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Monday, February 21, 2011

OK, now I really feel old
Posted by Jill | 2:35 PM


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Tuesday, September 07, 2010

Who in their right mind would major in computer science now?
Posted by Jill | 5:37 AM
It wasn't that long ago that tech skills were touted as the key to landing a job in the "new service economy" or the "new information economy" or whatever it was called in any given year by Thomas Friedman, whose own job is about dead trees. And yes, for a while, anyone with the right degree, or even a willingness to learn, could get into IT.

But the days when someone like me, who was able to get an entry-level programming job simply by transferring my secretarial skills into the IT department working for the department heads, expressing a desire to get into programming, and starting a couple of graduate courses, are over. I was extraordinarily lucky, even by the standards of 1988. I had a basic knowledge of programming concepts from struggling through an Introduction to Pascal course, but I required training in the 4GL that was being used, and the VAX operating system on which it ran. I learned as I went. I stopped grad school because I had to learn how to do my job. Two years later I saw that PC programming was the way to go, taught myself C out of a book, and got a job with a smalll investment consulting company writing C programs, working with the database application Paradox, and doing some Novell Netware administration -- all learned on the fly, on the job. Three years later I took a job that in short order I grew to hate, working on voice response systems. But it was walking distance from home, there was no commuting time, and I was able to go back to school and have it paid for. I stuck it out for a year and moved to another small software VAR, where I wrote Visual Basic programs after teaching myself THAT out of a book before even starting the job, and where I got into basic HTML web sites in 1996 -- again, teaching myself out of a book.

IT was like that in those days. The ability to learn quickly, a willingness to just jump in, initiative, some smarts -- that was all you needed.

Not today. Today, you can teach yourself out of a book till the cows come home. You can have skills in fourteen different programming languages, and if you are missing the fifteenth, you are out of luck. Ads for IT people contain a laundry list of skills that no one person can possibly have, because they involve completely different kinds of left brain/right brain dominance. You'll see ads for someone who has experience in a dozen programming languages, who's an experienced network administrator, a computer security expert, a graphic designer, a technical writer, and a trainer. And that's an ad for one job.

None of these jobs exist, of course. They are designed to have nobody qualify for them so that companies can wail that there just aren't enough qualified people and they simiply HAVE to outsource the wrok to countries that pay a dollar an hour at most.

And so, while politicians of both parties are continuing to laud education and "retraining" as a panacea for the unemployment situation, as they continue with the old chestnut that it's simply a question of workers gaining new tech skills, those who have lost their tech jobs, especially if they are over 40, might as well be auto workers:
“We are talking about people with very particular, advanced skills out there who are at this point just not needed anymore,” says Bart van Ark, chief economist at the Conference Board, a business and economic research organization. “Even in this sector, there is tremendous insecurity.”

Government labor reports released this year, including the most recent one, present a tableau of shrinking opportunities in high-skill fields.

Job growth in fields like computer systems design and Internet publishing has been slow in the last year. Employment in areas like data processing and software publishing has actually fallen. Additionally, computer scientists, systems analysts and computer programmers all had unemployment rates of around 6 percent in the second quarter of this year.

While that might sound like a blessing compared with the rampant joblessness in manufacturing, it is still significantly higher than the unemployment rates in other white-collar professions.

The chief hurdles to more robust technology hiring appear to be increasing automation and the addition of highly skilled labor overseas. The result is a mismatch of skill levels here at home: not enough workers with the cutting-edge skills coveted by tech firms, and too many people with abilities that can be duplicated offshore at lower cost.

That’s a familiar situation to many out-of-work software engineers, whose skills start depreciating almost as soon as they are laid off, given the dynamism of the industry.

“I’m sending out lots and lots and lots of applications, to everywhere within a 50-mile radius,” says Rosamaria Carbonell Mann, 49, a software engineer who was terminated in June when her employer closed its branch in Corvallis, Ore., and sent the work to China.

Corvallis was once a hotbed for tech start-ups. But Ms. Mann said that with layoffs from other tech companies in the area, including Hewlett-Packard, the city now has a glut of people like herself: unemployed engineers with multiple degrees. “I apply for everything I can find, but there are just not that many jobs out there,” she said.

Nevertheless, many high-tech companies large and small say they are struggling to find highly skilled engineering talent in the United States.

“We are firing up our college recruiting program, enduring all manner of humiliation to try to fill these jobs,” said Glenn Kelman, chief executive of Redfin, an online brokerage agency for buying and selling homes that is based in Seattle and San Francisco. “I do think we’re still chasing them, not the other way around.”

Perhaps companies are still chasing workers because they have absolutely no idea what to look for. You are not going to get a graphic designer and a guy who can bang out thousands of lines of bug-free code in a day in the same person. Network administrators usually don't have experience with technical writing. A C# programmer isn't going to be able to design your logos or write your marketing copy. However, a 49-year-old C++ programmer can get up to speed with C# in a matter of weeks simply by just starting to do the job.

But of course companies don't think like this. The hiring process tends to be run by human resources departments the staffs of which have no idea what the difference is between a programmer and a network administrator, between a web designer and software engineer. Resumes are culled out by keywords, and if yours doesn't have every keyword they're looking for, you are out of luck.

I contrast the plight of IT workers with my own situation over the last two years. Looking back, I'm astonished at how spectacularly unqualified I was at the time I was hired for the job I currently have. Oh, I had some passing familiarity with the process of the job from my previous one, but for the last three years on my previous job, most of what I did was build web sites, not the kind of medical applications for which I interviewed. I remember interviewing for this job, and answering questions with "No....no....I don't have experience with that....no, we had a guy who built that...no...no, but I did do...." I walked out of there thinking "Well, that was a waste of two hours", and two weeks later I had an offer.

As it turns out, the department was building a staff largely from scratch. Some people who couldn't handle the move to data capture systems left, others were hired, and I am after a mere two years the #3 person in seniority. The learning curve has been at times like climbing Mount Everest. I'm largely balanced between left brain and right brain, with slight right brain dominance. I gravitate towards writing and words and emotion rather than numbers and logic. Science programs on television make me glaze over, but I'll watch intently a program on how to build a kitchen cabinet. This balance allows me to do more quantitative work than a purely right-brained person would be able to do, but it does not come naturally. But I was fifty-three when I took the job, I am fifty-five now, and I've not only been able to learn almost from scratch new tools, new concepts, and also how to lead groups of people, but I've also won two employee awards for doing so. My experience makes every single argument that companies make for not hiring in the US ring completely hollow.

For better or worse, our society is organized around work, much of it around working for someone else. If we are evolving into a race to the bottom, in which the companies that used to employ us are chasing ever-cheaper, ever-more-exploitable workers, then this notion of work is going to have to change. I'm not sure what it should or will become, but simply demonizing those that corporations have left behind, or believing the claims of "We can't find qualified people", is not the answer.

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Friday, March 19, 2010

It's not a "computer problem", it's crappy software design
Posted by Jill | 5:16 AM
In over 20 years in IT (gee, has it been that long?), I've never claimed to be the most crackerjack programmer in the world. I know people who can crank out bug-free code at an amazing rate, but I was never one of those people. I'm pretty good at designing a normalized database, and because I came out of a liberal arts education and non-technical fields before stumbling almost by accident into IT, I understand what makes a good user interface and what makes a crappy one. This is, in my most humble opinion, a skill that is often sorely lacking in most IT projects. When you let programmers design user interfaces, you get, well, user interfaces designed by programmers. They're often convoluted, ugly, not at all intuitive, and only those who designed them understand how to use them.

Based on this article in the New York Times about the possible suspension of funding for the FBI's "computer overhaul", it sounds to me like you had a bunch of IT people using off-the-shelf software to develop applications for people who until a few years ago couldn't send e-mail:
F.B.I. officials said that design changes and “minor” technical problems prompted the suspension of parts of the third and fourth phases of the work, which is intended to allow agents to better navigate investigative files, search databases and communicate with one another.

The decision to suspend work on the $305 million program is particularly striking because the current contractor, Lockheed Martin, was announced to great fanfare in 2006 after the collapse of an earlier incarnation of the project with the Science Applications International Corporation.

“This is terribly frustrating,” Senator Charles E. Grassley, the Iowa Republican who has been a frequent critic of the F.B.I.’s computer systems, said in an interview Thursday. “We’ve been through this song and dance before. Wouldn’t you think after hundreds of millions of dollars being wasted that they’d finally get it right?”

Beyond the financial costs are concerns about the F.B.I.’s ability to handle its law enforcement and national security responsibilities with an information system still regarded as sub-par in some crucial areas.

In a paper-driven culture, the agency’s computers were so inadequate that many agents until several years ago could not send or receive e-mail messages, and had difficulty getting case histories and linking to other databases. In the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, agents in Florida had to send photographs of the hijackers by overnight mail to Washington because they could not send e-mail attachments.

The current project, known as Sentinel, has fixed some longstanding problems, including difficulties with e-mail and database searching, auditors have found.

But in examining recent work, officials realized that mundane problems — like slow response times, awkward display pages and screen print that was too small — were cropping up.

Posing added complications were guidelines on F.B.I. operations put in place in 2008 that gave agents more latitude to look at factors like ethnicity and religion in terrorism investigations. That type of data was not typically used by the F.B.I. when the project began, and officials said they were trying to find ways to incorporate the expanded criteria into their investigative files and computer reports.

Now, I don't know anything about the FBI's systems, nor do I know anything about what Lockheed Martin has spent $425 million developing. But based on the linked article, it appears that what Lockheed Martin has been working unsuccessfully to do for the last four years using off-the-shelf software (probably SAP or Oracle) indicates that either they have a thousand monkeys at a thousand keyboards working on the project, or (more likely), the tool they're using is so cumbersome out of the box that it's impossible to do anything with it that anyone would want to use. Given the extent to which Lockheed Martin uses SAP, my guess is that's what they're using.

Here's what ZDNet (linked above) said when the contract was awarded in 2006:

The FBI is on track for a fully computerized casefile program, dubbed Sentinel, with a $305 million grant to Lockheed Martin, FBI CIO Zalmai Azmi said. The full program, which will cost $425 million, will give agents secure Internet access to many systems within a year and the entire system will be running by late 2009, Azmi claims, according to the Washington Post.


Of course similar claims were made of Trilogy, the FBI’s previous attempt at a massive computer upgrade, which tanked on the iceberg of Virtual Case File. Azmi says Sentinel is different.


Azmi told reporters yesterday that the FBI has included an aggressive system of audits, outside management review and financial controls to guard against any problems.


"We have a number of controls in place to ensure that this program is not following in Trilogy’s footsteps," Azmi said.



Azmi said Sentinel would offer FBI agents and analysts "one-stop shopping" for access to the bureau’s dozens of incompatible databases. "The list of capabilities that this program will bring will be enormous," he said.



Still, the Justice Dept.’s IG released a report last week, casting doubt that the FBI has adequate management controls in place and that Sentinel, even if successful would deliver information-sharing capabilities across agencies. 

Two companies that are part of the Lockheed Martin project team, Computer Sciences Corp. and CACI International Inc., also played roles in the earlier Trilogy efforts, Azmi said. The main contractor on the failed software system, Science Applications International Corp., is not involved in Sentinel, officials said.



Linda Gooden, president of Lockheed Martin Information Technology, said she is "confident that the FBI has instituted the appropriate checks and balances" to guard against overruns and other problems. The company’s pay will be "performance-based," she said.



I guess that's why they've only received $305 million of the $450 million allocated for the project.

If two smart college kids can develop a search algorithm that becomes the most widely-used search tool in the world, you'd think it wouldn't be rocket science to produce something better than a system that relied in overnight snail mail until a few years ago.

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Friday, January 30, 2009

Welcome to the America of the Future!!!!!
Posted by Jill | 4:54 AM
In the mid-1980's, I got my first exposure to the PC. It started with a Wang word processing terminal, which for someone like me, who had once made extra money typing manuscripts for my then-employer on the IBM Selectric in the office, represented a quantum leap in convenience and typing speed. I was typing when you had to backspace, put a piece of chalk-backed tape behind the carriage, and retype the letter, to make a correction. So for me, the mere fact of the correcting Selectric was such a leap, let alone a word processing terminal. This behemoth took up half my cubicle, and files were saved in 8" floppy disks, back when a floppy disk really was floppy. This beast was replaced after a couple of years with an IBM AT, which boasted a huge 256K of memory and a 20MB hard drive. And that was how I become interested in IT.

My boss at the time loved to talk tech, and I loved to catalog shop. One day in around 1985 we were talking about technology and the Home Shopping Channel, and I mentioned how I could envision a day when instead of the nattering nimrods of Home Shopping on TV, a catalog would come into your house on a VHS tape, and you'd be able to order from that tape via a remote -- right through your cable TV. No telephone, no mail, no having to deal with a salesperson.

I do this sometimes. One day in the summer of 2007 I was talking with a co-worker who was complaining about how her son was shlepping around about 50 pounds of books every day in school. This segued about the high cost of college textbooks, and found myself describing an electronic device that would address the resistance people have to books. It would be about the size of a book, and be hinged like a notebook PC. It would have a screen on both sides, and a hard drive or flash memory. You would download books via a USB cable for a set fee, which would include updates. The device would have a thumb-button on each side which would "turn pages" forward and back. These pages would display on the two screens, so that the user interface would be exactly like a book. A student would then just carry this device around.

Three months later, Amazon.com introduced the Kindle.

I really have to learn how to act on these brainstorms I get.

But I'm not the only one who does this. The San Francisco Examiner envisioned today's internet newspapers even earlier than I envisioned clunky ordering of crap from a VHS tape through your cable system:




It's easy to laugh at the acoustic coupler that was required for a modem then, just as it's easy to laugh when I describe how in the early 1980's you had to wrap a piece of special paper around a cylinder, dial a number, put the phone receiver into an acoustic coupler and then wait 20 minutes while the cylinder spun and a needle-like thing etched an image onto it -- the Exxon Qwip early fax machine. But the people at the Examiner knew they were on to something as far back as 1981.

(h/t)

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Saturday, February 09, 2008

Comtech Global Careers
Posted by Citizen Carrie | 8:39 PM
Are you having a hard time finding an Information Technology position in the United States? You know the jobs are out there, because you've seen rows and rows of H-1B and L-1 visa holders/IT professionals working diligently as you walk through major operational centers.

As part of my ongoing research I sometimes find some of those difficult-to-find career opportunities.

Ohio-based Comtech Global is currently:

"...under the process of H1B sponsorship for interested candidates and are currently looking for resources in multiple skills listed below. Location:

Experience -2 to 8 years

Required Skills: Java/J2EE, Dot Net, VB.Net, ASP.Net, C,C++, Hyperion Developer, SAN Admin, SAP All Modules , Oracle Apps, Oracle Apps DBA, Oracle DBA, SQL PL/SQL Developer, Oracle Developer, Peoplesoft, Mainframes, JDE , Siebel , Data warehousing , ETL / Informatica , Business Intelligence, Business Objects, Cognos , Teradata, AB Initio, Siebel with I- module, Project Manager, Program Manager, Business Analyst, Systems Engineer, Network Administrator."

See the Indian-based Naukri.com website for more details.

I'm sure it's just an oversight that they forgot to post any openings on U.S. job boards.

Somehow, the locations are listed as being Ahmedabad, Chennai, and Delhi, but companies don't normally look to sponsor H-1B candidates unless they intend to send them to the United States.

If you have any questions, you can call 011-91-9818735043 in India, or (614) 796-1148 in Ohio. I'm sure you will be heartily congratulated for being pro-active in your career search.

In all truthfulness, U.S. companies are not required to look for Americans first before bringing in candidates from overseas, as explained in this still-relevant 2003 fact sheet written by Kim Berry that I just found.

(Cross-posted at Carrie's Nation.)

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Friday, October 12, 2007

"She Can't Hold On Much Longer, Captain"
Posted by Citizen Carrie | 5:33 PM

I mentioned in my recent SNARK ALERT! post the number of articles that have been published recently, all decrying the supposed "high tech skills" shortage. I've noticed that each author has his or her own unique spin on this catastrophe, making it impossible for us bloggers (since we are not being subsidized by Big Business to spend eight hours a day pounding out the party line on our keyboards) to keep up with the task of refuting all of the misinformation being spewed forth.

I give you the following examples:

  • Poor Billy Boy has no choice but to open a new software development center in Vancouver, British Columbia in order to skirt the limits on H-1B visas issued in the United States.
  • Equally poor Rob Preston from InformationWeek tried his best, but all he could do was come up with a confusing article that seemed to imply there is a talent shortage, but could not seem to muster up any convincing facts or statistics to support his claim. At least he had the guts to face his accusers!
  • Moira Herbst's article at BusinessWeek came up with an interesting twist. Sure, there are plenty of IT professionals and engineers out there, but most of them have the wrong skills sets. Enrollment in computer science and engineering programs at colleges and universities is predictably bottoming out, forcing Bill Gates to go on a public relations tour to urge students to switch their majors back to technical degrees.

Just when I thought things couldn't possibly get any worse, Anne Broache from CNET comes up with this gem, "Allow More Green Cards for Foreign Techies, Congress Told".

"But what's sometimes forgotten in the debate is a key point of agreement among at least some representatives of the warring sides. A new joint letter (click for PDF) to Congress from the Semiconductor Industry Association and IEEE-USA, the U.S. branch of the world's largest professional society of electronics engineers, seeks to remind politicos of that common ground, which is this: we need more green cards."

No, Anne, WE HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN ABOUT GREEN CARDS! And, no, Anne, WE DO NOT NEED TO ISSUE MORE GREEN CARDS! We do not mention Green Cards every time we write about this "high skills" debacle because we don't have time to write 300-page treatises debunking these claims each and every time you and your colleagues decide to write another article full of cheap shots aimed at American workers! And besides, have you Googled "Green Cards high tech skills shortage" lately? I came up with 805,000 results!

During the massive KoolAid-sipping debauchery amongst corporations in the 1990's, the decision was made to lower costs by downsizing thousands of experienced American professionals, and either replace them with lower cost H-1B or L-1 visa employees, or just to ship the jobs outright overseas and be done with them, once and for all. Surprise, surprise. We now ONLY HAVE A SHORTAGE of professionals who are perfectly matched for each and every esoteric little high tech position being created, and students, who are smarter than Bill Gates and his Strong American Schools cohorts realize, are REFUSING to major in technical career fields after having seen an entire generation of tech workers given the shaft and having no reason to believe it could never happen again.

U.S. corporations made their beds, now make them sleep in them! Just like the American households that must live with the consequences of their spending habits, U.S. companies should be forced to live with the available American talent pool that their policies have repeatedly diluted and destroyed over the past 15 years. Don't let these guys off the hook by letting them bring in workers from overseas.

I don't have time for any more of this nonsense. Tomorrow I'm going on a fall color tour. Don't anyone DARE try to publish another one of these phony talent shortage articles while my back is turned!

(Cross-posted at Carrie's Nation.)

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Thursday, September 20, 2007

Stealthy Little Piggies on the Senate Floor
Posted by Citizen Carrie | 8:10 PM
I don’t normally like to write alarming articles about bills that are being considered in either the U.S. Senate or House of Representatives, particularly during the early stages of negotiations. As my dad once said, he used to constantly get these email alerts begging him to call or fax his senator or representative right away about some huge issue before the world collapsed. My dad would usually do nothing, and Congress would usually vote the right way.

As early as today or tonight, our U.S. Senators could be voting on various proposals that would, in the words of NumbersUSA, "….when taken together, would grant amnesty to millions of illegal aliens and dramatically increase the importation of foreign workers at a time 10 million Americans are looking for jobs and can't find employment." Naturally, since similar proposals were overwhelmingly rejected in June of this year, these proposals are in danger of being piggy-backed onto H.R. 1585, the Defense Authorization bill for fiscal year 2008.

I took notice after seeing how grass-root activism helped the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007 go up in flames on the Senate floor on June 28, 2007. Among other measures, the Act would have raised the annual H-1B visa limits for "highly-skilled" workers from 65,000 to 115,000 per year. I knew that business oligarchs led by Bill Gates at Microsoft would not go away quietly. I also knew that these business leaders would use every means necessary, from soft-sell tactics to playing hardball, to get the visa limits raised this year. Knowing that stealth would be their weapon of choice, I resolved to keep my ears open for any new developments. I also resolved to get off my butt recently and start following this story a little bit more closely.

Here’s a little background on the whole saga. In 1990, thanks in part to my U.S. Senator at the time, Spencer Abraham (R-MI), Congress enacted the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1990, which established the H-1B category of "highly skilled" guest workers who were brought in to fill open positions due to a perceived shortage of qualified American candidates. The number of H-1B visas allowed per year fluctuated at various times between 65,000 per year to a peak of 195,000 per year. (Rob Sanchez has a nice history at his Job Destruction website.) From that point on, employers have been falling over themselves to slash as many American information technology and engineering workers as possible from their payrolls and give the jobs to lower paid and (often lower qualified) foreign guest workers, mostly from India.

When the Senate failed to approve the bill raising the H-1B limits to 115,000 in June as mentioned above, the assault began.

On July 5, 2007, Microsoft announced they were forced to open up a new software development office in Vancouver, British Columbia in order to get around the current visa limitation of 65,000 per year.

On July 10, 2007, Hillary Clinton made a video-conference speech to the Indian Institute of Technology 2007 Global Alumni Conference in Santa Clara, California, and affirmed her support for expanding the H-1B visa program.

On July 16, 2007, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce sent a letter to the U.S. Senate supporting measures for the "….temporary relief for companies in need of highly skilled workers."

On August 23, 2007, Microsoft filed a lobby registration form with the US Senate showing they were hiring the firm of SC Partners LLC for purposes of lobbying on issues surrounding H-1B visas and Green Cards for tech workers.

On September 11, 2007 (talk about horrible timing!), a bipartisan group of 13 governors sent a joint letter to the US House of Representatives and the US Senate urging our lawmakers to pass legislation to raise the H-1B limit to 115,000 visas.

On September 18, 2007, about 1,000 "highly skilled" legal immigrants rallied at the US Capitol in Washington, D.C. to "…protest long delays and vast bureaucratic backlogs in the immigration system." Paul Donnelly, one of the godfathers of the current H-1B system and now a consultant for American Families United, was quoted by the New York Times as saying. "It is a significant thing to have foreign-born people, who are notoriously hard to organize, organizing themselves." Oh, so this was a grassroots, spontaneous assembly, huh?

Not to mention various well-placed articles appearing here and there talking about the difficulties in hiring qualified people for tech positions, how the public school system contributes to our country’s failure to compete with foreign workers, and the benefits of free trade.

I’ve been vaguely disgusted with the U.S. visa policies for a number of years as I’ve seen high tech workers laid-off, forced to train their lower cost replacements, told their skills were irrelevant, told they lacked work experience after spending time and money to update their skills, and told they were overqualified on the rare occasion the potential employer could find nothing wrong with their work history. I’ve become a very recent convert in the drive against amnesty for illegal aliens when I started witnessing something I thought I would never see – highly educated American workers competing directly against illegal aliens for jobs in the building trades. Big government and businesses have been able to push around American workers for far too long now, and it’s time for all of us to put a stop to it.

Please don’t be afraid to contact your Senators and urge them to vote against any measure that would take away jobs from American citizens.

(Cross-posted at Carrie's Nation.)

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Wednesday, September 12, 2007

But I wonder whom they're hiring to build these sites?
Posted by Jill | 6:50 AM
If social networking sites for boomers and seniors are the Next Big Thing on the Web, are they still refusing to hire anyone over 40 to build them?

Older people are sticky.

That is the latest view from Silicon Valley. Technology investors and entrepreneurs, long obsessed with connecting to teenagers and 20-somethings, are starting a host of new social networking sites aimed at baby boomers and graying computer users.

The sites have names like Eons, Rezoom, Multiply, Maya’s Mom, Boomj, and Boomertown. They look like Facebook — with wrinkles.

And they are seeking to capitalize on what investors say may be a profitable characteristic of older Internet users: they are less likely than youngsters to flit from one trendy site to the next.

“Teens are tire kickers — they hang around, cost you money and then leave,” said Paul Kedrosky, a venture capitalist and author of the blog “Infectious Greed.” Where Friendster was once the hot spot, Facebook and MySpace now draw the crowds of young people online.

“The older demographic has a bunch of interesting characteristics,” Mr. Kedrosky added, “not the least of which is that they hang around.”

This prospective and relative stickiness is helping drive a wave of new investment into boomer and older-oriented social networking sites that offer like-minded (and like-aged) individuals discussion and dating forums, photo-sharing, news and commentary, and chatter about diet, fitness and health care.

Last week, VantagePoint Ventures, an early investor in MySpace, announced that it had led a $16.5 million round of financing for Multiply, a social networking site aimed at people who are settled.

In August, Shasta Ventures led a $4.8 million financing round for TeeBeeDee, a site coming out of its test stage this month. The name is short for “To Be Determined” (as in: just because you’re not trolling for a mate on MySpace doesn’t mean your life is over.)

Also in August, Johnson & Johnson spent $10 million to $20 million to acquire Maya’s Mom, a social networking site for parents, according to a person briefed on the deal. The site has been in existence about a year.


Maya's Granny, call your lawyer.

Let's take a spin around who runs these sites.

Jeff Taylor, founder and CEO of Eons, says "If you’re under 50, join me in being an evangelist for Eons and challenge yourself to see how many friends and family you can inspire to live the biggest life possible. Be loud and be proud about your age." The video linked here shows that while the senior staff appears to be well-represented by those in the target demographic, the staff is disproportionately under 40. The company gives lip service to encouraging "Eons members (age 50+)" to apply, but with a technical staff that isn't representative of this ethos, Taylor might want to think about providing training in the skills the company uses so as to more actively recruit the site's target demographic.

This is Peter Pezaris, the founder of Multiply.com. Doesn't look like a boomer, does he? Bet he doesn't hire them to work on his site, either.

Jerry Cover of ReZoom looks like he might be approaching the target demographic for his site. But before you rush to sign up, you should probably know that he's a founder of Lighthouse Family Ministries -- something his bio at ReZoom doesn't mention. This is all well and good, but since "sharing the love of Christ" is part of what Lighthouse does, and the "About Us" page at ReZoom refers to "inspirational stories about ReZoomers just like you", expect a Christian focus.

TeeBeeDee's founder, Robin Wolaner, is 50 and the other founders are all 50-plus. TeeBeeDee's job page has the boilerplate nondiscrimination blurb, but says nothing about welcoming "experienced" applicants.

I know that Gen-X likes to put the responsibility for everything that's wrong with the world in the laps of baby boomers, but it's surprising that it's taken this long for social networking to hit the boomer community. With many of the bloggers that I met at Yearly Kos and with whom I've become acquainted since being around my age, and with the keep-up-with-the-youngsters boomer mentality, it's overdue that entrepreneurs realize that web sites targeted at this elephant going through a snake could be a good idea. It would be nice, however, if these sites made an effort to hire engineers, programmers, and writers in the age group of their target demographic. There are a lot of them out there, trying to cobble together an income doing what they can because corporate America just doesn't want them anymore.

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