Tech Employment Drops Sharply In 2004

Cryofan writes "According to Information Week, the lastest Bureau of Labor Statistics report shows that the number of Americans calling themselves IT professionals has decreased by nearly 160,000 in the last 3 years, and the number of programmers, analysts, and support specialists has fallen 15% since the first six months of 2004. According to IT World, the number of employed Software Engineers fell by 15% from April to July of 2004 (from 856,000 to 725,000)."

Comments

OR...

[Pharmboy]

Could it be that IT professionals have moved up in organizations, and are now VPs, and such, thus they may not consider themselves IT when in fact they are, just with better titles? This is the case for me, where I started out being the only IT guy 10 years ago, and now considered more, but still doing IT work as well.

I don't really call myself an "IT Professional", even though I run the network, and in the middle of producing new applications for the business. I am sure this is not all of it, but I can't help but think its not all doom and gloom.

Get a Democratic President

[jfern]

The number of jobs is always created at a faster rateaverage annual percentage growth) under Democratic Presidents then Republican Presidents

Here's another chart with the same data

You can get the raw BLS Establishment survey data here

Re:Get a Democratic President

[Peter Cooper]

But since economic factors can take years to drag out, maybe it was all the measures the Republican president put in place that improved things a few years later when a Democrat was in power?

Re:Get a Democratic President

[foidulus]

Of course Democratic presidents create more jobs - more government jobs. Thus the size of gov't increases, and so does the tax burden on those of us who don't have gov't jobs. Number 1 employer in the US - gov't. Number 1 employer in most socialist/communist countries - gov't. Can you see the correlation? Just don't try to get a gov't job unless you know someone, that's the only way in now, unless your female, minority, etc.. (Just my white male rant!).
FYI: Government spending under Bush >> Government spending under Clinton(on both defense and non-defense)
To answer the grandparent, correlation does not necessarily imply causation. Economics is a still largely a mystery, we can measure a lot of things, and explain some others, but it's a lot more complicated than most people(such as yourself) make it out to be. I see a lot of people(and I myself have indulged in this on occaision) who really over-simplify economic theory(free trade is always good! All regulation is evil! We need to protect American jobs! etc)
That correlation should not be the reason you are voting for John Kerry. I am supporting Kerry because he will show fiscal responsibility(unlike our current president), put a lot of money into research for alternative fuel sources(though he hasn't mentioned making trains a replacement for domestic flights, but hey, you can't win 'em all), his willingness to volunteer to go to Vietnam(he inspired me to look into joining the Army), and his courage to protest the war after it, his plans to reduce health care costs, and the fact that he is respected in the rest of the world. I have traveled abroad and met a lot of people who like America, but loathe Bush. I do not want that man representing our country, and I think we have found a great replacement for him in John Kerry.
Now that I have stated my beliefs, I will don my flame retardant suit.

Re:Get a Democratic President

[dcollins]

Largely the same thing can be said about Stock Market returns: higher under Democrats, lower under Republicans.

http://morningstar.aol.com/PoweredBy/doc/article/1 ,,113806,00.html?CN=NSC123

I wish they would have broken down the numbers

[foidulus]

by education levels. Are the programmers who were laid off college educated or did they take, "ITT teaches you how to write a web page and use visual baisc" type programmers? Is there demand for a masters/phd? The numbers probably mean very little of themselves without a breakdown of who is employed/unemployed. Maybe demand for college graduates has increased, but demand for Devry/ITT flunkies has plummetted. Hard to tell.....

Re:Software Engineers

[Proud like a god]

My Computer Science degree in the UK is accredited by the British Computer Society (BCS), which is a Chartered Engineering Institution, so I would be classed as an engineer upon graduation, though my degree isn't a typical degree in engineering.

AND

[h4rm0ny]

I've noticed that IT skills are now necessary requirements for roles in other areas. Employers are less often looking for just a programmer, but a statistician who can program, or a physics graduate who can program, or a graphic designer who...

Where once you would have hired a programmer to implement the specialist's work, you now expect the specialist to comprise the IT specialist's role as well.

I'm currently doing some work in data analysis, but they want me to do the SQL work on the databases myself (the cheek of it!)

That point made though, I don't think this accounts for major falls in IT work availability. I think if there are such falls then they are more a result the market being flooded with muppets who think they can program (done the correspondence or the nightschool course) and that less and less work is needing to be done from scratch. We have MS Office, we have Postnuke, we have Dreamweaver templates and anything else you might want, requiring only the barest customization.

My advice is to get good at a supplementary field (maths is always good) and get yourself into something that requires more skill than the college course kid can fake in an interview. Go for jobs with people who take things seriously, not the ones who are looking for someone cheap and can't tell the difference between you and the muppet.

Perhaps true, but some industries took a pounding.

[Richard Steiner]

I'm a former Northwest Airlines applications programmer/analyst with a BSCS and 15 years of pretty solid experience who has been looking for a new permanent place to work for over 2.5 years now, and my local area (the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro) has had a number of large companies lay off a large number of people over the past few years including my former employer (NWA), Unisys (which has a heavy airline/mainframe presence in the Twin Cities), Lawson, IBM, Qwest, Verizon, and a number of others.

In the case of NWA, many IT people were laid off based on the organization or project they were affiliated with, and whole trees of people were lopped off from the manager on down. I know several folks who I considered top-quality techie types who were let go in October 2001 because they had moved to a project that was more technically interesting or high-profile a few years ago, but which was considered a non-critical project by management in the post-9/11 airline environment).

In other cases (such as in my case), cuts were made based purely on seniority, and my 13 years put me on the bottom of the ladder compared to the remaining folks I was working with in Flight Operations (I survived the major IT cuts in late 2001 only to find myself nickel-and-dimed out a few months later when we all thought it was over).

Given the experience level of my peers I was a logical choice, at least by that measure, but I'll frankly put my general level of technical acumen against anyone here. Or there, for that matter. :-)

Unfortunately, that wasn't the measurement used. Ability rarely factors into such choices, as two layoffs in the past 15 years have taught me, particularly when the layoff parameters are being determined mainly by bean counters rather than technical management.

With such a glut in unemployed techie folks in the local area, many of them quite senior, it's hard for someone with only 10-15 years of experience to get any sort of contract work because there are a fair number of 20-30 year people also laid off who are now competing for a much smaller number of positions. And contract work is almost all there is. A few firms seem to be hiring real permanent employees, but competition is so fierce that one has to be an almost perfect tech-skill+line-of-business match in order to get a first-level interview.

I know several folks who have roughly my experience level who are still out of work after more than a year, and it sure isn't due to a lack of technical ability or a lack of effort. From what I can tell, it's mainly due to a large number of people seeking a small number of positions, and to an increasing tendency for companies to require more and more specialized business and technical skillsets even for general IT positions.

The folks who have "left IT" according to common statistical measures are a mix of all types.

Some fit the stereotype of being "less skilled" or interested only in the financial aspects of an IT career, and I'm in agreement with those who say "good riddance" to such folks, but there are probably at least as many others who are hard-core bit twiddlers or talented designers or whatnot who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and who are finding it difficult to obtain employment in IT at a time when companies are hiring specialized short-term contractors in lieu of more generalized long-term employees.

When an IT position isn't available, and when the six months or so of unemployment runs out, a former IT person has to do *something* in order to make ends meet. In my case, it will probably end up driving a truck or doing some sort of generic office work so I can continue to pay the bills.

That doesn't make me any less interested in IT, and I'll still be looking when I'm not working at a lesser position, but for statistical purposes I'll have dropped off the radar and will no longer count as an unemployed IT position. It's a very misleading statistic...

If this comes across as a bi

Re:IT needs professional licensing!

[Master of Transhuman]

Right - you want the state of California to issue an IT license that requires you to be an expert in Windows.

That would be real good for OSS, wouldn't it?

Get a clue - professional licensing of any industry is controlled by people already in that industry and is used to keep everyone else out of that industry.

Besides, if you REALLY tried to license IT professionals based on competence, the entire industry would collapse - just like most industries. Incompetence is the norm, because you only find competence in the top ten percent of anything - and the bell curve says most people fall below that.

Suits .....

[Ex-MislTech]

Myself and my hard core old school group of friends call these
ppl suits, because they are typically "dressing for success"
and their technical expertise is at best a joke .

We have 20+ yrs hands on experience with computers, and remember
mag tape and punch cards . These ppl think there has always been a mouse .

When you have someone making decisions about technical material
and they themselves only have a shallow surface level understanding
of it , you are going to get a giant mess .

Technical ppl are usually not allowed into management because they
"talk over the heads" of the suits . Ego in check, and fear of
being made to look like idiots , the techie types are kept out
of the boardroom for their tendency to be blunt and call it like
they see it .

Techies make this fear real by being blunt, and calling dumb
ideas dumb with no sugar coating, and no window dressing .
Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, we call it a duck .

The boardroom wants slick willys that can sweet talk take sweet
deals, and and resell the same subroutines in different forms
and different apps as separate packages .

They want plastic personalities and want a professional image ,
not some bulky linux admin pagan that dresses like he got
his clothes from goodwill .

Even though more often than not that is the person at the "soul"
of the operations, keeping the blood of bits pumping .

Yet the garbage man of the company gets paid like a garbage man,
because it is a thankless job at "most" companies .

If it is a Engineer owned or built company it is usually better,
but even companies like Cisco grow to a point where they
lose their tech management soul, and become victims to the
marketing mantra of maniacs .

The sales rep, marketing rep, management type goes out and sells
that image and a bag full of promises they "forgot" to mention
to the technical ppl til a week before deadline .

The suits are not about good engineering, they are about lubing up
the customer for a first rate reaming .

It comes down to the usual common denominator, "money", period .

They want to make the customer think they are getting a great deal,
and then find the best way to get as much money as they can,
and lock themselves into that company so getting rid of their
solution is as painful as possible without making it obvious .

The marketing types and management types in alot of places are
about image, and giving the feel good, and ego massaging, and
orchestrating a grand play to make things look like they
should to the other suits in the other companies . Think of it like poker .

The company that can balance this, have good engineering, and
good slick willy management wins .

I hate it, and I decided to work for myself, and be a oncall
technician that does onsite and drop off .

Corporate drones, watch Office Space, it makes TOO much sense.
Tech corporate insanity can suck the life out a person .
May your god whomever he be, save you from this fate .

Peace,
Ex-MislTech