No good news yet
Submitted by softwarejanitor on Wed, 07/02/2008 - 10:49pm.
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Job market: No bottom until '09
http://money.cnn.com/2008/07/02/news/economy/jobs_outlook/index.htm?sect...
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Here's some more...
Deepening Cycle of Job Loss Seen Lasting Into '09
http://finance.yahoo.com/career-work/article/105339/Deepening-Cycle-of-J...
This one sounds worse even.
Yet another one...
Employers cut jobs for 6th straight month
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080703/ap_on_bi_go_ec_fi/economy
So I'm observing in Austin that the chip folks are in relatively high-demand. Everyone is looking for people in chip design, verification, etc. Granted, I'm focusing on semiconductors, but this seems to indicate that the semiconductor companies are still full-steam ahead, at least in R&D.
Of course, the chips are supplied to many other companies building embedded systems for automobiles to networking equipment. So are we on the leading edge of an economic pick-up, or the trailing edge of the slow-down.
Unless the automotive companies start to show a major turnaround in sales soon, embedded chip orders will have to start to drop off pretty soon. If you've seen the numbers recently even Toyota has seen their sales drop off by over 20%. GM's downturn was nearly as bad and Ford and Chrysler's were much worse. Nobody but Honda saw a gain and theirs was so small as to be statistically insignificant. From what I've heard the factory in San Antonio that they assemble Tundras at may be cutting a shift and laying off a bunch of people. The GM plant in Arlington already has cut way back. Other plant closings or slowdowns elsewhere in the country have been announced on a regular basis over the past few months.
The gist of most of the articles I've seen is that consumer spending in general is expected to remain slow through 2009, so I would expect chip orders for other product also to slow down.
Anyway, it seems like around Austin the hardware business is much better than software -- demand for software engineers still seems sluggish and cooling. However on the bright side, it hasn't gotten nearly as bad as one would expect given the amount of bad news we've seen. I think partly it may be that many tech companies have cut to the bone so much over the past 7 years that they don't have much left to trim and still be able to keep the lights on.