David White, owner of technology recruiting firm SC Palo Alto, which works mainly with small and mid-sized companies in Silicon Valley, made some interesting observations about today's tech job market. He spoke to The Wall Street Journal.

Social networking and gaming have seen a huge spike in the last few months. They've drained a lot of the stock of technical people we have.

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Companies are only hiring engineers who can jump right into a project. PHP, ActionScript 3, and J2EE are the most highly desired programming languages right now because they're used so frequently in social gaming

And...

You have to take your background and match it exactly to what a job description requests. I'll often see resumes that list experience in dozens of programming languages, but that (list} the one that the company requested way at the bottom.

And...

You're not applying for a "tech position." You need to show a real passion for whatever the company does.

-- Leslie Stevens-Huffman