It's not your imagination

Yes, the tech job market really does suck.



I guess that as the Bush regime moves farther away from science and more towards a medeival society, we should all start training as blacksmiths.

The U.S. information tech sector lost 403,300 jobs between March 2001 and this past April, and the market for tech workers remains bleak, according to a new report.



Perhaps more surprising, just over half of those jobs -- 206,300 -- were lost after experts declared the recession over in November 2001, say the researchers from the University of Illinois-Chicago.



In all, the researchers said, the job market for high-tech workers shrank by 18.8 percent, to 1,743,500 over the period studied.



Researchers Snigdha Srivastava and Nik Theodore compiled the numbers using the Current Employment Statistics survey and the Current Population Survey.



The report, funded by the Ford Foundation, was conducted for the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, a Seattle organization that wants to unionize workers at Microsoft Corp. and other technology companies.



Theodore, director of the university's Center for Urban Economic Development, said one factor in the staggering high-tech job losses is the familiar lament that businesses have been wary to hire because of uncertainty over how much the economy is improving.



But he also attributes some of the job losses to corporations farming high-tech jobs out to overseas companies whose labor is cheaper.



Theodore said the study shows that high-tech workers "are really bearing the brunt of economic restructuring strategies." It also shows that the end of the recession did not signal the end of high-tech job woes, he said.



"Not only has it not turned around, in many cases it has gotten worse," said Theodore.

I'm lucky in that I have a varied set of tech and soft skills, and a relatively secure job. But when I look around at the number of highly skilled people, many of them with advanced degrees, who are working menial jobs because they can't compete with someone who makes $30/week, I wonder what this drumbeat of "we need more training" is going to do.



Whether George W. Bush wants to believe it or not, a guy who used to make $60,000 a year as a programmer or network administrator is not going to be able to put much into the economy slicing deli meats at the A&P for eight bucks an hour.