Deb Perelman

What makes a work space terrible? Is it the gray-beige color scheme, the industrial-grade carpet, or the chipped Formica desks and fluorescent lights? Or is it the opposite, when a company is so desperate to keep up with the Googles that they try a little too hard–filling the offices with ping-pong tables, plastic toys and […]

With news of hiring freezes and budget cutbacks popping up everywhere, the job market is looking increasingly stormy for new graduates. A new report offers scant encouragement. Starting salaries for software developers and network and systems administrators have dipped by as much as $10,000 in May, according to JobFox, an employment firm. Software designers and […]

When most people think of outsourcing, they imagine U.S. businesses sending work to far-flung places like India, Russia and parts of southeast Asia where the salaries and cost of doing business are so much lower than in the United States that it makes a tremendous amount of fiscal sense. What people never picture, however, is […]

One of the main arguments touted by groups interested in seeing an increase in the cap on H-1B temporary worker visas is that those who wish to work here on these visas are some of the world’s best recruits, and their addition to the work force would foster U.S. innovation and global competitiveness. Opponents to […]

Though IT employment is at an all-time high in the U.S.–some 3.8 million employed residents in the U.S. consider themselves IT professionals according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, a record high–and is expected to climb even higher–computer and mathematical sciences jobs expected to grow faster than any other professional occupation through 2016, nearly a […]

In the first half of 2006, the Programmers Guild, an IT worker interest group, filed 300 discrimination complaints with the U.S. Department of Justice against employers who had posted “H-1B visa holders only” ads on job boards. Two years later, it appears that in at least one case, the group’s work has paid off. The […]

The stereotypical image of a technology company entrepreneur is young, scrappy and brilliant, a la Bill Gates in 1982, Steve Jobs in 1984 or, say, Mark Zuckerberg in 2007. They’re almost always Ivy League dropouts. Yet how accurate is this? A new study by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and researchers at Duke and Harvard […]

There was a time when telecommuting was seen as a panacea. The proliferation of wireless technology had made it easier for workers in countless arenas to work from their living rooms or the coffee shop of their choice, leading waves of companies to embrace partial or total remote work policies for their masses. It seemed […]

IBM IT workers planned a demonstration during the company’s annual shareholder meeting on Tuesday to protest changes in compensation structure that amount to a 15 percent pay cut for many employees. In January of this year, IBM informed 7,600 employees in technical positions that their jobs were being reclassified to make them eligible for overtime. […]

Statistically, men make more money than women do for doing the same job. It’s called the “wage gap” and it is considered one of the last bastions of gender inequality in the workplace. The wage gap hit its all-time low in 1973, when women could be expected to earn 56.6 percent of what a man […]

As Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer continues to obsess over buying Yahoo, Yahoo’s Jerry Yang might have an unlikely ally in his desire to stop the deal in its tracks: Microsoft employees. A Wall Street Journal article today, April 24, reports that some Microsoft rank-and-file workers say they’re skeptical about the deal. Their unrest is focused […]

Several recent reports have painted a depressing view of the condition of the American worker, and indicate that the nation may well be on the verge of a recession, if not already in one. Though unemployment only rose modestly in March–from 4.8 to 5.1 percent–the quality of work those still employed are able to get […]