Agreed, but the post isn't about people with mental problems, it's about people with disabilities in the workplace. And as my boss, you most certainly DO have to worry about my environment as a Deafie. You have to make sure that I don't have too many meetings, because it takes INTENSE mental focus to stay up to speed in crowds when I have to 1) figure out who's speaking, 2) focus on them and try to read their lips and foreign accents, 3) provide meaningful feedback.
But yes, you are absolutely correct in that it's a different ballgame hiring someone with a mental problem vs Deaf.
I work in IT, and am profoundly Deaf. Working with a disability is definitely a challenge. You have to set expectations and remind people constantly--I work in a company of only 35 people and I have to remind people I can't hear for shit. You have to advocate for yourself, and let people know what YOU need to be successful in the job. That being said, all of these things are difficult to do.
I have been hiring nearly constantly for about 10 years. 6 years hiring Solaris guys, and the last 4 hiring Linux guys. I will be the first to say that around Philadelphia anyway, the market is full of dog shit I wouldn't pay $40k. So if you want a job, figure out a way to shine brighter than everyone else. Some ideas:
-Intelligence cannot be faked, but also cannot be earned, unfortunately. -Use spell check on your resume, have someone else read it, ugh! If you've been around the block 20 times, limit resume to 2-3 pages or it gets trashed. -Groom yourself, even for a startup interview. Nobody likes smelly, sweaty, people in grungy clothes. -Do whatever you have to do to NOT be/appear nervous in the interview. Relax--we're trying to get to know you, the real you! -Do NOT put stuff on your resume that you do not know!!!! Or at least qualify your knowledge (e.g. "I am vaguely familiar with VMware") -Learn how to shake a hand and hold eye contact (yeah yeah, tricky for some IT folks) -For a Linux admin, you'd better have the basics down pat (resolve.conf, named.conf, ntp.conf, httpd,conf, how to change a system IP/hostname, how to add a new filesystem, how to rescue a system that won't boot, or you forgot root pass, etc etc etc)
I will say, I have learned my lesson about hiring young people without a degree. A degree shows you can think 4+ years ahead to a goal, and work hard to get there. If you don't have a degree, have a good reason why, and let them know why you can follow through on things.
This is exactly it. IMHO, coding is equal parts art, ingenuity, and science. Writing great code is no different than trying to write a great trilogy of fiction. Anyone can write garbage, but it takes a mastery of the language itself, and that mastery is just a means to an end--creating something great.
I'm deaf and I use the AlertMaster AL10, but it could work well for anyone oncall. I simply plug my land-phone line into my alarm clock. The alarm clock controls a vibrator and can also flash any light/appliance that can plug into a normal outlet. As long as you pick up the phone quickly, it shouldn't severely irritate your partner.
I have everything call my google voice number, which rings my home phone (connected to alarm clock) and also rings my iPhone so I can actually stop the ringing since the landline has no phone connected.
Check out the zScaler proxy. Lots of good benefits, including what you need. I use it for all my employees and love it, especially the reporting and fine-grained control.
I did exactly this when building out my recent company. Google mail service is fairly good, but hosted exchange is far better in terms of operating like a normal company with blackberries, etc. We outsource our web serving also. We basically have a fileserver and a pair of ADS boxes for inside services, and a redundant Internet connection.
people generally do NOT appreciate the jobs done by a truly talented sysadmin.
my last company brought in new management, who promptly fired me based on my salary, and hired 2 low-end admins to tend to things. heh.
well come to find out, I was the only worthwhile perl coder on the team, the only person who understood how to maintain the webfarm load balancer, etc etc etc etc.
"good sysadmins are like firemen. if you dont have a couple sitting around eating donuts, youre gonna be in trouble when the building is on fire"
"a good sysadmin never looks busy, and things runs well. a bad sysadmin gets an ulcer just keeping the ship afloat"
I'm in the same basic situation as the OP. I have been a unix admin for like 12 years, and am now admining 2500+ unix servers at a very large financial house. Even with lots of places around here that have unix, I cant help but wonder where I can possibly go next that I wont be jabbing bamboo up my fingernails from sheer boredom. Once you have managed hundreds or thousands of servers, you cant exactly go back to a small shop with 5 sun boxes...
why is this so difficult to understand. One of the MacHeist developers pointed out the most obvious truth in this: he would have never sold any software to the crowd who was buying the bundle.
I bought the bundle at the very last minute because a couple of the more expensive apps appealed to me. I will likely never touch the other ones. but the fundamental truth is that I never would have bought any of them if it weren't for the bundle, so each of the 10 developers got money from me that they would have never seen otherwise.
as a senior unix admin, I gotta say I personally enjoy the mystique surrounding our profession, especially that of the hardcore sysadmin. if they wanna think that it takes some uber-genius to be a sysadmin, and therefore keep our pay up in the ranks, let em! I may even buy a skateboard and hold onto limos while I intercept garbage files on a floppy from the teenager who just rooted my Sun e25k. heh.
$9 is a huge amount of electricity in term of charge. passing that through a line in 5 minutes is gonna take one HUGE ass line, and is gonna pose huge dangers.
theyre really lucky actually. I was in that elevator the other day and since it is not shielded from the sun in any way I could see it gettin pretty hot in there in a hurry. I woulda been freakin the fuck out. iPod my ass, I would have demanded a macbook pro in exchange for signing a piece of paper saying I wont sue them.
I appreciate that someone actually *got* my humor. I really didn't think anyone out there could be dense enough NOT to get it, but the guy who replied proved me wrong =)
seriously, though, I am very hard-of-hearing and need an ipod at about 9/10 volume to get any proper listening experience. glad to hear apple is putting a "limit feature" in rather than simply making them less powerful. the latter would ultimately lead to an unusable product for hard-of-hearing people.
A Symantec engineer predicts a 'gradual erosion' of the idea that Macs are a safer operating system than Windows.
this logic simply is not valid. it omits inherent differences in security between unix variants and windows.
IF unix was only as inherently secure as windows, THEN it would have long since been thoroughly exploited BECAUSE unix has long housed some of the most mission-critical and profitable data out there (and therefore some of the most profitable data to be gained by exploiting said systems)
While I would normally say use OpenLDAP, Sun has recently made a version of their Directory Server free and open source. Their GUI management is excellent, and it supports Multi-Master Replication.
In case you're not familiar with MMR, think about your normal scenario. Maybe you have 1 master server and 2 slaves, one for each physical location. with MMR, you quite literally have 3 master servers, all of which can be updated and will push the changes to the others. This means no more worrying about losing the "most important" server--they are all equally unimportant if lost!
If you're asking for 90k, you should be a UNIX specialist in addition to those things IMHO. I don't mean that you should be able to write 5000-line perl programs or build/config switches. I mean you should be able to stumble around and get done what you need to get done.
I never say "we" unless I am including *all* my personalities. They aren't all UNIX admins;)
I never said I was alone. I am on a team with 5 other sysadmins whose skills are equal to mine. We don't have any *old school* types or any junior types.
The last place I worked had an old-schooler that would open 20 xterms to work on 20 servers. THESE are the types of people who can only work at a 20:1 server:admin ratio. I would never pay this kind of person more than $60k.
Any UNIX admin asking for more than $80k in my mind needs to have an extremely good grasp on Perl, Expect, Hardware, and Solaris. Not to mention being multi-disciplined (e.g. know your way around CatOS and IOS, SAN switches, etc)
I can 100% attest to this. I commute from Phila burbs to North Wilmington every day, and something definitely happens south of that border. I think doing 10-15 mph under the already-ridiculously-low speed limit here is the state religion.
I see more 95-year-olds driving their 1980 Buicks at 7am than most Tuesday night Bingo championships. What I really want to know, is where the fuck are they all going at that time of the day, every single day??? Can't DE make a new law that says "if you dont have a job, please do NOT drive between the hours of 6am-9am and 5pm-7pm ???
I second this. I smell bullshit here. DE is approximately 80 miles long. 4-5 hours from Wilmington puts you south of Washington D.C.
As to the housing, the "housing situation" in North Wilmington is anything but "horrid".
I just went to http://www.rent.net and searched for all 1-bedroom apartments around 19809. each and every one was between $600-$800, and I *know* a few of these look quite nice.
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Agreed, but the post isn't about people with mental problems, it's about people with disabilities in the workplace. And as my boss, you most certainly DO have to worry about my environment as a Deafie. You have to make sure that I don't have too many meetings, because it takes INTENSE mental focus to stay up to speed in crowds when I have to 1) figure out who's speaking, 2) focus on them and try to read their lips and foreign accents, 3) provide meaningful feedback.
But yes, you are absolutely correct in that it's a different ballgame hiring someone with a mental problem vs Deaf.
I work in IT, and am profoundly Deaf. Working with a disability is definitely a challenge. You have to set expectations and remind people constantly--I work in a company of only 35 people and I have to remind people I can't hear for shit. You have to advocate for yourself, and let people know what YOU need to be successful in the job. That being said, all of these things are difficult to do.
I have been hiring nearly constantly for about 10 years. 6 years hiring Solaris guys, and the last 4 hiring Linux guys. I will be the first to say that around Philadelphia anyway, the market is full of dog shit I wouldn't pay $40k. So if you want a job, figure out a way to shine brighter than everyone else. Some ideas:
-Intelligence cannot be faked, but also cannot be earned, unfortunately.
-Use spell check on your resume, have someone else read it, ugh! If you've been around the block 20 times, limit resume to 2-3 pages or it gets trashed.
-Groom yourself, even for a startup interview. Nobody likes smelly, sweaty, people in grungy clothes.
-Do whatever you have to do to NOT be/appear nervous in the interview. Relax--we're trying to get to know you, the real you!
-Do NOT put stuff on your resume that you do not know!!!! Or at least qualify your knowledge (e.g. "I am vaguely familiar with VMware")
-Learn how to shake a hand and hold eye contact (yeah yeah, tricky for some IT folks)
-For a Linux admin, you'd better have the basics down pat (resolve.conf, named.conf, ntp.conf, httpd,conf, how to change a system IP/hostname, how to add a new filesystem, how to rescue a system that won't boot, or you forgot root pass, etc etc etc)
I will say, I have learned my lesson about hiring young people without a degree. A degree shows you can think 4+ years ahead to a goal, and work hard to get there. If you don't have a degree, have a good reason why, and let them know why you can follow through on things.
This is exactly it. IMHO, coding is equal parts art, ingenuity, and science. Writing great code is no different than trying to write a great trilogy of fiction. Anyone can write garbage, but it takes a mastery of the language itself, and that mastery is just a means to an end--creating something great.
I'm deaf and I use the AlertMaster AL10, but it could work well for anyone oncall. I simply plug my land-phone line into my alarm clock. The alarm clock controls a vibrator and can also flash any light/appliance that can plug into a normal outlet. As long as you pick up the phone quickly, it shouldn't severely irritate your partner.
I have everything call my google voice number, which rings my home phone (connected to alarm clock) and also rings my iPhone so I can actually stop the ringing since the landline has no phone connected.
Check out the zScaler proxy. Lots of good benefits, including what you need. I use it for all my employees and love it, especially the reporting and fine-grained control.
I did exactly this when building out my recent company. Google mail service is fairly good, but hosted exchange is far better in terms of operating like a normal company with blackberries, etc. We outsource our web serving also. We basically have a fileserver and a pair of ADS boxes for inside services, and a redundant Internet connection.
people generally do NOT appreciate the jobs done by a truly talented sysadmin.
my last company brought in new management, who promptly fired me based on my salary, and hired 2 low-end admins to tend to things. heh.
well come to find out, I was the only worthwhile perl coder on the team, the only person who understood how to maintain the webfarm load balancer, etc etc etc etc.
"good sysadmins are like firemen. if you dont have a couple sitting around eating donuts, youre gonna be in trouble when the building is on fire"
"a good sysadmin never looks busy, and things runs well. a bad sysadmin gets an ulcer just keeping the ship afloat"
I'm in the same basic situation as the OP. I have been a unix admin for like 12 years, and am now admining 2500+ unix servers at a very large financial house. Even with lots of places around here that have unix, I cant help but wonder where I can possibly go next that I wont be jabbing bamboo up my fingernails from sheer boredom. Once you have managed hundreds or thousands of servers, you cant exactly go back to a small shop with 5 sun boxes...
how about for prior art they drag in a filing cabinet from the 60's and show the tabs on top of each folder that separates things by category *grin*
I love my HP48GX. and once you grok RPN, there truly is no going back. so much easier for huge long formula calculations
why is this so difficult to understand. One of the MacHeist developers pointed out the most obvious truth in this: he would have never sold any software to the crowd who was buying the bundle.
I bought the bundle at the very last minute because a couple of the more expensive apps appealed to me. I will likely never touch the other ones. but the fundamental truth is that I never would have bought any of them if it weren't for the bundle, so each of the 10 developers got money from me that they would have never seen otherwise.
something > nothing;
as a senior unix admin, I gotta say I personally enjoy the mystique surrounding our profession, especially that of the hardcore sysadmin. if they wanna think that it takes some uber-genius to be a sysadmin, and therefore keep our pay up in the ranks, let em! I may even buy a skateboard and hold onto limos while I intercept garbage files on a floppy from the teenager who just rooted my Sun e25k. heh.
has anyone done the math here??
$9 is a huge amount of electricity in term of charge. passing that through a line in 5 minutes is gonna take one HUGE ass line, and is gonna pose huge dangers.
just my $0.02
theyre really lucky actually. I was in that elevator the other day and since it is not shielded from the sun in any way I could see it gettin pretty hot in there in a hurry. I woulda been freakin the fuck out. iPod my ass, I would have demanded a macbook pro in exchange for signing a piece of paper saying I wont sue them.
I appreciate that someone actually *got* my humor. I really didn't think anyone out there could be dense enough NOT to get it, but the guy who replied proved me wrong =)
seriously, though, I am very hard-of-hearing and need an ipod at about 9/10 volume to get any proper listening experience. glad to hear apple is putting a "limit feature" in rather than simply making them less powerful. the latter would ultimately lead to an unusable product for hard-of-hearing people.
so when they make it so it's not loud enough to damage hearing, can I sue them for not making it loud enough for hard-of-hearing people to use? (grin)
A Symantec engineer predicts a 'gradual erosion' of the idea that Macs are a safer operating system than Windows.
this logic simply is not valid. it omits inherent differences in security between unix variants and windows.
IF unix was only as inherently secure as windows, THEN it would have long since been thoroughly exploited BECAUSE unix has long housed some of the most mission-critical and profitable data out there (and therefore some of the most profitable data to be gained by exploiting said systems)
or invest $0.50 yourself and buy some 3M clearbra made to cover the front surfaces of cars. peel, stick, trim.
While I would normally say use OpenLDAP, Sun has recently made a version of their Directory Server free and open source. Their GUI management is excellent, and it supports Multi-Master Replication.
In case you're not familiar with MMR, think about your normal scenario. Maybe you have 1 master server and 2 slaves, one for each physical location. with MMR, you quite literally have 3 master servers, all of which can be updated and will push the changes to the others. This means no more worrying about losing the "most important" server--they are all equally unimportant if lost!
the best way I can think of it is with an analogy:
:: unix geek : mainframe geek
windows geek : unix geek
they've generally been around the block a few more times, know shit most unix geeks dont, and have quirks unix geeks dont.
"PUNK! when i was your age, i was writing operating systems... in binary... on punchcards!"
If you're asking for 90k, you should be a UNIX specialist in addition to those things IMHO. I don't mean that you should be able to write 5000-line perl programs or build/config switches. I mean you should be able to stumble around and get done what you need to get done.
;)
I never say "we" unless I am including *all* my personalities. They aren't all UNIX admins
I never said I was alone. I am on a team with 5 other sysadmins whose skills are equal to mine. We don't have any *old school* types or any junior types.
The last place I worked had an old-schooler that would open 20 xterms to work on 20 servers. THESE are the types of people who can only work at a 20:1 server:admin ratio. I would never pay this kind of person more than $60k.
Any UNIX admin asking for more than $80k in my mind needs to have an extremely good grasp on Perl, Expect, Hardware, and Solaris. Not to mention being multi-disciplined (e.g. know your way around CatOS and IOS, SAN switches, etc)
I can 100% attest to this. I commute from Phila burbs to North Wilmington every day, and something definitely happens south of that border. I think doing 10-15 mph under the already-ridiculously-low speed limit here is the state religion.
I see more 95-year-olds driving their 1980 Buicks at 7am than most Tuesday night Bingo championships. What I really want to know, is where the fuck are they all going at that time of the day, every single day??? Can't DE make a new law that says "if you dont have a job, please do NOT drive between the hours of 6am-9am and 5pm-7pm ???
dela-where? =D
I second this. I smell bullshit here. DE is approximately 80 miles long. 4-5 hours from Wilmington puts you south of Washington D.C.
As to the housing, the "housing situation" in North Wilmington is anything but "horrid".
I just went to http://www.rent.net and searched for all 1-bedroom apartments around 19809. each and every one was between $600-$800, and I *know* a few of these look quite nice.
nice try, though.