Tech Workers in Higher Demand
mjdroner writes "CNN has a story on an employment consulting firm report showing job cuts in the tech sector are down 40 percent." From the article: "Despite the inevitable job-cutting that typically follows mergers, the job market picture for the nation's tech workers is definitely improving. Many job seekers in high-demand fields such as storage systems administration and information security are probably finding themselves in the driver's seat when it comes to negotiating employment terms"
Many consulting and defense firms have been hiring tech workers non-stop for a long time now. Especially in the D.C. Metro area.
FTFA, "Some businesses may in fact regret some of the job cuts they made in recent years, which, in retrospect, may have been too deep. Recent surveys suggest that employers are having an increasingly difficult time finding information technology (IT) workers."
I was laid off in the fall of 2004 because it was determined that the company could outsource our System Admins and Database Admins to a domestic contractor and co-locate to save a couple bucks in the long run. (You can convince any executive to do anything, BTW, if you have a good PowerPoint ROI chart, laser pointer, and $800 suit).
Long story short, the fine print in the contract stated that only 2 major systems would be outsourced (which amounted to about 40% of the total workload), and after everyone was laid off, the contractor says, "Now... You know that we're not going to handle email, NAS, web services, and other misc systems, correct?"
Needless to say, they're now locked into a 5 year multi-million dollar contract, AND have hired back new system admins to replace the layoffs. I'm not bitter... But it still makes me smile anyway... =)