HP is testing its ideas in a small data center in Palo Alto with a 134kW solar array and four ProLiant servers.

Four servers is a nerd's basement.

Wouldn't you need something like 4 racks full of servers? Running something like seti@home or distributed.net?

In its own building.

I don't know what the article is going on about but my experience is 100% the opposite.

'If music evolved as a social glue for the species â" as a way to make groups and keep them together â" headphones allow music to be enjoyed friendlessly â" as a way to savor our privacy, in heightened solitude,' concludes Thompson.

I play crap I like to drown out the distractions. If I played crap I did not like then it would be the distraction.

This has nothing to do with "friendlessly".
A friend of mine keeps having us synchronize play times and then she types the chorus to me in chat.
And how many chat windows does everyone here have open when they have their headphones on? There's nothing about "solitude" there. We're communicating and interacting.

But we're doing it without the background noise.

Why aren't the other people on the other projects capable of handling this?

We have a couple who are. They're fully subscribed on other projects and the time stolen to keep this project moving is missed.

You ALREADY have people who fit this profile and you are having trouble finding/making more of them?

That makes no sense at all.

I'm looking for a senior level operations guy who can (A) explain stuff to senior level programmers without operations experience and (B) run some nifty BGP-using networks with interesting architectures.

Again, what you'll end up with is a master-network guy who has to dumb the concepts down to novice level to get it across to the master-programmer people.

But you already know that, right, because you already have TWO people with those skills who step in and look at the project.

And BGP? BGP isn't complicated. It's almost as easy as RIP.

Very few folks here work just one project. Those who do, do so by choice.

So you have more than one project but you don't have the people to staff this project and that is because none of the resumes have the correct qualifications?

That worries me. Why aren't the other people on the other projects capable of handling this?

Big difference between what stuff looks like in the lab and what it looks like on a production network. I need someone who knows the qualitative difference. That takes years of operations experience.

That's another problem. You expect someone who is a master to be able to explain the complex concepts to a novice in such a way that the novice can turn those complex concepts into code.

That does not work.
What you end up with is a master-level programmer implementing novice-level network concepts.
Because that is the level that the master-network guy has to use to communicate with the master-programmer guy.

And you refuse to bring the master-programmers up to a more advanced network level.

But you're willing to give a phone interview to someone who knows SCRIPTING?

If this was a legitimate job opening I can see why you'd have trouble filling it with anyone qualified.

How do you ensure the poll is representative?

If you let everyone vote on a web page, you're self selecting for technology literate, able to afford an internet connection, and politically engaged enough to care to vote.

If the same 10% or so vote on every issue, you might end up with skewed results.

And, as has been pointed out, you'd need to be sure the system was secure and had some validation in it -- otherwise you have no idea if you can trust the votes. Then of course, all of your voters are essentially on record for having voted for/against something.

It sounds like a good idea in theory, but the devil is always in the details.

So, there's 4 types of ionizing radiation. Gamma is only one. Is Gamma the type which is mainly radiated by the isotopes of concern? Or because that's the easiest/cheapest to create a detector chip for, so they slap one in a phone, creating a 1/4 solution to the problem, and market it to the public as a more or less total solution to the problem?

For the particular case of detecting reactor isotopes, is Gamma radiation even particularly useful?

Something makes you think I'm not?

Yeah. The fact that you're here claiming that you cannot fill that position.

Knock off the cutesy, attempted implication but avoiding directly saying it, bullshit. Either you have an opening for X at $Y or you do not.

The individual skills you're looking for are not uncommon. You can probably find someone with 2 of the 3 easily. And fairly inexpensively.

But getting all 3 of the 3?
Those people probably already have jobs doing something similar to what you're pushing and you'd have to hire them away from those jobs.

So either you aren't offering them enough or there is something about the job or company that is scaring away the people with the experience you are looking for.

And even experienced people who don't trust the situation can be hired if you're willing to pay enough up front.

What is this "minor software development"?
Scripting? C or C++ or Java?

Anything at all gets you to a phone interview.

Not the answer I was expecting. Scripting is VERY different from C coding.

The position is for the operations guy on a product team building a specialty firewall product.

So a very real possibility of a very limited career there? The firewall market is already fairly busy.

He's the guy who has to keep the devs grounded in both what can actually be maintained in the field and what the packets on deployed networks actually look like.

That would make me even less confident. If the people writing the code for the firewall need someone else to tell them what the packets look like then there is a problem. And that kind of education is a couple weeks at maximum.

I want TS. SCI would be a bonus. I'll consider Secret for someone with an otherwise terrific skill set with the assumption I'll have to find side roles for them until they can get up to TS+SCI.

I wish you luck with that. I don't think you'll find anyone with those skills willing to take a risk on your project at the expense of their current job.

But I'm going to reiterate the part about getting some more education for your coders. Understanding network packets is not difficult. If they can write firewall software then they NEED to understand packets. This is NOT something that someone else can explain to them while they're coding.

Good luck!

Having worked in acadamia myself, it has been my experience that talent and competence diminishes severely the further up the management ladder you go.

Otherwise known as the Peter Principle -- sooner or later everybody gets promoted to their own level of incompetence.

I can get them from TS to SCI in time and I would consider someone with secret who had all the other right skills but I can't get someone from zero to TS in time to deliver the product.

What The Fuck?!?

Bullshit.

Shouldn't you be head-hunting the people with those skills and clearances at the other security firms and paying them the 6 figure salaries that they'd demand?

Even then there aren't many.

Sure there are. It's just that they've already got jobs where they're pulling in massive salaries and you'd have to top those salaries / benefits in order to pull them away from that.