Ummm, no, the Explorer (at least the ones I've owned) sits on a twin I-beam frame/suspension, the same one used on the Ford Rangers. The Ford ESCAPE sits on a car chassis, but not the Explorer. As for mileage, my current one has 187,000 miles on it, runs like a top, uses no oil, no leaks of any kind. I've driven this one for almost 2 years, and aside from changing the oil and putting in gas, I've had to do nothing to it. The previous one had 208,000 miles. It blew a head gasket one hot summer afternoon, and I couldn't justify the time or expense to fix it.
I drive an SUV, a 10-year-old Explorer that I paid $2000 for. Before that, I drove a 13-year old Explorer that I paid $1800 for. They hardly qualify as luxury vehicles. I bought them for two simple reasons - they're easy to work on/maintain, and they're capable (and fun) in the snow. I don't consider them intimidating. Tough? Maybe, I do tend to abuse them, hauling all sorts of crap (stuffed 20 bags of mulch into one over the summer) and they never complain, does that make them tough?
I have a strong dislike of the "luxury" SUV's, the Escalades, Yukons, etc. They seem to always be driven by women, you always see them trying to back into a parking space while talking on the phone, and they never, ever haul anything but kids and groceries. I see them as nothing more than a status thing, but it's their money, they can spend it however they want.
This doesn't explain why my Comcast connection goes down for 20 minutes, every single day, at 10:30am. Without fail. You can set your watch by it. Modem doesn't lose sync, but I get 100% packet loss from 10:30-10:50, every morning. My assumption is that somebody on my cable segment is running a scheduled transfer or something...
Most people in central Ohio (hell, all of Ohio) only know stars as being "them thar shiny doohickies up'n that thar sky". Thankfully I escaped 10 years ago to another state.
Just received mine today, and I gotta say, I love it. My computer is in the bedroom, and I tend to stay up after my wife has gone to bed. It's a real pain in the neck trying to type in the dark. Not only is the backlighting awesome, but the keyboard has an excellent feel, and is very visually appealing.
Since Jan. 1st, 2008, I've spent over $1200 at Amazon, not a dime has been on a credit card. My debit card works just like a Visa, and I have that tied to Amazon's one-click feature. Combine that with Amazon Prime, I can have nearly anything I want delivered to my door step in 2 days. In fact, my new Logitech illuminated keyboard should be waiting for me when I get home today. For me, Amazon is the ultimate shopping vehicle. I have a Best Buy store less than 3 miles from my home, right next door to a large shopping mall, and I'm ten minutes away from the Mall Of America - but I rarely go to any of them. A trip to Best Buy means traffic, a crowded parking lot, pushy salespeople, and dealing with the "herd" in general. Anything I want from Best Buy, I can get from Amazon, usually cheaper, as easily as clicking a button. I can take my time, compare features, etc..
Both of my kids know what DRM is - my son uses several "no-cd" cracks to play various games. They both have iPods, and my daughter is getting an iPhone for Christmas. In spite of my best efforts to get them to purchase from Amazon, they both insist on buying from Apple. Reasons I've heard:
- it's easier - I'm never going to play them on anything buy my iPod anyway - I'm not going to give my friends music that I paid for. That's illegal anyway.
So... They understand the restrictions, they understand that they're married to Apple, but "the system" works for them. I don't like it, but I can see their point...
I use it all the time, most frequently to save recipes that I find online. I do a lot of cooking, and like to try new recipes. If I stumble across something interesting, I'll save it to Google Notebook. The "sections" feature works great for grouping stuff into categories, i.e. "Deserts".
I tried Vista when it was first released, installing it on a 3Ghz/1GB machine. MUCH slower than XP on the same machine, and the constant "Are you sure?" dialogs were annoying. I removed it after a week.
In October, I built myself a new machine, dual-core 3.3Ghz, 4GB of RAM, Nvidia 9500GT. I wanted to give Vista another chance, on a much more powerful machine, so I installed it on the new box. Performance was (as expected) much better than on the old machine, but it still seemed to be missing the "snap" that XP has. I did, however, have some legitimate issues, before starting over with XP:
- fonts in Civ4 look TERRIBLE, and some graphic elements are messed up. This was with the latest drivers available from Nvidia at the time. Doesn't happen under XP. - also in Civ4, I'll get random video card crashes, where I lose all video, but the sound (and presumably the OS) keep going. I have to hit the reset button to recover. Have not had a crash under XP. - the software for my HP all-in-one works differently. I know, it's bloatware, but I *like* being able to use the buttons on the printer to initiate a quick scan or copy. - I configure my machines to go to sleep (S3 standby) when idle. With Vista, when the machine sleeps, the power LED on the case blinks rapidly (very annoying at night in a dark bedroom). With XP, no blinky light. The machine is asleep, and wakes up nicely with a touch of the mouse.
Are these issues Vista's fault? Probably not, at least not entirely. Do I care? Nope. XP works, as expected, and it's wicked fast on this new machine...
I've seen no evidence of this. Unless you count the woman at my kid's school yesterday, trying to back into a parking space one-handed. She made it - eventually, and was almost between the white lines.
> I don't filter anything. > > If my children stumble across something, I encourage them to ask questions and I answer them as honestly > as possible. After all, I'm preparing my children to be ADULTS which means they need to learn how to deal > with the adult world. To shelter them from exposure to the real world means I'm not doing my job as a > parent (turning children into adults).
I agree with your last paragraph completely, BUT, I still filter, for a couple of reasons:
1. Nearly every weekend, we have "extra" kids at our house. With two teenagers, seems there's always one friend or another spending a Friday or Saturday night. I filter because I don't want a pissed off parent knocking on my door, asking why I "allowed" their kid to visit HamstersGoneWild.com. I don't shelter my kids. They've seen every episode of South Park (we're watching one of the Christmas collections tonight), and my son became hooked on The Shield, watching most of this final season. Swearing is allowed, around family and within our own walls. My daughter recently spilled a can of soda on her MacBook, prompting a panicked "Oh Shit!", exactly the response any rational person would have had.
2. I have multiple wireless routers in my house, one is wide open (MAC restricted, for visitors, I just have to add their MAC address), one is weakly protected (WEP and MAC restrictions) to allow the kids' Nintendo DS consoles to connect. I sleep better at night knowing that I've at least made an effort to restrict what somebody might be able to do should they gain access to these routers.
Twenty years ago, I was 2 years out of high school. I'd completed one year of a Computer Science degree, but my parents split up and I had no money to continue. I took a job at a small consultant/reseller in my hometown - I met the UPS guy at the door each morning, and spent the day putting away everything that came in, and preparing stuff to ship out that afternoon. At some point, I started tinkering with FoxPro, helping one of the consultants there modify SBT Accounting to do some custom stuff. Through to course of deploying and supporting those modifications, I started doing some Xenix administration.
Flash forward to today - I'm the senior production DBA for an 18,000-employee, 24x7 company, and I crossed the 6-figure salary threshold last January. Over those 20 years, I've done FoxPro/dBase/Clipper development, classic ASP web development, PHP development, Windows and Unix/Linux administration, network security work. For the last seven years, I've been focusing mainly on DBA work, and today my job is 100% SQL Server and Oracle administration, tuning, and development work. Sadly, many of the biggest messes that I've had to clean up in my career have been caused by college educated, degree-bearing "professionals". A degree doesn't guarantee ability.
It can be done without a degree, but it takes a certain mentality. You have to live & breath this stuff. When others go home to play WOW or Xbox all night, you need to be experimenting with something new, teaching yourself some new skill. You need to be downloading, installing, and breaking (and subsequently FIXING) various Linux distributions. You need to participate in online communities.
I have a shiny new dual-core 3Ghz machine with 4GB of RAM sitting at home that I just built. Just for grins and to see the current "state of things", I threw Vista Ultimate on there with SP1 and all available updates. Ran well, was generally unimpressive, but then I discovered that Neverwinter Nights won't run properly. Known issues, not worth my headache, didn't plan on keeping Vista anyway.
I like Ubuntu, I really do, and I'd love to see how it would perform on this box, BUT... XP is currently king. I NEED to run Quicken, and I WANT to run Civ4 (with Beyond The Sword expansion). I know I could run Quicken in VMWare or Virtualbox, and I know that if I sacrifice enough chickens during a full moon, and stand on one foot *just right*, I can get Civ4 to run under Wine, but WHY???? Why go through all of that to be able to run two apps with reduced performance? I essentially do five things with my computer:
Three of those can be done natively in either Linux or Windows - the other two require jumping through several, arguably complicated hoops. What's the point?
I can buy 5 quarts of oil plus a filter for $25 (less if I watch for sales and rebates). Without driving anywhere (my garage is conveniently located near where I live), I can change the oil and filter myself in 15 minutes. While waiting for the old oil to drain, I check the other fluids, give the belts & hoses a quick check, air pressures, and inspect the muffler bearings. I know the work was done and done properly, and it gives me the opportunity to spot potential problems (leaks, etc) before they become problems. Next time I go to the parts store to buy oil, I drop off the old stuff for recycling. My cost for twelve oil changes, at max price, is $300. You're paying an additional $300 just to avoid getting your hands dirty?
I 100% agree with this sentiment. Maybe I'm just getting old, but I still love gaming, and can very easily spend a rainy Sunday afternoon playing any number of games, online or off. Call Of Duty is one of my current favorites (takes me back a few years to playing Counterstrike on the company LAN), but NOTHING ruins a session faster than a couple of pre-teens trying to out-curse one another. Ban them all I say, until they grow up.
I'm currently doing the whole student-driver thing with my 16-year old son. Until recently, I took him out driving on Sunday mornings or other quiet times when there wasn't a lot of traffic. Over the past month, I've started easing him into higher traffic situations. He's made some mistakes, but he's not doing too bad. Yesterday, I let him drive home from school. As luck would have it, we got stuck behind a bus that several of his friends were on (sitting in the back of the bus, of course). They were laughing and pointing, and he was either nervous or showing off, or a combination of both. It was like he'd never driven before. I made him pull into a parking lot, where we waited several minutes until all of the buses and other school traffic was gone.
Do I trust him to drive? Yes, if he's alone. Reality is that there's not a teenager out there who isn't vulnerable to peer pressure. No kid wants to be laughed at by his friends, or be seen as "pussy" for not showing off or taking the dare that the chump in the back seat just made. I certainly don't intend to chaperone every outing he makes after getting his license, so any assistance I can get, mechanical, technical, or legal, I welcome.
Remember the late 90's, when any monkey who knew how to click around in FrontPage was able to call himself a web developer? Remember how you always ended up cleaning up after him, or finishing his half-baked projects? There are far fewer of those folks around now, one of the perks of the bubble bursting.
Unionizing would protect these people. The incompetent boob sitting in the cube next to you, the one who uses you as his personal reference manual, would have nothing to fear. He would have no reason to get his act together and start performing - the union would protect his job. Do you really want that?
Three years ago, I left a job where I hadn't received a raise in 2 years, because I was already being paid the maximum for my job title. HR had the final say in all salary issues - they paid strictly based on job titles and charts. I left that place, going to another company with the SAME JOB TITLE, doing the SAME WORK, for $11K more per year. With the increase I received last year, I'm now making almost $30K more than I made at the previous place, doing THE SAME JOB. The job (at both companies) involves production support - I'm essentially on call 24x7. At the old place, if I got called at 2:00am, I was still expected to be in the office the next morning. At the new place, a call at 2:00am means I come in if/when I want to the next day, or not at all. The new place gets it, they understand and recognize the value of IT.
Unionizing would make issues like this more cookie-cutter, attempting to make things the same for everybody. Of the two scenarios that I just described, which way do you thing that "sameness" would go? We'd all end up punching time cards, tracking every minute that we work, with no flexibility. No thanks.
- sales guys (driven by bonuses) promise features/deliverables that didn't exist, with a commitment to deliver them "next week". It then falls on the tech folks to either deliver those, or take the blame for losing the sale.
- account managers promise a customer that "sure, we can import your product list that is currently scattered across multiple Excel document, text files, and Post-It notes. Our tech people will get started on that immediately and have it done by tomorrow". It then falls on the tech folks to drop everything else and figure out how to pull this off, or take the blame for upsetting the customer.
- after an audit revealed that we were not 100% PCI compliant, we launched an initiative (with support of senior-level management) at the beginning of the year to become fully compliant. There have been major changes in infrastructure, application features, etc. Some people have lost rights that they previously had. Certain data is now "off limits" to all but a few users. It's no longer acceptable to run Access on your local machine to do ad-hoc database queries. One result of all of this is that there is a layer of people between Senior Management and IT who have been "inconvenienced", and they blame US (the tech staff) for that. They won't complain to SM and risk looking uncooperative, but they go out of their way to bitch and whine and generally make life difficult for us. Snide comments are commonplace, some friendships have suffered, etc, etc, etc....
So, yeah, there does tend to be some friction between tech folks and business folks. They're in different worlds with different responsibilities and different priorities.
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> The chassis is an up-scaled car chassis
Ummm, no, the Explorer (at least the ones I've owned) sits on a twin I-beam frame/suspension, the same one used on the Ford Rangers. The Ford ESCAPE sits on a car chassis, but not the Explorer. As for mileage, my current one has 187,000 miles on it, runs like a top, uses no oil, no leaks of any kind. I've driven this one for almost 2 years, and aside from changing the oil and putting in gas, I've had to do nothing to it. The previous one had 208,000 miles. It blew a head gasket one hot summer afternoon, and I couldn't justify the time or expense to fix it.
*I* use the same password for everything, thanks for telling everyone, you insensitive clod!
I drive an SUV, a 10-year-old Explorer that I paid $2000 for. Before that, I drove a 13-year old Explorer that I paid $1800 for. They hardly qualify as luxury vehicles. I bought them for two simple reasons - they're easy to work on/maintain, and they're capable (and fun) in the snow. I don't consider them intimidating. Tough? Maybe, I do tend to abuse them, hauling all sorts of crap (stuffed 20 bags of mulch into one over the summer) and they never complain, does that make them tough?
I have a strong dislike of the "luxury" SUV's, the Escalades, Yukons, etc. They seem to always be driven by women, you always see them trying to back into a parking space while talking on the phone, and they never, ever haul anything but kids and groceries. I see them as nothing more than a status thing, but it's their money, they can spend it however they want.
This doesn't explain why my Comcast connection goes down for 20 minutes, every single day, at 10:30am. Without fail. You can set your watch by it. Modem doesn't lose sync, but I get 100% packet loss from 10:30-10:50, every morning. My assumption is that somebody on my cable segment is running a scheduled transfer or something...
I wondered why rush hour in the Twin Cities seemed worse than normal this morning. Now I know why. Some folks found out about this and donated early.
Most people in central Ohio (hell, all of Ohio) only know stars as being "them thar shiny doohickies up'n that thar sky". Thankfully I escaped 10 years ago to another state.
Added to Google Reader - I look forward to reading every word!
Just received mine today, and I gotta say, I love it. My computer is in the bedroom, and I tend to stay up after my wife has gone to bed. It's a real pain in the neck trying to type in the dark. Not only is the backlighting awesome, but the keyboard has an excellent feel, and is very visually appealing.
Since Jan. 1st, 2008, I've spent over $1200 at Amazon, not a dime has been on a credit card. My debit card works just like a Visa, and I have that tied to Amazon's one-click feature. Combine that with Amazon Prime, I can have nearly anything I want delivered to my door step in 2 days. In fact, my new Logitech illuminated keyboard should be waiting for me when I get home today. For me, Amazon is the ultimate shopping vehicle. I have a Best Buy store less than 3 miles from my home, right next door to a large shopping mall, and I'm ten minutes away from the Mall Of America - but I rarely go to any of them. A trip to Best Buy means traffic, a crowded parking lot, pushy salespeople, and dealing with the "herd" in general. Anything I want from Best Buy, I can get from Amazon, usually cheaper, as easily as clicking a button. I can take my time, compare features, etc..
Both of my kids know what DRM is - my son uses several "no-cd" cracks to play various games. They both have iPods, and my daughter is getting an iPhone for Christmas. In spite of my best efforts to get them to purchase from Amazon, they both insist on buying from Apple. Reasons I've heard:
- it's easier
- I'm never going to play them on anything buy my iPod anyway
- I'm not going to give my friends music that I paid for. That's illegal anyway.
So... They understand the restrictions, they understand that they're married to Apple, but "the system" works for them. I don't like it, but I can see their point...
I use it all the time, most frequently to save recipes that I find online. I do a lot of cooking, and like to try new recipes. If I stumble across something interesting, I'll save it to Google Notebook. The "sections" feature works great for grouping stuff into categories, i.e. "Deserts".
I tried Vista when it was first released, installing it on a 3Ghz/1GB machine. MUCH slower than XP on the same machine, and the constant "Are you sure?" dialogs were annoying. I removed it after a week.
In October, I built myself a new machine, dual-core 3.3Ghz, 4GB of RAM, Nvidia 9500GT. I wanted to give Vista another chance, on a much more powerful machine, so I installed it on the new box. Performance was (as expected) much better than on the old machine, but it still seemed to be missing the "snap" that XP has. I did, however, have some legitimate issues, before starting over with XP:
- fonts in Civ4 look TERRIBLE, and some graphic elements are messed up. This was with the latest drivers available from Nvidia at the time. Doesn't happen under XP.
- also in Civ4, I'll get random video card crashes, where I lose all video, but the sound (and presumably the OS) keep going. I have to hit the reset button to recover. Have not had a crash under XP.
- the software for my HP all-in-one works differently. I know, it's bloatware, but I *like* being able to use the buttons on the printer to initiate a quick scan or copy.
- I configure my machines to go to sleep (S3 standby) when idle. With Vista, when the machine sleeps, the power LED on the case blinks rapidly (very annoying at night in a dark bedroom). With XP, no blinky light. The machine is asleep, and wakes up nicely with a touch of the mouse.
Are these issues Vista's fault? Probably not, at least not entirely. Do I care? Nope. XP works, as expected, and it's wicked fast on this new machine...
I've seen no evidence of this. Unless you count the woman at my kid's school yesterday, trying to back into a parking space one-handed. She made it - eventually, and was almost between the white lines.
> I don't filter anything.
>
> If my children stumble across something, I encourage them to ask questions and I answer them as honestly
> as possible. After all, I'm preparing my children to be ADULTS which means they need to learn how to deal
> with the adult world. To shelter them from exposure to the real world means I'm not doing my job as a
> parent (turning children into adults).
I agree with your last paragraph completely, BUT, I still filter, for a couple of reasons:
1. Nearly every weekend, we have "extra" kids at our house. With two teenagers, seems there's always one friend or another spending a Friday or Saturday night. I filter because I don't want a pissed off parent knocking on my door, asking why I "allowed" their kid to visit HamstersGoneWild.com. I don't shelter my kids. They've seen every episode of South Park (we're watching one of the Christmas collections tonight), and my son became hooked on The Shield, watching most of this final season. Swearing is allowed, around family and within our own walls. My daughter recently spilled a can of soda on her MacBook, prompting a panicked "Oh Shit!", exactly the response any rational person would have had.
2. I have multiple wireless routers in my house, one is wide open (MAC restricted, for visitors, I just have to add their MAC address), one is weakly protected (WEP and MAC restrictions) to allow the kids' Nintendo DS consoles to connect. I sleep better at night knowing that I've at least made an effort to restrict what somebody might be able to do should they gain access to these routers.
Twenty years ago, I was 2 years out of high school. I'd completed one year of a Computer Science degree, but my parents split up and I had no money to continue. I took a job at a small consultant/reseller in my hometown - I met the UPS guy at the door each morning, and spent the day putting away everything that came in, and preparing stuff to ship out that afternoon. At some point, I started tinkering with FoxPro, helping one of the consultants there modify SBT Accounting to do some custom stuff. Through to course of deploying and supporting those modifications, I started doing some Xenix administration.
Flash forward to today - I'm the senior production DBA for an 18,000-employee, 24x7 company, and I crossed the 6-figure salary threshold last January. Over those 20 years, I've done FoxPro/dBase/Clipper development, classic ASP web development, PHP development, Windows and Unix/Linux administration, network security work. For the last seven years, I've been focusing mainly on DBA work, and today my job is 100% SQL Server and Oracle administration, tuning, and development work. Sadly, many of the biggest messes that I've had to clean up in my career have been caused by college educated, degree-bearing "professionals". A degree doesn't guarantee ability.
It can be done without a degree, but it takes a certain mentality. You have to live & breath this stuff. When others go home to play WOW or Xbox all night, you need to be experimenting with something new, teaching yourself some new skill. You need to be downloading, installing, and breaking (and subsequently FIXING) various Linux distributions. You need to participate in online communities.
Deep Thought: The answer is 42, so you can all just stop looking now.
I have a shiny new dual-core 3Ghz machine with 4GB of RAM sitting at home that I just built. Just for grins and to see the current "state of things", I threw Vista Ultimate on there with SP1 and all available updates. Ran well, was generally unimpressive, but then I discovered that Neverwinter Nights won't run properly. Known issues, not worth my headache, didn't plan on keeping Vista anyway.
I like Ubuntu, I really do, and I'd love to see how it would perform on this box, BUT... XP is currently king. I NEED to run Quicken, and I WANT to run Civ4 (with Beyond The Sword expansion). I know I could run Quicken in VMWare or Virtualbox, and I know that if I sacrifice enough chickens during a full moon, and stand on one foot *just right*, I can get Civ4 to run under Wine, but WHY???? Why go through all of that to be able to run two apps with reduced performance? I essentially do five things with my computer:
- Quicken
- Civ4
- Neverwinter Nights
- web (using Firefox)
- copy DVDs
Three of those can be done natively in either Linux or Windows - the other two require jumping through several, arguably complicated hoops. What's the point?
I can buy 5 quarts of oil plus a filter for $25 (less if I watch for sales and rebates). Without driving anywhere (my garage is conveniently located near where I live), I can change the oil and filter myself in 15 minutes. While waiting for the old oil to drain, I check the other fluids, give the belts & hoses a quick check, air pressures, and inspect the muffler bearings. I know the work was done and done properly, and it gives me the opportunity to spot potential problems (leaks, etc) before they become problems. Next time I go to the parts store to buy oil, I drop off the old stuff for recycling. My cost for twelve oil changes, at max price, is $300. You're paying an additional $300 just to avoid getting your hands dirty?
I 100% agree with this sentiment. Maybe I'm just getting old, but I still love gaming, and can very easily spend a rainy Sunday afternoon playing any number of games, online or off. Call Of Duty is one of my current favorites (takes me back a few years to playing Counterstrike on the company LAN), but NOTHING ruins a session faster than a couple of pre-teens trying to out-curse one another. Ban them all I say, until they grow up.
My favorite part was Palin repeatedly, in true Homer Simpson style, saying "nucular". I believe our current great leader pronounces it the same way...
This will all be over after I go to Casa Bonita on Saturday....
I'm currently doing the whole student-driver thing with my 16-year old son. Until recently, I took him out driving on Sunday mornings or other quiet times when there wasn't a lot of traffic. Over the past month, I've started easing him into higher traffic situations. He's made some mistakes, but he's not doing too bad. Yesterday, I let him drive home from school. As luck would have it, we got stuck behind a bus that several of his friends were on (sitting in the back of the bus, of course). They were laughing and pointing, and he was either nervous or showing off, or a combination of both. It was like he'd never driven before. I made him pull into a parking lot, where we waited several minutes until all of the buses and other school traffic was gone.
Do I trust him to drive? Yes, if he's alone. Reality is that there's not a teenager out there who isn't vulnerable to peer pressure. No kid wants to be laughed at by his friends, or be seen as "pussy" for not showing off or taking the dare that the chump in the back seat just made. I certainly don't intend to chaperone every outing he makes after getting his license, so any assistance I can get, mechanical, technical, or legal, I welcome.
Stand still. It went over your head the first time, but it should hit you when it comes back around...
> We need to unionize
NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO......
Remember the late 90's, when any monkey who knew how to click around in FrontPage was able to call himself a web developer? Remember how you always ended up cleaning up after him, or finishing his half-baked projects? There are far fewer of those folks around now, one of the perks of the bubble bursting.
Unionizing would protect these people. The incompetent boob sitting in the cube next to you, the one who uses you as his personal reference manual, would have nothing to fear. He would have no reason to get his act together and start performing - the union would protect his job. Do you really want that?
Three years ago, I left a job where I hadn't received a raise in 2 years, because I was already being paid the maximum for my job title. HR had the final say in all salary issues - they paid strictly based on job titles and charts. I left that place, going to another company with the SAME JOB TITLE, doing the SAME WORK, for $11K more per year. With the increase I received last year, I'm now making almost $30K more than I made at the previous place, doing THE SAME JOB. The job (at both companies) involves production support - I'm essentially on call 24x7. At the old place, if I got called at 2:00am, I was still expected to be in the office the next morning. At the new place, a call at 2:00am means I come in if/when I want to the next day, or not at all. The new place gets it, they understand and recognize the value of IT.
Unionizing would make issues like this more cookie-cutter, attempting to make things the same for everybody. Of the two scenarios that I just described, which way do you thing that "sameness" would go? We'd all end up punching time cards, tracking every minute that we work, with no flexibility. No thanks.
In my tech career, I've seen:
- sales guys (driven by bonuses) promise features/deliverables that didn't exist, with a commitment to deliver them "next week". It then falls on the tech folks to either deliver those, or take the blame for losing the sale.
- account managers promise a customer that "sure, we can import your product list that is currently scattered across multiple Excel document, text files, and Post-It notes. Our tech people will get started on that immediately and have it done by tomorrow". It then falls on the tech folks to drop everything else and figure out how to pull this off, or take the blame for upsetting the customer.
- after an audit revealed that we were not 100% PCI compliant, we launched an initiative (with support of senior-level management) at the beginning of the year to become fully compliant. There have been major changes in infrastructure, application features, etc. Some people have lost rights that they previously had. Certain data is now "off limits" to all but a few users. It's no longer acceptable to run Access on your local machine to do ad-hoc database queries. One result of all of this is that there is a layer of people between Senior Management and IT who have been "inconvenienced", and they blame US (the tech staff) for that. They won't complain to SM and risk looking uncooperative, but they go out of their way to bitch and whine and generally make life difficult for us. Snide comments are commonplace, some friendships have suffered, etc, etc, etc....
So, yeah, there does tend to be some friction between tech folks and business folks. They're in different worlds with different responsibilities and different priorities.