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My family has a chance to relocate to Raleigh in June. My husband would be taking a job there as a .net web developer. (I'm a freelance illustrator, and can work anywhere.)
We are concerned about the economy, however. We'd hate to move just to have him laid off after we'd relocated away from our friends here in Colorado. (But his company has cut salaries to the point that we can no longer afford Boulder, which is a VERY expensive place to live: Median home price is 660K. We rent.)
I understand that unemployment is high in NC, as it is almost everywhere. However, how is the tech industry in the triangle? Are there massive layoffs? Or is the industry pretty much staying afloat?
Some companies (Nortel comes most to mind) have had pretty severe layoffs lately. Others are moving more and more jobs overseas. "IT" is more and more taking a backseat as this area's cash cow to biotech--although GlaxoSmithKline has been laying off a lot recently, as well.
That said, state government and several universities in the area will always need tech folks, so since he would be coming for a job (I wouldn't advise moving without one), and presumably is not in eminent danger of layoffs right away, there ARE some fallbacks.
I was laid off from Sony Ericsson in October along with 400 other people. I'm a software engineer. I still haven't found a job yet. Haven't even had a face-to-face interview since Jan 14th. I'm not in IT though, so I'm not sure how that is doing compared to my field.
I don't think anyone is going to assure you that the IT job market is hunky dory right now. It's slow. How slow is it compared to other places? That's hard to say, exactly, from what I've read, the overall unemployment numbers for this area are somewhere in the middle, nationally -- definitely not the worst, but definitely not the best, either. I work in IT in Raleigh, and my company just put in an across the board paycut AFTER having layoffs in November, and we're supposedly doing better than many places.
Everyone I know in IT has been gravely affected by the downturn, and I've been in an IT-related field, in IT departments, for about 20 years, most of them in the Triangle.
I do keep seeing listings for some types of developers in a newsletter I get from a recruiting firm, but I don't know what's "hot" now.
I was laid off from Sony Ericsson in October along with 400 other people. I'm a software engineer. I still haven't found a job yet. Haven't even had a face-to-face interview since Jan 14th. I'm not in IT though, so I'm not sure how that is doing compared to my field.
Wait, you're a software engineer but you're not in IT?
Wait, you're a software engineer but you're not in IT?
Yeah. There are other kinds of SW besides IT. I'm in embedded SW.
From Wikipedia: Information technology (IT), as defined by the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), is "the study, design, development, implementation, support or management of computer-based information systems, particularly software applications and computer hardware." IT deals with the use of electronic computers and computer software to convert, store, protect, process, transmit, and securely retrieve information.
Again from Wikipedia: Embedded software's principal role is not Information Technology, but rather the interaction with the physical world. It's written for machines that are not, first and foremost, computers. Embedded software is 'built in' to the electronics in cars, telephones, audio equipment, robots, appliances, toys, security systems, pacemakers, televisions and digital watches, for example. This software can become very sophisticated in applications like airplanes, missiles, process control systems, and so on.
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