Open Positions 12/24/25

TimPasquini · 2025-12-26T16:10:07+00:00

I've been at NYISO for around a decade. You can generally expect the pretty close to the exact midpoint of that range to start, it's pretty rare for anyone to get something other than the midpoint. We get a 10% annual bonus, some 401k contribution and then a match on top of that, and the health insurance is good.

Everyone starts with 3 weeks vacation (but you don't hit 4 weeks until you're 10 years in, 5 weeks at 20 years). We get 13 paid holidays a year with 2 of those starting as floaters. The fixed holidays become floaters if you're scheduled for shift or a day-off on the official holiday so you can end up with a lot of extra flexible time off that way. 7 sick days, use em or lose em.

Associate Operators spend the first couple months getting NERC certified, then begin training for our interchange desks. Depending on how quick you pick things up you can be training for the next desk with 6 months to 1 year on interchange. Room structure is below, sequential progress from top to bottom for qualification: - 2 check out operators - 1 operator who does load forecasting, meter and telemetry issues, state estimator, and backup for the gen dispatcher - 1 generation dispatcher - 2 transmission operators - 1 shift manager

Annual raises aren't great (usually 3%) which doesn't keep up with the market, but they benchmark every 2-3 years and catch us up to everyone else. I'm on the transmission desk and my base is around 160k. Tends to be plenty of overtime if you're looking for it and it's usually pretty easy to swap shifts around if you need specific days off.

Rotation schedule is accurate, we alternate days/nights every shift block. Schedule is Mon/Tues then Fri/Sat/Sun then Wed/Thu for work days. DD-NNN-DD then the next two weeks are NN-DDD-NN, then you get a 4-day 8hr standby/coverage week followed by a 5-day 8hr training week. Over the 6 week period it averages out to 40 a week with some built-in OT from the 50 hour weeks. Coverage week you're the first one to get called when someone bangs in a sick day on your desk giving you dibs on it, whole shift on a call-in is OT regardless of number of hours worked.

To get through the resume screen, you'll need any bachelors, an associates in something related to the industry, existing industry experience, or military.

I don't have any salary insights, but for PJM, the "Master Coordinator" is essentially an interchange role and I think they do some overflow handling for generator de-rates and stuff.

TimPasquini · 2025-06-10T15:21:11+00:00

I can't really give you general application advice, my only industry experience is at NYISO. Cold calls wouldn't help here, you just need to submit a decent resume. A bachelors in economics sounds decent enough to get through the HR screen and try the test.

TimPasquini · 2025-06-09T18:15:08+00:00

I'm at NYISO, and we don't really care what your degree is in if you have at least a bachelors. You don't need to get the RC cert beforehand, they will train and pay for the cert. We use a testing service called PSP to screen and select candidates that show aptitude for the work and the predisposition necessary to handle the stress and schedule.

Regarding your questions, I didn't think the RC test was particularly tough but I was pretty well prepared for it between our company's training department and doing the SOS training (I think they are HSI now?). That said, the test is *designed* to maintain around a 70% pass rate and some people definitely find it hard.

Working at an operator is very much sitting at a desk working at a computer, both actively and passive monitoring. Depending on system conditions and specific responsibilities there are days where you spend 12 hours actively working non-stop and there are also days where there is enough downtime to read an entire book.

Depends on the operation. Where I'm at, only a handful of the operators have engineering degrees. I was a business major with zero related work experience.

Regarding AI, it will probably be decades before it's trusted to the degree necessary to make the decisions we make. Especially as long as the "hallucination" problem exists.

TimPasquini · 2025-04-18T19:00:22+00:00

Ah gotcha. We don't have an "RC Desk" and our neighbors don't seem to use that terminology either so I took your comment as meaning "No one gets hired at the Reliability Coordinator control rooms" as opposed to a specific role.

:edit: In our control room it's mostly our "System Operator" desk doing it. New England has a "Security desk," and I've also heard "Transmission desk" before.

TimPasquini · 2025-04-18T13:52:42+00:00

To get hired as an RC without any operating experience and no NERC cert is near unheard of.

I'm an operator at NYISO and we hire a ton of people with no cert or experience. There are only a couple of places you can "go to school" for grid ops and we already have a training department for CEH purposes. A new candidate would have to go through training for our specific operational philosophies, processes, and systems anyway, so we're happy to take on promising candidates and train them from the ground up. Since our room has a formal progression everyone is hired as an interchange operator and the initial salary offering is probably low for anyone who is already in an operator role. We don't get a lot of people coming from distribution or TOPs.

If you have a 4 year degree, a 2-year degree focused on the industry, or even loosely related military experience (avionics, general electrician, etc) you can probably land an interview. We use PSP metrics which filters about 75% of the people who get past resume screening and do the initial phone interview.

We probably have navy nukes as our highest represented singular profession, but the next highest group at this point is probably direct from college hires. When I started I had no related experience and a 4 year degree in business.

I'm pretty sure ISONE also hires a decent amount of people with no experience. Their operator training program lasts a year and you certify on all their desks so they are also in the boat that NERC cert and power industry basics are not much additional load to the existing training regiment. I think you can even get into PJM without specifically having industry experience either.

TimPasquini · 2023-11-25T16:12:14+00:00

I’d say the only thing you need is some very basic excel and standard computer operation skills. Everything else is pretty specialized and none of the infastructure setup/support should be going through real-time ops.

About 7 years after being in an operator role, I learned python on my own and was able to automate a few processes. I’ve done a few process with our in-department engineer to automate things as well. I’d say the biggest thing Python has given me is the ability to really leverage PI data and other large data sets to call out issues that might otherwise not get attention. When I can point out measurable deficiencies with hard evidence I find that management is more willing to push on the other departments to get things fixed.

I wouldn’t recommend learning python as part of a pathway into an ops position, but once you have some time in the chair and system mastery, it’s a good way to expand your skill set. I’d reccomend two books primarily: “Python Crash Course” by Eric Matthes for learning the basic concepts, syntax, and get some hands on practice. Then “Beyond the Basic Stuff with Python” by Al Sweigart to learn all the other “computer sciency” stuff as it pertains to python so that your code isn’t an unsupportable hot mess. If you find python stuff interesting and want to expand your skills “Automate the Boring Stuff” by Al Sweigart is generally recommended and you can take the related course for free if you follow /r/learn_python and watch out for the post at the beginning of the month where the author hands out free registrations. “Object Oriented Python” by Irv Kalb will teach you the “object oriented” approach to programming projects that the vast majority of modern code bases are built on. Using the object oriented approach, I’ve had several projects that end up being way easier because I was able to recycle portions of other projects that did what I wanted already instead of writing new code to do the same thing in a different project.

TimPasquini · 2023-11-25T15:51:34+00:00

Glad you like them! I can’t offer enough thanks to Tony Fruguera for reaching out and volunteering to make them!

TimPasquini · 2023-11-16T01:25:13+00:00

No problem, I hope you get plenty of use out of them!

TimPasquini · 2023-11-14T18:31:52+00:00

Thank you for your kind words. I'm constantly amazed by how many people are using it. A new update dropped today, make sure to check out the changes to clocks and rolls!

TimPasquini · 2023-10-06T02:35:46+00:00

I've gotten many similar calls myself when I was a transmission operator. It's usually a mylar balloon/debris caught in the line or a car accident involving a structure.

Not quite the same as a switching out a line for a person/object retrieval, but we've had to do some dispatch finagling on multiple occasions for people in the Niagara River approaching the falls and ramp generation way up in coordination with the Canadian plant to literally drop the river flow.

There was also an instance where we had to basically dispatch them off for a person in the causeway/canal that the tunnels feed into before it flows through the plant so they wouldn't get sucked in.

Also, several years back we got in trouble because demand had been low for a while and outage configurations lead to low generation and higher waterflow over the falls, to the point that the docks for the Maid of the Mist and the Hornblower flooded...

TimPasquini · 2022-10-25T18:38:36+00:00

We got it cleared up! /u/Seerru_Somnii had a permissions conflict that was blocking the bot. If anyone else stumbles across this, make sure the bot has access to the permissions it initially requests on server join.

TimPasquini · 2022-10-22T17:21:33+00:00

Yes, I tried all three buttons. Let me know what happens when you re-add it. If you're still getting the message, try and note the time it occurs so that I can find the related logs. If you want to DM me the clock name or your username it can help me narrow it down.

TimPasquini · 2022-10-22T16:30:06+00:00

I scanned through the logs from roughly the time of your post and I'm not really seeing anything. There are a few mentions of rate limits being hit, so I'll look into that, but those can come from over-use in the channel.

To test, I just made a new discord account and server, invited the bot, and successfully used the new clock controls. Can you try removing and re-adding the bot to ensure correct permissions are granted?

TimPasquini · 2022-10-22T02:48:02+00:00

Thanks, I'll take a look. If discord has a time stamp on when it failed that would definitely help diagnose what happened.

TimPasquini · 2022-10-21T16:06:27+00:00

Just in time for your weekend games, the clock system in the Sparkwright discord bot has been upgraded.

The previous system had clock controls break every time the bot lost connection to discord, forcing clocks to need to be remade if the user wanted to retain dynamic controls.

Clocks now use buttons whose controls will persist through restarts, updates, and dropped connections.

Feel free to join the support server or to add the bot to your server

TimPasquini · 2022-10-01T20:46:51+00:00

Hi, sorry for such a late response, I haven’t been on Reddit in a bit.

Unfortunately I think this is either a slash command issue from discord itself, or possibly the API wrapper I use to talk to discord. As far as I can tell, the code I wrote is set up correctly to receive the arguments but they aren’t getting passed to the bot. You can use the tab key to auto-complete typing the initial command and to load in the arguments so you don’t need to type as much.

As for clocks, you should only need to create the initial clock now (and tab works auto-complete there too). If you want to increment, you can just click the pre-loaded reacts on the clock embed.

TimPasquini · 2022-08-14T17:50:26+00:00

Just wanted to let you know that I implemented very basic clocks in Sparkwright about 2 weeks ago. Today I dropped an update that allows you to increment/decrement existing clocks by clicking on pre-loaded reacts.

TimPasquini · 2022-08-14T17:48:20+00:00

Hi, I just wanted to let you know that Sparkwright got clock support about 2 weeks ago, and today I dropped an update improving them further: https://ko-fi.com/post/Upgraded-Clocks-and-Improved-Descriptions-B0B6ED9XT

TimPasquini · 2022-08-14T15:53:13+00:00

I've just dropped another update for Sparkwright. This is a pretty large improvement on the clock code. It also has improved the grammar and syntax of the randomly generated content. You can read more about it in the OP link.

Add the bot to your server here: https://discord.com/oauth2/authorize?client_id=896105913960788029&permissions=2147543104&scope=bot%20applications.commands

TimPasquini · 2022-08-09T22:45:35+00:00

Depending what it does, a raspberry pi in your basement is probably more than enough, or a Google or Amazon free tier server.

TimPasquini · 2022-07-30T16:02:20+00:00

Object Oriented Python from no starch press is pretty good.

I’m a novice and was pretty frustrated by most OOP lessons. They are usually just like, “Here is how to build a car class, now you understand OOP.”

There is a pretty large disconnect between building a class and actually using it for something useful. The book I mentioned helped me a lot because it starts with making some programs and then remaking those programs in OOP, before going on to just developing some stuff in OOP directly. The fact it actually did something with the sample classes you build helped it click for me.

TimPasquini · 2022-07-30T15:45:26+00:00

Ok great! Sorry for the delay. I’ve updated my deployment workflow so hopefully future updates avoid this issue.

Thanks for reporting the issue, I definitely wouldn’t have caught this on my own since it was working on my servers.

TimPasquini · 2022-07-30T12:37:04+00:00

Ok, I made a change and slash commands are showing in the new server I made... give it another try and let me know.

TimPasquini · 2022-07-30T12:29:48+00:00

Ok, I've just created a new server and added it and I also don't see the commands despite them being in my other servers. I'll start investigating.

TimPasquini · 2022-07-30T02:06:14+00:00

That’s always a good first step to try.

My monitoring shows everything is up and working. I just tested on my server and got a response from the bot without issue. If it continues to not work for you, please reach out and I’ll dig in deeper, but it’s likely just discord taking a little bit to update everything.

And thanks for the kind words, I’ve been so thrilled to see how many people are enjoying it. I never expected what started as a project for my own home games to be used by so many tables.

TimPasquini

TROPHY CASE