I work for a Fortune 500 company, and if I regularly brought our systems down even to install an update, I'd be polishing up my resume. In the private sector, people work weekends and overnights when shit goes down in production.
Likewise. My behind would be out the door faster than you could say "India Pale Ale" if my development, engineering, provisioning, and maintenance work was on par with Navy IT infra.
- The GS and SES (PhD required... please...) pay scales suck, which makes it difficult to attract and to retain requisite talent
- What you end up with are a pool of people who have a CISSP or related, and very little work experience. Why? Because, all you need for many security/IT govvie jobs is a certification. And, what do these people do? They stay forever and stagnate because they are unemployable in the private sector
- You could literally be a goat herder with a clearance and get a govvie IT job if you have a CISSP
- A multitude of ignorant, aging Navy civilians who are in the IT workforce who are not qualified
And as appealing as the public sector appears for the work hours and military-friendliness, things like this are why I don't go. Despite the ridiculous hours and deadline stress, working with very talented and motivated people is pretty nice.
not Navy related, but my old boss did this same thing. After a unfortunate series of events (maybe it was fortunate because he was a jerk) he no longer is employed with the company and I was asked to step-in to his spot. Guess what was the first thing I did, document the crap out of everything.
At my first group out of college,
nothing was documented. Everything was oral tradition, this being at a major engineering multinational. It was a surreal experience, especially since the companies/groups I interned with were very high-functioning. If you wanted to learn some particular process or workflow, someone had to sit down with you and explain it. Fortunately, the group's superiors took the opportunity of a layoff and companywide reorganization to dismantle the group and put people in different places, and I moved on to bigger and better things.
And yet the other services and much of government, which has nearly all of the same constraints and limitations, has IT services that are far better than the Navy's, admittedly a very low bar. . My colleagues in the Army and Air Force have nowhere near the amount of complaints related to IT as those of us who have to suffer through NMCI do and from what little I have seen over their shoulder of what they deal with is a fraction of the stupid NMCI is. The simple fact that a retired Navy reservist's link page remains the resource for much of the Navy Reserve to access Navy IT is a pathetically sad commentary on just how fucked up Navy IT is.
I'm convinced that this issue persists because our leadership doesn't have to deal with the day to day dysfunction that is NMCI, one of those 'thousand little cuts' that is added to the 'go' pile when folks are deciding whether or not to stay in the service.
Every time I speak with acquaintances and friends or others I come across who joined the Army or Air Force Reserve/National Guard directly about their experiences, it's a world apart on the administrative and technical side, which is not what I would have expected. They're baffled at what I've had to do just to make the ball roll and keep it rolling, while they knew nothing coming in, and were essentially ushered in and most things were more or less handled for them.
But it is perfectly sensible that they would be very competent at managing non-active components. The Army National Guard for example has more personnel than the active duty Navy, and largely comprises people who joined directly (not sure about the Army Reserve). They don't have the luxury of a SELRES that largely came off of active duty, nor fill in the cracks with watered-down programs (for officers at least).
