The state of IT

I wonder if I am in the wrong business or if the problems with IT and IT support exist in other businesses?

When I got started in technology it was by pure "fluke", I was in school to eventually pursue medicine and was heavily engaged in Science as a whole, Biology, Chemistry, Physics and Math and to "free" myself a bit from the required course-work I took a class called "Algorithms". Well hell, I loved it! I decided to take a course in C Programming and before I knew it I was a Computer Science major (thank goodness credits transferred!) and that as they say is history.

To get my first job in IT had to go through several "Tech" interviews which involved everything from converting Decimal numbers to Hexadecimal, Octal and Binary, analyzing some CShell scripts for optimization and describing and building a circuit using Logic Gates. Keep in mind this was for a Sys Admin gig working with HP-UX and Sybase SQL Server...

Well times have changed!

I now manage and work with people who "point-click" their way through an IT career, these folks have no formal IT education, they take an MCSE course, pass a couple of MCP classes and off into the wild!


It's a brave New World full of IT professionals who just barely pass the minimum requirement for basic IT support and I will not even bore you with my past experience in Software Development using off-shore teams. My interviewing process now involves even less "tech" than it used to (or I would never hire anyone) instead I find myself asking leading questions about support issues just hoping the candidate will be able to show some basic troubleshooting skills (you flip the light switch and no light comes on, what do you do next?).

With this is mind, it just makes me paranoid the next time I go to the Doctor.

Showing off

Couple of quick screens to show why I love the Linux...

Sure you can get similar results in Windows, but not if you want it stable! And yes, yes, OSX comes with some candy but again, you are only allowed to customize to the extent Apple will allow.

PS: This is Cairo-Dock (http://www.glx-dock.org/) and the Chrome icon is home-brew :-)

End of brag. Carry on...