plus 2, Tech career news? We’re on the job - Marketwatch

Tech career news? We’re on the job - Marketwatch
Young workers' careers to carry lifelong scars of Great Recession - Miami Herald
N.J. career politician retires on day she qualifies for pension - NJ.com

Tech career news? We’re on the job - Marketwatch

Posted: 12 Nov 2010 01:53 PM PST

By John Shinal of FINS.com

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — We at FINS picked a good week to inaugurate this column on MarketWatch, given how much of the tech news this week was job news. Thank you Google. Thank you Cisco Systems.

But we're not publishing this column to rehash news you can get elsewhere on MarketWatch — or anywhere else. What we'll bring you instead is the best of the frontline reporting we do every week on FINS.com, the new tech careers Web site from The Wall Street Journal Digital Network. See the FINS site.

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Nobody covers the tech jobs beat and related trends as closely as we do. Five days a week, we talk to the CEOs and human resource VPs who are doing the hiring and firing at tech companies, large and small. We talk to the recruiters and headhunters who get paid to know — before anyone else — which companies have workers with one eye on their work and another on the exit door.

This is how we know that Twitter -— not Facebook — is the Silicon Valley start-up that has the most mojo right now among young engineers, developers and other tech talent on the hunt for a new challenge. One reason is Twitter's location in San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood, once again a start-up hotbed where workers can take a break by walking to a Giants game or dozens of great eateries. You can't do that at Facebook. See this story on how to get a job at Twitter.

Talking to start-ups is also how we learned that Groupon is arguably the fastest-growing U.S. company ever. We heard it weeks before others were writing about the Chicago start-up's stunning valuation. When we talked to their VP of HR, he was hiring so fast he couldn't even tell us how many employees the online coupon service had. Read about Groupon's incredible growth.

But we don't know everything, which is why we also scour the Web every day for the most important tech career news and package it into an easy-to-read newsletter.

Will the "News Beast" merger work?

The road to successful media mergers is littered with ones that have failed. So will this the Daily Beast-Newsweek marriage click? MarketWatch's Jon Friedman discusses on digits.

We think hiring and firing news is important, and not just for job seekers. The biggest expense is always the cost of labor, and the most important assets of any company — especially in technology — are the people who walk in and out the door every day. Check out FINS Morning Coffee.

When we do talk about the big-company news here, we'll give you a fresh angle. Like asking why Cisco Inc. /quotes/comstock/15*!csco/quotes/nls/csco (CSCO 20.15, -0.37, -1.80%) was ramping up hiring sales staff in the same quarter its orders were falling off a cliff. Or why Google Inc. /quotes/comstock/15*!goog/quotes/nls/goog (GOOG 603.29, -13.90, -2.25%) felt the need to give out massive raises right after its October stock surge guaranteed that most employee options were very much in the money. Read about Cisco's hiring next year.

See the story about Google's battle with Facebook.

To us, Cisco's move begs the question of why all those new sales people couldn't sell enough to meet Wall Street expectations. And Google's largess seemed one part generosity and one part desperation, from a company that's losing a lot of its vaunted brainpower to Twitter, Facebook and other startups. Those young companies can offer something Google no longer can — pre-IPO options. The Google raises might also end up retaining exactly the wrong kind of workers, given that gifted visionaries who create new products are not the kind of people who'll stay at a job that bores them for an extra twenty or thirty grand a year. Read more about Google vs. Facebook.

And here's a nice piece about why tech workers would even want to leave Google to begin with.

Beyond company news, we'll also keep you posted on the latest tech trends affecting the job market. Like why nearly all of the fastest-growing startups want engineers who can code in open source environments using Ruby on Rails, Hadoop, Python and other new programs. Open source is how companies like Eventbrite and Involver can release upgraded versions of their software every three months, instead of the years it takes Microsoft Corp. /quotes/comstock/15*!msft/quotes/nls/msft (MSFT 26.27, -0.41, -1.54%) or Oracle Corp. /quotes/comstock/15*!orcl/quotes/nls/orcl (ORCL 28.32, -0.25, -0.88%) to produce one. Read about how open source is the future of development.

Open source also explains why Google's Android platform will soon have more apps and developers than Apple Inc.'s /quotes/comstock/15*!aapl/quotes/nls/aapl (AAPL 308.03, -8.63, -2.72%) iPhone. The trends in smart phone software adoption don't lie. Now matter how many people Steve Jobs or Steve Ballmer lock in a room to code, in the long run they can't out-innovate the collective brainpower of open source.

What else? Tech salaries grew so fast in the Seattle region last year that nobody in the industry there noticed a recession. That could impact Microsoft and Amazon.com Inc. /quotes/comstock/15*!amzn/quotes/nls/amzn (AMZN 165.68, -4.69, -2.75%) . And 2009 salaries in Silicon Valley, which after two years is once again a net creator of jobs, grew even faster. Even so, a growing number of Silicon Valley companies are looking outside the region to hire. See this story about salary gains in Seattle.

And this one about salary gains in Silicon Valley.

Even so, neither of those job markets are as strong as the one in Austin, Texas, which is incubating so many fast-growing startups, like StoredIQ and HomeAway, that it will soon be known as much for its geeks as for its great blues guitarists. Read how the Austin area is booming and about how startups like StoredIQ and HomeAway are leading the way.

So look for us here every Friday. We're glad to have you with us.

John Shinal writes about tech-industry career and hiring trends for FINS, a service of The Wall Street Journal Digital Network.

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Young workers' careers to carry lifelong scars of Great Recession - Miami Herald

Posted: 12 Nov 2010 08:19 PM PST

WASHINGTON -- As the nation struggles with the aftermath of the Great Recession, few groups have suffered greater setbacks or face greater long-term damage than young Americans -- damage that could shadow their entire working lives.

Unemployment for 20- to 24-year-olds hit a record high of more than 17 percent earlier this year. Even for young adults with college degrees, the jobless rate has averaged 9.3 percent this year, double the figure for older graduates, according to the Labor Department.

Adding to the impact, surveys by the Pew Research Center indicate, a greater share of workers in their 20s lost hours or were cut down to part-time status than any other age group. And their incomes have fallen more sharply, even as they are far more likely than others to say they are working harder than ever.

``These are young workers just trying to establish a connection to work, and it will cause permanent damage to long-term pay. This crisis has the potential for scarring,'' said Ron Blackwell, chief economist at the AFL-CIO.

The effect of the recession is reflected in the fact that many young Americans who started out living independently are moving back home with their parents because they are unable to survive financially.

Also, new Census Bureau figures show that couples increasingly are postponing marriage and parenthood, waiting for their financial prospects to improve. Meanwhile, more young families are falling into poverty.

``It makes you almost want to cry for the future of our country,'' said Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston.

These developments, beyond their effects on individuals, are harbingers of significant and painful changes for the whole country.

For decades, adult life, especially for college graduates, began with entry-level jobs that paid well and promised even better things to come. Those bright prospects encouraged young workers to go out on their own, marry and start families -- bolstering the overall economy.

But now, with so many unemployed or underemployed -- and others underwater on their mortgages or with little hope of buying houses of their own -- the spending they once provided simply isn't there now.

Moreover, low starting pay means that future earnings probably will be depressed as well because most workers see their incomes increase slowly and steadily over the course of their careers, not in big jumps.

In the near term, young adults' lower earnings and slower rates of family formation will hurt the still-depressed housing market and crimp consumer spending, which accounts for 70 percent of the U.S. economy.

In the long run, it could shape the way a whole generation saves and invests, with far-reaching consequences for businesses and the economy.

Young adults, for example, may be less prone to buy stocks because they have been shell-shocked by the recession, said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics.

He recalled how when he encouraged his own college-age son to put some money in the markets, the advice was met with incredulity. ``It dawned on me,'' Zandi said, ``that's his world. In the last 10 years, stock prices have gone nowhere.''

Young adults remain very hopeful that things will get better, surveys show, but many face daunting debts that are forcing them to further curtail spending now.

In the two years before the recession, adults younger than 35 were borrowing so heavily -- especially for education -- that their savings rates ran in the negative teens, according to Moody's analysis of Federal Reserve data.

Since the middle of last year, they have become the most prodigious savers of all age groups, socking away 8 percent or more of their after-tax incomes.

``We need them to drive housing demand and consumer spending,'' Zandi said.

With less means, the share of the population 18 and older that is married was just 52 percent last year -- the lowest in more than a century.

``Marriage is becoming more and more for those who can afford it,'' said Mark Mather, a demographer at the Population Reference Bureau, a private research group in Washington.

``These kinds of social changes tend to be glacial, but they're happening quickly,'' Mather said.

Mather said the recession prompted even more young adults to delay marriage.

There has also been a rise in the number of children being born into unmarried households, which analysts see as an ominous social and economic development, given the high poverty rate for children and families in such households.

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N.J. career politician retires on day she qualifies for pension - NJ.com

Posted: 13 Nov 2010 06:35 AM PST

Published: Saturday, November 13, 2010, 9:40 AM Updated: Saturday, November 13, 2010, 9:41 AM

TRENTON — A career Democratic politician will collect more than $5,300 monthly after resigning from her part-time government job on the day she qualified for a state pension.

Susan Bass Levin, 58, told the Local Finance Board via BlackBerry on Oct. 29 that she would retire from state government Nov. 1, according to a copy of the message released by the board. That was the day she reached 25 years of New Jersey government employment, entitling her to early retirement and lifetime health benefits.

"It has been an honor to serve the people of the state. Please extend my appreciation to the staff of the board," she wrote.

She did not respond to The Record's e-mail or a phone call for comment Friday.

The Local Finance Board, within the Department of Community Affairs, oversees municipal and county spending. A spokeswoman for Community Affairs did not indicate Friday whether an immediate successor — to be named by Gov. Chris Christie — is in line.

The board is embarking on a strict approach to local spending, a reverse of its policy in recent years. It no longer is freely allowing entities to borrow based on what is called "backloading," or making small payments at first and far larger installments 10 or 20 years in the future.

The Record found that commissioners approved more than $7 billion in such borrowing from 2005 to 2009. This year alone, the board considered, and largely approved, $813 million in backloaded deals for such purchases as firetrucks and road improvements and refinancing of old debt.

Bass Levin, a lawyer, was a former Cherry Hill mayor who became a statewide Democratic presence in the administration of Gov. James E. McGreevey, who named her commissioner of the Department of Community Affairs in 2002.

She left in 2005 to work on the successful gubernatorial campaign of Jon Corzine, who named her the $300,000-a-year deputy commissioner of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey in 2007.

The Port Authority's health and retirement systems are separate from those run by the state of New Jersey. Bass Levin was able to stay within New Jersey's health and pension system because Corzine also appointed her to the Local Finance Board, which pays commissioners about $12,000 — plus benefits — to attend 15 to 18 meetings a year.

Bass Levin left the Port Authority in 2009 to become president and chief executive officer of the Cooper Foundation, the fund-raising arm of Cooper University Hospital in Camden. She held the finance board post simultaneously.

She will start collecting pension checks Dec. 1 for her maximum benefit of $5,312.11, according to the state Treasury Department. The calculation, by the Division of Pension and Benefits, was based on her three highest-paid years as a state employee, for an average $139,774.15. That was her salary while head of Community Affairs.