A new survey from Dice found that 61 percent of hiring managers and recruiters in the United States anticipate more hiring in the first half of 2016 than in the last six months of 2015. Combined with low unemployment rates, those percentages suggest that the economy will remain healthy well into next year. More than a third of hiring managers also saw a rise in counter-offers, and 56 percent reported higher salaries for new hires. The U.S. unemployment rate hit 5.0 percent in October, below analyst expectations. The tech sector did even better, with an unemployment rate of 2.8 percent. Not all technology job categories experienced the same dips, however, with programmers, systems analysts, network and systems administrators, software developers, and computer & information systems managers all experiencing a rise in their respective unemployment. At the same time, a Dice analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data suggested that voluntary quits among tech pros were up, to roughly 500,000 employees per month in the third quarter—a sign that there’s enough generalized confidence in the economy for tech pros to quit their jobs in search of better ones. For tech pros, the low unemployment rate, combined with steady hiring, also opens up the possibility of negotiating successfully for higher salaries and better perks from new employers (and recruiters).