Tech hiring is tough on veteran workers

Posted by Mike on Monday, September 19, 2011 - 302 views

Brewster Smith specialized in mainframe systems for 35 years in the technology industry, recently converting his employer’s mainframe to servers that use newer programming languages. When Smith completed the project in July, his company laid him off because his skills no longer fit the new system. Read more…

Top 10 tech products of the last 20 years – or so

Posted by Mike on Wednesday, May 25, 2011 - 269 views

I’ve been writing a weekly technology column for over twenty years and the time has come to move on. I retired from my “real” job in the fall, and have found that the busy time of retirement makes writing more and more difficult, so it’s time to say goodbye.

I’ve often been asked what my top ten tech products of all time would be, so what better time to do that than my last column? So here goes.

5 old-school ideas that weren’t so bad: what we miss about MIS

Posted by Mike on Friday, December 31, 2010 - 204 views

Cobol was king and MIS ruled from on high — some old-school tech management practices we’d like to see revived. READ ON

The painful truth about age discrimination in tech

Posted by Mike on Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - 356 views

There are bold programmers, but no old programmers — the reasons for this reality aren’t simple age discrimination

The Net is rife with mainframe operators and Cobol pros who will tell you that they got into IT for love of the challenge or subject. It was passion-driven. … READ MORE