Heck, we have no problem with women joining our team. I know of two resumes we've received from women (or recruiters) for open Unix Admin positions at my job. The first was several years ago. She'd worked in a data center for 20 years but scripting wasn't something she had much experience with. Combined with other factors, she wasn't interviewed further. The second one was recently and apparently supplied by a recruiter who sprays resumes everywhere in the hopes it will stick on the wall somewhere. The candidate had extensive AIX experience but absolutely no experience with Linux or other Unix based operating systems. We considered her several times but finally the team decided to not interview.

[John]

We we are, by nature, expendable. We should be used as beasts of burden and discarded once our usefulness is over.

[John]

Yea, we're hiring for a mid level Unix sysadmin (Redhat and Solaris with a bit of HP-UX) and are getting resumes from power users on up to very experienced senior level admins. It's humorous to find folks who are "experienced" but don't list any specific operating systems. And our phone interview process seems to weed them all out. We just want folks who are beyond the "point and click" stage of administration.

"How do you configure the network interface on a Redhat box?"
"Bring up the Network Manager and click..."

[John]

Boulder itself is crazy WRT housing but really only in or close to Boulder. Living in the surrounding area (like Broomfield or Longmont) gives you reasonably priced housing and you're not that far from Boulder. The problem mostly is that you're farther away from the Tech Center (south Denver) so changing jobs without moving is tougher, the commute being difficult. Nothing like the DC Metro area of course but still not an easy commute (compared to commuting from Longmont to Boulder which is a piece of cake :) ).

[John]

Tough call. I work a bit north of Denver so I'm not in the south near the Tech Center. When looking for a job at the Tech Center 6 years ago (IBM sucks let me just say), where most of the technical jobs are, the offers were for around 75k. When I asked for a little wiggle room since I was making about 92k at the time plus a job at the Tech Center would mean having to drive through Denver to get to the job (or move of course), but the companies were pretty firm. I found a new job in my area for 95k am now making over 6 figures (haven't checked my W2 yet but around that). I'm pretty happy where I am even though I think I had 3 raises in the past 6 years, not even cost of living increases really.

And just so you know, I don't mind driving. I commuted from Stafford VA to Columbia MD for a year to work at Johns Hopkins APL and lived in the DC metro area for over 30 years :)

[John]

About 10 years ago I was coming down from computer gaming. Too many fast twitch kids out on the 'net and the vs AI was either crazy hard or non-existent.

8 years ago my wife was bugging me to do something about the 6 or 8 moving boxes full of paper games. So I started pulling out my old gear. Shadowrun 1st and 2nd, Paranoia, D&D and AD&Dr1/r2, Talisman 2nd Edition, Cosmic Encounters, and a bunch of misc gear.

I'd gotten out of person to person gaming in part because there just weren't any to be found.

So I got on line and started checking out places where I could off-load my gear keeping the really memorable ones and stumbled into a massive on-line community from rpg.net to boardgamegeek. Then meetup.com for a local gaming group.

Since then I've gotten heavily back into RPGs running Shadowrun 4th for 6 years (even listed in several of the books as a Proofreader :) ) and playing loads of board games at the local FLGS plus with friends at their houses. Right now I'm Dr. Alphonse Gillespie in a Hollow Earth Expedition RPG, Mad Physicist (channeling Sheldon from BBT :D ).

In the mean time, my wife decided being married to a gamer, motorcyclist, guitarist, and computer geek wasn't her style and she's moved back to the east coast to be with her daughter. I'm dating a computer geek (she's a DBA) who games, hikes, and has ridden on the back of my motorcycle on several occasions.

So more gaming. Much more gaming. :D

[John]

Lifetime: 0+, 1, 0, 0+, 0, 1, 0, 0+.

I have to say I felt more alone when married than otherwise.

[John]

As a contractor, I was always looking for work. One company I worked for when I was at Johns Hopkins APL would immediately "release" you if work ended. My manager came to me and said that when the contract ended in six months, I would be let go because they had no requirement for network engineers. Since looking for work while unemployed is more difficult than when employed, I immediately started looking for another job. That's when I went to work at NASA.

So I'm going to stretch my job out as much as possible since I like being able to eat regularly.

[John]

Okay. I was a contractor for 13 years at NASA Headquarters in downtown DC (bofh (at) hq (dot) nasa (dot) gov :) ). We (IT) spent our time in the Data Center (even got OSHA dinged for cubicles next to the air handlers). At HQ, the environment was pretty good. The main Government IT guy was damned smart and ahead of his time. When other NASA centers were shut down due to the ILoveYou virus, we were still up and running without a problem. So having all the centers using a single contractor for help desk and other IT stuff would be a huge task. The NASA centers are all over the country, not in one location.

[John]

Dress Codes? Man, we didn't have dress codes when I worked at NASA 10 years ago. That's sad.

[John]

When I worked at IBM, management of the IDS for the IRS was outsourced to India.

[John]

Really hard to say. I don't keep track of the employees in the company. I've been here a bit over 6 years. Many of the old timers seem to think I've been here longer. My co-Sr Unix admin has been here for 20 years.

This is the first job I've worked at where I've done the same thing for 6 years though. The previous job I worked on two different contracts. The one before that was for the Olympics in Greece. Before that I was at the Government Agency for 13 years but changed actual jobs 5 or 6 times (contractor).

[John]

Nah. The legacy Sun gear just gets decommissioned and is replaced by Linux or HP-UX (mostly Linux).

[John]