The tech job market seems to be rebounding, at least according to the Wall Street Journal. Pui-Wing Tam writes that hiring in Silicon Valley seems to be picking up, but the demand for new employees is not what you think. It seems that firms now days are primarily looking for employees with increased levels of education or experience. Netflix, one of the companies interviewed, say that most of their new hire engineers have around 15 years experience. That's a substantial increase over the three to five years experience desired only five short years ago. There has also been a shift toward hiring more applicants with masters and doctorate degrees.

Today's webmasters face many challenges when it comes to launching and maintaining a successful website. While design and content are key, its also true that driving new visitors to your site is often dependant upon outside sources. Take for example the extremely important role Google plays in promoting your site. A quick scan of your web server logs probably reveals that much of the search based traffic you receive comes from Google. Furthermore, having Google index your pages also effects how accurate revenue generators like Ad Words function on your site.

So how do you know if your getting the most out of Google? By in large, you want your site to be fully searchable by Google and you want your page rank to be as high as possible. Ultimately you want your page to be the first result when someone types in a particular search. Unfortunately deciphering features like Google's Page Rank system is largely like trying to reverse engineer a black box. But one web design guru recently conducted a test to isolate the importance of well formed HTML and semantics on how high web pages rank in Google searches. The findings were somewhat surprising, especially when it comes to the use of valid HTML code.

Think you're overworked and underpaid? You're not alone, 57% of respondents to a recent survey by Salary.Com said that they planned to leave their job because they weren't paid enough. But according to the company's research, only about 17% of workers are truly paid less than their peers. One of the major reasons for the gap in perception is the meager rate at which wages have increased in the past few years. On average the annual raise has been consumed by inflation, leaving little real gain in spending power.

The phrase coined by Tim O'Riley has come to represent many things to different people. For some it's the birth of a new round of innovation on the web, and for others it's something almost spiritual. An excellent blog entry by Nicholas Carr explores why the transcended promise of Web 2.0 isn't all it's cracked up to be.

I found this article interesting for several reasons, most notably because it attempts to rebut some of the arguments made about Web 2.0 without thoroughly trashing it. I also liked the way the author drew similarities between the early Internet movement and the "expand your mind" experience of the sixties, even if he does blame capitalism for their eventual corruption.

I'd say this is a necessary read for anyone concerned with where the Internet is going and how it will get there.

Rough Type: The amorality of Web 2.0