|
Cythereal posted:Da gently caress? That is absolutely not normal in the field I've been working in for the last five years. I've been very cautious about this whole thing because it's proceeding so wildly different from any job process I've been through before. Paying for travel and accomodations for a job interview in the library field is virtually unheard of for anything lower than "You will be the person in charge of running this entire place." Hopefully this guy understands and I intend to be enthusiastic in person as this opportunity sounds better and better all the time. I had three jobs that did that with me. I was flown to Chicago, Minnesota, and Seattle. Ended up taking the Minnesota job and yes all three times was 'Man in charge' for a major department, Chicago was for Director of QA for Bungie about ten months before MS bought them and HALO was released.
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2017 01:12
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 9, 2024 20:01 |
|
|
Has anyone worked with Aruba Instant and Cisco Mobility Express for long enough to be able to come down in favour of one or the other?
|
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2017 01:22
|
|
|
Humbug Scoolbus posted:I had three jobs that did that with me. I was flown to Chicago, Minnesota, and Seattle. Ended up taking the Minnesota job and yes all three times was 'Man in charge' for a major department, Chicago was for Director of QA for Bungie about ten months before MS bought them and HALO was released. How's the Minnesota IT job market? Any major companies, industries, or snags prevalent in the area? Scouting out a way to get out of smellinois
|
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2017 01:26
|
|
|
Be prepared to wear a weight belt so the mosquitoes don't carry you off. 
|
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2017 01:40
|
|
|
Judge Schnoopy posted:How's the Minnesota IT job market? Any major companies, industries, or snags prevalent in the area? Scouting out a way to get out of smellinois
|
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2017 02:03
|
|
|
I read somewhere that tech venture capital money was being funneled into northern Minneapolis due to friendly tax breaks, and it was supposed to be the next Nashville. I don't remember where I read it and I haven't heard anything about a tech boom since so maybe it never panned out?
|
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2017 02:27
|
|
|
Aunt Beth posted:Does Minnesota have anything besides 3M, a mostly empty IBM facility that made AS/400, the Mayo Clinic, and actual mayo? Best Buy and Target are huge employers in the Twin Cities. The latter surprisingly being a pretty big player in the modern OSS space. They're a big contributor to Kubernetes and a few downstream and adjacent projects. Neither pay Silicon Valley/Seattle raw salaries, but the cost of living being comparatively much lower, you can live very well on ~90-120.
|
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2017 02:34
|
|
|
SeaborneClink posted:Best Buy and Target are huge employers in the Twin Cities. The latter surprisingly being a pretty big player in the modern OSS space. They're a big contributor to Kubernetes and a few downstream and adjacent projects.
|
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2017 04:35
|
|
|
Aunt Beth posted:Is that because Target IT got bullied into the future after that credit card breach a few years ago?
|
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2017 05:06
|
|
|
Ok, I've got to get in on this container thing. I'm a windows admin with a good chunk of vmware and powershell experience, and I'm not afraid of Linux. How do I get started?
|
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2017 05:07
|
|
|
Aunt Beth posted:Is that because Target IT got bullied into the future after that credit card breach a few years ago? MC Fruit Stripe posted:Target IT doesn't handle their payment infrastructure - someone else does. I bet Target made sure poo poo wouldn't happen again, though. Nobody does POS things in house, it's like 3 vendors and they all use the same old Linux install that boots Windows XP that uses VirtualBox to boot some loving awful Solaris garbage. If you've ever wondered why self checkout kiosks take so long to do ANYTHING this is why  Dr. Arbitrary posted:Ok, I've got to get in on this container thing. I'm a windows admin with a good chunk of vmware and powershell experience, and I'm not afraid of Linux. How do I get started? Start by thinking about what in your day to day has the possibility of introducing the most 'skew' in your environment. For the majority of the people in this thread that's probably user-centric. Everyone has their own workflow around creating users and how much information they do or don't put in. Same for termination of accounts. Are you logging the group memberships that you revoke in a consistent manner? I doubt it. Start by driving down toil on things like this by removing choice (read: variance) Some people have people have issues with configuration skew. If you had to clone your entire infrastructure tomorrow, could you stand up your website/commerce stack in less than a few hours and guarantee that they are identical? I doubt it. People (that rear end in a top hat cowboy you don't like) love to 'fix' things by changing a config line here, or a wrapper there but nothing ever gets documented and there's no way of knowing that everything writes application logs to the same place, or is using the same password. Take our newest Pod-Dad the sickening and his password reset story the other day. How long would it personally take you to reset and disseminate a new random 12 character password to every user in your organization? Once you take the first step and have a password reset script that takes a username and password outputs a password, make a v1.1 that takes a list of usernames. Then make v1.2 that you can give an OU (only reset people in the Topeka office), then make v1.3 that can just scan for ObjectClass=Person. Then extend that into another script that can call THAT script that can rotate the password on your service accounts or privileged accounts on a timed basis (every month, or week) or that changes the password on your DomainAdmin account after every use and logs it somewhere that X person from Y location has changed the password. I'd be happy to do more of a detailed effort post on this later if you're interested and there's other people here as well that are very qualified to answer questions about moving towards having more reproducable or immutable infrastructure. The takeaway here is drive down the potential for variance and establish good habits around logging and auditing. Your auditors LOVE when they can ask when a change was made and you can in less than 60 seconds give them who did it, when it happened, where it was done and how large (or small) the scope was. Saying we have a X policy doesn't mean poo poo if you can't actually prove compliance with that policy. Requiring all changes to be made via source code or change control gives you that ability, but there's a lot of foundational groundwork that need to go in first before you can just start throwing poo poo into Docker and calling it a day. Writing test cases for code coverage doesn't mean poo poo if you didn't write integration tests to PROVE that the two feature branches you just merged into master don't actually work together. (Pretend I linked the picture of the two kitchen drawers that can't open because they're at 90 degree angles and each handle prevents the other from opening.) SeaborneClink fucked around with this message at 05:47 on Oct 26, 2017 |
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2017 05:10
|
|
|
Dr. Arbitrary posted:Ok, I've got to get in on this container thing. I'm a windows admin with a good chunk of vmware and powershell experience, and I'm not afraid of Linux. How do I get started? What do you want to do? I know that's a hard question to answer in the very beginning when you're not even entirely sure what the hype behind a particular technology is. I know nothing about your work environment or what your workloads are. The power of containers is the automation tooling surrounding them. A plain old docker file running somewhere doing something being handled by systemd or whatever is actually pretty boring. I guess you might be able to make things a bit quicker by pulling down an haproxy container file from a public repo or whatever, but that's not the point. Containers are great because they are the perfect primitive for building upon. What can be built ontop of containers? Immutable infrastructures, applications that can be deployed with all of their dependencies bundled with them, intelligent automatic resource scheduling, CI/CD pipelines, blue/green deployments off the top of my head. The reality is if you're the kind of windows admin that I was, the value isn't there for you. Whatever it was that I did at previous jobs had literally zero use whatsoever for any of the concepts I just named. But maybe you're not the kind of windows I was, or you don't want to be. If you don't know what you want out of containers, or more importantly, the larger superset that containers are part of, other than that you want them; that is is perfectly okay. A good place to start is to just make an account with either Google Compute platform or AWS. I'm actually going to recommend GCP here. I've been spending an awful lot of time recently immersed in GCP and it's very approachable compared to AWS. Kubernetes is also a Google product and thus is as first class citizen in GCP. Great, you've made your account and are ready to start. Here is where that hard question comes in, what do you want to do. You're entering here ~Devops~ territory. You're not a windows admin anymore working with pre-packaged applications that are built for you. In Devops land being familiar and comfortable with software development is now an unavoidable necessity because delivering software that your organization produces is the point. So, naturally I guess the first thing to do is write a hello world micro-service application in the language of your choice. Golang, nodejs, python, ruby. Pick one and follow a guide on the internet. Your hello world application can be simple, but use many pieces. Find a guide that involves multiple external components, maybe Redis or MySQL. Say ultimately you get 5 pieces to your new micro-service oriented distributed system. A front end, a piece dedicated to db access, something in the background that handled logging, maybe an internal request router, maybe something that procedurally generates a bitmap image, a message bus, redis and your DB daemon. Now, it's time to publish your application to the world. Each micro service is self contained and stateless which means they are a perfect fit for being in a container! But wait, writing and developing code is hard. The code you write sucks and is actually full of bugs. What a perfect time to set up a CI/CD pipeline to make your software developer lives easier. Like any good developer you've been using Git as your version control system. Why not build a Jenkins server, in a container naturally https://hub.docker.com/r/jenkins/jenkins/, that will automatically build, compile and test your code for you every time you commit a branch? Jenkins can spawn MORE containers where your code will be built and be ran against synthetic tests you write to be sure you haven't introduced regressions. https://techbeacon.com/beginners-guide-kick-starting-your-ci-pipeline-jenkins Finally: you have a sane build system like any good developer, your code is bug free and ready for the world. Maybe you start off pushing the containers produced by Jenkins to your VMs by hand, because hey, theres only like 7 of them right? But you continue to grow and your app is pretty popular. It's starting to get hard and expensive to provision all the necessary machines you need to power your bitmap generator. You notice that your application has clearly defined times of the week of peak traffic. Wouldn't it be great if you could size the amount of compute resources you were buying from Google according to your real time traffic load? Enter: Kubernetes. Kubernetes is a Big Deal. It's actually the technology that is underlying Google's Container Engine that's been open sourced. Kubernetes, is a system for managing containerized applications across a cluster of nodes. Explicitly designed to address the disconnect between the way that modern, distributed systems are designed and the underlying physical infrastructure. Applications comprised of different services should still be managed as a single application (when it makes sense). Kubernetes provides a layer over the infrastructure to allow for this type of management. Scaling traffic up and down according to load. Logically grouping containers together, software defined networking and so much more are now possible. Logically grouping containers together: maybe it just always makes sense for your bitmap generated to have 4 micro-services in running on the same host to minimize InterProcess Communication (IPC) latency. Kubernetes can do that. Maybe you always want X amount of microservices running on different underlying hardware to be resilient to datacenter mishaps. Kubernetes can do that. Since Kubernetes is now infront of your apps providing load balancing services, you can do things like blue/green deployments. Lets say parts of your application are stateful, how do you deploy new code? How about just building an entire new parallel environment that you send new users to while the existing stateful sessions just naturally drain off of the old environment. How about running as many versions of the code you write at once? Containers are the fundamental unit making up larger systems. This is why saying you want to do containers or devops is meaningless. Because it's not something you apt-get install or curl | bash. Devops is to technology-focused companies as the scientific method was to chemists. This is why containers and the Devops concept/mentality/paradigm/thing is useless to the kind of internal IT windows admin that I was. We didn't write code, we didn't open source software that we were empowered to orchestrate. Running large distributed systems was not our business. If you want to 'get in on this container thing' you need to evaluate what you're doing with it. Maybe you're not satisfied with being an internal windows admin anymore and thats why you're interested. Excellent! The new world of online services is big and scary, but it's here, and more accessible than ever. Join a mailing list! Go to the Kubernetes github and open every link in a tab and read it all! Write your hello world app! Learn to program! (I've got another huge rant about 'learn to program') Read my posts! Methanar fucked around with this message at 07:41 on Oct 26, 2017 |
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2017 06:56
|
|
|
I think I've got a weekend project figured out. I'm behind the curve on cloud computing but I don't think I'm left behind yet. That immutable architecture stuff seems really cool, I went to a Powershell event a week ago where Jason Helmick spoke about using DSC to accomplish that. It was really neat to see him set up a server with DSC, intentionally go in and break it, and then within a minute or two, it fixed itself.
|
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2017 07:12
|
|
|
Dick Trauma posted:Find the man nobody's protecting. A man without friends. And beat him until his eyes bleed. What do you have against me?? 
|
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2017 07:40
|
|
|
Cythereal posted:Da gently caress? That is absolutely not normal in the field I've been working in for the last five years. I've been very cautious about this whole thing because it's proceeding so wildly different from any job process I've been through before. Paying for travel and accomodations for a job interview in the library field is virtually unheard of for anything lower than "You will be the person in charge of running this entire place." Hopefully this guy understands and I intend to be enthusiastic in person as this opportunity sounds better and better all the time. ..and now you know why I switched careers, I am making twice as much for a quarter of the work (and I ran the loving library at certain times).
|
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2017 08:12
|
|
|
LochNessMonster posted:I’d love to listen to some good podcasts during my commute but everytime I try to I quit because of apples stupid / non intuitive podcast app. Overcast is far and away the best iOS podcast app 
|
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2017 12:50
|
|
|
Dr. Arbitrary posted:That immutable architecture stuff seems really cool, I went to a Powershell event a week ago where Jason Helmick spoke about using DSC to accomplish that. Immutable infrastructure and having a pipeline to produce it is a great way to start. When we started our last app at work we did it from scratch and made it immutable with AWS AMIs. We had developer buy in, happy good times, roses, etc. We got bought and our Infrastructure group has been tasked with taking the holy light to the new business and my drinking to work ratio has increased dramatically. We helped a team transform that had a good model when they left us to go back to their home team with their own Infrastructure (yay politics?). They are moving towards doing some container stuff and we had one of them ping us and say their Infra team wanted them to pull the container at runtime and not during bake and he thought that sounded weird. Good on you dev guy for paying attention. Docjowles posted:Overcast is far and away the best iOS podcast app I really like the Overcast app and enjoy listening to some of their topics they produce on their podcast with the guy who wrote the app.
|
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2017 13:55
|
|
|
Methanar posted:I'm going to be in Edmonton tomorrow. Where in Edmonton are you going to be at?
|
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2017 14:30
|
|
|
Hey, thank you for posting this. I am in a similar boat, Windows admin who would like to branch out and this helps a lot.
|
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2017 16:09
|
|
|
Internet Explorer posted:Hey, thank you for posting this. I am in a similar boat, Windows admin who would like to branch out and this helps a lot. Yeah this. Which of the languages you recommended would be your #1? I'm thinking Python would be my choice.
|
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2017 16:29
|
|
|
I'm not Methanar and I haven't really started learning this stuff yet, but it looks like Python is the way to go. I have heard that this is a good place to start - https://developers.google.com/edu/python/
|
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2017 16:31
|
|
|
My old employer just posted a job ad to backfill my position.quote:System Administrator Think they'll get all that for 65k a year?
|
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2017 16:35
|
|
|
MF_James posted:Yeah this. Python for sure. I also use Go for some stuff, but that's much more niche. PowerShell is good if you're working in the Windows space but I find myself working with Python so much more.
|
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2017 16:35
|
|
|
Vargatron posted:Think they'll get all that for 65k a year? Depends where., and I don't know where you live. In the bay area it would need to be about double.
|
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2017 16:36
|
|
|
Walked posted:Python for sure. I also use Go for some stuff, but that's much more niche. PowerShell is good if you're working in the Windows space but I find myself working with Python so much more. I live by powershell now (mostly), I've forced myself to stop using the GUI and am building a nice 'script' repository for pretty much anything I do, sadly some modules do not exist yet and I don't want to dig into WMI/ADSI to shore up gaps as that will consume too much of my limited time.
|
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2017 16:46
|
|
|
Vargatron posted:My old employer just posted a job ad to backfill my position. That is a pretty wide scope for that type of money. I am sure they could get a warm body to do it, but do it well? Probably only if they can find someone who doesn't know what they are worth.
|
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2017 16:56
|
|
|
MF_James posted:I live by powershell now (mostly), I've forced myself to stop using the GUI and am building a nice 'script' repository for pretty much anything I do, sadly some modules do not exist yet and I don't want to dig into WMI/ADSI to shore up gaps as that will consume too much of my limited time. I'm an MCSE - I built my career on Microsoft tech. However, as I've moved into the cloud engineering / DevOps space, I've found myself gravitating away from Microsoft stuff. It still has a place, but I'd personally be hesitant to invest a ton of time into the nitty gritty on that front. Just my self-reflecting observation; I've adopted a lot of platform agnostic tech (terraform, python, go) and have ended up better for it. And PowerShell is still headed towards multiplatform viability too. In summary - learn how to think about things programmatically, not necessarily getting entrenched in a specific language or technology. Edit: but since you're going to have to DO some of it to learn that, python is good for conceptually learning and it's widely used. Good place to be
|
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2017 16:57
|
|
|
Vargatron posted:My old employer just posted a job ad to backfill my position. depending on the area, absolutely.
|
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2017 17:00
|
|
|
Methanar posted:I'm going to be in Edmonton tomorrow.  I could be talked into lunch. I'll probably be taking it a little later today (13:00), but as long as I don't have to head all the way out to the West end it shouldn't be an issue. Got any preference as to the grub you consume?
|
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2017 17:01
|
|
|
ChubbyThePhat posted:as long as I don't have to head all the way out to the West end it shouldn't be an issue. Avenging_Mikon posted:Where in Edmonton are you going to be at? I should note I'm stuck downtown, so I'll probably have to give a pass.
|
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2017 17:16
|
|
|
Avenging_Mikon posted:Where in Edmonton are you going to be at? Currently at nait speaking! No preference for food Methanar fucked around with this message at 17:24 on Oct 26, 2017 |
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2017 17:21
|
|
|
Walked posted:I'm an MCSE - I built my career on Microsoft tech. However, as I've moved into the cloud engineering / DevOps space, I've found myself gravitating away from Microsoft stuff. I'm honestly glad I went to school for comp sci, despite dropping out, it changed the way I look at/solve problems and now that things are trending towards me needing to pick up some new languages, I feel I have a decent foundation to draw from.
|
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2017 17:36
|
|
|
Methanar posted:What do you want to do? Posts like this make me feel like I've learned nothing all these years. 
|
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2017 17:41
|
|
|
Avenging_Mikon posted:I should note I'm stuck downtown, so I'll probably have to give a pass. Avenging_Mikon posted:I should note I'm stuck downtown, so I'll probably have to give a pass. Well you're both reasonably close. Is travel an issue for you Methanar, or do you have a vehicle while you're in town?
|
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2017 17:50
|
|
|
Dick Trauma posted:Posts like this make me feel like I've learned nothing all these years. To be fair to us old people, the type of work he's talking about isn't us being left behind, it's a tool that we really have no use for in the Windows world. That may change over time with Microsoft getting more on-board, but how many people need to run their Windows infrastructure in containers? I've been doing non-persistent (cattle) servers for a long time. Web servers, XenApp servers, VDI. Having something that resets to a master image and essentially gets configured via script or GPO, has user data pulled out and stored somewhere else on reboot is probably as close as you can get in the Windows world unless you're supporting developers on a Microsoft stack.
|
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2017 18:04
|
|
|
Microsoft is moving that way in certain respects anyway. We'll see what improvements/changes come as 2016 matures, but they're making changes/improvements to azure constantly at this point and are pushing it hard. I guess we'll see where the chips fall eventually. I've come over to the side that you're doing yourself and your career a disservice by ignoring the cloud and it's time to jump on board.
|
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2017 18:12
|
|
|
Well, I’m getting compliments on my work and my manager and director are talking about future projects for me to work on, so I’m optimistic about my PIP. On the other hand my manager has talked about possibly having me do some work on the sharepoint project, so maybe that’s his punishment for me instead  .Seriously, though, getting some C# experience to go along with SQL would be great for my career.
|
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2017 18:18
|
|
|
quote:Hello Everyone, 
|
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2017 18:19
|
|
|
Vargatron posted:My old employer just posted a job ad to backfill my position. I like the salary range. A range of 62k-65k says to me 'Stingy company that isn't willing to negotiate on salary.' And that is possibly an appropriate payscale for somewhere in the Midwest, in a small city. lol if it is on either coast or in a metro area.
|
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2017 18:27
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 9, 2024 20:01 |
|
|
22 Eargesplitten posted:Well, I’m getting compliments on my work and my manager and director are talking about future projects for me to work on, so I’m optimistic about my PIP. Yeah C# and SQL are like peas and carrots, definitely learn them both if you're going to use SQL in any capacity.
|
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2017 18:29
|
|