Coping with the meltdown

For a while, I’ve cherished a notion about the economic downturn: Tech workers won’t be as bad off as everyone else because we already went through our violent contraction at the beginning of the decade. The recovery after the bust was weak and, for the most part, never came close to restoring IT spending to its previous levels — so there just ain’t that much to cut. IT has become a part of operations. If you want to keep the lights on, then you can’t cut that deeply.

Was that wishful thinking? It depends on who you are. Tom Kaneshige’s feature article, which posited that tech is a safer career than many these days, drew a firestorm of critical comments from readers. The bitterness was palpable.

[ It’s not all gloom and doom for IT workers — according to some reports, certain IT skills remain in demand, despite the economy | See also: “Surprise! Tech is a safe career choice today” ]

One of the milder responses: “I work for a Fortune 16 company and we are shipping roughly 500 jobs per quarter to India. Maybe Tom can come tell us IT folks here how safe our jobs are.”

The violent reaction came in part because Tom touched the third rail of tech: H1-B visas. We all know the argument that H1-B is all about hiring foreign workers at lower cost than experienced American workers. Period. That contention often carries with it an anti-immigrant flavor, which seemed to color the comments of Sen. Chuck Grassley, who wrote a letter to Steve Ballmer demanding that, in Microsoft’s layoff plans, it should target H1-B visa holders first.

Meanwhile, to avoid the axe, a lot of us are hunkering down and taking whatever protective measures we can. As Dan Tynan observes in “Six ways to save your IT project from the scrap heap,” your fate may depend on justifying the project to which you’ve been devoting your time and effort. And that means selling it all over again — like a well-prepared business guy.

One a ray of sunshine: In a study conducted by the IT staffing company Veritude in Q4 of 2008, only 38 percent of respondents planned to cut staff in 2009, with an equal percentage saying they will hire, concentrating on certain skills now in demand. For those on the hunt, Advice Line blogger Bob Lewis answers a job searcher’s question with an amusing three-step approach to scoping out prospective employers.

So where is the tech economy headed? The distressing velocity of the downturn makes it difficult to say. Numbers from last month may no longer apply. As for my pet theory of tech being protected, I got a reality check from a CTO friend in New York, who says of his fellow CTOs: “They are clearly cutting [their budgets] to shreds (I am too). Some are doing it in cooperation with their execs, some are doing it unwillingly, and some are just downright being beaten up.”

To a suit, muscle and bone look the same as fat. Those IT managers with budget responsibility out there, here’s hoping you left yourself some wiggle room. Meanwhile, we want to know how things are going on the front lines, so don’t hesitate to e-mail.