Things that suck about being in IT
Tech Republic has recently relased another article under their Sanity Check series: Five things that suck about working in I.T.
As I read the TR list I realized that in the Philippine context, Jason Hiner’s list was in the wrong order. This is the list as it appears on the article on Tech Republic.
5. You get a lot of fingers pointed at you
4. People assume you’re an expert in all things tech
3. You have to continually re-train, on your own dime
2. The hours are long and irregular
1. The job market is tumultuous and in transition
Having been in the I.T. business since 1995 (and a professed computer addict 10 years prior to that) I would say that list is upside down, and so may I offer my explanations to the same list, reordered for the Philippine I.T. setting.
5. The job market is tumultuous and in transition - Yes there are a lot of I.T. jobs out there, but quite a few of them are now going into the contractual basis which means a lot of money for the contractor but not for the programmer/developer/technician. There is also the I.T. brain drain out to Singapore, which has claimed a number of our better developers and technical support engineers.
4. The hours are long and irregular - I.T. has always been synonymous with long working hours, this is not something new, however it is always bewailed and belabored, like the habit of beating a dead horse.
3. You have to continually re-train, on your own dime - This may be true in a lot of offices, but not where I work. The company I work for pays for our training and certification exams and gives us an increase in pay (increase, not bonus) when we pass. Workers in other companies are not as fortunate.
2. People assume you’re an expert in all things tech - This is probably the most misunderstood aspect of I.T. totally incomprehensible to non-I.T. beings. Everyone assumes that just because I can make a website I can also fix their motherboards and its popped ic’s and their hard disks that have crashed without any backups, and even fix their kitchen sinks as well. I can’t. They think a programmer knows the same thing as a technical support engineer and are interchangeable. They’re not. There are times when I really feel like wearing one of the classic ThinkGeek shirts that say “No, I will not fix your computer.” (I can, actually, but I don’t wanna.)
1. You get a lot of fingers pointed at you - Yeah, but when something goes wrong with the machine all fingers are pointed at the I.T. guy. Case in point: ISP decides to change the IP address assigned to a company’s server “just for the heck of it” without telling anyone. As a result, no mail comes in or goes out. We come in and reconfigure the firewall to accommodate the new IP address, and the general manager (who in our case 9 out of 10 is an expat) is screaming expletives at us when he actually should have been screaming at the ISP. He doesn’t know or care about the difference. Tough, but hey, we get a lot of that, and it has made us stronger.
Team Philippines
One of the occasional perks of working in I.T. is being in the path of generous suppliers.
Last Friday the latest give-aways from Microsoft Philippines were distributed among us employees at the office. Training jackets proclaiming the Pinoy Olympian spirit, red white and blue and the yellow sun of our flag, resplendent in shining spandex, as modeled by our ever dependable tech team below.
But as this calls to mind our country’s poor performance at the Olympics for the third time in a row, one can’t help but decry either the system or the corruption (now why does that not surprise any of us), and the athletes themselves. Juan Miguel Luz’s commentary “Olympic gold not built on prayer” gets into the heart of the matter.
Maybe we should get rid of the presidential appointees that lead Philippine sports and replace them with Manny Pacquiao, Freddie Roach, Paeng Nepomuceno, Efren “Bata” Reyes, Django Bustamante and our other world-class billiards players. They understand that it takes a system of training to win in any sport.
I took my jacket home and snapped a couple of photos of it, as I was sure at one point that Kuya Maui (Is there a cap that goes with that?) would take it off my hands lickety-split. I was wrong in that regard. He said:
“I’m not exactly sure about jackets which make nationalistic statements in front and advertise ‘foreign devils’ at the back.”
Good point.
My SmartBro
Frankly, there are a lot of bad SmartBro reviews out there, some of them so bad that a potential client would say “never mind” or “no way”. But we have been on SmartBro’s Plan 999 (Canopy) for more than a year now and let me say first off that some of the horror stories you may read about may actually be true, but they have never happened to me.
This is not a sponsored post.
My Favorite Firefox Add-ons
Now that Firefox 3.01 has more or less stabilized quite a few of my favorite add-ons and plugins have been updated to run in this latest version. I love Firefox because it enables me to work my browsing to the fullest, and with Firefox the browser is not just a browser. It is an indispensable tool that I use everyday doing while I do what I do for a living.
Add-ons enhance the power of Firefox and provides you with tools that allow you to browse the internet, save important bits of data and save you time while you do what you do on the ‘net. The following is a list of my favorite Firefox Add-ons (in random order) and why they continuously make me say “wow, there can’t be a faster way of doing that”.
1. Colorful Tabs - This is an indispensable plugin for me as it makes tab identification easier, adding a different color to each tab. It looks cute on multiple tabs too.
2. Password Exporter - essential if you maintain two (or more) computers and would like your saved passwords present on all of them.
3. Split browser - pretty nifty for keeping everything in sight without having to switch tabs or open another instance of Firefox. It can be a little confusing to use at first, but once you get the hang of it it’s almost indispensable.
4. Abduction! - screenshots have never been made easier. Extremely useful for making documentation that require snaps of entire web pages or a selection thereof. I used to hit PrtSc or Alt-PrtSc and then load up the clipboard into Photoshop or even MS Paint, but Abduction lets me bypass the photo editing and allows me to save either entire web pages or snippets directly into a file.
5. Entrecard Toolbar - If you are an avid Entrecarder you definitely will need this. Simplifies card dropping, switching from one linked account to another, enables you to purchase card advertising on the site you are currently on.
Those are my top 5 favorites. I have used quite a few more since I started using Firefox but some of them haven’t quite caught up with version 3.0.1. When they do, they will find their way back to my add-on’s list.
I’m sure there are a few Firefox add-ons for you and the way you browse the Interwebs. Head on over to the Firefox Add-ons page and see how it can make browsing with Firefox a breeze.
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About Me
