On Saturday 02 August 2003 2:21 am, Dustin Decker wrote:

> > The job market is really bad right now. I heard that anything that get's
> > posted in the Star gets roughly 300 applications.

> I've actually heard numbers more like 900 applicants in a lot of cases.
> IT is on the ropes for a while unfortunately, particularly in this town as
> many companies have flooded the market with talent they don't think they
> need anymore.

That's it exactly.  I really can't imagine any reason that there would be 
enough demand in the K.C. area to employ all of the people that were working 
in IT in 2000.  We're not going to have another "Y2K Crisis", and even a 
"dot-com boom" wouldn't take up the slack, as so much is being done with 
fewer people these days.  We've gone from needing 1 tech for 30-40 people to 
more like 1-100 or higher.

Work that used to have to be done on-site, at the hardware level, is now done 
centrally, or even out-sourced.  The legal actions to protest the import of 
H1B visa workers when US workers were unemployed has basically stalled, 
because industry has found that it's cheaper to export the job than to import 
the worker.

This has even backfired on the big call centeres in India - once the technique 
of third-world-sourcing a call center was mastered, it was quickly discovered 
that there are even cheaper places in the world to do it.

Look at the numbers, and figure that there are as many as 1000 qualified 
people in Kansas City for every opening.  There's no way business in K.C. is 
going to grow 1000 fold in our lifetime.  There's relatively little actual IT 
business in K.C., it's mostly just support for Financial and Telecom 
companies, so it's always marginal.

It's just not going to get better.  It will probably even get worse, even if 
the economy recovers completely.