Tech job postings up in Atlanta

For tech professionals, it's been hot in Atlanta this summer--in more ways than one.

Job postings on tech-focused career site Dice.com rose 11.6 percent for the Atlanta metropolitan area in June, to 1,862, Dice said Monday.

Overall, though, tech job openings on the site cooled slightly last month. The total number of jobs listed on the site fell from 69,957 as of June 1 to 69,858 as of July 1, Dice said. Job postings in the Chicago region fell 7.7 percent in June to 2,761, Dice said.

For the past year or so, job market news has been uneven for technology professionals, who weathered hundreds of thousands of job cuts following the dot-com bust.

Computer workers face the threat of increased automation and the prospect of their jobs being shifted offshore. The average number of unemployed workers in nine high-tech categories fell by 64,000 last year but remained close to 150,000, according to the U.S. Labor Department. And a recent study from employment services firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas found that the pace of tech-sector downsizing is ahead of the rate a year ago.

On the other hand, job cuts announced by tech companies in the second quarter fell 33 percent from the first quarter. Techies' optimism about the job market improved in June from a slump in May, when, according to staffing firm Hudson, confidence was at its lowest point since the company first measured it in March last year. And a study released a few months ago indicated that the U.S. tech industry may have turned a corner last year when it comes to employment woes.

In addition, job postings on Dice.com rose 26 percent between the beginning of this year and June 1, with strong gains in eastern cities.

[brasten]

Dice.com

As of a few minutes ago, Dice.com is up over 70,000.

I would suspect that the 150,000 tech people looking for work are
primarily those that are under qualified or in a bad location for tech
jobs. The fact that 70,000 positions haven't been filled from that
pool of 150,000 out-of-work IT people seems to indicate that
those are the few that most people don't want.

I could be wrong.