IT job market may be looking up

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Why does ZDnet still print articles like this?

Seriously. Is there anyone who hasn't yet lost count of how many articles like this we've seen over the last couple of months? First there's a report from such-and-such staffing firm that they anticipate hiring 2% more people this month than last month, and the article concludes that the good times are back and Silicon Valley will soon be a happening place once again. Then, somebody predicts that jobs will keep going to India and China, or some company decides to axe several thousand workers, or "worker confidence" (how do you measure that, anyway?) has been down for a couple of hours and the article concludes that the apocalypse is here and nobody will ever have a job again. And the cycle repeats.

In case it hasn't become abundantly clear by now: You can't gauge how the market will go over the next 5 years--or even the next 5 weeks, for that matter--based on what some goofy poll of CIOs or CEOs or CFOs happens to indicate. Those kinds of trends change so rapidly that they are not any kind of long-term indicator of what's going to happen to the job market down the line. XYZ Company's revenues are up and they decide to hire a few hundred employees, everybody says the tech boom is back, two months later the company says "Oh, we changed our mind, you're all fired" and it looks like people are still getting fired in droves, when the company never intended to keep those people for very long in the first place.

Ed Frauenheim's style of late has been to construct half of his articles as a bunch of links to previous article he's written on the same subject. Yeah, we get the idea by now: There are mixed messages. Okay, nobody's clearing the matter up by citing every random executive poll that comes along. What we need are concrete stats on how the number of employed is changing, both by profession and by locality (state and country).

Posted by: LateBlt   Posted on: 06/09/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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