On Tue, Mar 06, 2012 at 02:45:55PM -0500, Evan Pettrey wrote: > I never indicated anything about ruling out anybody by age. Saying that I > want somebody who is driven has no reflection their age. You spending 10 > years in IT without moving forward tells me nothing about your age. If you > started in IT at age 18, then that would only make you 28. The comment I > made was directly related to wanting to finding somebody who would be > driven to do more.
But yeah, this attitude that 'attitude is everything' and selecting for the confident driven types seems... backwards. You end up with a bunch of guys like me, which is stupid from a business perspective. I mean, if you are doing sales, sure, but this isn't how you get the best technical people. Personally? i've never been anywhere (besides my own company) for more than 3 years. a 10% yearly raise is a personal failure. I'll take on almost any technical challenge, because it's really interesting, even if the chances of me being able to finish it are not great. I am a horrible employee. (oh man. So one of the guys I occasionally do business with wants a gigabit wireless connection from one data center to another in downtown. I told him it had about a snowball's chance in hell of being a datacenter quality connection, but if he wanted to pay for everything, I'd be pretty interested in trying anyhow, just 'cause I don't have that much experience with point to point wireless, and it'd be interesting.) And I think I'm a better employee than most people with my ambition; I'll at least tell you if I don't think something realistically will work, even if I want to work on it anyhow for personal development reasons. Most people this ambitious won't tell you that. And even I don't give you good information; I tend to wildly overestimate my own abilities, so even when I think I'm being honest, I'm not being correct. It's weird; I talk to my less-ambitious friends, and most of them are at jobs they don't particularly like, making less than they would if they switched. But even when I find them really nice opportunities (at companies with good reputations for employee treatment, for significantly higher pay.) they say they need to stick around at the old company until they can get to a stopping point, or until they finish automating their job or something. They seem to have actual loyalty, even when their employer doesn't deserve that loyalty. I find this absolutely baffling, but as far as I can tell? that's just how a lot of people think. There is a very strong inverse correlation between ambition and real loyalty. I mean, how much does it cost to get your kid a clearance? That means they are worth more later, right? No ambitious person is going to sit around with you when they can go get a 20% raise working for the competition. Man, speaking of not finishing things. I need to get back to work. -- Luke S. Crawford http://prgmr.com/xen/ - Hosting for the technically adept http://nostarch.com/xen.htm - We don't assume you are stupid. _______________________________________________ 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/
