Comment Re:Badly... (Score 1) 426
I was a 74B in the Army (which converted to 25B20) for a while, then I jumped ship and became a Warrant Officer (254a) - Signal Systems Support Technician.
The Warrant Officer program is excellent - the Army's attempt to have geeks in uniform who get paid a little more, and get a little more respect. The school at Ft. Gordon was great, and I enjoyed my time there. The classes were exactly what I wanted (and needed) to learn about, even though I knew most of it by the time I got there.
There's a big problem with the Warrant Officer corps though, well at least on the Signal side of things. Everything technical is contracted out because The Army (tm) does not understand technology very well. And usually the contractors (in my experience anyway) have been lazy, rude, and incompetent. They know they are on a contract making fat money, and so they get lazy and slack off. It's a rare day to see a competent, respectful contractor. I have yet to run across one.
My time in the Army has been good so far - it's gotten me two college degrees and some great work experience in Iraq and Kuwait. I love the culture of the Army, the "get it done no matter what" attitude. But the problem with geeks and the military culture is that the Military mostly attracts the "gung-ho" type of personality, which geeks rarely are. And "gung-ho" personalities do not understand technology, or appreciate people who are good at it. In fact a lot of 'geeks' in the Army are people who converted from other MOS's (jobs) because they'd get promoted faster than being a Medic or Artilleryman. I went to WOBC with a man who had been a UH-60 pilot, and only jumped to the Signal side of things because he had been passed over twice for promotion, and was about to get kicked out of the Army.
I don't think the Army (or military in general) is purposely lassiez-faire towards it's geeks, but they just don't understand geek work. It doesn't matter how brilliant of a login script you write for the domain PC's, or how many intrusion attempts you shut down, or the awesome Snort rules you wrote -- no one understands what the hell you're talking about. "Snort rules?? You mean like drugs?" It's like explaining how subnetting works to a fourth-grader.
I think until the Army fully changes to the next generation (once this generation of old guys is out), and younger people who grew up around current technology are in power, we won't have the military reacting well to technology. For men who love guns, tanks and explosions (I'm one of them), computers just seem to get in the way and annoy everyone when they crash. And crash they do - running almost exclusively Microsoft products.
Final random thought: Whoever the Army hires to work on AKO (Army Knowledge Online, our web portal), and the fifty-thousand other random sites (GIBill, ATRRS, ATTRS, Train.army.mil, etc), are some of the worst coders I've seen. Even AKO, with that huge 'update' they put out recently, brings the site up to roughly 1998 coding standards. This is why socialized health care is such a bad idea - when people have a) Unlimited funding and b) No pressure to compete or improve (like commercial companies do), they slide into mediocrity and apathy. It's a fact of human existence - we need the pressure put on us to perform. That is when we do our best.
The Warrant Officer program is excellent - the Army's attempt to have geeks in uniform who get paid a little more, and get a little more respect. The school at Ft. Gordon was great, and I enjoyed my time there. The classes were exactly what I wanted (and needed) to learn about, even though I knew most of it by the time I got there.
There's a big problem with the Warrant Officer corps though, well at least on the Signal side of things. Everything technical is contracted out because The Army (tm) does not understand technology very well. And usually the contractors (in my experience anyway) have been lazy, rude, and incompetent. They know they are on a contract making fat money, and so they get lazy and slack off. It's a rare day to see a competent, respectful contractor. I have yet to run across one.
My time in the Army has been good so far - it's gotten me two college degrees and some great work experience in Iraq and Kuwait. I love the culture of the Army, the "get it done no matter what" attitude. But the problem with geeks and the military culture is that the Military mostly attracts the "gung-ho" type of personality, which geeks rarely are. And "gung-ho" personalities do not understand technology, or appreciate people who are good at it. In fact a lot of 'geeks' in the Army are people who converted from other MOS's (jobs) because they'd get promoted faster than being a Medic or Artilleryman. I went to WOBC with a man who had been a UH-60 pilot, and only jumped to the Signal side of things because he had been passed over twice for promotion, and was about to get kicked out of the Army.
I don't think the Army (or military in general) is purposely lassiez-faire towards it's geeks, but they just don't understand geek work. It doesn't matter how brilliant of a login script you write for the domain PC's, or how many intrusion attempts you shut down, or the awesome Snort rules you wrote -- no one understands what the hell you're talking about. "Snort rules?? You mean like drugs?" It's like explaining how subnetting works to a fourth-grader.
I think until the Army fully changes to the next generation (once this generation of old guys is out), and younger people who grew up around current technology are in power, we won't have the military reacting well to technology. For men who love guns, tanks and explosions (I'm one of them), computers just seem to get in the way and annoy everyone when they crash. And crash they do - running almost exclusively Microsoft products.
Final random thought: Whoever the Army hires to work on AKO (Army Knowledge Online, our web portal), and the fifty-thousand other random sites (GIBill, ATRRS, ATTRS, Train.army.mil, etc), are some of the worst coders I've seen. Even AKO, with that huge 'update' they put out recently, brings the site up to roughly 1998 coding standards. This is why socialized health care is such a bad idea - when people have a) Unlimited funding and b) No pressure to compete or improve (like commercial companies do), they slide into mediocrity and apathy. It's a fact of human existence - we need the pressure put on us to perform. That is when we do our best.
