Working in IT 2.0: Fixes include more constructive criticism

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Working in IT 2.0: Fixes include more constructive criticism

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adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

DGK2000 posted:

So I was recently hired by a company as an Information Systems Analyst. I am literally the only IT person in the company, and as such I travel the entire county supporting numerous sites. I get paid mileage and 17.50/hour. Does this seem right?

What size is the company?

# ¿ Aug 25, 2013 15:42

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# ¿ Apr 20, 2024 01:44

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Docjowles posted:

The terrible, non-standard titles in IT are definitely a pet peeve of mine. I see "Network Administrator" used as a synonym for System Administrator fairly often. Especially in small shops which is extra hilarious because the network consists of a Linksys router and maybe an unmanaged 100mbit switch. Not much to administrate there.

In some industries, the examiners refer only to network administers for everything. Our FDIC quesionnaire references it constantly. More or less, IT Director and Network Administrator are synonymous terms.

# ¿ Aug 27, 2013 00:37

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

DrAlexanderTobacco posted:

Meanwhile, we have 3 people on the helpdesk and we're at call #55, at 1230PM. Hnng.

so 18 calls each in ~4.5 hours. Doesn't seem awful for helpdesk. I expect my helpdesk techs to take roughly 20 tickets + 5-10 phone calls per day. Roughly half of those requests are password resets or other simple tasks which take less than 5 minutes. Half of the rest should be resolved in under 30 minutes, and the remainder are often harder tasks which can take longer or be escalated to a higher tier.

Obviously the specifics of your company could differ significantly from mine, so my anecdotal example is possibly (or probably) poo poo. Also from your description it sounds like your management sucks, and is incapable of (or just unwilling to) shielding you from interference in the triage process.

# ¿ Aug 28, 2013 01:13

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Dilbert As gently caress posted:

What do you guys look for in an ideal candidate in <name position>?

Curiousity. In all IT positions.

# ¿ Aug 29, 2013 01:02

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Alereon posted:

What do "real companies" (~1000+ employees) typically set their exchange mailbox quotas to? We use <500MB which seems pretty small for this day and age, especially since employees are directed to archive to their local harddrive.

We archive all mail and auto prune anything older than 730 days. There are no space quotas, since our business runs on paper, and therefore scanned images.

# ¿ Aug 30, 2013 00:38

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Paladine_PSoT posted:

Anyone have any tips for dealing with chronic interrupters during teleconferences?

e: other than

Thank them for getting you off a dumb conference call?

# ¿ Aug 30, 2013 23:22

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

skooma512 posted:

Is there any career path in IT that would allow a more work to live lifestyle or should I jump ship?

In general, the higher up you go, the more out of hours demands you will have to deal with. Some environments handle this way better, others less well. Each person on my team is on call once every 9 weeks, but that's just due to size. Even when I am not on call, I occasionally get escalations from the helpdesk when they are on call.

# ¿ Sep 2, 2013 21:28

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

three posted:

To avoid the above, find a company that separates engineering and operations. Operations (sysadmins) should get all calls unless things are OMG CATASTROPHIC in which case engineering should get involved.

My company is not large enough for this. And realistically, separating support and engineering to the point that engineers no longer solve problems is a great way to end up with lovely design, because who gives a poo poo if the person who designed it can just blame support for the issues with it.

# ¿ Sep 3, 2013 03:04

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Bob Morales posted:

since most of those emails have each gone to 15 different people.

Exchange is single instance storage per datastore. If you only have one mailbox datastore, an email is only stored once, regardless of the number of recipients.

# ¿ Sep 3, 2013 03:22

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

evil_bunnY posted:

But then you have to work for finance companies

I don't get the hate -- I work for a bank (granted, it's not a wall street bank, but still reasonably sized) and I love it. We don't outsource much at all, so I get to be very hands on with almost every technology in the business. We have shitloads of money, so we are never left wanting for the next tech, I am well compensated for my time, and we are busy enough that I am very rarely bored, and when I am it only lasts for a few days.

# ¿ Sep 8, 2013 05:39

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

GreenNight posted:

Someone mentioned AS400. We actually have 10 grand budgeted into a new AS400 server this coming year straight from an IBM reseller. Woo woo!

We've had a consultant around for the past six months upgrading our system/32 software to get it to integrate with Sharepoint.

AS/400 systems are actually pretty inexpensive. If you have an IBM bladecenter they make AS/400 blades that are only a few thousand bucks. Like everything else, the expense comes with licensing.

# ¿ Sep 11, 2013 03:50

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Cardboard Fox posted:

All I've been doing is lab work for the past couple of weeks and I've hit a stall when it comes to imaging. I just don't know what software is currently the best to learn. I have a server set up with WDS that I use to deploy images through PXE to other virtual machines. Yet, every time I do research on google, all I hear about is IT dudes using Ghost, Acronis, Clonezilla, and even some new thing called Project Fog. Should I just stick with WDS or am I better off trying to learn a third party software if there is a greater chance that I'll be using it?

We use WDS to deploy base images and SCCM to deploy software. It's pretty easy and I don't see us moving away from that.

# ¿ Sep 11, 2013 16:21

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

SubjectVerbObject posted:

I am not a programmer, so I am trying to figure out what skills could make me more well rounded. I am also concerned that I am not young, so taking a junior IT position may not be possible. Do folks have any insights on what would be the best route to take?

Cisco voice is probably going to be in demand at lots of large companies where you can go full time supporting just phones. The skills from Avaya may translate over to cisco, with a little bit of training.

# ¿ Sep 11, 2013 17:14

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Tab8715 posted:

What actually goes wrong when you don't keep all your cabling nice and neat?

Assholes unplug the wrong thing.

# ¿ Sep 11, 2013 20:21

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Sepist posted:

Small shops

Small shops tend to be understaffed, overworked and not very good for upward mobility. The exception would be startups, where getting in on the ground floor has the potential to lead to very lucrative mobility and money. Lone wolfs are more common in small shops where there is no money to pay the salary for teams of peers.

Enterprise

Typically in enterprise environments it will be silo�d job roles, where everyone does a specific task, rarely moving out of their comfort zone. Things move slower as red tape to approve work is thick, but not as bad as government. Work flow could go either quickly or slowly depending on the company and you will find yourself more involved in working as a group. Meetings for changes are common in enterprises, and sometimes meetings to discuss the meeting discussing changes. Change management is prevalent in enterprise, so that accountability can be recorded for auditing. In enterprise IT you're seen as a cost center that doesn't provide anything, profit wise, to the company - your budget will be awful so your technology is typically dated back several years. Enterprise is great for "lifers", those of us who just want to work their 9 - 5, collect a paycheck and go home.

Service Provider

Service providers are vast, often complex environments. These jobs are even more silo�d than the enterprise environment and you will find getting into one too early may pigeon-hole your career. I would only recommend service provider jobs when you are in a position to leverage your experience for great monetary gains or there are limited alternatives in your area. Starting out in a service provider call center and working your way up seems easily done as long as you have the raw talent and the desire to move ahead. Don�t be surprised if you don�t end up where you meant to go in the end due to being sidelined into a job role that was needing to be filled.

I have worked for all three in the past 6 years. I can promise you, if you like to work (like really like IT and don't mind not being able to gently caress around at work much), smaller business is great. The 500 employee level is where you actually get some good budget and are still able to touch everything you want. I am busy all day every day, and some nights, but I love my job, love what I do, and am getting great experience while being reasonably well compensated.

# ¿ Sep 13, 2013 01:57

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

we have a semi public wifi that is really just where many of the cube slaves on my campus stream their Pandora from. It was so slow this afternoon even my email synchronization timed out.

# ¿ Sep 19, 2013 00:27

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

I write up a full page synopsis of my accomplishments for the year and provide it to my management prior to my anniversary every year. Every year, my direct supervisor puts me in for a raise larger than the guidelines suggest is the maximum.

# ¿ Sep 27, 2013 01:35

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Methanar posted:

Does anyone have any guidance or advice for a 16 year old graduating high school at the end of June to get into a networking job.

I'm not making GBS threads on you here, at least not intentionally, but why would someone who is graduating high school at 16 (seemingly at least 1 year early) not going to college? I am the first one to poo poo on going to college for the sake of going to college, but if you are smart enough to graduate that early, you are probably smart enough to actually accomplish something in college.

From my perspective, I would have no problem hiring a 16 year old with a high school diploma, but would start them off the same place everyone else starts -- entry level helpdesk.

# ¿ Sep 28, 2013 00:08

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

IamJacksAlcoholism posted:

I need the help of all you IT Pros out there. Given the thread I'm posting in, that should be most, if not all, of you. <insert shameless pandering and flattery here>

I'm having a debate with a colleague about SQL Server installations. He believes that it is rare for a computer, physical or virtual, to have more than one installation of SQL Server on it. Meaning, he doesn't expect to run across production servers with both SQL Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2012, or some other combination of versions. That such a setup is so rare that it is an edge case we shouldn't even bother considering.

I say that, although certainly not the majority of the time, this situation exists in production environments enough (20+%)to warrant taking it into consideration when designing the report.

What say you oh powerful and mighty IT Goons!

I can't think of a single reason to run two different versions of SQL in the same OS, especially with the ease in which you can just spin up a second guest. If I came across a server which runs two different versions of SQL I would wonder what the gently caress the previous admin was thinking when they did that.

edit: I have been involved in 5 mergers with failed financial institutions in the past 4 years. These institutions were broke as hell, and none of them did anything like this.

# ¿ Sep 28, 2013 04:56

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Tab8715 posted:

I posted this in the wrong thread earlier but I'm about to become a IBM System I (as400) System Administrator.

The pay is very good but tell me what I am getting myself into? Yes, I'll have training through IBM.

I'm still confused what new enterprises use for "processing" things - isn't everyone that has an AS400 just stuck with it since the cost of moving onto something else is just so outrageous? What are the alternatives?

Lots of finance poo poo runs on the as400 series. It's reliable as hell.

# ¿ Oct 1, 2013 00:51

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

you guys are all dumb because my penis is big.

# ¿ Oct 4, 2013 03:20

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

PUBLIC TOILET posted:

Hey, let's see what a local consulting firm in my area is offering for IT employment opportunities!

Where exactly in New York? For purely hardware break/fix it might not be as far off as you think.

# ¿ Oct 7, 2013 23:29

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Misogynist posted:

You need a little more than a reframing of this discussion.

Can you fuckers acknowledge that this poo poo is stupid in GBS, and it's stupid here?

# ¿ Oct 15, 2013 04:09

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

wintermuteCF posted:

Honestly, it's just short-sighted to continue putting in 100mbps switches in 2013. Even if your existing desktop hardware doesn't have gigabit ports, they'll eventually get upgraded. Then you'll have nice shiny new desktops puttering along at 100mbps because some jackass wanted to save some money putting in poo poo switches.

I would disagree. I still put 10/100 switches in my branch offices. At most their WAN links are 100mbit and we don't have any branch servers. Paying for gigabit is pissing money away.

# ¿ Oct 22, 2013 23:58

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

1 team leader
2 server admins
1 network admin
5 helpdesk

700 end users
2 client companies

edit: 200 production servers, 50 out of production servers, and a bank in growth by acquisition mode.

# ¿ Oct 30, 2013 00:24

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Reiz posted:

I'd hope the CCNA is a decent start.

If you have a CCNA you are already ahead of 8 of the 9 people on my team (myself included). I am the team leader for a medium sized business, and if I was hiring a straight networking guy I would want someone who was not just Cisco oriented (which with little real world experience, you probably aren't), could at least tell me why they would choose OSPF or BGP over one another, knew something about QOS, packet loss, and latency, and who understood VLANs and the difference between an access port and a trunk port. Some voice knowledge would be good as well.

# ¿ Nov 5, 2013 06:07

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

lol internet. posted:

With the network being a critical piece of infrastructure, I feel it's not as easy as systems administration where you can test a solution on a separate system prior to doing it on the live. How did you deal with a piece of the network going down for the first time?

You need a lab to test things in. When I want to test some kind of routing change I will plug a few routers or spin up a few vyatta instances to play with first. It doesn't take long to do generally. Even with testing, eventually you are going to gently caress up and cause some kind of outage. Everyone does at some point. The trick is to minimize the impact.

1) go to your lab and test any change that you are not absolutely 100% sure about
2) if you can make the change out of normal business hours, do it
3) always schedule a reboot of the gear for 15 minutes from now immediately before you make a change. That way if you lose communication, it will reboot and back out the change

as for just getting better? lab, lab, and more lab.

# ¿ Nov 11, 2013 18:37

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

lol internet. posted:

Hmmm never heard of Vyatta. Does it emulate Cisco IOS? What sort of advantages does it have over GNS.

It's fully featured software router and firewall package based on Linux, quagga, iptables, and a slew of other open source products tied together in an easy to use cli management interface. We leverage the product heavily in our primary datacenter, and now run a number of Ubiquity Networks EdgeRouters (based on Vyatta, stole a bunch of the devs) in our branch offices. Most features you can find in Cisco products can be found in vyatta, though there are some that haven't made it in yet (dmvpn and VRF come to mind).

# ¿ Nov 11, 2013 21:10

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Being in Central Illinois working for a business with branch offices sucks today. Of my ~60 branches, about 10 are completely down, and 30 are running on backup VPN links. I plan to have some irritated users in the morning.

# ¿ Nov 18, 2013 01:34

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

I would consider field tech to be on par with level 2 helpdesk, and I do believe 8-12 months is not an unreasonable amount of time to wait to make that jump. Like docjowles implied, titles are garbage and vary too much, so this could be way off.

# ¿ Nov 18, 2013 06:11

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Alfajor posted:

Anyone ever opened a ticket with Oracle support?
My vendor has an issue with their database locking up, and they told me over a month ago that they had to escalate to Oracle because their own DBA couldn't fix it. There have been zero news on that issue, and I'm wondering if it's because they never actually opened a ticket, or if Oracle is usually slow to respond.
Unfortunately, I have to go through the vendor, and I cannot contact Oracle directly

I get a response in like 30 minutes normally. It has on occasion just been a note to say they got my ticket and will begin working on it in XX hours.

# ¿ Nov 19, 2013 01:12

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

evol262 posted:

Who'd handle it if you weren't there? Tell them to do it.

That's why they pay him. So he can handle this kind of poo poo.

But they really should have given you more notice for a presumably planned upgrade.

# ¿ Nov 24, 2013 06:48

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Docjowles posted:

Good luck finding a sysadmin job posting that doesn't require proficiency in at least one scripting language.

Scripting and software development are pretty far apart. There is common ground in that you provide structured commands in a language the computer understands, but it diverges pretty spectacularly after that.

1) no one ever looks at my scripts but myself
2) therefore it is often completely unintelligible by the time I am done with it
3) my scripts perform small tasks

the "code" that I write more often than not does not need to be well written, it does not need to interact with code other people have written (beyond following the rules of the language and OS), and I never write anything that could possibly take more than a few hours to bang out. Most of the time my scripts are 3-10 lines, occasionally touching 100 in a worst case scenario (and I admit a real programmer could probably write my 100 line script in 10 lines of actual code). I don't have to adhere to best standards.

A good programmer writes code that can be maintained long after his departure, at the expense of extra time. A good sysadmin quickly hacks together a script that turns a 100 hour project into a 30 minute one so he can move onto the next important task and continue making efficient use of his time.

# ¿ Nov 28, 2013 02:48

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Misogynist posted:

I'm not sure what kind of paperwork you need to go through in terms of change control, but in a normal environment this is a pretty awful way to team-build, hire, or basically do anything at all.

Keeping an eye on the new guy in his first few weeks is a bad thing? I'm pretty sure the "watch over his shoulder" was not a literal statement.

# ¿ Dec 5, 2013 02:10

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Dr. Arbitrary posted:

As someone who is really new to IT, I was really excited when I realized that I do know the difference between those two protocols!

I will say it is more important to know why you would use one over the other than to "know the difference" between them. The easy answer is interior vs exterior, but there are cases where you will want to (or have to) use BGP internally.

# ¿ Dec 6, 2013 03:27

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Tab8715 posted:

What kind of salary range should one be looking at with VCP5/MCSE and lets say a few years of experience included.

location dependent.

# ¿ Dec 8, 2013 16:53

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Pantology posted:

You're going to end up siloed and bored working in internal IT. Vendor or VAR is the way to go, especially while you're young.

I don't think that is necessarily true. In a very large enterprise it might be, but on a daily basis I touch Cisco, Procurve, VMware, Windows, Linux, Storage, and a multitude of other things.

# ¿ Dec 12, 2013 00:54

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Dick Trauma posted:

It's still small (<200) and I asked because we don't have an education reimbursement program. I buy stuff on my own but wanted to put it out there just to be safe.

The Director title matches up with my responsibilities, especially because they want me to manage two other I.T. Managers at other sites.

With less than 200 people they have at least 4 members of management for IT (you, two subordinates, and your boss)?

I hope you are an IT company, otherwise it sounds like (three) too many chiefs to me.

# ¿ Dec 14, 2013 06:33

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Hawzy posted:

Does anyone have experience re-negotiating salaries as a contractor? I'm trying to figure out what a fair cut the contracting company should take. Currently I'm making $39/hr and my position is contracted out at $60. So the contracting company is making $21 for every hour I work - which seems ridiculous to me. Also for this position there are absolutely no benefits to add in except for like 7 paid holidays a year when the office is closed (x-mas etc)

Add 7.5% to your cost for SS taxes and another 2.7% for your paid holidays. Your salary cost to your employer with no benefits beyond that is $43/hr, bringing their profit to $17/hr or $35k per year. Now consider that they have to pay a payroll person, human resources, a manager, and unemployment taxes on you. They originally probably had to "sell" the position so there is a salesman in there too. With all of these extra costs their profit margin is probably substantially less than you think.

Moey posted:

I don't have a real demanding environment so I am able to easily get away with 2x10GbE running host management, iSCSI and front end traffic. I then have 2x1GbE for vMotion, then one last 1GbE for iLO/iDRAC.

We run 2x 10GBe for VM traffic, storage traffic, and vmotion traffic and 2x 1GBe for management. We have Cisco UCS so our ilo is on a vnic and doesn't need it's own cable. Once you put your vmotion on 10GBe you'll never go back.

H.R. Paperstacks posted:

Obviously they are not since the company is not not multihomed via different vendors with diverse paths.

It's always great to see people scream how important internet access is when it is down, but when you put the quote in front of them for diversity and redundancy it suddenly becomes less important. "You want me to pay how much for something to sit there idle 'just incase'?! You are out of your mind!"

I am going to be honest and say that a 40 branch bank isn't all that big, and it's not surprising that they do not have redundant internet links. We have 60 branches and are just now implementing redundant internet feeds into our main datacenter.

adorai fucked around with this message at 00:59 on Dec 18, 2013

# ¿ Dec 18, 2013 00:56

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# ¿ Apr 20, 2024 01:44

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Inspector_666 posted:

Yeah, but is it a total faux pas to to ask them to double their raise offer?

I asked for my last raise to be changed from $2500/year to $5000/year and got it. I made sure I had details of why I thought it was appropriate and my boss agreed. They gave me 6% when I was promoted to team leader and I thought it should have been 10%, so at my annual I asked them to double the cost of living adjustment to make up for it. I came out about 1% lower than I think I should have but I wasn't going to split hairs at that point.

# ¿ Dec 19, 2013 01:51

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Working in IT 2.0: Fixes include more constructive criticism

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