What's wrong with the market?

[Jonathan Hutchins]

Even with the economy picking up, it'll take a long time for anything to
reach KC.  As someone pointed out, we have an odball economy here.  I think
that the number I've heard is that over 60% of the positions in the metro
area are mid-level management.  It's because of the types of offices that
are here, and Sprint's headquarters accounts for some but not all of that.

There's also a lot of Insurance business here, and that and Banking are big
IT markets locally.  Those were the force behind a lot of hiring in '98-'99
to fix Y2K bugs in old COBOL programs.  Now that the crisis is past, how
many companies have taken the smart step and rebuilt the code in modern
languages?  Besides which, even if they do that, it's a time-limited
project, and we're back to code maintenance only.  The ends of those
projects corresponded with the economic slump - they may even have driven
some of it.

So chances of the KC market ever getting back to what it was are slim to
none, and slim just left the building.  If you want a decent career in IT,
this is NOT the place to be.