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

Janos Gaspar janos at transquest.com
Fri Mar 17 05:08:26 CST 2006


John,

I have to admire you for your defense of the flame.  I'm with a defense 
contractor and we do a lot of work at the NSA and CIA clearance levels so 
TS/SCI is not a big deal to us.  We also clear people, although we're a 
small company.  It does involve cost and effort.  And it is true that 
programs out there are not willing to wait a year for their resource to get 
through the clearance process.  It's very difficult and most applicants 
understand and are actually grateful.  They would get forgotten by the big 
contractors.  Small businesses that do cleared work also take more care with 
their employees.  Being in a small business and knowing what's involved in 
working with the department of defense and knowing the high-level of 
security we are dealing with and the end objectives, I can appreciate 
everything you've said and don't appreciate James' insinuations at all.  But 
all in all, this is a good group of guys and gals on this list, even though 
James appears to be bitter towards you.  Maybe you should suggest you talk 
about the cleared environment in relation to Linux and career development 
etc. at their next meeting?  That would be interesting, don't you think?

And by the way... there are plenty of cleared sys admins who are looking for 
work... just remember - they don't always get the best treatment at the big 
companies.  If I can help, let me know.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "John Szakmeister" <jszakmeister-calug at intelesyscorp.com>
To: "James Ewing Cottrell 3rd" <JECottrell3 at Comcast.NET>
Cc: <lug at calug.com>
Sent: Friday, March 17, 2006 2:52 AM
Subject: Re: [CALUG] [JOB OPENING] System Administrator at Intelesys Corp


> 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
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