With all of the gloom and doom forecasts about the global recession and layoffs everywhere, I’m interested to hear how this mess is affecting programmers. Despite the generally abysmal outlook, many statistics specific to the tech sector fall into the unchanged or optimistic buckets.  Meanwhile, TechCrunch and others are proclaiming that the tech industry has been particularly hard hit.  So what say you?

The Good

A look at job opening trends on indeed.com shows a healthy picture.  Compare the absolute number of jobs posting for programmers, net admins, and software developers to the number of postings for real estate.  Openings have actually been increasing in the tech sector.

Number of job openings is only one side of the equation though.  If the number of people looking for jobs is very high, the outlook is still grim.  But is this the case?  Unemployment numbers seem to say no.

According to the most recent US Bureau of Labor Statistics report for December 2008, the unemployment rate is 7.1%.  Looking at the stats by occupation, programmers would lie in the “Professional and related occupations” category, which is the category with the lowest unemployment rate, at 2.9%.

This industry went through the dot com bust not long ago, causing a huge glut in the workforce.  Enrollment in university programs went down, and many workers left the tech sector for greener pastures. The upside being that since the recovery from the dot com days, there has been a shortage of good programmers.  This shortage will soften the impact of the recession.

Also, during difficult economic times, companies are more likely to invest in tech that will streamline inefficient manual processes. This creates more programming jobs.

The Bad

The data above is a few months old, and recent layoffs have been pretty extensive. On their layoff tracker TechCrunch proclaims:

October 2008 will be remembered as the time in which the credit crunch came to a head not only for the economy as a whole but for the tech community in particular. Startups have begun preparing themselves for a bleak and uncertain economic future by cutting costs and focusing on efficiency. This has been achieved most obviously through layoffs, which can reduce burn rates quickly and dramatically for web companies that require little physical capital.

I don’t see a whole lot of hard evidence backing up the claim that the tech community is particularly affected.

However, there is some danger of a domino effect - if no one can afford to buy software, who is going to pay people to make it?

So what say you?

How has the economic crisis affected you?

View Results

Loading ... Loading ...