Several years ago, there was an unfortunate incident around the Morgan family Christmas dinner table. I nearly choked on my lunch.

I should point out ­ for fear of incurring my mother’s wrath ­ that the cooking was not to blame. Instead, my gagging resulted from the chutzpah of my sister’s then beau, a merchant banker, who had stormed into the room, sulking like a child denied a top-of-the-range Transformer. The reason for his anguish? His Christmas bonus wasn’t what he’d hoped ­ what with it being a paltry four times my entire income for that year.

So for all those who argue that the latest storm over bankers’ bonuses has all the hallmarks of naked envy, I think back to that Christmas dinner, and am reminded of the divisive nature of wages.

Few subjects create friction as readily as pay, and the reasons are fairly clear. Employment is one of the few areas where we are given explicit statements concerning our worth to another party.

The link between pay and employee morale should not be underestimated. Because although some workers will complain about the unfairness of the eye-watering bonuses being paid to bankers, it is fundamentally an issue that does not affect people’s day-to-day life. Start messing with their take-home pay and you’ll see a real fuss.

Take, for example, technology vendor HP. On the back of some disappointing financial results, it announced an across-the-board pay cut for all its staff ­ or at least all its staff working in countries with labour laws that allowed them to do it. In other places, such as the UK, staff are being consulted about the proposal.

There is some sense in HP’s approach ­ though I would suggest that cutting wages is a last resort, and find it difficult to conceive that HP could not have devised other cost-saving measures first.

Nevertheless, for better or worse, its management looked at the options of redundancies or pay cuts and thought the latter was the better option.

And it is not just HP that is trimming wage bills. BP recently emailed its employment agencies to let them know that from March it would be paying IT contractors 10 per cent less for their work.

These examples might not be indicative of a widespread trend, but they are worth taking note of. With the economy in turmoil, the prospect of a significant period of deflation looms, and that could make salary cuts a reality for many.

Faced with falling prices for goods and services, business leaders may conclude that staff numbers cannot be reduced further and have to consider cutting wages. I suspect many firms would take BP’s approach, at least initially, where any pay cuts are targeted at contractors and not employees. But ­ on the ultra-gloomy side ­ all staff could ultimately be affected.

That is likely to be a bitter pill for staff to swallow. And managers would do well to consider the psychological impact ­ staff would effectively be told their work is no longer as highly valued as it once was. That need not be calamitous, but it needs careful handling.

The HP example provides a lesson in how not to go about it. When making painful decisions, it can be useful to convey the message that the team is in this together. HP tried to do that by announcing that its chief executive, Mark Hurd, would take a 20 per cent cut in his basic salary, compared to his staff who were taking a five per cent cut.

That gesture looked less laudable when bloggers drew attention to Hurd’s remuneration package. The announced cut equates to about $290,000 off a basic salary of $1.45m ­ but Hurd’s complete package last year was worth $42.5m. Suddenly, that looks less like taking one for the team.

And there’s the rub ­ sensitivities about pay really become inflamed when people start feeling they are being treated inequitably.

By Gareth Morgan

Remote access technology has been instrumental in helping to forge a social and commercial revolution.

A report from the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) suggests that 46 per cent of UK businesses now offer some form of teleworking option to their staff, a figure that has more than trebled in the last two years.

If accurate, this is a huge victory for both technology and common sense. Not least because it indicates that, in some quarters at least, many of the old prejudices about responsible working adults turning into mischievous truant schoolchildren when let off the nine-to-five leash have finally been overcome.

IT has been instrumental in this turnaround, though perhaps only because its proven success has given bosses one less thing they can object to when considering a home working request.

The technology is there and it works. From the simple reliability of remote access to office email systems combined with internet links and mobile phones, to the sort of IP telephony and centralised applications being used by call centre staff to utilise office systems and databases from different locations.

If the CBI figures are wrong - and there may be instances of employers’ being unwilling to admit they do not offer flexible working options to their staff when questioned - the barriers to widespread adoption of home working are certainly not being raised by either a lack of suitable technology, or its reliability.

As always, the biggest hurdle is people’s attitudes, loosely based on their fear of one thing or another. Employers are scared that workers they cannot physically see will be putting their feet up and avoiding hard work. Employees are scared that working flexibly will limit their chances of promotion and the scope of their wider career advancement.

Both scenarios are occasionally true, but hopefully remain the exception rather than the rule. For the most part, home working can be successfully implemented using reliable technology, sound working procedures, and the willingness of both sides to be flexible.

If homeworking figures continue to climb at the pace the CBI suggests, remote access technology will have laid the foundation for the most significant alteration in global working practices since the beginning of the industrial age.

This week’s assertion from IT training body Computeach that studying for a computer science degree may not be the best route to an IT career is unashamedly self-serving in encouraging young people to study for specific vocational qualifications - preferably those offered by Computeach.

But its also overlooks the fundamental problem facing most 16- to 18-year olds – few of them have the slightest clue about the job they actually want to do, though most have a pre-conceived idea about those that they would rather avoid.

I did a straw poll of young people moving into both university and sixth form education recently to see how many planned or would consider a career in IT.

The results were predictable – none of them. Only a tiny percentage would ever consider doing an IT-related job for a living and only then when the door had already been closed on pretty much every other career option they could think of. Though you have to say, working with animals or children, being an artist or photographer, and doing something in the media, don’t exactly inspire confidence in young people’s ability to hammer out a coherent career plan.

As a teenager I didn’t plan to work in IT either. I wanted to be either a fighter pilot or a journalist, and yet strangely, via a career in IT first, one of those scenarios did eventually come true - and no, I didn’t write this from a deck chair in between sorties from Biggin Hill airfield.

So what exactly is wrong with IT as a career? Actually very little when you consider it objectively. It’s still relatively well paid in comparison to lots of other jobs, and can offer distinct advantages when it comes to flexible working - particularly if you are a programmer or other project-based worker that can safely jet off to India or Australia for a few months every year in between gigs.

People who work in IT are not geeks, just normal people earning a living in the best or most comfortable way they can – no more or less a spod than their counterparts working in sales, marketing, administration or finance. IT as a whole remains a dynamic, intellectually-challenging career that supports the growing reliance on computer systems by all organisations. And there are only so many IT jobs that can be exported to India or China, with plenty left for home-grown talent to fill.

Young people may not know it yet, but they could eventually settle for a lot less.

By Martin Courtney

Over the past few days I have been wrestling with the formidable challenge of setting up a home network. As the least technologically-inept member of my immediate family, such tasks usually land on my shoulders – whether I want them to or not.

After three days of battling with rebellious firewalls, mutinous anti-spyware tools and a router that appears to be made of cardboard, I’ve finally succeeded in making everything work. Sort of. The end result was the electronic equivalent of a lop-sided DIY shelf, but that’s beside the point.

Two weeks ago I happened to be chatting about home networks with some people at an event hosted by AT&T. Dave Belanger, the company’s chief scientist, pointed out that a few years ago it would have been pretty much unthinkable for everyday folk to set up a network in their own house. The speed at which technology advances is quite remarkable, but this acceleration throws up some interesting side effects:

As Belanger pointed out, whenever a new technology appears, there is a set period of time during which one generation of society has the upper hand in terms of experience. Say, for example, that a company suddenly reveals a range of consumer jetpacks with a minimum user age of 18. Anyone aged 18 and above would have immediate access to rocket-based fun, but anyone in their childhood at the time of launch would have to wait for over a decade before they could have a go.

Clearly this theory works along very broad lines. The very concept of a generation, as presented here, is a bit flawed since human beings aren’t conceived in regularly ordered batches. However, the over-reaching argument rings true - the speed at which a technology can be learned determines how fast it enters the social skillset.

Or to put it another way: I’m 25 and consider myself to be “not bad” with computers – but there are millions of 16-year-olds who could have done a better job of setting up my home network. In fact, there are probably millions of 10-year-olds who could have carried out the task in half the time I took, with better results.

The idea of parents asking their children for help with their PCs is nothing new, but the advance of technology – and technological literacy – means that the youngest generations now start learning computer skills from the age of about four.

Or as Berlanger put it: “By the time you’re eight, you’re obsolete.”

So, next time you’re feeling anxious about your IT job and you start looking around for your closest rival, don’t bother. They’re probably at home, sucking on a rusk.

By Neon Kelly

I’ve been browsing the web for stories on women in IT and reading the comments posted online by readers.

Unless you’re talking to the skills councils and equality groups, it’s quite difficult to have a serious conversation about women in IT. The debate will usually dissolve into banter, with comments ranging from the tedious - such as whether women are capable of logic - via the mildly offensive - whether it would be productive to increase the eye candy for male employees  - and arriving at the outright bizarre.

For example, one reader at our sister publication The Inquirer wrote: “They do not like IT and do not wanna work in that kind of area... Just like I do not want to work in marketing or human resources, which as far as I know is women and gay biased… every time I speak to an HR guy he has that funny sounds-like-a-girl sound.”

I’m not strictly a woman in IT, but I work on a mainly male IT newsdesk and while I’m taken seriously in all aspects of my work, I’m still laughed at for needing more than 10 minutes to get ready to go out socially with my team.

From what I can see, it’s not just about accepting women in IT, it’s about accepting that they can be themselves in IT, not expecting them to adapt so perfectly to an all-male environment that nobody notices they are female. This has been a long but positive road in the general workplace and IT should be quite capable of catching up quick.

By Janie Davies

Here at Computing, we have reported on the reaction of the IT community to the economic downturn from a number of different angles - but the tone of the conversation has changed quite considerably in the past couple of months.

From asking whether the crunch would affect the industry in February, we moved on to giving practical advice to managers on how to survive the recession in April. While analysts are trying to make some sense of the situation to translate it into numbers and trends, the simple conclusion is that the crunch is already here for the IT sector.

At a recent industry event, Gartner research vice president for emerging trends Mark Raskino gave practical advice to some 200 chief information officers. He highlighted that IT leaders “must not panic [about the implications of the downturn], but should act now” and “do not wait for instructions or permission.”

The analyst then moved on to suggesting a range of different shapes and sizes for possible IT-driven business decision plans, all of which advised IT directors to keep IT costs in trim “to avoid knee-jerk decisions later”.

But when Raskino asked the managers present whether their budgeting plans had changed at all as a consequence of the downturn, only a handful of candid leaders raised their hands, including Del Monte Foods IT director Mike Proudlock. I was seating next to a former CIO of a large financial services company, who whispered to me: “I am the living proof of cost-cutting…” He did not raise his hand, though.

For this article, we had a couple of out takes due to the broad “survival guide” nature of the copy, but when we asked where the cost-cutting actually starts, reducing staff overheads was a common answer from IT decision makers. Former Egg chief information officer Tom Ilube said that slashing workforce, as well as focusing on systems aimed at rationalising staff resources, would be near the top of the list of priorities during tough times.

News of lay-offs in the industry have already started to hit the headlines, with supplier Logica CMG planning to axe 500-or-so UK jobs to reap £80m in savings and “revitalise the business”. Speaking of revitalising, we interviewed Royal Mail’s CIO Robin Dargue last week and found out more about his transformation plans. Dargue has a large chunk of a £1.2bn budget to spend on technology, but when it came to evaluating his skills base, he chose to retrain around half of a 300-strong IT workforce.

In the current economic climate, IT capability reviews - such as the one carried out by Royal Mail - may become a trend. But companies should be undertaking such reviews anyway, said Marilyn Davidson, director of the Association of Technical Staffing Companies (ATSCO).

“There is a possibility that the downturn will force employers to undertake such reviews. But businesses should always ensure that their skills base is fit-for-purpose and keep expertise within the business to remain lean, mean and more competitive,” she said.

The way in which IT leaders manage cost-cutting processes – especially in the human resources field – is a delicate issue. If things worsen and “mean” reviewing processes are carried out, we may see some “grilling” of businesses by workers unions in the not too distant future.

By Angelica Mari