Skills crisis over - at least in Silicon Valley

And - despite the obvious bad news of continued layoffs - many will view any kind of let-up in the skills shortage as a welcome breath of fresh air.

John Olsen, CEO of applications management company Marimba, reckons he can now get hold of anyone he needs. (Given his company just laid off 20 per cent, he's probably not going to be looking too hard. But that's by the by.) Application server company BEA says much the same (and it is even recruiting - well, if you believe its hype).

The layoffs had to have some kind of impact. Certainly, the testament of our own west coast correspondent is that the P45 (sorry, pink slip in the US) parties are very much in full swing (see Transatlantic Cable: Your job, terminated with extreme prejudice, http://www.silicon.com/a44031 ).

However, let's not get ahead of ourselves. This is unlikely to mean - in the short term, at least - the cost of your friendly database administrator or Cisco certified engineer is going to go down.

This is because while all the IT vendors and dot-coms are letting the axe fall with chilling regularity on their San Jose offices, the fact remains that the bulk of the skills shortage is not in these companies. It affects the end users. And end users have never been conveniently located in Silicon Valley. We're all across the world.

So while the house prices may be falling in the Valley, wages for IT pros aren't falling anywhere else. You're still going to pay through the nose for a Unix administrator and you're definitely going to struggle to find a Java developer - unless you're reading this basking in the Californian sunshine.

Of course, the local effect will ripple outwards and there are many layoffs in other countries. However, by the time that ripple gets this side of the pond, let's hope the talk is of economic recovery, not slowdown. And of job creation, not job losses.