To follow up on that tome and its fitness-related sequel — The 4-Hour Body — Ferriss has come up with The 4-Hour Chef, a 3.8-pound, 672-page cookbook that’s best described as obsessive-compulsive to the max. (He has stated in interviews that this is the last of the “4-hour” series.)

Despite the inclusion of hundreds of recipes, The 4-Hour Chef isn’t like any cookbook you’ve ever seen. It’s actually more of a proof of concept of Ferriss’s maniacal deep-learning process, an example of what you can achieve when you dig deep, hard and fast into any subject at all, do some digestion and then spit it all back out. The trick is to harness the Pareto Principle, aka the “80-20 rule”: determine which 20 percent of a task will give you 80 percent of the desired results.

In fact, it’s the first 100 pages of the book, the part that doesn’t deal with cooking, that will be of most use to anyone who wants to learn anything, from a new programming language to a better swimming stroke. The key to Ferriss’s quick-learning process is what he calls DiSSS: Deconstruction, Selection, Sequencing, and Stakes. “What are the minimal learnable units I should be starting with? Which 20 percent should I focus on for 80 percent or more of the outcome I want? In what order should I learn? How do I set up stakes to create real consequences and guarantee I follow the program?”

In his own life, Ferriss has applied this technique to learning to speak Japanese and dance the tango, among many other endeavors. For cooking, it’s the same. He starts with the basics and expands outward, presenting harder concepts and more difficult techniques as the book progresses. Why he takes detours into survival skills and descriptions and illustrations of guns is a bit of a mystery, although he does offer the unique suggestion that if you buy a gun, pack it in your checked bag and declare it to the ticket agent, the airline will never lose your luggage. Remember, this is a cookbook.

Truth be told, there are some great recipes in the book — such as the roast chicken on page 488 — as long as you can find them. Ferriss claims that most cookbooks aren’t arranged logically, but is it really logical to follow the chicken recipe with 10 pages about a night at Grant Achatz’s Alinea restaurant in Chicago and a lesson on making bowls out of wax?

Better to focus on Ferriss’s self-improvement advice in the front of the book and see how you might apply it to a new skill you need in your career or life. He even includes Web links to 24 skills you can acquire in 48 hours, everything from how to peel a banana like a monkey to how to design a million-dollar business in a weekend. One suspects that cooking dinner with Ferriss would be a lot of fun … and completely exhausting.

The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life, by Timothy Ferriss. Hardcover, 672 pages; also Kindle edition. Published by New Harvest, an imprint of Amazon Publishing (Amazon.com).

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Windows 8 Won’t Become Business Standard: Forrester (via slashdot)

Windows 8 won’t become the enterprise standard, according to a new report from research firm Forrester. “Most IT shops are still too focused on migrating to Windows 7 to bother with Windows 8 anytime soon, if at all,” read the summary of Forrester’s report, which could have several Microsoft…

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One of the most vocal opponents of the program is Computer Science Professor Norman Matloff of the University of California at Davis. He questions not only the intentions of employers, but also the reasons why academic institutions often work hard to increase caps.

The Special Report:

• How 800,000 H-1B Workers Came to the U.S.
• The Picture in Washington
• Current Laws and Policies
• Programmers Guild: The American Worker Needs Protection  
• Industry Group: More STEM Grads, But H-1B Reform, Too  
• The Corporate Perspective: Intel’s Approach to H-1Bs 
• The Opponent: H-1Bs Pressure U.S. Wages  
• The Economist: H-1Bs Are Important to the Economy (May 20)
• A Guest Worker’s Perspective on H-1Bs (May 20)

Here’s what he had to say when I sat down with him.

Why don’t more computer science and engineering majors, particularly those who are U.S. citizens, want to pursue advanced degrees?

What role do universities play in efforts to increase the H-1B cap?

If an employer is considering hiring H-1Bs because they’re skilled and young, why can’t they hire recent U.S. college graduates? They’re skilled and young, too.

Is the prevailing wage H-1Bs are paid a fair wage?

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For starters, think location, location, location. What works in real estate can also play out when it comes to salary, since jobs in some metro areas yield better compensation than similar jobs in other locales. Surprisingly, Pittsburgh tech professionals reaped the largest percentage increase in pay last year — jumping 18 percent to an average salary of $76,207.

While tech salaries overall rose 5 percent last year nationwide, some occupations’ compensation grew at substantially higher rates. For example, network managers averaged an 11.2 percent increase, to come in at an average of $68,347. Help desk workers saw gains of nearly 10 percent.

Additionally, hiring managers are reporting strong demand for tech professionals trained in Linux, and expect to hire a sizable number of them through the summer. That means they’ll have to pay more to get the expertise they want.

Those are just some of the points to consider as you weigh whether you should maneuver for a raise. Here are some stories to help you some more in your research.

• Tech Salaries Rise to Highest Level in a Decade
• Tech Salary Trends Reveal Surprising Winners, Losers
• Tech Salary Growth Is Strong in These 7 Markets
• IT Salary Trends: What’s Hot
• High Demand Pushes Linux Salaries Higher
• Parity for Some, But Tech Women’s Pay Lags Overall

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I looked at actual listings on Dice to try to spot some trends. In late April, I searched both the entire set of job listings as well as specific job titles to see what skills companies were actually looking for. Here’s what I found.

First, it’s safe to say that the Web is the primary focus of many software projects. The top two mentions on Dice were for Web and Java developers, followed by Javascript and C++ developers. Clearly, if you don’t have any Web development skills in your portfolio, it’s time to start building them.

Java is much more important than Javascript, which seems to be evolving into other languages, such as Ruby and newer languages like Erlang and Clojure. If you’ve never heard of these last two, it might be worth your time to learn at least what they are and how they’re used in functional programming.

As to skills to jettison from your resume, Fortran, Cobol and to some extent Visual Basic aren’t needed by themselves anymore. They appear infrequently in job titles, a giveaway that few hiring managers are focused on them. While you can still find a few positions that require these languages (for example, a Cobol developer in MasterCard’s data center outside of St. Louis), for the most part these languages are dead and forgotten.

Visual Basic was the surprising one of this set, showing up in only 13 of the titles of more than 700 listings. So one recommendation would be not to focus on VB other than as a means to an end to entering the entire .NET Microsoft universe.

iOS developers are in moderate demand. Theirs is a specialized field, given that the number of entries in overall job descriptions match up with the number of mentions in the actual job titles. But Android developers are twice as popular, which isn’t surprising given the market growth in Android phones and tablets.

Despite all that you hear about Big Data, the concept is, curiously, not appearing as much as you might expect: The term showed up in less than 50 job titles. As another data point here, the fact that Hadoop is mentioned only 10 percent of the time that it is listed in the job description indicates it’s still specialized.

Note, though, that you can’t always go by job titles alone. For example, cloud expertise really involves a number of skills and familiarity with a number of platforms. Look at the job postings and you’d think knowledge of Amazon Web Services isn’t in all that much demand. While only 16 job titles mentioned AWS explicitly, that doesn’t mean companies are moving away from it. It simply indicates they’re not looking for someone to focus on it exclusively.

To check my informal analysis, I also looked at InterviewStreet.com, a tool used by a growing number of employers to screen for potential programming talent. Its coding challenges cover 16 different programming languages, including C, C++, Java, C#, Python, PHP, Ruby, Perl, Javscript, Haskell, Scala, Clojure, SQL, MySQL, R and Go. As you can see, there are a number of newer languages here as well as the old chestnuts.

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“When you get to the Ph.D. level, the number of people who specialize in engineering gets smaller and the universities don’t produce enough people with master’s and Ph.D.s,” she says.

How Intel Hires

When it comes to finding engineers with advanced degrees, Intel’s proactive. It posts jobs on a number of websites, advertises through social networks, contacts universities and holds job fairs in the U.S. When it’s seeking to fill a position, it basically doesn’t care whether it’s a U.S. citizen or H-1B worker who fills it.

The Special Report:

• How 800,000 H-1B Workers Came to the U.S.
• The Picture in Washington
• Current Laws and Policies
• Programmers Guild: The American Worker Needs Protection  
• Industry Group: More STEM Grads, But H-1B Reform, Too  
• The Corporate Perspective: Intel’s Approach to H-1Bs 
• The Opponent: H-1Bs Pressure U.S. Wages  
• The Economist: H-1Bs Are Important to the Economy (May 20)
• A Guest Worker’s Perspective on H-1Bs (May 20)

At college job fairs, however, the candidates with advanced degrees tend to be foreign students. In fact, most of the H-1B workers at Intel were hired through its college recruitment efforts. In some circumstances, the company isn’t able to find a suitable candidate on campus at all. In those cases, it resorts to other means.

First, it will exhaust its database of candidates compiled from conferences, career fairs, referrals, job postings and direct applications through its own website. “Generally, hires for our U.S. jobs come from candidates already in the U.S., even if they are experienced non-U.S. citizens,” says Lisa Malloy, an Intel spokeswoman. “Many of our experienced non-U.S. citizens are already working at other U.S. companies on an H-1B.”

Absent finding the people it needs in the U.S., Intel will seek to fill positions with candidates who currently reside outside of the country. “In those cases, we use similar means of attracting candidates, like posting on job boards targeted to this talent,” says Malloy. “Being a global company, our database is often filled with talented workers from all over the world. In essence our database is filled via local activities for local jobs and we capitalize on our database.”

H-1Bs represent approximately 6 percent of Intel’s workforce. Most of them are recent engineering graduates. During fiscal 2012, the company received approval from Citizenship and Immigration Services for 812 initial petitions and 645 renewals. How many of them were ultimately approved by the State Department is unclear.

While Intel isn’t one of those companies that’s leery of hiring experienced American professionals who’ve been out of work, it does want its candidates’ skills to be current. “With engineering, keeping current is one thing that’s critical,” Williams explains. “Where we’ve encountered engineers who’ve been laid off, many times their skills aren’t up to date.”

In addition, some qualified candidates pass on an offer because the job would require relocation, and many experienced professionals regard the need to move as a deal-breaker. Although Intel promotes its flexible work options, like telecommuting, which options are in place depends on each particular business unit’s needs.

Priming the STEM Pump

Intel is a strong supporter of STEM education in primary and secondary schools. For example, each year 1,700 U.S. high school seniors conduct innovative research projects in a quest for a $100,000 prize in the Intel Science Talent Search. The company also develops STEM units to supplement curricula for kindergarten through 12th grade.

The point of these efforts is to increase the number of U.S. citizens with STEM degrees. “For us as a company to innovate, we need those STEM graduates here,” Williams says. “Almost 75 percent of Intel’s research and development happens here in the U.S., and innovation creates jobs here in the U.S.” Efforts by both government and industry make Williams “very optimistic” that the U.S. will produce more STEM graduates between now and 2018 than it does currently.

Approaching Guest Workers

Intel’s guest workers receive the same compensation and benefits as its American professionals do. “The job, not where they were born, determines the wage,” says spokeswoman Malloy. In hiring H-1Bs, she says, the company’s intent is to help the worker secure permanent resident status. That way, both Intel and the employee have the freedom to relocate from the Intel facility specified in the H-1B application. Currently, relocating a guest worker to another city requires the company to petition for a visa all over again, with possibility that the petition will be rejected.

Intel would like to see the annual cap of H-1Bs expand when the economy is strong and demand for skilled labor is high, and contract when the economy softens and demand slips. Additionally, it favors immigration reform that would allow visas to be issued based on demand for a country’s workers rather than the current per-country limit. The company’s also asking policy makers to lift restrictions like those that prevent employee transfers, whether they’re for corporate reasons or the H-1B’s personal situation, such as when a spouse needs to move. Says Williams: “We want all our employees to be treated equally.”

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IT spending growth is expected to increase 4.9 percent this year to $2.06 trillion – a lackluster performance compared to IDC’s previous forecast of 5.5 percent. Last year, IT spending grew 5.6 percent, according to IDC’s report.

The effects of the federal government’s belt-tightening sequester, the European debt crisis and a weakening GDP in China are contributing to the economic uncertainties prompting IT customers to reign in their spending plans. IDC says a number of technology vendors faced greater challenges in closing deals toward the end of the first quarter. In turn, this is resulting in some companies laying off staff while others slow down their hiring.

Where Hiring May Get Hit

Some tech sectors will feel the spending slowdown more than others, says Eduardo Martinez, a senior economist with Moody’s Analytics.

“On the manufacturing side, you usually see an impact to jobs about a quarter or two after there’s been a slowdown in billings (orders),” Martinez says. “The correlation between manufacturing softness and job reductions are more precise. But for technical services and R&D, the impact is diluted.”

Research and development entails work that is usually based on projections far into the future, Martinez notes, so those jobs are less at risk if the economy hits a blip from one quarter to the next.

Another area at less risk is technical services as companies increase spending on services that makes their businesses run more efficiently with less people on the payroll.

Deep Dive into IDC’s Numbers

On the manufacturing front, IDC now expects PC spending to decline 3 percent this year, marking three consecutive years of faltering revenues. Some manufacturers, like HP, have already taken steps to reduce their headcount.

However, the picture’s better when you throw tablets into the mix. The combined PC-tablet revenue growth rate is expected to remain stable at 4 to 5 percent. By themselves, tablets are expected to post a whopping 32 percent growth rate in revenue this year, while smartphones are expected to see revenue growth of 17 percent.

“Just as outsourcing got its boost from the 2001 recession, and virtualization from the financial crisis of 2009, low-cost mobile devices and the cloud are being partly driven by the willingness of businesses to look for new ways of getting things done in return for improvements in efficiency, scalability and cost of ownership,” said Stephen Minton, IDC’s Global Technology & Industry Research Organization vice president, in a statement.

IDC also lowered its forecast for software spending growth to 6 percent this year, down from its previous forecast of 7 percent. Part of the drop stems from the popularity of cloud services, which allow companies to avoid direct investment in software and hardware platforms. So, IT services are expected to grow 3.8 percent this year.

But IT Jobs Still Growing

Despite IDC’s projections the overall number of technology jobs has been steadily growing throughout the year. In April, technology related jobs grew 2.6 percent, to 14.3 million jobs, compared with the same period last year.

Where there is softness in the tech job market, it seems to mirror the spending trends. Computer and electronic product jobs, for example, continued to post declines in year-over-year growth. That falls in line with IDC’s soft revenue growth projections for the PC industry. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, computer and electronic product jobs fell 1.4 percent, to 1.08 million jobs, in April.

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As the company continues to build out its Utah hub, it will hire in software engineering, IT support, research and development and general operations. Given the facility’s eventual size, SolarWinds plans to offer a full range of positions, says Tiffany Nels, a SolarWinds spokeswoman. Over the next two decades, the company says it could hire as many as 1,000 workers.

Based in Austin, Texas, SolarWinds selected Utah for its second North America hub because of the available talent pool and the commitment the state has shown in creating a technology cluster. “We were impressed with the package that the state of Utah put together for us,” Nels explains. The state offered the company a $32.9 million tax incentive package.

SolarWinds also operates facilities in Dallas and Tulsa. It develops such products and services as Alert Central, which aims to streamline alert management for technical personnel. It also offers a SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor, which allows users to resolve applications and server issues from a Web console.

The Utah hub will be expected to develop and release new software products, as well as manage the company’s current and future product portfolio. If the company has its way, this is just the first trickle of a flood: It hopes to hire 1,000 workers over the next 20 years, which would more than double its existing workforce of 700.

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European Startups Battle Labor Laws for Best Talent (via slashdot)

As the cult of entrepreneurship spirals upward in Europe, the intricate vagaries of immigration policy on the continent are being newly scrutinized by our company-building classes. Freshly venture-backed European Internet companies want your talent, and they are going to remarkable lengths to get it…

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Most likely, you’ve uploaded one of the more than 1 billion files shared through Dropbox each day.  Despite those kinds of numbers, Dropbox isn’t content to just be the most used files sharing program around. It wants IT professionals to use Dropbox in a different way – to build applications on top of its data layer platform.

As part of the development of the Dropbox API, the company is holding its first developer conference to educate IT professionals on integrating the platform, and showcase current third-party applications that use it. The conference is Tuesday, July 9th at Fort Mason in San Francisco.

Dropbox says this won’t be the typical technology conference where you sign up online, pay money and are guaranteed a spot. It’s an invitation-only conference, so you’ll first need to request an invitation and then pay a $350 registration fee if you get one.  Information about the specific sessions or speakers hasn’t been released yet. To find out more information as it is available, follow @dbx2013 on Twitter.

The conference is part of Dropbox’s increased focus on creating tools and support for third-party developers. Dropbox’s release of the new Admin Console for DropBox for Teams increased the ease of business use for Dropbox by providing better control and visibility for managers. It also opened up more integration potential for B2B Web applications and services.

Last November, Dropbox released the Dropbox Chooser, which lets developers integrate files into Web applications with a few lines of JavaScript. The Core API provides the functionality for leveraging basic Dropbox features while the Sync API released in February allows for greater cloud-based integration. Dropbox also maintains a blog, forum and email support geared toward helping developers successfully use the platform.

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