On Slashdot today there was an article from Computer World entitled 10 Things We Hate About Laptops. As I was reading it, I couldn’t believe some of the things being said. I’ve used laptops for a while, though I’ve never had to support them for other people. However, I found much of what was said to either be fallacious or misleading. > more <

Found an article this morning discussing 10 dirty secrets of the IT industry. It’s quite interesting and enlightening. Not to mention pretty truthful, at least in my experience. The comments are also interesting.

If you work in IT or are planning on it, I recommend taking a read. One of my favorites (mainly because I see it far too much in the military/government sector):

3.) Veteran IT professionals are often the biggest roadblock to implementing new technologies

A lot of companies could implement more cutting edge stuff than they do. There are plenty of times when upgrading or replacing software or infrastructure can potentially save money and/or increase productivity and profitability. However, it’s often the case that one of the largest roadblocks to migrating to new technologies is not budget constraints or management objections; it’s the veteran techies in the IT department. Once they have something up and running, they are reluctant to change it. This can be a good thing because their jobs depend on keeping the infrastructure stable, but they also use that as an excuse to not spend the time to learn new things or stretch themselves in new directions. They get lazy, complacent, and self-satisfied.

Found via Slashdot, Frank Wiles writes in his blog about why hiring the top programmers results in a better product and ultimately at a cheaper cost, contrary to popular thinking. His reasons are similar to what I’ve been thinking.

If you’ve ever read The Mythical Man Month, then many of his thoughts will sound familiar. A single expert programmer is equivalent to several average programmers. Therefore hiring a few experts yields numerous returns, such as: > more <

I don’t want this to sound like a political blog and it’s not directed at a specific political party. As usual it’s an observation from my personal life.

As readers should know, I am sending out resumes because I plan on leaving military service next year. Since I won’t be retiring from the military, it behooves me to get a federal civilian job so my years in the military will still count towards my retirement. In that light, I’ve been perusing USAJobs.gov, the “official” web site for federal service. > more <

Well, I figure it’s about time to harvest the power of the Internet and see what happens.

I plan on getting out of the Navy next June and so I’m starting to get my resume in order and see where to send it. Naturally I’m looking at Monster, et al. but for many large Internet job sites, it’s like looking for a job in the classified ads: you’re just one of several thousand resumes mass mailed to prospective employers. It’s even worse now in the digital age; it takes nothing to email a resume so a lot of people essentially spam employers in the hopes of “shotgunning a job”. > more <