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