That's basically my feeling on it also, and I'm mid-40's. Too many people stagnate naturally, or end up (or stay too long) in jobs that don't provide any avenue for technical growth. I built my skills on a foundation of solid Unix/Linux admin at financial places, but have also done 4 startups, picked up solid Network skills along the way, etc.
The biggest problem I've seen is young jocks wanting to use "buzzword technology" just for the sake of using them, even if it adds complexity for no gain, and then seasoned people get viewed as "old school" for using tried-and-true tech.
Nobody spends 10+ years as a researcher to become a cable guy.
If you consider a CCIE a "cable guy", then you probably don't have a clue what a CCIE is.
We are talking about someone with a PhD here, which basically proves he can persevere. That is the most fundamental requirement of anyone who endeavors to obtain a CCIE.
The CCIE would guarantee years of job security at a very high wage. The PhD... not so much. I was just thinking he may actually want to pay off those student loans before age 65.
This is coming from someone who has been in IT for 20 years, very successfully, and has never taken any computer courses...
Get a freaking skill!!! The OP admits that the subject of the PhD is not applicable to really anything in the world. You might as well have spent 6 years of your life under a rock, because you are now the utmost expert at that tiny, inapplicable area.
Want cash and job security up the wahoo? Go pick up a CCNA book, and $500 of used Cisco gear on eBay. Get CCNA and a network admin job at a small, growing company who can't afford to pay you more than $50,000. Proceed to get your CCNP. Invest another $10,000 and two years and get CCIE. Go to "whatever the hell company you want" and make $120k+ and never worry about unemployment again.
I mean seriously. There is no down side to going from not hearing to hearing except for having to listen to contemporary "music".
How is this horse shit actually modded up?
If you want to know what is killing Deaf culture, look no further than everyone who can hear and refuses to make any accommodations for us Deaf. So we run in droves to get CI (I just got mine 6 weeks ago) so that we don't become isolated and unemployable!
The standard list of ways we "oppress" hearing people with our "special needs":
1. Captions are so annoying. Who cares if we can't understand movies/tv/youtube/netflix as long as YOU don't have to be annoyed 2. People that know I'm Deaf still call me on the phone. are... you... fucking... stupid? 3. People that know I'm Deaf will walk over to my desk and talk to me, in an office where everyone is on company IM server all day long. are... you... that... stupid? 4. I'm going to guess that 95% of americans know the phrase No Habla Ingles. Maybe 10% know the sign for Deaf 5. I talk fine, but if I answer someone verbally, they assume I can hear them speak even though I said I'm Deaf. is it really possible to be this stupid???
I take mild offense to the OP insinuating that Napster "fell". It didn't fall, it was torn down by the claws of the RIAA who didn't have the foresight to even recognize this would be the future of media distribution.
I use zScaler Cloud for my work proxy, and I choose to have them decrypt all traffic using their CA cert that we have to install on all user laptops. This is critical because they are using heuristics to detect activity types (e.g. don't rely on a "list" of anonymizers, detect that anonymizing is being done and block it). Even if they are sitting at home, the proxy is decrypting all their activity. And the analytics are amazing.
The big difference is between this and the OP, though, is that my company owns these laptops. I display banners and let it be known that you have zero expectation of privacy. Hell, I use my personal iPad for personal browsing at work so as not to be tracked.
I went in there to buy some lame battery (CR123 or whatever) and ended up buying like a 30 pack online for cheaper than their ONE battery. Same deal with cables, electrical components, etc.
Oh gee, you started selling Arduino? At the size of Radio Shack, why the fuck can't they get within every $10 of the price of the board online? FAIL...
Guy took a bunch of shit from my car, I found him, gave all his info to the cops, and he's serving an 8-year term. The cop seemed amazed at the amount of personal info I gave him on this guy... I'm like "dude, any 20-year unix hacker can be a scary fuck on the Interwebs"
First, I don't see why Ayn is expected to not create fantastical characters in a work of fiction. Nobody would read it if it were just a mirror image of society.
Next, the book was not meant to be just a story that entertains. She felt very strongly about certain ideals since she transitioned from Communism to Capitalism, and she writes at the very edge of the continuum. You read it, you analyze it, you adopt the ideals that make sense to you and reject those that don't. Not sure why this concept is so foreign nowadays. I don't share her atheism, but I certainly share her ideals on capitalism.
I found the book very entertaining and highly thought-provoking. It's the only book I have read since university where I have taken copious notes whilst reading it.
I completely agree. I'm in a SaaS startup for 5 years now. My boss can easily tell when I am not producing work, and I can easily tell when my subordinates are not producing work.
As for the 1 month thing, that's just silly. If you cannot tell within 1 month if someone is worth keeping, the problem is you.
Yeah, no sure what's so hard about this. We recently moved from SVN to Git (all private) and I grabbed a copy of Git and set it up within about 20 minutes using the docs having never used or setup Git before. I needed help from my developers to port all their code form SVN to Git, but that's not rocket science either.
There's little point in not going private if you don't plan to share your code with the world (we sure as hell won't be sharing our closed-source, for-profit software anytime soon).
Yeah, great example. Even at 20 years doing Unix, I feel like I am just hitting my stride. I'm in the top 2-3 percentile IQ and have been extremely diligent about self-training my entire career. I started really learning the Cisco world 4 years ago and that also seems like a bottomless pit of knowledge that could keep any normal person busy for 2-3 decades.
Above all, however, one of the greatest skills an admin can have IMHO is analytical troubleshooting, and time definitely helps with that.
It also depends a whole lot on the area of IT. This article very mistakenly refers to "IT" and then makes a generalization that applies only to a subset of IT workers.
I can see where programmers may actually be better when fresher, but I have spent the last 20 years as a unix and network administrator, and neglecting a truly prodigious few, these areas are impossible to master without many years of experience. At the same time, I can say that many 10+ year admins out there have not invested in their own self-training and are every bit as worthless as a 20 year-old admin.
We deafies want to change our batteries every week or more, not every day. Have you seen the tiny size of current batteries? You must squeeze every last bit of efficiency out of the hardware possible.
The receivers (aka speakers that go in the ear) must be versatile enough to produce extremely loud sounds across the range of at least 500Hz --> 4KHz with no perceptible distortion. Distortion is the #1 enemy of deafies, and means the difference between "how are you today sir?" and "ajksdhv sdjkch asdkjhvkkf sjk?"
Oh, did I mention the receivers that must be as awesome as above, must also be able to survive something like 18,000 hours in a moist environment? (4 years, 12 hours a day)
The OS and DSP cannot even introduce milliseconds of delay while deciding what is "noise" to be filtered, what is "too loud" and should be compressed, and what was really soft but important enough to amplify even more than normal.
I don't like paying thousands of dollars for my aids, but neither do I believe they can sell for $400.
That's changing ever-so-slightly, especially for Cochlear implants, because we the deafies are now arguing that *not* covering them is plain and simple discrimination.
IMHO the government should pay for new hearing aids for me, once every 4 years. Before you pass out, let me explain: If I do not have hearing aids, I am deaf enough I cannot hear voices at all, and thus cannot work. I can collect about $2800/mo in SSDI right now if I cannot work. So balance that cost against the cost of new hearing ids every 4 years. AND as an added bonus, you bet your ass the Government would not be paying $3000/aid.
Atlas Shrugged is certainly the most profound book I have ever read.
As far as Technology books:
I learned to program from the Llama book (Learning Perl) and the Camel book (Programming Perl) is certainly my greatest weapon today as a sysadmin. Mastering Regular Expressions gave me knowledge that's crucial and most people in tech don't have!
All I've got to say it, I hope this fucker gets some royal treatment by our Government. Maybe this is one of those perfect times to throw the Patriot Act at some douchebag.
Under normal circumstances, my tone is completely opposite, but that's when groups deface, humiliate, take-down, etc sites that are well deserving of public shame (yeah we all know who they are, I won't even list).
But this pricks (or more likely these pricks) are screwing with the masses, making our day(s) hell, and taking dollars out of our pockets. If you have beef with GoDaddy, but all means, hack their shit, post pics of their execs fucking dogs, whatever. Don't fuck with every random person in the nation/world that needs to keep a website up.
And yes, there's something to be said for showing a gaping security hole, especially if nobody listened in private forum, but wtf it's been 7 hours.
So, AnonymousOwn3r, be glad I don't know you. I would personally drop your ass off at the front gates of Gitmo.
Slashdot Mirror
That's basically my feeling on it also, and I'm mid-40's. Too many people stagnate naturally, or end up (or stay too long) in jobs that don't provide any avenue for technical growth. I built my skills on a foundation of solid Unix/Linux admin at financial places, but have also done 4 startups, picked up solid Network skills along the way, etc.
The biggest problem I've seen is young jocks wanting to use "buzzword technology" just for the sake of using them, even if it adds complexity for no gain, and then seasoned people get viewed as "old school" for using tried-and-true tech.
I was on the NASA Genesis price team. Only a few hundred million lost on that one when it crashed into Earth...
Nobody spends 10+ years as a researcher to become a cable guy.
If you consider a CCIE a "cable guy", then you probably don't have a clue what a CCIE is.
We are talking about someone with a PhD here, which basically proves he can persevere. That is the most fundamental requirement of anyone who endeavors to obtain a CCIE.
The CCIE would guarantee years of job security at a very high wage. The PhD... not so much. I was just thinking he may actually want to pay off those student loans before age 65.
This is coming from someone who has been in IT for 20 years, very successfully, and has never taken any computer courses...
Get a freaking skill!!! The OP admits that the subject of the PhD is not applicable to really anything in the world. You might as well have spent 6 years of your life under a rock, because you are now the utmost expert at that tiny, inapplicable area.
Want cash and job security up the wahoo? Go pick up a CCNA book, and $500 of used Cisco gear on eBay. Get CCNA and a network admin job at a small, growing company who can't afford to pay you more than $50,000. Proceed to get your CCNP. Invest another $10,000 and two years and get CCIE. Go to "whatever the hell company you want" and make $120k+ and never worry about unemployment again.
I mean seriously. There is no down side to going from not hearing to hearing except for having to listen to contemporary "music".
How is this horse shit actually modded up?
If you want to know what is killing Deaf culture, look no further than everyone who can hear and refuses to make any accommodations for us Deaf. So we run in droves to get CI (I just got mine 6 weeks ago) so that we don't become isolated and unemployable!
The standard list of ways we "oppress" hearing people with our "special needs":
1. Captions are so annoying. Who cares if we can't understand movies/tv/youtube/netflix as long as YOU don't have to be annoyed
2. People that know I'm Deaf still call me on the phone. are... you... fucking... stupid?
3. People that know I'm Deaf will walk over to my desk and talk to me, in an office where everyone is on company IM server all day long. are... you... that... stupid?
4. I'm going to guess that 95% of americans know the phrase No Habla Ingles. Maybe 10% know the sign for Deaf
5. I talk fine, but if I answer someone verbally, they assume I can hear them speak even though I said I'm Deaf. is it really possible to be this stupid???
I take mild offense to the OP insinuating that Napster "fell". It didn't fall, it was torn down by the claws of the RIAA who didn't have the foresight to even recognize this would be the future of media distribution.
We do expressly forbid personal use. Of course we don't really care, but you have to say it.
I use zScaler Cloud for my work proxy, and I choose to have them decrypt all traffic using their CA cert that we have to install on all user laptops. This is critical because they are using heuristics to detect activity types (e.g. don't rely on a "list" of anonymizers, detect that anonymizing is being done and block it). Even if they are sitting at home, the proxy is decrypting all their activity. And the analytics are amazing.
The big difference is between this and the OP, though, is that my company owns these laptops. I display banners and let it be known that you have zero expectation of privacy. Hell, I use my personal iPad for personal browsing at work so as not to be tracked.
Ignorance indeed. Funny that people automatically assume that Creationism and Science cannot coexist.
I'm a Creationist, and I am also a published author in Quantum Physics. Go chew on that for a bit...
"Sabotage". Get a clue.
Seriously. I've got two words for Radio Shack:
Monoprice and Digikey.
I went in there to buy some lame battery (CR123 or whatever) and ended up buying like a 30 pack online for cheaper than their ONE battery. Same deal with cables, electrical components, etc.
Oh gee, you started selling Arduino? At the size of Radio Shack, why the fuck can't they get within every $10 of the price of the board online? FAIL...
Similar story, very different outcome.
Guy took a bunch of shit from my car, I found him, gave all his info to the cops, and he's serving an 8-year term. The cop seemed amazed at the amount of personal info I gave him on this guy... I'm like "dude, any 20-year unix hacker can be a scary fuck on the Interwebs"
First, I don't see why Ayn is expected to not create fantastical characters in a work of fiction. Nobody would read it if it were just a mirror image of society.
Next, the book was not meant to be just a story that entertains. She felt very strongly about certain ideals since she transitioned from Communism to Capitalism, and she writes at the very edge of the continuum. You read it, you analyze it, you adopt the ideals that make sense to you and reject those that don't. Not sure why this concept is so foreign nowadays. I don't share her atheism, but I certainly share her ideals on capitalism.
I found the book very entertaining and highly thought-provoking. It's the only book I have read since university where I have taken copious notes whilst reading it.
I completely agree. I'm in a SaaS startup for 5 years now. My boss can easily tell when I am not producing work, and I can easily tell when my subordinates are not producing work.
As for the 1 month thing, that's just silly. If you cannot tell within 1 month if someone is worth keeping, the problem is you.
I smell Gen-Y entitlement...
I do this also and have found it a very valuable thing. Also helps when updating the resume.
I just retired my office wireless (three WRT54GL units) and replaced with a pfSense firewall and three Aruba Instant 105's
For the pfSense, I used two Intel wired cards instead of the crappy onboards.
I couldn't be happier. granted, the Arubas are probably a bit pricey for a house (depends on who you are)
They are cheap, they support content recognition, are globally disperse, and they have good notification.
We wrote a simple page that does a DB query and returns "OK" if everything succeeds. Point SiteUptime to that sub-URL and monitor the content for "OK"
Yeah, no sure what's so hard about this. We recently moved from SVN to Git (all private) and I grabbed a copy of Git and set it up within about 20 minutes using the docs having never used or setup Git before. I needed help from my developers to port all their code form SVN to Git, but that's not rocket science either.
There's little point in not going private if you don't plan to share your code with the world (we sure as hell won't be sharing our closed-source, for-profit software anytime soon).
Still sounds really super duper hard though ;)
Yeah, great example. Even at 20 years doing Unix, I feel like I am just hitting my stride. I'm in the top 2-3 percentile IQ and have been extremely diligent about self-training my entire career. I started really learning the Cisco world 4 years ago and that also seems like a bottomless pit of knowledge that could keep any normal person busy for 2-3 decades.
Above all, however, one of the greatest skills an admin can have IMHO is analytical troubleshooting, and time definitely helps with that.
It also depends a whole lot on the area of IT. This article very mistakenly refers to "IT" and then makes a generalization that applies only to a subset of IT workers.
I can see where programmers may actually be better when fresher, but I have spent the last 20 years as a unix and network administrator, and neglecting a truly prodigious few, these areas are impossible to master without many years of experience. At the same time, I can say that many 10+ year admins out there have not invested in their own self-training and are every bit as worthless as a 20 year-old admin.
A couple other points:
We deafies want to change our batteries every week or more, not every day. Have you seen the tiny size of current batteries? You must squeeze every last bit of efficiency out of the hardware possible.
The receivers (aka speakers that go in the ear) must be versatile enough to produce extremely loud sounds across the range of at least 500Hz --> 4KHz with no perceptible distortion. Distortion is the #1 enemy of deafies, and means the difference between "how are you today sir?" and "ajksdhv sdjkch asdkjhvkkf sjk?"
Oh, did I mention the receivers that must be as awesome as above, must also be able to survive something like 18,000 hours in a moist environment? (4 years, 12 hours a day)
The OS and DSP cannot even introduce milliseconds of delay while deciding what is "noise" to be filtered, what is "too loud" and should be compressed, and what was really soft but important enough to amplify even more than normal.
I don't like paying thousands of dollars for my aids, but neither do I believe they can sell for $400.
That's changing ever-so-slightly, especially for Cochlear implants, because we the deafies are now arguing that *not* covering them is plain and simple discrimination.
IMHO the government should pay for new hearing aids for me, once every 4 years. Before you pass out, let me explain: If I do not have hearing aids, I am deaf enough I cannot hear voices at all, and thus cannot work. I can collect about $2800/mo in SSDI right now if I cannot work. So balance that cost against the cost of new hearing ids every 4 years. AND as an added bonus, you bet your ass the Government would not be paying $3000/aid.
Win, win, win.
Atlas Shrugged is certainly the most profound book I have ever read.
As far as Technology books:
I learned to program from the Llama book (Learning Perl) and the Camel book (Programming Perl) is certainly my greatest weapon today as a sysadmin.
Mastering Regular Expressions gave me knowledge that's crucial and most people in tech don't have!
All I've got to say it, I hope this fucker gets some royal treatment by our Government. Maybe this is one of those perfect times to throw the Patriot Act at some douchebag.
Under normal circumstances, my tone is completely opposite, but that's when groups deface, humiliate, take-down, etc sites that are well deserving of public shame (yeah we all know who they are, I won't even list).
But this pricks (or more likely these pricks) are screwing with the masses, making our day(s) hell, and taking dollars out of our pockets. If you have beef with GoDaddy, but all means, hack their shit, post pics of their execs fucking dogs, whatever. Don't fuck with every random person in the nation/world that needs to keep a website up.
And yes, there's something to be said for showing a gaping security hole, especially if nobody listened in private forum, but wtf it's been 7 hours.
So, AnonymousOwn3r, be glad I don't know you. I would personally drop your ass off at the front gates of Gitmo.