Survey: Techies stressed over job insecurity

In today's era of downsizing and offshoring, it seems that nothing stresses out technology workers more than job insecurity.

In a poll released Wednesday by job board Dice, 43 percent of IT worker respondents said a lack of job security is the greatest contributor to job stress. At 20 percent, the second most-cited stress factor was "always having to do more with less."

Fifteen percent pointed to few opportunities for growth and promotion, 13 percent cited "being underpaid," and 9 percent said "learning new skills."

The magnitude of anxiety over job security discovered in the poll is a bit surprising, given signs of a stronger job market for techies during the past year or so. According to U.S. Department of Labor data, the average number of unemployed workers in nine high-tech categories--including computer programmers, database administrators and computer hardware engineers--fell from 210,000 in 2003 to 146,000 in 2004. In addition, computer professionals of different stripes saw their wallets get fatter last year.

But there's also been evidence that techies have reason to fear for their jobs. Technology companies sent out 23 percent fewer pink slips in 2004 than they did in 2003, but they still laid off more than 175,000 workers last year, according to a report from employment services firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

A recent wave of mergers in the industry, such as the Oracle-PeopleSoft deal, is resulting in thousands of job cuts. In addition, tech professionals face the possibility that their jobs could be sent to a lower-wage nation such as India or China. The automation of technology tasks is also a threat.

Despite these gloomy trends, Dice indicated that plenty of tech jobs are currently available. Dice said more than 64,000 jobs were posted on its site as of March 1.

[felgercarbnaysay]

Help me out here.....

And we need to grant more H!B visas to to satisfy demand eh?

What's wrong with this picture?

What's going on?

Everybody in the media seems to be talking about how well the economy and the job market is doing. Still, in my personal experience, salaries and rates are down, and jobs are scarce. Maybe it's because my main expertise is related to IBM iSeries.

Anyway, are we supposed to be happier because there was a decrease in the number of layoffs? That feels like if I were in a falling plane, and the pilot tried to console us by saying that we are still falling, but 23% slower.

And, to make it even more offensive, according to the article, the job market is stronger because there are more than 60,000 jobs in the market... still, earlier in the article it is mentioned that the number of unemployed is more than double than that!

Am I too pessimistic? Is everybody else doing better? I'd like to hear the opinion of people who feels that things are getting better.

Luis

[jdtj63]

Getting Better?

I can't see the jobs getting better out there. How can they say there are 60,000 jobs out there and 175,000 were laid off last year, that still leaves 115,000 unemployed plus the massive number of tech workers who have not been able to find full time work, plus all the new people trying to get into the feild. There are still thousands of people not able to find any work. 90 percent of the Job postings on these boards are headhunters and temp agencys with no jobs, just cleaverly written job descriptions to entice you into sending them your resume for their databases util they can actually place someone or find a client to hire someone. Still these are mostly not full time positions.

[Rusdude]

Tainted Data

This survey is wrong as it misrepresents the data as the sample is nowhere close to random. It's really surprising to see C|Net run this story.

While informal polls on sites are alright, in no way they should be interpreted as having external validity, meaning that the results can't be applied to the entire demographic being tested.

Here, we have a job site asking people if they fear job security. It's common sense that people visiting Dice, Monster, HotJobs, etc. are looking for jobs. One of the reasons is that they might not have a very strong feeling about their job safety.

Thus, it's only natural to expect that the number of people fear job loss will be significantly larger than an overall population (tech workers, in this case).

Again, surveys on sites are useful but in this case it wasn't administered properly. It might've been better to run it on general tech sites. But here, we get clearly skewed results. This is like posting a survey about a preferred operating system on RedHat's site.

Again, I wish C|Net would not run this story :(