>> I've only lived in AZ except for a stint in the military. I've only had
>> a couple good managers. Most others where in over their head.....
Most often my experience too, particularly in AZ. Entrenched/clueless leadership often enough, then combine entrenched vendors (think cisco, microsoft, oracle), fight club between internal silos of organizations, lack of strong technical leadership, lack of strong technical anyone, people run too thin, people that simple hate their lives and thus everything suffers, everything in between, but there's any number of reasons I find when doing these gigs.
Start overlapping them like a weird 3d venn diagram, and the problems stack like mad.
Observing enough different industries from IT and management perspectives, one can apply dysfunctions like stereotypes if you've sampled enough of them, and after 24 or so years in over 120 unique organizations/agencies tinkering with their networks that run everything, it's not hard to do with some accuracy.
>> If AZ is so bad then why is all this tech choosing AZ?
Supposedly cheap resources in 2001-ish, but that certainly isn't the case anymore. Access to "cheap" labor never really works out either unless just for call centers or manufacturing, otherwise AZ pay isn't that significantly worse than Cali anymore.
There have been a lot of subsidies with local muni's over the years, such as the Price area, but the pull isn't as strong as was expected, and still really hasn't. I've worked in or know of much of the larger IT-based things like the data centers and semiconductor vendors down there, but nothing exciting, and usually just corporate people, call centers, or manufacturing of various levels that wanted cheap labor for lesser jobs.
You go to AMEX's corporate up on 101, it's like walking into an office in Bangalore. That's their solution to dealing with Arizonans, but hey, they'll still take those tax subsidies from here!
>> Yes water is an issue. And when I think of data centers in Phoenix
>> during the summer...
Most major businesses (and government) tend to build small data centers in their own buildings too, often not as complicated as the mega data centers we have a plenty here, but still often have the same water, cooling, power, etc issues here. That's already gotten nasty now with this totally fictitious climate change occurring.
AZ's major selling point is again environments due to no natural disasters, and access to Palo Verde nuke power (and technically SRP, but that's drying up...), but with extreme heat now occurring everywhere, power grids are already struggling. Texas power grids are on a verge of collapse right now with power through the roof, so I wouldn't want to be in Austin either...
>> I personally would never want to work W2 with a boss and coworkers..
>> Being self employed comes with it's challenges as well.
Me neither unless I found something extremely technical and compelling, and that just isn't really here in AZ, nor do I feel ever.
Just last week, a friend more or less offered me a walk-in W2 job with a local hospital company, and could only think of the horror of ever actually working for a hospital company. Supposedly cake work at nominal salary and low stress, but I have consulted and implemented changes in a LOT of hospitals and medical orgs over the years to know better, and always the most absolutely horribly run places ANYWHERE in the US across at least half a dozen different states including here. Plus if you're not directly medical staff, you aren't sh!t, and what they do have for IT is always the lowest paid and/or worst technical people, and I never want to be that guy just riding it out for a check.
Newp, not that desperate for work, yet, but suppose I've been in worse places too.
-mb