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Is It Time to Declare the Tech Crash Over?August 1st, 2005 by Hans Bjordahl :: see related comic |
Is it just me, or has the time come to declare the tech crash over?
Four signs:
One: Programmers are busy. Busy busy busy. I’m working on a Web site project (think Mr. Cranky meets ESPN) and need some PHP/MySQL help. Should be a piece of cake to get some hungry programmers fighting over the job, right? Wrong. Nearly all the programmers I know are busy. Severely busy. As in juggling-three-projects-already busy.
Two: Clearly, tech recruiters have come out of hiding and are once again prowling the industry on the hunt for fresh talent. Last week I got contacted by one such recruiter. Nice guy. “I found your resume in our database,” he said. The thing is, he must have been looking for a while, because it’s been in that particular firm’s database for four years.
Three: News stories about technology tend to cluster around themes, and “the battle to survive” theme has been replaced of late by “the battle for talent” theme. Three examples, one week, one company: Microsoft sues Google over the poaching of a senior executive. My close personal friend Bill Gates spends some of his valuable time lamenting how hard it is to find qualified programmers. And Office senior VP Steven Sinofsky starts a blog, but with a singular mission: to focus on college recruiting.
Four: Google. $300 a share. And that after a bad day.
What signs are you seeing?
There never was a tech crash. What happened was a period of phenomenal business stupidity, and it happened to be mostly fixated on the tech market.
Software and hardware professionals haven’t changed very much over the last few decades. There are new tools, new languages, but development is still an exceptionally hard problem (mostly because very few people take it seriously enough).
One: Good programmers have always been busy. During the “tech crash”, there was not much for average programmers to do because it became so painfully obvious that the so many business ideas were atrocious.
Two: Good recruiters have also not experienced this problem. Most recruiters don’t even know what the acronyms they search for stand for. Most companies don’t even ask candidates to write code in their interviews. You can now get away with this again, so poorer-quality recruiters can once again be moderately successful doing a poor job of recruiting.
Three: News stories about technology continue to be mostly wildy technically inaccurate. Their themes may affect how people think about the tech market, but they don’t generally affect the market itself.
Four: Yup, that’s a good sign. 
Have to laugh at this comment, Robby. Reminds me of people in all kinds of situations who get lucky, then explain their luck as having something to do with the quality of THEIR situation and their own intelligence, of course. There certainly has been a tech crash and all you have to do is look at the numbers of non-US programmers doing the work for all the major software companies to see the results. To stay afloat, most companies that survived the downturn turned to cheaper “offshore” labor. Good for you, Robby, that you didn’t get burned by it, but plenty of high-quality software and hardware pros did.
My experience is anecdotal (and thus my argument not scientific), but I don’t know anybody who I would consider high-quality who had trouble finding work. I DO know lots of people who sent out a couple resumes a week and whined about the “slow economy”.
More importantly, couldn’t your comments be applied just as well to the original article? Maybe Hans is just unlucky (he only knows busy programmers), and the appearance of a dusty resume from a recruiter is a lucky fluke.
There are historical examples of economic collapses which even the most capable people could not keep working. The tech recession, in my opinion, was not even the merest shadow of such events. But, I am not an economist, and I would welcome an economically sound rebuttal of my claims.
Now *That’s* A Tester!
Hans Bjordahl’s very funny comic Bug Bash is published in an internal newsletter. The most recent…
I recently started up a webdesign/webhosting business with some friends, the business we’re getting is tremendous, alot of small and medium size businesses in our area are in real need of not just web design but other IT services as well, they all see the potential of the internet for eCommerce and want in. I dont think there ever was really a ‘Tech Bust’, hiring might have slowed down, but the jobs were always avalible.
I certainly feel that the tech slump is over, but it’s been that way for over a year now. Unlike two years ago, when I know many folks looking for work, now when someone calls and asks for help with a project, I can’t think of one person who can take the work on.
I will say that I think the tech slump was real, at least in my field of work (webbish developers), in the Denver metro area. I remember folks being out of work for 15 months and cashing out their 401(k)s.
Of course, this is anecdotal experience, so take it with a grain of salt.
My experiences are similar to Dan’s in Denver. There was a rough 15 months where I basically did nothing except a pinch hit here or there. But Denver (from talking to friends who work different regions) seems to be lagging behind everwhere. I think much of it has to do with the downward spiral of Qworst after the buyout us USWorst.
That flooded the market with people and there was not another big company to fill the gap and the economy wa sbad enough the second tier companies couldn’t do likewise (eg JDedwards cum Peoplesoft cum Oracle wa sbusy downsizing also).
It is better, but I think a lot of the imported talent in Denver has left too. Not that I am complaining, being a native I really am happy to see the Californication of Colorado paused a little.:)
–Wes
My experiences with the tech crash (or, as we called it, the dot-bomb) are much different than Robbie’s. I was working for a small private development house in Seattle when the tech stocks took a nose-dive. I went to work one Monday morning to find the owner of the company already there, crying at his desk, waiting for us to come in and collect our things because the company was no more. (Not that the company itself lost anything in the stock market, but since all our paying customers did, well - you get the picture.)
I spent the better part of the next two years working odd labor jobs and the occasional contract, but there was NO tech work to be found anywhere. (OK, that’s not entirely correct - I was offered a position by TRW many times, but I could not, in good conscience, program guided missiles. I would rather muck stalls on a horse ranch - which I did during this time - than assist in long-range killing.)
Between the “dot-bomb” and the layoffs by Boeing, Seattle became an impossible place for tech workers. Seeing that I wasn’t the only “professional” working for Labor-Ready didn’t improve my optimism either. And as far as “high-quality” people unable to find work - I will let it slide for myself (although I consider myself a very competent programmer and was putting out an average of 30 to 40 resumes each week), but I was working at Labor-Ready with Computer Science grads, 2 with Bachelors, one with a Masters, all with 5 - 10 years in the field. I was also working with a gentleman with a PhD in Physics. Why were we all doing day labor for 6 to 7 dollars an hour? Because our unemplyment benefits had run out and no one seemed to be hiring. So yes, there were a large number of “high-quality” people who had trouble finding work.
Finally, I decided that since the unemployment rate in western Washington was not going to leave the mid to upper twenties any time soon, I moved back to Anchorage, where the unemployment rate (at that time) was around 2 to 3 percent. Since being back home I have not found too much trouble in securing employment - especially since Alaska is just now starting to test the technological waters, so to speak, and most of those who train in Alaska go outside to work for more pay. (The State of Alaska still pays laborers more than System Administrators. Don’t ask, I don’t get it either.)
Just my 9 1/2 cents.
Suggestion Kitty
Like the cartoon? Visit Hans Bjordahl’s Bug Bash to see more!
Suggestion Kitty was born…
Gretchen Ledgard
Like the cartoon? Visit Hans Bjordahl’s Bug Bash to see more!
I’m Gretchen…
Suggestion Kitty
Like the cartoon? Visit Hans Bjordahl’s Bug Bash to see more!
Suggestion Kitty was born…
Branding icons for JobsBlog … compliments of Bug Bash!
A few weeks ago, I told you about some design changes for JobsBlog. I’m still working on most…
Only when techies are worshiped for the very ground we walk upon will I declare the crash over.
And by we I mean mostly me. And by worshipped I mean $$$, because anything else is just talk.
Jim Stroud
Like the cartoon? Visit Hans Bjordahl’s Bug Bash to see more!
Hi! My name is Jim Stroud….
Jim Stroud
Like the cartoon? Visit Hans Bjordahl’s Bug Bash to see more!
Hi! My name is Jim Stroud….
Bug Bash is a comic strip written and illustrated by Hans Bjordahl. Bug Bash is a comic strip about technology: managing technology, the business of technology. It's about project management and managing projects through the dull world of Rational Rose, use cases, and requirements. Functional requirements, user requirement, functional specifications, design specifications, call it what you want but it's still the bane of project managers. And when you're done with that, you can think about all the fun that comes with timelines, scheduling, estimates (PERT estimation anyone?) and resourcing until Gantt charts are coming out of your ears. Let's not forget the risk management in the software engineering life cycle. Maintaining the project is just as much fun, managing what was initially set out in requirements and trying to keep feature creep / scope creep in check with change management. If any of these words send nightmares to you, the project manager, then this site probably rings true with you. (Who Links Here?)