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I need cover letter advice. I've posted a couple times about my situation - underneath all the mergers and acquisitions, I've been in effectively the same UNIX SA/manager/architect line for 15 years now, so I'm paid very well, but I'm in a non-promotable spot that's going to leave me with unmarketable skills when it all finally comes to an end. I'm applying for a job as an IT security analyst. It's a big step down in terms of pay but I think I could live with it for getting back into a job where I'm learning useful stuff and have some possible hope for advancement. I'm wondering if I should say something my cover letter explaining why someone with 20 years of UNIX experience is applying for a much less senior position, or wait to be asked.
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Sep 25, 2014 20:47
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Thanks for all the responses. It's an intermediate job, which (I hope) means they expect the candidates to know some stuff and learn some stuff too. I know how to talk to someone and identify security concerns in the solution they want to deploy. I haven't done intrusion detection but I've done system hardening, least privilege management, etc. In short, there's no way I go from UNIX architect to security architect, but I think I might have a shot at going to security analyst intermediate as written. The job description includes a lot more than just intrusion and sysadmin experience is part of their desired qualifications, so while I do not expect this to be a gimme, I think I might be a plausible candidate. If I can get in the door, I can learn more about intrusion detection, incident response, and that cool stuff, and hopefully make my way up to security geek senior or back into management in the next several years. I'm a pretty quick learner. Dark Helmut, you hit the nail on the head. I'm currently a telecommuter and if they ever stop needing me, they'll RIF me with no hesitation. I don't want to wait until I'm stuck and need to take whatever I can get; I want to pick my next slot. I hadn't thought about downplaying my seniority but I'll ponder ways to spin it right. Hatful, I have deep knowledge of all the UNIX issues in my current shop, but I don't touch SAN storage, nor network, nor DBA stuff, nor Windows, which means I'm not what the employers around me seem to be looking for. If I could punch at least one more of those, I'd probably be fine, but it's not going to happen with the current company. I'm too busy where I am, and if I'm ever not busy, they'd be more likely to get rid of me and hire someone on-site than allow me to pivot to a new field. I've applied for a couple local management jobs but my skillset is just too narrow and sheer management experience isn't cutting it - everyone wants a manager with more specific experience of the hardware or software in their specific shop. I suspect/hope that getting promoted from within is easier. I can certainly keep working until the music stops, and as long as I do, I'm not crying over it. However, if I'm going to have to take a more junior position to stay in local IT and get back on to a real career track, I'd rather do it in security or some other related field than take a midlevel UNIX job and do more of what I've already done.
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Sep 25, 2014 22:30
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Didn't we determine that titles are sort of randomized inside each company?
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Sep 26, 2014 05:14
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Dark Helmut posted:Zorak, to be clear by what I meant, I might look at downplaying the management portion. Not only does people management imply that you are more hands-off, but it's definitely more of a perceived "step down". Anyway, just my 2 cents. Hard to tell without knowing more about your situation. As a (very general) rule, I tell almost everyone to consider switching companies/roles every 3-5 years (unless your situation is airtight) so you don't end up getting silo'd. That's actually good to hear, since they moved me from manager to architect in 2012. They wanted all managers to be on-prem. I've been a lot more hands on lately.
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Sep 26, 2014 14:37
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internet jerk posted:Zorak (sweet Space Ghost ref btw), when do you find out if you're moving over? I think SA needs more sec dudes posting about sec things. I'm at the state of asking for cover letter advice. Figure I finish the application before Monday, might be a couple weeks for a callback, a week or two to schedule the interview, several weeks for them to make a hiring decision, so probably a couple months.
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Sep 26, 2014 21:46
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Why do some software vendors still think it's OK to ship UNIX software packaged as an install script and a README? If you're going to charge good money for a product on an officially supported platform, they ought to package it properly. I have some small sympathy for people who don't want to learn IPS for Solaris 11, but an RPM cannot possibly be too much to ask for.
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Jan 9, 2015 17:17
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flosofl posted:I'm not sure if this is place, but I'll give it a shot. We used to use a lot of Digi gear and we were reasonably happy with it. What's your scale, though? The Digis have some integrated management features which work great but require someone to configure them. In a really large environment I'd want to go with a terminal server just smart enough to handle an SSH connection and have all my access control, logging, alerting, etc done through something like ConsoleWorks. (I can't endorse CW unconditionally but when I used their stuff in 2010 it was good, steadily improving, and the vendor was listening to our feedback and getting better with every release.)
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Mar 25, 2015 20:24
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When I worked for an employer with a non-compete clause, it had less to do with my skillset and more to do with the market. As long as I didn't go to work for another ISP, and arguably as long as I didn't go to an ISP that competed in the same market segment, I could go use exactly the same skills anyplace I liked.
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Mar 27, 2015 14:24
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MrMoo posted:
Because Oracle Linux is so cheap! Those guys gave me the hard sell last month. I told them that based on the support we get from RH vs the support we get from Oracle on their other products, using them for Linux support was a non-starter. They assured me that if we weren't getting good support, we were using their support system wrong. That's where I wussed out; I focused on disengaging, but I should have jumped in their poo poo and explained that support you can use wrong is bad support.
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May 11, 2015 16:47
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, Reuters pushes out a lot of software on Linux and have now decided to pull support for RHEL7 because it costs 
and now support Oracle Linux and CentOS 7 instead.
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insidius, I don't know the law in your area, but if I was in your shoes, I would find out whether I can legally record my boss or not. If you can, start. You might benefit from having a record of that behavior some day.
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May 12, 2015 02:55
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DarkMoJo posted:Am in the wrong if I jump ship and go somewhere where people actually do their jobs and has less stress? Nobody is ever in the wrong for quitting provided that they do so in a professional manner. Depending on the scale of the BS you deal with, sometimes we won't fault you for quitting in an unprofessional manner.
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May 13, 2015 16:44
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It's only a matter of time until one of those shows up boiled in your kitchen.
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May 15, 2015 20:19
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Inspector_666 posted:I just answer questions with totally unrelated stuff and add it to Lastpass in the notes field. I generate new random strings with Keepass and use those, also in the notes field. As far as anyone at $COMPANY knows, my first pet's name was 0vgKrfjZcJMngDTl5s0lDaVMUAJV.
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May 22, 2015 22:39
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Use classic Yes lyrics. Even the plain text lyrics have no discernible meaning, so it's another layer of security!
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Jun 16, 2015 20:28
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evol262 posted:Interesting, but not even remotely true: I assume most places that want to use H1B or any other sort of inexpensive staff to replace existing employees structure it the way Disney did. Nobody gets fired and replaced by someone cheaper. You get RIF'd and the entire class of job you did is replaced by a contract with a service provider, who happens to be able to provide the service cheaply because they use cheap labor of debatable quality. The company realizes short term savings and acts very surprised when the service provider sucks.
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Jun 17, 2015 21:42
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Can anyone recommend a good book on Docker? It's getting traction at work and I'd like to get in front of it, but I don't want to be stuck in front of a computer as I learn about it.
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Jun 24, 2015 19:53
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SIR FAT JONY IVES posted:My company is leery about telecommuting because the guy I was hired to replace would do it all the time. He'd email the bosses "hey I'm working from home" and then an hour later email the team leader "hey, my home internet is down, so I'm not going to be able to do anything." I've never understand why people think about that as a problem with working from home rather than a basic case of an employee not getting their job done.
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Jul 7, 2015 20:39
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My employer almost always brings in new people on a six month contractor-to-perm basis, and it's absolutely a try before we buy situation. The only thing I can really add to the conversation about it is that while there may be only a trivial legal difference in the difficulty of terminating a contractor vs terminating a perm, there's a huge difference from an HR basis. We're a large company and if I went to my HR rep and said Joe Geek is not doing good work and I want to terminate, they'd march me through months of paperwork and performance improvement plans. We'd have to show that we gave Joe every opportunity blah blah blah. If I bring in someone on a six month contract and realize four months into their contract that they aren't the person I want, I just don't convert them to perm. No mess, no fuss, no increased paperwork. Even a probationary period isn't quite as clean or easy from an HR point of view. This has sometimes saved us - we had one guy who interviewed as a smart guy with a great work ethic, but turned out to be absolutely unable to focus on his own job. His 40 hour work weeks were 25 hours of what we wanted done, 20 hours of telling other people what they were doing wrong, and five hours of being told he wasn't allowed to work OT and needed to get out of the office. On the other hand, we very nearly got burned once when a change of upper management and budget priorities almost put us in the position of telling a highly respected contractor that we'd love to convert him to permanent but at a lower salary than we'd ever discussed. They'd have turned us down with extreme prejudice and been right to do so. We only dodged that bullet by finding a different slot to hire them into, and even then, there was some friction.
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Jul 30, 2015 21:43
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Che Delilas posted:I don't want to burst your bubble but there are a lot of managers out there that will say things like this, or anything else for that matter, to get you to stick around just a little bit longer than you otherwise would have in hopes of getting an actual raise, all the while knowing that there is no raise coming. Depending on the size of the company, he might be saying this with all the good will in the world and still never be able to commit. When I was managing an SA team in a Fortune 500 setting, I had one guy that I knew perfectly well was underpaid, and he knew it too. He got lowballed with his initial hiring salary, worked hard, learned fast, but never got properly rewarded for it because it was 2002 and the company was in a perpetual hiring and promotion freeze. Every review I'd say, "you're a smart guy, I love your work ethic, I want you to be making at least $70k, but if all I can do is keeping giving you the maximum allowable raise, it's going to take us a long time to get you there." At least once a year I asked my boss if we could promote him, and every year I got told no.
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Sep 11, 2015 02:42
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Vulture Culture posted:Sidebar that bears repeating: the same "only this person knows this thing" job security that keeps you from getting fired also keeps you from getting promoted. And that's if you're lucky. If you aren't lucky, management catches on, and one day you get happen to get cc'd on email saying that the project to replace the thing that only you know about has reached its first operational milestone. Then you end up out of a job with no references you can count on and a skill set without commercial applicability.
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Oct 16, 2015 17:17
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evobatman posted:Got the message yesterday that 2 out of the 4 positions in our support group has to be cut. The group consist of our manager who I take it for granted will not be cut, me and two coworkers. So the three of us now have to compete for one position, where we have to explain why we are the right person for the remaining job, and try indirectly to explain why the other two are the wrong person. So suddenly I find myself in a loving episode of The Apprentice, where "You're Fired" is a real thing if you gently caress up in the boardroom! Unless your manager has a lot of other responsibilities, I don't think you can assume they won't get cut. A manager with a single direct report usually leaves HR scratching their heads and wondering why that manager's boss couldn't manage the direct report themselves.
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Nov 5, 2015 16:59
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Dick Trauma posted:In essence, I'm struggling with making it dumb enough for my boss. I spent way too much time wrestling with this. When I lay out the implications of all the infrastructure changes we've made in the last year, I'm being too technical. When I boil it down to the bottom line, there's not enough detail. When I pick and choose, then it usually takes around 10 minutes for someone to start talking about the technical stuff I left out in a way that shows that they don't get it. My favorite was the preso I gave on how we were virtualizing Oracle. I thought it was pretty clear and comprehensive. I was encouraged by the lack of questions. A month later the DBAs asked me when the new farm would be ready. I asked what they meant. From my point of view, we were waiting on them to ask for new databases and servers, which would be built in the new VM stack. Nope. It turns out that they didn't know what virtualization was, and thought it meant that we were combining a bunch of physicals into one big superserver, and all they had to do was log into this magical 256-core, 8TB monstrosity, su to oracle, and start configuring databases.
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Nov 13, 2015 20:43
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Japanese Dating Sim posted:Spoken like someone who definitely does not live in DFW. I mean, it's possible to live near your employer, but holy poo poo the sprawl. And yep, crappy public transportation. I have coworkers in the area who keep getting screwed by this. The VPs act like any location in the area is as good as another, ignoring the impact it has when you live in Richardson and the office moves to Addison. Feh.
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Dec 3, 2015 19:38
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Aunt Beth posted:I completely fail to understand how unikernels are a good or useful thing. You can't fork, one process has complete control of the system. It's basically DOS where the OS is a glorified loader that passes hardware control to a given program. Maybe I'm still thinking pets, not herd, but can someone explain why unikernel architecture is relevant? If your application is sufficiently sensitive to latency, then it can be a huge win to rip out that messy kernel that keeps screwing you up by letting some other process have your resources, and replace it with something that provides nothing more than what you absolutely need.
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Jan 28, 2016 23:47
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I was in management for years before they made into an architect instead, due to my inability to relocate to a core location after I changed companies in a divestiture. The technical stuff would come and go. When the pace of change got crazy, my life would be a merry-go-round of meetings, spreadsheets, and presentations. At the worst of it, there would be days when I didn't even have an ssh session open, which is not natural when you manage the UNIX team. When it was quieter, I could be very hands-on, and generally acted as the level three support guy. You end up with a weird skill set if you let that go too far, since you touch lots of weird problems and edge cases but never the simple stuff. Bare metal install on a new server? No idea how to do that. Get it up and running after a disastrous disk controller failure? Loads of experience.
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Feb 20, 2016 18:27
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Sounds like a hostile work environment to me!
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Mar 7, 2016 02:14
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RFC2324 posted:What's wrong with Solaris zones? They work fine but they're hell to manage in a widely distributed environment? We got in to zones a little too quick back in the day and found ourselves trying to schedule patching for a global zone and 7 local zones by finding a window where five different applications could absorb an outage at the same time. That was when we started looking much harder at LDOMs.
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Mar 26, 2016 15:31
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Vulture Culture posted:11.3 supports live migration, doesn't it? I thought that was for kernel zones, not old school local zones. Not that it matters, we went to being a primarily LDOM-based shop in 2014 and haven't looked back. We only have a handful of local zones left for situations when a 1-core LDOM is still just too much compute power for a purpose.
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Mar 26, 2016 18:44
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Is there anything out there that competes with Graphviz in the automatic diagramming space? We have a server inventory now that maps servers to applications. I have a spreadsheet that augments that with data about what function each server has within the application. In my head I can envision having a modest about of metadata stored somewhere to describe how data flows between functions, and then dumping it all out to create graphs showing application or multi-application architecture. I'm at a point where I want to build something small and demo it to try to gain some traction. I'm hoping there's something out there that works sort of like Graphviz but generates output that looks more like Visio.
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Jun 21, 2016 21:36
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MC Fruit Stripe posted:Shifting this thread back to its true purpose which is to gripe about poo poo, but oh my god do I hate requests that are not in an email or ticket. I dread logging on to Lync or opening Slack because they function as little more than a way for people to jump the line. Oh what's that, you noticed I was on Lync? Yes, that absolutely entitles you to interrupt the 7 other things I am working on right now, how may I best assist you in your efforts to remember your password? Preach. I don't have this problem as much anymore but when I was managing people it drove me nuts. We had a policy that boiled down to "open a ticket or you get no service" but my guys all hated to tell people no. We had a particular group of internal customers that hated tickets so much that they're try individually IMing everyone on my team, hoping someone would help them over IM, before they'd submit a ticket. Then I'd ask my guys how come their ticket metrics had taken a dive for a given week, and the answer would be "I can't get time to close tickets because I'm always getting interrupted by people on IM." I had to get pretty surly with a lot of people to make even a dent in the problem. It takes 30 seconds to open a ticket. Why would anyone want to spend two minutes hunting around in IM for someone who would ignore policy when it takes so little time to follow it?
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Nov 4, 2016 15:25
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Lord Dudeguy posted:Does anyone here work for an IT department that promises an uptime percentage to their company? We don't promise an uptime % but we track outage seat-minutes pretty carefully and upper management watch that metric like a hawk. Make sure you define uptime in terms of applications, not servers. I've actually had trouble explaining the difference to non-IT-savvy management sometimes and it's painful. "I'm not sure I understand what you are asking, but it sounds like this patching thing means downtime. I do not want to have any downtime, so you do not have my approval." Dude, you have 8 servers in a load-balanced pool, we want to patch one at a time, outside peak hours. Users will see no downtime.
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Dec 1, 2016 23:00
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Now I feel the need to invent a scheme based around 128-bit employee numbers, organized in a sparse namespace so that your id is also your exact spot in the corporate structure.
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Jun 24, 2017 04:10
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H110Hawk posted:Ah the joy of "Would you rather hear this Thursday when half the company can't work, or today when I've prevented this problem?" This syndrome irritates the hell out of me. When I was at Verizon, we had a released cancelled, and it irritated people so much than we spent the first ten minutes of our team meeting discussing it. That sounds like no big deal except that we were a UNIX sysadmin team and had no connection to the release - it had just been the subject of so much discussion that our director wanted to discuss it with us. About nine minutes in, I lost patience and said, "Why is this such a problem? We have testing, the testing found a problem, the release was cancelled. That's working as intended. If we did all that testing and never, ever found a problem, that would tell us that we had a poorly planned test cycle and were wasting time and resources on tests that never failed." The conversation petered out quickly after that. I would have thought it was a pretty obvious point.
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Aug 3, 2017 18:50
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Japanese Dating Sim posted:Having someone who is your junior on every measurable scale apart from time at the company might get awkward, but it definitely sounds like everything else more than makes up for it. Congrats on the pod. I worked for a while with a director who was ten years younger than his youngest direct report, and younger than all but a handful of the people in the entire org. He was also smart as hell, energetic, and a conscious student of the art of leadership. It was a pleasure working for him. Unfortunately he also brought a lot of guys with him from previous jobs and never seemed to notice that they were not students of the art of leadership, or even interested in being good leaders. They just expected that their relationship with the director would be enough to make people defer to them. The entire thing fell apart horribly when the director moved on.
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Aug 9, 2017 22:07
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Sickening posted:I didn't exactly care about free, just before I buy something again I wanted opinions for options. I have used visio for years for no other reason than that is what was available to me. Do any of the alternatives to visio have any way to generate shapes programatically? I desperately want something I can integrate with an MS SQL DB and say "run this query, create a square for every row returned, and label it with field 1 space field 2 newline field 3 x field 4".
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Aug 23, 2017 20:15
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Re: people leaving, I agree with the thread consensus that management should be chill and wish them well, but I make (made) an exception for people who don't stick for a reasonable amount of time. During my 13 years as a manager, the only time I ever complained about someone leaving was when someone came to my UNIX SA team out of the NOC, stayed barely long enough to get into our oncall rotation, and then quit. I told him straight up that I thought it was unfair to us, especially to the SA who had spend dozens of hours mentoring him, and that he should handle his job searches more carefully in the future. Unrelated question: how long does it usually take vendors to deliver quotes for you? I'm constantly astonished that it takes our current VAR days to turn around what seem like straightforward server quotes. If I can do something in ten minutes on Dell's retail web site, why does it take days to provide corporate pricing for the same thing?
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Aug 28, 2017 16:30
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I wish I hadn't missed all that. I work for a large company in a conservative industry and it's hilarious to see the range of approaches our developers take. We have everything from "this worked fine on the hardware it was on in 2003, and we haven't changed our software since then, so we sit in a fetal position and continue to blame all our woes on the mean IT people who made us look at virtualization, SAN storage, and OSes that aren't Solaris 8" (these people can bite me, except that I have to show them professional courtesy) to "we have a working prototype of our application on AWS and it relies on AWS tooling to work, but someone says we have to compare costs to an on-prem solution, so please tell us what you would charge to duplicate all of AWS' functionality in our DC (we can't tell you what it would cost to do something we can't do, so tell your mgrs you are doing the cloud right and must be allowed to do your job). We have teams that release several times a week and teams that are stuck in quarterly waterfall releases but think they're agile because they talk about sprints. To get to the original question that sparked all this, I love RHEL support. We hardly ever need it but when we call and say "we have a major outage, we need a RHEL kernel engineer on this conference line in 15 minutes," we get one, and whoever shows up tries to be helpful and doesn't make excuses. Of course, they are substantially aided by the fact that RHEL has been very stable for us and rarely has anything to do with the outage.
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Sep 13, 2017 20:25
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DigitalMocking posted:The only problem I have is that senior staff salaries tend to just die off. There's no raises beyond a static 2% year regardless of your performance review once you crest 6 figures. I'm between 30 - 80% underpaid in the current market (depending on the level of responsibilities in the jobs in question) and I'm really hoping the new HR team is going to unfuck some of this. There's evidence they are, some other folks have had reasonable near market adjustments. I've been told mine is in line for the new fiscal year starting October 1st. I'm in a similar boat but I'm in a much crappier body of water. I'm 100% remote (a few hours from the nearest corporate office) and I'm never going to get another significant raise around here, but the local pay scale is considerably lower. If I ever get RIFed, it's a long-rear end commute or a local job and a 40% reduction in salary for me. Not entirely unrelated question: I got real good at Perl scripting, then my job changed and I don't have occasion to do a lot of scripting anymore. What I do write, I have to hand off to some other support team, so I've mostly been writing in sh lately. I want to get comfortable with Python and Ruby so I can get my resume out of the 90s. Can anyone recommend good books on those languages for someone who's already got a decent background and doesn't need babby's first script?
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Sep 21, 2017 18:46
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Puppet has a module for using it as a framework to manage DSC settings, which seems... cute? I like the idea of leveraging DSC since it's there anyway, but I haven't wrapped my head around it.
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Oct 1, 2017 04:20
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I can't even wrap my head around people who have Puppet but want to circumvent it. If it was one of our operations people, that would let them in for a scolding. For anyone else. a sudden and startling change in their sudo privileges.
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Oct 2, 2017 05:28
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