Deb Perelman

What makes IT professionals happy? According to a survey released April 23 by Robert Half Technology, an IT recruiting firm, the answer is really not that complicated: money. CIOs identified increased compensation as the most effective way to retain IT staff, cited by 27 percent of respondents. Yet not far behind–at 21 percent–CIOs also knew […]

“Platform,” “Megs and rams,” “FTP,” “Scalable solution” … Jargon shows up in all professions, but in few is it more apparent, or more divisive, than in the world of technology. Picture this. You’re in the middle of a presentation to a business team about some technology it would behoove the company to invest in and […]

Mac skills have long been seen as superfluous for IT professionals; Apple platforms are rarely used in medium and large enterprises, and not even the release of the OS X operating system chipped away at Windows’ claim on the IT department. Yet some observers feel that this is set to change. Between October 2007 and […]

As if the economic outlook of IT workers wasn’t dismal enough–IT worker confidence is at its lowest point since 2005, layoffs and large outsourcing deals abound–a new CareerBuilder.com survey of 168 IT hiring managers finds that a lot fewer plan to hire recent college graduates this year–down to 67 percent from 82 percent in 2007. […]

When most graduates consider where they would like to begin their careers, they consider cities, salaries and job titles; much more rarely do they consider one core feature of an organization that will drastically change the nature of their job: the size of the company. Few places is this more apparent than in IT, where […]

Reports that the high-tech industry added nearly 100,000 jobs in 2007 have done little to improve the confidence of IT workers, which, according to a new report, has hit a low not seen since 2005. Concerns expressed by IT workers ranged from the economy and job market to their personal employment situation, according to the […]

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ 10-year economic outlook, computer software engineers who work in the application professions sector are expected to be the fourth fastest-growing occupation between 2006 and 2016, increasing by 44.6 percent. Yet making sure that software is built in a secure way has typically been a secondary concern within […]

Lifeguarding may be good for your tan, bartending may be good for your social life and working at a downtown record store may increase your hip quotient, but rarely will any of them land a college student with the Holy Grail of early adulthood success: a job after college. However, a well-placed internship just might. […]

Does the IT workplace suffer from a Dead Sea effect? Bruce Webster, an IT analyst, says yes, and this is the reason large organizations struggle to hold onto their best IT engineers. Located below sea level, water only leaves the Dead Sea by evaporation and what is left is generally unable to support life. This, […]

Business analysts might be the least-known people in the IT workplace: Most agree that their role is important, but few know what they actually do-or should be expected to do. Referring to research on the subject, “Executives didn’t know whether they were performing up to par or whether they should be expected to be order-takers […]

Did Google–famed for its corporate mantra, “Don’t Be Evil”–handle its DoubleClick layoffs in a particularly shady way? According to at least one former employee, yes. A DoubleClick employee among the 300 laid off earlier in April told the Silicon Valley gossip blog Valleywag that managers had asked employees to sign one-year noncompete agreements only a […]

The Department of Defense announced April 5 that a total of 36,082 members of the U.S. military had been wounded in action or killed in Iraq since the war began in 2003. Of these, nearly 4,500 were deaths and 31,950 were wounded. Once they return from the war zone, injured soldiers face a multitude of […]