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Cyber Command Will Miss Friday's Operational Deadline
techinsider writes "The U.S. Cyber Command won't be fully operational by Friday's October 1st deadline. A major challenge appears to be staffing the command with qualified personnel, of which it will need over 1,000 skilled employees. General Alexander told Congress his leadership staff was in place but acknowledged there were challenges in bringing in people to the rest of the organization."
Can't get qualified IT staff? Why should someone who has studied for several years and has worked to gain specialist knowledge, want to work in an environment where people who know less than them and don't have to break their backs to meet arbitrary deadlines are more highly rewarded? When those with the greatest expertise and who have to work hardest to actually create the product get the smallest portion of the credit and the pay, no wonder there are problems encouraging people to work in the field.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Could it be that anyone skilled enough to participate is also skilled enough to see a complete operational failure that will smear the resume of anyone desperate enough to work there?
And with the additional toxic working environment supplied by mass-employed "upper-tiers" of politically motivated and utterly incompetent management not even the draw of decent pay in the coming second half of the recession is likely to reverse that.
kartune85 : Incapable of reason, observation or learning. A kind of dim, drab, flightless parrot.
now we look for somebody to do the work
"It was supposed to be a war fighter unit, not a geek unit," said task force veteran Jason Healey, who had served as an Air Force signals intelligence officer.
A fighter would understand, for instance, if an enemy had penetrated the networks and changed coordinates or target times, said Dusty Rhoads, a retired Air Force colonel and former F-117 pilot who recruited the original task force members. "A techie wouldn't have a clue," he said. --Washington Post
With their attitude towards cyber security experts (who are probably also geeks!), I am not particularly surprised they have had trouble with staffing.
I've never respected a manager who thought their job was to do the job their staff were employed to do. I've been 'managed' by someone two-three rungs up, based on another continent who I met twice. He had no background experience of my area of expertise. He was extremely good at getting the information he required, involving people as required and committed to decisions he made. I'd much rather be managed by a good manager than by a good worker.
If SAIC is running the show it's no wonder that it is difficult for them to staff the positions. No self respecting IT professional would accept a job under a company that treats their employees like crap.
Additionally, choosing "Combat Veterans" over IT professionals will eventually cause this entire project to fail. Field IT is not a qualification for running a full blow offensive security command. Most of these people are using pre-configured equipment in shock cases and only need to know that cable A goes to port B, then press power. If the government is concerned that civilian personnel will not know what the data they are protecting should look like, then they should train them to know what they are looking at.
+ must be army fitness + take a DI in your faces do a lot of PT just for A DESK JOB!
What's absurd is that leadership is so easily staffed, but technical prowess is not. These roles are subjective. The people actually doing something require objective skills. The fact that the objective-skilled people are not staffed, but the subjective-skilled people are, leads me to question the quality of leadership.
IT leadership requires IT skills. I had this disagreement with the CIO of Microsoft when I was there. He didn't think you needed IT skill to be an IT leader. But his projects all failed and he got fired.
The military never, ever has a problem filling billets for "knowledgeable" people to make "important" decisions with "authority" and "zeal."
The problem they do have, however, is that none of the people who actually understand and "live" for the work are ever the same as those "knowledgeable" people who make "important" decisions with "authority" and "zeal."
In other words, they have plenty of chiefs and no fucking indians. (that's not a pun at India, it's a phrase familiar to all sailors and many Marines.)
Smart and innovative people are frequently classed as troublemakers and misfits when they chaff at the idiocy of military stricture. It's hard to live with arbitrary rules that either have no rationale or lost whatever usefulness they had 50 years ago. You can't lure people in with glamour jobs where none exist. And most certainly not for less than a quarter of the pay. Military benefits have steadily eroded since the end of the Viet Nam war, and they sure as heel won't be getting any better.
Good luck with that staffing issue, Al.
In the MD/DC/VA area, everyone works for some form of gov't agency. Ft. Meade is also home to another larger and sexier IT-type agency which shall remain nameless, so they are competeing heavily for the IT talent they have. Also, agencies in the suburbs between DC and Baltimore generally pay less than those located in the District and NoVA, so people with the clearances required to work there would be taking a paycut. The short answer.... pay more or lower your expectations.