Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips Thanks to recent legislation concerning health insurance, we have a new way to calculate take-home pay. In the old days, whenever that was, take-home pay was calculated as: income minus taxes Now, however, take-home pay is calculated as: income minus taxes minus what you pay for health insurance in your job based […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I earn a ITIL Foundation-level certification. For the past six or eight years I have heard of ITIL  certification. I didn’t pay much attention to it as I wasn’t an Enterprise IT person and did see a way that I could qualify for it. A recent look at it changed my mind. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes citizens of the U.S. working for the U.S. become separated from the rest of the citizenry at everyone’s loss. Recently, heads of agencies of the U.S. Intelligence Community met to discuss the types of things they discuss in public. Several of them lamented the protests of many citizens against their efforts […]

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by Dwayne Phillips As a job seeker, I often run into inexplicable confusion between these two job titles. I am a systems engineer. I do systems engineering. I am not a systems administrator. I do not do systems administration. A quick read of the two Wikipedia articles linked above shows that the two professions are […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Efficiency (let’s call it hyper efficiency) is abounding. Maybe it isn’t always good. Amazon delivers wonderful cloud computing with their Amazon Web Services (AWS). They have found a way to activate virtual computers on demand, run them, deactivate them, and start over again. They have rooms of real computers that they share […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Technology appears to be changing so fast that culture and jobs cannot keep pace. This leads to a large group of people whose newly acquired skills never give birth to a new job. Culture adjusts to technology. The automobile displaced everyone in the horse and buggy industry. The culture and the economy […]

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by Dwayne Phillips What else would a person manage other than resources? I continue to be unemployed. Hence, I look at a large quantity of help wanted ads. Some of the job titles are absurd. One that sticks with me is: Resource Manager What else would a person manage. Managers manage resources—the end. Resources include: […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Take care in a job interview as you may find yourself giving work to someone who will not hire you. A few months back I tried to get a job with a publisher as an editor. First, I had to take an “editing test.” They sent me a ten-page piece of writing […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We have a #1 response of any bureaucracy in the 21st century. Any time a bureaucracy has a flub up (technical term), the response is the same: We will address this item as we change the training. This is the #1 response to any situation in the 21st century. Gosh. At least […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Beware – tests before hire are often a way to obtain free work from you. I have been applying to freelance jobs recently as a writer. On occasion, job openings require taking a “test” such a: edit this text so we can determine if you are a qualified editor write a piece […]

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