Unions ah the 70's just called :-) Seriously though never worked in a union environment, or at least in one where I was part of the union. Also mostly healthcare (essential service, back to work legislation in a clock cycle), military (against the law to form a union), or academic (you can strike but you won't graduate) have been most of my working conditions. Hard to form a union when you are 5 guys in a 500 employee company. Strikes are usually about actual grievances: too little pay, too long hours, etc. This would be more of an experiment: testing the theory that IT has little value, or at best minimum wage in a third world country value.

No you need people there so someone that knows what they are doing can confirm that the backups run, can act if you are being attacked, can create new accounts, remind users how to configure outlook if they move to another computer etc. I wasn't suggesting leave and in one day everything will break so they'll know they need us I meant more like power down the servers and go home for the day.

I know and the internet was broke for 2 hours here. Companies are cheap cheap cheap with internet bandwidth. Perhaps that would change if they were playing on the cloud but I wouldn't count on it. My work for example: 2000 employees in a hospital setting. 20Mbps internet connection and we are a "teaching" hospital (we teach slow students very slowly apparently). Now imagine everyone needing the internet for their word processor, email, pdfs, medical images, browsing, etc. Even "low bandwidth" activities aren't when you have ~600 people at a time all doing it on a 20Mbps connection. One person of those 600 decides to look at a 4D CT set and the network stops for ~50s for everyone. Not good.

Agreed. and BYOD policies mean more time involved in figuring out how to get someones gadget to play nice with the corporate network and more gadgets. If everyone can bring their tablet and phone versus the old way where you had to be important enough to warrant a standardized corporate gadget lots more gadgets per user. Much more gadget types etc. Nothing but work and headaches in the future for Tier 1 guys ... enjoy :-)

I agree. I had a guy interview me that when I told him what I was currently making he said "oh people here eventually make that kind of money but maybe 5-7 years." He even had the nerve to ask me if I had friends that wanted work and they could work for his company too and we could be roommates to share expenses. Really? Experienced software engineers are supposed to wait 5 years to make the same money they currently are and live with roommates to get by. Fantastic. Companies complain about not being able to fill positions because they want Ferrari employees on Civic salaries.

It's not just throttling, chances are their servers don't have something that can handle 4Gbps reliably since their connection likely isn't that large, if they are only serving webpages there is little need (say even a 1MB page) you'd need to get ~500 hits per second to need that bandwidth (43M a day) chances are you don't. People that would go nuts for this: distributed nightly backups, HD content uncompressed I think is pretty close to this size (not talking BR but straight from the cameera streaming) one connection per building kind of setups etc. I can see ISPs adding a box to an apartment building and then selling 250MBps to ~20 apartments rather than having to manage the boxes somewhere else/per flat hookup etc).

Make it $50-100 and you'll see some demand :-)

Simple solution to get management to understand the value of IT have a no IT day. One day, no email, internet, IP phone etc. They'll come back crying before lunch time.

Shitheads will be shitheads.

I agree with war4peace: camera memory cards, ssd in my kindle and ipod etc are not really storage. I kind of think of them as a network connection with extremely high latency. I don't take pics so they can live on my camera and they are of very little use to me until I upload them to my computer and can look at them on a decent screen. My Kindle: the books are their to read and then get deleted. Any document I need to keep gets sent to cloud storage and my local hdd. Kind of like those old school attachments for diskmen in a car that had a tape that the disk got written too so you could play it through your tapedeck, you don't care about the storage of that tape as long as it makes your stereo go.