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Looking for some interview advice, in particular questions I should be asking. I have an interview next week for an IT Supporter/Technician at a radiation therapy department. It's inside the same overall organization I already work at, currently I'm in help desk on a temp contract, which expires at new year's. I like my current help desk position as well as the overall way IT is managed in the org, so I'm really hoping to land a permanent position. My education is in software development, but over the past 2-3 years I have gradually discovered that it might not really be a job I'm cut out for. Which is why I'm now looking into support instead. It would be my first time doing support in the field (apart from several years ago at a small office), and additionally working with medical machines. As in, machines that could maim and kill if configured wrong. I obviously don't have any medical training. Are those real concerns? Are there things to look out for regarding the team I would be joining, as well as coworkers? The job posting mentioned a wide range of tasks including hardware setup, user support, some light software development/scripting, probably vendor contacts etc., anything to watch out for there?
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Dec 12, 2014 23:43
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flosofl posted:My gast is completely flabbered when candidates do this. MC Fruit Stripe fucked around with this message at 23:49 on Dec 12, 2014 |
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Dec 12, 2014 23:44
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Roargasm posted:It's easy with the built in OSX disk utility. You can just image the disk and restore it back onto the SSD - I think I used an external adapter to restore to the SSD but I don't remember. Bootcamp doesn't affect the loader at all That's not quite true. MacEFI is a funny beast which is only UEFI 2 compliant on very recent macs, but this ultimately works because the firmware on macs has "extended" efi to read hfs+ (while stupid, this doesn't violate the spec), and there's an efi stub for legacy bios which can find and boot hybrid MBR partition tables. So the efi partition on macs is like an appendix and you can delete it, because the essential efi data is on HFS+. But that (and Bootcamp) still affects the "loader", especially if you kill the data in /System/Library/CoreServices. Oh, and firmware updates fail without an efi partition, because those are dropped on as a simple efi application which flashes it instead of putting it with boot.efi on the system volume, because :apple: Also, there's some stuff (mostly disk ordering) in nvram. But bootcamp definitely has an effect. Just not on nvram. And efi systems don't actually "need" a boot loader anyway as long as the firmware can find a FAT (or other, depending on extensions) partition with boot.efi (or boot${arch}.efi) evol262 fucked around with this message at 00:07 on Dec 13, 2014 |
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Dec 13, 2014 00:05
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Docjowles posted:"running your own in-house AWS". evol262 posted:That's kinda the crux of it, yeah. Also that I'm not sure whether or not the kind of customers/whatever who look at it and say "what's openstack" can cogently answer "what's ec2"? No, that's an awesome explanation. Thanks a lot guys  Misogynist posted:Chef and Puppet are beginning to be used with Windows more frequently. Both tools recently got very good support for PowerShell DSC primitives, which pretty tremendously extends their power on the Windows platform. That's cool but the more I hear about automation while there be a point where we no longer need to manually install servers, features, roles? flosofl posted:My gast is completely flabbered when candidates do this. Is anyone opposed to open interviews? The candidate gets a laptop with the internet, command-line, vms and you ask away. If they need to google, read help, etc they can. I've been really impressed by a lot google-fo and various online sub-communities and I don't really expect you to remember everything but if you can google it in 30 seconds, remember and explain it that's fine by me.
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Dec 13, 2014 00:43
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Tab8715 posted:Is anyone opposed to open interviews? The candidate gets a laptop with the internet, command-line, vms and you ask away. If they need to google, read help, etc they can. That sounds like a pretty good idea to me.
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Dec 13, 2014 00:45
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Tab8715 posted:Is anyone opposed to open interviews? The candidate gets a laptop with the internet, command-line, vms and you ask away. If they need to google, read help, etc they can. A core part of my teambuilding strategy is take-home tests. I don't care how good your memorization is, what I want to know is how quickly and confidently can you execute a multi-part task that requires you to do some research. Here's a login to a test cluster, diagnose and fix the problem with this stack.
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Dec 13, 2014 00:49
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Tab8715 posted:Is anyone opposed to open interviews? The candidate gets a laptop with the internet, command-line, vms and you ask away. If they need to google, read help, etc they can. I've actually had one interview like this and it was awesome, made the whole thing less stressful. I wish I'd taken that job MagnumOpus posted:A core part of my teambuilding strategy is take-home tests. I don't care how good your memorization is, what I want to know is how quickly and confidently can you execute a multi-part task that requires you to do some research. Here's a login to a test cluster, diagnose and fix the problem with this stack. This is good too, without tests like these you end up with people like a couple of my colleagues who have literally no troubleshooting skills and will constantly need their hands held. theperminator fucked around with this message at 00:59 on Dec 13, 2014 |
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Dec 13, 2014 00:55
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Tab8715 posted:That's cool but the more I hear about automation while there be a point where we no longer need to manually install servers, features, roles? I'm not much into Windows anymore but you can already automate all of those things with Powershell scripts.
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Dec 13, 2014 01:02
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Tab8715 posted:Is anyone opposed to open interviews? The candidate gets a laptop with the internet, command-line, vms and you ask away. If they need to google, read help, etc they can. It really depends on what were looking for. With initial screens what we're trying to capture is a couple things. First off, general personality and how well we think they'd mesh with the team. Secondly, depth of knowledge. Someone googling completely defeats the purpose of that. We're also looking for people to say "I don't know." That's vitally important in our group. I'd rather you say you don't know something than regurgitate the 1st google hit (we also google our questions after the call to see if there were any word-for-word answers. You'd be surprised at how often it happens). It's also a bit of a gateway. If you're struggling on fundamentals that we require, you're not going to be a good fit and BS-ing your way to a face-to-face is just going to result in misery (and a guarantee we will never consider for a future opening). Now, if I'm testing problem solving, Google away. We'll set something up, break it in an interesting way (perhaps obscure depending on how the phone screen went) and then turn the candidate loose. I'm not looking for the "book solution". My team is looking for an ability to solve under pressure and think creatively and in a non-linear manner. In fact, I'd be disappointed if Google wasn't an immediate go to. And how the searches are crafted are also a good indicator of how the candidate thinks.
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Dec 13, 2014 01:03
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Tab8715 posted:Is anyone opposed to open interviews? The candidate gets a laptop with the internet, command-line, vms and you ask away. If they need to google, read help, etc they can. In one of my interviews for my first helpdesk job, I got stumped by a technical question and semi-jokingly said "so, I don't know that one. Mind if I Google it?" Interviewer laughed and said "nobody's every asked that before, go for it" By the time he got done saying that, I had the answer.
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Dec 13, 2014 01:23
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Fiendish Dr. Wu posted:In one of my interviews for my first helpdesk job, I got stumped by a technical question and semi-jokingly said "so, I don't know that one. Mind if I Google it?" Sounds like you guys actually got grilled. I got asked what i'd do if a PC powers on but nothing happened and I just laughed and said "does it beep?". Technical portion passed. I can see why my company has issues with first line techs.
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Dec 13, 2014 01:33
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MagnumOpus posted:Unless I missed something in there the req is for someone who would be in a pool of DevOps engineers. It even says you'd be part of an on-call rotation. That does rather sound pretty awesome.
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Dec 13, 2014 01:55
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Tab8715 posted:That's cool but the more I hear about automation while there be a point where we no longer need to manually install servers, features, roles? This is exactly what the Powershell DSC toolkit does. You create a configuration (features, roles, services to install or uninstall, files to check for, etc) and apply it to a group of servers that you want to all look the same.
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Dec 13, 2014 04:20
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I have an interview next Friday! It's for a hospital, which I know is like  but since I don't do tech work at all, I'm not sure if it'll matter. I guess I'll find out?
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Dec 13, 2014 05:02
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MagnumOpus posted:A core part of my teambuilding strategy is take-home tests. I don't care how good your memorization is, what I want to know is how quickly and confidently can you execute a multi-part task that requires you to do some research. Here's a login to a test cluster, diagnose and fix the problem with this stack. flosofl posted:It really depends on what were looking for. With initial screens what we're trying to capture is a couple things. First off, general personality and how well we think they'd mesh with the team. Secondly, depth of knowledge. Someone googling completely defeats the purpose of that. We're also looking for people to say "I don't know." That's vitally important in our group. I'd rather you say you don't know something than regurgitate the 1st google hit (we also google our questions after the call to see if there were any word-for-word answers. You'd be surprised at how often it happens). It's also a bit of a gateway. If you're struggling on fundamentals that we require, you're not going to be a good fit and BS-ing your way to a face-to-face is just going to result in misery (and a guarantee we will never consider for a future opening). Colonial Air Force posted:I have an interview next Friday! Hospitals have a lot of red tape, and that makes it very difficult to get things done sometimes, and almost impossible to learn anything outside of your job description unless it's a very small IT department. As with any job, it varies a lot from organization to organization. A state/county/city hospital is usually going to be very budget-constrained work with little appreciation for the people who make the technology decisions from day to day, while many private health systems have plenty of technology spend and you get to be very hands-on with all kinds of really neat hardware and software. Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 05:50 on Dec 13, 2014 |
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Dec 13, 2014 05:47
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Misogynist posted:
This is essentially the way we run. We're a SaaS and we try to make sure the devs have the tools and support necessary to build their project (for example, an MVC app for a new client that plugs into our larger application framework) from the ground up while integrating it into an environment as close to production as possible. So, we make sure their environment is setup right, give support on the deployment integration into the larger framework and they are responsible for making sure that their app is packaged up and has all the documentation necessary to deploy properly. We also help give them perspective on how what they are working on fits into the greater whole. "Oh, your new app uses a 3rd party component that's incompatible with one that's already in use by an app on the same server. We'll spin up a new set of VMs for deployment in this case and segregate it from the conflicting pieces." When poo poo goes wrong during testing in our various code promotion environments, we're the ones digging into the logs and metrics on the servers to give feedback to the developers to help them solve the issue. We just had a round where we had a bunch of aggregation calcs absolutely pummeling and crashing our test mongodb server so my team worked directly with the teams that wrote the code to do the post mortem to figure out where things went south. In that case, it was a slightly underspec'd VM combined with some mongodb driver settings that would occasionally create the perfect storm of locked collections and sharp escalation of memory usage that would eventually tank the server. Now, where we fall into the devops 'trap' that is talked about here (sometimes not having enough people) is that there's no dedicated IT staff outside of my department so we're also responsible for office desktop support as well. It's annoying and something we've talked about eventually correcting by outsourcing our desktop support, but for right now the workload isn't quite enough to keep a whole dedicated team busy so it lingers. But, no environment is perfect. One thing that has been great about this sort of role is the sheer number of technologies you get to touch. Every once and awhile I think it would be nicer to dig deeper into something and master it, but then something new and shiney comes by. Digging out the issues remains the fun part and things break in new and interesting ways with the rate we're growing as a company and how quickly we are evolving our software.
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Dec 13, 2014 06:55
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Raise negotiations: So my company got bought out a year and half ago. I stuck around and took over for our outgoing senior admin, who wasn't replaced. Employee reviews were finally conducted, and I got a run of the mill 3% increase. I tell my boss that I'm doing the job of two people right now, and that senior work warrants senior pay, so I ask for a 30% raise. He's going to get back to me next week. From what I've seen, the new company has trouble acquiring talent, and I suspect the reason is because they're not willing to pay for it. I can make a strong case for a pay adjustment, but 30% is not likely to be rubber stamped. Has anyone had success doing more than accepting the counteroffer while sending out resumes?
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Dec 13, 2014 08:03
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Sounds like you want to stay at your current gig but considering they're only offering 3% I'd bounce. Maybe they'll cough it up when you put in your notice maybe not.
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Dec 13, 2014 08:10
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bull3964 posted:Now, where we fall into the devops 'trap' that is talked about here (sometimes not having enough people) is that there's no dedicated IT staff outside of my department so we're also responsible for office desktop support as well. It's annoying and something we've talked about eventually correcting by outsourcing our desktop support, but for right now the workload isn't quite enough to keep a whole dedicated team busy so it lingers. Our solution to this has been to have a college intern do desktop support/helldesk, overseen by a more senior employee obviously. They have been completely awesome and often go on to be promoted to full-time Ops employees after graduation. Having someone with your skill set (and, I hope, salary) run Malwarebytes or ask "did you try turning it off and on again?" is a colossal waste of resources. bull3964 posted:But, no environment is perfect. One thing that has been great about this sort of role is the sheer number of technologies you get to touch. Every once and awhile I think it would be nicer to dig deeper into something and master it, but then something new and shiney comes by. Digging out the issues remains the fun part and things break in new and interesting ways with the rate we're growing as a company and how quickly we are evolving our software. I'm with you there! The diversity of tech I get to play with on a daily basis is awesome and I consider it a perk. Skill atrophy and falling behind the times is not a concern because "keeping up with new poo poo and using it as appropriate" is core to doing my job well. Docjowles fucked around with this message at 08:23 on Dec 13, 2014 |
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Dec 13, 2014 08:15
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Contingency posted:Raise negotiations:
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Dec 13, 2014 08:49
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Misogynist posted:This is the IT thread, so I'm assuming you're related to the IT field in some way. Are you more on the HRIS side? I'm a project manager, specifically for IT. The budget concerns could be a problem, although it is not a public hospital. I'd mostly heard that it's hard to support doctors because they're jerks and egotistical ones at that, but I suspect that will matter less (although I can think of a few ways it could come up).
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Dec 13, 2014 14:09
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Contingency posted:Raise negotiations: Devil's advocate question: Is your skill set strong enough to be earning 30% more on the open market in your town? If so, you can certainly make a move or use that as leverage. If not, then maybe look at settling for a smaller raise while you use this job as an opportunity to really solidify your standing as that senior admin, and then make your move when your stock value is truly improved. Just my 2 cents...
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Dec 14, 2014 00:30
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My boss just endorsed me in LI for Sharepoint. SHAREPOINT. We have a meeting Monday morning to talk to her boss about our standards documentation and hear his feedback on it. He's pointed out that although it's the primary [only] documentation the team uses internally to track what/how on coding standards, we have to remember that technical types aren't the only audience. I heard he's 'concerned' about the volume of sample code we have in there. 
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Dec 14, 2014 04:34
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LI?
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Dec 14, 2014 04:50
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Tab8715 posted:LI? LinkedIn I'm guessing.
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Dec 14, 2014 04:55
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Pfft, my LinkedIn account sent messages to my coworkers asking to endorse me for exchange. It's not even listed in my profile, skills or anything at all.
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Dec 14, 2014 05:02
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Tab8715 posted:Sounds like you want to stay at your current gig but considering they're only offering 3% I'd bounce. Maybe they'll cough it up when you put in your notice maybe not. To their credit, 3% was the annual increase. The funding for an adjustment for responsibilities would had to have come from a separate source. Misogynist posted:30% is a really tall order unless you were already at the wrong payscale before taking over for your senior admin. I know it is. The way I see it, if you need an average 45 hours of network engineer a week with occasional 50-55 hour stints, it's tough to justify hiring 2x40 hours worth. If they need more than 40 from me, it shouldn't be unreasonable to expect compensation to reflect it. Dark Helmut posted:Devil's advocate question: Is your skill set strong enough to be earning 30% more on the open market in your town? If so, you can certainly make a move or use that as leverage. If not, then maybe look at settling for a smaller raise while you use this job as an opportunity to really solidify your standing as that senior admin, and then make your move when your stock value is truly improved. Just my 2 cents... It isn't, but it's not terribly above market wage. The company is a carousel. Some people hopped off immediately, some were flung off, and others are clinging on for dear life. Plan B is exactly what you suggest--picking the appropriate time to step off the carousel. Odds are my next employer is going to ask two questions: what is your job title, and what is your current salary? It would certainly be worthwhile to stick around for an improvement on either front, but you also don't want to wait too long before finally cutting your losses. I could wait another six months and make a stronger case for 30%, but if all they were going to do all along is 15%, I'd have been better off rushing the next level cert and hightailing it.
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Dec 14, 2014 08:22
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Contingency posted:Odds are my next employer is going to ask two questions: what is your job title, and what is your current salary? You realize there's nothing stopping you from throwing out any number you want, correct? Legally (at least in the US) your previous employer can do nothing but say that you were, in fact, employed there from date X to date Y. They are not allowed to disclose information regarding your departure or any other information regarding your time there. They open themselves to legal action from you if they do, and no HR dept is going to willingly release that information.
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Dec 14, 2014 09:59
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flosofl posted:Legally (at least in the US) your previous employer can do nothing but say that you were, in fact, employed there from date X to date Y. They are not allowed to disclose information regarding your departure or any other information regarding your time there. I'm almost completely sure that this is not the case. They are legally allowed to say much more than that you were employed from X to Y. quote:They open themselves to legal action from you if they do. This is why they don't say more than that, for fear of a libel/slander lawsuit. The population is litigious enough in general that there's no reason for a company to take the risk that some disgruntled ex-employee will take any opportunity to sue them. It certainly doesn't gain them anything to tell another company that you flipped off your boss on your way out. But they're still legally allowed to. ---- Flosofl is right in terms of his advice though: If some hiring manager or recruiter is audacious enough to ask you about your current salary, which is completely and utterly irrelevant to the new company and new job, don't tell them the truth. Hell, I'm more inclined to tell them that I don't think it's terribly relevant and that I'm sure we can come to an agreement on a compensation package once we figure out if we're a good fit for each other. As for the job title, I'm a fan of ignoring my company-provided title in favor of using something recognizable that applies to what I actually do. I'm a software engineer. My job titles have been things like "Staff Programmer" or ".Net Developer." I put "Software Engineer" on my resume.
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Dec 14, 2014 11:26
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Che Delilas posted:I'm almost completely sure that this is not the case. They are legally allowed to say much more than that you were employed from X to Y. This is definitely a region-dependent thing.
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Dec 14, 2014 11:36
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Saying any number you want works until they ask for W2's, which has happened more than once to me. The reaction was the same though: absolutely not. But tax records are easily gotten with background check permission so they can find out anyway.
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Dec 14, 2014 15:01
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mayodreams posted:Saying any number you want works until they ask for W2's, which has happened more than once to me. The reaction was the same though: absolutely not. But tax records are easily gotten with background check permission so they can find out anyway. I really don't think I would take a job that wants my w2's from a previous job. Unless it's like, my dream job.
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Dec 14, 2014 16:53
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Fiendish Dr. Wu posted:I really don't think I would take a job that wants my w2's from a previous job. Unless it's like, my dream job. I totally agree. A company that is so hell bent on finding out how much I make to look up tax records or request my W2's to low ball me as much as possible is not somewhere I want to work.
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Dec 14, 2014 17:17
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Employers can say whatever the hell they want about a previous employee they just often don't because it could end up it court and usually will only confirm job title and duration. I'd imagine if you were a that awful of a employee they'd have no problem telling everyone else about it. A lot of employers ask for W-2 as a means of confirming your past jobs but I know a few people that have flat out refused to give them over and they'll got hired.
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Dec 14, 2014 18:05
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Tab8715 posted:Employers can say whatever the hell they want about a previous employee they just often don't because it could end up it court and usually will only confirm job title and duration. I'd imagine if you were a that awful of a employee they'd have no problem telling everyone else about it. I haven't had a single employer ask for a w2. I wouldn't do it unless something was amazing.
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Dec 14, 2014 18:56
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Is calling HR/providing a W2 the only way to verify you've actually worked where your resume says? (US). I'm assuming there's no big database that tracks where you've worked other than the IRS. I've seen background check companies advertise employment verification as part of their package, do they do that just by calling?
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Dec 14, 2014 19:21
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Contingency posted:I know it is. The way I see it, if you need an average 45 hours of network engineer a week with occasional 50-55 hour stints, it's tough to justify hiring 2x40 hours worth. If they need more than 40 from me, it shouldn't be unreasonable to expect compensation to reflect it. Go on the market if you want 30%. Don't fall into this trap of "I work more so I should get paid more". Go to an hourly job if you want that. Learn that you don't need to accomplish absolutely every thing on your plate that day, learn to comp time when you have project work that means 55 hour weeks, etc. You're working more for nothing. Why would they pay you more? Tab8715 posted:Employers can say whatever the hell they want about a previous employee they just often don't because it could end up it court and usually will only confirm job title and duration. I'd imagine if you were a that awful of a employee they'd have no problem telling everyone else about it. This is what "is this person eligible for rehire" means, usually. Inasmuch as a candidate would need to try to demonstrate communicated bias for a civil suit, telling people that they suck and they're consistently tardy is how you lose lawsuits, much less actually protected info (as annoying as abusing FMLA is, it's protected).
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Dec 14, 2014 19:34
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Assuming a W-2 is like a T4 here in Canada (according to my googling), you are an idiot if you give that form to potential employer or to anyone period, outside tax purposes. I'm not sure you would even be allowed to legally here.
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Dec 14, 2014 20:17
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If they insist on seeing W2s and you need the job more than you want to make a principled stand, redact everything but the employer name/address/EIN.
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Dec 14, 2014 20:59
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evol262 posted:earn to comp time when you have project work that means 55 hour weeks, etc. Is that bank it in writing just like PTO and take an extra week off comp time, or your boss lets you come in at lunchtime on monday after working all weekend? The former is as good as cash in my mind, the latter makes you a sucker if it happens outside of rare, unavoidable circumstances. We pay overtime despite everyone being salary/exempt on paper, my last two jobs have paid overtime, I think consulting firms are more likely to do it because you working directly translates into billable hours. I approve 90-100 hour biweekly timesheets fairly often, with occasional ones over 110. It's a nice bump in income for the guys who work migrations etc and it seems only fair to do it. I'd look at this on more of a yearly or quarterly basis. Take your fixed salary and the number of hours you worked and calculate an hourly rate. Then look around for jobs that will actually result in working <45hrs, or jobs that'll pay for any extra time and do the same. If you can move positions and make the same amount for working less or make more for working the same amount, why not..
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Dec 14, 2014 21:06
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