Special report: First the good news, then the bad. IT salaries are on the rise this year, but so are anxiety, longer hours and low morale. “Reduced competition for jobs and brighter prospects for company growth are spurring pay hikes across the spectrum of IT positions, flushing the post-millennial doldrums of subinflation raises from recent memory and replacing them with dreams of earning even more,” reports Jason Snyder in 2007 InfoWorld Compensation Survey. Read our salary survey by the numbers, or if you prefer download the PDF. Notes from the field: Readers, some of you anyway, are clamoring to know why Cringe even cares about Microsoft’s advertising campaigns. “I don’t,” he answers in Slogan’s run. “My point was that Microsoft’s tortured, clumsy and/or inscrutable taglines are an all-too-accurate reflection of its tortured, clumsy, and/or inscrutable software.” While said readers were at it, they offered up suggested slogans of their own for the Redmond crew, including one that goes “the clouds above, the mud below.” Others include “Microsoft: Never have so many produced so little so slowly.” Okay, so I neither said these were entirely fair, not did I reveal Cringe’s personal favorite. Careers