Careers: Features

As oil prices continue to fluctuate, the economy flounders and the pressure is on to slow global warming, both public- and private-sector organizations are turning to alternative work schedules such as telecommuting, flex time and four-day workweeks to ease the pain to their bottom lines, their employees' wallets and the environment.

Even in the nuts-and-bolts world of tech execs, choosing a right-hand man (or woman, of course) can be as politically challenging as anything going on in the halls of Washington, D.C.

Let's say you're a young IT manager, in your 20s, 30s or even early 40s. It's not unheard of for you to put in 10-hour workdays in front of your computer, or some other user's.

The collapse of Wall Street may help make computer science and IT careers attractive to students who abandoned these fields in droves after the pop of the last big bubble, the dot-com bust of 2001.

It was 9:30 on the morning of March 4, 2002, and something was terribly wrong at the offices of PaineWebber UBS. Computers in branches all over the country began showing disc errors. A logic bomb buried deep within the machines had wiped their hard drives clean, preventing 17,000 brokers from making trades.

Senior management prizes one simple attribute: predictability. Whether they communicate this value clearly or not, predictability can be more important to your bosses than cost. Trust emerges from the intuitive belief that things are under control. Things are not under control if delivery cannot be predicted accurately.

If you're a nice person, you probably think that being nice works to your advantage in the office. After all, how could it be any other way? Genuinely nice people are well liked. They're generally easy to work with. They care about others and tend to have good values. In a fair and just world, that sort of behavior should be rewarded. Right?

If you work in data center operations, at the help desk of an IT call center, or as a programmer for an aging coding language like COBOL, it might be time to consider a new career path, according to a former Forrester Research analyst.

A look at this year's job cutbacks at HP, Dell, Sun and other top technology companies

Like most generations before it, Generation Y -- those born roughly between 1982 and 2002 -- has been stereotyped based on a cultural change identified with its era. In this case, the group is bound by a hunger to use the latest technologies to communicate.

A new report warns that the cost from lost productivity at work related to the new NFL season could add up to US$10.5 billion. And there we were, thinking the biggest waste of time at work came from fielding an endless stream of IT industry reports?