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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
Why would any self-respecting geek want to work in a place where there is no possibility of being management, and all the management is, self-admittedly, not 'qualified' to do their job?
I'm sorry, but I've never been able to respect a manager who could not have done my job, and has done in previous years. Now that doesn't mean everyone up to the CEO needs to be a programmer, very quickly managers stop being programmers and their day focuses on other things (read: meetings and bureaucracy).
So by my example, a dev manager should be a former programmer, his/her manager should have experience leading a team of tech people, his/her manager should have been a manager for other tech managers before, etc. In other words, each level should have experience doing the day-to-day job of the level below.
And what about career advancement - it sounds pretty lame when all the management positions are pre-filled, so the only way to move up the chain is for someone higher up to retire, or get dishonorably discharged (I assume the guys in management are career military, not doing a tour).
"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.
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.