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With Troop Drawdown, IT Looks To Hire More Vets
Lucas123 writes "The military's a great place to learn how to kill people and break things, but many also consider it one of the best training grounds for high-tech skills. 'If you're working on a ship or a plane or tank, you've got responsibility for large, complex, extremely expensive equipment run by highly sophisticated IT platforms and software,' said Mike Brown, senior director of talent acquisition at Siemens. But, just how well do military tech skills translate to private-sector IT? Computerworld spoke to veterans to find out just what they learned during their tours of duty and how hard it was to transition to the civilian workforce."
I like to brag that, when I walk into the server room, Danger Zone starts blaring in the background.
My life in this hell-hole is extreme. Can't tell you how many times a server blade has nicked me. We go through bandages like coffee at Google around here!
Therefor it will not succeed.
We've hired a few of these folks. Technical skills tend to be shallow, but we are willing to train the right candidate. Worse is their yes man attitude. You can't get these guys to provide any useful input, when they think their input might conflict with that from somebody "above them". It doesn't seem like these guys can overcome that part of their military training.
Not doing at least 20 years is a questionable call since you can retire after that, but going contract after you eject (early or late) is a good way to leverage any skillset you acquire.
Find a system that will outlive you (the first folks to work on C-130s are now long dead!) and get in as early as possible.
I've never met anyone who regretted serving until retirement, self included.
If you don't like your job, crosstrain. If you don't like your service, get smart and go Air Force. :)
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
In our Biology department we have a high end confocal microscope. This is a very expensive, sophisticated and complicated microscope with complex optical, mechanical, and control systems. The technician who services it and keeps it running was a sonar technician in a submarine for many years before he got a job working on microscopes. He is very good - logical, careful, and responsible. Obviously this is a small sample size but if his training in the navy has anything to do with his performance in his current job then this is a nice example of military training actually translating well into a civilian technology position.
I've had the opportunity in the past to work closely with people who learned their IT skills in the military. Without exception they were very competent and a pleasure to work with. If I were hiring today, a candidate who learned IT skills in the military would get a closer look than the guy with the degree from the local community college.
I'm not saying that everyone who learns IT skills in the military is awesome, but the ones I've met have been.
Why would they? This is based on skill and experience, not the color of someone's skin. Nice try though...
Military logistics is some of the most advanced out there.
When I was working shipping at Dell I would say almost all of the logistics management was ex-military. At least all the useful ones were ex-military.
FedEx being another good example of military logistics making its way to the civilian world.
of military veterans in IT my experience is limited to managers or techies, all can vary wildly.
the manager I had at one company was from the navy. not very intelligent but he knew enough about how to lead a team
that he could tell when we needed help and he knew when to stay out of the way. great guy to work with.
but the helpdesk manager im told was a complete asshole. he alientated the seasoned pro's by treating them like kids
and before we knew it, they had all quit.
the NOC tech i work with now is coming out of retirement from the airforce. hes not brilliant by any stretch, and he doesnt appear motivated to
any great feats of knowlege. probably a bad example
the guy we just promoted is from the army. he isnt smart, and he chews up most of our time asking questions about code, but hes at least very motivated
to learn. i guess thats a plus.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Can you please explain exactly how this would be discriminatory?
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
"The military's a great place to learn how to kill people and break things"
So is urban America. What would you rather have, someone joining a gang, or someone getting
trained to fight your wars for you and coming out with some useful skills and discipline?
During the tech bubble burst of 2002, I went from being a full time Perl programmer to working part-time at a super market in the meat section. One of my coworkers was a tech lead in the Army working on avionics in attack helicopters. When the attack copter wings were cut, he left with them, only to discover his high-tech skills in attack helicopter avionics were completely useless in the private sector. Clearly advanced technology, clearly without a direct compliment in the civilian world.
I eventually found another Perl/PHP job, but as far as I know hes still at the super market. So I think it really depends on what you're high tech skills are, as to how successfully you can make the transition.
s. The technician who services it and keeps it running was a sonar technician in a submarine for many years before he got a job working on microscopes. He is very good - logical, careful, and responsible.
I've known couple others that been in the sub service and they are very good. Getting sub service experience means they had to pass courses and examinations, besides weeding out nutzoids they also want best techie talent on board when you are weeks (months?) under the water.
mfwright@batnet.com
If they give hiring preference based on being a vet that seems discriminatory to me though I am open to suggestion if you can explain why that is not discriminatory.
This is much more of propaganda, and far less of reality. The reality is much more of people who have shallow and overly specific skills, whose ability to learn and innovate on their own has been stunted, who are much more willing to just do anything and claim it was an order rather than being an active, thinking participant in the process. If you need people who will just take on tasks from some ticketing system, do whats in it, close it, take the next one and keep doing that for 8 hours every day of the week - sure, hiring ex-military will probably pay off.
Ex-military is not the contingent from where you will find people passionate about IT or CS. And those are the people you want if you are not just doing routine crap. And as a result, ex-military is extremely poor fare to recruit.
No, it's not. Subsidies to employers mean that, given 2 people of "close-enough"qualifications, the one from the military, who qualifies for subsidies and tax credits, will get the job.
How is that NOT economic discrimination?
What is common between the /. editorial department & the USPTO? They don't bother to check what they rubber-stamp :S
The post links to the last page of the article instead of the first.
Submariners tend to be very good on the average. It comes down to the fact that they live in roughly a 1000' long steel pipe under water with a nuclear reactor, high explosives, and on SSBNs a hundred plus nuclear war heads sitting on 24 big honking rockets. Mistakes are very costly in that environment :)
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I'm a prior Army Officer that has transitioned into the civilian workforce. The Army taught me many things, but the primary benefit was the amount of money the Army was willing to risk on me. Not many people can say that their first job out of college was managing 55 people and 8 million dollars in physical assets. Fortunately I did very well and had more command positions after with ever increasing responsibilities. I have what I consider to be an above average intelligence, but I'm certainly not anything special (certainly not genius level, I've met geniuses, I can't understand half of what to them is simple). I've faced combat and been under extreme pressure situations. I currently work in programming and find it moderately boring and frustrating with almost no correlation to my military service. Currently I'm working on getting back into some sort of operational role.
The point is, just because their military does not mean they will be uniquely gifted to do a job. The talent to shut up and listen I have found is what differentiates the good from the bad.
If there is no God then free will is an illusion.
Perot served in the Navy and supposedly hired a lot of veterans at Electronic Data Systems, his firm that did enterprise system consulting and IT facilities management work (and probably the same at Perot Data Systems, the outfit he started after selling EDS to Roger Smith's GM in the '80s). That strikes me as a good match between jobs and personalities.
I have to agree. Submarine sailors often are more technically inclined and generally smarter than your average sailor as they had to qualify for those posts. From what I remember these sailors are often recruited to be placed on submarines from the start. Also there are mental aspects of being underwater for months on end as well as living under an unconventional daily cycle.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
When you hire someone you always look at their past job history to determine if the person is going to work well in your organization.
This is a standard practice, you would be a moron not to do that.
Yes, I will more likely higher someone with military background vs someone with a fast food background.
I guess you would be technically correct, discrimination happens, but it is not illegal unless the discrimination is based on something the individual cannot change, such as their skin color or place of birth.
Remember, you can always join up, serve your country for a few years and when you get out you too can enjoy the perks of being ex-military if it is that big of a deal for you.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Plus, it's a bonus for submariners if they're tiny - so you can fit them into cramped server closets with ease!
BAZINGA.
"The military's a great place to learn how to kill people and break things"
With a starting line like that, I can tell this guy isn't politically leaning to the Far Hippie Left.
I have a friend in the military what does he do... He plays Trombone.
My Dad was drafted in Vietnam, what did he do... He fixed cars and helicopters, he was never in combat.
The military goes out to dangerous places and their goal is to offer humanitarian aid.
But when you have people who want to kill you or your allies, you better be more then ready stop them and if they are not going to back down with words, you better be ready to stop them using more forceful methods...
While the military is there to perform wars, it goal isn't to kill people and break things, they kill people and break things when they have to and they will do it as best as they can.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Maybe you could suggest to *your* boss that they "higher" someone who knows how to spell? (Do you also take a "coffee brake"?)
Just asking ...
Which is discriminatory, the military isn't exactly an equal opportunity employer. There're plenty of folks out there that aren't eligible to enlist for one reason or another but are perfectly suitable for jobs of this nature. Bumping people, particularly in the period of a recession, who didn't have that option is just plain wrong.
I've worked with ex-military types before. Some are great, especially in my area (systems) where attention to detail is very important. Others are just like a typical low-achieving civilian employee. The old adage "you get out what you put into it" seems to apply to the military too. Positive qualities I've seen are the ability to work hard, stay focused and complete tasks. Negatives are the typical ones you'd see with a rigid chain of command -- less of an ability to interpret a request and think up a better solution.
One of the other things I've seen is that the military has a lot of jobs without a civilian equivalent. Sure, if you're a diesel mechanic repairing troop transports, you can be a diesel mechanic repairing over-the-road trucks. But, I once worked with a former Air Force guy whose sole job was to man a nuclear missile silo -- he would have been the guy (actually, one of two) who turned the key/pushed the button to start World War III. How in the world do you translate that to a civilian job, short of security guard? Or better yet, there's not too many legitimate jobs out there looking for sniper skills.
That said, on average, my experience has been positive with ex-military types. It's a great jobs program, especially in peacetime, and gives a lot of people who are willing to put up with the miserable quality of life an opportunity to succeed. If those of us in the civilian world are lucky, some of the good ones leave and take the positive attributes they learn with them. (I don't think I could ever handle the "moving every 1-2 years" thing, especially with a family though, much less the distinct possibility of being killed...so there's some extra points right from the start.)
If you are such a fuck up that the military wouldn't take you don't be surprised if no one hires you.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
And you're an asshole...
I've worked in a number of military-oriented institutions (TLAs, if you get me) and while I have nothing but respect for the warfighter, I rarely found any of them to be technical superstars. Like any population, there were a few, but overwhelmingly they were put-the-square-peg-in-the-square-hole guys. They could memorize a manual and know everything about a piece of equipment (well, on a sysadmin level), but innovation was not their strong suit. At all.
And this is why the government/military has had and will continue to have immense problems attracting really, *really* good people to work in their CyberCorps or whatever they're calling it now. There's too much procedure in those circles; good techies quickly go insane.
One thing I did find, though, was that *usually* the officers had damn good project management skills and knew how to solve problems, support their people, and get the job done. That skillset is really universally applicable to all fields, though, and not just IT.
They are getting tax breaks on each vet they hire. It is all about the bottom line.
We've created about 6 positions at my employer over the past 2 to 3 years and interviewed a few vets each time. Typically somewhat older gentlemen, which could also be a factor here. But every time their skill set was a little obscure, and their personality was really hard to acclimate to, even in an interview session where everyone is trying to be as happy and jovial as possible.
That's not to say that they're bad guys, just that they might have a difficult time figuring out how to fit into a civilian IT environment. But I guess there's nothing new about that.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
If you are such a fuck up that the military wouldn't take you don't be surprised if no one hires you.
There are certain physical requirements to enlisting in the military that are, let's say, not specifically geek-centric. Further, until very recently, they were notorious for automatically disqualifying approximately 10% of the population based upon... a questionable criterion.
There are plenty of reasons why the military would have rejected otherwise perfectly suitable IT workers.
As a recruiter for IT (in the past) I was pleasantly surprised to find that the Coast Guard had an exceptionally rigorous and broad training schedule for their IT ratings. In fact, they were "perfect" candidates for jobs that needed broad experience and the ability to work independently. I imagine the need to work afloat away from shore assistance had something to do with it. From what I could tell CG pay was pretty crappy but if you're looking for on the job IT training that has meaning outside the sevice environment, I'd go with the CG - they really impressed me.
"He's using a quantum encryption scheme! That'll take hours to break!"
I had a good friend that went into the Navy. When he went in, he was far from thoughtful and responsible. When he got out, he worked his way through a Physics degree, and we hired him where I worked.
The military really can transform people.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
I agree. I'm not doing anything related to nuclear power now, but the training I got in the navy has been invaluable to me. As many people say college *should* be, the Nuke Power program taught me how to teach myself and how to absorb massive amounts of information quickly, plus things other posters have mentioned (yes, mistakes are deadly).
This whole thing is stupid. Discrimination is not a bad thing. I don't eat shit, I don't pork ugly, dumb women and I don't play bad video games. I also don't accept friend requests from people with a personality I don't like. I don't hire people that aren't good at the job or tell jokes in bad taste during the interview process. All of those things are discrimination. The only problem with discrimination is when society systematically discriminates against a class of people for the purpose of holding that class back. If you don't discriminate you're an idiot, but you would give yourself a job anyway if you could because discrimination based on intelligence or capability is somehow wrong to you.
Does this sound like unsavory discrimination, or just helping out some vets who gave a lot for and should get a lot from society?
If I can just reach out with my words and touch a butthole, just one, it will all be worth it.
Nah...they're just the 2000's version of the hippies/yippies from the 60's. Loud, boisterous...but not really adept at accomplishing anything, nor even having a real concrete, unified goal or message to promote.
The OWS today's shouts of "Kill the Corporations" and "Life is Unfair" are basically the analogous to the "Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out" of that day. Fun to say and march to....but in the end, fairly useless and pointless.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
it is discriminatory, in the strictest sense of the word. But its not illegal. its not even immoral. To provide preferential treatment to those who gave up their time to help defend our freedom is not a bad thing. To offer a job to someone who risked their life to ensure our way of life is never a bad thing. Of all the things our government does that they shouldn't do, it should do more for veterans.
Let's say they're closely qualified, maybe the civilian has slightly more real work experience, etc....but the company gets a tax break for hiring the military guy, so you hire him instead of the guy that actually was slightly more qualified., that's not discriminatory?
Hell, lets say they were 100% equally qualified...rather than maybe flip a coin, you always go to the military guy? That seems a bit slanted and discriminatory...etc.
I'm assuming, of course, that said job would not directly benefit from military experience (say some military IT job developing HR for the military, etc).
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
1-800-PETMEDS means people no longer take their dogs and cats to the Vet for their health issues. So the vets are having to find other employment, such as Information Technology.
Personally, someone isolated to a environment such as a naval ship who spends hours and hours training on systems that are not very well changing and in a disciplined user environment doesn't seem to be much of a real world IT skills than someone who continually faces hardware and software changes, users being dumb, and continual bugs for new loads. Based on the article skills, the person seems like they may make a good work horse who can follow directions but for the thinking on your feet and adapting to new changing IT situations doesn't seem to fit the military environment unless our ships are running bleeding edge technology and continually crashing.
I work in IT (sys admin), having spent a bit of time in the military. Military experience is certainly no stone-cold guarantee that you've got a quality person on your hands, but it does increase the probability significantly. Technical skills aside, the military tends to instill a fairly healthy amount of discipline, teamwork, and the ability to think/act under pressure. As my Dad puts it (formerly in the military for 12 years) - the ability to think and chew bubble gum at the same time.
You can have shitty people in the military, too, but the military is generally not an environment that lends itself to extreme incompitence, advancement out of nepotism, etc.
If I'm looking at a pile of resumes or interviewing candidates, I generally assume that if someone has military experience, they won't have too many issues coming in late, being poorly dressed, being disrespectful to team mates, etc.
They would make the best astronauts for long term space travel.
No, it's not. Subsidies to employers mean that, given 2 people of "close-enough"qualifications, the one from the military, who qualifies for subsidies and tax credits, will get the job. How is that NOT economic discrimination?
Perhaps it is. But speaking as someone who sat in a cushy chair eating chips while these folks were overseas doing my fighting for me, I think I'm fine with this instance of discrimination.
I have visited a few Canadian Navy ships and I saw some pretty old crap. Lots of RS232 and whatnot. The newest tech was all in the private hands of the sailors in the form of iPads to keep themselves sane. The main tech skills that the sailors seemed to have developed was how to select computers that won't die in the harsh environment and how to run cables through this nasty environment. So if you are wiring a building where you have a magnitude 5.5 earthquake 9 times a day and your server room has a salt water swimming pool then these Navy Guys might be for you.
Also looking at how the various systems were wired together I could see layer upon layer of upgrades where various proprietary systems had been hacked into the older systems. So if you need your sonar system upgraded then the Navy could provide you with a guy who understands what all the pins do in that 183 pin plug that someone thoughtfully painted gray.
I've always wondered about this kind of thing, and if it actually happens.
I mean, I've never seen two people of objectively equal qualification for a job.
But assuming two candidates apply for a job with the same, exactly level of education, same level of experience doing the same jobs for equal companies, with the same personal presentation and people skills... then in that rare case, does it really matter so much as to complain about discrimination?
Hell, lets say they were 100% equally qualified...rather than maybe flip a coin, you always go to the military guy? That seems a bit slanted and discriminatory...etc
Not a flip of the coin, if you have two equally qualified people applying to the job you would hire the one who interviewed best.
A good resume might get you an interview, but it won't necessarily get you a job.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
As an 8 year veteran of the Navy who moved into a successful IT position in the civilian workforce I have to say my skills translated directly with very few exceptions. I left the service with experience administering Windows Server 2003 / 2008 (including Exchange), HP-UX, Red Hat, and all modern Windows desktop environments. Same goes for Cisco routing and switching equipment, as well as Alcatel / Xylan. I left the Navy with A+, Net+, Security+, CCNA, MCSA, MCT, Kitco Fiber Optic Cert, and 8 years experience.
About the only skills I have that didn't translate directly (or at least I don't use now) is SATCOM and servicing cryptologic hardware. Maybe one day I'll use the SATCOM again, who knows?
I'm very happy with the skills that I acquired, and I didn't have any problems finding a job in the down economy. Just speaking for me though, I hope other veterans comment as well.
"large, complex, extremely expensive equipment run by highly sophisticated IT platforms"
This guy has never step foot on a Navy ship, and has never met a Navy IT engineer. I was the only sailor that knew Unix on every ship I've gone to and IT wasn't even my job. The best way to describe it is level 1 help desk at best, with a few people that *might* know a little more. Contractors and distant support provide the rest. Their training program is horrible. Extremely accelerated because they think they can teach a monkey everything in a few weeks with a goal to put out as many passing sailors as fast as they can. When you get out to a ship, you're often lucky if you get put on the IT side. Most people work radio. Quite often your Chief knows about as much as a call center manager when it comes to IT. There's a large focus on Windows, and not many training programs for the *nix world.
What he doesn't stress is that sailors don't easily give up. They find a way to get shit done at any means possible. A lot of creative thinking.
Tell that to the many gays and lesbians that weren't allowed to openly serve. Not to mention those that have too many tattoos or are missing a digit. None of those things would be grounds for a company to refuse to hire a person and yet all of those things within recent memory were grounds for the military to refuse candidates.
And that doesn't even include things like HIV status or being overweight.
Right or wrong, the military isn't an equal opportunity employer and granting additional status based upon being allowed into the club is just not right.
Years ago, when I was a headhunter, I proposed a newly retired Marine Captain for a Lotus Notes assignment. I got a lot of pushback from both our client rep and the client simply because he was a vet. I told them to actually read his resume. He'd implemented Notes across the entire Marine Corp. They gave in and he excelled. The military is bigger than corporation. And some men and woman who've served are the best.
"Knowing everything doesn't help..."
Hey Brad, why does Joe keep hitting the CTL-ALT-F combination over and over and over again with that glazed look in his eyes?
Oh, that was the key code for firing the autonomous Gatling gun on the ship he served on. And uhhhh, and the boss just gave him supreme shit for like the tenth time for painting all the monitors white.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
I was in the Marine's for 5 years (got out in 09) .. I was enlisted and can't tell you how many officers I had to tell they were a retard because they learned a 'buzz word' in OCS and thought it would apply to real world tactics ...
Me: "Sir, I've configured all the routers to use BGP and setup the admin interfaces for the VLAN's so we can remotely configure these things if there are issues." .. ok, now make sure we can connect to our sister sites and outside of them too" .. you need to use nslookup to see what their DNS entries say for sister site Y" .. nslookup won't tell us anything other than our DNS tables are configured right or wrong"
Sir: "Great
Me: "Done! We can't get passed sister site X because they need to configure forwarding for our network on their site"
Sir: "How'd you determine that?"
Me: "I just tracerouted through them and saw my packet bounce on their interface indefinitely"
Sir: "That's stupid, you can't use traceroute to figure that out
Me: "No Sir
Sir: "SHUT UP AND DO IT OR COURT MARTIAL YOU!!"
This happens ALLLLLL THE TIME!! .. With misguided skills like this it's no wonder that military members can't get good jobs once they get out .. They have NO CLUE what they're talking about .. The DoD needs a complete overhaul of its IT 'training' .. 1 week for 'advanced' routing concepts is nothing for the guy in the back who doesn't even know what a router is ... The tools and skill are only as good as the guy using them, and that guy is only as good as his knowledge set .. It's damn hard to learn any advanced stuff to actually further your knowledge while being in .. I was lucky and had a lot of good higher ups who were all about continuing education .. and a lot of the skills I have I learned on my own before the military, and the things I did in the military I learned on my own .. had to buy my own books pay for my own classes (ran out of TA for continuing ED and didn't want to use my GI bill) ... point is that the entire culture for education in the military needs to change before any military members will get out with directly translatable job skills
Being able to tell your superior NO in confidence because of your skills and knowledge is well more important (financially and technically) than telling him YES because of your 'military experience' ...
There are certain physical requirements to enlisting in the military that are, let's say, not specifically geek-centric. Further, until very recently, they were notorious for automatically disqualifying approximately 10% of the population based upon... a questionable criterion.
There are plenty of reasons why the military would have rejected otherwise perfectly suitable IT workers.
Yes the military does discriminate against people who are physically disabled. And honestly when I tried to join up I was rejected even though my scores were outstanding, yes they do discriminate against others for non physical reasons, with me it was mainly because I really was a complete fuck up at the time. Getting properly medicated has been a tremendous boon to my life.
Now that doesn't mean that we should ignore if someone has served their country in the hiring process just because someone who was physically disabled wasn't able to join.
If you were born physically disabled you should already know that you will have to work twice as hard and be twice as qualified if you want a job. It ain't fair, but it is the truth. There are foundations and charities set up to help the disabled do exactly that.
If you are physically disabled you really need to do very well in school because no ones going to hire you just because you have a strong back, they will be hiring you for your brain. Study hard, get a scholarship and obtain skills.
If you are currently unemployed and disabled use the downtime to study your ass off so that you will be better qualified.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
I finally gave up and went into consulting and made a good living through. Ironically 3 of the 10 or so companies I applied for later hired me as a contractor for 1 to 3 months to come in and fix up what the college grads screwed up or to show their teams how to update their technology.
The problem is, as I learned from a former client that was a head hunter, most HR people don't know how to relate military experiance to real world applications and training. The Military gives you a stack of papers with how your various training relates to the real world, but even those definitions fall short of anything a civilian world HR person will understand.
I disagree. You shouldn't shit on someones accomplishments just because someone else didn't have the opportunity.
Straight out of high school I had to help my parents maintain a roof over our heads so I really didn't have an opportunity to go to college, should I therefor discriminate against those who were able to?
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
All branches of the military will take most any body type, nowadays. They have down-level programs for fixing (almost) any mess.
.0000001 percent of the available hiring pool that would be at a modest disadvantage.
Don't ask, don't tell, while kinda dumb, virtually eliminated the "I can't serve 'cause I'm gay" issue, and now that's been done away with altogether.
So assuming you somehow still managed to be unemployable by the military, and were someone that tried, and are an otherwise capable IT person that didn't do something equally valuable with yourself in the meantime... then yes, you might be in that
seems like a logical progression to me. it makes sense that the US military would counteract its relative manpower shortage with lots of hightech equipment. (conversely, some military forces counteract a relative equipment shortage with lots of manpower)
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
One of the few places were rigorous physc profiling is done. If only the police force was also as restrictive.
The problem is when the government subsidizes someone who has fewer qualifications, with your tax dollars, to compete directly against you.
It's like Ford being asked to pay for GMs bail-out.
Or renters and home-owners who weren't greedy being asked to bail out under-water home-owners.
If they had been drafted into the military it would be a different situation - as it is, they got the quid pro quo of any other job - salary + on-the-job training and experience.
The IT job market is already lousy for non-qualified people, so shouldn't these subsidies be going to train them for where there's actually a sustainable demand? Or those "green" and "infrastructure" programs being hyped? Or training in home care to reduce the demands on public finances for public medical programs?
Well, no sub is even close to being 1000' long.... ;)
But an oft overlooked factor is the small size of the crews. We operated my weapons system (sixteen Tridents and their control, launching, testing and support equipment) with just eighteen people. There was just no room for anyone that wasn't at least above average. The Missile Techs (which generally came from the bottom third of the rankings in school) even called themselves the "scum of the cream".
The schools were brutal. When I attended SWSEA, the drop rate (I.E. people kicked out of the school) *averaged* thirty percent. My class started with 18 people, and graduated with 12. I was the only person in the class who had never been 'dropped back' (failed a block, and been transferred to a class behind you in the cycle to repeat it), and with a 99.988 average was the *number two* man in the class. Of the 18 people I started with, only 7 of us eventually completed the school and graduated.
Don't ask, don't tell, while kinda dumb, virtually eliminated the "I can't serve 'cause I'm gay" issue
"Virtually," being the operative, rather subjective word. Tell that to the ~13,000 who were discharged under DADT.
The OP forgot that there really aren't any jobs here in the US. Unless you have 10+ years experience in a given IT field, you are going to have a helluva time finding something that pays decent.
My theory is most that come back will simply stay in the reserve, since there will be no opportunity outside of it.
The best thing I learned in the navy was job dedication and work ethic. I will go to any extreme and expend any amount of effort to get a job done. That alone has carried me very well my entire IT career.
I'm a drug addict. I know I need to keep my mouth shut if I want to maintain my job.
If you were a homosexual joining the military you already knew the situation. You already knew you had to keep your mouth shut to maintain your position, to bitch and whine about it is just that, bitching and whining.
Does not matter the skill level or talent. Its a warm body with a built in security clearance.
Thank you, sir!
I spent '82-'89 as a radioman on an SSN. Hight of the Cold War stuff. The training was one thing. Getting qualified at sea and surviving was another.
When I got out I went straight to work as an RF tech for a major wireless carrier. The skills I learned (technical and otherwise) marketed well, but it took a long time to readjust to civilian life. Sometimes I still feel that long steel tube.
I in no way mean to ascribe the poor technical skills and work ethic of one person on all vets by any means, I'm just relaying my experience with hiring a vet for IT work.
The vet we got had pretty shallow technical skills, which isn't really that big of a deal on its own. We don't mind training people to properly perform IT work. The specific vet we hired didn't seem inclined to actually improve his tech skills, and any time he finished a task, rather than either seeking out someone to give him another task, or take it upon himself to do something constructive, he would generally just start watching tv on his laptop. And his definition of finishing a task was pretty loose if it was a bigger task. Many times he would work on a longer task for an hour or so and then give up and watch videos on his laptop until someone checked in with him to see how he was doing.
I feel bad that he didn't work out in the end, but it had become a full time job just making sure he was being productive.
How does this question make me a troll? This is an honest question prompted by the recent Republican 'bake sale' stunt at the UC Berkeley campus where everyone was charged a different price based on their ethnicity. Their point was that they were utterly against discrimination for any reason, so I think this is a legitimate question about how they would respond to this discrimination.
Uhm.. Unless your last name is Bush or Cheney, I doubt those who fought in the Iraq War was doing it on your behalf. I don't think being stupid enough to participate in a war aiding wealthy oil imperialists is anything you should deserve preferential treatment for or even be proud of.
Football Odds
That's a bullshit straw man, if you want to go to college you can, there are tons of scholarships out there and if you work your butt off you can pay for it. There's even guaranteed loans available for those that can't otherwise pay.
As far as the military goes there's plenty of folks who haven't been eligible over the years no matter how hard they're willing to work. Sometimes it has been reasonable and other times it's just a matter of bigotry.
Also, nice appeal to emotion there, I'm not shitting on anybody's accomplishments, military personnel vary significantly in terms of what they do, many of whom are no more accomplished than somebody in the civilian world doing precisely the same job. There's already anti-discrimination laws in place, giving priority to an identical job done in the military is by its nature discriminatory against other protected classes of individuals who are not eligible for service.
No amount of bullshitting is going to change that fact. And quite frankly you ought to be apologizing for veterans for making them out to be enfeebled morons incapable of earning a job without cheating.
I was eligible for sub service when I enlisted many years ago, but due to acne, the high humidity high oxygen environment was not a good match so I went into cryptology instead. It is also a good field with highly sought after skills.
Basic rule of thumb is go for advanced fields, avoid student loans, get hired after your service, and enjoy the benefits of not being in debt. When the high student loan guys have to turn down jobs as they can't make ends meet, you remain employed and in demand during high unemployment. This has worked for me in the 1980's and now.
Being slightly underpaid is much better than being unemployed when companies downsize. I've never been downsized.
The truth shall set you free!
I have a relative that spent 20 years in Germany in the US Army. He was a leader of some sorts, in charge of Pershing Missiles. When he came back, he thought he would work at a nuclear reactor, or something. He spent the rest of his life moving and placing mobile homes, in the MIdwest USA.
I could write out a nice long explanation of why you are wrong, but I now see that your head is so far up your ass it wouldn't matter what I wrote.
Your reply states things I have never said, things that apparently seem to be entirely in your head.
Seek help.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
They also work well under a great deal of pressure!
I used to work for a mid-sized company where quite a few people in middle management were ex-military. Therefore, I guess it goes almost without saying that when I.T. or Engineering staff was needed, they selected a fair number of them who shared former military backgrounds.
Since I worked in the I.T. department, and not over in Engineering, I can't speak with quite as much accuracy about their situation. I know the ex-military I.T. types we hired were not the individuals I would have chosen as my co-workers, if I was given the choice. Just as the parent poster said, they tend to have that "Yes sir!" attitude to anyone above them in the corporate structure, even when doing so is counter-productive to your own team or seems to be counter-productive to the company as a whole.
Something I didn't suspect would be the case, but has proven to be true both at that job and with other jobs I'd had since is the tendency for the ex-military folks to "backstab" you in the workplace. What I mean is, to your face, they may be perfectly friendly and co-operative, and thank you for any assistance you gave them on a project. But they're more likely to turn around later and speak poorly of you to upper management after the fact. I suppose this is all part of their ingrained concept of the "right way to get ahead" (never show your hand to let the "enemy" know what's on your mind, but report everything to higher-ups).
Purely looking at the I.T. skills and training that a former military person brings to the table? I haven't been particularly impressed in that area either, but I wouldn't want to judge everyone by the relatively few folks I've had personal experiences with. I'm sure there's much to be said for the military giving people opportunities to work with large-scale systems and high-end networking technologies. On the other hand, I don't know if some of their skills translate to anything practical in the private sector.
I remember, for example, an ex-Marine who told me how they had to learn everything there was to know about the disassembly, repair, and reassembly of certain models of HP LaserJet printers. The reason? They relied on certain ones out in the field, and if one broke in the middle of the desert or something, it wasn't really an option to just go to the store and pick up a replacement. So this guy could tell you exactly how to replace a 10 cent spring that had broken off inside one, vs. obtaining a replacement "assembly", or how to test for improper voltages on a power board inside and troubleshoot it at the component level if it quit feeding paper.... Impressive, actually -- but not real practical in corporate I.T. Heck, if an old laser printer breaks down in most businesses, they'd rather write it off as depreciated and go buy a new, faster model rather than pay you for hours of time to tear the thing apart on your desk.
I'm not ex-military, but I work with a bunch of people who either are in the services or have been; as in many things, there is much variability. I've worked with some extremely competent people, and some that are just there to collect a check. I've worked with specialists who can look at a hexdump and decode frame, packet, protocol, and payload - but who couldn't write SQL to save their lives (they may indeed have the ability to learn that). I've worked with some who give lip service to the rules when "The Man" is looking, but casually flaunt 'em when no one's looking.
If I had to generalize, I'd say more often than not that ex-military are courteous, highly disciplined, buttoned-down in terms of outward passion, extremely opinionated, and stress resistant. All other matters tend to follow standard distribution curves.
I encourage everyone out there disillusioned with their employment to check out the world of industrial maintenance. I'm a veteran who has used my experience to work in IT (about 15 years) but about three years ago I ditched IT and went after robots that shoot fire. If you want to be a lump, it doesn't pay as well, but if you're good you can make a fortune on six months a year work. The first time I saw an industrial heat treat furnace open its maw I nearly screamed with joy.
I think most IT folk, especially the sysadmin types, would be shocked at how little most industrial maintenance techs know about computers. There's lots of old dudes that are about to retire, and they've got the skills of the old school...welding, machining, electricity. When I designed my first industrial system (just a simulation) I was pleasantly surprised to realize that it was just like programming. If, then, else...but with switches and sensors and wires, not zeros and ones and keystrokes.
A lot of the younger guys coming in are vets, and quite a few of the older ones are as well. They're all geeks, though they wouldn't admit it. I basically hang out with several dozen makers/hackers every day....we just hack metal and electricity instead of code and microprocessors (though sometimes that too...).
Get out of your office and into the factory. The first time you watch a 260 Amp plasma jet spraying molten steel everywhere as it pierces a 1-1/2" thick plate of steel that weighs 60lbs a square foot...goosebumps. And when it breaks and *you* are the one to make it live again by enlisting your black magic? Glory.
Our IT department takes its 100% satisfaction rate very seriously.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Why thank me for the truth. I guess I should have looked up the length of the Ohio but oh well. Frankly it is a wonder that the US only ever lost two SSNs and no SSBNs over the years. Thanks for you service.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
It's actually about 350 feet long. DOUCHEBAG.
It seems to me that, being trained to be able to kill on command makes most ex-military people damaged beyond repair as human beings.
Just about everywhere else expects to get somebody fully trained from somewhere else instead of having a training program.
If you really want the troops home, you'll vote for Ron Paul.
Anecdotal evidence is just that.
We have a few people in our engineering department who were in the military. The one who served on a nuclear submarine is perhaps the laziest guy in the organization right now. He constantly completes tasks completely wrong- ignoring procedures and instructions so he can do things the lazy way. His knowledge is shallow and his attitude is "ask someone else" and "get someone else to do my work".
This is a guy who came from a job in Hawaii with a stable company to work in the northern Midwest. If he resigned voluntarily, I would eat my hat.
Maybe he is an extreme exception, but generalizing people into a "preferred" group just because they served on a submarine may not be appropriate.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Except at the point that they figure out some approach like... moving your money out of banks into credit unions.
Or things get violent. I think the violence is still a couple years away.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
99.999999% of Vets in Bush's and Obama's illegal wars had nothing to do with information or internet technologies.
Meaning that on a rather generous expectation, that less that 0.000001% of all Vets in Bush's and Obama's illegal wars had something if much less than nothing to do with information or internet technology.
So.
What do we make of the revelation?
Its a bloody lie.
Bush's and Obama's DoD outsourced to private contractors!
Vets know SHIT and Bush and Obam know even less than any dead Vet.
FU
_
The main point I didn't get across well in the parent post is that we had an incorrect view of what an ex military person would be like. We thought we were doing him a favour by taking him on, but in reality he is one of our best recruits.
A drop rate of 1/3 is not brutal. The computer science course at my university has a drop rate of more than 2/3.
I think that says it all.
Was it 12 or 7?
Wouldn't it be smarter to reward the troops with decent employment, instead of hiring them into mind-numbing dead end jobs? Besides, I'm slightly worried about hiring people who are completely comfortable with guns in the workplace into high-stress positions.
When you are talking about vets or people in the service, people who have actually had to perform professionally and methodically while other people are actually trying to fucking kill you with bullets or IEDs, don't call the nuances of cubicle politics and IT services "high-stress positions." As someone who has done tier II/III IT support getting angry calls at 3AM, yeah, it's stressing... like any other job with a lot responsibilities.
But to call it "high-stressing" specially when referring to military vets (of any country), wondering whether they can keep their cool in the face of your typical office monkey business, that's a little self-masturbatory, e-tarded and disturbing no matter how you cut it.
My brother came back from the Marine Corp being a Server "administrator" with less knowledge and a smaller skill set than I aquired through self-education and a year running an AD domain at home. They are sufficiently brainwashed but not necessarily better trained.
Two different overlapping sets:
Set #1 - the people in class 82028 on the day it started, eighteen people of which seven eventually graduated.
Set #2 - the nominal size of classes at the school, versus the number that graduated as part of class 82028, eighteen versus twelve.
The sets overlap because of the drop back system - if you failed a block, you dropped back a class to repeat the block and then continued with that class. If you failed a second time in a different block, you could be dropped back if your average was over 70. If you failed a second time but a different block with an average under 70, or failed the same block twice in a row, or failed a third block, you were booted from the school.
The typical concept-to-reality time of a military project of minimal complexity (read: nothing that flies, drives, floats or shoots) lies around 5 years, and often those products are kept until they fall apart. That's why the US needs wars: it speeds up kit renewal cycles.
What you learn in the military is "make do" - grab what you have and make it work the way you need it to work for a specific deployment, ignoring the fact that some of the stuff you're working with still has its instructions written in ink on parchment.
So, in a way you do learn skills you can use in civilian life: you learn how to work with a usually inadequate budget and still make it happen.
Wait why are we talking about submariners here? Were there submarines deployed into the Middle East?
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
You think only groundpounders are going to be effected by the coming cuts?
And yeah, submariners were deployed to the Middle East. I know a yeoman and storekeeper who spent time there.
"It's actually about 350 feet long. DOUCHEBAG."
Actually the Ohio class is 560 feet long you are thinking SSNs and that is why I said roughly. I was off by roughly a football field as I thought they where around 3 football fields long but they are only around two....
Maybe you should get out of 8th grade before you post on slashdot. My post was that they where living in a small area with a reactor, explosives, and sometimes nuclear warheads. You just pointed out that I under estimated just how small it was.....
AKA my error and your less than completely accurate correction do not in anyway invalidate my point.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.