In my small circle of acquaintances, most are tech workers and most are struggling. I’ve heard of taking third world pay rates. With more western workers accepting less, it’s also impacting the outsourcing market. Data showing up today affirms that tech has taken a major hit, not just here but world wide.

Tom Silver, senior vice president of Dice.com, told us this morning that Dice.com is reporting a 44% year-over-year drop in job listings for the month of June. May’s year-over-year decline hovered around 45%. And Silver also points to a rise in the Department of Labor’s unemployment rate for the “Computer and Mathematics sector,” (the area best associated with the tech sector). June’s unemployment rate for the tech sector almost tripled year-over year, from 1.9% in June of 2008, to 5.4% in June of 2009. While Silver says that the tech job market is certainly better than during the fourth quarter of 2008 and the first quarter of 2009, the number of job opportunities have remained stagnant over the course of the past few months. (Tech Crunch)

According to the Times of India, the big outsourcing firms are marking down their bills by 35 to 40 per cent.

Apparently it is now possible to hire an IT specialist in India for about $16 per hour, which analysts say is the lowest rate for human labour since Kunta Kinte was imported into the Southern US to pick cotton.

Siddhartha Pai, MD, at the India offices of TPI told the Times that such rates will continue at least until the first quarter next year. (The Inquirer)

This could mean we’re in for an even bumpier road ahead. It also means what the politicians have been doing isn’t working. Maybe they should stop meddling for a while.

Time was when a call to AT&T brought you to an interested and understandable person who bent over backwards to help you solve your problem.  The connected world enables anyone, anywhere to do knowledge work. When the world became connected AT&T was among the first to exploit this technology hire hire off shore customer service and support people. While the cost savings were huge, the quality of customer service tanked. Even then, only a soft economy had the power to change MBA school logic. When money is tight, there are fewer customers to compete for and bad service can kill a company by increasing customer flight. When jobs are scarce, great people can be hired for very little money. Of course, AT&T is spinning this story a very differently.

“We expect to complete this ambitious 5,000 job in-sourcing initiative by this summer, less than three years after the program was announced,” Bill Blase, senior executive vice president of Human Resources, said in a statement.

Technology jobs including Internet broadband and wireless support could very well help companies and workers during the economic recession.

Moreover, the jobs come with good wages and benefits. It is a plan to bring employees back in-house which will provide new works with high-tech jobs. Most of the jobs will be located in Internet broadband support centers in North Carolina, Louisiana, Alabama, Florida and Kentucky. (newsoxy)

Outside of the India based contract labor firms, Microsoft tops the list. For the most part, I’ve found the numbers much smaller than I expected. IT employment in the US has been soft for some time, and it appears to have impacted the H1B portion of the work force. While I do not have data on prior years, these numbers on a company by company basis look small to me. H1B employer list on Computerworld.