[CALUG] [JOB OPENING] System Administrator at Intelesys Corp

[John Szakmeister]

James Ewing Cottrell 3rd wrote:
> Yeah, right! Like there are actually TS/SI cleared people out there
> without jobs.

There are some out there who may not be happy with their current position.

> <flame>
>
> Any company doing cleared word had better be willing to clear everybody.
> Otherwise, that company is not qualified to be doing cleared work.

That was useful.  I'm glad you judged our company like that based off of
one line in one job requirement that we have. :-/  We do clear people.
However, for this job, we'd rather have someone *this year*. :-)  You
can't always predict a need in advance.  Waiting a year for something
you need today is just bad business sense.

> Finding someone who already has a clearance is just gravy. You cannot
> expect it. Otherwise, there will be no people left with clearances.

...which is the current situation. :-)  We're always on the lookout for
good people, whether they're cleared or not.

> Companies who will not spend the time, effort, and money to clear people
> are just Stealing from the companies that are willing to do it.
>
> Yes, we all know that it takes lots of time, money and effort to clear
> someone. This is why traditionally only the bigger companies could
> afford to do it, or they had non-cleared contracts as well.

If a company had to clear every person themselves, then a small business
could not exist.  Also, dealing with government contracts is
fundamentally different than dealing with commercial entities.  A
company geared towards doing commercial contracts--which they'd have to
be in order to be competitive and still meet your requirement of
clearing people themselves--would have to change their business model
entirely to cope with the government (not an easy feat, and it's hard to
be competitive if you have to incur all that overhead of changing
business models).  In the commercial world, you don't have to deal with
fiscal years, and the fact that the budget doesn't get approved on time.
 And, you'd expect a commercial entity to be responsive when it comes to
changing the terms of the agreement because their requirements have
changed.  The government doesn't operate nearly that efficiently.  It's
hard enough on small business without throwing the fact that we need to
clear every person ourselves as a requirement on top of everything else.

I'll submit that large companies put out a lot of requirements where
they need someone already cleared.  It's not like small businesses are
the only ones in town hiring already cleared people.  And from what I've
seen, big business is just as likely to "Steal" people as anyone else.

> </flame>

Not everyone is out to be malicious. :-)  I've grown tired of
administering the networks myself, and I see plenty of opportunity for
someone else to come in, help us out, and learn a lot of new stuff along
the way.  I'm not trying to commit theft, but rather offer an
opportunity to someone interested in learning more about administration,
Linux, networking and even web development, that a person wouldn't
otherwise have.  I can't say that there are too many companies out there
in the cleared community who are willing to teach and train people, much
less have opportunities that allow you to make use of the world's best
OS: Linux. :-)

Let's get back to the regularly scheduled program. :-)  Speaking of
which, I've just set up a couple of servers as a high-availability pair
using heartbeat and drbd.  Looking at the past events, no one has done
such a talk... would people be interested in a talk on that?

-John