IT Careers: If you had it to do over again.

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Begall: Jul 28, 2008

Has anyone worked for CGI in the UK? Any thoughts, good/bad?

# ? Oct 10, 2016 22:30

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# ? Apr 25, 2024 23:27

TheShrike: Oct 30, 2010; You mechs may have copper wiring to re-route your fear of pain, but I've got nerves of steel.

When I think CGI I think IT body shop- so if that's what you want it's fine. Def low tier firm though.

# ? Oct 11, 2016 08:15

Pryor on Fire: May 14, 2013; they don't know all alien abduction experiences can be explained by people thinking saving private ryan was a documentary

If you want to survive 30 years starting from today in IT you're probably a bit naive. Study machine learning and pray I guess?

# ? Oct 11, 2016 14:25

TheShrike: Oct 30, 2010; You mechs may have copper wiring to re-route your fear of pain, but I've got nerves of steel.

Pryor on Fire posted:

If you want to survive 30 years starting from today in IT you're probably a bit naive. Study machine learning and pray I guess?

Nah, IT is going to survive unless someone finds a way to automate all operations of a company within 30 years. Not going to happen.

# ? Oct 11, 2016 15:14

necrobobsledder: Mar 21, 2005; Lay down your soul to the gods rock 'n roll; Nap Ghost

The problem isn't about whether it'll exist as much as whether there will be enough jobs to be relevant for the bulk of engineers. Not many jobs worth getting doing COBOL and keeping AS/400s running because they're directly in mature, commoditized (read: competes upon cost primarily) systems rather than upon revenue growth or innovation in some manner. There's a lot of American manufacturing and coal mining jobs still technically, but try telling that to the millions that lost their jobs in these businesses in the past 30 years.

I think the biggest impact upon tech jobs won't be so much about machine learning / AI as much as companies standardizing upon platforms leading to consolidation instead of competition and innovation. If everyone in the F500 is on Kubernetes and AWS or GCE for 95% of their servers, for example, that destroys or suppresses jobs at most hosting vendors and reduces opportunities for disruption by entrepreneurs or even open source contributors. Most companies couldn't give a rat's rear end how you deploy a web application as long as you're doing it cheap enough and it's not breaking compliance, and AWS is quickly becoming the new IBM mainframe standard. Big companies might be slow to change, but once they've gotten into a rhythm to make anything cheaper, sustainable, and more effective, they'll shed jobs left and right to eliminate bureaucracy and redundancy after the bake sales are over.

Begall posted:

Has anyone worked for CGI in the UK? Any thoughts, good/bad?

I don't think CGI's distinctively worse or better than most IT body shops in the world, but they've been in some unfortunate political situations recently that makes me question leadership. CGI in the US and Canada was who was one of the major contractors for the first roll-out of the ambitious, politically charged US healthcare.gov site that was disastrous. CGI in Australia bought out a company (ServiceMesh) whose CEO seems to have technically bribed government officials into picking the software (although he says they were owed that money for their assistance and that it wasn't related to their position... sure....) and it's become a $1Bn+ write-down I believe as well as lawsuits flying left and right.

With that said, my personal interactions with engineers in CGI Federal have been probably in the top 10 percentile of contractors in the space, but that's not a resounding endorsement either.

If you just need a job to tide you over while you work on something more important, I can't say CGI or going to a body farm is a bad idea, but if you're ambitious you should be concerned about your perception to those that have doubts someone talented would ever think about working at such a place.

# ? Oct 11, 2016 16:21

Begall: Jul 28, 2008

Thanks for the feedback - from the position of someone who currently works for an analyst for a small, single product software firm, what would be considered a higher tier of company? Even if they have not got the greatest reputation, I suspect that CGI would still look better on my CV compared to a largely unknown company.

# ? Oct 13, 2016 07:26

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

Begall posted:

Thanks for the feedback - from the position of someone who currently works for an analyst for a small, single product software firm, what would be considered a higher tier of company? Even if they have not got the greatest reputation, I suspect that CGI would still look better on my CV compared to a largely unknown company.

There are prestige companies with very strict hiring standards like Facebook and Google, and then there's everybody else. Name recognition isn't worth a thing if the hiring manager doesn't think, "they must be really smart to work there."

# ? Oct 13, 2016 15:53

Xguard86: Nov 22, 2004; "You don't understand his pain. Everywhere he goes he sees women working, wearing pants, speaking in gatherings, voting. Surely they will burn in the white hot flames of Hell"

Vulture Culture posted:

There are prestige companies with very strict hiring standards like Facebook and Google, and then there's everybody else. Name recognition isn't worth a thing if the hiring manager doesn't think, "they must be really smart to work there."

It can be detrimental having a well-known body shop versus a generic small company. Plenty of people consciously choose to work in smaller businesses but I don't think I have ever heard of anyone working for a big outsourcing firm because they want to be there.

# ? Oct 13, 2016 19:14

necrobobsledder: Mar 21, 2005; Lay down your soul to the gods rock 'n roll; Nap Ghost

Also, if someone doesn't know they're working at a body shop, that usually means they don't know anything about their business, which is usually not a good sign.

# ? Oct 13, 2016 20:09

Gucci Loafers: May 20, 2006; Ask yourself, do you really want to talk to pair of really nice gaudy shoes?

Vulture Culture posted:

There are prestige companies with very strict hiring standards like Facebook and Google, and then there's everybody else. Name recognition isn't worth a thing if the hiring manager doesn't think, "they must be really smart to work there."

What are some of strict standards at Google and Facebook?

# ? Oct 14, 2016 00:07

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

Tab8715 posted:

What are some of strict standards at Google and Facebook?

Google goes sort of in depth in the O'Reilly SRE book they released earlier this year. The base skillset for a Google SRE is a software engineering competency that would 80-90% qualify someone for a Google development job on its own, plus a number of Unix/operations skills that are generally tough to find in the broader pool of developers. No more than 50% of anyone's time at Google is permitted to be spent on operations tasks, so nobody falls into an incident response role. Everyone has to be able to carry the weight of real engineering work at very large scale. When we joke sometimes about DevOps positions being someone doing two jobs for one salary, that's basically how Google runs things, with comp to match.

Facebook is a lot of the same, based on what I've heard, but I haven't dredged up any sources recently.

# ? Oct 14, 2016 02:17

Liquid Communism: Mar 9, 2004; Out here, everything hurts.

Tab8715 posted:

What are some of strict standards at Google and Facebook?

In Google's case, start off with a hiring process intentionally designed to weed out a ton of people with the view that it's better to drop hundreds of candidates for false negatives than hire a single person who doesn't work out.

# ? Oct 14, 2016 12:22

Gucci Loafers: May 20, 2006; Ask yourself, do you really want to talk to pair of really nice gaudy shoes?

Let's say I'm totally insane and would like to take my career in the direction of an SRE at Google, Facebook, Apple, etc. but I didn't graduate from an Ivy League School, I can't program beyond a hundred lines but I've been doing SysAdmin things for years - what should I do?

# ? Oct 16, 2016 20:00

necrobobsledder: Mar 21, 2005; Lay down your soul to the gods rock 'n roll; Nap Ghost

You'll need to get a lot stronger at coding and algorithms. Practice on Project Euler puzzles in languages like Go, Python, or Ruby (top languages for most tools and platforms in that ecosystem). Should be good to go in a couple years of practice, tops if you've been pretty good as a sysadmin and already been coding a lot of automation in at least Bash scripts.

# ? Oct 16, 2016 22:21

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

A hundred lines might be enough in the age of microservices. :haw:

# ? Oct 17, 2016 00:55

Gucci Loafers: May 20, 2006; Ask yourself, do you really want to talk to pair of really nice gaudy shoes?

necrobobsledder posted:

You'll need to get a lot stronger at coding and algorithms. Practice on Project Euler puzzles in languages like Go, Python, or Ruby (top languages for most tools and platforms in that ecosystem). Should be good to go in a couple years of practice, tops if you've been pretty good as a sysadmin and already been coding a lot of automation in at least Bash scripts.

I'm starting to dabble around with Python - seems like a straightforward enough language - and it's going well but I think I am going to be lacking in the academic area. Does anyone have a list of all the course work from an Ivy League school or the books from the main courses?

# ? Oct 17, 2016 02:18

necrobobsledder: Mar 21, 2005; Lay down your soul to the gods rock 'n roll; Nap Ghost

You mean data structures and algorithms? Learn discrete structures and algorithms including modular arithmetic is a good start. If you pick up the CLRS book that everyone covers maybe some excerpts of but not the whole dang text, you should be good. Hell, there's some stuff on Coursera I'm pretty sure that could fill in some gaps on theory.

Also, here's a guy that got rejected from Google that wrote about his phone screen questions and they sound like questions that SREs should be able to answer. Outside school environments, these things come up if you're had to dig through lots of source code, have run a crapton of tcpdump or wireshark commands, and done a number of programming puzzles that most sysadmins will just never do unless you've been a programmer before being a sysadmin / network admin. Don't read on past the questions & answers if you don't want to get distracted by non-technical crap.

# ? Oct 17, 2016 03:44

Xguard86: Nov 22, 2004; "You don't understand his pain. Everywhere he goes he sees women working, wearing pants, speaking in gatherings, voting. Surely they will burn in the white hot flames of Hell"

Vulture Culture posted:

A hundred lines might be enough in the age of microservices.

Import library work;

Do.work(mywork);

# ? Oct 17, 2016 20:28

necrobobsledder: Mar 21, 2005; Lay down your soul to the gods rock 'n roll; Nap Ghost

In the year 3000, we will reach a global deadlock after we realize that nobody knows how to code anything anymore besides how to send a message to a queue for someone else to go do the work we were supposed to do.

# ? Oct 17, 2016 20:36

Xguard86: Nov 22, 2004; "You don't understand his pain. Everywhere he goes he sees women working, wearing pants, speaking in gatherings, voting. Surely they will burn in the white hot flames of Hell"

necrobobsledder posted:

In the year 3000, we will reach a global deadlock after we realize that nobody knows how to code anything anymore besides how to send a message to a queue for someone else to go do the work we were supposed to do.

This is actually true for at least a couple very large enterprises.

Poor knowledge sharing/engineering practices + short sighted outsourcing and the march of time = business critical black boxes no one is allowed to touch but everyone consumes.

Even the supposed owners of the system only know how to connect to the box and translate outputs. It's like you get the village shaman to go talk to the F-ing god of pricing and returning with this month's output.

# ? Oct 17, 2016 21:45

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# ? Apr 25, 2024 23:27

Beef Of Ages: Jan 11, 2003; Your dumb is leaking.

Xguard86 posted:

This is actually true for at least a couple very large enterprises.

Poor knowledge sharing/engineering practices + short sighted outsourcing and the march of time = business critical black boxes no one is allowed to touch but everyone consumes.

Even the supposed owners of the system only know how to connect to the box and translate outputs. It's like you get the village shaman to go talk to the F-ing god of pricing and returning with this month's output.

Stop talking about my life. :stare:

# ? Oct 22, 2016 19:42

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Business, Finance, and Careers > IT Careers: If you had it to do over again.

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