IT job slump not affecting data center facility managers?

There has been a significant slump in the IT job market recently. InfoWorld (via Slashdot) is reporting nearly 50,000 IT jobs lost in the last year. The Wall Street Journal, Gartner, and others are all reporting that tech-spending is slowing, and a slumping economy means less hiring. Systems and network admins, helpdesk employees and other IT workers are reporting hard times on the U.S. job market.

“We have not seen extreme measures being taken by IT organizations, such as hiring freezes, but we do expect to see enterprises take a more conservative and ‘wait-and-see’ approach to staffing for the rest of 2008,” said Gartner research vice president Lily Mok in a recent report.

Nonetheless, data center facility manager jobs are still in high demand. The New York Times reported on it recently and I’m still getting emails from Google’s recruiters asking if I know anybody looking for a job on with the Google facility engineering team.

So what gives? Is there a data center facilities job gap on the horizon? Is working knowledge of Ohm’s Law and computational fluid dynamics protection against a down economy?