Want to earn big bucks as a computer industry executive?
Forget working in Seattle, Dallas and New York. Scratch Los Angeles and Miami, too. Chicago beats them all.
Increasing demand for skilled information systems professionals is driving up pay scales nationwide. Taking advantage of the shortage, the average chief information officer scored a 28 percent boost in salary this year to $123,000 from about $96,000 a year ago, according to a survey by Computerworld magazine.
But for the really tall dollars, Chicago is the place to be.
Chief information officers, network administrators, senior systems analysts and computer programmers in the so-called Silicon Prairie earn higher wages than their peers in those other five cities, Computerworld found.
For example, the average CIO at a Chicago company makes $169,000, while New York firms pay their top computer exec $152,000, second highest in the survey. For any Big Apple computer geeks who want to relocate to Chicago, there’s an opportunity to make $17,000 more and, as a bonus, escape from New York. Compensation for CIOs in Seattle, home of Microsoft Corp., is a mere $66,000, last among the six cities selected by Computerworld for their geographic diversity.
Chicago tekkies still have a way to go before they’re the highest paid in the industry. Corporations in the Atlanta and San Francisco areas shell out the most, paying their CIOs $184,000 and $180,000, respectively, a year.
Maybe it’s the weather.
Automation marches on: The high technology gurus at Chicago-based OmniTech Consulting Group Inc. last week released a major study of how Fortune 1000 companies are using multimedia CD-ROMs to sack growing numbers of people in corporate human resources departments and elsewhere in the employee-training food chain.
A CD doesn’t take lunch breaks, doesn’t punch time clocks and doesn’t worry about things like 401(K) benefits and insurance plans as it walks new employees and newly promoted ones through the ropes of a new job.
OmniTech’s John Faier, principal in charge of the study, and Marita Decker, a company expert in multimedia production, found that corporate leaders remain hot about the idea of off-loading training costs onto CDs, even though they’re actually doing it a lot slower than they hoped.
The study is based on surveys of Fortune 1000 firms in 1996 and again this summer.
In 1996 corporate information officers had responded that they expected that they would be doubling the use of multimedia-based training (CDs, Internet, Intranets) by 1998. But when Faier went back this year, he found that they now are saying that the doubling won’t be a done deal until the year 2000. By then, they insisted, multimedia computers will have risen from 16 per cent of all training time to 37 percent of all training time.
Apple polishing: The Gray Lady of Times Square, also known as the New York Times, was honored at McCormick Place last week by Apple Computer Inc. for adding some rouge and colored bloomers to the mix. This after a century of black-and-white-only drabness that became a trademark in its own right.
Apple, which has been in the downside of the news lately due to corporate chaos and bright red balance sheets, took a decidedly upside turn while pointing out at the huge Print 97 trade show that the New York Times on Sept. 15 will depart with tradition and begin publishing its Weekend, Arts and Sports sections in color using Apple’s ColorSync Macintosh technology.
And, by the end of the year, said Tara House, manager of design technology for the Gray Lady, the Times’ front page too will offer color art.
ColorSync running on Macs, House said in prepared remarks, finally offers the power that the Times needs to join virtually every other major newspaper (this one most definitely included) that have been using full color throughout for many years now.
Hewing to its journalism ethics standards, the Times turned down the prize Apple gave to others honored at Print 97, however.
House took a pass on one of the Limited Edition 20th Anniversary Macintosh computers that the Apple elite like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak have taken to passing out to especially favored cronies and customers.
House took a plaque instead. And ask any Mac fan: That must have hurt.
Another alibi gone: While most money in the United States is contaminated with traces of cocaine, it doesn’t rub off on people who handle the money casually, researchers at Argonne National Laboratory have found.
Some defense lawyers have argued that just because their clients have traces of cocaine on their clothing or hands, that doesn’t mean they traffic in the drug, because just handling money can contaminate a person.
But a high-tech chemical analysis of several bills doesn’t support that argument.
“It turns out the lawyers are wrong,” said Jack Demirgian, an Argonne chemist. “The cocaine gets embedded in the currency fibers and doesn’t rub off on the fingers of people who handle it.”
Demirgian and colleagues gathered dollar bills from several stores in the Chicago area and analyzed them, finding 78 percent were contaminated with traces of cocaine. Their study was supported by the Office of National Drug Control Policy.
