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The Dirty Jobs of IT
dantwood writes "In an Infoworld article, Dan Tynan writes about the '7 Dirtiest Jobs' in IT. Number three? Enterprise espionage engineer (black ops). 'Seeking slippery individuals comfortable with lying, cheating, stealing, breaking, and entering for penetration testing of enterprise networks. Requirements include familiarity with hacking, malware, and forgery; must be able to plausibly impersonate a pest control specialist or a fire marshal. Please submit rap sheet along with resume.'" Paging Mike Rowe, Mike Rowe to the IT desk.
For a time I was the primary (er, only) technical person for an eCommerce site. I learned one important lesson. Sales people have zero morals. They would lie to their own mother to make a sale. Hell, they would toss in sex with their baby sister to make a sale. I felt sleazy just keeping their servers running. I hope I never have to take that kind of job again.
-- Will program for bandwidth
My teacher stayed in a nearby motel and hacked in over the telephone, but a military officer with expertise in security parachuted into the base at night - it's a big base, with lots of wide open space.
He started breaking into computer rooms. Interestingly, he was detected but not caught. My teacher intercepted emails from the base staff warning that an intruder had been seen in the area.
Eventually they went public, and submitted a report to the staff as to how they could improve security.
They emphasized that this sort of thing is meant to help, and not to cost anyone their jobs.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
It's a dirty job to be a penetration tester? Looks pretty cool to me. Awful to stand in a server room sandwiched between (horror!) a server rack and a wall? That's called working in a server room. And since when are support techs all patronizing idiots, and night-shifters all zombies. For the most part, at our company people treat our techs with respect. This is sensationalist BS... a lot of people would kill for any of these jobs.
One of the first thing that any IT support person needs to know is that "USERS LIE". With people on the other end of the phone, they are certain there is some secret "fixed" button and if they stall and are a pain long enough, you'll tell them where it is so they make stuff up in an effort to speed things along. Sometimes, you even do tell them where the "fixed" button is (for their problem anyway) and they'll keep on lying because they don't recognise it as being the instructions for pushing the "fixed" button. They may not even know they are lying, but they still lie. Many times, they'll try and describe what is happening, and do so in a way that either offers no information or wrong information who actually knows what the terms they are using actually mean. Then there are the people who simply call the help desk but are still trying to solve the problem on their own. The number of times I've told people to click one button or open a window and not to do anything else, and could hear frantic typing over the phone drives is non-trivial. When I repeat "do not do anything" they'll tell me they aren't. Then when I ask them to do something like read the error message that appears or follow a set of steps that has to be done in order without doing anything else, they tell me to hold on and reboot the machine to return to the state I told them to get in. This in one of the main reasons help desk zombies want to get their hands on the machine, users lie and when the person who is actually trying to fix the machine can't see the machine and must rely upon a lier to tell them what is going in, it makes things really hard.
On the other side of things, the on-site reboot specialists have to deal with the users who give them no information and still expect results.
My best experience with a dirty IT job was at a Chemical Plant turned Furniture Factory. I never before hoped the burning sensation in my hands was just fiberglass.
Logic is flawed
And I actually think that a really dirty IT job is when management enforces the implementation of a hack that may not only be insecure but also possibly illegal.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Personal experience has taught me the magic formula for telling when a user (over the phone) is lying. (And no, I don't mean that their lips are moving). In all seriousness, I've found an almost 100% correlation with this simple "is the user lying" test. I call it the 2 Second Rule.
... at which time a few seconds have passed and you'll hear back down the telephone line ".....no". BINGO! User is lying.
Ask the user your question. E.g. "Did you do {insert something the user may have done}". If the user takes longer than 2 seconds to reply to a simple yes/no question, they are lying. No one takes 3 seconds to say yes or no.
People only take this length of time to reply if a more complex thought process has kicked off in the background. Something along the lines of "oh no, I did do that... should I have? Should I tell support? Will they still help me or think less of me if I say yes?"