It's always been several orders of magnitude more stable. It's competing very nicely with NT for the server market. Their markets haven't recovered from frozen projects during the Great Y2K Campaign of 1999. It was a cold specialty before the Y2K scare, now it's back to cold. Every two years a new king is crowned by market consensus.
Opportunities lie in ecommerce and wireless jobs.
Barbara Gomolski, research director for the tech research hub GartnerGroup, agrees that the technology industry has some cold contractor specialties right now. Companies seem to be bringing a lot of their networking functions in house, she says, so contractors looking for networking jobs should stay away from setup and maintenance and focus more on security and optimization. As a contractor you can't just put your head down and code. Companies want someone who's going to teach their staff or offer some other kind of value beyond technical skill. Barbara Gomolski, GartnerGroup Straight programming jobs also seem in short supply for freelancers, because companies that are outsourcing those functions are contracting with large body shops, she adds.