In my experience, the telecommuting jobs that you're actually going to want either aren't going to advertise that they're telecommuting, or it's going to be hidden in the text/blurb about the position and MAY not be searchable./shrugs.
In my specific case, I was hired to telecommute. Of the team I'm on, I think only a handful of people actually work in one of our offices (generally our HQ in Gaithersburg, MD). The vast majority of my group telecommutes, including my manager (although he's traveling 30 weeks out of the year is seems like...)
As for how I got into it - I got lucky. I found the position on Monster, and after I blew my interview with Google (I own up to this one - I fucked it up, badly. Should have let them reschedule it after they called an hour late and I ended up taking a nap while I waited. Doing an interview when groggy is never, -ever- advisable) I pursued it full bore, especially after I found out it was a telecommuting gig. There actually ARE some honest, and good, headhunters out there, and the one managing recruitment for my current employer are in that category. I got lucky. Hell, I'm probably one of the few absolute successes that Monster can claim - every (and I mean EVERY) professional position I've had since I dropped out of College has come from -selectively- applying to positions on Monster.
The one thing I do hate about Monster is that some of the potential employers can take too long getting back - took me about a month of interviewing and such for the current job, and I had people finally replying from resumes I sent in 3-6 months earlier for jobs I actually had wanted MORE (start-up type environment outside of Boston, specifically, for one of them) but could no longer take.
Amen. I've been telecommuting full time for most of this year, and while I most certainly miss the socialization that goes on in an office setting, I don't miss the hour long commute, and all the negatives that goes along with getting to/from an office.
Hell, I've been explicitly told I can move pretty much anywhere I want, provided the company has a business license there (ie. I could move to England if I were feeling up to it, or I could move to pretty much any state east of the Mississippi).
Telecommuting in general should be the norm, not the exception. Lord knows it would help decrease automotive emissions...
I personally think companies in very expensive areas with a tight technical labour market are crazy for struggling to hire locally.
Exactly.
For example, Blizzard (yes, THAT Blizzard) has been looking to hire Unix SysAdmins for their WoW and Web systems for close to a freaking year now. They're either not getting many bites, or the bites they're getting are from non-local people, because the positions aren't getting filled.
I will not move to CA unless the salary is equivalent to what I'm getting now, adjusted for the cost of living, and specifically enough to allow for me to purchase a similar home as I currently own (which I purchased at the ripe old age of 24). The odds of me getting paid a quarter million a year by ANYONE to be a SysAdmin is pretty laughable.
The alternative, then, is to have local server techs and come to the realization that you DON'T need your server sysadmins on site. Ever. Even for new OS installs (it's called standardization for a reason, and you can build new images quite easily if you set up a Xen box somewhere for development and testing of the new OS images) hardware failures (you -did- design redundancy in, right?), etc. Hell, a good SA is going to spend most of his time reading tech docs and journals looking for ways to further automate his infrastructure. Once it's mostly hands free, he's either going to be looking for a new job out of boredom or necessity (ie. he got laid off because he wasn't "needed" anymore), or he's gonna sit pat and play WoW all day because the network is now taking care of itself.
Honestly, you're probably more cut out for the job because you DON'T want it and think you're singularly unqualified than the jackasses that have been about nothing but power, law and politics their entire adult lives (which would be MOST of the jackholes in Congress).
Seriously. As the other respondent stated - Write yourself in. Get your friends to write you in. Hell, get everyone who you can contact in the next week to write you in for every fucking office that they want to get an incumbent out of. Failing that, to at least write THEMSELVES in.
In that case, you're looking at a full scale mutiny, because the family would already have to be in custody for that to be the case.
Start threatening the families of the people flying your nuclear bombers sometime. Those are the folks who joined the military out of duty to country, and they -will- refuse to follow improper orders, especially coming through a corrupted chain of command.
How many of the pissed off Republicans are in positions that actually matter within the party power structure?
Very, very few, if any.
I completely agree that, as a party, the Republicans are heavily divided on things at the moment, unfortunately, they are -STILL- going to vote for the same scoundrels that are currently in office, because they have to be better than the alternative. (Such flawed logic is part of WHY we're in this situation to begin with)
The difference between the military shooting Iraqis versus them shooting Americans is that the Iraqis AREN'T US.
Think about that for a second. The Iraqis/Arabs are people that we have been taught are borderline evil for at least 20 years now, and many Americans harbor general resentment against Arabs in general for a variety of reasons.
The same is NOT true of how we feel about our fellow Americans. Multiple Case-Western type incidents, and the general knowledge that the current Iraq policy is being enforced on Americans WILL lead to a second Civil War. One far, far more bloody in terms of both actual body count and percentage of the population lost than has ever been seen before, but one that would likely result in a far better country and world than what wer are living in now.
Actually, the odds of a home defense being used in an accident is LESS likely than the injured family member being in a car accident during any given time period.
Quote : Children from 5 to 14 years old are three times as likely to die from bicycle accidents as from gun accidents. They also are 14.5% more likely to die from car accidents and five times as likely to die from drowning or fire.
Now then, care to spout off on some more of the junk, bullshit "science" that the anti-gun jerk offs have been spouting for the last thirty years?
Multiple weapons owned by a single person increases both his, and his family's, survivability. Not only can he arm himself and EVERY person able to fire a weapon in his household, he likely has at least one extra weapon so a non-combat family member can be reloading while everyone is continually firing.
This tactic was used to great effect during many past wars, including the US Civil War and the US Revolutionary War.
Ironically, that's exactly what's being used against our military in Iraq and Afghanistan. Throw in IEDs and the very, very occasional shoulder fired missile, and you get a stalemate situation.
Asking American troops to fire on American citizens? I could see a couple Case Western-type incidents occurring before whole-sale armed desertion begins to occur. In all branches. Having a lot of active and former military peeps in my family, most of them would very, VERY serious consider an order to fire on American Citizens to be improper, and would ignore it.
If the Federal government, today, were to actually limit itself according to the amendments currently enacted, the Federal government would be, at minimum, HALF the current size.
Why?
Because every single one of our entitlement programs (Social Security, Medicare and Welfare) aren't legalized by it. The FBI, DEA and BATF would be arguable, as there is no provision for federal police forces (of which type all three are).
The powers of the federal government are limited to what is -specifically- stated in the Constitution. Period. There has been an excessive use of the Commerce clause to expand the reach of the Federal government into areas which are covered explicitly by the Ninth and Tenth amendments (both of which have been almost explicitly ignored since the Civil War).
Sadly, I believe that only application of the Second Amendment and a military coup leading to a reformation of the government under the Constitution, as written, will solve the current problems. The fuckers -NEED- to fear the populace, it's unfortunate that most Americans are as uneducated about what their rights and responsibilities with respect to governance are.
It's one of the core reasons that, while I abhor term limits in principle, I support them in practice.
It might be one of the least stealthy processes on the planet, but it's horribly broken in that, due to the volume (both in number and number of lines) of bills passed each year, that it is impossible for all legislators to actually read the legislation brought before them.
Secondly : Bush is abnormal in that he has singularly refused to veto ANYTHING (ok, with ONE exception). Look at the numbers : Clinton issued 37 in two terms. GHWB issued 44 in ONE term. Reagan issued 78 in his two terms.
That's the last 26 years worth of presidents. GWB has issued -one- veto on 1 and a half terms. The last time a president issued so few vetoes was Garfield, and he was assassinated 8 months into his term (ok - he was actually shot about 6 months into the term, and died 2ish months later). Garfield was President in 1881, so it's been 125 years.
Prior to Garfield, Taylor and Fillmore BOTH failed to issue a single veto. Both, it should be noted, held the office within a decade of the Civil War, so there was an intense amount of appeasement being made towards both Southern and Northern interests. It comes as no surprise. (Note: Taylor died from a food-borne illness in 1850 allowing Fillmore to assume the office).
In general, vetoes were uncommon prior to 1860 (Abraham Lincoln's election to the Presidency). The Congress had a tendency to not over govern, and to actually apply their common sense. Something which has been increasingly uncommon since 1890 (Garfield vetoed 414 bills in his single term of office, FDR 616 in his 4 terms, and Truman followed FDR up with 250 - these three presidents combing for just under half of all vetoes issued, ever).
What we -need- is a president willing to follow all three's example and force Congress to pass legislation that is actually -necessary-, and not what is politically expedient. A President that vetoed entire bills because of a single Rider added would quite a powerful force to be reckoned with. Shutting down the Federal Government for a year or two would be interesting, to say the least:D
In a past life working at a (still profitable) dot-com we didn't pay for support either. Tomcat, RedHat, Apache, etc.
However, there's a BIG difference between a webhosting-type services company that MIGHT promise 2 9's and a transaction processing company who promises 4 9's and where downtime costs/losses are measured in the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars per hour. Any business where reliable systems are a critical component are going to be willing to pay for that reliability, be it in HA hardware solutions, HA software solutions, or more likely, a combination of the two.
Sometimes, you really don't have a choice - you need high end support because you need someone to blame when the shit hits the fan. You need someone who will dedicate development time to alter their product to meet your specific needs. Out of the box w/basic configuration? Sure, pay the least you can. Throw in semi-exotic hardware and the need to meet high-end reliability targets, and support costs are literally the least of your concerns.
It's not what you want. It's what you need to properly cover your ass and support the business.
My employer is going RH (and possibly SuSE) and we're saving something like 7 figures in licensing and hardware support contracts by dumping the majority of our HP and Sun systems for bladeframes running RHEL.
Even with that, we're still paying a crapload, but the savings are immense when compared to RH's "real" competition. Personally, I suspect that RH would be nore than happy to lose what little of the workstation market that they have so they can rake in more money in server licenses...
Are probably my top three. After that, pretty much the entire rest of the cabinet level positions, including the Department of Homeland (in)Security. Easily 75% of the current executive level government positions are either extra-constitutional or are outright unconstitutional.
Slashdot Mirror
In my experience, the telecommuting jobs that you're actually going to want either aren't going to advertise that they're telecommuting, or it's going to be hidden in the text/blurb about the position and MAY not be searchable. /shrugs.
Dammit. NOW I have a reason to buy a card with TVOut.
:D
omygawd....
And a reason to buy the $3000 TVs I've been looking at
In my specific case, I was hired to telecommute. Of the team I'm on, I think only a handful of people actually work in one of our offices (generally our HQ in Gaithersburg, MD).
The vast majority of my group telecommutes, including my manager (although he's traveling 30 weeks out of the year is seems like...)
As for how I got into it - I got lucky. I found the position on Monster, and after I blew my interview with Google (I own up to this one - I fucked it up, badly. Should have let them reschedule it after they called an hour late and I ended up taking a nap while I waited. Doing an interview when groggy is never, -ever- advisable) I pursued it full bore, especially after I found out it was a telecommuting gig. There actually ARE some honest, and good, headhunters out there, and the one managing recruitment for my current employer are in that category. I got lucky. Hell, I'm probably one of the few absolute successes that Monster can claim - every (and I mean EVERY) professional position I've had since I dropped out of College has come from -selectively- applying to positions on Monster.
The one thing I do hate about Monster is that some of the potential employers can take too long getting back - took me about a month of interviewing and such for the current job, and I had people finally replying from resumes I sent in 3-6 months earlier for jobs I actually had wanted MORE (start-up type environment outside of Boston, specifically, for one of them) but could no longer take.
Amen.
I've been telecommuting full time for most of this year, and while I most certainly miss the socialization that goes on in an office setting, I don't miss the hour long commute, and all the negatives that goes along with getting to/from an office.
Hell, I've been explicitly told I can move pretty much anywhere I want, provided the company has a business license there (ie. I could move to England if I were feeling up to it, or I could move to pretty much any state east of the Mississippi).
Telecommuting in general should be the norm, not the exception. Lord knows it would help decrease automotive emissions...
Exactly.
For example, Blizzard (yes, THAT Blizzard) has been looking to hire Unix SysAdmins for their WoW and Web systems for close to a freaking year now. They're either not getting many bites, or the bites they're getting are from non-local people, because the positions aren't getting filled.
I will not move to CA unless the salary is equivalent to what I'm getting now, adjusted for the cost of living, and specifically enough to allow for me to purchase a similar home as I currently own (which I purchased at the ripe old age of 24). The odds of me getting paid a quarter million a year by ANYONE to be a SysAdmin is pretty laughable.
The alternative, then, is to have local server techs and come to the realization that you DON'T need your server sysadmins on site. Ever. Even for new OS installs (it's called standardization for a reason, and you can build new images quite easily if you set up a Xen box somewhere for development and testing of the new OS images) hardware failures (you -did- design redundancy in, right?), etc. Hell, a good SA is going to spend most of his time reading tech docs and journals looking for ways to further automate his infrastructure. Once it's mostly hands free, he's either going to be looking for a new job out of boredom or necessity (ie. he got laid off because he wasn't "needed" anymore), or he's gonna sit pat and play WoW all day because the network is now taking care of itself.
Systems work
Honestly, you're probably more cut out for the job because you DON'T want it and think you're singularly unqualified than the jackasses that have been about nothing but power, law and politics their entire adult lives (which would be MOST of the jackholes in Congress).
Seriously.
As the other respondent stated - Write yourself in. Get your friends to write you in.
Hell, get everyone who you can contact in the next week to write you in for every fucking office that they want to get an incumbent out of. Failing that, to at least write THEMSELVES in.
Hell, it's what I'm doing.
In that case, you're looking at a full scale mutiny, because the family would already have to be in custody for that to be the case.
Start threatening the families of the people flying your nuclear bombers sometime. Those are the folks who joined the military out of duty to country, and they -will- refuse to follow improper orders, especially coming through a corrupted chain of command.
How many of the pissed off Republicans are in positions that actually matter within the party power structure?
Very, very few, if any.
I completely agree that, as a party, the Republicans are heavily divided on things at the moment, unfortunately, they are -STILL- going to vote for the same scoundrels that are currently in office, because they have to be better than the alternative.
(Such flawed logic is part of WHY we're in this situation to begin with)
The difference between the military shooting Iraqis versus them shooting Americans is that the Iraqis AREN'T US.
Think about that for a second. The Iraqis/Arabs are people that we have been taught are borderline evil for at least 20 years now, and many Americans harbor general resentment against Arabs in general for a variety of reasons.
The same is NOT true of how we feel about our fellow Americans. Multiple Case-Western type incidents, and the general knowledge that the current Iraq policy is being enforced on Americans WILL lead to a second Civil War. One far, far more bloody in terms of both actual body count and percentage of the population lost than has ever been seen before, but one that would likely result in a far better country and world than what wer are living in now.
Actually, the odds of a home defense being used in an accident is LESS likely than the injured family member being in a car accident during any given time period.
Quote :
Children from 5 to 14 years old are three times as likely to die from bicycle accidents as from gun accidents. They also are 14.5% more likely to die from car accidents and five times as likely to die from drowning or fire.
Now then, care to spout off on some more of the junk, bullshit "science" that the anti-gun jerk offs have been spouting for the last thirty years?
Boy, you anti-gun jerk-offs are really dumb.
Multiple weapons owned by a single person increases both his, and his family's, survivability. Not only can he arm himself and EVERY person able to fire a weapon in his household, he likely has at least one extra weapon so a non-combat family member can be reloading while everyone is continually firing.
This tactic was used to great effect during many past wars, including the US Civil War and the US Revolutionary War.
Ironically, that's exactly what's being used against our military in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Throw in IEDs and the very, very occasional shoulder fired missile, and you get a stalemate situation.
Asking American troops to fire on American citizens? I could see a couple Case Western-type incidents occurring before whole-sale armed desertion begins to occur. In all branches. Having a lot of active and former military peeps in my family, most of them would very, VERY serious consider an order to fire on American Citizens to be improper, and would ignore it.
How much you want for one of the Garands? They easily my favorite firearm of all time (although I'm also fond of the M16A1...)
If the Federal government, today, were to actually limit itself according to the amendments currently enacted, the Federal government would be, at minimum, HALF the current size.
Why?
Because every single one of our entitlement programs (Social Security, Medicare and Welfare) aren't legalized by it. The FBI, DEA and BATF would be arguable, as there is no provision for federal police forces (of which type all three are).
The powers of the federal government are limited to what is -specifically- stated in the Constitution. Period. There has been an excessive use of the Commerce clause to expand the reach of the Federal government into areas which are covered explicitly by the Ninth and Tenth amendments (both of which have been almost explicitly ignored since the Civil War).
Sadly, I believe that only application of the Second Amendment and a military coup leading to a reformation of the government under the Constitution, as written, will solve the current problems. The fuckers -NEED- to fear the populace, it's unfortunate that most Americans are as uneducated about what their rights and responsibilities with respect to governance are.
It's one of the core reasons that, while I abhor term limits in principle, I support them in practice.
It might be one of the least stealthy processes on the planet, but it's horribly broken in that, due to the volume (both in number and number of lines) of bills passed each year, that it is impossible for all legislators to actually read the legislation brought before them.
:D
Secondly : Bush is abnormal in that he has singularly refused to veto ANYTHING (ok, with ONE exception). Look at the numbers :
Clinton issued 37 in two terms.
GHWB issued 44 in ONE term.
Reagan issued 78 in his two terms.
That's the last 26 years worth of presidents. GWB has issued -one- veto on 1 and a half terms. The last time a president issued so few vetoes was Garfield, and he was assassinated 8 months into his term (ok - he was actually shot about 6 months into the term, and died 2ish months later). Garfield was President in 1881, so it's been 125 years.
Prior to Garfield, Taylor and Fillmore BOTH failed to issue a single veto. Both, it should be noted, held the office within a decade of the Civil War, so there was an intense amount of appeasement being made towards both Southern and Northern interests. It comes as no surprise. (Note: Taylor died from a food-borne illness in 1850 allowing Fillmore to assume the office).
In general, vetoes were uncommon prior to 1860 (Abraham Lincoln's election to the Presidency). The Congress had a tendency to not over govern, and to actually apply their common sense. Something which has been increasingly uncommon since 1890 (Garfield vetoed 414 bills in his single term of office, FDR 616 in his 4 terms, and Truman followed FDR up with 250 - these three presidents combing for just under half of all vetoes issued, ever).
What we -need- is a president willing to follow all three's example and force Congress to pass legislation that is actually -necessary-, and not what is politically expedient. A President that vetoed entire bills because of a single Rider added would quite a powerful force to be reckoned with. Shutting down the Federal Government for a year or two would be interesting, to say the least
One wonders just how many of the leftist gun grabbers are actually going to have this epiphany.
Unfortunately, the gun grabbers on the right side of the aisle are laughing gleefully because it hasn't happened.
Hence why I use a CRT for most of my daily computer use, and try to avoid the damned LCD panel I have to use on the laptop.
Blah.
Not really, because we're also paying hardware support for the bladeframes that we're using.
A cost which is a _FRACTION_ of what we are paying for our Sun and HP rigs.
In a past life working at a (still profitable) dot-com we didn't pay for support either.
Tomcat, RedHat, Apache, etc.
However, there's a BIG difference between a webhosting-type services company that MIGHT promise 2 9's and a transaction processing company who promises 4 9's and where downtime costs/losses are measured in the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars per hour.
Any business where reliable systems are a critical component are going to be willing to pay for that reliability, be it in HA hardware solutions, HA software solutions, or more likely, a combination of the two.
Sometimes, you really don't have a choice - you need high end support because you need someone to blame when the shit hits the fan. You need someone who will dedicate development time to alter their product to meet your specific needs. Out of the box w/basic configuration? Sure, pay the least you can. Throw in semi-exotic hardware and the need to meet high-end reliability targets, and support costs are literally the least of your concerns.
It's not what you want. It's what you need to properly cover your ass and support the business.
Exactly.
My employer is going RH (and possibly SuSE) and we're saving something like 7 figures in licensing and hardware support contracts by dumping the majority of our HP and Sun systems for bladeframes running RHEL.
Even with that, we're still paying a crapload, but the savings are immense when compared to RH's "real" competition. Personally, I suspect that RH would be nore than happy to lose what little of the workstation market that they have so they can rake in more money in server licenses...
I enjoyed the bullshit classes.
They were a nice respite while I digested the harder stuff.
Plus, an "easy" semester here and there allowed for rampant partying. I -still- don't remember much of Spring 1995...
And since most people aren't going to get the reference.
Ray Bradbury.
Fahrenheit 451
If you haven't read it, go out and read it. Now.
Only 3?
IRS
FBI
BATF
Are probably my top three. After that, pretty much the entire rest of the cabinet level positions, including the Department of Homeland (in)Security. Easily 75% of the current executive level government positions are either extra-constitutional or are outright unconstitutional.
Uuuh, actually, no. In this case, you're wrong.
I'm pretty rusty, but given access to my documentation library I could have probably hacked something up to handle just GET/HEAD in 2 or 3 hours.
Sockets really aren't that hard, people...