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From: www.itworld.com
Harvesting the Dot-com Discontent
April 4, 2001 —
When Steve Sodeberg joined winemaker The Robert Mondavi Corp. as its chief technology officer four years ago, he was convinced it would be an easy place to recruit programming and development talent.
A former Cisco Systems Inc. executive, Sodeberg saw the sprawling Oakville, Calif.-based winery as a place where an information technology professional could strike an ideal work/life balance and still be both professionally challenged and soundly compensated.
But Sodeberg had his work cut out for him. As one of the biggest booms in the history of the U.S. stock market hit the IT industry, dot-coms swept away much of the available IT talent in the San Francisco Bay area. Sodeberg, like many brick-and-mortar IT executives, felt as if he had dropped off the job-hunter's map.
But now he's back on that map, well armed.
His arsenal includes salaries that he says are as good as or better than what many dot-coms can offer, a host of one-of-a-kind IT projects that are in need of stewardship and an excellent chance for an eight-hour workday.
Taking Advantage
A year ago, dot-coms were the darlings of IT job-seekers. Now, amid the current wave of dot-com failures, many are at the bottom of the preferred-employer list. So Sodeberg is feeling bullish about his recruitment prospects. And that's a good thing: Mondavi's IT demands are quickly outgrowing Sodeberg's staff of 30.
Mondavi, which will produce about 8 million-plus barrels of wine this year, relies heavily on a range of computers to manage its wine-making process. IT tracks everything from the collection of grapes and the sugar levels they yield to the barrels in which they are stored and the distributors who move them out to market.
A proprietary software program built in-house with Powersoft's PowerBuilder with a SQL Server back end serves as Mondavi's primary harvest-management system. It runs across a collection of wide-area networks, virtual private networks and intranets. The plan is to extend the system even further throughout Mondavi's nationwide operations while enhancing its ties to the winemaker's third-party grape growers and distributors.
"For the right person -- someone who wants a good work/life balance -- this company and this industry is a great place to be," Sodeberg says.
Wine-making is just one of dozens of brick-and-mortar industries that fell off the radar screens of many IT job seekers during the past couple of years.
Like Mondavi, employers in these industries see the recent spate of dot-com failures as an opportunity to bolster their profiles in the IT job market.
Now, it's often the user companies in a job market that can promise hot projects, high pay and employee empowerment.
Healthy Opportunities
Take health care, for instance. Though traditionally a high-profile employment sector for IT professionals, itt, too, has found itself pushed into the shadows by stock-wielding dot-com start-ups.
Although he may not be able to offer stock options to his employees, Bob Rosecrans, CIO at Chicago-based health care insurance provider Blue Cross/Blue Shield Association, says he's prepared to compete for good IT talent.
Rosecrans says there are at least 15 IT staff openings in the association's Washington and Chicago offices. The insurance provider is in the midst of a massive push to shift its current legacy-system-reliant business model to the Internet, where it plans to support member doctors and patients in a real-time environment.
Rosecrans is looking for professionals with experience in IBM's MQSeries messaging technology, Java and object-oriented programming. In particular, he's looking for project managers -- folks to oversee teams of programmers and designers on individual projects.
It's a far cry from the traditional C++ and Cobol administrative-level programming his staffers did in the past, Rosecrans says. Although he won't disclose salary levels, he's adamant that he can and will pay market rate, and then some, for those who stack up.
"I have complete control over salaries and flexibility in terms of what level people come in at," he says.
Tapping the Non-Internet Market
Helen MacKinnon, president of Technical Connections Inc., a management-recruitment firm in Los Angeles, says she has a number of health care clients that are offering not only signing bonuses but also retention bonuses for people with specific skills.
MacKinnon says these companies are offering market-rate salaries starting at $70,000 for entry-level talent. And salaries go well into six digits for the more experienced professionals, she adds.
Demand for CIOs in industries such as advertising and financial services is also high. And MacKinnon says she has had difficulty attracting Web-oriented talent lately.
There's been a perception that many traditional industry sectors are somehow behind the eight ball on committing to the Internet, says MacKinnon. As a result, some IT job seekers have been avoiding user companies.
"They feel they might miss out on valuable Web experience," says MacKinnon.
While that might have been a valid concern two years ago, MacKinnon says Web experience can be garnered just about anywhere these days. She estimates that approximately 15% of all of the placements her firm is making right now involve Internet-related jobs at non-Internet companies. She says she expects to see that number grow over the next year.
Computerworld