packysauce

Not sure if taken by candlejack or the CI

Not the person you replied to, but I was a CIA, then DA, then CIA Sr. I left when I got offered a foot-in-the-door helpdesk spot at a gov't research facility.

GS experience is helpful. It's not the experience with computers that is impressive thought. It gave me a plethora of responses to the standard bullshit interview questions (tell us about a time you had to overcome a difficulty, and other such questions) and taught me a lot about people.

It's not helpful about subject matter since you're not doing any REAL troubleshooting and repair and computers may as well be legos. "Look for something that looks just like the part you bought, and take it out, and put this one in the same way the old one was" was how I told people how to replace their own stuff if I deemed it necessary. Geek squad or not, most people that are into computers at any skill level can be handed sticks of RAM and a screwdriver and have it figured out within 20 minutes. Demonstrating that you like to go above and beyond in your work and spare time to constantly hone your craft is much more impressive.

Learning how to work with people was the best part about my time at GS. Not just coworkers and managing Agents, but also customers. There are different types of people in this world. From timid little creatures to people who just seem to get off on being uber-pricks. Learning how to work with such a variety of people has led me down a pretty successful path in IT (or, not bad for a guy with no college education). Being able to "change attunement" depending on the type of person you're working with is really handy, too.

Hate to quote some self-help-type shit, but you get out of it what you put into it. If you go into work every day taking everything seriously, you'll get out of it a bunch of experience you can put towards your next adventure. Take the best buy side seriously, as in: go in, take a gander at budgets, develop a strategy to reach those goals. Take the customer service side seriously: your customers come to you for help, and will have to trust you. Abusing that trust means they stay away. Helping them helps the business. Take the Agent management side seriously: train them to do exactly what you want. Retrain them if necessary. Take responsibility for a failure in training.

If you have your managers, customers, and agents happy at the same time, you'll be able to move forward in your career pretty easily.

Reading this over, it meanders a bit from a concise response to a 4 sentence post, but since it's already typed I may as well post it.

Go download several free antivirus and antimalware programs and put them on a CD. Back in my day they just wanted us to run Webroot's System Analyzer and show the customer how the bar was red and that was bad.

MRI Customizer was pretty bitchin a little while after it came out. It was just a "shortcut" program to add/remove programs and automated the silent install of antivirus and antispyware.

Eventually it had a Windows PE with some repair/diagnostic tools, but it's all stuff you could do with a Linux Live CD, or a PE if you build it yourself (regedit was handy, but I usually used the command line)

I don't think there's anyway to verify automatically that won't trigger user paranoia. "Read SMS" and you can get the SMS verification code automatically, but everyone thinks youre mining SMS messages. "Read phone state" and you can just get the device's phone number (could probably be fooled on a rooted phone) but everyone thinks you're spying on their calls.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't it would seem. Sucks to be them.

What can be done and what are done are two different things though, correct? I haven't done any android development in a while, but isn't it "read all SMS" vs "read no SMS at all"?