I have a new piece on the dismal impact of information technology on the workforce at ReadWriteWeb:
Last week we told you that enterprises are investing more into business intelligence and analytics initiatives. This week there’s more good news for professionals in this area: according to KDNuggets, salaries are rising for analytics and data mining professionals.
Based on a poll with approximately 250 respondents, KDNuggets found that salaries are up from its 2010 poll in North America, Western Europe, Asia and Latin America. (There is no mention of Eastern Europe, Africa or Antarctica.)
It’s a good time to be a geek, particularly one with a background in statistics, analytics and data mining. But a bad time to be almost any other type of worker.
For example, The New York Times reported on software that can process legal documents at a fraction of the cost of hiring lawyers and paralegals:
“Some programs go beyond just finding documents with relevant terms at computer speeds. They can extract relevant concepts — like documents relevant to social protest in the Middle East — even in the absence of specific terms, and deduce patterns of behavior that would have eluded lawyers examining millions of documents.”
That’s good news for the people who develop that software. But for people in the legal profession? Not so much.
ReadWriteWeb: Good News for Data Geeks, Bad News for Everyone Else
Supplemental reading:
Paul Krugman: Degrees and Dollars
Krugman, again, on the same issue back in 1996
And, less dreary but probably less realistic: