James Maguire

Update: IT Salary Survey, January 2009 (gives comparative numbers between ’08 and ’09.) If recent salary figures are any indication, tech workers are whistling a happy tune. The Yoh Index of Technology Wages indicates that wages are the highest they’ve been since Yoh began monitoring in 2001. According to Yoh, which tracks the pay of […]

The statistics are bleak, but far from surprising. According to a new report, American businesses spend a whopping $712 per worker, per year, in the battle against spam. “This isn’t just a technology problem,” says Rebecca Wettemann, vice president at Massachusetts-based Nucleus Research, the firm that authored the report. Email has become such an integral […]

If you listen to the SOA vendors (or the research reports funded by SOA vendors) you would think that Service Oriented Architecture has swept the enterprise. Big companies across all sectors, we’re told, are building SOA infrastructure. Business analysts and tech departments are eagerly putting aside their historic enmity to discuss upcoming SOA projects. After […]

Any IT professional who’s had to deal with the intricacies of Service Oriented Architecture will see the humor in this video. “Greg the Architect – SOA This. SOA That.” This video was posted by SOA Now Journal, a publication of TIBCO Software. RELATED NEWS AND ANALYSIS Ethics and Artificial Intelligence: Driving Greater Equality FEATURE |  By James Maguire, […]

A quick glance at the layoff tracker reveals that IT layoffs are currently minimal – fortunately. Due to a healthy tech job market, not too many IT pros are handling the slings and arrows of layoff notices. But over the course of an IT career a layoff is far from unusual. Tech companies are notorious […]

You have to hand it to Novell: the Linux vendor knows how to piggyback on a popular ad campaign. The company’s pro-Linux parody of Apple’s “Mac vs. PC” ads not only co-opts a well known ad series (guaranteeing instant recognition), it scores major satiric points for the open source OS. But humor aside, the ads […]

That mid-level executive who walks out of corporate headquarters with a flash key that holds reams of sensitive data doesn’t feel like a hacker. But when – whoops – he leaves it on the kitchen table, your firewall has been compromised. And when it’s picked up by his teenage son, who inadvertently downloads it to […]

The battle lines are clearly drawn. On one side are IT employers, as exemplified by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates. Speaking before a Senate committee earlier this month, Gates said that America is facing a critical shortage of tech workers. He recommended boosting the number of H-1B visas to allow more foreign tech workers into the […]

Are you paid as much as your colleagues in equivalent tech jobs? More importantly, are you paid what you’re worth? The Payscale web site allows you to answer these questions in ways that early job data sources didn’t. In a new twist, the site’s information comes directly from workers, not from employers, headhunters or large […]

If you want to land a tech job in 2007, it helps to be in one of four hot areas: project management, security, IT architecture, and network management. On the other hand, those workers who do packaged app support and app maintenance may have a cloudier future: these tasks are being outsourced. Recent Tech Job […]