You: Who are you?

By JULIE BORT
Network World Fusion, 7/26/99

All the people like us are we, and everyone else is they.

-- Rudyard Kipling

Network World readers are endlessly interesting to Network World editors. If we could put you all in a fish bowl and study your every move, we would.

Because that's impossible, we do the next best thing: survey you. We do individual phone interviews and online surveys. We hire research firms to compile statistics on what you earn, how much you spend and what you think about vendors. We query you on your jobs for our circulation data and so on.

After all the answers are tallied, what have we learned about you? Here's a short rundown:

All work and some play

You are the corporate network managers. You are employed across industry segments, but are most likely to work in manufacturing, government, retail/hospitality, finance/banking and education, in that order, according to Network World's 1997 and 1998 audited circulation surveys. (Although thousands of you work in healthcare, insurance, process manufacturing, media, military and transportation, too).

Your industry is as much your career as the networks for which you care. One-third of you have logged 10 or more years of tenure in your industry, according to our 1999 salary survey of 65 respondents.

Roughly three out of four of you are responsible for multisite networks. Our circulation studies show that these multisite networks typically have from two to nine locations. As such, your major task last year was internetworking your LANs via an intranet to the Internet. Ditto for the year before. Wireless garnered more attention in 1998 than previously, reflecting your search for ever-better ways to integrate remote locations.

On the LAN side, you are almost eight times more likely to buy Pentium-based PCs than a Macintosh, although almost all of you lord over networks that include both, as well as RISC workstations. Even more interesting is that one-quarter of you still manage 386-based machines (and almost 10% of you told us you would buy 386s or 286s in 1999.)

Most of you are, apparently, naturally energetic. In a survey we conducted on Fusion in April, 81% of 946 respondents said they work more than 40 hours a week. About one-third of respondents typically work between 50 and 75 hours a week. Yet, one-third of you drink no coffee at all. How can that be? We editor Java heads wonder.

Dream Works

Work is serious fun for you because you love technology. In our Fusion survey, when asked which company in the world is your ideal employer, more of you named a technology-related entity than any other type of company. Specifically, out of 880 respondents, 437 named high tech. Nearly 50% of you named Cisco as the hottest employer. It garnered 88 write-in votes, or 20%. That's twice as many as any other single vendor, even millionaire-maker Microsoft. Microsoft was named by 9% of the technology crowd, including one reader who wants to be become Microsoft's "head of Linux advocacy."

You technology lovers also listed dozens of other cool companies as great prospective employers, including "the one building cutting-edge ATM networks on the Bahamas Beach front." We say "hang 10" to that.

All by yourself

Other than technology, the No. 2 dream job category is self-employment - 19% of you would like to strike out and start your own company. "One I start and take public," summarized one respondent about his ideal company.

Meanwhile, about 9% said you dream of the entertainment and sports industry, working for companies such as Cirque du Soleil, Leggoland and Playboy (truly in your dreams). Of the entertainment lovers, about one-third want to be where movies and technology meet - at Disney, LucasFilm or the derivatives of these two movie-making giants, DreamWorks and Industrial Light and Magic.

Seven percent of you wish for travel-related jobs with almost half of that crowd wanting to work for the ultimate travel agency, NASA. "It's the cool factor," one reader explained.

That leaves 13% in the other category, which included such lofty aspirations as working for the Vatican ("They have a great retirement package") or even directly for God ("He pays very well"). We editors wondered what the rush for that job was - we all get that gig sooner or later.

Some 13% of you told us that your dream job was our job - Network World editor - or working for various trade media. Before we editors get too smug, an equal number of you also told us that your dream job is independent wealth. "I wouldn't work if I didn't have to," one person wrote.

We understand. Still, we're glad we asked.

Important technologies
More from our Fusion surveys: The technologies you find important.

1999 salary survey and calculator
See how your salary compares to your peers'.

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