Remember When Information Technology Was Hot, Hot, Hot?

I came across a very telling article recently while cleaning out some old piles of my journalism. In January, 1999, I co-authored a piece, "IT careers for sale," that appeared in Computer User magazine. The subhead stated: "If you have computer skills and a pulse, recruiters want you on the IT front lines."

Remember when information technology (IT) was hot, hot, hot? Clinton and Gore were in office in those days, and the overheated dotcom boom was still underway.

Here is how the article began:

Chances are, you've gotten their calls. And their emails. And their faxes, postcards and letters. You've seen their big "Now Hiring!" signs hanging on the sides of buildings. You've read their billboards, heard their radio commercials, even felt their earnest handshakes and gotten their business cards at professional association social gatherings.

Lately, you may even have noticed their pitches in a most unlikely place: On monthly statements from some of your credit card companies.

It's a recruiters' jungle out there, and you, friend, are the big game they are stalking, even if you don't want to be hunted.

Blame it on demand versus supply. There are now many more information technology jobs than there are computer professionals to fill them. The Information Technology Association has estimated that one in 10 computer-related jobs currently is going begging--that's almost 350,000 vacancies.

Desperate companies are searching far and wide, recruiting on the Internet, on college campuses, at rock concerts and in distant lands. They are offering referral bonuses, signing bonuses and bigger bounties to outside recruiters. Some even are raiding their competitors' talent--or at least being accused of it...."

Sadly, those days likely are long gone now. But that seems to be how the American economy works: in cycles of boom and bust.

A decade later, in troubled 2009, if you have computer skills and a pulse, you likely are unemployed, underemployed or in fear of losing your job very soon.

It may be time now to recruit yourself and turn your computer skills and job experiences into self-employment. If you still have a job or need more income, you can start something on the side and test the waters of small business. If you are unemployed and standing now with others in long lines to compete for one, two or a few jobs, it may also be time to recruit yourself and create your own job.

It's not easy, but if you have computer skills and a pulse, you can do it. You might even have to do it if the economy doesn't pick up soon.

Operators, unfortunately, are not standing by.

--Si Dunn

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Second-Look Book Reviews - #1

New books often don’t have long shelf lives at bookstores. Also, after just a few weeks in print, the books’ chances of getting featured in a newspaper or magazine review have all but vanished. Newer books already are flooding in and competing for editors’ attentions and shrinking column spaces.

Here are a few books that have been in print for several months and already have had their brief moments in the media sun. Yet they remain very much worthy of second looks by readers.

More “Second-Look Book Reviews” will appear occasionally in future updates of Dateline: Oblivion.

From Bloodshed to Hope in Burundi
By Ambassador Robert Krueger and Kathleen Tobin Krueger
University of Texas Press, $26.00, 308 pages, hardback

Burundi is one of the world’s poorest countries, squeezed between Rwanda and Tanzania in the mountainous heart of Africa. Like many other countries on that troubled continent, Burundi has a long history of political instability and violence.

In 1994, while neighboring Rwanda was wracked by ethnic killings that claimed more than 800,000 lives, U.S. Ambassador Robert Krueger and his wife, Kathleen Tobin Krueger, were sent by President Bill Clinton to try to help preserve Burundi’s fledgling democratic government and minimize its own outbreaks of ethnic violence.

The Kruegers’ book, which has a foreword by Nobel Prize laureate Desmund Tutu, recounts their efforts to help stabilize Burundi amid surging genocide, tragic indifference by many other nations, and great personal danger to Americans and their families.

Fourteen years later, Burundi has made some progress, but it is still a troubled land where Hutus and Tutsis sometimes engage in revenge killings. In the book, Ambassador Krueger lays out his proposals and hopes for a peaceful Burundi. And he adds this urgent call: “If other countries respond to its need, Burundi can take its place as a full participant in the community of nations that by painful experience have learned to respect the value of every human life.”

Remembering Marisa
By Judd Holt
West Oak Press, $24.95, 292 pages, hardback

Judd Holt’s second novel is at once a warm and troubling story of a respected young woman, a teacher, who carries with her some painful memories of violence, as well as a dark secret she can never reveal to anyone, not even the many people who love her.

After Marisa inexplicably goes missing, her friends, her fiancé, her students, and her family start revealing the ways they know, miss and remember her. In their eyes, she is just about perfect, but not quite. As one character recalls: "She never confided with anyone about her problems. She just wouldn’t ask for anyone’s advice….[h]er folks called all kinds of people trying to find out if they had heard from her. No one had. She just ran off. "

The mystery of Marisa’s disappearance plays out across much of the varied and rugged Texas landscape, from the Permian Basin and Big Bend to the Hill Country, San Antonio and North Texas.

Judd Holt’s previous novel is A Promise to Catie, published by the University of North Texas Press.

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