The 'Cable Guy' Now a Network Specialist 235
Hugh Pickens writes "Amy Chozick reports that cable guys, long depicted as slovenly cranks who dodged growling dogs and tracked mud on the living room carpet, often have backgrounds in engineering and computer science and certifications in network engineering. 'Back in my day, you called the phone company, we hooked it up, gave you a phone book and left,' says Paul Holloway, a 30-year employee of Verizon, which offers phone, Internet, television and home monitoring services through its FiOS fiber optic network. 'These days people are connecting iPhones, Xboxes and 17 other devices in the home.' The surge in high-tech offerings comes at a critical time for cable companies in an increasingly saturated Internet-based market where growth must come from all the extras like high-speed Internet service, home security, digital recording devices and other high-tech upgrades. 'They should really change the name to Time Warner Internet,' says Quirino Madia, a supervisor for Time Warner Cable. 'Nine out of 10 times, that's all people care about.' Despite their enhanced stature and additional responsibilities, technicians haven't benefited much financially. The median hourly income in 2010 for telecommunications equipment installers and repairers was $55,600 annually, up only 0.4 percent from 2008."
Re:Networking Certs and CS Degree? (Score:4, Insightful)
shows you how worthless those are, considering your partner may have just been hired cause he owned a truck and a hand drill
Re:And the last 3 times I had one at the house... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:And the last 3 times I had one at the house... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hmm.... not so sure about this .... (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because today's customer is more sophisticated...
Just because today's customer THINKS they are more sophisticated because multiple devices can be easily connected to a home network as a result of standards and effective design created by hardworking engineers.
fluff don't read (Score:5, Insightful)
installed a “wireless gateway,” transforming an unused stairwell into a control room for the modem and router that can handle at least 24 devices at 22 megabits per second.
Anybody in this business more than 5 minutes, already knows you don't need an unused stairwell to hold a little apple airport. Unused Barbie Dollhouse stairwell, then I'll be impressed. My unused stairwell has a fileserver psuedo-nas, a small 3 unit compute cluster, a vlan capable ether switch with a zillion ports, a sbc6120 pdp-8 clone with an ethernet to serial telnet converter box, one of my ipphones that connects to the house asterisk ip pbx, and yes, I wedged an apple time machine box in there as a wireless gateway too.
Also not sure about the marketing figure of 24 devices. A /28 for the customer and a /29 for the public guest network? Uh, not. Probably just pulled than number out of a completely meaningless nether region.
Another rant is you don't need certifications in network engineering such as my long expired CCNP to ... crimp a F-connector on a cable, or yank cat-5 thru a wall. I think this is one of those ever so trendy and tiresome "be glad you networking guys at least have some kind of job, because physicists and aerospace engineers are stuck driving taxis" story. Its very much like implying that you "Need" a french literature degree to be a mcdonalds fry cook because that seems to be the only job position hiring french lit grads now a days. You need the overtraining and overeducation due to intense competition and lack of jobs, not because the workload requires it.
Finally, $55K is for a national job not just flyover big cities on the coasts. In the semi-rural area where I live, three times that gets you basically my house, a nice landed estate, an upgraded non-mcmansion house, an acre or so to grow gardens or have the kids play or put up a ham radio antenna in a non-HOA neighborhood, more or less low crime, decent neighbors, great four season weather, tons of money left over for kids education, travel/vacations, excellent local schools, tech toys, gourmet food, etc. Two spouses income and if you want you can live a rather more elaborate lifestyle, like perhaps own a house on a lakeshore, or substantial land for a private hunting reserve, etc. So spare me the comments that $55K in the flyover coastal areas or Chicago means living in a cardboard box and eating mac n cheese in the park; we know that. I know that TW pay has at least a small correction factor for local cost of living. The difference in salary required for "the good life" varies across the US by darn near a factor of 10, so if you can get a mid paying job in a fantastic area, its pretty good indeed.
Re:Not comcast (Score:4, Insightful)
You're missing the big picture (Score:3, Insightful)
All companies regard employees as a pain in the ass. Going by the capitalist model, all workers are essentially profit-stealing overhead. Ideally a company with no employees, run entirely by machines, is the most profitable.
Basic economics works against the working class.
Re:Not comcast (Score:5, Insightful)
When I was at the other end a customer called claiming he was some Network Specialist and he knew there was something wrong on our end.
I asked him if he could prove I was an idiot by removing the second network card config he had configured. Things suddenly worked.
So yes, there are idiots on both sides. I understand that a script is stoopid for most of us here, but for the majority of 'specialists' it isn't. I have seen people trying to solve an issue for 45+ minutes only to realize they did not do step 1 or step 2 in the script.
If somebody asked for the IP adress of any server, we just gave it. We even explained telnet to POP3 for dial up customers who often received to large mails and MS cut of the connection.
Sure it is annoying and you have checked everything. On the whole it however will save time. Not with you. It will with the 1000 other customers. The problem is not so much the usage of a script, but the script itself. If you get people who say "My mail does not work" the standard we did was to do a traceroute to see if there was a connection or a DNS problem. If that worked, we tried a telnet to see if there was no firewall issue.
Only then did we check the mail program. This if the mail had worked previously.
And if you are so smart and have a connection, why don't you look up the IP adresses in either your settings or on our website. Yes, you can find that without a valid DNS server. You are the specialist. You figure it out if you don't like the way we give support. Yes, I have hung up on customers as agent, supervisor AND manager because they started demanding I do things their way and refused to answer some extreme simple questions, like their login (so I can see if there is an issue with their account) or their basic network setting. They kept telling that there was an issue at our end without giving ANY feedback on how they reached that conclusion.
I am there to give service. That does not mean I am your servant. And yes, we gave the best service at that time of any provider. When I compared with others, our 1st level support did what others did at second or even third level.
So next time, just go with the flow and use your knowledge to find those adresses yourself with your knowledge. There is no reason to call them for the DNS addresses. None whatsoever unless you are not a specialist of any kind. Then please follow the script to see if you have not forgotten other configurations.