Don't believe the hype, as they say.

A recent study shows that about 400,000 tech jobs have been lost in the United States in this 3 year period. Most job losses are a direct result of outsourcing of jobs.

You can read the pdf report here.

When you go to vote this november, give this some careful thought, at least if you care about your and your family's future.
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the IT unemployment rate fell to 3.4% in the 3rd quarter, level last seen in 2000. btw, actually 2nd quarter of 2000 it was at 3.5%.



there are 3.4 million total IT workers...here's the break down:
3% databas administrators
6% network and computer systems administrators
9% computer support specialists
10% computer and IS managers
10% network systems and data communications analysts
16% computer programmers
22% computer scientists and system analysts
24% computer software engineers

there has been over a 3% drop in the IT unemployment rate in the last 6 months.


as a side note, IT is never going to be where it was in the late 90's. all of that money in the market was smoke and mirrors...most of it was never there which is why there was the dot com bust. it was truly absurd, everyday a dot com was popping up offering asburd salaries and insane benefits...but what good were those jobs? people hardly even held the for a year because the company would go under.
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Thanks for the stats, Mike. One thing you have to really watch with things like 'the numbered of unemployed IT workers is x or y, or rose or fell x or y%', is that unemployment numbers work in a weird way. When you are receiving unemployment benefits, you are in the official ranks of the unemployed. If you get a job, any job, you are not unemployed. If your benefits run out, you are no longer considered as part of the unemployed.

So it's useful to look at the actual numbers of employed, not the percentages.

Otherwise I pretty much agree with what you say. Another thing those numbers don't show is how much tech workers are getting paid when they do find work, even if it's tech work.

Personally I think the late 90's were ridiculous, people were totally overpaid, it was silly. I don't miss that nonsense at all. But I can tell you, both on the east coast and west coast, the job market is very BAD for tech people. The markets are glutted, admittedly with a lot of people who probably should never have been hired in the first place, but it's hard for good people too, the bar to get into places is much higher now than it was.

And outsourcing is a real thing, it's not really slowing down much, that sort of sucks out a middle part of the IT job market, the standard plug and play corporate drone type employee, and a lot of higher end people too, especially in programming. Networking on the whole is I think a better bet, but it's a hard job, not very rewarding.
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