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Even Dirtier IT Jobs
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Dan Tynan offers up 7 'even dirtier IT jobs' in a follow-up of last year's 7 dirtiest jobs in IT. Number four? Zombie console monkey.
'Wanted: Individuals with low self-esteem and high boredom threshold willing to spend long hours poring over server logs and watching blinking lights on a network console.'"
cmdrtaco's toilet slave.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Website maintainer after being /.ed would be #8
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
...or Quantum mechanics at work. By publishing this story we can't now read it.
/. editors won't implement it, why not a user with a bot looking for fresh stories and doing a ~1st post linking to cached copy?
Why can't it become routine to (also) link to a cached copy?
If the
When you look into your children's eyes and wonder what will they wear, eat, buy their books and toys from, somehow you feel you can do less-than-dreamlike jobs.
It's not pretty, but it beats being unemployed - and being responsible for a family.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Puts a whole new twist on the old zombie mantra:
Zombie: Braiiiins! Need more BRAIINS!!!
Employer: Yes, you do... your work experience is attrocious!
- Despite popular opinion, I am not perfect.
And, perhaps, fulfillment can come from sources other than work...
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
My nomination: A PHD (Plumbing Hardware Dispatcher) in Google's TiSP Program.
When you look into your children's eyes and wonder what will they wear, eat, buy their books and toys from, somehow you feel you can do less-than-dreamlike jobs.
I have two boys and couldn't disagree more; I just beat them and gamble away my wages.
=Smidge=
Is it just my observation, or is eldavojohn an idiot?
I had to ask myself this question the last time I was crawling through an underground crawlspace below a very old building so I could run drainage tubing from our new server room.
That was pretty dirty.
When you look into your children's eyes and wonder what will they wear, eat, buy their books and toys from, somehow you feel you can do less-than-dreamlike jobs.
I have two boys and couldn't disagree more; I just beat them and gamble away my wages.
=Smidge=
I don't want to call you a bad parent or anything, but the way you're wasting your kids' potential is appalling.
Those kids could be out hustling on the street or working in an illegal textile mill and providing you money to gamble with. Instead, you waste time and energy beating them when the factory foreman could be doing it and paying you for the privilege.
Zombie console monkey...
Finally, a job that really COULD be replaced with a shell script.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Next time: the world's seven wettest oceans!
Meta will eat itself
Data miner?
Sounds awfully like data mining except for the blinking lights on the console but rather the status output of your data mining software.
For those who think "poring" in the summary is a typo, you're not as smart as you think you are.
http://www.google.com/search?q=poring+pouring
So am I the only one pouring things into my logging servers in attempts to stop the blinking lights before my boss notices and forces me to stay late?
Taken "offline for maintenance", i.e. applying a plunger to it after it got Slashdotted.
This is what they get for spreading a story over eight pages.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
If I see this on Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe, I'll give it a reason to be dirty.
Sig? No thanks. I don't smoke.
Well, I can't RTFA, because it's probably slashdotted, but I have done some stuff in my career, which would make a lots of folks hurl. Like, looking at Unix kernel dumps caused by bugs in the TCP/IP stack or network device drivers . . . or deadlocks (register four has the PID of the process holding the lock, unless the code grabbed the lock on an interrupt).
At any rate, a lot of folks would abhor doing such stuff. I found it challenging, but fun. Some of the folks that I worked with would have rather just looked at blinking lights the whole day.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Your employer is blocking your access to this information to stop you trading up.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
For a month or so, I did this as a temp job. My job consisted of manually logging into a server every two hours and manually running a command to gather log files, and then another to send those files to a second server. I honestly have no idea what kind of system I was logging into, I just know that I was told they were unable to automate the process, so there needed to be a warm body to run the commands. For that, I got to sit in a windowless basement data closet with no access to TV, radio, or open Internet. At least it was a paycheck, and I got to catch up on some reading, writing, and sleep.
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
So are you saying that your only alternative to naked, starving and illiterate kids is a night shift job as bestiality porn site QA engineer? I think most people have more pleasant, even though lower-paying choices. I just looked at my kid's eyes and I think, if it comes to that, she needs a sane dad more than XBOX360 or a 4 bedroom house.
Exploitation begins at home. - Unnumbered Ferengi Rule of Acquisition
"I'm just here to regulate funkyness." - James Gandolfini, as Winston in The Mexican
Sounds a lot like something like this.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Websites that make you browse to a new page to they can bump their page views to advertisers can rot in hell.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
I don't see any problems with that job.... Why so dismissive? It's not as if you're the person blowing the horse or being taken from behind by a donkey. I'd object to that, but doing some QA on perverted stuff? Pffffff....
Sorry, but most of these jobs are not that, "dirty," compared to my last job. I did systems administration work for a meatpacker. This meant that several times a year I would go to feedlots and slaughterhouses to help out with the systems. There is nothing like working in a place where you can be walking on guts and dung as you go up and down to the computer rooms. (And by, "rooms," I mean, "modified coat closet with an air conditioner sticking in a hole cut in the wall.") Some of my favorites:
-One abattoir had the intake for the server room on the roof... directly under the exhaust tower for rendering. Even when we moved the equipment into the new offices, I turned on the disk array and got a face full of rendered pork from the fans.
-One place in Texas was a nightmare. Imagine extension cords stapled to the wall for systems, where they were wired so the pronged end was the, "hot," side. Yep, it could double as a cattle prod if needed.
-Communicating with the people at these places was impossible. One night crew person sounded exactly like Boomhauer. It was always fun trying to understand her.
-Other people didn't like the fact that we in IT were generally smarter than them. I got one woman who liked making up big words to sound more intelligent than she was. On one occasion, she said that her screen was, "tricating." I had to ask her a few times to repeat the word to understand it. After I found out that she meant that the column size for her green screen console was wrong, causing the lines to wrap improperly, I told her I had never heard of that word before. "Oh, you're young," she said, "that's why you don't know it." Yeah, neither did Merriam and Webster, and they're pretty old, too.
-Another plant in the south had an adjacent, "smoking room," in someone's office, so the fans were sucking in both slaughterhouse smell and nicotine. Lovely.
-And it was always fun walking on the floors when we had to check out the equipment, since we in IT stuck out like sore thumbs. I remember going to check an electronic scale once and watching these workers with sharp knives cutting things and staring at me. I was thinking, "Why don't you look down at what you're doing with that sharp blade instead of me? You know, that piece of meat that has... an... eyeball looking back at me... oh, boy...."
--Chag
A statement which further reinforces my view that having children signals the end of happy life, and the beginning of some kind of badgered and miserable existence, regurgitating the dregs of ones own aspirations into the insatiable beaks of thankless offspring.
And to think. People bring this on themselves.
May the Maths Be with you!
That "Disconnect/Recconect Specialist" in TFA is a wuss. I've worked in a lab building built entirely on a raised floor. Not just the lab, but the offices and everything. This wasn't actually an IT job, much of the cabling being instrumentation. But we had employees with no concept of modern day sanitation. Have some lunch leftovers? There's a hole in the floor and its closer than the garbage can. It'll do. So now we've got rats. Or. more aptly RATS. And rats don't live forever either. And when they die, other rats .......
There were also a few instances in which I believe someone couldn't make it to the men's room it time.
Have gnu, will travel.
And paradoxically, it seems to be difficult to get a job when you're unemployed. When I didn't have a job I felt like I was begging for a chance, so I got a job at an cable company/ISP helpdesk. Five months later I got a job as an embedded software engineer (what I was looking for).
It was a pretty lousy job, when I came home I felt completely empty. You get verbal abuse, everything from people who don't know the first thing about computers, all the way to undisguisable idiots. Still, I can advise everyone to do it for a while. You get a lot of people skills, and you get a lot of direct feedback from people struggling with technology. This is invaluable when you start developing these things yourself, as your mental image of the end-user is is less self-centered. It has helped me staying very alert about intuitivity and consistent mental models.
PS: the verbal abuse was sporadic. People call for help, and most of them seem to be aware that yelling first and then asking "can you help me?" isn't very productive. If you really want to thicken your skin, get a job at the payments helpdesk, not the technical one. If you can help them, you also receive a lot of gratitude.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
Save the world they said... Tropical Island I was told....
So, when your choice is making a living wage as the night buy doing QC for a porn site, or working at McDonalds or the corner Gas Station... you say hell yeah Fast Food because it will keep you saner?
So, when it is a choice between your kids eating and not eating, not whether or not they get an XBox, how tasty does that porn based job look now?
My current boss is a shit. I'm paid $8.25/hr to repair laptops all day long. Not just replacing boards, but replacing power adapter ports and more when necessary, as well as software issues. I'm in the US of A. Sure, being the QC for a disgusting porn site would be crap WORK compared to what I do now (satisfying work, crap wage)... but I've walked a path few choose to walk. I've seen the choice of "DO work that keeps you sane and go homeless due to lack of money" and I embraced it. I lived in a van for more than a year. I'm going back to living in it. I don't get paid enough to support living, and I don't have the schedule that allows for another job, there are no third shift jobs here, and I can't find another job. I'm not the spouse of a Marine, which is what 95% of the jobs in town are geared for, since this town is a support system for two Marine bases.
So step down from the pedestal you are on. it isn't the difference between nice and extravagant gifts that we are talking about. It isn't about an XBox or a 4 bedroom house over a 3 bedroom house... it is the choice between homelessness and a two bedroom apartment for a family of 5 (mom and dad in one, all three kids in the other). if you really think it is all about having the money to afford a new console, or making due for one more year with the old one, it is time you woke up. Some of us have to make due with $16k a year. Some of us who work those jobs that fit into your quote "I think most people have more pleasant, even though lower-paying choices." don't make a fraction of what is needed to survive... not thrive, just survive.
And do you really think working as a dish dog at Applebys or Outback or Longhorn or TGIF or any of those places is really a "more pleasant" lower paying job? How about working fast food? Again, is that more pleasant? What is your frame of reference as to Lower-paying and Higher-paying? What pay range caps the "Lower-paying" scale?
"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." -D. Adams
A statement which further reinforces my view that having children signals the end of happy life, and the beginning of some kind of badgered and miserable existence, regurgitating the dregs of ones own aspirations into the insatiable beaks of thankless offspring.
Of course, if nobody cares about you or depends on you then noone will miss you. It's so simple to do, just not establish those deep bonds and your life is carefree. If you got run over by the bus, a few friends, relatives and coworkers would attend the funeral, shrug and say "terrible shame" and get on with their lives. Noone would cry for you, noone would call out your name, noone would reach out for you in the dark wishing you were there. No kids means you can just split up, take out a divorce if necessary, and go your separate ways- You never have to worry about my kids and your kids and our kids, you've never got commitments deeper than those you can just break away from. It's also an empty life. I want my life to have mattered to someone other than just my selfish self. Not like go down in history but having deeply touched the people closest to me.
If I ask a girl out on a date I could become happy or sad, but if I don't my heart is just empty. They come in equal measure, if I didn't care much about the date it'd be small and if I was madly in love with her it'd be great. If your boss asked you to write a big and important piece of a business critical software you'd feel pride - and worry. Your solution is say "Can't I just work on this little insignificant piece? That way anything I do won't really matter". and of course you can. Here's what you're missing about most parents I know - they're full of love and full of worry. They wouldn't worry unless they loved their kids, it's the positive love that is the source and the worry is just a reflection. I would surely like to have someone that would have such a special place in my heart, including the rough times.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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So you're saying that I should have children in order that, upon my inevitable death, they shall be struck so great an emotional blow that they will keen and wail piteously in futile despair; all for the benefit of my own personal requiem?
I find your ideas intriguing and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
May the Maths Be with you!