IT BS thread

Yes. BUT!

Keep in mind,,,this is where I kept running into an issue...when it's just you or you and 1 or 2 other people...you're it. If you don't make it to work one day, shit stops working (or being fixed, or whatever)

For me, that was a HUGE self-inflicted guilt trip. No WAY would the department / business run without me, therefore never take days off! I won't ask my underlings to do my job!

Etc etc. I love working at small companies, but there ARE upsides to being "I.T. Guy 4 of 7" when it comes to taking a day off. Or not being the one to get stuck doing a mail server migration at 2AM Saturday because it isn't your turn to be on-call.

 

I'm in security and there is a lot of cubicle life. But depending on the job you can be walking around a lot too. As far as learning, again it depends on the job, there is the technical side and administrative side, and depending on where you work, they might separate the two drastically (government, contractors) or require your strong with both.

But yeah, lots of sitting, then more sitting at home (self studies)-- its very un-healthy IMO- I went to Ikea a week ago and got excited that their electrically adjustable standing desk is in stock, I've been waiting for that product to finally come out. Oh the things that excite you when you get older lol.

 

Admittedly I haven't had a vacation in over 2 years. I also had a 36 hour work day a couple weeks ago.

 

Thanks for all the information guys. I work for my family right now, and I have about 5 people that I'm the manager of and I like being the person in charge, I've always liked making decisions, but I've never dealt with hiring or firing anyone. Currently with my family's business I've built a website, maintain a system of 4 cameras, and I occasionally try to fix any computer or networking problems we run into.

 

"Technology companies continually urge us to upgrade; to buy the newest tablet or phone." -

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150402-the-worst-place-on-earth

 

Lots of guys who start with networking don't stick with it. Many find it dry. I love it and the best days at work are the ones where I'm working with Cisco configs.

I absolutely hate programming, though. Knew a little C++ and Java at one point, but I just find it frustrating.

 

Back in high school I had college credits for Cisco Networking, but I never really had an interest in continuing with it. I'd probably like programming more. Closest I've done it though is shell scripting. I also like working with HTML. Sitting in a cubical all day was never appealing to me though.

 

different strokes for different folks. "Networking" is the farthest arena that is dry. Everything else from programming, dev, servers, OS, virtualization, storage etc etc is siloed and only see their own AO.

Networking stretches: routing, switching, security, wireless, data center, collaboration, service provider, architecting/designing having the holistic view and approach. no other area allows you to do that as much.

It's hard to become an architect or manager of it all without having the broad knowledge of the backbone. The "network" world also requires you to have an even broader knowledge of everything but a shallow depth. Can't say that about other tracks.

 

I think my biggest problem with programming is the compiler. You can't force something with errors to compile then see what doesn't work, because that's not how the language works. Plus the errors never helped me much. Just had a hard time getting my head around it. I also don't like being that sedentary.

HTML wasn't so bad, because you could write bad code then clearly see "Hey, that whole section of the page looks awful, what did I do wrong?" At the end, you could validate it and see what the W3C didn't like, but generally that stuff is easy to get up to their standards.

 

A lot of those pains are entirely up to the IDE you work in.
HTML can also be a pain because you can see that things look bad, but you have to hunt around for the problem.
In Visual Studio, programming stuff like C#, you can procedurally step through your execution, set breakpoints, look at values changing during runtime, and many other helpful things that I no longer remember (I work in a different language now).

I personally love MS SQL.

 

I can do very basic HTML, but nothing really beyond that. Another question I have is later in the program I have to choose to specialize in either Microsoft or Linux, but I can also come back after I complete my degree and get a certificate for the other too. Which would give me a better advantage?

 

I remember trying to make a webpage with some javascript that worked in both IE and NS. There was a lot of code, and somewhere I had forgotten to close quotes. Page rendered fine in IE, but was completely blank in NS. Took me a while to find the mistake.

I know shell scripts aren't as efficient as programming, but I don't have to compile and hope it works, and testing is as easy as "bash -x <command>". Eventually I might try my hand at Python or similar.

 

I'm not nearly as 'salty' as the others here, but from what I've seen having Linux experience is a big plus. Linux gurus are hard to come by and that comes with pay and fringe benefits. I'm curious to see what the others say.

 

Linux or some command line work is pretty much everywhere now.

All my devs have mint or other linux vms that they sling code with. even the windows guys are getting pretty good with the prevalence of powershell nowadays.

Plus, you get the back-end guys like me that are dealing switches, appliances, SANs/NASes and whatnot, you basically have to be platform agnostic nowadays just to get anything done.

Best thing to happen for Linux was OSx.

(You know that's just a pretty shell on *nix, right?)

 

From the dev side of the world, I'll also say that PowerShell has been coming into my area. From the little I've seen:
-Soon to have Visual Studio support?
-It's going to be the new standard for importing upgrades on their Dynamics ERP platforms
-I'm not sure if it's totally taking the space of SSIS, but it is at least seen as a viable alternative. At times it can perform faster/easier.

 

I've noticed they're really pushing PowerShell to take over as well. I try to do some things with servers "the old way" now and it tells me the feature has been deprecated and I need to use PowerShell to do it instead. It doesn't seem so hard, just some of the syntax is a little unique. I did find a PS script the other day that let me figure out why a user account kept getting locked out the instant I'd unlock it (told me which machine was trying logons). Took all of a couple minutes to figure it all out and run it.

I learned a lot of this stuff really young from some old dogs, so I still commit Cisco configs to memory with "wr" and find myself trying dcpromo to promote or demote a dc. One of these days I'll have some spare time to learn PowerShell...

 

As shaming as it is to admit it, I did not know this up until about a year ago.

 

Hey guys, hoping you powershell wizards can save me from some hell.
I'm trying to get the below script to run from a command window (in other words, cmd.exe).

Code:

powershell -noprofile -command "& foreach ($a in ([Net.DNS]::GetHostEntry("myserver.mydomain.com")).addresslist.ipaddresstostring) { if ($a –eq [Net.DNS]::GetHostEntry("myaliasedserver.mydomain.com").addresslist.ipaddresstostring) { $true } }"

I'm having troubles getting the parser to not take issues with the spaces and the double quotes, but I'm failing.

 

You know powershell and cmd.exe aren't the same thing, right? I'm sorry to sound like that, but I have to ask.

It may be so simple and simply running the very same command from a PS prompt rather than a CMD window, as CMD has a pissy fit with spaces, and always has. You should have seen the shit we had to sling in batch files back in the early 2K / AD days to map drives and printers and stuff...it was absurd.

Also, check your permission level. A user-level CMD might not work, but an admin-level one might.

Also, always run powershell as admin as well.