RE: Looking for a Tier 1 ISP Mentor for career advice.

[Nathan Eisenberg <nathan () atlasnetworks us>]

> Say a
> coder gets confused when /tmp fills up and being unaware of this thing
> called a "search engine" and instead will virtually cry "help my puter
> b0rked, I stuck!" and vice versa.

Hah!  In my experience, this phenomenon is not unique to coders, sysadmins, or any other specialization.  People prefer 
to look to other people for their answers.  This one has bugged me for a long time, as I'm not sure what to attribute 
it to - is it a desire to be social, or to have the answer personalized?  Is it a compliment indicative of respect of 
ones peer, or is it an indication of laziness?

> Employers in the USA need to invest more in training their employees
> and
> learning should be an important and constant part of one's job and be
> actively encouraged. I think in this they're quite behind their Western
> European counterparts.

This is likely true in many larger corporations.  I have found the startup and SMB sectors to be highly amenable to 
investing in their people.  Cash-strapped businesses are most likely to consider the ROI of buying their employees 
skillsets (ie, training) vs hiring in new employees just to acquire those skillsets, whereas larger companies either 
already have a guy who knows how to do X, or doesn't really mind hiring an X specialist (or the all-too-common X 
consultant).

Nathan