<p>The high demand is for people with the right skills, right pedigree, and right connections. I am not sure the demand is there in general.</p>
<p>2002 was a free for all for several reasons. Dot com companies were disappearing, lots of existing IT or CS workers were marginalized (see below) and thus unemployable due to old skills; all the same, outsourcing was growing by leaps and bounds. Add the recession and you have it made.</p>
<p>The old skills issue was by far the most critical issue. I gave a prophetic quote in the late 90’s… “Dot Net and the Web was responsible for sending more IT / CS workers to work Radio Shack and Best Buy jobs than any outsourcing”. The late 90’s was when N-tier client server (blah blah web based) stuff begin to spread, and if you had your experience in the crud that passed for technology back then you were golden. Of course, nobody had the experience so if one wanted a .NET or ASP or what have you coder there was only one place to get them, and it was not Kansas City. </p>
<p>That time also became the beginning of versionitis and the search for purple squirrels. Mere decent knowledge of an arcane technology would not cut it. You had to be an expert (as confirmed by the myriad of online test companies that conveniently enough popped up, or kangaroo court interviews where one could and would be asked footnote questions), code-writing interviews, and the like. Interestingly enough, offshore resources were rarely subjected to such inquisitions, as the contract houses that sponsored them by the thousands convinced everyone that indeed, the City of Mumbai Municipal Water Company did employ thousands of C++ programmers who all decided to seek H1B visas and move to Kansas City…</p>
<p>Fast forward ten years and I don’t think we have learned much. The graduates from top schools have proven they can learn quickly and thus get employed in decent to good jobs; graduates from good schools like flagship states, well, not so sure, not without knowledge of very specific tools and techniques that are usually well beyond the scope of college CS courses (I see an opportunity for a book here, “Algorithms and Data Structures in PHP” :). </p>
<p>Bottom line - it was bad, and I don’t think it has gotten much better.</p>