Forbes' Ed Sperling has a unique take on the IT job market.You may not agree with him, but it's worth thinking about. His thesis:

Hiring is up in the technology sector, particularly for legacy programmers and those specialties shared by companies such as Google, Yahoo, and Facebook. While all of this may not seem immediately relevant to the corporate enterprise, it will.

Why would legacy programmers be in high demand? Because, Sperling says:

Instead of just operating systems and applications, the focus now is on algorithms and efficiency in coding. In many respects this is about speed - the time it takes to search and make connections, which are based on the same skill set.

He goes on to point out the value of being able to separate out the parts of computing that require lots of computational power from those that don't and placing those two things on different virtual machines. "There is no reason that a Web search has to drag down the entire corporate computing apparatus. There's no reason it even has to be connected over the same network as other applications." Sperling points to Dell's dual-processor PCs, which use an ARM cord for Web surfing and and e-mail and an Intel processor for application work. Expect to see much more of this, he says, and expect programmers who can make this kind of bifurcation happen through software tricks to be in demand.