Tech workers in big demand despite grim US jobs stats

According to the most recent US Department of Labour figures released last week, the jobs outlook remains grim-unemployment clocked in at 9.2% with only 18,000 jobs created in June (the Obama administration had hoped to add about 125,000).

But in Silicon Valley, where there’s a scramble to find qualified tech workers, things are playing out a bit differently.

“It’s surreal in the Valley, compared to the rest of the country,” said Harj Taggar, a partner at startup incubator Y Combinator told the Huffington Post . “It’s so hard to hire people here-and salaries for engineers are going through the roof.”

[caption id=“attachment_39235” align=“alignright” width=“380” caption=“In Silicon Valley, there’s a scramble to find qualified tech workers. Lucas Jackson / Reuters”] [/caption]

Engineers and IT workers can thank, in part, the flood of venture capital and angel investor money flowing to Silicon Valley startups, which has created a demand for software engineers “who can do hard-core algorithms or front-end development or web design,” Anand Sanwal of CB Insights, a venture capital database, told the website. (A recent CB Insights report found that VC funding in the second quarter of 2011 is up by 32% from the first quarter, and half of that money went to California.)

Not a totally rosy picture

Certainly, it’d be unfair to paint a purely rosy picture of the Silicon Valley job market. Unemployment remains high in Silicon Valley overall, and senior tech workers seem to have suffered more than younger employees who are less expensive and who are vying for jobs with the most updated skills.

“There’s still … a significant number of people in the greater Silicon Valley, Bay Area just in the tech sector alone, that are out of work,” Kevin Grossman of HRmarketer.com told Computerworld .

Jack Cullen of the staffing firms Modis and Ajilon Consulting also told the site that “There are people that took much lesser skilled positions and had a really hard time finding the work that they may have been laid off from doing.”

Still, according to Dice.com, a high-tech employment agency, those with tech skills have experienced relatively lower levels of unemployment than other kinds of workers.

“The unemployment tech rate … tends to be half the national average,” Tom Silver of Dice.com told ComputerWorld. “So tech unemployment is around 4% versus the overall average, which is around 9%. So if one is a tech worker, while the market overall is not great, it continues to gradually improve for people with tech skills.” (With no official industry tally, Russell Hancock, the CEO of Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Network, told the Huffington Post that according to his research, unemployment in the area was closer to 8.5 percent, but that this was promising because it is “a drop from 11 percent 18 months ago.”)

On the horizon: Hiring uptick

Though precise industry unemployment data is a frequent source of debate, there’s agreement that the job market for tech workers is poised to turn around in the second half of 2011. Dice.com produces a biannual hiring survey and its most recent study found that 65% of the 900 hiring managers and recruiters it surveyed said that they plan to hire more tech workers in the second half of 2011.

“Several years ago companies cut back pretty far, particularly in infrastructure and technology development,” Dice.com’s Silver told Computerworld . “They’re in a little bit of a state of catch-up … in terms of their infrastructure and therefore the people they need in order to replace aging hardware and software and deal withsecurity challenges.”

The Dice.com survey also found that compared to 2010, 50% reported that it took more time to fill a job opening, with 63% of employers citing a lack of qualified candidates as the primary reason. In fact, to attract the right candidates, companies are bumping up pay rates, and 47% reported that new-hire salaries will increase.

“The environment is changing,” Silver said . “It’s not great, but it’s improving. [Employers] believe they’re going to be hiring more people in the second half of the year. Not dramatically more, but they’re feeling better [about the economy].”

Staffing expert Cullen agreed. The industry has “rebounded pretty aggressively from the early third quarter of last year,” he said , adding that infrastructure upgrades and a focus on portability mean companies will hire network administrators and mobile developers. “Throughout the course of the year I think we’re going to be getting some of the backlog off of the shelves and companies are going to start investing in things they need to do.”

A recent perusal of Dice.com’s online job listings produced 4,613 open jobs in Silicon Valley, including a posting for a “Sr. Django Python Software Engineer” that commands an annual salary of “$120,000+.” Another open position for a C++ and Linux developer for a security startup was offering between $60,000 and $130,000.

Go South, young techies

But Silicon Valley isn’t the only tech mecca with a hiring boom. According to reports by industry associations and businesses, San Diego is giving the Valley a run for its money when it comes to tech job hiring.

More often associated with beaches and US military-related jobs, San Diego has about 2,000 engineering and 6,000 IT jobs waiting to be filled, according to Fox News . The median salaries for these gigs aren’t bad-about $94,000 a year.

But San Diego remains a stealth market. “Everybody always talks about the Bay Area…the Silicon Valley this, the Silicon Valley that, but the opportunities here are just as good the jobs are fantastic and there’s a lot of support,” an employee at a San Diego startup named Ariana Faustini told Fox News.“The qualified applicants aren’t coming here because they are trying to get that sexy Silicon Valley job.”