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Is there any truth to the belief that U.S. tech jobs are outsourced to India at least in part because Indian developers are better skilled than U.S. workers? According to GILD, a company that combines professional social networking with games that assess skills, there are some areas in which Indians beat their counterparts in the U.S, but there are others in which Americans excel. GILD examined the results of over 1 million assessments taken by over 500,000 developers with an average of 2-3 years of experience.

Continuing our series on iPad applications for businesses, this week we take a look at apps for IT professionals. This is one category of worker most often tasked with doing remote work, often during emergencies. The tablet form factor is attractive to many grizzled system admins on the go, and there are plenty of apps designed just for them. We take a look at SSH, remote desktop and VNC, remote support and server administration apps.

We told you last week about seven trends shaping the IT job market, and which skills are in the highest demand based on Dice.com statistics. But where should you look for those jobs?

Eric Savitz at Forbes CIO Central looks at data gathered by the IT staffing firm Modis to determine the seven best cities for finding tech jobs.

CTOs know that today, when it comes to IT, more is no longer better. IT departments in every industry are faced with static or shrinking budgets and the mounting pressure to do more with less. To reduce operating expenses and network spending, they must find ways to maximize their current investments rather than make new ones. Opportunities for outsourcing infrastructure and applications management, WAN optimization, cloud hosting and software-as-a-service (SaaS) are now available, and can help IT departments meet their budgetary requirements.

IT services company Virtela announced today a new IT infrastructure management service based on predictive analytics. VirtelaPredict will monitor system logs and event data for both on-premise and cloud based infrastructure and look for patterns that signal trouble. The company will then correct issues, hopefully before an outage ever occurs.

Each year Consumer Goods Technology, a trade publication for consumer goods companies, polls subscribers to identify which IT service providers provide the most value across 10 categories. It's recently released its 2011 results. To determine scores, "Participants were asked to identify the solution or service provider they currently use in each applicable category and rank the customer experience received using their chosen provider on a scale of 1 to 5 (1 being extremely dissatisfied and 5 being extremely satisfied)." The rankings were determined by both the sheer number of votes for a particular vendor weighted against its customer experience ranking. CGT also recognized the companies with the highest average customer experience rating.

According to The Bureau of Labor Statistics 9,600 IT jobs were added in December. "Five bellwether IT job segments in the BLS data showed a net gain of 45,800 jobs in the last six months of 2010 and 26,000 jobs in October through December," eWeek reported today. The vast majority of the gains were in management, technical consulting services, computer systems design and related services segments.

Increased hiring for technical positions is one more reason IT managers need to be worried about the growing discontent among tech workers. Gartner analyst David J. Cappuccio thinks a data center staffing crisis might be looming and research finds that
more than 1/3 of IT workers are interested in switching jobs.

We've suggested some ways to improve morale, but we're also curious about the level of satisfaction dissatisfaction among our audience. Tech workers: how satisfied are you with your job?

The prophesied great migration to the cloud is often seen as a career killer for data center workers as storage and infrastructure requirements are consolidated into the hands of a few IaaS providers. In the past we've looked at the impact of cloud migrations on IT jobs in general, though not data center related positions in particular. However, Gartner analyst David J. Cappuccio thinks there could be a looming data center staffing crisis.

According to the 2010 Practices & Salary Report from HDI, an IT service and technical support membership association, 67% of the IT help desks surveyed reported an increased number of support requests in 2010. Roughly the same number reported an increase in 2009. Meanwhile, a report from Computer Economics shows that spending on help desk support has decreased. Patrick Thibodeau covered both reports for computerworld.com.

Curtis Franklin Jr. has written a post for Enterprise Efficiency on becoming a better IT manager. Specifically, Franklin's advice is on how to manage IT teams - not contracts or technologies. He notes that although some elements are important for all managers, there are some distinct skills necessary for managing the sorts of people that gravitate towards careers in IT. Some of Franklin's points are obvious ("hire well"), but all bear repeating.