There's a good chance this has nothing at all to do with Dell. Laptops are extremely notorious for going "missing" in the APO system and since that same system uses quite a few local nationals there's really no recourse. The problem is so wide spread that some downrange units were forbidding military members from having laptops shipped to them. There's nothing Dell can do about it since the product leaves their hands when it's shipped. The Post Office just hands it off to the APO center in New York and all tracking stops at that point. Because of the way APO is set up, anyone at anytime in any point between New York and Afghanistan can essentially pick up your laptop and walk off with it. When that happens the best you can hope for is that you had the laptop insured and the Post Office isn't going to squirm around too much in getting the insurance back to you.
And since when has age indicated experience at any particular task? My mother's a bus driver and it takes a good deal of rough work to hold that position. On the days she works she works about 16 hours a day, just in the driver's seat. During that time she has to deal with all manner of miscreants, questions, bizarre situations, and the occasional fight. She certainly doesn't make anywhere near 70k, and I personally doubt that any bus driver does, but if they do then perhaps it's because there's a demand for qualified bus drivers. You can't just come off the street, perfect driving record or no, and get hired on by the local public transportation provider. For one thing, most companies require that their drivers memorize all the bus routes and times in their area before they become full-fledged drivers. That's a heckuva lot of data to imprint into one's brain.
Observing the job is not the same as knowing the job.
I'll second that. I don't currently have any teaching experience (though it is a long-term plan for me to get there), but I've seen some correlation from being in the military. I think he put it better than I could have.
When I was in Oklahoma (just a few years ago) it was $18, and that was if they got paid at all. In 2002/2003 at least the State's education budget "disappeared" and the second semester of the school year was done entirely on donations from the public (so much for taxes). To my knowledge, Oklahoma does have the lowest average salary, but I'm not aware of any immediately available reference to confirm/deny that.
I'm not sure where you got your information on the military, but it's not entirely accurate. For starters, E-5 is not something that's automatically handed to people and you'll be in for at least 2-3 years before you're even given an opportunity to test for it, and then it's another 3-4 years on average for most people to achieve it (this is in the Air Force, it's different in other branches). And once you achieve it, if you achieve it, you'll definitely have a sharp increase in responsibility (though not necessarily authority). Most likely you'll be a supervisor for any number of airmen and in charge of their activities, careers, performance, etc. It's certainly not a "nobody."
Following that, your housing is definitely not a guaranteed allowance and while most will get the sustenance allowance, it's not guaranteed either. The sustenance allowance is supposed to compensate those enlisted who may not be able to get their three squarish meals (mostly shift workers) at the local chow hall and it comes out to about $250. That sounds like a lot, but if you were to buy three meals at the same chow hall every day for a month the bill would be a bit closer to $400.
If you retire after 20 years you get 10% of your base pay, after 30 I believe you get $15. While you're in each year you receive two documents from the military telling you how much you've been paid. One is your W-2. The other is a document from DFAS (DoD's financial department) stating how much that was equivalent to in the civilian world with all the "unpaid benefits" and allowances and what not. For the length of my enlistment it just seemed to me like they were roughly doubling the number on my W-2.
In either case, I spent six years in the US Air Force and then got a job working the same industry once I separated (IT Support) and I've got a lot more in my bank now than I ever did in the service, and I don't make that much.
I graduated from Boerne High School in 2000 so maybe you can imagine my surprise at seeing this thread. As I recall, Principal Champion wouldn't have allowed something like this but I believe he's since passed on unfortunately. If the IT situation there is still the same as it was in the late 90s then the three or four computer labs are being run and maintained by one teacher who also doubles as the Electronic Arts teacher. In fact, while I was there at least, certain students (myself included) were occasionally approached to help with maintaining the network. While I'm not sure if it is anything unusual by any degree, the school's webpage at the time was developed and maintained by the Web Design class, rather than a profession Web-guy.
I'm still inclined to believe Boerne ISD is an awesome school to go to (most people move to that area because of the schools) and it's relatively consistently judged to be among the best in Texas. We happened to have the whole "Snow Falling on Cedars" scandal while I was attending the school (CNN showed up to show all their proficiency at misreporting the story and misspelling and mispronouncing "Boerne" and the only lasting effect of the whole thing was that the book got made into a movie) but I was never given the impression except that the school had the student's best interests at stake.
Personally, I'm ambiguous about this particular situation. I highly doubt that these students were banned for a first offense, and if that's true then I can agree with punitive action being taken. Could the whole incident simply be a case of an overworked teacher who works on computers as a hobby being used as the school's official SA?
Three things that the military could do to improve their IT situation dramatically but will never happen:
1) Develop their own proprietary OS, probably based on Linux. There's no way you can tell me that that would be as expensive as paying MS licensing fees each year, and support costs would go way down.
2) Remote terminal. Go back to that concept of the mainframe and just give the user a dumb terminal. The advantages of that are considerable to too lengthy to give here.
3) Take the SIPRnet away from the Army. I only say that because the amount of leakage that occurs from that alone is just... staggering. Of course if you did that I'm sure the Army officers would start sending their TS messages over NIPRnet rather than route it through proper channels.
I list these because they're fairly obvious and, besides the first one, none of those are my ideas. The command of the Air Force honestly believes, or seems to, that they're on top of the IT world, livin' it large, and their IT training is top notch. The fact that that belief couldn't be farther from the truth is a sign of the failure of leadership.
Re:Ex-Military IT staff described in a nutshell.
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The Living Dilbert?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
You just put a nice bullet on a good many of my own thoughts. The degrees might be different, but IT in the Air Force is just the same. The only training I received from the Air Force (on IT) was on 98 and NT (in '01/02) and all the diagrams featured 5" floppies. The training material told us that the Dot Matrix was the most popular type of printer and one paragraph referred to CDs as a technology that was in development. Latest and greatest tech, huh? When I got to my first assignment it didn't take me long to figure that the Air Force wasn't going to offer much in the promised training so I downloaded some Mandrake and some Slackware and started figuring out things on my own.
I agree whole heartedly that most in the military, whether they are managing the position or an officer over others, have no real mental grip on IT. Yet at every Commander's Call we're reminded how we're the premier force with the latest and greatest technology. This may not mean much to most civilians, but the Air Force is now starting to talk about making a Network Warfare Wing. Apparently it's finally occured to some big brass that networks are important and they should be exploited in some regard. This paradox of what we're told and what really is is something I could easily see causing people to get out with an overinflated sense of knowledge.
As for myself, I at least know what I don't know. I run Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows at home and play around regularly to see what works how, but I have little in the way of formal training. Sure, the government has the money and they'd send me to it but due to manning I can't be spared for a week to go to training. I've done tech support these six years on everything from Windows 3.0 to XP to cryptos and satellites (don't worry, all that comms equipment was at least a decade old) but I've never really specialized in any of it beyond what I've learned in my free time. I have no expectations of getting a $60k job anytime soon and I think I'd be fairly satisfied with about half that. It's hard to tell what it'll be like then since I'm in Germany now. I'll just have to wait and see.
Re:Come work at Army Knowledge Online....
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The Living Dilbert?
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Even though I'm Air Force, I'm pretty familiar with AKO. My unit is assigned on an Army installation so we utilize Army NIPRnet for our NIPRnet-like services and therefore have Army email accounts. A few of us even have the AKO accounts well. I do have to give the Army at least props for doing better than the other branches in IT at least when it comes to the BATs and AKO.
Yep. I know some X2s too, couple of the rare X3s. At my first assignment I was one of 60 airman providing 24 hour support to roughly 30,000 civilians with no budget (literally) and an openly hostile command that was surprised when morale was low. At my currently shop I am the only airman supporting about 200 users, most of whom belong to a certain government civilian agency that shall remain nameless. I mention this to illustrate that my entire career I've worked with and around civilians. I've heard the arguments that it's no different on "the outside" and I realize that politics are everywhere, but it's a matter of degrees.
I honestly believe that until someone takes the Oath of Enlistment, goes through basic, and works 6 to 12 months at their first assignment, that there's no way they can understand what military life is like. It's nothing against the person, it's just so different and alien to the alternative. I don't expect that I truly understand civilian life either (workforce-wise) but having worked with civilians for so long I hope I at least have an idea.
Fundamentally, I have to conclude that if a business entity was run the same way as the military (lapsing several years being the market in technology, placing the aforementioned (in a previous posting) military bearing before performance 100% of the time, being utterly resistant to real change while preaching transformation for decades, etc) it would not be able to survive for very long. Businesses have to worry about their end result because it directly affects their "health." Garrison units (of which the vast majority of the Air Force at least is composed of), don't.
I have to give credit where credit is due. You gave me the whole IT = Dilbert idea in the first place when you made that response in my LJ some weeks ago. Thanks, kattphud.
Re:Military promotion is *very* clear cut.
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The Living Dilbert?
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· Score: 1
You must've been in awhile ago. It's AFI 36-2903 now and while I don't know the page count, it's enough to fill a two inch binder. I don't know that I'd agree that EVERYTHING is well defined, but I would agree that the promotion system itself is pretty cut and dry. It's the criteria and the nuances behind them that I disagree with in regards to military promotions. National Security and the well-being of the nation relies on me preforming my mission (ideologically), not on how pressed my uniform is or how shined my boots are. Yet those factors influence these things more than my work performance. From what I've seen in the last five years, your performance on duty is actually the last thing considered when you're up for promotion or decorations. That's a problem in my opinion.
And it works differently in each branch. Promotions take a good deal longer and come a good deal harder in the Air Force than other branches, generally speaking. Ultimately, the only factor I may influence directly in regards to my promotion is my test scores, which is only 2/5s of the equation. A lot of it is TIS and TIG. A lot of it is also my EPRs and Evals which I have no control over at all. If I had my supervisor a whole stack of bullets, by the time the EPR makes it through the approval process I've all of sudden wound up doing a great many things that I've never heard of and the bullets I had originally put in are no where to be seen. In the Air Force, I myself don't have any effect on my promotions (beyond test scores) or decorations. All that rests on my supervisor's shoulders. This process is a one reason, of many, that I'm separating.
Actually, Congress wanted to let the AF have more people. It was General Jumper who decided that we have to many already. He's cutting some 16-21k airmen in a project he calls "Shaping the Force." From what I've been told, there's no shortage of volunteers. Its also been indicated to me that this is a good sign that the Air Force didn't learn it's lesson back in the early 90s when it cut a lot of troops and threw itself into a major manning problem.
Not at all. I should've worded that differently though. I meant to say that there is a bigger impact mission-wise when an important "grunt" leaves than when Commanders change. Because I'm the only one performing my function and my replacement doesn't arrive until two months after I've already gone, it's reasonable to expect that there will be a significant impact. The Help Desk during that time will be manned (hopefully) by someone who's never manned it before and, odds are, probably won't realize I've left them a heap of documentation till it's too late. On the other hand our Commander has recently changed in the squadron and, like other Change of Commands I've seen in the past, the only noticable difference was that we couldn't work for a day due to the ceremonies.
I'm sure that's not true in every single case, but it does seem to be generally true in my experience.
That would likely be one of those dream jobs I'd luck into. I'm not really sure Squaresoft's going to be hiring any Help Desk Techs with a TS clearance anytime soon. =P It's certainly something to look into though.
Re:Ex-Military IT staff described in a nutshell.
on
The Living Dilbert?
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· Score: 1
There isn't really a lot of legislation you could bring anyway. And all because of my favorite amendment:
Amendment I - Freedom of Religion, Press, Expression. Ratified 12/15/1791
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
I can fully believe that someone's had multiple bad experiences hiring ex-military. We do have a number of sleezebags who wear the uniform. When the separate, there's nothing to say that they stop being sleezebags.
I decided a good long while ago that I wouldn't seek a commission (become an officer) because I wanted to do the work, not tell others to do it. Officers/Managers have their place in the scheme of things, but I'd rather be the guy at the bottom of the pole making the least amount of money and having the direct effect on the mission than being the guy at the top of the pole who could be replaced in a day with little to no effect.
The latest Skillcraft is usually what I keep in my BDU blouse. I could make a comment about how if it's good enough for the whole government then it's got to be good enough for anyone but I doubt anyone could finish the sentence because they'd be laughing too hard...
It's nice to see something from behind the scenes. My question would then be: if this process is so strenous why do we still have cases of CDCs contradicting themselves (I'm not even going into the multiple technical errors I found in my CDCs that weren't right 10 years ago and they're not right now) and why is it apparently so difficult to get them corrected?
I've been to the Train the Trainers course. I'm pretty familar with CFETPs. I think it's kind of funny that I am actually required to be certified on things like:
- can successfully boot up a computer
- can successfully shut down a computer
- can successfully install keyboard
but then again I've also met a few cases, and these may be isolated to our career feild for all I know, where there is a requirement, in this case I'll use the requirement that I know how to configure a kernel, that isn't known by the majority of people in that feild. From my personal experience, most of the people in my career field don't even know exactly what a kernel is much less how to configure one. I only know because I happen to run Linux at home. But I've never seen a position where it's neccisary for us to know that particular example either. I'm sure there's some out there somewhere though.
All in all, I've entertained the idea pretty often of volunteering to go down to Keesler as an instructor. My understanding is that if I do I would be first person to do so in our career feild in a very long time. I just sewed on SrA a few weeks ago so now I finally have enough rank to at least submit the package and probably will as my current assignment draws to a close (I doubt I'm eligible for special assignments while I'm working at my current duty station). All in all though, thanks for the info!
I did get with my supervisor and fill out a feedback form. I also have at least two other freinds who did the same thing. Most of the errors in our CDCs are obvious so I'm appalled that they're still in there after six years. We've tried following up on those forms but we can't get a response. The biggest corrections I can remember making to my CDCs was crossing out entire pages because they were no longer applicable and changing the author's rank from TSgt to MSgt.
The CDC method could be effective but it has to be much better written. The general training model could work if properly used. I think it could work very well in fact, but it's not being properly utilized in my opinion.
As for the tests, the instructors, to my knowledge, don't write those tests and even if they do, is a one week course enough? School teachers have to get something like four year degree to do what they do so I'm not sure how a one week course is supposed to compare to that.
I have some insight into why they use MS so much. At my last assignment (the one where I was one of 60 airman supporting 23,000-30,000 users) I spent the year and a half I was there trying to get the base to at least switch its server farm to some form of *nix. To say that I was met with scepticsm at every turn would be to put it lightly. I recall at one point realizing that most of the people maintaining this network, including my fellow airmen, didn't even know what Open Source was (I resolved this by sending an email to the entire squadron defining it, didn't get much popularity points from that though may have been the most practical solution. I think most of us would agree it no longer is but my personal mission to get the AF to realize that is still, well, not going so well...
The biggest change that I've suggested consistantly since I've been in is to get those same instructors and the CDC writers actual training. If the people who come up with those tests just got pointers from Elementary school teachers I'm sure those tests could be much improved. While I'd love the content to me more modern I realize from a logistical perspective that's not too realistic. So, I'd just settle for effective presentation. All this training material is supposed to be written at the eighth grade level to my understanding. Well I can read will over the 8th grade level, as can many many others, and our biggest issue (at least in my career feild) remains trying to pass a test where the correct answer is not neccisarily the right answer.
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There's a good chance this has nothing at all to do with Dell. Laptops are extremely notorious for going "missing" in the APO system and since that same system uses quite a few local nationals there's really no recourse. The problem is so wide spread that some downrange units were forbidding military members from having laptops shipped to them. There's nothing Dell can do about it since the product leaves their hands when it's shipped. The Post Office just hands it off to the APO center in New York and all tracking stops at that point. Because of the way APO is set up, anyone at anytime in any point between New York and Afghanistan can essentially pick up your laptop and walk off with it. When that happens the best you can hope for is that you had the laptop insured and the Post Office isn't going to squirm around too much in getting the insurance back to you.
And since when has age indicated experience at any particular task? My mother's a bus driver and it takes a good deal of rough work to hold that position. On the days she works she works about 16 hours a day, just in the driver's seat. During that time she has to deal with all manner of miscreants, questions, bizarre situations, and the occasional fight. She certainly doesn't make anywhere near 70k, and I personally doubt that any bus driver does, but if they do then perhaps it's because there's a demand for qualified bus drivers. You can't just come off the street, perfect driving record or no, and get hired on by the local public transportation provider. For one thing, most companies require that their drivers memorize all the bus routes and times in their area before they become full-fledged drivers. That's a heckuva lot of data to imprint into one's brain.
Observing the job is not the same as knowing the job.
I'll second that. I don't currently have any teaching experience (though it is a long-term plan for me to get there), but I've seen some correlation from being in the military. I think he put it better than I could have.
When I was in Oklahoma (just a few years ago) it was $18, and that was if they got paid at all. In 2002/2003 at least the State's education budget "disappeared" and the second semester of the school year was done entirely on donations from the public (so much for taxes). To my knowledge, Oklahoma does have the lowest average salary, but I'm not aware of any immediately available reference to confirm/deny that.
I'm not sure where you got your information on the military, but it's not entirely accurate. For starters, E-5 is not something that's automatically handed to people and you'll be in for at least 2-3 years before you're even given an opportunity to test for it, and then it's another 3-4 years on average for most people to achieve it (this is in the Air Force, it's different in other branches). And once you achieve it, if you achieve it, you'll definitely have a sharp increase in responsibility (though not necessarily authority). Most likely you'll be a supervisor for any number of airmen and in charge of their activities, careers, performance, etc. It's certainly not a "nobody." Following that, your housing is definitely not a guaranteed allowance and while most will get the sustenance allowance, it's not guaranteed either. The sustenance allowance is supposed to compensate those enlisted who may not be able to get their three squarish meals (mostly shift workers) at the local chow hall and it comes out to about $250. That sounds like a lot, but if you were to buy three meals at the same chow hall every day for a month the bill would be a bit closer to $400. If you retire after 20 years you get 10% of your base pay, after 30 I believe you get $15. While you're in each year you receive two documents from the military telling you how much you've been paid. One is your W-2. The other is a document from DFAS (DoD's financial department) stating how much that was equivalent to in the civilian world with all the "unpaid benefits" and allowances and what not. For the length of my enlistment it just seemed to me like they were roughly doubling the number on my W-2. In either case, I spent six years in the US Air Force and then got a job working the same industry once I separated (IT Support) and I've got a lot more in my bank now than I ever did in the service, and I don't make that much.
I graduated from Boerne High School in 2000 so maybe you can imagine my surprise at seeing this thread. As I recall, Principal Champion wouldn't have allowed something like this but I believe he's since passed on unfortunately. If the IT situation there is still the same as it was in the late 90s then the three or four computer labs are being run and maintained by one teacher who also doubles as the Electronic Arts teacher. In fact, while I was there at least, certain students (myself included) were occasionally approached to help with maintaining the network. While I'm not sure if it is anything unusual by any degree, the school's webpage at the time was developed and maintained by the Web Design class, rather than a profession Web-guy. I'm still inclined to believe Boerne ISD is an awesome school to go to (most people move to that area because of the schools) and it's relatively consistently judged to be among the best in Texas. We happened to have the whole "Snow Falling on Cedars" scandal while I was attending the school (CNN showed up to show all their proficiency at misreporting the story and misspelling and mispronouncing "Boerne" and the only lasting effect of the whole thing was that the book got made into a movie) but I was never given the impression except that the school had the student's best interests at stake. Personally, I'm ambiguous about this particular situation. I highly doubt that these students were banned for a first offense, and if that's true then I can agree with punitive action being taken. Could the whole incident simply be a case of an overworked teacher who works on computers as a hobby being used as the school's official SA?
Three things that the military could do to improve their IT situation dramatically but will never happen: 1) Develop their own proprietary OS, probably based on Linux. There's no way you can tell me that that would be as expensive as paying MS licensing fees each year, and support costs would go way down. 2) Remote terminal. Go back to that concept of the mainframe and just give the user a dumb terminal. The advantages of that are considerable to too lengthy to give here. 3) Take the SIPRnet away from the Army. I only say that because the amount of leakage that occurs from that alone is just... staggering. Of course if you did that I'm sure the Army officers would start sending their TS messages over NIPRnet rather than route it through proper channels. I list these because they're fairly obvious and, besides the first one, none of those are my ideas. The command of the Air Force honestly believes, or seems to, that they're on top of the IT world, livin' it large, and their IT training is top notch. The fact that that belief couldn't be farther from the truth is a sign of the failure of leadership.
You just put a nice bullet on a good many of my own thoughts. The degrees might be different, but IT in the Air Force is just the same. The only training I received from the Air Force (on IT) was on 98 and NT (in '01/02) and all the diagrams featured 5" floppies. The training material told us that the Dot Matrix was the most popular type of printer and one paragraph referred to CDs as a technology that was in development. Latest and greatest tech, huh? When I got to my first assignment it didn't take me long to figure that the Air Force wasn't going to offer much in the promised training so I downloaded some Mandrake and some Slackware and started figuring out things on my own. I agree whole heartedly that most in the military, whether they are managing the position or an officer over others, have no real mental grip on IT. Yet at every Commander's Call we're reminded how we're the premier force with the latest and greatest technology. This may not mean much to most civilians, but the Air Force is now starting to talk about making a Network Warfare Wing. Apparently it's finally occured to some big brass that networks are important and they should be exploited in some regard. This paradox of what we're told and what really is is something I could easily see causing people to get out with an overinflated sense of knowledge. As for myself, I at least know what I don't know. I run Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows at home and play around regularly to see what works how, but I have little in the way of formal training. Sure, the government has the money and they'd send me to it but due to manning I can't be spared for a week to go to training. I've done tech support these six years on everything from Windows 3.0 to XP to cryptos and satellites (don't worry, all that comms equipment was at least a decade old) but I've never really specialized in any of it beyond what I've learned in my free time. I have no expectations of getting a $60k job anytime soon and I think I'd be fairly satisfied with about half that. It's hard to tell what it'll be like then since I'm in Germany now. I'll just have to wait and see.
Even though I'm Air Force, I'm pretty familiar with AKO. My unit is assigned on an Army installation so we utilize Army NIPRnet for our NIPRnet-like services and therefore have Army email accounts. A few of us even have the AKO accounts well. I do have to give the Army at least props for doing better than the other branches in IT at least when it comes to the BATs and AKO.
Yep. I know some X2s too, couple of the rare X3s. At my first assignment I was one of 60 airman providing 24 hour support to roughly 30,000 civilians with no budget (literally) and an openly hostile command that was surprised when morale was low. At my currently shop I am the only airman supporting about 200 users, most of whom belong to a certain government civilian agency that shall remain nameless. I mention this to illustrate that my entire career I've worked with and around civilians. I've heard the arguments that it's no different on "the outside" and I realize that politics are everywhere, but it's a matter of degrees. I honestly believe that until someone takes the Oath of Enlistment, goes through basic, and works 6 to 12 months at their first assignment, that there's no way they can understand what military life is like. It's nothing against the person, it's just so different and alien to the alternative. I don't expect that I truly understand civilian life either (workforce-wise) but having worked with civilians for so long I hope I at least have an idea. Fundamentally, I have to conclude that if a business entity was run the same way as the military (lapsing several years being the market in technology, placing the aforementioned (in a previous posting) military bearing before performance 100% of the time, being utterly resistant to real change while preaching transformation for decades, etc) it would not be able to survive for very long. Businesses have to worry about their end result because it directly affects their "health." Garrison units (of which the vast majority of the Air Force at least is composed of), don't.
I have to give credit where credit is due. You gave me the whole IT = Dilbert idea in the first place when you made that response in my LJ some weeks ago. Thanks, kattphud.
You must've been in awhile ago. It's AFI 36-2903 now and while I don't know the page count, it's enough to fill a two inch binder. I don't know that I'd agree that EVERYTHING is well defined, but I would agree that the promotion system itself is pretty cut and dry. It's the criteria and the nuances behind them that I disagree with in regards to military promotions. National Security and the well-being of the nation relies on me preforming my mission (ideologically), not on how pressed my uniform is or how shined my boots are. Yet those factors influence these things more than my work performance. From what I've seen in the last five years, your performance on duty is actually the last thing considered when you're up for promotion or decorations. That's a problem in my opinion.
And it works differently in each branch. Promotions take a good deal longer and come a good deal harder in the Air Force than other branches, generally speaking. Ultimately, the only factor I may influence directly in regards to my promotion is my test scores, which is only 2/5s of the equation. A lot of it is TIS and TIG. A lot of it is also my EPRs and Evals which I have no control over at all. If I had my supervisor a whole stack of bullets, by the time the EPR makes it through the approval process I've all of sudden wound up doing a great many things that I've never heard of and the bullets I had originally put in are no where to be seen. In the Air Force, I myself don't have any effect on my promotions (beyond test scores) or decorations. All that rests on my supervisor's shoulders. This process is a one reason, of many, that I'm separating.
Actually, Congress wanted to let the AF have more people. It was General Jumper who decided that we have to many already. He's cutting some 16-21k airmen in a project he calls "Shaping the Force." From what I've been told, there's no shortage of volunteers. Its also been indicated to me that this is a good sign that the Air Force didn't learn it's lesson back in the early 90s when it cut a lot of troops and threw itself into a major manning problem.
Not at all. I should've worded that differently though. I meant to say that there is a bigger impact mission-wise when an important "grunt" leaves than when Commanders change. Because I'm the only one performing my function and my replacement doesn't arrive until two months after I've already gone, it's reasonable to expect that there will be a significant impact. The Help Desk during that time will be manned (hopefully) by someone who's never manned it before and, odds are, probably won't realize I've left them a heap of documentation till it's too late. On the other hand our Commander has recently changed in the squadron and, like other Change of Commands I've seen in the past, the only noticable difference was that we couldn't work for a day due to the ceremonies. I'm sure that's not true in every single case, but it does seem to be generally true in my experience.
That would likely be one of those dream jobs I'd luck into. I'm not really sure Squaresoft's going to be hiring any Help Desk Techs with a TS clearance anytime soon. =P It's certainly something to look into though.
That's pretty much my question. =P
There isn't really a lot of legislation you could bring anyway. And all because of my favorite amendment: Amendment I - Freedom of Religion, Press, Expression. Ratified 12/15/1791 Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. I can fully believe that someone's had multiple bad experiences hiring ex-military. We do have a number of sleezebags who wear the uniform. When the separate, there's nothing to say that they stop being sleezebags.
I'm stationed in Germany at the moment so I'm already half way there!
I decided a good long while ago that I wouldn't seek a commission (become an officer) because I wanted to do the work, not tell others to do it. Officers/Managers have their place in the scheme of things, but I'd rather be the guy at the bottom of the pole making the least amount of money and having the direct effect on the mission than being the guy at the top of the pole who could be replaced in a day with little to no effect.
The latest Skillcraft is usually what I keep in my BDU blouse. I could make a comment about how if it's good enough for the whole government then it's got to be good enough for anyone but I doubt anyone could finish the sentence because they'd be laughing too hard...
It's nice to see something from behind the scenes. My question would then be: if this process is so strenous why do we still have cases of CDCs contradicting themselves (I'm not even going into the multiple technical errors I found in my CDCs that weren't right 10 years ago and they're not right now) and why is it apparently so difficult to get them corrected? I've been to the Train the Trainers course. I'm pretty familar with CFETPs. I think it's kind of funny that I am actually required to be certified on things like: - can successfully boot up a computer - can successfully shut down a computer - can successfully install keyboard but then again I've also met a few cases, and these may be isolated to our career feild for all I know, where there is a requirement, in this case I'll use the requirement that I know how to configure a kernel, that isn't known by the majority of people in that feild. From my personal experience, most of the people in my career field don't even know exactly what a kernel is much less how to configure one. I only know because I happen to run Linux at home. But I've never seen a position where it's neccisary for us to know that particular example either. I'm sure there's some out there somewhere though. All in all, I've entertained the idea pretty often of volunteering to go down to Keesler as an instructor. My understanding is that if I do I would be first person to do so in our career feild in a very long time. I just sewed on SrA a few weeks ago so now I finally have enough rank to at least submit the package and probably will as my current assignment draws to a close (I doubt I'm eligible for special assignments while I'm working at my current duty station). All in all though, thanks for the info!
I did get with my supervisor and fill out a feedback form. I also have at least two other freinds who did the same thing. Most of the errors in our CDCs are obvious so I'm appalled that they're still in there after six years. We've tried following up on those forms but we can't get a response. The biggest corrections I can remember making to my CDCs was crossing out entire pages because they were no longer applicable and changing the author's rank from TSgt to MSgt. The CDC method could be effective but it has to be much better written. The general training model could work if properly used. I think it could work very well in fact, but it's not being properly utilized in my opinion. As for the tests, the instructors, to my knowledge, don't write those tests and even if they do, is a one week course enough? School teachers have to get something like four year degree to do what they do so I'm not sure how a one week course is supposed to compare to that.
I have some insight into why they use MS so much. At my last assignment (the one where I was one of 60 airman supporting 23,000-30,000 users) I spent the year and a half I was there trying to get the base to at least switch its server farm to some form of *nix. To say that I was met with scepticsm at every turn would be to put it lightly. I recall at one point realizing that most of the people maintaining this network, including my fellow airmen, didn't even know what Open Source was (I resolved this by sending an email to the entire squadron defining it, didn't get much popularity points from that though may have been the most practical solution. I think most of us would agree it no longer is but my personal mission to get the AF to realize that is still, well, not going so well...
The biggest change that I've suggested consistantly since I've been in is to get those same instructors and the CDC writers actual training. If the people who come up with those tests just got pointers from Elementary school teachers I'm sure those tests could be much improved. While I'd love the content to me more modern I realize from a logistical perspective that's not too realistic. So, I'd just settle for effective presentation. All this training material is supposed to be written at the eighth grade level to my understanding. Well I can read will over the 8th grade level, as can many many others, and our biggest issue (at least in my career feild) remains trying to pass a test where the correct answer is not neccisarily the right answer.