I’ve received hundreds of impassioned letters (well, okay, so it was only one e-mail from my colleague, Tom DeMarco) about my recent posting discussing Money magazine’s survey indicating that software engineering is the best job in America. After five years of dot-com collapse, layoffs, outsourcing, and stagnant salaries, it’s no wonder that some people would be a little skeptical and cynical about an upbeat, rosy report about careers in the software field.

But now there’s a new article from Information Week, entitled “IT Employment Reaches Record High in U.S.,” that lends some credence to Money’s assessment. According to some data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. IT employment reached a record high of 3.472 million workers in the 12 months ending March 31, 2006. Obviously, it’s a lot easier to feel good about your profession if you believe the job market is expanding; and the data about IT unemployment supports that perspective. Unemployment among IT professionals was 2.5% at the end of the last quarter, compared to 3.7% in the first quarter of 2005; it’s still not quite as good as the 2.2% unemployment figure at the end of 2000, but it’s moving in the right direction. And if the job market is expanding, there’s a good chance that salaries will increase too. Woo hoo! Maybe we’ll see the crazy days of stock options, signing bonuses, and company cars (make mine a Mazerati, please!) once again.

Well, probably not. Indeed, this is a good time for all of us to take a deep breath and ask, “What’s it all about, Alfie?” For example: does this good news mean that the competitive pressures of offshore outsourcing will disappear? I think not; indeed, I think we’re going to see a phenomenon that partially explains why the dire predictions in my 1992 book, Decline and Fall of the American Programmer, were roughly 10 years too early (some folks have kindly credited me with being “ahead of my time,” but I think that’s overly generous). When I predicted that U.S. software jobs would suffer disastrously from offshore competition in India, I failed to anticipate that the IT industry would grow so rapidly throughout the 1990s that it would gobble up all of the available programmers in the U.S. and India. It wasn’t until the economic downturn in 2000 that demand for IT professionals dropped, and employers began taking advantage of the lower salaries (and, in many cases, higher productivity and higher quality) of Indian programmers.

So, if the demand for IT professionals begins to increase dramatically in the next few years, that will be good news for American software people — assuming that we still have some university students who bother to major in that topic. But there will also continue to be a strong demand for offshore software producers, in countries like India and China, as well as Eastern Europe.

Meanwhile, it would behoove the mid-level IT managers in this country to spend a few minutes reflecting on the lessons from history — i.e., what happens when the economy grows and jobs become more plentiful? One of the first reactions is that disgruntled workers, who have been locked into lousy jobs for the past five years, can now vote with their feet. You should expect to see an increase in Dilbert cartoons in which downtrodden engineers stomp into the office of the PHM (point-haired manager, for those of you who don’t know the acronym) and say something along the lines of, “Remember the last five years when you froze our salaries, and then made us take a 10% pay cut? Remember the last five death-march projects, when you told me I could ‘volunteer’ to work 80 hours a week, or else get fired? Well, guess what: I quit!”

I’ve seen this phenomenon in the aftermath of recessions in the early 1980s and the early 1990s, and I have no reason to believe it won’t happen again. But each time it does happen, there’s a new generation of mid-level managers who say, “What’s going on here? We just gave these folks a 2% cost-of-living increase, so why are they quitting?”

There will be lots of other consequences associated with an uptick in the IT job market. I’ll mull it over for a few days, see what else is being reported out there in cyberspace, and offer my humble opinions when it seems appropriate to do so…