Unwired: N.C. has lost high-tech jobs at nearly twice the national rate.

• Author: Roush, Chris
• Position: Feature - North Carolina

If misery loves company, Fredrick McGriff should have been in a state of blissful sorrow. In November 2002, his job moved to Asia, where labor was cheaper. At 53, he was unemployed. He had to find a comparable job or get some training to switch careers, the same grim choice facing thousands of other laid-off Tar Heels.

But McGriff hadn't been pulling a shift in a textile mill or a furniture factory. He was a college-educated high-tech worker, holding the kind of job--applications programmer--that the state has always showcased. Since graduating in 1971 with a bachelor's in physics from North Carolina Central University, he had worked in Research Triangle Park--first for IBM, then Nortel Networks, then Computer Sciences Corp. But El Segundo, Calif.-based CSC shipped his job and about 100 others to India, where programmers work for as little as $7,000 a year.

For 13 months, he searched for another tech job. He believes his age worked against him. He considered biotech and even becoming a teacher but, in the end, decided to stay with what he knew best. The problem was, he had a lot of company. "And I'm talking about smart, trained people with a wealth of experience. It was frustrating."

McGriff was one of nearly 20,000 Tar Heel high-tech workers who lost their jobs in 2002. Through the first two quarters of 2003, the most recent period for which statistics were available, about 10,200 more joined them on the sidelines. That left slightly more than 136,000 high-tech workers in the state, down 18% from the peak of about 166,000 three years ago. The number of technology companies declined nearly 45%, from 4,311 in 2001 to 2,392 last year, according to the North Carolina Electronics & Information Technologies Association. Most were small, with fewer than 10 employees, and simply went out of business. But some left the state, lured by better incentives and lower taxes. And most ominously, some that are still around have begun outsourcing what were some of the state's better-paying jobs to lower-wage countries, particularly India.

The losses have been especially painful because they come as North Carolina is shedding thousands of jobs in such traditional industries as textiles, apparel and furniture. High-tech was supposed to be the state's vaccination against economic downturn. Instead, it has become another symptom.

What went wrong? For one thing, the job losses were part of a larger trend. High-tech employment nationally fell by 540,000, to about 6 million, in 2002, according to the American Electronics Association. It estimates 234,000 more jobs disappeared in 2003. But North Carolina's decline was nearly double the national rate. It dropped the state two places nationally, to 16th, in high-tech employment.

Joan Myers, president and chief executive of...