Companies in every sector are ravenously hiring data scientists, hoping to eke out more sales or improve their efficiency. Pay is good for the average senior data scientist who makes nearly $140,000 a year and can pick from thousands of openings.
But for new entrants, just out of college or a tech bootcamp, the job market is rife with mislabeled job postings and stiff competition.
Media exposésand boycotts from big-name advertisers are doing what government regulators haven't: They're forcing the country's biggest tech companies to change their products, policies and strategies.
Why it matters: Despite an onslaught of hearings and statements from Washington, virtually no regulation has actually passed to significantly address privacy practices.
The early 2020 conversation includes a call to "break up" big tech — led by Elizabeth Warren's proposal targeting Google, Facebook and Amazon. But the proclamations have yet to be backed up by any concrete action.
A growing number of tech companies, big and small, are relocating to (or opening additional offices in) emerging startup hubs. But as they seek relief from the high cost of doing business in Silicon Valley, they are finding that salaries in cities like Salt Lake City, Denver, and Atlanta are on the rise.
Why it matters: Companies have increasingly bemoaned the challenges of growing in San Francisco and the rest of the Bay Area due to housing shortages, skyrocketing engineer salaries and other costs. But as other emerging hubs in the U.S. see a boom in their local tech industries, they may not be less expensive job markets for long.
In several midsize cities across the U.S., unusual software teams are programming apps and websites. In past lives, these workers delivered pizzas and parcels, tended stores and taught in schools, or drove Ubers and forklifts.
They made the unlikely jump to tech by way of apprenticeships — free intensive training followed by jobs at the companies that taught them.
Why it matters: This train-and-hire model is a potential answer to a huge outstanding issue: how to get people whose jobs are likely to be automated into new, future-proof work that requires vastly different skills.
Alicia Waide was two decades out of college when she started thinking about a tech job.She'd worked at Procter & Gamble for three years, then as a biology teacher in Baltimore high schools for another 16.
For the next 8 weeks, some of the best-known minds in the study of the future of work will be appearing at MIT.
What's next: It's a free online course led by MIT's Thomas Kochan and Elisabeth Reynolds, and it will track technological history going back to the 19th century, income inequality, labor groups, automation, German manufacturing and more. In the final 4 weeks, students look at the social contract coming out of WWII and create a new one for the new age of automation, Kochan tells Axios.
SmileDirectClub, a provider of at-home teeth straightening systems that lets users bypass the orthodontist's office, has picked bankers for an upcoming IPO, Axios has learned.
Details: The Nashville-based company expects to file its S-1 document by the end of June, with J.P. Morgan listed as lead manager. It was launched 6 years ago and expects to do at least $1 billion in 2019 revenue.
President Trump's former director of the National Economic Council Gary Cohn let his feelings about the president's tariff battle with China be known in an interview on Freakonomics Radio released Wednesday night.
"When you put tariffs on goods that people in the United States consume every day, it's a consumption tax. So all the tariffs did is they made products that Americans were going to buy more expensive. And in fact we got the final trade data numbers ... And lo and behold [in 2018], we hit an all-time record-high trade deficit globally, and with China."
