Women Are Fleeing IT Jobs 578
Lucas123 writes "An alarming number of women are currently abandoning IT jobs that require workers to be on-call at all hours, according to a story in Computerworld. One study cited in the article states that by 2012, 40% of women now working in IT will leave for careers with more flexible hours. 'I think women in that regard are at a real disadvantage,' said Dot Brunette, network and storage manager at Meijer Inc., a Grand Rapids, Mich.-based retailer and a 30-year IT veteran. She noted that companies can fail to attract female workers, or see them leave key IT jobs, because they fail to provide day care at work, or work-at-home options for someone who leaves to have a child.'"
I Like The On Call Pay... (Score:2, Informative)
Now, management sees the on call pay as an expense they would like to cut. When/if they cut it, I think the on call response is going to get a lot worse. A lot worse.
"Oh, a double-disk failure? Darn..."
Re:I thought IT workers can telecommute to work? (Score:5, Informative)
Besides the cost of putting up the VPN stuff, Making sure there is high speed access to the Internet or a T1 directly to the building, you now have to worry about enforcing policies on a computer completly out of your site that could be used to compromise everything you spent the last ten year trying to stop from being on the Internet. Meijers does a lot of credit/debit transactions. Has quite a few employees spread across several states and then there is the problems of what needs fixed being part of what gives access to tele-commute.
It is somewhat scary as well as flaky/inefficient in some situations. I cut an accountant from remote access once because the IDS started wigging out on some ports being scanned. Turns out, she used her family computer for work at home and was logged into the VPN when she walked away letting her kid go online. He proceeded to download some movies and game cracks from IRC networks and got scanned repeatedly by at least 20 different IPs . And yes, I logged the commands being typed, I know this was happening. I just don't know if it was her or her kid. And I had to go on site (35 min away) to block everything and figure out what was going on because the IDS locked everything out once the scanning attempts got so bad. The IDS probably has some anal policies but it was doing it's job and this was an accounting firm.
Because civilization depends on having children (Score:3, Informative)
You bitch about offshoring and H1-B visas. Well the solution is to have more kids. The ideal solution would have been to have more kids 20 years ago.
Demographics is destiny. If you don't reproduce your world view won't be around when you are not.
The design flaw of the secular social-democratic state is that it requires a religious-society birthrate to sustain it. Post-Christian hyperrationalism is, in the objective sense, a lot less rational than Catholicism or Mormonism. Indeed, in its reliance on immigration to ensure its future, the European Union has adopted a 21st-century variation on the strategy of the Shakers, who were forbidden from reproducing and thus could increase their numbers only by conversion. The problem is that secondary-impulse societies mistake their weaknesses for strengths--or, at any rate, virtues--and that's why they're proving so feeble at dealing with a primal force like Islam.
What's the better bet? A globalization that exports cheeseburgers and pop songs or a globalization that exports the fiercest aspects of its culture? When it comes to forecasting the future, the birthrate is the nearest thing to hard numbers. If only a million babies are born in 2006, it's hard to have two million adults enter the workforce in 2026 (or 2033, or 2037, or whenever they get around to finishing their Anger Management and Queer Studies degrees). And the hard data on babies around the Western world is that they're running out a lot faster than the oil is. "Replacement" fertility rate--i.e., the number you need for merely a stable population, not getting any bigger, not getting any smaller--is 2.1 babies per woman. Some countries are well above that: the global fertility leader, Somalia, is 6.91, Niger 6.83, Afghanistan 6.78, Yemen 6.75. Notice what those nations have in common?
Scroll way down to the bottom of the Hot One Hundred top breeders and you'll eventually find the United States, hovering just at replacement rate with 2.07 births per woman. Ireland is 1.87, New Zealand 1.79, Australia 1.76. But Canada's fertility rate is down to 1.5, well below replacement rate; Germany and Austria are at 1.3, the brink of the death spiral; Russia and Italy are at 1.2; Spain 1.1, about half replacement rate. That's to say, Spain's population is halving every generation. By 2050, Italy's population will have fallen by 22%, Bulgaria's by 36%, Estonia's by 52%. In America, demographic trends suggest that the blue states ought to apply for honorary membership of the EU: In the 2004 election, John Kerry won the 16 with the lowest birthrates; George W. Bush took 25 of the 26 states with the highest. By 2050, there will be 100 million fewer Europeans, 100 million more Americans--and mostly red-state Americans.
As fertility shrivels, societies get older--and Japan and much of Europe are set to get older than any functioning societies have ever been. And we know what comes after old age. These countries are going out of business--unless they can find the will to change their ways. Is that likely? I don't think so. If you look at European election results--most recently in Germany--it's hard not to conclude that, while voters are unhappy with their political establishments, they're unhappy mainly because they resent being asked to reconsider their government benefits and, no matter how unaffordable they may be a generation down the road, they have no intention of seriously reconsidering them. The Scottish executive recently backed down from a proposal to raise the retirement age of Scottish public workers. It's presently 60, which is nice but unaffordable. But the reaction of the average Scots worker is that that's somebody else's problem. The average German worker now puts in 22% fewer hours
The new plumbers (Score:3, Informative)
But in all honesty, my computer work was 24 hours before the Internet, too. It was just called a "BBS" and I didn't get paid for it.
Re:Women Belong In The Kitchen (Score:1, Informative)
Re:I don't get it (Score:3, Informative)
Almost everyone in Michigan knows that you dont work for Meijer in IT unless you are desperate. And then only for a short time.
Re:Because civilization depends on having children (Score:3, Informative)
Blatant copy of
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?%20id=110007
Re:Women Belong In The Kitchen (Score:2, Informative)
In the UK you get a mandated 4 weeks holiday a year, but a lot of places do give 5. I wish for the joys of a 35 hour week. Our limit, unless you choose to be exempt, is 48 hours per week (monitored across a 12 week period). Only unionised employees have very good job protection, and they should expect to give a ton of their salary away for the pleasure of being used in political games by the union leaders.
Yes, we get more vacation than the US, but we also get paid less and taxed more. And you can't even buy Mountain Dew here.
Re:Women Belong In The Kitchen (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Women Belong In The Kitchen (Score:4, Informative)
If you live in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Mexico you'll only get 7 days. Chinese workers probably envy their neighbors, assuming that this [nationmaster.com] page can be trusted ...it's not without errors though, here in Denmark we've only got five weeks and not six.