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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?"
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/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.
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.
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.