Thank you. I was about to post a "fuck you" like yours when I saw that you had beat me to it.

I'm 45 yrs old, run 15-30 miles per week, eat as diabetics should, etc. I'm 6'0" and just over 175lbs now. I've been diabetic for 10 years. I'm not currently on any medication, but probably will be in the next year or so. My numbers keep creeping up.

There is a subset of people who just think that anything wrong with somebody is their own fault. Small people with limited understandings. And it's amazing the damage they can do to somebody who feels vulnerable. It's bad enough that the doctors are never happy; but now they have some random internet puke telling them it's all their fault for being a stupid fatty.

It burns me sometimes, these idiots.

In your 20s you're fascinated by all the things you can do, and all of the tools that help you. The staggering possibilities are endless. You hate yard work. F that.

In your 30s, you're aware and thankful that you're passion allows you to provide for your family. It takes long hours and lots of work, but gives your loved ones a lifestyle that you're proud of. The neighbor kid mows your lawn for $20 per week.

In your 40s you start to relive these things vicariously through the new crowd, eager and energetic. Long nights, desperate deadlines and high pressure projects are tiring. You've racked up a lot of these at the expense of your personal life. Your kids are old enough now to mow the lawn for you.

In your 50s you wonder how much of you this company and these people deserve. The 20 somethings look at you like you've checked out. In reality, you're just trying to do better at balancing your effort against what really matters to you. This puts you in the slow lane on the running track. The endless possibilities are staggering, and no longer fun. You'd rather spend your time in the yard or doing something else relaxing.

Different things will be important to you 10 years from now. That doesn't mean you're wrong today, or then. It's just the way it works... for most.

I think we have an unhealthy culture of dominance in this country. I'll stand up for my rights. I'll be number 1. I'll win.

Everything is a competition. Financial, political, physical, workplace, school, etc. We've turned everything into a ranking model where somebody is always above or below somebody else. It pervades every single thing we do. It's this sort of thing that leads to deaths at WalMart on Black Friday, road rage beatings and shootings, backstabbing in the office, and anxiety in the classroom. If you're not winning, you're losing, and don't think for a second that it's happening without notice.

We're constantly anxious about our standing in some fashion. Will I be let go? Am I better looking than that person? Am I better off than that person? Am I smarter? Am I more aggressive?

We're overtly competitive in many ways, but the subtle pervasiveness of the competitive mindset is really troubling.

Electric utility companies do have some interesting dynamics. Staff tend to have long tenures, so many of the plant operations folks remember days before they had to deal with IT folks to do their business. But, everybody (and I mean everybody) at this point understand the necessity and value of a strong IT staff. They may resent it, but they get it.

And, you can bet that the IT departments at electric utilities are as professional as any. Your assumption that they don't want to be good at it is utterly and shamefully false. Even if it were true, they have no choice. There's a lot going on at utility companies that these types of scare-mongering authors never talk about. She very briefly mentions the NERC-CIP regulations (glossed them over, really) without also mentioning the IT components of reliability audits, internal audits, internal exercises, external pen tests, coordinated exercises with regional entities, law enforcement, FERC, etc. Industry peer groups play a big role as well. Protecting the power grid is vitally important to us. Why on earth would it not be? We run a metered business. We can't bill if we aren't creating, transmitting and distributing power.

Is it vulnerable? Of course, as is the highway system, water, food distribution, agriculture, shipping, etc.

Now, I totally agree that NERC-CIP should be more assistive and less about pure compliance with standards; but "continuous improvement" is a concept that is constantly harped on by both staff and regulators. It's already there.

I can teach almost anybody Unix or Windows, etc. But I can't teach somebody to show up, work hard, be a part of the team, etc. I try to interview for those sorts of soft skills. I also try to find somebody who can deconstruct problems. These are your troubleshooters and they can apply those talents to almost any skillset.

Basic troubleshooting methodology is unfortunately not something that seems to be taught in schools.

Yes. We see this in aviation.

The law likely references "compensation" rather than money. Compensation may take many forms.

The laws regarding commercial flight operations plumb the depths of this type of situation. There was even a case where a pilot gave a potential business partner a ride from one of the Hawaiian islands to another without charging him (so he could catch an airline flight out). But, because it was assumed that the potential partner might factor that into his process and remunerate with a contract, it was considered to be for compensation.

That's an extreme example, but others abound of inadvertent compensation.

Regardless of the hypocrisy of Feinstein, this turn of events needed to be made public.

The CIA did something wrong. The Senate opened an investigation. The CIA accidentally sent them incriminating information, then deleted some after it had already been reviewed. The CIA agreed not to delete any more, then did it again. The Senate put some of this incriminating information into their official report and moved evidence to a secure location. The CIA didn't much care for that and started an investigation into how they got it, trumped up accusations of criminal conduct and have refused to accept the legitimate oversight role of the Senate. Hate Feinstein all you want, but don't dismiss this illegitimate action by the CIA because she's no angel herself.

We've seen where even helicopters can be abused, using thermal imagery, etc. to see into places where they really have no business seeing. Drones are quickly evolving and will exacerbate such problems. We've seen how the warrant process is bypassed or ignored, now imagine drones small enough to see every space you occupy, and autonomous enough that nobody is even providing oversight into what they're recording or observing until after the fact.

Helicopters require effort and cost, and so there is some incentive for their operators to dispatch them only when there is a good cause. Small cheap drones won't have even that barrier.

My experience in pricing these things out is that it's cheaper in-house. I can spin up a virtual machine on our VMWare/UCS infrastructure for about 1/5th the cost of a higher tier provider. I hear a lot about scalability, but so far I've never been in a position of telling somebody "I don't have room to create another VM for you." Flexibility is a semi-valid argument. It depends on what flexibility you want. If you don't need your test servers backed up, you're either paying for separate tiers in the cloud, or you're just paying for something you don't need or use. If I don't need to back up a VM in my own data center, I get direct savings from not doing so. The backups are just one example.

Cloud makes sense as an offering from 3rd party ISVs. If they have a product, they should offer a cloud option for it, where you pay them and they contract to whatever cloud provider they wish and include it as part of your cost. It's just another one of those tools that we will all use the wrong way because we have to satisfy some kind of managerial mandate. And we won't use it the right way because it jacks up the apparent cost of the products that could truly be a good fit.

If the certification is relevant and useful, and the training is good, I'll pay for it. But, often it requires some prep work by the employee.

For instance: Joe wants to get his RHCE. The RedHat prep and test all-in-one class is a good bit of training, outside of being a certification exam. So, as long as Joe puts in the effort to be prepared for the class and exam, and assuming I have the training dollars, I'll invest in Joe and send him to RedHat.

Of course I expect my people to be self-starters, but I'm either going to pay for the class, or pay him enough to pay for it himself. Why not invest in him directly so that he knows I value him. I get not only a skilled employee, but a loyal employee.

I agree with you completely, and for the record I am an IT manager with a corner... cube.

The benefits of cloud are not typically financial. For some small companies they can be, but not if you are of any significant size. The cost of a given cloud virtual machine is much higher than the cost of a local virtual machine if you already have any kind of server infrastructure. When I divide out the labor, data center costs, storage, backup, etc. I find it costs about 5 times more on average to pay for a cloud server, assuming you're using one of the leaders in the cloud provider space than to pay for your own VM.

That extra 400 percent cost can go a long way to buying your own scalability. After all, it buys the cloud vendor scalability.

I think the perfect fit for cloud, outside of the above mentioned small business, is in the 3rd party app space. It makes sense to me for vendors to offer hosted solutions in the cloud, instead of dealing with each client's personal hardware choice, configuration standard, etc. I'm a big fan of cloud in that regard, but too often it's just a stupid buzzword.

That is exactly what I was thinking. I'd be pissed if an empty case dented my new car or crashed through the windshield and injured me or my family.

Think of the managers you have respected, and analyze what made them great managers for you. Some common things that have served me well:

1. Don't try to change your people. They are who they are. Work with their strengths. If you can't deal with who they are, you'll need to work on getting them off your team.
2. Pay attention to your employees' careers. You should be training them to see the broader aspects of what they're working on. You should have a career path in mind for them. Some may want to do what they're doing for the rest of their lives. But you should be looking for the ones who will eventually want to move up or sideways, and you should help prepare them for that.
3. Remember that if you're successful, it's because of the work they do. Don't forget that. You aren't successful all by your little lonesome.
4. When you give them something to do, give them a result. Don't micromanage the way they do it. Certainly standards have to be applied, regulations complied with, etc. But as much as possible, let them work toward the goal.
5. Your authority is in your title. It's in black and white. You don't need to prove it all the time. You don't need to fear challenges to your authority: they're stupid and you can't lose them.
6. Finally, this one is tough, but be aware of the difference in your relationship now. There are some jokes that will not go over like they used to, because although you are still who you are, you are now also boss. Neither you nor they can forget that, and shouldn't. Otherwise what would be the point of making you boss?

For what it's worth, I often see this scenario from the opposite perspective:

Them: We've got a new program that we chose on our own and requires customization and a lot of changes to our default security policies.
Me: It's not that easy, we have regulatory compliance issues to sort out, and the security policies are in place for a reason. You should have consulted us before you spent the money.
Them: I just want to do what I want to do, and you need to help me because I make money and you don't.
Me: That's exactly why we've ended up with all of these regulatory compliance issues, people just doing what they want. I wish it were different, too. I could be a lot more effective.
Them: I don't care about you. My wants are the only thing that matter.

Agreed. Both sides of the debate are doing a good bit of quibbling about how things are being represented, but the truth is that he refused to give the owners of the system the information they needed to run it, information they owned and were entitled to. The result of that action (or inaction, however you wish to represent it) is that a lot of time was spent by a lot of people dealing with the situation, whether they were 3rd party consultants doing the technical work, or city staff who gave reports, depositions, investigated his employment history, argued the case in court, etc.

We can argue about calling it "damages", but the costs are real. And Terry is nobody to hang your hat on. Having a jerk for a boss is no excuse for what he did. Every boss is a jerk in someone's eyes.