Oreo had a great time at the party last night.  He had a whole yard and house in which to run around freely and two dogs to play with.  The one collie was eleven and very aged so they could not play but was very friendly and looking for attention from everyone.  It is very sad seeing a sweet dog get so old.

Dudley was there, Katie’s dog, and he and Oreo spent a lot of time running around together.  Oreo does not often get wide open space so it was a nice change for him.  They played pretty well until some kabobs were given to the dogs and some territoriality came into play.  In a surprise move, Duds, who is close to three times Oreo’s size, and a little argument with Oreo and in a flash Oreo was flipped over on his back and panicking.  We had to pull them apart pretty quickly.  That was the end of the fun night for Oreo.  After that he just wanted to be held and to relax.

We had to sleep in a bit this morning just to make up for getting in so late last night.  It was around ten thirty when we finally got out of bed.  I did a little work in the office but only a tiny bit.  Today is my last official day with a contract so I figured that I should at least do something, even if it was only symbolic.

We found out this morning that the Mazda PR5 is not going to be purchased as we had hoped.  We have been waiting for the final approval of the purchase for two weeks, or so, thinking that everything was pretty much finalized and then today, in the midst of everything else, found out that they weren’t actually interested in it.  Of course, bolstering my already hearty dislike for people’s concepts of “vacations”, we would have known this quite some time ago but people went “on vacation” and stopped communicating to the outside world – ignoring obligations because somehow some parts of society have approved the idea of a “vacation” as exempting the vacationers not only from their work obligations but from their personal ones as well.

I think that this concept is probably quite old.  When I was a child (and obviously any time before that) going on a vacation (one that involved travel, at least) meant going to a remote location where postal mail and telephones were impossible to get or unreasonably expensive for anything less than a full emergency.  But that world has past and today with the Internet, mobile phones, BlackBerries, etc. you are no less accessible while in a remote location than when sitting in your living room.  Today, having a telephone that doesn’t reach you everywhere actually costs you more, usually, than one that does not reach you everywhere.

Basically, we live in a world when the traditional concept of escapism in vacations is no longer an intrinsic feature of travel but now requires active, intentional ingnorance (in the tradition, true meaning of the word as a derivitive of the word ignore.)  You have to ignore people trying to reach you.  You have to avoid responding to people.  It is a completely different animal these days.  And this phenominon is not new.  Mobile phones have been making this shift occur since the early 1990s and the Internet has been changing it since the late 1990s.  It has been roughly eight years now, a decently long time, that there has been little to no excuse to ever be out of reach for more than half a day or less.  And now that most people use instant messaging and text messaging via mobile devices all day long any breach in ongoing communications because of a “vacation” has to be completely intentional.

I am not suggesting that people never stop working and never take a break from work.  Moreso I am saying that personal responsibilities are not curtailed in any way by a claim of “vacationing” or being out of town.  People have traditional used the idea of vacationing as a way to avoid responsibilities and communications because it was a difficult claim to dispute.  No one would be able to know if you were truly stuck in a situation without communications or not.  Today that is not true and there are so many, free or nominal cost communications modes and so little change between home, office and hotel in relation to those modes that not responding to responsibilities while away is exactly the same as not responding to them when standing face to face with someone.

If you want some sympathy from me in reference to you being helplessly out of reach you had better be backpacking through Kyrgystan and even there you will likely have intermittent phone and Internet access.  There are very, very few places left on earth where you are truly out of touch and fewer and fewer people who are comfortable being in those situations.  Most people today desperately want to keep in contact via email, phone, web, etc.  Recently I even had a conversation with my friend David while he was hanging out in a cafe in Tunisia.  He was just checking up on his email, FaceBook, etc.  It’s far more interesting, I think, vacationing in places when you can still communicate to the outside world instead of just “disappearing” for a few days and then returning with some pictures.

All of that aside, we are rather happy that we are not selling the car as we think that we will most likely want to have it once the baby arrives in November.  We need a car that can haul some things and will easily fit the baby’s car seat, Oreo, both of us and the baby’s things.  The PR5 also gets good gas mileage and has amazing snow tires.  It just had a bit of work done to it and has been sitting all summer not getting any older so its value to us is probably much higher than its street value and we had been planning on selling it at rather a bargain.  So, other than a certain desperation for cash right at the moment because of the house, we would prefer to hold on to the car.

My afternoon was spent writing a very large BASH script that will take our newly built Castile Christian Academy workstations and turn them into fully ready desktops.  It has to remove all of the unnecessary and inappropriate packages, change repositories, add in needed educational packages, change system files, detect the system’s identity and do all of our standard customizations.  It is rather involved.

I got some word, finally, from the consulting firm this afternoon but it wasn’t encouraging.  Basically, they claim that their hands are tied and they have no contracts to protect them.  It would appear that doing the “right thing” is way too much effort and so instead they see me as a scape goat and are just passing the cuts on to me… including massive monetary gains for themselves.  The original cut was just 7.5% but it escalated to 15.73% by the time that it reached me.  That means that while there was a cut (which was at their discretion and they opted to take) at the beginning I am taking more of a cut than anyone and the only person losing here is me.

In fact, everyone else is making a fortune on the deal – coming completely out of my pockets.  In addition, I took the furlough earlier in the year which was an additional 3.5% or so.  So my total cut, between March and August comes to 19.5%!!  This is insane.  And they wonder why I won’t even discuss the possibility of accepting the cut.  To make things even more stressful I have a very large amount of comp time and 401K money on the line that could very easily be taken away.  At least things look promising to have my contract moved to another pass-through vendor, but who knows what all impacts there could be along the way.  I think I need ulcer medication

For dinner we ordered in Brazilian Pizza again.  It was awesome.  We ate pizza and watched two episodes of Frasier.  We are on the third season still, I think.

The weather is cooler today than it has been in a while so we decided to open the windows and let some fresh air into the apartment.  The apartment has gotten musty and stale.  The air conditioning units did not get cleaned like they are supposed to be because our bed takes up the entire room and there was no way to clear space to do the cleaning.  Or at least we imagine that that is the reason.  Nothing was said to us so we are giving the building the benefit of the doubt that the cleaning process even occurred.  It might easily have not taken place at all.

I was doing some shopping on eBay and discovered an amazing price on a high effeciency Hewlett-Packard DL145 G3 rack mount AMD Opteron based server.  It even comes with the rack mounting kit which is nice.

Andy called and we talked for an hour or so this evening.  Then it was time to walk Oreo, wrap up SGL, do a little work for the office (in the minutes running up to the end of my contract), answer emails, update Twitter and head off for bed.

No wonder it is hard for me to ever actually make it to bed!

This coming Saturday, Dominica and I have Nadine and Clarence’s wedding to attend.  So we will be gone for most of the day.  Every moment that we are not gone I am scheduled to be working – although that is obviously in some question at this point.

Once again I am backed up on email.  One busy day and everything falls apart.  It took me days last time to get caught up on all of the mail.  It comes in so quickly and so much of it is something that I need to keep for one reason or another.  I find the constant flow of it to be pretty frustrating.  Even with all of the diligence that I put in attempting to read everything that pertains to me the levels of SPAM that we have – internal SPAM that is, not external – completely overwhelms us and forces us to automate huge swaths of email reception so it is extremely easy to miss something.  I must spend two hours per day just managing the email.

I had a very busy morning with tons of requests coming in even before my morning started and while I was on the train in to Manhattan.  My entire morning was spent just completing incoming requests as quickly as I could.  Very draining.  I am going to be doing a lot of catch-up work tomorrow – if just to get my mailbox back to a state in which I can manage to take care of people without missing critical things!

For lunch, Katie and I went out to Financier Patisserie on Stone.  It’s Friday so that sandwich of the day is the hot smoked salmon and Gruyeres which is amazing along with their crap quiche which I have not had an opportunity to try before.  Lunch was excellent although it is always so crowded down on that part of Stone – it can be rather uncomfortable to attempt to eat there.

My real shock of the day came in the early afternoon when my consulting firm called me to tell me that not only was I going to receive an “out of the blue” paycut but that it was going to be 15.27% and that it was effective immediately – starting Monday morning (today is Friday.)  I was originally told, by my consulting firm, some month or two ago that there was a cut but that I exempt from it and not to worry.  This news, apparently, is actually the news that caused this disaster to happen.

So my day went from busy to insanely stressful in a moment.  No warning at all that something like this was going to happen.  Blissfully going through my day thinking that everything was great and then “blam”, humongous paycut and a hearty muhahahaha!

Most of my afternoon, somewhat obviously, was spent panicking about what was happening with my pay and my job and my consulting firm.  What a mess.  I finally reached my boss out on Long Island and was able to talk to him and then administration and the staffing department.  The company for which I work was not happy to find out that I was getting  a massive paycut, without warning and for no reason.  Their recommendation to me, that I had also come up with on my own, was simply to not accept the new offer.  On Monday morning, in theory, there will be some serious renegotiations and very likely a change of consulting firms.  We are going to see.

So, somewhat nerve-wracking, I am officially unemployed this weekend.  Monday morning is going to be interesting.  The company at which I work is thinking that things will be okay – but it is still stressful as there are so many variables and changes and potentially bad things that can happen.  For example, this could really impact the 401K that I have been investing into as I am not completely vested yet.  I hate that companies can take away your vestment simply by lowering your rate or firing you to protect themselves.

I was at work until seven this evening.  This is going to be a long weekend as we wait to see what will happen come Monday.  I hate that so much of my career involves major disasters in the eleventh hour and then having to wait while no one is available to see what is happening.  Completely inappropriately, my manager at the consulting firm is both on vacation all next week and decided to just leave in the middle of the afternoon so that I had no one to reach.  I reached out to her backup manager to whom important things are supposed to go when she is not available and that person’s out of office email message said that they were on vacation and that people who needed them needed to speak to the person that I tried the first time!  Circular out of office hand-offs.  How professional.  Argh.

This has been an ongoing situation for me over the years.  I cannot count anymore how many times I have been given incomplete information or have received major changes in plans or have gotten disasterous news on a Friday afternoon (I seriously believe now that this is planned so that people don’t have to “deal with it”) and then absolutely anyone who could be involved leaves the office early and hides.  This has often occurred when work scheduled for a Monday morning gets cancelled and no one wants to admit that they never had a contract for the work.  It is very common.  A consulting firm should never have a circumstance where people are not available over the weekend.  I even left a voicemail for the entire consulting office, before five o’clock which is well before the end of the working day, for just anyone to call me back as it was an emergency and not one person bothered to contact me knowing that I had an emergency and that both of my managers decided to stop working today.

Something that “non-contractors” seem to forget is that in “business time”, a Friday night and a Monday morning touch each other.  There is no work over the weekend.  Not real work anyway.  There is no HR, staffing, managers, etc.  If something is left unresolved on a Friday night that means that it is unresolved over the weekend and on Monday morning.  Did my consulting firm really forget that when they said that Monday morning I had a new rate that that meant that it had to be completely dealt with before I left the office today or else we had no resolution and no contract on Monday morning?  It isn’t like they can get into the office (or will bother to go into the office) early on Monday, contact me before I am supposed to start work and make a deal with the company at which I work and coordinate with the “pass-through” consulting firm all before I start needing to work around seven in the morning!  They aren’t prepared to deal with this situation in any way.  They just run home, stick their collective fingers into their proverbial ears and go “la la la la – I can’t hear you” and hope that the situation resolves itself, magically, without their intervention.

Why does every company find it so important to make going to work everyday and doing a good job incredibly stressful?  It takes real effort to make things have this much stress.  This doesn’t happen naturally.  It took a minimum of four or five people at my lowest level consulting firm alone completely failing to do their jobs to get us into this situation and they aren’t even the company that initiated the whole problem!  It took a lot of screwing up to get here.  How come all of those people aren’t getting major paycuts?  I put in a lot of effort this afternoon trying to find a way to keep my job.  Apparently neither of the consulting firms cares whatsoever if they lose me as a consultant (and, as we approach the end of day – perhaps lose the company at which I work as a customer.)

It’s no wonder people go out drinking so often!

It was after eight when I finally got home to Newark.  When there is this much stress, though, it isn’t fun going home.  You want to stay in the office and get things fixed.  You want resolution.  That’s what makes me the most upset.  That so many people can just knock off for the weekend because it doesn’t directly affect them is outrageous.

So I got home but it is pretty hard to relax on weekends like this.  Ryan came up from downstairs and we ordered in Brazilian Pizza from a place the Dominica and I had never heard of before.  The pizza was amazing.  Min and I got a corn and cheese pizza which was delicious and we all shared a chocolate and cheese pizza for dessert which, sounds awful, but was amazingly good.  Mozzarella, chocolate, cherries and cinnamon!  We will be ordering from this place a lot.  They have like fifty different pizzas.

It was around midnight before we actually got to bed.  Busy day tomorrow.  Working all day and then going to Katie’s house on the Hudson for a riverfront party in the evening.

I was pretty tired when I pulled myself out of bed at six thirty this morning considering the fact that I did not fall asleep until sometime after one in the morning.  I am covering the early morning shift today for someone at work so it is just this one day this week.  It fit perfectly into my schedule to cover this shift today except that I had not planned on working so late last night.  So today I am very tired, but that really isn’t anything new.

Tomorrow is 08-08-08.  Just interesting.  In just over three years we will have 11-11-11 which is the coolest.  That is, if a date can every be cool based on the recurrence of numerals within it.  It is on the boundary of cool at the very best, I think.

My morning was incredibly busy as I worked on the same project that had kept me up so late last night.  I have been determined to get to the root cause of this major issue that we have had at the office.  It has been going on for two or three months and has caused countless issues and I would be so happy to have it resolved.  Not just for the sake of getting it resolved but also for the opportunity to show up the “escalation” people who are supposed to have been able to fix this for us quite easily but have been unable to even grasp the core of the issue after two months with it.  This is my first serious bought with the problem but it is a tough one indeed.

By mid morning I actually had the solution to the issue and was quite gleeful indeed.  What a relief if was to figure that mystery out, and quite a rush as well.  This has been plaguing all of us for quite some time.  It is quite the feather in our administration team’s caps as well as the engineering team who claim to be our next level of escalation have been completely lost in this issue and unable to come up with a single clue.

Not one hour after completely embarrassing the engineering team, again (first time was two months ago, then someone else on my team showed them up pretty bad yesterday, then again this morning) their manager called me to tell me that they had decided not to offer me a position on their team.  Ha ha.  Talk about being a soar loser.

It is sad, of course, to not be offered a position for which you interview.  In this case, though, it is a bit embarrassing to be turned down by a team that so conspicuously can’t do their own jobs and need me to do it for them as it is!  The issues of the last few days were nothing compared to the issue that I resolved for them a few months back and that issue did not involve a “problem” that they could not solve but a massive architectural disaster that they had caused.

Oh well.  After this morning it would have been embarrassing to have gone to work there anyway.  People that I work with, that I really respect, have no respect for this team and would not be at all impressed if I was to switch over there.  In hindsight (with the wine of sour grapes, of course) staying exactly where I am seems like the far better decision anyway.  I am thankful, in some ways, that the decision was not really mine to make as I was far more likely to make a poor one.

Most of my evening was spent supporting Jeremy remotely as he worked to install a dozen computers at dad’s house with OpenSUSE 11 Linux.  It is actually a rather challenging project because the computers are so old with the slowest being a Celeron 433 and the fastest being a few Pentium III 1GHz and several different speeds in between.  Anything without a PC133 memory interface is being considered “obsolete” and will not be used for installation at the school.  Even a PIII 667 will do the trick – it is amazing how much performance one can eek from a Pentium 3 with enough PC133 memory.  But fall back to the older memory systems and the performance is just too slow, in my opinion, for desktop use.  The PIII 667/133 has been my “drop dead line” for desktops for six years at least.  That machine had just enough performance to make it the longest lived useful desktop platform of which I know.  These days, having the 1GHz machine is quite noticably better, however, and we are trying to get as many of those installed as possible.

I worked the early evening with Jeremy on the installs and then spent the late evening writing a script that can be run against the machines to take them from the raw install state to a finished product.  I am used to using RPM and YUM on Linux but now I am automating with Zypper which is similar to YUM but a little different.

I got to bed at a reasonable hour and listened to a little more of “Shadow fo the Silk Road.”  I am now halfway through the book.

If you need more cool stuff, check out the face on this girl after performing a pretty incredible landing into a pond.

The categories here are separated by duty and represent the basic building blocks of the IT professions and disciplines. By no means is this meant to be representative of all job roles and career paths available to an aspiring IT professional or hobbyist but to provide some structure to make target careers less ephemeral. In the real world few, if any, IT professionals do the work of only a single job role without venturing outside its strict boundaries if such boundaries can even be argued to exist. In extremely large IT departments (those over 10,000 IT professionals) will often stick very strictly to descriptions such as these but small departments (say of only 10 IT professionals) may lump almost all skills into just two or three overarching job descriptions.

Programming: Of all professional areas within Information Technology the area of programming is surely the most well known to people outside of the profession. Programmers can work in numerous different technology areas, specialize in many different ways and can work with many different languages and platforms. Programming is often the area of IT that draws people into the field. Programming, more than any other IT discipline, is easy for people to begin learning early and is very accessible.

Programming, or coding, involves the writing of computer programs which can range quite significantly and job titles vary dramatically as the job descriptions begin to differ. Beginning professionals on the programming path are often just termed “programmers” and can expect to do programming projects that involve tiny pieces of larger systems. Programmers are almost always working on teams of programmers but can potentially live very solitary existences if such is desired. Programming professions allow for a very wide array of working environments. Programmers are more well suited to working flexible hours and from remote locations or “work from home” due to the nature of many programming projects.

As programmers progress along their career paths they can move up to positions like software developer, software engineer and software architect. Specialization within the programming realm can include system programming (working close to the hardware – highly technical), user interface programming (working closer to the end user experience – generally less technical and more creative and involved in the “human element”), database programmer, web application programmer, etc. Programming fields lend themselves to crossing into software design and management roles as well.

Systems Analysis and Design: Programmers may write software but systems analysts design it. Often the two roles are combined in what is called a “programmer analyst” as the roles are so closely identified. A systems analyst’s role is to define requirements and high level design for an application or program. Programmers are responsible with the low level design. A good analyst will have a very good understanding of programming, developer’s tools, architecture and more. It is a broad discipline that often involves a lot of customer or client interaction and the ability to translate requirements from clients outside of the IT field into useful requirements for design and for the programmers.

Systems Analysis is almost a management discipline and analysts will often cross that boundary many times during their careers. It is an exceedingly creative part of the IT field requiring a lot of critical thinking and “outside the box” contemplation skills.

Project Management: Any area of IT can have project management involved with it but this almost always applies to software project management or system project management. IT departments that include any number or programmers and possibly analysts will logically be charged with developing software. Project Managers oversee this process. Technical project management is generally closer to being a management discipline than an IT discipline but many PMs are highly technical and come from the core IT ranks as IT project management is so varied and different from project management in other areas such as engineering.

Hardware Support: Hardware support comes in two basic flavours – desktop hardware (which includes laptops and other commodity end user items) and server or datacenter support. Hardware techs range from consumer desktop support personnel that you will encounter at stores like CompUSA and BestBuy to server technicians working in the datacenters working with multi-million dollar hardware. the range is rather broad. Because desktop hardware has become so commonly known the “computer store” techs are generally not considered to be IT professionals any more than a car salesman would be considered a mechanic or a car designer. Sometimes a store tech job can provide leverage into the field but generally this is not the case. The technologies that are used in consumer PCs is enough different from enterprise business systems that the skills are generally not useful across the divide.

Some large companies maintain a staff of hardware technicians who work on desktop and laptop level hardware. Desktop class technicians are so identified with the CompTIA A+ certification that often times these job roles may be termed “A+ Techs”. This is generally a path towards the server technician positions. Server technicians need to be familiar with much more complicated and varied hardware and often work in large datacenters where there is little or no direct customer interactions. While desktop techs often interact to some degree with end users and desktop support technicians, server technicians generally interface only with systems administrators.

Networking: One of the core skill areas in IT is networking and communications. Networking is a relatively new discipline within the industry as computers used to exist primarily as stand-alone devices whether in homes or in business. But over the last few decades the idea of computers that are not a part of a larger network has gone from commonplace to practically unthinkable. Today even the most basic home computer is purchased to be an Internet connection node and not for the innate capabilities of the computer itself. Because of this networking has exploded into a very large, core discipline needing many qualified professional to fill out its ranks. Networking jobs generally fall into a few basic categories: network technician, network administrator and network engineer.

As you can guess from the job role names a technician’s general role is to deal with mostly “field” networking issues which often involves a lot of leg work, is more likely than other positions to place you in a remote office and often involves working with smaller categories of networking equipment but it is a stepping stone to high level networking positions. The network administrator is the position responsible for managing and running the day to day operations of the corporate network. Generally the network administrator is the last word in the company’s network operations. This can be a very senior position and while the job titles are few the discipline’s long term career growth is solid. A network engineer’s job would be to design a network. Often administrators and engineers are the same people but in large companies these roles are separated with engineers generally having a broader knowledge of network solutions and vendors and administrators having a more thorough knowledge of low level tuning and configuration of the equipment used at that time.

Systems: Possibly the largest of all IT disciplines is that of systems. The concept of systems is so large that it is difficult to define in any meaningful way and is often conceptualized as several sub-disciplines to make it easier to quantify. The basics are that the “systems discipline” involves any basic management of computer “systems”. This can mean management of end-user resources like desktops, laptops, PDAs, etc. as well as shared resources like servers. Generally a “systems” professional will work primarily with the computer’s operating system but this qualification is hazy at best. Any real work systems professional will have much overlap with other areas but core functionalities are generally more well defined.

Desktop and Deskside Support: The most common sub-discipline within systems is desktop support. This role is very difficult to separate from that of “Helpdesk” although the later is less of a distinct discipline but more of a delivery method of support. Most businesses separate helpdesk into a unified function that crosses many discipline boundaries.

Desktop Support involves the direct management of personal computers whether they are Windows, Mac, Linux, etc. A desktop technician will often work either directly with an end-users workstation or remotely via remote control technologies to help keep workstation resources working correctly, adding new software, etc. Desktop administration often deals with large numbers of desktop resources and generally handles password and account issues, large scale desktop changes, migrations, etc.

While desktop job descriptions are generally rather lean the field is actually extremely large. Almost every business requires a regular host of support personnel to keep the non-IT staff working on a day to day basis and will additionally utilize contract desktop support staff to augment internal resources as often “project” work will require far more people than a company can normally keep on staff. Many IT professionals who intend to enter almost any of the other disciplines will start their careers in the desktop support realm as it has the lowest “barrier to entry” into the field. But don’t be fooled. Just because it is easy to get into the beginning desktop support ranks there are many long term career opportunities within this field as well. Many professionals have long and rewarding careers without even leaving the desktop support arena.

In some large organizations there might even be a dedicated desktop engineering role specifically for those function of designing the operating system and application profile for corporate desktops. This position is almost always included in other job roles but can, potentially, exist on its own.

Server Administration and Engineering: The most visible and well known career path under the systems umbrella is that of server administration and its nature sibling, server engineering. These roles are so common that almost all businesses simply refer to them as system administration and system engineering.

Server support roles are involved with the designing, building (from a software perspective,) securing, deploying and managing the server resources of an organization. These servers come in a wide variety of types from Windows, Linux and Netware operating systems to application, database, web and email functions. Server support is a very large job role category that often spans entire careers from intern to retirement. This is one of the largest senior level career categories and is often a “target” career for people entering the IT field.

Pure server support roles as can be found in very large companies may be very strictly limited to supporting just the operating system and core functionality of a server. More often server system administrators will be involved in the running of extended functionality such as email, web, database and other software that is tied to the server.

Application Support: In large organizations when the system support role is strictly limited to the server’s operating system you will find dedicated application support personnel who generally specialize in a single application (such as Microsoft Exchange) or in a category of applications (such as Email) or in a suite of applications (such as Microsoft BackOffice including applications like Exchange, SharePoint, LiveCommunications Server, Project Server, etc.) More often you will find mixed server and application specialist who specialize on a particular platform and application combination such as iPlanet on Solaris or Apache on Linux, etc. Management Information Systems applications such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or Customer Resource Management (CRM) are common dedicated application areas as well.

Many companies have myriad internal applications that have been developed or customized either in house or through a consulting agreement and are considered to be a competitive advantage for the organization. These unique applications often require support as would any commercially purchased off the shelf application. In addition to the obvious role of application administration the role of application support is also common in large corporate entities. This is often called “operations” as this role functions almost as an organizational nerve center.

Database Administration: Known as a DBA, a database administrator is a special category of application administrator that is dedicated to the database technologies. Databases (such as Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, Sybase, MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc.) are such a critical, popular, important and unique application that the field is considered to be its own area. There are many skills unique to the DBA profession that are not used or not widely used outside of database administration.

Database Designer: In a role somewhat related to both systems analysis and programming is that of database designer. A database designer’s job role is to work with application designers and analysts to design the database portion of an application. Databases are extremely complex types of software that generally require careful management and tuning and individual databases require detailed design which can be a significant portion of the design of an application.

Web Designer: Unlike the web application developer which is a popular programming job role a web designer fulfills the very popular function of designing web pages themselves. This is often considered to be a fringe IT job role because it is equally related to publishing, marketing and other, non-IT disciplines but because a truly qualified web designer needs a to be very skilled technically it is, in my opinion, a true IT discipline. Web designers get probably more opportunity for artistic creativity than any other IT activity. Often web designers will slowly more into programming to enhance their skill sets and will begin to become user interface specialized web application developers. But the leap from non-programming web design to web application development is a large one not to be undertaken casually. It is truly a change of discipline but between two disciplines that are closely tied together. Web design is by far the most prominent IT discipline to make use of traditional artistic abilities.

Security: While almost every job role needs to make security a part of their own discipline the enterprise has a place for overarching security personnel as well. IT, because of its ties to the company’s most valuable non-people assets – data, is integrally tied to security. The role permeates the field and is broad in its implications. Security professionals must be aware of everything from physical security, system security, network security, database security, programming methods, etc. In today’s IT professional realm security has become an extremely hot topic and it is very likely to remain so indefinitely.

Help Desk: This task is often placed in its own category because of the nature of the position. Help desk generally refers to the job role of the technical support call center. Help desk roles generally range from customer application support to remote desktop support. A help desk and an operations center will often be paired together or combined into one entity. Using current remote desktop management technologies such as RDP the modern helpdesk has taken on many of the job functions previously covered by deskside support. As networks become more stable and power powerful and as desktop management becomes more ubiquitous and far reaching the abilities for the help desk to cover most day to day support functions increases. Often the helpdesk is used as an aggregation resource to provide a single point of contact for any needs originating from an non-IT end user.

LAN Administration: This mostly deprecated term was once popular for referring to the small and medium business combined job role of deskside and server administrator along with network technician. LAN Administrators were often required to be “jack of all trades” functioning as a single point of resolution for all “computer” problems in small businesses. Often this meant constant trips to user’s desks and wrangling with tiny mixed user server and network closets. As IT advances this role is becoming less popular but is likely to continue in smaller companies for some time. The term LAN refers to the “Local Area Network” and was meant to suggest that the administrator was responsible for all machines connected to and including the office’s network. LAN Administrators also have a tendency to occur at remote, branch office locations where a single person can satisfy almost all local IT needs and additional needs can be handled via helpdesk or remote administration.

Storage Administration: One of the newest professional areas now widely available as a specialty within IT is that of storage management.  Over the last several years new and highly specific storage technologies have emerged and have become a mainstay in the corporate technology environment.  These technologies are, to some degree, unique to storage dealing with large and fast storage hardware as well as network technologies adapted for dedicated use in the storage space.  Storage results in generally being a blend of systems, networking and a little server level hardware support.  This is a young and growing area within IT but definitely here to stay.