Lingering Job Insecurity of Silicon Valley
失业阴云依然笼罩硅谷

By STEVE LOHR and MATT RICHTEL
Published: March 9, 2004


(中文导读)
对于计算机工程师和相关专业人员而言，90年代是他们的天堂，现在，虽然IT行业在经历了技术泡沫破裂之后已开始复苏，但硅谷的就业市场依然是愁云惨淡。分析人士称，尽管高技术人员是美国就业大军当中相对较为富裕的一个群体，但IT企业纷纷裁员再加上日益加剧的全球性竞争都使得硅谷里的IT人个个自危。

For computer scientists and engineers, the 1990's were close to paradise - until the technology boom collapsed. But even as business has started to pick up again, the job market they operate in has become the toughest ever.

While this group represents a comparatively affluent sliver of the American work force, it illustrates the broader forces - higher productivity, cost-cutting business practices and increased global competition - that have combined to make job growth throughout the American economy so frustratingly sluggish.

The Commerce Department reported Friday that the economy added just 21,000 jobs last month, another disappointing performance, particularly when the economy has been growing strongly since the summer and corporate sales and profit are rising.

Well-educated technology workers have long been at the forefront of American economic growth and innovation, used to working in a field where rapid change is the rule. As markets shift, new technologies emerge and companies die. Yet such changes typically meant little more to these employees than moving rather easily from one well-paying opportunity to the next.

That is no longer the case. An upturn in demand for all kinds of workers, including those in technology, may be just around the corner, economists keep saying, but David Friedman has seen no evidence of improvement yet. Mr. Friedman, an experienced software engineer in Austin, Tex., moved from one job to another during the boom years of the 1990's. But his last job ended in March 2001, shortly before the software start-up where he was working closed.

Mr. Friedman, who holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, has found little demand for the kind of software design work that is his specialty. Building software, he observed, is "becoming the equivalent of blue-collar work."

Unemployment has risen sharply in computing, making it more like blue-collar work in that sense. The unemployment rate last year among computer scientists, for example, was 5.2 percent, the highest level since the government began tracking this work as an occupation two decades ago. In most of those years, the unemployment rate for computer scientists was under 2 percent. Similarly, unemployment among electrical engineers last year, at 6.2 percent, was the highest in 20 years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

By comparison, the unemployment rate for all workers, skilled and unskilled, averaged 6 percent last year, a much smaller increase from the low point of joblessness around 4 percent for 2000, and well below the 7.8 percent jobless-rate peak of the early 90's.

The persistence of record high unemployment among skilled computer engineers suggests that something beyond the usual up-and-down cycle of business is at work.

"You have multiple effects going on: automation, outsourcing and business strategy all playing a role," said Ronil Hira, an assistant professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology. In the 90's boom years, companies scrambled to invest in new technology and hire technology experts, eager to tap the new markets of the Internet and fearful that dot-com start-ups might put them out of business.

Despite exaggerated claims for the Internet, most companies still operate on the premise that Internet-era technologies can deliver large benefits to their businesses, enabling improved communications with suppliers and customers, better competitive intelligence and quicker responses to shifts in the marketplace. But in a big switch from the past, most companies are now intent on using the technology investments they made in the boom years more efficiently, which means employing fewer technology workers.

"In the last few years, companies have been totally focused on cost-cutting," said Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "The pendulum really swung, and that has led to a lot of the slow job growth."

One way companies have cut costs is to send some computer-programming technical support work to developing nations, like India, where programmers are paid a fraction of American wages.