Cyber Command Will Miss Friday's Operational Deadline 156
techinsider writes "The U.S. Cyber Command won't be fully operational by Friday's October 1st deadline. A major challenge appears to be staffing the command with qualified personnel, of which it will need over 1,000 skilled employees. General Alexander told Congress his leadership staff was in place but acknowledged there were challenges in bringing in people to the rest of the organization."
Re:Staff shortages (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Staff shortages (Score:3, Interesting)
The big exception is successful startups. Emphasis on the word "successful", because there are a lot of unsuccessful startups out there. And even then, you need to get in early.
One of the major flaws of corporate capitalism is that people who make a product are generally seen as less important (and thus less paid) than those who sell the product or tell other people to make or sell the product. It's exceedingly rare these days for someone to move from the proverbial factory floor to anything higher on the totem pole than the equivalent of senior foreman. In geek-land, those translate to techies' career path frequently blocked by de facto policy from getting past something like Senior Software Architect in a lot of corporations.
'Management positions are filled ...' (Score:5, Interesting)
Why would any self-respecting geek want to work in a place where there is no possibility of being management, and all the management is, self-admittedly, not 'qualified' to do their job?
I'm sorry, but I've never been able to respect a manager who could not have done my job, and has done in previous years. Now that doesn't mean everyone up to the CEO needs to be a programmer, very quickly managers stop being programmers and their day focuses on other things (read: meetings and bureaucracy).
So by my example, a dev manager should be a former programmer, his/her manager should have experience leading a team of tech people, his/her manager should have been a manager for other tech managers before, etc. In other words, each level should have experience doing the day-to-day job of the level below.
And what about career advancement - it sounds pretty lame when all the management positions are pre-filled, so the only way to move up the chain is for someone higher up to retire, or get dishonorably discharged (I assume the guys in management are career military, not doing a tour).
Re:Staff shortages (Score:3, Interesting)
One of the major flaws of corporate capitalism is that people who make a product are generally seen as less important (and thus less paid) than those who sell the product or tell other people to make or sell the product
This reminds me of a movie we watched a couple of days ago...a biopic on Coco Chanel [wikipedia.org]. In the film, there's this scene where there are dozens of women sitting there sewing purses, dresses, etc...and the woman playing Chanel says "This company is successful because of me! It's called C-H-A-N-E-L for a reason!".
Claiming responsibility for the company's success while saying nothing of the throngs of people actually putting together her products was simultaneously amusing and disheartening.
Offtopic: for anyone interested, this is the one I'm talking about [imdb.com]. It's pretty good.
Maybe if they paid closer to industry standard... (Score:4, Interesting)
most good IT people are to old for the army to get (Score:3, Interesting)
most good IT people are to old for the army to get in and do you want to start over at amry private pay as well?
Re:Staff shortages (Score:4, Interesting)
The root of the problem is that "something" is suppressing IT worker pay and that fewer people are interested in doing that sort of work for the rest of their lives. How did that happen? Just gotta follow it all back to see where it started. There was a time when IT was well paid. It could have stopped if the government took a firm stand on the H1B issue. It could also stop if the government interrupted the flow of foreign students here.
We have a serious problem with our final superior asset in that it is pretty much GONE already.
We don't have strong R&D because current business philosophies see it as a waste of money when this quarter's bottom line is at stake. The mentality of business is breaking the long-term outlook on business, employment and the general economy of the U.S. They managed to sell out the entire nation while the government who should have been preventing this was busy taking "contributions."
Re:Staff shortages (Score:5, Interesting)
I also find it hard to believe, with 10% unemployment, they can't find engineers/software people who are desperate for jobs.
National unemployment for Americans with a bachelor degree or higher is currently 4.6% [bls.gov]. Certainly there are plenty of unemployed engineers/software people out there, but not as many as you might expect.