On 2011 Dec 12, at 21:41 , Derek J. Balling wrote: > Silicon Valley is its own Private Idaho when it comes to tech employees > having any sort of street-cred or respect. Outside that bubble, things are > radically different. > > And since Silicon Valley is only a couple hundred square miles out of the > entire land-mass of the US, let alone the planet, it is NOT a sound basis for > comparison. :-) > > You're right, I've lived there, I'm sure many others list-members still do, > and it can be a really great environment (if it wasn't so blasted expensive), > but it doesn't reflect the normative respect level throughout the rest of > society, unfortunately.
I'm not a Silicon Valley resident. Never lived there or worked there. I don't live in another recognized high tech region either. I find that tech employees are neither particularly loved nor villified. It's seen by the "random person on the street" I speak with as a respectable profession. Now, my normal way of explaining my job is "I keep the computers you use to pay your $x bill safe enough to use your credit card." That puts it in terms that they can understand, and the normal reaction from those who have actually gone so far as to ask what I do is far from disinterest. Yes, their eyes glaze over if I go into any more detail, but my eyes glaze over when I talk with an environmental engineer about what he does. Some of the perceived dislike of system administrators, says my non-technical spouse, is that it means things have broken when you see them. That means the user is likely to already be frustrated. This is similar to the car mechanic. When you are talking to them, it means things have already gone wrong. Of course you aren't happy to see them for your car, but most have at least a reasonable respect for the job. (Okay, the recent scandals of shifty car mechanics make that not a very good analogy for some). How one explains one's job goes a long way to how it is perceived. Yes, some people will always treat your job in a negative way. I get most of that from work though, people who are frustrated because they perceive me as blocking them from doing their job. (Since I work in security, that's a pretty common first reaction.) Is my career particularly respected by the average[1] person? No. More because I don't think the job is thought about. For years, there was the normal joke, with a certain amount of truth to it, that a good sysadmin is invisible to most users, never seen, because they just do their thing without the user even knowing. I think I have a reasonable cross-section because my out of work discussions with people encounter a wide variety of people from different backgrounds. Very few of the people I end up talking with have technical skills beyond standard word processor capabilities. It's not scientific by any means, but I'm more likely to believe that sheer lack of thought about the profession is widespread than any active dislike or distrust by the so called average[1] person. [1] Using mode here ---- "The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue." Edward R Murrow (1964) Mark McCullough [email protected] _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
