Re: [PLUG] Tech jobs and politics, and IT diploma mills

[Magnus <chrish@trilug.org>]

On Monday, July 7, 2003, at 01:54 PM, Craig Brennan wrote:

> - How many fights per day are broken up by the average IT worker?

I was going to answer that, but my place of employment is probably not 
the norm.

> - Stand in front of a group of your coworkers and be interesting for 7 
> out
> of your 8 hour work shift.

OK but what does this have to do with public school teachers?  Granted, 
there are a few exceptions, but they are just that.

> - Cut your lunch hour down to 40 minutes max (most of the time it's a 
> half
> hour) - now take about half of those lunch hours and spend it 
> photocopying
> something.

OK but what does this have to do with public school teachers?  I 
graduated about 12 years ago, and from what I remember back then a 
teacher that had eight 40-ish minute periods per day plus a homeroom of 
about 20 minutes in the morning got one lunch period and usually two or 
three periods without classes to prepare for upcoming classes or grade 
projects from previous classes.  They would also stay about 45 minutes 
to an hour after school (the better ones would, anyway) to be available 
to give students extra help if they needed it.  Often, the students 
didn't take the teachers up on this offer and they ended up having that 
time to grade papers and prepare for the next day.

Furthermore, copies were made by the copy room staff.  Sheets for 
copying were submitted ahead of time and delivered to the teacher's 
desk in time for the planned lessons or tests.  Any teachers that made 
their own copies were working inefficiently.

Not all schools are the same, YMMV, and this was in the late 80's 
through 1991.  Dunno how things have changed since then.

> - Take approximately 1/4th of your salary and spend it on the materials
> you need to do your job.  What? You mean your company gives you what 
> you
> need to do it?  Lucky you.

This message comes to you from my personal TiBook because my desktop 
machine given to me by $EMPLOYER is now the development team's 
PostgreSQL server.  The desktop machine that is on my desk was picked 
from the trash and ended up being a sandbox machine so I don't have to 
break production servers for R&D work.

> - After you go home, you get to grade your co-workers work until 9 or
> 10pm.

Have you ever heard of a duty pager or duty cell phone?  The less your 
company spends on vital infrastructure, the more you are awake during 
the wee hours.  There is nothing like having the phone ring at 2:30 in 
the morning and have Bob tell you to make the 45+ minute drive into 
work to deal with the alarming disk array.

--

C. Magnus Hedemark
http://trilug.org/~chrish
PGP Key fingerprint = 984D 9A88 3D60 016F BE01 1506 60FB 85E1 9ABD 96F6

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