Will your IT job survive the financial meltdown?

Fearful tech workers tiptoeing along the shaky alleys of Wall Street -- and fretting about losing their jobs -- should take a deep breath. Of the more than 100,000 job losses expected as a direct result of the financial crisis, only a tiny slice will likely be from the tech ranks, figures Sean O'Dowd, an analyst at market researcher Financial Insights. As with any market consolidation, finance companies "will look for redundancies and overlap," O'Dowd says. For IT, that means management, not programmers, admins, and other line staff. "I think [layoffs] will come out of the IT management layer such as CIOs, so you're looking at hundreds [of layoffs], not necessarily thousands. Companies will continue to need a lot of the rank-and-file IT folks."