Careers: Today, guest writer Jerry Mahoney weighs in on the current epidemic otherwise known as the talent shortage in IT. “It’s causing lots of IT problems. In fact, all of them. We’ve got failures galore! And if you actually still have a job in IT, you’re infected, too. It’s why you can’t work more hours without complaining,” Mahoney writes in this Ask the headhunter post. The dilemma: a 40 percent drop in new IT grads being churned out results in a 5.2 percent salary increase for current workers. “Gotta pay more to get the few of you people out there in IT to work 24X7! That’s how competition works.” Columnist’s corner: Nothing quite like trial by fire, particularly on one’s first day at a national support desk. But that’s exactly what happened to our Off the Record author, back in 1978 I ought to add. The problem was a departmental mini-computer that would come to a crawl every Monday, only to spring back 15 minutes later. “Over the course of the next several weeks, we studied every aspect of what happened on Monday mornings.” The case of the very bad Monday. “I learned an important lesson from this experience. Although most support issues can be looked at in terms of ‘what changed?’ it does not necessarily mean that the change was directly tied to the symptom.” Open source: Here’s a thought-provoking question: How vested are you in your OSS? Savio Rodrigues ponders this from a developer perspective. “I’m wondering whether a developer who has built skills with OSS product A is more, less or equally invested in the product’s life than another developer who has built skills with a commercial enterprise product B,” he writes. Talkback below or via the link immediately above. The news beat: Microsoft lays out a roadmap for Dynamics and upgrades support for the business applications. Oracle ships a Windows version of its 11g database, replete with performance improvements and better integration to Microsoft’s platform. Sprint-Nextel and Alcatel-Lucent introduce a mobile data card that serves as a security tool. And a new wireless public broadband plan hopes to cover Silicon Valley with Internet services but, of course, the strategy is not lacking obstacles. Careers