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Older IT Workers Becoming Hot Commodity As companies begin to think of hiring again, they're more apt to be looking for experience over youth. Although job search time has fallen for all age groups since the fourth quarter of 2002, the drop in over-50 search times was much steeper, dropping 19 percent from 4.9 months in the fourth quarter last year to 4.0 months at the end of the third quarter this year. (Oct. 2003 Datamation)
Secrets to Managing Techies IT employees don't respond well to a leadership style based on power and control. They have little tolerance for anyone who doesn't understand what they do. If they think you are technology-stupid and they can buffalo you, they will. (Oct. 2003 CIO)
Acquiring the proper tools for the trade Today we are not suffering from an absence of technical skills, although there is some shortfall in the mainframe and midrange skills-base. We are experiencing a shortfall in business skills. There have been a lot of redundancies in IT and I personally know of around 20 people who are more than adequately qualified for managerial and business oriented positions but they are turning down jobs. (Sep. 2003 MIS)
Robert Reich: Jobless in America What's to stop all IT work from moving abroad, eventually? First the risk. Second is quality control. Third is the competitive pressure for continuous innovation. American companies will also need to invest more in developing the skills of their IT workers, which requires more than just training in the latest computer language. (Sep. 2003 CIO)
End of IT jobs decline? For the first time since 2000, the number of job advertisements placed by employers seeking IT staff has begun to rise. The financial sector is hiring significantly more IT staff, with advertisements for permanent staff up by 10.5% and advertisements for contractors up by 30% this quarter. (Sep. 2003 ComputerWeekly)
Here in Body Only Employees suffering from warm-chair attrition have already left their jobs, at least mentally. Their physical departure only awaits the first uptick in the job market. For those IT departments that have already suffered layoffs, the first people out the door will be the folks with the most options — the best employees in your organization. (Aug. 2003 CIO)
How's the Team Doing? What do we do about people that disrupt and undermine? People that complain all of the time? People that have nothing to offer but bitterness, anger and jealousy? Ask your high performers who they avoid and why they avoid these people. (Aug. 2003 CIO Update)
Managing 'geeks': unconventional tips and techniques Most ideas about leadership are universalistic, making no distinction between leading a software development project and leading a nation into war. Power is central to most ideas about management, but when dealing with geeks, it will lead you astray. When geeks perceive that someone is ineffective, they have a tendency to dismiss that person completely. (Jul. 2003 ZDNet)
Computing's dying breed The T-Rex mainframe will be used by some customers to replace several mainframes with just one system, thus helping to reduce the number of mainframe administrators needed. IBM has done a lot to promote the use of Linux on the mainframe in universities, which has been a very clever move, because it means that there are young mainframe IT professionals coming into the workforce. (May 2003 Financial Times)
Snooping, by Hook or by Crook During the technology boom, one early morning flight from Austin to San Jose earned the nickname the nerd bird. Shuttling businesspeople from one high-tech center to another, that flight became a great place for competitive intelligence professionals, who might overhear useful discussions among coworkers talking loud enough to be heard over air vents and engine roar, perhaps behind a shoulder-surfable PowerPoint presentation or financial spreadsheet. (May 2003 CSO)
IT workers' value sliding Management positions increased from 8 percent in 1996 to 17 percent in 2003, while positions in application development fell from 39 percent in 1996 to 24 percent in 2003. A further worrying trend for IT workers is the declining importance IT management is placing on investing in their staff. Retraining and recruiting IT staff fell from 15th position in 2002 to 22nd position in 2003. Reskilling staff fell from 12th position in 2002 to 16th position in 2003. (Apr. 2003 ZDNet)
Taking A Judicious Approach to Outsourcing For Value The recent cancellation of a project to outsource mainframe operations, must have sent quite a shock through the outsourcing community. The project was estimated to be worth £100M ($158M) a year and would have involved the transfer of around 1,000 staff from the IT division. (Apr. 2003 IT-Director)
The Sleeping Bag Solution Technology innovation often goes hand in hand with destabilization. If firefighting has become your organization's daily grind, you should consider assembling your top team and using a model to devise your own outage handling strategy. All you need is an outage response team, some preparation measures and processes, and some comfortable sleeping bags! (Apr. 2003 Intelligent Enterprise)
Not Just a User, a Customer! I asked the candidate what his ideal job would be. He replied, "I would love to manage a data center with hundreds of machines and no people. People just get in the way when I am managing machines." Needless to say, he did not get the job! (Mar. 2003 Datamation)
When Managing, One Size Does Not Fit All For several reasons, it's important that managers of technical people focus on what they want their people to accomplish and not tell them how to accomplish it specifically. One reason is what geeks would call micromanagement. It offends the nature of technical people as a personality type. Geeks have a very strong sense of resisting hierarchy. (Mar. 2003 Optimize)
IT Departments under Stress CIOs are most concerned about demanding workloads and preventing burn-out (75%), retaining key IT skill sets (58%) and low morale/motivating staff (54%). Half (50%) of those surveyed described the stress level among their IT staff as high to very high. (Jan. 2003 CIO)
Productivity per employee at top Indian IT firms lower Productivity per employee at India's celebrity companies is almost a factor of 10 lower than some top IT companies elsewhere in the world. (Jan. 2003 Economic Times of India)
Changing the culture at IBM These days, Gerstner sees the basis of IBM's subsequent transformation as wholly cultural. There was the IBM culture of crisp white shirts, the culture of hordes of administrative assistants, and the culture, most debilitating, of the individual with a capital "I," of me-first for every employee. (Dec. 2002 CNET news)
Are Your Older Systems Slowing You Down? Problems arise when the people who create and update legacy systems move on, and the system becomes a mystery. Agile companies recognize the value of their legacy systems, but they also recognize the value of the people who keep these systems viable. The difference between successful and unsuccessful companies is they retain the intelligence about the systems they are running every day. (Dec. 2002 CIO Insight)
IT's generation Gap When the economy was hot, companies went after the young, hungry guys. Now more companies are seeking folks who have proven experience. It's easier to teach older staffers about new technologies than it is to teach young arrivals about the business. (Sep. 2002 InformationWeek)
The folly of forced rankings It is one thing to evaluate the results of sales professionals; it is quite another to measure the performance of knowledge workers who operate in teams to produce such hard-to-measure output as software code. Employees who compete with one another for ratings are much less likely to help one another, train one another, share information and operate as an effective team. (Aug. 2002 CNET News)
Spontaneous Order Geeks often don't want leaders, and some geeks are borderline sociopaths. A 1970s survey rated employees for certain psychological characteristics such as the need for approval and the need for social interaction. Most were at 4, 5, or 6, as expected, but the computer department personnel tested out at 2 on the need for social interactions. A score of 1 would be a serious mental case. (Dec. 2001 Intelligent Enterprise)
You manage things; you lead people. (Grace Hopper)