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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 21st, 2023

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  • Ah…yeah, whoops 😅. IT & Military definitely love their acronyms!

    But you’ve got it pretty much spot on! Just keep an eye out for the various companies that are winning defense contracts; I usually keep an eye out on this site to see what’s going on out there: https://news.clearancejobs.com/category/defense-contracts/

    Once you find one you’re interested in, the job listing will usually tell you it requires a certain level of clearance. Depending on the job, some will expect you to already have said clearance, but most will not. The company will apply for your clearance on your behalf, referencing the contract that you’ve been hired for. Then you get to go through the extremely fun process of a 30+ page background check, where you get to go through the last ten years of your life. Where you lived, who knew you at those addresses, where you’ve been out of the country, jobs you’ve held, etc. The very first one I did was in my early 20’s, so going back 10 years I was filling in my parents address when I was still in high school! It’s really not that bad, but they definitely ask a lot of off-the-wall stuff.

    You’ll usually get an “interim” clearance a few months after you apply, which will allow you to do your work, but you’ll get your final clearance after about a year or so (assuming everything checks out.) Once you’ve got it, you keep it for 5 years, and it’ll automatically be renewed as long as your job requires it, and it can be transferred between companies if they require you to have a clearance.


  • Now that does not shock me in the least. The contract I worked for the USAF was to provide IT services.

    You know how many usable SOPs or process guides they had available to train us with? None. Not a single one. We recreated each and every process after having to fumble through it ourselves.

    There’s so much transition in the USAF that unless you have a civilian or contractor working alongside the uniformed workers, it only takes like one or two PCS cycles until there’s not a single person left that remembers the processes unless they’re written down in a detailed SOP (that is updated regularly.)


  • I guarantee she had access lol. Getting access to a flight line is not as difficult as you’re making it out to be.

    If her job duties included…you know, being on the flight line (as it sounds like her contract absolutely was,) all she had to do was get the SMO to verify her clearance, verify her job duties, assign her a RAB, and she’s good to go. Guaranteed she had all of the correct clearances and authorizations.

    If you’ve got access to the area, nobody is going to follow you around and “keep track of everyone.”

    I know this because I had all of this access as a civilian contractor when working on a military installation.


  • I feel you fellow IT brother/sister!

    The IT world is chock-full of this garbage, and all it really forces people to do is A. Provide lesser service so that it “takes longer”, inflating their time metrics, and B. Causes people to make shit up, or submit their own BS tickets to make it look like they’re doing stuff to justify their existence.

    Ultimately holding people to a metric-based system like this leads to worse service, and make people hate their jobs.

    The job I had before my current one, I was site lead for Field Services. Luckily we were sort of a start up/experimental program, so the technician metrics weren’t tracked at all. MAN it was nice. Nobody felt stressed out needing to justify every second of their day, they wound up doing the work in an appropriate amount of time because it didn’t matter how long an individual took (be that long, or short). We only had an SLA to meet for the customer, which was easily hit.

    I even took it a step further and didn’t really pay much heed to the corporate timekeeping rules… If someone needed to run an errand or “telework” for a day; fine by me. The company didn’t give anyone sick time, or enough time in general, OR a big enough salary, so they can eat my whole ass. Lo and behold, our section had the lowest MTTR, and highest amount of tickets closed, all with 100% SLA met. Crazy what you can achieve when you treat people like adults and actual human beings instead of soulless automatons.


  • I am from Alaska and I love that we have FPTP/Ranked Choice. A lot of my coworkers are super right leaning, and have been crying that ranked choice is the only reason any left leaning candidates have won. They want to ditch it and return to the old archaic system.

    I’ve tried and tried to explain how it’s such a better system, and that it means that you can vote for the person you actually want, instead of the ‘if I don’t vote for this guy, the other guy who I definitely don’t like will win’. They just didn’t get it; they kept going on and on about how ‘Oh you just want people to be able to vote twice. people should only get to vote once’ 🤦