"People are under a lot of personal stress," said Paul Barron, CIO at Tulane University in New Orleans. "There are people working much harder in their jobs here because there are just fewer people, even though we're advertising for [more workers]."

Tulane, which runs one of the larger data centers in the New Orleans area, has about 70 IT staffers but is 10 people short of what Barron said he needs. And things have changed drastically for many of the school's employees. "A lot of people in the Tulane community and technology services lost everything," Barron said. Some suffered deaths in their families, he added.

The situation in New Orleans remains far from normal, according to Barron. The population is only about half of what it was, and the available housing that remains intact is expensive. "The city is not so easy still," Barron said. That makes recruiting employees from outside the area a difficult prospect. "I desperately need some DBAs but can't find them," he said, referring to Oracle database administrators.

In addition to dealing with on-the-job recovery issues, many IT workers still have to contend with ongoing personal concerns, such as working with contractors to rebuild their homes and trying to resolve insurance issues. Some continue to live in temporary housing, while many others have simply left the region, according to IT executives.

"There are more jobs than people," said David Erwin, CIO at Adams and Reese LLP, a New Orleans-based law firm that also has offices in Washington, Houston and six other cities. Erwin said companies in the New Orleans area are competing with one another for the available IT workers.