Data center consolidations are never easy, and this is most likely being handled by a for-profit contractor, so tack on an extra 20% to whatever price tag it is, just for overhead.

Think of all the stuff that has to happen:
- All the connectivity to various networks has to be moved or duplicated. If we're not talking IPsec over the Internet, that means circuit orders, routing changes, etc. which quickly multiply and all involve tons of coordination.
- If you're doing P2V, that has to be carefully scheduled and everything needs to be tested on the consolidation hardware before you decommission the old stuff completely.
- If you're doing lift-and-move for things that can't or shouldn't be on VMs, downtime, network changes and logistics to get it to the new place need to be coordinated.
- All the system dependencies need to be worked out. System X will break without connectivity to Systems S, T and Z. System T will fail intermittently if the latency between System F goes above a certain point, taking down A, B and N. Etc. Etc. Yay for integration.

Also, DC migration plans tend to expose all the skeletons that previous admins left in the closet. Well-worn examples of undocumented networks, networks that unexpectedly rely on some crappy Linksys switch backboning traffic between key segments are par for the course. [1]

My experience from the private sector with consolidations is usually large companies wanting to shovel things that started off in branches up to a central point, or to move IT someplace with a lower cost of living. In every case, it's never paid off right away. The fact that it's the federal government just means they have more real estate at their disposal, so it's a bigger job, not necessarily more or less cost.

[1] My favorite comes from the dark ages of Token Ring where it turned out that the link between two components of a very important, must-be-running system depended on TR gateway software running on an original IBM PC AT with two TR NICs.- and this was in the 90s. It was never meant to be that way, but it turned out that someone never documented this and it was found during a move.

One of the things this might do is increase the completion rate of the engineering courses without having to dumb down instruction.

Back when I was in college (measured in geological time units,) I started off in chemical engineering due to a fascination with engineering and a good prep in chemistry. What I didn't have was (and still is) a good math background. I know people who "get" math learn it differently from the rote memorization method taught in most schools, and this makes it make more sense. I was a memorizer -- I'd love to know the secret to actually understanding math. Anyway, it became clear to me after a year and a half that I was never going to be able to keep up with the coursework because of my lousy math background and full time employment. Most people I knew who washed out of engineering switched to business - I tried that for a semester, found it incredibly easy and boring, and switched to chemistry. So you could say I succeeded, in that I got a degree in something marketable, but I still lacked the tools to pursue what I was interested in.

It's awful that universities have to do a "remedial year" to fix shortcomings in K-12, and I wasn't even a low income student who went to a crappy school. But looking at it from the perspective of someone who may have benefited from something like this, it makes a little sense. I think that if I hadn't had to learn calculus at the same time I was doing physics and other intro engineering courses, I may have had a better chance of actually understanding what was going on. Once you go beyond the basics and start dealing with thermodynamics, dynamics, etc., not having that foundation kills your ability to fully master the material. The problem with a program like this is that they have to find people who have skills deficiencies AND are willing to put in the hard work to correct them quickly.

Maybe I'm getting a little older, but I think a major problem that any education reform can't solve is the lack of a diverse group of jobs for people of varying abilities. Previously, high school dropouts had a hard life, but they weren't sentenced to a lifetime of poverty like they are now. The reason is that there were jobs for them, and some of these jobs actually had stability and wage progression. High school graduates could go and work in a factory, and in some cases, they would have stable income and the ability to live a middle class life. Smarter high school grads and the low-to-middle achieving college graduates had their pick of millions of corporate paper-pushing jobs. The good college grads and post-graduate degree holders had even more choices open to them.

The current situation isn't sustainable:
- High school dropouts have nothing to look forward to in life - they will always be either unemployed or making minimum wage in a string of temporary jobs. Low skilled jobs used to be protected by strong unions, but public opinion has soured on them.
- Factory work is much less plentiful than it used to be. In fact, there are articles citing the lack of skills for current manufacturing jobs (which I genuinely don't understand, but apparently the only people left in a factory are CNC programmers -- does anyone know the real source of this skill shortage? Is everything done by robots now?)
- There's less corporate paper to push and entry level positions are increasingly being outsourced or eliminated. This leaves tons of people with college degrees, high student debt and no way to pay it back. Example: I used to work in the IT department of a huge insurance company and my older colleagues told me about a time where they had many thousands of people just processing claims, keeping the books, etc. That's mostly gone now.
- There's even pressure on professions like law and medicine -- apparently outsourcing has killed the market for a lot of legal jobs.

The problem is, anyone who advocates having enough employment for everyone at every level is branded a socialist or Luddite. I can't see it getting better until there really is a "1%" of people who have a good life and we have a repeat of the French Revolution.

Sure, we should fix problems with education. But we should also realize that not everyone benefits from more education and can't handle anything beyond a basic job. A janitor shouldn't make the same as a doctor or engineer, but that janitor should at least have some stability in their life. I grew up in the Rust Belt, and it wasn't uncommon for people to graduate high school, and spend the next 40 years at a steel mill or car plant. Those people weren't rich, but the stability of the work meant they could have a few nice things and be solidly middle class even without an expensive education.

All I'm saying is that producing millions of college graduates for a class of work that doesn't fit them or doesn't exist isn't the fix. The conservative ideal of entrepreneurship for all is also silly -- millions of failed business ventures can't be supported by the economy any more than millions of unemployed employees. I say the Rust Belt model is a good one.

There are two things that really bug me about this story and stories like this:

• - (Obviously) The employer wasn't able to effectively lock the former employee out of the system
• - Because of idiots like this (assuming he did it,) IT will never be considered a profession

One of the things I would really like to see before I retire is the ability of IT / systems engineering to grow up a little bit and attain the same level of recognition that professional engineers enjoy. I'm old and curmudgeon-y at 38, but one of the things I've consistently seen throughout my career is examples of stuff like this. When standards are put in place (see ITIL as an example,) they are implemented so poorly or are so rigid that they remove any critical thinking from a process. I know many support people in ITIL shops who have quit out of the sheer frustration of paperwork and being limited to pushing pre-defined buttons at pre-defined times. This kills the pipeline for new engineering talent, and we're increasingly at the mercy of high-paid vendors and vendor consultants. In my opinion, this needs to change.

The problem is, how do we do it? A basic engineering education has math, physics, mechanics, thermodynamics, etc, to fall back on. The fundamentals in these subjects change very rarely. Let's say for the moment that "IT" represents the computer systems engineering field, even though I know the term encompasses tons of technician roles. When you dig down into the fundamentals of IT, you're dealing with the interoperability of computer systems, networks, storage, and so on. The concepts are all the same, but the layers on top keep getting changed every few months as new technology comes out. In many cases, old technology gets trotted out again with new underpinnings attached -- see the rise of virtualization and the parallels to the 70's timeshare concept. Sometimes it's change for the sake of change (and a cut of the App Store pie) -- see Windows 8. The field is definitely not static, but neither is engineering. New methods and materials are tried all the time, and if one works better it displaces the old one.

One thing an engineering curriculum that leads to the possibility of PE licensure has is an ethics component. Sure, some people may consider it a joke, and think following ethical guidelines is for suckers when executives get away with things all the time. But, it's there. IT as it is now doesn't really have something like this. How many sysadmins do you know that behave like a slightly less criminal version of the BOFH? I've seen a lot of this behavior, and there's very little done to combat it. Because I'm an ethical idiot, I point out things like the loopholes this guy probably exploited to get his revenge. I've often walked into situations where I've been accidentally granted way too much authority. I don't know about you, but my first reaction isn't to exploit it -- I've politely explained, "Look, I know I can do xyz with my privileges, but I really shouldn't be able to. Please take this away from me." Why? Because I really like the work I do, and I want to keep doing it. The guy in this article is going to be lucky to have any sort of job, let alone work in the IT field again, even if he's found not guilty.

I know that a lot of the problems with education rest with the fact that we trust vendors and their certifications to fill the gap in fundamental knowledge. I absolutely hate vendor "whitepapers" that promise a "deep dive" on a technical subject and are thinly veiled advertisements for a product. Having only that as an educational resource leads to people who have a very vendor-centric view of the world. My natural reaction when faced with an unfamiliar system is to dig in to the details and figure out what's going on under the hood. Vendors don't want you to do that, and employers are happy because the vendor they chose just happens to certify "professionals" who "know" the product in question.

Computer systems are absolutely fundamental to the work we do these days. In my mind, having a "professional profession" is the best way to keep systems stable. And yes, that means that professional systems engineers would need to guarantee their work and sign off on it. Therein lies the other problem -- lots of "IT professionals" don't want any sort of regulation or responsibility for their work. I would welcome it, even if I had to pay for liability insurance. Without some formality around what we do, we will always be the scary basement dwelling nerds that are feared by the executives.

I'm a systems integration person, so I have actual real-world experience getting one steaming turd of enterprise software to coexist with another one. Even if it's just coding style, and nothing your team does shows up in the final product released to customers, sloppy work means that your customers are going to have longer waits for bug fixes in the future. They're also going to be cursing your company because your products are a pain in the butt to install, require 100% of a high-end server's resources for a simple client/server application, and other reasons. When was the last time you looked at an Oracle or CA or SAP product and said, "Wow, that product is amazing! Clear documentation, easy installation and plays nice with other things on the same system!" Yeah, I thought I knew the answer. :-)

One of the things that really gets me is over-reliance on the infinite hardware resource fairy to get an application to work. I've worked with tons of very expensive software that utilizes some of the worst, most inefficient SQL queries and procedures I've seen. The solution is always "add memory" or "buy a dedicated server." Admittedly, we're far from the days of hand-optimized assembler in most systems, but just reasonable hardware utilization still seems to be too much to ask.

So from a customer perspective, yes, you're doing the right thing by recognizing the problem. How to fix it is a very hard problem and depends on a lot of things. From your question it sounds like poor project management and resource allocation is a big part of this. Well, welcome to my world. :-) Project managers are an interesting lot. The best ones actually did the work previously and know how hard it is to estimate a software project. The worst take the PMP course and assume you're working on a construction project. I wish IT projects were like construction projects -- there's zero uncertainty in most of those. It takes X workers Y hours to drywall Z m^2 of studs. It takes X workers Y hours to rough in plumbing. Etc. Software is a whole different bag -- most construction projects don't get halfway down the track and require that you rip the whole thing down and start over, or even that you rip the last 3 floors out.

I guess I would try to see if the PMs on your project are the type that can be reasoned with and have a clue about what you're doing. That's going to be the way to solve the problem -- getting the pressure off the other guy so he can deliver decent stuff. I've rolled out stuff I hate to make artificial deadlines as well -- it's unprofessional and I hate doing it.

Most corporate social media sites are the domain of the marketing department. Am I the only one who thinks there isn't much hacking involved?

Username -- BigCorpTwitter
Password -- password1

If I were a company's IT department, I would make sure the marketing people were using a 40 character complex passphrase. Unfortunately there's no way to enforce it, and making it complex means that it'll be written under the keyboard of the Associate Twitter Specialist who has to write all the "spontaneous, off-the-cuff, edgy Web 2.0" marketing messages every day.

Dear Microsoft,

I fully understand the reason for switching to the full-screen Start screen. You want a cut of the app revenue like Apple gets, and that only makes sense. I would even be happy with Win8.1 if you could just boot to the desktop and not have the Start button back (but I would REALLY like it back as a bonus...) Here's one thing I can't live with that needs to change:

Put Aero Glass back into the OS as a selectable theme, or even Aero without the glass.

I'm our company's desktop systems architect, and I'm still on Windows 7 for all my personal machines. The main reason is the flat, ugly, hard-to-navigate 2D user interface on the desktop. I really want the client-side improvements Windows has made, I want Client Hyper-V so I don't have to shell out for VMWare Workstation. I definitely want Windows to Go. But I can't use the new flat user interface. Office 2013, Visual Studio and Server Manager are acres and acres of monochrome text and icons with very little to guide your eyes around the screen. I know a lot of people complained about Aero wasting processor cycles, but even the non-transparent version had buttons, text and icons that were colorful, stood out on the screen so you knew where they were instinctively, etc.

I guess I should have left the Customer Experience Improvement Program opt-in checkbox checked all these years...but I can't be the only one who feels this way. So if you want me to upgrade, I need the following:
- Aero Glass available as a theme - you can even leave the 2D screen as the default.
- Start button as a bonus -- If I don't get that I'll be OK, but I'd be happy if I did.

If I upgrade, there's a very good chance 6000+ PCs will upgrade too.

Sincerely, Me

You're pointing out an interesting fact about the IT industry -- there are some really good places to work and some that are really awful. And that definition of good and awful depends on the individual/situation. Without going too far off topic, think about working at Google vs. a "traditional" IT employer like a bank or hospital. Google is ideal for young/single workers who kind of want to continue the college dorm atmosphere. Free meals, concierge service, funky office space, etc. all designed to extract maximum hours out of a workforce who doesn't mind working 80 or 90 hours a week because nothing else is going on in their lives ATM. A more staid IT employer can either be a soul-crushing experience, or (in my case) realize that they need to attract mature talented people. (I work for an IT company that exclusively services a very staid, established industry sector for which correctness and uptime come before speed and flashy stuff.)

Just like corporate cultures are different, training policies are different. Our product design groups basically have to take all the latest flashy tech off the shelf and get it working reliably for our industry, so we're constantly learning. Since our company also deals with a few industry-proprietary skills that aren't easy to come by off the street, long-term employment is also encouraged. (And yes, I know that's wierd and 20th Century, but I like it now that I'm married with children.) We're encouraged to do one company-paid course a year, typically one of those week-long classroom sessions. Certification exams are also reimbursed, even if you don't do them as part of your formal course. Anyone who starts out with our company (including when I started) is told up front that they'll be given all the training they need in the proprietary side of the business, but that they'll be useless for at least the first 8 months while they learn. They then get our internal training where they learn the basics of our customer's business, the fundamental concepts behind what we do, and get to work on small projects. Also, university courses are fully reimbursed once good grades are submitted if you so desire.

I realize that my situation isn't typical, and we can only do it due to our unique situation. But the reality is that this should be the norm. On the job training should be encouraged if your company wants people who are engaged and understand the business side of things. Otherwise in my experience you get a never-ending stream of generic VMWare people, generic Windows people, generic Citrix people, etc. who only get the IT side of things because that's what they need to do to keep jumping ship every 2 years. Part of the reason why our company does well is that the consulting staff knows the customer's business beyond some crash PowerPoint briefing that they read on the plane before they showed up to work.

Bottom line, IT employers should invest in their people and not expect ready made new hires. IT employees should actively seek these employers out to encourage the bad ones to change their practices.

First, welcome. You're probably going to get a lot of comments telling you you're too old, but I don't think that's true. I'm in my late 30s and have often worried about what happens when I have to (or want to) completely retrain for something new down the road. And believe it or not, the 25 year olds will eventually run into this problem too. I love IT work, but if I ever win the lottery, I'm going to go back for my PhD in chemistry and be a scientist when I grow up. :-)

I can think of a few things in your favor switching into IT, although youth-obsessed workplaces may not agree with me:
- You probably have a better handle on troubleshooting, which is my #1 complaint with newbies in our field. 70% of this job, especially on the IT side, is figuring out what's broken in a methodical, logical way.
- You also probably have more discipline than someone straight out of school to design a system or application in such a way that it doesn't need to be babysat 24/7.
- You can probably document what you do clearer than younger people (although that's subjective -- I know a lot of older people who refuse to document their work, and 20-somethings who write perfect docs.)
- It also sounds like you're lucky that you're not going to be the guy constantly begging for raises in a job where salaries are contracting overall.

The problem. as I'm sure you're aware, is that not every employer sees your age and experience as strengths. I'm very lucky to be working as a systems engineer for an IT company that services a very mature industry. Most of the guys on our team are around my age or older, and experience is highly valued. Some of the stuff we do is proprietary, but the vast majority of it is implementing off-the-shelf IT stuff for our customers. This means we're constantly learning new things, or at least enough of those new things to get things done. The flip side of this would be a place like Google, Facebook, Zynga, or any Silicon Valley startup. Those places are all about youth and time-to-market, and are much less likely to take someone older regardless of skill set.

So, given the age problem, you can either selectively cut things out of your resume, OR, you can fall back on your network of people if you have one. I learned a few years ago that the best chance of getting a non-crap IT job is to call someone you worked with and ask them for help finding something. Even if they don't work in IT, they'll be able to find someone who does and get you past the cold call resume HR filter. My experience with this was good - a company I was working with for a while decided to move their IT department to Florida, and I was told to move or be laid off. I hate the heat and sun, so I called up one of my former managers and asked if anything interesting was brewing. 6 weeks later, I had a job and never had to be unemployed. And I don't have to deal with 100% humidity and 95 degree temperatures for 8 months of the year. So yeah, networking is a good thing.

The other problem you face is this - entry level IT is shrinking as well. I started out doing help desk work. These jobs can still be had, but with so many companies contracting out basic IT services like helpdesk, network and systems management, they're more consolidated than they were and the pay is lower. This means that you may have fewer choices about where you work, and you're going to have to deal with very low pay until you have that magical experience under your belt.

So what would I recommend doing?
- If you're really interested in IT, get yourself hands on experience. Pick a specialty (software development, sysadmin, etc.) and learn on your own. Amazon EC2 is giving away compute power for new customers to get started. You can download VMWare ESXi for free and build a whole lab on spare hardware at home. It's easy to train yourself now, much more so than it was.
- Stick to more predictable, established companies that don't have a culture that prizes youth over experience. Since pay is less of an issue, and the hiring process is much more open, I'd even recommend state or federal government work.
- DON'T pay for training classes, certifications, etc. outside of taking the exams if you want to. I've seen so many people who come out of these training schools and spend tons of money without learning much. DO get some basic vendor certifications in your specialty of choice. They're not cure-alls, but they get your resume a second look especially if you don't have a degree.
- Accept the fact that your first job or two is going to be pretty miserable, low paid work even if you do have a ton of work experience.
- This is just my opinion, but SW development might not be a good fit. There are just too many places that expect all-nighters and constant firefighting, and have zero work/life balance. Systems stuff is much better, IF the place you're working isn't totally chaotic. Chaotic places are the home of 24/7 on call duty and 2:30 AM phone calls.

Good luck! Hope I haven't scared you away. :-)

One very important point that you may have missed is this -- tech IS very important. Even organizations who don't care about IT beyond basic file and print have a stake in making sure things they use work well. But, IT is one of those fields where you can still cover over massive, huge, big balls of fail with money to the right vendor or cheap labor. Because of this, companies don't like to pay for competent help, or if they do, they squeeze every last nickel out of it that they can because they feel it's a waste.

Also, "tech" is too broad. The desktop support guy changing toner cartridges, the help desk person changing passwords and the systems architect trying to make sure everything doesn't come crashing to a halt when you put it in the same room have very different jobs, skills and responsibilities. On the simple break-fix support/part-swapper side, the work is getting easier and more automated. This means that you can hire fewer people, and those that you do hire don't need to have as much specialist knowledge. I'm a systems engineer, dealing with Intel server boxes every day -- the vendors have resorted to putting an extra "Don't pull this drive out!" light on hard disks so that part swappers don't pull a second drive out of a failed disk array and cause data loss. Even though the failed drive has a big blinky red light on it. That tells me that customers have complained about this happening enough...so you can draw your own conclusions about skill sets. On the higher end, you just run into wage pressure, companies trying to get away with as little as they can.

I think part of the reason for flat wages across the board is just the overall impression that "computers are simple" now, so why do we need to pay these geniuses to run them? Anyone in corporate IT is keenly aware of the "consumerization" trend, where everyone expects all systems to be as seamlessly integrated as their iPad, no matter how complex.

So at least in "big corporate IT," there are a few things putting wage pressure on:

• Automation - just like all the other office jobs, anything that isn't absolutely essential is being turned into an automatic process.
• Ready supply of cheaper labor - ...and the lack of understanding that cheap labor may not always be the best way to spend money, especially if you have to pay a consultant 5x that amount later on to clean up the mess.
• Lack of standards and understanding - IT is still seen as a magic box, and any attempts at standardizing things (_cough_ITIL_cough_) have just made things worse and completely pigeonholed a lot of IT employees.
• Vast difference in skill sets - It is still very difficult to tell whether or not the person you hire is a complete dud based on the interview. I think that a lot of organizations pay less simply because they don't know whether they're actually getting competent help.
• CapEx vs OpEx - In the old model, you kept employees on staff for a long time, trained them and they learned the business inside and out. Now, accounting makes it cheaper to just hire the people you need, when you need them, and pay them out of the operating expense budget.

Things like this make IT a very difficult field to work in. I'm not stupid enough to call myself a rock star IT god, but I certainly feel I'm competent and do a good job. Fortunately, I have an employer who appreciates that (for now) and I do OK. The other class of people who are making serious coin in the IT "racket" are the nomadic consultants. How many places have you worked where these guys seem to parachute in out of the sky when a very narrow specialist problem needs to be solved, charge hundreds an hour for months, and are off to the next place requiring that same specialty just as quick as they came in? I know a lot of these guys personally (can't do the lifestyle if you're married or have any sort of ties to any one place or thing) and they're definitely not hurting. For those of us tied down by one thing or another, and not able or willing to switch jobs every six months for salary increases, the key seems to be the one who has enough skills to be valuable, and who lives frugally enough to not be the guy constantly begging for raises.

In the end, I think lower wages are just a sign of the field maturing. And the more basic your particular IT job is, the more you'll feel that pressure.

Even if it's just for PR points, some domestic manufacturing employment is a good thing. The reason why isn't nice, it's not politically correct, but it's the facts:

Not everyone is intelligent enough for knowledge work.

In my opinion, if we continue the way we're going, we're going to spiral into a society with three classes -- business owners, knowledge workers and a huge swath of working poor. If everyone has to complete at least a masters' degree to secure a place in one of the top two classes, that completely ignores the other 75% of the IQ distribution.

Think about the way society was organized in the 50s through the 70s:
- Only the highly intelligent and/or well off went to college. They typically inherited a business, got a technical, science, engineering or other kind of knowledge job, or became academics. Each one of these outcomes guaranteed a stable job for life because that's what business ownership, academia or large corporate employment did back then. This is still the preferred path, minus the guarantees of course.
- For the high end of the medium-intelligence scale, there were plenty of paper-shuffling jobs in corporate environments. Remember that before computers, automation and email, large corporations had to employ thousands of file clerks, secretaries and layers of management that just routed paper reports around. Because US companies were doing so well, and things couldn't be outsourced and automated, a huge upper middle class thrived.
- For the low end of the medium-intelligence scale, there were millions of factory jobs. They were all simple, stand on a line for 8 hours and perform a single task or set of tasks. Because of unionization and a lack of global competition, even those jobs were stable and paid reasonable living wages. This was the bulk of the middle class, and I grew up in a Rust Belt city in the early 80s so I got to watch it all unravel live.
- The screwups, dropouts or just plain dumb people wound up doing menial labor. But even at that end of the scale, there was less downward pressure on those wages, so they were able to scrape by for the most part.

The problem is, in 2012, you can locate a factory anywhere, employ thousands of people for a fraction of the price that 100 would cost you, and pump out products just as quickly as before. All the secretaries and paper routers lost their jobs in the late 80s/early 90s automation and downsizing waves. So now, where do all those people who used to have solid incomes go? They either end up permanently unemployed, or go work menial jobs for just above minimum wage, no security and no benefits. So you have a huge class of working poor, working at Wal-Mart, as a home health care aide, or something else.

It's a really tough problem that might have a very bad ending in the next 40 years or so -- we need to find something for everyone to do and someone to employ them. Conservatives love to tout entrepreneurship as our savior, but do they really think a factory guy whose job was bolting the same two parts together for the last 20 years is going to be a successful business owner? Thinking like that will mean you have a class of bankrupt working poor instead of just working poor as all their little ventures fail.

So yes, I hope manufacturing comes back. And I hope it can be something that someone can build an entire career on, not just a string of $10/hr temp jobs.

Given that this is GM, this might set off a few ideas in MBA-land that will be beneficial to IT at large. A huge company bringing IT back in house? Amazing how things come back around... kind of like the cloud.

I actually work for a service provider (not doing hands-on support but engineering work for customer projects.) If you are absolutely, completely not dependent on IT, or too small to have your own IT department, outsourcing is one way to go. Big companies I've been at that outsourced IT have almost always had a negative experience that only gets worse as time goes on. You can mainly attribute this to "no one cares about your IT infrastructure more than you do (or should.)" I do my job professionally, because I'm just that sort of IT person, but I've seen countless experiences where vendors try to weasel out of extra work by hiding behind contracts and procedures. Or, they throw up huge roadblocks because YetAnotherWierdProprietarySystemThatThe50YearOldYouFiredKnewEverythingAbout breaks every few weeks and it's too expensive to hire expertise and still make margin on the contract.

There's lots of reasons to avoid outsourcing if you rely at all on your IT -- A Team replaced with the F Team after the contract is signed, bottom of the barrel talent, cost, etc. etc. I'm sure GM ran into all of this and more, and got sick of wasting money. (Didn't EDS start out as the GM IT department way back when?) It's nice to see some different thinking in the marketplace now -- I know when I worked direct for a company, I felt way more plugged into what was happening, and on the hook to deliver. After all, if they can't deposit my pay into my account, I have a great motivation to fix the A/P system. :-)