"Any suggestion that information technology is yesterday's news, doesn't matter, or has lost its edge as an economic driver is just plain wrong," Miller said. "In fact, major trends indicate the opposite is true."

But Forrester officials said there are some signs of a slow-down ahead. Early reports have chief executive officers (CIOs) confidence measures down in the last quarter of this year, and large U.S. companies are projecting only small budget increases for 2006, Forrester said. The U.S. tech industry could see a "mild" downturn in 2007 after an up-and-down 2006, said George Colony, Forrester's chairman and chief executive officer.

The tech industry has "clearly recovered" from the recession of 2001-02, Colony said.

The two organizations didn't release in-depth details of the guts of the index during a press conference, but they noted that there's been steady improvement since 2003.

The first is computer code. The idea of hiring a programmer to make that little widget you are desperate for might seem decadent, but it is very good value for money and remarkably easy. I needed a selection of little programs to do things with my email. But I'd never had the time, or the patience, to write them myself. After a visit to RentACoder.com, I was able to file a request for bids from programmers around the world.

Prospective coders can view all the requests on the site, and bid for the ones that interest them. Once I'd accepted a bid - it was less than £200 for a fortnight's programming work - I paid the money to the site, which placed it in escrow. My coder, a young man in Belorussia, completed the work, and once I'd checked it was up to scratch (it was), I instructed the site to release the cash.

HotJobs is using Yahoo's Web crawling technology to search for job openings listed on employers' Web sites and other sites. It then "scrapes" those listings into its own database, where it can share them with its users for free.

The move is significant because it is the first time one of the big three leading job sites -- HotJobs, Monster and CareerBuilder -- has incorporated free listings into its database. Until now, the three have required payment from employers, and that's what keeps them in business.

HotJobs is offering the free listings partly in response to competition and to increase its market share. But analysts say the free scraping could undercut the paid business, even though some employers will still pay money for other services, deeper relationships with prospective employees and higher rankings on the page.

"The current situation is getting back to the '70s and '80s, where IT workers were the basement cubicle geeks and they weren't very well off," said Matthew Moran, author of the six-month-old book Information Technology Career Builder's Toolkit: A Complete Guide to Building Your Information Technology Career in Any Economy.

"They were making an honest living but weren't anything more than middle-class people just getting by," Moran said.

"We keep passing the baton between California and India, and that way we can cram a lot more work into a 24-hour period," said Jeff Hawkey, vice president of hardware engineering, who conducts evening meetings from the office or on his laptop at home. "A lot of nights, I go home, tuck the kids into bed and then get on the conference call."

IBM's chief financial officer Mark Loughridge said the west European market was performing poorly so jobs would be lost in the UK, Germany, France and Italy.

He gave no figures on how many jobs would be lost in each country.

Answering questions after a conference call with analysts, he said the job cuts were new, and not "bundled" together parts of an ongoing restructuring.

Tech grew fast as it clawed back from the dot-com bust of 2001. Some markets, such as cell phones, topped 20% growth a year. The industry is still growing, but not at that rate, tech analysts say. Corporate tech buyers surveyed by CIO magazine in March said they expected to increase spending by 6.4% in the next 12 months. That's down from 7.3% in March 2004, the magazine said Friday.