Certification Magazine - January 2008 - (Page 28)

Working toward a position where you can telecommute? Enter ‘telecommuting’ into CertScope to ﬁnd a half dozen CertMag articles and 30 Web sites on this job role. So, what’s it like to live with someone who may have work tasks scheduled in the middle of the night? “Sometimes it’s disappointing if we’re out and we have to go home early, but I understand that in that industry, it’s just part of the job,” said Trisa Inzerillo, Kern’s live-in girlfriend. Inzerillo was quick to add that Kern working from home has its advantages. It has facilitated a role reversal between the two. “In Kansas City, I had a 10-minute commute and he had a 40-minute commute, so I would go home right after work and cook dinner and start laundry,” Inzerillo said. “Now, I have a 40-minute commute and he has a zero-minute commute, so he’s more of a homemaker in that I will tell him when I’m coming home so he can start cooking dinner and throw in laundry for me.” equipped with a Yamaha CR-2020, a vintage stereo receiver that pumps out 105 watts per channel. Upstairs — his break room, as it were — Kern has a homemade video arcade cabinet that houses a large flat-screen TV, a full complement of mounted joysticks, buttons and trackballs, slots for coinoperation capability and a dedicated PC loaded with roughly 4,000 video games. “It’s nice to have, because a lot of times I will just go up and play Robotron for about 15 minutes and not think about what I was working on,” Kern said. His next project is modding an Xbox and getting it set up as a media center. But, as is customary for IT professionals in general, and telecommuting IT pros in particular, the concept of when exactly his job ends can be somewhat nebulous. “Normally, a work day will end somewhere around 5 or 6 p.m. and I go upstairs, but then a lot of the times I’ll just open up my laptop and work on something if I need to,” Kern said. “Then there’s the other aspect of the job: maintenance and software releases. We have to do those at times when the fewest amount of users are on our system. That’s usually 2 a.m., so maybe once a month we have to do some sort of maintenance at 2 a.m.” The more than 35,000 IT professionals who responded to the CertMag 2007 Salary Survey reported that they are telecommuting, but not in large numbers and not all the time. Home Networking Despite a career in IT that goes back more than a decade, Kern has had little in the way of formal training, though he plans on pursuing an LPI Linux certification and CCNA at some point in the future. He started college at the University of Missouri at Kansas City. “I went to college for about a year, but at the same time I was interning at a company and realized that I could just make money right away, so I stopped college and got a full-time job.” This was with Cerner, a company in Kansas City that writes software for hospital management. This begs a question many techies’ experiences tend to raise: How did Kern acquire all these IT skills if they weren’t taught? “I’m definitely a hands-on learner — when I get interested in something, I will just sit down and try to figure it out,” Kern said. “When I first got a computer, and friends showed me what bulletin boards were, Kern said the support his company offers has made this requirement manageable. “I’m definitely used to it, because the majority of my career has been at Positive and it’s only gotten easier as we hire people for me,” Kern said. “The nice thing is we trade off who’s on call. So, say one of our routers goes down at 3 a.m.: If I’m not on call that week, then one of the engineers picks it up and works on it, and they’ll only wake everyone else up if it’s a huge problem that everyone needs to be on. Generally, it’s not stressful, because I know what week is mine.” 28 CERTIFICATION MAGAZINE January 2008 http://www.CertMag.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Certification Magazine - January 2008

Certification - January 2008 Editor's Letter Contents Data Stream Tech Careers Academic Connection Dear Techie Virtual Village Making the IT Leap: How to Move Into the Industry Inside Certification Phoning It In: Telecommuting Systems and Networks Engineer Interface Band of Brothers: Why You Should Join an IT Association Ad Index Endtag

Certification Magazine - January 2008

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