Once a Dynamo, the Tech Sector Is Slow to Hire

[NeoConsSuck]

Source: NY Times

For years the technology sector has been considered the most dynamic, promising and globally envied industry in the United States. It escaped the recession relatively unscathed, and profits this year have been soaring.

But as the nation struggles to put people back to work, even high-tech companies have been slow to hire, a sign of just how difficult it will be to address persistently high joblessness. While the labor report released last week showing August figures provided mildly positive news on private-sector hiring, the unemployment rate was 9.6 percent.

<snip>

The chief hurdles to more robust technology hiring appear to be increasing automation and the addition of highly skilled labor overseas. The result is a mismatch of skill levels here at home: not enough workers with the cutting-edge skills coveted by tech firms, and too many people with abilities that can be duplicated offshore at lower cost.

That’s a familiar situation to many out-of-work software engineers, whose skills start depreciating almost as soon as they are laid off, given the dynamism of the industry.

“I’m sending out lots and lots and lots of applications, to everywhere within a 50-mile radius,” says Rosamaria Carbonell Mann, 49, a software engineer who was terminated in June when her employer closed its branch in Corvallis, Ore., and sent the work to China.


Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/07/business/economy/07jobs.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=homepage

[Bette Noir]

1. Tell me about it. My sysadmin hubby has been out of work for three months.

It chaps my hide to have to pay $1200/month to COBRA the sucky health insurance his former slavemasters chose.

[Drale]

2. My aunts brother

just got a job as one of 3 IT guys at Playboy, he had a job before but from the stories he told us he might as well have been unemployed. His old company refused to give them a new lightbulb for their one lamp and would not let them buy one for "insurance" reasons.

[Stumbler]

3. Not in India

"... and the addition of highly skilled labor overseas."

Until we can curb outsourcing in tech and manufacturing fields our jobless rate will remain high.

[OhioChick]

4. Bingo. n/t

[Canuckistanian]

5. Slow to hire AMERICANS, maybe

But recruiting in India and China is still going gangbusters.

And excuse me? "not enough workers with the cutting-edge skills coveted by tech firms"?????

Give me a FUCKING BREAK.