FAQs
- What should the customer know about your pricing (e.g., discounts, fees)?
Not complicated. I generally try to charge between $30-100 for my work depending on the complexity. For work that will be over an extended period I charge $50/hr.
- What education and/or training do you have that relates to your work?
Throughout my career I've held numerous professional certifications including A-Plus, Net-Plus, Sun Solaris Administration, MicroSoft CNA, and a variety of company-internal certifications. I've let most of those go because there are some pitfalls to relying on certification classes as they are so generic, but I've continued with company-internal certifications to date. In 2006 I graduated with a MBA from Kennesaw State University and I'm currently pursuing ITIL certification. Current internal certifications I'm working toward include Big-Data, Mobile device services, Cloud Computing,
- How did you get started doing this type of work?
I was originally an Electrical Engineering major at Southern Polytechnical State University (then called Southern Tech) in Marietta. That school is now being merged with Kennesaw State University. As a part of my studies I was required to take a computer programming course (Fortran 77) for exposure into this thing called the computer industry, I guess in case the industry did something and I would have to understand what a computer did. I programmed using a DECWriter and IBM punchcards. We fed our programs into an IBM card reader to be processed on a DEC PDP 11/70 midrange Unix computer, and the results printed on a large line printer. To do a simple calculation that one would normally do on a pocket calculate or even in their head took 30 minutes or more in those days because so many students had their jobs queued up to run before class stated. At about the same time I had the initiative to get a job while in school and I applied a Radio Shack thinking my technical knowledge might be of some use in a technical store. I worked on the first Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I computer (4 Kilobytes RAM and a cassette deck for storage). In that simple system I saw the potential for what became the computer industry and I was hooked. I changed my major to computer science the next semester.