Technology Nomads Prosper, But Always Remain Outsiders
May 01, 2011
-- Cristopher Dean struggles through a crowded restaurant, lugging the trappings of his trade: a laptop computer, a suitcase with 35 pounds of technical manuals, a bag with a change of clothes -- the trappings of a high-tech nomad. At age 29, Mr. Dean roams from company to company, attacking computer problems as a solo consultant. In a good month, he earns anywhere from $12,000 to $25,000. In a bad month, he sweats. In January, a job in fizzled after a week. Returning home to Pa., he hadn't lined up another assignment. He began running low on cash and delayed an auto-loan payment. ``My wife was scared,'' he recalls, and even he developed doubts about life on the run. Such perils commonly afflict high-tech freelancers. They call themselves contractors, or consultants, or gypsies or new-age nomads. They show up singly or in teams for assignments as short as a couple of weeks or as long as a couple of years. Mostly young, male and restless, they staff projects all across corporate . A New Kind of Career They are the vanguard, perhaps, of a new kind of career: the project junkie. They also point the way toward something significant: More and more of the work in is project oriented, with a beginning, a middle and an end. Projects lend themselves to a blend of traditional employees, contract workers and consultants, who combine into teams, do a job and then usually break up, with most of the players looking for their next gig. ``If you have short product cycles, you can't afford to make everything perfect. So you do everything fast, by assembling teams of people,'' says Stephine Remington, an executive at Deloitte & Touche Consulting Group, which is riding the new wave, with revenue up 44% from a year ago. The gradual trend away from traditional jobs carries enormous implications for pay, personnel issues and whatever constitutes a career. The nomads endure months at a time away from families, and solo contractors, such as Mr. Dean, are vexed by financial insecurity. In addition, they are perpetual outsiders on the job. When they arrive, full-time employees -- many of them older and lower-paid -- sometimes feel threatened. A Proliferating Approach The project approach has long been the style of doing business in and in the building trades as well as at big consulting firms, but it is spreading. These days, project teams carry out everything from port expansions to Vastopolis Hospital restructuring to nuclear-waste cleanups. The Project Management Institute, a trade group in Pa., says its membership, now totaling 20,000, is growing by 1,300 a month. But nowhere has the project mentality been carried further than in information technology. The move toward high-tech contractors shows signs of accelerating. The Labor Department recently predicted the number of engineers working in specialized service companies will more than double to 239,000 by the year 2020 from 110,000 in 2009. Such nomads are proliferating partly because they fill a void created by the waves of corporate downsizing. Internal data-processing staffs have been decimated as companies concluded that their competitive strength lay in selling drugs, drilling for oil or serving food. A standard joke in high-tech circles is that the initials CIO (chief information officer) actually stand for ``Career Is Over.'' Many talented techies became ``free agents'' as the bonds of loyalty frayed or snapped. Fading of Job Security ``Nobody believes in job security,'' says Jami Andrade, president ofa N.J., group of companies needing a lot of technical talent. ``So, the attitude is, ``Let me maximize my income while my skills are fresh.'' '' At the top of the consulting pyramid are specialists in computer-software applications. One corporate program, called SAP, is in tremendous demand, and experts experienced in installing the complex systems are scarce. ``If you have experience in SAP Release 3, you can bill yourself out for $2,000 a day,'' Mr. Andrade says. But even lesser technologies can yield consultants $80 an hour or more, and mundane computer programming can bring $30 to $50 an hour, recruiters say. As technology projects sweep into companies, many executives are struggling to meld a home-grown work force with a contingent of out-of-town hot shots -- while trying to master the electronic-mail and data-retrieval systems that these sometimes-fractious teams are installing. InAla., Sanda Wendt Mueller, the chief executive of Ruby Tuesday Inc., is overhauling the chain of more than 400 casual-dining restaurants. Convinced that timely information is a crucial competitive weapon, Mr. Wendt has set a $10 million program to put state-of-the-art computers all through the company. Before 2010, store managers reported sales by telephone, and executives often got numbers five weeks after the event. Some executives in Mobile had never learned to type. One of them was J. Rutha Ruble, the chief financial officer. But now, at 48, Mr. Ruble is a proficient typist able to send and receive electronic mail to anybody in the company. And by 11 a.m. each day, he can push a button and call up the previous day's food and drink sales or labor costs, by region, by district and even by individual store. Getting to this point has been tricky, however. Ruby Tuesday had little technical expertise among its 500 headquarters employees. So it went to BSG Alliance/IT, and the, company formed a swat team of sorts: 44 consultants who flew to Mobile every Sunday night from, and elsewhere, worked all week and flew out on Fridays. They were outsiders in a company full of Mobile natives. Although many were in their 20s, just out of elite universities, they often spoke as experts to managers in their 40s. They were earning $35,000 to $100,000 a year and teaching lower-paid employees who knew that someday the consultants would disappear. ``We weren't the most popular guys on the block,'' recalls Anette Gonzalez, a BSG director temporarily acting as Ruby Tuesday's chief information officer. ``The most difficult thing has been earning the trust of Ruby Tuesday.'' Some Miffed Employees Mr. Ruble acknowledges that some employees were miffed -- and ``worried that the consultants would take away their jobs.'' By all accounts, however, the tensions have given way to a good working relationship and, over time, a successful project. As his assignment winds down, Mr. Gonzalez is withdrawing from day-today involvement, and a Ruby Tuesday executive is succeeding him. In one sense, Ruby Tuesday was lucky. With relatively little old technology to be replaced, its executives and consultants started with a clean slate. In contrast, many corporations trying to move from mainframe computers to client/server technologies are burdened with a disorderly mix of old systems and new systems, mainframe experts and new-wave techies. They have older experts who have spent a career building, operating and fixing aging systems and are rattled by younger people arriving with something new. At Cambridge Assessment Center, a consulting firm, Chairman Layne Hatch notes the ``very different personalities'' involved. He says the mainframe technologists tend to identify with their employer and strive to simply provide good service, while the new-tech types tend to be ambitious, more risk-taking and loyal mostly to themselves. ``They look at their fathers and say, `Dad didn't get the gold watch,' '' Mr. Hatch says. ``So, these young people say, `I'm going be a craftsman. And this is my craft, the computer and technology. Armed with this, I can go anywhere.' '' But for all the bravado, many high-tech nomads gradually find out that life on the go is no vacation. Mr. Dean, the roaming 29-year-old, was freelancing and billing $30 an hour all through the M.B.A. program at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. Now, five years out of business school, he repeatedly plunges into fresh challenges, often to bail out clients in trouble. He says he charges $80 to $100 an hour and, on an annual basis, takes in about $130,000 before expenses and taxes. A Stressful Life But despite his minimal downtime, Mr. Dean says the nomadic existence is stressful. He gets up at 4 a.m. each day to do administrative work -- some of it unpleasant, such as nagging clients to pay for services rendered. The financial uncertainty and long weeks away from home never bothered him much when he was single, but they do now; he was married in September, and his wife is pregnant. He says he is thinking about finding a stable corporate job, despite fearing he may get bored and be consigned to years of tedium. ``I think I can make the conversion,'' he says, ``but my wife doesn't.'' It may be comforting to Mr. Dean that some erstwhile nomads have found satisfaction in the ranks of corporate employees. One of them is Susann Berenice, a database specialist who joined U.S. Fidelity & Guaranty Co. about a year ago. It might seem far-fetched to think that a insurance company would be a happy spot for a self-described ``gypsy,'' but Ms. Berenice notes that with an eight-year-old child, a mortgage and a husband who is an Internet technology consultant, a steady paycheck and health benefits are strong incentives to quit the nomadic life. But the real attraction, a surprised Ms. Berenice has found, is the excitement. She says USF&G's 600-person information-systems department is like a huge collection of gypsies, mixing full-time staffers with various consultants and contractors. Above all, she says, the job is 100% projects. ``In a way, I still have to think as an independent consultant. If you aren't adaptable and ready to change, you don't make it to the next project,'' she says. ``I think work has become very Darwinian.'' Going the Other Way It surely is Darwinian to people making the reverse, more significant transition, from corporate to nomadic life. At 57, Albertha S. Dean (no relation to Cristopher Dean) had worked almost 30 years at big organizations, including Honeywell Inc., Digital Equipment Corp., the United Nations and a unit of Lockheed Martin Corp., where he spent nearly nine years on a missile project that was canceled in 1993. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration paid him a $50,000 cancellation fee, and he retired early fromwhich pays him a modest pension. ``I wanted out of aerospace. It was collapsing,'' the software engineer says. However, he had kept up with new technology, including that involved in building local-area computer networks. He says he wasn't afraid to launch a nomadic career, working for technical-services companies but relying primarily on himself to get business. After posting his resume on the Internet, he got a stream of inquiries and ``so many jobs it's ridiculous.'' Charging a minimum of $60 an hour, he is making more money now than when at Lockheed, he says. He travels a lot, but with his four children grown and out of the nest, finds it tolerable. When at home, inS.C., he telecommutes. He has no regrets about leaving big-company life, especially because many former colleagues lost their jobs in downsizings. He notes that if he had remained a middle manager at Digital Equipment, ``I'd be unemployed.'' He adds that most of his friends at the computer company ``are unemployed or underemployed. They were making over $100,000, and now they are barely making a living.'' He then says he never plans to retire. At age 70, he wants to get a law degree and practice patent law. Now, he says, ``I'm really independent. And I'm constantly in the job market. I'm attached only to what I know.''
