I completely agree. I'm in a SaaS startup for 5 years now. My boss can easily tell when I am not producing work, and I can easily tell when my subordinates are not producing work.

As for the 1 month thing, that's just silly. If you cannot tell within 1 month if someone is worth keeping, the problem is you.

I smell Gen-Y entitlement...

I do this also and have found it a very valuable thing. Also helps when updating the resume.

I just retired my office wireless (three WRT54GL units) and replaced with a pfSense firewall and three Aruba Instant 105's

For the pfSense, I used two Intel wired cards instead of the crappy onboards.

I couldn't be happier. granted, the Arubas are probably a bit pricey for a house (depends on who you are)

They are cheap, they support content recognition, are globally disperse, and they have good notification.

We wrote a simple page that does a DB query and returns "OK" if everything succeeds. Point SiteUptime to that sub-URL and monitor the content for "OK"

Yeah, no sure what's so hard about this. We recently moved from SVN to Git (all private) and I grabbed a copy of Git and set it up within about 20 minutes using the docs having never used or setup Git before. I needed help from my developers to port all their code form SVN to Git, but that's not rocket science either.

There's little point in not going private if you don't plan to share your code with the world (we sure as hell won't be sharing our closed-source, for-profit software anytime soon).

Still sounds really super duper hard though ;)

Yeah, great example. Even at 20 years doing Unix, I feel like I am just hitting my stride. I'm in the top 2-3 percentile IQ and have been extremely diligent about self-training my entire career. I started really learning the Cisco world 4 years ago and that also seems like a bottomless pit of knowledge that could keep any normal person busy for 2-3 decades.

Above all, however, one of the greatest skills an admin can have IMHO is analytical troubleshooting, and time definitely helps with that.

It also depends a whole lot on the area of IT. This article very mistakenly refers to "IT" and then makes a generalization that applies only to a subset of IT workers.

I can see where programmers may actually be better when fresher, but I have spent the last 20 years as a unix and network administrator, and neglecting a truly prodigious few, these areas are impossible to master without many years of experience. At the same time, I can say that many 10+ year admins out there have not invested in their own self-training and are every bit as worthless as a 20 year-old admin.

A couple other points:

We deafies want to change our batteries every week or more, not every day. Have you seen the tiny size of current batteries? You must squeeze every last bit of efficiency out of the hardware possible.

The receivers (aka speakers that go in the ear) must be versatile enough to produce extremely loud sounds across the range of at least 500Hz --> 4KHz with no perceptible distortion. Distortion is the #1 enemy of deafies, and means the difference between "how are you today sir?" and "ajksdhv sdjkch asdkjhvkkf sjk?"

Oh, did I mention the receivers that must be as awesome as above, must also be able to survive something like 18,000 hours in a moist environment? (4 years, 12 hours a day)

The OS and DSP cannot even introduce milliseconds of delay while deciding what is "noise" to be filtered, what is "too loud" and should be compressed, and what was really soft but important enough to amplify even more than normal.

I don't like paying thousands of dollars for my aids, but neither do I believe they can sell for $400.

That's changing ever-so-slightly, especially for Cochlear implants, because we the deafies are now arguing that *not* covering them is plain and simple discrimination.

IMHO the government should pay for new hearing aids for me, once every 4 years. Before you pass out, let me explain: If I do not have hearing aids, I am deaf enough I cannot hear voices at all, and thus cannot work. I can collect about $2800/mo in SSDI right now if I cannot work. So balance that cost against the cost of new hearing ids every 4 years. AND as an added bonus, you bet your ass the Government would not be paying $3000/aid.

Win, win, win.

Atlas Shrugged is certainly the most profound book I have ever read.

As far as Technology books:

I learned to program from the Llama book (Learning Perl) and the Camel book (Programming Perl) is certainly my greatest weapon today as a sysadmin.
Mastering Regular Expressions gave me knowledge that's crucial and most people in tech don't have!

All I've got to say it, I hope this fucker gets some royal treatment by our Government. Maybe this is one of those perfect times to throw the Patriot Act at some douchebag.

Under normal circumstances, my tone is completely opposite, but that's when groups deface, humiliate, take-down, etc sites that are well deserving of public shame (yeah we all know who they are, I won't even list).

But this pricks (or more likely these pricks) are screwing with the masses, making our day(s) hell, and taking dollars out of our pockets. If you have beef with GoDaddy, but all means, hack their shit, post pics of their execs fucking dogs, whatever. Don't fuck with every random person in the nation/world that needs to keep a website up.

And yes, there's something to be said for showing a gaping security hole, especially if nobody listened in private forum, but wtf it's been 7 hours.

So, AnonymousOwn3r, be glad I don't know you. I would personally drop your ass off at the front gates of Gitmo.

Agreed, but the post isn't about people with mental problems, it's about people with disabilities in the workplace. And as my boss, you most certainly DO have to worry about my environment as a Deafie. You have to make sure that I don't have too many meetings, because it takes INTENSE mental focus to stay up to speed in crowds when I have to 1) figure out who's speaking, 2) focus on them and try to read their lips and foreign accents, 3) provide meaningful feedback.

But yes, you are absolutely correct in that it's a different ballgame hiring someone with a mental problem vs Deaf.

I work in IT, and am profoundly Deaf. Working with a disability is definitely a challenge. You have to set expectations and remind people constantly--I work in a company of only 35 people and I have to remind people I can't hear for shit. You have to advocate for yourself, and let people know what YOU need to be successful in the job. That being said, all of these things are difficult to do.