I happen to know a few IT headhunters very well.They have been swamped,for the past year+ with so many jobs,that they are in a perpetual haze from overwork! There are and have been plenty of well paying jobs in the IT field for AMERICANS!
frannie,the BUBBLE bust years ago and still wet behind the ears,right out of college kids in ALL fields,don't get the big bucks! But there ARE lots of jobs out there....they just don't need "warm bodies" as they once did,before the IT BUBBLE burst.
tell your headhunter friends to look elsewhere - the game is up. the field is entirely broken now, many people who have been (and continue to be) blown out of the field have moved onto other careers out of necessity and/or desire. they have thrown in the towel and aren't coming back. they are math teachers now, real estate agents, have taken government jobs or government-supported ones (defense and homeland security jobs), etc. and at the entry level, college enrollment (and hence graduation) in these fields is drying up - in fact, if it wasn't for foreign national enrollment, americans engineering programs would be drying up. Typically, engineering is a field a person enters because their parent(s) were engineers and would guide them into it. But after seeing what has happened to US tech, those same parents are piling their own kids into law schools now. Talk to some of them like I do every day, ask them if they would send their kids to school for it now.
and this current wave of M&A activity sweeping across telecom and tech - will result in layoffs of 10s of thousands of more white collar technology workers.
some data points on this topic here:
http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelease.asp?id=43212
Right. And I just happen to know a headhunter for the past ten years who hasn't placed one American in a high tech job in two years.
Their clients run through a charade of interviews, inform the recruiter none of the candidates are qualified (which is a damn lie), then put in an official request for an H-1B guest worker.