Report Cites Highest IT Job Growth In 4 Years

netbuzz writes "Employment research firm Foote Partners says U.S. labor statistics from last month reveal an increase of some 18,200 jobs in IT, which represents the largest such monthly jump since 2008. 'The overall employment situation in the U.S. is lackluster, in fact this is the fifth consecutive month of subpar results,' says David Foote. 'But the fact that more than 18,000 new jobs were created last month for people with significant IT skills and experience — and nearly 57,000 new jobs added in the past three months — is incredibly good news.'"

Comments

In real jobs or fake ones?

[crazyjj]

Is this report counting the *real* programming and IT jobs, or just the ones that companies post with ridiculous qualifications, just so they can run to Congress and claim they can't find American personnel to fill them and get more H1-B visas?

Re:In real jobs or fake ones?

[CastrTroy]

IT is a stupid classification anyway. It includes way too many different types of jobs. It could include everything from people working at the IT help desk all the way to people designing operating systems. That would be like looking at the "manufacturing sector" but also including the people who design the machines the manufacturing plants use. Sure an increase in manufacturing jobs means they need more machines, but you still shouldn't count them in the same lot.

Re:In real jobs or fake ones?

[Chrono11901]

It is extremely difficult to find highly skilled mid to senior level software engineers (here in NYC at least) unless you plan to pay over the top to seal someone away from another company. It seems to take at minimum a month to find someone, and thats if your a company with good benefits and great salary

Re:In real jobs or fake ones?

[jrj102]

I've filled a dozen or so positions in the last 4 years, most of them took 2-3 months to find a qualified applicant. Only once did I hire someone inside of a month. So while I am not arguing that there are a lot of fake job ads out there, the assertion that any 30+ day aged ad is fake is demonstrably false. Larger companies take time to fill positions, and with the economy slumping there is pressure to find exactly the right applicant even if that means the spot lay unfilled for a couple months (often at great pain) rather than hire someone "with potential" as was the common practice 5-10 years ago.

Re:In real jobs or fake ones?

[afidel]

See, to me your post is indicative of exactly what's wrong in IT hiring today. If you're looking for exactly the "right" person it probably means your making people play buzzword bingo. This is the lazy way to hire IT people and it does nothing to assure that you actually get a good candidate. Instead you need to hire someone with the correct level of experience for the job, some familiarity with subject matter of the position, and the ability to learn. That is ALL the qualification you should realistically need since even if they've used the exact same product at the exact same version level it's likely that your environment has enough differences to their previous experience that it might as well have been a different product. It's never taken me more than two weeks to hire someone. In fact the only position at my employer I would have trouble filling quickly is the one we outsourced after having four people in 3 years fail in our environment (we needed someone with Oracle and MS SQL experience and knowledge of our ERP platform, very very niche).