Fewer Jobs, Mo' Money For Tech Workers

from the that-doesn't-make-sense... dept

So, the economy is tough, and more techies than ever are searching for a job. Companies have their pick of the crop, and since the market is flooded salaries are dropping. Except... they're not. It turns out that despite all the whining and complaining about unemployment and outsourcing, IT salaries are going up. Sure, the number of jobs is still fewer - but people complaining that IT workers were going to get paid less than if they worked at McDonald's might want to reconsider. Of course, no one seems exactly sure why this is, and the trend could turn around again. However, I would guess that when companies find good IT workers, they realize that it's not a commodity that they can just ship out. Thus, they end up paying them a bit more to keep them happy and hope they stay. Techies aren't all the same, and companies that recognize that are rewarding the cream of the crop - and are being rewarded with better work in return.
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  • identicon
    nil-ram, 12 Sep 2003 @ 8:17pm

    Hard to believe

    The article was about sys admins, a job that's harder to move offshore than development or maintenance. The salaries I'm seeing for developers are holding steady or dropping. And do you count the months of unemployment in-between jobs when you figure that salaries are holding up?

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 12 Sep 2003 @ 9:44pm

    The best thing about the tech sump is...

    ...all the fools I had to put up with during the boom times are now flipping burgers or standing in line, just like I told them they should be.

    One less poser who plays golf/racket ball with somone who sits on the board makes my solid position much stronger.

    I'm all for outsourceing the grunt work (99% of the useless programming efforts that get spun up in any organization of any significant size) to intelligment, over populated third world countries.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 12 Sep 2003 @ 9:51pm

    92% of all statistics....

    > [...] do you count the months of unemployment in-between jobs when you figure that salaries are holding up?< br>
    Oh, hell no. After 6 months, those people aren't even unemployed anymore. They just "choose" to drop out of the job market and are dropped from the unemployment numbers that the government publishes.

    There have been some unofficial (non-government sponsored studies) that indicate as many as 10% of those dropped numbers never find full employment again. Those numbers begin to add up really quickly... of course we won't notice anything is wrong until we're stepping over dead homless people on the city streets.

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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