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Full Discussion: Advice on pursuing a career
The Lounge What is on Your Mind? Advice on pursuing a career Post 302189451 by bakunin on Friday 25th of April 2008 09:11:50 PM
Old 04-25-2008
Quote:
Originally Posted by -CurrentStudent
Is there a lot of competition in the business, or is it a pretty friendly area?
Here are some impressions from a european AIX admin:

I am a freelancer for more than 10 years now and my speciality is data center automatisation. My main occupation is to develop procedures (read: scripts) for all sorts of things admins would want to do in a (big) data center. For instance: if you want an always up-to-date list of all the SAN shares in all machines in a data center i'm the man to develop such a script.

The market is of course competitive, but: the business is relatively small. Once you are "on the tour" going from project to project you know many to most of the people doing the same in your area either from personal experience or from second hand knowledge because one of your colleagues has already worked with the guy.

As it is nobody is perfect and everybody has some things s/he won't know. Of course you can find it out by reading manuals and using google, but usually you have a colleague who can explain that to you because it his speciality. If you have shown adequate manners and are treating your colleagues generally nice they are inclined to help you out (which is usually faster than studying some manual). This social network works both ways: the colleague helping you out this day might well stumble upon something which is your expertise and you will return the favor.

I have seen a lot of "super-competitive" (read: anti-social) people in this business come and go. They usually do not last long. They do some projects, maybe getting a few euros per hour more than the others, but once the word gets out that they are not willing to participate in this netowrking they are left to their own resources - nobody is that good. Nobody compares well against a dozen of specialists willing to help each other - if only by asking the right questions over the phone. I have easily not one but 4-5 dozens of colleagues and former colleagues in my phone directory and several of them call me or i call them regularly.

Most of the times i find out what a project i get offered is like by asking around - this sometimes saves you months of frustrating work because you know where better not to go even if the payment is good.

Bottom line: a team beats an assortment of single specialists any time and real experts know that. Time spent on building such a team, on socializing with colleagues and taking time to help them so they will be willing to help you when you need it is well spent.

(By the way: about the same is true for the consulting companies i work for. Several have tried to press out more revenue from their specialists by all sorts of tricks. Invariably they went out of business when the word spread and many consultants (especially the real cracks) decided to not work with them.)

I guess that could be called a "friendly business".

I hope this helps.

bakunin
 

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Date::Manip::Lang(3)					User Contributed Perl Documentation				      Date::Manip::Lang(3)

NAME
Date::Manip::Lang - date manipulation routines (language initialization) DESCRIPTION
This module is a series of routines, one per language, used to initialize the support for different languages in Date::Manip ADDING A LANGUAGE
Adding a language is easily done. If you want to add a language, refer to the list of words and phrases given below. Translate them into the desired language and email them to me. Note that Date::Manip does support international character sets, so if there are non-ASCII characters in the words, it's not a problem. Be sure to include an ASCII representation as well that can be used in cases where non-ASCII characters might cause problems. In many cases, alternate spellings are allowed, and there may be multiple words or phrases which fit, so please include all of them (with ASCII representations for any that include non-ASCII characters). Please translate ALL of the following. In some cases, a phrase is given in parentheses. It is not necessary to translate the phrase. They're there to show the word in the correct context. month names (January February ...) abbreviations (Jan Feb ...) day name (Monday Tuesday ... Sunday) abbreviation (Mon Tue ... Sun) short abbrev. (M T ... S) number suffix (1st 2nd ... 31st) spelled out (first second ... thirty-first now today tomorrow yesterday last (last day of the month) each (each Tuesday of the month) of (first day of the week) at (at 3:00) on (on Tuesday) next (next Tuesday) last (last Tuesday) exactly (in exactly 3 hours) approximately (in approximately 3 hours) business (in 4 business days) Some times of the day are named. At the very least, there is probably noon and midnight. Provide all named times, and the time of day. noon 12:00:00 midnight 00:00:00 The delta field names can be written or abbreviated in many differet ways. Provide all names and abbreviations for the seven fields. For example: years/year/yrs/yr/y months/month/mon weeks/week/wk/wks/w days/day/d hours/hour/hr/hrs minutes/minute/min/mn seconds/second/sec/s What words/phrases can be used to say that a time is in the future? E.g. IN 3 hours 3 hours LATER 3 hours IN THE FUTURE In the past? 3 hours AGO 3 hours PAST Does the language have an equivalent of the English AM/PM? If so, what are all possible values of each? Other than a comma or period, are there any common integer/decimal separators? For example: 1.25 can be expressed as 1.25 or 1,25 commonly. Are there any other ways? When expressing time the hours/minutes and minutes/seconds are typically separated by colons. Are there any other separators? If so, what combinations of the separators are used in real life? For example: 05h30:00. NOTE: there must be the same number of sephm and sepms values and the first sephm corresponds to the first sepms, etc. AUTHOR
Sullivan Beck (sbeck@cpan.org) You can always get the newest beta version of Date::Manip (which may fix problems in the current CPAN version... and may add others) from my home page: http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~sbeck/ perl v5.12.1 2010-01-12 Date::Manip::Lang(3)
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