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Vulture Culture posted:With long publication cycles, books are a bad place to get the current state of basically anything, but The Phoenix Project is probably the closest thing to a vision statement that there is on DevOps, told as a novel (really, an IT reformatting of Eliyahu Goldratt's The Goal). If you really are after the current state, maybe dig around for keynotes from various recent conferences on YouTube? Seems like a good game plan, cheers!
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Mar 21, 2016 16:49
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Asking about the state of the art in DevOps is a weird thing depending upon what you even mean by it. Do you mean the tools and systems used to make operations fast? Do you mean specific technical methodologies for how to make software super easy and reliable to deploy, maintain, etc.? Or maybe you mean "how do I keep my developers and operations engineers from dueling each other at the office un-ironically during release weeks"? Perhaps your questions have nothing to do with any of these? For the purpose thread-local, the first two are mostly answered as a form of "what are the hip trends by cool, respected companies?" with a large quantity of salt to cover the large asterisk that what works for them is potentially not a good idea for your organization. I mean, it'd be stuff that gets buzzwordy among engineers like Kubernetes, CoreOS, etcd, Consul, microservices, immutable infrastructure, but I don't think that's useful for people that don't even have basics like continuous integration, monitoring, or configuration management nailed down yet to have opinions on those topics. The last is, in my inflammatory opinion, not actually a technical question and should go directly into the discipline of management consulting first-most.
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Mar 22, 2016 01:46
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I'm basically looking for how other large companies are doing continuous delivery successfully. I'm in the federal space working on a contract with a vast number of integrated and disparate systems. It's all very waterfall established but at the same time there's a big (sometimes contradictory) push toward agile and continuous incremental releases. I'm basically looking for inspiration from other organizations and to see how they've dealt with similar obstacles and what approaches have been successful. E: I'm in management consulting.
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Mar 22, 2016 02:50
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Tots posted:I'm basically looking for how other large companies are doing continuous delivery successfully. I'm in the federal space working on a contract with a vast number of integrated and disparate systems. It's all very waterfall established but at the same time there's a big (sometimes contradictory) push toward agile and continuous incremental releases. I'm basically looking for inspiration from other organizations and to see how they've dealt with similar obstacles and what approaches have been successful. You may find some of the links in https://github.com/mmcgrana/services-engineering interesting, at least on how organizations are building systems today. You may be able to infer some information from that. Specifically, posts by John Allspaw may be helpful. Zwiebeck's postmortems paper isn't bad either. In the federal space, 18f/USCIO/USDS have done some work on getting agile contracts working within government, a while ago I asked them if they would be comfortable posting some of the interagency agreements they have as to get a sense of how agile is written into contracts, and I think they've started a repo but am not sure if they've added to it since. Definitely check those folks out. Vulture Culture posted:I skimmed this one because its predecessor, The Practice of System and Network Administration, was extremely influential in the formative years of my career. I'm a few years too far down into my engineering career to read this kind of book cover to cover nowadays. But Limoncelli's thought a lot about the philosophy and the mindset behind things, and he does a great job explaining that on the whole. My one complaint is that the tone is a little bit too didactic, so if you're the kind of person who likes to see data explaining why an approach is "the right way" to do things -- the way you might have found great studies cited in old-timey software engineering books by Fred Brooks or Steve McConnell, for example -- you're not going to find it. But if you can take the book at its word, or reinforce the parts you don't quite get the value of with the war stories from Web Operations, you'll have a great time with it. I like both TPoSaNA and TPoCSA; I'm definitely looking forward to the next edition of TPoSaNA. The authors do admit up front (at least in the cloud book) that they paint an ideal picture; if I had to look in my crystal ball, I would imagine much of the content of the cloud one is heavily influenced from Tom's time at Google.
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Mar 22, 2016 04:15
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Awesome, seeing how some of this is written in the contracts elsewhere would be enormously helpful. I felt a bit frustrated by how contradictory our Task Order Management Plan was written out, basically saying "You need to produce these lengthy artifacts that require several levels of bureaucracy, then you may start your agile process on a comprehensive agreed upon set of requirements." I'm thinking there must be a better way.
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Mar 22, 2016 04:31
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Tots posted:I'm basically looking for how other large companies are doing continuous delivery successfully. I'm in the federal space working on a contract with a vast number of integrated and disparate systems. It's all very waterfall established but at the same time there's a big (sometimes contradictory) push toward agile and continuous incremental releases. I'm basically looking for inspiration from other organizations and to see how they've dealt with similar obstacles and what approaches have been successful. A project I was on that had 50+ sub-contractors with 3 prime contractors and eventually they were all contractually obligated to have working CI and CD builds with verification of deployed services passing tests in staging environments on the days of releases or they will not be approved to demo in prod (and therefore have no deliverables as defined in the contract as agreed). Artifacts simply were a zip file with a very well defined structure and a manifest listing each item with MD5 checksums and contact information for whoever produced it. All artifacts were burned onto DVDs for delivery to different sites and things worked out well enough. The requirements we had specified (not necessarily contract I believe) at least 1 week of time to do CI, test, and deploy to staging would be allowed so if project schedule slipped anyway, contractors were not responsible for others' failures... usually. There were rigid standards on technology and training was provided with repeat sessions to accommodate schedules (and allow for the I think 200+ engineers that needed the training to fit in physically to the meeting room). If you knew what you were doing with Puppet, already practiced CI in-house, and setup some basic tests, you were fine and this was easy. If you were a typical waterfall style software team in government contracting that threw things over the wall for 20 years, you were in hell because the people deploying didn't know jack about how to build the things they were supposed to deploy. At least 50% of the systems people I met pretty much scp'ed artifacts and sat watching a JBoss / Tomcat console and would call a developer if anything went wrong - we had to help these folks transition and that became at least 70% of the infrastructure team's time spent throughout the process. Build artifacts that were acceptable were defined separately by what would be an infrastructure / devops / ops team and not actually in the contract almost certainly, but because everyone needed to get everything working in Jenkins per contract and there was no way to even login to staging unless you were on the infrastructure team, everyone worked like mad to get Puppet modules working. A sample SVN project with Puppet module layout was provided that worked for 90%+ of projects that were basically "drop a WAR file into JBoss and let it fly." If you want an engineer reference open source codebase that's used in government projects, look into https://github.com/simp. I'm a bit disappointed that code I wrote never made it in there, but a lot of contributions in general seem to have been stripped out in favor of much more robust code oftentimes beating open source community standards.
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Mar 22, 2016 17:37
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necrobobsledder posted:I've spent about half my career in federal / DoD (IC) so I get what you're up against and you're actually the right level to get this done at least. 18F / USDS is doing some good work here but it's a long, painful road ahead as expected. I'm very new to the contract that I'm currently supporting, but coming in I can already spot what the problem is going to be from a mile away. Every senior developer/dba/administrator on this project is Old Hat been working on the system for like 2-3 decades. I don't want to judge books by the cover too much, but I've met too many people that fit this stereotype exactly. The very first meeting I sat in one of the newer devs was talking about a SQL injection he found (there's also a big push for integrating better security into the dev process). The most senior dev here starts brushing him off basically saying he doesn't see why we need to address this and asking whether or not it returns any useful information. It's going to be an interesting road between figuring out how to work towards more efficient release cycles between oppressive contract terms and senior engineering being apparently resistant to change combined with the fact that there are dozens of systems with dozens of teams all working almost completely independently of one another.
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Mar 22, 2016 18:27
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Tots posted:I'm very new to the contract that I'm currently supporting, but coming in I can already spot what the problem is going to be from a mile away. Every senior developer/dba/administrator on this project is Old Hat been working on the system for like 2-3 decades. I don't want to judge books by the cover too much, but I've met too many people that fit this stereotype exactly. The very first meeting I sat in one of the newer devs was talking about a SQL injection he found (there's also a big push for integrating better security into the dev process). The most senior dev here starts brushing him off basically saying he doesn't see why we need to address this and asking whether or not it returns any useful information. I work in this world a bit but try to bring in the knowledge from outside the walls. It can be an uphill battle. Grizzled old-hat sysadmins who subscribe to the "great wall" security model are the bane of my existence. They are why we can't have nice things.
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Mar 22, 2016 22:08
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People that just sat in a job and coasted avoiding learning new things are bad whatever industry they're in. With anything in technology, this is kind of a sign of a decrepit organization that's being held up artificially because most organizations in tech that are that behind the times are incumbents that have monopolies (IBM's mainframe division is quite profitable still, after all) or have gone out of business by now.
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Mar 23, 2016 02:14
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necrobobsledder posted:People that just sat in a job and coasted avoiding learning new things are bad whatever industry they're in. With anything in technology, this is kind of a sign of a decrepit organization that's being held up artificially because most organizations in tech that are that behind the times are incumbents that have monopolies (IBM's mainframe division is quite profitable still, after all) or have gone out of business by now. Tots posted:federal space It seems like the motto for forever has been "don't rock the boat" for fear of something not adhering to one or another compliance standard. Don't get me wrong, I get this to a large degree, but you also need to recognize evolution and be willing to reorganize when the helper becomes the hindrance. I think at this point most of the stakeholders realize it, but there isn't full buy in being pushed down the chain. Tots fucked around with this message at 02:22 on Mar 23, 2016 |
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Mar 23, 2016 02:18
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One of the lowest employee satisfaction rates in the federal government a few years back was at the Library of Congress. I know a guy that was working on the IT migration they were having there and basically they were modernizing as much of the library system as possible and it was scores and scores of stereotypical librarians that just wanted to "do their job." The problem is that job descriptions and duties will change over time and you're not the only one that needs to get things done, so I view the need to not change things as incredibly selfish in the same way that people pushing for change for the sake of change as selfish.
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Mar 23, 2016 10:24
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I'm wrapping up my study of the Network+ cert, what kind of jobs should I be looking for? I have a degree in information systems, but no prior job experience. I started studying for the network+ cert because I couldn't even find a help-desk job and was told in a phone interview that it would help. Should I continue looking for help-desk positions?
molotoveverything fucked around with this message at 01:46 on Mar 28, 2016 |
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Mar 28, 2016 01:05
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Does anyone here work on or with 18F and would be willing to chat for a bit?
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Mar 31, 2016 16:27
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What's a good job for someone with a degree in Computer Information Systems but no particular talent? I'm reasonably intelligent and am a hard worker, but I can't compete with most of my peers in the IT field. Is there anything I could pursue certification-wise that would at least give me some sort of work a few steps up from working on an assembly line?molotoveverything posted:I'm wrapping up my study of the Network+ cert, what kind of jobs should I be looking for? I have a degree in information systems, but no prior job experience. I started studying for the network+ cert because I couldn't even find a help-desk job and was told in a phone interview that it would help. Should I continue looking for help-desk positions? Tell me how it works out.
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Apr 4, 2016 12:38
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Sucrose posted:What's a good job for someone with a degree in Computer Information Systems but no particular talent? I'm reasonably intelligent and am a hard worker, but I can't compete with most of my peers in the IT field. Is there anything I could pursue certification-wise that would at least give me some sort of work a few steps up from working on an assembly line?
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Apr 4, 2016 15:25
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Sucrose posted:What's a good job for someone with a degree in Computer Information Systems but no particular talent? I'm reasonably intelligent and am a hard worker, but I can't compete with most of my peers in the IT field. Is there anything I could pursue certification-wise that would at least give me some sort of work a few steps up from working on an assembly line?
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Apr 5, 2016 00:11
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adorai posted:Why do you feel you can't compete with your peers? I'm not a very good programmer and in general am just not much of a computer wizard. I could pass classes well enough to get the major, that's about it. I don't know, maybe if I got some experience I would feel more confident. Right now I'm just looking for something, anything, that will get me out of working at plastics factories. Haven't had any luck in finding a helpdesk position or anything else, I'm wondering if you guys have any advice on which certifications would give me the best shot at landing something. I don't want to waste time or more importantly money on something that's not going to be of any use to me. Vulture Culture posted:Tech is a big industry. What interests you? What made you pick CIS? I like database management type stuff, I like working with SQL, I liked working with Excel, Access, Rapidminer. To be honest I picked CIS just because I heard it had good job prospects. At this point I'm wishing I'd picked something I liked better, but well, it's a little late for that. I took a skills test on SQL about a month ago for a position and think I did ok, but I didn't have the Java skills they were looking for.
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Apr 5, 2016 01:24
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Sucrose posted:I'm not a very good programmer and in general am just not much of a computer wizard. I could pass classes well enough to get the major, that's about it. I don't know, maybe if I got some experience I would feel more confident. Right now I'm just looking for something, anything, that will get me out of working at plastics factories. Haven't had any luck in finding a helpdesk position or anything else, I'm wondering if you guys have any advice on which certifications would give me the best shot at landing something. I don't want to waste time or more importantly money on something that's not going to be of any use to me. Search for any junior position with "Analyst" in the title and "SQL" in the job description.
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Apr 5, 2016 02:07
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Tots posted:Search for any junior position with "Analyst" in the title and "SQL" in the job description. Hell, Junior DBA positions would work too.
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Apr 5, 2016 02:47
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Sucrose posted:I'm not a very good programmer and in general am just not much of a computer wizard.
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Apr 6, 2016 05:33
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I'm looking into A+ certification in order to add onto my current experience working IT and make myself more presentable on my resume. Any recommended books? Also, is downtime super common?
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Apr 6, 2016 17:00
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Benny the Snake posted:I'm looking into A+ certification in order to add onto my current experience working IT and make myself more presentable on my resume. Any recommended books? Benny the Snake posted:Also, is downtime super common?
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Apr 6, 2016 17:36
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I'm not 100% sure if this is the right thread(for some reason I thought there was a QA thread), but I am looking for someone who does web QA automation with UFT. Anyone out there using HP UFT?
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Jul 2, 2016 15:11
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I'd love to get some suggestions on how I should proceed. I'm currently doing a job I enjoy. The general job description is "capacity management". I oversee the capacity management and performance metric collection responsibilities for a somewhat specialized financial infrastructure. What this means in practice is that in addition to doing things like making reports and recommendations on when upgrades or configuration changes are needed, I also end up writing scripts to gather the statistics and manipulate them and insert them into relational & non-relational databases. I also do some development of the Javascript front-end dashboards and end up administering the Linux servers running the tools and NoSQL database, too. However, it looks my division may be getting moved, and I'm not really interested in enduring that commute. In the past, my experience and familiarity with financial market technology made it fairly easy to get more interviews. However, due to personal circumstances, I now live quite far enough outside the city, so it's not realistic to commute to the city for a financial industry job, short of some sort of hybrid telecommute solution. So instead I'm stuck with some job experience and skills that are a little bit harder to apply to broader IT roles. I enjoy programming, but I'm not sure I'd be qualified for a rigorous software development role. Likewise, I'm pretty familiar with Linux/bash, but I can't really say I've had x years of experience as a System Administrator. The DevOps role sounds like it could be a fit, but I have no familiarity with AWS/Puppet, that all those jobs seem to want. While I do have some flexibility with how I administer my servers at work, being at a large company means I have to stick with approved tools, which does not include Docker/Puppet/chef. Should I just spin up some VPSs and AWS instances on my own and familiarize myself with the platforms? Any other tools I should be looking at, or job functions I should be looking into? Thanks, and thanks to Vulture Culture, Guiness, and the talent deficit for their existing write-ups on devops skillsets.
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Jul 6, 2016 04:22
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Capacity Management is a job that is usually firmly in the "lol, IT operations" camp but it sounds like you've been able to spin it (correctly, I would add) into a strongly software engineering oriented role. You may want to look into companies that do operational analytics such as New Relic, Loggly, Datadog, Librato, etc. I say this as someone that's working on a company directly related to this area and there's a drought of people that can code that have interest in this area because it's perceived as reinventing the wheel or that it's a solved problem. Most of these companies will likely want to find someone that knows their way around managing servers with best practices (configuration management, application monitoring, security / hardening, auditing, all that jazz), sure, but honestly if you're able to use some Linux tools to do performance and troubleshooting as well as explain how to get to certain metrics (/proc/, writing SystemTap DSL code to extract some counters, etc.) I'd say you're ahead of a lot of people that are configuration management weenies that are just bad developers that were "promoted" to operations. I've taken devops contracts barely knowing Puppet or Chef and if you know Ruby or any other modern-ish non-enterprise language you'll figure it out within a couple weeks and catch up to the new hotness pretty fast. The insistence of so many companies demanding people that know something already over smart people that can learn anything you throw at them quickly is an attitude I think only works for really advanced groups where even smart people will take years to achieve the minimum baseline of expected performance / skill. For biggest bang for buck, I'd recommend getting familiar with how to deploy a small application in AWS using Ansible and / or CloudFormation and for bonus points do it with an application you write with an AWS SDK for your language of choice (Ruby, Python, or Go are good candidate languages). For more on the software side, you may be able to move into a more data science kind of software engineering role. This is where you'll want to be able to explain / implement different algorithms on time series data, including predictive and correlation functions. For example, you may want to explain the differences between Holt-Winters forecasting method and ARIMA, and you should know that Dynamic Time Warping exists and where it's useful for comparing different time series. From here onward you can probably go full hog machine learning engineer if you can show you do stuff other than deep neural networks writing My First Torch Application On ImageNet. If all else fails, just being able to work with some NoSQL databases and working in JS should make you alright for a lot of "full stack" developer type jobs, but I have to caution that a lot of the companies that want them are going to be pretty early stage / small and that could be a big shock for you.
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Jul 6, 2016 04:59
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I'm looking for a little help on where my career should go. After being a sys admin for 10 years I got a new job doing consulting work for an obscure/small ERP system. I was really looking forward to the job as I could work from home and it gave me a chance to learn a lot of new systems (I love learning). Unfortunately its just not working out the way I thought it would after being here for almost 2 years. The main reason its not working is I don't feel like I've learned much of anything due to the majority of my time being spent putting out fires. The other issue is that the ERP system is so small, there is no user base for me to draw from so I can't teach myself anything. Basically I'm forced to ask for help from the few people I work with and since everyone is so busy I just get the bare minimum to fix the issue thereby not actually learning anything. On to my question. Where do I go from here? I've never really put any thought into my career other than the desire to make more money, so recently I've been trying to be retrospective to figure out what I really want to do. The 2 things I enjoyed the most throughout my career was when I was working on BI and DBA type stuff. The BI was really exciting because I really got to dive into the data/database and find all the missing pieces to come up with a answer to whatever question upper management was asking. It allowed me to interact with everyone from accounting to purchasing to whoever and tie it all together. My other passion seemed to be DBA type of work. Recently I've been setting up a lot of DR sites for customers which has been a lot of fun (real time secondary databases that eliminated any downtime). I also enjoyed doing some performance tuning and learning more about how to get the most out of the database. The easy answer seems to be just find some junior BI or DBA job and go from there but I was hoping to get a little more insight. The only BI tool I have used is QlikView which although I thought it was awesome, it doesn't appear to be used very widely. So for most of the BI jobs I've seen, they want experience with some Microsoft or other more well known product. The DBA job is sort of a similar issue as my experience is with a less known database (Informix) which again I don't think many people use. Should I consider going back to school in order to get some first hand experience with more common tools? Is there some hybrid job that I'm not aware of that mixes my two passions (I've read about Big Data which seems like it might be a good fit)? Do either of these have good job prospects (IE, are they growing fields or are they dying out and I should stay away)?
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Jul 7, 2016 02:44
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cheque_some posted:I'd love to get some suggestions on how I should proceed. Have you considered going into a more traditional analytics role? More and more, having a technical background is an excellent differentiator and if you find the right org/company it can be a lot more than slogging Excel dashboards all day long. It's also usually outside of the IT department so it may provide an interesting career trajectory for you to consider if you like the data aspect as much or more than the traditional IT stuff.
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Jul 8, 2016 02:37
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I turn 31 next month. I've also slowly come to the realization that I'm not happy with my current career path and that I do not want to wake up 35 or 40 and wish I had done something sooner. I did finish my degree (B.S. in Psychology) seven years ago, but since then have spent my time doing unfulfilling jobs without either a viable or interesting future. I'm looking at going back to college and getting a more practical degree that could put me in a job that I enjoy and has a good career path. I'm interested in IT primarily because I've always been into computers. I do not know how to code, and my tech support experience amounts to being the person in my family who knows how to reset modems and the like, but I am interested in the field, and it seems like it'll be around forever. What's the market look like for IT Bachelor's graduates these days? Do people out of college have a decent chance at a good job, or is every one behind a Master's or loads of experience and/or both? Provided I come out of college in three years or less (I plan on going back hard and not loving around like I did in my early 20s), will I have a good shot at finding work for decent pay, or will everyone look at the weird guy ten years too late to the party with no experience? Basically, I'm going at this like the thread title says, and I don't wanna gently caress up and waste more time. I just found this thread tonight and am bookmarking it to read through it, I'm just wondering where I stand when considering IT as a solid option.
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Jul 10, 2016 03:29
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Soul Glo posted:I turn 31 next month. I've also slowly come to the realization that I'm not happy with my current career path and that I do not want to wake up 35 or 40 and wish I had done something sooner. I did finish my degree (B.S. in Psychology) seven years ago, but since then have spent my time doing unfulfilling jobs without either a viable or interesting future. I'm looking at going back to college and getting a more practical degree that could put me in a job that I enjoy and has a good career path.
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Jul 10, 2016 05:51
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Vulture Culture posted:What is it about IT that interests you? More interestingly/tellingly, what is it about IT that makes you think the work will be around forever? You don't think IT work will be around forever? Or let's say in the next few decades?
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Jul 10, 2016 08:23
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Vulture Culture posted:What is it about IT that interests you? More interestingly/tellingly, what is it about IT that makes you think the work will be around forever? I enjoy solving problems, and I like technology, always have. I wasn't complaining about being the person in my family who knows how to reset a modem or knows what's in the pc case or whatever, I like it. "Forever" might be hyperbole, but it certainly seems like the field will be around for the rest of my life with just how dependent the world is on digital technology, while it seems most people are fine with not knowing how any of it works, and I thought asking people already working in the field about the jobs might be a good idea. IT casts such a large net across hardware and software maintenance, system and network building, security, etc. that there seems like the jobs and opportunities must certainly be there, but I'm ignorant of just how it operates for new entrants and future prospects, so I figured I'd ask here.
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Jul 10, 2016 13:40
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Soul Glo posted:I turn 31 next month. I've also slowly come to the realization that I'm not happy with my current career path and that I do not want to wake up 35 or 40 and wish I had done something sooner. I did finish my degree (B.S. in Psychology) seven years ago, but since then have spent my time doing unfulfilling jobs without either a viable or interesting future. I'm looking at going back to college and getting a more practical degree that could put me in a job that I enjoy and has a good career path. This post pretty much sums me up as well and I'm interested in the responses too.
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Jul 10, 2016 21:42
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Instead of possibly going into a huge amount of a debt and also like committing "an IT bachelors" degree, check your local community college for "Computing Information Systems/Support" classes. These are different than straight "Computer Science" classes, as those are much more academia/math related. The classes that I am talking about are more of trade skill classes from what I have seen, and thus most 4-year colleges do not offer them. However, these classes hopefully would allow you to dip your toe in the field without feeling overwhelmed. I know I was pretty lucky with my local community college having a whole department of trade skill classes in computer support, computer networking, and related classes. Maybe you may be lucky with that too? This is the sort of department I am talking about : Computer and Information Systems. It is much different than a straight CS degree, however obviously not every community college has them. The goal for these sorts of classes is to prepare you for taking certifications, such as A+ or CCNA, instead of just a degree or a transfer to a 4-year. The bonus to these sorts of classes is that you don't have to compete with 19 year olds who do not need to work for a living and are taking like a full load of calculus, engineering, physics, and computer science like you see in more programming related classes. That can make someone who is 30+ who also works full time to, you know, pay my bills, feel REAL old real fast. Or at least from my own personal experience 
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Jul 11, 2016 00:08
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I'd recommend avoiding any additional bachelors degrees specifically for IT (not programming - I consider IT and software development completely distinct from each other because one is a cost center and the other for most companies that even have roles for such is definitely not). Some of the best people I know that earn far more than most people with bachelors degrees have nothing more than a GED or high school diploma and have gone through their career education almost solely through certification exams and what amounts to PhD theses (CCIE, VCDX, RHCA, etc.). The first, most important thing you can do in any profession is to know what you're actually interested in and to learn as much as possible about it that's applicable for people that can afford to pay you. You like breaking software? Security might be a possibility. You always tinkered with network settings and optimizing the registry or /etc/sysctl.conf settings since you can remember? Network sounds reasonable. Messed around with RAID levels and building a home NAS frequently? Storage engineering would be where I'd steer you. The second thing to understand is to figure out where the industry in general is and to stake your bets on where it'll go wrt what you're interested in. You don't want to invest years of your life on roles and software that will be obsolete or become shelfware by the time you start being serious about a career. Here's where I stand as someone that's hired for IT and for software development - I have no need for people that cannot program and perform automation of basic tasks and communicate it effectively. As far as I see it, you'd better know how to use PowerShell if you're a "Windows guy" or bash if you're a "Linux guy" and put it into some form of version control. IT department budgets across the Fortune 500 are on the decline and are constantly being asked to do more and more with less - the answer when push comes to shove is to lay off everyone possible and to get rid of vendors that have no viable plan for offering solutions that can cost-effectively scale with enormous, nearly exponential expected user demand (read: legacy solutions).
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Jul 11, 2016 01:06
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in my experience IT is a shrinking industry. managed platforms like aws, azure, openshift and gce are going to cannibalize all but the most specialized installations. technicians who work with those platforms are going to be expected to be able to program going forward. even IT specialists like security researchers, network analysts and database admins are expected to be able to program now that being said, i don't think going back to school to get a computer science degree is worth it if you are older than 25. i think self directed learning and bootcamps are a much better investment of time and money and are more likely to pay off with a job
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Jul 11, 2016 02:25
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Most of the Fortune 500 won't be able to put their internal applications into a commoditized public cloud for a decade at the rate I've observed. I've been consulting for enterprise cloud deployments from IaaS on up the stack since 2006 and most are basically in the same place as then (junk that mostly makes cloud software vendors richer and sit on shelves) except AWS is an option for some workloads. Hell, with organizations like USDS and 18F the federal government may beat the Fortune 500 into the cloud (but not defense, most of DoD was owned by the Chinese a decade ago and most security models presume an insider attack and audit trails are more important than ever, so obviously doubling down on everything done wrong is the right way). The big issue is that budgets are shrinking overall while IT service consumption is going up per employee (employee headcount and contractor headcount is separate and this doesn't help the reality either). I'm only slightly joking that by 2030 most IT organizations will have 3 managers, 1000 mostly useless engineers all over in India paid $10 USD / mo, leased robots in their data centers controlled by Google APIs, and $50MM / mo to Amazon.
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Jul 11, 2016 03:39
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jeeves posted:Instead of possibly going into a huge amount of a debt and also like committing "an IT bachelors" degree, check your local community college for "Computing Information Systems/Support" classes. These are different than straight "Computer Science" classes, as those are much more academia/math related. The classes that I am talking about are more of trade skill classes from what I have seen, and thus most 4-year colleges do not offer them. However, these classes hopefully would allow you to dip your toe in the field without feeling overwhelmed. necrobobsledder posted:I'd recommend avoiding any additional bachelors degrees specifically for IT (not programming - I consider IT and software development completely distinct from each other because one is a cost center and the other for most companies that even have roles for such is definitely not). Some of the best people I know that earn far more than most people with bachelors degrees have nothing more than a GED or high school diploma and have gone through their career education almost solely through certification exams and what amounts to PhD theses (CCIE, VCDX, RHCA, etc.). A two-years technical associates degree is great but don't discount a 4-year Management of Information Systems Bachelor Program or similar offerings at a reputable non-profit State School. It's a entire education at the intersection of technology and business. You'll know how to program, why ITIL is more than just a bunch of acronyms and how SLAs actually impact the business. Sure, you'll take on some debt but it's nothing impossible to pay off. You should easily be able to get out with less than $20-40k and make at a minimum $60k/y. You'll also pass the dumb "Degree Requirement" at many employers. the talent deficit posted:in my experience IT is a shrinking industry. managed platforms like aws, azure, openshift and gce are going to cannibalize all but the most specialized installations. technicians who work with those platforms are going to be expected to be able to program going forward. even IT specialists like security researchers, network analysts and database admins are expected to be able to program now There's without a doubt pressure on the typical "IT" industry but modern Cloud Provider Infrastructure doesn't just run itself. I haven't seen any automation of Security or Databases aside from virtual Firewall Appliances or PaaS Databases both of which still require a professional that knows what the hell they're doing to keep everything running well. necrobobsledder posted:Most of the Fortune 500 won't be able to put their internal applications into a commoditized public cloud for a decade at the rate I've observed. I've been consulting for enterprise cloud deployments from IaaS on up the stack since 2006 and most are basically in the same place as then (junk that mostly makes cloud software vendors richer and sit on shelves) except AWS is an option for some workloads. Hell, with organizations like USDS and 18F the federal government may beat the Fortune 500 into the cloud (but not defense, most of DoD was owned by the Chinese a decade ago and most security models presume an insider attack and audit trails are more important than ever, so obviously doubling down on everything done wrong is the right way). The big issue is that budgets are shrinking overall while IT service consumption is going up per employee (employee headcount and contractor headcount is separate and this doesn't help the reality either). I'm only slightly joking that by 2030 most IT organizations will have 3 managers, 1000 mostly useless engineers all over in India paid $10 USD / mo, leased robots in their data centers controlled by Google APIs, and $50MM / mo to Amazon. Are budgets shrinking? As far as I'm concerned companies are putting more and more into technology but just asking for a higher return on their investment. The amount of legacy software is mind-boggling enormous and that's why you still see things like AS/400s (Okay it's Power Systems but w/e same diff) still around but still provide plenty of business value. Personally, I think we'll see a big squeeze over but new generation of System Administration will be programmers but not so much developing software but automating the hell out of everything, tying infrastructure together and managing workload placement. Do we leave it On-Premise? If not, which Cloud Provider? Beyond a decade, who knows and nobody's able to see that far. Gucci Loafers fucked around with this message at 05:46 on Jul 11, 2016 |
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Jul 11, 2016 05:39
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Tab8715 posted:Sure, you'll take on some debt but it's nothing impossible to pay off. You should easily be able to get out with less than $20-40k and make at a minimum $60k/y. You'll also pass the dumb "Degree Requirement" at many employers. Do it online at WGU, pay basically nothing and get a bunch of certs out of it. Bonus if you can get your work to foot it.
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Jul 11, 2016 10:43
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I'm looking at transferring to an application-focused information services role from my current job in a hospital. I don't have an IT background, but they're willing to train due to my existing hospital experience. I'd be on the other side of a number of specialized professional programs and some capital equipment, along with some customer service duties. Has anyone in the thread made a move from an industry to IT/IS roles serving that industry? What did you focus on to move up and expand your skills?
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Jul 11, 2016 11:49
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Tab8715 posted:Are budgets shrinking? As far as I'm concerned companies are putting more and more into technology but just asking for a higher return on their investment. quote:Beyond a decade, who knows and nobody's able to see that far. I think that on-premise will stay and become mainframes in terms of position and stability for most companies (so-called "crown jewel" applications hosted there) with legacy IT personnel stuck there while most growth-oriented and revenue-producing applications, if possible, will live externally. Nobody wants to host applications in the F500 because most of the F500 is Bad At Computers - it's not their primary business and they don't want it to be.
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Jul 11, 2016 14:19
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