Jose Medeiros

Hmm... about me? I am an American of Portuguese descent. My great grandparents migrated to the United States of America in the 1800's. My Grandfather Francisco Furtado De Medeiros was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1894, however during the great depression his family lost their entire savings when the banks closed and he was forced to return to the Azores Islands to find work to help feed his family. In the Azores, he met my Grandmother who was a Cardoso and they lived on the island of San Miguel. My family later immigrated back to the United States when I was two. A few years later, my family moved to San Jose, California when I was six. The five of us lived in a two bedroom duplex on Beverly Blvd in San Jose until my parents could save enough money for a home of their own.

As for myself, I am some what humble and shy until you get to know me. I do not smoke and I do not do drugs ( I grew out of that phase 20 years ago ), and I rarely drink, however I occasionally will have a beer with friends in a social setting. I love working on computer servers, fiber channel storage area networks and mail / database clusters and helping others with their computer server based problems ( I am a hands on kind of guy ), so you can probably call me an egg head or nerd it really does not bother me. I was in the Electronics Club in High School and took Technical Drawing and Electronics as my electives so what does that tell you?

What do I like? I love all kinds of foods, from Chicken Adobo, Shrimp Creole, Sushi to PHO. I am not into the party scene and I mainly attend community events and political functions on the weekends.

So why did I stand with a sign saying will work for food, am I an idiot?

Fast forward to the year 2001, many technology companies laid off hundreds of thousands of workers in the United States of America over a 5 year period, and finding work that paid a fair wage, where technology companies didn't expect you to have the skills and do the job of three or more employees was difficult or nearly impossible for many to find. Even non profits and government tried taking advantage of the labor market by offering positions that paid very low rates for the experience that they expected ( They consider it the law of supply and demand ). I know many people in their 50's and 60's with Master Degree's that were forced to find low paying jobs if they could even find one at all. Although our Nation's unemployment statistics showed that less then 15 percent were still collecting unemployment benefits in 2002 & 2003, they failed to take into account many of the people that took minimum wage jobs just to survive or their benefits had just expired, so they were no longer being counted.

Even today many technology companies still will not hire full time employees and pay for health benefits, claiming that it is too expensive for business, mean while many companies are making record breaking profits at the expense of the workers. I thank God that I was one of the fortunate few to find work in my career field again even though I had to take a substantial pay cut, and the first company that hired me back in 2002 to put in their Microsoft Exchange 2000 Mail Server Cluster and migrate them from their NT 4 domain to Microsoft Active Directory 2000, filed for bankruptcy and did not even pay me for the 160 hours of work that I completed.

So I leave up this picture to remind company executives, corporate board of directors and share holders of what they do in the name of increased profit and how our life's and futures are affected. Companies are now complaining that school enrollment in Computer Science programs is at an all time low and they blame our education system, however it is they that are setting the poor example, why would some one choosing a career want to go into a field that lays off their employees every few years and forces them to start over? Only some one that really loves the work they do and is crazy such as myself would still choose such a career. The companies have no one to blame but themselves for the low student enrollment. They are the ones that have set the bad examples. We are not just commodities to be discarded at a whim. It's always easy to tell other's that you should do this or that, however it's a much different story for most when it occurs to them.

From time to time, people tell me I should be a teacher or go work for a non profit. In my opinion teaching is a calling, it should be your passion and some thing that you love doing. I put working for a non profit in the same category. Technology is my passion, possibly when I am older and can retire with out having to sell one's home, I may have a change a heart. I have also been called heartless for not wanting to teach and told that I do not share my knowledge. All of us are teachers in one way or another , mother's and fathers are teachers to their children even if they do not work in that profession. I help others all the time with their computers and websites and never charge for my time, however being a professional teacher in a class room is much different then helping to mentor a friend, neighbor, co-worker or class mate.

If wanting a home, a family of my own and a middle class paying job in my career field that I enjoy working in, and one that I have spent tens of thousands of dollars and years of time in training to become proficient in, means that I am greedy and heartless, then so be it, I am what I am. Have companies forgotten that the best education available is real world experience? Do they no longer realize that an employee is their greatest asset? You decide for your self who is heartless and greedy. I myself have never made a six digit salary!

I found this little story in Bits & Pieces and felt inspired by it, so I thought I would share it with you

Most Employees are pretty much the same on their approach to their work. But, as every leader knows, a few in every group will be originals. Their approach will be unconventional, and sometimes extremely valuable. They apt to have a unique, fresh, even naive way of looking at things.

The boss put his finger to his lips. "Shhh," he whispered, "one day when Smith was staring out that window he thought of an idea that made the company a million dollars."

If you want to find out more about me, please visit my web site http://www.sjpc.org/~medeiros/

" The reasonable man adapts himself to world, the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself, therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." ...George Bernard Shaw