At 05:24 PM 7/18/2002 -0400, Dean Anderson wrote: think the answer is highly variable rates, and highly variable skills. And crossover between specialists and generalists.Yep.
I was in a union when I was at UMass/Boston. It had absolutely nothing to do with any of the *content* of my job. The union, as a mass body, was able to deal with things like vacation time and layoff notices. The down side was that it tended to enforce seniority at the expense of skill. When you're in a collective bargaining unit, your jobs skills are pretty much rated in a binary way: adequate/not adequate. There may be arrangements to give a small bonus for good reviews, but in terms of who gets laid off, all workers are equal. The union has historically been an incredibly powerful tool for social justice - in industries where workers were interchangeable parts and could be fired or replaced without any downtime on the employer's side. I find it hard to imagine a scenario where that could be true for IT professionals. >The certification issue is related. Certification is an attempt at >standardizing the IT worker. If the worker could be standardized, or even >measured adequately, like a baseball player, then unionization could work. Yes and no. I think it *is* possible to define various areas of competence, although I don't think the current crop of multiple-choice trivia quizzes is what's needed. The SAGE guidelines are a good start. Part of the problem is that we don't have good categories for our jobs. I've met "sysadmins" who were really expert Perl tools hackers, and "sysadmins" who were really shop managers and "sysadmins" who were really network design engineers and "sysadmins" whose greatest skills were in hardware repair and maintenance. I think we really need some sort of way to put categories on our jobs. My own situation is that I spent many years doing sysadmin jobs that were more than half shop management and user relations. My pure sysadmin skills are mid-level, and so are my management skills, but my pure years of experience seem to plunk me into the very senior category, which I don't pretend to be. I'm very valuable in a situation where there are large numbers of users, especially with widely varied skills, and lots of interdepartmental interactions and complexities, and purchasing and budget management, and all sorts of odds and ends of machines; I am wasted in a job that's all back-end network stuff. But both these jobs carry the title "Senior System Administrator". And when I was job hunting, I found myself weeding through calls for every sort of mismatch from device driver programmer to Oracle DBA to Microsoft Exchange admin. Of course there are people who excell at everything, but in this field there are a lot more who *think* they do... Betsy PS I'm doing so-called Customer Support Engineering now and finding it a real hoot. All users, all the time! It's senior sysadmin-level work because of the complexity of the software, and the complexity of the performance tuning issues, and the need to play with customer systems and build QA systems and identify networking problems and such. I'm such a weirdo, I *like* dealing with users. (And users love getting to talk to a sysadmin who isn't bopping them over the head with a LART) I suppose that sooner or later I'll end up running an academic lab again. --- Send mail for the `bblisa' mailing list to `[EMAIL PROTECTED]'. Mail administrative requests to `[EMAIL PROTECTED]'.
