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orange sky posted:Hey guys, I need to absorb some of your knowledge. I work for a consulting company and we don't really have to do any of that because sales can't sell anything without an engineer providing input. We create all SOWs and BOMs and are present at all customer meetings. They still do sales focused training though vendors (every vendor offers it) and know the products well enough to generally understand where they fit, but they basically don't provide any input at all regarding which product or solution we pitch. They are there to manage customer relationships and turn around quotes.
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Feb 19, 2016 22:47
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If your sales team don't show any interest in the products that your company sells then they are the wrong people for the job. Obviously stuff passed over to them should have been the result of a pre-sales engagement to spec things up right and make sure the correct materials and hours are on the jobs, but you need people who have a bit of a clue about what they are selling so they can realise if stuff 'look' wrong. All vendors of the size that you'd partner with offer free web-based sales training to help with this.
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Feb 19, 2016 22:49
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Wrath of the Bitch King posted:Security is an "advisement" position, not a "take action" one. Cripes, that's the part I always want to get pushed to an ops team. It's by far the least interesting part of Info Sec. Leading incident response/post mortems are what butters my toast. We got beat and god drat it I want to know why and how. So it doesn't happen again. That and hammering our products in a lab to break it in interesting ways make up for the all the drudgery of oversight committee meetings and policy framework reviews. Every now and then you get to break things in a way that opens up god-mode on a device. The dev/engineer BU gets real salty when that happens.
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Feb 20, 2016 08:18
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What's you guy's take on moving to management from a senior technical position. I'm a Systems Architect right now and the most senior technical person in the IT department, but am being encouraged to revise my role into taking on a few direct reports and leading an Infrastructure team, broken off from the main IT team. I think it will still be mostly technical and I will need to continue to be the one who "knows how it all works", but with a lot of knowledge dump and mentoring for my direct reports. My worry is that this will take me too far away from the technical side, as learning new stuff is what keeps me engaged with my career. Also I don't have a degree, and I feel like this is pushing me more towards a management track that feels like a dead end for an uneducated swine like me. They also don't like my architect title and want me to change to more of a manager/director title. Is there one that still reflects more "technical management" than "people manager"? I know titles don't matter within an organization, but I'm always wary of what story my resume or linkedin tell, and if the story is that I'm losing my technical chops and turning to middle management, then I imagine there will be a lot less recruiters knocking.
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Feb 20, 2016 13:13
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I moved from Engineer/Architect to Manager, I love it, and I wouldn't go back. Admittedly I'm in a crossover role because of the size of the team, here, but I'd be just as happy to never touch an IT device again.
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Feb 20, 2016 13:53
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Colonial Air Force posted:I moved from Engineer/Architect to Manager, I love it, and I wouldn't go back. By crossover you mean you still do all the design and high level stuff? I'm happy to delegate away all the mass device configurations, quick changes and field work, but I really want to continue to do the architecture and learn/research new technologies.
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Feb 20, 2016 14:00
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whaam posted:By crossover you mean you still do all the design and high level stuff? I'm happy to delegate away all the mass device configurations, quick changes and field work, but I really want to continue to do the architecture and learn/research new technologies. Yep, and that part I enjoy. The direction of IT and what technologies we use, how they work together, &c., that's all designed by me. In theory, I delegate the actual construction to my team, but since my team right now is me and my desktop guy, I do a lot of that also. I'm hoping in a couple of years that will not be the case any longer. For what it's worth, though, I do have a degree, and I'm working on an MBA. I doubt either of those would matter here at a ski resort (I'm probably the second-best educated person in the whole place, just behind our CEO), but it may matter elsewhere.
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Feb 20, 2016 14:04
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If you love the tech side so much I'd think hard about it. Managing people can be a huge chunk of time. The IT here likes to think that good technical people make good managers which isn't always the case. I know my boss regrets picking up 2 direct reports because it cut his tech side by like 40%
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Feb 20, 2016 15:06
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Yeah my boss is sad that he never really gets to mess with the technical stuff anymore and instead just has to worry about meetings and overseeing those of us who do get the fun technical stuff
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Feb 20, 2016 15:16
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Virigoth posted:If you love the tech side so much I'd think hard about it. Managing people can be a huge chunk of time. The IT here likes to think that good technical people make good managers which isn't always the case. I know my boss regrets picking up 2 direct reports because it cut his tech side by like 40% I'm thinking of proposing it as more of a team lead role than a manager. Still have the team report to their current manager (Director IT) and just lead them on projects but not deal with the personnel side of things. I just don't want to give the impression that I'm not capable or willing to accept a challenge because that's not the case. They are really hung up on titles too and I can't think of a title between Architect and Manager/Director.
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Feb 20, 2016 15:19
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whaam posted:What's you guy's take on moving to management from a senior technical position. 2) My title is "Network Operations Officer" which I think conveys exactly what you are talking about, external parties see it and think it is more "prestigious" or something. 3) Be careful about walking away from the trenches -- IT managers are very often promoted from within, so make sure you are able to go back being a tech if something were to happen to your company. As I understand it, it's very hard to simply get hired off the street into an IT manager role.
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Feb 20, 2016 15:20
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adorai posted:1) I made this move. It is nice, because it satisfied my need to control everything, however (and this will likely depend on your organization) it's hard to prevent being constantly leveraged for the same poo poo you used to do. Something will need to be done, and they'll say "Whaam did this before! Let's call him agian." So just don't be afraid to delegate. I've never seen Officer used in this case. I like it but I don't think it would fly in my company. I am definitely a control freak so I like that aspect of this idea. I'm more worried about my future outside this company if I have to leave. A year or two down the road if I'm no longer a SME on networking or vmware or whatever, my job prospects aren't good. No one is likely to clamour hire a "Manager, IT Infrastructure" who has no degree and has started to lose their technical edge.
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Feb 20, 2016 15:27
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You can put your title as whatever you want it to be on your resume. Nobody cares if the Director of Information Systems lists his title as Technical Engineering Lead, or whatever. It's the bullet points under the title that matter. Edit: You can also have two titles. My boss has two titles on his business card because he does two roles. KillHour fucked around with this message at 15:52 on Feb 20, 2016 |
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Feb 20, 2016 15:42
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KillHour posted:You can put your title as whatever you want it to be on your resume. Nobody cares if the Director of Information Systems lists his title as Technical Engineering Lead, or whatever. It's the bullet points under the title that matter. Eh, this just simply isn't true everywhere and for every company. There are plenty of companies that care what your title was and if you lie about it on your resume.
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Feb 20, 2016 15:57
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Sickening posted:Eh, this just simply isn't true everywhere and for every company. There are plenty of companies that care what your title was and if you lie about it on your resume. I'm sure these companies exist, but I've never had it be a problem unless I outright lied about my job function. IT titles ate notoriously misleading. On my resume, I have both my last official title (product manager) and what I actually did (lead systems designer). Like I said, there's no reason someone can't have two titles. When you get up there, I've seen people with 4 or 5 on their business cards. It turns into alphabet soup.
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Feb 20, 2016 16:00
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whaam posted:No one is likely to clamour hire a "Manager, IT Infrastructure" who has no degree and has started to lose their technical edge. I think you may be over thinking this part. And I guess it depends on your company, but I wouldn't necessarily say you're guaranteed to lose your technical edge as a manager. It's not like you'll be at the C-level and have several layers of management between you and the trenches.
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Feb 20, 2016 16:49
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Virigoth posted:If you love the tech side so much I'd think hard about it. Managing people can be a huge chunk of time. The IT here likes to think that good technical people make good managers which isn't always the case. I know my boss regrets picking up 2 direct reports because it cut his tech side by like 40%
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Feb 20, 2016 18:06
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I was in management for years before they made into an architect instead, due to my inability to relocate to a core location after I changed companies in a divestiture. The technical stuff would come and go. When the pace of change got crazy, my life would be a merry-go-round of meetings, spreadsheets, and presentations. At the worst of it, there would be days when I didn't even have an ssh session open, which is not natural when you manage the UNIX team. When it was quieter, I could be very hands-on, and generally acted as the level three support guy. You end up with a weird skill set if you let that go too far, since you touch lots of weird problems and edge cases but never the simple stuff. Bare metal install on a new server? No idea how to do that. Get it up and running after a disastrous disk controller failure? Loads of experience.
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Feb 20, 2016 18:27
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Zorak of Michigan posted:I was in management for years before they made into an architect instead, due to my inability to relocate to a core location after I changed companies in a divestiture. The technical stuff would come and go. When the pace of change got crazy, my life would be a merry-go-round of meetings, spreadsheets, and presentations. At the worst of it, there would be days when I didn't even have an ssh session open, which is not natural when you manage the UNIX team. When it was quieter, I could be very hands-on, and generally acted as the level three support guy. You end up with a weird skill set if you let that go too far, since you touch lots of weird problems and edge cases but never the simple stuff. Bare metal install on a new server? No idea how to do that. Get it up and running after a disastrous disk controller failure? Loads of experience. This is my experience as well. I was forced into a managerial role for several years, sucked at half of the job (the "bookkeeping" parts, not the advocacy/interference parts) and finally was able to get out. I am now in an architecture and "last line of defense" role. I haven't been oncall in a few years, but the 1-2 times a year my phone rings poo poo is 100% sideways. I sort of roam from team to team advising on how to do projects and spend a lot of time on whiteboards. Currently the team I am on is a multidisciplinary team pulled from our most senior level people to improve our core product wall-clock performance by any means necessary. I have a terminal open but it's just to run the ad-hoc nightmare hellscape python scripts I wrote to migrate us between DNS+GSLB providers. They will be shredded on Monday. (Why use `json.dumps()` when you can do a complicated print statement which includes double quotes in the output?  )
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Feb 20, 2016 20:42
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whaam posted:My worry is that this will take me too far away from the technical side, as learning new stuff is what keeps me engaged with my career. Also I don't have a degree, and I feel like this is pushing me more towards a management track that feels like a dead end for an uneducated swine like me. Just be like two managers I've had and maintain your role as single point of failure/only source of knowledge, that way you can be really harried all the time and get mad at the rest of the team for asking your questions or offering to help with some of the stuff you have to to do!
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Feb 20, 2016 21:31
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This technology company doesn't allow .docx resumes to be uploaded. On a scale of 1-10 how much should this concern me?
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Feb 21, 2016 06:02
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22 Eargesplitten posted:This technology company doesn't allow .docx resumes to be uploaded. On a scale of 1-10 how much should this concern me? I'm concerned you're trying to upload a .docx instead of a pdf
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Feb 21, 2016 06:05
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Why? Is it the recruiters editing resumes thing? TBH I just saved it for the newest version of Word they had listed when I originally started this resume 3+ years ago.
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Feb 21, 2016 06:10
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22 Eargesplitten posted:This technology company doesn't allow .docx resumes to be uploaded. On a scale of 1-10 how much should this concern me? Word macros are pretty dangerous.
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Feb 21, 2016 06:30
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Word can save as PDF natively now, there's really no reason not to do it.
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Feb 21, 2016 06:32
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Libreoffice doesn't. It turned out that it was just their resume scraper to pre-fill information that didn't take it, the actual resume submission did. Is docx really a dangerous file format?
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Feb 21, 2016 10:24
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I think it's probably a resume upload service that allows .doc and not .docx, the almost decade-old file format.
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Feb 21, 2016 12:33
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So, I am going for a second interview as first line support at a company that does complete solutions for stuff like ticket machines, pharmacy systems and stuff like that. So at the first interview they asked me for an example of some technical problem I had solved. That was probably something I should have prepared for, but it kinda stumped me. I haven't worked in support earlier and I don't really want to give an example of when I fixed grandmas internet or set up a minecraft server for my younger brother. I'm thinking that I should just try to make something up, but of course make sure it's something I know a lot about. Any tips?
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Feb 21, 2016 12:35
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Sistergodiva posted:set up a minecraft server for my younger brother Physical server or hosted on his machine? This might actually be OK if you cared about and enjoyed doing it. Better than making something up in my opinion. Or go break your computer right now, fix it, and use that.
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Feb 21, 2016 13:10
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Judge Schnoopy posted:Physical server or hosted on his machine? This might actually be OK if you cared about and enjoyed doing it. Better than making something up in my opinion. Hosted on my machine. I guess I could try to set up a server on a physical machine, just gotta find a computer to do it with.
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Feb 21, 2016 13:18
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22 Eargesplitten posted:This technology company doesn't allow .docx resumes to be uploaded. On a scale of 1-10 how much should this concern me? Is it a Linux-oriented company? Is so thats a good sign 
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Feb 21, 2016 14:09
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feedmegin posted:Is it a Linux-oriented company? Is so thats a good sign Only accepting the old, binary OLE compound document formats, and not the newer at-least-kinda-open ones, that's a good sign?
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Feb 21, 2016 14:19
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22 Eargesplitten posted:Libreoffice doesn't. Of course it does, and way back before Microsoft did, but they have stupid Save As ... and Export As ... menu options. 
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Feb 21, 2016 15:30
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Thanks Ants posted:I think it's probably a resume upload service that allows .doc and not .docx, the almost decade-old file format.
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Feb 21, 2016 19:32
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MrMoo posted:Of course it does, and way back before Microsoft did, but they have stupid Save As ... and Export As ... menu options. Huh. I never noticed that. Does the .pdf come out editable, or is it stuck as that form, and you've got to edit whatever other format you save it as?
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Feb 21, 2016 20:24
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22 Eargesplitten posted:Huh. I never noticed that. Does the .pdf come out editable, or is it stuck as that form, and you've got to edit whatever other format you save it as? PDF are generally not editable period, I guess that's why they put it as an export option so you do not forget to keep the original.
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Feb 21, 2016 22:12
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I'm not sure why you wouldn't submit a résumé as a pdf
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Feb 21, 2016 22:21
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MrMoo posted:PDF are generally not editable period, I guess that's why they put it as an export option so you do not forget to keep the original. I really like that idea. it explicitly acknowledges the difference between things the program will edit in the future, and things it wont. Good UI design.
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Feb 21, 2016 22:49
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When I was getting resumes I almost immediately questioned someone if they submitted a .doc(x) instead of a pdf.
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Feb 21, 2016 22:51
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Why does it even matter? I just use doc(x) because that's what we were told to use in school, so I never bothered to change that habit.
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Feb 21, 2016 22:56
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