I wonder if anyone in NY, SF, or any other 1st tier developer city can comment on the local unemployment rate for either software devs or IT in general. Here in Orlando/Tampa it's been around 2% for YEARS.

I don't know how First Tier Phoenix is... it's mostly business process development here, a lot of banking, and quite a bit of other financial process development, and business management dev.

We've been really low on unemployment for a number of years... the cost of living compared to dev wages (usually >= 80% of NYC/SF wages) is really great, that I would be hard pressed to consider moving to SF, Seattle or NYC. That said, it's a bit hard to find talent, but then I don't do it for a living... Also, I don't think the business people doing HR really "get" the mindset of a software developer in terms of actually recruiting.