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I'm having a problem with deciding where I want my career to go next. I absolutely love building desktop PCs because building computers from the components allows me to use problem-solving skills that normally just aren't useful. When I get asked to get bids from vendors for solutions it gets very frustrating because almost every time nothing will work perfectly and there have to be bad/awkward workarounds. If I'm controlling what the solution is, then I can take a goal of "We need this system to do X", and just build it, using my knowledge of PC hardware to get something that works optimally. I have recently been tasked with handling my company's RMAs, and it is just soul-crushing when there's nothing I can do beyond "send it back and hope it gets fixed" since business workstations are so integrated that there's nothing for me to do other than re-seat the memory or HDD, as the CPU is permanently soldered in. The writing is on the wall for me at my current position but I am very hesitant to find more corporate IT work. I know that the place I'm at is one of the few jobs left that will actually let me do custom PC builds, so I feel like I'm at a dead end. I am a competent Windows and single-subnet network admin but I find that work very boring. Am I just being left behind by the expectations of corporate IT? I feel like taking a job at Best Buy or some other consumer-based computer shop rather than stop working with the skillset I love.
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Jan 2, 2016 03:08
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RyuHimora posted:I feel like taking a job at Best Buy or some other consumer-based computer shop rather than stop working with the skillset I love. Don't do this. Especially not Best Buy. You really do NOT want to work at Best Buy. Have you considered getting into Systems Administration? Datacenters are always looking for infrastructure/server janitors.
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Jan 2, 2016 03:11
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RyuHimora posted:I'm having a problem with deciding where I want my career to go next. Maybe start looking at systems/infrastructure engineering? Similar skillset, tho you aren't working with trying to make one PC work optimally, but rather servers/networks/software, so at a larger scale.
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Jan 2, 2016 03:35
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CommieGIR posted:Have you considered getting into Systems Administration? RFC2324 posted:Maybe start looking at systems/infrastructure engineering? My understanding is that you can't buy servers/business network gear without a repair agreement, which still leaves me buying things from a predetermined list without needing any knowledge other than the budget, and shipping it off if one little thing goes wrong. I guess the problem is I want to be very hands-on with the computers, but that's just not a skill outside of consumer gaming rigs anymore  Fake edit: My other concern is that I get a lot of satisfaction from having my finger on the pulse of the PC hardware industry. Whenever I look at servers the only question that ever needs special knowledge is "How many Xeons do you want?" RyuHimora fucked around with this message at 03:52 on Jan 2, 2016 |
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Jan 2, 2016 03:50
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RyuHimora posted:My understanding is that you can't buy servers/business network gear without a repair agreement, which still leaves me buying things from a predetermined list without needing any knowledge other than the budget, and shipping it off if one little thing goes wrong. I guess the problem is I want to be very hands-on with the computers, but that's just not a skill outside of consumer gaming rigs anymore Plenty of whitebox servers still getting built dude.
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Jan 2, 2016 03:56
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Physically building computers is a dead end job. A few companies like Google use hand built servers, but they basically have monkeys maintaining them. The thing is, PC hardware is a pretty low skill business, outside the people that work at OEMs actually designing the desktop computers. There may be a few niche environments where sometimes people are getting their hands in servers, but generally not. Going with OEM hardware is almost always going to be cheaper and more reliable than anything you can buy from Newegg. I will say though, if you're interested in keeping up with desktop PC hardware, you might find doing workstation deployment interesting. When I was the person doing workstation ordering, I had to keep my finger on the pulse of the latest Intel releases and when Dell was putting them in their desktops, so I knew what to order and when to order it. Working with SCCM to deploy operating systems to those workstations was also interesting, especially when I had to muck around with finding the right drivers.
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Jan 2, 2016 04:08
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RyuHimora posted:My understanding is that you can't buy servers/business network gear without a repair agreement, which still leaves me buying things from a predetermined list without needing any knowledge other than the budget, and shipping it off if one little thing goes wrong. I guess the problem is I want to be very hands-on with the computers, but that's just not a skill outside of consumer gaming rigs anymore Start looking around for some Mom&Pop computer stores or small-end MSPs that provide custom server builds for one-off applications. As CommieGIR said, there's still plenty of whitebox servers still getting built.
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Jan 2, 2016 04:08
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Alternatively, the holy grail for your passion is to get in with some place like Facebook or any place that uses custom hardware in their datacenters.
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Jan 2, 2016 04:30
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bull3964 posted:Alternatively, the holy grail for your passion is to get in with some place like Facebook or any place that uses custom hardware in their datacenters. Even then, I can't imagine you would ever engineer more than a handful of whitebox servers before documenting the process and handing it off to people who can be paid less.
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Jan 2, 2016 04:43
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:Even then, I can't imagine you would ever engineer more than a handful of whitebox servers before documenting the process and handing it off to people who can be paid less. They're white boxes in the way that they have them custom designed and built. You'd probably just be sticking in ram or hard drives. If it's broke just swap it out. No trouble shooting. They have so many servers it's a waste of time to troubleshoot that 1 server. I heard rumors of Google just running them until they die. If a hard drive breaks they just revamp the server as something else. Most of these places have like super hardware architects that check power loads and other highly technical stuff to maximize what they can put in there racks. That's you know 10 years of experience needed before they'd even think about you for that job. Your best bet if you just wanna build computers is find a smaller hosting company. They're still building them by hand but the big boys are just buying all prebuilt open hardware stuff now.
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Jan 2, 2016 04:51
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May I ask (roughly) how old you are, and how long you've been working professionally in IT? Just using myself as an anecdote, when I was in my teens/early 20's I LOVED working on hardware. Reseating RAM, racking/stacking servers, pulling Cat 5 cable, I don't care man let me at it. Need to know the specs of every current Intel / AMD / Cyrix (remember when that was a thing???) chip? I'm your guy. But at some point, it became familiar and routine. Faster chips and new connecter shapes and sizes come and go, but once you get the hang of it, the work is pretty simple. If you need to know how different chipsets stack up, Google exists. At some point a switch flipped and now when I have to go to the data center and deal with "mundane" hardware stuff I die a little inside. I now find it much more satisfying to work at the systems/software level where I'm tuning the performance of hundreds or thousands of machines at once. Which, to be fair, are only as fast as the hardware that someone cared enough to spec out! But it's pretty rare that I run into a problem that scales better vertically (beefier hardware in a single system) instead of horizontally (many cheaper systems working together to share the load). Which is still a very important choice that someone has to make. But that's just me. I don't mean to diminish your passions or the important of hardware. Companies like Google and Facebook literally couldn't exist without engineers micromanaging custom hardware builds to the point where they're basically disposable boards slotted into racks with no cases or other conveniences. They are the 1% who actually utilize their hardware to the fullest. That's a God-tier hardware geek job but good luck getting in there without a PhD or two. More reasonably, there are definitely custom white-box PC and server vendors like SuperMicro or Penguin Computing or dozens of others you could hit up. Whatever you do, don't go work for loving Geek Squad  Fake edit: beaten on a lot of these points
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Jan 2, 2016 04:51
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Seriously, you are going to want to get into Server Infrastructure/Sys Admin stuff if you really want to get near hardware. Unfortunately, outside of some small Whitebox manufacturers, there just isn't much of a call for a hardware only guy anymore. I've been doing Systems Admin for 10 years, and I started the same way, and I STILL love doing hardware, but its so much more fun, like Docjowles said, to mess with systems at the operations level.
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Jan 2, 2016 04:55
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RyuHimora posted:I'm having a problem with deciding where I want my career to go next. With all due respect, you're throwing hardware together because you know you're good at it. Those problem-solving skills can be put to so many bigger and better things, solving new challenges instead of just being a pair of hands doing things millions before you have done already. Believe in yourself.
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Jan 2, 2016 05:02
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:Even then, I can't imagine you would ever engineer more than a handful of whitebox servers before documenting the process and handing it off to people who can be paid less. Facebook actually does far more than that, but to get hired to do more than that you would probably need an engineering degree. They are a major driver behind the Open Compute project and they have all kinds stuff cooking with intel to increase density and ease upgrade processes. The best place to look for work if you want to get hands on with hardware and custom builds is to keep jumping ship between SAAS companies that need to rapidly scale but can't afford to go fully into AWS or Azure. Facebook is an extreme example. Backblaze with their storage pods would be another. Really, anyone that needs to scale in a very specialized direction that would be cost prohibitive to subscribe to IAAS.
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Jan 2, 2016 05:40
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Has anyone actually had the lack of a degree hold them back career wise in IT?
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Jan 2, 2016 07:22
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Tab8715 posted:Has anyone actually had the lack of a degree hold them back career wise in IT? Not even a page ago Virigoth posted:This. I just got blocked going into management by not having a bachelors degree but I'm a senior software engineer.
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Jan 2, 2016 07:26
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Management is not IT, even if you are an IT manager 
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Jan 2, 2016 07:33
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I know people have been blocked where I work without a degree, to the point where they've left the organization. But I work for a huge public University so we're a bit biased in that regard.
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Jan 2, 2016 08:03
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DigitalMocking posted:I don't disagree, just after 2 decades of hearing "it must be the network" I'm ready to stab a bitch some days. Believe me I'm on your side. I once fixed a vmotion problem, handed to us by the infrastructure team, by googling the error message and implementing the fix in the first result. How lazy can you possibly get where you can't even be hosed to check google?
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Jan 2, 2016 12:18
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Hey, started looking seriously at my career options lately and it seems like IT in some capacity is going to be the way to go with a Help Desk job of some description probably being my next step. Just wondering if anyone would know if all the advice in the OP is pretty much the same for someone in the UK? The certifications and such mostly.
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Jan 2, 2016 12:51
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Do you like computers and technology? Because if you don't like computers and technology, you'll hate IT.
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Jan 2, 2016 16:32
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If you have a pulse you can probably get a hero del job. Literacy and knowledge of where the power switch is are helpful, but not required. If you are intelligent and have some motivation you can probably bounce into a junior admin role or something comparable after a year or so.
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Jan 2, 2016 19:19
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psydude posted:Do you like computers and technology? Because if you don't like computers and technology, you'll hate IT.
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Jan 2, 2016 19:30
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I'm a sysadmin with a static workload environment. My day to day job is to look after the Windows servers. Definitely pets, not cattle. What skills would I need to hone to land a more interesting (to me) admin role in a DevOps environment? I'm aware of all the big name technologies like Chef, DSC, Vagrant etc and the big cloud vendors, the "configuration as code" idea. But I have very little practical experience with them, as zero experience in in production. If I'm sitting across from a hiring manager, what do I need to do to convince him that I'm hireable? Bonus question: What would I ask them about their workplace to ensure I wasn't walking into a "Devops" role that was really just another CJ role?
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Jan 3, 2016 03:20
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We have a shitton of bare metal but we contract all that stuff out to Racklive. They build the servers to our spec, rack and cable and ship them to wherever they go in the world.
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Jan 3, 2016 03:27
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Swink posted:I'm a sysadmin with a static workload environment. My day to day job is to look after the Windows servers. Definitely pets, not cattle. Learn the basics about the Software lifecycle (QA - > UAT - > Production) and understand the basic ideas behind those tools and I think they'll be willing to help you with the rest. Most DevOps positions are just looking for someone WILLING to handle these sort of things. Get some experience with Git/SVN, understand how to check out/check in code, learn about things like JIRA and Jenkins build cycles.
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Jan 3, 2016 03:27
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CommieGIR posted:Learn the basics about the Software lifecycle (QA - > UAT - > Production) and understand the basic ideas behind those tools and I think they'll be willing to help you with the rest. Most DevOps positions are just looking for someone WILLING to handle these sort of things. Get some experience with Git/SVN, understand how to check out/check in code, learn about things like JIRA and Jenkins build cycles. So I need to know how to ship code, how much do I need to know about writing code? If I learn Ruby and walk into a shop that uses C#, will that be a deal-breaker?
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Jan 3, 2016 03:36
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Swink posted:So I need to know how to ship code, how much do I need to know about writing code? If I learn Ruby and walk into a shop that uses C#, will that be a deal-breaker? No, not really, DevOps is more about managing the code lifecycle, and most places are just happy to have someone who is willing to learn a new code on their team, especially if they hired you do fr DevOps, not to actually be a developer. Its like Sys Admin'ing, but instead of just handling boxes, you are helping the development team deploy/manage their code as it goes from concept to production, but there is a lot of managing boxes inbetween and helping make sure a code roll out goes flawlessly on the operations side.
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Jan 3, 2016 03:38
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Swink posted:I'm a sysadmin with a static workload environment. My day to day job is to look after the Windows servers. Definitely pets, not cattle. Best of all, you can do all this stuff while you're working at your current job, without needing to justify or find places to apply a single bit of it. Swink posted:Bonus question: What would I ask them about their workplace to ensure I wasn't walking into a "Devops" role that was really just another CJ role? Swink posted:So I need to know how to ship code, how much do I need to know about writing code? If I learn Ruby and walk into a shop that uses C#, will that be a deal-breaker?
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Jan 3, 2016 05:11
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Swink posted:Bonus question: What would I ask them about their workplace to ensure I wasn't walking into a "Devops" role that was really just another CJ role? I'll answer this from the perspective of a web/SaaS company, since that's what I do and where you probably find the most interest in DevOps. Though most of the ideas apply universally as long as you translate "developers" to "whoever is my customer on the business side of the house". You really want to dig into how much the operations or sysadmin team lets what we've historically thought of as Developer best practices guide their workflow. If they're doing a bunch of cowboy poo poo logging into individual servers making one off edits, you don't want any part of that. It's the sysadmin version of the 1993 developer SSHing directly into the production web server to edit live code in vi. If there's lots of automation, testing, and frequent deploys of both code and configs, that's good. When you ask about the company's CI/CD practices and tools, the interviewers shouldn't give you a blank stare or brush it off as bullshit only the devs care about. "Describe the workflow for making a change to the production Apache config, from end to end". You're hoping to hear that they use config management tooling and/or something like Docker to automate things and ensure consistency across all environments. Plus something along the lines of "well, first I make the change locally in my dev environment and run some quick automated tests. Assuming that passes, I commit it to source control and push the change to the main test environment where it faces another battery of tests. Assuming everything passes, it will be promoted to production and slowly rolled out sitewide. If there's a problem, we stop it, fix the issue, and begin again. Making sure to add a test for the new problem we found. All of this usually takes less than an hour." You're hoping NOT to hear "well I fire up remote desktop to www01 and open the IIS properties page" or "I get the change added to the bi-monthly change review board agenda and hope it's approved." You also want to look for a healthy, collaborative, respectful relationship between the dev and ops teams. How early in the planning process for a new feature or operational change does the other side find out about it? Do team leads sit in on each others' planning meetings to keep abreast of what's going on, or at least sync up for lunch a couple times a month or something? If you asked a random mid-to-senior dev to whiteboard how a request for https://www.company.com flows through the network and servers, how accurate would it be (or would they just say "lol idk" because the teams never talk at all)? Do devs participate in on-call (this is super contentious, but IMHO is critical for DevOps to function. You don't page devs for a failed hard drive, but why not for a sudden huge spike in HTTP errors?)? And yeah, what VC said. You'll hopefully hear them talking about these things, too. If you're on hour three of getting grilled on group policy and RAID levels and DNS records, but no one has once mentioned scripting or config management or automation, that should be a huge red flag. If one of your interviewers isn't a developer, that's also probably not great.
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Jan 3, 2016 05:42
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My coding is extremely weak but I like doing it. I have some vanity projects on GitHub already. I sometimes think about switching careers and becoming a developer but in reality I prefer doing sysadmin, I just need a more professional (and more exciting) environment than where I am now. (Not to mention the phenomenal amount of work it would take to get job-ready). Anyway thanks a lot for that helpful advice. Looks like I've got my new years' study topics set. Swink fucked around with this message at 11:19 on Jan 3, 2016 |
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Jan 3, 2016 11:14
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luminalflux posted:We have a shitton of bare metal but we contract all that stuff out to Racklive. They build the servers to our spec, rack and cable and ship them to wherever they go in the world. I'm curious, how accurate have your orders been? We recently added Racklive to our vendor mix and it seems they talk a lot more game than they actually have on the "cookie cutter rack" approach. Your avatar actually made me think you work with me, you don't work in adtech do you?
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Jan 3, 2016 16:42
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H110Hawk posted:I'm curious, how accurate have your orders been? We recently added Racklive to our vendor mix and it seems they talk a lot more game than they actually have on the "cookie cutter rack" approach. Accurate enough that they're the only vendor we use and we're one of their featured clients. I'm not in DCOps though so I just get a pile of servers' IPMI addresses handed to me after DCOps and Network has done their stuff, I don't really deal with any snafus with Racklive if they arise. quote:Your avatar actually made me think you work with me, you don't work in adtech do you? gently caress no
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Jan 3, 2016 21:49
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luminalflux posted:Accurate enough that they're the only vendor we use and we're one of their featured clients. I'm not in DCOps though so I just get a pile of servers' IPMI addresses handed to me after DCOps and Network has done their stuff, I don't really deal with any snafus with Racklive if they arise. We have had a steady stream of incorrect orders. BIOS not configured correctly, wrong MAC addresses (Both flat wrong, and wrong NIC ordering see problem 1), comically underperforming boot flash drives (Somewhat my fault.) Our DC ops guys are remote hands. They are supposed to attach ~6 cables including power to a rack and walk away. If it's anything more than that to get it to a booted OS ready to deply our integrator has hosed up in some way. IPMI addresses are only for later when something is broken. I would look up if we're a "featured" customer but their website is currently broken.
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Jan 3, 2016 23:20
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Tab8715 posted:Has anyone actually had the lack of a degree hold them back career wise in IT? I can't say it's held me back really, but I will say the lack of a 4 year degree prevented some doors from even being opened. I've worked for the same company for almost 14 years now, but about 5 years ago I was dissatisfied with my role at the time and started looking around for a new job. I had interviewed with multiple companies over the prior few years for journeyman Sys Admin positions but was either not offered or didn't take the opportunity for various reasons, but I almost always got at least a phone screen for a job that I applied for. Anyway, circle back to summer 2010, I put out multiple job applications at places I wanted to work at for mid level Sys Admin jobs. Jobs that I was totally qualified for but were for larger corporations here in Texas. I had an AAS 2 year degree, 5 years of progressive experience in System Administration, a pretty good resume and multiple IT certifications. I didn't get so much as a single phone screen. All of these big companies wanted a 4 year degree, and I realized I wasn't even getting my resume and information to the hiring manager to even look at, I was being filtered out at the HR level. That's when I decided to go to WGU. So I can go on and on about this subject. I won't say the 4 year degree was necessary to be successful in IT, some of the best IT people I know have no degree at all. For those big corp jobs I didn't even get a call about, I'm sure if I knew people there and could get my resume to the hiring manager through business networking I could have had a chance at those jobs, but I didn't. Basically having the degree opens some doors that might be closed to you otherwise.
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Jan 4, 2016 15:16
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Welcome back to work, everything is broke! ShoreTel
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Jan 4, 2016 17:51
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CloFan posted:Welcome back to work, everything is broke! ShoreTel I got paged by a cool bug New Year's Day. A condition in our code could trigger an infinite loop if a partner advertising on our site had their contract expire. Apparently this was a known issue in the bug tracker, but had been allowed to slide because the business people always get contracts renewed well in advance. But guess what happens when everyone is out of the office for 2 weeks at the end of the year, and a really prominent ad is set to expire at midnight 1/1? And guess what happens when every Apache worker on every web server is blocked in an infinite loop waiting for a call that will never return?  That should be an interesting postmortem.At least I was able to find a dev who wasn't (too) hungover from NYE to get it fixed quickly.
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Jan 4, 2016 18:42
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I job offer is in the making  My old boss can't find anybody willing to work as hard as I did. He's over being mad that I left and is moving on to asking me to come back. I gave him my compensation requirements (current + benefits) and he seemed to balk a little bit, but I'm sticking to it since he's made it abundantly clear I'm valuable to him. We'll see what numbers come back from the CEO (since he will also balk at it, nobody under the president is making that much, it's still a relatively small MSP). I like the idea of having way too much work to do as my current bank job is boring as gently caress. I don't like the idea of being under-compensated for my time. I know numbers aren't everything but I really like paying all my bills on time and not stressing month to month. Just have to wait and see. Anybody else move back to a job they left and grabbed a decent raise in the process?
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Jan 4, 2016 18:52
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Judge Schnoopy posted:I job offer is in the making Don't take a counter offer. NEVER EVER take a counter offer.
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Jan 4, 2016 18:58
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Judge Schnoopy posted:Just have to wait and see. Anybody else move back to a job they left and grabbed a decent raise in the process? ratbert90 posted:Don't take a counter offer.
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Jan 4, 2016 19:04
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