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riser

riser

Illustrious
Feb 17, 2001
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Well, my time here is about over and time to disappear again as I won't have time to argue pointless topics with other ill informed people with strong opinions. 😀

I will be heading up a new Line of Business for a consulting company in Nashville. My job is to be the lead architect and engineer for my speciality and to grow the line. The company expectation is that I can help them grow the business to a 4-5 person job in the next couple years. In the mean time, it will be me assisting with the sales and taking control from there to do the heavy lifting.

The job is mainly upgrades, implementations, training, and some break/fix. Most of it will be architecting, implementation, and training others on cloud anddata center management, client management, and security.

Given that I will be a full time consultant and probably be busier than I am now, I won't have time to banter on here. I will be moving back to 5 day work weeks from the government 4 day work week (read 3 day workweek for real government workers).

New posts will be slow. Maybe from time to time I will find time to pop in to take a break and read over some random arguments. :)
 
haha craigslist eh?

80 person business with well over $100 million revenue per year. My specialty has been enterprise architecture/design and implementation. I'm pretty much exclusively worked for medium to large companies. 5,000 devices or more, largest had over 15,000 computers and 60,000 users that I supported.

Main areas that I work in, Active Directory (all of it, not just Users and Computers like most people think) and the bread and butter has been System Center products 2007 and 2012.

Best place to find a job? LinkedIn.
 
Wish you the best of luck in your new job.

 
I'm going to be consulting, on site/travel, working from home and all. If I get bored I probably will have to post from home. You know, when I'm not getting paid. haha
Government work is just too slow. Things that you do in a month in the private sector took 9 months in government. Two of my last projects have been on-going since July 2012. One finished June 29th that started July 24th. My current project started July 8th, now we have to wait 3 months for paperwork, we lose November/December because government takes so much time off and people have crazy amounts of vacation. Nothing will get approved and the impact of making change when people aren't around to verify systems still function, etc... so It'll be complete in February. Once that's complete, the next 2 projects take on and should be complete before the end of 2014.

Sad, I have everything mapped out for the next year. After that, my next project would take approximately the entire year of 2015 to design and start implementing. By mid 2016 it should be fully converted over.

By 2016, the new versions of all my projects will be out - from 2012 to the 2016 version (maybe even a 2017). That will be down time for small projects, tweaking, refining, etc. until that version comes out. That will be 4 software suites to update, each one taking 6 months to complete.

My government job is secure because I literally had the next few years mapped out and could show the costs savings.

This year, I saved nearly $200,000 in licensing by implementing changes. They were purchasing 2-3 times as much as they needed and never asking why, purchasing two different software products that do the same thing.

Reoccuring, they'll save $200k a year for the next 3-5 years or until the new licensing changes. If they follow my roadmap, they'll save an additional $250k/year after 2015. That will be a half million dollars per year in savings.

Problem is I was the only person who did what I did and finding someone is difficult since the System Center suite is really new to the market. Besides all the red tape, having 9 managers who can't make decisions without consulting their layers of management, etc.

Right now for example, an up coming project for people in my group is to implement a disk to disk backup solution. This means we get rid of our expensive tape libraries. D2D saves us a TON of money per year because as we say, just feed the beast, instead of trying to control disk space. So we keep buying hundreds of these few hundred dollar tapes. Then we need to have a lot of operators in place to change out tapes, restores, etc.

D2D we can eliminate 60% of our operators because they won't have the work load anymore. Plus we save a ton of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Guess what? We're eliminating jobs off the contract. For our company, that's bad because they're losing contracting hours and not milking the department of money. But its the right and smart move in our eyes. So they're just reassign those people to some other tasks to keep billing hours.

The whole process is a joke. I personally can't continue to do it, especially given my statements and opinions about government waste. I currently live it. I see the waste. I see so many people that love it, like working the slow pace, knowing their job is guaranteed no matter how much they screw up or how incapable of doing their jobs.

The most common things I've heard working here:
"They pay me way too much to do what I do."
"Why would you want to go back to working 5 days a week?"
"The Private Sector is too cut throat, in government you know your job is secure and they're always going to expand."

There are some really good people that work there, especially in my group. Then again, we're a main staple of fixing the full spectrum of problems. A lot of people complain we don't do anything.. but they don't realize we're too busy fixing everyone else's problems. We're also one of the few single groups. All other have 2 groups doing the same job, splitting work duties. We support everything.

It doesn't help the guy cutting the grass makes just as much as me. It doesn't help that the custodian almost makes as much as me. It doesn't help that pretty much everyone there makes the same amount because of how the contract works.

You look at Edward Snowden. I know why he did what he did. Because everyone inside is too concerned about stupid things and preserving their golden pay and parachute. They're all just counting the time down until they retire. No one really cares what's happening.. so he had to go to outside measures to run it up the flagpole. I believe he took it too far with some of things he released. He should have kept it only to what was happening to US Citizens, not outside of that.. that's where he screwed up. When he is caught, if he is caught, he will be tried with Treason. We sign that paperwork saying we will be accountable of treason for releasing any information. All government workers sign that NDA paperwork.

No one gets fired, no one is ever held accountable, everyone fears sending someone to Congress to talk about the paperwork, not the reality.

For example, our paperwork states that all vital servers and workstations are on 100% of the time, all the time, without any downtime allowed. If it is not 100% online, we are out of compliance and can be in trouble. What that paper says is one thing, the reality is another. Patching is downtime, failed hardware is downtime, losing power is downtime, etc. But if something happens, the reality isn't mentioned. That paper is sent to Congress and that's all they know. The system is on 100% of the time. How could something happen? This greatly differs in the private sector. Government entities have become overrun with under qualified people who are more concerned about their paychecks, retirement, and easy work, instead of doing the job they were assigned. I've never been at a company where the vast majority of people have 20-25 years in and never changed jobs. That to me is insane.. especially in IT!
 


I'll bow in presence of greatness!
 
Very ambitious that is a good sign in life.I worked 2 jobs when i was over 65 years old in Phoenix myself years ago.7 days a week also.

 
Only in DC because most other government agencies are contracted out to private shell companies to eliminate the government from doing anything wrong.

Even then, Edward Snowden was not a government employee. He was a contractor.
 
That is why this high school drop out got this job than by getting no real vetting at all in this company makes no sense at all.

 
Some of the best in IT are high school drop outs. Many are bored in school and drop out and move up. IT is one of the few areas where a degree doesn't mean much, experience and know how are required. He knew what he was doing enough to get the job. He had to have a complete FBI background check for the last 10 years of his life. It also helped him that his family worked in government and had clearances as well.

The vetting process takes about 6 months, sometimes quicker, sometimes much longer, it just depends on your history and the backlog of work.

It took me about 6 months to get my clearance and that included a 4 hour interview after all the information was gathered and everyone else was interviewed. The process is exhaustive but again, anyone can pass if you meet the criteria; what you do after that the clearance and vetting process doesn't matter.
 



My sister works for a NASA contractor and said one guy she worked with had no education past high school. She told me about hearing the phrase the sharpest tool in the shed, he was it....There are some truly gifted individuals and a piece of paper is just that, a piece of paper.
 
In my experience, the ones with IT degrees aren't that good. Occasionally you find one. The vast majority in my career have been high school degrees or some college.. and those who did get degrees only did it to advance their careers later on. I picked up my 2 year degree long after I was successful.. the degree came after I was able to do the job, not before it.
 
Where is the solution than if anyone can pass their tests?This is not fair at all.

 


How do you catch someone who hasn't committed a crime? When he signed up, he was squeaky clean. He served in the military, worked hard, had good reviews, etc. He took an oath to protect the Constitution. All service members take that oath... to protect the Constitution from all threats, foreign and domestic.

So, you take Snowden who received his higher than Top Secret clearance for the work he was doing and he doesn't like what he sees. Granted, if he did not have an operational need to know, he shouldn't have been looking. This is considered Treason by the US Government. But then he looked further anyhow because the US Gov't doesn't exactly do a great job with understanding the realistic security. They're only concerned about paperwork and CYA files, not reality.

He digs and after a few months he doesn't like what he's finding. He knows that they don't have an easy way of differentiating between a US Citizen and a foreigner. They capture it all. On the front the gov't says they're not doing it. On the back end, they're doing it. This is why is it classified information.

He speaks out. He does so because no one in government will listen or want to know it because of that word Treason. It's a catch 22. If you're a government employee or contractor and you see the government doing something they shouldn't be doing, they threaten you with treason and death. That deters a lot of people. But a few realize that it is simply bullying and won't stand in the courts and through public opinion.

Does someone with a 4 year degree mean they won't go against their government? How many foreigners, highly intelligent foreigners, have defected to the US? It happens. Everyone has their own moral compass and their own ideals of what is right, wrong, and what something stands for.

Snowden put the fear of government into people's minds. We know the government is doing things it shouldn't and says it isn't. But what are we going to do? Hope the government corrects itself? Not in the least, they'll create new entities to cover up other entities and so and so forth.

The Jason Bourne series of books/movies really show how it happens in the background. People think that is all entertaining and whatnot, but if you look at how they made multiple government agencies and multiple projects and each one expands bigger and bigger, one fails, the other takes over, etc. That happens.

Our government will never take fault or blame for its actions. It will always blame something else, have some paperwork somewhere fixing the issue, and/or dissolve and recreate with a new name. I mean, a new name gives everything a blank canvas to start over on, regardless of what the other named entity had done. And in our own court of laws, that sh*t holds up.
 


I second that 100%. I have spent a lot of time and a TON of $$$$$ for the mandatory degrees and certifications for my field. All of that time and money has been pretty well wasted as all it did for me was allow me to check off the checkboxes that I did in fact get X degree, X certifications, and had the ability to take X tests, and also the scores on X tests. I also have to pay about a hundred bucks to re-verify that all of that happened every time I get a different position. The actual usefulness of the "education" in my job has been pretty minimal. My education essentially resolved around regurgitation of trivia like bandgaps of various semiconductive materials and the physical structures of amino acids that I had to draw from memory. My job nearly all consists of regulatory compliance work and being a secretary/data entry clerk. Nobody has ever asked me to draw the structure of lysine. But that's the crap we're forced to do as our "education."

I saw some of the political indoctrination but it was pretty muted because of the field I am in. They did however hide the business and legal aspects from us at the behest of the university, which was GROSSLY negligent. (They did that as universities are statist and the reality of healthcare, engineering, and business is that the government is 99% of your problems. My instructors can't go against the party line so they stayed quiet.) However that stuff is nearly of my work today and it was a semi-spoken rule that nobody was to talk about it! That's a hell of a good preparation there, isn't it?

I tell nearly everybody not to go into healthcare unless you want to be a midlevel (nurse practitioner or physician assistant) or administrator because every other job is too much time and money spent training for too little money and long or odd hours at work and get treated like garbage to boot. (This includes nurses, doctors, and IT staff. All their jobs suck to large degrees, some worse than others. IT guys and docs not in the handful of lucrative specialties have it the worst though.) Ditto with engineering- you will be replaced in a handful of years by a guy halfway around the world who will "do the necessary" for half of the salary you make, which is barely enough to keep up with your student loan payments. You have to train his can-barely-speak-English butt too on your way out. Shoot, I even tell most people to not go to a four-year college as you would definitely do better in the short and even in the long term in many cases in going to a tech school, community college, or go to North Dakota and work in the oil fields. A significant amount of higher education today is nearly always a ripoff. Just ask pretty well anybody under 40 and they'll tell you.
 
Just what you are stating is that being a somewhat educated person with a masters degree does not pay off in the long run.Sad indeed on our part.

 


The real issue is the "why" since it seems so counterintuitive. The real reason is government regulations. The economy went down the toilet in the fall of 2008 once it became clear he was going to get the Democrat nomination and likely become President. Obama is clearly an arrogant paternalistic statist and the business world was (rightly) scared witless of what he would do- and later actually did quite a bit of. Everybody just sat on their money and did nothing, lest they expand and then get whacked with some new idiotic dictate from Obama or one of his unelected czars, be overextended, and then go out of business before cooler heads get elected in Washington and business can resume. The economy has remained poor ever since Obama was elected. Yes, the unemployment rate has gone down but that is a function of how it is calculated- people who haven't worked in 6 months are no longer counted. The actual number of employed folks is at a 30-plus year low. Also the stock market appears to be doing well, but again a lot of that is inflation driven as well. The feds have printed a BUNCH of money so a buck isn't worth what it was even 5 years ago.

Regulation is what has happened to the healthcare field. We got whacked with a TON of regulations with Obamacare, the HITECH Act (EMR mandates), HIPAA part 2, Stark part 2, PhRMA, the "waste fraud and abuse" IRS and CMS hit squads, "pay for (checkbox-filling) performance," declining reimbursements, JCAHO crawling up everybody's butts, etc. etc. We saw a ton of practice, hospital, and small health system sales and mergers to create these giant multi-state health systems to try to have some economy of scale to manage costs and some assets on hand to try to ride out Hurricane Obama. That really limits job opportunities and also brings unpleasant things like several year long noncompetes to the table. Hiring is sluggish to frozen and salaries and benefits are flat to declining as everybody is trying to hoard cash/minimize debt because of the impending enormous expenses of the full implementation of Obamacare. It's pretty much the same thing just with different names and faces in other industries.

Mark my words, the economy won't improve until these (insert your favorite string of expletives here) are out of office. Once they are out of office the economy should be pretty decent as we will have lost at least 8 years of economic activity and there is a lot of pent-up demand.
 
You educational haters are just upset because your not seeing the return on the big bucks you spent on your education ... perhaps because your not as good as you thought, or not as good at selling yourself.

My view of my education is that it has been extremely worthwhile and I have managed to tie together my military, electronics and psychological studies into a competency assurance role in Oil and Gas; after 20 years of experience in Training sector in an Institute of Technology.

Yes I do my own admin because I am good at it ... I want to get it right ... every time.

I get to help ensure people working here are trained properly and competent to do the job ... we keep it in the pipe ... all the way to the customer.

If your own experience is a poor one ... don't assume everyone else feels the same.

I spend money on my training to better predict other's needs in the future ... therefore my future is assured ...
 
Reynod, if I read your post correctly you have also been out of school for about 20 years. 20 years ago school was far less expensive and far more useful. The economy was also a lot better and you managed to gain 20 years of experience, which likely puts you in the sweet spot of being in your early to mid 40s. You have enough experience to hit the ground running but are not too old to be a "short-timer" or be woefully out of date.

Education today and the job market today for people recently out of school is grossly different than what you went through if I am reading your history correctly. It's like apples to oranges. The economy is poor and you have to have experience to get a job...but without a job you can't get experience. That's why unemployment among younger people is so stinkingly high. That's also why I am in a cubicle farm for 60-80 hours a week and carry a pager around all of the time. An ugly job is better than no job because maybe someday when the economy perks back up (e.g. the statists are thrown out of office) I can use the experience and job history to get an actually decent job.
 


Dude, you're old. College went to hell in the 90s. My dad worked in a nuclear power plant with a high school education. They learned how to do stuff back then; He spent his last years working there before retirement training the college grads on how to do, what was to him, high school math calculations.

We have college kids doing basic freshman math. I remember my first years in college. They wouldn't allow me past basic algebra - you couldn't test out of it. Everyone had to take it unless you were an honors student with As in calculus with high school teacher/councilor recommendations. After my first week in the class my teacher told me not to come back because it was wasting my time.

I received my college degree completing 3 semesters. I received 1 full semester of work experience and I tested out of all my computer classes. I basically took Comp I, II, Binary for Computing, Excel, and Office Basics. I had to take a couple filler classes like Accounting and Electronic Accounting, EDI, and Visual Basic I and II.
 
Riser, you speak the truth. The Baby Boomers and WWII generation just doesn't understand as they were and now are in a completely different situation than we are. It would crack me up to hear them tell us how we are wrong in our assessments of our lives, except that I hear it SO much at work that it's very tiresome. It's not the 1970s or 1980s any more. The world has changed, you haven't.
 
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