The recession hit jobs hard — even in IT. But the fact remains that work doesn’t disappear. It goes somewhere, and that somewhere may be a city near you.

One hot place to find IT work these days: That would be Washington, DC.

The Obama administration made lots of campaign promises about streamlining government, creating electronic records and bringing the federal government out of the IT stone age.

With lots of stimulus money to spend, the new administration’s spending big on IT projects. Experts predict the feds will add 11,000 tech jobs by 2012.

Another top spot, Atlanta, where wages for IT workers are high and so is demand for programmers, software engineers and systems analysts.

Other towns to check for tech: Huntsville, Alabama, and Houston both need lots of IT folks to work on NASA projects; Boston ranks high on the list because of its surfeit of big-name universities, such as MIT and Harvard; Seattle, Phoenix, San Francisco and San Diego all have lots of work for techies — and you could do a whole lot worse in the lifestyle department with that trio.

Finally, there’s the Big Apple, New York City, where most of the big financial houses are facing a massive overhaul of their accounting procedures, regulations and reporting requirements. All this will mean jobs for IT folks who’ll be charged with helping these folks get their ducks in a row and cleaned up.

Info for this story comes courtesy of the folks at eWeek. Read their take on the IT job market here.

Tags: Atlanta, Boston, D.C., Houston, Huntsville, IT, jobs, Phoenix, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington