Bruce;

I just read a report about jobs in the San Francisco Bay Area. It seems the most popular jobs that the unemployed are taking on are real estate and financial services. We are still loosing IT jobs and if Oracle buys PeopleSoft, 3500 will loose their jobs.

The nations economy is “strange”, and the economy out here is bizarre. So I guess things are “normal”.

I think that IT is far from a mature discipline. In fact I do not believe that government or business has a clear understanding of IT. Add to that IT does not understand itself. Gee, this is a fun profession!

By the way the last time I did research on unemployment by job sector as defined and reported by Bureau of Labor Statistics, it seems that the Bush Administration ran out of funds so dropped the report. That was around November of last year?

It seemed handy to know on a national level, how specific industries were doing. I guess it is only important to know if you have a job or not. If you do not have a job you are unemployed. After six months you no longer receive unemployment compensation (or have they extended that period) and you are “no longer considered as seeking work”, therefore you are not unemployed. That last fact helps to reduce the number of unemployed in our country.

I have several friends from the IT world who have been out of work for 2 ½ years. Each one has a degree in computer science and experience. They are also over 40. I do not think you could convince any of them that they are no longer “unemployed”, by definition. :)

Tom


>>I thought it was a phenomena limited to Silicon Valley until I saw some national news reports. A group of kids about to graduate from college were hired my .COM companies on the east coast. Not one had a degree related to computer science. The kid with the marketing degree said he was hired as a DBA, at $120,000 a year, but knew nothing about the subject.
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>Hi Tom - Just in the Post newspaper here is an article about how those same $120K, fresh-from-college kids are now working for FREE as IT Interns, just in the hopes of eventually landing a paid position, if they do a *real good* job as Intern. (They are doing things like late-shift "busboy" to pay the rent, in the meantime).
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>Quite a change, eh?