There are two key questions that drive IT training.
(1) Is your company an IT company? If not, expect less enthusiasm for buying training for you, because IT isn't revenue. It's cost. And for any business, the less cost, the better (and forget the long term benefit blah blah... budgeting gets done year by year, or completely seat of the pants if not a big enough shop to have an IT budget.
(2) As alluded to above, how big is your company? Are they big enough to even have a standing conversation about IT training or is it something that they never think about, even for a moment, until you bring it up and then they go, "whazzat? You're the computer person don't you already know?"
There is no "norm for IT." There are norms for training in general as they relate to whether you're training on core business (vs overhead) and business size (i.e., free money to spend). Go to Microsoft as part of their IT staff and ask for training on inventory management techniques, because someone asks you questions about inventory management software. What? Huh? Good luck.
Cisco will (probably) happily train you as an employee on Cisco products. Or networking. Why? DUH! They sell the danged product! But I doubt that Joe's Gigantic Shop of Big Shoes will. They don't care about the fricking network! It had just better work!
With that said, in non-IT shops, unless they're big ones that have figured out that their people need to know something more, most orgs are a lot happier with your non-optimized, unmanageable infrastructure than you are. You think it can be better. They think it's just fine because it works, and if it doesn't work, it's because you're not doing your job, not because you need training that they're supposed to give you.
There are definitely nicer situations and YMMV. But if you want to make a career-- versus a paycheck-- in IT, taking ownership of your training is going to be part of the turf, unless you are decidedly fortunate.
Good luck. Tough space to work in, IT. Definitely a fast-moving balancing act, and definitely not for everybody.
when you go into these low end job interviews and you're the only person of a particular race there out of a dozen people, doing it professionally as you were taught, it sure looks like racism on the end of the HR person
I also wonder how you, or any one really, got around this.
Understandable enough. But not enough to just label it "racism" and troll on to the next job application. The real bugger is that it doesn't matter whether anyone agrees with you about whether it's racism or not. If this wigs you out every time, you're in trouble.
Racism, and all the other "isms," are largely about putting someone in their "proper place." In the workplace, the means are psychological. They can't string you up from a tree so they throw all this time and energy into screwing up your head so that you'll doubt your ability to get around them. Scrambling your ability to (a) earn a paycheck and/or (b) make that paycheck bigger and improve your standard of living is a *really* good way to mess with someone, both in the individual and the aggregate. If you have a spouse and/or kids, it really gets under your skin.
All "isms" are also manifestations of fear. And anyone making hiring decisions based on fear is going to pull each and every last one of their fears into the equation-- they've crossed the line already, so they dive in hard. They're scared of you because of your color. They're scared of you because you fit the profile. They're scared of you because you *don't* fit the profile. They're scared of you because you might be better than them (you're dressed professionally, they're not). They're scared of you because you highlight things that could make them look bad (you handle yourself professionally, they've been hiring folks who don't). On and on and on.
The truth is that you can't win in a head-to-head against these people. There are more of them than there are of you. You can, however, capitalize on the fact that they're going to cluster at the bottom, where their lack of skills and professionalism leave them. They and the people who prefer them over you are going to stay down there. Forget about them and focus on finding somewhere better, and somewhere else, to be.
As for how one does that... obviously I've been at this a little while and feel I've gotten past the entry-level crap successfully. And don't get me wrong, I deal with racism at the level I work at as well-- when they come up with a creative way to come after you, you get dragged back to the bottom pretty quick. I had to hire lawyers to help keep one job when a bigot with an agenda and some false accusations was given immediate credibility by HR-- becuase she was white and I was "dark." I can't say I won. Kept the job but paid a steep personal price that will take years to unravel. You never really "win" once engaged in battles about race; you just hope you come out with fewer scars than the other party.
But with that said, my first full time job was, surprise, data entry. I got it as a summer job, and since it was full-time and they had to replace me, I asked if I could stay on. Interviewed, got the yes, and off I went working full time and studying business in the evening. I got promoted within the company, mostly by luck and fate (earned it, but the opportunities were largely dumb luck), and established professional credibility.
I was not an IT major. I studied Finance. But the IT thing kept following me around.
I was in the crummy job search space for over a year before getting my degree. When I got just shy of the degree I had three choices: Go into my field of study, and take a pay cut; stay in the industry I had been working in (neither Finance nor IT), or take that IT thing that had been following me and turn it into a career. I landed an IT position through an informal contact (more dumb luck), relocated, and pulled off a $13,000 increase in pay. That was 10 years ago.
I went from that job to consulting as part of a firm that I had
With respect to the holiday, it's on the first Monday following his actual birthday, which (if I recall correctly -- I was pretty young when most of the squabbling was going on) is in such a weirdo setup because the one thing they couldn't get in the uphill climb to make it a holiday at all was to make it sit on the actual date. More inconvenience they (opponents of the holiday's existence) didn't want to have in memory of a man who they didn't want to show respect for in the first place.
Could your prof imitate a "poor white trash" accent? I think that experiment would make the point much stronger because the race and class issues would be disentangled.
Now you know, that's an interesting item you point at there. Up here in Portland, Oregon, where there are barely enough "black" people to shake a stick at (2% or less, as I recall), the "white trash" are running around banging loud rap music, "tricking out" their cars, talking with stereotypical "black accents," and even getting the syntax and context of a lot of the slang right.
It completely blows my mind. Of all the things I figured I would have to deal with as an educated black person who clawed his way out of the 'hood, I never thought I'd be subjected to the occasional cultural "out-blacking" by whites who had neither the education nor the motivation to keep up with me.
How's that for a sociological experiment? It's an eye-opener, at least as long as you can stand to be around it. It certainly suggests that at the low end of the socioeconomic scale, things are driven a lot more by class than people want known.
I don't think your example has much bearing on the racism question posed. But I'm responding because I may have some experience to help you.
I'm guessing you're young and new to the industry, possibly entering the permanent work force for the first time. Data entry is entry-level work, low end, low paying (relative to other IT jobs, that is).
I suspect you didn't get a callback because you outclassed the expectations of the hiring parties. I ran into similar issues early in my career. I dressed professionally. Less professional people resented it and accused me of "trying to impress someone." Many of those people were in entry-level positions-- including HR. And while they didn't have the power to hire me, they had the power to disappear my resume (which also outclassed expectations, by simple virtue of having one).
Let's try another angle. Wearing a suit? That means you have a job that lets you afford it. Nice suit? Nicer job. Nicer salary. Hey, you're more expensive than I'm willing to pay for this position or your abilities. Buh-bye.
Your problem may simply be that your game is on a shade ahead of everyone's expectations. The good news: you will get jobs that value talent and professionalism. The bad news: the jobs that stink (which there are abundantly more of) won't look at you twice, and you're going to be slighted and feel slighted every time. Eventually you'll wonder what's wrong with you, or what they "all" think is wrong with you.
Incidentally, I'm African-American. And I went through exactly the same kind of situation you described, over and over again. Big staffing firms that moved a lot of clerical labor-- in fact, outfits like "outsourcing agencies for various things from tech support via phonedesk to your very basics of transcription or data entry"-- were particularly bad about this. I finally figured out what was going on when their eyes glassed over during the interview. Big smile, very happy, mucho impressed, no idea what to do with me. I knew more than they did. Woops.
After some years in the biz I was skilled enough to get a toehold in a staffing firm that wouldn't talk to you unless you were Tier 3 or higher IT material. They're gone now, but wow, what a change. They were interested in skilled people, because skills made them money. You had the skills, you meant money. The other outfits were simply low-grade meat markets that made their money on volume and turnover.
Hang in there. If you're worth your salt, in 10 years you'll be so far ahead of everyone else it will actually make you laugh. Especially if you get one of those "big time four year degrees." A four year education is worth something, and without one you'll eventually be swimming alongside those who don't have one because they lacked the dediction-- or ability-- to get one. And the pay will match. Good luck.
Oh for crying out loud. The very notion that whether racism exists in hiring practices varies by industry is laughable. We're talking about human behavior for crying out loud. It doesn't switch on and switch off based on a position's SIC. The question barely merits an answer.
Oh wait, racism. I forgot, discussions about racism are always about how someone else has the problem to be sure, because we realize "we" haven't reached utopia; but maybe "you" and/or your personal/professional space have. So we gotta figure out whether "your" space works the same way as "the rest."
Red herring, red herring, red herring, and a real insult (irrespective of intent) to those who have their livelihoods upended by racism on the job (or trying to get the job) daily. You want to talk about racism in hiring practices, talk about ways to mitigate it. Stoking a debate about whether this industry has found some oasis the rest haven't (i.e., whether this industry has anything to resolve at all) doesn't help, not even remotely.
It's bad enough being accused of being high and mighty just because you know how to work with computers and can do it for a living. But to actually legitimize catcalls from the non-IT space by proposing that somehow IT may not have the same issues of race in hiring that other industries/disciplines do... which would require that somehow IT be inherently more humane, evolved, moral, homo superior, something or other... cripes.
Sounds to me like you have (had?) incompetent mail admins, not "too much security."
Plenty of sympathy here, but the "if I want something done right you have to let me do it myself" thing just plain doesn't work in the context we're talking about. Sole proprietorships with no staff but the owner, perhaps, but not in the enterprise. Your mail admins need to be getting the job done without cutting you off over and over again. Going around them is not the solution. Fixing them is.
To be clear, there is no excuse for the trouble you're describing. I've done mail admin, server admin, network admin, and security on all of the above-- and I'd disappear any mail admin who chronically couldn't figure out how to patch an Exchange box without blowing up established SMTP relay allowances.
Again, availability is a cornerstone of security, and they're making services unavailable by goofing up every time. The problem isn't that you have too much security. Rather, your firm has something being called security that is quite the opposite. And like any *breach* of security, it is undermining business function. The folks managing your back end need a clue, and maybe some new staff.
My sympathies. The only thing worse for security than apathy and ignorance is incompetence. Sounds like someone has plenty in your shop.:-(
But at the end of the day incompetent staff are incompetent staff. They don't stop being incompetent staff and morph into something else called "too much security" just because they control an IT choke point that you can't bypass. And this is important mainly because-- as you presumably know, being a Unix admin-- if you don't properly identify a problem's root cause, you can't very well fix it.
Why not? Production machines need to be able to mail their owners about problems. Desktops need to be able to send mail. Both might just not be Windoze machines able to talk to your crappy, virused out Exchange "server".
Desktops, servers, and other devices need to be able to send mail to the central mail infrastructure and USE IT if your company has invested in such a thing. And if all you have for a central mail server is a "crappy, virused out Exchange server," then your company's problem isn't that they have overzealous security, nor is the fix to allow every box to be an SMTP server.
Your company's problem is that you are misclassifying a poorly handled mail infrastructure as overzealous security and then claiming that the solution is to abandon it rather than fix it, so they now have to both fight with you and fix the mail infrastructure at the same time. Plenty of ROI on that salary of yours while you're armchair quarterbacking.
Your problem is an "I don't care how the mail gets out as long as it works for me and my job" mindset, which, incidentally, back-seats the company's interests (which is interesting, considering that its interests are the only reason why you're there at all).
After I get about 6,000 of you in my company, there are too many of you for me to lock in a single room so you can claw each others' eyes out about whose ad-hoc infrastructure is more important. So I have to assume you're ALL important (horrors!), build an infrastructure that can sustain ALL of you, point you at it, and shut down all the destablizing junk you ad-hoc and armchair-quarterback into existence and then complain to me about when it not-so-surprisingly gets blown up by something ad-hoc'ed and armchair-quarterbacked into existence by your coworker.
The business purpose behind a centralized email infrastructure is to make sure that each and every one of the 6,000 of you can get your work done instead of having 6,000 separate and distinct you-vs-your-5,999-coworkers'-infrastructure-trashi ng battles going at once, with each and every one of you 6,000 telling me to get it fixed but in some way that doesn't impact anyone but the other 5,999 who you personally don't give a damn about (ok, 5,998, I'll allow you one buddy who you care about).
The biggest reason IT winds up playing stability cop is because YOU DEMAND IT. We don't blow it up, YOU blow it up, and YOU demand that it be rendered stable with no changes in your destabilizing behavior. Well guess who wins? YOU. We can't tell you to flake off, so you get stability, and just like order kills chaos, stability kills off all the unstable stuff you love doing so much. You can balance them and compromise, but you most certainly can't have both in their extremes.
Security is a pain? Tell you what. There are three components of security. Confidentiality (of information), Integrity (of information), and Availability (of information). Guess which one you lose first when your infrastructure is unstable? (Hint: the last one). Wow. Since you love your email so much, guess you need security after all. But then, you did mention the viruses first, so maybe you *do* know that.
Up here in Oregon, maybe a year ago, there was a series of ads that ran for a local casino. The caption was "Luck Happens" and the graphic was a map of the western continental United States, basically from Utah/Nevada west. The map looked odd. And then I realized-- California wasn't on the map. Where it would have been was the Pacific Ocean.
A lot of people had a good laugh on that one (sorry to any offended Californians, that ad was danged funny).
Unfortunately these well known technical definitions, don't stay in thier technical context forever.
I am sorry... but if you are suggesting that somehow these technical definitions are going to "leak" into the populace and grow other meanings you have the equation backwards. In the English language the terms master and slave define a control relationship, with "master" being the controller and "slave" being the controlled. This is a historical relationship between the two terms that substantially predates the creation of anything called a "hard drive". The terms "master" and "slave" were not invented for high technology, and for that matter one might argue that their historical and current definitions have never been restricted to the practice of human slavery, in spite of their portrayal by those who see these terms as having only one joint meaning.
Consequently, it makes very little sense to argue that this high-tech defnition is going to somehow become some other kind of broader non-high-tech definition. It already HAS a broader, non-high-tech definition, that being the aforementioned control relationship. It CAME FROM a non-high-tech definition, and that definition is being applied in a high-tech context, in a highly accurate and precise manner. The usage cannot be construed as expansive, and in fact it is already subordinate to the base terms, which is easily understood when the technical use is viewed in context.
The biggest problem here is that people continue to grumble and gripe about the usage of words while paying no attention whatsoever to the context within which they are utilized, and they pick and choose which definitions "matter" (those they want to leverage to justify abolishing words) and those that "don't matter" (those whose significance they deem irrelevant, because they want the word abolished from the language due to the definitions that annoy them). Unfortunately, this appears to be a general social trend, at least in the US (I have no overseas experience), where I find it more and more difficult to have meaningful discussions with people because they increasingly listen and react to isolated words but can't seem to digest full sentences, much less paragraphs.
In the end the position of LA County is linguistically and rationally nonsensical, nothing more than the dressed-up emontionalism of those who-- as many have pointed out-- want to control language in order to create artificial comfort zones, without addressing the real issues that underpin discomfort on hot-button issues.
In a language filled with words that have multiple meanings, approaches like this are a bit of a problem. And even worse, get into something other than English where all or most nouns are defined as masculine or feminine. Unless you are willing to abolish the practice of having words with multiple definitions, and rewrite entire language bases so that everything is gender-neutral, you aren't going to get far. And if you think you can pull this off-- with five billion communicating individuals to re-educate into using the new and improved linguistic plan-- good luck.
In the end it needs to be recognized that common sense has a role to play in dealing with language just as it does in dealing with anything else. If one wishes to take things out of context, the meaning is going to be changed. If one doesn't like the out of context meaning, perhaps the real issue is that one shouldn't be taking it out of context in the first place. If one doesn't understand the significance of context, or doubts that context in fact has significance at all... well... there's not much debate left to have with that person. LA County needs to figure that out, and with any luck, the fact that every hard drive manufacturer on the planet probably won't start creating "LA County" versions of their drive labels will get them to figure out how brain-dead this idea of theirs is.
Has LA County banned mail from this guy? Will his employees be allowed to enter into county facilities? Will he have to change his title from Postmaster to Post-uh-Lead-Handler-Executive-Person? Huh? Wha?
He promised an Action Oriented State. By printing the voting machines will have more Action and therefore he supports them. It is much more interesting than an Action-Less machine which doesn't have moving thingies to show the People of California all their Action.
... that punch cards had problems. Dang, bring them back. As long as you ignore Florida and leave it to the states that can actually figure out how to vote everything works fine. And hey, you don't have to generate e-waste.:)
You completely miss the point. You see, you don't have to worry about someone getting this data on a bogus warrant if it is not there. Similarly, you do not have to worry about it being transmitted if it is not there. Strangely enough, you also do not have to be worried about it being archived for long periods of time or in combination with GPS data if it is not there.
However, this minor detail appears to be completely lost upon you, so instead, you choose to label anyone who raises such concerns, including your own, and I daresay the very question of the wisdom of implanting a device to collect such data in the first place, as "paranoid and unreasonable," a broad characterization about two steps away from name calling which suggests that no person with a brain larger than an eggplant could possibly disagree with you without benefit of mental deficiency.
And this makes your argument credible? Sounds like opnion being passed off as fact, and yet another attempt to stifle any real discussion via a favorite childhood argument: "Well that's how I think and so I'm taking my ball and going home-- end communication."
Amazing. Perhaps one day people will learn the difference between dismissing a raised concern, and actually addressing it.
Person: Hey George.
George: Hey.
Person: George, I'm going to follow you around and watch everything you do.
George: Huh?
Person: Really, it's for the best of everyone.
George: Who the heck do you think you are? Big Brother?
Person: No no no. I'm just going to follow you around to make sure you don't do anything that endangers anyone.
George: Why I ought to... what gives you the right to follow me around and invade my privacy like that? What are you accusing me of anyway? Go to hell.
Person: But I'll only follow you by sitting in your car and monitoring your acceleration, speed, and general method of handling your vehicle while you're driving.
George: Well HECK! Wy didn't you say so? That's a great idea. I'm sorry my concerns were so completely irrelevant. I was completely out of line. Hop in and let's start plugging in those sensors. Hey, what else can you monitor with that thing?
The "breaking" that this "patch" supposedly caused is a feature (root-delegation-only), apparently used more by the (understandbly) uninformed than the informed, that is available only in BIND 9.2.3 Release Candidate 3 and 4.
Informed or uninformed about the feature, a release candidate in production may as well be beta software, good reasons to deploy notwithstanding. When you use beta software in production and it does something unintended, that's not a callous failure of the provider/programmer, that's called "testing" and impact should have been considered first. Last I heard, those who place their feet in a fire can expect to get burned, even if they don't like the idea of it.
BIND 9.2.2P3-- which is neither designated formally as a release candidate nor informally as a beta-- does not implement the root-delegation-only feature. So unless you're playing with the fires associated with beta testing... there should be no wildcard-related issues for the uninformed (innocent or otherwise).
Doesn't quite work that way. In terms of inbound SMTP, a secondary MX with a lower priority (higher numeric value) is already, techincally, a backup. However, it is a backup *route* that will accept mail at anytime, so if someone simply decides to ignore the primary-- or falls back to the backup because the primary said no-- well, you have the problem described.
If you wish to leave the boundaries of the SMTP protocol there are probably all kinds of things you can think up, but if you aren't willing to implement add-on-style solutions that say "I will only accept email if *I* think the primary is down" then you're out of luck. SMTP+DNS alone doesn't work that way, never has, never will.
Same story, different (legit) no-registration site
on
The "Techie" Vote?
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· Score: 1
The same story is republished at this URL. No registration required and it appears to be republished here legitimately. Enjoy without feeding the LA Times' marketing/hassle department.
Yes, it has the Compact Disc logo we all know and love-- and it also happens to lack any disclosure whatsoever of the fact that it is playback-hampered. I wound up magic-markering the CD just to get it to play in my home theater system, which is centered around an Apex CD/DVD player (with no burn capabilities, so there's no copy risk). So, in short, EMI is fraudulently using the Compact Disc logo for this particular CD. Fun huh?
This got modded as "funny?" HE WASN'T KIDDING. The job market here is flatter than a two-by-four. Hell, it's concave. There is NOTHING here. A whopping five-and-a-half columns in the want ads on Sunday. *Nothing* on Monster. It is DEAD here and it is NOT funny. It's downright pitiful. And if you find a job, count on having your salary slashed to entry-level wages or as close to it as they can shove you. Folks are really getting desperate up here.
And god forbid you work(ed) as a Network Engineer... I've given up... so sick of it I bought these domain names last night... itisdead.com... nojobsinoregon.com... notechinoregon.com... oregonhasnojobs.com... theeconomysucks.com. I figured folks stuck here needed a vent. Maybe someone in this state might even take the problem seriously (ya right).
Oregon is getting hit hard... but Oregon IT is getting outright slammed. I don't want to know what the industry unemployment rate is in this state. Too depressing.
Let me first say that you absolutely have a brain, unlike a whole lot of the Chicagoans I left behind.:)
I'm a native south-sider and spent a good deal of time living in the Lakeview area (about 4 miles north of downtown) in my adulthood. "Ah ain't one o' dem suburban-people!":) I also spent a fair amount of time *outside* Chicago on the East Coast, and I currently live on the West Coast. I've got a taste for some different professional and intellectual climates.
I don't count the south/west sides-- different dynamic altogether, as you alluded to-- my comments were actually based on my experiences as a member of the labor pool, as a Northsider, and (six years later) as a visitor. Blue collar town stuck with white collar jobs, still acting like a bunch of (sterotypical) steel and millworkers in terms of how they treat those around them. Pretty sad to see, actually, very sad.:(
Up on the North side, I found thinking to be more... advanced (cough) but there was still a distinct marriage to the status quo that puts a whammy on any real intellectual movement. When I finally started asking around, before leaving, people in a *number* of professions all told me the same thing: East Coast, smart but a bit uptight and conservative. West Coast, smart and laid back. Midwest, freaked out by anything new and by the time they finally accepted something "new" it was passe in the rest of the US. Chi was no exception.
IT is about innovation. Chicago is about things that are already there, and they hate innovation (enjoy the link). So I left.
And strangely enough, I found plenty of (Chicago-food-missing) ex-Chicagoans saying the same thing. I'm clearly not alone in my observations.
The item I mentioned about the prewired building was actually from some rather ridiculous speech that Daley gave... it's so far back that I haven't been able to Google it, but at the time it was so obnoxious that I showed it to quite a few of my hi-tech associates out here (Portland OR). They all just shook their heads in shame. I figured I had to let some other people read it to be sure I wasn't losing my mind and mistranslating...!
I'll concede that there are areas where the people are nastier than in Chicago. But note that I never said Chicago was *the* nastiest, just that it's one of the top nasties (heh). It definitely has some good company, and some places just might devour Chitown outright.
Anyway, I'm glad to hear that there's more going in IT space there than before... maybe they can civilize the place.:)
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I may have come off sounding a bit arrogant
Sometimes the only difference between "arrogant" and "cocky" is that arrogant means you can back it up.
If you really are carrying that 190 IQ, you're not alone. 'Nuff said for this forum, best wishes.
There are two key questions that drive IT training.
(1) Is your company an IT company? If not, expect less enthusiasm for buying training for you, because IT isn't revenue. It's cost. And for any business, the less cost, the better (and forget the long term benefit blah blah... budgeting gets done year by year, or completely seat of the pants if not a big enough shop to have an IT budget.
(2) As alluded to above, how big is your company? Are they big enough to even have a standing conversation about IT training or is it something that they never think about, even for a moment, until you bring it up and then they go, "whazzat? You're the computer person don't you already know?"
There is no "norm for IT." There are norms for training in general as they relate to whether you're training on core business (vs overhead) and business size (i.e., free money to spend). Go to Microsoft as part of their IT staff and ask for training on inventory management techniques, because someone asks you questions about inventory management software. What? Huh? Good luck.
Cisco will (probably) happily train you as an employee on Cisco products. Or networking. Why? DUH! They sell the danged product! But I doubt that Joe's Gigantic Shop of Big Shoes will. They don't care about the fricking network! It had just better work!
With that said, in non-IT shops, unless they're big ones that have figured out that their people need to know something more, most orgs are a lot happier with your non-optimized, unmanageable infrastructure than you are. You think it can be better. They think it's just fine because it works, and if it doesn't work, it's because you're not doing your job, not because you need training that they're supposed to give you.
There are definitely nicer situations and YMMV. But if you want to make a career-- versus a paycheck-- in IT, taking ownership of your training is going to be part of the turf, unless you are decidedly fortunate.
Good luck. Tough space to work in, IT. Definitely a fast-moving balancing act, and definitely not for everybody.
when you go into these low end job interviews and you're the only person of a particular race there out of a dozen people, doing it professionally as you were taught, it sure looks like racism on the end of the HR person
I also wonder how you, or any one really, got around this.
Understandable enough. But not enough to just label it "racism" and troll on to the next job application. The real bugger is that it doesn't matter whether anyone agrees with you about whether it's racism or not. If this wigs you out every time, you're in trouble.
Racism, and all the other "isms," are largely about putting someone in their "proper place." In the workplace, the means are psychological. They can't string you up from a tree so they throw all this time and energy into screwing up your head so that you'll doubt your ability to get around them. Scrambling your ability to (a) earn a paycheck and/or (b) make that paycheck bigger and improve your standard of living is a *really* good way to mess with someone, both in the individual and the aggregate. If you have a spouse and/or kids, it really gets under your skin.
All "isms" are also manifestations of fear. And anyone making hiring decisions based on fear is going to pull each and every last one of their fears into the equation-- they've crossed the line already, so they dive in hard. They're scared of you because of your color. They're scared of you because you fit the profile. They're scared of you because you *don't* fit the profile. They're scared of you because you might be better than them (you're dressed professionally, they're not). They're scared of you because you highlight things that could make them look bad (you handle yourself professionally, they've been hiring folks who don't). On and on and on.
The truth is that you can't win in a head-to-head against these people. There are more of them than there are of you. You can, however, capitalize on the fact that they're going to cluster at the bottom, where their lack of skills and professionalism leave them. They and the people who prefer them over you are going to stay down there. Forget about them and focus on finding somewhere better, and somewhere else, to be.
As for how one does that... obviously I've been at this a little while and feel I've gotten past the entry-level crap successfully. And don't get me wrong, I deal with racism at the level I work at as well-- when they come up with a creative way to come after you, you get dragged back to the bottom pretty quick. I had to hire lawyers to help keep one job when a bigot with an agenda and some false accusations was given immediate credibility by HR-- becuase she was white and I was "dark." I can't say I won. Kept the job but paid a steep personal price that will take years to unravel. You never really "win" once engaged in battles about race; you just hope you come out with fewer scars than the other party.
But with that said, my first full time job was, surprise, data entry. I got it as a summer job, and since it was full-time and they had to replace me, I asked if I could stay on. Interviewed, got the yes, and off I went working full time and studying business in the evening. I got promoted within the company, mostly by luck and fate (earned it, but the opportunities were largely dumb luck), and established professional credibility.
I was not an IT major. I studied Finance. But the IT thing kept following me around.
I was in the crummy job search space for over a year before getting my degree. When I got just shy of the degree I had three choices: Go into my field of study, and take a pay cut; stay in the industry I had been working in (neither Finance nor IT), or take that IT thing that had been following me and turn it into a career. I landed an IT position through an informal contact (more dumb luck), relocated, and pulled off a $13,000 increase in pay. That was 10 years ago.
I went from that job to consulting as part of a firm that I had
Actually, January 15th is his birthday.
With respect to the holiday, it's on the first Monday following his actual birthday, which (if I recall correctly -- I was pretty young when most of the squabbling was going on) is in such a weirdo setup because the one thing they couldn't get in the uphill climb to make it a holiday at all was to make it sit on the actual date. More inconvenience they (opponents of the holiday's existence) didn't want to have in memory of a man who they didn't want to show respect for in the first place.
Could your prof imitate a "poor white trash" accent? I think that experiment would make the point much stronger because the race and class issues would be disentangled.
Now you know, that's an interesting item you point at there. Up here in Portland, Oregon, where there are barely enough "black" people to shake a stick at (2% or less, as I recall), the "white trash" are running around banging loud rap music, "tricking out" their cars, talking with stereotypical "black accents," and even getting the syntax and context of a lot of the slang right.
It completely blows my mind. Of all the things I figured I would have to deal with as an educated black person who clawed his way out of the 'hood, I never thought I'd be subjected to the occasional cultural "out-blacking" by whites who had neither the education nor the motivation to keep up with me.
How's that for a sociological experiment? It's an eye-opener, at least as long as you can stand to be around it. It certainly suggests that at the low end of the socioeconomic scale, things are driven a lot more by class than people want known.
I don't think your example has much bearing on the racism question posed. But I'm responding because I may have some experience to help you.
I'm guessing you're young and new to the industry, possibly entering the permanent work force for the first time. Data entry is entry-level work, low end, low paying (relative to other IT jobs, that is).
I suspect you didn't get a callback because you outclassed the expectations of the hiring parties. I ran into similar issues early in my career. I dressed professionally. Less professional people resented it and accused me of "trying to impress someone." Many of those people were in entry-level positions-- including HR. And while they didn't have the power to hire me, they had the power to disappear my resume (which also outclassed expectations, by simple virtue of having one).
Let's try another angle. Wearing a suit? That means you have a job that lets you afford it. Nice suit? Nicer job. Nicer salary. Hey, you're more expensive than I'm willing to pay for this position or your abilities. Buh-bye.
Your problem may simply be that your game is on a shade ahead of everyone's expectations. The good news: you will get jobs that value talent and professionalism. The bad news: the jobs that stink (which there are abundantly more of) won't look at you twice, and you're going to be slighted and feel slighted every time. Eventually you'll wonder what's wrong with you, or what they "all" think is wrong with you.
Incidentally, I'm African-American. And I went through exactly the same kind of situation you described, over and over again. Big staffing firms that moved a lot of clerical labor-- in fact, outfits like "outsourcing agencies for various things from tech support via phonedesk to your very basics of transcription or data entry"-- were particularly bad about this. I finally figured out what was going on when their eyes glassed over during the interview. Big smile, very happy, mucho impressed, no idea what to do with me. I knew more than they did. Woops.
After some years in the biz I was skilled enough to get a toehold in a staffing firm that wouldn't talk to you unless you were Tier 3 or higher IT material. They're gone now, but wow, what a change. They were interested in skilled people, because skills made them money. You had the skills, you meant money. The other outfits were simply low-grade meat markets that made their money on volume and turnover.
Hang in there. If you're worth your salt, in 10 years you'll be so far ahead of everyone else it will actually make you laugh. Especially if you get one of those "big time four year degrees." A four year education is worth something, and without one you'll eventually be swimming alongside those who don't have one because they lacked the dediction-- or ability-- to get one. And the pay will match. Good luck.
Oh for crying out loud. The very notion that whether racism exists in hiring practices varies by industry is laughable. We're talking about human behavior for crying out loud. It doesn't switch on and switch off based on a position's SIC. The question barely merits an answer.
Oh wait, racism. I forgot, discussions about racism are always about how someone else has the problem to be sure, because we realize "we" haven't reached utopia; but maybe "you" and/or your personal/professional space have. So we gotta figure out whether "your" space works the same way as "the rest."
Red herring, red herring, red herring, and a real insult (irrespective of intent) to those who have their livelihoods upended by racism on the job (or trying to get the job) daily. You want to talk about racism in hiring practices, talk about ways to mitigate it. Stoking a debate about whether this industry has found some oasis the rest haven't (i.e., whether this industry has anything to resolve at all) doesn't help, not even remotely.
It's bad enough being accused of being high and mighty just because you know how to work with computers and can do it for a living. But to actually legitimize catcalls from the non-IT space by proposing that somehow IT may not have the same issues of race in hiring that other industries/disciplines do... which would require that somehow IT be inherently more humane, evolved, moral, homo superior, something or other... cripes.
Sounds to me like you have (had?) incompetent mail admins, not "too much security."
Plenty of sympathy here, but the "if I want something done right you have to let me do it myself" thing just plain doesn't work in the context we're talking about. Sole proprietorships with no staff but the owner, perhaps, but not in the enterprise. Your mail admins need to be getting the job done without cutting you off over and over again. Going around them is not the solution. Fixing them is.
To be clear, there is no excuse for the trouble you're describing. I've done mail admin, server admin, network admin, and security on all of the above-- and I'd disappear any mail admin who chronically couldn't figure out how to patch an Exchange box without blowing up established SMTP relay allowances.
Again, availability is a cornerstone of security, and they're making services unavailable by goofing up every time. The problem isn't that you have too much security. Rather, your firm has something being called security that is quite the opposite. And like any *breach* of security, it is undermining business function. The folks managing your back end need a clue, and maybe some new staff.
My sympathies. The only thing worse for security than apathy and ignorance is incompetence. Sounds like someone has plenty in your shop. :-(
But at the end of the day incompetent staff are incompetent staff. They don't stop being incompetent staff and morph into something else called "too much security" just because they control an IT choke point that you can't bypass. And this is important mainly because-- as you presumably know, being a Unix admin-- if you don't properly identify a problem's root cause, you can't very well fix it.
Good luck.
Why not? Production machines need to be able to mail their owners about problems. Desktops need to be able to send mail. Both might just not be Windoze machines able to talk to your crappy, virused out Exchange "server".
Desktops, servers, and other devices need to be able to send mail to the central mail infrastructure and USE IT if your company has invested in such a thing. And if all you have for a central mail server is a "crappy, virused out Exchange server," then your company's problem isn't that they have overzealous security, nor is the fix to allow every box to be an SMTP server.
Your company's problem is that you are misclassifying a poorly handled mail infrastructure as overzealous security and then claiming that the solution is to abandon it rather than fix it, so they now have to both fight with you and fix the mail infrastructure at the same time. Plenty of ROI on that salary of yours while you're armchair quarterbacking.
Your problem is an "I don't care how the mail gets out as long as it works for me and my job" mindset, which, incidentally, back-seats the company's interests (which is interesting, considering that its interests are the only reason why you're there at all).
After I get about 6,000 of you in my company, there are too many of you for me to lock in a single room so you can claw each others' eyes out about whose ad-hoc infrastructure is more important. So I have to assume you're ALL important (horrors!), build an infrastructure that can sustain ALL of you, point you at it, and shut down all the destablizing junk you ad-hoc and armchair-quarterback into existence and then complain to me about when it not-so-surprisingly gets blown up by something ad-hoc'ed and armchair-quarterbacked into existence by your coworker.
The business purpose behind a centralized email infrastructure is to make sure that each and every one of the 6,000 of you can get your work done instead of having 6,000 separate and distinct you-vs-your-5,999-coworkers'-infrastructure-trashi ng battles going at once, with each and every one of you 6,000 telling me to get it fixed but in some way that doesn't impact anyone but the other 5,999 who you personally don't give a damn about (ok, 5,998, I'll allow you one buddy who you care about).
The biggest reason IT winds up playing stability cop is because YOU DEMAND IT. We don't blow it up, YOU blow it up, and YOU demand that it be rendered stable with no changes in your destabilizing behavior. Well guess who wins? YOU. We can't tell you to flake off, so you get stability, and just like order kills chaos, stability kills off all the unstable stuff you love doing so much. You can balance them and compromise, but you most certainly can't have both in their extremes.
Security is a pain? Tell you what. There are three components of security. Confidentiality (of information), Integrity (of information), and Availability (of information). Guess which one you lose first when your infrastructure is unstable? (Hint: the last one). Wow. Since you love your email so much, guess you need security after all. But then, you did mention the viruses first, so maybe you *do* know that.
Up here in Oregon, maybe a year ago, there was a series of ads that ran for a local casino. The caption was "Luck Happens" and the graphic was a map of the western continental United States, basically from Utah/Nevada west. The map looked odd. And then I realized-- California wasn't on the map. Where it would have been was the Pacific Ocean.
A lot of people had a good laugh on that one (sorry to any offended Californians, that ad was danged funny).
Unfortunately these well known technical definitions, don't stay in thier technical context forever.
I am sorry... but if you are suggesting that somehow these technical definitions are going to "leak" into the populace and grow other meanings you have the equation backwards. In the English language the terms master and slave define a control relationship, with "master" being the controller and "slave" being the controlled. This is a historical relationship between the two terms that substantially predates the creation of anything called a "hard drive". The terms "master" and "slave" were not invented for high technology, and for that matter one might argue that their historical and current definitions have never been restricted to the practice of human slavery, in spite of their portrayal by those who see these terms as having only one joint meaning.
Consequently, it makes very little sense to argue that this high-tech defnition is going to somehow become some other kind of broader non-high-tech definition. It already HAS a broader, non-high-tech definition, that being the aforementioned control relationship. It CAME FROM a non-high-tech definition, and that definition is being applied in a high-tech context, in a highly accurate and precise manner. The usage cannot be construed as expansive, and in fact it is already subordinate to the base terms, which is easily understood when the technical use is viewed in context.
The biggest problem here is that people continue to grumble and gripe about the usage of words while paying no attention whatsoever to the context within which they are utilized, and they pick and choose which definitions "matter" (those they want to leverage to justify abolishing words) and those that "don't matter" (those whose significance they deem irrelevant, because they want the word abolished from the language due to the definitions that annoy them). Unfortunately, this appears to be a general social trend, at least in the US (I have no overseas experience), where I find it more and more difficult to have meaningful discussions with people because they increasingly listen and react to isolated words but can't seem to digest full sentences, much less paragraphs.
In the end the position of LA County is linguistically and rationally nonsensical, nothing more than the dressed-up emontionalism of those who-- as many have pointed out-- want to control language in order to create artificial comfort zones, without addressing the real issues that underpin discomfort on hot-button issues.
In a language filled with words that have multiple meanings, approaches like this are a bit of a problem. And even worse, get into something other than English where all or most nouns are defined as masculine or feminine. Unless you are willing to abolish the practice of having words with multiple definitions, and rewrite entire language bases so that everything is gender-neutral, you aren't going to get far. And if you think you can pull this off-- with five billion communicating individuals to re-educate into using the new and improved linguistic plan-- good luck.
In the end it needs to be recognized that common sense has a role to play in dealing with language just as it does in dealing with anything else. If one wishes to take things out of context, the meaning is going to be changed. If one doesn't like the out of context meaning, perhaps the real issue is that one shouldn't be taking it out of context in the first place. If one doesn't understand the significance of context, or doubts that context in fact has significance at all... well... there's not much debate left to have with that person. LA County needs to figure that out, and with any luck, the fact that every hard drive manufacturer on the planet probably won't start creating "LA County" versions of their drive labels will get them to figure out how brain-dead this idea of theirs is.
Or at least one can hope.
Has LA County banned mail from this guy? Will his employees be allowed to enter into county facilities? Will he have to change his title from Postmaster to Post-uh-Lead-Handler-Executive-Person? Huh? Wha?
Geez if there was ever a reason for Slashdot to allow modding up more than +5, this post is IT!!!
Signed, fellow math geek (and yes I've run into this same kind of thing-- lol)
He promised an Action Oriented State. By printing the voting machines will have more Action and therefore he supports them. It is much more interesting than an Action-Less machine which doesn't have moving thingies to show the People of California all their Action.
:)
Sorry couldn't resist.
... that punch cards had problems. Dang, bring them back. As long as you ignore Florida and leave it to the states that can actually figure out how to vote everything works fine. And hey, you don't have to generate e-waste. :)
You completely miss the point. You see, you don't have to worry about someone getting this data on a bogus warrant if it is not there. Similarly, you do not have to worry about it being transmitted if it is not there. Strangely enough, you also do not have to be worried about it being archived for long periods of time or in combination with GPS data if it is not there. However, this minor detail appears to be completely lost upon you, so instead, you choose to label anyone who raises such concerns, including your own, and I daresay the very question of the wisdom of implanting a device to collect such data in the first place, as "paranoid and unreasonable," a broad characterization about two steps away from name calling which suggests that no person with a brain larger than an eggplant could possibly disagree with you without benefit of mental deficiency. And this makes your argument credible? Sounds like opnion being passed off as fact, and yet another attempt to stifle any real discussion via a favorite childhood argument: "Well that's how I think and so I'm taking my ball and going home-- end communication." Amazing. Perhaps one day people will learn the difference between dismissing a raised concern, and actually addressing it.
Person: Hey George.
George: Hey.
Person: George, I'm going to follow you around and watch everything you do.
George: Huh? Person: Really, it's for the best of everyone. George: Who the heck do you think you are? Big Brother?
Person: No no no. I'm just going to follow you around to make sure you don't do anything that endangers anyone.
George: Why I ought to... what gives you the right to follow me around and invade my privacy like that? What are you accusing me of anyway? Go to hell.
Person: But I'll only follow you by sitting in your car and monitoring your acceleration, speed, and general method of handling your vehicle while you're driving.
George: Well HECK! Wy didn't you say so? That's a great idea. I'm sorry my concerns were so completely irrelevant. I was completely out of line. Hop in and let's start plugging in those sensors. Hey, what else can you monitor with that thing?
... with OS upgrades to *nix. Funny, it makes the GUI-thingy go away tho, anybody know why that happens? :)
The "breaking" that this "patch" supposedly caused is a feature (root-delegation-only), apparently used more by the (understandbly) uninformed than the informed, that is available only in BIND 9.2.3 Release Candidate 3 and 4.
Informed or uninformed about the feature, a release candidate in production may as well be beta software, good reasons to deploy notwithstanding. When you use beta software in production and it does something unintended, that's not a callous failure of the provider/programmer, that's called "testing" and impact should have been considered first. Last I heard, those who place their feet in a fire can expect to get burned, even if they don't like the idea of it.
BIND 9.2.2P3-- which is neither designated formally as a release candidate nor informally as a beta-- does not implement the root-delegation-only feature. So unless you're playing with the fires associated with beta testing... there should be no wildcard-related issues for the uninformed (innocent or otherwise).
Doesn't quite work that way. In terms of inbound SMTP, a secondary MX with a lower priority (higher numeric value) is already, techincally, a backup. However, it is a backup *route* that will accept mail at anytime, so if someone simply decides to ignore the primary-- or falls back to the backup because the primary said no-- well, you have the problem described.
If you wish to leave the boundaries of the SMTP protocol there are probably all kinds of things you can think up, but if you aren't willing to implement add-on-style solutions that say "I will only accept email if *I* think the primary is down" then you're out of luck. SMTP+DNS alone doesn't work that way, never has, never will.
The same story is republished at this URL. No registration required and it appears to be republished here legitimately. Enjoy without feeding the LA Times' marketing/hassle department.
Yes, it has the Compact Disc logo we all know and love-- and it also happens to lack any disclosure whatsoever of the fact that it is playback-hampered. I wound up magic-markering the CD just to get it to play in my home theater system, which is centered around an Apex CD/DVD player (with no burn capabilities, so there's no copy risk). So, in short, EMI is fraudulently using the Compact Disc logo for this particular CD. Fun huh?
You forgot "in Soviet Russia, Comment Anticipator anticipates YOU!"
:)
Sorry couldn't resist
And god forbid you work(ed) as a Network Engineer... I've given up... so sick of it I bought these domain names last night... itisdead.com... nojobsinoregon.com... notechinoregon.com... oregonhasnojobs.com... theeconomysucks.com. I figured folks stuck here
needed a vent. Maybe someone in this state might even take the problem seriously (ya right).
Oregon is getting hit hard... but Oregon IT is getting outright slammed. I don't want to know what the industry unemployment rate is in this state. Too depressing.
/End laid-off-too-many-times-to-count, yeah-I-know-how-to-use-Windows-after-13-years-in-t he-biz, no-senior-engineers-don't-have-to-be-certified-to- fix-printer-jams rant-rant-rant :(
Let me first say that you absolutely have a brain, unlike a whole lot of the Chicagoans I left behind. :)
I'm a native south-sider and spent a good deal of time living in the Lakeview area (about 4 miles north of downtown) in my adulthood. "Ah ain't one o' dem suburban-people!" :) I also spent a fair amount of time *outside* Chicago on the East Coast, and I currently live on the West Coast. I've got a taste for some different professional and intellectual climates.
I don't count the south/west sides-- different dynamic altogether, as you alluded to-- my comments were actually based on my experiences as a member of the labor pool, as a Northsider, and (six years later) as a visitor. Blue collar town stuck with white collar jobs, still acting like a bunch of (sterotypical) steel and millworkers in terms of how they treat those around them. Pretty sad to see, actually, very sad. :(
Up on the North side, I found thinking to be more... advanced (cough) but there was still a distinct marriage to the status quo that puts a whammy on any real intellectual movement. When I finally started asking around, before leaving, people in a *number* of professions all told me the same thing: East Coast, smart but a bit uptight and conservative. West Coast, smart and laid back. Midwest, freaked out by anything new and by the time they finally accepted something "new" it was passe in the rest of the US. Chi was no exception.
IT is about innovation. Chicago is about things that are already there, and they hate innovation (enjoy the link). So I left.
And strangely enough, I found plenty of (Chicago-food-missing) ex-Chicagoans saying the same thing. I'm clearly not alone in my observations.
The item I mentioned about the prewired building was actually from some rather ridiculous speech that Daley gave... it's so far back that I haven't been able to Google it, but at the time it was so obnoxious that I showed it to quite a few of my hi-tech associates out here (Portland OR). They all just shook their heads in shame. I figured I had to let some other people read it to be sure I wasn't losing my mind and mistranslating...!
I'll concede that there are areas where the people are nastier than in Chicago. But note that I never said Chicago was *the* nastiest, just that it's one of the top nasties (heh). It definitely has some good company, and some places just might devour Chitown outright.
Anyway, I'm glad to hear that there's more going in IT space there than before... maybe they can civilize the place. :)