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According to IEEE-USA, number of employed in IT-related occupations dropped in the second quarter of 2004. The drop in employed software engineers, programmers, and computer scientists is blamed on the continuing trend for U.S. companies to send jobs overseas, often called offshore outsourcing. So there you go, outsourcing is hitting us pretty hard, and encourages others to leave the IT industry altogether. I think something has to be done about it. That’s why I’m looking into John Kerry’s solutions on offshoring. But this is a hard issue, and I don’t know whether there is a good solution for it.

The IEEE-USA reported the following high-tech employment trends yesterday:

* The number of employed software engineers in the U.S. dropped from 856,000 in the first quarter of 2004 to 725,000 in the second quarter. Yet the unemployment rate among software engineers dropped from 3.3% to 2.9% from one quarter to the next. In 2003, an average of 758,000 software engineers were employed in the U.S.

* The number of computer scientists and systems analysts dropped from 672,000 in the first quarter to 621,000 in the second, and the unemployment rate for computer scientists dropped from 6.7% to 4%. An average of 722,000 people were employed as computer scientists and systems analysts during 2003.

See the whole article High-tech employment numbers drop in second quarter on Computerworld.com