This is the 32nd excerpt from the second book in the Defen series: BIT: Business Information Technology: Foundations, Infrastructure, and Culture
Note to readers: in reviewing this stuff myself I'm struck by both how much and how little has changed since 2002/3 (the date of this tour). I'm thinking this whole Wintel culture thing needs revision - and one of those revisions might be a second tour, focused on the situation in 2008/9. Comments on change would therefore be of particular interest.
The data center handles John's hiring for him and he has currently asked data center personnel management to screen candidates for three positions:
In all cases the job specification calls for a related university degree but more than half the incumbents have only high school educations with supplementary certification from a career college or privately operated technical training school. MCSE (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer) certification is a must-have for people to be considered and the typical candidate's resume will show several other certifications such as:
A typical resume
Certifications:
Technical Skills
- MCSE
- LCNAD - Lotus Certified Principal Application Developer
Lotus Script, Visual Basic 6.0, Java Script, HTML, ODBC, ASP Lotus Notes 4.o, Domino R5, Exchange 4.0, Internet Information Server 4.0, SQL Server 7.0 Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000 (Certified), TCPIP, Cisco.
Professional Experience
6/01 - present - Web Developer using IIS/ASP, at Western Mutual
- Developed successful e-commerce applications for secure client access.
- Used Visual Basic and Lotus Script to dynamically generate HTML.
- Used ODBC SQL queries and stored procedures to interface to AS/400
2/99 - 6/01 Lotus Notes Developer at Highway Recoveries Inc.
- Programmed Help Desk application utilizing Domino & Lotus Script.
- Solved Domino and Win2K server performance and stability issues.
- Assisted with planning a successful Notes/Win2K rollout to 500 users.
- Implemented a Point-of-Sale system to automated a part-time position.
9/97 - 2/99 LAN Administrator at the law firm of Gunnies & Charm
- Supported 8 Windows NT 4.0 servers on TCP/IP.
- Used Visual Basic 5.0 to develop a file transfer application.
- Maintained five MS-Exchange 4.0 servers.
- Used Performance Monitor to track server health.
- Responded to server-down and disaster recovery situations.
- Supported 15 staff on Excel and SQL-Server/Access issues.
Education:
Bachelor of Science. Major in Accounting, May 1996 - Trinity Technical College
MCSE certification, 1999, Clarkson Institute for Self-advancement
Some notes:
- These excerpts don't (usually) include footnotes and most illustrations have been dropped as simply too hard to insert correctly. (The wordpress html "editor" as used here enables a limited html subset and is implemented to force frustrations like the CPM line delimiters from MS-DOS).
- The feedback I'm looking for is what you guys do best: call me on mistakes, add thoughts/corrections on stuff I've missed or gotten wrong, and generally help make the thing better.
Notice that getting the facts right is particularly important for BIT - and that the length of the thing plus the complexity of the terminology and ideas introduced suggest that any explanatory anecdotes anyone may want to contribute could be valuable.
- When I make changes suggested in the comments, I make those changes only in the original, not in the excerpts reproduced here.