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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.
One-page link.
lying, cheating, stealing, breaking, and entering for penetration testing of enterprise networks
Sounds like fun.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
When will this be on Dirty Jobs
who publishes stories on IT web sites and only puts a tiny amount of information on each page but has tons of pages in a desperate attempt to increase ad revenue? I think that should be #1 on the list.
Monstar L
If "dirty" implies unpleasant to preform, I think anything that forces you interact with an end user should be higher on the list. If "dirty" implies morally wrong, only the espionage engineer seems to apply. But if "dirty" implies physically dirty, only 1 and 2 apply. This article seems to combine all the different definitions, but I enjoyed reading it anyway. I think intern would fit somewhere on the list event though it isn't a job, exactly. You get to experience whatever other people would like to avoid, so you get a nice spectrum of unpleasantry.
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
What is the point of linking to the Dirty Jobs entry on Wikipedia? What's wrong with the actual Discovery Channel site ??
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
Oh really, I think corporate spy would be a simple job. Find out what they want you to do, turn in your company/boss, flip them off as the FBI takes them away, collect the reward and get a new job. Sounds awfully simple to me. If anyone ever asked me to pull some illegal bullshit job like that I'd be like "Hmm, yeah can you repeat that and speak closer to my MP3 recorder?"
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Actually, this guy is the TV narrator, and this guy was sued by Microsoft.
Don't mind the extra X. Alex
Finally some recognition.
Dirty IT job No. 7: Legacy systems archaeologist WANTED: INDIVIDUALS FAMILIAR WITH 3270
Hey, that #7 job doesn't sound bad at all. Legacy systems? I'll take that any day over most of those other jobs. It's probably not very outsourceable and is obscure enough that when you actually do a good job you'll be revered as a god by those who depend on your work.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
How about equipment in an 'institutional' environment? Replacing printers, terminals and interface hardware in areas where the dust lays almost an inch thick like dryer lint. One spark in the wrong place and FWOOOM. How about facilites where there are wiring problems? Never touch a metal doorframe and a metal computer case at the same time, cause you'll get a jolt (not cola). How about servicing a line printer with five guys with guns on one side and a score or more of arrestees peering at you behind an expanded steel screen with the place smelling like BO, spit and fingerprint ink?
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.
Would this then, be a description of Mike Rowe Soft?
Jus' wonderin'...
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
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UTF-8: There and Back Again
Having done both, I completely disagree. In fact, I have yet to meet a help desk zombie who hasn't dreamed of becoming an on-site reboot specialist. It doesn't take long for a help desk zombie to wish they could simply get the person on the other end of the phone to do what they tell them and nothing else, or even just understand what they have told them. Getting to be an on-site reboot specialist allows one to work directly on a machine without the person who has no idea playing a literal game of telephone with your instructions to mess things up. In addition, on-site rebooters usually get paid more for doing less and can get rid of angry customers at least for a time by telling them to go get coffee. The only real exception I've seen to this would be the Graveyard Support Vampire who have other priorities than more money or getting the job done ASAP to meet quota.
It may be undesirable by most of the kids around here, but there is nothing bad about coding COBOL for a living:
You are always in demand, unlike several other IT fields
Pays well
Stable work
Stable code.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
More and more I'm finding that simple upgrade jobs are taking longer to do due to masses of dust and crap.
Upgrading a 256mb to 1 gb takes maybe 5 mins. The last one took over an hour, It was so bad I took photos.
The dust was so thick that I had to dismantle everything, vacuum, use artist brushes and compressed air, reassemble after oiling the fans! I even replaced the power supply as it was too stuffed with dust to be safe.
By the time I finished, my workspace was filled with dust, crap everywhere.
Next time I'll blow it out with compressed air outside in the sunlight.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
...but I've had 5 of these jobs in my career.
/.'s will get the incredible irony of that.
No, I haven't had #1, but the wet end of a paper making machine is very close. It's amazing what will grow in warm pulp, if you leave it there a while. And how your shoes literally fall apart when you walk through the stuff they use to clean it off. Literally. In minutes. Leather is no match for DuStrip.
Cat Herder is the worst of them. Being a rebootnik isn't quite as much fun as a third-party field tech, driving back and forto from the airport 3 miles away in a driving snowstorm to get *another* part to make that ^&*) Alpha server run again, so people can rent porn. Yeah.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
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.
The lab tech at the police officer that gets to deal with computer crimes. Yeah, once the police knock down the door to the house of someone collecting child porn, he's the guy that has to touch the keyboard...
Pretty early on in my career, I worked at a Multi Level Marketing [read: Pyramid Scheme] company.
The company makes multi-millions, and I was personally in charge of the systems that calculates, tallies, and print out "reward" cheques every month. I had to be intimately familiar with all the details and clauses and sub-clauses and secret definitions of obvious words like "one week" or heck even what "50" means. I knew first hand that what our marketing people said was very different from what our sales people said, which is different from when people call our customer service, and which in turn is many miles away from how the system actually works.
They never lie, because you get sued when you lie.
But ever since, I have been convinced that it is dirtier to speak in half-truths and equivocations than out-right lies.
[confession]
I was young and dismissed my disgust at the company as my being too "picky" about jobs. I convined myself to tough it out. Eventually I found out the company was stealing from ME, and only then did I quit. So I already got what I deserved. [/confession]
sorry about posting as AC, but I have a rather unique handle I've been using for quite a few years.
While a spelunker isn't likely to be going to explore underwater wrecks, they very well may be going to explore underwater caves.
Even though medicine and IT aren't obviously related, I've garnered a lot of wonderful problem solving theory from Dr. House.
Rule #1: Patients lie
I was just chatting with someone about this the other day.
You're right, Help Desk is a horrible place to expect qualified techies to hang out. It's more of a litmus test than anything else. If you've got some level of skill, you advance out of the help desk and into something useful. If you suck...well...at least you're unlikely to be fired.
Every place I've worked that had a decent sized IT department had two types of people; Help Desk / Operators that had been there 10+ years, and help desk staff that got promoted or moved on within six months.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
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
I should've read into the "of IT" more. Really, I was thinking someone had a dirtier job than I did repairing cables crawling through the mud under a building, working 40 hours a week in an office that flooded with every rain storm (the water carried beach sand, I was working at a resort), the cables the guys I replaced ran through a cesspool yard... if you're thinking nothing is worse than that, you're right. Sadly, this article raised my hopes that I didn't have it so bad... then crushed them.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
The Dirty Jobs of IT
Is that you, Steve?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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?"
anyone who was really good at this wouldn't have a rap sheet... as they wouldn't have been caught
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Dirty IT job No. 7: Legacy systems archaeologist
WANTED: INDIVIDUALS FAMILIAR WITH 3270, VAX/VMS, COBOL, AS/400, AND OTHER LEGACY SYSTEMS
I have to disagree: It may not be the very best idea to try to connect AS/400 applications to webbrowsers, but an AS/400 is certainly NOT a legacy system. The system architecture of the AS/400 is actually much more modern than that of most other systems. Do you know any other system with a persistent single-level-storage, that continues working exactly where it stopped before the power was lost, after you boot it up again - I mean, it does not RESTART processes, it CONTINUES them. Or do you know another system, where you can plug in a completely different main processor, just recompile the OS kernel, and every application on the system will be AUTOMATICALLY ported to the new processor architecture upon first start - as if they were Java programs? Ever heard of the "technology independent machine interface" (TIMI)?
Reimplementing your old applications on an AS/400 is much LESS of a risk than trying to migrate those applications to so-called modern systems like PC-servers, because an AS/400 is orders of magnitudes more secure (you DO know it has hardware-supported pointer protection, don't you?) and more realiable than a PC-server.