Merrill Lynch & Co. has shrunk from 70,000 employees worldwide in 2001 to 53,500 today. Its 2003 IT budget of US$2.2 billion is down 30 percent from two years ago.
If he were writing a song about his first 18 months in the top IT post at BMC Software Inc., CIO Jay Gardner might call it "I Learned It the Hard Way."
Vendor-provided Web-based tools for calculating customers' returns on investment in hardware, software and other gear are all the rage in today's show-me-the-value budgeting climate.
The good news is U.S. companies hired 2.1 million IT workers last year. The bad news is they fired 2.6 million, reducing the overall IT workforce by about 5 per cent.
IT managers looking to cut labour costs during the ongoing economic instability might want to think twice before laying off any of their workers who have mainframe or data centre skills
Two years of heavy corporate merger activity followed by the dot-com bust and a general downturn in the economy have brutalized the IT job market, victimizing even veteran, highly skilled IT professionals.
Attention unemployed mainframe programmers and operators: Prospects are dim for landing a mainframe IT job in the immediate future. The much-touted mainframe skills shortage is still about five years off.