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The Living Dilbert?
AirmanTux asks: "Next march I will be separating from the US Air Force, after six years wearing 'the uniform', working in the closest thing to IT that the military has. For certain reasons, I've come to the conclusion that I will be more effective in serving the US public out of uniform than in it. There seems to be a common belief that the civilian sector is just as disorganized and mismanaged as the uniformed services. Do you think this is true? Are there any 'honest' places to work any more (where promotions/awards are based on work preformed and bureaucracy, and politics aren't encouraged to supplant the 'mission), or has America become one big living Dilbert strip?"
I just made that switch myself not long ago.
It really depends on the place where you end up working (their size, what type of company they are, etc matters a lot).
Regardless, I *don't* ever want to be "promoted" to a management job. I like coding, not paperwork, meetings and managing people.
After 4 years in the Marines I was ready to get out to the "real" world... a world free of BS and well paying cool jobs. Well I got my degree in Comp Sci and was ready to face the world. Upon getting a job with a large corporation, I was amazed at the amount of BS there. It made the military look like an efficient & well-oiled machine. After 5.5 years now in the corporate world I ahve come to one conclusion... you alone can't make a damn difference. Either you will like it or you won't. I have finally realized that being my own boss is the way to go and thus I am pursuing that vigorously.
As for you my friend, take a walk through the corporate jungle and see if its your kinda thing. You can always do your own thing!
http://psychicfreaks.com/The more in-depth knowledge you have of some area, the more immune you will be to having to bow to mindless political requirements. I'm not saying that will go away, just that it will be lessened.
Consider focusing on specific areas, like perhaps IT security work or perhaps programming related to military applications. It seems like you should be able to use your time in the services to your advantage.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You can work at a Start-Up. In those types of jobs, there's not a lot of money to go around so there's no room to slack off. Thus, everyone around you should, in theory, be top quality. Your reward for long hours and lower pay is a lot of stock options... But if the company doesn't work out, all you're left with is toilet paper. (No, I'm not bitter, not at all)
Or you can work at Big Corporation. All of them are the same, with varying degrees of B.S. Some have very little office politics and your hard work is noted and rewarded. Others are just one big C.Y.A. environment. Even worse, even if you do work hard in your local I.T. area, upper management may decide to oursource your job, so you get screwed anyways.
Remember, the goal is not to work hard. The goal is to work smart. Put in a lot padding on your estimates so you can slack off and still meet the deadline. If your co-workers in other areas / departments ask you to do things for them, pretend you don't know so they won't bother you anymore. (After all, you only answer to your boss.) Be sure to take the credit when something works and pass the blame when it doesn't. Don't complain about new projects or moved up timelines. You'll still have to complete them anyways if you still want to keep your job. Instead, agree with management and discuss how much more revenue the company will make once the project is finished. It gives the impression you actually give a shit about your clients and you'll be remembered as the "can do" person instead of the "can't do" complainer. I do all of these and have steadily advanced in position & salary.
I happen to be in the Air National Guard currently and am well on my way to making it my career, though not in IT. I have my Master's Degree in Computer Science, and had the privledge of doing my research work with the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada. I can tell you with a great amount of certainty that the driving forces between government and public IT are worlds apart. In Air Force/Government IT, there is little motivation to strive to learn more skills. Pretty much anyone can enlist into a technical field and they're all put through the same relatively short, simple training. In my opinion, they're amateurs on an unjustified power trip. There is significantly higher motivation for learning new skills in the public sector because it will actually make a difference for the individual. When you become invaluable, your status and pay reflect that, generally, in the public sector. Definetly not so in government positions. I do completely agree that an individual with a strong desire to learn and expand skills and knowledge can be of immense use in the public sector. However it takes a supernatural kind of driving force to penetrate the mundane aura of government IT.
Having spent 5 years in the military myself and the last 18 years in the civilian sector, I can say with great confidence that the civilian sector in no way is anywhere near as disorganized and incompetent as the military. The military is another branch of the federal government. That means it falls to the same economic problems the government has. No accountability for output or productivity.
No competition in govt. means the quality of output is not compared to a competitor. There are no standards nor metrics that have any independant oversight. The result is obvious. Poeple in govt. tend to get lazy and do less and less for more and more pay because they can. What standards can they be compared to? Who holds them accountable? The govt. is too big to have any real accountability.
In the civilian sector you have to make money. Yeah there is plenty of fat/red tape/ incompetance in large corporations. But it doesn't last forever. Any company that gets fat, happy and lazy will eventually lose in the marketplace. Just look at any large tech company in the last 10 years to see what a difference competition makes. When was the last time the military or fed govt. laid off a _large_ portion of it's workforce because they stopped bringing in enough income? The last time I checked, the govt just borrows more and more money when income goes down. It'd be nice in the civilain sector if companies could just borrow their way out of financial woes but unfortunately the civlian sector has to budget and follow normal economics.
Therefore no waste, incompetance and lazy tenured people who are mean, lazy and disfunctional (been to get a drivers license lately? Imagine millions of poeple in one organization just like that. Now think of the fed. govt.).
Hopefully getting into the civilian sector is not too much of a shock since you will now have to justify your value by production and not by how much "time" you have put in (unless you go union - that has the same problems fed govt has).
My $.02.
-- Mean People Suck
I'm an information architect who works for a consulting company that has major contracts with both the military (portals, both secret and non) and teh private sector (special focus in financial services and ecommerce). The answer to your question is an emphatic NO, not in the slightest.
A project that the private sector will complete inside of 9 months will take 2 years inside the government. The reasons for this are fairly straightforward.
1. Contractors (the big boys, not my company necessarily) have NO interest in efficiency. The longer the contract lasts the more money they make.
2. Government personnel have no motivation to be competitive or efficient. Promotions are few and far between, there is a low expectation to begin with, and the aforementioned also holds true for this group as well.
3. The politics doesn't lend itself to efficiency. You have to worry about all sorts of buy-in on an enormous scale, in some cases ACTUAL politics comes into the game, etc.
Yeah, you'll see some inefficiency and idiocy in the private sector, but NOTHING like the government. At the end of the day the private sector business owner (PM, CEO, whoever) is responsible for the net result, and he has a serious interest in the success of the project.
If anything the only thing I would tell you to expect is to be ready for the more aggressive and demanding environment you're entering. Long turnarounds are gone, you will be responsible for what you come up with, and you likely won't get funding for what's perceived as "nice but unnecessary". For example, the best usability testing I've gotten funds for havre been from governement projects. Why? Its not their money, and the bottom line is more or less irrelevant.
Best,
rt
A marine officer friend once told me the military was operated and run like a big business, except instead of turning profits, they export bodies of bad guys.
And he was serious, he went into details on the similarities of his training and an MBA program, though I suppose the MBA didn't involve automatic weapons.
There's red tape in any large organization. I've you've developed an allergy to it, go into business for yourself, or a small company with good people.
In my opinion, they're amateurs on an unjustified power trip.
First of all, my hat's off to all who have served our country in the military, but something is very, very strange and wrong going on with the way the AF and Army train their IT folks and what quality of actual usable knowledge, experience and attitudes those people have when they leave the service and apply for their first civilian IT jobs after leaving the service. I used to be a hiring manager for an organization that primarily did systems integration, installations and support for state and local government and we interviewed a lot of newly ex-mil IT applicants and the above statement generally hits the nail right on the head. Of course there were exceptions to the rule, but by and large it seemed like most of these applicants got very little broad-coverage training in the real IT world, but instead were all pidgeon-holed into little isolated sub-sections of IT training and knowledge without being able to be immediately competant at the "big picture" without substantial re-training and what I'd call "reverse brainwashing". Yet every one of them thought they knew it all better than everyone else, and one of the most common answers in the interview questions about where they saw themselves in 3 to five years of working for us was "to become the senior manager/director of the whole IT department"... in other words to run off the existing boss and take over. Wrong answer.
Amateurs on an unjustified power trip indeed.
We did hire a few of these over the years and they turned out to be some of the worst IT employees we ever had. A recurring theme was a lack of respect for proper software licensing. One particular worst offender would take a master copy of the full corporate MS Office Professional edition and install it on every desktop he touched regardless of whether the customer had purchased the full version for that machine or not. Of course the end-users loved it, but when the tech was confronted with what he was doing he said that he knew he would not be the one getting in trouble for it, but rather his boss would and the sooner he could get the boss in trouble or fired, the better chance he thought he'd have to move up, take over and "rule with an iron fist".
I'm posting A/C because now my company considers ex-military IT techs at the very bottom of the list when hiring due to too many problems we've had with them in the past. We actively discriminate against them due to getting burned too many times.
The best quality IT folks we've been hiring the past couple years now come from two radically different groups of people. The first group is the young Computer Science geeks right out of college who are still trainable/mouldable before they can pick up too many bad habits, and the second groups is older college degreed people (late 30's to early-mid 40's) who have had one non-IT professional career for a while (but were above-average proficient as technology users) and then have gone back to school to get their CompSci or MIS degrees and have changed careers to the IT field.
I joinf the Naval Reserves at the age of seventeen. The military was a way of life in my family. My dad retired as a colonel in the air force after 33 years of service. My brothers were both brunts. I spent three and half years with the Naval Reserves and somtimes I regret leaving the service. Just somtime. After leaving the reserves I studied Chemical Engineering and then Computer Science. Had various jobs as a consultant. Then worked for myself as a Computer Consultant. What the service gave me was the discipline that I was lacking.
:) Remember the discipline and life will take care of itself.
I won't lie to you, life oustside of the service is harder than within. But overall I've come to think that life outside of the service offers more.
I don't know if your an officer or an enlist person, but outside of the service, we don't care if your mother was married when she had you!
Good luck.
It's not only big outfits: I worked at a startup where the VP of Engineering sprouted pointy hair three months after hiring me. On the other hand, some large outfits manage to combat idiocy fairly well, so it's really about the particular employer.
In job interviews I tell the questioner they're being interviewed just as much as I am - the ones who get offended are likely to be idiots about other things, whereas the folks who understand it's about matching styles have a good chance of understanding my approach to the job.
You can smell someplace will be a losing proposition. Here's an example. I was called into one office to speak with the hiring manager, but when HR heard about it, they came over with a six page form to fill out before I could talk with the guy. Didn't make a damned bit of difference whether all the data was already on my resume, paperwork had to be filled out, and at the bottom it even said "See resume not acceptable response". I scratched that in anyway since I had other things to do, the interview went swimmingly well, the engineering manager was ready to make me an offer, but after that nothing. Nada. Not hello, not goodbye, merry christmas, fuck you, nothing. I can only suspect HR scotched the followup, and if HR can override an engineering hire I wouldn't care to work there anyway because the priorities are FUBAR. Turns out my gut check was right: they went tits-up eighteen months later because of inept management.
There are other cases, like the hostile HR guy who smelled of liquor at 11 am, the place which desperately solicited resumes then couldn't be arsed to answer email when I followed up a week later, or the guy who wasn't at his desk because there was no way he would say yes so he passive-aggressivated his way out of the problem. Each one of these was a huge warning sign, and in retrospect I'm way better off for avoiding these gigs. See, in civilian life, you can somewhat choose your CO, so reading the organisation before you get involved is a useful way to minimise potential asshattery.
The hiring manager clearly said to come right on in, but HR threw this at me and said I couldn't talk with him until this was done. They could've asked for the same info afterwards with no skin off their nose, but they insisted on this with a roomful of waiting interviewers. As I said, HR nixing a hire on something as silly as this is a clear cut case of misplaced priorities: they were obviously turf-marking over engineering.
As to the high maintenance bit, for the job I did end up taking I not only coded my ass off but near the end took on a few tricky hardware problems, even though they weren't anywhere near my job description, because my work was done and I wanted to move the project over the goal line. Doesn't sound too prima-donna to me, pal.
Pray tell, what a fascinating point of view. All this time, I thought my right to bitch and complain about things was enumerated under the constitution (first amendment.)
So you are also telling me that someone who is politically active, does things to promote their cause, but doesn't vote because he can't conscientously a hand in picking one of the two candidates running, because one is a douche and the other a turd, doesn't have a right to complain about politics?
And someone who slaves away at some corporation and has a wife with a baby along the way, can't complain about corporate culture because he doesn't think the risk is worth it because it's not just him affected by that life decision.
And by this line of logic, unless people jump in and program computers themselves, they have no right to complain about crappy user interfaces, program logic, shitty computer games, etcetera, ad infinitum.
What a wonderful idea. Where do I sign up to join this fascist society?
I have been an IT manager for over 17 years and I make it a point to hire military over civilian IT personel. This is mostly due to the work ethic. Many civilian IT folk have serious personality disorders, anger issues, social issues and most of their competency is theoretical. In other words there are millions of IT folk who have heard of this and that, but they lack real world application or completion skills. Recently I hired an army networking guy over a cisco certified applicant and paid for the ex-military guy to get his cert, this was simply because I know where his work ethic will be and the ex-military I have hired have been very concerned with the end result, while non military experienced seem to be caught up in a theoretical world...
No, bearing isn't really that ill-defined. Just didn't feel like going to into details of the components; such as, in the original poster's case as a member of the Air Force, how well he meets the requirements of AFR 35-10, the appearance standards (which are so insanely detailed it is difficult to believe unless you have been subject to them), maintains a good posture and how well he recieves and issues commands. Oh, and that he doesn't lean against things and never puts his hands in his pockets (you can't make this stuff up). In the case of the Air Force, about 85% of basic training is fundamentally about military bearing issues, so it isn't like you don't know and understand them intimately before you are worried about fitness reports.
Another important point to remember about the military is that *nothing* is ill-definied. Every single thing that does or can ever happen in the course of being in the military is defined in a manual somewhere. There is a Tech Order for how to use a hammer, and right beside it are the instructions for using a screw driver. No, these aren't special hammers and screwdrivers, or doing weird things with them on some kind of exotic military equipment. Just how you use a hammer and a screwdriver. I can't remember the TO numbers on them, but I ran into them at some point and laughed for 20 minutes.
7. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
You asked: "Are there any 'honest' places to work any more (where promotions/awards are based on work preformed and bureaucracy, and politics aren't encouraged to supplant the 'mission)"
The answer, sadly, is a resounding no.
Your individual skills (troubleshooting, coding, organising, selling, whatever) are the stuff that you _do_. The "work" part of work IS the politics. The "work" part of work is dealing with 9-5, 5 days a week on the books, and 8-7 and sometimes on weekends in reality.
That's why it's called "work" and not "play". That's why you get paid money -- because while we would probably all continue to code, mess with hardware, organise, conceptualise in our free time should we not be working -- we expect a big pay packet to deal with the bullshit.
It's the difference between micro-evolution and macro-evolution. You can micro-evolve in any company -- go from Programmer 3rd Class to Programmer 2nd Class, for example -- but to completely move up or even across the ladder is rare, precisely because if you're actually good at what you do, you won't be good at the things that guarantee promotion.
Google the "Peter Principle". Look up the "60% rule" (60% of your time inside any company bigger than 10 people will be spent on servicing "how things are done around here" -- not actually your "job description" stuff).
Work is work, and if you're lucky the stuff you're actually good at will align slightly with it.
Are there any 'honest' places to work any more (where promotions/awards are based on work preformed and bureaucracy, and politics aren't encouraged to supplant the 'mission), or has America become one big living Dilbert strip?"
I don't know if there are any? My girlfriend works for the local County Office of Education. From what she tells me, I can surmise that it's nothing more than a bureaucracy that lives only to maintain the federal funding coming it's way. Tax-payer payed luncheons, "elected" Superintendents that force everybody who didn't support their campaign, or thinks the same way, to resign. That Superintendent has currently resigned to join this state's actor governor's cabinet, but has pretty much molded, and placed, the new Superintendent. Did I mention that the Superintendent was a Republican? I'm not saying a Democrat would be any better, but go figure. Oh, and before election campaigns started, the current Superintnedent (the guys who's gonna make it "big" with the actor governator, warned all employees not to show support for any candidate, because they might not be on the winning end and have to leave. Also, my girlfriend is questioned about her personal days off, because she might be out being "political."
I tell my girlfriend that public institutions, meant to help the public, start off with a liberal idealogue, with probably full and honest intentions. But after a while, conservative hands come into play and run the project into a ditch, and won't let go of it, turning it into a cash cow (while conservatives are in control). Only until it's known that the institution does not work (as controlled by conservatives, but nobody's judging) for the public interest, is that institution either closed or "fixed", i.e. education vouchers, or W's social security plan. First you wreck the plan while milking it, then you close it, and pass that into private sector (who voted for you).
I'm a Network admin getting out of the Navy here in a few weeks and have pretty much the same thoughts... I will say though, that I haven't lost touch with any of my IT friends back home so I'm not to uninformed... as for a few of the comments I saw earlier about the training Air Force / Army techs received... well, I tell you, it's not any better in the Navy. I'm an electronics tech (ET) by training, not a computer tech (IT), and yet I still do IT work, and do it better than the ITs. Granted, I am a geek, and I was doing desktop level IT work before I joined, so I guess i cheated; but dealing with all these Navy ITs for the last 6 years has made me sad. 80% of them are flat out idiots, from E1 to E9. The next 10% are capable, but haven't been trained or trained right. The last 10% are the true geeks that would make it just about anywhere... and this last 10% usually gets out before they make E6 (sometime around end of 1st or 2nd tour) because they know they can make twice as much in the civilian world. ... *shrug* it makes me sad, but every one of the idiots that were in change where I came from, had plenty of warning as to what would happen when I left... 2 years of warning, 2 years of "we need to do this to keep that from happening" ... no one listened, and I'm sad to say, I was right... 2 weeks after I left, the poop hit the rotary propeller. *shrug* oh well. Loved the Navy, hated my command. If only stupidity was painful to the stupid person.
Sadly enough, the Navy IT system is clogged with the 80% (the type I'm surprised don't strangle themselves in the morning with their shoelaces), and mostly it's because of their IT training program.. they take people who've never touched a computer before, give them 6 weeks of training, and expect them to be MCSE/CCNA/whatever level quality (not paper cert quality, but actual techs) and it doesn't work for a variety of reasons... most of which I've typed up in a multi-page email and sent to my CO once I was on terminal leave (and DD214 in hand)
However, after working as a clerk for a non-profit at the University of Iowa, Widernet, it seems to me that there are at least a few opportunities for tech positions that put mission over politics. Widernet hired programmers as their main workforce...the pay wasn't great, the work schedule was very flexible, and the environment was great...particularly since it was a fairly regular part of the job to meet with students and teachers from Africa who were making use of the project.
It seems to me that non-profits would be in need of skilled and experienced IT profs (being an Air Force vet would definitely, IMO, qualify you in both those areas). The drawback would be that you would be making a fraction of your corporate potential. The advantages would include less politics, a sense of worth about what you are accomplishing, and potentially a better-grade of co-worker.
Websites to check out:
Charity.org
Idealist.org
Non Profit Jobs
There are numerous other sites, just check Google. Additionally, if you get in contact with your local United Way (or similar group) that dispense funds to non-profits, they should be able to give a detailed list of local non-profits.
but by and large it seemed like most of these applicants got very little broad-coverage training in the real IT world, but instead were all pidgeon-holed into little isolated sub-sections of IT training and knowledge without being able to be immediately competant at the "big picture"
Most of the job listings I have encountered seem to call for specialists. They read like this. The listing is obviously the resume of the guy who just left. So tell us, is this sort of listing a bluff? Do all managers really want broad-coverage people and figure asking for the opposite is the best way to get them? Or are you the only one who wants broad-coverage staff?
I recently left a very large multinational electronics company. I can pretty much guarantee that my next employer will be a small company for the very concerns voiced in the article.
A large company (unfortunately) cannot help but embody Dilbert principles. Even though your immediate manager, or even several levels of managment may be more than competent, there are simply too many levels of management, with responsibilities impacting your job, spread out over too many individuals. As an example, as a software engineering manager, it was impossible for me to implement the 'Pair Programming' practice from Extreme Programming because employee cubicle sizes/layout were dictated by the highest levels of management within the product division. This decision was made by made by a management team located in Europe (I was based in San Jose, California). This management team is sufficiently removed from me as to be completely unreachable. This structure made it impossible for me to organize the physical office layout in a manner that would facilitate pair programming.
A large company in many ways cannot treat employees as individuals. The larger the company, the more the employee must conform to the process of the organization, and the more organizational process replaces individual initiative.
By contrast, a smaller company succeeds or fails on the basis of every member of company. When choosing to join a smaller company, it is possible to actually interview with, if not everyone in the company, at least all of the key management (including the CEO), and many of the key contributors. In a smaller company, your own efforts are more visible, with a greater impact on the company, and stand a better chance of being truly recognized.
Some people tend to work well as a cog in a large machine, but that's not me. I wish those people well, but I would much rather work my *ss off at a smaller company, even if it's for a smaller monetary reward, and have the opportunity to make a real, recognizable contribution.