False Alarm

Bob Weinstein is a journalist who covers technology, project management, the workplace and career development.

  Career Development   Manufacturing  

Sorry! Those days are history. So what's ahead for this once vibrant industry? Not a heck of a lot. This story looks at the semiconductor industry's bleak outlook.

If you've been anxiously waiting for job opportunities to surface, a turnaround in technology stocks is good reason to get excited. It means hard times are over and the industry has its act together, which means plentiful jobs. Utopia, nirvana.

It certainly looked that way when chip stocks jumped in mid-August. One headline read "Surging Chip Stocks Helped Spark Wider Buying," and another: "Dow Had Its Best Close in Nearly 14 Months." Semiconductor issues never looked so good. Advanced Micro Devices, Cypress Semiconductor, Intel, Texas Instruments, Motorola and others posted gains.

That was uplifting news if you worked for a chip company. But hardly a week later, Hewlett-Packard's lower-than-anticipated quarterly earnings threw the market into a tailspin, hurtling indexes into the red. Meanwhile, other tech issues were mixed.

That's an abbreviated picture of the …

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