[ale] OT: H1B: PLEASE DISREGARD EARLIER POSTS

[Jeff Hubbs]

After working for the Air Force and then the US Department of Energy for
12 years, I was desperate to get into something else.

Because at the time I had become *the* person for anything having to do
with Windows NT, I initially thought that that experience and capability
would be valuable in the private sector world.  I was frustrated to find
that the jobs that I found that sought WinNT experience were sysadmin
positions paying in the vicinity of $50K, very significantly less than
what I was making at the time.  

What took me a while to figure out was that after having already been in
a sysadmin position some years before, I had since moved on to more
senior activities involving oversight of IT contractors and help desk
operations, research/design/deployment of IT resources to meet certain
business goals across a number of functional units, cost analysis of
major IT purchases, and so forth and that the position that I really
needed on the outside did have a name:  Information Systems Manager or
similar.  

In the fall of 1998 I was able to get a job in Atlanta running a
satellite data center for an old-economy company - a customs brokerage
and import/export logistics firm headquartered in Buffalo.  In making
this leap, I went from quasi-supervisory to supervisory, Augusta to
Atlanta, and Government to private sector.  A substantial pay increase
accompanied the move, but my decision to take the job and the timing
thereof was poor for other reasons I won't get into here but suffice it
to say that the overall living conditions for me and my family were
worse.  

Before we could climb out of the rut I had dug, I was laid off 10 months
after starting the job.  Mostly, it was because of the company's
financial emergency it found itself in due to some Enron-like shady
accounting.  Four months of unemployment ensued (my wife had quit her
job that had paid equal to mine a few years before we moved to Atlanta
in order to raise our daughter) during which time my wife was diagnosed
with breast cancer for the first time (we're currently dealing with the
second time).  A few hundred resumes later, I was hired by an Indian
company in November 1999 and a month later we moved clear across town to
a rental house in Sandy Springs so as to do away with the hour-plus
commute (sometimes more than 2 hours in the afternoons).  That job
lasted roughly a year and a half before I was laid off again in August
2001.  9/11 was less than a month later.  My wife had started working
again right before I was laid off; she still had stitches in from her
fifth and last surgery from the first breast cancer bout when she
interviewed for a temp job with a Government contractor.  Then she was
able to get a permanent Government job and she was reinstated, i.e., was
able to more or less take up where she left off when she resigned
before.  

Meanwhile, what had used to be two pages of Computer/IT jobs in the AJC
dried up to about a column and it started to seem as though computers
had been a loser thing to get involved with (I'm still not convinced
it's not).  At my wife's urging, I agreed to work as a consultant to a
medical services company of her acquaintance to help them get Government
contracts (filed some paperwork to get them on a supplier's list;
arranged meetings with procurement officials).  I was able to get a
full-time job for six months in 2003 as a Government contractor (pay cut
of 40% from last perm job) but my principal work output consisted of
preparing and giving presentations on things like performance appraisal
issues instead of actual IT work.  That ended in August 2003 due to
sheer lack of work, and back to unemployment I went.  

Emboldened a bit by having done some freelance consulting, I went ahead
and formed an LLC for myself, did some "odd jobs," and since March I've
been working part time as a Government subcontractor.  I'm not expecting
that to last past the spring of next year, so I'm both looking for "real
jobs" and also trying to formulate plans for freelance work.

Part of my problem is that the jobs that I see posted are so specific
and numerous on product skills that I can't compete.  A great example is
that ridiculous posting on the ALE list from 12/13:  "The successful
candidate will have experience with most of the following skills: Perl,
Shell Script, UNIX (Solaris 8,9 -, AIX, HPUX-11), Veritas Volume
Manager, Veritas Cluster Server, Veritas Netbackup Veritas Netbkup
Oracle agents, Solstice Disk Suite, Remote Management tools for Windows,
Windows Automated Deployment Services (ADS), EMC Power Path, Netscape,
Apache, Iplanet, BEA WebLogic, Windows 2000/2003 Server and Linux...Only
those resumes reflecting all of the required skills will be
considered."  That's a load of bollocks and I think either the recruiter
or their client or both know it!  

The other problem that I'm having is that my more-or-less "dream job"
where I head up the computing and networking in a decent-sized,
respectable, stable company - i.e. IT Manager or Director - now pays
squat compared to what the title once earned:  $45-50K.  At that, what
are you supposed to pay your sysadmin(s), $35-40K?  I had a phone
interview with a place in NC that wanted an "everything guy" (run all of
the company's IT; no other staff) for I think $45K, and even when I
pointed out that some of the exact same stuff they needed done (make
printed reports from MS Access) were things that I had done when I was
making over 60K and that I have a friend who's basically doing sysadmin
(config Exchange; periodic nuke/pave, etc.) work in Norcross and was
making nearly $50, they were unmoved (they tried to attribute their low
pay to the difference between the Atlanta market and their market - I
reminded them that this was in an outlying suburb).

I'm also applying to Government jobs, which is a time-consuming and
almost always fruitless process.  I am plenty willing to move, since my
bright idea that my job choices would be far more open to me in metro
Atlanta in 1998 turned out to be a lot of hooey.

But, by and large, I see no good answer for myself; I just have to put
in hours and hours looking for work - and those are hours and hours that
I can't invoice.

Jeff