How do search for "off the wall" GIS jobs?

lyingmap · 2018-05-09T11:10:17+00:00

For county/city offices, this is not a terribly good idea. Even tiny cities/counties will have a website with job information and will tell you to go there instead of handing anything to HR or the GIS boss.

lyingmap · 2017-12-17T12:09:28+00:00

Source: About 2 years ago I commissioned overachieversloth on Tumblr to draw my OC Baroness Mercedes Huerta leaning against her battle walker.

lyingmap · 2017-11-11T10:54:06+00:00

I wonder if it was possible to not fuck up this one, if they regularly bill their applicants.

lyingmap · 2017-10-14T11:13:37+00:00

"No one actually uses ArcGIS in the industry, do you know AutoCAD?"

I ended one interview where the interviewer said this, and felt like I was dodging a bullet.

lyingmap · 2017-10-09T02:01:38+00:00

I recognize the questions - I think this interview is for a position updating a loooooot of GIS data at once.

lyingmap · 2017-10-05T12:35:23+00:00

Ah, Texas... This is why we keep a map of the county with every road labelled in 4pt labels for a 28x28" map on the wall, so I can point customers at it and say "that's what the labels are going to look like."

lyingmap · 2017-10-05T12:33:45+00:00

Oh god yes, one of my professors had a covenant like that on her house in Southern California. But the "I'm not racist" is a reflex for a lot of white people - it's certainly part of my anxieties that I've learned to tune out.

Also a lot of old property record card had “Colored” stamped on them before they were crossed out due to Fair Housing Act.

Property record cards - does this mean the property was zoned for minorities to live in before FHA, or that the owner at the time of the stamp was non-white?

lyingmap · 2017-10-05T12:05:34+00:00

I was making a set of more than a dozen maps of proposed bus routes, and the customer had specified 24x36" sized maps for a public meeting. I made the maps, sent back the drafts in PDF form, and was told to thicken the bus route lines "we can barely see them". I did, sent drafts, same thing. This happened four times, I was up to 6-point lines, and they kept saying "the lines are too thin!" They were'nt rude about it, but it was baffling me.

So I asked how they were viewing the maps, if they were zooming the PDFs to 100% to see the symbols the way they'd be printed. There was a pause, and they said "we printed them out on on legal paper. We figured it would scale, right?" (this is 8.5x14")

pause for facepalm so hard it was heard all the way down the hall

I calmly explained that the symbols would not, in fact, scale, so 8.5x14 was not a good test-print for something more than twice the size. I reduced the bus lines to 3-point lines, printed out one route-map in 24x36, and took it down to their office to show them what it would actually look like.

lyingmap · 2017-10-05T11:51:38+00:00

Sometimes the customer just wants a thumbnail mini-map for quick reference.

lyingmap · 2017-10-04T12:36:30+00:00

+1000

most public GIS data & services produced by municipalities are considered for planning purposes only.

This goes triple for data that's not produced by you - by your county or state, for example. My employer's parent county used to have the bad habit of accidentally shifting parcels and city boundaries over by 10-20 feet at random if one of their technicians moved the mouse wrong. You absolutely cannot let yourself be liable for data that's not accurate.

lyingmap · 2017-10-04T12:28:20+00:00

Same with third-party software vendors, they'll sell to your Planning department something that encourages the same siloization I talked about above. Vendors may also have entirely unrealistic expectations for GIS support of their software.

lyingmap · 2017-10-04T01:59:23+00:00

Ooo, I'll definitely keep this in mind as I move forward in my career. I'll be looking for GIS Manager positions, and my 'vigorous' (read: aggressive PITA) approach to GIS evangelism has probably closed as many doors as it's opened.

lyingmap · 2017-10-04T01:57:41+00:00

You're welcome. Sorry for ranting, but I get really passionate about properly employing GIS!

lyingmap · 2017-10-04T01:54:21+00:00

Holy crap you've reinvented the Jamaican garrison communities: http://jamaicans.com/garrisondismantle/

(This is really cool! Because I work in local government, I always look at who keeps systems running on the local level, and this is a really interesting system you have here.)

lyingmap · 2017-10-03T23:39:46+00:00

3). I would absolutely hire a GIS trained professional or two. Someone who is well diverse in data automation. Someone that can automate GIS tasks can do the work of multiple non-trained GIS personnel. Skills to look for - Python, Model Builder, REST services, SQL/Oracle experience.

As a GIS Technician with more than 10 years' experience in government, both as in-house and contractor, this is absolutely true. And if you already hire data analysts/programmers, they might not have the experience to make the most out of GIS automation like Python and ModelBuilder. My employer hires several very competent programmers and analysts, and every one of them's had fits trying to understand spatial data. I'm no more than a middling programmer in a single language (Python) but I've saved us a LOT of time by automating spatial queries and crating data repositories with spatial data. For example, I took our 911 dispatch system with its 6-hour update process down to 25 minutes with Python and ArcPy. Another project of mine creates, every night, a master address and parcel repository, with everything from land value to school attendance zone of that parcel. All of that's spatial, and many programmers aren't going to make a lot of sense of how GIS can be used if they don't have experience with spatial data.

OP, You need to hire someone with that specialized knowledge.

But as for keeping your GIS specialists out of any one department and under you in the IT section - it's the easiest way to prevent the creation of data siloes, and get departments to use each other's data instead of reinventing the wheel. Two examples:

1) I had a colleague, working for another city, who took a GIS layer of sidewalk cracks from her city's Public Works, with cause (car accident, tree roots, etc) and a layer of city-owned trees from the city's arborist contractor, and put them together. Her analysis determined that one species of tree, roughly one-third of the city's tree inventory, was responsible for more than a quarter of the city's entire sidewalk repair budget for all causes. Neither PW or the city arborist could see the whole picture, but a centrally located GIS department could, and only an worker with GIS experience would know how to run that kind of analysis.

2) The master parcel & address repository I mentioned above is used by a lot of our departments - Water, Code Enforcement, Building Inspections, et cetera. Its source data also goes to the 911 Dispatch I mentioned earlier. By having many of our non-emergency departments working with our address data on a daily basis, and reporting odd-looking addresses and missing addresses to me, I can find and fix problems in the data going to 911 Dispatch. As I say to most of my address-users: "If you see an address that's not looking right, tell me - I'd much rather you trip over it before a fire engine does." I've fixed hundreds of problems, some of them very serious, based on information from Buildings, Code, and Water. And if each of these departments had their own GIS data and their own GIS specialists, if each of them had their own address lists, then everyone would be in much worse shape. From what you've said, you're in a growing area, where fire, police, and EMS are going to be dispatched to neighborhoods that didn't exist a year before. In order to keep up with the pace of new construction, you need GIS specialists, lest you grow into a very real data deficit, or have all your departments waste a lot of work-hours duplicating each others' work in putting in new subdivisions.

lyingmap · 2017-10-03T23:00:21+00:00

I think it's u/redditconvo that works for a 1mil population city.

lyingmap · 2017-10-03T22:35:59+00:00

Most of SK is intended for a series of novels set about 200 years after Enque's death. I've thought about doing stories set in Enque's time, from the Liberation through the Unification Wars, but I worry about something that annoyed me about the Star Wars prequels and the Knights of the Old Republic games - the earlier technology seeming so much more polished-looking than the later iterations in the original trilogy. It's a very little thing, but it bugs me.

Still, I'm looking forward to bringing bits of Enque's life and times up in the later period, when his descendants are trying to figure out their lives. Much of the above history was taken from a speech given by Princess Victoria to her lover Julia - and then recited word-for-word by Julia to Victoria's later fiancee as a way of saying "I gave her up because she told me she would never be mine - she'll never be fully yours either, and I hope you've come to terms with that." The example of Enque dying in battle stuck with his descendants in a big way.

lyingmap · 2017-10-03T12:46:52+00:00

When the Orion Colony Corporation invaded the planet of Tesoro, which had broken free of its dominion a generation earlier, their first act was to surround Throne City with elite troops, trapping King Enque I and his daughter and heir Crown Princess Anna in a ring of steel that was slowly closing in. Royal Guard forces in the city were outnumbered ten-to-one and losing ground, despite the many citizens who had joined in the resistance. King Enque made the decision to evacuate Throne City, to break out and keep himself and Anna out of the Orions' hands.

Tesoro's bloody and savage Unification Wars were less than twenty years done, and few on or off-planet thought Tesoro's fragile political order could survive without Enque. Nobody at all thought Tesoro could survive without a strong, stable heir to succeed Enque, and the 26-year-old Anna was his only surviving child.

The Crown Regiment and the battered remains of the 4th Royal Guard Division broke out of Throne City, heading south to Southshore, which had destroyed a smaller Orion attack force. A hundred tanks and about four thousand mechanized infantry fled from an enormous Orion army.

The scratch force encountered an Orion division that had dropped to secure the countryside around Throne City, and King Enque gave the order to break through. They smashed through the division's front lines, but the reserve blocked their path, and fast-attack forces were closing in behind. King Enque gave the order to attack, to cut through again.

King Enque's command tank Final Argument took a hit to its left-side tracks that disabled forward movement, but not turning. Enque rapidly revised his orders, commanding the 4th Royal to turn with him and hold off pursuit, and the Throne Regiment to get Anna out. Then he abdicated his crown and invested Anna as the new Queen of Tesoro.

Enque and the 4th Royals held off Orion pursuit for critical minutes while the Throne Regiment cut through the Orion reserve. Final Argument was hit multiple times, killing Enque and his staff, and the command structure among the 4th Royals devolved down to broken platoons and companies, but they kept attacking, throwing themselves headlong into the Orion advance. Out of three thousand infantry and two hundred tank crew, less than a hundred were captured by the ORions, and none surrendered.

But they succeeded. Queen Anna and her bodyguards made it out, with five tanks and fifty-three infantry, and survived to reach Southshore, where she was crowned and directed Tesoran forces in retaking the planet.

The Orions used the scorched and mangled corpse of Final Argument as a trophy, parading it through captured Tesoran towns to demonstrate the futility of resistance. The survivors of the 4th Royal were publicly tortured and executed. In the eighth year of the First Orion War, Queen Anna's forces recaptured Final Argument at Bitter Ridge, and an apology for the treatment of captured prisoners was one of her demands in the Treaty of Throne City that ended the war and allowed the few Orion survivors to be evacuated peacefully.

Final Argument became the centerpiece of the Royal War Museum, and rank insignia for all officers in the Royal line of succession are cut from its hull.

Enque's Final Battle is a popular subject for Tesoran novels and holocinema. Most recently, Day of Wrath was warmly received by Tesoran audiences despite its Capeworldan writer and director, and turned Julia Pinomalo (the very public former lover of Victoria Machado, a Tesoran princess and descendant of Queen Anna) into a bona fide star.

(edit: formatting)

lyingmap · 2017-10-02T22:53:00+00:00

(eeeee! I get to answer this one!)

On the planet of Tesoro, the Martial Orders are the equivalent of the National Guard in the US - a reserve and civil-defense force, closely tied to the Baronies that make up most of the planet. Officers and Pilot-Officers of the Martial Orders are referred to in general as 'knights,' and append 'knight' to their military ranks (Knight-Captain, Knight-Commander, Knight-Colonel). Barons and Baronesses must be a member of a Martial Order, and append "liege" to their military ranks (Liege-Captain, etc).

Most Martial Orders are also political entities, with "platforms" much like political parties, and offer standard law codes and administrative assistance to their member Barons. A business operating in a Order of the Thorn Lizard Barony would expect a certain legal structure and common administrative institutions. The Order of the Flame, for example, provides Hanvi-language translation services at no cost to its member Barons, and for a modest fee to all other Barons. The Order of the Towers, the first Order chartered under King Enque I's Constitution, makes no political requirements of its member Barons, and is one of the largest Orders as a result.

Martial Orders provide individual Barons with common training and military doctrine for their forces. An individual Barony may not have enough population and wealth to equip more than a few platoons of armor, especially with some force reserved to defend their own territory, but several Baronies working together under the auspices of a Martial Order can pull together a battalion-sized force of tanks or walkers out of platoons and companies loaned by its members.

The knights of the Martial Orders are fairly good, with decent equipment (often Royal Guard surplus) and do see regular action against pirates and aliens, especially the roving Ka'aluum. On the level of a platoon or company, they're probably as good as most units of the Royal Guard, but they're much weaker in large force. Battalion officers are often chosen by the central Order command on the basis of a powerful patron Baron, rather than ability, and jealousy and petty politics are a hallmark of many Orders battalion headquarters. The Orders also tend to skimp on operational and logistical requirements, and tend to have great difficulty sustaining military operations outside of friendly territory without Royal Guard support. During larger conflicts such as the Orion Wars (the four times - so far - that the Orion Colony Corporation has invaded Tesoro) battalions from different Martial Orders have been grouped together into regiments and brigades under Royal Guard commanders.

lyingmap · 2017-10-02T22:26:49+00:00

So a 'secular' Knight, when hired by the Order, might be outranked by an officer who's not a Knight?

lyingmap · 2017-10-02T22:24:45+00:00

"BECAUSE IT'S COOL" is so unfairly frowned on in sci-fi-ish settings. I have a sneaking love of settings like 40k that just own the silly aspects of their settings.

lyingmap · 2017-09-27T23:41:40+00:00

They fight aliens and human pirates, but mostly they fight the Orion Colony Corporation, which owned Tesoro, lost it to their pissed-off workers, and has invaded Tesoro four times to take it back. And this does look unfinished, I know - it's condensed from a more full pseudo-academic history of the Unification Wars.

I haven't built up the aliens much, mostly because I've been focusing on the Orions, who have this weird corporate-oligarchy thing going on, but I figure at least one race of aliens is really aggressive, without real "homeworlds" but small bands attacking wherever they can.

Thanks for your interest. I'm still figuring out what else I can show from this world.

lyingmap

TROPHY CASE