Have to wonder how many jobs US tech companies created outside the US. I suspect rather more than 700.

Bidenomics!

Are we talking admins, developers, chip designers etc ?

Or are we talking about not recreating jobs which require no formal education in IT.

The article is vague ...

While you are right, it is because the underlying statistics are vague as well. But it's not really as much of a surprise. Companies that aren't suicidal add IT people because they need IT people. Good or experienced people tend to be in demand regardless. So it makes sense that by the numbers we saw staggering losses at some big companies, and those people are not quick to move down market, especially if they either went remote and have a mortgage, or are paying rent in an overheated market like the Bay area, New York, or Boston.

Just the fact that so many of these jobs changed regional markets helps explain part of the sticky population of open jobs and applicants seeking work. TSMC and Intel are trying to expand Fab operations into new markets and whining about the lack of qualified applicants in cities where there were no jobs before. It's easy for them to make decisions like this based purely on the bottom line, but as employees we need to consider our families, our social support networks, and the actual lives and communities we are a part of.

Another trend that goes unmentioned is that companies are still posting delusional job postings asking for and expecting applicants to have experience with the majority of their deployment, which is not a problem when that is super generic, like AWS, Azure, G-suite, and some secondary stuff like Adobe CC. Almost all companies use almost all of these platforms.

It's the stuff like niche CRM apps, industrial control systems, or worse, literally listing the companies own internally developed apps. Sometimes this a just a flag that the position already has an internal or fast track candidate, and the posting was required by policy and was literally written to match one "applicant". But to often, even in companies I have worked for, HR insists on pasting pages of boilerplate qualifications that don't actually make sense for the applicants we need. As a result we then have to sift through a pile of applications that are targeting the wrong things and try to find a fit.

From the article: "...A mere 700 IT jobs were added in the US last year compared to 267,000 the year prior..."

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"One bad programmer can easily create two new jobs a year." --David L. Parnas

to train up on the latest craze that will be the latest fiasco by the time you actually start work.

Very few companies are in a position where they can both be early movers and not a target for the first wave of IP lawsuits this moment represents. The rest of us will then need to be certified on the minority of platforms that survive the coming legal and technical purges.

We told them NFT's weren't going to be a thing, and they barely listened. We are now telling them that machine learning technology is going to be important and in some silos transformative, but is not easily applied to general tasks, and if your company had a valid use case, you would know it already.

I think the stay one move ahead plan is to build a platform to organize IT people into a union where the Machine learning is applied to automating the bribery, graft and lobbiing to keep union dues down things that actually benefit the union members. Imagine if we automate the same process the hedge funds are using to drive up real estate and rent prices.

Plenty of high end IT jobs are still be created, but some of those at the lower end that couldn't be offshored (due to government rules in some places) are now getting replaced by chatbots. So the net gain of the higher end people is balanced by the loss of the lower end people.

I've actually seen this in practice. There's a large company nearby selling to the medical field (pharmaceutical companies and university hospital researchers) that employs a rather large staff for first and second level support. Not sure if those would be classified as "IT" jobs (the devices are basically giant computers, interfaced with a dedicated Windows PC) or "medical" jobs, but since what they sell costs so much I guess they never saw it being worth the pennies they'd save offshoring that support (it is not a publicly traded company with Wall Street pressures I guess)

I just heard last weekend from a guy I know who works there that layoff notices started going out to some of the level one support staff. They aren't being offshored, they are being replaced by some sort of AI voice technology. It is capable of responding to simple problems (the people using them may have one or more PhDs, but aren't necessarily clueful where computers are concerned) with canned solutions, or gathering information that is forwarded to the level 2 people. They had been trialing it for a few months and found the people calling didn't have any problem with talking to an AI than a person (they were probably anticipating talking to someone in India so maybe they were happy they could understand them easily) so decided to go forward with the second stage rollout that includes laying off part of the level 1 staff.

If this is happening where I live and I just happened to hear about it, I can imagine it has been going on rather widely and for a while - well before the "ChatGPT" hype.

I'm sure they'll still let in the full quota of H1B workers. Gotta keep those salaries down.

Switch jobs to kicking cones down the road. It pays upto £200 a day to sit on your hands for 8 hours a day with 4 hours on running about unloading and reloading vans. (yup, its a 12hr day). still better than dealing with obnoxious IT users.

Perks of the job, driving a van or running shotgun, lots of exercise, lots of quality time perusing the internet durring the day or night. walk in all weathers taking photos, free drinks (thrown by passing boy racers along with verbal) good chance of choice of day or night shifts or holidays with overtime. If working in major cities the odd crazy with a knife or drugs dealers wanting to shortcut through a hole in the road,

fun. fun. fun...