Working in IT 3.0: xp_cmdshell

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Working in IT 3.0: xp_cmdshell

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

evol262 posted:

It's run the gamut.

First job ran everything but HP-UX, including VMS and Nonstop. Nobody else has been that diverse (thankfully), but I don't think I've ever been at a shop which isn't running other systems of some kind.

I spearheaded the move from AIX to Linux at one, but we kept around a few HP-UX boxes even after the migration was complete because the enterprise Oracle people still ran on HP-UX. Next one had Solaris/SPARC. The one after that was Solaris/x86 and Linux. I currently work for another major vendor, so we've got pretty much any box that might be expected to be supported on RHEL (Linux on z, POWER, especially since KVM on POWER is coming up fast, significant ARM).

I still think most of the world runs Windows and Linux on x86. If I were a new company, I wouldn't bother with anything else unless the (Open) POWER8 stuff is very good -- and price competitive. ARM may get in with the same caveats. But it's really hard to go wrong with x86.

Older shops still have investments in code they don't want to port or teams with enough sway to keep buying AIX. It's pretty unlikely that a greenfield would pick AIX, though (for a variety of reasons). Not gonna die, but not gonna grow.

Sometimes there are crucial commodity software products whose best support is on a certain proprietary UNIX, as well. It's not uncommon at all to see shops that are otherwise entirely x86 keep around a handful of pSeries boxes to run Tivoli Storage Manager. The Linux support isn't bad, but TSM on AIX is widely regarded as a more stable, robust, and performant package.

# ¿ Aug 1, 2014 17:01

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 13:07

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

three posted:

Do you hate Tivoli as much as everyone I've met hates it?

Note: I've never used it other than deploying some packages.

Tivoli Storage Manager is the best enterprise backup product on the market, though you should expect to hire at least one well-paid FTE to manage it. The rest of the suite can go gently caress itself.

# ¿ Aug 1, 2014 17:26

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Fiendish Dr. Wu posted:

Seattle does seem really cool. The IT part of it is obviously a major factor for obvious reasons, but I guess for us we're mostly looking at cultural fit (of which I'll not get into for risk of a nearly guaranteed major derail / thread closure)

This thread is much more informative, but also boring, when it has rails.

# ¿ Aug 1, 2014 18:18

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Dark Helmut posted:

Unlike most think, a resume doesn't have to be a journal of everything you've ever done. Look at it as the "what's going to get me my next job" and in doing so, feel free to go to 2-4 pages, but assume that no one is going to look past the first page. Make that your heavy hitter and ensure that all the skills you want to utilize in your next job are well-articulated on that first page.

Also, skip the objective, no one wants to read about what YOU want, they care about who you are and what you bring to the table. A good summary followed by your most recent experience is ideal. If you have some really good certs, consider putting them at the top right next to your name. ex. Dark Helmut, PMP, CCNP

Definitely have a skills section, which doubles as a keyword repository so us recruiters can find it.

That's the short version of my resume 101...

Whether present on the paper or not, an objective is always implied to be "to get the job I am currently applying for."

# ¿ Aug 1, 2014 22:17

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

FISHMANPET posted:

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.

Government procurement processes pull this poo poo all the time.

# ¿ Aug 6, 2014 06:15

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

go3 posted:

I really can't understand how HR ever became part of the search and hiring process.

There's a really tremendous amount of legal liability associated with this process, especially in states like California, and that's in hiring processes where external recruiters aren't involved. I agree that they overreach in trying to become the single entry point for recruits finding their way into the company, but they absolutely have an important role in the process.

Sepist posted:

If I ever become a hiring manager I am going to ask soooo many ICMP questions, just to really get under peoples skin

Christ, there's more than enough hiring managers doing things that serve no purpose but to get under a candidate's skin.

# ¿ Aug 7, 2014 18:00

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

GreenNight posted:

I appreciate this. The company is 2 years old, so not exactly brand new and they sound decently stable, financial wise. Her current job is extremely stable (doing Java for a billion dollar insurance company) and she already told them she needs to be blown away to consider leaving. Thanks for the advice.

Age has nothing to do with the financial viability of a startup. (Aren't startups fun?)

Many startups are founded by venture capital. With a traditional bank loan, you're given money to start a business, and this money has interest attached. The idea is that over time, you make money, and you pay back the interest on the loan. These loans also tend to be fairly small. A business running on bank loans has a limited amount of time to become break-even or ramen-profitable before they start burning through their cash reserves and go out of business.

Venture capital is someone looking at your business, determining a valuation for your company, and saying "I'll give you $X for Y% of your business." The hope is that the business will explode, and be worth billions, like Instagram or WhatsApp. These are often larger cash infusions, sometimes enough to keep the company running for years at a time without ever being profitable or even cash flow positive. They also occur in multiple rounds, so the company may not even have enough to keep themselves running another month before they close a VC deal, and then suddenly they have the funds to live another entire year. Many startups running on VC funding approach the three, four, or five year mark having never turned a profit, but having the user stickiness to convince VCs to keep pouring money in.

The instability in this model is that you have a monopoly shareholder who's sinking money in, and if there's a failure to execute, you don't have a trickle of customers away from your platform -- you just have your only real source of money go away. Then you have a handful of months to monetize your assets to break-even, or everyone at the company is a rat on a sinking ship.

The other irony is that if a company is being too responsible with their VC funds, and trying not to burn through too quickly, their product may not develop at a fast enough rate for the VC to consider them a viable investment, and they may not fund future rounds because of it.

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 01:02 on Aug 10, 2014

# ¿ Aug 10, 2014 00:59

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Docjowles posted:

Drove (and actually still own, but it's relegated to running errands these days) a lovely late 90's Civic for many years. Daily driver is now a 2011 Hyundai Tucson SUV. It actually gets respectable mileage for an SUV, high 20's on the highway. Nice cargo capacity, AWD for lovely weather. The only thing I dislike is that it has blind spots the size of a tank. I can compensate for it by using the mirrors a lot more than I'm used to in other vehicles, but then my wife drives it and changes them and I'm all hosed up again for a while til I get them set back correctly

I moved a remarkable amount of servers and other misc crap between offices in that Civic, now that I think about it. Which was pretty retarded since there was a company van I could have used at any time.

Once the Tucson is paid off, I'd love to replace the Civic with something sportier and from the current millenium. One day... luckily none of my employers have ever asked or cared what I drive. Apparently I'd never get a job since I don't drive a BMW

My mother had a Lincoln in the late '80s that had multiple programmable presets for the mirrors and the driver's seat. How is this not a standard feature on cars in 2014?

# ¿ Aug 11, 2014 20:30

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

MC Fruit Stripe posted:

For those of us who work a little quicker, is there a better gift than Outlook's delay delivery? My god do I love doing 8 hours worth of work in some subset of that, while setting emails to fire off throughout the day at appropriate times to show how hard I am working.

I also want to make clear that this is a parody post and I would never do such a thing.

Delay delivery is actually awesome for dealing with people who are really lovely at responding to emails that arrive while they're not at their desk.

# ¿ Aug 13, 2014 07:28

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

MC Fruit Stripe posted:

Tonight is the first production code deployment in over two years that I am not a part of. The guys who are handling it are fine - a new guy with a solid baseline of knowledge, and the guy who trained me, so it's not like they're going to struggle. Still, I feel like I'm missing a limb or something, someone hold me.

Our dev team just did theirs last night; didn't even ask me. Awesome feeling.

# ¿ Aug 14, 2014 05:05

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

lampey posted:

Now more than ever a degree is less important to a career in IT. If it is important at a later date there are increasingly non traditional options like WGU to get a degree.

IT isn't a profession, it's a whole industry with roles running the gamut from QA tester through CIO. Every job in the field has a completely different set of requirements even at a general level, before you dive deeper into the requirements and candidate preferences of different verticals and different job markets. This is, at best, a stupidly incomplete generalization.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2014 06:29

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

NippleFloss posted:

Having a degree only getting more important in every other field in the world, why would you think that IT is the exception? Going back to school and getting a degree when you're settled in to work life is a lot less appealing than doing it when you're young and relatively free from other responsibilities.

There are certain areas where that's true. For example, the technology industry has a much healthier startup scene (quantitatively, anyway) than a majority of other fields, and most of these companies tend to be looking for young, doe-eyed professionals who fit their countercultural ideals. Software development as a profession has tended to lean heavily towards self-taught programmers, partly because many computer science curricula haven't been updated since Fred Brooks wrote 30 years ago about building one to throw away. Entry-level helpdesk positions tend not to have degree requirements because they're aimed at people in their late teens and early twenties, which confuses some people into thinking that degrees aren't useful in a desktop support or sysadmin track.

It's true that your odds in many technology jobs are better than they would be in other professions, if you're coming at them without any kind of degree at all. If someone finds themselves in this position, the questions he or she needs to ask are:

What is my lack of a degree going to do to the salaries I can expect to earn in the kinds of companies I expect to work for?
What jobs will I have a very difficult time getting without a degree?
What skills will I develop more slowly on account of having not gone to college?

# ¿ Aug 15, 2014 07:02

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

FISHMANPET posted:

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.

In other words, college doesn't necessarily give you skills or judgment, same as literally any other kind of experience

# ¿ Aug 15, 2014 18:23

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Daylen Drazzi posted:

Had two Microsoft employees come in and train 5 of us who were relatively new to Exchange earlier this week. We had two days of training, plus we had a lab that was built for us to play in. Pretty cool experience and I actually picked up quite a bit from the class. Anyways we were chatting during a break and one of the trainers mentioned that there were a huge number of Microsoft employees who actually had teaching degrees after someone had asked what kind of education requirements MS had for employees. There was even one person, he told us, who had quit his practice as a neurosurgeon to work for Microsoft. I'm still trying to wrap my head around that.

Lots of people put a decade of work into becoming a doctor just to find out that they aren't emotionally able to deal with the loss of a patient. If they were already experienced enough to be working in private practice, though, then that is weird.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2014 22:19

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

lampey posted:

The increasing commoditization of IT means that individuals require less job specific knowledge to perform the needed roles, and it takes less time to learn than previously. A bachelors degree is not without merit, but many of the experiences that result in a being well rounded can be learned while on the job. If someone was 30 years old and wanted to get into IT should they get a 4 year degree first?

You know what critical piece you're ignoring? Modern IT jobs require more skills than they used to regardless of how long it takes to learn any one of them.

Most IT salaries aren't going down, they're going up, which is the opposite of what would be happening if the jobs were getting easier. Pretty much every IT job from technical writer up through business analyst requires a tremendous amount of multidisciplinary skill, and more effort than ever to align with the goals of an increasingly complex business. Availability strategies that used to be the purview of architects are now everyone's concern because of the idiosyncrasies of the cloud. Everyone needs to worry about storing and processing absolutely gargantuan amounts of data or they lose their competitive advantage to companies that do. Sure, desktop support CJ work is easier now than it was 10 years ago, and sysadmins manage marginally fewer apps because of SaaS. But you're out of your fuckin' gourd if you think there's less people on the business side to impress and not more, or that the soft skills associated with a degree are becoming in any way less important in the workplace.

# ¿ Aug 16, 2014 18:27

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

I hate to be that guy, but it's worth pointing out that being hired for your self-taught skills is way more likely to work out if you're born a male of an unobjectionable ethnic group (or at least sound like one on your resume).

# ¿ Aug 18, 2014 06:41

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Comradephate posted:

Do you have actual evidence of this or are you just looking to stir the pot?

Innumerable scientific studies have shown that resumes with black-sounding names, or resumes with female names, are ranked lower in the candidate pool than those with identical qualifications, but names that sound like white males:

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/black-names-a-resume-burden/
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/unofficial-prognosis/2012/09/23/study-shows-gender-bias-in-science-is-real-heres-why-it-matters/

It stands to reason that candidates who are black or women need higher levels of credentials than their white male counterparts to get competitive levels of responses to their resumes.

Of course, the effects of these biases are going to vary by position, company, industry, etc. Science has long been known to be a shithole for women, but so has technology, especially in the manchild-run startup arena.

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 17:20 on Aug 18, 2014

# ¿ Aug 18, 2014 17:17

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Dark Helmut posted:

Drink for the following terms:

Synergy
Paradigm shift
Low hanging fruit
Going forward
Outside the box
Let's pull up offline
It is what it is

My list is probably a bit dated, feel free to add your own.

Disruptive

# ¿ Aug 18, 2014 21:01

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

three posted:

Unrelated to the current topic, but I found out I'm having a baby girl, and it makes me really sad to know that there's no way I'd encourage her to go into IT due to the misogynistic weirdos it attracts.

Congratulations! Things might be better for women in IT in 20 years. God knows it was better for them 20 years ago.

# ¿ Aug 18, 2014 21:32

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Does anyone in here have Verizon FiOS? Can you do me a favor and ping rabb.it a few hundred times and let me know the packet loss, and what city you're in? It looks like they have issues to us-east-1 on EC2, we're launching a product from us-east-1 in a couple of hours, and we need to know how bad the situation is.

Feel free to PM if you don't want to clutter the thread.

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 00:50 on Aug 19, 2014

# ¿ Aug 19, 2014 00:40

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

So FiOS is okay through upstate NY but is hosed from the NYC metro area down to Baltimore, at minimum. Thanks!

# ¿ Aug 19, 2014 03:44

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Sepist posted:

Must be YOTJ day, just got a linkedin recruitspam that was actually enticing enough for me to consider commuting back to NYC. Gotta love hedge fund money. We'll see how this goes..

Gotta love that NYC commute on top of the 13-hour hedge fund days. At least you'll be able to afford a top-of-the-line bed.

# ¿ Aug 19, 2014 06:56

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Sepist posted:

Eh I've worked in finance before, I think it gets an exaggerated bad rap. The commute had the benefit of allowing me to read a lot and now that I'm studying for my CCIE this would be a nice bonus. I am a glass is half full kind of guy obviously..

Also I already have a sweet bed

Depends on where you work. The big houses are usually okay in terms of working hours, but the smaller shops (especially the very quantitative ones like Jane Street) have finance culture on top of startup culture translating into 16-hour days where nobody's allowed to leave for lunch.

# ¿ Aug 19, 2014 19:30

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Speaking of positivity, sorry to be a self-promoting pain in the rear end, but we just had a huge product launch of Rabbit, and we held together despite huge traffic surges from Reddit's front page and friends. If you're tired of Google Hangouts, or if you want to watch Netflix or HBO Go with a friend across the country or the ocean, give us a shot (and send us feedback).

# ¿ Aug 19, 2014 23:58

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

evol262 posted:

Congrats! Why no Firefox? Or maybe I just don't see it (I'm on mobile and fully intend to visit).

We're currently evaluating platforms, and hangouts v bluejeans is the play right now. But this looks really promising. Pricing? Support for more than 10 participants?

Free! We also don't (currently) have any plans to charge end-users -- that seems like a losing play and even Skype backed away from that model. Support for larger group chats is coming in a future release; if this is something that's important to you, please submit feedback! I'd be happy to relay it on your behalf, but it makes our product team happy when they hear directly from users. The stack can easily accommodate dozens of users at a time in a chat, and the 10-user limit is honestly pretty arbitrary, but we've been trying really hard to figure out what a good UX feels like for that many users in a room.

Firefox is complicated. Its support for WebRTC is really lacking in fundamental areas across the board. The echo cancellation is bad enough that if a user without a headset joins a chat (say, using a built-in laptop or webcam microphone) they'll ruin the audio for everyone in the chat. It also doesn't do SRTP key renegotiation correctly, so the CPU usage is literally an order of magnitude higher on all our WebRTC servers when we have Firefox users because we need to re-encrypt the stream separately for every source->destination pair instead of using a single key for each room. We're going to be investing significant dev resources in the coming months to make sure Firefox users have a good user experience, however we manage to do that.

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 06:17 on Aug 20, 2014

# ¿ Aug 20, 2014 06:03

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

lampey posted:

Wages are going up mostly because there is a tech bubble. You don't need a degree to have soft skills, and many people with and without degrees have terrible soft skills. It is a stereotype in general that many people in IT have poor soft skills.

The tools we all have available require less knowledge to use. It is relatively simple to deploy email with archiving, spam filtering, message encryption and availability for an organization through Office 365. This is much simpler than installing exchange properly. There is a group at Microsoft that is doing the job of hundreds of different sysadmins spread out with less time and delivering a better product.

Do you still need to know how to setup an exchange server? How to host a website? VOIP PBX?

My job is web infrastructure engineering and operations, so you could say I need to know how to host a website.

# ¿ Aug 20, 2014 18:03

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

CLAM DOWN posted:

Likewise, I'm the newest person on my Windows team and they view me as that young whippersnapper who can whip up anything in Powershell for them. I really like doing it too, never enjoyed scripting before this.

Nothing feels as good as sweet, sweet piles of money.

# ¿ Aug 20, 2014 22:43

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Docjowles posted:

Anyone messing with Rundeck for orchestration? It's been in the back of my mind for ages but I finally had time to test it out this week. It's pretty slick. Especially once I found out that it has a SaltStack plugin, since we're using Salt extensively already.

"Orchestration" is a term very loosely applied to Rundeck, since it's really not good at anything of the sort, but it's a great C&C console for repetitive tasks. We're using it all over the place and, yes, using the Chef plugin to provide node data into Rundeck directly from our Chef server. We're shifting more and more functionality into heavily customized middleware, though. Looking forward to trying out Consul and some other tools. We'll still likely use Rundeck to provide a nice quick interface to all the scripts that run our deploy processes.

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 00:34 on Aug 21, 2014

# ¿ Aug 21, 2014 00:26

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Tab8715 posted:

Is there any credibility that the demand for software is infinite?

As long as white people need helicopters to the Hamptons, there will always be an Uber for it

# ¿ Aug 21, 2014 01:59

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Docjowles posted:

Yeah, orchestration was a poor choice of words. I'm eyeing it for two main use cases: giving developers self-service access to a few things they ask Ops for constantly, and getting some visibility and consistency around how and how often our NOC people perform certain tasks. Both of which it seems super well suited for. For example, I said the other day our devs do all their own deploys. But if poo poo seriously goes south and they need to restart Tomcat or whatever, Ops has to do that. Once in a blue moon, they have a bad deploy when literally all of Ops is offsite at a team lunch or something and then we all get paged with HOLY poo poo RESTART TOMCAT NOW. I'd love to give them a button they can click to do that themselves.

So I guess my question is more organizational. Any resistance to allowing tasks like that to creep outside of Ops? And if so, how did you deal with it?

Also, sounds like the Chef plugins are nicer (no surprise, really). The Salt plugin lets you send job steps out through Salt instead of SSH, but I still had to write my own script to dump out node data for targeting the job. If I didn't hate Java with the fire of a million suns I'd consider writing such a plugin.

Most "don't do that" restrictions come from one of two sources:

Ops doesn't trust dev to do simple tasks correctly.
This is an organizational problem mostly caused by lack of accountability or responsibility. If you have people who do cowboy things and break production, they should be gently educated and eventually taken to task if it forms a pattern of behavior. If the organization refuses to do this, then it's time to involve more stringent access controls, further compounding the effects of an untrusting culture.

Ops doesn't have the time to explain and codify the ground rules for working in that type of environment.
This is more common in environments with poor automation, where it's very easy to do dangerous things the incorrect way. A better solution is to create a safe, standard way of doing these dangerous things. Sometimes you can't, or shouldn't; example: restoring a large-scale production database from backup should probably have an SME on hand before someone clicks the button.

There's obviously special cases, and you probably wouldn't apply this to the trading floor of the NASDAQ or an airline reservation system. There's also various situations like regulatory compliance that may impact what people are legally allowed to do to systems. But in general, I like to empower and trust people to do things themselves until they've proven they can't. I like not being a bottleneck. I like not getting called when I'm on lunch because someone needs to push an emergency patch to all of prod.

# ¿ Aug 21, 2014 05:36

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Sheep posted:

I just got promoted from pseudo-management where it was just me and my machines to "now you have people reporting to you" management. I understand that there is this ITIL thing that I should probably look into, but can anyone else provide some sort of "you're now managing people in IT" bullet points so I can figure out what just happened? My only management experience with actual people prior to this was as a high school teacher, which isn't really relevant in the slightest to what I do now.

ITIL is kind of a prescriptive guide on how to run a large IT department, so it's probably not what you want to be implementing. It's worth quickly reading about so you can see how all the pieces and roles fit together in a large enterprise, though.

There's a newish thread in BFC called Tell Me How to Be a Good Manager that's probably a good place to start asking questions.

My advice is as follows: hire the most competent people you can find. Resist the urge to get someone in a chair because you need warm bodies doing work; if you're reasonably good at managing systems at scale, this kind of person will cost you more in productivity than you'll net back. Working in a small environment that probably pays at least slightly below market rate (and this is nothing more than a vague assumption on my part), you'll need to take risks on people who don't fit all the checkboxes for the positions you want. You'll need to take a chance on people based on gut feelings about their intelligence and ability to do the job, and you need to do what has to be done if they turn out not to be up to the task.

IT management, especially in small and budget-constrained environments, is a monumentally challenging but really rewarding occupation. Congratulations, and good luck!

# ¿ Aug 22, 2014 21:36

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

"As expected" is (and should be) a consistently-moving set of goalposts, though. As manager, you need to do more than just facilitate the people under you. Presumably, you have better business acumen than the people who weren't picked for your job instead, and you should be using that to understand the priorities of the business units you support. Grow with them, anticipate their needs, and be a key player in the organization instead of just a cost center when things break.

# ¿ Aug 22, 2014 22:25

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Anyone have a preferred SSH client app for iPhone these days?

# ¿ Aug 23, 2014 07:37

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Mom, can't we just use the cloooooud?

# ¿ Aug 26, 2014 22:28

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

HatfulOfHollow posted:

And that shouldn't imply anything bad about them. I've spent nearly my entire career in the large enterprise. Every company I've worked for has had a team of people who deal with the money and handle getting quotes and actually paying for things. The architects and senior engineers in these companies only spec out new systems and then hand it off to procurement to get quotes. I haven't had to actually talk to a salesperson in the past decade.

If someone asked me to buy hardware I'd give them a deer-in-the-headlights stare because I wouldn't even know where to begin.

In the places I've worked, procurement doesn't usually get involved in technology purchases from reseller channels or VARs. The reasons for this are two-fold. One, the cost of error can easily outweigh the potential savings if the people in procurement don't understand what it is that they're buying. A trivial error in a specification delivered to them in a quote can slip a project's completion date by months. Two, most computing hardware vendors don't let their channel partners bid against each other anyway. If the request comes in directly, or if it comes in to one specific reseller, that reseller gets the vendor's preferred pricing for the project. If you submit that same quote to another vendor, that vendor will give you higher pricing, because they aren't counted as having generated the lead, and they don't have access to the vendor's preferred pricing.

# ¿ Aug 27, 2014 00:01

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Drunk Orc posted:

Also, I don't know if it is relevant but I don't even work in IT currently because my current job cutting meat pays pretty well at $14/hr, with potential to make $10 more on the hour in about three years, and great benefits through Costco. Am I better off looking for a job in IT now while finishing my BS before my pay gets too high to compete with my current position, or should I hang out at Costco until I get my degree and certs?

You're in a better position in any career with more experience in that career. That said, I'm assuming you're going to school in the daytime, and part-time IT work with any kind of meaningful experience behind it is tough to come by. See what's out there, I guess?

# ¿ Aug 29, 2014 02:20

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Drunk Orc posted:

Well I work full time during the day and do my school at night online. I should probably just talk to a recruiter I suppose and tell them this stuff I guess?

Recruiters are great to talk to when you become mid-level/senior-level, but they're almost universally awful when you're looking for entry-level positions. I mean, don't hesitate to do whatever you can to get your foot in the door, but at that experience level and payscale you're probably going to do much better by studying your rear end off, networking professionally around whatever area of IT you're particularly passionate about, and doing whatever you can to find yourself work that's not a call center somewhere.

# ¿ Aug 29, 2014 02:26

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

KuNova posted:

What's the catch with recruiters? I see the benefits but why obligate yourself to a third party?

From whose perspective? The company with the open position gets to delegate the hard work of finding and attracting IT candidates to a company that does it full-time, in exchange for a portion of their base salary (pro-rated across the first three months if the candidate doesn't stick around). The candidate gets a job, with the understanding that the recruiting firm is treating them as a product to sell.

The only disadvantage to working with recruiters is that, given two candidates with equal qualifications and equal salary requirements, the one coming from the recruiter is going to cost more to hire. This can sometimes work to your disadvantage if you're head-to-head with a direct applicant who doesn't have a headhunter looking for a cut.

# ¿ Aug 29, 2014 03:38

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

"How can we gently caress over a guy who's already doing someone's job for free?"

"I dunno, how about he pays our credit card interest?"

# ¿ Sep 3, 2014 15:23

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 13:07

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Median pay in a major metro area for a Senior Systems Engineer or Lead Systems Engineer is around $125k FYI

# ¿ Sep 3, 2014 17:09

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Working in IT 3.0: xp_cmdshell

«‹›48 »