Donald Sears

IBM is taking advantage of tax rebates in Boulder, Colo., and hiring 500 customer service call center workers over the next five years, say news reports from the AP, Wall Street Journal, Daily Camera and Longmont Times-Call. The 500 jobs will come between now and 2014, said the Daily Camera, a locally published Boulder media […]

Depending on who you ask, there is either optimism on hiring for technology jobs in the first quarter of 2010 or there is flatness. Recent studies from Gartner Research and Computer Economics expect jobs to rise in the first part of 2010. How many jobs are we talking about? No one seems to ask. They […]

Regardless of how much time and energy you put in trying to convince senior bean counters that you can prove return on investment in IT projects, you might consider scrapping that completely and focusing on real financial issues, suggests Irwin Teodoro, director of systems integration, at Laurus Technologies. What struck me with this piece is […]

IT contracting and freelance work is up in 2009, mainly due to layoffs, pay cuts and other economic realities beaten to death in the media. The good news is there is no shortage of IT contracting and freelance technology work Websites that let you advertise your skills, compete for work and build client reference lists. […]

It hasn’t been a good year for IT jobs, but there are some segments of IT faring better than others, shows analysis of recently released government data crunched by Foote Partners, an IT research firm based in Florida. Net gains in the five category segments of IT tracked by the BLS show 11,200 jobs added […]

The national coordinator for health IT, Dr. David Blumenthal, recently announced that training for jobs in health IT will be coming to a community college near you. Federal stimulus money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (to the tune of $80 million dollars) has been put aside for grants to help kick-start […]

Equipping workers with the ability to work remotely is not a priority for over half of companies, finds a Cisco Systems study on remote access released Nov. 23. Of the 502 IT managers surveyed, more than half (53 percent) said less than half of their employees have remote access, and nearly a quarter (21 percent) […]

Want to check in on the progress of a project or the state of your office, or need an immediate status update on the floor of a manufacturing plant? It’s impossible to physically be in two places at once, but that is getting a little less difficult with an innovation known as “telepresence robotics.” Pretty […]

As the layers of the Bernie Madoff ponzi-scheme scandal continue to be peeled away, two programmers on the Madoff books are now in the spotlight and facing a potential 30-year prison sentences. Jerome O’Hara, 46, and George Perez, 43, the accused programmers, began working for Madoff in the early 1990s, under the direction of another […]

Adobe Systems announced Nov. 10 that it will trim 680 jobs or roughly 9 percent of its work force in order to make 2010 projections. The company did not issue an official press release about the restructuring, but did make note of it in a public SEC 8-K filing. The layoffs appear to be within […]

Many economists have been expecting overall unemployment numbers to expand above 10 percent for much of 2009. The U.S. Department of Labor reported Friday that those numbers are finally here. As of Oct. 31, unemployment in the United States is the worst it has been in 26 years–now at 10.2 percent. What does it mean […]

While the offshoring of technology labor is a trend not likely to go away any time soon, there are U.S. companies that are staying competitive by having parts of their operations at locations in more rural U.S. states. Patrick Thibodeau at Computerworld has a good article on the trend and includes a profile of Atlanta-based […]