Don E. Sears

Failure in IT projects is a much written about topic, and an all-too-frequent experience for technology and business professionals. There are many competing factors: There are budgets to maintain, schedules to manage, personalities to handle, resources to share and shifting priorities to organize. Most of you live and breathe it every day. It’s complex, requires […]

Perhaps more telling than the rise of small and midsize companies’ use of outsourcing is that the levels for large companies remain essentially the same, says a new report by Computer Economics. Small and midsize companies’ use of offshore outsourcing services grew 10 percent from 2008 to 2009. “There is a surprisingly sharp increase in […]

Boston and the state of Massachusetts are struggling economically like everywhere, but there are some signs of life for technology workers. Technology companies are expected to come out of the recession stronger, and opportunities for technology jobs are starting to open up again, says a recent Boston Globe article. Numbers on technology equipment demand are […]

There isn’t an area of technology management where cost is not a factor.For many organizations, maintenance costs are a necessary evil, especially when certain customer-facing systems are crucial to business. But eliminating industry-standard 4-hour turnaround times in most hardware maintenance contracts is a risk many CFOs and some CIOs are willing to take during a […]

Yes, it’s been a bad year for every industry, but technology has not been hit as hard with job losses between 2008 and 2009 as one might have expected, says the industry group TechAmerica Foundation.The organization, basing its premise on recent government data, shows that between January and June of this year 115,000 jobs have […]

Of the 4,000 workers surveyed by CareerBuilder, six in 10 people are living from pay day to pay day, including many who earn more than $100,000 a year. The rapid exhaustion of funds is not surprising with so many out of work, and so many former dual-income families being supplemented by only one income, or […]

San Diego, despite what you might have learned from fictitious Anchorman Ron Burgundy, was not founded by the Germans in 1842. In fact, it has a storied history, with its neighbor to the south, Mexico, being a border town, a major U.S. port and a gateway to the United States. Yes, the U.S. Navy still […]

10 Best Places for Technology Jobs in 2009 by Don Sears Atlanta This competitive-salary city for tech ranked “high in volume of tech job openings in early September and had an above-average ratio of tech openings to employees for many IT occupations, including computer programmer, software engineer and systems analyst.” Boston MIT, Harvard and 72 […]

The disconnect between technology workers and business-centric workers is a theme you see regularly, and it couldn’t be more important in challenging economic times. How you work with management, and how they understand how you think is of particular interest when the difference between your productivity and your peers’ is being closely evaluated on a […]

Maybe all it takes is one or two bad experiences with an inexperienced recruiter with very little technology knowledge to get under the skin of tech job seekers. Maybe it’s all those unsolicited e-mails and phone calls. Maybe they just feel like a flock of mosquitoes, trying to pinch a little bit of your blood […]