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.
Joomla! Day Philippines - June 14, 2008
Finally! After having heard of Joomla! days all over Europe and the American continents, Joomla! Day is finally here.
Details on preparations can be found on the Google Groups Filipino Joomla Community. Our dev team is going, we’ve been working on Joomla! sites for more than a year now and it would be good to interact with other developers who have been involved with this CMS system that has made building websites so much easier for non-web savvy persons.
Captcha for a Cause
You (yes very) precious few visitors to this blog may notice that I have implemented a captcha form on my comments area. CAPTCHA means (and I discovered this only today) “Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart.”
I did this not because I think there are robots among my very precious few readers, but because of reCaptcha.
To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then, to make them searchable, transformed into text using “Optical Character Recognition” (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.
—What is reCAPTCHA?
Comprehension and the human eye are more reliable than a scanner’s optical character recognition software. So everytime you provide the answer to a captcha code before submitting your comment, you are actually helping reCAPTCHA digitize books two words at a time.
So I beg your patience for the additional step you need to take before submitting a comment, but I assure you it’s for a good cause. Allow me to explain the three icons that you can see on the form.
Clicking on this icon will bring up a new captcha image in case the current one is much too illegible for you to decipher.
Clicking on this icon will start the playback of a voice reading off eight numbers, and you need to enter the numbers that the voice dictates into the box.
Clicking on the question mark icon will bring up the small help screen as a pop-up window.
reCAPTCHA can be implemented as a plugin for WordPress blogs, as well as other widely used CMS software.
In addition, reCAPTCHA has something that can help you cloak your email address, a technique which you can use for your signatures in forums and websites.
DIY Branding can be Fun!
One of the most difficult aspects of marketing your business is branding. Some startup companies do it the simple (read: cheap) way with a word processor and built in graphics. But logo design is not just jazzing up a wingding on a photo editing program. Designing companies know this, and will charge you an arm and a leg for designing your corporate identity.
Not anymore.
You can design your own logo and branding on Logoyes.com. It takes less than five minutes to come up with a business card design on Logoyes, what will probably take time is going throught the vast number of choices available for your logo, colors, typography and layout.
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