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The Morning Download: Market, Virus Woes Portend IT Hiring Pullback
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Good morning, CIOs. A rebound in information-technology hiring earlier this year might be short-lived due to the impact of the coronavirus outbreak. CIO Journal's Angus Loten takes the temperature.
But first, the numbers. Job postings for core enterprise-technology positions at U.S. businesses fell by nearly 70,000 in February, after rising by 52,000 in January.
The forecast. Add to those figures this week's markets plunge and the continuing uncertainty around the epidemic, and IT hiring might be in for more bumps.
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The good(ish) news. A supply-and-demand imbalance for talent will likely protect the IT workforce from the full impact of a downturn, says Michael Solomon, co-founder and managing partner at 10x Ascend, a tech-sector recruiting firm. “We have reached a stage where tech employees are the backbone of most businesses and no longer a luxury.”
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The Latest on the Coronavirus Epidemic
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JOHN HOLCROFT
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More bosses tracking your happiness. Eager to retain and energize staffers, more companies say they are making employee happiness a priority. The Wall Street Journal’s Chip Cutter and Rachel Feintzeig report that the shift has fueled a cottage industry in software devoted to monitoring, analyzing and improving workers’ moods.
Creepy or caring? One service offered by Toronto-based software firm Receptiviti plugs into email and messaging systems like Slack Technologies to search for signals that employees are depressed or burned out.
Cornerstone OnDemand Inc. is experimenting with heart-rate data gleaned from wearable devices such as watches. It hopes to tie that information, with an employee’s permission, to entries from a person’s calendar or project-management software to shed light on whether certain events cause elevated stress levels.
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“It’s not just about choosing a platform and devices. You could go to an Apple store and buy a bunch of iPads and it could be a disaster ... It’s about making the accounts, devices and individual teachers and students prepared to use the system.”
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— Avi Bloom, administrator at SAR High School, in Riverdale, N.Y., closed recently by the coronavirus
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An artificial intelligence program at an office in Shenzhen, China, measures visitors’ body temperature, checks if they are wearing a mask, and checks their identity. PHOTO: ALEX PLAVEVSKI/SHUTTERSTOCK
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Countries turn to tech to fight coronavirus. Health officials across Asia-Pacific have sought to repurpose existing technology to combat the virus, the WSJ's Timothy W. Martin in Seoul and Liza Lin report. Among the examples:
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Unmanned aerial vehicles. Drones from Drone UAV Co., outfitted with thermal imaging, can scan crowds in China and spot someone hundreds of feet away running a fever.
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Apps. South Korea's “Self-Quarantine Safety Protection” tracking app alerts quarantined users and a government case officer if they leave a permitted area.
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Alerts. In Shanghai, digital devices are attached to the doors of those sequestered. Unauthorized door movements trigger an alarm to the neighborhood police station.
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Image recognition. Chinese technology firm Baidu said this month that it helped develop an image-recognition algorithm for Beijing subway officials to single out commuters not wearing masks.
AT&T cooperates with the Justice Department in Google probe. AT&T has conferred several times with Justice officials to share its views that Google is stifling competition in the advertising sector. (WSJ)
Amazon selling its self-checkout tech. The company tells Reuters it has several signed deals for the system running AmazonGo, its cashierless grocery stores. It wouldn't name the customers.
Split verdict for CIA programmer charged in massive leak. A federal jury couldn’t reach a verdict on whether a former software engineer for the Central Intelligence Agency was responsible for leaking a trove of classified documents to WikiLeaks, convicting him instead on lesser charges stemming from the leak. (WSJ)
Disinfecting wipes work with iPhones. Apple on Monday updated its “How to clean your Apple products” website with new wording: “Using a 70 percent isopropyl alcohol wipe or Clorox Disinfecting Wipes, you may gently wipe the hard, nonporous surfaces of your Apple product, such as the display, keyboard, or other exterior surfaces.” (Apple)
Coronavirus wallops mobile device sales in China. Shipments of Apple smartphones dropped to 494,000, down from 1.27 million in February 2019. All told, mobile-phone brands notched a 55% drop in shipments to 6.34 million devices. (Reuters)
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Everything Else You Need to Know
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The oil-price collapse wiped out tens of billions of dollars in energy-company stock market value in a moment Monday, calling into question the industry’s ability to pay a huge tab that it rang up with bondholders and banks to fuel its price war with OPEC. (WSJ)
A federal court ruled that Led Zeppelin didn’t steal the opening bars of “Stairway to Heaven," a decision that music executives hope will slow claims that some of the most popular songs are rip-offs. (WSJ)
A surge in economic sanctions and a tangled web of international blacklists are overwhelming in-house compliance staffs and lifting the ledgers of third-party compliance services. (WSJ)
The U.S.’s largest effort to collect data on Americans using the internet gets under way this week when tens of millions of households will be asked to fill out their 2020 census forms online. (WSJ)
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