Well, all right – “before,” in this case, only includes the period from 2001 to the present – the index of wages with which we’re working doesn’t reach back any further.  Still, things are supposedly going quite well for workers in the tech field.

“[W]ages rose at varying levels during the third quarter, but showed significant improvement from 2006,” according to Yoh, a staffing agency.  “The Yoh Index of Technology Wages reported a 6 percent increase in July, followed by 4.64 percent growth in August, and then ended with a 5.79 percent improvement in September, when compared to the same months in 2006.”

Congratulations may be in order – tech guys can practically work miracles, as far as I’m concerned, so their pay is well deserved.  On the other hand, these wages could be yet another sign of a bubble.

Meh.  For the time being, I’m content so long as those Porsches continue to act as eye candy.

An earlier lawsuit against Qihoo is still active; at issue is a Qihoo anti-spyware program, called 360 Safe, “that prompts users to de-install Yahoo China’s toolbar,” according to Fortune’s Elen Wu.

That dispute became fairly ugly, with references to “personal vendettas” and “evil” tossed about by both sides. This new lawsuit isn’t likely to mend relations between the two companies. Matt Marshall, who broke the story, reported on the details.

“Yahoo China will claim Zhou was already using his position . . . to steal partnership and investment opportunities away from Yahoo China, preparing the groundwork for his exodus to Qihoo,” Marshall wrote.

“He also offered money to key Yahoo China staff if they left the company, the suit will allege. He even launched press releases through front PR firms, saying in one case that a Yahoo China deal with MSN had expired when in fact it hadn’t, the suit will claim.”

And as if all that wasn’t enough, Marshall’s VentureBeat article also noted that “a separate source says Yahoo’s co-founder Jerry Yang is actively seeking to dissuade investors from backing Qihoo.”

Yahoo China is owned by Alibaba, a Chinese company. The fate of the lawsuit will still reflect on its American counterpart, though. China has proven to be a “challenging” market for Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft.

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For of men it may generally be affirmed, that they are thankless, fickle, false, studious to avoid danger, greedy of gain, devoted to you while you are able to confer benefits upon them, and ready … while danger is distant, to shed their blood, and sacrifice their property, their lives, and their children for you; but in the hour of need they turn against you.”

So naturally, he would have considered occasional, small-scale cruelty justifiable and wise when it inspired fear and enabled a prince “to keep his subjects united and obedient.”

Ethical issues aside, this seems to work reasonably well, at least for a while, if your goal is to control the behavior of a population, quell social unrest or suppress dissent. But if your goal is to lead a group of knowledge workers to peak productivity, this may not be a recipe for success.

As a consultant and speaker, I have the privilege of peeking into many companies, associations and IT departments. Within each, one can discern subtle attitudes, beliefs and emotions regarding their leaders.

In organizations where the leadership either deliberately or inadvertently cultivates fear, I’ve observed some interesting patterns. Few of them are particularly helpful for the organization or its leaders.

Creative energy is misdirected. There seem to be limits on the creative energy of any group. Only so many hours a day are really productive for generating the best answers to the important questions at hand. When a group comes to fear its leadership, a great deal of that creative energy is siphoned off into questions of how to mollify the manager rather than how to support the organization with technology.

The staffers focus their attention on what they feel are basic issues of personal security rather than on organizational accomplishment. If an employee is worried that you might publicly humiliate her because she forgot to use the official corporate PowerPoint slide template, then she’s diverted some of that vital energy away from the valuable content.

Offhand remarks are transformed into rigid policies. One way for staffers to avoid potential confrontations is to try to get decisions made in informal chats.

Imagine that you are the scary boss. You’re walking through the hall, and a subordinate tells you, “We’re going to send you a status report on Friday.” And you say, “Sounds great; the morning is best,” because you’ll be leaving early to visit your grandmother in Schenectady.

Next thing you know, every project manager in the organization is grumbling, angry and upset, because they’ve all heard that there is a new policy that EVERY PROJECT MUST HAVE A STATUS REPORT DELIVERED TO THE BOSS BY NOON EVERY FRIDAY … OR ELSE. There are whispers in the hall, “How come we can’t turn them in Monday? Why can’t we use the weekend?”

The pressure builds until someone eventually breaks and blurts out his frustration and incredulity at a public meeting, and you’re left slack-jawed wondering how this all started.

No one wants to talk to the scary boss. You’ve announced an open-door policy. All staffers have an open invitation to come to your office to discuss anything troubling them. Yet, on those rare occasions when you’re not in a meeting, you could hear crickets chirping to the gentle whine of your hard drive. No one wants to talk to you.

Before long, you don’t really know what’s going on. The staff has spent its creative energy constructing a rosy picture of reality, presented in the most formal settings, designed to avoid your wrath.

And, sadly, you’re probably smart enough to know that you’re being snowed, but you don’t know quite how to break through to these people. Eventually, your frustration comes out in a burst of anger — and the cycle begins again.

These are among the wages of fear. On the good side, the staffers have been unified. On the bad side, they are probably unified against you.

(This article originally appeared in Computerworld USA.)

Paul Glen is an IT management consultant and the author of the award-
winning book “Leading Geeks: How to Manage and Lead People Who Deliver
Technology” (Jossey-Bass Pfeiffer,2003). He regularly speaks for
corporations and national associations across North America. For more
information go to: http://www.paulglen.com. He can be reached at
info@paulglen.com.

The Labor Department reported that costs of gasoline, food, medical care, insurance and housing all went up. The consumer price index for March increased by 0.6%. Economists were expecting 0.5%.

“The honest thing to say is that inflation has been rising for more than a year,” said John Silvia of Wachovia Bank. “It’s not roaring inflation like you saw in the 1970′s, but it clearly is rising, which means the cost of living for households is rising, and for investors, the rate of return on C.D.’s or bonds or whatever the investment is, this is cutting into your profit.”

According to an Associated Press article,

While inflation was rising, the Labor Department said in a separate report the average weekly earnings of nonsupervisory workers, after adjusting for inflation, fell by 0.3 percent in March after having dropped by the same amount in February. Real weekly earnings had risen by 0.2 percent in both January and December.

Underscoring that inflation pressures are rising, the Federal Reserve said yesterday in its latest survey of business conditions in the Fed’s 12 regions that ”price pressures have intensified in a number of districts and most report that high or rising energy prices are a concern.”

The core rate went from an 0.3% increase in February to 0.4% in March.

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