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The Morning Download: Tech Jobs Rise for Fourth Straight Month
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Good morning, CIOs. When it comes to jobs, technology both gives and takes. The focus of late has been on the threats automation poses to the workforce. But an analysis of last week's jobs report reveals a surge in IT-based hiring. CIO Journal's Angus Loten has more.
More jobs in tech. Companies last month added 104,000 information-technology workers, the fourth consecutive month of gains, boosting the total number of U.S. information-technology jobs to more than 5.6 million, according to a report by IT trade group CompTIA.
And more tech in jobs. Meanwhile, the ongoing digitalization of the U.S. economy means that every job now has a technology component, as CIO Journal Columnist Irving Wladawsky-Berger reported Friday. In 2016, 23% of jobs required high digital skills, up from 5% of jobs in 2002, he writes, citing a report by the Brookings Institution.
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SOURCE: DEALOGIC
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Success stops at the border for China's tech giants. They have found it challenging to translate domestic domination into international success, despite spending billions on overseas investments and acquisitions, The Wall Street Journal's Phred Dvorak and Stu Woo report.
'My way or the highway.' Experts tell WSJ that the hard-charging, top-down management style practiced by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and other Chinese firms doesn't quite translate in other markets. “It tends to be ‘my way or the highway,’” says Singaporean entrepreneur and investor James Chan of Chinese executives’ management style. “The general consensus of Chinese companies in this part of the world is they’ll just bulldoze their way through.”
U.S. files criminal charges against professor linked to Huawei. The criminal complaint against Bo Mao, a professor at University of Texas-Arlington, doesn’t mention Huawei Technologies Co. by name. But it closely parallels a civil suit filed by Silicon Valley’s CNEX Labs Inc. against Huawei. A Texas jury in June found Huawei had stolen CNEX’s solid-state drive computer technology but declined to award damages. (WSJ)
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'Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates,’ a three-part profile premiering on Netflix Sept. 20, connects chapters in his personal history to his current work with the Gates Foundation. PHOTO: MICHEL EULER/ASSOCIATED PRESS
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Q:
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You were hailed as a tech wunderkind and then experienced a backlash against Microsoft. Is that similar to what’s happening for today’s tech titans like Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg?
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A:
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As soon as tech became important, with the personal computer and the internet, there was certainly a duality where people were saying, “Oh my God, this is brilliant stuff,” but they were also looking at me, or other leaders in the industry, and saying, “What motivates their work? Do they understand the potential negative side effects?” I’m sort of the poster boy of that original duality. By some measures I was extremely popular and by some measures I was extremely—you know, people worried what Microsoft was up to. What’s happening now is more of a mainstream thing. The concerns are legitimate, and they’re touching more areas of life now.
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PHOTO: RICHARD VOGEL/ASSOCIATED PRESS
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Gig-economy RIP? Uber Technologies Inc. and Lyft Inc. have spent much of the year pushing California lawmakers to alter a bill which intends to force companies that rely on “gig workers” to reclassify them as employees. That effort has failed against opposition from labor unions and a large Democratic majority in Sacramento. The bill already passed the State Assembly and is expected to be voted on in the state Senate before the legislative session ends on Friday.
Job impact. Lyft has said that the bulk of its roughly 325,000 California drivers—most of whom are part time—would no longer be able to drive for the company if they were employees, because it would need to start scheduling shifts. “Costs would also be higher on the passenger side,” a Lyft spokesman said.
Nationwide impact. “What happens here is likely to affect what other states do and—depending on what happens in the upcoming elections—what Congress does,” said Ken Jacobs, chair of the Labor Center at the University of California, Berkeley. (WSJ)
Amazon has 30,000 open positions. The posts are permanent jobs, not seasonal and more than half are tech-oriented. (New York Times)
Also Amazon...a walkout. About 1,000 employees are planning a walkout September 20 to demand the company reduce its carbon footprint. (Motherboard)
Live like a CIO. Martin Chavez, Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s departing coder-in-chief, is listing his townhouse in New York’s West Village for $19.95 million amid a planned move to the West Coast. (WSJ)
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Everything Else You Need to Know
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A shift by some investors to corporate bonds from stocks indicates relative confidence in the ability to pay back debt despite slowing earnings growth. (WSJ)
PG&E unveiled a plan to settle billions of dollars in wildfire-related claims and exit bankruptcy next year as it seeks to prevent creditors from taking over the embattled company. (WSJ)
President Trump declared that talks were dead between the U.S. and the Taliban and warned the U.S. could do “certain things” that would cost millions of lives in a move to end the war, a step he said he doesn’t want to take. (WSJ)
Drilling into the seafloor off Mexico, scientists have extracted a unique geologic record of the single worst day in the history of life on Earth, when a city-sized asteroid smashed into the planet 65 million years ago. (WSJ)
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