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.'"

Comments

dirtiest of all:

[larry bagina]

cmdrtaco's toilet slave.

Based on how fast that burned

[falcon5768]

Website maintainer after being /.ed would be #8

ironic...

[Brit_in_the_USA]

...or Quantum mechanics at work. By publishing this story we can't now read it.

Why can't it become routine to (also) link to a cached copy?

If the /. 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?

Re:ironic...

[sa1lnr]

Already done.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2175

Bad jobs? Maybe. But some people will take them.

[blind biker]

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.

Re:Bad jobs? Maybe. But some people will take them

[MyLongNickName]

And, perhaps, fulfillment can come from sources other than work...

Re:Bad jobs? Maybe. But some people will take them

[Smidge207]

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=

Re:Bad jobs? Maybe. But some people will take them

[eln]

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.

Dirty Jobs

[reidiq]

If I see this on Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe, I'll give it a reason to be dirty.

Would this qualify?

[denzacar]

Dirty IT job No. 5: Fearless malware hunter
Wanted: Go-getter with inquisitive nature and a high tolerance for gore, sleaze, and the baser instincts of humanity.

Hunting malware means crawling the deepest, darkest, nastiest corners of the Web, because that's where the bad stuff usually congregates -- such as drive-by installs on porn and warez sites, says Patrick Morganelli, senior vice president of technology for anti-malware vendor Enigma Software.

"Due to the nature of the sites we need to monitor, one of our first questions in any job interview here is, 'Would you mind viewing the most offensive pornography you've ever seen in your life?' Because that's what a lot of malware research entails."

Even employees not actively involved in malware research can encounter deep nastiness, he says. One time an employee merely passed by a support technician's display while the tech was remotely logged in to a customer's PC. What the employee saw on the tech's screen was so disturbing that he quit shortly thereafter.

Sounds a lot like something like this.

Re:I did this

[KeithJM]

I got to sit in a windowless basement data closet. At least it was a paycheck

But did anyone take your stapler?

Truly Dirty IT Job

[Chagatai]

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...."

Re:I did this

[PPH]

You think you have it tough? Try a job where you have to live in a bunker and enter "4 8 15 16 23 42" into an old Apple II every 108 minutes.

You young punks have it easy. Now stay off of my lawn!