Career Spotlight: Geek revival
The outlook is surprisingly grim for foreign engineers, scientists, and other techies hoping to snag a job in the United States anytime soon. But for techies already here, the job market is heating up to levels not seen since the heady days of early 2001.
American employers are so eager to bring new programmers and other technical experts to the country that they have already filed more than 100,000 applications for fiscal-year-2006 H1-B visas, the three-year work permits for well-trained specialists that employers say they can't find here at home. But Congress has decreed that the United States can issue only 65,000 H1-Bs every year. So more than a month before federal 2006 begins, on October 1, the Department of Homeland Security has announced it won't accept any more applications. Foreign techies hoping to land a job here will now have to wait until at least 2007.
Businesses, battling a boom in worms, viruses, and hackers and facing a constant need to update aging computer systems, will have to hire more folks who are already here—or explore more creative ways to "offshore" the work. That's good news for techies here in the United States; the number of job openings has jumped 24 percent from last year. The old trend of job-hopping by workers looking for the best perks may be coming back, too: The number of techies who've quit their jobs has risen 15 percent so far this year and is now approaching the 2001 rate.
Jeff Markham, who heads the San Francisco office of job-placement firm Robert Half, says that while there are still plenty of applicants for jobs like tech support and Web design, he's starting to have trouble locating good candidates for network security, E-commerce, and auditing jobs.
"There is still some desperation out there," he says of the tens of thousands of techies laid off during the last recession. "But salaries are slowly rising, and we're seeing more signing bonuses."
Of course, with more technical work being shipped overseas, the job market probably will never reach the frenzy it approached during the last boom. A recent McKinsey study predicted that companies worldwide will have sent more than 4 million jobs overseas by 2008, about triple the 2003 level.
And entrepreneurs are coming up with even more inventive ways to get around the limits on importing workers. One San Diego company is planning to buy a ship, man it with low-paid Indian, Chinese, Russian, and even perhaps some desperate American computer programmers and anchor it off the California coast -- a new and much more literal kind of offshoring.