|
So just for the hell of it, the wife and I are pondering fleeing the US for Canada or somewhere in Europe. Anyone have any experience with something like that, specifically in IT? I know there are lots of IT jobs in New Zealand, but how does it look in other countries?
|
#
¿
Aug 1, 2014 03:55
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 2, 2024 05:31 |
|
|
So how would an architect be different from an administrator? Looking at the Op, Technician is clearly at the bottom, Architect sounds like it would be at the top, and then Administrator and Engineer occupy a similar murky middle space. And then I have no idea what an analyst would be.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 6, 2014 06:03
|
|
|
We're posting for a "Storage Architect" with OpenStack experience despite us in no way using OpenStack, because my boss' preferred candidate has OpenStack experience and why look for real qualified candidates through an actual application process when you can just manipulate HR to get what you want. I need a new job.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 6, 2014 06:10
|
|
|
Ding ding ding! Public University.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 6, 2014 06:20
|
|
|
How does New Zealand even exist?
|
|
#
¿
Aug 9, 2014 06:08
|
|
|
The PDF works, basically all of IT is critical shortage. But when I clicked Calculate on the points form it gave me an error that I'd entered some improper data. In 2 years my wife will have her PhD (a level 10 education!) so between the two of us I'm sure we'd be a shoo in.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 9, 2014 06:14
|
|
|
CLAM DOWN posted:For example: The Task Scheduler gui can also connect to the Task Scheduler on a remote computer, you just right click on where it says "Task Scheduler (Local) and put in the name of the computer. Not sure what kind of firewall access that requires though.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 15, 2014 18:16
|
|
|
I work for a Computer Science department in a major public research university, my boss doesn't send an email without at least one major typo. Our last job posting had about 10, including looking for someone with "Linus administration" experience. He has a college degree. I don't really know what my point is saying that.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 15, 2014 18:22
|
|
|
Regardless of whether or not a 4 year degree provides actual value in our modern society is a topic for D&D discussion, but right now, no matter how silly it is, a 4 year degree is basically required.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 15, 2014 18:33
|
|
|
I bike to work every day, but it's only about a mile and a half. But my wife just started a night teaching job so she's gone until 9, so I've started taking 5 mile bike rides on my way home from work. Very relaxing and good exercise to boot.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 20, 2014 00:26
|
|
|
Got an email from the city about a job I applied for:quote:Dear FISHMANPET
|
|
#
¿
Sep 23, 2014 19:59
|
|
|
I love when people that don't like Windows call it a bad operating system, just because they don't understand it. The only truly bad OS is Solaris, and that's only because nobody understands it.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 29, 2014 17:38
|
|
|
So, I'm an anti-social autist myself, so I realize I'm not an accurate representation of an "average" person. But for me, personally, if I'm a user and I have some kind of issue, I'd rather the issue get resolved quickly than getting lots of "yes we're working on this" type stuff without any actual resolution. However my managers are much more focused on giving the illusion of providing support than actually providing support. I have an open ticket, and I asked the user a simple question and she gave a simple answer, and my manager says I should have gone upstairs and talked to her in person, which would just be a waste of both our time.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 2, 2014 18:00
|
|
|
In general I agree that keeping people in the loop is good. But I can do that by sending an email, and take 1-2 minutes of my day. My managers think I should take 10-15 minutes to go upstairs, interrupt whatever the user is doing, and talk to her in person. At my org we've got an policy that says that within 48 hours of submitting a ticket, you'll get a response from a human that says we've received the ticket (note, we have an auto response, and we don't have to start working on it in 2 days, we just have acknolwedge it exists). I remember a case where a ticket came in at night (we're a University, and we have students work the actual help desk, and they work until 10). The issue was fairly simple and could be fixed by most full time staff in the morning, but the big boss wanted the student to send a message that night saying someone would look at it soon. Responding to the ticket with a resolution first thing in the morning would be well within our defined policy, but we had to give the user useless information first. Looking at it another way, if I need to make a warranty claim, I chat with Dell rather than calling, because it's easier for me and gets a resolution faster. I could call and get that personal contact but it would be a longer process for me and it would interrupt the rest of my work. And I would think that when choosing between a fast resolution and human contact, most people would choose fast resolution, but maybe not.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 2, 2014 18:37
|
|
|
Tab8715 posted:Illusion or not, it's important the customers feel that they're being attended too. There's a subtle difference between "Tom's" message, and a message that says "Hi tab8715, someone has received this and will work on it soon." The first gives an actual update with new information, the second just restates the auto-reponse, but sends it from a person (but when someone copy pastes the same "human" response to a bunch of tickets I'm not sure how that's any better than an auto-response). Also in the interest of "full disclosure" working help desk is far below my current stature but everything is terrible so I got stuck here while I also try to rebuild their infrastructure (which I can't do when I'm busy dealing with loving tickets!)
|
|
#
¿
Oct 2, 2014 18:43
|
|
|
But in that case I'm the one on the other end of the issue. I'm the "user." I choose the route that gets me the fastest resolution, and I'd think everybody would want the fastest resolution. And in a lot of cases, it's not like we're leaving people out in the cold. I'm sending then an email to keep them updated, which makes perfect sense to me since email is the medium through which they contacted me. Even if they won't see how me physically visiting them effects how long it takes to resolve their issue (though they may see how it interrupts them), may managers should be able to see that. I'm not keeping them in the dark, I'm just corresponding with them via email. In Tab1875's example, it's as if instead of sending an email that Tim is working on the issue, Tim should go up and visit the user and tell them he's working on the issue. A user may not see how that wastes Tim's time, but Tim's manager should be able to.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 2, 2014 19:27
|
|
|
My organization is so completely dysfunctional who even knows what drives anything. One of many reasons why I'm looking to get out. And if it was just that one thing I'd be like "eh that's dumb but whatever" except it's just piles and piles of these weird decisions that make no sense. But specifically the political situation is usually laid out fairly well, especially since group is feeling all butthurt about stuff (and this person is in a group that is in fact very happy with us).
|
|
#
¿
Oct 2, 2014 19:53
|
|
|
Yeah, again, I'm not talking about ignoring the users. And we get plenty of face time with them and they all love us and everything's peaches and roses. And I think sending an email to ask a question is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and there's no reason I need to "go up and talk to her" to ask her what version of InDesign she's using (a question I know she knows how to answer).
|
|
#
¿
Oct 2, 2014 22:04
|
|
|
Alfajor posted:This is a great analogy. I think I'll borrow it. Thanks! Now imagine the chef comes out and tells you this instead.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 3, 2014 03:57
|
|
|
I have no doubt they would love it. They'd also love it if their meal was free, but that doesn't mean they should do it. That doesn't mean it's a good idea. And I'm sure at least one person would say "hey why aren't you cooking my meal instead of telling me it's going to take longer?"
|
|
#
¿
Oct 3, 2014 04:15
|
|
|
Yeah I'm not even supposed to be doing user support, I built everything from scratch in that department 5 years ago (while on help desk, everything is stupid) and now my replacement is on a 2 month vacation so they've slotted me back in. I'm less than thrilled. After that I get to "run" (nobody knows what that means yet) another help desk while the person that "runs" it now goes on maternity leave. Hopefully I'll be able to :yotg: before even this 2 month sentence is up.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 3, 2014 04:50
|
|
|
We don't have any "help desks" because departmental help desks are heavily discouraged by central IT, but we have 3 rooms where IT people sit and answer calls and help people that walk in. My current role is "employee" and we're loath to describe it any farther than that, but I'm probably closest to some kind of senior Windows admin. I've been told that when our current lead Windows admin retires I'm a lock for his job. He retires in 8 years. Really everything is hosed and I'm in a department of people who, for the most part, would be unemployable if they didn't work here. I need to get out before my skills atrophy and I end up stuck as well.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 3, 2014 15:23
|
|
|
internet jerk posted:That is literally a Help Desk. What's the function called if not a Help Desk? Discouraged by central IT? In title I'm a Systems Admin I, which means I need help wiping my own rear end. In practice I'm like a level III, but that's all just arbitrary anyway. I work at University, and University IT is trying to centralize help desks. My department IT director, who recently got promoted to college IT directory (hierarchy goes University > College > Department) thinks that we should keep everything to ourselves. So in political terms we don't run a helpdesk. Everything is run by clowns.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 3, 2014 16:50
|
|
|
Obviously you guys don't know me so I could be making all this poo poo up, but I am the lead sysadmin for this group (in that I actually do sysadmin stuff, we're currently engineering a domain migration), and essentially the number 2 Windows guy on staff. I also have no problem communicating with staff and this office is mostly ladies in their 50s, and they all love me. I'll go up there to help them with stupid stuff because it is so close, and often that's easier than trying to fix something over the phone. But I'm not going to walk upstairs just to ask a simple question.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 3, 2014 18:12
|
|
|
AD can be virtualized no problem. And having the DCs be redundant is trivial, just install two, the protocol is designed to be robust, so as long as a client can reach one of them you'll be able to connect. But also I guess you can put an entire domain in Azure now? 
|
|
#
¿
Oct 3, 2014 18:18
|
|
|
Like I said early, it's not that that example is particularly egregious, it's just one of a million examples of the nonsense management. My boss seems to believe customer service is 100% giving the customer what they want in this instant, and never stepping in to say "hey maybe this would work better." He'd rather people come to us with their solutions for us to implement than their problems for us to solve. And that get's pretty demoralizing because you keep implementing these awful things that you know won't work but my bosses aren't even willing to entertain the idea that maybe we should be pushing for another way. Especially when everything blows up and "I told you so" isn't cutting it. I don't subscribe to the idea that IT should just be a punching bag that anybody can dump their poo poo onto, but I seem to be the only one at work that thinks that way.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 3, 2014 18:25
|
|
|
And for the love of God I'm not saying I'm refusing to ever physically talk to a user, I'm saying there's no point for every single interaction with the user to be face to face. E: Also I recognize the value of face time, I'm currently in a different building from the rest of our IT staff and it's a little isolating. We also recently rearranged our offices so the people that worked together more often were closer to each other (as opposed to the previous scheme of sit at whatever random desk is open when you get hired). FISHMANPET fucked around with this message at 18:29 on Oct 3, 2014 |
|
#
¿
Oct 3, 2014 18:26
|
|
|
Also set expectations. One of the labs I worked at for a while wanted 100% up time and I'm like "dude I can't guarantee 100% nor do you have the millions of dollars it takes to be able to even guarantee anything close to that."
|
|
#
¿
Oct 3, 2014 19:30
|
|
|
I'd say the ability for a single employee to manage more systems means we'll have more systems, not fewer sysadmins, but that's just a random guess.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 7, 2014 01:12
|
|
|
I know I've written a powershell script that uses an rsync.exe binary to do a thing, I'd imagine if you can get an ssh.exe type thing in cygwin or some such thing, you can use that in a powershell script.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 9, 2014 04:31
|
|
|
Pudgygiant posted:IBM did something like that with beta / preview versions of Lotus Notes. You'd apply to be part of the beta program, and if your job title matched something technical like IT Specialist (they have catchall job titles, then job roles are more defined, so it'd be something like IT Specialist / Network Architect) the upgrade would get pushed. It'd be appealing as all hell because the new version would add incredibly basic functionality that every other email client has had for a decade, like the ability to search by sender, or threaded conversations. Then some relatively trivial functionally, but critical from a production perspective, piece of it would break, and you'd put in a bug note to the dev team and ideally get a hotfix back super quick. For instance, threaded conversations with participants in more than two time zones didn't work with 9.0.0. My lead put in a ticket, and a patch was put out within the hour. Pretty great and efficient, outside of edge cases like something critical breaking at night on a holiday, when nobody from the dev team is around to fix it. One of the schools my wife teaches at uses Lotus Notes for email. She asked me how she could search. I poked around the interface, I googled, I can't figure out how to search. So yeah, never use Notes. When she first showed it to me I was like wuuuuuuuuuuut 
|
|
#
¿
Oct 16, 2014 16:26
|
|
|
Pudgygiant posted:Everything before 9.x has a really loving hidden magnifying glass button in one of the left pane menus. 9.x has a search bar at the top, so that's an improvement. Unfortunately the search backend is still a Mexican kid reading through all your emails, so a search of a mailbox with 3 emails takes an hour and locks up your entire system. Also as of when I left earlier this year you could only search plain text, not anything fancy like "sender: " or "date: ". Also she uses the web interface exclusively.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 16, 2014 17:10
|
|
|
If you've only got a few Lenovos you're working on, I wouldn't do something so in depth. Just get on the machine before you image it and run the right wmic commands to figure out what it thinks its own Model is, and use that in your WMI rule. That's what I did for the handful of Lenovo x120e machines I imaged, each batch we ordered had a different "model" (2 batches, so 2 models) so I just made the WMI query be Model Like X or Model Like Y and called it a day.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 24, 2014 22:51
|
|
|
Maybe my view has been soured by the people I work with, but I feel like you'd be just as likely to get candidates that have had the same year of experience for 15 years, and will just do things 1999 style, rather than people that have been truly learning and growing for 15 years.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 2, 2014 18:41
|
|
|
So reach for the stars when applying for jobs etc etc, but if a job asks for a specific cert, but I don't have that cert (but am willing to get that cert and it's on my mental road map anyway), how should I spin that?
|
|
#
¿
Nov 3, 2014 23:48
|
|
|
My current job is just awful in about 16 different ways, so I'm looking to jump ship. I think I'm looking for some kind of not entry-level Windows admin job, anybody care to take a look at my resume and critique it? I've actually paid for the resume2interview service from the guy here on SA, but he just kept trying to turn me into a help desk drone, even after I explicitly said that's not what I'm looking for, so I just gave that up. I suppose I could pass him this and see if there's any polishing to be done, but any thoughts from the experts here? Thanks in advance. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2UziKgugmFybk5jYzB4MEhhNWc/view?usp=sharing E: I'm also just starting to study for the MCSA: Windows Server, but that probably doesn't belong on the resume until I've actually got it, right? Though there is a job I'm looking for that requires an MCSA so I'd probably mention it in the cover letter. FISHMANPET fucked around with this message at 23:26 on Nov 11, 2014 |
|
#
¿
Nov 11, 2014 23:24
|
|
|
Good catch on the VMWare. I was super careful the first time I wrote it and then I guess just forgot the rest of the times. E: Wait, no it's VMware, the w is lower case, not upper case. So I got it right 2 of 3 times. FISHMANPET fucked around with this message at 23:42 on Nov 11, 2014 |
|
#
¿
Nov 11, 2014 23:40
|
|
|
J posted:Bolded part concerns me quite a bit. I'm in a similar boat as you and was considering using that service but not if it's going to be geared toward helpdesk stuff. Was that resume you posted the one you got from the service? So, basically, I'm really bad about writing resumes. Like, I try and my brain just turns off. So I was hoping that something useful might get pulled out of me through the process. But as the process went on it was just help desk stuff getting pulled out. He was asking questions about how may tickets I was resolving and I didn't really want to answer those because it wasn't relevant. I just kind of gave up on the whole thing because it wasn't taking me in any kind of useful direction. So the one I posted is based off the work in progress I got from R2I, but only very barely.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 12, 2014 18:59
|
|
|
I hadn't been help desk for 2 years at that point though. My previous job (as a student worker) was helpdesk. I was not trying to get out of helpdesk, I was already out of help desk.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 12, 2014 20:47
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 2, 2024 05:31 |
|
|
Once upon a time, it was just me and another guy basically doing the same work in the department, and the other guy got a job offer and got a retention offer, because due to politics that was the only way for us to get raises. My boss fought for me to get the same raise, since we both did the same work, we should still be paid the same.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 19, 2014 00:49
|
|