[wplug] Best mid-life career advice

[Bryan J Smith]

Why do you think I became a consultant?  ;)
Seriously, the greatest complement my clients give me is that statement.

If you can script yourself out of a job, then the job should not
have existed. That's just sound microeconics talking.
It's also why the US has lost it's technical design edge,
and gone service-oriented.

It insults my engineering instinct when I hear people praise microcosms
of manual tasks, support details and other, wholly unnecessary tasks.
It's also the #1 reason I hate Microsoft's "pyramid" support scheme.

And yes, I am a capitalist pig that will recommend elimination of
positions to a client when I identify such.  I am not a popular person,
at least not with traditional IT departments.
I guess that's why most of my employers have typically
been in the defense and financial industries, where engineering
and "the raw dollar" rule.

--  
Bryan J Smith - mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org  
http://thebs413.blogspot.com  
Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile  
    

-----Original Message-----
From: Jonathan Billings <billings at negate.org>

Date: Wed, 05 Sep 2007 12:59:42 
To:General user list <wplug at wplug.org>
Subject: Re: [wplug] Best mid-life career advice


Bryan J Smith wrote:
> I.e., the number of IT personnel I've met that lack basic scripting know-
> how is not only staggering, but they will gleefully do manual tasks
> repeatedly, justifying not only their jobs, but turning around and
> complaining they are "over-worked."

On the other hand, I've personally programmed/scripted/automated myself 
out of a job, or at least, made it so boring that I ended up finding 
another job.

I know people who get to that point, and enjoy sitting and watching 
nagios and email all day, but I've got a short attention span.

-- 
Jonathan Billings <billings at negate.org>
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