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Women Are Fleeing IT Jobs
Lucas123 writes "An alarming number of women are currently abandoning IT jobs that require workers to be on-call at all hours, according to a story in Computerworld. One study cited in the article states that by 2012, 40% of women now working in IT will leave for careers with more flexible hours. 'I think women in that regard are at a real disadvantage,' said Dot Brunette, network and storage manager at Meijer Inc., a Grand Rapids, Mich.-based retailer and a 30-year IT veteran. She noted that companies can fail to attract female workers, or see them leave key IT jobs, because they fail to provide day care at work, or work-at-home options for someone who leaves to have a child.'"
Well, I'm not sure at home work on certain things can be done let alone safe in some situations.
Besides the cost of putting up the VPN stuff, Making sure there is high speed access to the Internet or a T1 directly to the building, you now have to worry about enforcing policies on a computer completly out of your site that could be used to compromise everything you spent the last ten year trying to stop from being on the Internet. Meijers does a lot of credit/debit transactions. Has quite a few employees spread across several states and then there is the problems of what needs fixed being part of what gives access to tele-commute.
It is somewhat scary as well as flaky/inefficient in some situations. I cut an accountant from remote access once because the IDS started wigging out on some ports being scanned. Turns out, she used her family computer for work at home and was logged into the VPN when she walked away letting her kid go online. He proceeded to download some movies and game cracks from IRC networks and got scanned repeatedly by at least 20 different IPs . And yes, I logged the commands being typed, I know this was happening. I just don't know if it was her or her kid. And I had to go on site (35 min away) to block everything and figure out what was going on because the IDS locked everything out once the scanning attempts got so bad. The IDS probably has some anal policies but it was doing it's job and this was an accounting firm.