i agree. an internship is exactly what you make of it. i've had both IT and non-IT interns work for me and universally i'd rather hire the intern who works hard, asks questions, and realizes that some of the stuff they are doing is menial crap that we all had to do when we started out. you can do your internship just to say you did one (which honestly won't matter to most potential employers that much) or you can really try, ask questions, try to be involved, etc. a lot of the busy work they ask you to do does help, but mostly it's to keep you busy while they work on important stuff. if you show you can be trusted (even just to grab a screwdriver when needed) they'll start bringing you along for fixes, start showing you the ropes, etc. if you pay attention you'll likely be surprised that you can be an asset relatively quickly. when you're standing in the server room looking over someone's shoulder, pay attention to what they're doing. it's easy to let your mind wander but you might just happen to notice the thing the guy in charge is missing. if you're smart, you'll notice it, let him/her know by asking something like "is that screen configured correctly? i've never done it before", and then reap the benefit of having helped without seeming like a know-it-all. in my experience it's a tight-rope walk at first to be accepted as knowledgable without coming across as someone "dangerous" to everyone else, but if you can be helpful, personable, and willing to spend several months doing gopher stuff you'll be fine. just my 2 cents, your mileage may vary, etc.

i wonder if each employer did a criminal background check? his next book will be called "why i get stopped at the airport every time i fly".

i agree with the parent. when usb 2.0 came out, lots of machines came with both. they were usually marked with some non-descript color difference that had no reference so unless you natively remembered "purple outline means usb 2.0" you had to guess or wait for windows to tell you the device would work faster in a usb 2.0 port.

"wii toy" - right, because the other two are deal-making, shuttle launching, techno-heavy pieces of equipment. "hey guys, we better get some xbox360s in here before people stop taking us seriously."

exactly. sure it's frustrating for an implementation of a good idea to take a really long time, but in turn that usually ensures the implementation of a bad idea will be thoroughly vetted and exposed before its adopted (with a few notable exceptions). i'd much rather risk the eternally promised "end of the internet" with the notion that someone would likely provide a fix before it gets to that point than i would risk having some person or company "in charge". we see how far that gets us with basically every other industry - nowhere. maybe i'm missing something obvious but what other global technology works as well with as little global oversight? it's easier from a "regulation" standpoint for me to email a home video to antarctica than it is to make a phone call to europe. just my 2 cents, ymmv, etc.

i read somewhere james cameron said it was dances with wolves but with aliens. it's what came to my mind when i read the synopsis (dude infiltrates a foreign and somewhat hostile group, falls in love, becomes one of them, is forced to decide whether to betray his former life).

all developers think they could be sysadmins (the inherent problem in dealing with them). i'm happy to finally be in a position where we don't have any in house developers. in the past ten years, no stereotypable group (technophobes, self-taught-it-experts, etc) has been more frustrating to work with than developers. all they NEED is something to input text and something to compile that text but they end up with $5,000 worth of equipment, countless hours of tech support, and endless perks but they still bitch that they can't work because we won't give them admin access to install twitter apps or "ram booster" software.

why don't you just add rss feeds to your bookmarks toolbar? assuming at least half of the sites you keep open have rss enabled, you could severely decrease your need to have an insane number of tabs open at once.

parent = perfectly stated. my company is paying for a new web site. the developer does good stuff but didn't realize it needed to be optimized for: IE6, 7, 8, firefox, and basically every other browser someone might use. it also has to fit the specs for blind/handicapped users. 90% of the developer's clients are happy with it being optimized for IE as long as it's somewhat renderable for everything else. doesn't work that way for us for a variety of reasons. he's happy to do it for a renegotiation of the contract (he knows it's not a breeze).

i spent the past week modifying the site's css, html, and js to look and function in a variety of browsers and with a variety of requirements for different types of users. i can absolutely see a use for someone who can do this well, especially in a shop where new sites or additions to current sites come online often. it's not rocket science but it certainly a skill set greater than it's being made out to be by people who i'm assuming haven't had to do much of it. it's tedious, there are a lot of nuances, trade-offs, tricks, pitfalls, etc.

the problem is that for your $60 and thousands of hours, you've got my $60 and a few hours here and there. how do you translate that to a final price? i'd rather pay $60 for a "ten hour" game than $60 plus a monthly fee for a "thousand hour game", not to get off the point - it's a function of how much you value the thing vs the value of other things blah blah. it's why, although i'm sure world of warcraft is a great game, there's no way i'd justify spending the money on it plus the monthly fee when i'm only going to play it five hours a month. plus the inherent marriage you enter into with a game that you play against other people (if they play while you don't, they get better, gain experience, etc while you don't). different (sword) strokes for different folks i guess.

the whole thing is riddickulous.

isn't the long and short of it really "why do you care who has the passwords to a place that just fired you?" if my place of employment fired me they can have any password they want. go for it, screw something up, i don't care, i don't work there anymore. his real problem was making the job more than a job. he's only the superhero of the network in his mind.

several people have touched on this, but i'll speak from personal experience: even if you get over the hurdle of them doing their work instead of screwing around, you're alienating your team from the rest of the company. i promise. as soon as everyone else hears that your people are getting stupid non-job-related stuff like that they are going to resent your team and that will trickle down to inter-department performance. i just got done dealing with a year of this at my former place of employment. we hired an interactive manager who took a few months to hire four developers for a web site project. almost immediately he started throwing gobs of money at all sorts of ridiculous stuff his team didn't need but that could "motivate" them. $1,000 chairs, lamps, painting the room red, large monitors, endless food, etc. are some of these arguably motivators/ok for the office? sure, until you realize that the rest of the people in the building had old machines, crt monitors, couldn't get reimbursed for travel appropriately, job cuts, etc. it was nothing but complete resentment that these guys got tons of perks while everyone else had to fill out forms for basic office supplies. i'm not saying it's right of fair, but it absolutely fed into constant disagreement and bad work environment between that team and everyone else. it also gave a heightened sense of entitlement to the development team who were really impossible to deal with. they were given specials perks, they felt special, and they acted like none of the rules of the place applied to them. i'm not implying causation entirely on this, but when i left the project was a year behind schedule. your mileage may vary, my 2 cents, etc, but i'd think long and hard about how what you're giving your folks can impact not only their production within your team but their ability to be productive in the rest of the organization.