OT: State of the IT market in KC?

[Jonathan Hutchins]

On Friday 14 January 2005 12:12 pm, Brian Densmore wrote:

> I know there were a number of IT people on the list
> who have in the not too distant past been looking for
> IT jobs. As I am likely to be in the looking for a
> job market soon, I thought I'd ask what the current
> market is shaping up as. 

There's a lot of talk, and recruiters/placement agencies are building their 
stables with talk of lots of new projects, but I haven't seen any actual jobs 
yet.

They say that companies are still not hiring directly, they're contracting 
projects, not positions.

They (the recruiters) are speculating that a lot of offices that upgraded for 
Y2K are reaching the end-of-life on those upgrades because they haven't 
upgraded since due to the weak economy.

Sprint is moving upper management to Washington, D.C., but will probably 
continue to flood the local IT market with their cast-offs.  There is a huge 
pool of under-employed programmers left over from Y2K projects in the area.

I have heard that except for Sprint, the local programming market is for Life 
Insurance companies and Financial companies (DST).  I don't know if Garmin 
has a significant programming staff.  There are the old "Silicon Prarie" 
companies like Tallgrass (whoever they are these days), but it's not a big 
market for PC languages.