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IT Workers Cushioned From US Economic Downturn
DontLickJesus writes "According to the AP, technology has been the least hardest hit by the U.S.'s recent economic downturn. Quote: '"Overall technology employment is up in America and the wages associated with it are up," said John McCarthy, a vice president with Forrester Research.' The article goes on to say that companies realize the worth of their [IT] staff. This paired along with a recent article regarding the value of data centers when selling a company leads one to believe that the business world, while historically not fond of IT workers, is showing its true opinion of the sector."
Perhaps because during 2001-2003 they sliced back so much IT staff that they still have not finished catching up? Also many IT people went into other fields or back to school during that time, reducing the supply, meaning there is less chance of oversupply this time around.
Table-ized A.I.
Good luck to all still trying to make a living completely unappreciated - worse than plumbers but just as necessary.
At least the plumbers can't be outsourced.
Well, help desk technicians are worth about $12/hour, honestly.
"Help Desk" is the low-end of the IT totem pole. It's a job that requires few qualifications beyond "Knows how to install software and update drivers".
I think the bigger fear that people with IT careers (myself included) is the inevitable deployment of high-speed fiber networks. For MANY businesses, having nothing but "terminals" that run apps on remote servers (which would probably be running under VMs) would be a huge cost savings, and probably more reliable, too.
It costs a lot of money to have a really reliable network, and the staff to maintain it. Why not pay some other company to do all that, and enjoy the economies of scale that they can offer?
IT professionals have been hit very hard and nowhere is this more evident than in Phoenix, where I live.
That's a great anecdote.
Now how about you show us some information which proves your one data point reflects the entire US economy.
You know, something tangible to refute the Labor Dept and TFA's quote from the VP & Principal Analyst of Forrester Research.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
This is just the start of it. It's way too early to crow.
Our end of the boat may not be taking on water yet but the ship is sinking, the brass band is playing and politicians are fighting over the deck chairs.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
The reason IT is being the least hit is because it has been the primary target for so long. IT has been viewed as fat, as so trimmed, for so long that there is precious little left.
The "true opinion" is that all the expendable IT jobs are now outside the company.
After outsourcing and offshoring as many jobs as possible, there are few expendable positions left in companies. Many of the positions that are being cut are jobs waiting for backfill and contract jobs.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
It's not that other people are getting 'free money' that's on his nerves. It's where this 'free money' is coming from - guess what, it's coming out of his ass in the form of an extra $5,000 worth of income taxes next April 15th. Mine too. Yours too.
If the government gives me $100 in 'free money' - as you say that really doesn't concern you personally. Unless they dip right into your checking account and take it right out of your pocket to give it to me. Then it's something for you to get pissed about.
Make sense now?
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
We must not allow the Treasure Secretary to receive $700 billion to spend with no oversight whatsoever. The current plan creates a gigantic moral hazard, is inflationary, rewards reckless risk-taking by CEOs, and still results in common people being foreclosed upon. We need to re-institute the Glass-Steagall act, allow highly leveraged firms to fail, insulate common people from the effects of these failing institutions, and regulate the market to prevent this catastrophe from happening again.
Just because technology companies are not hit as hard by this economic downturn, that does not mean technology workers (programmers, engineers, network admins, system admins) are equivalently immune. One problem here is the Labor department is classifying things badly. When the payroll of a technology company goes up, they interpret it as benefiting technology workers. It could be they are just hiring more sales people (I've seen it done). And a huge amount of IT is done in non-technology companies, including financial companies. And even if these companies consider their data centers to be of value, the IT workers own none of it, and few of them would be considered vital employees.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I think they are not looking for much, except for:
10 years of Guru level Java expert experience with AJAX, Java Beans, Hibernate, Spring, SCJP
With Minimum 10 years of Oracle 10g (yes) experience with DBA skills to match the development skills working on Oracle RAC, Data warehousing and ETL
with great Linux/Unix skills with 15 years of socket programming, general admin knowledge, backup expertise with strong emphasis on korn, bash and C shell scripting
at least 8 years of Perl, Python and 5 (yes) years of Ruby on Rails
Yes, this is a made up requirement, but not too far from what I have seen in last 4 months on job boards when I was looking for a decent mid level development job.