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devmd01 posted:Today I discovered the best use for twitter ever: trolling the gently caress out of an IT conference hashtag and everyone tweeting it. Look. You can't post something like that and then not include links. It's like saying, "Oh man I just saw something so funny! Well, bye." jaegerx posted:Middle management to me has always seemed like the quickest way to get fired. Especially if you come from a technical background where you expect some productive thing to occur. I've done team lead. Never again. I don't want people working for me or having to deal with career managers that are only there to ensure they keep their job. See, I could see myself doing Team Lead, as long as Team Lead is defined as "The head developer on the team" and not "The project manager." Some of my older relatives have conversed with me about careers in general and they have assured me that at some point in my life I'm going to stop wanting to solve the technical problems and start wanting to solve the human ones, and at that point I'll move into management. I just don't see it. I've never not loved learning new poo poo, especially technical poo poo. I've personally met people in their fifties who turned down management positions to remain DBAs and other upper-level IT guys, because they never lost their love of computational problem solving in one form or another. If I were a manager my whole day would be smacking people upside the head and telling them to grow up, stop acting like they're in high school, and stop treating other people like poo poo. My whole day. I mean, with what I do now I can generally put my head down and turn up the music and ignore the bullshit, but if I were in charge of overseeing it, I would probably off myself inside a month.
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Aug 1, 2014 04:00
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adorai posted:That's not what a manager does, that's what a douche does. A manager develops business and people, and good ones do it with coaching and imagination rather than discipline. Right. Which is one of the many reasons I don't want to be a manager.
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Aug 1, 2014 04:08
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high six posted:So I went to the third interview for a junior network admin/helpdesk position. It went well. I was at the gas station afterwards and noticed that the seam in my pants around my rear end was ripped, so, I was hanging out of said pants. I don't know when it happened or whether it happened during the interview... Haha. Man, this is one of those times you just have to laugh at yourself and the universe in general. It's out of your hands either way, so you might as well try and appreciate the absurdity of the situation.
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Aug 3, 2014 09:02
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MC Fruit Stripe posted:No I mean, that's what I'm saying, I can't do this by myself, so like, what is my play here? I do have one of those rack assist machines, but that only allowed me to rack it initially. Unracking it and shipping it, I have no idea how this is doable. What's stopping you from telling whoever is in charge the truth of the situation?
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Aug 11, 2014 12:41
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hanyolo posted:I've found it's easiest to tell someone's tech knowledge in an Interview, no matter what certs / experience / degrees they have. Even better if you get a lab setup with a 30-60 minute exercise and see how they perform configuring things from scratch (we had a 3 router 1 switch setup and asked them to configure VLANs, EIGRP, a GRE tunnel and some access-lists, etc.). If you know your poo poo and can get in the door, it should be easy enough to convince them you're the man for the job. Unfortunately demonstrating your tech knowledge is only one part of getting hired. I agree with everything you're saying about how to determine a candidate's competence. But there are people who are involved in the hiring process that will automatically veto anyone without a certain level of degree. It has nothing to do with your competence, it's just a personal bias that you have to deal with. Even if they don't automatically reject all non-degree candidates, if they have two very similar finalists that both know their poo poo and both are perfect for the job, but one has a degree and the other does not, who do you think will be chosen? Obviously this doesn't apply to all jobs - I doubt most Tier 1 helpdesk positions require a degree. But hell, that just supports my point - if all a degree lets you do is jump past Tier 1 helpdesk, might that alone be worth it? The debt involved in getting a degree is a major problem, and it's something you have to weigh in your decision making. Just realize that you will have fewer opportunities without one, and while that may not leave you unemployed, it lowers the likelihood that you will find that dream job. psydude posted:Get a degree just for the sake of being able to write. Because god damned, there are so many people in IT who cannot write. Perhaps not worth crushing yourself with debt for a third of your life on its own, but I can certainly get behind this point. This industry is reliant on the precise transmission of correct information, and that includes between your peers. Please make it easier to work with you by being able to construct a readable sentence.
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Aug 15, 2014 12:06
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Fiendish Dr. Wu posted:So here's a different spin on the whole degree / certification thing: With the advent of free MOOC's like on Coursera, how valuable do you think certified specializations are, or will be? It looks like vocational training to me, which is great! Especially if you can take the knowledge you gain from these courses and create something or do something that you can show off; another bullet point on the resume, especially something you can point to in an interview and say, "This is what I did, this is why I chose to do A, B and C this way, here's the URL of my project log, this is what I liked and disliked about it, this is what I would have done differently a second time around," etc. That stuff is gold in an interview, especially if you enjoyed the project, because your passion will come through, and it's concrete so it won't trip an interviewer's bullshit alarm. It's still not a degree. If you just take the course and get the certificate and don't do anything else with it, it's probably going to look like any other cert to an interviewer. It's going to be worth more the more you do with it.
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Aug 18, 2014 00:49
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Dick Trauma posted:Always get dressed in the morning. Resist the impulse to free-ball it during a conference call. I agree with this when the conference call is pertinent to your work. When it's the IT director's weekly scheduled self-promoting monologue, feel free to hang loose.
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Aug 18, 2014 23:04
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JHVH-1 posted:I don't know what kind of health plan my new gig I'm starting next month has, but the current one has a poo poo high deductible HSA. The new place did say they pay up to $440/month of the plan. I'm not trying to get you down, but when I hear a phrase like, "we pay up to $X," alarm bells start going off in my head and I start digging for details. Because "up to" doesn't mean anything at all.
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Aug 19, 2014 04:35
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stubblyhead posted:I'm pretty sure I've got enough cachet with my current management that I could come back if things go south, but it's hard to say how that might change if I actually give notice. Anyone have any experience in leaving a job and then coming back (or trying to) when the new opportunity didn't work out for whatever reason? I haven't kept track of your personal saga in these threads (if you have one), so my question is this: do you like your current job? I personally would be hesitant to change jobs if I were genuinely happy at my current one, without some serious motivation. Compensation can be motivation, sure. But to have a job where I'm treated well, lets me have my own life outside of work, and doesn't actively damage my mental state, that's worth a lot to me. It's hard to put a dollar amount on that, for me. Obviously our situations are not the same; I don't have nearly the financial obligations you do, for one. But a lot of people can be distracted by the money and forget to factor in their quality of life, when the number is right there on the table, so I'm just trying to make sure it's in your mind too. Good luck! Oh, and to your actual question, I don't actually have any personal experience going back to an old employer.
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Aug 19, 2014 05:26
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Round is a shape.
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Aug 20, 2014 00:12
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SSH IT ZOMBIE posted:But I just work here..I'll just keep doing what I do till I'm told to stop. You may want to put feelers out now. Just in case you get unceremoniously fired for no reason, or just in case they make a bunch of decisions that make your job hell. You might get lucky and everything shakes out so that it doesn't affect you personally very much, but if the worst happens it would be better if you didn't feel like you suddenly have to scramble for a new gig.
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Aug 21, 2014 07:45
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CLAM DOWN posted:They might not be needy, but engineers are sneaky as gently caress. Hey, we don't want to bug you when you have passwords to reset and printers to un-jam. Just give us local admin and we'll 
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Aug 26, 2014 19:13
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CLAM DOWN posted:the world outside America! You're using English words, but in this arrangement they don't mean anything. Are you missing punctuation?
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Sep 4, 2014 18:11
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Tab8715 posted:If things go well, you can go to your supervisor and prove to them how you've prevented outages and helped make whatever systems more efficient. Then you're totally open to demanding the appropriate title and compensation. Right, this is how you could handle it if you were dealing with adults who viewed you as a human being, and not a toy ball on the end of an elastic band. Were I in his place, the last thing I would be inclined to do is extend any more benefit of the doubt to the people who have so far offered me nothing more than vague mumbling.
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Sep 4, 2014 23:06
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SamDabbers posted:Wouldn't we all. I guess it's just too much to expect a boss to have your back in the face of unreasonable demands, run interference when you're trying to get things done, and shield you from corporate politics. It's especially bad when the boss is non-technical and doesn't really understand what value IT brings to the company; it's like having a dean of medicine who isn't even a doctor. It's not too much to expect. It's exactly what you should expect, among a number of other things. This is how I go into a new gig: everyone gets the benefit of the doubt, I expect to be treated a certain way, and in return I operate in good faith. I think that's a pretty good deal for the people I'm working with and for. I am, however, always prepared for disappointment, and if it happens they suddenly have a real hard time getting me to take their word on anything.
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Sep 5, 2014 01:42
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Zero VGS posted:Does that mean that my company can stop paying me overtime now that I got a raise up to $30/hr? Just keep putting in for overtime. If they keep paying it, you don't have to worry about anything else. No need to borrow trouble.
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Sep 6, 2014 18:27
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CLAM DOWN posted:That's hosed up. There's a few "exempt" groups here, employees who will have very unusual hours and shift work like police, firefighters, forestry workers, taxi drivers, etc. But their regulations tend to be more beneficial and specifically catered to their job, as opposed to worse-off. What's even better, even if we don't have the need to work extra time, some managers use that as the sole way to evaluate our performance. An old boss of mine was one; in response to my request for a raise, he informed me that I was "doing the bare minimum." That is to say, I was working 40 hours per week. Of course, he disregarded the fact that my colleagues at the time, some of them 25 year veterans of the industry, had given input to said boss that I did more and better work during that forty hours than most other people they had seen at my level of experience and education. "Bare minimum." It's funny how much less work I got done after that. Guess I hadn't actually been doing the bare minimum after all. Not until that point, anyway.
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Sep 9, 2014 05:49
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H.R. Paperstacks posted:Work more efficiently and don't get taken advantage of. Right, because when a server melts down because of a defective piece of hardware and you have to get your rear end into the building to get everything back up and running, that's you not working efficiently enough.  CLAM DOWN posted:He said "Work more efficiently and don't get taken advantage of", implying the onus is on the employee to not get taken advantage of by the employer. That's the part I disagreed with. Right. In theory it's not a problem because the employee can work fewer hours at some point to compensate; if I work my rear end off during a crunch to get a product out the door under a deadline, if I give up a couple evenings or a weekend, you better believe I'm taking a break after it's all over. Not just a little 2-day weekend either; my off hours are worth more to me than an hour in the middle of a Tuesday, so if I give them to you I expect more than a straight-across trade. It's basically OT pay, I just take it in time off, rather than money. And I expect it to not be deducted from my banked PTO either. The problem with the theory is that many companies in the states don't offer the two-way street. You work a minimum of 40 hours per week, starting at 8:00 on Monday, and if you work more than 40, you get a pat on the back if you're lucky, see you Monday! I don't put up with it myself, but too many people do. Dick Trauma posted:I'm not looking forward to the deluge of iPhone 6/6+ demands I'm going to receive. That and I also hate these giant new phones. Not only do they fit poorly in a pocket but they're so skinny they're a bitch to hold. My email signature last year included "Sent from my iPhone 6 Developer Preview" but nobody commented 
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Sep 9, 2014 19:20
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MC Fruit Stripe posted:Is there any way for me to phrase this email which doesn't cause me more trouble than its worth? Go with the Multiplayer Online Game Company Method. "We are aware of this issue and are working to resolve it as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience. =D" Generic, non-committal, doesn't identify any scapegoats or whipping boys, but still tells them they aren't being ignored. Send this exact message every time they passive-aggressively try and hold your feet to the fire. They'll either be happy with the acknowledgement or they'll get the hint. Personally I'd be tempted to ignore those kinds of prodding messages entirely, but most bosses are going to squawk about "service-oriented," which usually translates to "let everyone we service walk all over you." Edit: I may have misread your problem here. Your use of 2nd person pronouns makes it very unclear what is going on. Che Delilas fucked around with this message at 00:14 on Sep 10, 2014 |
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Sep 10, 2014 00:12
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awesomebrah posted:
You're probably going to run into a lot of stupid procedures or ways of doing things that are obviously inefficient or costing the company money or something that you have the perfect solution for. Ignore the impulse to try and fix these things, and just do the job you were brought in to do. Nobody likes the new guy coming in and telling them how wrong they're doing everything, even if it's the truth (especially if it's the truth).
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Sep 10, 2014 09:01
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I got my first long term IT job
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Sepist posted:I love dilberts sweeping generalizations Sweeping generalization based on year of industry experience, no less! (not a typo)
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Sep 11, 2014 22:26
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dogstile posted:Its two weeks man, just let it go. It can't be that much extra money and a good reference is important. Allow me to make a gross generalization: any company that pulls that kind of underhanded garbage ("the boss filled out one of the fields on your raise paperwork incorrectly," MY rear end) is taking his leaving as a deliberate attack against said company, and would not give him a good reference anyway. I figure the reason to put up with it is if his direct supervisor is a good boss who's had his hands tied (I seem to remember that he suggested that Zero take the new job because there was no way they would come up with that kind of raise if he stayed?), and leaving immediately would screw him. If he's been treated well by his immediate supervisor, sticking it out for those two weeks would be a huge show of class in the face of some really petty behavior by the company. Just gotta go directly to that guy when it's time for the reference. Also wouldn't hurt to ask the immediate boss if he can intercede. If I were the supervisor in this situation, I would probably go to HR or one of the execs with a message of, "this costs us basically nothing and it makes us not look like enormous dickbags. We are better than this." Edit: Though really, it's probably not worth the effort. This is the kind of event that would utterly dominate any review or conversation about the company that I would be involved in though. Feels like a pretty bad deal for the company but hey, they saved 50 bucks. Che Delilas fucked around with this message at 11:16 on Sep 16, 2014 |
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Sep 16, 2014 11:08
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angry armadillo posted:You need to talk to your boss and work out exactly how much your neck is on the line Yeah, I would talk to the boss and nail down exactly what "technical lead" entails compared to the rest of the people on the team.
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Sep 20, 2014 14:37
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Sepist posted:SalaryFairy: You get a 100k salary, and you get a 100k salary! Everyone gets a 100k salary! Maybe this is an experiment. "Can we counteract even slightly the decades of wage-suppressing efforts by businesses?" If more people, especially people of our industry who tend to underestimate our own skill - and therefore our own worth - think that they should be making significantly more money, expectations as a whole should go up. Intentional or not, I can't help but cheer sites like SalaryFairy on if they make even a tiny difference.
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Sep 26, 2014 21:48
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psydude posted:Management is freaked out by Shellshock and wants us to stop running FreeBSD and switch to RHEL despite the fact that it's the foundational OS behind our proprietary packet capturing system. And also despite the fact that FreeBSD is more secure than Linux. It's so hard to find a polite way to say, "stop panicking" to people with massive egos. Maybe, "This is why you have an IT department, right here. We are all over this and there's nothing to worry about."
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Oct 2, 2014 09:29
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Inspector_666 posted:Ok but Fishman specifically said he was in contact with the user via e-mail, so I don't know why people keep telling him he should do that. Yeah, Fish's situation sounds more like there's some manager who's a technophobe or read a management blog and now he's got this neurosis about "face time" and being physically present in the room with every user who has a problem. gently caress me, half the users probably don't even want to talk face-to-face with anyone from IT.
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Oct 2, 2014 22:30
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angry armadillo posted:There is something about IT departments- yes fixing problems immediately is the best and quickest way to fix it but if you don't tell users why they've lost their system in a way that is meaningful to them, Sigh.
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Oct 3, 2014 02:10
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Disclaimer: I have no knowledge of these specific companies.Phil Tenderpuss posted:For the first month or so I'd be an employee of KRG and then would be hired on full time by HCL and I'd be working with their client. The bolded part might as well not even be there, that's how much you can count on it. quote:They want me to pick up and move to New Orleans on very short notice, by next Monday. gently caress that right in the ear. I would never take something that uncertain on that short a notice, not without a huge incentive. Maybe like, two years' worth of signing bonus up front, so if they decided to jerk me around it would hurt them, not me. Moving sucks poo poo under the best of circumstances, and on that short a notice you'll probably be living out of a hotel while you look for a place, which you will have lots of fun doing while being trained during business hours.
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Oct 7, 2014 03:37
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"Updates help prevent things like Shellshock." Judging by some of the panic reactions of executives that some people in here wrote about, that might be all you have to say.
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Oct 14, 2014 01:32
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Bob Morales posted:Why the gently caress does every app need an icon? Gotta have something to associate with those loving balloon announcements that never matter ever.
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Oct 16, 2014 19:59
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Sickening posted:I just had an interesting recruiter call. Way to be a team player.
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Oct 17, 2014 20:34
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stubblyhead posted:A lazy recruiter that wants you to do their job for them?? What did I just say...
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Oct 17, 2014 20:41
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Dark Helmut posted:In my state, you can be fired at any time for any reason, so there really is no more security in full time roles, it's just perceived that there is. A CtH is just a different way for companies to onboard a full time resource, similar to buying a car with cash up front or making payments (6 month contract to hire). In addition, it's sometimes actually an advantage for the employee. If you find yourself in a job that you hate, would you rather show that you left a full time job after 6 months (or be trapped!) or would you like the natural escape hatch that CtH provides so you can just call it a 6 month contract? Helmut, your posts in this thread (these threads? I can never keep track who posts where, between the three threads here and the ones in CoC) are informative and I always enjoy seeing another perspective of the employer/recruiter/employee system. Especially since you seem to be one of the recruiters who actually work with people and businesses, rather than just spray gallons of spunk indiscriminately across linkedin without considering skills or job requirements or basically anything at all. I may not agree with everything you say, but it's usually at least worth consideration. So don't take what I'm about to say next personally. For the love of all that is holy, don't ever use that bolded term the way you just did. I know it's probably a recruiter thing and you talk that way among your recruiter colleagues and probably a lot of businesses' hiring departments and you don't actually think of people as disposable cow patties that terrible companies can get on the cheap to heat the building. But calling someone a loving resource is some of the most dehumanizing bullshit I can think of in the business world. It's pretty much the fastest way a company or recruiter can get on my permanent poo poo list; it screams that they aren't paying attention, don't consider me any different from anyone else they deal with, don't give a single gently caress, and consequently will not put in any effort to actually matching me up with a job that fits my skills at all. I don't expect you to treat me like a sultan. I don't expect you to learn my family history and my life story. I don't expect you to actually care about me on a personal level. I realize you have to deal with uncountable applicants and they all start to run together after a while. I just want you to make the smallest amount of effort to make me think that you will treat me like a person. Treat me with respect. Calling me a resource sends the message that you are actively trying to do the opposite, and moreover that you don't care if I know that. ---  over. ---As to the actual content of your post, I am going to say it's not our fault that businesses in this country can no longer be trusted to keep any kind of faith with their employees. At-will employment (I'm pretty sure you meant at-will, not right-to-work, right?) certainly means that permanent positions don't technically offer any more job security than contract positions. But a job posting for an actual permanent position carries the implication that the business has long-term, open-ended need for someone in that position, while contract and cth mean that they have some specific work they want done and may not need you any longer after that. I'm glad that you apparently work with some businesses that use cth to screen candidates and actually hire people on a permanent basis, but I'm sure you can't deny that plenty of them use it to attract a larger number of applicants that they would otherwise not be able to select from, knowing that they only need specific work done and have no intention of hiring on a permanent basis. Promises are worth exactly nothing, and until business culture or the law changes, any smart job seeker is going to treat "6 month contract-to-hire" as "6 month contract." If you're fine with contract work, that's fine, but it's just automatically riskier if you are actively seeking a permanent position.
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Oct 17, 2014 21:46
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Dark Helmut posted:Yes, on a tactical level, I don't want to ever be referred to as a resource, or a number, or anything other than my name or title. But when we are talking about a position I'm trying to fill, not the person I am trying to fill it with, "resource" is a placeholder for "person with desirable talents". I don't know, I just feel like there are a plethora of words you can use as placeholders that don't relegate people to the level of interchangeable cogs. Professional, expert, or a generic term for a person who would fit a particular job (developer, network admin, tech, etc.), it's not like it takes any effort for you to use one of those terms instead. Hell, calling the people you send to your clients "experts" instead of "resources" might make your clients see them as more valuable on a subconscious level, which can't be bad for your business. Misogynist posted:It's different in a staffing context when you haven't done anything with the company yet, especially in contract situations. You're not a person with skills, abilities and intelligence to bring to the team, you're a checkbox on a project manager's spreadsheet. A very good way to put it. A boss I respect calling me a valuable resource to the company can be a compliment. A recruiter sending me a job posting jam packed with phrasing such as, "My client is looking for a resource to develop their website," makes me want to respond with a link to w3schools.com. It's a button with me, I'll certainly admit that (I'm the one who CFed the thread, if we're being honest). Che Delilas fucked around with this message at 23:11 on Oct 18, 2014 |
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Oct 18, 2014 23:08
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Dark Helmut posted:Ian, I have a client seeking a resource just like you. 
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Oct 20, 2014 15:11
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evol262 posted:I'll take absurd over generalization for $500. FB is a terrible example to use anyway when talking about average ages, since Zuckerberg is on record saying that younger people are just smarter, to the loving founder of Oracle, of all people (I think that's who it was). With an attitude like that from the CEO, is it any surprise that they hire young?
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Oct 20, 2014 20:18
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skipdogg posted:I've loving had it today. I'm running lead on a project that will involve at least a 6 figure annual spend with whomever we choose and I can't get a loving straight answer to some simple questions that I have. I'm going to write a plugin that changes the word enterprise to 'bullshit' just like the old cloud -> butt That would just lead to confusion; for some products, "Bullshit Edition" describes every choice.
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Oct 20, 2014 22:53
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Zero VGS posted:For hiring, the first candidate is often far better than the second best, and they'll up the pay rather than settle. What are you basing this on?
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Oct 22, 2014 03:51
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psydude posted:Speaking of typing systems, can someone explain to me why vi's input and hotkeys make no loving sense? Is it some sort of leftover poo poo from the glory days of ARPANET that *nix neckbeards refuse to let go of so they seem legit? Or is there an actual good reason why it's remained completely goddamned different from every modern text editor that's come about over the past 20 years? Pure function. As I understand it, it was designed so that you can do as much as possible while moving your hands away from their natural touch typing positions as little as possible. One of my old college professors taught C using Vi, and it was pretty amazing how quickly and completely he could manipulate text. As far as why it's still around, why change it? There are a million and one text editors out there with intuitive interfaces. There's no chance that Vi would compete with any of them if it changed, so it's better to just keep holding onto its niche: unixbeards.
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Oct 24, 2014 03:42
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PCjr sidecar posted:vi chat? this is about to hit archives: People who play Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup will be thrilled to know that you're already 5% of the way to being able to use Vim! psydude posted:"I just prefer using the CLI" at least twice a day, even when using the UI is actually faster and easier. I see this quite a bit from developers who use Git as their source control. I think what they really mean is, "Every GUI ever made for Git is such hot garbage that it's just faster and easier to learn all the console commands." But they don't want to say that, because otherwise Git is pretty great. Che Delilas fucked around with this message at 03:59 on Oct 24, 2014 |
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Oct 24, 2014 03:57
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