I was reading one awhile back that where in a strategy, you actually did at times split 10's....a generally stupid move, but, if done at certain times, sparingly, it would not mess with your edge badly, yet it would definitely throw off the casino watching you as a 'serious' counter. I'm sorry I don't have the book around to cite the source, but, it is out there.
You are probably thinking about Blackjack for Blood by Bryce Carlson. It's a really good read and a good introduction to a level II counting system.
The rest of this post isn't directed toward you cayenne8, but seemed like a good of a place as any to put it.
At the end of the day, card counting wasn't very profitable for the level of effort it takes. While playing, a good card counter needs to do the following things:
Keep track of the count (possibly maintaining a separate count of aces)
Play perfectly based on the current count
Keep track of his or her bets
Look like he or she isn't counting cards
The last item is actually the hardest on the list. Vary your bet spread more than 4 to 1? You're a possible counter. Make an advanced play (split 9s against a dealer 9 with a high plus card deck)? You're a possible counter. Look focused? You're a possible counter. Have an average bet of over $100/hand? You're a possible counter. The list goes on.
Now assume you've mastered the above and can count perfectly. Lets look at the money involved. To ensure that you have a 99.5% chance of not being wiped out, you are going to need a stake of approximately 120 times your average bet (details are hazy, but that's about right). Let's say you are going for an average bet of $50/hand. You will need a $6000 stake. Using the number of $50/hand, let's see how much you can expect to win per hour. Let's take a really high number for hands per hour, 100. In my experience, you would have to be playing three or four hands at a time to achieve this, but lets go with it. Bryce says that the best counters in the world have a 1.6% advantage over the house. Using the numbers so far we have $50/hand * 100 hands/hour * 1.6% advantage which leads to a whopping $80/hour take for perfect play that still carries a 0.5% risk of losing your entire $6000 stake.
On top of the risk/reward issues outlined above, card counting made blackjack boring for me. Instead of being fun, it was a job, and a job that required a lot of outside work as well. Keeping your skills up to date with a level II system takes daily practice. If you are going to try to push the limits on bet spreads or average bets, you have to manage where you play and how long you play for with excruciating detail. It just wasn't worth it. Now I play roulette when I want to gamble. There's nothing you can do from preventing the house from taking its cut. Just throw some chips down and hope you end up a winner.
Aeron chairs come in three different sizes. You might have tried one that didn't fit you. I only found this out because I moved to a new job where everyone had Aerons and I hated mine at first. My desk came with a size A chair, and I needed a size C. Once I got fitted for the correct size chair, it was a lot better. There is a size chart on the right hand side of this page: http://www.hermanmiller.com/CDA/SSA/Product/0,,a10-c440-p8,00.html
If you really want to make a case to management, write out all the worst case scenarios for your management (I know that there should only be one WORST case scenario, but work with me here). If you can list the things that can go wrong, you might be able to help. I once worked in an environment where a developer wrote a query that locked a database for four hours until we killed it. One of the DBAs was able to re-write his query so that it completed in under 10 seconds. His access was then revoked.
Tell you boss how someone with read only access could affect the rest of the users, and you should be on the right track.
A long time ago, Slashdot was load balanced by an Arrowpoint CS-800. According to this write up, Slashdot has moved to LVS. What instigated the move? Did you feel that a fancy appliance-type load balancer was no longer needed? I didn't really care for the Arrowpoint switches or the Cisco CSS switches that they became, but I do like F5s and to a lesser extent the Foundry ServerIrons. Was the move away from appliance-based load balancers a money-saving idea, or just a lack of need?
As a great scholar once said, you can write your thesis on Gameboy if you can bullshit well enough.
I think someone needs to alert Jeremy Piven that he was just referred to as a great scholar. That's got to be the first time in history that's happened.
There would have been a lot more than 147,000 jobs created here, but our companies are having difficulty finding Americans with the background
Every article about outsourcing or jobs in general has a quote along these lines. And they never qualify it with "for the rates they are willing to pay." Unless a company is doing some serious, way-out, pie-in-the-sky research, there are people that can and will do the job for the right price. Employers just don't want to pay it. If a company really wants a CCIE with 20 years experience in networking for a position in New York City, they just might have to pay a premium rate. I didn't take Econ 101, but it seems like simple supply and demand to me. How come limited supply increasing demand is good when companies want to sell products, but bad when they are hiring?
More importantly, though, I want to know what brand of suspension system the Dukes put in the General Lee. That has to be the best car product ever built.
I actually read an article about the General Lee and how it survived those jumps. They used a different car for every jump. Even if the car looked OK after shooting a jump, it wasn't used again. It said they went through 260-ish Chargers over the life of the show.
After you talk to the parties involved (recruiter, relocation department, hiring manager, HR) and make a decision to accept or reject the offer, document everything and publish it. If someone clearly wronged you in the process, try to save others from having to go through the same ordeal.
I will tell you a related story. I was a consultant on an open-ended contract for 2.5 years. The company re-organized and I was given less than two weeks to either take a 30% pay cut or leave. I immediately started looking for other work, but stuck around for a couple of months while I found a new position. The one thing I did do was to calmly, rationally let everyone that was in a similar position know what had happened. After I left, they gave a whole group of consultants (about 20 people) the same ultimatum. Since they were prepared for the new offer from my story, all of them resigned, simultaneously. The company back-pedaled on the ultimatum and allowed those consultants to stay on under their current terms. It was still detrimental to the company, however, because 10 of the 20 left anyway.
Several of those 20 people thanked me for sharing my troubles because they were better prepared. The details of your experience may help someone else not make the same mistake later. It may even make the business involved change their practices.
Take your choice. I suspect a real Stratocaster would be a great chick magnet... but it's a far cry from the thrill of finishing Crossroads on expert.
Actually, the Les Paul seems to win over more chicks than the Strat. I've got 2 Strats, a Tele, a Jaguar, 2 Mustangs, a Jag-stang and a Coronado II from Fender, but the one that wows them is the Les Paul.
I just went through the interview process with one of the "prominent websites" and my reason for not taking the job are much along the lines of what the parent poster suggested. Prominent-website company was based in LA and offered me a salary of X. An east-cost company offered me a salary of X - 2000, but with a potential.15X bonus every year. At the east-cost firm, I am eligible for a salary increase after six months and once a year after that. At prominent-website company, I wasn't going to be eligible for a raise until I had been there 18 months.
Finally, there was the cost of living. According to the homefair.com salary calculator someone else posted, LA is 137% more expensive than where I ended up. To me, the coolness of working for one of the prominent websites wasn't enough to drastically change my standards of living.
As far as port management goes, you may want to look at Netdisco. If I recall correctly, UC Santa Cruz was using it to manage about 20K ports. It's open source, so you so should be able to customize it for your environment. I haven't run it personally, but the demo looks impressive.
When considering how to secure the ports, I think you have to find the balance between security and functionality. If you lock down each MAC to a specific port, how much time will you spend managing it? Whenever there is a connectivity problem, will you have to fight with the other groups assuring them that it isn't the network?
As a final thought, you generally get out of a network management system what you put into it. With a network as large as yours, there isn't a silver bullet to fix all of your problems. Whether you customize, roll your own or use vanilla off the shelf software, you need to figure out what makes the most sense for your business. Good luck. It sounds like you need it.
That's an interesting analogy. By "biggest kid" you would seem to mean "biggest bully". People tend to tolerate bullying. (My elementary school principal used to tell me, "It takes two to make a fight!" What bullshit.) But bullying is still evil.
Unfortunately, the trend in most industries is to become the largest kid so that you can bully the rest of the kids. I don't condone their practices, but they aren't the only company that uses size or market share to its advantage. Until something changes, I think things are going to get worse before they get better across all industries.
Your principal did have a point. I quit fighting after I started taking martial arts. I learned enough joint locks, pressure points and defensive maneuvers that I don't strike people, I just disable them if I have to. Most of the time a bully will back down if you tell them what's going to happen and you have the power to back it up (which most of the time isn't the case with MS). If someone is confrontational with me, I give them the following speech:
"I will not fight you. You can hit me as many times as you want. If you get off balance, I will break the knee you put more weight on. If you throw a punch that doesn't connect, I will catch your wrist and break your elbow."
I've had one person mess with me after I started that. I actually felt bad for him because he was tanked, so I only kicked out his knee instead of going for damage. Most bullies back down when called out. As for the ones that don't, you're probably going to get your ass kicked anyway.
To help with your back problems, you could also try these two yoga positions (which are sort of the same thing):
The bridge
The wheel
The bridge requires a lot less strength than the wheel, but I feel the wheel does much more for the back. You can do an approximation of the wheel pose with one of those large workout balls. It helps my back a lot.
If you do start doing the wheel or bridge, I'd suggest alternating with something like the child pose just to even things out.
Many of the other posters in this discussion have talked about the security side of network security, so I thought I'd address the networking side. In my opinion, you must understand the basics of networking at an expert level if you want to be a good network security professional. At the very least, you should:
understand IP (packet formats, TCP, UDP, ICMP) extremely well.
be able to deal with packet data in many forms.
be able to work with numbers in binary, hex and decimal. (octal wouldn't hurt either)
be familiar with most common protocols and their behaviors.
At that point, you can start looking at the types of network security work that are available. Possible areas include:
Intrusion Detection and Prevetion
Vulnerability/Penetration Testing
Research
Audit
Incident response
There are many others, but those seem the most "network" of the fields in the security arena.
Because they have never and would never say that they could 'probably do an IT job better than the IT guy' whereas that doesn't seem to stop IT guys (Such as yourself, admittedly) from saying the opposite.
Actually, that is exactly what the poster of the question is doing. In his case, he sounds justified if the problem with his IT department isn't budgetary as many other posters have suggested might be the case.
Users constantly second guess IT when it comes to the systems that they have little to no understanding of. Examples:
Why do we have to spend $5000 to get another 1 TB of SAN storage for our database server? I got a 200GB SATA drive for $70 from Fry's. Can't we just get five of those?
Why does my machine have to get updates every month? My machine at home hasn't been updated in a year and it is fine.
Why is our internet access so slow? I only pay $40 a month for my cable modem where you guys pay $1500 for two T1s that go to "different providers" (whatever that means).
Why can't I open attachments from my friends if they have.exe at the end? They're my friends, they wouldn't send me anything bad.
You don't think statements questioning IT's decision making and professional ability are the same as me stating that I (not all IT people, but me personally) think I could do a majority of non-IT worker's jobs better than they could do my job? Maybe the examples above aren't as brazen as my comment, but they are in the same vein. And as I stated previously, I've done it. If I find myself with another business user that thinks that my IT job can't be that hard I will do the switch again.
That's what really scares me sometimes... he even admitted he was basically trolling (in the good-natured classic ironical sense), but some of y'all fell for it anyway and think these are good recommendations.
They're not. They're ludicrous impositions on users, with nothing complicated like risk management and contingency planning and fer godsakes, real actual training. You know, easy glib answers that most people throw out, magnified to an extreme.
You'd think the one-minute screensaver timeout would have tipped you off. I took longer than that to profread this post.
Your job isn't to make widgets as part of IT, your job is to make sure I have the infrastructure to sell the widgets that engineering made.
Wow, thank you for taking a completely crafted example, used only to make point, and distort it to another non-real-world business. That completely absolves you of having to answer any points I made. Let me re-phrase my example to fit your business model.
I work in the IT department for a company. I am underfunded, but have come up with a plan to offer premium support and infrastructure services to groups that have the budget to pay for them. I go to marketing to ask for a plan on how to sell these services. Marketing tells me that I should approach the head of each department and offer the new premium services for X dollars. Instead, I decide that I will just tell random people in the hall that they can get better support and systems for X/2 dollars. The new project fails because not enough groups bought into it and I didn't get enough money from them to provide said services. I go back to marketing and they calmly explain to me that the project failed because I didn't follow their advice. I behave the exact same way as I did in the previous example, reading them the riot act and trying to get them fired.
How is this different than the users I described in my first post?
I did switch jobs; I moved out of working IT for the largest Telco in Canada and went to work for a financial institution in their marketing department; and oh boy did it open my eyes to the arrogance of IT folk in general, which judging from your last paragraph isn't necessarily incorrect.
First of all, I qualified it with most of the time. And yeah, I'm arrogant, but I'm also really good at what I do. I've tried the switch before, and it wasn't close. You as a former IT person that now does Marketing for a living could very well best me in a so called job-switch competition. How many of your marketing cohorts that never worked in IT could? How is the arrogance of IT any worse than the ignorance of users that refuse to learn how to use the tools they need to do their jobs?
And since you were the first to resort to Ad Hominem attacks, how many moose did you have to uplink when you worked for the Canadian Telco?
I agree with you. With the submitter talking about not having enough network storage or backups at all, I posted in the mindset that he/she wouldn't be able to afford the luxury of redundant systems. I should have clarified when a posted.
Polite employees who don't talk down to the users in that "OH, you should understand this, it's so stupidly simple" tone. You don't understand Marketing, I don't understand Computers (Although I do probably more than they do)
Let me play devil's advocate with the two groups you mentioned. Say I'm in IT and come to marketing and say that I want to sell 100K IT widgets. I ask marketing for a plan to sell widgets. Market comes back with a price point of X and a recommendation of a TV, radio and adword media blitz. Instead of doing this, I decide to sell my widgets for X/2 and stick with magazine ads and billboards. I brag to my other IT friends that I did the marketing thing my own way and don't really need the marketing group. Finally, when sales are lackluster and I'm losing money on the products I do sell, I go back to the marketing group and read them the riot act for my failed media blitz. When they calmly explain to me that I didn't follow their recommendation and that's why my product failed, I become belligerent and try to get them fired.
Whether or not it is true, the reverse of my crafted example is what it seems like from an IT perspective. People are proud that they don't understand or know how to use their computers. From my perspective, IT provides a set of tools for business users to do their jobs. If the business users won't learn the proper way to use the tools provided to them, IT is not completely at fault.
Finally, as a hard-core network guy, I always offer the business users that complain about IT the chance to switch jobs. In a sink-or-swim competition, I bet I can do the business user's job better than they can do mine most of the time. Except for the lawyers. I'm sure I could get it, but I think I would slit my wrists before that time came.
-Continual access (within reason): If there are natural disasters, power outages, or personal emergencies, then certainly one can't reasonably expect 24-hr access. At almost any other time, however, I'd like to be able to turn a computer on at the workplace and not worry about downtime or have to call someone to fix the system (as my colleagues and I do now).
Your list is very reasonable. One thing that you may have not considered (or just didn't mention) is maintenance. As a long-time operations type, I can tell you that a 24x7x365 operation needs some maintenance windows. Users (at least the ones I dealt with) don't seem to get that we have to apply patches, upgrade equipment and other stuff. We realize that it is a burden to have to reboot once a month, but when we tell you about it 3 times before it happens and it happens every month at the same time you should not get mad at us because you had an unsaved 20 page document open on your desktop.
I chide, but I feel your pain. As a network guy, I was often hit by the desktop group doing maintenance during the same period as my maintenance. I think it comes down to poor communication in both directions a lot of times. The techies say something and the users don't listen or understand. The users talk back and the techies don't listen or understand. Both groups get pissed and little work gets done.
The main reason I prefer reading dead-tree anything over the same content online is reflected light vs. emitted light. When I read a book, the book isn't actively shooting photons into my eyes. I find that with a monitor, laptop or PDA, my eyes tire much too quickly for long periods of reading.
An additional factor would be comfort when reading. I prefer to recline when reading and my desktop doesn't really offer the ability to pick it up and lay down on the couch with a good novel. I could do this with my laptop, but I think it would be uncomfortable.
Here is a post I made in a different discussion that seems to relate to your book. The problem with banding and the like (from the employee's point of view) is that everything is generalized to the point where excellence cannot be rewarded. In the linked post my example is that the company would want one of the top %5 of DBA's in the country. Their hiring policy is that they pay in the 60th percentile of salaries for all positions. How do you get top 5% quality when you pay in the 60th percentile?
The other problem with said company which can be extrapolated to banding in general is that technical bands get capped much lower than management bands. In the case of the company discussed above, technical bands were capped at $110K with most positions starting at $70K. First-level managers started at $100K and were capped at $150K.
If you'd like more of my rantings for your book, reply with questions and an email and I'll drop you a line.
I haven't seen any reports post-PODS, but I think it addresses many of the problems reported with other movers.
My POD move went fairly well, but I can give some advice on POD moving.
You must have ample space for the delivery of the POD at both locations. This means space for the POD, plus the length of the delivery truck, plus room for the truck to maneuver, plus room for the lift system to move around the POD.
You must pack the POD so nothing moves. I followed the POD instructions and tied everything down with bungee cords and rope, but there was some sway room on the things I couldn't get 100% immobile. The problem isn't so much in transport as it is in the loading and unloading of the POD to/from the truck. The truck has a hydrolic lift system that raises/lowers the POD onto/off of the truck. When the guy lowered mine off the truck it dropeed about 2 feet for some reason. Several things broke because of that. You could actually hear some of the things inside shift when it dropped. If you can drop-kick something in the POD and it moves, you don't have it packed tight enough.
The inside of the POD is hot in the summer. It was about 95F outside when I was loading the POD. It was probably 110 F inside the POD.
Mileage on the POD is expensive. Make sure to get a firm quote on the cost before going that route. I had already decided to use a POD before I looked at the prices. It was cheaper than hiring movers and storing my stuff, but not by much.
As far as other cross-country moving advice, try to create a cost comparison including as many things as you can. I looked at moving from the Midwest to LA and I was shocked to see how much I would have to make after just the differnce in taxes and rent.
Slashdot Mirror
I was reading one awhile back that where in a strategy, you actually did at times split 10's....a generally stupid move, but, if done at certain times, sparingly, it would not mess with your edge badly, yet it would definitely throw off the casino watching you as a 'serious' counter. I'm sorry I don't have the book around to cite the source, but, it is out there.
You are probably thinking about Blackjack for Blood by Bryce Carlson. It's a really good read and a good introduction to a level II counting system.
The rest of this post isn't directed toward you cayenne8, but seemed like a good of a place as any to put it.
At the end of the day, card counting wasn't very profitable for the level of effort it takes. While playing, a good card counter needs to do the following things:
The last item is actually the hardest on the list. Vary your bet spread more than 4 to 1? You're a possible counter. Make an advanced play (split 9s against a dealer 9 with a high plus card deck)? You're a possible counter. Look focused? You're a possible counter. Have an average bet of over $100/hand? You're a possible counter. The list goes on.
Now assume you've mastered the above and can count perfectly. Lets look at the money involved. To ensure that you have a 99.5% chance of not being wiped out, you are going to need a stake of approximately 120 times your average bet (details are hazy, but that's about right). Let's say you are going for an average bet of $50/hand. You will need a $6000 stake. Using the number of $50/hand, let's see how much you can expect to win per hour. Let's take a really high number for hands per hour, 100. In my experience, you would have to be playing three or four hands at a time to achieve this, but lets go with it. Bryce says that the best counters in the world have a 1.6% advantage over the house. Using the numbers so far we have $50/hand * 100 hands/hour * 1.6% advantage which leads to a whopping $80/hour take for perfect play that still carries a 0.5% risk of losing your entire $6000 stake.
On top of the risk/reward issues outlined above, card counting made blackjack boring for me. Instead of being fun, it was a job, and a job that required a lot of outside work as well. Keeping your skills up to date with a level II system takes daily practice. If you are going to try to push the limits on bet spreads or average bets, you have to manage where you play and how long you play for with excruciating detail. It just wasn't worth it. Now I play roulette when I want to gamble. There's nothing you can do from preventing the house from taking its cut. Just throw some chips down and hope you end up a winner.
Aeron chairs come in three different sizes. You might have tried one that didn't fit you. I only found this out because I moved to a new job where everyone had Aerons and I hated mine at first. My desk came with a size A chair, and I needed a size C. Once I got fitted for the correct size chair, it was a lot better. There is a size chart on the right hand side of this page: http://www.hermanmiller.com/CDA/SSA/Product/0,,a10-c440-p8,00.html
If you really want to make a case to management, write out all the worst case scenarios for your management (I know that there should only be one WORST case scenario, but work with me here). If you can list the things that can go wrong, you might be able to help. I once worked in an environment where a developer wrote a query that locked a database for four hours until we killed it. One of the DBAs was able to re-write his query so that it completed in under 10 seconds. His access was then revoked.
Tell you boss how someone with read only access could affect the rest of the users, and you should be on the right track.
A long time ago, Slashdot was load balanced by an Arrowpoint CS-800. According to this write up, Slashdot has moved to LVS. What instigated the move? Did you feel that a fancy appliance-type load balancer was no longer needed? I didn't really care for the Arrowpoint switches or the Cisco CSS switches that they became, but I do like F5s and to a lesser extent the Foundry ServerIrons. Was the move away from appliance-based load balancers a money-saving idea, or just a lack of need?
As a great scholar once said, you can write your thesis on Gameboy if you can bullshit well enough.
I think someone needs to alert Jeremy Piven that he was just referred to as a great scholar. That's got to be the first time in history that's happened.
Every article about outsourcing or jobs in general has a quote along these lines. And they never qualify it with "for the rates they are willing to pay." Unless a company is doing some serious, way-out, pie-in-the-sky research, there are people that can and will do the job for the right price. Employers just don't want to pay it. If a company really wants a CCIE with 20 years experience in networking for a position in New York City, they just might have to pay a premium rate. I didn't take Econ 101, but it seems like simple supply and demand to me. How come limited supply increasing demand is good when companies want to sell products, but bad when they are hiring?
I actually read an article about the General Lee and how it survived those jumps. They used a different car for every jump. Even if the car looked OK after shooting a jump, it wasn't used again. It said they went through 260-ish Chargers over the life of the show.
I will tell you a related story. I was a consultant on an open-ended contract for 2.5 years. The company re-organized and I was given less than two weeks to either take a 30% pay cut or leave. I immediately started looking for other work, but stuck around for a couple of months while I found a new position. The one thing I did do was to calmly, rationally let everyone that was in a similar position know what had happened. After I left, they gave a whole group of consultants (about 20 people) the same ultimatum. Since they were prepared for the new offer from my story, all of them resigned, simultaneously. The company back-pedaled on the ultimatum and allowed those consultants to stay on under their current terms. It was still detrimental to the company, however, because 10 of the 20 left anyway.
Several of those 20 people thanked me for sharing my troubles because they were better prepared. The details of your experience may help someone else not make the same mistake later. It may even make the business involved change their practices.
Take your choice. I suspect a real Stratocaster would be a great chick magnet ... but it's a far cry from the thrill of finishing Crossroads on expert.
Actually, the Les Paul seems to win over more chicks than the Strat. I've got 2 Strats, a Tele, a Jaguar, 2 Mustangs, a Jag-stang and a Coronado II from Fender, but the one that wows them is the Les Paul.
Finally, there was the cost of living. According to the homefair.com salary calculator someone else posted, LA is 137% more expensive than where I ended up. To me, the coolness of working for one of the prominent websites wasn't enough to drastically change my standards of living.
When considering how to secure the ports, I think you have to find the balance between security and functionality. If you lock down each MAC to a specific port, how much time will you spend managing it? Whenever there is a connectivity problem, will you have to fight with the other groups assuring them that it isn't the network?
As a final thought, you generally get out of a network management system what you put into it. With a network as large as yours, there isn't a silver bullet to fix all of your problems. Whether you customize, roll your own or use vanilla off the shelf software, you need to figure out what makes the most sense for your business. Good luck. It sounds like you need it.
I think the prize money should go to those few people that can remember the name of that contest.
Is this somehow related to the First Annual Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence?
Is that a quote from somewhere or did you come up with it? If it is yours, do you mind if I quote you?
Unfortunately, the trend in most industries is to become the largest kid so that you can bully the rest of the kids. I don't condone their practices, but they aren't the only company that uses size or market share to its advantage. Until something changes, I think things are going to get worse before they get better across all industries.
Your principal did have a point. I quit fighting after I started taking martial arts. I learned enough joint locks, pressure points and defensive maneuvers that I don't strike people, I just disable them if I have to. Most of the time a bully will back down if you tell them what's going to happen and you have the power to back it up (which most of the time isn't the case with MS). If someone is confrontational with me, I give them the following speech:
"I will not fight you. You can hit me as many times as you want. If you get off balance, I will break the knee you put more weight on. If you throw a punch that doesn't connect, I will catch your wrist and break your elbow."
I've had one person mess with me after I started that. I actually felt bad for him because he was tanked, so I only kicked out his knee instead of going for damage. Most bullies back down when called out. As for the ones that don't, you're probably going to get your ass kicked anyway.
To help with your back problems, you could also try these two yoga positions (which are sort of the same thing):
The bridge
The wheel
The bridge requires a lot less strength than the wheel, but I feel the wheel does much more for the back. You can do an approximation of the wheel pose with one of those large workout balls. It helps my back a lot.
If you do start doing the wheel or bridge, I'd suggest alternating with something like the child pose just to even things out.
At that point, you can start looking at the types of network security work that are available. Possible areas include:
There are many others, but those seem the most "network" of the fields in the security arena.
Actually, that is exactly what the poster of the question is doing. In his case, he sounds justified if the problem with his IT department isn't budgetary as many other posters have suggested might be the case.
Users constantly second guess IT when it comes to the systems that they have little to no understanding of. Examples:
You don't think statements questioning IT's decision making and professional ability are the same as me stating that I (not all IT people, but me personally) think I could do a majority of non-IT worker's jobs better than they could do my job? Maybe the examples above aren't as brazen as my comment, but they are in the same vein. And as I stated previously, I've done it. If I find myself with another business user that thinks that my IT job can't be that hard I will do the switch again.
They're not. They're ludicrous impositions on users, with nothing complicated like risk management and contingency planning and fer godsakes, real actual training. You know, easy glib answers that most people throw out, magnified to an extreme.
You'd think the one-minute screensaver timeout would have tipped you off. I took longer than that to profread this post.
I was replying to this post. It is reasonable.
You think I was replying to this post. I realize he is pointing out the extreme cases of each of the original poster's points.
Wow, thank you for taking a completely crafted example, used only to make point, and distort it to another non-real-world business. That completely absolves you of having to answer any points I made. Let me re-phrase my example to fit your business model.
I work in the IT department for a company. I am underfunded, but have come up with a plan to offer premium support and infrastructure services to groups that have the budget to pay for them. I go to marketing to ask for a plan on how to sell these services. Marketing tells me that I should approach the head of each department and offer the new premium services for X dollars. Instead, I decide that I will just tell random people in the hall that they can get better support and systems for X/2 dollars. The new project fails because not enough groups bought into it and I didn't get enough money from them to provide said services. I go back to marketing and they calmly explain to me that the project failed because I didn't follow their advice. I behave the exact same way as I did in the previous example, reading them the riot act and trying to get them fired.
How is this different than the users I described in my first post?
I did switch jobs; I moved out of working IT for the largest Telco in Canada and went to work for a financial institution in their marketing department; and oh boy did it open my eyes to the arrogance of IT folk in general, which judging from your last paragraph isn't necessarily incorrect.
First of all, I qualified it with most of the time. And yeah, I'm arrogant, but I'm also really good at what I do. I've tried the switch before, and it wasn't close. You as a former IT person that now does Marketing for a living could very well best me in a so called job-switch competition. How many of your marketing cohorts that never worked in IT could? How is the arrogance of IT any worse than the ignorance of users that refuse to learn how to use the tools they need to do their jobs?
And since you were the first to resort to Ad Hominem attacks, how many moose did you have to uplink when you worked for the Canadian Telco?
I agree with you. With the submitter talking about not having enough network storage or backups at all, I posted in the mindset that he/she wouldn't be able to afford the luxury of redundant systems. I should have clarified when a posted.
Let me play devil's advocate with the two groups you mentioned. Say I'm in IT and come to marketing and say that I want to sell 100K IT widgets. I ask marketing for a plan to sell widgets. Market comes back with a price point of X and a recommendation of a TV, radio and adword media blitz. Instead of doing this, I decide to sell my widgets for X/2 and stick with magazine ads and billboards. I brag to my other IT friends that I did the marketing thing my own way and don't really need the marketing group. Finally, when sales are lackluster and I'm losing money on the products I do sell, I go back to the marketing group and read them the riot act for my failed media blitz. When they calmly explain to me that I didn't follow their recommendation and that's why my product failed, I become belligerent and try to get them fired.
Whether or not it is true, the reverse of my crafted example is what it seems like from an IT perspective. People are proud that they don't understand or know how to use their computers. From my perspective, IT provides a set of tools for business users to do their jobs. If the business users won't learn the proper way to use the tools provided to them, IT is not completely at fault.
Finally, as a hard-core network guy, I always offer the business users that complain about IT the chance to switch jobs. In a sink-or-swim competition, I bet I can do the business user's job better than they can do mine most of the time. Except for the lawyers. I'm sure I could get it, but I think I would slit my wrists before that time came.
Your list is very reasonable. One thing that you may have not considered (or just didn't mention) is maintenance. As a long-time operations type, I can tell you that a 24x7x365 operation needs some maintenance windows. Users (at least the ones I dealt with) don't seem to get that we have to apply patches, upgrade equipment and other stuff. We realize that it is a burden to have to reboot once a month, but when we tell you about it 3 times before it happens and it happens every month at the same time you should not get mad at us because you had an unsaved 20 page document open on your desktop.
I chide, but I feel your pain. As a network guy, I was often hit by the desktop group doing maintenance during the same period as my maintenance. I think it comes down to poor communication in both directions a lot of times. The techies say something and the users don't listen or understand. The users talk back and the techies don't listen or understand. Both groups get pissed and little work gets done.
An additional factor would be comfort when reading. I prefer to recline when reading and my desktop doesn't really offer the ability to pick it up and lay down on the couch with a good novel. I could do this with my laptop, but I think it would be uncomfortable.
The other problem with said company which can be extrapolated to banding in general is that technical bands get capped much lower than management bands. In the case of the company discussed above, technical bands were capped at $110K with most positions starting at $70K. First-level managers started at $100K and were capped at $150K.
If you'd like more of my rantings for your book, reply with questions and an email and I'll drop you a line.
My POD move went fairly well, but I can give some advice on POD moving.
As far as other cross-country moving advice, try to create a cost comparison including as many things as you can. I looked at moving from the Midwest to LA and I was shocked to see how much I would have to make after just the differnce in taxes and rent.