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Hot for elsewhere. I'm "in" the industry and have been for over 20 years. What's hot? None of the above.

Developers (Dime a Dozen)
Security (most "security experts" can't secure their own PC's)
Project Managers (dime a dozen)

Where's it at. Well were it's always been the boring, slog work performed by your friendly Administrators everyday. You too can have a unglamorous career doing:

Storage Resource Management
Network Systems Management
Network Load and Bandwidth analysis
Server implementation for the 200th crappy application your CTO has purchased.

The grunt work of the IT industry can be yours. Bore your friends with exciting explanations of storage trending, Service Level agreements and network card thresholds. Explain to your wife for the one thousand time what you do for a living and get that confused blank look. Get excited when your parents ask for the "final" time when you are going to get that real job (a lawyer I think)

Honestly I love my career but I've seen these "HOT" fields come and go so often. I've never been umemployed and don't plan on starting now.

Security (most "security experts" can't secure their own PC's)

Um...what "security experts" are you hanging around? Sure, there are a lot of charlatans in the field, but that doesn't mean they're all pretenders.

Personally, I put little stock in security wizardry claims. I instead look for papers, utilities, and presentations done by the party in question. Those speak more clearly to their skill set than any FUD-hyped media coverage or overinflated security claims.

ha, ha, ha.

you really think the network guy slot is more important and harder to fill than developers and PM's?

on our project with 27 technical slots, there is only one network slot because that is all that is needed and there was a ton of them available because the tech schools keep pumping them out every six to nine months.

a trained developer who can actually perform, they are worth the money. And here is the dirty secret network people don't want anyone else to know - in hard times, the developers can always double duty as network engineers but the network engineers can rarely ever step up and design and code applications.

developers a dime a dozen? only if they don't know what they are doing. network people (regardless of which flavor) those are the dime a dozen slots.

pm's - I'll give you this one but maybe 2 for 1 instead of a dime a dozen since there are some who know what they are doing and some who really do nothing but generate busy work.

Explain to your wife for the one thousand time what you do for a living and get that confused blank look.

Isn't this the truth! :-) I'm a Unix SA and I've learned not to get deep in the details when discussing my projects with my wife. She's not stupid, it's just that her eyes kind of glaze over when I talk about upgrading systems or migrating the data to a new SAN. She does like the paycheck I bring home.

Security (most "security experts" can't secure their own PC's)

a properly trained security engineer will secure a company up nice and tight... but what happens that anyone who has done security work (like me) there is very few around ... so companys can only find regular system administrators or network administrators and force them into the role, and alas end up with some hacked systems.