[geeks] Hosting - 600GB disk - 6000GB transfer - $8 - Catch?

[N. Miller]

On Oct 11, 2007, at 7:10 PM, Aaron Finley wrote:

> Phil Stracchino wrote:
>> N. Miller wrote:
>>> I actually interviewed at the place for a night job, but they  
>>> weren't
>>> willing to accept the hours restrictions I wanted so as to "ween"
>>> myself out of IT unless I was willing to take the pittance they were
>>> paying level 1 techs.  On the flip side, what they were offering  
>>> as a
>>> salary for supervisor (with on-call) to said techs was ridiculous as
>>> well.
>>
>> This is why, honestly, I want to find a new line of work outside  
>> of IT.
>>  Being paid to be a geek was kinda fun.  Being underpaid to be a  
>> trained
>> monkey who's expected to have no boundaries between personal life and
>> work, and no life outside work, was not.
>
> There are tech jobs in IT that pay as well as high-level lawyers.  
> Plenty
> actually.

Yes, there are.  But note Phil's comment about boundaries between  
personal life and work.

I've made good money working in IT, I won't claim otherwise.  But I  
wasn't happy at any of the places.  The reality of it is IME, the  
entire industry is dysfunctional.  I've yet to work at a place where  
people follow best practices, management supports them doing so even  
if it's a little more expensive short term, and management  
understands that "best practices" and therefore, employee skill set  
is a moving target and therefore also supports employees in their  
skill improvement (e.g. training, seminars, etc).

I'd also concur with every single thing that Jonathan P. said about  
client interactions.  It used to be that clients were willing to  
admit they didn't know anything about networking/OSes/etc.  Now they  
think because they have wireless at home with their WinDOHs boxes or  
they have Gentoo on their desktop that they understand the broader  
concepts of scalability, architecture, infrastructure management,  
etc.  I'd be at least 50% of my salary richer if I had a $1 for every  
time some PHP developer at $last_job told me they understood how to  
secure a Linux box or thought that hand building each box from a  
stage three image was "efficient".[0]

The closest I ever came to "happy" in an IT was my "in over my head"  
period when I first got started in *nix in '95--happy because I was  
making good money (relatively speaking to what I'd been making prior  
to that), had no on call, and my hours in the first 6 months or so  
were ~9-5 pm.  The sys admins were funny, helpful, and aside from  
some personality quirks here and there a knowledgeable and easy to  
work with.  I didn't know enough to know that the infrastructure was  
a house of cards.

The second closest I ever came to happy was as an IT manager and the  
3 months before as team lead of the team.  The managers got along  
well, we had a good manager, and my employees were pretty decent  
fellows, for the most part.  The downsides: I knew I had no career  
exits, no possibility of getting my salary bumped to within range for  
managers, and laid off two guys from my team thanks to '00 dot-com  
crash.  Frankly, I should have lived with all of that--I might still  
be there as in hindsight I know some things happened that might have  
gotten me promoted.  20/20 and all that.

=Nadine=

[0] IMO, the only reason why developers like Gentoo is that they are  
LAZY.  The advantage to the Gentoo build system is that you don't  
have to do ANYTHING extraordinary if your app is in the portage  
system--all the flags will be there for building with all the weird  
wibbles you want on PHP, Apache, MySQL, or whatever.  Why do I say  
this?  Because *I*, the sys admin, was the one who had to massage the  
AMP stack on a RH box to match those of the Gentoo boxes, not the  
developers.  Pure and simple, they wanted to avoid dealing with build  
dependency hell.