January 12th, 2009
Will it be impossible to change jobs this year?
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Career Builder said last week that nearly one-in-five workers plan to change jobs in 2009, a percentage unchanged from the year. The lack of variation surprised me. I would expect that being in the early party of what threatens to be a drawn-out recession would make people feel too conservative to change jobs. How do you know that your new company is in good financial health? How can you put yourself at risk, as the newbie, to be the first laid off if things go south?
I pitched the question to a few recruiters and — not surprisingly, seeing as it is their line of work — most of them felt that it is possible to land new jobs during a recession, but that it’s on job-seekers to adapt their approach.
Don’t assume there are no good jobs out there
Even though fewer people are being hired, recruiters were quick to note that they are being hired for jobs that count.
“Obviously, a lot of people go by the theory that you should keep your job while you can and do everything in your power to not get laid off,” said Greg Gary, managing director of Technisource, Spherion’s technology division. “But the reality is that because we’re in a recession, if a company is offering a job, it’s not a ‘want’ job, it’s a ‘need’ job. And if they need that job filled, you have a lot of power when you’re negotiating.”
Don’t quit your day job
Not quitting one job before you land the next one is age-old advice. But it would be all the more shortsighted to do so when job opportunities are so sparse.
“With any job search it is always best to seek a new position while you still have your current one. I would advise against leaving a position until another opportunity is solidly within one’s grasp,” said Casey Manning, a San Francisco-based IT recruiter.
December 30th, 2008
How to be a better techie in 2009
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| In 2009, this could be you. |
… Cure cancer, run that three-minute mile, save the whales… remember when your New Years Resolutions were downright triumphant? These days, they sound a whole lot more sober: “I hope I’ll have a job in January,” said one reader. “Contract work with no benefits is all I see out there,” commented another. World peace, anyone?
Yet the Web is full of advice for IT professionals on how they can be become better, more hireable pros. Not all of it is realistic, though it sure beats “cross your fingers and hope your job is still there after vacation”. Here are some of my favorites, and the things I would bank on getting you the furthest in the new year.
1. Pay attention to where the hiring is.
We all get caught up in our work. We all bear down for months and even years at a time on one all-encompassing project or another — this is a good thing — but the danger is in looking up and seeing that the field around you has changed. Keeping your eye on the “prize” so to speak — where the hiring is still taking place, even in a downturn — is essential for continued career success.
So where is this mythical hiring surge? It depends on who you ask, of course. Some people, such as Read Write Web’s Jobwire, point to the growing use of community managers and new media specialists and that developers are still being hired at twice the pace of sales and marketing folks. Others put their money on SAP, .Net and help desk support. But all agree that even in a downturn, there will be small pockets of growth.
2. Keep your skills current.
Advising tech pros to keep their skills current may be advice as old as time, but it doesn’t change the fact that if you’re still boasting skills at the top of your IT resume that haven’t been a central focus of enterprise organizations in years, or worse, a decade, you’re going to have a harder time selling yourself for a promotion or to a new company.
It’s not something to put off, either. “Any IT Pro knows that keeping up with the latest technology is a career key. Make it easy on yourself by reading technology news and subscribing to various newsletters and technology magazines. If you keep up consistently, you can’t be overwhelmed by falling behind,” explained Kristin Clifford at CompTIA.
3. Be a documenting fiend.
Most IT departments are a place where the cowboys still roam — the “cowboy” being the guy that everyone in the department depends on because he or she knows how to run things. Productivity can hinge on them, and dangerously so.
But this is now an age of standardized processes — things like CMMI and ITIL are more popular than ever — and documentation is at the core of this. Being someone who is organized and keeps track of what they’ve done, even if your boss doesn’t require it, will mean that you can always reference your work so that your successes can be repeatable. If this is where IT is going, you want to be there first. Heck, you might even like it.
December 22nd, 2008
The sweet lure of tomorrow
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| Do you feel like this when you get back from a holiday break? |
Just sending out your holiday cards today? Rushing to get gifts you’ll need to distribute in 48 hours? Frantically filing your 2008 expense reports, due last Friday? Don’t worry, you’re in good company. Because I meant to discuss this topic with you last week, and then earlier this week, and then yesterday but you see, if there were a Patron Saint of Procrastination, I may indeed be deified.
Procrastination rarely fits a learning curve — even if putting things off has gotten you in trouble at work, killed your productivity or caused all sorts of harried messes, odds are, you haven’t learned your lesson or sworn off the phrase “I’ll do it tomorrow.”
Creating this psychological distance is at the heart of procrastination but what is less understood is why — why put off starting a diet or workout regime until January 2? Why let the inbox pile up only to feel overwhelmed every time you look at it? Why bear down on your job responsibilities and start pushing for that promotion after your vacation?
An international team of psychologists began exploring these questions, wanting to see if there was a link between how we think about a task and our tendency to postpone it, and their preliminary findings were reported in the December issue of Psychological Science. What they found was that people who were primed to think about tasks in a concrete manner (i.e. “First I’ll delete spam and newsletters, then respond to yes or no questions first…” versus “How did this inbox get so bad? How will I ever get through this?”), were much less likely to put them off. Those primed to think in vague terms about the tasks they had ahead rarely got to them.
December 10th, 2008
The steep price of good technology
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| Netflix says that Silverlight was too good for some technical specialists own good. |
If you’ve been in the technology field for long enough, and (hopefully) survived enough rounds of layoffs, by now you’ve probably heard every reason in the book that an organization has had to eliminate jobs: They were bought by another company and there were departmental redundancies. They can get the work done in India/China/[Insert Your Outsourcing Destination Here] for half the price. The recession has affected their bottom line and they need to make across-the-board cuts. They’ve decided to discontinue your project.
[My goodness, that there is a depressing list.]
But today I read a new one: the technology, you see, it is too good. It doesn’t break as much. They don’t need as many techies to maintain it. In short, they may need less of you.
This was the case with Netflix, which announced in a Dec. 7 blog entry that it would be eliminating the positions of 50 technical specialists. The reason? “We just don’t have the technical specialist work for them to do in Customer Service because of the improvements in our streaming player,” said VP of Corporate Communications, Steve Swasey.
December 3rd, 2008
Nobody works for a dollar
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| Executive salaries, plus or minus a few jets. |
Blasting across the television screen and into my living room last night was a headline that never fails to drive me batty: Execs Say They’ll Accept $1 Salary.
In this case, the self-sacrificing, willing paupers were the CEOs of the three biggest auto-makers on the occasion of their $34 billion bailouts, vowing to sweeten the deal for taxpayers by sacrificing their yearly millions.
Except, none of these boldface names actually work for a dollar. Not former Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, not Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, nor its CEO, Eric Schmidt. Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs doesn’t work for 100 pennies a year either, and neither do the execs of Capital One or Pixar, all who have been the cause for previous “Works for Pennies!” headlines.
One dollar salaries are a PR move: a message to shareholders, employees and taxpayers that the bosses care, and are doing everything in their power to get the company out of the mess they’ve overseen, even sacrificing their own bottom line to save the company. They’re symbolic gestures, kind of like arriving for their meeting on Capitol Hill in hybrid cars after being chastised for arriving at the previous meeting in private jets. They’re no more retiring their private jets than they will be opening cans of soup for dinner should the bailout meet approval.
December 1st, 2008
The most slacking-est time of the year
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| Is this what your office looks like from November to January? |
Statistically speaking, you’re not doing any work today — or so poll after poll out this time of year about “lost productivity hours” and “distracted workers” claims.
You probably won’t work for the rest of the week, either and you didn’t last week, when half your office was out for Thanksgiving and you likely didn’t do a lick of work after Tuesday afternoon. Next week, when the days until Santa are down to the mere teens, you’re probably not going to be focused on the daily grind either. And the week after that, you’ll likely already be on vacation and probably won’t be back until January, when you’ll start focusing on your MLK Birthday ski weekend.
Ah, it’s the most wonderful time of the year, indeed! But here is what the curmudgeons are saying:
- Shop.org, a division of the National Retail Federation, says 84.6 million U.S. consumers planned to shop via their home or workplace Internet connections today, also known as Cyber Monday.
- ComScore, a marketing research firm, says that online spending numbers on Green Monday, a term coined by eBay for the second Monday in a December, trumps both Black Friday and Cyber Monday, at $881 million versus $430 and $610 million respectively.
- CareerBuilder.com warns that workplace productivity will be impacted throughout the holiday season. Of those who plan to holiday shop online this season while at work, 43 percent of workers anticipate they would spend more than one hour, 23 percent said they would spend two hours or more and 13 percent said they’d spend spend three hours or more doing so.
November 13th, 2008
'The devil you know' keeps worried workers in place
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| The comfort of the familiar trumps the fear of uncertain economic conditions, say workers. |
So, let’s say that you’re one of the lucky ones who slip out from under the economic downturn’s merciless grip, and you get to keep your job. Aside from keeping your head down and by all means, not audibly cheering your good fortune, what do you do?
While it is is of course a “gift” to “have a job at all” (as others will be sure to tell you), office life for those saved by the axe can be anything but a relief. There is a bigger work burden for each employee, who must then cover for a position or two that has been lost and morale takes a hit as the unsettled feeling about one’s job security doesn’t leave when the last pink slip is distributed.
There is more career conservativeness. Is this the time to job hunt, what with the job market flooded with established applicants with bad luck? Probably not, most workers rationalize, and choose to stay where they are.
If you’re one of these people, a new survey finds that you’re anything but alone. Nearly two-thirds of U.S. middle managers said that the economy was having a negative impact on their work environments, according to the survey released today by Accenture, a management consultancy. And despite the fact that more than half (53 percent) said that they were dissatisfied or only somewhat satisfied with their jobs, only 13 percent said they were actively looking for a new job. Nearly half (46 percent) felt that taking a new job in the current economic environment was risky.
There is good reason to be cautious, too, as it is hard to fully know the financial health of a company you may be considering jumping ship to. When layoffs come around, it is usually the newest employees who are given the boot, putting these professionals in exactly the place they were trying to avoid.
So what can be done? Accenture feels that employers whose ranks are filled with employees worried about their job security should do what they can to reassure them, and to help them cope, be it through opportunities for telecommuting, four-day work weeks or transportation subsidies. But if there is one thing for certain, it is that most employees are too unwilling to make waves right now to ask for these things themselves.
November 10th, 2008
Is there a better way to be handed a pink slip?
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| Sadly, we’re talking about the other kind of pink slip. |
I know what you’re probably thinking: What a ridiculous question. There is no gentle way to hand out pink slip. There is no way to be told that “your services are no longer needed” but “here is the number to our local unemployment office” and/or “an explanation of why we won’t be offering severance packages this round” that doesn’t sting. Want to do it better? Don’t do it at all.
But, it is hard to argue that there aren’t better and worse ways to break bad news. Countless layoff horror stories abound– from IMs to being informed by security that you are just a “visitor” now and disabled network connections–suggesting that even the so-called smartest companies could use a little tutorial in how to break bad news with respect and tact.
Jason Calcanis, on the day his company, Mahalo, shed 10 percent of their staff, shared lessons he’d learned laying off employees with TechCrunch.
1. Don’t spread layoffs over multiple rounds: Rounds of layoffs is a “horrible idea”, says Calcanis, because it creates massive fear and uncertainty inside of your organization.
2. Lay people off in a group, not individually: Calcanis found that telling people one-by-one was not more humane.
3. Don’t sugarcoat the rationale: Be 100 percent honest and upfront about why you chose to keep some people and not others.
4. Cutting jobs is better than cutting salaries: Rather than angering everyone in the organization by hurting all of their bottom lines, cut a few salaries altogether and leave the people you want to keep as happy as possible.
Read the rest of this entry »
October 31st, 2008
My Awesome IT Job: Enterprise Architect, IBM
Hey, we all complain about work from time to time; we’ve all had lousy jobs. But before you call it a day and head off to the support group that meets at the bar, here are a few words from an IT pro that loves their work.
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Name: Martine Combes
Location: Paris, La Defense - France
Profession and specialization: I am Enterprise Architect in IBM and recertified Consulting IT specialist in Business Analysis. I am reporting to the IBM CIO organisation and I lead architecture in Europe. I have thirty years of experience in various domains, like project management, Business Architecture and implementations of SAP and CRM Siebel.
Hobby: I have the chance to live in Paris that I love. I like to stroll in Paris streets, comparing old Paris from past pictures with the modern Paris, taking photographs on my turn; Paris streets are a changing scenery across the centuries. I also read books where I can discover and learn about the History and stories of these different places, and I love visiting the antiques to unearth old books. There is also a literary geography provided by novels where we can discover streets and quarters as described by great novelists. This is this secret and ghost Paris that I either physically discover or virtually across old picture and novel pages. I am just at the starting point of assembling my personal discovery in a book.
Last book read: Paris: The Secret History, by Andrew Hussey
Latest accomplishment: Being part of the IBM CIO organization, I am involved in internal large initiatives of Business Transformation and IT programs at the global level. This includes participation to the definition of the strategic enterprise architecture, building the transition architecture at global and geography/ Europe levels, performing architecture reviews with teams of architects and executives. Within a large company, application architecture tend to be complex, because of the weight of the history and legacy applications that were developed to support a specific process and specific set of offerings.
Toughest technology lesson learned: Architecture is one thing, delivery is another thing. You can design wonderful architecture on the paper, but which can reveal at the end quite challenging and very expensive to execute. …It is very easy to become overwhelmed by complexity and it is very difficult to maintain simplicity, especially when the scope is large, the number of team members is high. So better to have a simple architecture from the start, clearly showing the benefits for the Business.
Advice to an up-and-comer:
Read the rest of this entry »
October 24th, 2008
No rest for the weary techie
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| Does your workload make you want to do this? |
The state of the economy, and the job market that it is dragging down with it, may or may not have affected you yet. Your company may be mired in whatever language they use for layoffs, cutbacks, downsizings, rollbacks or “how about we all use a few less paper clips this month?” or it may be skirting by, fingers crossed, hoping the credit crisis doesn’t swoop down and make an example of it. (And if you’re in that camp, let us all hope that it stays that way)
But one thing that is abundantly clear is that whether your employment situation makes it out of this recession intact, your nerves may not. A little-discussed sobering truth about surving a round of layoffs is that your workload can often double or triple, leaving the consolation prize of “But at least you still have a job!” that much harder of a pill to swallow.
A new survey of CIOs illustrates this point, wherein more than one-third (36 percent) said rising workloads were the greatest source of stress for their teams. And although “too much work to do” may sounds like a relatively good problem in light of the current economy, “overstressed IT workers are unlikely to perform at their best. The pressure of mounting workloads, combined with ever-evolving technologies and office politics, can quickly erode morale and adversely affect productivity,” explained Katherine Spencer Lee, executive director of Robert Half Technology, the IT staffing firm that published the study.
Of course, these results should be little surprise to IT workers feeling the brunt of the rising workloads, especially in light of dialed-back IT budgets and frozen hiring plans. Let us only hope that stress will not be so much that we’ll have a whole ‘nother batch of cracked technology professionals…
How about you? Have you been stressed by an increased workload as a result of money problems at your company?
Deb Perelman is a journalist in New York City with a focus on tech and the daily grind. See her full profile and disclosure of her industry affiliations.
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