrical engineer, etc...). Although the same was true for other industries, they tended to have more focus (health care had Nurse; education had Teacher). Now if one viewed the sources of new jobs on an industry basis, two of the leading sources of new jobs were health care (way ahead of everything) and computers/electronics (with incomplete data I couldn't rank it, but the numbers would certainly place it in the top 10 as an industry). If someone has the full set of numbers, I think we all would appreciate seeing them on the net (the newspaper and magazine accounts all truncated the table). Joe Falcone Eastern Research Laboratory decwrl! Digital Equipment Corporation decvax!deccra!jrf Hudson, Massachusetts tardis!