On Penny Arcade, Exploitation, and the Myth of the Do-Everything Rock Star

You're right, I'm not being charitable in my assumptions. I would edit it and trim it back a little, but I don't want to take away from your response.

To examine this more seriously:

Individually their requirements fit in the broader context of IT. However, taken as a whole the job post screams 'toxic environment', and 'setup for failure'. It's possible I'm entirely wrong, but the post throws off a lot of red flags. Such a long list of requirements and roles without one mention of decision making or authority. Not even one mention of responsibility. Most skilled IT people are comfortable meeting a high standard, but are wary of entering situations where they will be 24/7 solo on-call for variegated environments that they get no authority over.

The issue with the requirements isn't being oncall or managing projects, or travel, or attention to detail, or fexibility, or offensive environment. It's oncall AND projects AND travel AND details AND flexibility AND offensive environment WHILE cheap AND alone.

How would they fix it? How could this job post be better? Change the language to reflect more of a management position. Talk more about selecting and managing tech vendors, projects, strategies. Make it sound like they are looking for an IT Director for guidance who is not afraid to roll-up his sleeves. Right now it appears they are looking for a skilled slave to do it all.

Having been around many highly skilled IT teams, I can guarantee you that most senior IT people aren't filling multiple roles while being on-call for all of them.

EDIT: "The wifi at PAX Prime 2012 was unusable the majority of the time. How do you mitigate that?"

I'd reach out to my network and find someone who's already solved the problem of large scale wi-fi and rent them. Or contact a large wi-fi equipment provider and see if we could make an arrangement for equipment support/manpower in exchange for PAX floor space. The last thing I would do is ask the IT generalist who's been on-call for three months straight and is in the middle of updating the website. "Hey can you figure out convention wifi?"

"Annual Salary: Negotiable, but you should know up front we’re not a terribly money-motivated group. We’re more likely to spend less money on salary and invest that on making your day-to-day life at work better."

Don't ignore that second sentence. If you're interpreting this section as anything other than "shit pay", you're being wildly optimistic.

Ha! I think your law is basically a logical corollary of my law + SIWOTI syndrome.

> I don't regret the time I spent there, and I still help put out fires from time to time

What the...? Why would you do that?

Do you know any homeless or folks on SSDI in the US?

It's tricky getting SSDI when the problem is inobvious like debilitating pain from Trigeminal Neuralgia or Crohns Disease or anything behavioral, cases which - from the outside - look like you're just effort-averse. Even family and friends , it's difficult to watch someone manage their pain with pot and videogames or TV and not conclude they're they're just being deliberately useless and that you should withdraw support "for their own good".

People argue that if you can play games then you can do menial office work, but unskilled office labor pools generally don't tolerate you taking a ton of sick time because you need to spend all day curled in a ball crying, drugged to sleep for pain, or because you're pooping five times an hour. The job market is such that they can just hand your job to someone healthier, and they usually will without considering the labor law of their jurisdiction, you could challenge that but its probably a waste of time. If you can keep them, these jobs probably also don't include health coverage.

This is where the later phases of will ACA become valuable to you, but until then and otherwise (say if its opponents finally manage to kill it), if you have no money or health coverage its pretty fucking hard to get a diagnosis. For pain, if you can't pay much for a doctor you get to spend 90% of every appointment just trying to convince your doctors that you're not a junkie. For anything behavioral, that end of the care market seems to mostly either be a joke where they shrug and throw prescription samples at you or a nightmare where they try to hospitalize you.

Even with a diagnosis you are not likely to be deemed eligible. Then you get to argue your case which requires finding a litigator willing to bet you'll win and some years.

Some assistance you're just automatically not eligible for if you're attending school, with the idea that you'd instead use the financial aid systems specifically in place for that situation, not considering that maybe aren't eligible because your parents make too much, or they refuse to even file taxes so you can prove what they make, or even in the case that you're independent if past health issues affected your grade average too harshly.

Doing all of this yourself (because you have zero social support because friends and family all think you're just lazy or a druggie) with your condition is difficult to say the least.

Meanwhile you're vagrant because there's nothing in place to help you unless and until you win your case(s) for eligibility or wrongful termination, or for getting things stricken from your education record.

And that's if you're even fully educated on what your options for care are. Many people just don't know how to begin seeking free mental care, free clinics or that they could try to find a lawyer that would help them seek SSDI, some are homeless and have no phones internet or mail, some of them are single parents doing everything they can just to continue to have jobs, others have behavioral problems and wrongly perceive that these options will fail so can't generate the will to try them.

Sure, the US has nets, but they're not so big that you don't have to aim for them as you're falling.

I guess there's a logical position that you could hold that the people in those situations don't matter: if they can't even help themselves why should we help them, if it's impossible to distinguish them from lazy people then we shouldn't help them lest we increase opportunity for fraud, but I reserve the completely subjective opinion that such a position is terrible and irresponsible.