Anne Bennett's CV: Position Sought

CV: Position Sought

Personal goals

My strongest drive is to understand, my best-honed skills are to analyze, design, and build, and my most dearly held values are personal integrity and fairness. The value of fairness makes me passionate about human rights (including especially women's rights), social justice with an emphasis on food security and environmental protection, and universally accessible education and health services. The drive to understand underpins my choice of tools to further these aims: critical thought, the communication of knowledge, and the wise use of technology (for example the free software movement and the Creative Commons licensing initiative).

The ideal employer will work to increase and disseminate knowledge, to influence public policy in a progressive way, and to contribute useful tools and skills to society. Any acceptable employer will respect the rights of its clients, employees, subcontractors, and neighbours, will encourage and support the professional development of its employees, and will foster a work environment where each person can take pride in his or her contribution.

Career path

The first decade of my career emphasized learning technical skills, managing small installations mostly manually, writing small tools, contributing to the larger community in modest ways, and forging contacts with colleagues all over the world.

The second decade saw more automation allowing the management of larger installations, larger individual projects, and the coordination of projects involving multiple people, sometimes from outside my immediate group. Conversely, though, as I have become more deeply enmeshed in the workings of my department, there has been less time for contact with the wider community of sysadmins, and consequently a disappointing paucity of involvement or contributions at that level.

My goal for the next decade is to re-balance those aspects of my career. I want to spend more time being a hard-core techie: I enjoy making machines jump through hoops and am "in the zone" when sitting quietly in a corner with the computer. I also want to continue to be involved in large projects: organizing thoughts, information, and tasks comes naturally to me, and I enjoy those aspects of my work. I also enjoy creative interactions with talented and interesting colleagues.

But the most important change I intend to make in the short term is one of meaning and impact: I'd like my work to have a wider effect than just keeping computers running for a few thousand students and researchers. Whether I manage installations that benefit a wider community, or whether I contribute tools that will help fellow sysadmins at other sites (or both if possible!), I'd like to re-connect with a sense of purpose in my work.

In the longer term, I will probably continue to deflect any attempts to make me a manager: I am happy to coordinate projects and to mentor younger colleagues, but I prefer to exercise influence and not authority. Rather, I'd like the opportunity to climb a technical ladder, not a managerial one, and perhaps eventually make a lateral move into more architectural work.

Work environment

I'd like to continue working with people whose personal integrity is beyond question and who strive for excellence in their work, people who are decent and kind. My new employer will do everything it can to provide conditions where it's possible to do a good job, and at the same time will, where feasible, demonstrate a flexibility that facilitates the conciliation of personal and work lives. Good working conditions include a quiet, clean, and healthy workplace, control over the choice of one's tools (desktop computer software in particular), the use where possible of free and open-source software, a large degree of autonomy in choosing and prioritizing one's tasks, and an atmosphere of respect for every person no matter how high or low in the hierarchy.

The fine print

I have for the past many years benefitted from a 35-hour work week (on average!), with 22 days of vacation and 18 statutory holidays each year, and well as short summer Fridays. This situation has allowed me to give my job my all during the day and yet still have energy left to enjoy the rest of my life; I would be hesitant to work much longer hours.

Expected remuneration will vary depending on the quality of the other benefits: health, dental, and vision plans, pension plan, sick and compassionate leave, study leave and study plans, training and conference opportunities, access to a high-quality library, and so on. However, I have over 20 years of solid, proven experience at Unix system administration, and I would expect remuneration to reflect my considerable abilities in the context of the cost of living near the workplace. I'm very confident in my ability to earn my salary!