From a purely career perspective, I found this comment by an analyst most interesting –
“They don’t need the AT&T Wireless employees at all. They might save some salesman, but everything is redundant,” Comack said. “Cingular doubled their customer base and doubled their spectrum, but they can run that with the same amount of employees.”
As many IT types wait for some significant recovery in the technology sector, I think that what will really happen is a continued shrinking of technical career opportunities. This is an off shoot of the productivity gains from technology.
To borrow from the military man’s lament in the late 1960″s “We the unwilling, doing the unwanted, for the ungrateful, have done so much with so little for so long that we can now acheive anything with nothing.”
Assuming a rough equality in employees, about 35K are about to join the ranks of the unemployed. Most of them skilled and experienced in their particular crafts.
