Silicon Valley has lost 200,000 IT jobs since April 2001, according to the State of California.


According to C/NEWS:

http://news.com.com/Has+tech+employment+turned+a+corner/2100-1022_3-5685399.html

The good news:

“333,000 tech industry jobs were lost in 2003 and 612,000 in 2002”.

“the average number of unemployed workers in nine high-tech categories--including computer programmers, database administrators and computer hardware engineers--fell from 210,000 in 2003 to 146,000 last year, according to Labor Department data”.

The bad news::


“On the gloomier side, technology companies have been slashing jobs at a rapid pace. In addition, tech professionals face the possibility of their jobs being sent to lower-wage nations such as India or China. The automation of technology tasks is also a threat”.

Gee, that is so nice and I am glad that Bill Gates has a solution: Hire more H1B’s!

http://yahoo.reuters.com/financeQuoteCompanyNewsArticle.jhtml?duid=mtfh50501_2005-04-27_19-44-44_n27662375_newsml

If the high tech industry in all of its permeations was a career field that was stable perhaps more students would join its ranks. Instead, the students I talk to shun high tech (electronics engineering, computer science, etc.) in favor of other endeavors. The job market is just not there for high tech in the United. Why enter a career field that lacks stability or has a questionable future?

Sometimes markets can be created, embellished, or enhanced by a variety of means. One way to inject something into the IT industry is to have IT companies assist the academic world. We had an alliance with many universities in the Silicon Valley area (Stanford, UC Berkeley, etc.), business and the State of California EDD, during the Presidency of Clinton. This was an important act for Silicon Valley during the early to mid 1990’s. As an example we had 60,000 unemployed electronics engineers in my area. I was one of them.

Unemployed people in the high tech fields were sent to colleges and universities to take courses to assist them in improving, or updating his/her skills as well as training for a new career. The end result was it helped lower our unemployment rate which was then over 10%.

Silicon Valley is famous for discarding high tech professionals who are over 40. That is a fact of life.

I think that companies should invest in the training of employees. It costs over $20,000 to hire a new employee. If you keep your technical staff up to date on technologies important to your operation it could help your profitability as well.

Bill Gates and Microsoft have billions of dollars in the bank. Investing in the technology workers and prospective workers who are in the United States (not H1B’s) seems like a logical solution.

The vast number of companies want profits regardless of the cost to anything else. The name of the game is instantaneous gratification – that is show a profit each quarter to make the investors and board of directors happy. Long-term investments especially in people are not something that is common within the American business scene.

I know the head of a well-known company who has a PhD. He told me, “In my working career I have held 17 different jobs. Nine of them no longer exist! If you want to remain in the high tech industry keep up with technology changes”!

Tom