You need to show how much of your time is being spent on stuff is help desk, desktop support and so on. You then need to document your cost that is being spent on these activities each week in terms of salary plus benefits (HR can get this for you, typically 1.5 times salary). You then need to document your opportunity cost for those things that you aren't working on that the business needs (systems that support business functions).

If you can do this than you can show how your company is spending by using programmers as help desk staff. It likely won't take very many hours a week of help desk time to justify paying for a couple help desk staff. The biggest thing is the opportunity cost to the business in terms of what you aren't working on during those hours. If the numbers don't add up than it doesn't justify to hire your staff, if they do than it does.

Okay, I'm going to try and explain it to you step by step because you are talking about things that are completely unrelated. I never said anything about the pay that tenured professors make, nor did I talk about the drain that the professors make on the resources of the institution.

What I talked about was the disproportionate level of power that is seated in the hands of tenured professors. Tenured professors have an attitude of entitlement that they do not have to answer to anyone, most especially the world outside of academia. Tenured professors then create an ivory tower that is disconnected from the real world because they do not need to have any connection to it.

The result is that degree programs often do not have any connection to the outside world and programs are created that do not serve the public or private sector and therefore do not serve their students. In parts of Europe the problem is so bad that many companies won't touch a graduate without two years of unpaid free labor just to show that they have gained some actual real world knowledge.

In other fields departments do nothing but churn out students for degrees that have little or no prospects for a job as certain fields simply have far fewer positions than degrees are granted for each year. The net result is that those students are forced by a job market that does not have enough jobs for their field to become the proverbial PhD at a fast food job while they compete for a too few positions with all of their previous classmates.

Words like best practices, ITIL, industry, government, the private world are answered with "that's not how we do things around here" - and it doesn't matter what the subject is. I have seen this attitude up close and personal with tenured professors routinely doing things that would get them fired in any other setting that didn't have anything to do with free speech.

All of this has absolutely nothing to do with the ultra-wealthy (whom I do not care for and am not defending) or the business world and everything to do with the Ivory Tower and it's disconnect from the real world.

The fact that a few professors (the chosen few that run each department, choose the curriculum and set the tone for everyone that serves beneath them) have tenure does not change anything about what I have said. If anything all it does is concentrate power in the hands of fewer and fewer people ensuring that they have even greater sway over everything.

I have seen professorships that are low paid, with PhD's that work for less than what they could make in fast food when you factor in the number of hours. This is common in academia from my conversations with people in other institutions when I worked in the environment.

The fact that you have a large number of overly qualified people chasing far too many paying positions only enforces my point about the disconnect between the real world and academia. The problem has been created by a system in which there fields in which there are effectively no jobs due to over-saturation of the market. The result is that if you want to have any chance of having your degree actually be used in your professional career you must work at one of these jobs and compete where you can easily have 100 like qualified people in identical situations per job. If those kinds of numbers were being used at a vocational school the Federal Government would shut the program down for being unsuitable. It's a pyramid much like a multi-level marketing scheme, only your working with students, teaching positions and the very rare tenured position at the top.

There is nothing ignorant about my post, I saw students at my University realize with horror the uselessness of some their degrees for years. I watched academics fight for positions and saw everything that I described to you from a position as an administrator. I also have sheer statistics in terms of millions of workers that are underemployed, out of work or working in a field that does not match their degree. You can easily Google the statistics, the number in the millions.

Tenure is one of the most destructive things to ever happen to higher education. The entire concept is much akin to the widely reviled stacked ranking that many corporations have started to use in their ranks. The entire concept is that whoever wins the political / popularity contest at the educational institute is rewarded with tenure.

The result of the tenure system is political backstabbing, a good old boy (girl) club, group think that literally requires the death of the elders to change. Because the existing staff with tenure are often the ones to choose the new they do everything they can to ensure that even upon their death that things still will change as little as possible. Since the leadership of departments can't be fired the result is an elitist entitlement attitude where because doesn't have to answer to the real world and a feeling that should be isolated from it, no matter how callous their actions.

An academic institution that is isolated from the real world with tenure will become so separated from reality that term 'Ivory Tower' was coined to describe the phenomenon. The net result is that they do not serve society or their students, instead serving only themselves. Without checks and balances a department can become more and more self feeding on their own dogma each year. Because they do not ever have to interact or answer to the real world their coursework and degrees become more and more disconnected from the real world and students continue to be granted degrees irrespective of whether or not they will ever be able to use them.

The results are hardly academic when society suffers from a large influx of college graduates that receive degrees that have absolutely no value outside of academia. The results have been overwhelming with recent college graduates finding that their college degrees are often worthless, even when granted by well known Universities. Millions of college graduates have discovered themselves working jobs at places like retail or fast food when they had a harsh reality check that their degree was worthless. These graduates are now being tasked with repaying a four year degree with a McJob, a task that cannot be done. With crushing debt and chronic underemployment the student loan crisis in America is arguably the next mortgage collapse.

In Europe unemployment rates among college graduates are at record levels with many graduates lucky to find jobs doing things in supermarkets or factories. Finding a job in your field often requires getting a job literally without pay for a couple years just to get experience so that you might have something that will apply to the real world for the employer. /Formerly worked at a University for a few years and saw this madness from the inside.

I never disregarded altruism, in fact I explicitly covered it in my grandparent post:

You can have sponsors that donate time and materials, you have generic ads, volunteers to a certain point

I have nothing against altruism, at a personal level I have volunteered for charity work for many years. In fact I have even taken a pay cut to serve in a professional capacity in an environment that needed people. However there is nothing about this that changes the fact that you still have expenses such as those that I have listed. Let me make my point with the National Blood Marrow Donor program which is pretty non-political and receives a lot of volunteer efforts, donations and services that are donated by altruistic people, companies and government agencies.

http://bethematch.org/About-Us/Careers/Career-opportunities/Information-technology/

Read through their IT department career website and you'll notice that they have IT needs as sophisticated as any company. They have expenses that include things like professionals with security, HIPAA and other practices. I can assure you that even for a program as necessary and heart warmingly approved by just about everybody as the NMDB that they still have substantial expenses.

In fact when your benefiting from Altruism your often on a very short leash by your benefactor to justify your expenses. I've done things like work with grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. I've worked with IT in education where grants were a form (if not the only form) of income for a program and we have to carefully track that programs expenses. I can promise you that grants require an operational model of income and expenses, saying we're going to get by on Altruism is a really good way to never get a grant.

I can also guarantee you that after spending a fair amount of time working with non-profits and educational institutions in a professional capacity that they have the very expenses that I listed above. Any website of any size will require those expenses, those that benefit from altruism do nothing but shift where the expense is being paid from.

I stand by my point, you cannot have a functioning website that operates without expenses and those expenses must be paid for in some manner.

Are you trying to make my point for me?

Linux has easily had billions of dollars in development costs over it's life and easily costs hundreds of millions of dollars per year. Linux gets by on donated servers, hardware, millions of donated hours of labor, countless patents that are donated and on and on. Open source companies are just as expensive as closed source companies, only they wrap their costs into maintenance instead of licenses.

Open source companies aren't alive through good will, they are live because they charge money, they simply do it in different ways. Take Firefox, they get over 80% of their money through advertising revenue from Google.

Linux is as far from free as possible, and exists as a community effort because people, companies and government agencies actively contribute to it's costs. These companies do so because it is in their mutual best interest to do so (the overwhelming majority of Linux code is written by large corps). My point about the costs stand, the costs are overwhelmingly donated.

Tell you what, why don't you have a conversation with one of the developers or Linus sometime and suggest that Linux is without cost. However when you really get down to brass tacks, Linux isn't a product, it's a philosophy.

I never said a god damn thing about politics. I never said I was a Republican. I'm not, I'm an Independent. I'm not a right winger, I'm not a left winger. I'm a moderate in the middle.

I talked about the laws of economics. You can't operate an expense without a source of income. The laws of economics require that you have income to cover expenses. If you have a website that website is going to have certain costs that are required to keep it up and running.

Domain name
Hosting
Servers
Load Balancers
Networking Gear
Firewalls
Bandwidth
Staff Time
Licensing (you can try and run strictly GPL to an certain extent but you will discover that GPL based companies make their money on the next one)
Maintenance
Administrators (if you want staff good enough to not pay for maintenance your going to pay a lot for admins)
Disaster Recovery
Insurance
Electricity
Security

Now you'll notice the one expense I haven't covered is content, because you can generate that on your own. But in the real world the other expenses require cold hard cash and you had better believe that Rackspace and Cisco wont take unicorn farts for payment.

When I was on the web 20 years ago most web pages were hosted on University servers with donated bandwidth and concepts like dedicated firewalls, electrical budgets and the like just weren't issues. The web was a very different place then with many pages being static, the malice of today was largely absent and if a page was hacked typically the most someone would do was replace the front page with a picture of their choosing and throw the results up on 2600. That isn't the world we live in and you can't operate a page that way today, and you certainly can't operate a commercial web site that way.

If you aren't being charged for the product, you are the product.

This axiom has been true for a very long time and it's true for this site as well as any other such thing. How are they making money? I'm not objecting to their making money, after all they have to pay for their servers, bandwidth and admins and so on.

It's a fundamental question that you simply can't ignore and economics requires that you have to deal with it whether you want to or not. You can have sponsors that donate time and materials, you have generic ads, volunteers to a certain point, you can charge people for your service and so on.

The point is somehow or another you have to get money, and this site is claiming that they get money in ways that don't exploit your privacy. Since exploiting your privacy is how these sites normally pay your bills, this leaves serious questions on how they are monetizing their site.

I love the idea that a site can raise money without exploiting privacy in an evil manner, but before I can give them any credibility to their model I have to know their model works. I hate to rain on people's feel good parade, but you can' run a website on community goodwill, hugs and unicorn farts.

Does exactly what you need and is designed explicitly for integration with third party tools. Spins up everything from disks to automating webforms and jobs and imports and exports of jobs. There really isn't anything else out there that comes close to what Workflow will do. Used to be called Altiris Workflow. Works with everything from CMDB, change management, service desk to multiple languages.

http://www.symantec.com/connect/articles/learn-about-symantec-workflow

Really! Hundreds of studies showing that GMO is harmful? Stop the presses, gather the pitchforks and round up the boys quick! How on earth did HUNDREDS of studies showing GMO is harmful get overlooked by the entire scientific community? You have to be right that Monsanto has orchestrated suppressed this with a worldwide conspiracy across two hundred plus countries with different religions and political views. The world is secretly ruled by Monsanto, they are the world's puppeteers!

Better yet how did a worldwide conspiracy theory to buy off the entire scientific community ever make it? Where is wikileaks? Thousands, tens of thousands of people, perhaps even hundreds of thousands of people must be involved in a worldwide conspiracy to suppress HUNDREDS of scientific studies. Why hasn't anyone blown the lid off this and put Snowden on page 2?

Amazing story you have there, let me sit back and place this one somewhere between JFK assassinations conspiracies and the Illuminati. You could make a movie out of this and everything, think of the fortune to be made. You could even afford to feed your whole family at Whole Foods for a week - wow!!!!

Science wins and political extremists lose today, and for that progress for humanity is made. Any time a political extremist tries to hijack science to push a political agenda they should be subject to the greatest of scrutiny. Science can and must rise above politics for the greater good of humanity and in this case it did. Here's hoping science can do so in other realms as well.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/26/microsoft-kill-windows-rt-larson-green

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/microsoft/10477811/Microsoft-appears-set-to-abandon-Windows-RT.html

http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-is-hammering-the-final-nails-into-windows-rts-coffin-7000023641/

http://www.timeslive.co.za/scitech/2013/11/28/microsoft-windows-rt-faces-the-chop

http://blogs.computerworld.com/windows/23194/microsoft-confirms-windows-rt-will-die

It's still slander because the intent is to damage someone's reputation enough to cause harm through dishonest means. That being said, in today's society with some people if you accused them of something like an orgy they didn't participate in they would probably go ahead and claim credit anyways...