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MrMoo posted:Reuters have offices everywhere, depends what side you are on though, Thomson, editorial, or the bit selling off to LSE. NJ is mainly the tax & accounting? Yeah it's sounding like we will all be converted to contractors at this point. Going to have to make some strategic career decisions because I doubt anyone gets renewed after a year's time. I guess that's why they call it Tata: that's what they say to you when your contract is up. BIG OL EDIT: So at this point it seems like a good question: what's everyone's favorite industry to work for? Woof Blitzer fucked around with this message at 21:02 on Jul 14, 2020 |
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Jul 14, 2020 20:52
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Woof Blitzer posted:Yeah it's sounding like we will all be converted to contractors at this point. Going to have to make some strategic career decisions because I doubt anyone gets renewed after a year's time. I guess that's why they call it Tata: that's what they say to you when your contract is up. Converting the left over staff to contractors is definitely a short term play. They want to write your healthcare and vacation benefits off their books. It also makes it so firing you doesn't hit into their unemployment insurance.
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Jul 14, 2020 21:03
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MSPs are great to get your foot in the door or if you can get a position that's just projects for a bit to round out your resume. Don't stay any longer than you have to. Seconding finding a place to do internal IT. Just realize that it's an absolute poo poo time to be looking for a job right now and will likely be that way for the foreseeable future. Keep networking, keep looking while you have a job.
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Jul 14, 2020 21:09
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Internet Explorer posted:MSPs are great to get your foot in the door or if you can get a position that's just projects for a bit to round out your resume. Don't stay any longer than you have to. Seconding finding a place to do internal IT. Just realize that it's an absolute poo poo time to be looking for a job right now and will likely be that way for the foreseeable future. Keep networking, keep looking while you have a job. I totally get this. It's hard to network as I'm working remotely, and it's not like I can really network when everyone is staying at home as well. I suppose I could dig around on Linked in and see what I can find. On a side note, for security sides of things after I finish the CompTIA trifecta, what's a reasonable Security Cert to go after that, so I can kind of build myself a road map for the next 4-6 months? I'm eyeing the CySA+, but I'm not sure which certs are just pieces of paper, and which really hold weight.
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Jul 14, 2020 21:24
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Zotix posted:I'm in Atlanta. The company I'm with is only 15/h and that's not something I want to look forward to for another year. I'd seriously like to try and land something around the 1 year mark. I'm just not sure of what job titles really make sense for the next step. Picking up some python is definitely worth your while, for pretty much any IT. Whether it's automating changes for a networking role, or responses with SOAR technologies for a security role, it is a good skill to have.
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Jul 14, 2020 21:44
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Zotix posted:I'm in Atlanta. The company I'm with is only 15/h and that's not something I want to look forward to for another year. I'd seriously like to try and land something around the 1 year mark. I'm just not sure of what job titles really make sense for the next step. AWS Certs, and learn Terraform/Ansible. Devops/SRE is a meaningless term but Infra/Config As Code is a balance between the two.
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Jul 14, 2020 22:36
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Internet Explorer posted:MSPs are great to get your foot in the door or if you can get a position that's just projects for a bit to round out your resume. Don't stay any longer than you have to. Seconding finding a place to do internal IT. Just realize that it's an absolute poo poo time to be looking for a job right now and will likely be that way for the foreseeable future. Keep networking, keep looking while you have a job. I'd honestly advise 18 year old me to forego college and go to work for an MSP until I have my bearings while collecting certs like Pokemon.
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Jul 15, 2020 00:24
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I found a few positions that I applied for. There seem to be some honest job postings that aren't looking for 5 years experi nice for 40,000/year. But im sure the jobs are just being flooded by candidates. Narrowing results by search terms really produces a variety of results. It's not as easy as help desk where 500 results easily populate. I'm trying to discern the differences between analysts and technicians and so on. Zotix fucked around with this message at 02:08 on Jul 15, 2020 |
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Jul 15, 2020 01:16
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Work for MSP until a client hires you.
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Jul 15, 2020 01:34
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Matt Zerella posted:AWS Certs, and learn Terraform/Ansible. Devops/SRE is a meaningless term but Infra/Config As Code is a balance between the two. This. The sys admin is going away. Soon being a server toucher won't be enough to crack 40k.
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Jul 15, 2020 01:36
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Jerk McJerkface posted:This. The sys admin is going away. Soon being a server toucher won't be enough to crack 40k. Lmao, the server toucher was declared dead a decade ago and its still not true today. Its definitely not what I recommend for high end salaries, but your statement isn't necessarily true.
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Jul 15, 2020 01:39
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Sickening posted:Lmao, the server toucher was declared dead a decade ago and its still not true today. Its definitely not what I recommend for high end salaries, but your statement isn't necessarily true. idk what I do if not touch computers
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Jul 15, 2020 02:00
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Bob Morales posted:Work for MSP until a client hires you. really? i would expect basically all MSPs to put nonsolicitation clauses in both the MSAs with the client and employment contracts with their workers. (a client is currently attempting to hire me and my MSP employer is not having it)
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Jul 15, 2020 02:03
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uniball posted:really? i would expect basically all MSPs to put nonsolicitation clauses in both the MSAs with the client and employment contracts with their workers. Oh yeah. At my MSP most people land the next job and quit without saying anything due to the non compete. To add I originally was planning to go into networking and maybe get my CCNA but I think I'm looking more towards security. Zotix fucked around with this message at 02:11 on Jul 15, 2020 |
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Jul 15, 2020 02:09
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Sickening posted:Lmao, the server toucher was declared dead a decade ago and its still not true today. Its definitely not what I recommend for high end salaries, but your statement isn't necessarily true. It’s not dead for sure but the “traditional” sysadmin has split and the idea that you can herd a stable of pets for good money no longer exists. Where that role does exist it’s barely above helpdesk. All of the interesting (and well paying) work is happening with automation, configuration management and herding cattle.
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Jul 15, 2020 02:15
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The Fool posted:It’s not dead for sure but the “traditional” sysadmin has split and the idea that you can herd a stable of pets for good money no longer exists. Where that role does exist it’s barely above helpdesk. Where that role has always existed is right above the helpdesk.  I agree with you where all the interesting stuff has is and has been for a while now, but the traditional server toucher is a live and well. We employ plenty of them despite my best efforts.
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Jul 15, 2020 02:22
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Sickening posted:Where that role has always existed is right above the helpdesk. We’re all barely above the helpdesk.
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Jul 15, 2020 02:28
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Zotix posted:But im sure the jobs are just being flooded by candidates. Put a couple of weird things on your resume. Something to give the hiring manager the impulse to talk to this person. This should be in the top half of the first page. "Objective: find an IT role where I will never again have to...." HR doesn't read that part (or any), and the hiring manager might be intrigued. Load your resume with things you've accomplished, and prompts for questions that will let you talk about how awesome you are. "Used a bubble sort algorithm to optimize golf cart allocation to the Security and Facilities teams." People will ask. Have a good story about how something weird came up and you handled it with skills that are arguably applicable elsewhere. Every bullet point should be a talking point. And if you put a networking cert on your resume I am going to ask you about the OSI Seven Layer model even if the position will probably involve no network troubleshooting whatsoever. If it's on the resume, you might find yourself standing in front of a whiteboard having to explain it. If you can't tell me anything about a couple of things you put on your resume on purpose, I'm gonna think you're bullshitting about all of it. Trim the bullshit, it can cost you a job.
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Jul 15, 2020 02:34
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The Fool posted:We’re all barely above the helpdesk. I wish I was helpdesk, they have set hours.
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Jul 15, 2020 02:35
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Sickening posted:We employ plenty of them despite my best efforts. I was all set to disagree with you on every count and then you said this and I realized hell, same.
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Jul 15, 2020 02:51
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The worst part about being hired by an MSP client is that you’ll be bored out of your loving skull in less than a year You’ll end up in a chill job with friendly co-workers, post on message boards all day, eat donuts every morning and gently caress the skanky secretaries, get hammered at chili’s after work, and then in ten years realize you got fat and lazy and don’t even remember linux commands anymore. Actually what you should do is get good at something else, anything else, and find a job where you can combine IT and whatever the other skill is, then you can fool a company into thinking you’re real important and pay you more money than IT alone
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Jul 15, 2020 03:17
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Bob Morales posted:You’ll end up in a chill job with friendly co-workers, post on message boards all day, eat donuts every morning and gently caress the skanky secretaries, get hammered at chili’s after work, and then in ten years realize you got fat and lazy and don’t even remember linux commands anymore. this is the goal
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Jul 15, 2020 03:27
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Matt Zerella posted:AWS Certs, and learn Terraform/Ansible. Devops/SRE is a meaningless term but Infra/Config As Code is a balance between the two. Methanar posted:idk what I do if not touch computers Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 03:42 on Jul 15, 2020 |
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Jul 15, 2020 03:40
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Bob Morales posted:Actually what you should do is get good at something else, anything else, and find a job where you can combine IT and whatever the other skill is, then you can fool a company into thinking you’re real important and pay you more money than IT alone I'm considering doing this, just from a good industrial automation job, branching into renewable energy. Someone tell me not to 
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Jul 15, 2020 04:17
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Bob Morales posted:You’ll end up in a chill job with friendly co-workers, post on message boards all day, eat donuts every morning and gently caress the skanky secretaries, get hammered at chili’s after work, and then in ten years realize you got fat and lazy and don’t even remember linux commands. I’m not seeing any downsides here. E: never mind I see it. Chili’s
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Jul 15, 2020 04:24
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Can't go the gently caress out anymore anyways so Chili's is now at my house with my pool table and beer fridge.
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Jul 15, 2020 04:34
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mllaneza posted:Put a couple of weird things on your resume. Something to give the hiring manager the impulse to talk to this person. This should be in the top half of the first page. "Objective: find an IT role where I will never again have to...." HR doesn't read that part (or any), and the hiring manager might be intrigued. Helpful for sure. I've trimmed my resume to my most recent positions which are my current at a MSP, and then my job as a manager at one of the largest Hilton's in the world. They might ask about my Hilton job, they might not, but it shows that I've led teams of nearly 100 people, and ran three restaurants in an 18 hour a day operation. Most isn't going to be interesting to an IT person but some might. The most recent job is at an MSP and basically contains the systems and such that I've interacted with. There's not a lot of highlights in terms of accomplishments. I haven't had a review in the 9 months I've been there because of CovID. It's basically about 7 bullet points, assisted users working in VM environments, helped with remote access troubleshooting with VPN connections, limited AD duties including password resets and adding users to groups, hardware troubleshooting, etc. One thing I have done is taken pictures of all of my surveys that are positive(which nearly every one of them has been excellent) but I've saved a lot with extra comments about my helpfulness. I was considering printing out several and putting them in a binder to bring on an interview. I'm not sure if that would be advised. I feel like I've learned a lot in the 9 months at an MSP, but like nothing that actually involves say networking or security. All of that is handled by on-site and internal IT. At this point I'm basically a candidate that says I've got 15 years of customer service experience, some hands on with IT and a poo poo ton of ambition. I think the customer service experience is a big plus, but I'm still in that camp of hoping someone takes a chance on me. Right now it's tough to figure out what's the next step, do I take certs that may or not be valued, etc. I'd love to be in a company where if I want to take Jim's job when he moves up I know I need x, y, z or at least some progress towards that. I'm still seeing tons of acronyms on job postings and I have no idea what they are, so I Google it, but it's hard to conceptualize if it's something I should learn or if it's something I should skip. I still can't quite conceptualize certain things and how they'll play into where I want to head to. I just know I'm approaching the year and I want out of MSP help desk. I've got customer service in my blood, I'm damned good at it, but I left hospitality for a reason and I want to get more involved in complex thing rather than JoAnn calling in again because her DMS addin has become disabled in Outlook or word for the 5th time this week. Sorry if I'm rambling, I've had a rough weekend and I'm trying make sense of where I'm at and how to get to the next step. Thank you everyone for your input thus far.
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Jul 15, 2020 05:53
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I'm pretty much in the same boat as you, except I've been at my MSP for a year and a half. Wanted to leave at a year, but COVID means having /any/ job is better than none, even if I am not happy with it. I have A+, N+, S+ trifecta as well. The difference with me is that I am third shift, so I actually don't get to handle a lot of the customer service part. Mostly I monitor backups/patching and work dispatch for parts of the world that are awake while the US is asleep. That part of the job I enjoy most. If I could just do the "client needs a field engineer, find one" part of the job, it'd be fine. I hate third shift, and it has really started messing with my mental/physical health. Another wrinkle is that I'm looking for jobs in another city, as my girlfriend and I are wanting to move, so it's even harder to find a job. I don't really even know what direction I want to go in within this field. I strongly dislike help desk, but don't have enough specialized experience to land other jobs that I see listed. I've been trying for internal IT positions, as I don't want to work for an MSP anymore. It's pretty discouraging, but these are tough times to find work.
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Jul 15, 2020 08:14
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Whenever something breaks at $MEGACORP I usually have $THEBUSINESS on line 1 asking me what the hell is going wrong, how this could happen and how I'm going to make sure we are never going to get any downtime ever again. To be as transparent as possible about outages I've setup a post mortem page on our wiki that shows a detailed description of what went wrong, how it could've happened and actions we're taking to improve this (links to Jira and all). When outages happen I share this with management and teams we're supporting via mail and slack channels. Still I get managers asking me stuff like "that post mortem stuff is all fine, but you still have outages so it doesn't work. I need you to freeze all production releases during my next marketing campaign that lasts 2 months". I usually tell them that they don't own the process nor the infra and we're not putting dozens of dev teams on hold because he's going to run a a campaign and thinks 99.99% is not enough uptime. If he wants to add a 9 he can allocate his budget to the infra/platform teams and they'll start working on that. It probably doesn't help that the company only just started working in an Agile way and most of the management is struggling hard with adjusting to it. It's always been more of an authoritarian organisation and now all of a sudden you have these self organizing teams. For me this seems to be a recurring issue and no matter how well I try to explain the incidents, processes, solutions and planning we do to prevent them, I don't think I ever get the point across. Next time we have an incident (even though there's 4 months in between) I get escalations saying "see, LochNessMonsters platform is DOWN AGAIN!!!". Fun fact is that half of the time the escalating managers team broke something in a release, but that's still my issue because how is it possible that devs can break a production environment? Even though we have a clear seperation of infra/platform/application responsibilities. How do 'mature' organizations deal with people complaining about downtime, even though it's well within limits of the SLA?
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Jul 15, 2020 08:23
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I think I've had a breakthrough with my tech guy. He is not a customer service kinda guy which obviously hinders him quite a bit. Fault came in, a PC basically needed a re-image, it's not my system so a 3rd party engineer comes into do it - great. The PC is very locked down and the user then complains that they have 2 printers and everything is coming off of the dot matrix, it should be mainly the laser jet and only on the dot matrix for the things that need it. Tech guy says 'the user can just select a printer, it's fine' - my point is 'but it worked automatically pre-re-image so why can't we make it like that' - *shrug* So I challenge my tech guy and say, let's say you go to the user and said 'are you happy if I close the ticket' you're going to get a big fat no, to me, the idea of just shrugging at it is lazy and you should find out why it's changed - if there is a reason, that's fine, but don't just shrug- if it needs the engineer to come back, she has his number, do a deal that she brings him on site (secure facility) so that she is happy the job is in hand and you can close the ticket. Tech then says he feels insulted that I called him lazy, I said I did no such thing, I said the idea of leaving this as is, is lazy, but going back to the user and getting it right is A+ stuff, obviously, you are going to walk out the door and following this chat you will decide if you want to close the fault, at which point I'll say you are lazy or you can finish it properly and I'll give you that A+. He then tells me he has already arranged to sit with the user and work out what's wrong... So whilst he is goading me into a rant to accuse him of not doing something which is really bizarre trait. He is actually starting to spend time with the users and fix things properly (which wasn't happening before) I was also very clear that he was goading me and he needs to stop, to which he admitted he was being a dick, which he doesn't usually do I'm taking this as progress. Baby steps and all that.
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Jul 15, 2020 11:50
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The Fool posted:It’s not dead for sure but the “traditional” sysadmin has split and the idea that you can herd a stable of pets for good money no longer exists. Where that role does exist it’s barely above helpdesk. That's just normal sysadmin work though?  The whole point of package management processes is automation, config management is decades old. One of my current projects is slowly moving from our old collection of automation scripts to Ansible since it's finally mature enough.
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Jul 15, 2020 13:50
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Bob Morales posted:
This used to be my dream. I got away form the MSP stuff and moved into something more specific and it is so much fun to learn and work with new stuff rather than Googling for hours to fix some legacy software
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Jul 15, 2020 14:06
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Finally released something that had been stuck in limbo since october to prod after releasing it to dev 3 weeks ago. Found a weird hiccup and wow all of a sudden I'm actually completely wrong and obviously I should have done this other thing that I don't seem to recall ever being suggested in the last 8 months of being blocked.
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Jul 15, 2020 17:31
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Aren’t you vested now? gently caress that place
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Jul 15, 2020 17:36
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It is 2020. Why are there still people who say, "well it worked in QA!" with a straight face? Especially when they never load tested the script and are suddenly shocked when I tell them to check their SQL statements.
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Jul 15, 2020 17:44
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Is there any way to receive encrypted messages in outlook if your org has a hybrid environment but OWA is disabled? Basically a user from an outside org sends an email to a user on our end. They receive the Microsoft email saying they have an encrypted message and in that email is a link to view the message. But when they click it they are asked to log in with an account. Since we have o365 accounts, the user enters their org email and password but then gets redirected to an "oops something went wrong" page because OWA is disabled. My boss swears that Outlook should be decrypting the message and displaying it in the program, but I think his assumption is based on some ancient process or configuration that hasn't been in place. Then he backpedled a bit and claims that Microsoft should be providing a one time passcode. I explained that this is only true if it's not a Microsoft email address and he swears I'm wrong citing, "well it works when we send messages" followed by, "you just need to engineer a solution." That's his favorite phrase now, by the way. "Just engineer a solution. It's in your job title." It's a pretty good one actually. He gets to simultaneously set you up for failure, make you feel inadequate, AND pass the buck all in one phrase. But I digress... Is there actually a way to do this? All my googling and reading of Microsoft documentation and support responses tells me to gently caress right off and enable OWA.
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Jul 15, 2020 17:52
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The Outlook client should be able to display encrypted messages, there are version requirements https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/send-view-and-reply-to-encrypted-messages-in-outlook-for-pc-eaa43495-9bbb-4fca-922a-df90dee51980
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Jul 15, 2020 19:48
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My team made the cut! However, our senior hardware/software guys (who sit between us ops admins and the devs) will be getting the short end of the stick: 50% canned, 50% contracted to Tata. Can't wait to see our application downtime explode. This truly has been a wonderful experience and I would be thrilled to leave before the next bloodletting session in 2021. So let this be a message that you can never get too comfortable.
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Jul 15, 2020 20:23
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- Asks vendor for registry keys that need to be cleared to fully remove a software installation - Instructions include at the bottom quote:WARNING From Microsoft: Using Registry Editor incorrectly can cause serious problems that may require you to reinstall Windows 95. Microsoft cannot guarantee that problems resulting from the incorrect use of Registry Editor can be solved. Use Registry Editor at your own risk.
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Jul 15, 2020 20:57
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Thanks Ants posted:The Outlook client should be able to display encrypted messages, there are version requirements Yeah the problem is that due to the odd nature of our setup, the encrypted email doesn't actually come to us. Only an email with a link to retrieve the encrypted email. So it falls under the last scenario on that link and there is no option to sign in with a one time passcode. I do not know how the sender is doing the encrypting or which version of OME the sender is using or if that even matters at this point.
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Jul 15, 2020 21:15
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