IT Jobs Still Plunging
I was reading this Slashdot story about IT jobs per language and someone posted this interesting job site in the UK which maps out the numbers of IT jobs. You can see the numbers are steadily declining, even now. I'm still wishfully thinking that we've reached some sort of bottom, but it doesn't look like it. That graph above is incredible... it shows in vivid and frightening detail the plunge in jobs. Oof.
I noticed the other day that jobs on Dice have gone below 20,000. This is amazing. I used Dice for ALL my jobs when I was living in San Francisco and the numbers, if I remember correctly, were 10 times that amount.
However, the bright side of all this is demand for office space: ZDNet is reporting that rents in Silicon Valley are still plummeting as well, averaging $15.24 per square foot, down from $50.88 in Q1 2001. That's very, very cool if you're just starting out. This is a great time to start a new business, IMHO.
There's still people out there buying tech stuff and the business cycles are coming around - soon all those PCs and tech that businesses bought several years ago will start showing their age and things will pick up. We're all wishing for another boom, and it won't come until we stop wishing and get around to creating it... but we're going to see it.
-Russ