From a slashdot thread on IT ethics, which somehow I find more interesting these days, which is interesting.

They talk with complete conviction on a subject and it sounds like they know what they are saying (to anyone who doesn’t know the subject), but with programmers I’ve found we often add disclaimers, because we see there are gaps in our knowledge and gaps in areas where we want to carry out more tests etc.

I’ve complained about people in similar ways and identify with this. I think of spoken of my surprise caused by the lack of people I know on the west coast that know anything about working on cars. I think the only person I hang with out here that does is Wendell, and he doesn’t count because he’s from Maine too. There’s definitely something about growing up in the country that makes one appreciate having a vehicle more. While I’ve been getting around fine with the bus, I recently realized how much I miss leaving town and put some renewed effort into fixing the suburban. Besides, it’s getting warm enough outside and finally stopped snowing. I got quite a ways this weekend but got cut short when it came to needing some welding done. I don’t have access to the welding gear I did in the warehouse back east, so it was either hire someone or buy some. Since I’m leaving for Shmoocon in a couple of days and won’t be back until Sunday night, I hired someone to come out next week and do the welding and put some time into the reassembly of the truck. Apparently the dude’s been fixing cars for a long time, but he’s from Montana, which I assume is a place where kid’s grow up appreciating cars like in Maine.

Of the annoying things in this escapade is looking for advice. I did get a hold of Matthew, who’s certainly my default person to bounce anything trade like off of. But of the locals that I did ping I have a hard time telling if they’re blowing smoke up my ass because I see so few people here actually engage in any trade work besides drinking beer.

Gabe posted a bit of a rant on PA recently about anxiety. I hate trying to get to sleep at night if I’m not exhausted. I have too much crap on my mind. Interesting though.

I’m pretty sure my next job needs to linux operations only.  I did mention a recent chat with an executive about IT. I don’t care a whole lot about the money side of work, but I do consistently make below what salary sites say I should be be making. Salary is such a weird taboo in the industry around these parts. That’s fine with me, when I took this job my boss mentioned wanting to avoid a bidding war between this company and another. I said that’s fine, because I don’t want to fuck around with that either. Matthew used to talk of his business practices and we’ve had a conversation that stuck in my mind. Basically, pay people what you can. Let’s say you’re selling a bunch of crap to person A for $100. Someone else (B) offers you $150, so you tell A you’re going to sell to B. A then offers you $200. Now it’s more complicated than this, relationships and all, but the question you have to consider to A, is if they can pay you $200 now, how long have they been ripping you off for. I take this attitude into salary negotiations, which I realize is totally wrong and everyone in the world would call me a fool, but I just don’t find negotiating worth it. Maybe that’s why I prefer work in a dark closet near a server room somewhere.

In any case, after much desk building and windows server/database fucking around, I’m thinking next job needs to be specifically skilled enough that people won’t want me doing that shit based on what their paying me. The company isn’t paying my expenses for shmoocon, but is considering it paid time off for educational reasons or whatnot. As I was sitting in bed reading a Ruby book last night, I looked at the stack of books physically on my bed (most recent) and they included an RT, Vista, Exchange and Puppet book as well. It’d be nice if the fact that I get no training on this crap was made better by having on the job training, but I have a tough time recalling a situation where “on the job” training amounted to anything other than “happen to be in the office when I’m reading about it and teaching myself”.

I have to figure this is common for tech people, but I’ve been thinking about programming, design, etc and I’m not so sure it gets too far out of IT (systems/network administration/engineering).