by So if I were to tell my friends eight years ago that I was going to go to work for a municipal government agency doing sysadmin and automation and control work, they’d have laughed me out of the room. Despite my friends postulations that the term would be changed to “Going Aquatic,” I’ve had quite a good run with my current employer. [0]
Over the last couple of weeks, however, all of the worst traits that can be exhibited in a municipal government have bubbled to the surface. The Mayor of the city has determined that the City should be run as a business but he hasn’t the foggiest idea of how to make a successful business work. Decisions for how money should be spent are made related to public perception and developer demands as opposed to public health and safety.
The latest bit is that the Mayor and City Manager have decided that it’s better for the entire City to earn a junk-bond rating than to increase water rates. Not a really enlightened situation when water meters have been mandated by the state. If we can’t get any loans, we can’t provide the capital for the meter installations. If we don’t install meters, we get our rights to surface water coming through town taken away and we have to purchase the water BACK from whomever gets the rights.
With all that, I decided it’s time to get with the program. I’m enrolling in school again and applying for jobs that interest me. The problem is, the jobs that I think I would do great at have a list of requirements two pages long.
Sheesh!
No wonder there are a bunch of tech jobs open! I’m fairly certain that there can’t be enough qualified people that have a B.S. in CSci and 5+ years of experience in a heterogenious environment of HP/Windows/Novell/Linux (3 flavors)/BSD/Cisco/…/oh and a top-secret clearance too!
Having been in an environment where I’m the only sysadmin and having to make up the job as I go, I haven’t had exposure to $commercialUnix and have been doing just Linux for about 7 of the 8 years now. I found out about Usenix/Sage when I went to the Atlanta Linux Show (in Oakland!) and took a samba class from Jerry. I didn’t have a real title for what I did at the time other than managed chaos.
Now I consider myself to be somewhere between Sage II and III and find that many of the things that would likely push me over the brink to III are things that I can’t see being run in my environment.
The size of the company I’m working for doesn’t scale to more than 25 servers in the forseeable future and the places that I’d like to work all say, “Experience in an environment of 500+ servers.”
Sounds like I have wine tastes on a beer budget, eh?
So, here I sit, musing on the blog, hoping that I will inspire myself. I’m pretty sure that I’ll be working at the City for a while yet. At the end of the day, it’s not a bad place. I’m almost completely autonomous and I have a “junior” that almost has helpdesk figured out. It could definitely be worse.
I just hope it get’s better.
–Robert
[0] I work for a municipal water utility. It’ll come to you. 🙂