Salaries for developers in most parts of the country have been flat for the last several years. More teams are trying to do without development managers and wit

Salaries for developers in most parts of the country have been flat for the last several years. More teams are trying to do without development managers and with fewer project managers. Network operations salaries, from what I have seen, are actually lower now than they were when I was in college. Network architects and engineers still command pretty good salaries, probably because there are so many legacy networks out there that need to be replaced. In general, salaries in product oriented positions are going up, and salaries in service oriented positions are going down. IT has one of the highest unemployment percentages of any industry (14.9%, last I read). While I don't believe there is an actual, honest to goodness shortage, I do believe that there are three critical problems in the industry right now: 1. Hiring - Companies can't hire the right people, good people can't get past HR, companies are afraid that they're going to hire the wrong person, and in general there are no professional organizations that are making this any easier. This has resulted in ridiculous salaries (in both directions) because companies don't know what they're paying for when they first hire someone, and are desperate not to lose the people who they have hired that know what they're doing. In addition, positions stay open for an inordinate amount of time because of the difficulty of hiring, and overall employee mobility is reduced because the interview process is slowly moving from a multi-day process to a multi-week process. I got my first programming job on a phone screen and a lunch break interview. That would be ludicrous today. 2. Training - Companies don't want to hire people who have 85% of the skillset they're looking for, because they don't believe that training for the extra 15% is going to pay off. I think this is partially because the value proposition of a new graduate with six months of solid experience is probably double of the same graduate before their experience. I think this is something not strictly limited to IT at the moment, but I'm seeing it more in IT than in any other engineering discipline. 3. Placement - In short, people aren't getting positions that are most suited to their abilities. Unskilled, first-time "CIO"s are running startups into the ground, and former "CIO"s with plenty of experience are consulting because consulting, right now, actually seems more low-risk than being an employee. I see more and more of my friends moving over to consulting not because of the money, but because they were switching employers so much before they started consulting that it doesn't make sense not to go that route. Keep in mind that I am providing minimal evidence - although I know that the 14.9% employment rate is recently accurate, within a few weeks, but in general I'm seeing these trends everywhere and it's worrying as someone whose job it is to make systems function well simply because there is so much waste.