Some tech jobs defying recession, others wiped out

MANILA, Philippines - Oracle’s $7.4-billion purchase of Sun Microsystems will create a more formidable enterprise computing vendor but will bring about the loss of thousands of jobs at the Silicon Valley server company.

Industry analysts estimate that about a third of Sun’s 30,000-strong workforce will lose their jobs, a number that will become part of the statistical data on technology jobs that vanished during the recession.

When times were good, technology workers were in high demand across different industries and markets, but in the face of a protracted global economic crisis, even the hottest jobs are getting the cold shoulder.

Forrester Research sees tech jobs in the United States declining by 1.2 percent this year after three years of 2.5 percent annual employment growth.

Those whose works are not exactly critical to their companies’ daily operations, such as research and development and software engineering, may have a more difficult time holding on to their jobs.

Yet certain tech skills like software design and development and networking and systems administration are proving to be harder to dispense with perhaps even in companies that are reeling from the economic crunch.

Jobfox, a popular four-year-old online job site, listed software design and development as the second most recession-proof profession based on data it gathered from employers who used its service to fill up their human resource requirements.   

Other tech jobs that made Jobfox’s list of 20 most recession-proof professions are networking/systems administration, business analysis (software implementation), database administration and technology executives.

The recession doesn’t discriminate either on whose tech job it would eradicate. There have been a number of mighty job casualties of late due to poor revenues that could be traced to an economy that dried up.

High-profile tech executives who have succumbed to pressure for them to step down included Yahoo co-founder and chief executive Jerry Yang, AMD chief executive Hector Ruiz, Lenovo CEO William Amelio, VeriSign CEO William Roper, Sony president Ryoji Chubachi, Hitachi president Kazuo Furukawa, and chief financial officers Paul Liska of Motorola and Blake Jorgensen of Yahoo.