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Mad Wack posted: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. Why is WGU so popular on SA? Don't most orgs frown upon online degrees?
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Jul 11, 2016 15:52
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necrobobsledder posted:[Good write up]  I probably overstated my programming/scripting abilities. Not working in a formal programming role or having much formal CS education means that my code will generally work, but certainly isn't optimal. I feel like it would be great if there were something like codeacademy that focused on development beyond the level of "what is an array, what is a for loop". Mackieman posted: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. This is an interesting idea. I think I would miss the actual infrastructure work, though. I do find it very interesting in my current job that I can directly see the affect of market events on infrastructure utilization, but that's certainly not something that would be present at most jobs. Any idea how much of a math background is required for those types of jobs? Or is it mostly using Tableau/Qlikview to produce reports?
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Jul 12, 2016 02:30
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cheque_some posted:This is an interesting idea. I think I would miss the actual infrastructure work, though. I do find it very interesting in my current job that I can directly see the affect of market events on infrastructure utilization, but that's certainly not something that would be present at most jobs. Any idea how much of a math background is required for those types of jobs? Or is it mostly using Tableau/Qlikview to produce reports? Generally not that much; it's not like a quant or stats gig where you're crunching numbers all day. It's more of a BI focused role where you're building reports in tools like Tableau or Qlik (Qliksense looks to be a lot better than Qlikview ever was) and doing the deep dive analysis where trends are spotted. Of course, that is all dependent upon the organization; there are many where it's all reporting because the data quality is too poo poo to do anything else. That said, you could also look at data management roles where you do get to deal with infrastructure and scale issues. Having some clue of how business partners will consume the data positions you in a much better way than a knuckle dragging DBA who makes sure their poo poo queries get optimized.
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Jul 12, 2016 03:32
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IT infrastructure is going to be less important for internal IT teams, but there is big dollars in making systems work with each other and exchange data easily. The biggest pain in the rear end of using some SaaS platforms is the difficulty in accessing the data easily. I don't want to learn 13 APIs just to send a happy birthday email from HR when it used to take a single sql query inside a stored procedure. It sucks.
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Jul 12, 2016 04:11
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necrobobsledder posted:(at least 50% of the "devops" jobs I've seen are really sysadmin jobs for organizations with sysadmins that refuse or are too underbudgeted to be trained to 2002 standards). What? You're saying that half of "DevOps" positions are actually filled with System Admin's that don't script? necrobobsledder posted:I literally have observed the past decade of "progression" of IT for a decade and with my grimmest projections expected most F500 companies floundered and failed to create their own, cost-effective private clouds. Agreed. necrobobsledder posted: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. Agreed x2.
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Jul 15, 2016 16:42
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Tab8715 posted:What? You're saying that half of "DevOps" positions are actually filled with System Admin's that don't script? Manual firewall and DNS requests filled in Excel spreadsheets and humans that do changes inconsistently, load balancer configurations that require a person that takes 5 days and a manager approval to setup, and restrictive sets of Linux packaging and software that you have no say in because you're not in the security organization - these are typical in enterprise IT that destroy devops technical efforts without any human factors involved like bad or incompetent managers and coworkers. This situation can happen whether or not you're supporting a software product (the #1 warning sign that you're really just in corporate IT is that you're not going to be supporting a definitive, specific software product or service - what is the point of devops without software to deploy and support? Automation of menial infrastructure and services as an integrator without using the loaded, negative term). This is my creation, and I stand by it  adorai posted:I don't want to learn 13 APIs just to send a happy birthday email from HR when it used to take a single sql query inside a stored procedure. It sucks.
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Jul 15, 2016 18:44
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necrobobsledder posted:I mean that when people post "devops" jobs, they are for organizations where existing system administrators are up to maybe 1998 standards of skills (more accurately, product suites rather than technology principles) and you will be working with peers primarily like that instead of a team of 5+ skilled automation-oriented software and operations folks that know development lifecycles and all that jazz. Because these places can't retain decent people they're constantly putting up jobs with skillsets of jobs that previous incumbents were able to fill. You'll be fighting 5 against 1000+ that are resisting change probably, even if you do have a team and some management backing. It doesn't matter if you work 100+ hour weeks and can code every Puppet module or Chef cookbook instantly and with zero defects to your infrastructure - you will be blocked by decades of siloization from doing anything meaningful within 5 years. It's why the lifers at these places stick solidly to 9-to-5 - because caring will make you miserable in such a large organization. I'm a big advocate for "devops" (even though its a buzzword these days), but I agree with all of this. I've been working at a small boutique software consulting company for several years and we internally are all about automated build and test cycles, continuous integration/test/deployment, good test coverage, automated/containerized environments, monitoring in production, etc. etc. and we try to apply those tools and principles where we can to our customers but in our experience the bigger the customer the harder it is to apply. Our small customers where we can get management buy-in and the access and approval to overhaul old poo poo and put new things in place generally go fairly smoothly and are great successes. Working with these guys who are all on board is great and we can make a team of 5 super effective and productive with great quality results. Trying to modernize, automate, or otherwise improve processes at our big customers (one of which is a Fortune 50) is like hitting yourself in the balls with a spiked baseball bat repeatedly. The sheer amount of deadweight lifers who don't give a gently caress about anything and only exist to say "no" is maddening. These guys are 20 years behind in technology and have basically nothing for process documentation, and LOL at the thought of automation or APIs. Everything is siloed across a dozen different groups. Nobody is willing to take ownership for improving a single thing because CYA. Better to be outdated, lovely, and inefficient than risk anything trying to make it better. Everything is manual, almost nothing is automated. They waste hundreds/thousands of man hours per year in inefficient, error-prone procedures because changing is "too hard". These are the guys who are just now getting on board with virtual machines instead of developing and testing manually on hardware. In the year 2016. And those virtual machines are rolled by hand following a hodge-podge of out of date instructions and tribal knowledge. No kickstart, no puppet/chef/ansible, no vagrant, and definitely no containerization. It's an absolute poo poo show and it's amazing that they get anything done at all -- and frequently they don't. Every single project deadline slides, and more often than not projects get axed after a year or two and millions of dollars are spent with hardly anything to show for it. If you are enthusiastic about learning and applying new technology and improving the dev/test/deploy/support cycle do not loving work at a large non-tech company. If you instead want to settle in to the cold, damp embrace of technological ennui, then go ahead. Guinness fucked around with this message at 19:07 on Jul 15, 2016 |
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Jul 15, 2016 18:57
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Soul Glo posted: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. Enough other people have offered their perspectives that rather than posting a long dissertation on this post, I'll be responding to some of the other recent replies to you.
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Jul 17, 2016 15:07
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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. That said, some skillsets like networking aren't going anywhere even if they're changing very, very rapidly, and a trade-oriented program is going to serve almost anyone better. I'd still recommend a solid foundation in code as more things move towards software-defined, software-managed platforms.
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Jul 17, 2016 17:05
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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.). Most young professions tend to be dominated by people without degrees, because they're moving very quickly and the coursework that gets formally taught is typically pushed by retirees who haven't updated their skillsets in thirty years. But as they mature, you increasingly need that education to stay competitive. IT and development professions are straddling that line right now, but compare it to other highly industrialized professions like oil exploration/production or international shipping logistics -- you can't stay ahead of anyone without the proper education. necrobobsledder posted: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. necrobobsledder posted: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 17, 2016 17:15
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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 I don't think it's true that IT is shrinking on the whole. It's poised for enormous growth. But I do think that certain positions, like systems engineering and administration positions, are being quickly consolidated and the skillsets are changing very rapidly. Either one of us could be right, and the number of companies who make sincere efforts to convert their cost centers into competitive advantage will be the deciding factor in which of us is right. I work in the startup space and talk to a lot of startup people, so we sort of live in our own bubble a lot of the time. There are still lots of shops that mistrust virtualization, to say nothing of public cloud. The rate at which the industry-wide transformation happens will be a function of how fast legacy vendors go out of business, replaced by the new guard. It only took one unicorn (and a handful of upstart competitors) to upset the entire taxi industry, and I'm not so naive to think it couldn't happen to my role. Self-directed learning is always a good thing, but it requires a lot of worldview-broadening to be successful. The nature of the beast is that you don't know what you don't know, which is one of the things that poisons a lot of startup cultures, makes them unable to scale as a company, and makes them supremely ineffective at business. Do the work yourself, but do try to find people much smarter than yourself to direct you so you don't spend your entire time walking into walls. This is doubly-true for people who are switching careers and don't have the free time of teenagers who don't do their homework.
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Jul 17, 2016 17:24
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necrobobsledder posted:With every other F500 pumping money into a CIO vanity Big Data project, that leaves a lot less room for IT budgets as a whole. Meanwhile, EMC, Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM, MS, etc. are trying to do their damnedest to keep those dollars coming in whatever promises they need to make and break. It's not so good to be at a vendor anymore let alone within an IT department unless you're in an automation-centric role (at least 50% of the "devops" jobs I've seen are really sysadmin jobs for organizations with sysadmins that refuse or are too underbudgeted to be trained to 2002 standards). Most CIOs don't understand statistics. Full stop. That thing I said before about not knowing what you don't know? A lot of management doesn't understand what the capabilities are of statistical inference or machine learning whatsoever and trust these miracle vendors to deliver things that are hypothetically possible but that they've never done. People who put forward Big Data projects without understanding something as basic as Holt-Winters seasonality have no business in business. What's really going to drive the F500 forward is when they get their poo poo together and put together CIOs/COOs/CFOs with enough of a foundation in stats to sort out the bullshit artists from the people who will actually deliver real insights to the business.
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Jul 17, 2016 17:31
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Vulture Culture posted:I have yet to address some of the more alarmist posts in this thread, but they're right that the characteristics of IT as a profession are changing rapidly as the way people use technology changes. What's being alarmist here?
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Jul 17, 2016 19:35
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Tab8715 posted:What's being alarmist here? Where I think we need to be subtle is when we compare what the best plans are for future career growth versus what's a viable path forward for someone just entering the field. If someone had the choice between an entry-level job that was variously AWS-centric or one that was managing networking hardware in a datacenter, I would say the AWS job seems to offer the most growth right now. But the other path forward is viable too, and it's not like any job with current technologies will be rapidly viewed as obsolete with no path for someone to cross over into cloud-land (provided they pay attention to developing the right skills in the meantime). Know how to automate tasks so they can be repeated across large swaths of hardware or software instances. Know how to merge, split, and mangle data so you can pull things from disparate sources, filter it, and put it somewhere else. These are tasks that are common and relevant across a large amount of IT specialties, and they're very transferable. And despite our best efforts, BGP isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 21:06 on Jul 17, 2016 |
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Jul 17, 2016 21:00
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Vulture Culture posted:OpenShift (like OpenStack) is a hosted on-premises solution. It brings with it all the difficulty of managing your own physical infrastructure, plus all the headache of having to architect your applications as Kubernetes-centric microservices. It has its place, but like OpenStack, you're mostly going to be seeing it with carriers or large companies that won't give Amazon money because they're a competitor (see: Walmart). My point is not so much that everyone is going to move to AWS but that the model of interaction with infrastructure is changing at a rapid pace. Openshift, Kubernetes, Mesos/Marathon and other platforms are all abstraction layers that allow a relatively small number of operations people to support a huge number of developers and systems. Additionally, the days when operations could get by with bash and a little bit of perl are probably over. Almost all of these platforms present apis meant to be consumed by applications, not operators. The trend is to hire developers to fill operational roles now. Training for a traditional operations role is a bad idea in 2016. Note also that we may have radically different ideas of what IT/operations as a role entails.
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Jul 17, 2016 23:01
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the talent deficit posted:My point is not so much that everyone is going to move to AWS but that the model of interaction with infrastructure is changing at a rapid pace. Openshift, Kubernetes, Mesos/Marathon and other platforms are all abstraction layers that allow a relatively small number of operations people to support a huge number of developers and systems. Additionally, the days when operations could get by with bash and a little bit of perl are probably over. Almost all of these platforms present apis meant to be consumed by applications, not operators. The trend is to hire developers to fill operational roles now. Training for a traditional operations role is a bad idea in 2016. I've worked as everything from a developer to a full-scope IT manager, in industries from small-business web hosting to Fortune 500 to high-tech academic research in biotech to a Fortune 100 where my infrastructure's pageviews were measured in billions to a startup with custom hardware and a significant, but NDA'd, DAU count. I do not believe "IT/operations as a role" exists in any meaningful way when you put companies like Netflix and Northrop Grumman side by side. It's really, really important to see things outside the glass of any one wheelhouse. Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 01:06 on Jul 18, 2016 |
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Jul 18, 2016 01:02
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Vulture Culture posted:There are still lots of shops that mistrust virtualization, to say nothing of public cloud. Vulture Culture posted:A lot of management doesn't understand what the capabilities are of statistical inference or machine learning whatsoever and trust these miracle vendors to deliver things that are hypothetically possible but that they've never done. Vulture Culture posted:Most CIOs don't understand statistics. Full stop. That thing I said before about not knowing what you don't know? A lot of management doesn't understand what the capabilities are of statistical inference or machine learning whatsoever and trust these miracle vendors to deliver things that are hypothetically possible but that they've never done. People who put forward Big Data projects without understanding something as basic as Holt-Winters seasonality have no business in business. What's really going to drive the F500 forward is when they get their poo poo together and put together CIOs/COOs/CFOs with enough of a foundation in stats to sort out the bullshit artists from the people who will actually deliver real insights to the business. With that said, an experienced consultant I worked with before recalled how he was asked to present a solution to some executives at a company for a full week and the charge was something like $70k. He went through the slides and all these white-haired, very stern looking guys never, ever said a word. No questions were asked. He gets called to come back and present the same slides again. Same thing. This happens four times. He finally asks as respectfully as possible what more they'd like to see when the head of the meeting angrily yelled back "You are being paid a lot of money to present the material, and you will continue to present until we all understand the material." The customer asked for a different presenter next time and demanded the same material. I am not sure how some people get into and stay in career leadership positions, but what perplexes me more is how these companies can stay afloat with management that seems to have lost all concepts of rational thought. Are creative accountants that good? Is there a relationship-based nepotism / conspiracy culture prevalent across the F500? Is there some hidden messaging that I'm too stupid to understand (case in point: some Subaru and VW commercials in the 90s were directly aimed at gays and lesbians but straight people had no idea of the cues)? Are shareholders in on this? It's a maddening curiosity of mine. Vulture Culture posted:Companies that have made previous large investments in datacenters and the infrastructures in them generally aren't seeing much benefit in getting rid of the facilities, hardware, teams and expertise that they already have in order to do things worse (at first) for more money (forever).
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Jul 18, 2016 01:35
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necrobobsledder posted:I am not sure how some people get into and stay in career leadership positions, but what perplexes me more is how these companies can stay afloat with management that seems to have lost all concepts of rational thought. Are creative accountants that good? Is there a relationship-based nepotism / conspiracy culture prevalent across the F500? Is there some hidden messaging that I'm too stupid to understand (case in point: some Subaru and VW commercials in the 90s were directly aimed at gays and lesbians but straight people had no idea of the cues)? Are shareholders in on this? It's a maddening curiosity of mine. size is its own advantage. Think of elephants and whales, they're just too big to eat 99% of the time. Combine the advantages of scale with some preferential regulations due to direct lobbying or natural monopoly and BAM you can run a C- ship for a long rear end time. I'm not a 30 year professional but in my limited experience, the really high level people are quite smart and on top of things. The people on the ground at least understand their job even if they're disengaged. You just have this huge middle that tends toward misaligned incentives, and negative behavior. Theres always the whatever percentage of lovely free riders or under qualified folks but its amazing how individually smart, hardworking well meaning people end up in these incredibly wasteful enterprise machines. I've seen stats pointing to a decline in new company creation and an increasing amount of bureaucracy in organizations. There is also this interesting information: https://hbr.org/2015/08/productivity-is-soaring-at-top-firms-and-sluggish-everywhere-else I have no idea how all this shakes out. Seems like there are a large number of incumbents who are very stagnant but control most of the resources and a minority of more aggressively growing competitors who are actually growing in a meaningful way.
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Jul 18, 2016 16:54
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The death of the system administrator has been greatly exaggerated. The nature of the work has (and will continue to) see a shift but skilled IT guys with a high level view (and automation skills) will always be valuable.
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Jul 19, 2016 00:39
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I don't foresee disappearance of system administrators as much as I view the mere existence of the role as an indicator of sheer inefficiency (non-automatable standards, etc.), but I foresee less need for dedicated roles for a variety of reasons partially even unrelated to new technology. It starts with the drastic decline in productivity among incumbent companies that make up a sizable bulk of the F500 which translates into cost reduction measures as revenue increases are nowhere near as easy to do. What I'm seeing in a lot of organizations is other roles being tasked with items that would traditionally have been under system administrator tasks (an organizational anti-pattern is to have developers manage production systems on top of other duties, for example). And with SDN, many network engineers are now fully immersing themselves into understanding Linux (a lot of newer Cisco devices are literally built on top of a Linux kernel including full Redhat-style userland). When a system administrator that can perform at modern standards of competence gets maybe $60k / yr at a low-performance organization after half a decade (my father was a system admin and stuck at about $60k for about 8 years) while modern system administrators at high performance organizations with an order magnitude number of servers and scale under management start around $110k, it brings into question what kind of business will be able to stomach the costs of so many manual, error-prone processes. I know that the Pentagon is under intense political pressure to lower costs somehow while being strongarmed by Congress into taking more funding for things they don't want (namely more tanks, aircraft carriers, etc. that directly support American manufacturing jobs) but few organizations can bleed money with such poor performance for as long as American geopolitical monopolization can hold. Xguard86 posted:size is its own advantage. Think of elephants and whales, they're just too big to eat 99% of the time. Combine the advantages of scale with some preferential regulations due to direct lobbying or natural monopoly and BAM you can run a C- ship for a long rear end time.
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Jul 19, 2016 01:57
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Sure but many other giants have limped along during this decade and will continue to function for years to come. And by the time they go under Google/Amazon will probably just take their place... http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/01/g-m-google
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Jul 19, 2016 16:30
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necrobobsledder posted:Fun facts: last I heard a few years ago, VMware had 0% virtualized internal IT because they felt it didn't offer enough compelling value and mostly added more overhead of management. The same motivations apply for Salesforce - over 900+ physical servers in production with zero planned virtualization efforts because you don't stop needing to manage the virtual servers either and you can build high availability, high durability services and data without virtualization, after all. On the wider topic, IT organizations have two separate IT infrastructure groups and often different management chains, whereas normal business have only one, and I think it's important to make this distinction. The first that all businesses have is internal IT, the infrastructure that's supporting employees, your line of business software - that's your laptops, payroll systems, physical building networks, email systems, and intranet. Many of these systems have PII or proprietary data, have rigorous installation or hardware requirements or are otherwise unsuitable to be SaaS'd or outsourced in any way. These systems are slow to adapt and are absolutely critical to any business. I've seen no signs whatsoever that any of this software is adapting or moving in any consolidated direction and they will continue to be around for a long time, with the minor exception of salesforce. There has been some movement in the systems that support these systems like internal networking but it's minor to the whole. The second group is your external IT, what the company is actually selling - the core product or products themselves and the infrastructure to support that. This is where all the transformation is happening because you can focus on a single product that you own and not a slew of interconnected products from different vendors, and on a global scale it might be cost-effective to put this stuff "in the cloud". Netflix thinks so, anyway. Netflix doesn't have it's internal IT in AWS. Bhodi fucked around with this message at 17:06 on Jul 19, 2016 |
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Jul 19, 2016 17:03
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I agree that there is going to be a very long tail of "traditional" system administrator roles to keep legacy and internal systems hobbling along, but IMO that is not a growth industry and is already being squeezed by demands for lower costs and more efficiency. Some SaaS/cloud providers are already getting approved for some high-level infosec standards/audits, and you better believe that it will continue as there is a ton of money to be made there. Most non-tech companies would LOVE to get their tech cost centers out-of-house to someone who can do it better/cheaper/faster and with an SLA. A lot of the low-mid level IT admin stuff is already a race to the bottom in terms of wage, benefits, and career growth. Sure you can still probably make a decent living in it for a while to come, but you'll almost always be behind the industry as a whole and somewhat at-risk as trends continue. I think that having some basic competency in programming and automating tasks is essential for a young/new IT-related worker if you really want to succeed over the course of the next 20-30 years. It opens up so many more roles and avenues for growth. You don't need to be an expert level programmer or full-on software engineer, but more and more some fluency is hugely beneficial. It also is extremely helpful in understanding how all these different systems and applications talk to each other, especially when things don't work and you need to fix them. And I think it applies to anyone doing moderately technical work, including system admins, business analysts, systems engineers, quality assurance, and even digital marketing people (i.e., analytics). Even simple stuff like scripting the aggregation of data and dumping it into a report that automatically refreshes will turn repetitive hours-long tasks into mere minutes. When I was doing analyst work several years back I was able to automate a "week's worth" of repetitive, dull report creation into like half a day thanks to some scheduled SQL queries and automated reports. In my work experience, an admin, ops, or QA person who can program/script a bit is worth at least 10x as much as one who can't, if not way more. At this point my company won't even hire an admin/ops/QA person who doesn't have some basic programming/scripting chops and a desire to expand those skills. Doing everything "by hand" is just too time-consuming and error-prone and a waste of time. And by writing reproducible, automated scripts/programs/environments you empower your colleagues to save huge amounts of time as well. The force multiplier cannot be understated. The bar is not very high, but many people can't/won't meet it. Like in an interview rather than saying "sorry I don't have much in the way of programming skills, but I'd love to try to learn" they say "I can't program and I don't care to learn at all". Don't be that person. Guinness fucked around with this message at 19:20 on Jul 19, 2016 |
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Jul 19, 2016 19:15
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That's hitting the windows world hard, much more than linux, now that powershell has been completely embraced. If you're a windows admin and you use the mouse all day every day, you're simply not going to succeed in the IT world in the coming decade. But then again, neither are HP/UX or Solaris administrators, two jobs which were entirely in demand when I first started in IT. From a business perspective, I honestly haven't seen the headcount reduction promised; it's simply the same people and a slightly shifted focus. For now at least there are an abundance of jobs at the provider level fueled by the growth and additional market penetration of these SaaS products. There is likely a slowdown coming but as long as you keep your tools and tech up to date, are somewhat articulate and professional, and are willing to move to where the jobs are, you'll always be able to find work. e: also being white helps Bhodi fucked around with this message at 19:29 on Jul 19, 2016 |
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Jul 19, 2016 19:26
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Xguard86 posted:Sure but many other giants have limped along during this decade and will continue to function for years to come.
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Jul 19, 2016 21:30
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I'm not white and have had nothing but whites and Latinos with an offshore India group under me so far. I'm probably going to wind up using Tamil or Gujaratti at work more often than English in the next decade though. I can point to the tens of thousands of people in corporate IT that I contributed to the lay-off of by working on automation software that made it tougher to justify the same head counts during the recession. I kept a bit of tabs on old customers and where they were laying people off and it was the same divisions. I mean, these were people whose jobs were clicking next and collecting checks basically, and the next stage is to get rid of as many rank and file system admins as possible. Now, if you're attached to a project you may be an admin, but it's something you may do part-time rather than to act as 24/7 gatekeeper and caretaker. Those jobs lost haven't come back since the remaining engineers and hired guns like me basically automated it away. There is a bit of a balancing act where companies try to see what they can get away with in terms of personnel and initiatives and at this point corporations found out they can get away with a lot less employees than they expected.
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Jul 19, 2016 22:39
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And that's not at all by working their existing employees into the dirt until they're crying at their desks because unplanned work is somehow supposed to come out of magic "unbillable" time that you do on top of your weekly 42 billable.  Ask me how I feel about our company laying people off because someone did an awful job at estimating work!
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Jul 19, 2016 23:01
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I didn't want to go there given I have my own axe to grind, but that's another consideration to help avoid such companies even as a competent engineer in a good role.
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Jul 20, 2016 00:18
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Bhodi posted:That's hitting the windows world hard, much more than linux, now that powershell has been completely embraced. If you're a windows admin and you use the mouse all day every day, you're simply not going to succeed in the IT world in the coming decade. But then again, neither are HP/UX or Solaris administrators, two jobs which were entirely in demand when I first started in IT. I sysadmin HP/UX, AIX and Solaris boxes on the regular  (as a side-job to my main job of being a Linux C++ developer)
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Jul 22, 2016 15:46
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feedmegin posted:I sysadmin HP/UX, AIX and Solaris boxes on the regular
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Jul 22, 2016 16:05
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Bhodi posted:I am so, so sorry. What's it like being lumped in with FORTRAN / COBOL developers, janitoring anemic systems that are too entrenched to be replaced? Ehhh, it's actually not so bad. Pretty good for job security, because good luck finding someone to replace me and look after these boxes if I get canned.
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Jul 22, 2016 16:27
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There's a lot of crazy old bastards with beards like you wouldn't believe who live in the mountains around here and still maintain gainful employment at IBM doing Fortran somehow. They certainly have my respect.
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Jul 23, 2016 00:44
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Tab8715 posted:Why is WGU so popular on SA? Don't most orgs frown upon online degrees? WGU is regionally accredited, you'll actually learn and you'll have to be self-motivated to make it. And it's cheap. WGU graduates are not seen poorly in the industry because they have the skills needed.
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Jul 26, 2016 01:10
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My company is looking at replacing T-SQL and MS SQL Server. There are ongoing "test" development projects. I've been explicitly denied entry to this party because then, and I quote, "we'd have to bring her up to speed on what we've done so far." Additionally, I'm busy+bored. I've been doing a fairly successful job at coding myself out of work, so my work has trended much heavier into manual data analysis and less actual coding. I'm seriously considering going for the Udacity data analyst nanodegree. It sounds like what I'm currently doing, plus machine learning. Would it be possible to do something like this while living in a flyover state? I've had a massive  every time one of the data scientists at my current workplace talks about their work. It sounds amazing.
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Jul 27, 2016 16:41
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necrobobsledder posted:I'm not white and have had nothing but whites and Latinos with an offshore India group under me so far. I'm probably going to wind up using Tamil or Gujaratti at work more often than English in the next decade though. I'm expecting to see it go even further as far as reduction of 24/7 staff because with cloud ops and virtualization it's a lot easier to spin up redundant servers, so very, very few things are an immediate emergency that needs 24/7 staff to fix.
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Jul 28, 2016 11:04
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I think there's a bit of a limit to the offshoring in that many places with deep pockets legally are not allowed to let non-US citizens have access to even a rack. This is a big part of what GovCloud's headaches for hiring become and also why there will likely be someone getting woken up at 3 am during an outage instead of implementing a follow-the-sun policy. We had a huge outage before where we had to have remote hands physically recable the entire corporate firewall to the outside world because a failover and failback exercise didn't go as expected (firmware bug, swell). That kind of amateur-hour work is still quite common in the F500. Either that or those jokers just are the ones that hire contractors the most. Developers getting production access is not allowed in some regulatory scenarios either, so this already presents an issue for more flexible methods of getting things done, but these trainwrecks are not going away anytime in decades. The distance between competent organizations and the inept is growing faster as those that are near the front have collected and organized their operations well enough to use machine learning to help answer some questions while everyone pays $50MM+ / year (just capex, not even opportunity costs) for manually collected, out of date data and analysis and calls it a bargain.
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Jul 28, 2016 15:02
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I just spent all this week with a client consulting discussing a cloud migration. We got stuck on some deployments as a half terabyte of RAM on VMs wasn't enough and the latency on the virtual network adapters too high.
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Jul 28, 2016 23:26
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Guinness posted:
I spent a lot of time learning SQL automation and it really paid off in my current job. I increased my salary about 30% in the past 3 years because I took every opportunity to hop into a SSRS implementation project and learn SQL. This involved rewriting many reports and streamlining the data data analysis. I never really thought about getting into Business Analytics while I was going through technical college, but the market is definitely growing (or has been for years, I don't know). I agree that nobody needs to be a full blown programmer, but it helps to understand programming logic and how to read through code.
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Sep 1, 2016 19:58
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I've been applying for jobs in the past few months with little luck, I only got one interview and it was very recent. I have an Information Systems degree and I worked in my father's business as a administrative assistant for close to two years after graduation. I feel terrible about my situation, it feels like people think I forgot everything I've learned even though I acquired a Network+ certification from CompTIA just last month. What should I do? I have been applying to Help Desk jobs primarily.
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Oct 10, 2016 16:06
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molotoveverything posted:I've been applying for jobs in the past few months with little luck, I only got one interview and it was very recent. I have an Information Systems degree and I worked in my father's business as a administrative assistant for close to two years after graduation. I feel terrible about my situation, it feels like people think I forgot everything I've learned even though I acquired a Network+ certification from CompTIA just last month. Being mobile helps; go where the jobs are.
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Oct 10, 2016 16:49
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