Actually, the truck driver is pretty good Solaris admin, and is the SA for our database server. He really liked veritas for one reason or another.
Saying that our best programmer is mediocre shows that you think that jerry-rigging and best-guessing is the way to get things done. Our programmers are good engineers and communicate with each other frequently. If something happened to someone, the other members of the team are familiar enough with what he was doing to take up the slack.
"Soft Skills" are not analagous to "kissing ass" or pushing things on people like a used car salesman. Being able to write clearly, speak intelligently, coming up with new & unique solutions to problems and being willing to take a risk on a new idea are my idea of soft skills. You sound like you are down on your luck and somewhat bitter. Try to drop the attitude.
The software we write performs in life-and-death situations. While we have to deal with a bueracracy (like all large organizations have) in the end if we succeed our stuff works and the people using them come home to talk about it. If we fail, people can be injured or even killed.
#1 Technical skills, in the form of specific experience in a particular OS or certification are irrelevant. We have IT staff who were interns, clerks or in one case a driver who injured his leg. In most cases they became good mid-level Unix or NT admins in about 12-18 months. 5/6 of them are taking classes paid for by our organization.
#2 I don't know about other people, but I like people who take their work & education seriously. Programmers who come from a CS or EE background are far better than those who missed out on formal education about 50-75% of the time. They tend to stick around longer too.
#3 We work in teams here. If our best programmer was hit by a bus, we wouldn't lose too much as far as coding or system availability went. (It would be a terrible thing, of course)If some exceptional geek who won't talk to anyone leaves or suffers from some tragedy, there is a much bigger loss.
#4 Skill and talent are important. Soft skills are important too.
I am an IT Manager for a pretty sizable organization. We probaly hire about 6 junior level tech people a year, most of which I get to meet during the interview phase.
We do not have a need for nerds or people who are completely self-taught with no education beyond high-school or some certification camp. I have hired several people like this, and none of them worked out.
- College is an environment when you deal with other adults with less control placed over you than a high school environment. Those interpersonal skills are key.
- Self-taught people (especially those who learned alone, without a mentoring environment like school) tend to be very arrogant and difficult to work with. One brilliant person can ruin a whole organization if they have a bad attitude.
Technical skills are valuable, but they are easy to teach and learn. People skills and things like charisma and the ability to work in a team are far more rare and more valuable.
Face it, you are going to be working for the rest of your life. Why start sooner.
College is not a vocational school, although the US News rankings and guidance counselors would have you think otherwise. College is great for a number of reasons:
1. You can explore a wide variety of subjects or even a variety of topics within a disipline (like AI vs. Databases)
2. You have an opportunity to party and get laid all you want.
3. You get a chance to finish growing up without your parents in your face. Making 40 or 50k out of highschool is nice, but you won't be as free as you think. That lease you have to keep paying on plus groceries plus car payment is a real pain in the ass.
Plus, any intelligent being gets sick of being a Sysadmin after awhile. What seems really cool today may not be so cool when you do it for 40-50 hours a week, every week.
Go to college, take some classes and get a degree. If the degree is in computer science, great, if it is in Philosophy or Rennaisance Literature, that's cool too. Just broaden your horizons and enjoy yourself.
You are completely out of your mind, if you have one.
When you purchase something, there is an implied warranty of merchantability. This means that the product should function correctly and within specifications. You cannot avoid liability for selling something that is broken by not stating that it should work.
If you purchased a car and discovered that it would overheat and shutoff when driving at highway speeds, you would insist that the dealer or manufacturer address the issue and repair or replace the automobile. If the auto manufacturer upgraded the engine computer to govern the cars top speed to 40mph, you would sue them and win.
My wife works for a large insurance company that handles medical claims. When she was home sick, she simply rsh'd into the companies terminal server from our earthlink account!
She was not 'rooted' or hacked. In fact, her connection was much faster than the useless VPN that I am forced to use.
I'm a Tivoli administrator and run into all sorts of issues because of Tivoli's continued support of perl v4. Perl 4 doesn't support useful features like modules, and the syntax is signifigantly different in a number of areas. But because so many customers invested a fortune in man-hours and consulting time to develop Tivoli scripts and perl-based policies, everyone is going to be stuck with a very old version of perl for the indefinate future.
Perl 5 is going to be a dinosaur just like perl 4 is today. When Perl 7 is out and there's a problem with a server that is a pain in the ass to fix becuase nobody remembers Perl 5 syntax, you'll be in the same boat.
ksh and sh are standardized on all platforms and do a good job. Use them whenever you can.
Ms. Cooper answered the questions presented to her throughly and accurately, which she would have been able to do if she had answered 'promptly'. Sun has made alot of policy changes in recent months that would have made a prompt interview pretty worthless.
Shows what a pack of assholes the Slashdot crew can be.
Here are some potential future topics for/. along the same line as this one:
CmdrTaco finally learns to fucking spell Slashdot finally fixes the page-widening bug /. editors finally stop posting the same story 3x
There is alot of reasons for that. A large bueracracy is one of them.
In poor (as in poverty) schools, alot of money is spent running health clinics and providing social and mental health services that comes right out of the schools budget.
In addition, there is often higher numbers of disabled children for whom the school must legally provide alot of expensive services for.
In NYC you have other peculiarities. School custodians purchase personal vehicles with school district funds and steer lucrative coal (yes, many NYC schools are still heated with coal) oil and food service contracts to friends, amoung other things.
The entire teacher payscale is increased by 1% each year, not your wife's salary.
Teachers work on a union scale and get step raises every year. In NY there is 30 steps, in Vermont it is 25, i have no idea where you live. Depending on the district and collective bargaining agreement, a teacher starts out making between 28k and 38k and retires making 55k to 75k. My best friend's wife is a teacher (for the last 3 years) in a rural district and her salary is in the high 30's with good benefits and education reimbursement. (I believe her district pays low in comparison with others in our region)
It sounds to me like your wife is stuck in a shitty school with a nazi schoolboard and administrative staff. Most teachers around here get jobs at the local raceway during the august track season and nobody gets fired. Maybe she should look for a better position.
As far as the school system in general goes, it doesn't take much to figure out that the public school system is for the most part an abysmal failure. Rather than blindly increasing salaries, we should be looking for more effective and less labor-intensive ways to educate kids.
I should have added that depending on the interception, ballistic missiles which are travelling at mach 6-20 are sometimes able to escape the damaging part of the blast with little damage.
Missiles in development like THAAD use smaller missiles with no warhead that attempt to score a kinetic kill by striking the warhead. So far, these missiles are not very reliable at all.
Destruction of targets with proximity fuses is an accepted method of intercepting aircraft and cruise missiles.
One of the big problems we encountered was that the Patriot fuses tended to direct the force of detanation towards the center of mass of the target. In the case of a SCUD missile, this is a rocket motor. Unfortunately, the warhead typically survives and drops like a rock to the ground.
The bad thing about this is that somebody is going to have a SCUD warhead falling on his head. The good part is that the missile will not hit it's intended target.
Perhaps if you took a more mature approach in bringing up problems to management you wouldn't have been fired 20 years ago, the bug would have been fixes, and you probaly would have found others.
There a few things more annoying than a techie primadonna.
Windows 95 was released in late 1994, dumbass. So it is nearly a decade old, perhaps I should stated "...to get a nearly decade old OS..." so illiterate bumpkins like you could make the connection.
He lives in the sticks, if he has a cable company it is some nearly bankrupt mom-and-pop that can't afford the upgrade to be an ISP.
I would suggest biting the bullet and buying a Windows 2000/XP machine. It may cost money, but your time should be worth more than fiddling to get a decade old OS to work with new equipment.
I work for a state gov't, and we get a pretty liberal amount of vacation time.
We accumulate one workday (7.5 hours) of vacation per month, plus up to seven bonus days (1 your first year, 2 your second, etc) and can accrue up to 300 hours a year. You get 11.5 hours a month after ten years. Then you get a week of personal time and 5.5 hours of sick time. If you accumulate 1200 sick hours over the course of your career, you can use that banked time to pay for your health insurance when you retire.
The policies for taking time off vary, in some groups its very hard to get large blocks of time, in others its very easy.
People always consider gov't jobs to be low pay, but that really isn't true, if you consider the time you get, the excellent health benefits and great retirement program, you're actually making out pretty good in the end, esp for IT people.
omputer science and computer security experts have been saying for years that Micros~1 hasn't got the first fscking clue when it comes to writing solid, reliable, secure code. This despite the fact that there have been several examples of, if not ideal solutions, good first approaches to the problem. Indeed, to create WinNT, Microsoft snarfed the VMS team from DEC, a bunch of guys who understood those principles.
And yet, despite the mountains of examples both within and without the company, despite the millions of computers blue-screening every damned day, Microsoft willfully persists in making the same stupid mistakes.
As is well-known, Word macro viruses were a big problem in years past. This was because Microsoft made a series of impossibly moronic decisions:
* To incorporate a macro facility into Word directly (rather than as an external engine driven by IPC protocols, where access controls can be applied in a uniform manner),
* To embed the macros into the Word documents directly, rather than as separate macro files (thus making it impossible for the user to distinguish between a normal document and an "active" one),
* To set the default condition to run the macros automatically upon document loading, without informing the user, * To, by default, not inform the user that any of this idiocy was going on.
Okay, fine, so Microsoft got bitten by their would-be cleverness, but they cleaned up their act, right? They learned their lesson, right?
No. Not only did they refuse to acknowledge that they had fscked up royally, they went and deliberately committed the same errors again and again:
* Not only does IE uncritically implement JavaScript, it also throws in Visual Basic scripting and ActiveX, all of which are turned on by default. This condition is identical to that which propogated the Word macro virus fiasco. Even their "secure" execution environments hasn't prevented hostile Web sites from hijacking the browser. * Outlook likewise, without user intervention, will extract and launch embedded content while simultaneously hiding it from the user. The damn thing doesn't even check to make sure the MIME type and the filename extension are consistent.
There's a term for this kind of behavior: Willful negligence. Oh, you can point out that there are security update downloads. But you can't ignore the fact that, if Microsoft had followed basic security principles, if they had learned from their own history -- hell, if they'd even extended common courtesy to their users -- this sort of thing wouldn't have happened in the first place.
This isn't an honest mistake. This is a pattern with over twenty years of history behind it.
Any responsibility born by Microsoft is equalled by the responsibility born by those users who don't apply security updates and don't run up-to-date firewall and virus checking software.
I agree that uneducated users are a big problem. But, especially with the advent of broadband connectivity, what Microsoft has effectively done is to give a loaded Uzi with the safety off to eight-year-olds, and then fail to train them in its use or even tell them where the safety lock is.
Microsoft touts its products as turnkey, ready-to-go, fire-and-forget, no setup, no configuration, no need to learn computer-ese, just sit down and become productive immediately. This is misleading in the extreme. Training is required; proper configuration is required (because Microsoft keeps setting the defaults wrong). As such, I feel Microsoft bears a significant burden of responsibility for the havoc their software has wreaked on the Internet.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the truck driver is pretty good Solaris admin, and is the SA for our database server. He really liked veritas for one reason or another.
Saying that our best programmer is mediocre shows that you think that jerry-rigging and best-guessing is the way to get things done. Our programmers are good engineers and communicate with each other frequently. If something happened to someone, the other members of the team are familiar enough with what he was doing to take up the slack.
"Soft Skills" are not analagous to "kissing ass" or pushing things on people like a used car salesman. Being able to write clearly, speak intelligently, coming up with new & unique solutions to problems and being willing to take a risk on a new idea are my idea of soft skills. You sound like you are down on your luck and somewhat bitter. Try to drop the attitude.
The software we write performs in life-and-death situations. While we have to deal with a bueracracy (like all large organizations have) in the end if we succeed our stuff works and the people using them come home to talk about it. If we fail, people can be injured or even killed.
Very few things in computer science have changed in the last couple of decades.
I can talk to candidates about their Discrete Structures or Systems Programming classes and relate pretty well.
System Admin != Computer Science or EE
I'd like to comment on your reply point by point.
#1 Technical skills, in the form of specific experience in a particular OS or certification are irrelevant. We have IT staff who were interns, clerks or in one case a driver who injured his leg. In most cases they became good mid-level Unix or NT admins in about 12-18 months. 5/6 of them are taking classes paid for by our organization.
#2 I don't know about other people, but I like people who take their work & education seriously. Programmers who come from a CS or EE background are far better than those who missed out on formal education about 50-75% of the time. They tend to stick around longer too.
#3 We work in teams here. If our best programmer was hit by a bus, we wouldn't lose too much as far as coding or system availability went. (It would be a terrible thing, of course)If some exceptional geek who won't talk to anyone leaves or suffers from some tragedy, there is a much bigger loss.
#4 Skill and talent are important. Soft skills are important too.
#5 Manuals are easy to fake. Success isn't.
I am an IT Manager for a pretty sizable organization. We probaly hire about 6 junior level tech people a year, most of which I get to meet during the interview phase.
We do not have a need for nerds or people who are completely self-taught with no education beyond high-school or some certification camp. I have hired several people like this, and none of them worked out.
- College is an environment when you deal with other adults with less control placed over you than a high school environment. Those interpersonal skills are key.
- Self-taught people (especially those who learned alone, without a mentoring environment like school) tend to be very arrogant and difficult to work with. One brilliant person can ruin a whole organization if they have a bad attitude.
Technical skills are valuable, but they are easy to teach and learn. People skills and things like charisma and the ability to work in a team are far more rare and more valuable.
Face it, you are going to be working for the rest of your life. Why start sooner.
College is not a vocational school, although the US News rankings and guidance counselors would have you think otherwise. College is great for a number of reasons:
1. You can explore a wide variety of subjects or even a variety of topics within a disipline (like AI vs. Databases)
2. You have an opportunity to party and get laid all you want.
3. You get a chance to finish growing up without your parents in your face. Making 40 or 50k out of highschool is nice, but you won't be as free as you think. That lease you have to keep paying on plus groceries plus car payment is a real pain in the ass.
Plus, any intelligent being gets sick of being a Sysadmin after awhile. What seems really cool today may not be so cool when you do it for 40-50 hours a week, every week.
Go to college, take some classes and get a degree. If the degree is in computer science, great, if it is in Philosophy or Rennaisance Literature, that's cool too. Just broaden your horizons and enjoy yourself.
So when the FBI uses carnivore to monitor email, that is not an invasion of privacy?
If someone rifles through your garbage looking for information, that's not an invasion of privacy either, right?
You are completely out of your mind, if you have one.
When you purchase something, there is an implied warranty of merchantability. This means that the product should function correctly and within specifications. You cannot avoid liability for selling something that is broken by not stating that it should work.
If you purchased a car and discovered that it would overheat and shutoff when driving at highway speeds, you would insist that the dealer or manufacturer address the issue and repair or replace the automobile. If the auto manufacturer upgraded the engine computer to govern the cars top speed to 40mph, you would sue them and win.
That is nonsense.
My wife works for a large insurance company that handles medical claims. When she was home sick, she simply rsh'd into the companies terminal server from our earthlink account!
She was not 'rooted' or hacked. In fact, her connection was much faster than the useless VPN that I am forced to use.
The only idiotic thing here is your argument.
I'm a Tivoli administrator and run into all sorts of issues because of Tivoli's continued support of perl v4. Perl 4 doesn't support useful features like modules, and the syntax is signifigantly different in a number of areas. But because so many customers invested a fortune in man-hours and consulting time to develop Tivoli scripts and perl-based policies, everyone is going to be stuck with a very old version of perl for the indefinate future.
Perl 5 is going to be a dinosaur just like perl 4 is today. When Perl 7 is out and there's a problem with a server that is a pain in the ass to fix becuase nobody remembers Perl 5 syntax, you'll be in the same boat.
ksh and sh are standardized on all platforms and do a good job. Use them whenever you can.
Here is another detailing other litigation pursued by Mr. Lockwood (the holder of this patent) and his associates.
s _amicus. htm#Summary
This amicus brief gives you an insight to how these people think.
http://www.ipcreators.org/SC/Kearns/kearn
It's about fscking time!
This is the truth.
/. along the same line as this one:
Ms. Cooper answered the questions presented to her throughly and accurately, which she would have been able to do if she had answered 'promptly'. Sun has made alot of policy changes in recent months that would have made a prompt interview pretty worthless.
Shows what a pack of assholes the Slashdot crew can be.
Here are some potential future topics for
CmdrTaco finally learns to fucking spell
Slashdot finally fixes the page-widening bug
/. editors finally stop posting the same story 3x
In previous discussions I have read about how overworked, underpaid and professionally dedicated teachers were... so how could this be true?
Does this guy mean to say that these dedicated professionals are surfing the web all day?
Cancer, gunshots and drowning doesn't kill you.
You die when your heart stops and oxygen stops getting to your brain.
There is alot of reasons for that. A large bueracracy is one of them.
In poor (as in poverty) schools, alot of money is spent running health clinics and providing social and mental health services that comes right out of the schools budget.
In addition, there is often higher numbers of disabled children for whom the school must legally provide alot of expensive services for.
In NYC you have other peculiarities. School custodians purchase personal vehicles with school district funds and steer lucrative coal (yes, many NYC schools are still heated with coal) oil and food service contracts to friends, amoung other things.
That 1% raise thing is a load of shit.
The entire teacher payscale is increased by 1% each year, not your wife's salary.
Teachers work on a union scale and get step raises every year. In NY there is 30 steps, in Vermont it is 25, i have no idea where you live. Depending on the district and collective bargaining agreement, a teacher starts out making between 28k and 38k and retires making 55k to 75k. My best friend's wife is a teacher (for the last 3 years) in a rural district and her salary is in the high 30's with good benefits and education reimbursement. (I believe her district pays low in comparison with others in our region)
It sounds to me like your wife is stuck in a shitty school with a nazi schoolboard and administrative staff. Most teachers around here get jobs at the local raceway during the august track season and nobody gets fired. Maybe she should look for a better position.
As far as the school system in general goes, it doesn't take much to figure out that the public school system is for the most part an abysmal failure. Rather than blindly increasing salaries, we should be looking for more effective and less labor-intensive ways to educate kids.
I should have added that depending on the interception, ballistic missiles which are travelling at mach 6-20 are sometimes able to escape the damaging part of the blast with little damage.
Missiles in development like THAAD use smaller missiles with no warhead that attempt to score a kinetic kill by striking the warhead. So far, these missiles are not very reliable at all.
Destruction of targets with proximity fuses is an accepted method of intercepting aircraft and cruise missiles.
One of the big problems we encountered was that the Patriot fuses tended to direct the force of detanation towards the center of mass of the target. In the case of a SCUD missile, this is a rocket motor. Unfortunately, the warhead typically survives and drops like a rock to the ground.
The bad thing about this is that somebody is going to have a SCUD warhead falling on his head. The good part is that the missile will not hit it's intended target.
Perhaps if you took a more mature approach in bringing up problems to management you wouldn't have been fired 20 years ago, the bug would have been fixes, and you probaly would have found others.
There a few things more annoying than a techie primadonna.
Windows 95 was released in late 1994, dumbass. So it is nearly a decade old, perhaps I should stated "...to get a nearly decade old OS..." so illiterate bumpkins like you could make the connection.
He lives in the sticks, if he has a cable company it is some nearly bankrupt mom-and-pop that can't afford the upgrade to be an ISP.
I would suggest biting the bullet and buying a Windows 2000/XP machine. It may cost money, but your time should be worth more than fiddling to get a decade old OS to work with new equipment.
It probaly would bother your OpenBSD box though.
I work for a state gov't, and we get a pretty liberal amount of vacation time.
We accumulate one workday (7.5 hours) of vacation per month, plus up to seven bonus days (1 your first year, 2 your second, etc) and can accrue up to 300 hours a year. You get 11.5 hours a month after ten years. Then you get a week of personal time and 5.5 hours of sick time. If you accumulate 1200 sick hours over the course of your career, you can use that banked time to pay for your health insurance when you retire.
The policies for taking time off vary, in some groups its very hard to get large blocks of time, in others its very easy.
People always consider gov't jobs to be low pay, but that really isn't true, if you consider the time you get, the excellent health benefits and great retirement program, you're actually making out pretty good in the end, esp for IT people.
omputer science and computer security experts have been saying for years that Micros~1 hasn't got the first fscking clue when it comes to writing solid, reliable, secure code. This despite the fact that there have been several examples of, if not ideal solutions, good first approaches to the problem. Indeed, to create WinNT, Microsoft snarfed the VMS team from DEC, a bunch of guys who understood those principles.
And yet, despite the mountains of examples both within and without the company, despite the millions of computers blue-screening every damned day, Microsoft willfully persists in making the same stupid mistakes.
As is well-known, Word macro viruses were a big problem in years past. This was because Microsoft made a series of impossibly moronic decisions:
* To incorporate a macro facility into Word directly (rather than as an external engine driven by IPC protocols, where access controls can be applied in a uniform manner),
* To embed the macros into the Word documents directly, rather than as separate macro files (thus making it impossible for the user to distinguish between a normal document and an "active" one),
* To set the default condition to run the macros automatically upon document loading, without informing the user,
* To, by default, not inform the user that any of this idiocy was going on.
Okay, fine, so Microsoft got bitten by their would-be cleverness, but they cleaned up their act, right? They learned their lesson, right?
No. Not only did they refuse to acknowledge that they had fscked up royally, they went and deliberately committed the same errors again and again:
* Not only does IE uncritically implement JavaScript, it also throws in Visual Basic scripting and ActiveX, all of which are turned on by default. This condition is identical to that which propogated the Word macro virus fiasco. Even their "secure" execution environments hasn't prevented hostile Web sites from hijacking the browser.
* Outlook likewise, without user intervention, will extract and launch embedded content while simultaneously hiding it from the user. The damn thing doesn't even check to make sure the MIME type and the filename extension are consistent.
There's a term for this kind of behavior: Willful negligence. Oh, you can point out that there are security update downloads. But you can't ignore the fact that, if Microsoft had followed basic security principles, if they had learned from their own history -- hell, if they'd even extended common courtesy to their users -- this sort of thing wouldn't have happened in the first place.
This isn't an honest mistake. This is a pattern with over twenty years of history behind it.
Any responsibility born by Microsoft is equalled by the responsibility born by those users who don't apply security updates and don't run up-to-date firewall and virus checking software.
I agree that uneducated users are a big problem. But, especially with the advent of broadband connectivity, what Microsoft has effectively done is to give a loaded Uzi with the safety off to eight-year-olds, and then fail to train them in its use or even tell them where the safety lock is.
Microsoft touts its products as turnkey, ready-to-go, fire-and-forget, no setup, no configuration, no need to learn computer-ese, just sit down and become productive immediately. This is misleading in the extreme. Training is required; proper configuration is required (because Microsoft keeps setting the defaults wrong). As such, I feel Microsoft bears a significant burden of responsibility for the havoc their software has wreaked on the Internet.
What exactly is it that you do?
You seem to write at a 3rd or 4th grade level... perhaps you should consider a remedial english class?