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i am a moron posted:That’s not great but you get negotiated rates on high deductible plans and HSAs have made them at least a little more palatable. The more I read about W2 contracting the less I understand though. Seems like a normal employee you can give less benefits to and fire more easily?
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Nov 8, 2023 20:30
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Did contract to hire that ended up being forever W2 contract. Things to watch out for-- I've already seen health insurance mentioned, I'd recommend getting in on a spousal plan if you can. No PTO. Enjoy taking a 10% paycut that week if you need to visit a doctor or dentist? Some companies will allow you to make the time up, mine denied overtime beyond 2 hours a week, so I got to eat the loss for holidays. 20 hour paychecks suck. IRA vs 401k contributions: IRA is capped at something stupid low like $6500 a year. No severance. You're disposable. I got dumped during an off-peak hiring season. Let me tell you, it is not fun having to gauge whether you have to take a low-balled job before the money runs out.
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Nov 8, 2023 20:39
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Vulture Culture posted:In the US, there's generally very few barriers to firing anyone for any reason, unless it's discriminatory, at which point it becomes a civil rights issue instead of an employment issue Well right so like… what’s the distinction
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Nov 8, 2023 20:40
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i am a moron posted:Well right so like… what’s the distinction There often isn't one, you'd have to be able to have some level of proof that you were fired for that reason. Most companies executing this are smart enough to have a valid reason, or "No reason". But if you can prove that they fired you for being something like being a member of a a protected class, well, you might get a payday or your job back, assuming you want it. https://www.usa.gov/wrongful-termination
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Nov 8, 2023 20:49
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‘You’re a W2 employee but we hate you more than usual’ seems like what W2 contracting amounts to
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Nov 8, 2023 20:58
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FISHMANPET posted:E: ok since we trapped a live one, care to share what kind of day to day stuff is happening with AD that's outside of any IAM, skipdogg? And certainly don't mean to imply that you've got a bad setup, you come off like you know what you're doing in these threads. So the environment is large, and is under a heavy load. Combine that with all the fun stuff that comes from working in a highly regulated environment and it basically takes 10 times more effort than usual to do things. We over 200 domain controllers just in production. Things are over built so we can lose an entire datacenter, plus an availability zone in the other data center without disrupting the business. . It won't be pretty but it will work. We have a full blown dev version of AD, plus 3 other AD environments built for specific other things. All in all we keep track of 300ish domain controllers. We have 17 different monitoring, inventory, or security agents running on the domain controllers. Every time one of those is updated, we have to update the agent across all of our domain controllers. In a normal world that's easy, weekend work right?. I'm not allowed to touch more than 25% of the fleet a time in case something goes wrong. That means a single agent upgrade in our environment is a 6 week project. First week, dev/test rollout, second week, prod test rollout. Weeks 3, 4, 5 and 6 are 25% of production at a time. Everyone of these changes needs appropriate change control paperwork filled out and change control board approval. We're limited to after-hours work for most production work as well which is fun. Networking is constantly changing things, so just the weekly report of new subnets and updating sites and services is a 3 to 4 hours task every week for one of our guys. Networking never tells us when they change things of course. If I had to break down an average 40 hour week: 40% of it is just dealing with paperwork. Audits, assessments, filling out change paperwork, attending meetings about audits, assessments, and changes. I'm pretty sure every regulation under the sun applies to us. PCI, US GOV, FFIEC, you name it. These audits and assessments can range from quarterly to annually. 10% consulting or meeting with other teams on enterprise projects 15% attending other meetings and other unproductive but necessary corporate stuff The rest of it you might call IT work. Troubleshooting things... like why is Hadoop doing extremely intensive ldap queries 2000 times a second against the root of the domain and working with the hadoop team to make it stop. Working in dev/test and preparing for prod stuff. Just patching alone is a 3 week endeavor spread across 5 nights. Just something as simple as updating a group policy object for the domain controllers takes me about 3 hours of "work". Test in test/dev, fill out paperwork, get peer approval and management approval, attend cab meeting, get cab approval. All so I can then check out my admin credentials to right click a gpo and link it to an OU. You also run into a lot of issues at this sort of scale that you don't usually run into. I've been dealing with O365/Azure since the 2009 BPOS days. Never gave much thought syncing AD to Azure. We had to do some stuff in our environment so AD Syncs didn't take 12 hours to complete due to the sheer number of users and groups and how often IAM is changing them. Every single access permission is mapped to an AD group and entitlement. The average employee is in over 200 AD groups. We have some internal environments like the container environment and hadoop we had to build dedicated AD clusters for. They can service over 4,000 ldap queries a second sometimes. We've run into a couple other issues over the years that can cause issues at the scale we run at. It's incredibly frustrating sometimes. It often feels like you never get anything done, and when you do get to do something, it can take months to finish it. We've got 10 guys on the team right now. 2 of them spend the majority of their time just on automation and have done some pretty cool stuff in the last couple of years. 1 guy is pretty much dedicated just to datadog and getting that setup before we get rid of another tool. 1 guy pretty much owns patching and some other recurring maintenance items The lead is running around doing consults and putting out fires. I seem to land a bunch of the audit paperwork tasks for some reason the rest of them just do whatever else needs to be done. Oh, and lets throw in the chaos of trying to conform to Agile as an infrastructure team. PI planning alone kills an entire week every year. Things are better since we're Kanban now, but there's no strong PMO so projects are a complete nightmare. Like I mentioned though, everything is just insanely complicated here for a variety of reasons. Here's another example... New version of Veeam has been released. Veeam db changed to Postgres instead of SQL Studio. Guess how many months it's going to take to get that approved since postgres isn't an internally supported database by the database team. Upgrading Veeam should take you a couple hours at most right? 3 month project here. Mountains of paperwork for exceptions to controls, application inventory exceptions, sign offs from sql support saying if the db blows up they don't own it or support it. It's just crazy sometimes. When I started here almost 3 years ago I went in with the "oh babysit on prem AD, how hard could this be?" "Why are there 200 domain controllers, this is insane?" Now we have monthly meetings with capacity management about deploying more domain controllers because they feel the load is too high and is a capacity risk. skipdogg fucked around with this message at 21:20 on Nov 8, 2023 |
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Nov 8, 2023 21:16
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skipdogg posted:Veeam db changed to Postgres instead of SQL Studio. Guess how many months it's going to take to get that approved since postgres isn't an internally supported database by the database team. Everything you just explained blows my mind. But I have to say, why do you need your DB guys in your backups DB? I could only invision a SME at veeam directly to dive into that stuff if there was an issue. I guess i'm old school and there is a legit reason WHY they moved to Postgres (licensing same why vsphere swapped databases and platforms) instead of expertise and db guys should stay out. But it's your environment, and there is probably a reason for it.
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Nov 8, 2023 21:24
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incoherent posted:Everything you just explained blows my mind. But I have to say, why do you need your DB guys in your backups DB? I could only invision a SME at veeam directly to dive into that stuff if there was an issue. I guess i'm old school and there is a legit reason WHY they moved to Postgres (licensing same why vsphere swapped databases and platforms) instead of expertise and db guys should stay out. Oh, it blows my mind too. For this particular example, we have a bunch of internal application controls (ITGC and some others). Veeam uses a database. Is the database hosted on the enterprise database platform? We answer No. We are now not meeting the all enterprise database controls, which kicks off all sorts of paperwork. (If you use the enterprise database platform, you're automatically compliant with all these ITGCs) We need to fill out exception requests to the enterprise database controls, get the exception requests approved. Then we have to tell the inventory people we have an approved exception, because if an inventory tool catches postgres, it'll raise a red flag. AT the same time we're trying to do all this, we have the VULN team chasing after us about why we haven't upgraded Veeam yet. They are crazy aggressive about what software is run in the environment. I can't even download open source software without getting approval from a panel of people, much less use it in production. skipdogg fucked around with this message at 21:36 on Nov 8, 2023 |
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Nov 8, 2023 21:31
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I started working through a staffing company as a contract to hire and I'm loving all this hourly OT I'm getting, which I hadn't gotten as a salaried employee in over a decade. The hourly rate is a 45% bump over my last gig, too. My team/boss/company is really chill, though - they said I can make up any time off after hours without any issues, and it's fully remote, so I don't need to take much time off for the time being. Granted, the overtime is only 5-10 hours a week, but being hourly is nice. I won't mind when they convert me though. Corb3t fucked around with this message at 21:40 on Nov 8, 2023 |
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Nov 8, 2023 21:35
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what does a ticket that just says "I think my computer is blurring" mean
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Nov 8, 2023 21:42
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Sometimes places won't care about an hourly contract getting a ton of OT billed against it because it's going under an account code that the C-Suite doesn't really care about. Working in the public sector, it's wild how some departments are on a shoestring budget while others straight up laugh at me when I ask for a maximum spend amount and they're like "just order the poo poo lol, money is no object".
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Nov 8, 2023 21:42
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I’m still mad at Veeam for not releasing a virtual appliance with the admin tool a web app. Why it needs to be installed on a windows vm in 2023 is beyond me.
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Nov 8, 2023 21:56
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skipdogg posted:Oh, it blows my mind too. A lot of my days these days aren't too far off from what you're describing and it's been excruciating. So much work required to do anything. I miss my tiny shop days.
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Nov 8, 2023 21:56
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Update on interviews for the jobs I mentioned in this post: Job A: Did not go as well as I'd hoped. Despite asking for a CCNA in the requirements, almost everything they asked me about was CCNP level. My raw experience from all my NOC jobs saved me from looking like a clueless idiot, but there were too many questions I couldn't give a direct answer for. Felt bad, but interviewer never seemed surprised or disappointed. Job B: Interview was cut short early, apparently the interviewer's boss sprang a surprise meeting on them right before my interview started. But for what time we had, it went really well. The interviewer started things off by saying she had literally never heard of someone actually wanting to work nightshifts before, and we spent most of the interview talking about how they could use me to help fix their scheduling woes. Unsure of when I'll hear from them again though, hoping I will soon. Job C: This was intense. 3 different interviews, and they grilled me hard with very open ended questions that had no clear answer. 2nd interview had a focus on networking though, and I smashed that one so hard that the interviewer straight up mentioned they were going to submit me as a higher level technician because he felt it would be a waste of my skillset to "just have me swapping out SSDs and RAM sticks". Base pay will definitely go up if I start off as a higher level. Job has massive room for career growth, and they have a lot of cool policies I like a lot. Most excited by this position and I hope to hear from them soon.
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Nov 8, 2023 23:33
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GreenNight posted:I’m still mad at Veeam for not releasing a virtual appliance with the admin tool a web app. Why it needs to be installed on a windows vm in 2023 is beyond me. It has been a while since I looked at docs but I am pretty sure you can back up via agent without a B&R server, if an agent job would work for you.
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Nov 8, 2023 23:56
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Umbreon posted:Update on interviews for the jobs I mentioned in this post: Rooting for you. Does Job C also give you night shifts?
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Nov 9, 2023 00:13
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Umbreon posted:Update on interviews for the jobs I mentioned in this post: Job C is the FAANG one right? All in all I wouldn't sweat the self reported "bad performances" in A and B. You are always going to be harder on yourself and it sounded like you held your own. Rootin' for ya!
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Nov 9, 2023 00:14
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Umbreon posted:Update on interviews for the jobs I mentioned in this post: Our interview and lab for network techs starts at CCNA level and scales up to increasing levels of complexity ending at troubleshooting a broken pipeline trying to push a BGP change to production. Makes it easy to figure out where your knowledge starts and ends. No one is actually really expected to know all the answers, and one of the goals is actually to see how the person being interviewed responds to not knowing. Will you try to bullshit me or just say "I don't know, but I can look it up/figure it out/this is outside my area of knowledge etc"? They may be doing the same thing.
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Nov 9, 2023 00:14
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Umbreon posted:
This may already be part of your plan, but if you are excited I'd definitely recommend reaching out and letting them know you enjoyed the interview, a couple reasons why you think you'd be a good fit, etc.
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Nov 9, 2023 00:14
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LochNessMonster posted:Rooting for you. Does Job C also give you night shifts? Yep, although not all locations have nightshifts available I found out, so now I know to ask ahead of time before picking one. George H.W. oval office posted:Job C is the FAANG one right? Yep. Nuclearmonkee posted:Our interview and lab for network techs starts at CCNA level and scales up to increasing levels of complexity ending at troubleshooting a broken pipeline trying to push a BGP change to production. Makes it easy to figure out where your knowledge starts and ends. No one is actually really expected to know all the answers, and one of the goals is actually to see how the person being interviewed responds to not knowing. Will you try to bullshit me or just say "I don't know, but I can look it up/figure it out/this is outside my area of knowledge etc"? They may be doing the same thing. I definitely was honest the whole time and even mentioned exactly what you said("I haven't had the chance to work on an issue that involved that yet, but I'd be more than happy to research and tackle it if given the chance"). At the very least I made it clear that even if I didn't know something, I still have a process for finding out how to do it and was not afraid to use it. eonwe posted:This may already be part of your plan, but if you are excited I'd definitely recommend reaching out and letting them know you enjoyed the interview, a couple reasons why you think you'd be a good fit, etc. I actually got to talk about exactly that in 2 of my interviews with them, and in one of them, specifically because the interviewer was telling me why they thought I'd be a good fit lol
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Nov 9, 2023 00:29
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There is an Azure Storage outage right now and it is a load bearing service for most of our applications.
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Nov 9, 2023 00:37
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skipdogg posted:AD Engineer life My last job was for a big giant financial services company. Their AD engineering team was I think 15 people or so. 200 DCs is probably a low number for this org and it would not have shrank since I left. In addition to everything that skipdogg posted, there was the core AD infrastructure stuff that they inherited - AD integrated DNS, DHCP, all the reporting/monitoring/etc., and WINS. Yes, WINS. As of TYOOL 2021, WINS was not only in production but part of critical systems for one of the major divisions of this big giant company. It will not be retired anytime soon. Add on BC/DR responsibilities - this big giant financial services company had a massive, complex BC/DR planning/execution system that required Lotus Notes to work with it. I would not take an AD engineering job unless I knew for a fact that I wanted to be the equivalent of today's COBOL graybeard about 20ish years in the future - still employed because I wanted to be, quite busy, in demand, doing something pretty darn technical and important that couldn't be easily hired to fill, and important only in big, giant, huge organizations. If your AD situation is complex enough to require a specific engineer, it's too complex to want to do, IMO, but it'll at least put money on the table as long as you get crazy more $ out of a W-2, no benefits, no 401k, etc. contract. That's bupkis and if you really want an AD engineer role with benefits, let me know and I'll see if they need one at my former place. i am a moron posted:Well right so like… what’s the distinction The distinction is "you're fired out of nowhere because you're black and the CEO doesn't like black people" vs. "you're fired out of nowhere because of a cultural fit". One of those comes with the company having to cough up unemployment insurance since the target was fired for no cause, the other comes with massive amounts of liabiltiy because they were stupid enough to put being a member of a protected class as the reason for termination. That's why every firing for no cause comes with a long run-up of manufactured, stupid reasons so they can make it look like it was termination for cause and not lose in court if they get sued. The third option - "you're fired because of a long string of performance issues which were documented and presented to you with opportunities to improve (which were stacked against you from the start) and thus it's termination for cause", meaning they don't have to cough up for UI. Big thanks to everyone who ever bitched about having to wait an hour to do something because ~*~unions ~*~ and thus empowered Reaganite garbage, forever ending any hope of collective bargaining amongst white-collar workers and letting garbage firings be the modus operandi MJP fucked around with this message at 01:25 on Nov 9, 2023 |
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Nov 9, 2023 01:20
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Cool more layoffs. Being in survival mode all the time sure is awesome.
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Nov 9, 2023 02:24
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i am a moron posted:Cool more layoffs. Being in survival mode all the time sure is awesome. My productivity/motivation since our last round has dropped by like 75%. Doesn’t help the HR director is telling people to work on their resumes cause they don’t know if the company is going to exist in 6 months. Also; I really hate third party integrators. I have so many systems I’m trying to get any level of support on and it’s a never ending uphill battle of wasting my time. Either give me a full SaaS solution or give me complete ownership.
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Nov 9, 2023 02:47
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Every so often, I really enjoy my job. Just that dopamine hit of finding a new process, learning how it works, setting it up, and getting the exact result wanted, which allows me to do my job more efficiently, all while not letting the bosses know that I'm now automating part of my job away.
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Nov 9, 2023 04:07
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I'm currently a W2 contractor doing a 2 month dumbshit voice deployment for a hundred dollars an hour I wouldn't quit a regular job to go do this, but the money is very nice (especially for the work I'm doing). Lots of overtime fighting dumb/bad customer stuff, but no vacation, no benefits, and the skillset is neither interesting nor career-advancing. However the staffing company reached out about lining up a long-term gig  Except its 5 days in person, and its doing actual network architecture. I can do the job, maybe, but designing network topology is not my jam by a long shot. I've mentioned itt that i felt VOIP was at a weird spot, maybe this is a good layup? 
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Nov 9, 2023 04:22
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The Fool posted:There is an Azure Storage outage right now and it is a load bearing service for most of our applications. I know it's criel, but post/username combo?  Azure continues to impress me with their jankyness.
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Nov 9, 2023 08:01
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Wibla posted:Azure continues to impress me with their jankyness. 1. Intune is the future. 2. Azure has hilariously bad uptime for a load bearing cloud service. 3. FML
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Nov 9, 2023 08:08
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What are people here using for server and network monitoring? I've been using PRTG for years and it's fine, but ahead of our maintenance renewal my boss has asked to explore other options (especially if they're cheaper). Am I missing out on a much better product?
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Nov 9, 2023 12:24
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If you’re looking for something cheaper than PRTG? No. If you’re looking for something better than PRTG? Debatable
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Nov 9, 2023 12:27
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i am a moron posted:What the absolute gently caress have they been developing to this point?? *laughs in MUMPS*
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Nov 9, 2023 12:40
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bitterandtwisted posted:What are people here using for server and network monitoring? Logic Monitor is slick but it’s not cheaper by any means. PRTG is gonna be fine for the most part for the price point.
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Nov 9, 2023 14:18
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Dont even look at datadog, it costs roughly 7 billion dollars a year. But it is nice, we use it. Elasticsearch has metricbeat and is free as long as you don't want 2FA and support, but managing elasticsearch is a full time job and imo it's not as good as other solutions. Zabbix is pretty good. Sepist fucked around with this message at 14:40 on Nov 9, 2023 |
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Nov 9, 2023 14:38
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Datadog is nice indeed. Last place I used it, dropped it because it became too expensive. Also if you’re a small user, support can vary from ok to utter trash.
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Nov 9, 2023 14:42
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Grafana/Prom
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Nov 9, 2023 15:00
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Datadog is sweet but so god drat expensive. Elastic is fine so long as youre not hosting it yourself or in charge of running it day to day. As an end user though its great! I still like Sumo the most, it seemed to be the best combo of price/features/usability, but I know a few people that hated it for whatever reason too.
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Nov 9, 2023 15:03
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mllaneza posted:1. Intune is the future. I haven't had any Azure services affected by an outage in years. Either I'm lucky or the data protection omamori actually works.
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Nov 9, 2023 15:20
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Sometimes poo poo happens. 99% of the time it doesn’t. Most of the time I find people saying it’s flaky are also bad at appropriately designing their cloud deployments (not directing that at Fool storage outages can be tricky because of the nature of the services that use them and even if you’re appropriately failing over and it’s a regional outage and you need to write to them it might not work great)
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Nov 9, 2023 15:26
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Can we call azure the grovercloud?
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Nov 9, 2023 15:30
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I worked at a manufacturing plant who put all their ERP/Production Systems in The Cloud circa 2016 and it was a disaster any time somebody cut a fiber line or the weather got bad and we lost internet connectivity. I practically begged them to do on-prem production servers with a cloud mirror but this was determined to be too costly. But one of these line-down events cost about $300k, so that money could have been saved had we set up redundancy in our infrastructure. I think placing things in the cloud is a great idea overall, but not a business where your loving assembly line shuts down if it can't get to the internet. EDIT: Also holy poo poo did the C-Suite at that company LOVE seeing KPIs on monitors next to machines. It didn't matter if it was useless information. They just wanted to see a pretty bar or pie chart with a number on it. We spent THOUSANDS of dollars setting up dashboard stations and the plant still ran like poo poo.
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Nov 9, 2023 15:33
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