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Subject:Sort of Re: Posted Pay Ranges & Government Jobs From:<neilson -at- alltel -dot- net> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Wed, 1 Dec 2004 17:22:41 -0600
Eric Dunn wrote,
> I'd like to raise the BS flag ...
Sometimes the BS is imposed from above. One place, an
academic site with hefty DoD contracts, had to rank all
employees, and (if I remember correctly) reward only
the top few with raises, and fire the bottom n percent.
Needless to say, this can only go on so long until they
have to start getting rid of good staff, unless they
deliberately hire a few ringers to fill in the bottom.
This particular place however (sometimes described by
those who know it as a one-ohm resistor across the US
Treasury) is very good to work for, regardless of the
salary one gets, because of the top-notch scientific
staff who are there. So I never got a raise, but I got
to use Unix when it was just a baby, and the fledgeling
ARPAnet, too. (Yes, I remember having to wait for the
net to be rebooted, which was done by reading a paper
tape into an already very old PDP-1 computer at BBN.)
I also received a good education, at the hands of a
Very Difficult Person, in some of the fundamentals of
computer science, including the (then) recently discovered
semaphores known as P and V. Made me feel like an
idiot, but I learned, I learned.
So government jobs can offer much more than salary. Or
much less, if you get stuck somewhere that subscribes
to the culture of mediocrity.
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