A Positive Outlook on the Software Industry

joechang writes "According to this article in Business 2.0, our IT sector jobs are not as glum as we make them out to be. Despite the downturn in the economy, the article maintains that our jobs are as stable as ever, and that pay increases are actually at reasonable levels. In addition, software development is still one of the largest growing industries, and that Billings, MT is a high growth area. Of course, I haven't heard of any of my co-workers taking a job in Billings..."

Comments

Biz Week ran a "IT Jobs are headed overseas" story

[cryofan5]

....just 2 weeks ago.

ANd this week, they run a story about how we don't need to worry. The jobs will stick around.

Hmmm. Let me see...what are there tactics?

First they run a scare story so that all the programmers will buy the magazine or will visit the website (actually, I don't think that story was online right away).

So, then the business lobbies know that their paid-for congressmen will have to knuckle under to an angry and scared electorate, so they pay Biz Week to run the antidote to the scare story. Biz Week makes out! Mo' money...mo' money....mo' money!

Re:Uhh I live in Silicon Valley

[version5]

> 1. It will cut the number of tech jobs due to war funding.

That doesn't make any sense - the government is about to drop bags of cash on the defense industry and homeland security, both of which rely heavily on technology.

> 2. It will cut down on the number of younger less experienced people applying for jobs as they head for war

Also false. The younger, less-experienced people headed off to war were never applying jobs because they already have jobs. They are fulltime military personnel. As for the reserves, they'll be back pretty soon.

> 3. Large corporations are leveraging off-shore IT pools in foriegn countries

According to the article:

"As a cyclical phenomenon, jobs moving offshore isn't that important," says Robert Shimer, an associate professor of economics at Princeton. The concern... is based on the misapprehension that if our wages are high and other people's are low, all our jobs will be exported. "It turns out we are more efficient than the people we are competing with," he adds.

Speculating for a moment, I think you may be disproportionately feeling the effects of the recession, more so than other IT jobs. It seems to me that admin type jobs would be the first to go. I've read more than a few /. posts boasting about the posters ability to write shell scripts that do 90% of the administration while they play CounterStrike. Conversely, if a you've had some layoffs in your company and your sys admin is overloaded with work, you could probably suck it up and hold out for a while longer. But if you absolutely had to get your product to market because it looked like the ecomony was turning around, and you don't have the programming staff, that's simply not going to work, you have to get more programmers. In short, the consequences of not enough admin staff are less severe than the consequences of not enough programmers.

Of course that's all speculation.