Between January and December 2001, companies hired 2.1 million IT workers, compared to 1.6 million workers between July 2001 and June 2002. Hiring dipped 25 percent during this tracking period.
Brains are competing across borders:
Posted by Randall Parker at September 23, 2002 10:10 AM"The real challenge is offshore programming—not the few thousand [IT workers] that come to the U.S., but the workers in Ireland and South Africa and India that are paid much less to do the work," said Miller. "I think there is more work going offshore in part due to the pressure to keep costs down, and there's huge downward pressure on software vendors to keep their labor rates down," he added.
In the long run, the fact that the US companies
are hiring programmers who are physically in
foreign countries, makes the US strategically more
vulnerable in the future.
Check out the article in CIO magazine entitled "Ready, Aim, Hire", which says smart CIO's are starting to hire now in anticipation of an upturn in the economy. You can see it online at http://www.cio.com/archive/080102/hire.html.