Pay rates are low even adjusted for the cost of living (which is dirt cheap for a northern city) and IT workers get ZERO respect unless you are working for a profit center (you are doing IT staffing, contracting or are a programmer writing product to be sold).
Between H1Bs and large contracting pushing down rates and squeezing out locals at the big operations (Lilly, Sallie Mae, Allison, Caterpillar, etc.) about the only good place for IT long term is working for state or the federal government (which is even lower pay but you might actually get a career out of it)... although many of those jobs are being handed over to contractors, too.
About the only place I have heard pays well for IT is Angie's List and it's only for programmers... that company is a ticking time bomb, though. How they stay in business while loosing money every year they have existed is a miracle of a pyramid scheme.
I am the last of my friends that came out of college in the early nineties still in IT. The rest have moved on to various other careers (several became attorneys, two are doctors, and one crazy bastard is a deep water welder... he makes more than all of us).
Fox wrote for a ton of different titles through the Golden Age. He was one of the best for stories back then so it might be wise to try his story lines.
Barracuda's interface isn't too bad on most of their products considering how complex they are. Ubiquiti's AirOS on their wireless bridges and devices is wonderfully put together.
Where I went to school in the 90's (Purdue), Computational Science was a math degree and we didn't touch a computer for the first two years unless you specifically took a programming course.
Programming IS a vocation that is an application of several disciplines. If a tech employer has no use for UML, then they are not a very sophisticated business. Hell, I work at a little rinky dink manufacturing company and we use UML and other modeling systems to lay out our business processes to better understand the business and for ISO 9001 quality management.
If you want code monkeys to crank out unmaintainable spaghetti to show your VC fund, then by all means go find some.
Good luck finding and buying one as a civilian but what you want is an active sensing laser denial system... It's going to be expensive and I've only seen them in military gear but they work... Mostly. Link: http://www.naimark.net/project...
Tom's got nailed over the "burning" AMD Athlons. If you dig through the HardOCP forums from back in 2001-2002, Kyle Bennett and others managed to trace some not so savory relationships with Intel and the site.
I've never trusted Tom's since and they have a well established Intel bias. HardOCP is much more transparent in it's testng.
Until IT staff have the same power and ability to lean back on a state license like an engineer or architect and say "no" to dangerous, illegal, or just plain stupid demands from end user, management, and shareholders, this will not change.
Keep the masters in a private cloud and sync to it from your PCs. Git and other multi-user SVN is an idea, too. Also, SharePoint is excellent (but lots of overhead).
Kevin Turner, Lisa Brummel, and Amy Hood are all despised within Microsoft... they are Ballmer yes-people and Lisa Brummel is directly responsible for destroying any shred of productive culture there. They all need to go.
The employees want Satya Nadella or maybe Tony Bates... although many say it has to come from the outside... Sinofsky;-)
Framemaker in structured mode is an alternative for technical and book publishing. It supports content management systems natively and is all XML under the hood in structured mode. Being Adobe and meant for professionals, it's fairly pricey as you can imagine. Lyx/Latex is a pretty decent alternative.
When we set our budget this year, we researched and found that the national average for IT budgets according to CIO.com and couple of other sources (all self reported, though) was 5.2% of the company gross. I would sit down with the corporate comptroller or CFO and find out where you should be. It sounds like most of your expenditures are directly related to product (and if the use any form of cost accounting internally) should be able to trace directly to your expenditures. Remember, if after the analysis things look even better than 5.2% then promptly point out your exceptional leadership and ask for a raise...
Everyone is so terrified of a discrimination lawsuit that generally, you're never going to get a call telling you that you did not get the job let alone any feedback whatsoever from the interviewer.
Vyatta is owned by Brocade now. It's not in their best interest to support other hardware vendors. Cumulus is aiming to support all hardware. That's the piece that kills everyone: poor interoperability.
You are IT just at another section... try working WITH the rest of the team. You do realize that IT policy managers are the police of the corporation along with the safety manager, HR, legal, etc. They exist to keep employees from breaking the law and doing serious harm to the company. They work for the corporation, not you.
That said, I wonder if they are trying to gain some momentum (there seem to be quite a few major players in the SDN crowd since they founded their company) or if they have run out of steam and are trying to get the Open Source crowd involved on the development side... worth keeping an eye on, I guess.
I was a contractor for over a decade as a "hatchet man" to come in when large projects were in serious trouble, fix the project and then usually do an after action report which many times included firing people.
My recommendations: 1.) Hire someone like me to do this and completely side step the politics and anger that will come with dealing with this. Trust me on this. Get as far away from this as possible. 2.) On the question of evaluating IT budgets... current thinking is about 5.2% of the yearly gross of the business goes to IT but that's an average.
There won't be many in-house IT teams, anymore. You'll have a few severely overworked, stressed "DevOps" guys that do everything from printer maintenance to screaming at the cloud vendors, but no real in-house infrastructure.
Microsoft is slowly exiting the desktop market. They are doing this by developing an app market and moving their business apps to the cloud and pushing them hard. There is a very strong rumor that Office 2013 is the last desktop Office (Office Web Apps Server works extremely well for most use cases and is the basis fro Office 365).
They are doing fantastic in the enterprise apps market (Dynamics, Exchange, SharePoint, Lync) and Server 2012 is a stunningly good server OS with Azure being a heck of a platform, too. They don't need nor want the desktop OS market; they want the desktop APPLICATION market... it's where the money is.
Slashdot Mirror
Do NOT come to Indianapolis for IT!
Pay rates are low even adjusted for the cost of living (which is dirt cheap for a northern city) and IT workers get ZERO respect unless you are working for a profit center (you are doing IT staffing, contracting or are a programmer writing product to be sold).
Between H1Bs and large contracting pushing down rates and squeezing out locals at the big operations (Lilly, Sallie Mae, Allison, Caterpillar, etc.) about the only good place for IT long term is working for state or the federal government (which is even lower pay but you might actually get a career out of it)... although many of those jobs are being handed over to contractors, too.
About the only place I have heard pays well for IT is Angie's List and it's only for programmers... that company is a ticking time bomb, though. How they stay in business while loosing money every year they have existed is a miracle of a pyramid scheme.
I am the last of my friends that came out of college in the early nineties still in IT. The rest have moved on to various other careers (several became attorneys, two are doctors, and one crazy bastard is a deep water welder... he makes more than all of us).
Most of us old dudes moved over to Reddit and Soylent... one of us one of us... come on over.
At least on the rendering side, I have found MuPDF to be really good and stable: http://mupdf.com/
Fox wrote for a ton of different titles through the Golden Age. He was one of the best for stories back then so it might be wise to try his story lines.
22,000 free and legal... go here: http://comicbookplus.com/
Barracuda's interface isn't too bad on most of their products considering how complex they are. Ubiquiti's AirOS on their wireless bridges and devices is wonderfully put together.
Also, m0n0wall and Tomato are favorites of mine.
Where I went to school in the 90's (Purdue), Computational Science was a math degree and we didn't touch a computer for the first two years unless you specifically took a programming course.
Programming IS a vocation that is an application of several disciplines. If a tech employer has no use for UML, then they are not a very sophisticated business. Hell, I work at a little rinky dink manufacturing company and we use UML and other modeling systems to lay out our business processes to better understand the business and for ISO 9001 quality management.
If you want code monkeys to crank out unmaintainable spaghetti to show your VC fund, then by all means go find some.
Good luck finding and buying one as a civilian but what you want is an active sensing laser denial system... It's going to be expensive and I've only seen them in military gear but they work... Mostly. Link: http://www.naimark.net/project...
Tom's got nailed over the "burning" AMD Athlons. If you dig through the HardOCP forums from back in 2001-2002, Kyle Bennett and others managed to trace some not so savory relationships with Intel and the site.
I've never trusted Tom's since and they have a well established Intel bias. HardOCP is much more transparent in it's testng.
Until IT staff have the same power and ability to lean back on a state license like an engineer or architect and say "no" to dangerous, illegal, or just plain stupid demands from end user, management, and shareholders, this will not change.
Toms got outed years ago as being paid by Intel. If you want good, unbiased reviews of games and gaming hardware, go to HardOCP.
I thought NASA struck a deal with DOE back in March to do 2 kilos per year of Pu-238 back in March. Did it get de-funded or something? http://www.universetoday.com/100875/u-s-to-restart-plutonium-production-for-deep-space-exploration/
https://owncloud.org/
Keep the masters in a private cloud and sync to it from your PCs. Git and other multi-user SVN is an idea, too. Also, SharePoint is excellent (but lots of overhead).
Kevin Turner, Lisa Brummel, and Amy Hood are all despised within Microsoft... they are Ballmer yes-people and Lisa Brummel is directly responsible for destroying any shred of productive culture there. They all need to go.
The employees want Satya Nadella or maybe Tony Bates... although many say it has to come from the outside... Sinofsky ;-)
http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2013/08/steve-ballmer-is-going-to-frickin.html
Framemaker in structured mode is an alternative for technical and book publishing. It supports content management systems natively and is all XML under the hood in structured mode. Being Adobe and meant for professionals, it's fairly pricey as you can imagine. Lyx/Latex is a pretty decent alternative.
Snowden didn't seem to have a problem finding information. Maybe they just need a contractor to come in and do it for them...
When we set our budget this year, we researched and found that the national average for IT budgets according to CIO.com and couple of other sources (all self reported, though) was 5.2% of the company gross. I would sit down with the corporate comptroller or CFO and find out where you should be. It sounds like most of your expenditures are directly related to product (and if the use any form of cost accounting internally) should be able to trace directly to your expenditures. Remember, if after the analysis things look even better than 5.2% then promptly point out your exceptional leadership and ask for a raise...
Everyone is so terrified of a discrimination lawsuit that generally, you're never going to get a call telling you that you did not get the job let alone any feedback whatsoever from the interviewer.
Vyatta is owned by Brocade now. It's not in their best interest to support other hardware vendors. Cumulus is aiming to support all hardware. That's the piece that kills everyone: poor interoperability.
You are IT just at another section... try working WITH the rest of the team. You do realize that IT policy managers are the police of the corporation along with the safety manager, HR, legal, etc. They exist to keep employees from breaking the law and doing serious harm to the company. They work for the corporation, not you.
This is a Andreeson Horowitz funded startup founded in 2010. The principles are JR Rivers (formerly of Cisco and Google) http://www.linkedin.com/pub/jr-rivers/3/3b7/372 and Nolan Leake (formerly of Tile and 3Leaf) http://www.linkedin.com/in/nolan. They're pretty darn smart cookies.
That said, I wonder if they are trying to gain some momentum (there seem to be quite a few major players in the SDN crowd since they founded their company) or if they have run out of steam and are trying to get the Open Source crowd involved on the development side... worth keeping an eye on, I guess.
I was a contractor for over a decade as a "hatchet man" to come in when large projects were in serious trouble, fix the project and then usually do an after action report which many times included firing people.
My recommendations:
1.) Hire someone like me to do this and completely side step the politics and anger that will come with dealing with this. Trust me on this. Get as far away from this as possible.
2.) On the question of evaluating IT budgets... current thinking is about 5.2% of the yearly gross of the business goes to IT but that's an average.
There won't be many in-house IT teams, anymore. You'll have a few severely overworked, stressed "DevOps" guys that do everything from printer maintenance to screaming at the cloud vendors, but no real in-house infrastructure.
Sign a petition http://wh.gov/ll6wj
Microsoft is slowly exiting the desktop market. They are doing this by developing an app market and moving their business apps to the cloud and pushing them hard. There is a very strong rumor that Office 2013 is the last desktop Office (Office Web Apps Server works extremely well for most use cases and is the basis fro Office 365).
They are doing fantastic in the enterprise apps market (Dynamics, Exchange, SharePoint, Lync) and Server 2012 is a stunningly good server OS with Azure being a heck of a platform, too. They don't need nor want the desktop OS market; they want the desktop APPLICATION market... it's where the money is.