Greg Smith, the former Goldman Sachs executive who caused an uproar earlier this year with his opinion piece in the New York Times exposing the corruption and greed that’s rampant on Wall Street, is about to debut his new book: “Why I Left Goldman Sachs: A Wall Street Story.”

Surely Smith will regale us with more in depth explanations of the sickening stories he shared in his oped:

It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as “muppets,” sometimes over internal e-mail.

This disregard for others in the name of money isn’t only the domain of Wall Streeters.

If you’ve been paying attention to the news lately you’ve probably heard about the tainted steriod injections that have killed 19 and sickened many others.

The problems aren’t only an issue for a lone lax pharmacy that produced the injections. A story in the New York Times today points to rampant violations at drug factories around the country. The first paragraph of the story will make you sick to your stomach:

Weevils floating in vials of heparin. Morphine cartridges that contain up to twice the labeled dose. Manufacturing plants with rusty tools, mold in production areas and — in one memorable case — a barrel of urine.

How does this happen? Clearly, someone, or a group of someones, decides to cut corners all for the good of the bottom line, and it turns out we may be teaching the idea that “greed is good” to students studying economics. (more…)

(Below is a guest post by Emmanuel Conde, a respected IT recruiter and writer. It is part of a series of guest posts I will be publishing on CareerDiva offering a different perspective and expertise on jobs and careers.)

By Emmanuel Conde

I became a recruiter out of necessity.

I was an IT manager and a technical assistant center manger and then a consultant manager, and through these last few roles I was always called upon to do my own recruiting. It was easier for me to search on Monster myself for candidates than explaining what I needed to human resources. So, after so many years of doing this on my own it changed my career.

Now I essentially run a geek dating service.

Recruiting is often like herding cats. If you have never had more than three cats in your responsibility at one time, then you don’t know. I mean cats are great for stuff like ignoring you, allowing burglars to take stuff they don’t use, urinating in places you cannot locate, and running in different directions.

Geeks are like that if you are scheduling interviews for more than one in a day. So, you get them lined up and they can’t find the cell phone charger, or the server room has no signal, or they forgot, or they found a new place to urinate.

And they’re slow to make decisions, even critical career decisions. The problem can be even worse for geeks who are married. (more…)

I know a lot of you don’t take Twitter seriously, but a recent rogue tweet by a once-prominent CEO proves otherwise.

Jack Welch, the former head of General Electric who went on to make a career for himself as a writer for a host of business publications, decided to take his political fervor for Mitt Romney and trash the staff at the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, or BLS.

You see, he was apparently upset that the BLS’ unemployment data for September showed a drop in the jobless rate and wrote a tweet that questioned the integrity of the BLS numbers.

Here’s his tweet:

“Unbelievable jobs numbers…these Chicago guys will do anything…can’t debate so change numbers.”

I was particularly perturbed over Welch’s tweet because I know many of the folks at the BLS and they’ve always seemed to have the utmost integrity no matter which administration they served under. But clearly, Welch has a right to say what ever the heck he wants.

But, and here’s the big but, it can end up hurting your career, as it appears to have in Welch’s case. (more…)

The image of the 1950s father epitomized in the Father Knows Best TV series has changed dramatically. Men are increasingly realizing they have to be more involved at home.

But men face a work-life conundrum.

New research released this week, which is part of the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project, shows young men are more open to new roles. (more…)

(Below is a guest post by Emmanuel Conde, a respected IT recruiter and writer. It is the first in a series of guest posts I will be publishing on CareerDiva offering a different perspective and expertise on jobs and careers.)

By Emmanuel Conde

All the good IT jobs are going to India! Or are they?

We live in an age of fictionalized sensational sound bites on TV. What an undue influence some of this has on our children, and let’s face it, since the television was accepted into our homes we have all felt this influence.

Ask an American kid what they want to do for a living, and you will hear answers based on what TV shows they like. Crime Scene Investigators might be in demand in a few places, but is every wide eyed child going to cut the mustard?

What we do not see are a lot of real world job heroes sensationalized on the boob tube. How do you make an IT geek look good in tights and a cape? It won’t happen! So, we look to our news announcers in their sound-bite worlds saying there are millions of American IT jobs going unfilled. We have to retool our workforce damn it! Well, they don’t generally say damn it, but I do.

There is nothing more boring than watching some geek do geek stuff on TV. Who is there left to influence our young people to step up and take IT careers seriously? The nerds on the TV show, Big Bang Theory are as close as we have come in the USA to glorifying nerds, but they are not IT geeks.

Still, they are inaccurate in their depiction anyway; shouldn’t there be more than one Indian guy? Take a look at the cast and I would challenge any American university to present a ratio of only 25% of a class of science majors who are immigrants. Indian? Yes a lot are from India. Where have all the good IT jobs gone? They are still there, waiting to be filled. (more…)