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I had 3 years, told them I was in school, helping family, working on art projects. Worked out fine for me.
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Mar 12, 2015 22:00
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Really it was more like 10 weeks. I even did some IT stuff in between! I figured then was as good as time as any to get my A+ since I was worried about getting past the HR gatekeepers. Hopefully no one presses to hard and if they do maybe they'll think it's interesting. People in the midwest generally seem to like farmers, especially old crotchety HR types.
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Mar 12, 2015 22:04
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BaseballPCHiker posted:Really it was more like 10 weeks. I even did some IT stuff in between! I figured then was as good as time as any to get my A+ since I was worried about getting past the HR gatekeepers. Hopefully no one presses to hard and if they do maybe they'll think it's interesting. People in the midwest generally seem to like farmers, especially old crotchety HR types. There you go. Education. And you have the added benefit of it being the honest-to-god truth.  My 9 months was mostly filled with helping a friend with his shop computers and network. So while *technically* Freelance, it was more "can you help a brother out".
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Mar 12, 2015 22:07
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J posted:We're starting to have increasingly more users requesting if we can provide them access to our windows file server on their phones, tablets, etc. These devices are their own personal devices so obviously there is a mix of operating systems at play here, and they also want to be able to access stuff from outside the office. I've been asking people who make this request for some information on their use case and what they actually want to accomplish, but I always get a vague answer back. "Oh I was just wondering." "Oh it would be faster to pull it up on my ipad instead of turning on my laptop." Those types of answers. I work for an MSP and we've started deploying eFolder's Anchor product out to clients. It's basically a Dropbox replacement for MSPs and gives us granular control over the data and the machines that access it so you can easily remote wipe and such. A big component of the product is the "file server enablement" piece which basically "cloud enables" your file server allowing you to create "team shares" on Anchor that map to certain local folders or UNC paths on your network. The Anchor agent keeps that synced up and allows for permissions on each "team share". They have smartphone apps where you can access the data from. The permissions are really good because you can limit access to only Web/Mobile or only WebDAV. Another great part of the product is that it is completely brandable in terms of naming, icons, logos- we have our named [company] File Sync with our own logo and no one can possibly know it's Anchor unless they've used the product before. Anyway- it's a good product and can be hosted internally as well... they pitch towards MSPs but I'm sure will sell to anyone.
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Mar 12, 2015 22:19
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Working with 3 recruiters looking for new work (recruiter who I'm currently working for, Dark Helmuts guy from where I'm at (he's trying. Got one company that "wants to talk to me" they're just taking Goddamn forever), and some other one (the one who lined up that one I talked about a few pages ago, turned out to be a tea party lobbying non-profit)). Suddenly, player 4 has entered the game (with some pretty awesome sounding Cloud Systems Engineer stuff) It feels good to be wanted  Now hopefully something sticks
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Mar 12, 2015 23:01
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Out of curiosity, at what level of pay/job title are you expected to be able to code and or script reasonably well? I started in large systems operations maybe 10 years ago, and have been able to do it since back then. I'm on a team of systems engineers, officially that is my title. Maybe 25% of us can code. Some of us have written major apps for the org, though I specifically try to avoid that myself as we have an actual development team, and major stuff comes with maintenance and support. We also have desktop engineers and a team of printing engineers, sometimes they get poo poo on by management...they do not script. Currently helping them with something and my manager is sorta annoyed. Someday we will probably reorg and have more normal titles. Bottom line, I've always felt it is an extra thing, unless you're a programmer, or a *nix admin. Interestingly, the company we merged with, many of them make over 40% more than us, haha. Some of them know less, some of them are pretty good. None of them script, though one of them is very good at general Windows infrastructure. SSH IT ZOMBIE fucked around with this message at 01:12 on Mar 13, 2015 |
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Mar 13, 2015 00:38
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I just got a call from the "System administration" department about my "windows computer". It was apparently sending a string of error messages to the "global monitoring service". I trolled him for about 10 seconds before I got bored with it and launched into a profanity-laced tirade about what a terrible person he is. My inner moralist won, and apparently can scare sailors.
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Mar 13, 2015 00:58
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Had my first client meeting today and I managed to upsell them on a SIEM solution (which they actually needed, so it wasn't even a bloat purchase). Boss pulled me aside afterward and told me he was really impressed. Then I spent most of the rest of the day screwing around in our lab while teleworking. Definitely liking this job better than my last one.
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Mar 13, 2015 02:02
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SSH IT ZOMBIE posted:Out of curiosity, at what level of pay/job title are you expected to be able to code and or script reasonably well? I'd like to see this answered but define "script well".
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Mar 13, 2015 02:38
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SSH IT ZOMBIE posted:Out of curiosity, at what level of pay/job title are you expected to be able to code and or script reasonably well? I'm sure opinions are going to be all over the place on this, especially with the joke that is IT job titles. Personally, I think scripting/coding ability should be a basic, required skill in 2015 for anyone with a job title like system admin/engineer. Even junior positions. Anything above help desk/desktop support. I'm not talking about the ability to write "major apps for the org" as you have done, although that's great. I think you're right that that work is best left to professional developers. But the ability to read, understand and write short to medium scripts to automate work is pretty critical. It's certainly more expected in the Linux world for whatever reason. But once you're managing more than a handful of servers, regardless of the OS, I don't know how you get by without scripting and automation. Manually doing the same chores over and over again is a terrible use of time, both for the company and for you. Automate once, then move on to something more interesting and valuable. Obviously you can still get by without knowing how to code at all. For now. But I don't know why you'd want to unless you're in the coasting to retirement phase. Or why a company would want to hire someone whose primary skill is the ability to click Next.
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Mar 13, 2015 03:03
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If you're a Windows admin and not atleast trying to learn PowerShell or have some familiarity with it then you should probably just be put out of your own misery
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Mar 13, 2015 03:20
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Docjowles posted:I'm sure opinions are going to be all over the place on this, especially with the joke that is IT job titles. Personally, I think scripting/coding ability should be a basic, required skill in 2015 for anyone with a job title like system admin/engineer. Even junior positions. Anything above help desk/desktop support. This is the right answer. There is no role which would not be improved by knowing powershell/python/etc. Real languages (PS due to .net tie-ins). Not shell. Shell/batch is ok, but it's TYOOL 2015. Start with a real language. It's not like it's a choice between C, tcl, and shell anymore. I'd say it's flatly unacceptable to be in a systems engineering position without knowing how to script at an intermediate level. What kind of integration and projects can you actually do as an engineering team without automation?
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Mar 13, 2015 04:08
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Tab8715 posted:I'd like to see this answered but define "script well". Kind of hard to define. Basically what Docjowles said. Writing scripts up to maybe up to a couple hundred lines to resolve various problems that would take too long to do by hand, or, regularly using shorter Powershell\VBScript\whatever you want scripts to accomplish various tasks. I'm wondering what the general consensus is. I'm wondering if the ability to script is pretty common among colleagues at other places. No one outside director level pulls anywhere close to 6 figures. We had one Sharepoint guy that pulled in that much. There might be one or two people on the network team that have negotiated close to that much. I'm wondering if the ability is tied to salary or quality of the employees with higher level titles. I've more or less come to expect that most IT people don't cut code of any sort, so I occasionally help folks. Some people who can script tell me I'm "bailing them out again" when they have trouble with various projects. But I might just be blinded by the abnormality that healthcare IT is, or at least is in this area. SSH IT ZOMBIE fucked around with this message at 04:25 on Mar 13, 2015 |
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Mar 13, 2015 04:22
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I'm looking for some good ways to keep up on IT news, especially security. Anyone have suggestions? I'm trying to find a few that someone who isn't super into IT could reasonably follow and stay sort of up to date with the most notable stuff. My list so far is: https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/ http://arstechnica.com/security/ https://twitter.com/swiftonsecurity Here's some posts from earlier in the thread. Tab8715 posted:
Lord Dudeguy posted:
Bhodi posted:I do most of my learning on here, twitter folks, and https://news.ycombinator.com/news. I still check slashdot but honestly I don't know why I bother anymore. Reddit is worthless for deep tech stuff unless it's front page news; too much chatter not enough deep info. flosofl posted:Yeah HN is on the list, but less so the comment section. I've neglected mine lately, but my Feedly is currently set up for Hacker News, Krebs, Naked Security, SANS Pen Testing, Schneier on Security, Threat Research and Threat Post.
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Mar 13, 2015 04:23
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dox posted:I work for an MSP and we've started deploying eFolder's Anchor product out to clients. It's basically a Dropbox replacement for MSPs and gives us granular control over the data and the machines that access it so you can easily remote wipe and such. A big component of the product is the "file server enablement" piece which basically "cloud enables" your file server allowing you to create "team shares" on Anchor that map to certain local folders or UNC paths on your network. The Anchor agent keeps that synced up and allows for permissions on each "team share". They have smartphone apps where you can access the data from. The permissions are really good because you can limit access to only Web/Mobile or only WebDAV. Another great part of the product is that it is completely brandable in terms of naming, icons, logos- we have our named [company] File Sync with our own logo and no one can possibly know it's Anchor unless they've used the product before. Anchor is awfully similar to Sharepoint as well but have you got logging to actually work on the cloud version? How difficult is it to setup the on-premise version?
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Mar 13, 2015 04:47
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SSH IT ZOMBIE posted:Out of curiosity, at what level of pay/job title are you expected to be able to code and or script reasonably well? My title is System Engineer, but I really disagree with calling everyone an engineer, unless you design bridges or something you aren't an engineer. Most of the titles are just fancy rebadging of technicians. That said, I do design Linux server environments for publication companies, I also do a lot of application installs on Redhat. I work in NYC so the salary is sort of skewed high, but it's relatively easy to make 100k if you are familiar with Linux and can reliably manage a linux system. The vast majority of my job is writing and analyzing Bash scripts. Our product is a bit of boutique customized one, so each project is based on a standard baseline delivered by R&D and then modified per the customer requirements. That requires modification of a lot of Bash and Python scripts to make it align with the customer needs. If you are in Linux you absolutely need to know how to script at a high level. At the very least you'll be debugging other scripts to find problems. I'm working on learning Python now, since I run it to it as often as Bash, and don't really know my way around it.
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Mar 13, 2015 10:37
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I'm in two minds whether to pay any attention to the @swiftonsecurity account. A good few months back it was genuinely interesting but now it just seems to be making GBS threads out blanket statements backed with "because I'm Taylor Swift" which gets really boring really quickly. Whoever's behind it went through a phase of posting pictures of some poo poo old 4U Dell server from about 8 years ago as though people should be impressed that it was on their living room floor. It's by no means the worst account on Twitter, I'm just not sure what you're supposed to gain from following it.
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Mar 13, 2015 11:32
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TWiT podcasts and Feedly with many of the above RSS feeds
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Mar 13, 2015 12:41
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Thanks Ants posted:I'm in two minds whether to pay any attention to the @swiftonsecurity account. A good few months back it was genuinely interesting but now it just seems to be making GBS threads out blanket statements backed with "because I'm Taylor Swift" which gets really boring really quickly. Whoever's behind it went through a phase of posting pictures of some poo poo old 4U Dell server from about 8 years ago as though people should be impressed that it was on their living room floor. It's by no means the worst account on Twitter, I'm just not sure what you're supposed to gain from following it. It's supposed to erode your sense of irony just like everything else on the internet
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Mar 13, 2015 14:13
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Thanks Ants posted:I'm in two minds whether to pay any attention to the @swiftonsecurity account. A good few months back it was genuinely interesting but now it just seems to be making GBS threads out blanket statements backed with "because I'm Taylor Swift" which gets really boring really quickly. Whoever's behind it went through a phase of posting pictures of some poo poo old 4U Dell server from about 8 years ago as though people should be impressed that it was on their living room floor. It's by no means the worst account on Twitter, I'm just not sure what you're supposed to gain from following it. I never understood the point of that account. There are so many jokes that can be made with her lyrics and infosec stuff, or even reaction gifs and infosec stuff. But instead, it's just tweets about infosec that are some combo of mundane, unfunny, or opaque.
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Mar 13, 2015 15:00
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SIR FAT JONY IVES posted:My title is System Engineer, but I really disagree with calling everyone an engineer, unless you design bridges or something you aren't an engineer. Most of the titles are just fancy rebadging of technicians. While I agree that that engineer is over used in our industry, I disagree that it has no place. There is a lot more to the field than just civil.  The difference between technicians and engineers is typically that engineers design and techs implement and support. I prefer to be called a Systems Engineer because I am designing and integrating infrastructure rather than just doing general admin work. I think many see the difference between admins and engineers are adapting to that nomenclature, while most are still looking for 'network admins' which is the title from the 90's for doing sysadmin work. In most cases titles aren't terriblely relevant, but I think there is a progression from admin, to engineer, to architect.
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Mar 13, 2015 15:34
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Tab8715 posted:Anchor is awfully similar to Sharepoint as well but have you got logging to actually work on the cloud version? How difficult is it to setup the on-premise version? What do you mean by logging? On the endpoint it definitely logs to the logs folder. We are using the hosted model, not the on-premise- I just know it's possible. edit: I also feel like it's pretty different from Sharepoint as there's no customizable home page or anything like that. We use both internally. dox fucked around with this message at 15:42 on Mar 13, 2015 |
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Mar 13, 2015 15:38
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SSH IT ZOMBIE posted:I'm wondering if the ability to script is pretty common among colleagues at other places. All of the sysadmins, DBA's and even NOC folks I work with can write scripts, although we're a 100% Linux shop so that definitely skews it. Our network engineer started with no coding ability but he's been inspired to learn Python after seeing all the cool poo poo everyone else does with it I would not hire someone for my team who can't code at all.There's going to be a general correlation between salary and ability to write code, yes. Automation is an investment and a force multiplier. If you're grinding poo poo out manually every day, it takes the same amount of time to do it every time. Your work never gets much faster or better. Whereas if you automate it up front, that work is done once and then you never have to do it again. And it's done correctly every time. The company can pay fewer, highly skilled admins vs a small army. This is how you get companies managing many thousands of servers per admin. If you want the best chance of being paid well, make sure you're on the right side of that equation. I won't speak to "quality of employee" since you can certainly hire a complete shitlord who also happens to be able to write code. Inspector_666 posted:I never understood the point of that account. There are so many jokes that can be made with her lyrics and infosec stuff, or even reaction gifs and infosec stuff. Yeah it's a bad gimmick account and I stopped following it pretty quickly. Anything genuinely interesting or funny gets retweeted by everyone else you're following anyway. I really don't get why everyone loves it :get off my lawn: I'm currently enjoying @sadserver, @honest_update and @BadAtNetworking as my bad IT joke accounts. For easy to digest security news, you could do worse than SANS ISC and Krebs on Security. The oss-security mailing list is good if you use a lot of open source stuff, although it's very high-traffic.
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Mar 13, 2015 16:14
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SSH IT ZOMBIE posted:I'm wondering if the ability to script is pretty common among colleagues at other places. I was pretty amazed to find out how few people at the help desk I started at knew anything about scripting. They've been there for years. Then again, they've been in the help desk for years, so it probably makes sense.
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Mar 13, 2015 16:17
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You guys make me feel like I really need to learn how to script effectively to find better positions in the future, but I'm in the middle of learning IOS for school and I don't really have anything that needs automation at my current job, should I just play with Python/PS and see if I can make my work PC do stuff on its own? 
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Mar 13, 2015 16:20
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Drunk Orc posted:You guys make me feel like I really need to learn how to script effectively to find better positions in the future, but I'm in the middle of learning IOS for school and I don't really have anything that needs automation at my current job, should I just play with Python/PS and see if I can make my work PC do stuff on its own? If you use Windows as your desktop OS, don;t open CMD, open Powershell and do everything command line from there. Branch out to doing more and more stuff from powershell. Need to clear out a directory of old log files by date, do it in powershell and save the script to a folder somewhere. You can reuse that code over and over and eventually you'll find some IIS webserver that you can;t turn logging off but it keeps filling the drive up. Bam! Scheduled task to clear out old log files and keep the server alive, you're a hero. Straight up forcing yourself to learn it all at once is great, forcing yourself to learn it opportunistically, is better in my opinion because it tends to stick more by being more practical application of the skill.
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Mar 13, 2015 16:26
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SIR FAT JONY IVES posted:My title is System Engineer, but I really disagree with calling everyone an engineer, unless you design bridges or something you aren't an engineer. Most of the titles are just fancy rebadging of technicians. That said, I do design Linux server environments for publication companies, I also do a lot of application installs on Redhat. I work in NYC so the salary is sort of skewed high, but it's relatively easy to make 100k if you are familiar with Linux and can reliably manage a linux system. The vast majority of my job is writing and analyzing Bash scripts. Our product is a bit of boutique customized one, so each project is based on a standard baseline delivered by R&D and then modified per the customer requirements. That requires modification of a lot of Bash and Python scripts to make it align with the customer needs. There's plenty of civil engineers and mechanical engineers that never design anything. A large portion of the traditional "engineering" community oversees maintenance and compliance, which you may recognize as the analog to the exact thing most network or systems engineers do.
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Mar 13, 2015 16:26
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SSH IT ZOMBIE posted:Kind of hard to define. Basically what Docjowles said. I get that scripting isn't coding and you're not developing an actual application but what I'm kind of lost on is when one should list scripting on their resume? If I can slowly read some bash/powershell/python with the help of google does that count? If I need to make a script am I allowed google, grab pieces from other scripts or do I just have a blank prompt? SSH IT ZOMBIE posted:No one outside director level pulls anywhere close to 6 figures. We had one Sharepoint guy that pulled in that much. There might be one or two people on the network team that have negotiated close to that much. Sharepoint is serious business. It's complicated because not only do you need to know Sharepoint you also need to have a solid grasp AD and MS SQL. I've heard of SP Architects pulling in $200k and I believe it.
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Mar 13, 2015 16:33
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Drunk Orc posted:You guys make me feel like I really need to learn how to script effectively to find better positions in the future, but I'm in the middle of learning IOS for school and I don't really have anything that needs automation at my current job, should I just play with Python/PS and see if I can make my work PC do stuff on its own? Do like me and buy Powershell in a Month of Lunches. I'm just getting started on it but I'm already impressed.
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Mar 13, 2015 16:33
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Docjowles posted:Yeah it's a bad gimmick account I don't think it's even a gimmick account, unless you look only at the name. Drunk Orc posted:You guys make me feel like I really need to learn how to script effectively to find better positions in the future, but I'm in the middle of learning IOS for school and I don't really have anything that needs automation at my current job, should I just play with Python/PS and see if I can make my work PC do stuff on its own? What I've been trying to do is look at any time I would have to read something off of a screen and then type it in somewhere else, and try to make Powershell do it. I generally don't get to work with servers and domains, so I can't do a lot of fun stuff day-to-day. That said, I did get to use it to bulk add users to AD from a CSV, then create shared directories by pulling directly from AD into another script I found. Felt like a goddamn wizard, and I think I impressed the project managers.
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Mar 13, 2015 16:39
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Tab8715 posted:
Sharepoint is crazy. I've been at three companies that have decided to "just do it in sharepoint" but not really give any thought to their implementation. I'm a Linux sys admin and twice it was handed to me like "oh, just do this" and it's a nightmare. I can understand paying a Sharepoint admin well.
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Mar 13, 2015 16:42
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What would be the qualifying skills of a mid-level network engineer?
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Mar 13, 2015 16:46
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If you subscribe to the many worlds interpretation then there is a universe where there is a perfectly working Sharepoint install and someone who understand MS licensing front to back
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Mar 13, 2015 16:47
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go3 posted:If you subscribe to the many worlds interpretation then there is a universe where there is a perfectly working Sharepoint install and someone who understand MS licensing front to back My favorite story about MS. i was on an airport shuttle from Seattle Airport to the rental car garage and I see a guy with an Microsoft OCS (Lync before it was called Lync). I say to him "Oh you work for Microsoft? Did you help develop Lync?" and he looks at me says "Yeah, I did, and I was on that team. Are you familiar with Lync?" I say "yes, I'm actually in the middle of a deployment now" He looks me in the eyes and says "I'm really sorry."
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Mar 13, 2015 16:55
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We use Novell eDirectory here still, so while I have classroom and sim experience with AD I don't get to play with it at all, I'll start forcing myself to do stuff with PS when it's nothing urgent though. And I will definitely be buying that book, something about having an actually text to thumb through makes me learn better than reading from a screen. Thanks all
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Mar 13, 2015 16:56
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Tab8715 posted:I get that scripting isn't coding and you're not developing an actual application but what I'm kind of lost on is when one should list scripting on their resume? If I can slowly read some bash/powershell/python with the help of google does that count? If I need to make a script am I allowed google, grab pieces from other scripts or do I just have a blank prompt? A good rule of thumb is "would you be comfortable answering questions about it in an interview?" Anything on your resume is fair game for the interviewer. The job description will probably be a good guide, too. If they list "strong scripting skills" as a requirement they may expect you to bang out a short script during the interview without having to Google "how do I do X in Python?". Or at least be able to talk in some depth about how you'd implement it. Whereas "familiarity with scripting is a plus" might be a lower bar. On the job, no one is realistically going to require you to code 100% without references or searching. Even professional developers have library references or API docs open in one window all day. But if you literally have to look up what every single line of a script does, you're going to want to put in some more practice before applying to roles that require a lot of scripting on a daily basis.
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Mar 13, 2015 17:00
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Docjowles posted:On the job, no one is realistically going to require you to code 100% without references or searching. Even professional developers have library references or API docs open in one window all day. But if you literally have to look up what every single line of a script does, you're going to want to put in some more practice before applying to roles that require a lot of scripting on a daily basis. I script a lot, at my previous job my annual review went really well. but then two weeks later my manager told me he was unhappy that I was always reading tech blogs. I told him that I always have a window open for referencing scripting and he said "bullshit". The next day they fired him and offered me his job...lol.
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Mar 13, 2015 17:07
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icehewk posted:What would be the qualifying skills of a mid-level network engineer? You should be able to understand how to design a network and networking principles. Also if you can configure NAT port forwarding on a Cisco ASA via command line I'd consider you midlevel. if you can do it in the GUI I'd consider you high-level.
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Mar 13, 2015 17:10
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My entire large office's IP phones are all down. Happy Friday.
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Mar 13, 2015 17:17
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Would powershell be a good starting point to jump into coding or should you begin with something else for this framework?
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Mar 13, 2015 17:27
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