September 24th, 2008
Go West young IT worker!
In 1851 Indianna journalist John Soule advised: “Go West Young Man.”
With the financial crisis causing turmoil in the financial services sector there are tens of thousands of IT jobs being lost on the East coast and elsewhere in the US.
On WebGuild Daya Baran writes:
Potentially, there are 90,000 jobs which will be lost between Lehman and Merrill. Soon, they will start to flood the tech sector seeking employment. The labor pool for tech workers will increase and put downward pressure on wages.
Will Silicon Valley become flooded with IT workers? Maybe. But I don’t think there will be many because:
- East Coast IT people chose the safe confines of a large organization, the relative job security and a regular work week. There isn’t much of that around here. Startup life is your life and that’s it.
- Companies here want skill sets that include PHP, Ruby, Flash, MySQL etc. There’s not that many overalapping skills within financial services.
What could happen is that the trend to outsourcing IT services to India and elsewhere could slow dramatically.
The cost of IT outsourcing has been rising steadily and so has the high trunover in teams, sometimes as high as 100 per cent annually.
The dollar is cheap and US IT staff are highly trained in the latest IT enterprise technologies. There will be fewer incentives to outsource IT projects outside of the US, imho.
Tom Foremski reports on the business and culture of Silicon Valley at the intersection of technology and media. He also writes at Silicon Valley Watcher. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
Subscribe to Tom Foremski: IMHO via Email alerts or RSS.
Follow on Twitter:
