It’s not new, but Computerworld has an excellent story explaining how non-compete clauses in contracts are dangerous.

The good news is these contracts are hard to enforce in many countries and even in the US, courts often recognise these clauses as unfair and refused to enforce them.

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An interesting piece at Computerworld about the father of modern management and the first person to use the phrase “knowledge worker”. I’m not sure about describing Drucker as a “life coach” though – it’s a term I’ve learnt to mistrust.

Peter Drucker as Life Coach: Book Shares His Wisdom.

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The optimistic interpretation of the latest Olivier Job Index information technology figures says while the number of job ads continues to fall – the rate at which job ad numbers are falling has slowed. In other words, things are continuing to get worse, but not dramatically so. In fact the official line from Robert Olivier in this press release says things are stabilizing.

The Olivier Job Index measures the number of advertised job. In June the number of tech jobs fell 1.9 percent from May. They were down almost 57 percent from the same time a year ago. Both numbers represent a faster decline for tech jobs than for the overall job market.

According to a report last week in The Australian (Tech employment pool drying up by Jennifer Foreshew) only 16 percent of senior managers in Australia’s corporate sector expect to hire staff in the next 12 months and about a third intend to reduce their headcount. Foreshew spoke to a number of companies who made similar comments about a lack of new work.

Official figures issued by Australia’s Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR) on Friday say the number of IT professional job vacancies dropped 7.5 percent in June compared with May. Year-on-year the total number of jobs declined by 63 percent.

New Zealand IT sector now positive

A report in today’s Computerworld New Zealand (New Hudson survey shows IT more positive by David Watson) draws on quarterly figures from the recruitment firm Hudson. It says a net 16.4 percent of employers intend to increase permanent staffing levels in the June to September quarter. That’s up from the previous quarter’s 7.7 percent figure.

Computerworld Australia reports IT job advertisements continued their slide in May, which is bad news for tech-oriented knowledge workers. Overall job ads fell by 4 percent in May and 52 percent for the 12 month period ending in May. The number of IT job ads fell 58 percent over the 12 months. The numbers are taken from Olivier job index

The good news is the decline is is slowing down and part-time and contract positions were up during the month.

via IT jobs slump 5% in May: Olivier – Computerworld.

Computerworld (US edition) lists some of the grubbiest jobs in information technology.

You may be ordered to crawl into the nastiest corners of your office — or to explore the nastiest corners of the Web. You may be required to stare zombie-like at a network monitoring console, waiting (possibly hoping) for the alarms to go off, or be chained to an endless series of spreadsheets and Word docs, looking for minute differences in data. You may end up berated, belittled, or sobbed at for circumstances that have nothing to do with you.

Even dirtier IT jobs: The muck stops here – data crisis, engineers, IT jobs, malware – Computerworld

Computerworld reports, the total amount of global data grew by 281 exabytes in 2007.

An exabyte is one billion gigabytes. So this adds up to 800MB of data for each of the world’s 6 billion people. That’s equal to a stack of books piled some 30 metres high.

It’s a lot of information.

Or maybe not. Storage experts believe that anywhere from 80 to 90 percent of stored data is anything but valuable.

In 2002 I spoke to Rob Nieboer, who at the time was StorageTek’s Australian and New Zealand storage strategist. He revealed the vast bulk of data stored on company systems is worthless.

He said, “I haven’t met one person in the last three years who routinely deletes data. However, as much of 90 percent of their stored data hasn’t been accessed in months or years. According to the findings of a company called Strategic Research, when data isn’t accessed in the 30 days after it is first stored there’s only a two percent chance it will get used later.”

At the same time many data files are stored many times over in the same file system. Nieboer says it’s not unusual for there to be as many as 15 separate copies of the same file in a single system.

Storage Parkinson’s Law

According to Rosemary Stark (also interviewed in 2002 when she was Dimension Data’s national business manager for data centre solutions), storage obeys Parkinson’s Law.

She said, “It’s a case of if you build it, they will come. Put together a system with 2GB of storage and pretty quickly it will fill up with data. Buy a system with 200GB of storage and that will also fill up before too long.”

Like Nieboer, Stark said there’s a huge problem with multiple copies of the same information but she estimates the volume of unused archive material is closer to 80 percent. But she said 80 percent isn’t all junk. “It’s like the paper you keep on your desk. You don’t want it all, there may be a lot you can safely throw away but there are things you need to keep just in case you need them again later.”

Needles and haystacks

Although many companies focus on the economic cost of storing vast amounts of junk information, there’s a tendency to overlook the performance overhead imposed by unnecessary data. In simple terms, computer systems can burn up huge resources ploughing through haystacks of trash to find valuable needles of real information.

There are other inefficiencies. Stark said she has seen applications, for example databases, with say, 300 Terabytes of storage even though the real data might only be 50 Terabytes. This happens when systems managers set aside capacity for anticipated needs. The situation is like a child’s mother buying outsize clothes on the grounds that the youngster will eventually grow into them.

Nieboer said there are inherent inefficiencies in various systems.

Mainframe disks are typically only 50 percent full. With Unix systems disks might only be 40 percent full, with Windows this falls to 30 percent.

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Writing in Computerworld Australia Kathryn Edwards reports; “The Australian IT job market fell 15 percent in March, crashing to the level of 2005 and down by 53 percent on the same time last year.”

Edwards story was based on numbers from the Olivier Job Index.

It said Internet job ads also fell 12.5 percent in March leaving fewer vacancies advertised on the than at the beginning of the year.

Olivier Group director Robert Olivier, suggests the job market is only going to get worse.

In New Zealand the Hudson Report shows IT employers have radically changed their hiring intentions. A year ago a net 36 percent of employers expected to hire IT specialists, that number has dropped to just 7.8 percent. The sector compares with the general job market where 24 percent of employers expect to reduce staff numbers in the next three months.

IT job ads, vacancies down in March: Survey – Computerworld

Writing in the US print edition of ComputerWorld, Paul Glen makes a solid argument against managers using fear as a tool to bully additional effort from information technology workers during times of lay-offs and a weakening job market.

His comments apply pretty much across the board for all knowledge workers so I’ve repeated some of them, though I recommend reading the original story here.

Glen says managers are unlikely to come right out and tell employees their jobs will threatened if they don’t work harder. But they

…will be tempted to allow rumors to run wild, unchecked by reassurances. They may feel that a bit of fear and anxiety brought on by concerns about career and financial security is just what the efficiency expert would order to improve productivity.

As he points out this isn’t ethical. Moreover, it’s unlikely to work as knowledge workers doing creative intellectual work are hardly able to perform at their best when they are worried about putting food on the table next month.

Paul Glen operates the Geek Leaders site.

Fear: The great de-motivator for IT professionals