Some species of birds and social insects routinely help raise another's brood. Even bacteria can cooperate, sticking to each other so that some may survive poison. If extortion reigns, what drives these and other acts of selflessness?

Lacking a human ego, the species in question naturally accept that they are all one and part of a larger whole. Therefore self sacrifice is innate because it leads to the survival of the whole.

I was not going to be the first one to say it, but the exact same thought passed through my head.

This guy has a wife with a serious illness AND a two year old child. His solution is to make it possible for his two year old to keep an eye on his wife.

What kind of long term trauma is that going to cause? "Now Sally, keep a close eye on your mom because it is on you to make sure that when she starts convulsing that you make sure daddy is aware of it." What kind of sick person puts that responsibility on a toddler?

Are you sure about that? They are cutting senior staff positions. A Director of community relations is probably a smart choice given that they are going through a massive transition. Do they really care what the old message to the community is? Can they even afford to care what the community thinks, or court their input at such a delicate time? While fan participation and buy in is important, it is doubtful that they are in a position to do anything meaningful with it right now, or in the near future. It would not surprise me if they fill the position again, probably internally, once they figure out what their new messaging is going to be.

The Director of Development is an odd one, but in a way it makes sense. If they had a solid development program, they would not be in dire financial straights in the first place. While they are losing a leadership position, it will be interesting to see if they fill the position internally, or go outside. An internal hire shows that they are committed to leveraging current talent to lead them in a new direction. An external hire shows that they have little faith in their current staff, and will very likely accelerate a talent exodus.

By and large, the public does not care. They certainly do not care enough to do anything about it.

If people really cared, it would take self sacrifice. People would have to refuse to go to work, for weeks, if not months. We would have to stop working long enough to really throw a wrench into the system. Not only that, we would have to some how convince others not to take our jobs while we are out there doing whatever it is we would do when we were proving to the government that we are not there to perpetuate their system.

Good luck with that.

Now, to be able to go through 13000 cases (each with multiple documents), each member of this hypothetical team will need to process 928 cases. How many can they process per day?

The relevant metric here is number of documents per case. On average, a trained reviewer is going to do about 2 docs a minute, or 120 docs an hour. Keep in mind, that is for a typical privilege review. They may be able to do it even faster if all they are doing is verifying redactions.

and search using OCR. But these cant be redacted as easily.

There are plenty of systems out there that can perform keyword searches and redact accordingly once the originals have been OCR'd.

First paragraph should read

"Progress is being made to address those concerns, and companies who can deliver successful SOLUTIONS are trying ..."

Jeez I need to do a better job of proof-reading.

Should read "Progress Being Made in Renewable Energy Storage"

Yes, the recession is already starting. It is going to be another 8-12 months before it starts getting major press coverage, but companies are already cutting back on CapEx in general, and IT CapEx in particular.

You will notice it accelerating when Merger and Acquisition (M&A) activities start picking up.

Especially if you can get into Federal Contracting, the money is good

This is an interesting perspective. I just interviewed someone in the DC area who is looking to get out of Federal contracting because their perception is that it is getting harder to find stable work.

Now granted, I ended up passing on the person because their skills were not up to par and that might very well explain their challenge with finding work.

Is there a specific skill set that you find is in demand among Federal contractors?

I did not realize that. Thanks for the heads up.

Who the fuck are you to come on and assassinate someone else's character who you have not even met, and whose work product you have never seen?

At least you had the dignity to post with a legitimate account instead of as AC.

I have to wonder what is so wrong with your own character, that you are so threatened by the potential competence of a complete stranger, that you have to take to defaming them in order to re-enforce whatever impoverished view of the world you have adopted for yourself.

It seems to me like you have had some bad past experiences that you are still projecting into the now. Hopefully you find your way out of whatever pathetic, asshole infested farce of a career that you seem to be stuck in.

There are better solutions for that, like Ghostery.

I manage a technical team in a medium sized corporation (~3000 employees). Our primary offerings are SaaS based applications and we are on board with all of the buzzword trends from the last few years; virtualization, cloud, flash storage, blah blah blah. Our environment is fairly small with 60 UCS servers at two sites (full SRDF/A replication between them) running ~1500 VMs.

One of my guys is an engineering rock star. He can pick up any language given a week or two to sit down with it. On top of that he is an excellent systems administrator, DBA, networking guy and project manager. Retention is a constant challenge because there are very few engineers who excel in so many different areas.

The technologies that we are working with are widely deployed. We could be implementing them somewhere else and making the same money. At a high level, we are just infrastructure plumbers. We could care less about the applications. Our purpose is to make sure that they are stable and that they perform well. With my particular employee, he keeps coming to work because we give him the opportunity to work with the latest technologies and the ability to leverage them to make his, and everyone else's, lives easier.

The two things that keep this team together are money, and the leeway to continually improve things. We have had a lot of territorial disputes with various teams over their inability to effectively manage infrastructure at scale. In many ways, they are scared of losing their jobs and are resistant to adopting better ways of doing things. We win those battles one at a time, but continually fighting them gets lame.

In that regard, I think that the author of the article is on point with the observation that good engineers need to believe that they are involved in setting the direction of how the office, and most importantly, operations, will develop. There are too many companies who need good engineers, and not enough good engineers to go around. Therefore good engineers will choose to work for companies where they can do things "the right way". Life is too short to put up with organizations who are slow to adopt new technologies and better ways of doing things.