Unemployment high in Tech Sector – NYTimes

Job growth in fields like computer systems design and Internet publishing has been slow in the last year. Employment in areas like data processing and software publishing has actually fallen. Additionally, computer scientists, systems analysts and computer programmers all had unemployment rates of around 6 percent in the second quarter of this year.

While that might sound like a blessing compared with the rampant joblessness in manufacturing, it is still significantly higher than the unemployment rates in other white-collar professions.

via Tech Sector, Slow to Hire, Unlikely to Lead Recovery – NYTimes.com.

While the stats on high unemployment in technology are scary enough, the details in this piece challenge some of our hopes for the Technology market.  For example, the hope that R&D would not be off-shored:

“There’s been this assumption that there’s a global hierarchy of work, that all the high-end service work, knowledge work, R.&D. work would stay in U.S., and that all the lower-end work would be transferred to emerging markets,” said Hal Salzman, a public policy professor at Rutgers and a senior faculty fellow at Heldrich Center for Workforce Development.

“That hierarchy has been upset, to say the least,” he said. “More and more of the innovation is coming out of the emerging markets, as part of this bottom-up push.”

So where’s this huge demand for more IT workers?