Good Morning Silicon Valley
The trend in tech jobs: hire and hire
By JOHN MURRELL
I can't remember the last time there was enough encouraging economic news in the tech sector to warrant a roundup, but the latest earnings reports, hiring plans and other indicators seem to be signaling better days ahead.
On Tuesday, market bellwether Intel surprised the Street with earnings of more than $2.4 billion, its best quarterly profit in four years, and reported that corporate PC spending was on the rise. On Wednesday, research firms Gartner and IDC said worldwide PC demand in the first three months of the year was up 20 percent over the same quarter last year. On Thursday, Advanced Micro Devices said rising PC demand had helped put it back into the black for the quarter. Also Thursday, Google said strength in online advertising contributed to a 23 percent jump in revenue for the quarter and a 37 percent increase in profit year-over-year (results which met expectations but were still not enough to satisfy investors, who are sending the stock down today). Next week, we should get another batch of positive news with reports from Apple, Amazon and Microsoft, among others.
With the industry's growing confidence has come a surge in hiring. Google said it had added almost 800 new employees in the first quarter. "We expect to continue hiring aggressively through the year," CFO Patrick Pichette told analysts. "We have a strong pipeline of candidates primarily focused on engineering and sales, and we are on-boarding them to fuel our growth agenda as fast as possible." Intel is expecting to hire between 1,000 and 2,000 people this year. Cisco, which added 2,100 bodies in November, December and January, intends to grow by 2,000 to 3,000 more this year. In another positive sign, tech employment site Dice.com said it now lists more than 62,000 tech positions nationwide, up nearly 22 percent from a year earlier. And locally, the Silicon Valley Leadership Group's annual business climate survey of CEOs found 58 percent expect to hire this year, while just 7 percent foresee cutbacks. Last year, only 17 percent of the CEOs responding to the survey expected job growth.
It's not like happy days are here again — certainly not for the thousands of recession layoff victims who continue to struggle — but it's a relief to finally see things moving in the right direction again.
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