The pundits insist that the economy (softening, weakening, choose your euphemism) isn't going to hurt IT because companies need IT more than ever when times are tough.
That's a comforting thought if you're an investor in a big IT company, or an executive in one, particularly one with exposure to international markets. Having a huge services arm, like HP or IBM, doesn't hurt. In fact, pure services companies like EDS probably see opportunity where the rest of us see gloom and despair.
But for people whose jobs are connected to IT, I mean people who administer server farms or use OLAP cubes to do their work, folks who maintain networks and create new apps, the cratering economy means less job security and negative earnings on our 401(k)s.
Even folks who work for the big IT firms have to worry when financial services companies, traditionally one of the big IT customers, start consolidating or folding.
Market-based retirement seems a heck of a lot less enticing when returns are negative. The idea of letting savings & loans get back into commercial banking and vice versa (reversing 1930s-era legislation) doesn't seem so smart now, either.
I wouldn't go so far as my esteemed colleague Steven Vaughan-Nichols, who predicts we'll skip right over the recession bit and go straight into depression.
But I will say this: the dominoes are standing pretty close together, and it's a bit naive to think that a couple of them can fall without touching the ones we're under.