Lisa Vaas

CovinAs the American Legion Bridge crosses the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., sometimes traffic flows smoothly. But sometimes it flows like glue. There came one very gluey day when Carol Covins 30-minute commute over that bridge turned into a three-hour odyssey. It involved a broken-down truck, a call to her system integration employers client canceling […]

You sit in job interview after job interview, chirping away about your mastery of C++ or Java or Cisco routers or whatever, but what you really want to do is blurt out, “Just how many layoffs have you guys had in the past year?” Thankfully, Carol Covin has asked those questions–and many more, all of […]

The collapse of the dot-com bubble has finally had an impact on salary increases for information security jobs–a job family that was long considered a safe harbor for IT professionals. The percent of annual increases of salary declined from 11.6 percent in December 2000 to just 7 percent last year, according to a salary report […]

Two years ago, IT vendors and other proponents of the controversial H-1B visa program were generating about as much sound and fury as a raging storm on the high seas. Lobbying groups such as TechNet insisted the chronic IT skills shortage would sink the industry unless the annual numbers of H-1B visas—allowing foreign workers to […]

Claiming that the H-1B visa program has “proven to be abusive of domestic workers in several ways,” the Communications Workers of America union has passed a resolution condemning program abuses and called for the programs immediate repeal. The CWA has had reservations about the visa program in past years, union officials said, but the straw […]

It may sound like blatant sucking up, but it must be said: Most eWeek print subscribers are simply light years ahead of the “security? Huh? Whats that?” technology sophistication reflected in “Safety Net.” Just scanning the illustrations should warn off most (serious, experienced) IT people. Take Figure 7.1, in Chapter 7, titled Reducing Denial of […]

Many people would see a one-year, minimum-wage, entry-level network support apprenticeship as a job from hell. To Shellie Chambers, its a gift from heaven. Chambers, now in rehab, has been plagued by drug addiction for the past 28 years, the last eight of which she spent working in a dry-cleaning business. Chambers escape from all […]

For the third month in a row, application programmer/analyst was the most popular job title posted last month on IT job board Dice.com. There were 5,389 application programmer/analyst jobs listed as of May 31, according to Dice Inc.s monthly Dice Report. Top technical skills listed in ads were: C++, at 5,876 listings; Oracle, at 4,354; […]

Until recently, Microsoft Corp.s attitude toward certifications for its platforms and technologies felt to many IT professionals more like a love-em-and-leave-em fling than a long-term relationship. IT professionals could cry all they wanted over the Redmond, Wash., companys penchant for decertifying old designations to no avail: When the certifications and the technologies got old, they […]

Sixteen percent of CIOs say they expect to increase hiring of IT professionals in the third quarter, according to a national poll conducted by Menlo Park, Calif., IT recruiting firm RHI Consulting. Of 1,400 CIOs surveyed, 80 percent said they expect no change in IT hiring, while 3 percent said they expect to cut the […]