Chris Hocking
Get involved and share your knowlege. You know more than me and i know more than you. Lets know the same!
Thursday 27 December 2007, 5:33 PM
Problem with governments IT future
One way in which they could do this is to have a government academy where they would take the best performers in colleges such as mine and fund them to use them for the future.
Take myself for example I work full time and go to university to further my career in IT. I pay £3000 a year plus the cost of living. Yet with current education the government will happily pay for an idiot to do a course they are going to fail or never take anything onboard from, rendering said person un employable. But they are happy to do this and then pay them benefits for the rest of their adult life. Someone like me who has the ability is trodden on. If there were such an academy where you received accommodation and learning and then had to work for the government for say six years they would have a chance in the long term.
PreviousComments on this post
You sound like a motivated and intelligent person .. backed up by your actions, your age and your current qualifications. I am rather more ancient than you and have worked around government IT quite a few times. Believe me. You do NOT want to work for them .. in any capacity.
I now run my own small company and I simply do not do work for government, government agencies or indeed mega-corps. I work for SMEs and SMEs only. The first and most crucial reason is that I want to be paid for the work I do in the same year that I did it. The above routinely leave invoices to "Mature" (sic) for 9 months or more. The second reason is that they are not run as technical departments. The actual physics and realities of thing are all but irrelevant. They stick to the principle of "The Policy is xxx so that is reality".
An example: The policy of this one department was that the software they used never created duplicate customer records in the database. This had been stated at a senior management meeting and was therefore the truth. Everyone in the department then took this as gospel and inviolate despite the daily evidence to the contrary. The behaviour of the rest of the department when the database was shown to have produced a duplicate would get thrown out as a plot element in a TV sitcom. It drove me out. I couldn't take the almost violent rejection of reality in favour of departmental policy .. and bear in mind, this is the rule rather than the exception.
Believe me. Stick to your guns. Soak up everything you can. Get a job with a small but wide ranging IT shop with a few decent admins on board. Listen learn and work hard. Above all, avoid the government where humanly possible. They are bad for your health.
