My view of where things are going is a bit different.
I see the VB/Web level activities being viewed more as a basic office skill, just like everyone is supposed to be fairly fluent in using word processors, spreadsheets, and email/groupware clients. The jobs dedicated to this sort of development activity will still exist in places, but they will become lower and lower paid jobs as time goes on.
More serious development for the web seems to be breaking down to:
* Paper-based "project manager" types of roles (no real web skills at all)
* Some in-house people to maintain static web pages, prepare images for the web, pull reports from web server logs and such at low pay
* Web application programmers (where the programming is shipped offsite if not offshore)
Sort of the same thing seems to be happening in the "tech" arena. A lot of people are moving to preinstalled commodity boxes you just unpack and plug in. Less and less real troubleshooting or repair is being done. The result is that box & cable jockey jobs will also continue to drop in pay. We'll probably see fewer and fewer high-dollar "server admin" type jobs because NOSs and email servers are much simpler to deal with than they were in 1988.
There will still be a good number of higher-paying high-skill IT jobs domestically, but the numbers will be far less than the press and educators led us and "the corporate public" to believe.
The better paying C++/Java jobs are still out there right now, but these require a lot more skills than just knowing a programming language. I think this is why so many such jobs seem to be open compared to others. The shortage we have is in skilled developers, often with specific, intimate knowledge of large, expensive application suites for order-entry, inventory, process-control, CRM, and the like. Employers also want experience in their line-of-biz along with background in UML tools, change-management tools, project management tools, middleware technologies, specific DBMS products, and other things that won't be covered in a semester or two of community college.
A big factor in employer expectations is that they feel they're in a buyer's market. A lot of employers are quite happy to live with the work contracted out until they find the right guy at the right price-point to bring on board.
Other views?