Tech industry.

TheDan said:

So your privilege is to do all the work?

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EXACTLY!!!!

Kar98 said:

the other half of my job, I have pretty much automatized. In case you're wondering why I've got so much time posting here, LOL.

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I can relate...

Kar98 said:

Some time half way through we went remote and home office, with me baby-sitting the server racks here at the data center, so all of the deskside support went away, which was half of my job. And the other half of my job, I have pretty much automatized.

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I made the mistake of telling some folks I had found the job in which I could be happy till I died or retired. I was a sysadmin with racks of servers to babysit and I'm convinced that I jinxed myself.

There were two of us and we could handle everything, have a reasonable work/life balance, and even help end users. Our end users loved us and the system in which they spent all their time because everything just worked. Life was good.

The powers that be looked upon all this and decided it wasn't good. No matter how much our users loved the system, it had to be screwed up in the name of efficiency. The servers were virtualized to 6 central locations instead of 60. Just one sysadmin was promoted to each virtual home. They stuck pagers on them and expected those six people to cover for each other remotely. If anything went wrong, regular work didn't get done. Simple things like fixing user account permissions now took days to rise to the top of the pile instead of a 2-minute phone call. When a server caught on fire, groups of users would be unable to work for days because there was every chance that the responsible sysadmin was elsewhere and being covered remotely. When that happened, in the worst cases, people would be flying around the country to plug and unplug hardware. Those sysadmins who thought they were lucky because they stayed with the system they loved found themselves working outrageous hours for ungrateful bosses and burning out at a prodigious rate.

Once the back end was screwed up enough, the software was all rewritten to change it from a tool to help users do their work into a tool to help managers micromanage their employees, track every single assigned task to the second, and write people up for missing unimportant deadlines by a day. Everybody with enough time retired, sickened by the whole thing. Everybody who was left just bitched, nonstop.

This actually has something to do with the OP.

If the organization grows large enough, folks who run things, like a government agency or Google, will eventually lose sight of the day-to-day work people need to do and stop meeting those pedestrian needs. It's inevitable because they lose perspective on the real work; they're too far away from it. Whey they do, they begin to implement ideas that look good and important to them but, in reality, just screw up everything.

I've seen it in my work life. I've seen it in other organizations. It's happening at Google. It will eventually happen to Texas government and then to the U.S. at large.

I expect to be dead by then. I hope I'm that lucky.

TheDan said:

So your privilege is to do all the work?

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See Price's Law and Lotka's Law. Half of all work in large organizations is done by the number of employees equal to the square root of the total number employed.

If you have 100 employees (and there's a creative component to the work, not just stamping out widgets), half the work will be done by 10 of them.

benenglish said:

I've seen it in my work life. I've seen it in other organizations. It's happening at Google. It will eventually happen to Texas government and then to the U.S. at large.

I expect to be dead by then. I hope I'm that lucky.

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DD130 said:

I really wish I'd learned a trade, like welding or machinist.. something productive.

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It’s fun but I’m done. I don’t want anything to do with it unless it has to do with guns. My problem was if I wasn’t working on guns I was so bored. Also if say you program well and watch your offsets and toolwear and do your job running a machine...talk about a long boring day. When nothing goes wrong, it’s like mental suicide.

Welding can be easy work. CAN. Lol. Or it can be a challenge in sheet metal work. Repair work with welding is easy.

My gift is labor. Being physical. Doesn’t sound like much but for nearing 40 I’m in great shape and my ultimate goal is to have my own gun store/training center. Hire someone to teach gun courses and myself and another would handle hand to hand self defense. It’s also great for fitness. I love being active. I have seen a lot of people in various industries develop poor health because of not keeping active.

Sam7sf said:

My gift is labor. Being physical. Doesn’t sound like much but for nearing 40 I’m in great shape and my ultimate goal is to have my own gun store/training center. Hire someone to teach gun courses and myself and another would handle hand to hand self defense. It’s also great for fitness. I love being active. I have seen a lot of people in various industries develop poor health because of not keeping active.

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I keep pushing around the idea of getting some handgun instructor certs. I AM good at this. Just don't know what the income opportunities are. I've got no LEO or mil background, lol.

Kar98 said:

I keep pushing around the idea of getting some handgun instructor certs. I AM good at this. Just don't know what the income opportunities are. I've got no LEO or mil background, lol.

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I’m a few years out but when that day comes I’ll include my search for people here. It is a selling point that an instructor be ex uniform. I’m not sure what people care for in that regard. It’s like mixed martial arts. I never got into a cage. I was trained by a great guy who was. His teachings and philosophy will carry into what I show others and the times I have had to defend myself, they played out well. I was ok and didn’t get hurt. But jui jitsu is the core. kick boxing is good for fitness but does deliver good skills to know.

If you ever need somebody to just sit around & eat, I'm your guy!

ZX9RCAM said:

If you ever need somebody to just sit around & eat, I'm your guy!

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Or make coffee. You know I never was a coffee person. Maybe less than half a dozen times in my life. I just get up get water, food, get a little blood moving, and I’m off to work. I know very little about coffee. Lol. But most gun shops have coffee

Kar98 said:

I keep pushing around the idea of getting some handgun instructor certs. I AM good at this. Just don't know what the income opportunities are. I've got no LEO or mil background, lol.

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I suppose the answer to "What are the income opportunities?" is "It depends." Back in the day, the first IPSC world champion demonstrated that you can have the most credibility in the world with a handgun and still crash and burn a training business if you're also total crap as a teacher.

I think things have changed.

Just being a great teacher doesn't cut it in the world of handgun training. I know that's harsh but it's what I've observed. People want to see an LEO or a mil background before they sign up. There are teachers out there without that experience who can do a fantastic job teaching fundamentals but they are rarely successful. OTOH, there are teachers who have (or at least claim to have) incredible military experience but are also completely incompetent as instructors. Some of them manage to sell their brand well enough to make a living. A few brown-nosers on YouTube can create a cult of personality that overcomes incompetence.

I have no doubt that if Chapman were starting out today and hooked up with a savvy social media PR person, he'd make lots of money despite the fact he couldn't teach his way out of a paper bag.

My takeaway? Making money as an instructor requires a lot more than being a good instructor; there are probably 500 other things that have nothing to do with shooting that are required to actually make money.

See, that's what I thought, and that's why I'll keep pushing that idea without ever going through with it.

I've a completely absurd combination of unrelated skill sets.

I agree with Ben. I can tell you what to do if you need to put a guy twice your size on the ground, but I have no right to tell people how to use a firearm in self defense. I was never in a firefight. So pretty simple.

Same time don’t think you can’t do something Kar98. Plenty of ways to help new shooters and make money with knowledge.

IMO there is a lot more need for firearms safety, maintenance, and shooting fundamentals training than there is tacticool training. Of course that doesn't pay as well...

Just to head off anyone who thinks I'm reading too much into this, I realize that TheDan is talking about need, not profit potential. Nevertheless, that's the tangent I'll follow.

TheDan said:

IMO there is a lot more need for firearms safety, maintenance, and shooting fundamentals training than there is tacticool training.

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I have my NRA cert and I provide this sort of training as private lessons. It does not pay well.

Men tend to think they already know it all so they don't want the training or they push back at whatever they're told. Women tend to want to be taught by women. Everybody seems to want their teacher to be ex-LEO or ex-military. Basically, the people who have paid me to train them are people who know and trust me already; they find out I teach and then ask for help.

If I had to actually make a living at it I'd starve.

As for maintenance, we had a shop here in Spring that was almost solely a cleaning shop. They sold some swag but their core business was cleaning guns. You could drop off anything and they knew how to clean it.

Now, I suppose there are some boutique gun-try clubs that can sell such services but they already have a near-captive audience of financially successful patrons. The shop that opened in a strip center here in Spring? It closed down as soon as the lease expired.

I agree that there's more need for training in safety, maintenance, and shooting fundamentals than there is for tacticool training. I'll go even further and say that most attendees at an entry-level tacticool class would be better served by a shooting fundamentals class. I'll go even further and say that most attendees at an entry-level tacticool class would be better able to defend themselves if they just took a proper fundamentals class.

However, most people don't see it that way. Since "most people" includes "most potential customers", I conclude that making money by providing training in fundamentals is probably not going to be profitable.

That said, I'm sure there are people who make money teaching fundamentals. I just think they're rare.

PS - I'd love to see numbers on all of this since I don't have any and everything in this post is just anecdotal and my opinion.

Ya, see, therein lays the crux. Your anecdotal opinion meshes 100% with what I've seen.

benenglish said:

If the organization grows large enough, folks who run things, like a government agency or Google, will eventually lose sight of the day-to-day work people need to do and stop meeting those pedestrian needs. It's inevitable because they lose perspective on the real work; they're too far away from it. Whey they do, they begin to implement ideas that look good and important to them but, in reality, just screw up everything.

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^This...

However, IMHO, a much bigger part of the problem - and if not the root-cause then pretty damn close to it - is too many leadership roles filled via the golf course or college-buddy network...

CyberWolf said:

However, IMHO, a much bigger part of the problem - and if not the root-cause then pretty damn close to it - is too many leadership roles filled via the golf course or college-buddy network...

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This is precisely the means by which the federal TLA I retired from was ruined.