Alaskan here - this is what I’m most afraid of. I can’t tell you how many coworkers (who are conservative) have bitched and moaned about how “That’s the only reason Peltola [D] won!”

It’s extremely evident that they simply don’t understand the system, nor do they want to. They’ve latched onto it as “the thing that made their pick lose” and so it must die.

OpenSUSE TW KDE supremacy!

Ah…yeah, whoops 😅. IT & Military definitely love their acronyms!

But you’ve got it pretty much spot on! Just keep an eye out for the various companies that are winning defense contracts; I usually keep an eye out on this site to see what’s going on out there: https://news.clearancejobs.com/category/defense-contracts/

Once you find one you’re interested in, the job listing will usually tell you it requires a certain level of clearance. Depending on the job, some will expect you to already have said clearance, but most will not. The company will apply for your clearance on your behalf, referencing the contract that you’ve been hired for. Then you get to go through the extremely fun process of a 30+ page background check, where you get to go through the last ten years of your life. Where you lived, who knew you at those addresses, where you’ve been out of the country, jobs you’ve held, etc. The very first one I did was in my early 20’s, so going back 10 years I was filling in my parents address when I was still in high school! It’s really not that bad, but they definitely ask a lot of off-the-wall stuff.

You’ll usually get an “interim” clearance a few months after you apply, which will allow you to do your work, but you’ll get your final clearance after about a year or so (assuming everything checks out.) Once you’ve got it, you keep it for 5 years, and it’ll automatically be renewed as long as your job requires it, and it can be transferred between companies if they require you to have a clearance.

Now that does not shock me in the least. The contract I worked for the USAF was to provide IT services.

You know how many usable SOPs or process guides they had available to train us with? None. Not a single one. We recreated each and every process after having to fumble through it ourselves.

There’s so much transition in the USAF that unless you have a civilian or contractor working alongside the uniformed workers, it only takes like one or two PCS cycles until there’s not a single person left that remembers the processes unless they’re written down in a detailed SOP (that is updated regularly.)

I guarantee she had access lol. Getting access to a flight line is not as difficult as you’re making it out to be.

If her job duties included…you know, being on the flight line (as it sounds like her contract absolutely was,) all she had to do was get the SMO to verify her clearance, verify her job duties, assign her a RAB, and she’s good to go. Guaranteed she had all of the correct clearances and authorizations.

If you’ve got access to the area, nobody is going to follow you around and “keep track of everyone.”

I know this because I had all of this access as a civilian contractor when working on a military installation.

I feel you fellow IT brother/sister!

The IT world is chock-full of this garbage, and all it really forces people to do is A. Provide lesser service so that it “takes longer”, inflating their time metrics, and B. Causes people to make shit up, or submit their own BS tickets to make it look like they’re doing stuff to justify their existence.

Ultimately holding people to a metric-based system like this leads to worse service, and make people hate their jobs.

The job I had before my current one, I was site lead for Field Services. Luckily we were sort of a start up/experimental program, so the technician metrics weren’t tracked at all. MAN it was nice. Nobody felt stressed out needing to justify every second of their day, they wound up doing the work in an appropriate amount of time because it didn’t matter how long an individual took (be that long, or short). We only had an SLA to meet for the customer, which was easily hit.

I even took it a step further and didn’t really pay much heed to the corporate timekeeping rules… If someone needed to run an errand or “telework” for a day; fine by me. The company didn’t give anyone sick time, or enough time in general, OR a big enough salary, so they can eat my whole ass. Lo and behold, our section had the lowest MTTR, and highest amount of tickets closed, all with 100% SLA met. Crazy what you can achieve when you treat people like adults and actual human beings instead of soulless automatons.

Link for the lazy: https://aersf.com/products/city-pack-pro

Hmmmm, this coincides with the shutdown of Tachiyomi…

WHAT IS A MAN? A MISERABLE LITTLE PILE OF SECRETS! BUT ENOUGH TALK - HAVE AT YOU!

Technically our sun isn’t big enough to explode. It will expand though!

Definitely no arguments there!

I think a lot of middle managers get a small taste of power, and at that point take on the “corporate drone” personality, and start parroting the corporate agenda as well as wanting to directly micromanage their employees (can’t do that if they’re not there.)

“Stakeholders this, we’re here to make the company money that, yada yada yada”

The thing is that the reason corporate wants people back to the office is that these companies have put so much money into these office buildings, and if they don’t get their workers back to the office, then that equals a loss! Can’t have that! They can’t sell the buildings off either since the housing/commercial building market is trashed right now, so again they’d be taking a huge loss.

So even with all of the benefits of WFH to people’s work/life balance, mental wellbeing, and productivity, the company is losing some X amount of money, and that’s what they really care about.

I do not WFH and unabashedly eat breakfast at my desk every single day lol.

Not a single person has said a word to me, and my direct supervisor and their supervisor have both seen me doing it. Not a word.

My philosophy has always been - and I’ve told the employees who work under me many times - as long as you complete the tasks assigned to you, and are performing the role that you were hired for, I don’t particularly care what you’re doing in the interim (as long as it’s not something that is explicitly against the Code of Conduct). Giving people a little breathing room, and, ya know, treating them like human beings instead of soulless automatons, goes a long way. My team is generally more productive, and is nearly always the front runner for task resolution times compared to the other offices.