January 28, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Job hunt 2.0: Get paid to be interviewed
IT workers with one eye on the want ads now have a means for making their passive job search lucrative -- by getting paid to interview with potential poaching organizations.
Seeking to provide employers with improved hiring options, startup NotchUp offers passive job-seekers the ability to set their own headhunting price at which they would agree to be interviewed.
The proposed online recruitment marketplace allows individuals to create a profile, tap the NotchUp calculator to evaluate the marketability of their skills, and put their time up for auction to employers seeking a less work-desperate pool of applicants without tapping recruiters.
For the 41 percent of IT workers passively seeking a new gig, according to the InfoWorld Compensation Survey, NotchUp could very well be a hit. Rather than investing in pounding the pavement, they can simply sit back and wait for companies to pay them to talk new horizons.
The service is geared directly toward organizations strapped to fill key positions for want of highly qualified candidates, who are more often than not already under contract elsewhere. Given that the inability to fill open spots is this year's top staffing concern of IT organizations, according to the InfoWorld Compensation Survey, the marketplace, if successful, could prove worthwhile for hiring managers.
Similar to eBay and other such reputation-enabled marketplaces, NotchUp offers feedback capabilities to ensure hiring organizations that those cashing in on their potential interview bid will in fact be seriously open to new opportunities when talked to. The service provides granular candidate search capabilities and, according to the Web site, a 100 percent money back guarantee on all interviews.
For those putting their chops up for interview auction, the service includes privacy assurances. Prospective employers must make an offer to interview you before your contact details are revealed. More to the point, the system blocks your profile from your current employer, allowing you to sniff out new opportunities on the DL.
Additional resources:
• Take home more tech pay in 2008
• 2007 InfoWorld Compensation Survey: Personal gains and personnel woes
• 2007 InfoWorld Compensation Survey: By the numbers
• 20 ways to get promoted in the tech industry
• IT's seven deadly career sins
Posted by Jason Snyder on January 28, 2008 01:14 PM
January 10, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Application developers and project managers top the list of sought-out IT pros, according to an Atlantic Associates' survey, which also noted that, when it comes to managing techies, folks are not fully psyched to wrangle work out of so-called "millennials," the generation currently entering the workforce, those aged 18 to 31.
The survey, which polled more than 100 Massachusetts executives, noted an expected pay hike for both certified and non-certified IT pros, with those bearing credentials having a two-in-three shot at grabbing more pay in the coming year and 45 percent of non-certs taking home more.
The upbeat outlook on pay echoes the findings of the 2007 InfoWorld Compensation Survey, providing further creedence that IT skills remain valuable despite increased reliance on outsourcing and offshoring.
[ For a granular look at compensation trends, see: 2007 InfoWorld Compensation Survey: Personal gains and personnel woes and 2007 InfoWorld Compensation Survey: By the numbers ]
Nearly one in three of the executives surveyed expressed a serious need for application developers, while more than a quarter lacked the project management personnel required to get out in front of mounting tech requirements.
But for those young among you looking to capitalize on the IT job market, take heed: Management may fear the overhead in bringing you on board, as executives were three times as likely to label "millennials" difficult to manage than they were to cite Generation Xers as a headache.
Often perceived as a generation in need of coddling, responsive only to pats on the back, rec time, and "employee of the day" accolades, those entering the workforce face an uphill battle proving their chops in IT. More than one in two executives cited those between 18 and 31 as the most difficult employees to manage.
Manageability aside, computing education has been taking flak as of late when it comes to preparing students for careers in IT. And much is being made of the sense that there is a shortage of qualified candidates to fill open IT positions. Some, however, contend that the IT talent "shortage" is in fact a failure of management. Debate aside, managers remain ultimately in control of hiring, and so the fact that 22 percent of managers surveyed by Atlantic Associates list the talent gap as their primary staffing challenge for 2008 make a packed résumé a serious advantage-maker for those resolved to make more dough this year. More to the point, two in three executives said finding qualified candidates is harder today than a year ago.
[ For tips on capitalizing on the IT job market, see Take home more tech pay in 2008 ]
Yet underqualified candidates took the No. 2 spot of staffing challenges among polled executives. No. 1 was retaining existing staff, as many managers are dealing with the fallout of a thawed IT job market. In fact, 32 percent of respondents noted an increase in voluntary turnover in the past 12 months, while 11 percent saw a decrease in churn.
Additional resources:
• Take home more tech pay in 2008
• 2007 InfoWorld Compensation Survey: Personal gains and personnel woes
• 2007 InfoWorld Compensation Survey: By the numbers
• 20 ways to get promoted in the tech industry
• IT's seven deadly career sins
Posted by Jason Snyder on January 10, 2008 01:08 PM
January 09, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Google employees trade on optimism
A recently released study of trades undertaken in an internal predictive market in place at Google surfaced a quantifiable can-do spirit among the company's employees.
Analyzing the predictive market trading behavior of 1,463 participating Google employees from April 2005 to September 2007, Justin Wolfers and Eric Zitzewitz, economists at Wharton and Darmouth, respectively, along with Google economic analyst Bo Cowgill, found that "internal markets overpriced securities tied to optimistic outcomes by 10 percentage points."
Meaning, in essence, that participating Google employees were, on the whole, willing to pay a 10 percent premium to place a bet on success.
[ PDF download: "Using Prediction Markets to Track Information Flows: Evidence From Google" ]
Part of a larger trend attempting to glean insight from the wisdom of crowds, predictive markets allow participants to perform trading-style transactions on the outcome of various short- and long-range conjectures. Participants are given tokens -- in Google's case, "Goobles" -- to place bets. The flow of this currency is believe to provide a credible prediction engine for future events -- more accurate, some believe, than knowledge gleaned from polls and surveys. Much of this accuracy is attributed to the assurance of vested participation in the form of financial compensation for individual participants' predictive accuracy -- for Google, this took the form of a $10,000 prize budget pool per quarter.
[ For a deeper look at predictive markets and crowdsourcing, see "Mob wisdom means business" ]
Google's market, which the authors believe is the largest such company market in operation, has been up and running for four years. Similar markets are under way at Abbott Labs, Arcelor Mittal, Best Buy, Chrysler, Corning, EA, Eli Lilly, Frito Lay, GE, HP, Intel, InterContinental Hotels, Masterfoods, Microsoft, Motorola, Nokia, Pfizer, Qualcomm, Siemens, and TNT, according to the authors of the report.
Conjectures ran the gamut, from demand forecasting (number of Gmail users at the end of a particular quarter), performance (Google Talk quality rating), company news, industry news, decision markets (will users of feature A use feature B more), to plain-old fun (how many rotten tomatoes will Star Wars III get?).
In all, 270 such "markets" were opened at Google, each with between two and five bet outcomes.
Participants in the Google market, who were more likely to be programmers at the Mountain View campus, exhibited a bias toward outcomes linked to a positive outcome for Google. Moreover, the economists found a measurable correlation between bullish predictive market behavior the day after Google's actual stock price experienced a better-than-average boost.
According to the economists, such optimism is akin to what is known as the "entrepreneur's curse," in which "firms are started by those most overly optimistic about their prospects." Such optimism, the authors conjecture, is desirable for leaders and employees in such environments, as it generates motivation, leads to risk-taking, and "makes employees cheaper to compensate with stock options."
Optimism, according to the study, was correlated most prominantly with more recent hires, as experienced employees tended to be less likely to overspend on optimistic outcomes.
Also of note from the study was a correlation of like-mindedness with physical proximity, as strong correlations in trading were found among employees with 10 to 20 feet of one another in a shared office setting, suggesting that being on the same page means being in the same environs.
Moreover, trading correlations were also found among employees sharing the same "three-levels-below-SVP" manager, which at Google, usually means working on the same broad set of products, according to the authors of the report.
Analysis of holdings and trading activities is used to determine how an organization processes information.
Interestingly, the authors did not find friendship to be a strong correlation factor in Google's predictive market. Apparently, work-farm architecture and workforce organization have a demonstrable effect on siloing information.
Organizations looking to foster cross-departmental collaboration, take note.
Posted by Jason Snyder on January 9, 2008 01:41 PM
June 08, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Craigslist poster sticks it to offshoring "douchebag"
Tall tale or no, a vitriol-laden Craiglist post in which a disgruntled programmer confesses to sabotaging production code in retaliation for what s/he perceives to be a management-orchestrated movement of jobs to India provides for deeply entertaining reading if not further illumination of mounting tensions in the American IT workplace as the immigration reform bill continues to be debated on the Senate floor.
[Added after original post: Craigslist has since taken down the original post. kevsedg at reddit has posted it verbatim here.]
In a narrative worthy of InfoWorld's popular More Stupider User Tricks or Off the Record series, Craiglist poster pers-347610578@craigslist.org describes a salacious revenge story wherein training one's Indian replacement transforms into an opportunity to stick it to the man by way of error introduction and altered passwords on the eve of jumping ship for another employer.
All hope for sabotage circumvention rests on "Pradeep," the anonymous poster's aforementioned replacement-in-training. The "$11k/year" L2 visa holder has until next week to complete pers-347610578@craigslist.org's introduced-error Easter egg hunt and save his sponsor company's bottom line. Certainly, "douchebag" -- the poster's now former boss -- hopes "Pradeep" is up to the task, as some of the commenters over at reddit suggest he likely is. And with three visa-holding co-worker roommates to call on for input this weekend, "Pradeep" might just pull off what could assuredly amount to a Bollywood flipside of Office Space before returning to India to "get a 50% raise with all the American experience he got here," as the Craiglist poster him/herself puts it.
Riveting, yes, but the underlying sentiment is one that continues to plague the U.S. IT industry. In a sneak preview of statistics from our upcoming InfoWorld Compensation Survey, 23 percent of IT workers consider offshoring as a threat to their job security. Moreover, the trend of shipping jobs overseas remains ongoing, as 53 percent of companies will tap offshore resources in the next 12 months, up from 47 percent in 2006 and 39 percent in 2005.
Posted by Jason Snyder on June 8, 2007 11:40 AM
April 17, 2007 | Comments: (0)
An article in today's New York Times on the gender gap in computer science education further underscores the troubling trend of women opting out of IT as a career path, as reported by Carmen Noble in a recent InfoWorld feature.
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Moreover, the article goes on to suggest that demand for computer scientists should increase in the coming years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Jan Cuny, who directs a National Science Foundation program to broaden participation in computer scientist, presents one take on the downside of the gender gap in tech education as relates to the increasing demand for computer scientists in the workforce:
"If you look at the demographics of the country, if we are not going to get our new professionals from women and minorities and persons with disabilities, we are not going to have enough."
Another problem with imbalance in the IT workforce, as Maggie Biggs assesses in her recent analysis of the trend, is that "today's global IT envrionment requires an organizational chart rife with intangibles -- not just a checklist of technical skills. And as the tenets of Web 2.0 continue to take hold, women will be an increasingly vital component of any winning IT strategy, as they tend to be effective communicators who thrive in highly distributed and collaborative environments."
Activism at the educational level is vital, as experts quoted in the Times article advocate. Companies are also getting into the education activism mix. For example, IBM and Cisco have launched highly successful initiatives aimed at inspiring girls and young women to take an interest in IT. And when it comes to keeping women in the IT workforce, many women tech leaders stress the ongoing importance of on-job mentoring.
The competition for bright minds among career tracks is stiff. And drawing from a smaller applicant pool will prove problematic for IT's long-term prospects. Especially as some feel the trend of women opting out of computing careers may in fact signal a greater migration away from IT among men in the future. As the Times article states:
"Women are the canaries in the coal mine," Lenore Blum, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, told an audience at Harvard University in March, in a talk on this "crisis" in computer science. Factors driving women away will eventually drive men away as well, she and others say.
Posted by Jason Snyder on April 17, 2007 11:43 AM
March 26, 2007 | Comments: (0)
InfoWorld folds print mag to focus on online and events
Yes, the rumors are true. As of April 2, 2007, InfoWorld is discontinuing its print component. No more printing on dead trees, no more glossy covers, no more supporting the US Post Office in its rush to get thousands of inky copies on subscribers' desks by Monday morning (or thereabouts). The issue that many of you will receive in your physical mailbox next week -- vol. 29, issue 14 -- will be the last one in InfoWorld's storied 29-year history.
But let me dispel any other rumors. InfoWorld is not dead. We're not going anywhere. We are merely embracing a more efficient delivery mechanism --the Web -- at InfoWorld.com. You can still get all the news coverage, reviews, analysis, opinion, and commentary that InfoWorld is known for. You'll just have to access it in a browser (or RSS reader) -- something more than a million of you already do every month.
Frankly, the editorial staff foresaw the demise of print from a long way off and began making preparations for that inevitable day. Now that it is here, InfoWorld is well positioned to serve our readers, both through InfoWorld.com and our burgeoning events business. Keep in mind that for several years now, we have been posting all of the magazine's content online first, sometimes as early as six days before the print issue arrived anywhere. But that content was just the tip of the iceberg. In addition to the articles we had prepared for print, our staff and contributors create and post the equivalent of a full magazine online every day, featuring 25 blogs, bundles of daily online-only news stories, columns, articles, regular videos, slideshows, and podcasts. The limited confines of a print magazine, with 32 pages of editorial content each week, simply couldn't begin to address the needs of an information-hungry IT audience.
Now, I don't want to sound glib about print's demise. I've worked on print publications for nearly 30 years, and I enjoy the physical feel of a magazine, its portability, the way you can spread it out in your lap and dog ear pages for future visits. Online bookmarks may be more efficient, site searches retrieve information faster, but it's hard to beat a magazine for its tactility and visceral thrill. On a personal note, I'll miss creating covers, working with my art director and other editors to develop a concept, then reviewing the sketches and tweaking until everything works. And it's hard to imagine I'll never have to create another InfoWorld "coverline" -- the only-in-magazine-style type that graces each cover, combining equal parts information and tease. For an editor, few jobs are as satisfying, especially when the finished product arrives, all shiny and new.
InfoWorld, though, is a for-profit business not unlike the businesses many of you run or work for. I am an editor, which means I answer to the readers, not the advertisers. That will never change. Nonetheless, I also know how the business works, or in some cases, doesn't work. The ad-driven economic model that supported print magazines for years (publishers deliver a steady stream of highly qualified readers, and advertisers pay for the privilege of putting ads in front of them) is unraveling. Given the alternative, advertisers want more immediate gratification and measureable results than print can afford them. On the Web, they can know who and how many people are viewing their message; they can target specific audiences and know exactly what they are getting. They can engage potential customers directly in ways print magazines never allowed. There's no more guesswork.
And what if advertisers want even more intimate face-to-face contact? They can sign on as sponsors for events, which puts them in front of several hundred influential, spectacularly targeted attendees. InfoWorld.com is benefiting greatly from this business shift; InfoWorld Events is also prospering. InfoWorld print simply couldn't keep up with the rest of our product line.
So this is publishing's immediate future, and I expect other trade publications will be following InfoWorld's lead soon enough. Some things shouldn't change, however: The basic principle of separation of church and state -- that advertisers must not influence what editors say, write, or cover -- is still sacrosanct. We remain committed to holding that line and serving our audience, whether they are readers, video viewers, podcast listeners, or conference attendees.
I'd like to make this more of a dialog than a soliloquy. So tell me what you think, or share any memories of InfoWorld print here. Let the conversation begin.
-- Steve Fox, Editor in Chief, InfoWorld
Posted by Steve Fox on March 26, 2007 06:00 AM
November 22, 2006 | Comments: (0)
As much as 84 per cent of professional IT workers will have to work for some or all of Thanksgiving this year, a poll of 500 business workers by IT hosting provider Intermedia.NET has found.
The study, sent to me with a plug for the group's hosted apps as way to give IT a break, "found that 28% of IT professionals will get no time off at all, or will have to work overtime to catch up after the break".
As well as being more hard-working, IT workers were found to be more honest than their non-IT office worker counterparts:--Only 6% of IT professionals will "pretend to work to avoid relatives”; 14% of office workers are planning to do the same.
--Only 7% of IT pros will use work as an excuse in some way, such as to avoid helping out in the kitchen.
--Only 9% of IT professionals will deliberately ignore all work calls and emails, compared to 19% of office workers.
OK, I am skeptical now. IT: Are you going to miss all or some of the holidays just to keep Exchange chugging? And for who? They'll all be chowing down.
Posted by Mike Barton on November 22, 2006 09:41 AM
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