Donald Sears

It’s not clear from outplacement giant Challenger, Gray & Christmas’ latest job cuts report where IT exactly stands, but the numbers that it is giving across most industries suggest a fair amount of people at the beach for the remainder of the summer months, as inflation is on the rise. Sorry to report what is […]

The good ol’ IT research-events-consulting-analyst folks at Gartner released the 2008 IT Market Compensation report today, and it shows a slight decline in hiring for this year, but pay increases are “at a level similar to previous years, with the reported median salary increase budget at 3.6 percent,” according to the news release. I won’t […]

Recruiting and staffing company Technisource, a subsidiary of the ginormous staffing company Spherion, says that IT worker confidence has “reached its lowest level since 2005,” which is when it began tracking confidence in its own index, dubbed The IT Confidence Index (pdf). The latest index released this week charts confidence at 45.9 percent. In 2005, […]

Who benefits when one of your staff holds the keys to your systems and doesn’t want to let them go? Apparently, your company’s vendors. Terry Childs, a technology worker for the city of San Francisco, had been sitting in jail for the past week for changing passwords and was withholding them from his employers. Childs […]

“SFDC should do for SFA’s (SalesForce Admins) what Oracle did for DBA’s, basically create its own job class.”– Quote from user comments (user “sandpcheryl” on May 14) on the Salesforce IdeaExchange community postings in response to the post “Salesforce.com Certification Program.” Touting what it calls overwhelming interest in certifications for Salesforce.com admins and developers, the […]

In times of economic uncertainty (as in, right now), adding headcount is like a game of freeze tag. The bean counters run around the office with spreadsheet formulas chasing the business, figuring out what’s worth getting pushed in the ice tray and what stays a funding priority. IT, no matter the size of the organization, […]

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say the economy is in a recession. When Nevada brothels need to give rebates for gas to prospective clients (link will expire in 30 days), and well-seasoned MIT grads take to the streets with sandwich boards looking for work in the soul-crushing financial Mecca (aka […]