I am sysadmin, I am worthless - LONG, sad, sorry :(
Wayne Pascoe
Is there ever recovery? I mean _REAL_ recovery? I've been in the IT
game for about 6 years now, since I left school. It seemed like a good
option with no heavy lifting at the time. Little did I know that rack
mounting a Sun E450 on your own, definitely counts as heavy lifting.
The first couple of years were good. I started out installing cabling
to get my foot in the door, and used the company kit and books to
learn novell at night. Within a couple of months, I was doing all the
company's novell support, the customers were happy, and life
progressed. I was happy there.
Then I got greedy. And stupid. I decided that there had to be more to
it. Bigger challenges. So I went off and learned NT. It seemed luck
such a good idea at the time. Ooooh... pretty. What did I know? The NT
gig didn't last too long. A year in, I was busy rolling out a WAN
across 6 cities in South Africa. We were doing e-mail for the company
through a single dial up modem. Not bright, but hey, not everyone can
afford bandwidth. We got it right, IN SPITE of microsoft. That was
when the disenchantment began. They kept telling me that things
weren't possible, and later that day I made it work. Then when I
called in for support, they read technet to me. If the solution was in
technet, I wouldn't be calling you! Beyond that, they were useless.
Then we got an MCSE on staff. His MCSE bought him double my salary,
with only 6 months experience in the idustry. Fresh out of school. And
I had to work twice as long fixing his messes. The one thing you can
never learn on a course or from a book, is common sense and good fault
finding skills. He broke more than he fixed!
The one good thing that came from the 6 city rollout is that I met my
future wife. I packed up my things, quit my job, and moved to her city
to be closer to her. And I bought a book on Linux to amuse me while I
was looking for a job there.
It's been almost 4 years since that fateful roadtrip. I found True
Love and an alternative to MS. What more could a man ask for?
Since then, the love of my life was stupid enough to stick around long
enough to marry me. We moved to the UK to start a new life, and I
started to dislike Linux just a little bit. All operating systems
suck, right? But look good at this point.
Then I get into new media whoring. I learn some things the hard
way. If I thought the hours I was putting in while I was running cable
during the day and learning Novell at night were long, time to put
things into perspective. 18 Hour shifts become the order of the
day. Everything is urgent. The world is ending if we don't fix
this. And so on. And so on. But I persevere, because this is now all I
know how to do. I can drive most *nix systems fairly well, I
understand the basics of security, and I'm even heading from PFY state
to BOFH with a bit of luck.
My first job in the UK dies a horrible death when we get bought by
$LARGE_COMPANY and they try and start the switch to NT. The good news
is that that particular project failed, and NT did not happen. At
least on the webservers. And I even met some nice people through my
resignation. The contract company that they brought in to take over
from me are made up of good human beings, which I think is even more
important than being good techs (which the are!).
The next job holds promise though. I get told it's for a few small
websites. Sounds good. Chance to recover for a bit and work on my code
skills. Small websites? Try a lowcost airline with their booking
system online, a large printer, scanner and camera manufacturer, a
crap but famous clothes brand, some furniture stores, and so on. But
hey, I love a challenge, so boots and all, in I go.
When I got here, 4 of the boxes were 0wn3d by kiddies. They were
running telnet to the world for ****'s sake! It took me three months
just to get most of the sites migrated from the rooted servers to new
servers on a secure lan, behind a router and a firewall. I still have
one owned box that I can't move because the people who control the DNS
won't repoint it, and we can't take the box down to reload it because
it is the public driver download box for a rather large companies
entire range of products (printers, scanners, digital cameras, etc.)
But we've put effort into making the new network secure, scalable,
etc. And for the most part it works! The airline is ecstatic, the
clothes company are happy, and I feel like I'm doing some of my best
work ever.
But there's a thorn. Isn't there always? A government
contract. Migrate their website from where it is now to our
network. Here's a shiny Sun E450, make it so. No documentation on disk
layout, oracle database schema, 3rd party software, etc. Hell, we're
still finding new software on the old box that they didn't even know
they had.
I threw a project plan together, and went for the migration. With User
tests, and mock switchovers to make sure my scripts and procedures
worked, the whole project took 4 months. The site has a weird content
management system, lots of scripts, etc. All things being equal, I
thought that this was quite good time.
I did all this solo. Single sysadmin. 18 hour days were the short
ones. Tired.
Then I get my very own PFY. A guy who used to be my PFY once before
and I knew to be (a) brilliant and (b) desparate to leave South
Africa. He arrived, started work on the second day and was productive
by the third.
Now, for the last 3 months, on and off, the trolls from finance have
been on our back.
'You need to bill more of your time out to clients. We're not making
money from you. You are costing us the earth'
I keep trying to explain that we're infrastructure. Mostly, we keep
things alive. We fix things that die. This provides the infrastructure
for other people to generate revenue. When I was still lucid and not
looking for tall buildings with lots of concrete around the base, I
tried to explain that even if we only have one client, we still have
to do all the daily maintenance, backups, and security checks that we
would have to if we had 10 clients. So sell more of the same. Or wind
the operation up and let us move on. I tried to draw analogies to us
as a resource and a cost to factor into other projects. They said that
was fine, they understood, and went away. Then they came back. 'You
have to bill out more of your time or we're going to fire one of you'.
Hi. We're working between 12 and 18 hours a day. And have been, every
day, since January 5. How the HELL do you expect just one of us to
cope? And you're not even paying overtime! Screw this noise. But is
anywhere any better?
We've had this fight about 4 times in the last couple of months. Now
I've been told that we are 'worthless' to the company and need to
justify our existance. This time by a director. So I asked her how
many times she's heard of what I do. She said none. I said, when you
hear, that's when I am not doing my job! We get hit by skr1pt kiddies
daily, we get DoS'd regularly, but we survive. When the national grid
for learning got owned, the standards site stayed up. When go-fly got
whacked, our airline stayed up. When our busiest client told us on
tuesday that they intended to tripple their traffic through a
promotion on saturday morning, we rolled the new routers in and the
network stayed up. Even though said client's traffic went up by a
factor of 5, not tripple! When a developer was two months late in
delivering the stats software, I stayed up for 48 hours writing perl,
and the stats happened. But I am worthless.
Now where from here? I'm 25 years old, I have an RHCE and 6 years
experience, and I am at the end of a road. Every time I move, it's for
the worse. Does it actually ever get tolerable, let alone good?
The new media gig is a lemon. The whole industry is rotten to the
core. But where else do I go? What else can I do? And will it be any
better? Will people from marketing still walk up to me and say 'It's
easy. Do it now' ?
Why am I even writing this? Who cares about my woe? Not me of late! I
don't even know what to do with myself in the rare time that I have
that I'm not working. I just sit, staring at the wall, waiting for the
next shift to kick in. The time I took writing this, I could have been
doing work that I'll have to do later. This goofing isn't like me. But
I just can't face this anymore.
I'm damned good at what I do. I learn fast. I work hard and long. But
I'm worthless. Because I don't wear a suit and yessir management.
If anyone knows where from here, I'd love to know about it! Thanks for
reading. Don't flame the loser :(
-Wayne
--
Be nice to your daemons. | wa...@penguinpowered.org.uk
| www.penguinpowered.org.uk
Perdita
<story of woe>
>If anyone knows where from here, I'd love to know about it! Thanks for
>reading. Don't flame the loser :(
I suspect all of us here who hire had a sudden need for a copy of your CV.
Claire
Jeff Mcadams
>If anyone knows where from here, I'd love to know about it! Thanks for
>reading. Don't flame the loser :(
Flame? Man, I'm drying my eyes after that rant. That was beautiful.
I'm (in spirit) standing and applauding the awesomeness of that rant.
Good luck to you. I can't give you advice as I fear that you are
farther along that road than I am, but if I could give you advice, I
most definitely would.
--
Jeff McAdams Email: je...@iglou.com
Head Network Administrator Voice: (502) 966-3848
IgLou Internet Services (800) 436-4456
Bob Dowling
In article <m3wvbib...@zaphod.realtime.co.uk>,
Wayne Pascoe <wa...@penguinpowered.org.uk> writes:
> Now, for the last 3 months, on and off, the trolls from finance have
> been on our back.
> 'You need to bill more of your time out to clients. We're not making
> money from you. You are costing us the earth'
You need to understand that the Accounts Trolls don't read the data you send
them back. So long as the data is in the right shape they will process it
though their hind brains without conscious thought.
So, calculate the number of man-hours you and your PFY work per year. Take
the number of clients you have. Divide man-hours by clients and bill the
result to each client individuially. This is the right shape for accounts
and will be taken by them saying "see, we knew you could generate this
oh-so-essential data for us". They will not notice all the numbers are the
same and will then leave you alone. You might want to calculate this
monthly if your client profile varies through the course of the year.
--
Bob Dowling: UNIX Support, University of Cambridge Computing Service,
rj...@cam.ac.uk New Museums Site, Pembroke Street, Cambridge, UK. CB2 3QG
+44 1223 334728 http://www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk/
--- Those who do not learn from Dilbert are doomed to repeat it. ---
Ben
pronoun upon which to hang this post]
In article <m3wvbib...@zaphod.realtime.co.uk> Wayne Pascoe
<wa...@penguinpowered.org.uk> writes:
> [snipped]
> Now where from here? I'm 25 years old, I have an RHCE and 6 years
> experience, and I am at the end of a road. Every time I move, it's for
> the worse. Does it actually ever get tolerable, let alone good?
Damn you man. You may be futher along the road and one year older than
me (although I turn 25 in April), but your skills will stand you in
better stead than mine currently do. I feel your pain, and I feel it in
the personal way that any NT admin who knows he's in a dead-end job with
little prospect of ever being worth a damn in that area of expertise but
has no time or practical way of expanding his working knowledge to
include Unix because "we don't use that here" would do. I want to be
more than I am, but I can't, because NT sucks. It's shit. It may do
what you want, but it doesn't do what I want and I'm not doing what I
want. I don't want to be here, I want to be herding linux boxes. I
want to be doing linux helpdesk for fucks sake! Anything but working
with NT day in and day out with a few token illicit RedHat and FreeBSD
boxes to keep myself from going insane. Every time _you_ move you may
get something worse, but think on this; you're still not working with
Windows, you're still keeping your knowledge up to date, you're not
forgetting more than you learn about Unix and you're not thought of by
your 'peers' (although you feel every one of them has more knowledge in
their little finger thay you'll ever have because they get to say "NT
batch file? Don't know that mate, but I can do it Perl for you in a few
minutes") as an NT admin, not a proper sysadmin worth his salt in a
discussion about glibc libraries and config scripts.
And you're not responsible for planning the department's migration to
Windows 2000 and have to drop it back for a year so your fucking
no-brain users can have Eudora 5.0.2 and Office 2000 this summer, to
break the panicking up into sizable easy to swallow chunks. You're not
doing the 'training' either are you. I thought not. You work in a back
room. Dear god how I'd love to do that. You get to work long hours on
projects which amount to something. You go home after 21:00 or later
knowing that even though you've worked your arse off to get something
done, it's been done to the best of your ability and it's been done
right. I'd love to work long hours where what I left at the end of the
day was worth a damn. You remember NT don't you, I'll bet you still
have the nightmares where you wake up on a Saturday morning after being
at work at quarter to eleven on a Friday and think "Shit, I have to go
into work to reboot the machine/tweak the config/the machine's crashed I
know it has" because you did it RIGHT, you did it PROPERLY and in most
cases the fucking OS didn't sit in the corner humming to itself and
butting its head against the wall until the blood began to run in warm
rivulets down the plaster.
No, because you run something other than NT. Do you know how much fun I
managed to wring out of installing and building Apache for Win32? It
must have been illegal how much enjoyment I had configuring that damned
thing with PROPER CONFIG FILES. I almost damned round the room when the
OK came down to order some 3Com switches. The chance to use a
commandline interface and set up something that would stay in that
configuration and perform was almost too good to pass up. Because I
hate Windows. I want to move to another job where I get to use a
command line more than I use a mouse. The problem is that unless I take
time off from my long working days, which are filled with the struggle
to keep my three domains of machines running in the face of failing
antivirus software and fuckwits who want to install AOL software on my
LANed machines (can you say "no modem"?), to keep up to date with even a
small amount of linux administration I'll never get a job which doesn't
involve NT, BECAUSE I WON'T KNOW ENOUGH.
Shit.
Fucking ARSE.
I'd be happy with a mixed environment gig. A little bit of linux (any
flavour) some NT, samba, some NFS, basic Apache and most important of
all, the chance to learn some scripting and support some machines. I
believe there's nothing better than solving problems for learning how
shit works on the inside. I'm anal retentive when it comes to tidiness.
This overflows into liking clean machines, scripts that do exactly what
they say on the tin and solutions which actually solve. Not that this
is every totally achievable, but I like to try. I also believe in
gutting the user, butchering and burning the remains, flamthrowering the
area and sowing the ground with salt. But that's another story.
You may think you have it bad, but always remember there's someone
chained to the bottom of the pile of shit you are just managing to keep
your head above.
> Why am I even writing this? Who cares about my woe? Not me of late! I
> don't even know what to do with myself in the rare time that I have
> that I'm not working. I just sit, staring at the wall, waiting for the
> next shift to kick in. The time I took writing this, I could have been
> doing work that I'll have to do later. This goofing isn't like me. But
> I just can't face this anymore.
This rant was not aimed at you, you're more of a catalyst in this
regard, a pressure valve. Thanks for letting me blow off again. It's
been a long time.
> I'm damned good at what I do. I learn fast. I work hard and long. But
> I'm worthless. Because I don't wear a suit and yessir management.
I'm damned good at what I know. I'd be BETTER at something I actively
enjoyed and gave me a challenge to learn, rather than a challenge to
continue to support because it's almost intentionally broken by
Microsoft or some other pissant megacorp with their tongue firmly
working its way between Microsoft's collective buttcheeks. Given a job
where having to learn because something doesn't get done would be great.
The only problem is that everywhere I know at the moment wants people
who actually know how to support Unix _already_. How am I supposed to
get into that? Learning stuff here can only do so much, nothing I do is
actually _required_ for anything, so there's no demand. And like I
said; when would I get the time to do anything heavy duty anyway? At
home? Aren't I supposed to be recovering?
> If anyone knows where from here, I'd love to know about it! Thanks for
> reading. Don't flame the loser :(
This was not intended as a flame, even if some of it reads like a
personal attack on you. It's not. I'd apologise but my ire is up at
the moment. I want another job. I want a job where I don't know
everything and I have to refer to man pages. Where I have to search
through other people's scripts in place and figure out what the hell
they did, and make it better. I want a job where I'm thrown in at the
deep end and someone comes to me and says "we need you to support $FOO
within two weeks" and I know nothing about $FOO except someone told me
it was "OK, but not great". And I have to go away and learn $FOO from
the ground up, and then go and do a damned good job.
Before I get there I'd be happy to work a phone for fuck's sake. Talk
people through kernel compiles, take (lead) courses on the gubbins I do
know.
I don't know shit compared to most of the Unix admins I can name, and
this depresses me utterly. I'm not a sysadmin, I'm a fucking install
monkey for Microsoft. I don't support the box, I install shit, follow
the wizard and try to break out of the routine by writing a few lines of
ActivePerl to use the NT commandline every now and often. This isn't a
life, it's barely a prison sentance. I don't want to be here, but it
pays for Recovery.
There's more, but frankly I can't be fucked
Ben
--
"I'm sorry, you must be confusing | For your top-notch JenniCam
me with someone who gives a damn." | parody: http://bofhcam.org
Abbot, Cambridge Chapter of the Monks of Cool since MCMXCVI a.d.
Joe Zeff
<wa...@penguinpowered.org.uk> wrote:
>I've been told that we are 'worthless' to the company and need to
>justify our existance. This time by a director. So I asked her how
>many times she's heard of what I do. She said none. I said, when you
>hear, that's when I am not doing my job!
Do yourself and the world a great big favor: find a different job,
preferably one where you can take your PFY with you. When you tell
your PHB that you're both leaving on the same day, give her a list of
*everything* you two do and tell her she has two weeks to find
somebody to do all of that. Then leave, without a backward glance,
secure in the knowledge that this stupid company is going to go down
the tube at relativistic velocity, and deserves it. You owe them
nothing, and that's exactly what you should leave them with.
--
Joe Zeff
The Guy With the Sideburns
By Grabnor's hammer, you *will* be avenged!
-Galaxy Quest
http://www.lasfs.org http://home.earthlink.net/~sidebrnz
Andrew
being:
1. After the two best rants in this thread (yours and Wayne's), there were
mentions of resumes/CVs, and I didn't want to sound like I was trying to
get a job offer.
Rationale: I don't post here for job offers. I post here because I like
the forum.
2. Your situation is so similar to mine, that I was concerned about a "Me
Too" post.
Rationale: This forum (as I understand it) is for recovery and
support. You're not the only one in your position.
3. Wayne's post was too damn good. I didn't feel I had anything to add
until I read yours, and it took me a while before I convinced myself that
I could add anything at all.
Rationale: Maybe I can't. Maybe I can. I can at least offer my sympathies
to both you and Wayne.
Quoted and commented below:
On Fri, 26 Jan 2001, Ben wrote:
> Damn you man. You may be futher along the road and one year older than
> me (although I turn 25 in April), but your skills will stand you in
> better stead than mine currently do. I feel your pain, and I feel it in
> the personal way that any NT admin who knows he's in a dead-end job with
> little prospect of ever being worth a damn in that area of expertise but
> has no time or practical way of expanding his working knowledge to
> include Unix because "we don't use that here" would do. I want to be
> more than I am, but I can't, because NT sucks. It's shit. It may do
> what you want, but it doesn't do what I want and I'm not doing what I
> want. I don't want to be here, I want to be herding linux boxes. I
> want to be doing linux helpdesk for fucks sake! Anything but working
> with NT day in and day out with a few token illicit RedHat and FreeBSD
> boxes to keep myself from going insane.
I turn 26 in April. I work in an NT and Macintosh environment. I keep a
FreeBSD box under my desk, and it took a long time to get to the point
where my boss would let me (he almost threatened to fire me at one point
for running Linux on my main box instead of NT). I now have three
Linux/FreeBSD boxen on the network, on the sole condition that my boss
doesn't have to ever touch them.
> minutes") as an NT admin, not a proper sysadmin worth his salt in a
> discussion about glibc libraries and config scripts.
An admin is an admin. A good admin is a good admin. Some tools suck less
than others. An *excellent* admin has the proper mindset *regardless
of what he has to work with*.
> And you're not responsible for planning the department's migration to
> Windows 2000 and have to drop it back for a year so your fucking
> no-brain users can have Eudora 5.0.2 and Office 2000 this summer, to
> break the panicking up into sizable easy to swallow chunks.
I've been attempting to do the planning, but have been told to work on
other projects. At some point, we are going to go to Windows 2000, and
with the way they run things at the school I work for, they are going to
want it done quickly. We don't even have anyone really planning for
it. The DoT is keeping the administration at bay, saying we're not
ready. But we're not doing any planning outside of my few experiments. But
I've been told I have other priorities. So we will never be ready.
> right. I'd love to work long hours where what I left at the end of the
> day was worth a damn.
I'll bet you work long hours on piddly shit that merely consumes time, and
very little thought resources, right? I spent this Friday evening removing
web browsers from an entire department of Windows 95 boxen, when I could
have been tweaking our intranet server, or resolving a problem with an
equipment-checkout database, or any number of things to improve the
quality of our systems and network. There was no thinking involved in that
task, just reading a list and scratching off names as I performed the
stupid repetitive task that really couldn't even be automated past a DOS
batch file (and not very well at that).
> You remember NT don't you, I'll bet you still
> have the nightmares where you wake up on a Saturday morning after being
> at work at quarter to eleven on a Friday and think "Shit, I have to go
> into work to reboot the machine/tweak the config/the machine's crashed I
> know it has" because you did it RIGHT, you did it PROPERLY and in most
> cases the fucking OS didn't sit in the corner humming to itself and
> butting its head against the wall until the blood began to run in warm
> rivulets down the plaster.
FYI, I intend to add that quote to my fortune file.
> command line more than I use a mouse. The problem is that unless I take
> time off from my long working days, which are filled with the struggle
> to keep my three domains of machines running in the face of failing
> antivirus software and fuckwits who want to install AOL software on my
> LANed machines (can you say "no modem"?), to keep up to date with even a
> small amount of linux administration I'll never get a job which doesn't
> involve NT, BECAUSE I WON'T KNOW ENOUGH.
Even worse: because you manage an NT environment, technical managers in
charge of hiring will think that the only problem-solving skills you have
is "rebooting to see if the problem goes away". That's the NT mantra
(aside from "reinstall the service pack"), and you'll have a difficult
time proving that you can troubleshoot problems without rebooting a
production server in the middle of peak operations.
> The only problem is that everywhere I know at the moment wants people
> who actually know how to support Unix _already_. How am I supposed to
> get into that?
This borders on UI, but I think it's fairly safe. From what I've seen (and
I'm sure present Monks will correct me if I'm wrong), Unix admins tend to
come from a (Unix) programming background. NT admins tend to come from a
PeeCee/gamer/hardware background. That's why almost _every_ Unix admin job
description requires shell/sed/awk/perl scripting, and almost _no_ NT
admin job description ever does.
> Learning stuff here can only do so much, nothing I do is
> actually _required_ for anything, so there's no demand.
I think someone here in the Monastery complained once about a kid wanting
a job as a Unix admin because he ran RedHat at home. I was once that kid
(actually, I prefered Slackware), but I realized that I had a loooong way
to go before I understood runlevels, NFS, directory services, encryption,
databases, programming, config scripts, backups, ad nauseum. The only way
is to keep plugging at it. If circumstances don't consipire in your favor,
then you have a forum here to complain about it. After all, it could be
worse...you could be clueless and MCSE and not even know it (ignorance is
bliss?)
> And like I
> said; when would I get the time to do anything heavy duty anyway? At
> home? Aren't I supposed to be recovering?
Abso-fscking-lutley! I was trying to get ahead for a while at home, by
setting up DNS, DHCP, aquiring an old Alpha and SGI, learning this, that
and the other. I got burned out very quickly. Now I've turned to other
pursuits (I learned to juggle, for instance), and reopened old
hobbies (music in particular). Fuck work. I know that I'm capable of
learning anything I want to learn. You know you're as *capable* as your
Unix-peers, even if you're not at their level right now. Enjoy that, at
least, and remember to spend as much *company* time learning the things
that will get you where you want to be.
> deep end and someone comes to me and says "we need you to support $FOO
> within two weeks" and I know nothing about $FOO except someone told me
> it was "OK, but not great". And I have to go away and learn $FOO from
> the ground up, and then go and do a damned good job.
I'll caution you right now, young Patawan, that direction there lies
PHBs. While learning something "from the ground up" and doing a "damned
good job" may stroke your ego, it will only cause you to be seen as a
miracle worker, which means more "miracles-on-demand". I learned that the
hard way, and have been fighting it ever since.
Them: "So you can design and implement a scalable, enterprise network
architecture by Monday, right? And you can set up my Outlook and
download/install Webshots desktop for me?"
Me: "No, I mow lawns." [1]
> life, it's barely a prison sentance. I don't want to be here, but it
> pays for Recovery.
Amen, brother!
ObUI: I do have a post from a mailing list someone made about getting out
of a crappy tech job (in response to a complaint I made about
recruiters). If I can find it, I'll send it to you, Ben. I won't send it
to Wayne, because he's doing better than both of us. I'm certainly not
going to post it here.
[1] Thanks hymie!
--
Andrew Boring ---> bore...@inemy.com
"Computer games don't affect kids. I mean if Pacman affected us as kids,
we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching pills and listening
to repetitive music." -The Winter Queen, dc-stuff
Andrew
> <whistle> Hey Newbies. Yeah, you. You, lurking who are just about to
> try a test post. Yeah, you. Put that test post down. Come read this.
> Now THIS is what a first post to asr is supposed to be. If you don't
> have a rant in you - a real rant, something on your chest RIGHT FUCKING
> NOW - you don't really have a reason to start posting here, do you?
I'll be the first to admit that after reading Wayne's post, my
first complaints should have been posted to
alt.sysadmin.sunny.skies.and.roses.
Matt McLeod
Andrew <bore...@inemy.com> wrote:
>This borders on UI, but I think it's fairly safe. From what I've seen (and
>I'm sure present Monks will correct me if I'm wrong), Unix admins tend to
>come from a (Unix) programming background. NT admins tend to come from a
>PeeCee/gamer/hardware background. That's why almost _every_ Unix admin job
>description requires shell/sed/awk/perl scripting, and almost _no_ NT
>admin job description ever does.
I get the impression that most MCSEs at least just sort of appear
out of nowhere. They see an ad on the telly like the ones that have
been running here with crap like "there is a shortage of trained
IT people, come do our course and Make Money Fast!!!1!". Most of
them have no real interest in the technology, just in the money
they can make from it. At best it's "just" a job.
Most of the really good sysadmins and developers I know -- the people
I'd happily provide a reference for -- almost have a passion for
this stuff. "Passion" is probably too heavy a word, as they're not
so far gone that they can't deal with people too, but they are,
when you get down to it, geeks.
If it makes either you or Ben feel any better, I didn't come from
a Unix programming background. I screwed around with MSX systems
and the C64 as a kid, learnt enough about programming to write
MSX games and C64 demos. Moved on to PC stuff when the 386 was
king by buying a second-hand CBM COLT.
Professionally, I started out writing small apps in Pascal and
doing stuff in dBASE. And doing helpdesk. None of this went
anywhere near UNIX. I was lucky to get into the volunteer ISP
thing, and that kind of led me to where I am now.
So I dunno. Maybe you guys should be looking at the horror that
is working for an ISP? It sucks in oh so many ways, but it's
still probably at least 50% Unix-based...
Not that it'll save you. I'm trying to find work where I can learn
about stuff which isn't already on my CV. Nobody wants to hire
anyone without 5 years experience in *exactly their thing*. Never
mind that I've spent the past 5 years doing horrible things to
Solaris, Linux, and BSD boxes, I still couldn't get a gig doing
junior HP-UX or AIX work...
Though that's more the fault of the recruiters who have more or less
taken over the IT job market here. There are hardly any real job ads
any more, and those that do exist are nigh-on impossible to find
among all the recruiter trolls. Most of the recruiters are very
literal-minded: spec says "HP-UX", then you've gotta have HP-UX
experience or they won't even let the client see your CV.
So my grand plan of finding a new job isn't going so well. The
current plan is still to resign in April if I haven't found anything
else and use my annual leave to find a new gig, but if the job
market here hasn't picked up by then I may have to just stick it
out in a job where I'm frequently bored shitless and there's
no future. Because that's better than starving.
Even so, there's always a bright side. At least I'm not part
of the Windows Generation.
--
More than a mere hindrance. It's a whole new barrier!
Chris King
writes
>I get the impression that most MCSEs at least just sort of appear
>out of nowhere.
You mean, like cockroaches ?
Scratch that, cockroaches are way more intelligent and likeable than
some of the MC$E-weenies I've encountered...
Chris
--
Chris King
ch...@csking.co.uk
http://www.csking.co.uk
Ewen McNeill
>In article <Pine.LNX.4.20.01012...@kagero.fuckdns.org>,
>Andrew <bore...@inemy.com> wrote:
>>This borders on UI, but I think it's fairly safe. From what I've seen (and
>>I'm sure present Monks will correct me if I'm wrong), Unix admins tend to
>>come from a (Unix) programming background. NT admins tend to come from a
>>PeeCee/gamer/hardware background. That's why almost _every_ Unix admin job
>>description requires shell/sed/awk/perl scripting, and almost _no_ NT
>>admin job description ever does.
I'm not sure it's a programming background per se. Just that it is
actually relatively easy to customise things on a unix system with a bit
of shell script, or a bit of perl, or whatever. And most of the glue
that holds things together is scripts that one can read and modify. So
naturally some level of programming (or at least scripting) comes with
the job.
With Windows that level of "write a quick program to customise this"
just doesn't exist. It's possible, but it's not quick, and there are
fewer things that can be easily tied together. The fact that the
default Windows scripting language sucks a lot doesn't help.[0] But
even once you have perl, etc, installed, there's still a lot of things
which cannot be done without writing a bit of C code to an awfully
complex API and compiling it with a compiler than doesn't come with the
system.[1]
>I get the impression that most MCSEs at least just sort of appear
>out of nowhere. They see an ad on the telly like the ones that have
>been running here with crap like "there is a shortage of trained
>IT people, come do our course and Make Money Fast!!!1!".
I think that's probably true. I was certainly somewhat horrified
hearing radio adverts a while back[2] for MCSE courses, along the lines
that in "just 6 weeks" you'd be trained up and ready to go and get a high
paying job. From scratch. Everything you need to know.
As a friend was commenting recently, at best they'd learn a sequence of
steps to do. But without the understanding of what happens underneath
if anything doesn't work they're lost. However given the difficulty in
finding out what is happening underneath on a Windows system anyway (eg,
kernel tracing, network snooping, reading configuration files, etc), and
the fact that a lot of issues are not repeatable, often the Reboot/Reinstall
cycle is the only "obvious" thing to do.
A lot more experience is required to do the "build a mental model of
what is going on, and compare the symptoms with that" type of diagnosis.
And that's really hard to get on a system which is not transparent
enough to encourage/reward it. Those that do have that experience seem
to be able to switch back and forth between systems much easier.
Probably there's also a level of self-selection going on: people who do
like to tinker, "look under the hood" are going to gravitate towards
systems which make that easier.
>If it makes either you or Ben feel any better, I didn't come from
>a Unix programming background.
I sort of did -- I was doing unix programming for money before I started
doing unix sysadmin stuff for money. But I'd dealt with some 8-bit
systems, and PC stuff, before either of those, including a fair chunk of
programming.
>Not that it'll save you. I'm trying to find work where I can learn
>about stuff which isn't already on my CV. [....]
>Though that's more the fault of the recruiters who have more or less
>taken over the IT job market here. There are hardly any real job ads
>any more, and those that do exist are nigh-on impossible to find
>among all the recruiter trolls.
I find this difficult to relate to. Not because I don't believe you,
but because I can't think of a single job that I've got in the last 10
years as a result of an advert somewhere.[3] Pretty much all of my work
(I'm self employed) has come either through word of mouth, and the rest
has been a matter of asking "any work here?".
It's my impression that the "good" jobs don't even get advertised,
because they're generally filled with friends-of-friends-of-friends, or
people that a friend worked with a while back, or whatever.
Which is why I spend a bit of time matchmaking for friends and clients.
Ewen
[0] I used to run a BBS under DOS, then DesqView, then OS/2, so I've
had more than my fair share of scripting-with-batch-files experience.
REXX under OS/2 sucks quite a bit less, but still quite a lot more
than the average unix shell.
[1] Not that "no compiler" is unique to Windows. Some fairly commonly
used unix-derived operating systems don't come with a compiler
either.
[2] There may have been TV and newspaper adverts too; I don't have a TV
and don't read newspapers as a rule. The radio tends to be on when
I can't be bothered figuring out what I want to listen to; if the
adverts get too much that generally makes up my mind.
[3] And before that was a paper round, so probably doesn't even count.
--
Ewen McNeill, ew...@naos.co.nz
Andrew
> I get the impression that most MCSEs at least just sort of appear
> out of nowhere. They see an ad on the telly like the ones that have
> been running here with crap like "there is a shortage of trained
> IT people, come do our course and Make Money Fast!!!1!". Most of
> them have no real interest in the technology, just in the money
> they can make from it. At best it's "just" a job.
We had three "MCSGs" (Microsoft Certified Security Guards) at the school
for which I ork, and they were of that mindset. They studied the books,
took the tests, and then asked me to explain to them what an "enterprise
network" was. One of them actually turned down a $47,000/year job because
he thought that once he passed that last exam, he would get a better
offer. He had *NO* experience in the field. I told him he was an idiot. He
ended up working as a tech for a "training center", and called me several
times to help him fix things there because he couldn't get it right. (He
wanted three servers, a Primary Domain Controller, a backup Domain
Controller, and a stand-alone server....all for 12 client machines.)
> So I dunno. Maybe you guys should be looking at the horror that
> is working for an ISP? It sucks in oh so many ways, but it's
> still probably at least 50% Unix-based...
Phew. I did do helldesk for local/regional ISP for about three months and
I hated it. The only good thing I can say about it was that I had a free
internet account. And I didn't get to even think about possibly touching
anything remotely similar to Unix.
> Not that it'll save you. I'm trying to find work where I can learn
> about stuff which isn't already on my CV. Nobody wants to hire
> anyone without 5 years experience in *exactly their thing*. Never
> mind that I've spent the past 5 years doing horrible things to
> Solaris, Linux, and BSD boxes, I still couldn't get a gig doing
> junior HP-UX or AIX work...
I hate to say this, but I found it's almost easier to do consluting
work. i can at least say "Yes, I can do XYZ", negotiate a contract, and
then buy an O'Reilly book. Except that most contract stuff I've found that
way generally deal with stupid NT/RAS/PPTP stuff for small businesses.
> Though that's more the fault of the recruiters who have more or less
> taken over the IT job market here. There are hardly any real job ads
> any more, and those that do exist are nigh-on impossible to find
> among all the recruiter trolls. Most of the recruiters are very
> literal-minded: spec says "HP-UX", then you've gotta have HP-UX
> experience or they won't even let the client see your CV.
Ack. You're about to start me on a recruiter rant....
It's too late for me to start on that. I need to get to bed.
> Even so, there's always a bright side. At least I'm not part
> of the Windows Generation.
You lucky Bastard.
Andrew
> With Windows that level of "write a quick program to customise this"
> just doesn't exist. It's possible, but it's not quick, and there are
> fewer things that can be easily tied together. The fact that the
> default Windows scripting language sucks a lot doesn't help.[0] But
> even once you have perl, etc, installed, there's still a lot of things
> which cannot be done without writing a bit of C code to an awfully
> complex API and compiling it with a compiler than doesn't come with the
> system.[1]
Uh oh, now you've done it. I'm going to rant a bit about Windows:
The Microsoft DHCP manager front end management utility sucks. Even for
Microsoft, it is really tedious to use. So I add a couple of lines to the
login script for the NT clients to write/append the network hostname and
MAC Address information to a text file on a shared drive upon login. I
then wrote a quick Perl script to parse it and store the hostname and mac
address into a hash. My next step was to use that to remove the previous
DHCP reservations and add the present hostnames and MAC addresses into the
reservation list, but I found out that the DHCP database was stored as an
.mdb file...oh yes....a *Microsoft Access* file. However, the file will
NOT open in Access, so even though the MS file extension says "Access
Database", it's not? Huh? So my current plans on writing a Perl front-end
to manage the DHCP Manager properly are zilch at the moment, until I can
figure out why Microsoft doesn't allow an Access database to act like an
Access database. Until then, I have to use the stoopid gooey tool. And my
wrist hurts when I use a mouse for looooong periods of time. Grrr....
Matt McLeod
>
>> I get the impression that most MCSEs at least just sort of appear
>> out of nowhere. They see an ad on the telly like the ones that have
>> been running here with crap like "there is a shortage of trained
>> IT people, come do our course and Make Money Fast!!!1!". Most of
>> them have no real interest in the technology, just in the money
>> they can make from it. At best it's "just" a job.
>
>We had three "MCSGs" (Microsoft Certified Security Guards) at the school
>for which I ork, and they were of that mindset.
Of course it's not just MCSEs who are like that. I've met a lot
of developers for whom coding is their job, not something they're
particularly interested in outside of work. And I've seen the
results of their work...
>(He
>wanted three servers, a Primary Domain Controller, a backup Domain
>Controller, and a stand-alone server....all for 12 client machines.)
Everything I hear suggests that this is not as stupid as it
sounds. Won't go any further than to say that an ex-Monk
wrote an interesting doc on the subject some time ago...
>> So I dunno. Maybe you guys should be looking at the horror that
>> is working for an ISP? It sucks in oh so many ways, but it's
>> still probably at least 50% Unix-based...
>
>Phew. I did do helldesk for local/regional ISP for about three months and
>I hated it. The only good thing I can say about it was that I had a free
>internet account. And I didn't get to even think about possibly touching
>anything remotely similar to Unix.
The trick is to do so in a small ISP. Somewhere where there's
at least a snowball's chance in hell of moving from helldesk
to systems. It's been done before. So often that we might be
able to present a case for a Right of Way under UK law.
>> Not that it'll save you. I'm trying to find work where I can learn
>> about stuff which isn't already on my CV. Nobody wants to hire
>> anyone without 5 years experience in *exactly their thing*. Never
>> mind that I've spent the past 5 years doing horrible things to
>> Solaris, Linux, and BSD boxes, I still couldn't get a gig doing
>> junior HP-UX or AIX work...
>
>I hate to say this, but I found it's almost easier to do consluting
>work. i can at least say "Yes, I can do XYZ", negotiate a contract, and
>then buy an O'Reilly book. Except that most contract stuff I've found that
>way generally deal with stupid NT/RAS/PPTP stuff for small businesses.
Which is something I refuse to do. Unless I hit the point where
I'm starting to starve and can't get a job flipping burgers.
>> Even so, there's always a bright side. At least I'm not part
>> of the Windows Generation.
>
>You lucky Bastard.
I know. Not as lucky as guys who got to play with stuff more
interesting than the C64 while growing up, but every day I say
a small prayer of thanks that I'm not 20 and trying to get
started in this business.
Or I would if I were the praying kind.
--
"Bastard's the name, but you can call me Right Bleedin'"
Matt McLeod
Chris King <ch...@csking.co.uk> wrote:
>Scratch that, cockroaches are way more intelligent and likeable than
>some of the MC$E-weenies I've encountered...
Yeah. And the roaches are set to take over the world after
we kill ourselves off. We'd just better make sure we take
the MCSEs down with us...
--
"Help!! Come see the violence inherent in the sysadmin!"
Cobb, User Friendly, by Illiad
Quentin Stephens
<m3wvbib...@zaphod.realtime.co.uk>:
>We've had this fight about 4 times in the last couple of months. Now
>I've been told that we are 'worthless' to the company and need to
>justify our existance. This time by a director.
"OK, then you won't mind both of us going on holiday for a fortnight."
Oh, and put it in writing.
And stop working 18 hour days.
In each case, they'll start complaining, and you can turn round and say,
"But you said we were worthless."
Matt McLeod
Ewen McNeill <ew...@naos.co.nz> wrote:
>In article <94u3ha$du3$1...@amoeba.cugc.org>, Matt McLeod <ma...@cugc.org> wrote:
>>In article <Pine.LNX.4.20.01012...@kagero.fuckdns.org>,
>>Andrew <bore...@inemy.com> wrote:
>>>This borders on UI, but I think it's fairly safe. From what I've seen (and
>>>I'm sure present Monks will correct me if I'm wrong), Unix admins tend to
>>>come from a (Unix) programming background. NT admins tend to come from a
>>>PeeCee/gamer/hardware background. That's why almost _every_ Unix admin job
>>>description requires shell/sed/awk/perl scripting, and almost _no_ NT
>>>admin job description ever does.
>
>I'm not sure it's a programming background per se. Just that it is
>actually relatively easy to customise things on a unix system with a bit
>of shell script, or a bit of perl, or whatever. And most of the glue
>that holds things together is scripts that one can read and modify. So
>naturally some level of programming (or at least scripting) comes with
>the job.
Yeah. And Unix systems lend themselves to automation *much*
more readily, which is usually going to require scripting stuff.
As these things are constantly evolving, you really need to be able
to write at least small things.
>>I get the impression that most MCSEs at least just sort of appear
>>out of nowhere. They see an ad on the telly like the ones that have
>>been running here with crap like "there is a shortage of trained
>>IT people, come do our course and Make Money Fast!!!1!".
>
>I think that's probably true. I was certainly somewhat horrified
>hearing radio adverts a while back[2] for MCSE courses, along the lines
>that in "just 6 weeks" you'd be trained up and ready to go and get a high
>paying job. From scratch. Everything you need to know.
Yup. And the ones running here say things like "All you need is
ambition and the right training". Bollocks. Aptitude is just a
*little* bit important to this stuff. You can rote-learn all you
like, and be an ambitious little shit, but if you can't *think*
then you're either heading right back out the door or on to
management. Mostly depending on your luck.
>>Not that it'll save you. I'm trying to find work where I can learn
>>about stuff which isn't already on my CV. [....]
>>Though that's more the fault of the recruiters who have more or less
>>taken over the IT job market here. There are hardly any real job ads
>>any more, and those that do exist are nigh-on impossible to find
>>among all the recruiter trolls.
>
>I find this difficult to relate to. Not because I don't believe you,
>but because I can't think of a single job that I've got in the last 10
>years as a result of an advert somewhere.[3] Pretty much all of my work
>(I'm self employed) has come either through word of mouth, and the rest
>has been a matter of asking "any work here?".
I'd like to have that work for me, but it doesn't. I don't have
a place I could reasonably call home, and I don't have a wide social
network useful for finding things like good jobs. I'm beginning
to realise that it wouldn't be any great deal more difficult to start
over in a new country than it is to find a new job in Melbourne
right now.
(My Jobnet daily report thing is including gigs in Wellington.
I really need to visit the place soon: probably in April.)
>It's my impression that the "good" jobs don't even get advertised,
>because they're generally filled with friends-of-friends-of-friends, or
>people that a friend worked with a while back, or whatever.
My current job was good for a while. Plenty of people might even
regard it as good now: I'm just not comfortable with doing everything
as a bodge. I want to do *quality* work. Someone happy to just slap
things together and ship 'em would probably be quite happy where I
am right now. I got this job through a recruiter, though I had to
pretty much force him to ask his client if they'd be happy with
someone who didn't have much Solaris experience (that literal-minded
thing again).
--
"A satisfied customer? We ought to have him stuffed!"
-- Basil Fawlty
Robert Moir
<94u8gc$eib$1...@pagoda.wgtn.cat-it.co.nz>:
>I think that's probably true. I was certainly somewhat horrified
>hearing radio adverts a while back[2] for MCSE courses, along the lines
>that in "just 6 weeks" you'd be trained up and ready to go and get a
>high paying job. From scratch. Everything you need to know.
Well the problems is training factories like this, and the people who
believe them. Fact is, that training is, at best, the *start* of a journey
to being a halfway competent admin but far too many people leave these
places convinced its the end of the journey.
>
>As a friend was commenting recently, at best they'd learn a sequence of
>steps to do. But without the understanding of what happens underneath
>if anything doesn't work they're lost. However given the difficulty in
>finding out what is happening underneath on a Windows system anyway (eg,
>kernel tracing, network snooping, reading configuration files, etc), and
>the fact that a lot of issues are not repeatable, often the
>Reboot/Reinstall cycle is the only "obvious" thing to do.
Thats down to background too. Sure I run NT servers, but I have high
uptimes (by NT standards at least) on all of them because I started with
mainframes, and graduated via mini computers running VMS, various unix
flavours and other bits and pieces and so before I even saw my first NT
machine I had spent about 5 years learning that shutting down and
restarting something was the last thing you did, not the first.
>A lot more experience is required to do the "build a mental model of
>what is going on, and compare the symptoms with that" type of diagnosis.
>And that's really hard to get on a system which is not transparent
>enough to encourage/reward it. Those that do have that experience seem
>to be able to switch back and forth between systems much easier.
Once you get good enough at a few systems from "looking under the hood" you
then learn that operating systems are tools, and you just need to find the
right fit for the job? Hmmmmmm.. sounds like a programmer who has learnt
more than a couple of languages would say. *shrugs*
Rob
Robert Moir
100...@kagero.fuckdns.org>:
>Uh oh, now you've done it. I'm going to rant a bit about Windows:
>
>The Microsoft DHCP manager front end management utility sucks. Even for
>Microsoft, it is really tedious to use. So I add a couple of lines to the
>login script for the NT clients to write/append the network hostname and
>MAC Address information to a text file on a shared drive upon login. I
>then wrote a quick Perl script to parse it and store the hostname and mac
>address into a hash. My next step was to use that to remove the previous
>DHCP reservations and add the present hostnames and MAC addresses into the
>reservation list, but I found out that the DHCP database was stored as an
>.mdb file...oh yes....a *Microsoft Access* file. However, the file will
>NOT open in Access, so even though the MS file extension says "Access
>Database", it's not? Huh? So my current plans on writing a Perl front-end
>to manage the DHCP Manager properly are zilch at the moment, until I can
>figure out why Microsoft doesn't allow an Access database to act like an
>Access database. Until then, I have to use the stoopid gooey tool. And my
>wrist hurts when I use a mouse for looooong periods of time. Grrr....
The DHCP database is not and never was an access DB format. Yes, it *is*
stupid that it has the same extension as an Access database but read on.
If this is UI for anyone here besides Andrew then god help you. But it is
ROT13'd anyway to protect our younger viewers from such distateful
material.
Npprff ZQO svyrf naq gur qngnonfr sbezng va hfr sbe QUPC naq bgure ovgf naq
cvrprf qvq pbzr sebz gur fnzr snzvyl gerr; gur WRG qngnonfr sbezng. Lbh
zvtug jnag gb frnepu ZFQA (uggc://zfqa,zvpebfbsg.pbz) sbe vasbezngvba nobhg
gnyxvat gb WRG sbezng qngnonfrf.
Rob
Joe Zeff
>As a friend was commenting recently, at best they'd learn a sequence of
>steps to do. But without the understanding of what happens underneath
>if anything doesn't work they're lost.
This is one of the things that keeps me employed and busy. Almost
none of our PFYs[1] have any idea of what's going on under the
hood[2]. They end up frobbing, more or less at random. Then, when
they're done playing with the wrong part of the system[3] I get to
clean up their messes and do what they should have done.
[1]And, I'll add, many of our "senior techs" as well.
[2]Or bonnet, for those on the other side of the pond.
[3]Like reinstalling the TCP/IP stack because the modem doesn't sync.
--
Joe Zeff
The Guy With the Sideburns
Or you can continue griping and being bitter,
which is often just as good as solving a problem.
Whatever works.
http://www.lasfs.org http://home.earthlink.net/~sidebrnz
Mike Andrews
: Nice post, Wayne. My sympathies for the situation - everywhere sucks,
: but there are a lot of places that suck less then that.
AOL. There are a lot of _BAD_ plces that suck less than that.
--
"... by God I *KNOW* what this network is for, and you can't have it."
- Russ Allbery (r...@stanford.edu)
Earl Grey
> Now, for the last 3 months, on and off, the trolls from finance have
> been on our back.
>
> 'You need to bill more of your time out to clients. We're not making
> money from you. You are costing us the earth'
Think, "Internal Clients".
Take the time to document your time.
Hand them a timesheet.
And leave at 5pm.
Think, "WHEN is the last time I took more than a week off for vacation?"
Take a chunk of vacation time. My guess is you've got a LOT accumulated.
See if the place is still standing when you get back.
> Hi. We're working between 12 and 18 hours a day. And have been, every
> day, since January 5. How the HELL do you expect just one of us to
> cope? And you're not even paying overtime!
So don't work the Overtime.
Let the work pile up.
VERY high.
Submit reports to someone on how long the backlog is.
And when they complain that the work is not getting done, point at the
stack. Better yet, hand them some of it and thank them for their help.
And when things fail, point at where, however far down the stack it was
that you were going to get arround to fixing it.
They will either fire you, which at this point would seem to be a
kindness, or they will realize that somewhere, they are not adding up the
right numbers.
"Stay Alive, Leave at Five."
--
http://copyleft.net/cgi-bin/copyleft/t039.pl
http://kapu.net/~bofh/
Pim van Riezen
> Scripsit Chris Rovers <cdrove...@ennui.biomass.to>:
>
> : Nice post, Wayne. My sympathies for the situation - everywhere sucks,
> : but there are a lot of places that suck less then that.
>
> AOL. There are a lot of _BAD_ plces that suck less than that.
What scares me is that I know a lot of them.
Pi
Wayne Pascoe
> "OK, then you won't mind both of us going on holiday for a fortnight."
>
> Oh, and put it in writing.
>
> And stop working 18 hour days.
>
> In each case, they'll start complaining, and you can turn round and say,
> "But you said we were worthless."
That's one of the current plans. Thanks to the monks here, perspective
has been adjusted and leaving will happen soon :) That will happen
RIGHT AFTER I use all my remaining leave. Loyalty? No, that's a two
way thing. You broke it!
-Wayne
--
If you hurt her, I'll hunt you down | wa...@penguinpowered.org.uk
and kill you with a shovel... A vague | www.penguinpowered.org.uk
disclaimer is no-one's friend. |
David P. Murphy
> I find this difficult to relate to. Not because I don't believe you,
> but because I can't think of a single job that I've got in the last 10
> years as a result of an advert somewhere.[3] Pretty much all of my work
> (I'm self employed) has come either through word of mouth, and the rest
> has been a matter of asking "any work here?".
Jobs are apparently so thick in this area (.dc.us) that the
recruiter who matched me with my current employer works
(so he claims) purely on location --- minimal commute distance
being a significant benefit, and enough openings to justify it.
ok
dpm
--
David P. Murphy http://www.myths.com/~dpm/
systems programmer ftp://ftp.myths.com
mailto:d...@myths.com (personal)
COGITO ERGO DISCLAMO mailto:Murphy...@emc.com (work)
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
In <m3wvbib...@zaphod.realtime.co.uk>, on 01/26/2001
at 03:10 PM, Wayne Pascoe <wa...@penguinpowered.org.uk> said:
>Will people from marketing still walk up to me and say 'It's easy. Do
>it now' ?
No. They'll promise the customer an impossible set of specification
with an absurd delivery date, but the first you'll hear about it is
when they PHB asks you why it's not up yet.
>Why am I even writing this? Who cares about my woe?
Recovery. The details vary enormously, but most of us have been where
you are in one form or another. Posting in asr helps us to remember
that we are not alone.
--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT
Reply to domain acm dot org user shmuel to contact me.
"He was born with a gift of laughter,
and a sense that the world was mad."
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
In <slrn973p...@manlap.zetnet.co.uk>, on 01/27/2001
at 12:16 AM, p...@zetnet.net (Paul Martin) said:
>Anyone else of the mind that they'd far prefer stuff like this
>instead of a CV?
I don't know how things are over there, but here in the States all of
the books tell people to hold their resumes down to one page. Every
time I see one, I have to ask what he did, because nobody with much
experience can fit it in one page. A long loud wail of pain conveys
more information about what you've done, but at most places, if an
applicant sent in something like that, HR would never let you see it.
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
In <t76ofel...@news.supernews.com>, on 01/28/2001
at 12:03 AM, d...@myths.com (David P. Murphy) said:
>Jobs are apparently so thick in this area (.dc.us
Tell me about it! My company has been looking for MVS sysprogs for
months. Yet in the same area, Fairfax County advertises for positions
at salaries that aren't enough to feed a doormouse. If we're having
trouble hiring, I can just imagine how much trouble they're having.
I have this fantasy about a company where the HR department actually
makes it easier to find and hire quailified applicants, filtering the
resumes intelligently instead of by matching buzzwords. I won't hold
my breathe.
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
In <Pine.LNX.4.20.01012...@kagero.fuckdns.org>, on
01/26/2001
at 02:51 AM, Andrew <bore...@inemy.com> said:
>I'll caution you right now, young Patawan, that direction there lies
>PHBs. While learning something "from the ground up" and doing a
>"damned good job" may stroke your ego, it will only cause you to be
>seen as a miracle worker, which means more "miracles-on-demand". I
>learned that the hard way, and have been fighting it ever since.
There is, or was, a statuette in novelty stores with a plaque reading
"Work diligently and hard and you shall surely get your reward." The
figure had a screw coming in from the back. Some bosses are like that.
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
In <94u8gc$eib$1...@pagoda.wgtn.cat-it.co.nz>, on 01/27/2001
at 11:39 PM, ew...@naos.co.nz (Ewen McNeill) said:
>I find this difficult to relate to. Not because I don't believe you,
>but because I can't think of a single job that I've got in the last
>10 years as a result of an advert somewhere.[3]
My experience is that the entire system for matching jobs and
applicants is badly b0rk3n. When I've had to hire someone, it's been
every bit as traumatic as trying to find a job.
Patrick M Geahan
> I don't know how things are over there, but here in the States all of
> the books tell people to hold their resumes down to one page. Every
> time I see one, I have to ask what he did, because nobody with much
> experience can fit it in one page. A long loud wail of pain conveys
> more information about what you've done, but at most places, if an
> applicant sent in something like that, HR would never let you see it.
Then fuck 'em.
I heard that 'one page resume' crap all throughout my high school, college,
and professional careers. It's a load, period.
For one, I don't want to work for any company that judges my worthiness
based on some arbitrary bullshit such as how many pages I chose to fill up.
My current resume tags out at just barely over two. That's relavent stuff
- you want employment history, I need more than that.
I met a guy once whose father was a Professional Hiring Person. He told me
that his dad didn't have time to read all those resumes, so he had to toss
some of them. I don't get this idea - so, if you're tossing some, you're
going to keep all the ones that would contain one reference to once having
a computer(or whatever), and you're tossing the ones where someone has
mucho experience with many systems?
Fuck 'em. My resume contains my relavent stuff. If you're going to toss
it because I don't fall within some defined range of 'normal', then please
toss out my number and contact info, too. I don't particularly want to
hear from you.
--
-------Patrick M Geahan----...@home.com-------ICQ:3784715------
Quote of the Week: "Where in the bible does it say `God so loved the
world that he congested bandwidth by forwarding email to everyone in
his address book?'" - Tom Sevart in alt.folklore.urban
Mike Sphar
following? Read the book:
>This borders on UI, but I think it's fairly safe. From what I've seen (and
>I'm sure present Monks will correct me if I'm wrong), Unix admins tend to
>come from a (Unix) programming background. NT admins tend to come from a
>PeeCee/gamer/hardware background. That's why almost _every_ Unix admin job
>description requires shell/sed/awk/perl scripting, and almost _no_ NT
>admin job description ever does.
Speaking for myself, I cut my UNIX teeth doing tech support/helpdesk work.
While I learned quite a bit of scripting along the way, I'd in no way
consider myself a "UNIX programmer".
Before that, I pretty much got into computers in the first place to play
games, though that was back when I got the Atari 800 for my birthday.
--
Mike Sphar http://www.dogfacedboy.org/
This is really a religious pilgrimage for me,
a religious pilgrimage with a lot of buttkicking.
-- Ben, "Full Throttle"
Andrew
> The DHCP database is not and never was an access DB format. Yes, it *is*
> stupid that it has the same extension as an Access database but read on.
That, I did not know.
> If this is UI for anyone here besides Andrew, then god help you. But it
> <snip UI to prevent further propagation>
That, I did not _need_ to know.
While I may or may not have figured the problem out very quickly on
my own, I do have resources...and I choose to employ them on *company*
time, not my own. Until said company chooses to provide me with a newsfeed
(and the time to use it), I read/post here on my own time. This was (as
the FAQ states) merely a chance to blow off some steam. Please don't
respond to my humble complaints with UI, no matter how useful it
might be to me or anyone else. Otherwise, I may be tempted to engage you
in conversation about said UI, and no one wants that kind of mess.
If you *really* can't resist UI, then at least send it via email, instead
of posting it here. That way, everyone can easily ignore it. Thanks.
ObRecovery: I went to a jazz club down the street from work the other day,
since I was working late and thought I might catch the last set before
heading home. A funk/fusion band was playing. The keyboard player was
playing a rinky-dink 40-key keyboard with a MIDI interface running to a
Macintosh *Classic* which then ran out to a digital mixer/amp and his
speakers. I haven't seen a live rig like that in a looong tme. He got a
great sound, too. I talked to him for a while after the set, and he
explained his mindset ("it does the job, why do I need more features? It
only means more complexity and more prone to crashing."). I talked to him
about laying down some tracks for me to play around with (I play trumpet,
and consider music *excellent* recovery). Oh yeah...
Chris King
<pe...@bounty.org> writes
> I almost bought a copy of SCO OpenSewer today. Still in the box.
>
> $40. I still might go back and get it.
Don't bother. If you're really into industrial-grade wailing and
gnashing of teeth, they're giving it away for non-commercial use and the
latest media/doc kits are cheaper.
The best way to deal with OpenSewer is to run away. Terribly fast.
[No points for mangled STR]
Red Drag Diva
[NT rant to beat mine]
Matt, I'll be in your cube tomorrow, playing with one of the Sparcstations.
--
http://xenu.tygger.net/ http://www.caube.org.au/
"Telecommuting's just another word for company-sponsored masturbation." (Skud)
Red Drag Diva
:If this is UI for anyone here besides Andrew then god help you. But it is
:ROT13'd anyway to protect our younger viewers from such distateful
:material.
Please don't. I want to read this thread, but don't want to risk UI. I've
had a profoundly recovering three days off and would like to maintain this
wonderful condition until, ooh, 10am or 11am tomorrow at least.
Red Drag Diva
:In article <Pine.LNX.4.20.01012...@kagero.fuckdns.org>,
:>> So I dunno. Maybe you guys should be looking at the horror that
:>> is working for an ISP? It sucks in oh so many ways, but it's
:>> still probably at least 50% Unix-based...
:>Phew. I did do helldesk for local/regional ISP for about three months and
:>I hated it. The only good thing I can say about it was that I had a free
:>internet account. And I didn't get to even think about possibly touching
:>anything remotely similar to Unix.
:The trick is to do so in a small ISP. Somewhere where there's
:at least a snowball's chance in hell of moving from helldesk
:to systems. It's been done before. So often that we might be
:able to present a case for a Right of Way under UK law.
The company from .sg has bought everyone out, far as I can tell. The thing
you may learn on helldesk is initial training in working in sewers eight
hours a day, learning the names and functions of all manner of turds
floating past. It's endlessly varied work, and you can even do an MCSE and
get really *good* at throwing turds around in *just* the right fashion and
do what is, for the stuff you're working with, a good job. But it's still
working in a sewer, up to your arms in shit for many hours a day, and you
spend all day immersed in the smell of shit and come home stinking of shit.
No, you are unlikely to see Unix from the ISP helldesk these days.
:I know. Not as lucky as guys who got to play with stuff more
:interesting than the C64 while growing up, but every day I say
:a small prayer of thanks that I'm not 20 and trying to get
:started in this business.
:Or I would if I were the praying kind.
They seem to be reading kuro5hin, so that might give them some attitude to
start with :-)
Calle Dybedahl
> See Box running Mysql and Veritas have it's disks nearly fill up.
You almost made me post UI, you evil person!
--
Calle Dybedahl, Vasav. 82, S-177 52 Jaerfaella,SWEDEN | ca...@lysator.liu.se
"My Body Is A Temple...To Bacchus" -- Penny Dreadful
Mike Andrews
: I have this fantasy about a company where the HR department actually
: makes it easier to find and hire quailified applicants, filtering the
: resumes intelligently instead of by matching buzzwords. I won't hold
: my breathe.
While you're at it, fantasize about lawyers who, instead of
getting in the fscking way and throwing up irrelevant roadblocks
by the doz^Wscor^Wgross, actually facilitate doing business.
--
This reminds me of a colleague a few days ago who turned to me
and asked in a bit of a hushed voice: "what's the politically
acceptable name for a clitmouse?"
-- Matt, in the Monastery
Mike Andrews
: Ewen McNeill <ew...@naos.co.nz> wrote:
:>[1] Not that "no compiler" is unique to Windows. Some fairly commonly
:> used unix-derived operating systems don't come with a compiler
:> either.
: You mean like Solaris and (Supposedly) MacOS X?
And, unless you license the feature, AIX.
Oh, wait -- you said "operating system". Nevermind.
--
Death is just Mother Nature's way of telling you
to Slow Down.
Mark W. Schumann
petro <pe...@bounty.org> wrote:
> You do because you *are*. Even if you leave IT, you'll still be
>an Admin or a Programmer. If (ob. thread cross) you become an Architect,
>you'll *still* do it the way you'd build a peice of software. If you're
>a motorcycle mechanic, well, you're a motorcycle *admin*.
>
> It's the way you look at and solve problems. Whether you fix
>people, computers, or you work as a freaken janitor in a school.
Exactly.
My dad knows practically nothing about computers, but he's still a
hacker. He used to be a CO supervisor for Southern New England
Telephone.
My favorite story went something like: natural disaster, small town,
phone system totally down, grabbed operator switchboard off a trash
heap somewhere, bypassed all the lines into the dial-based CO, and
taught a couple of his techs how to work a manual switchboard. This
must have been sometime in the 1960s, I guess.
Pop had restored phone service to this small town in a few hours
instead of waiting days for the replacement dial-station equipment to
be delivered. You'd pick up the phone and get a freshly-trained
operator instead of a dial tone. It worked well enough to get by.
Now *THAT* is hacking. People ask me now what I'd be doing for a living
if computers didn't exist, I tell 'em I'd be a telco hacker. It's the
same thing.
(Interestingly, the PHBs were impressed, not angry.)
Mark W. Schumann
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz <spam...@library.lspace.org.invalid> wrote:
>I don't know how things are over there, but here in the States all of
>the books tell people to hold their resumes down to one page. Every
>time I see one, I have to ask what he did, because nobody with much
>experience can fit it in one page. A long loud wail of pain conveys
>more information about what you've done, but at most places, if an
>applicant sent in something like that, HR would never let you see it.
For those rare occurrences where I want an HR person to see my CV,
they get the one-page version. But if there are any intermediaries,
such as pimps, they can have the whole two-page tiny-print version
with everything on it. I figure let the pimps work for their money.
Which is also why they get the CV in PDF or PostScript. If they want
it in Word, they know how to type, right? I'm not going to go buy
MS Office just to make them happy.
Then I have the dilemma of how to email docs to my lawyer. He can
retype or edit things, but that costs about $200/hr and he doesn't
like editing TeX. Haven't figured out how to deal with this other
than by getting a more geekish lawyer. *sigh*
Jay Maynard
>And, unless you license the feature, AIX.
>Oh, wait -- you said "operating system". Nevermind.
Hey...I can run lotsa different language compilers on my RS/6000. It has a
P/390 board installed.
Ralph Wade Phillips
"Chris King" <ch...@csking.co.uk> wrote in message
news:nnuTOLA9F$c6E...@csking.co.uk...
> In article <slrn977ahg...@lists.bounty.org>, petro
> <pe...@bounty.org> writes
> > I almost bought a copy of SCO OpenSewer today. Still in the box.
> >
> > $40. I still might go back and get it.
>
> Don't bother. If you're really into industrial-grade wailing and
> gnashing of teeth, they're giving it away for non-commercial use and the
> latest media/doc kits are cheaper.
>
> The best way to deal with OpenSewer is to run away. Terribly fast.
> [No points for mangled STR]
Well, things COULD be worse.
I still have distro media for Xenix 286 and Xenix 386 (the 386 is
3.2v4.2, not sure about the X286 media.)
Anyone with 360K floppies on a fast (8MHz or above) 286 with at
least 2 megs of RAM? <grins>
Now if I could only find the appropriate clue stick to whap myself
about with for a problem I'm having with OpenSewer ...
RwP
David P. Murphy
> ObRecovery: I went to a jazz club down the street from work the other day,
> since I was working late and thought I might catch the last set before
> heading home. A funk/fusion band was playing. The keyboard player was
> playing a rinky-dink 40-key keyboard with a MIDI interface running to a
> Macintosh *Classic* which then ran out to a digital mixer/amp and his
> speakers. I haven't seen a live rig like that in a looong tme. He got a
> great sound, too.
Sounds like the setup I saw in use at a David Bowie concert (_Serious
Moonlight_, my first date[1] with the woman who is now my wife).
> I talked to him for a while after the set, and he
> explained his mindset ("it does the job, why do I need more features? It
> only means more complexity and more prone to crashing.").
I call dibs on hiring him.
[1] Me, now: "But . . . but . . . but we agreed that it wasn't a date!"
Her: "Well, we got married, so it must have been a date."
Me (wailing): "But we specifically agreed ----"
David P. Murphy
> Grr ...
> Anyone with 360K floppies on a fast (8MHz or above) 286 with at
> least 2 megs of RAM? <grins>
Great horny toads, what is so big that you need that many floppies??
Alan W. Frame
[]
> Them: "So you can design and implement a scalable, enterprise network
> architecture by Monday, right? And you can set up my Outlook and
> download/install Webshots desktop for me?"
> Me: "No, I mow lawns." [1]
[]
> [1] Thanks hymie!
.uk variant, from my PFY:
"I drive a van"
Blah, blah, blah.
"It's a white van"
Apropos this thread, Yeah, I run DedRat at home & Ork, but I generally
compile from tarballs, avoid rpms and don't really do X[2] - hey, it's
just like the BSD 4.2 and HP-UX boxen I used used in the late 80s, 'cept
then I (generally) wasn't a BOFH, but a mere developer. My home box
*is* where I man/ora things before I present them as a fait acomplait
(and NT alternative) to ork, so does that make me a RedHat weenie?
ObRecovery: Wallpapering - first attempt - SO & I do a standard 8-foot
wide flat wall - it looks OK, so we move onto a stairwell with 14-foot
drops, bannisters and all sorts of strange curves - surprisingly, we
only had to abandon one drop, and it all looks almost OK.
HTH, Alan
[2] As I've mentioned before, when I want point 'n' drool, I use another
OS.
--
99 Ducati 748BP, 95 Ducati 600SS, <Guzzi-space>, 74 MV Agusta 350
"Ride to Work, Work to Ride" SI # 7.067 DoD#1930
Chris King
<d...@myths.com> writes
>Great horny toads, what is so big that you need that many floppies??
Xenix. Just like the man said.
You only got it on floppies for two reasons:
(1) You didn't have a tape drive, or
(2) You were a masochist who liked shuffling big piles of floppies.
David Scheidt
: I have this fantasy about a company where the HR department actually
: makes it easier to find and hire quailified applicants, filtering the
: resumes intelligently instead of by matching buzzwords. I won't hold
: my breathe.
Instead of the one a couple of jobs back that wouldn't let me be hired
into a permenant position because I wasn't qualified for it, plainly
ignoring that my would be boss was begging them to, and that I'd been doing
the exact same job for 18 months? Good luck.
--
David Scheidt <dsch...@enteract.com>
Large fibreglass fruits are much the same the world over.
-- Vicki Parslow Stafford
Ralph Wade Phillips
David P. Murphy <d...@myths.com> wrote in message
news:t7971j6...@news.supernews.com...
> Ralph Wade Phillips <ral...@techie.com> wrote:
> > Grr ...
>
> > Anyone with 360K floppies on a fast (8MHz or above) 286 with at
> > least 2 megs of RAM? <grins>
>
> Great horny toads, what is so big that you need that many floppies??
A|N>K
See? Even if I DO use Windoze, I'm not TOTALLY clueless (i.e., I don't
drink or eat while reading this group.)
I meant CAPACITY of 360K. It's actually 7 floppies, IIRC.
(As in won't boot on HD floppy drives. Period. Such were the wonders
of Microsoft XENIX as sold by SCO.)
RwP
Jeff Mcadams
> Even if you leave IT, you'll still be
>an Admin or a Programmer. If (ob. thread cross) you become an
>Architect, you'll *still* do it the way you'd build a peice of
>software. If you're a motorcycle mechanic, well, you're a motorcycle
>*admin*.
> It's the way you look at and solve problems. Whether you fix
>people, computers, or you work as a freaken janitor in a school.
No, I mow lawns...wait...I guess you could be a lawn-mower admin though.
Dang it!
--
Jeff McAdams Email: je...@iglou.com
Head Network Administrator Voice: (502) 966-3848
IgLou Internet Services (800) 436-4456
Earl Grey
> That's one of the current plans. Thanks to the monks here, perspective
> has been adjusted and leaving will happen soon :) That will happen
> RIGHT AFTER I use all my remaining leave.
THAT'S the Spirit!
Hmmm. $$$ in place of un-used "leave"? Or better to shop around while on
Vacation? Difficult to tell which is better.
--
http://copyleft.net/cgi-bin/copyleft/t039.pl
http://kapu.net/~bofh/
Paul Brown
> Mark W. Schumann <cat...@apk.net> wrote:
>>Then I have the dilemma of how to email docs to my lawyer. He can
>>retype or edit things, but that costs about $200/hr and he doesn't
>>like editing TeX. Haven't figured out how to deal with this other
>>than by getting a more geekish lawyer. *sigh*
> If he uses office, send it to him in HTML.
*AWOOGA* *AWOOGAH*
UI DETECTED
NUCLEAR LART PRIMED
TARGETING
DEPLOY!
Paul
And yes, this is UI to me dammit. Fscking M$ lusers.
--
Paul S. Brown + E-Mail : p...@newtonsols.net
Satya
>My solution has always been to keep my usual five page resume, but with
>a single summary page in front of it that contains only the stuff that's
>most relevant to the job that I'm applying for.
AOL.
I don't know how the hell mine tops out at 6 pages; I haven't really done
anything yet.
Oh, all the small projects. Do those count if I did them on my own time,
being my own boss, at home, but they're live on the web NET DAMMIT NET! ?
--
Satya.
Paul Brown
> Paul Brown <p...@read.the.sig.coz.this.address.is.invalid> wrote:
>>petro <pe...@bounty.org> wrote:
>>> Mark W. Schumann <cat...@apk.net> wrote:
>>>>Then I have the dilemma of how to email docs to my lawyer. He can
>>>>retype or edit things, but that costs about $200/hr and he doesn't
>>>>like editing TeX. Haven't figured out how to deal with this other
>>>>than by getting a more geekish lawyer. *sigh*
>>> If he uses office, send it to him in HTML.
>>*AWOOGA* *AWOOGAH*
>>UI DETECTED
>>NUCLEAR LART PRIMED
>>TARGETING
>>DEPLOY!
> Christ man, I'm sorry--I thought I was stating the obvious.
>
Oh, I already knew it. It is so obvious that the Lusers I do support
for don't realise it.
Paul
goes away and sobs quietly
Matt McLeod
Red Drag Diva <f...@thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
>The company from .sg has bought everyone out, far as I can tell.
And what they haven't bought, an American outfit has bought instead.
Except for the true dregs of the industry, like my former employer.
Still, there are a few "independent" ISPs left in this country,
and I imagine the same is true for the UK.
But yeah, working in a corporate ISP you've got *no* chance of
getting anywhere near anything useful. All you can do is bide
your time until someone throws you a rope, and hope like hell
it doesn't turn into a snake.
--
"What I like most about myself is that I'm so
understanding when I mess things up."
Matt McLeod
Lionel <n...@alt.net> wrote:
>Word has it that on Sat, 27 Jan 2001 21:20:59 -0500, in this august
>forum, "Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz" <spam...@library.lspace.org.invalid>
>said:
>>My experience is that the entire system for matching jobs and
>>applicants is badly b0rk3n. When I've had to hire someone, it's been
>>every bit as traumatic as trying to find a job.
>
>Do *not* get me started on this topic. I had always assumed that
>resume's are not actually supposed to be more than 30% fiction.
Hrm. I'd always assumed that a CV should be 100% nonfiction.
Mine certainly is. Perhaps this is why I'm having such a hard
time getting past the pimps?
I have so far found one, count 'em, *one* useful pimp in my
current hunt. Yes, Thorf, it's Laz. He is the *only* one of
them who has actually called me with a job which matches my
skills and interests.
Whether I get it or not (or want it, for that matter) remains
to be seen, but it does at least sound promising.
--
Never count your chickens before they rip your lips off
Matt McLeod
Calle Dybedahl <ca...@lysator.liu.se> wrote:
>>>>>> "petro" == petro <pe...@bounty.org> writes:
>
>> See Box running Mysql and Veritas have it's disks nearly fill up.
>
>You almost made me post UI, you evil person!
Likewise, though more in the form of a question.
--
Service with a capital "Bugger Off".
Matt McLeod
Earl Grey <bo...@kapu.net> wrote:
>Wayne Pascoe wrote:
>
>> That's one of the current plans. Thanks to the monks here, perspective
>> has been adjusted and leaving will happen soon :) That will happen
>> RIGHT AFTER I use all my remaining leave.
>
> THAT'S the Spirit!
>
>Hmmm. $$$ in place of un-used "leave"? Or better to shop around while on
>Vacation? Difficult to tell which is better.
I would be very surprised if UK law differs from that here in
this respect, so Wayne: check this, but chances are that if
you quit before using your accumulated leave, they have to pay
it out whether they like it or not.
I know I'm planning to use my six weeks of accumulated leave as
a nice cash bonus when I find my next gig...
--
"The devil couldn't do what a woman can:
Make a thief of an honest man"
-- "Bob", _The Old Maid and the Thief_
John Riddoch
> times to help him fix things there because he couldn't get it right. (He
> wanted three servers, a Primary Domain Controller, a backup Domain
> Controller, and a stand-alone server....all for 12 client machines.)
This is NT, after all. You need a PDC anyway, then you need a BDC for
when[1] the PDC crashes. And, since you don't have an NT box doing
more than one job at a time, you have a seperate server for sharing files.
1/ no, not if..
--
John Riddoch Email: j...@scms.rgu.ac.uk Telephone: (01224)262721
http://www.scms.rgu.ac.uk/staff/jr/
"I'd change the world but God won't give me the source code" - Anonymous
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
In <953m9t$91k$1...@amoeba.cugc.org>, on 01/29/2001
at 11:05 PM, ma...@cugc.org (Matt McLeod) said:
>I would be very surprised if UK law differs from that here in this
>respect, so Wayne: check this, but chances are that if you quit
>before using your accumulated leave, they have to pay it out whether
>they like it or not.
Well, in the State the employer pretty much sets the rules, and
there's one very large 3-letter company that has an explicit policy
that leave is a privilege, not a right, and that unused leave
disappears the instant you hand in your notice.
--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT
Reply to domain acm dot org user shmuel to contact me.
"He was born with a gift of laughter,
and a sense that the world was mad."
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
at 11:35 AM, Paul Brown
<p...@read.the.sig.coz.this.address.is.invalid> said:
>Oh, I already knew it. It is so obvious that the Lusers I do support
>for don't realise it.
And you think everyone else's have more on the ball because? People
work by rote, and if something hasn't hit them in the face then it
doesn't exist.
--
-----------------------------------------------------------
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT
Atid/2
Team OS/2
Team PL/I
Any unsolicited commercial junk E-mail will be subject to legal
action. I reserve the right to publicly post or ridicule any
abusive E-mail.
I mangled my E-mail address to foil automated spammers; reply to
domain acm dot org user shmuel to contact me. Do not reply to
spam...@library.lspace.org
-----------------------------------------------------------
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
In <ht987tk00sf0d1t6b...@4ax.com>, on 01/29/2001
at 01:09 AM, Lionel <n...@alt.net> said:
>Do *not* get me started on this topic. I had always assumed that
>resume's are not actually supposed to be more than 30% fiction.
I guess I'm not a team player, because when the marketoid pad my
resume with languages I don't know, I dmenad that they take it off.
"Trust, but verify."
--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
<2CA129721B772740.8C44BE82...@lp.airnews.net>,
on 01/28/2001
at 06:50 PM, jmay...@thebrain.conmicro.cx (Jay Maynard) said:
>Hey...I can run lotsa different language compilers on my RS/6000. It
>has a P/390 board installed.
ITYM "R/390 board"; the P/390 is for the other platform.
<rant>
Why couldn't they offer an upgraded version of the P/390 and R/390 as
part of the ZEOS <g> announcement?
</rant>
--
-----------------------------------------------------------
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT
Peter N. M. Hansteen
> No, I didn't You have a Free Will.
But, how is that possible? Don't you need a landshark
to make will valid?
--
SPECIAL OFFER! I proofread unsolicited commercial email sent to this
address at a rate of US $500.00 per incident! Include billing address
in your message and save US $500.00 per hour off ordinary address
resolution and tracking charge!
Matt McLeod
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz <spam...@library.lspace.org.invalid> wrote:
>
>In <953m9t$91k$1...@amoeba.cugc.org>, on 01/29/2001
> at 11:05 PM, ma...@cugc.org (Matt McLeod) said:
>
>>I would be very surprised if UK law differs from that here in this
>>respect, so Wayne: check this, but chances are that if you quit
>>before using your accumulated leave, they have to pay it out whether
>>they like it or not.
>
>Well, in the State the employer pretty much sets the rules, and
>there's one very large 3-letter company that has an explicit policy
>that leave is a privilege, not a right, and that unused leave
>disappears the instant you hand in your notice.
Yeah, but a lot of Australian law derives from UK law,
and even the bits we've explicitly over-ridden are not
entirely dissimilar in spirit.
Which is true for most of the civilized world.
In this particular instance, annual leave is a legal entitlement,
and though you generally can't accumulate it indefinitely it's
a part of the package and the employer can't dodge it. And
quite frankly, I'd refuse to sign any contract which tried to
claim otherwise, particularly if it also included those
insanely-low US vacation entitlements.
--
"From empirical experience, your Exchange admin needs to put down the crack
pipe and open a window to disperse the fumes." -- Joe Thompson, ASR
D. Joseph Creighton
}Andrew <bore...@inemy.com> wrote:
}.uk variant, from my PFY:
}
}"I drive a van"
}
}Blah, blah, blah.
}
}"It's a white van"
I immediately thought your PFY was a polar bear.
--
ICBM LART @ UofM: 49°48.555'N, 97°07.947'W (+/- 20m)
D. Joseph Creighton [ESTP] | Programmer Analyst, Database Technologies, IST
Joe_Cr...@UManitoba.CA | University of Manitoba Winnipeg, MB, Canada, eh?
Wayne Pascoe
> I would be very surprised if UK law differs from that here in
> this respect, so Wayne: check this, but chances are that if
> you quit before using your accumulated leave, they have to pay
> it out whether they like it or not.
>
> I know I'm planning to use my six weeks of accumulated leave as
> a nice cash bonus when I find my next gig...
I was sorely tempted by this idea, but I have two problems.
1. I'm burned. Bad. Need the break. And while I hate current
$ORKPLACE, I plan to go to one that I like. I don't want to arrive
burned and surley.
2. I'm nearing the end of the company leave year. They won't let me
carry more than 3 days over, so if I don't use it, I lose it.
'sides, the wife could also do with some me-time.
-Wayne
--
Be nice to your daemons. | wa...@penguinpowered.org.uk
| www.penguinpowered.org.uk
John Riddoch
> (who _has_ bought a house without having a lawyer for my side)
Given that I've just bought a flat[1], I now have a fair idea what is
required to purchase one. I'm happier paying the legal fees rather than
a) go through the rigmarole of figuring out what I need to do,
b) actually doing the necessary paperwork and
c) panicking in case I missed out some important step to cover my ass.
Your milage obviously varies, it seems.
1/ moved in in July
cdj...@ualberta.ca
> In .us at least, I've heard a will is legal if written by the
> person in question in his own handwriting, even if not validated
> by a landshark.
Unsurprisingly, it depends on your jurisdiction: what holds in one
state (or province) may not necessarily be true in the adjacent one(s).
However, in general, wills do not require a lawyer, merely a few witnesses.
In some jurisdictions (most of Canada, most of the Commonwealth, etc),
"holographic" wills (written in your handwriting) are valid without
witnesses, too.
<plug type="blatant" for_whom="landsharks">
With that said, not talking to a lawyer if your estate is likely to
be more complicated than "sell everything, and direct the proceeds in these
proportions to these people" is a very silly move. The few hundred bucks
that it costs to get a lawyer to do up a will properly will make the chances
of anyone contesting the will go down, and increase the likelihood that
it'll actually be followed. Probate law is not intuitively obvious.
</plug>
Mike Andrews
: "Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz" <spam...@library.lspace.org.invalid> wrote:
: : I have this fantasy about a company where the HR department actually
: : makes it easier to find and hire quailified applicants, filtering the
: : resumes intelligently instead of by matching buzzwords. I won't hold
: : my breathe.
: Instead of the one a couple of jobs back that wouldn't let me be hired
: into a permenant position because I wasn't qualified for it, plainly
: ignoring that my would be boss was begging them to, and that I'd been doing
: the exact same job for 18 months? Good luck.
I see you've been doing business[1] with the Oklahoma State Office
of Personnel MisManagement, or with an agency organized around the
same policies, procedures, and thought processes.
[1] FSVO "doing business" that involves trying to push the cooked
spaghetti of your real abilities and skills through the soda
straw of their requirements and processes.
--
Remember the signs in restaurants "We reserve the right to refuse
service to anyone"? The spammers twist it around to say "we reserve
the right to serve refuse to anyone."
-- SPAMJAMR & Blackthorn in nanae
Mike Andrews
: Calle Dybedahl <ca...@lysator.liu.se> wrote:
:>>>>>> "petro" == petro <pe...@bounty.org> writes:
:>> See Box running Mysql and Veritas have it's disks nearly fill up.
:>You almost made me post UI, you evil person!
: No, I didn't You have a Free Will.
Free Will and all the other enslaved whales!
--
"Tam byl, to delal, futbolka byla defitsit..." [2]
[2] BTDT, T-shirts were in short supply
-- bee...@euro.cauce.org (Beebit),
in news.admin.net-abuse.email
Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
Robert Moir <mara...@bitey.force9.co.uk> spake:
>ew...@naos.co.nz (Ewen McNeill) wrote in
><94u8gc$eib$1...@pagoda.wgtn.cat-it.co.nz>:
>>I think that's probably true. I was certainly somewhat horrified
>>hearing radio adverts a while back[2] for MCSE courses, along the lines
>>that in "just 6 weeks" you'd be trained up and ready to go and get a
>>high paying job. From scratch. Everything you need to know.
>Well the problems is training factories like this, and the people who
>believe them. Fact is, that training is, at best, the *start* of a journey
>to being a halfway competent admin but far too many people leave these
>places convinced its the end of the journey.
But, the end of the course *IS* the end of the learning journey.
Haven't you met any MCSE's?
<http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/quotes.html#joyce_park_herdthink>
--
<a href="http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/"> Mark Hughes </a>
Disclaimer: I do not have an orbital mind control laser; you are free to post
your own opinion, but be prepared to back it up, because I *will* call you on
it if I think it's bullshit. That's how the Internet, and life, works.
David P. Murphy
> You'd be amazed & how much more cynical it is possible to become, once
> you start trying to hire people. You become even more cynical once you
> start actually interviewing them.
And homicidal when you have to work with them.
ok
dpm
--
David P. Murphy http://www.myths.com/~dpm/
systems programmer ftp://ftp.myths.com
mailto:d...@myths.com (personal)
COGITO ERGO DISCLAMO mailto:Murphy...@emc.com (work)
Eric The Read
> But, the end of the course *IS* the end of the learning journey.
> Haven't you met any MCSE's?
For most MCSE's I've met, the end of the learning journey is miles before
the end of the course. Sometimes before it even starts.
-=Eric
--
this is the first time i have seen $, used for good and not for evil.
-- Uri Guttman <u...@ibnets.com>, on comp.lang.perl.misc
Robert Moir
<slrn97bi1l.1...@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu>:
> But, the end of the course *IS* the end of the learning journey.
>Haven't you met any MCSE's?
>
Yes. Several. Some are good and some are bad. The ones who expect you to
salute because they tell you they are A MCSE AND KNOW LOTS are bad. The
people who just get on and do the damn job and don't give two fucks about
your certificates, their certificates and anyone else's certicates are
usually good. I don't actually think thats got too much to do with the
paperwork itself.
Måns Nilsson
>Which is true for most of the civilized world.
Like .SE. We get 5 or 6 weeks paid vacation.
>In this particular instance, annual leave is a legal entitlement,
>and though you generally can't accumulate it indefinitely it's
>a part of the package and the employer can't dodge it. And
>quite frankly, I'd refuse to sign any contract which tried to
>claim otherwise, particularly if it also included those
>insanely-low US vacation entitlements.
I handed in my notice today. I'm swapping my accumulated vacation (or
part of it) for keeping a computer, my *BM Th*nkp*d 600X. It's
unrecovery, but unrecovery in black rubber and red clitmouse.
The boss said that he was very sorry that I'm leaving. I believe him.
I'm sorry too. I'm not accepting the stupidities of our owners anymore.
Either they leave or I do. They are fucked anyway, I'm not.
I'm diving headfirst in Academentia, but a very well-paid Academentia.
This is going to be interesting. Very. Very.
--
Måns Nilsson MN1334-RIPE
http://vvv.besserwisser.org GSM 070 9174840
J.D. Baldwin
In the previous article, Ben <B...@lspace.org> wrote:
> I almost damned round the room when the OK came down to order some
> 3Com switches.
Now that has to be the happiest typo I've seen in a year.
I'd elaborate, but I'm off to do some damning of my own.
--
_+_ From the catapult of |If anyone disagrees with any statement I make, I
_|70|___:)=}- J.D. Baldwin |am quite prepared not only to retract it, but also
\ / bal...@panix.com|to deny under oath that I ever made it. -T. Lehrer
***~~~~-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Jari Lehtonen
[ Xenix 286 ]
> I meant CAPACITY of 360K. It's actually 7 floppies, IIRC.
360K? Hmm...
*rummages through closets*
Ah, here. Seven floppies, right. I could've sworn it was 1.2M capacity
but I guess not. Says on the label: 96 dshd. I guess 96 tracks, double
sided and high density, but I've blissfully forgotten what to make of
that.
> (As in won't boot on HD floppy drives. Period. Such were the wonders
> of Microsoft XENIX as sold by SCO.)
This one did, release 2.2, license dated Sat Dec 12, 1987. I distinctly
remember installing it on my old Goldstar 286 just for the hell of it.
Back in 1991, I guess.
--
Jari Lehtonen
ja...@utu.fi
Chris King
Random <ra...@bradakis.net> writes
>Right. Another bad memory of Interactive Unix on 1.2Megs because I
>couldn't get XENIX up on the 386. Gah.
Ah hell, I'm definitely NOT drinking enough to forget all this stuff...
Chris
--
Chris King
ch...@csking.co.uk
http://www.csking.co.uk
J.D. Baldwin
In the previous article, Matt McLeod <ma...@cugc.org> wrote:
> >Hmmm. $$$ in place of un-used "leave"? Or better to shop around while
> >on Vacation? Difficult to tell which is better.
>
> I would be very surprised if UK law differs from that here in
> this respect, so Wayne: check this, but chances are that if
> you quit before using your accumulated leave, they have to pay
> it out whether they like it or not.
There are a couple of potential problems with this. One is that you
might not really know how your balance is calculated. Another is that
you might have a dispute about what that balance *is*. Yet another is
that it might not be clear how much a "day" is worth. Some companies
actually calculate it as worth 1/30th of monthly salary. Reflect for
a moment on why that is hardly just.
I have experienced all three of these options. At one company,
vacation days were prorated according to the month in which one left
the company. I left in August, and my nominal ten days for the year
were to be prorated to five, payable to me at the rate of 1/240th (or
thereabouts) of annual salary per day. If I *took* the vacation days,
I could take all ten.
So I said "screw that noise" and decided to disguise my intention as
if it were a huge favor to my boss -- which, actually, it was. I told
my boss that I was going to leave in four weeks. I would work for a
week, during which I would clean up some things, document others, and
attempt to replace myself. Then I would go on vacation for two weeks.
Then I would come back to work for one last week, during which I would
help interview the people he'd found in the meantime. (I was truly
the only person there who knew anything at all about the systems for
which I was responsible.) Then I would be gone.
When I came back, he had exactly one candidate for me to interview.
The guy was more or less OK, and seemed capable of learning. The poor
bastards^W^W systems guys I was leaving behind liked him well enough,
so I signed off on him. (He lasted four months, I later heard.)
After I left, I got a check for my "unused" five days of vacation.
Being a generally honest and lawsuit-fearing individual, I fired off
an email to the payroll person in HR suggesting that this might have
been an error and asking what I should do to correct it. This note
disappeared into a black hole. [1]
I wonder whether the fact that this payroll person liked me quite a
lot, and that I had once written a VB script [2] that made her life
dramatically easier [3], had anything to do with this oversight?
By way of contrast, when I left the service of the U.S. Navy, they
overpaid me by a month -- about US$4,000. Of course, this being the
government, they noticed immediately and I had to pay it back. At a
usurious 3% APR over three years. I took my sweet time, believe me.
As to the rant that started this thread: "triple" is spelled with one
"p." Not a spelling flame -- it's the only flaw I could find in that
magnificent rant o'beauty. It was, as others have noticed, tear-
inducing. (As in "thing of beauty" tear, not "I am sad" tear.)
[1] a) Yes, I am aware I really should have sent a certified paper
letter, return receipt requested. I didn't think of it at
the time.
b) I was by this point reasonably confident that inbound mail
was reliably reaching its destination at this site, as I
assisted in the bloodletting^W reconfiguration of the mail
gateway and did most of the final testing myself. So I was
fairly sure that the mail got to the appropriate inbox.
[2] Hey, this is the monastery. We can confess our sins in here,
right?
[3] Seems that 3,000 highly-paid technology consultants couldn't grasp
the concept of higher math involved in such reasoning as "Total
hours is the sum of direct and indirect hours," or "Hours in a
given day for all categories add up to total hours for that day"
and the like. Timesheets were submitted on those pencil-in-the-
dots sheets and read into an Access database. The database was
then hand-corrected by the payroll staff. A trivially easy
program [4] to highlight the problem children's timesheets and
suggest "obvious" corrections (that could then be applied with a
single keystroke) saved them each about five or six hours per pay
cycle (twice a month).
[4] Total development time: four half-days. This included the "learn
VB" part.
J.D. Baldwin
In the previous article, Patrick M Geahan <pmge...@home.com> wrote:
> I met a guy once whose father was a Professional Hiring Person. He
> told me that his dad didn't have time to read all those resumes, so
> he had to toss some of them. I don't get this idea - so, if you're
> tossing some, you're going to keep all the ones that would contain
> one reference to once having a computer(or whatever), and you're
> tossing the ones where someone has mucho experience with many
> systems?
I once worked a job fair -- and there's a whole thirty-page rant in
*that* experience, believe me -- and collected a few score resumes[1].
The next day, my boss instructed me to toss all the ones from people
with Ph.D.'s. Really.
[1] I once ran a corporate website that of course included an "apply
for a job" page. Anyone care to guess how many "corrections"
I received about how many of those e's are supposed to be
accented? Don't any of these bloody idiots own a freaking
*dictionary*?
Christian Wagner
Robert Moir <mara...@bitey.force9.co.uk> wrote:
[re: MCSEs]
>
>Yes. Several. Some are good and some are bad. The ones who expect you to
>salute because they tell you they are A MCSE AND KNOW LOTS are bad. The
>people who just get on and do the damn job and don't give two fucks about
>your certificates, their certificates and anyone else's certicates are
>usually good. I don't actually think thats got too much to do with the
>paperwork itself.
I've never met -anyone- who gave a shit about certificates or paperwork, who
was also actually worth working with. This may change at a certain level
(like insanely-hard-to-get Cisco certs), but at that point the cert is
almost superfluous, like chrome on an SR-71.
It's amazing, though, how much faith your average person puts in pieces of
paper. I was talking to a cab driver the other day on my way to work, and
after I told him what I do for a living, he asked how I learned to do what I
do, and if he should take one of those MCSE courses someplace in town is
offering.
I told him, paraphrased, "Don't waste your money. The only way you become
competent in supporting computers is by -doing- it, and making lots of
mistakes along the way. The only people who hire based solely on a
certification are people you really don't want to be working for."
In other news, the skillset I can put on a resume has roughly doubled in the
four months I've been at this job. Which is the way it should be, I would
think.
--
Christian Wagner | The object in life is not to be on the side
cwa...@io.com | of the majority, but to escape finding
http://www.balseraph.net | oneself in the ranks of the insane.
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
In <951hu8$g...@junior.apk.net>, on 01/28/2001
at 11:38 AM, cat...@apk.net (Mark W. Schumann) said:
>For those rare occurrences where I want an HR person to see my CV,
>they get the one-page version.
I don't have a one page version. I don't want a one page version.
>Which is also why they get the CV in PDF or PostScript.
I'm perfectly willing to give it to them in ASCII, HTML, word or WP.
But I won't condense it to the point where it doesn't say anything.
--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
In <Pine.LNX.4.20.01012...@kagero.fuckdns.org>, on
01/27/2001
at 03:48 AM, Andrew <bore...@inemy.com> said:
>This was (as
>the FAQ states) merely a chance to blow off some steam. Please don't
>respond to my humble complaints with UI, no matter how useful it
>might be to me or anyone else.
<rant><aol>
Yes! It should not be necessary to state in an article "Please, No
UI!". If I post a rant about a techical screwup, the only UI that I
want is along the lines of a comparison of rope versus piano wire for
LARTing the parties responsible. If I'm seeking technical assistance,
I will find appropriate fora for my questions, thank you very much.
</aol></rant>
BTW, rhetorical questions are not requests for UI, e.g., in a rant
about reporters getting their facts wrong, the appropriate response is
"You think *he* got his facts wrong? How about this one?"
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
In <izjd6.159$Nq6....@news.flash.net>, on 01/29/2001
at 07:32 PM, mi...@mikea.ath.cx (Mike Andrews) said:
>I see you've been doing business[1] with the Oklahoma State Office of
>Personnel MisManagement, or with an agency organized around the same
>policies, procedures, and thought processes.
Friends, come to do business with you. STR.
Mike Sphar
once write the following? Read the book:
>In the previous article, Ben <B...@lspace.org> wrote:
>> I almost damned round the room when the OK came down to order some
>> 3Com switches.
>
>Now that has to be the happiest typo I've seen in a year.
But accurate, he truly is damned if he's getting 3Com switches. We only
finally got rid of the last of those $DEITY-forsaken Corebuilders that IT
management saddled us with. Giant screaming pieces of excrement, they are.
I will admit though, that 3Com has Cisco beat in blinking-light technology.
For some reason it bothers me when network equipment doesn't have blinking
lights to indicate traffic.
--
Mike Sphar http://www.dogfacedboy.org/
TAURUS: You will never find true happiness - whatcha gonna do, cry about
it? The stars predict tomorrow you'll wake up, do a bunch of stuff and
then go back to sleep. -- Weird Al Yankovic, "Your Horoscope for Today"
Mike Sphar
<spam...@library.lspace.org.invalid> once write the following? Read the
book:
>In <953m9t$91k$1...@amoeba.cugc.org>, on 01/29/2001
> at 11:05 PM, ma...@cugc.org (Matt McLeod) said:
>>respect, so Wayne: check this, but chances are that if you quit
>>before using your accumulated leave, they have to pay it out whether
>>they like it or not.
>
>there's one very large 3-letter company that has an explicit policy
>that leave is a privilege, not a right, and that unused leave
>disappears the instant you hand in your notice.
Are we confusing "leave" with "vacation"? As far as I know, .us law
requires that a) employers maintain liquid assets to cover the vacation pay
they owe their employees, and b) that employees be reimbursed for unclaimed
vacation time when they quit or are terminated.
Employers do have some latitude in that they can make policies like "No one
may accumulate more than $NUM hours of vacation time." But I've never
encountered a .us company that got away with not paying out for unpaid
vacation.
Matt McLeod
Lionel <n...@alt.net> wrote:
>Word has it that on 29 Jan 2001 22:53:28 +1100, in this august forum,
>ma...@cugc.org (Matt McLeod) said:
>>Hrm. I'd always assumed that a CV should be 100% nonfiction.
>>Mine certainly is. Perhaps this is why I'm having such a hard
>>time getting past the pimps?
>
>It couldn't possibly help. Bear in mind that the vast majority of pimps
>& interviewers will be *assuming* that your CV has been tarted up like a
>televangelist's wife, & will read it accordingly.
Even so, I will *not* lie on my CV. I even try not to overplay
things (for example, I include a note that although I'm familiar
with a fair range of programming languages, I am *not* a Real
Developer and should not be hired as such).
At the last interview I had arranged for me by a pimp (several
months ago -- it really has been a shit of a time, nobody much
seems to be hiring Solaris admins right now) I went so far as
to ask to see the CV the pimps had sent, as I'd been sent for
a development gig despite having been really clear about that.
Surprisingly, they hadn't modified it at all. I asked why they'd
had me in for an interview given the content of my CV, and was
told that it was because the interviewer recognised my name.
So not entirely the pimp's fault, but I seriously flubbed on
the interview because it was so bloody obvious that my skillset
and their requirements were wildly out of alignment, and I
was embarassed as all hell to be there.
--
SUSPICION BREEDS CONFIDENCE
Matt McLeod
Lionel <n...@alt.net> wrote:
>You'd be amazed & how much more cynical it is possible to become, once
>you start trying to hire people. You become even more cynical once you
>start actually interviewing them.
I've sat in on interviews twice. The first time was at Dragon,
when we were hiring bobs. That was fine, though I didn't really
have a lot to add.
The second time was when I sat in on that interview you did in
Hongkong while I was there. I felt so sorry for that poor bastard:
either the pimps had really set him up for failure, or he'd lied
so much on his CV it wasn't funny. Sending an NT guy for a
Unix admin position was bad enough, but if memory serves he was
a bit disingenuous about his AIX experience too...
--
"I'm not sure if this is a good or a bad thing.
Probably a bad thing; most things are bad things."
-- Nile Evil Bastard
Matt McLeod
Wayne Pascoe <wa...@penguinpowered.org.uk> wrote:
>2. I'm nearing the end of the company leave year. They won't let me
>carry more than 3 days over, so if I don't use it, I lose it.
*What*?!?!?
Now that sucks. Hugely. Amazingly hugely. I've never heard of
anything so disgusting on the leave-entitlement front. I woudln't
be surprised it it were illegal.
The usual deal on this side of the planet at least is that the
employer sets some maximum amount you're allowed to accumulate
without managerial permission, but that amount is usually more
than a single year's worth, and the only portion you can lose
is the stuff over that level.
I *think* our threshold right now is 35 days. I'm a little under
that, but not by much. If I were to transfer to the new company
rather than find an entirely new gig, then they'd be paying out
anything over 20 days, and transferring the remaining 20 days
to the new company.
It sounds like the people you're working for are even lower
scumbags than I'd thought.
--
"You know, I'm almost convinced that Matt
is just the Australian branch office of me."
-- Dave Brown, clearly disturbed.
Matt McLeod
J.D. Baldwin <baldwi...@panix.com> wrote:
>
>In the previous article, Matt McLeod <ma...@cugc.org> wrote:
>> >Hmmm. $$$ in place of un-used "leave"? Or better to shop around while
>> >on Vacation? Difficult to tell which is better.
>>
>> I would be very surprised if UK law differs from that here in
>> this respect, so Wayne: check this, but chances are that if
>> you quit before using your accumulated leave, they have to pay
>> it out whether they like it or not.
>
>There are a couple of potential problems with this. One is that you
>might not really know how your balance is calculated. Another is that
>you might have a dispute about what that balance *is*. Yet another is
>that it might not be clear how much a "day" is worth. Some companies
>actually calculate it as worth 1/30th of monthly salary. Reflect for
>a moment on why that is hardly just.
I believe we have a pretty much standard way of doing this which
everyone sticks to: a "day", when paying out leave, is equivalent
to what you'd have been paid for working for a day. So if you
have ten days leave accumulated, you get paid for two weeks.
There are all sorts of scumbags trying to shaft anyone they can
to make an extra buck, but we do at least have *some* standards.
--
"Don't tell my momma I'm a sysadmin, she thinks I play piano in a whorehouse."
-- Alan J Rosenthal, ASR
John Riddoch
> But accurate, he truly is damned if he's getting 3Com switches. We only
> finally got rid of the last of those $DEITY-forsaken Corebuilders that IT
> management saddled us with. Giant screaming pieces of excrement, they are.
Given that 3com have left the network market. It does mean we're now moving
to Cisco kit, which is due to arrive today or tomorrow. Then we get to
configure the VLAN's...
> I will admit though, that 3Com has Cisco beat in blinking-light technology.
> For some reason it bothers me when network equipment doesn't have blinking
> lights to indicate traffic.
Good point. We have two hubs[1] coming into our room, each on a different
subnet. Moving cables to the non 3com hub is distinctly unsatisfying as
not blinkenlichts start up when I do...:(
1/ Well, one hub and one switch.
J.D. Baldwin
In the previous article, Mike Sphar <s...@dogfacedboy.org> wrote:
> But accurate, he truly is damned if he's getting 3Com switches. We
> only finally got rid of the last of those $DEITY-forsaken
AAAAGGGGGHHHHHHH!!! My eyes!! Ow ow ow ow ow ow ow!!
<*runs to emergency eye wash station*>
Please don't do that again.
Darren Tucker
Mike Sphar <s...@dogfacedboy.org> wrote:
>But accurate, he truly is damned if he's getting 3Com switches. We only
>finally got rid of the last of those $DEITY-forsaken Corebuilders that IT
>management saddled us with. Giant screaming pieces of excrement, they are.
That would be the 3coms with the same-day delivery on ping responses?[0]
-Daz.
[0] 0-1000ms response times on the same LAN. As near as I can work out, all
packets that don't immediately get routed go into a queue which is processed
every second or so. Pings and SNMP requests included.
--
Darren Tucker. (dtucker at the domain zip dot com dot au)
Good judgement comes with experience. Unfortunately, the experience
usually comes from bad judgement.
J.D. Baldwin
> interview because it was so bloody obvious that my skillset and
> their requirements were wildly out of alignment, and I was
> embarassed as all hell to be there.
I once flew, at the expense of a large U.S. aerospace corporation,
across the entire North American continent solely for the privilege of
experiencing the pain and embarassment -- an entire *day's* worth! --
you describe. They wanted a EE design type. They got an aviator /
admin / developer type. They brought me from SEA to ASH for the
purpose of finding this out in the first five minutes and then
torturing me for another seven hours. Thank $DEITY my return flight
left at 4:30 and I had to cut out a bit earlier than scheduled.
Had a nice meal at a lovely hotel, though. And it was a nice two-day
break from life on a ship in drydock, which is a fairly close
approximation of Hell on Earth.
David P. Murphy
> I've never met -anyone- who gave a shit about certificates or paperwork, who
> was also actually worth working with. This may change at a certain level
> (like insanely-hard-to-get Cisco certs), but at that point the cert is
> almost superfluous, like chrome on an SR-71.
"Superfluous" is not the adjective I would choose to describe that.
Not that it matters; the ghost of Ben Rich has probably arisen and
slain you by now.
David P. Murphy
Chris Klein
>lot, and that I had once written a VB script [2] that made her life
>dramatically easier [3], had anything to do with this oversight?
>[4] Total development time: four half-days. This included the "learn
> VB" part.
Interesting. Drawing on my own experience I can hypothesize that you
spent:
<= 1 half day getting up to speed with VB,
15 minutes to 2 hours (complexity-dependent) doing actual useful dev,
...and...
the remaining balance of the time trying to figure out why what should
obviously work according to every scrap of documentation, dejanews
post, and cow orker's advice you can find... doesn't.
But then, I could be stupid, or something.
--C
Derry Hamilton
>But accurate, he truly is damned if he's getting 3Com switches. We only
>finally got rid of the last of those $DEITY-forsaken Corebuilders that IT
>management saddled us with. Giant screaming pieces of excrement, they are.
The solution is of course to upgrade the OS. Oh, I'm sorry, did I say
upgrade I meant downgrade of course. Oi, what are you doing touching
the OS, I told you to leave it alone. The problem is, of course, the
cables, yes, they are all bad, yes, the whole building. You are of
course using them wrong. What, no, we don't support them any more.
--
Derry Hamilton, ras...@tardis.ed.ac.uk
"I think your cats need tuning - according to a couple of quick measurements
on a recently calibrated reference cat, the dominant frequency of a correctly
adjusted cat should be 12Hz +/-20%." ===Lionel Lauer on a.s.r===