/. was one of the sites that got me so heavily into IT. I remember that one of my highlights early on in my IT career was getting an article about me posted on/. (http://slashdot.org/story/01/02/19/1558257/Student-Run-IT-System-Just-Makes-Sense). Sad to see Rob move on - but all the best!
The ol 'designers haven't figured out how to design efficient website' argument is rolled out now and then and it think it's time it was put to rest.
We're not on dialup anymore - there is no need to waste time on getting the most minimalistic (in terms of file size) anymore. Yes it's a nice to have, but no longer essential. Even mobile phones which are the closest to dial-up are heading down the fast 3G route.
It's the same as to why we don't need to program in machine code anymore to make the most 'efficient' program possible... it's okay to use higher level coding tools.
I reckon most of these 'the internet is too slow' articles are just a media beatup. I'm yet to meet anyone who has 'slow' internet.
Whilst the examples you give are valid in their frustrations, I have to disagree with your comparisons. I know this will sound patronising, but you really need to get a better understanding of what other jobs are like before you say that IT workers have it (to paraphrase your statement) 'harder in this industry than another other'.
Teachers have it tough - imagine trying to control a room of teenagers who have no respect on you, will make fun of your looks, your dress sense.. and you have to spend your nights marking assignments, preparing lessons. Ever worked in a professional kitchen? The pressure to deliver on time all the time, the yelling, the heat. What about the air-traffic controllers? Stress so high that they have the highest suicide rate of any job. What about nurses with weird shift patterns and having people's lives in their hands?
A lot of what we consider stressful is personal - I would find teaching ulta-stressful, I don't consider IT to be stressful at all. You may be different.
But at least recognise that all jobs have their own version of stress/burnout. Crying out with a martyr complex of 'IT is soo hard - it's like no other job' is not accurate or constructive in finding ways to improve our industy.
I remember reading an etiquette guide where the rule of thumb was 'proximity'.
So if you are talking to someone face to face and you get a phone call/pager/email/IM, then you ignore those and focus on the face to face conversation because that person is closer.
Or if you are on phone call, and you get a pager/email/IM, then the caller is 'closer' to you (since you are engaged in a real-time voice conversation) and you would ignore the others including the IM (which is real-time, but less 'close' since it's not voice).
Basically it comes down to common sense and respect for the other person. Ever since I read that, I've been following that rule of thumb to the point where people I'm having conversations with are shocked when I let a phone call go to voicemail rather than interrupt my chat with them.
Mind you, the shocked look is often replaced with one of admiration that I consider them important/interesting enough that I am giving them my undivided attention. To me, that's proof that the rule of thumb is worth following.
being in a plane that disintegrates in mid-air, falling onto a road, getting hit by a car whilst it's raining where I drown in a deep water-filled pothole. That's what's got me most concerned.
Heh - i don't think we are disagreeing then:) Definitely forced 'how are you today' conversations are really bad - probably worse than not saying anything at all.
"Looks like you are the first actual manager to respond to this. Because you do absolutely *nothing* and then make it sound like you are somehow the glue that holds the team together. "You heard about quantum cryptography? Think you can do something like that?"
As someone who worked as a unix sysadmin for 8 years before becoming a manager, I understand where you are coming from and why you feel that way. I can also say you are talking from complete ignorance of what managers do (or you've had a bad run of poor managers).
In very broad terms, (most) technical work is 'easy'... you get a problem, you apply a solution. Need to add a disk, follow these steps. Need to add another disk, follow the same (or similar) steps again. Dealing with people doesn't work like that. Every single person needs their own personalised 'solution'. That in a nutshell is what makes management so bloody hard. As I remember someone saying in one of the management training courses: "The soft stuff is the hard stuff".
"Except that as the manager, you should be there before anybody else so there's nobody to greet yet."
In my experience, this is a curiously outdated attitude to have. With IT teams working 24x7, telecommuting, virtual teams etc... what has your start and end time have to do with how productive/effective you are.
And as a manager myself working in a multinational that promotes work/life balance, I always remember my previous manager telling staff that she wanted us to have that balance and that she would try to set a good example by starting/ending at reasonable times (8.30am to 5.30pm). And she was quite forceful in getting people to take time off in lieu if they had worked on problems at night, or had worked late for several nights running.
I find that it is a sign of an immature workplace where the hours you 'appear' to be at work is a measurement of your value to the company. It is also a sign of how lacking in leadership managers are if their 'authority' comes from how long they work as opposed to the results they achieve.
I understand what you are saying about virtual teams etc (I run one myself), but it's not quite the point I was trying to make.
My point is that as a *manager*, your primary responsibility is to the people in your team. Part of that is removing roadblocks, handling critical issues, but a big component of being a manager is your team.
Simply dealing with your team as if they are a queue of issues is not management. Understanding the people in your team, getting the best out of them - that's management. And the only way to get that understanding is to spend time with them (in person or virtually). You will never find out what Person A's career aspirations are by reading an overnight email of some problem they have widget X. Nor will you understand how to relate to Person B without spending time with them shooting the breeze.
And the reason I put greeting your team in the morning as the first thing to do - is because as a manager, I make the people in my team my priority - above and beyond work issues. If the work issue is critical, they can call.
Sure - if you are logging into email/chat to greet your virtual team - that's great. But in my experience, many (most?) managers only treat their staff like a queue of issues to be fixed and this is reflected in what you do when you start your day at work.
I see a lot of responses about checking for any problems etc...
As a manager, shouldn't your first responsibility be to your team? The first I thing I do when I get in to the office is go and chat with my team. I find out a lot more stuff about the 'current state' than any email I might read.
Besides, if there was a critical problem, my team would have already called me or sent a SMS.
The sign of an incompetent department/person is one who doesn't want to be benchmarked.
Look at it this way: If you are better than the rest, you should make sure everyone knows about it and ask for a payrise. If you are doing worse than others, then you better improve.
It's the latter situation that most people such as the parent end up fearing (and hence ranting about). Simply, they are scared to change their current work practices - they are content doing a mediocre job. They are the sort who spend enormous effort trying to maintain the status quo whilst the rest of the world improves around them... then one day they wonder why they are obsolete/getting offshored/getting downsized and then they bitterly complain about their situation and how unfair it is. If you have ever read the book 'Who moved my cheese', you will recognise this position.
... and in a nutshell, the easiest way to do it is to write a business case outlining what you hope to achieve as a full-time sysadmin, what benefits you can bring to the school and what you will cost them. I'd throw in a little bit of 'dreaming' in your business case - what I mean by this is you should show you have a vision for where the schoole *could* be in 5 years time.
You can read about how I transformed Whitley College from having paid consultants to employing myself to run their facilities. It started out with me doing it on a volunteer basis and getting rid of the paid consultant and it ended up with me getting a paid job out of it.
... company. Japanese society has one of the most warped views on sexuality (I mean this in a good way:), and yet a Japanese company is anti-porn? That's just too funny.
Actually you are mistaken as well. There are no hard and fast rules on 'fair use', but it is determined by:
the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
the nature of the copyrighted work;
amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
When I studied Copyright Law as part of my engineering degree, it was emphasised that you cannot copy the whole material regardless of whether it was for educational or non-commercial use.
The 1961 Report of the Register of Copyrights on the General Revision of the U.S. Copyright Law cites examples of activities that courts have regarded as fair use: "quotation of excerpts in a review or criticism for purposes of illustration or comment; quotation of short passages in a scholarly or technical work, for illustration or clarification of the author's observations; use in a parody of some of the content of the work parodied; summary of an address or article, with brief quotations, in a news report; reproduction by a library of a portion of a work to replace part of a damaged copy; reproduction by a teacher or student of a small part of a work to illustrate a lesson; reproduction of a work in legislative or judicial proceedings or reports; incidental and fortuitous reproduction, in a newsreel or broadcast, of a work located in the scene of an event being reported."
Note that nowhere in those examples does it say wholesale copying of a document.
What you have said is absolutely correct. It just goes to show how many people do not understand the underlying principles behind free speech and simply parrot the line 'all censorship is bad'... and amusingly, the person who marked you as flamebait was choosing to exercise/. version of censorship.
... they found that the materials worked best when painted on Kevlar in ultrathin coats. By holding the fibers tight like a flexible glue, the compound spreads out the impact of a blow better than fibers alone.
Imagine the practical jokes you could play with this stuff... smear a thin coating on eggs and watch as your housemate tries to crack them in the morning. Or smear it on a trampoline... the more they try and jump up and down, the less bounce they get. Or if you could blow bubbles with this stuff... would you be able to pop them?
We ran thin clients at a residential college here in Australia. For the most part they worked quite well once we got over the learning curve.
Two things killed thin clients for us. First, there was a trend in our computer lab of using it for multimedia work - eg photoshop, premiere.. thin clients really aren't cut out for that.
Second, licensing. It depends on the vendor, but Microsoft licensing agreement says you need a license for every single thin client. This is okay if it's something like say Office where it's quite feasible that every thin client may use it simultaneously. But for something less commonly used (eg Publisher), it's a huge cost overhead especially when only one person may use it at a time.
In my experience as a dedicated sysadmin working for a huge multinational, every time developers are allowed to have root access to a system, they produce the crappiest application code ever.
Applications that *require* root access to even run and require sub-apps to be root as well. They are slowly getting better (but only because in the last few years we've enforced a policy of no root access to developers).
IMHO, root access encourages sloppy behaviour (in both developers and sysadmins) and it becomes an essential crutch rather than an 'only as needed' facility. With the focus on security, and the requirement to participate in regular security audits (SOX anyway?), it simply suicide to give developers root access.
I think we have long gone past the point were censorship of this nature will have any effect. What with bittorrent and other P2P networks, people will still be able to obtain copies. And by making such a big deal of it, all the authorities have done is made it into the latest 'must have' computer game.
And I would love to read their position paper (which will apparently get relaeased) soon that explains the majority and minority positions. I cannot understand how they feel that they should ban this game and yet allow violent movies to not be banned.
In my opinion, the CEO role is more about being a leader, not a manager (that's what your underlings are for). Steve Jobs is leading. He's showing vision and implementing it.
Most CEO's these days are nothing more than managers - they worry about the bottom line, their idea of raising profits is limited to cost cutting, and basically spend their time looking back at the last quarters results (to see where they can cut more costs) than looking forward.
So no, I don't think Steve Jobs is 'redefining' the CEO role - I think he's merely showing up how crap most CEOs actually are.
I have used GAIM, Trillian Basic and Pro versions and found all were pretty good. In the end, I found GAIM to be a bit too 'clunky' and settled on Trillian Pro (of which I have been very happy with it's performance and stability).
what you say is absolutely true. When I've interviewed grads, I'm barely interested in your degree (other than that you have one and you didn't fail too many subjects).
I'm interested in your final project, merely as a conversation starter and as chance to get you talking so I can see what your communication skills are like. I'm much more interested in your attitude, communication skills, willingness and enthusiasm to learn, and extra-curicular activities. This is what distinguishes people from the masses, not the degree.
And depressing as this may sound, we assume you know nothing (beyond the basics that you learn at uni) when you start in the job. So in the parent post, he's absolutely right that whether you know CPLDs or infrared sensors... it really doesn't matter to me in the interview.
My advice is to do a project which you can do comfortably and excel in. Better to get an 'A' for a 'simple' project than a B for a complex one.
You might find 'creative' ways of solving the problem, but that would better be described as finding more elegant solutions, or more efficient solutions... just not artistic solutions.
Perhaps look at another profession... a surgeon. They might find a really elegant way of stitching up an open wound... is that artistic? I don't think you could say that it is, not from a 'lay persons' definition.
You get paid to do approximately a 40 hour/week job. 1% of 40 hours is 24 mins a week or approximately 5 mins a day.
It will take you 5 mins a day just to review any automated reports you have that let you know that backups have completed successfully, that you aren't running out of filesystem space, check any weird exceptions in your log files etc etc.
This of course does not take into account any time spent actually putting any of these automated reports in, or fixing any problem with your servers, or even responding to user requests.
Frankly, anyone who says you can do it on 1% of a single person's job has obviously either never worked as a sysadmin or never done a proper job of being sysadmin.
Slashdot Mirror
/. was one of the sites that got me so heavily into IT. I remember that one of my highlights early on in my IT career was getting an article about me posted on /. (http://slashdot.org/story/01/02/19/1558257/Student-Run-IT-System-Just-Makes-Sense). Sad to see Rob move on - but all the best!
The ol 'designers haven't figured out how to design efficient website' argument is rolled out now and then and it think it's time it was put to rest.
We're not on dialup anymore - there is no need to waste time on getting the most minimalistic (in terms of file size) anymore. Yes it's a nice to have, but no longer essential. Even mobile phones which are the closest to dial-up are heading down the fast 3G route.
It's the same as to why we don't need to program in machine code anymore to make the most 'efficient' program possible ... it's okay to use higher level coding tools.
I reckon most of these 'the internet is too slow' articles are just a media beatup. I'm yet to meet anyone who has 'slow' internet.
Whilst the examples you give are valid in their frustrations, I have to disagree with your comparisons. I know this will sound patronising, but you really need to get a better understanding of what other jobs are like before you say that IT workers have it (to paraphrase your statement) 'harder in this industry than another other'.
Teachers have it tough - imagine trying to control a room of teenagers who have no respect on you, will make fun of your looks, your dress sense .. and you have to spend your nights marking assignments, preparing lessons. Ever worked in a professional kitchen? The pressure to deliver on time all the time, the yelling, the heat. What about the air-traffic controllers? Stress so high that they have the highest suicide rate of any job. What about nurses with weird shift patterns and having people's lives in their hands?
A lot of what we consider stressful is personal - I would find teaching ulta-stressful, I don't consider IT to be stressful at all. You may be different.
But at least recognise that all jobs have their own version of stress/burnout. Crying out with a martyr complex of 'IT is soo hard - it's like no other job' is not accurate or constructive in finding ways to improve our industy.
I remember reading an etiquette guide where the rule of thumb was 'proximity'.
So if you are talking to someone face to face and you get a phone call/pager/email/IM, then you ignore those and focus on the face to face conversation because that person is closer.
Or if you are on phone call, and you get a pager/email/IM, then the caller is 'closer' to you (since you are engaged in a real-time voice conversation) and you would ignore the others including the IM (which is real-time, but less 'close' since it's not voice).
Basically it comes down to common sense and respect for the other person. Ever since I read that, I've been following that rule of thumb to the point where people I'm having conversations with are shocked when I let a phone call go to voicemail rather than interrupt my chat with them.
Mind you, the shocked look is often replaced with one of admiration that I consider them important/interesting enough that I am giving them my undivided attention. To me, that's proof that the rule of thumb is worth following.
being in a plane that disintegrates in mid-air, falling onto a road, getting hit by a car whilst it's raining where I drown in a deep water-filled pothole. That's what's got me most concerned.
Heh - i don't think we are disagreeing then :) Definitely forced 'how are you today' conversations are really bad - probably worse than not saying anything at all.
"Looks like you are the first actual manager to respond to this. Because you do absolutely *nothing* and then make it sound like you are somehow the glue that holds the team together. "You heard about quantum cryptography? Think you can do something like that?"
... you get a problem, you apply a solution. Need to add a disk, follow these steps. Need to add another disk, follow the same (or similar) steps again. Dealing with people doesn't work like that. Every single person needs their own personalised 'solution'. That in a nutshell is what makes management so bloody hard. As I remember someone saying in one of the management training courses: "The soft stuff is the hard stuff".
As someone who worked as a unix sysadmin for 8 years before becoming a manager, I understand where you are coming from and why you feel that way. I can also say you are talking from complete ignorance of what managers do (or you've had a bad run of poor managers).
In very broad terms, (most) technical work is 'easy'
"Except that as the manager, you should be there before anybody else so there's nobody to greet yet."
... what has your start and end time have to do with how productive/effective you are.
In my experience, this is a curiously outdated attitude to have. With IT teams working 24x7, telecommuting, virtual teams etc
And as a manager myself working in a multinational that promotes work/life balance, I always remember my previous manager telling staff that she wanted us to have that balance and that she would try to set a good example by starting/ending at reasonable times (8.30am to 5.30pm). And she was quite forceful in getting people to take time off in lieu if they had worked on problems at night, or had worked late for several nights running.
I find that it is a sign of an immature workplace where the hours you 'appear' to be at work is a measurement of your value to the company. It is also a sign of how lacking in leadership managers are if their 'authority' comes from how long they work as opposed to the results they achieve.
I understand what you are saying about virtual teams etc (I run one myself), but it's not quite the point I was trying to make.
My point is that as a *manager*, your primary responsibility is to the people in your team. Part of that is removing roadblocks, handling critical issues, but a big component of being a manager is your team.
Simply dealing with your team as if they are a queue of issues is not management. Understanding the people in your team, getting the best out of them - that's management. And the only way to get that understanding is to spend time with them (in person or virtually). You will never find out what Person A's career aspirations are by reading an overnight email of some problem they have widget X. Nor will you understand how to relate to Person B without spending time with them shooting the breeze.
And the reason I put greeting your team in the morning as the first thing to do - is because as a manager, I make the people in my team my priority - above and beyond work issues. If the work issue is critical, they can call.
Sure - if you are logging into email/chat to greet your virtual team - that's great. But in my experience, many (most?) managers only treat their staff like a queue of issues to be fixed and this is reflected in what you do when you start your day at work.
I see a lot of responses about checking for any problems etc ...
As a manager, shouldn't your first responsibility be to your team? The first I thing I do when I get in to the office is go and chat with my team. I find out a lot more stuff about the 'current state' than any email I might read.
Besides, if there was a critical problem, my team would have already called me or sent a SMS.
The sign of an incompetent department/person is one who doesn't want to be benchmarked.
... then one day they wonder why they are obsolete/getting offshored/getting downsized and then they bitterly complain about their situation and how unfair it is. If you have ever read the book 'Who moved my cheese', you will recognise this position.
Look at it this way:
If you are better than the rest, you should make sure everyone knows about it and ask for a payrise.
If you are doing worse than others, then you better improve.
It's the latter situation that most people such as the parent end up fearing (and hence ranting about). Simply, they are scared to change their current work practices - they are content doing a mediocre job. They are the sort who spend enormous effort trying to maintain the status quo whilst the rest of the world improves around them
... and in a nutshell, the easiest way to do it is to write a business case outlining what you hope to achieve as a full-time sysadmin, what benefits you can bring to the school and what you will cost them. I'd throw in a little bit of 'dreaming' in your business case - what I mean by this is you should show you have a vision for where the schoole *could* be in 5 years time.
5 7
You can read about how I transformed Whitley College from having paid consultants to employing myself to run their facilities. It started out with me doing it on a volunteer basis and getting rid of the paid consultant and it ended up with me getting a paid job out of it.
http://fon.com.au/articles/theage.html
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/02/19/15582
... company. Japanese society has one of the most warped views on sexuality (I mean this in a good way :), and yet a Japanese company is anti-porn? That's just too funny.
When I studied Copyright Law as part of my engineering degree, it was emphasised that you cannot copy the whole material regardless of whether it was for educational or non-commercial use.
If you want to read more, you can do so at the US Copyright Office website:
http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html
From that site:
Note that nowhere in those examples does it say wholesale copying of a document.
What you have said is absolutely correct. It just goes to show how many people do not understand the underlying principles behind free speech and simply parrot the line 'all censorship is bad' ... and amusingly, the person who marked you as flamebait was choosing to exercise /. version of censorship.
Wolverine didn't need Adamantium bonded to his skeleton, he just needed to smear this super-strong 'peanut butter' on his bones.
We ran thin clients at a residential college here in Australia. For the most part they worked quite well once we got over the learning curve.
.. thin clients really aren't cut out for that.
Two things killed thin clients for us. First, there was a trend in our computer lab of using it for multimedia work - eg photoshop, premiere
Second, licensing. It depends on the vendor, but Microsoft licensing agreement says you need a license for every single thin client. This is okay if it's something like say Office where it's quite feasible that every thin client may use it simultaneously. But for something less commonly used (eg Publisher), it's a huge cost overhead especially when only one person may use it at a time.
In my experience as a dedicated sysadmin working for a huge multinational, every time developers are allowed to have root access to a system, they produce the crappiest application code ever.
Applications that *require* root access to even run and require sub-apps to be root as well. They are slowly getting better (but only because in the last few years we've enforced a policy of no root access to developers).
IMHO, root access encourages sloppy behaviour (in both developers and sysadmins) and it becomes an essential crutch rather than an 'only as needed' facility. With the focus on security, and the requirement to participate in regular security audits (SOX anyway?), it simply suicide to give developers root access.
I think we have long gone past the point were censorship of this nature will have any effect. What with bittorrent and other P2P networks, people will still be able to obtain copies. And by making such a big deal of it, all the authorities have done is made it into the latest 'must have' computer game.
And I would love to read their position paper (which will apparently get relaeased) soon that explains the majority and minority positions. I cannot understand how they feel that they should ban this game and yet allow violent movies to not be banned.
In my opinion, the CEO role is more about being a leader, not a manager (that's what your underlings are for). Steve Jobs is leading. He's showing vision and implementing it.
Most CEO's these days are nothing more than managers - they worry about the bottom line, their idea of raising profits is limited to cost cutting, and basically spend their time looking back at the last quarters results (to see where they can cut more costs) than looking forward.
So no, I don't think Steve Jobs is 'redefining' the CEO role - I think he's merely showing up how crap most CEOs actually are.
> Trillian is extremely overrated.
How about saying why?
I have used GAIM, Trillian Basic and Pro versions and found all were pretty good. In the end, I found GAIM to be a bit too 'clunky' and settled on Trillian Pro (of which I have been very happy with it's performance and stability).
what you say is absolutely true. When I've interviewed grads, I'm barely interested in your degree (other than that you have one and you didn't fail too many subjects).
... it really doesn't matter to me in the interview.
I'm interested in your final project, merely as a conversation starter and as chance to get you talking so I can see what your communication skills are like. I'm much more interested in your attitude, communication skills, willingness and enthusiasm to learn, and extra-curicular activities. This is what distinguishes people from the masses, not the degree.
And depressing as this may sound, we assume you know nothing (beyond the basics that you learn at uni) when you start in the job. So in the parent post, he's absolutely right that whether you know CPLDs or infrared sensors
My advice is to do a project which you can do comfortably and excel in. Better to get an 'A' for a 'simple' project than a B for a complex one.
You might find 'creative' ways of solving the problem, but that would better be described as finding more elegant solutions, or more efficient solutions ... just not artistic solutions.
... a surgeon. They might find a really elegant way of stitching up an open wound ... is that artistic? I don't think you could say that it is, not from a 'lay persons' definition.
Perhaps look at another profession
You get paid to do approximately a 40 hour/week job. 1% of 40 hours is 24 mins a week or approximately 5 mins a day.
It will take you 5 mins a day just to review any automated reports you have that let you know that backups have completed successfully, that you aren't running out of filesystem space, check any weird exceptions in your log files etc etc.
This of course does not take into account any time spent actually putting any of these automated reports in, or fixing any problem with your servers, or even responding to user requests.
Frankly, anyone who says you can do it on 1% of a single person's job has obviously either never worked as a sysadmin or never done a proper job of being sysadmin.