This it not the TYPE of job, but by INDUSTRY it appears from looking at the LED (Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics) description.
The difference is incredibly important. Have 500 workers including janitorial, secretarial, programmers, and executives at a high-tech company and they are all reported as high-tech workers regardless if the highest tech they touch is a floor waxer. Or have some IT people at a hotel and they are classified as hospitality.
I never like these industry classifications because they aren't actually very helpful in looking at employent statistics except in aggregate.
Your observation is spot-on and I agree that it's important not to misread this data set, but I think it still has some valuable uses. While I would rather see more detail, I am interested to see how different industries impact overall employment in the economy even if I can't bucket all the individual jobs under one heading.
With that said, given that a lot of companies contract out for non-core work (e.g. janitorial, kitchen/food-preparation in cafeterias, etc), I wonder how that is handled in this dataset? In particular, what location would be associated with a given contract worker. Would it be their employer's address or the address where they provide services?
Employer. These are all done through payroll numbers and some self-reports to fill in the gaps maybe. I'm guessing, similar to the monthly ESR establishment survey.
Great map! I notice a large amount of green. In fact, most major cities are completely green. Could it be an even tight mix of blue and yellow dots making it look green? Also, the Microsoft campus near where I live is red (Mfg, trade). Wouldn't they be blue (professional)? How about a color for agricultural jobs.
I really don't understand the classification. Most of Manhattan appears to be predominantly green. And while there's plenty of government/education/healthcare workers here, I don't think that's a reasonable classification for most of the companies with big offices in NYC. Something is off.
Other than it seems to only allows zooming in cities, its data is pretty wrong looking at the local map. I don't see the local manufacturing plant or any farm jobs.
Farm jobs are generally not included in the employment statistics gathered (nor for military occupations) for historical reasons. There was a push in the 80s the change that.
Uhm, agriculture is listed as "Number of jobs in NAICS sector 11 (Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing and Hunting)"[1] which is coded CNS01 in the csv tables[2].
Those still aren't farm jobs. From the LODES description of what it doesn't count:
"Business owners, self-employed persons, some temporary workers, family farmers, military personnel, and others are typically outside of this frame, are not covered, and thus not counted in LODES."
For some reason, the map seems to be categorizing technology jobs as green (Healthcare, Education, and Government). Look at SF, and it's almost completely green.
Given that most of Silicon Valley's employment is not in SF, it's quite likely that the tech jobs in the city are overshadowed by the massive number of education, government, and healthcare jobs.
The data is very dubious - they've mapped the entire Googleplex as "Retail, hospitality, and other services". The North Bayshore area east of Shoreline is listed as "Manufacturing and trade" - most of that area is Google now.
Sunnyvale and the Stanford area look pretty accurate though, and it got the big office park near Middlefield-Ellis-Whisman and some of the industrial areas in Santa Clara. Perhaps it's working off an old data set (~2000ish)?
Even if it's that old, that doesn't explain why Infinite Loop would be categorized as Manufacturing and trade, with all the area around it as healthcare and government.
Based on industry. It is based on industry not category of job. E.e., everybody at McDonalds is classified as food services even if they are sys admins.
I've heard this as an explanation for the US's perceived lack of "manufacturing" jobs -- if a factory employs its own maintenance people / janitors / whatever, those are manufacturing jobs, but if the factory contracts with another company to send people to do the same work, those are service jobs.
> All 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands have joined the LED Partnership, although the LEHD program is not yet producing public-use statistics for Massachusetts, Puerto Rico, or the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Noticing an issue with zoom levels. It appears there is only a national zoom resolution, another at the 4-5 states level and then one more resolution at the tiny, neighborhood level. There's not a good resolution for looking at the state level or metropolitan level unfortunately.
Seems to me like modeling every single job based on census data seems unnecessary. Couldn't you also use maybe even just other census data or zoning data on the types of businesses and then pattern based on density, esp. with such rough grouping of classifications?
It really matters a lot more if an employee finds his or her own job interesting than if you find it interesting. I can personally attest that at least one employee finds his job in software development interesting, even though it involves little to no theoretical math. In fact, I find it a little disparaging that you call my career uninteresting so unequivocally.
However, if you yourself are so dedicated to pursuing mathematics (which does sound like an interesting topic) know that there are mathematicians in industry. Tech companies and government agencies hire huge numbers of math majors, and although the work can stray into the realms of applied mathematics, your interest in pure math could serve you well.
Software development is not interesting - you don't have to come up with any novel ideas, or be creative in your problem solving, especially with the existence of large libraries that already exist that can perform any algorithm for you. For example, if you are doing machine learning in Python, you can just use a library like scikit or numpy, and you don't even have to code the algorithm. In fact, you don't even have to understand the algorithm or why it works - your boss just tells you to use k-nearest-neighbors and you select that from the library - no independent thought required. It's basically mindless - I don't understand what is intellectually interesting about it.
And in order to do interesting mathematical work in industry, you have to have a PhD and therefore you must again be placed in the extremely competitive and toxic environment of academia. And regardless, any theoretical knowledge of pure math would be unnecessary due to the existence of these libraries that basically do all the thinking for you. Even if you are smart and able to do pure math (which should give you a competitive advantage), it doesn't.
What is intellectually interesting about just copying and pasting code from a library? I think we can all agree that it is significantly (orders of magnitude) less interesting than solving abstract math problems.
Speak for yourself. My day job involves taking apart and diagnosing small electronics, and repairing them if necessary. I find that fulfilling and nearly every day I come across something I haven't seen before, or I come up with a new fix for a new problem. If that was all I did at work all day, I'd be content to stay here indefinitely. The only reason I'm looking elsewhere is because I only get to spend about 15% of my work day doing that. The rest is sitting at a desk answering phone calls, which might be the best job in the world to someone out there but it isn't to me.
In other words, what's good for you isn't good for everyone. If you drop the selfish attitude you'll realize that your happiness matters to one person: You.
If you wrote a new library, what would you put in it? What is the point of writing a new library that contains functions that already exist in other libraries?
I'm not saying industry doesn't conceptualize unmet needs. I'm only saying that it's intellectually uninteresting.
It's what we used to call "trolls". HN is blessedly free of them. This user will be hell-banned, but there's nothing to keep them from creating another account and doing it again.
The difference is incredibly important. Have 500 workers including janitorial, secretarial, programmers, and executives at a high-tech company and they are all reported as high-tech workers regardless if the highest tech they touch is a floor waxer. Or have some IT people at a hotel and they are classified as hospitality.
I never like these industry classifications because they aren't actually very helpful in looking at employent statistics except in aggregate.