Much has been made of our great nation’s economic recovery; that is to say, the recovery of Wall Street. Lo, the floors of the great exchanges are again brimming with prosperity and enormous drifts of paper. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a picture of an exchange devoid of both traders and paper. In all the pictures, they are either packed, cheek-to-jowl, with the howling, scrambling slaves of Mammon, clad in a colorful array of polyester jackets, utterly obscuring the floor. That, or the place is empty, save for a few janitors in a vast sea of litter, representing the suffering and death of millions of trees, formerly home to untold multitudes of heartbreakingly charming woodland creatures with big, sad eyes. Shame, shame on the callous securities trading that would dispossess such agonizingly cute bearers of plague and rabies!

Anyhow, we’re supposedly in good shape, because… because, um, we say we are. Take that, G8! Still, the outlook for the IT industry is not sunny, in terms of employment. This is in part due to the fact that companies are sending jobs overseas to tiny, well-educated, nimble-fingered Indian children who cost mere pennies to hire, and work without complaint in the
dangerous, noisy, hot, steam-filled, and otherwise unsavory environments of server farms and call centers. I hear that, sucked dry of their life essence, they are also delightfully crunchy and taste delicious, once their contracts are up, or so an article in Fortune magazine’s annual homemaking issue informs me. The other reason is that as IT professionals, it’s our job to automate everything, leaving only sinister, untended machinery and crushed human dreams in our wake. We’re probably automating ourselves out of jobs. We need to start breaking more stuff as a profession. Hopefully Microsoft will help us out with the next security patch.

The true gauge of the job market, as everybody knows, is the Internet, that font of Truth Eternal. Speaking from personal experience, I know that there’s not much to be had out there for followers of the IT profession. I recently had this confirmed by recent results of a job market scan sent to me by Monster.com, where, in days of yore, vast, untamed herds of geeks grazed the fertile workscape, employed to their content. Not so any longer:

These were the results returned by two agents with extremely broad search criteria for the industry. I didn’t doctor the output, or rig the agents so that only lame stuff was returned in the search. I’m now thrice as thankful for the job I have, because otherwise I’d be emigrating to India, which would suck because I don’t speak any of the languages over there, I don’t like curry, I have a fetish for parasite-free drinking water, and I hear cheeseburgers are hard to come by. The only other option seems to be the computerized equivalent of those lame envelope-stuffing scams that suckers pay hard cash for.

Thus, the Cubelodyte forecasts big gains in this country for wealthy and institutional investors who couldn’t give a gnat’s fart about what is written here, as well as strong indications that it will be a good decade for early speculators in caffeine futures on the Indian subcontinent. Demand for new buzzwords is expected to remain relatively constant, and government spending on smoke and mirror production may spike, despite extremely low market demand. Small producers of social noise and blogs are also expected to continue their exponential growth in output, despite a comprehensive market glut.