The current financial crisis has had, and will continue to have far reaching consequences inside and outside of the financial sector. What will be interesting to follow s the impact that it has on the technology sector, east coast and west.
As the foundations that underpin our financial sector crumble before our eyes what we dont see is the flow of tech workers that are about to flood the job market. To be honest it is ont something I had thought much about until I came across this article over on ZDnet, titled “Go West young IT worker!“ In the article, Tom Foremski questioned wether or not the flood of recently unemployed tech workers would make their way out west to Silicon Valley. He concludes that he does not think they will for a couple of reasons
- East Coast IT people chose the safe confines of a large organization, the relative job security and a regular work week. There isn’t much of that around here. Startup life is your life and that’s it.
- Companies here want skill sets that include PHP, Ruby, Flash, MySQL etc. There’s not that many overlapping skills within financial services.
So if his conclusions are to be considered, how will this influx of technology workers into the job market affect the east coast, should thy choose to stay. In the DC area, we are generally insulated against large fluctuations in the job market since most industry around here supports the government, either directly or indirectly. In any case I don’t see a large populace of that newly unemployed workforce making its way down here. So what is left ? Is there enough left in other sectors and the blooming startup cultures in new York, and Boston to support all these tech workers ? I doubt it. Are they gonna go west ? I am not sure.
What I do know is that in these times we are facing, huge shifts seem to occur in some natural order and an equilibrium is established somehow. So some will head west, some will stay here in the east.
One thing that Tom also mentioned was the decreasing dependence of outsourcing as a rule in companies these days. Those prices have steadily been on the rise, making it not such a bright alternative. With these workers back on the market, as Tom put it, this could drive the market for salaries down and make outsourcing less attractive. I have read this in some other columns as well, and to be honest it, while the circumstances are not the greatest, it may be a good step to get us back on track to being more reliant on us versus depending on someone else to do our work for us. This could have a tremendous affect in the long term to returning us to a more solid foundation.
What do you think ? How will all of these workers be absorbed into out ecosystem, east or west ? Any thoughts ?
