I agree. Many companies will sell you your own laptop (or may even give it to you if they like you enough). Just ask. If there is company information, they may request that it be wiped.
An alternative would be to just keep the hard drive. If you've wiped it clean and you're satisfied that no personal files exist, if you purchase a new identical drive and image it with the existing drive, there will be no magnetic fingerprints and the company should be satisfied.
If you can "talk the talk", but don't have the experience, you may consider IT management. After all the chuckling dies down, you need to realize that your degree does give you a diversity of thought and does have some value. I, too, graduated in psychology and found my options lacking. After 8 years pulling myself up by my bootstraps in the IT industry, I got tired of it and realized that having an understanding and sympathy for mismanaged IT was an asset. A couple years and an MBA later, I'm very happy.
There is a disconnect between the business world and tech. If you want to make money, you need to bridge the gap. I would recommend (gasp) going back to school. Take some entrepreneurial classes at a nearby college. Network with the professors and students, many of whom have been through the process or intend to. Learn about the VC process and realize that in order to make money, you are going to lose control at some point. Your problem here is primarily a business one and slashdot might not be the best forum for an answer.
Without knowing the specific relationship and obligations you have with the company, I might proffer a suggestion: Offer access to your data as a service for a price. If you are worried about neophytes causing mass chaos on your well-oiled machine, tell them that you can give certain people access, if they pass your certification program. Certification and training (by you) cost them, which may make them back down. Otherwise, it puts more money in your pockets and minimizes the risk of problems. It also may make your job easier in the long run by having them do the heavy lifting instead of you. More money for less work - sounds like a win.
I'm in the same boat. When your resume is full of IT experience, it makes it hard. And I sympathize with the money thing...it's very tempting to keep slogging it out to support your lifestyle. But ultimately you have to do what is right for you as well as your family.
My solution was to retool. I saved up as much as I could and enrolled in an MBA program that I'll start in the fall. That isn't necessarily going into "Management". Finance, Marketing, and HR are all possibilities. You don't have to return to managing High Tech. Additionally, with the Baby Boomers retiring from a large number of high-ranking positions, there is going to be a vacuum. Now is a great time to get ready to fill that vacuum. There are tons of other graduate programs to consider as well.
Of course, this requires that leave your job, which means tightening your belts temporarily. But struggling together as a family can strengthen you, if you approach it with a unified front. And in the end you'll probably end up making more money. All good things.
Coming at this from a SysAdmin-who's-never-quite-made-the-switch point of view, there are a lot of us that haven't taken the Linux plunge yet. We fiddle with it and have installed Linux a few times to see what the hype is all about, but at the end of the day we work in a MS World and so we haven't "crossed over" yet. But we know we have to and so we're going to find the easiest, most powerful, and troublefree distro we can find. I recently downloaded Ubuntu 6.06 at the behest of a friend just to see what it looked like and liked it overall. I might even install it and play around with it, which is saying something because I've seen tons of distros that haven't really caught my fancy.
It's a brilliant strategy...one that big bad Microsoft has known for years. Get them hooked on the desktop and they'll go for the server. Ubuntu is just starting out and has nowhere the time in game that Red Hat has, and as such doesn't pose as large a risk as the article might have us believe. But still...it's a deadly strategy they're using and Red Hat (among others) would be wise to take note.
Shakespeare is difficult enough to read now. Old English is darn near impossible. By changing the rules of spelling, alphabets, or whatever, we will succeed in cutting of future generations from a wealth of literature, culture and knowledge. It's hard enough to get kids to read the classics, and we want to make it impossible? And lets not even think of the monumental task of transliterating all of the existing documents. Ha! The end result in 100 years is simply a new useless university degree in 21'st century English.
English, for all its faults, is a beautiful language. It's malleable and fluid. It produces beautiful poetry and music because of the very depth people would erase. Insead of dumbing down the language, let's wisen up.
The spot.
How can we exclude Stephen Russell from the list. His acting in the role of Garrett from the Thief trilogy helps you feel like you're the one with the nerve, not a loser living vicariously through pixels.
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I agree. Many companies will sell you your own laptop (or may even give it to you if they like you enough). Just ask. If there is company information, they may request that it be wiped. An alternative would be to just keep the hard drive. If you've wiped it clean and you're satisfied that no personal files exist, if you purchase a new identical drive and image it with the existing drive, there will be no magnetic fingerprints and the company should be satisfied.
If you can "talk the talk", but don't have the experience, you may consider IT management. After all the chuckling dies down, you need to realize that your degree does give you a diversity of thought and does have some value. I, too, graduated in psychology and found my options lacking. After 8 years pulling myself up by my bootstraps in the IT industry, I got tired of it and realized that having an understanding and sympathy for mismanaged IT was an asset. A couple years and an MBA later, I'm very happy.
There is a disconnect between the business world and tech. If you want to make money, you need to bridge the gap. I would recommend (gasp) going back to school. Take some entrepreneurial classes at a nearby college. Network with the professors and students, many of whom have been through the process or intend to. Learn about the VC process and realize that in order to make money, you are going to lose control at some point. Your problem here is primarily a business one and slashdot might not be the best forum for an answer.
Without knowing the specific relationship and obligations you have with the company, I might proffer a suggestion: Offer access to your data as a service for a price. If you are worried about neophytes causing mass chaos on your well-oiled machine, tell them that you can give certain people access, if they pass your certification program. Certification and training (by you) cost them, which may make them back down. Otherwise, it puts more money in your pockets and minimizes the risk of problems. It also may make your job easier in the long run by having them do the heavy lifting instead of you. More money for less work - sounds like a win.
I'm in the same boat. When your resume is full of IT experience, it makes it hard. And I sympathize with the money thing...it's very tempting to keep slogging it out to support your lifestyle. But ultimately you have to do what is right for you as well as your family. My solution was to retool. I saved up as much as I could and enrolled in an MBA program that I'll start in the fall. That isn't necessarily going into "Management". Finance, Marketing, and HR are all possibilities. You don't have to return to managing High Tech. Additionally, with the Baby Boomers retiring from a large number of high-ranking positions, there is going to be a vacuum. Now is a great time to get ready to fill that vacuum. There are tons of other graduate programs to consider as well. Of course, this requires that leave your job, which means tightening your belts temporarily. But struggling together as a family can strengthen you, if you approach it with a unified front. And in the end you'll probably end up making more money. All good things.
Coming at this from a SysAdmin-who's-never-quite-made-the-switch point of view, there are a lot of us that haven't taken the Linux plunge yet. We fiddle with it and have installed Linux a few times to see what the hype is all about, but at the end of the day we work in a MS World and so we haven't "crossed over" yet. But we know we have to and so we're going to find the easiest, most powerful, and troublefree distro we can find. I recently downloaded Ubuntu 6.06 at the behest of a friend just to see what it looked like and liked it overall. I might even install it and play around with it, which is saying something because I've seen tons of distros that haven't really caught my fancy.
It's a brilliant strategy...one that big bad Microsoft has known for years. Get them hooked on the desktop and they'll go for the server. Ubuntu is just starting out and has nowhere the time in game that Red Hat has, and as such doesn't pose as large a risk as the article might have us believe. But still...it's a deadly strategy they're using and Red Hat (among others) would be wise to take note.
Shakespeare is difficult enough to read now. Old English is darn near impossible. By changing the rules of spelling, alphabets, or whatever, we will succeed in cutting of future generations from a wealth of literature, culture and knowledge. It's hard enough to get kids to read the classics, and we want to make it impossible? And lets not even think of the monumental task of transliterating all of the existing documents. Ha! The end result in 100 years is simply a new useless university degree in 21'st century English. English, for all its faults, is a beautiful language. It's malleable and fluid. It produces beautiful poetry and music because of the very depth people would erase. Insead of dumbing down the language, let's wisen up. The spot.
How can we exclude Stephen Russell from the list. His acting in the role of Garrett from the Thief trilogy helps you feel like you're the one with the nerve, not a loser living vicariously through pixels.