The Staton Jones Report

The odd part (intimated by your quote) is that the number employed in various IT fields dropped, but so did the unemployment rate for those workers; i.e. more workers either retired or changed profession than the drop in employment.

Some of this may be last-stage fallout from the internet boom - there were quite a few weak "web programmers", MCSEs and the like who jumped on the bandwagon then, and may have started finally giving up and going back to other things. But, as I'm sure you'd mention, some of the longer-term unemployed probably just took jobs in other professions because they had trouble finding work.

Honestly, from what I've seen around here (Philly), job prospects for good engineers are on the upswing. We've hired several recently ourselves, and some of those had multiple offers (one HW guy had offers here and in the Boston 'burbs, but he's already here and it's a lot cheaper than Boston(!)

I think the IT market in Dallas is marginally better than it has been, going from abysmal to merely awful. Headhunters are still being deluged with resumes for every posting and still have that "don't call us, we'll call you" attitude, so it hasn't exactly turned the corner as the Bushies would have it.

Mike's Dallas assessment pretty much accurately captures the sitch' in Austin, as well (at least, by my reconning)

I've had a noticable uptick in "resume broker" spam mailings to deltos.com. Apparently I'm a big employer now. (sigh)

My own search is going well enough compared to six months ago ... but it's almost entirely thanks to an extensive network of (still) employed friends. God bless you guys!

Darn, lost the comment I was writing earlier.

I've started to get cold calls here from headhunters who want my resume. Quite a change from a year or even two ago.

We've gone from 22 people and $0 in the bank (and expecting at any time to be told to just go home), to ~45 people and millions in the bank - perhaps enough to reach cash-break-even next year, unless we decide to get more money to grow faster. (And since we both work here, we stood to lose both of our jobs if it'd gone under.) In the last few weeks we've had Bush (sigh) using our phone in front of the cameras, the CEO of motorola introducing it as one of their major new products to analysts and press, calls to troops in Ramstein, Korea and Ft. Hood in conjuction with the USO at various USO events, etc. We're even trying to get a phone to work in Baghdad.

A very senior SW guy who was laid off last summer got a job 4ish months ago - doesn't love it (idiot sales and IT people), but he's working in the field again, and I don't think he took too much of a hit from his internet-bubble-era salary.

So in this area, at least, things have picked up.

That's great news, Randell. Now ... are you hiring? :-)

Last I knew we were. We've hired at least 3 engineers in the last month or two (1 HW, 2 SW). I think we have 2-3 positions listed currently at http://wgate.com, though with the recent hires we may wait a bit before digesting any more (and I think the positions listed are generally more mid-level - people to work at the direction of some of the senior engineers).