The problem here is the assumption that because you worked in dept. X for years that you can manage dept. X. That coupled with the belief that management ability is innate rather than learned leads to people being promoted to management with no training, or the support needed to develop as a manager.

Seriously, give people training an mentoring! Nuffsaid!

Dear Tim,

Many Android owners bought that platform deliberately. I don't see a resurgence in iPhone sales either so maybe their accidental discovery was more like a Penicillin kind of accident than say, a 'had a bad burrito' kind of accident. Or maybe they switched to Windows Phone after Android (haha... yeah I know, doesn't look like it).

L8r.

Awesome!

Someone please mod this reply up. This guy/gal is proof it can be done.

L8r.

30 you say? Well that's hardly over the hill now is it?

I have to say there are some pretty poor responses in the comments, many are very discouraging. Don't listen to them. Let's look at some factors:

- There's an IT skills shortage, worldwide.
- As a teacher you must have a degree so you've a proven ability to learn.
- As a teacher you've proven that you can train people, and speak to groups confidently.
- As a non-geek originally, people should be able to relate to you better than your average Slashdot troll (sorry, couldn't resist)!
- You don't need to learn to program to be a sysadmin. Scripting skills would be a big advantage though.
- Tech is a wide and varied area, you have lots of options for entry, from going back to school through to starting with a small business and doing helpdesk stuff to work up to sysadmin duties.
- It will take time and effort (be prepared to 'live' IT for several years). But I've seen other teachers do it (I work as an IT Manager at a school).

Finally, like I said, you can do it, you're by no means over the hill. I wonder if a side-step might be a best first move. Buddy up with some companies that do tech in schools at the same time as doing some out of hours study and you might find you can move over as an educational tech. consultant or a techie with a welcome educational background, and then use that as the foot in the door.

Anyway, best of luck. Like I say, I've certainly seen teachers do this, I know a former school teacher who works for Microsoft.

My final words of advice.... prepare to give up the long holidays, forever! ;)

This guy's blog post pretty much sums up what I've been thinking for a while now. I used to be an MS hater, but there's not much left to hate now. The antitrust thing is ancient history. Now you're looking at a Microsoft who will willingly roll over rather than get in a fight with anyone (Sky or Metro are examples). They certainly do some strange things, but they're no more strange than the competition. Also, when they were being 'evil' it was annoying to us all, but hardly world-ending stuff.

Yet here we have a trail of comments on Slashdot like it's still the 90's. Probably - just like the 90's - from people using a Windows PC to whine about Microsoft. Or a Mac, which is just hillarious (the MS hater taking refuge with Apple is absurd). You guys and gals need to move on, or grow up.... or both.

I dont know if I agree with the sentiments about cgi. But I do agree sci-fi storylines in movies and TV have become awful, repetitive, predictable and most of all, more fiction than science.

Its great to see someone at least thinking about what went wrong and getting away from the post-apocalyptic / disaster / alien invasion / technology will destroy us themes. Lets think about a future of discovery and development instead!

L8r.

Firstly, if TV isnt broken, Why have so many of my non-tech friends started downloading instead of watching live?

What's broken? How about the fact that I have to work my life in around their schedules. TV companies are selling me a service (paid for by ads or a subscription), but they dont think it fair for the service to be convenient for the customer?

How about TV shows outside their country of origin? Is it fair for your customer to watch shows years after their release (assuming they air the whole season, in order, and dont change their minds and pull it).

How about, assuming you can organise your life around their schedule, how you have to browse listings or flip channels to find what youre looking for. Give me a search dialog!

How about ads? Advertisement after advertisement for things I could hardly care about. Get rid of ads. If you cant, at least make them relevant to me!

Theres a few, and thats wihout even getting into the quality issues!

So people have already said use DBAN. So I'll point out Symantec Ghost also wipes drives drives using the GDisk utility. Both Ghost and DBAN can wipe a drive with a DoD standard 5220.22-M wipe. Surely if it's good enough for national defense...

L8r

Hahaha, oops! Er, that's for programmers who eat a lot of greens!

Sorry but I just don't buy it. Social acceptance is likely to only be on the surface, scratch the surface and that person at the party will show the same interest as if you said you worked as a Customer Experience Enhancement Consultant. Keep talking and the look of interest will have moved to disinterest, then beyond that, to the look of someone who's just had a healthy whiff of chlorophyll.

The fact of the matter is, (some) apps are cool, but coding for a living isn't. Sure, some app developers have become rich, but most don't. Unless you've got more money than a small country noone will care beyond polite acknowledgement (and even then, maybe not, I imagine Bill Gates' money didn't make him any more interesting).

The upside is, chances are the other party goers jobs are probably some sort of administrative role or a traditional profession that isn't at all exciting. You won't care what they do either, because most people's jobs are boring. Not everyone can be, or wants to be a Frog Shaker.

I kind of included the player you speak of in my reference to govt. corporate funding and the media, at least in my head! Thanks for pointing this out though, it certainly can't hurt to point it out seprarately.

The thing that annoys me most is to hear you talk of one type of science versus another. I guess that's the way some people see it, which irks me even more. There are only two types of science - good science and bad science - and the latter isn't even science at all! ;)

L8r.

Hi,

What do you think represents the biggest threat to the credibility of science in the eyes of the layman?:

- The media, and the way they report results of scientific (and sometimes pseudo-scientific) research.
- The models used to fund science that sometimes leads to a quest for funding over a quest for scientific rigor.
- Political and governmental ignorance.
 

So it seems that the public and some elected representatives still have an enthusiasm for Space and NASA, even if legislators at the federal level don't.

L8r.