Imagine how much progress we could make as a society if we just dropped those who just can't merge onto the Information Superhighway. I will never get back those lost weekends I spent formatting my mom's Filemaker forms or troubleshooting my aunt's wireless router via cell phone. But I can spare my kids from ever having to face the same fate.

The same goes at work, where the bosses have headcount to trim. They can no longer afford to pretend that it's okay that you don't understand Excel, since they have to pay to have someone on site who can explain it to you. Every dollar spent paying an IT guy is a dollar not spent doing whatever it is that makes the company money. That's why it's time companies everywhere get out of the handholding business.

Oh, sure, that means more people out on the street. But they can — and should — get reemployed making systems that are so solid they don't require tech-support calls.

There's an unpleasant converse: Desk jockeys will have to face the fact that part of their job is to understand the tools they're being paid to use. People will never take responsibility for learning about their computers as long as it's easier to pick up a phone and whine to someone.

A dozen years ago, Microsoft broke Sun's run-anywhere Java technology, which was supposed to make operating systems irrelevant for most applications. The Windows version of Java changed one function call, in a way that seemed trivial. It made many apps written for Windows not work on other operating systems. Sun sued, cementing the company's has-been status. Microsoft eventually paid a token settlement for having cock-blocked Java in favor of its own buggy, security-violation-breeding ActiveX technology. I'm sure Bill Gates considers it the best $20 million he ever spent. Where was I? Oh yeah: Sun has been reduced to bundling a non-Java Microsoft toolbar with every Java download, to pick up a few extra bucks. I can only hope the Sun staffers involved are too new to be humiliated.

You're all missing the point: take the job and then write a book in 18 months - call it the Web 2.0 version of "The Devil Wears Prada."

A zero-day patch is a security alert that's been issued for some major, Internet-threatening bug, one that's so serious that they give people zero days of warning. It means the bad guys know about it. It's so bad that it needs to be fixed right away, I get that. But do you think IT departments are staffed for one zero-day patch over another?

Of course not. Your infrastructure doesn't scale, but who cares? And why pay for all that automation? We have people here. Or in Bangalore, or somewhere. But when an operation takes 10 minutes per machine, multiplied by hundreds of servers and thousands of workstations for millions of customers ... well, I'll get complaints about the overtime charges, but my managers already told me they didn't want to pay to configure the automated solution. See? I can't win, even if Arista replaces every Cisco box on the network.

The bright side: This morning, I worried I'd be out of a job by noon. Thanks to Microsoft, I now have another life-or-death upgrade to install. I'll do it this weekend. I may not have a family life, but I have a job.

It transcends all words? Maybe at Google it does, but at Valleywag it only rolls downhill.

Billionaire George Soros once pledged to use his wealth to get Bush out of office. Yeah, we knew he'd bail early. But what happens if the Obama-struck news media decides to foot the bill? If you're right that there's nothing to see, you'll be searching her mails until you retire. Wrong, and you'll need another excuse soon. (Photo by AP/David Zalubowski)

We both braced ourselves and held on — him in one doorway and me in another –- for what seemed like forever but was maybe 15 seconds until the shaking stopped.

Under different circumstances it would have been a typical ZOMGEmbarrassed! moment, but Dad never mentioned it afterwards. My brother thought it was hilarious ... later. The house survived, minus a speaker that fell from the top of the entertainment center. We watched on TV as footage came in of the crushed Cypress Structure. We listened to the commentary from X100 FM, who luckily had a backup transmitter. My uncle normally would have been on the Cypress right at 5:04. He stayed home for one reason or another, probably saving his life. What I remember now is that right before hell hit, all my Dad was worried about was finding a job.

In a good example of NASA's goal of "faster, cheaper, better," commercially developed, commonly available equipment was used to build this new computer at a fraction of the price it would cost to build a specialized computer designed specifically for the spaceflight environment.

1. Reduce headcount or freeze hiring: Layoff.
2. Renegotiate with technology and service providers: Force your vendors to have a layoff.
3. Curtail data center expansion, virtualize assets and lease them back: Layoff your datacenter staff.
4. Consolidate systems: Layoff your non-datacenter staff.
5. Outsource commodity: Anything that can't get you fired if it screws up is a commodity.
6. Offshore: "The redundant staff will become our New Knowledge Workers! Just kidding, Chief. They're gone."
7. Investment shutdown: If it can't save your job, shut it down.
8. Prioritize projects: Cut the ones you aren't crazy about. Layoff.
9. Mothball businesses and projects: Same as above, if you work with academia.
10. Change leadership and restructure teams: Fly to Aspen. Hold secret summit. You weren't at Aspen this weekend? Start packing.

Headhunters are paid a commission to find and lure experienced people into jobs they will probably do well at. Typically the contract is about 20 percent of a year of your new-job salary. But there's a penalty if you take the job, then leave before so many months. Their job is to identify someone better than what's in the stack of resumes, and sell that person on the job during the employer's screening and interview process.

Culturally, headhunters are sales people, polar opposites to the techies they recruit. They'll feed your skills and qualifications into a process that's as opaque to you as XML is to them. But here's the surprise: It works. There are lamebrain headhunters, just as there are PHP-whackers who call themselves gurus. As a jobhunter, do unto recruiters as they do unto you:

• DO qualify your leads. Ask recruiters for references from people they've placed. Find out if those people feel they're in the right job at the right pay.
• DON'T grill a headhunter on tech. The nitty-gritty details are for you and the employer to discuss, once you've been flagged as a possible fit.
• DO say no to jobs that are obviously beneath you. The headhunter may be desperate to fill slots, or just plain clueless about your experience.

A good headhunter will sell you up, not down. She'll make you fume by suggesting jobs that are beyond your resume — but that you can get. She'll land you a salary you didn't have the huevos to ask for. Why are you unable to do this yourself? Because you've been trained not to overestimate capacity. Good headhunters are relationship-savvy, not tech-savvy. They've got their own algorithms for matching employers with employees. Work it with a headhunter who'll place you as a star hire, not just another C# coder. It'll be worth the migraine.

The core issue isn't compensation, it's trust. This article at Infoworld explains the shift in perception many IT employees experience: As they become more senior, they become a threat rather than an asset. Something to be protected against, rather than being the protector.

Moreover, IT people often feel they're not being told the truth about the organization they serve. Are stock options about to tank? Is the scandal denied in the press actually true? Will the techies be blamed for project failures to save face? Is the CEO who demands weekend work busy packing his golden parachute?

It's a cliche, but it's true: IT people live in a logic-driven world. Privileged, encrypted, confidential information and access-restriction procedures are fine with them. Lies aren't. Computers don't do lies. Yet the same human boss who tells an admin how valuable he is to the company is often planning to cut him loose. Terry Childs went berzerk because he knew the cost-cutting managers piling more and more work on him were also looking for a way to chop his $126,000 salary from the payroll.

The solution isn't perks, it's candor. If management is playing a game of Advanced Strategery against the IT department, a foosball table, free lunches and drycleaning will only add to their sense of indignity. Yeah, they're kind of ungrateful that way. But if your admins feel pressured to continually re-justify their existence to managers they believe are brazen liars, why is it such a surprise that one of them will look for a way to turn the tables?

• Don't hope for much. Past experience tells us those laid off will not be treated well. EDS has been known to time layoffs to minimize severance paid.
• Leave when you can. Given the prospects of a skimpy severance, you might as well get out sooner rather than later. EDS has a sordid history as a service provider. Although the guys in the trenches are long gone, the management culture that brought you the $8 billion Navy-Marines IT debacle is alive and well and is now moving to a new host environment. Trust me — another six months at the company will not add anything to your resume. Start your job search now.
• Aggressively market yourself. Polish the resume on standards like Monster and CareerBuilder. Make sure to also hit specialty sites like Dice.com, Cybercoders, and Jobfox. Update your professional networking pages. LinkedIn is an obvious one, but have you thought about your college's alumni directory?
• Clean up your online persona. Yes, most employers don't actually waste time checking your social-network profiles. But why take chances? Play it safe and delete anything even vaguely unprofessional from your Facebook and MySpace pages.
• Attend mixers and job fairs. Not because you'll get a job there, but just to get practice interacting with other people. Your next job will require more face time, not less.
• Meet with the headhunters. You may not love them but they can be effective. Visit your friends at Robert Half and the other usual suspects.
• Keep your sense of humor. HP's layoffs are large in scale, but you're not the first person to endure a flurry of pink slips at the workplace. Some of the revenge stories written by other people in the same situation are epic.

(Photoillustration by Jackson West)

• Childs is said to have access to email, 311 service, and law-enforcement applications. He only had the power to block network access to these apps, not to log into them.
• Childs had a list of 150 VPN groupnames and passwords. These were part of his job, not something he'd stolen. Ironically, these passwords were entered into court documents, making them publicly-accessible information.
• When Childs was arrested, he had documentation of the city network, including configurations, maps, and diagrams of the FiberWAN and possibly other networks in his possession. Again, knowing this info is part of his job.
• He had configured some number of routers to disable password recovery, but did not write the device configurations to flash memory on some number of routers. This would cause them to fail if power-cycled. City officials claim this was a "booby trap" designed to disable their data center at One Market Street during a forthcoming planned power outage. I think they're giving him too much credit for plan-within-plan cleverness here. Disabling password recovery is a standard security procedure for routers. More likely Childs just forgot to save to flash.

You can read a longer, wonkier takedown of the city's claims at IT World.

The most damning charge, technically speaking, is that Childs had several modems hooked up to computers in his workspace. It appears that he used these modems to access the network remotely without leaving an audit trail back to himself.

What an amateur.

The Childs case backs up a point I've been making to clients for years. City officials have admitted — in public! — that "not only was Childs the only admin, he was always on call, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. As the only admin with the knowledge and access to the FiberWAN, he had no help. During the past few years, the DTIS staff has been significantly reduced due to budget cuts, keeping the city dependent on a sole admin for its core network."

Overwork your techs and bad stuff will happen. Maybe Childs is happy to be in jail. He can get some sleep there.

(Photo by Robert McMillan)