Working in IT 3.0: xp_cmdshell

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

Thanks Ants: May 21, 2004; #essereFerrari

I think you need to have a defined path that issues get escalated through. If people assigned to points on that path aren't pulling their weight then you need to address that problem. I can't see how having everyone scrambling to fix an issue won't result in people treading on each others toes.

You wouldn't start paging the entire IT department at 3am if the on-call guy had a habit of ignoring high priority issues.

Edit: I can see the merit in letting people outside the team that are tasked with dealing with the issue know that there's an outage, but this needs to be something reasonably non-disruptive, like changing the status on plasma screen or a Slack notification or something low key.

Thanks Ants fucked around with this message at 23:12 on Jun 20, 2015

# ? Jun 20, 2015 23:09

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# ? Apr 27, 2024 11:54

OhDearGodNo: Jan 3, 2014

One of the few things I like about working for the DoD.. don't have to deal with any H1B poo poo.

OhDearGodNo fucked around with this message at 23:16 on Jun 20, 2015

# ? Jun 20, 2015 23:13

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

Vulture Culture posted:

Kind of the whole point of NoSQL is that it's as dumb as possible, because you need to do things with your data model that are very tightly coupled to your application's data access patterns in order to scale out. Most NoSQL solutions are fairly uncomplicated by design, and certainly much less sophisticated than an enterprise RDBMS like Oracle. Then there's MongoDB, and gently caress MongoDB.

That said, there's people here who understand the underlying concepts of Dynamo, etc. pretty well if you have questions.

My employer is freaking out trying to find NoSQL :airquote:

experts

and my team is sort-of being pushed into Hadoop / Storm. Looking into those two products this doesn't seem to be something I'm going to be able to become an expert at in my free time or watching YouTube videos.

# ? Jun 20, 2015 23:15

Sickening: Jul 16, 2007; Black summer was the best summer.

Vulture Culture posted:

My point was less about H-1Bs in general (yes, Americans routinely lose jobs to underpaid foreign workers; yes, 50%+ of H-1Bs are awarded to employees of outsourcing companies) and more about the fact that if your focus is the H-1Bs themselves and not the complete lack of worker protections in this country, you're a hypocritical moron.

I am hard pressed to find someone that isn't concerned about both. :iiam:

# ? Jun 21, 2015 00:23

eonwe: Aug 11, 2008; Lipstick Apathy

Sickening posted:

I am hard pressed to find someone that isn't concerned about both.

Yeah, who here concerned about H1B abuse isn't also concerned about lack of worker protections lmao

# ? Jun 21, 2015 00:48

AreWeDrunkYet: Jul 8, 2006

Eonwe posted:

Yeah, who here concerned about H1B abuse isn't also concerned about lack of worker protections lmao

I believe he's saying not to focus on the H1B workers themselves (who among us wouldn't do the same thing coming from a low-income country?), but rather the companies that abuse the H1B system. Same way the problem isn't illegal immigrants who are trying to feed their families, but the companies and farmers that are looking the other way to save a few bucks on labor costs.

There's an unfortunate amount of :argh:

Indians

in IT, when they're being exploited as much as anyone.

e: That, and if there was solid union backing and other worker protections in place, skilled immigration would be less of a concern for individual workers and a net good for the economy.

AreWeDrunkYet fucked around with this message at 00:59 on Jun 21, 2015

# ? Jun 21, 2015 00:54

Sickening: Jul 16, 2007; Black summer was the best summer.

AreWeDrunkYet posted:

I believe he's saying not to focus on the H1B workers themselves (who among us wouldn't do the same thing coming from a low-income country?), but rather the companies that abuse the H1B system. Same way the problem isn't illegal immigrants who are trying to feed their families, but the companies and farmers that are looking the other way to save a few bucks on labor costs.

There's an unfortunate amount of Indians in IT, when they're being exploited as much as anyone.

e: That, and if there was solid union backing and other worker protections in place, skilled immigration would be less of a concern for individual workers and a net good for the economy.
[/

[quote="AreWeDrunkYet" post="446834643"]
I believe he's saying not to focus on the H1B workers themselves (who among us wouldn't do the same thing coming from a low-income country?), but rather the companies that abuse the H1B system. Same way the problem isn't illegal immigrants who are trying to feed their families, but the companies and farmers that are looking the other way to save a few bucks on labor costs.

There's an unfortunate amount of Indians in IT, when they're being exploited as much as anyone.

e: That, and if there was solid union backing and other worker protections in place, skilled immigration would be less of a concern for individual workers and a net good for the economy.

Also

. Please point out someone blaming the h1 workers themselves.

# ? Jun 21, 2015 01:26

eonwe: Aug 11, 2008; Lipstick Apathy

AreWeDrunkYet posted:

I believe he's saying not to focus on the H1B workers themselves (who among us wouldn't do the same thing coming from a low-income country?), but rather the companies that abuse the H1B system. Same way the problem isn't illegal immigrants who are trying to feed their families, but the companies and farmers that are looking the other way to save a few bucks on labor costs.

There's an unfortunate amount of Indians in IT, when they're being exploited as much as anyone.

e: That, and if there was solid union backing and other worker protections in place, skilled immigration would be less of a concern for individual workers and a net good for the economy.

if someone is mad at an Indian person for trying to better their life with a decent paying job then they are pretty terrible people imho

i think evol seems to think I'm :freep:

my jobs

but it couldnt be further from the truth, if anything i am for a much more open way for people to come and live in America coupled with better worker protections for those working a job trying to support their families

i dont get why this has to be a "if you dont love h1bs you are a xenophobic racist"

eonwe fucked around with this message at 01:51 on Jun 21, 2015

# ? Jun 21, 2015 01:48

NZAmoeba: Feb 14, 2005; It turns out it's MAN!; Hair Elf

Tab8715 posted:

If there's an issue with whatever why should I care or be involved if it's nothing that falls into my teams technical expertise?

Granted, if it's fine if you want to help but sometimes having more people look into an issue doesn't mean it gets fixed faster. If I'm busy putting out fires I do not need other teams looking over my shoulder.

Because I find "Not my problem" to be a toxic way of thinking about things. And if you spot a problem that you know the resolution falls outside of your expertise to fix, do you not at least have a duty to make sure the people who do have that expertise are notified as quickly as possible?

Thanks Ants posted:

I think you need to have a defined path that issues get escalated through. If people assigned to points on that path aren't pulling their weight then you need to address that problem. I can't see how having everyone scrambling to fix an issue won't result in people treading on each others toes.

You wouldn't start paging the entire IT department at 3am if the on-call guy had a habit of ignoring high priority issues.

Edit: I can see the merit in letting people outside the team that are tasked with dealing with the issue know that there's an outage, but this needs to be something reasonably non-disruptive, like changing the status on plasma screen or a Slack notification or something low key.

You don't page the whole team at 3am, but I feel something that happens during business hours can with dealt with differently. I don't care which DBA I get, I just need one who happens to be sitting in front of a computer right now. If I specifically went to whoever was on call, they could be out getting lunch at the time, or in a meeting on a different floor to their laptop, or having a poo poo. Plenty of legitimate reasons for them to not necessarily being the best person right at that very moment when you have a whole pool of available people.

# ? Jun 21, 2015 01:50

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

NZAmoeba posted:

Because I find "Not my problem" to be a toxic way of thinking about things. And if you spot a problem that you know the resolution falls outside of your expertise to fix, do you not at least have a duty to make sure the people who do have that expertise are notified as quickly as possible?

I'll do my best to help but at the same time I'm not a human pager either.

# ? Jun 21, 2015 02:15

Mrit: Sep 26, 2007; by exmarx; Grimey Drawer

Gonna be vague here, but a position has opened up in my company that would be better in many ways, and offer me more of a challenge than my current position(though it would only be a minor pay increase and that section of the company is in flux, it would be more focused on working with servers and not endusers).
However, my company is insane and requires me to ask permission from my manager before we can apply for an internal position, in department or outside of dept. :iiam:

I sent my boss an email asking if he minded if I took a look at the position and... silence. I tried bringing it up and he gave me an odd look and changed the subject.

How does someone approach this? Just... push the issue? I try to be tactful at work, which has helped over the years, and I really don't want to burn any bridges(especially since in most cases, my current boss is an awesome guy). Oh, and keep in mind my bosses' boss is an rear end in a top hat who will undoubtedly attempt to block my transfer.

Mrit fucked around with this message at 04:42 on Jun 21, 2015

# ? Jun 21, 2015 04:40

Dr. Arbitrary: Mar 15, 2006; Bleak Gremlin

I feel like I'm tactful, so here's what I'd write:

Dear Boss,

I mentioned that I'm interested in the X position over in the Y department last week and I haven't heard back from you. I'm starting to try and make plans for this and I'd really like to have your blessings and support.
If you'd like, maybe we can take 15 minutes to talk about this on Thursday at 2.

Now, if you want to take the pressure up a notch, add this:

I intend to start making plans by Friday, I'd like to hear back from you before then unless you're ambivalent about the issue.

Thanks,
Arbitrary

# ? Jun 21, 2015 07:40

evol262: Nov 30, 2010; #!/usr/bin/perl

AreWeDrunkYet posted:

Which, again, would self-evidently depress domestic wages. $60k is low-wage scabbing for non-entry level IT folks.

Which is market forces. We are, as an industry, absurdly overpaid. Few other careers net you 6 figures with 7-8 years of experience and no degree. Few careers expect regular 10-30% jumps in salary every 18 months when you switch jobs until you hit that $100k+ market cap. I enjoy this. But maybe it's because there's a skill shortage that expanding the labor pool (via h1bs or whatever) alleviates. You see it as scabbing. It might be normalization.

Eonwe posted:

i think evol seems to think I'm my jobs but it couldnt be further from the truth, if anything i am for a much more open way for people to come and live in America coupled with better worker protections for those working a job trying to support their families

i dont get why this has to be a "if you dont love h1bs you are a xenophobic racist"

I don't think that. I think this is a normal market adjustment. I think that I'd rather equalize pay between professions than rage at how they're cutting down IT wages. I wish Disney were doing this so they could pay other workers more. They're not, I'm sure.

But "don't love h1bs ->racist" isn't right. "muh jobs/wages -> racist" is a bit.

# ? Jun 21, 2015 08:41

skooma512: Feb 8, 2012; You couldn't grok my race car, but you dug the roadside blur.

Eonwe posted:

Also I'm not against H1Bs themselves but it needs a huge loving overhaul, but that probably means I'm 'xenophobic'

Americans are having trouble finding gainful employment in their chosen fields after racking up lots of college debt. There's no good reason to increase the labor supply unless you specifically want to drive down wages. It's irresponsible and the plutocratic overtones are plain to see and the program should be halted. I don't really care what that position labels me as.

evol262 posted:

Which is market forces. We are, as an industry, absurdly overpaid. Few other careers net you 6 figures with 7-8 years of experience and no degree. Few careers expect regular 10-30% jumps in salary every 18 months when you switch jobs until you hit that $100k+ market cap. I enjoy this. But maybe it's because there's a skill shortage that expanding the labor pool (via h1bs or whatever) alleviates. You see it as scabbing. It might be normalization.

That seems pretty outdated. Not everyone works for Google and Apple. I work for [a major brand name] providing IT services and we get pretty average pay, almost no annual raises, 10% maximum (usually much less) raises on promotion. Not needing a degree is on the way out, and that's not even getting into why every middle class job needs to have college as a gatekeeper.

I think we as a society need to stop asking "why do these people get paid so much?" and start asking "why do most people get paid so little?". Income inequality is a big deal, but why don't start we with people who don't even really work for a living and people who simply game financial markets all day?

# ? Jun 21, 2015 09:03

evol262: Nov 30, 2010; #!/usr/bin/perl

skooma512 posted:

Americans are having trouble finding gainful employment in their chosen fields after racking up lots of college debt. There's no good reason to increase the labor supply unless you specifically want to drive down wages. It's irresponsible and the plutocratic overtones are plain to see and the program should be halted. I don't really care what that position labels me as.

The h1b program is explicitly intended for specialized workers with degrees. They're required to pay market wages as well as significant fees, and potentially more. You can think it's "plutocratic", but there are few advantages and many disadvantages to using temporary visa workers.

skooma512 posted:

That seems pretty outdated. Not everyone works for Google and Apple. I work for [a major brand name] providing IT services and we get pretty average pay, almost no annual raises, 10% maximum (usually much less) raises on promotion. Not needing a degree is on the way out, and that's not even getting into why every middle class job needs to have college as a gatekeeper.

Google and Apple like degrees. But your definition of "pretty average pay" is probably pretty far outside of what people in other fields with similar education levels and experience make. IT pays very well. We don't need to deny that. But, as skills become commoditized, should it?

You're grossly underestimating the gate

skooma512 posted:

keeper effect.

I think we as a society need to stop asking "why do these people get paid so much?" and start asking "why do most people get paid so little?". Income inequality is a big deal, but why don't start we with people who don't even really work for a living and people who simply game financial markets all day?

I agree. Which is why I think IT is overpaid

# ? Jun 21, 2015 09:47

lampey: Mar 27, 2012

evol262 posted:

Which is market forces. We are, as an industry, absurdly overpaid. Few other careers net you 6 figures with 7-8 years of experience and no degree. Few careers expect regular 10-30% jumps in salary every 18 months when you switch jobs until you hit that $100k+ market cap. I enjoy this. But maybe it's because there's a skill shortage that expanding the labor pool (via h1bs or whatever) alleviates. You see it as scabbing. It might be normalization.

I don't think that. I think this is a normal market adjustment. I think that I'd rather equalize pay between professions than rage at how they're cutting down IT wages. I wish Disney were doing this so they could pay other workers more. They're not, I'm sure.

But "don't love h1bs ->racist" isn't right. "muh jobs/wages -> racist" is a bit.

It is about the value you bring to a company, and what the next best alternative is. The reason these wages are what they are is because it saves money or creates value for the employer. There will always be niche industries that will be affected by commoditization, but there are new industries springing up just as fast.

# ? Jun 21, 2015 10:59

Daylen Drazzi: Mar 10, 2007; Why do I root for Notre Dame? Because I like pain, and disappointment, and anguish. Notre Dame Football has destroyed more dreams than the Irish Potato Famine, and that is the kind of suffering I can get behind.

So, derailing the H1B talk for a moment...

I have final confirmation on the virtualization position I'm moving into tomorrow morning (well, technically it's in a couple days, but tomorrow morning is my last day on 3rd shift weekends, so close enough). It was initially going to be considered a horizontal move, but I submitted that the position's requirement for specialized experience made it something of a vertical move and requested a pay increase of about $6,300. They came back and gave me just a little under $5,000 after the PM went to the bat for me. Slowly but surely I'm closing in on that magical six figures. I'm making double what I was earning 4 years ago, so give me a couple more years with time to gain even more experience and get a few more certs under my belt, and I'll have finally made it to the promised land.

Okay, back to H1B visas.

# ? Jun 21, 2015 14:45

AreWeDrunkYet: Jul 8, 2006

evol262 posted:

Which is market forces. We are, as an industry, absurdly overpaid. Few other careers net you 6 figures with 7-8 years of experience and no degree. Few careers expect regular 10-30% jumps in salary every 18 months when you switch jobs until you hit that $100k+ market cap. I enjoy this. But maybe it's because there's a skill shortage that expanding the labor pool (via h1bs or whatever) alleviates. You see it as scabbing. It might be normalization.

Or to look at it another way, IT is one of the few fields where workers are able to capture some semblance of the value they generate for a company due to scarcity. Even then that's probably not true if you look at the margins of technology firms - most of your value is still being pocketed by share/debt holders - but at least it's an improvement over most industries.

It's the crab in a bucket mentality that would have you tearing down some workers to bring them down to the level of others. The better question is, how do we improve other industries so that they can look more like IT? It can't last even in IT since the current situation is likely more of a result of a temporary shortage of labor due to evolving technology than anything fundamental to the industry, the change has to come from organization of workers and regulation that prevents companies from undermining that. Otherwise, IT workers are going to end up like the folks in more mature industries, struggling to keep up and seeing wages stagnate for decades while the owners of those companies pocket the fruits of their labor.

# ? Jun 21, 2015 14:48

evol262: Nov 30, 2010; #!/usr/bin/perl

lampey posted:

It is about the value you bring to a company, and what the next best alternative is. The reason these wages are what they are is because it saves money or creates value for the employer. There will always be niche industries that will be affected by commoditization, but there are new industries springing up just as fast.

This is just a blasé way to say market forces.

Daylen Drazzi posted:

Congrats! Sounds like everything worked out just right.

AreWeDrunkYet posted:

Or to look at it another way, IT is one of the few fields where workers are able to capture some semblance of the value they generate for a company due to scarcity. Even then that's probably not true if you look at the margins of technology firms - most of your value is still being pocketed by share/debt holders - but at least it's an improvement over most industries.

I can look at it that way, but I won't. Wages are high because of the scarcity of specialized workers. As an effect of that, wages tend to be higher. But it isn't the situation because it's more just or anything, and an increase in the pool of available specialist workers or a decrease in the value of those specialized skills will change that situation.

If you want a share of the business, start your own, or buy stock. Your employer is not obligated to pay you anything near the value of your contribution. I'm all for a more egalitarian workplace, but it currently isn't, and you can't argue from a position of how it ought to be to explain how it is.

AreWeDrunkYet posted:

It's the crab in a bucket mentality that would have you tearing down some workers to bring them down to the level of others.

No, it isn't. I'm not in the bucket trying to keep people down with me. My position and wages are not in jeopardy in an existential sense, and my job is not likely to be outsourced. I am also not trying to keep people down. It's simply market forces.

AreWeDrunkYet posted:

The better question is, how do we improve other industries so that they can look more like IT? It can't last even in IT since the current situation is likely more of a result of a temporary shortage of labor due to evolving technology than anything fundamental to the industry, the change has to come from organization of workers and regulation that prevents companies from undermining that. Otherwise, IT workers are going to end up like the folks in more mature industries, struggling to keep up and seeing wages stagnate for decades while the owners of those companies pocket the fruits of their labor.

Do you mean "how can we improve the wages of other jobs"? There are glib answers from economics. Closing the wage gap is a much larger question than "how do we make other industries like IT?", because the wage gap in IT companies is just as awful as anything else.

This is the old, old problem solved by unions and labor rights movements. It's an answered question.

# ? Jun 21, 2015 15:37

RFC2324: Jun 7, 2012; http 418

Zorak of Michigan posted:

Use classic Yes lyrics. Even the plain text lyrics have no discernible meaning, so it's another layer of security!

Perfect password generator. Get high as hell and change all your passwords, no one will EVER guess 'hamster nipples'

# ? Jun 21, 2015 16:58

skooma512: Feb 8, 2012; You couldn't grok my race car, but you dug the roadside blur.

evol262 posted:

Google and Apple like degrees. But your definition of "pretty average pay" is probably pretty far outside of what people in other fields with similar education levels and experience make. IT pays very well. We don't need to deny that. But, as skills become commoditized, should it?

I make 44k as desktop support with a college degree and on-call expectation. People who got promoted from within to higher level, obviously I don't know what they make and can only infer, but the server guy still lives in an apartment. The consensus is that nobody started high here and nobody's finishing high either. This in Southern California, so cost of living is pretty high. Maybe I'm not quite a groveling peasant yet, but I'm certainly not going to shoot myself in the foot and advocate for an increased labor supply because "high" wages just aren't fair.

For comparison, my girlfriend is a high school teacher that just started, and she makes more than I do.

quote:

The h1b program is explicitly intended for specialized workers with degrees. They're required to pay market wages as well as significant fees, and potentially more. You can think it's "plutocratic", but there are few advantages and many disadvantages to using temporary visa workers.

What they're required to do and what they actually do are very different things. They're not supposed to replace Americans either, but that's exactly what Disney was trying to do and will eventually do. A company with that many lawyers wouldn't have tried unless they knew they would get away with it. I think it's plutocratic because it only benefits people who own these businesses. The worker, both the American and potentially the H1-B, is the one getting the shaft.

Speaking of market forces, if wages are so good why hasn't there been a glut of people flooding into IT from universities? This is happening in nursing, all the drat schools are full and it costs an arm and a leg to get into some of them, and wages will come to reflect that. The word got out that it was raining money and people wanted in, and so they are coming in. That's [ market forces, not people coming in because the government and business cozied up and made a nice system for business to game.

# ? Jun 21, 2015 18:13

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

Scientific research in this country would pretty much shut down if we cut the H-1B allotment. (This is precisely the problem worker visa programs were designed to solve, right?) STEM, and especially the life sciences, run almost entirely on foreign-born postdocs. But we're not going to solve the problem by cutting back on H-1Bs -- not without making other problems much worse, anyway -- unless we turn our attentions on the companies that solely use them as a cheaper alternative to American labor. A better apportionment by industry might help, but that system just seems ripe for gaming by the people with the most profit motive (read: not the basic research community).

# ? Jun 21, 2015 18:28

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

I'm completely confused, a few pages ago the "goon-census" was there isn't a tech-worker shortage just greedy companies refusing to pay. Now, we're turning around and it's overpaid workers since we're refusing to let other tech's participate in our labor market and we get inflated domestic salaries. :v:

# ? Jun 21, 2015 20:51

Proud Christian Mom: Dec 20, 2006; READING COMPREHENSION IS HARD

just ignore the SHSC resident corporate shill and move on please

# ? Jun 21, 2015 21:08

MC Fruit Stripe: Nov 26, 2002; around and around we go

I've not weighed in on this discussion so here's my contribution: I don't give a poo poo. Study a lot, learn a lot, do a lot, get a lot of certs, and get better jobs.

# ? Jun 21, 2015 21:50

crunk dork: Jan 15, 2006

MC Fruit Stripe posted:

I've not weighed in on this discussion so here's my contribution: I don't give a poo poo. Study a lot, learn a lot, do a lot, get a lot of certs, and get better jobs.

Yeah seriously can you guys please post about the technologies you work with and keep the Piketty type poo poo to a minimum?

# ? Jun 21, 2015 22:11

Toshimo: Aug 23, 2012; He's outta line...

But he's right!

MC Fruit Stripe posted:

I've not weighed in on this discussion so here's my contribution: I don't give a poo poo. Study a lot, learn a lot, do a lot, get a lot of certs, and get better jobs.

Bootstrap up, y'all.

# ? Jun 21, 2015 22:40

Swink: Apr 18, 2006; Left Side <--- Many Whelps

My workplace has 150 staff in various locations. Our IT Support is completely unstructured. What are some tips to creating a highly effective support team?

Step 1 - Get Ticketing System.

Step 2 - ???

I have myself and one other guy to utilise. Should I just read that ITIL book?

Edit - I realise the answers can be unique to each workplace, I'm really looking for broad ideas that I can fit to apply to us.

Swink fucked around with this message at 02:04 on Jun 22, 2015

# ? Jun 22, 2015 01:54

Docjowles: Apr 9, 2009

Tab8715 posted:

How far are they going? Re-location usually gives you a budget of $X and you turn in the U-haul rental receipt. Unless they hired a 3rd-Party Contractor to appraise your house, sold it separately along with hiring movers.

What conference was this? Is there a YouTube of presentation or what's the gist of the whole thing?

The relocation package is pretty comprehensive. We're actually going to keep our house and rent it out, at least in the short term. Prices are going through the roof here and I feel like if we sit on it another couple years we could make another 30k+ easily. Which we'll need to be able to afford a Boston-area downpayment :homebrew:

They're covering professional movers to pack, move, and unpack for example. 30 days of temporary housing if we haven't signed a lease by the time we have to move. They would have even paid closing costs if we sold the house (not that anyone is asking sellers for closing costs in this housing market).

The conference was DevOps Days Denver. I haven't been able to find a video of the talk or even slides. IIRC it was mostly "do all the stuff Dark Helmut talks about. Actually work with the client to understand who they are and what they want. Don't just be a shitlord and spam out .NET developer jobs to a Linux sysadmin who hasn't touched Windows in 10 years. etc"

Daylen Drazzi posted:

I have final confirmation on the virtualization position I'm moving into tomorrow morning (well, technically it's in a couple days, but tomorrow morning is my last day on 3rd shift weekends, so close enough). It was initially going to be considered a horizontal move, but I submitted that the position's requirement for specialized experience made it something of a vertical move and requested a pay increase of about $6,300. They came back and gave me just a little under $5,000 after the PM went to the bat for me. Slowly but surely I'm closing in on that magical six figures. I'm making double what I was earning 4 years ago, so give me a couple more years with time to gain even more experience and get a few more certs under my belt, and I'll have finally made it to the promised land.

Congrats, dude! You've earned it :cheers:

Docjowles fucked around with this message at 02:36 on Jun 22, 2015

# ? Jun 22, 2015 02:27

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

Congratulations Docjowles

# ? Jun 22, 2015 02:35

Docjowles: Apr 9, 2009

Tab8715 posted:

Congratulations Docjowles

Thanks. Yeah... like I said I was not intending to make the move so soon. But the offer loving blew what I was even planning to ask for at the top end out of the water. So here we go!

Amusingly I actually interviewed with Google for a Linux admin position earlier this year. Made it through the entire thing, including multiple phone screens and a half-day onsite. Got great feedback at every stage, thought I was gonna get an offer. Then at the very last moment they decided I didn't meet their bar for programming skills and the whole thing blew up. To be fair I did kind of bomb that segment. I don't think I'm allowed to talk about it more than that (what up NDA's) but honestly this offer is close to what I'd likely have gotten from them. It's not the ungodly resume boost Google would be, but I'm pretty excited things worked out how they did since now I get to move back close to family.

Docjowles fucked around with this message at 02:45 on Jun 22, 2015

# ? Jun 22, 2015 02:41

rafikki: Mar 8, 2008; I see what you did there. (It's pretty easy, since ducks have a field of vision spanning 340 degrees.)

~SMcD

Docjowles posted:

Thanks. Yeah... like I said I was not intending to make the move so soon. But the offer loving blew what I was even planning to ask for at the top end out of the water. So here we go!

Amusingly I actually interviewed with Google for a Linux admin position earlier this year. Made it through the entire thing, including multiple phone screens and a half-day onsite. Got great feedback at every stage, thought I was gonna get an offer. Then at the very last moment they decided I didn't meet their bar for programming skills and the whole thing blew up. To be fair I did kind of bomb that segment. I don't think I'm allowed to talk about it more than that (what up NDA's) but honestly this offer is close to what I'd likely have gotten from them. It's not the ungodly resume boost Google would be, but I'm pretty excited things worked out how they did since now I get to move back close to family.

# ? Jun 22, 2015 03:11

MC Fruit Stripe: Nov 26, 2002; around and around we go

Toshimo posted:

Bootstrap up, y'all.

If you think I'm a bootstrapper then boy have you not been paying enough attention.

# ? Jun 22, 2015 04:37

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

Swink posted:

My workplace has 150 staff in various locations. Our IT Support is completely unstructured. What are some tips to creating a highly effective support team?

Step 1 - Get Ticketing System.

Step 2 - ???

I have myself and one other guy to utilise. Should I just read that ITIL book?

Edit - I realise the answers can be unique to each workplace, I'm really looking for broad ideas that I can fit to apply to us.

ITIL is a really dangerous thing. It's a valuable set of concepts, but the majority of literature is largely focused on governance and obsessed with change controls, because these are the things of most concern to shops operating with strict regulatory requirements (SOX, HIPAA, etc.). Do read and understand the different subject areas of IT Service Management, especially the distinction between Incident Management and Problem Management. Read some of John Allspaw's writings on running blameless postmortems (we have some discussions around this in the IT Books thread where I'm very slowly sunmarizing one of Sidney Dekker's works here). Don't fall into the trap of implementing bureaucratic governance without understanding what every single aspect brings to the business - some or many parts likely won't be beneficial to you.

The most crucial thing is that standards make people work faster. Standardize everything you can, while balancing it with the right amount of user choice so people can get their jobs done.

# ? Jun 22, 2015 05:06

lampey: Mar 27, 2012

Swink posted:

My workplace has 150 staff in various locations. Our IT Support is completely unstructured. What are some tips to creating a highly effective support team?

Step 1 - Get Ticketing System.

Step 2 - ???

I have myself and one other guy to utilise. Should I just read that ITIL book?

Edit - I realise the answers can be unique to each workplace, I'm really looking for broad ideas that I can fit to apply to us.

Tell the staff requesting work they have to do some small prerequisite before you can start. Gain influence and buy in with key decision makers to help with any future changes to IT. Automate tedious and repetitive tasks.

# ? Jun 22, 2015 05:24

evol262: Nov 30, 2010; #!/usr/bin/perl

go3 posted:

just ignore the SHSC resident corporate shill and move on please

We've been over this, but I'm a socialist. The world does not hold to my ideals. You cannot talk about how the world is based on how it ought to be. And being able to understand and explain things I don't agree with ideologically doesn't make me a shill.

skooma512 posted:

I make 44k as desktop support with a college degree and on-call expectation. People who got promoted from within to higher level, obviously I don't know what they make and can only infer, but the server guy still lives in an apartment. The consensus is that nobody started high here and nobody's finishing high either. This in Southern California, so cost of living is pretty high. Maybe I'm not quite a groveling peasant yet, but I'm certainly not going to shoot myself in the foot and advocate for an increased labor supply because "high" wages just aren't fair.

Bluntly, you're terribly underpaid. Especially in that market. And living in an apartment in a market where a family home can easily over be over a million dollars isn't hard to understand (for a variety of reasons).

You've totally misunderstood the argument. It doesn't matter whether you think you're overpaid or whether you think the labor pool should be increased. Your job would not be at risk from an h1b in a dependent company anyway (you don't make enough, and cannot be displaced), but what you think about the labor market doesn't matter unless you do advocate.

I'm not advocating for more h1bs or wage readjustment or anything. But that's what's happening. Because complaining on the internet doesn't stop inertia. Advocating publicly does, ala the labor rights movement in the past. Be outraged. In public. Around other outraged people. Otherwise you can listen to people talk about market forces...

skooma512 posted:

What they're required to do and what they actually do are very different things. They're not supposed to replace Americans either, but that's exactly what Disney was trying to do and will eventually do.

You can replace Americans with h1bs unless you're a dependent employer, and if you are, you can replace highly paid Americans with highly paid h1bs. "What they actually do..." gets the Department of Labor looking, because they take that seriously, and companies don't want labor violations. As a generalization, companies obey the law.

What the h1b program is "supposed" to do is bring skilled labor into the US for temporary needs (temporary in the sense that the worker doesn't start the immigration process). Nothing less or more.

skooma512 posted:

A company with that many lawyers wouldn't have tried unless they knew they would get away with it. I think it's plutocratic because it only benefits people who own these businesses. The worker, both the American and potentially the H1-B, is the one getting the shaft.

"What is capitalism?"

skooma512 posted:

Speaking of market forces, if wages are so good why hasn't there been a glut of people flooding into IT from universities? This is happening in nursing, all the drat schools are full and it costs an arm and a leg to get into some of them, and wages will come to reflect that. The word got out that it was raining money and people wanted in, and so they are coming in. That's [ market forces, not people coming in because the government and business cozied up and made a nice system for business to game.

Computer science enrollments are way up, and this whole paragraph reeks of "I'm not old enough to remember the .com era". But, in general, CS programs have a higher washout rate than bachelor RNs, but many, many nurses are LPN->certificate RN, or complete a bridging program. It's much less homogeneous.

It's also labor market forces. But replacing workers making more than the median household income with h1bs also making more than the median household income, just less, isn't gaming the system. That is the system. You don't have to agree with it. I don't. But that's what it is.

# ? Jun 22, 2015 05:26

MC Fruit Stripe: Nov 26, 2002; around and around we go

evol262 posted:

We've been over this, but I'm a socialist. The world does not hold to my ideals. You cannot talk about how the world is based on how it ought to be. And being able to understand and explain things I don't agree with ideologically doesn't make me a shill.

Seriously. I'm either a socialist or a progressive depending on my mood or how hard one holds to a definition. But I just got called a bootstrapper because talking about this stuff exhausts me when all we should really be doing in these threads is studying and learning and working on climbing the ladder. Sure, I wish the system was different, but uh, it isn't, so go learn a lot and make that paper.

# ? Jun 22, 2015 05:40

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

MC Fruit Stripe posted:

Seriously. I'm either a socialist or a progressive depending on my mood or how hard one holds to a definition. But I just got called a bootstrapper because talking about this stuff exhausts me when all we should really be doing in these threads is studying and learning and working on climbing the ladder. Sure, I wish the system was different, but uh, it isn't, so go learn a lot and make that paper.

I am too a socialist but there's nothing stopping us from discussing two topics that directly effect our careers.

# ? Jun 22, 2015 05:50

Daylen Drazzi: Mar 10, 2007; Why do I root for Notre Dame? Because I like pain, and disappointment, and anguish. Notre Dame Football has destroyed more dreams than the Irish Potato Famine, and that is the kind of suffering I can get behind.

Looks like I spoke too soon. Our parent unit commander made an informal visit this morning and delivered the news that he was apparently mistaken in regards to the nature of our contract extension. While not directly stated, the gist of our discussion was that there will, in fact, likely be no extensions forthcoming, so on August 13 we will probably be closing up shop.

Regardless, I'm in the Virtualization Network Administrator position for at least 7 weeks, so I hope it will help me in my job search. And if all else fails I can still head south to Tampa, FL like I've been planning once the contract ends. I think I'll still get the $2k bonus they promised us right when this mess started, so that will help with relocation. I've got a few grand in savings, and unemployment will cover most of my living expenses. I think all I can do at this point is just take it one day at a time. If we make it past August 13 I can be pleasantly surprised.

Daylen Drazzi fucked around with this message at 02:59 on Jun 23, 2015

# ? Jun 22, 2015 15:58

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# ? Apr 27, 2024 11:54

BaseballPCHiker: Jan 16, 2006

Swink posted:

My workplace has 150 staff in various locations. Our IT Support is completely unstructured. What are some tips to creating a highly effective support team?

Step 1 - Get Ticketing System.

Step 2 - ???

I have myself and one other guy to utilise. Should I just read that ITIL book?

Edit - I realise the answers can be unique to each workplace, I'm really looking for broad ideas that I can fit to apply to us.

Like others have mentioned ITIL can be great and useful but don't go overboard with it. Just take the parts that would help your company and make the most sense for your environment and ditch the rest. It's easy to get way to into it, then all of the sudden you're having weekly meetings across multiple departments and hiring consultants and having change review board meetings all to discuss what should be in employees email signatures.

# ? Jun 22, 2015 16:09

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

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