IT BS thread

I used to always practice for interviews by cramming as much logic and personal facts into my head as I could as if it were final exam week.
I ended up telling rambling explanations, or would talk myself into a corner, or talk about technical skills like I was quizzed, which came off as me being nervous and unsure.

My interview mantras are now:

• Before the interview, concentrate on how awesome you are. Think about the times you kicked wicked butt.
• Less is more, just give concrete facts. People that know what you are talking about realize your achievements; people that don't know what you are talking about often don't want to look stupid and will think you've done something important rather than show weakness by asking for more.
• Provide metrics on how you saved money, time, or discovered something new. "I increased search times by 20%." "I improved data quality 70%." "I advocated for a $10,000 software system and two $40,000 servers. Through this effort, we are able to perform real-time analysis, we added a net profit of $200,000, and we have a failover environment with a 10 minute disaster recovery time." "I wrote documentation that now serves as part of the packet that all new employees receive." I didn't have to explain how I did it, but I just gave you everything you needed to know.
• Technology can be taught. Tenacity can't.

The only time I can see this working against you is if you are going after a state job. State job interviews always involve a bunch of people who have no idea what you do or why they want you, so they grabbed some questions out of a college textbook and push them in front of you as a 'test of aptitude.' From my experience, those are guaranteed to fail because they want a decorated MIT graduate who will work for minimum wage, and you either can't win or could make more mowing lawns. Sorry if you are a state worker, no disrespect - it's just been my experience at every turn
The other instance may be if you have some guy who is actively trying to crush you, or a guy who honestly needs to know your thought processes under stress.


We recently interviewed someone and asked him, "do you have knowledge in data analytics?" They said no (which at least showed honesty). Over the course of the interview, we did some guided nudging and found that the person was a warehouse manager for the military, improved inventory spec sheets, and oversaw several subordinates. My coworker asked, "Did you manage inventory? Did you have to find items? Did you categorize things? Did you write things down on those inventory sheets?" They said yes, of course. "All those tasks you did are physical examples of data analytics. You even have managerial skills in working in that field." As you can see, there's a lot in how you present yourself. If my coworker hadn't had taken the time to act as a mentor during the interview, that individual would have completely shot themselves in the foot.

 

From the other side of the table, I've interviewed and hired more techs than I can remember. Lord only knows what you're going to get with 5 software guys doing the interview. They may know how to interview, or not. Personally I use a peeling the onion technique. I'll start with a question and keep pealing back the layers with followup questions until I get to a place where the person has proven their knowledge or lack thereof. It has the advantage of cutting through BS, canned answers and gives me a pretty good insight into the individuals capabilities. For example if I got this answer to a question "I advocated for a $10,000 software system and two $40,000 servers." My next question would be "how did you decide on that $10,000 software?" By the time I get to the bottom of that rabbit hole I will know if the candidate was a member of a team or works alone, what analytical processes they use, if they are complete in their analysis, their understanding of the underlying business process and more.

You'll know you're dealing with amateurs if they ask "what is your greatest weakness?" Any interviewee worth their salt will have a canned answer ready for that one. And, any interviewer worth their salt will already know the candidates weaknesses because they've pealed back the layers to their answers.

Relax, be yourself, listen to the questions, answer them as best you can, ask for clarification if needed, don't ramble on, and you will do fine.

 

28% of people with a career in IT hide it from their friends and family in fear of becoming free tech support for them.

https://www.teksystems.com/en/resou...and-stress?goback=.gde_46343_member_243195892

 

This pretty much sums it up for me:


My uncle is a professional musician and taught me an important lesson early in my career. He has played with the biggest names in the business, TV, movies, commercials, you name it, and he will not play for free. At family gatherings his sister, my mom, would all but beg him to play, but he was good for a tune or two and he was done. His opinion is I make my living doing this and I deserve to be paid. Why should he or the techy nephew spend their evening with friends and family at work?

Ass, gas or grass nobody's tech is fixed for free.

 

I give them my hourly rate and tell them it's a minimum of 1hr. I've also been known to ask them if I can ghost their machine or reinstall windows. In corporate desktop support, you are paid to get the user working again, not to waste hours fixing something that you could fix in 30 minutes by reimaging their machine. Their files should be on the network and their apps should be in citrix or in the image

 

Just upgraded to Office 365 Pro Plus here at work.
New Skype = hello, old man mode. I hate it. Buttons are huuuuge.
Also, dark theme is great for Word/Excel, but looks like ass for Outlook. Of course, it's a universal setting

 

I favor dark theme, never seen it on outlook though.

 

I totally lost track of this thread... NewEgg has a sale on APC UPSes it seems today? Maybe tomorrow (9/20) as well?

Anyone script in Bash much?

 

I used to do bash scripting about 15 years ago. I do a ton of PowerShell scripting now, mostly for vmware stuff.

 

PowerShell? That sucks.

 

Sounds like you've never used it. It's extremely powerful. On the fly, object oriented scripting.

 

It's crippled Windurz attempt at Bash. Before they broke down and started implementing bash proper.

 

Working with a language that is well documented, has a good user base, and Intellisense does not suck. Having an IDE does not suck. Having access to .NET does not suck.
Come back to me when you have none of those and you are ready to write your own TCP/IP stack from scratch, and you have to fully manage all memory handling.

Granted, I can't do that on a whim right now, but I have done exactly the above.


EDIT: I should also mention that you have to write your own OS. No cheating by using UNIX or Windows, that would be easy.

 

Man you're seriously offended by the fact Windows sucks.

For the record I regularly use VI/M to do all my scripting 'cause I can hit it from any of my army of servers that run headless CentOS.

 

good luck using bash to manage anything in vmware. all of the commands bring back objects that you can act upon via the pipeline.

get-vm | where{$_.powerstate -eq "poweredoff"} | start-vm -runasync
this is a very basic example of acting on the object results... it gets all of the VMs, filtered them by the ones that are powered off, then turns them on.

 

You're scripting instead of using vCenter?

Talk about "roll your own"

 

the scripts run against vcenter. if you have a task to do on 1 VM, do it in the vcenter gui. if you have a task to do to 100 VMs, you need to script it. say you wanted to shut down 100 VMs and increase their ram. I can do that fairly quickly with a script. clicking through the gui would take for forever.

$vms = import-csv .\vm.list.csv

foreach ($vm in $vms){
stop-vm $vm
get-vm $vm | set-vm -memoryGB 8
start-vm $vm -runasync
}

 

That's really weird way of interpreting what I said. I said that the world can be a much rougher place than PoSh.
I'm also not for the bandwagon approach of 'Windows sucks'. It's typically the rallying cry of grizzled sysadmins in handmade hemp suits, or starry-eyed CompSci freshmen who need to prove street cred. You can rip into any OS and find fault, you aren't special carrying around a MacBook with an obscure Unix distro.

From the little I've done with PoSh, it is the exemplification of a stereotypical Microsoft product: it tries to do EVERYTHING for EVERYONE, but tends to clunk around because it can't get out of its own way with all the baggage coming along for the ride. Most stuff seems to follow the pattern "let me search for all the stuff, load all the stuff into memory, and then, if you haven't given up on waiting for me to buffer, let me start actually doing what you asked for in the first place, but only if I haven't run out of resources." I spent two weeks on a crash-course learning the language, and everything was about trying to inject .NET where possible or deconstruct cmdlets into smaller trivial cmdlets so the system isn't choking out.

WYSIWYG coding tends to puke out results with unused fluff. Rolling your own tends to produce lighter, faster results, no matter the codebase. The difference is how much time does it take to do one vs. the other, including the performance/legacy maintenance.

 

Question for you IT gurus. Have a Sony Vaio. Recently it started bugging on me so I rebooted it to factory. Came with windows 8. Before I rebooted it I had windows 10 because of the update.

Now, after rebooting it, still at windows 8.1 because of it starting off at Windows 8 and having to I guess do that upgrade first, it keeps telling me to register Windows and I need the product key.

Can't find any of my paperwork from when I bought it, and for some stupid reason there isn't a sticker on the bottom with the key. WTF!

So how do I retrieve my windows key from my laptop to be able to register it so I can upgrade to 10? Did a bunch of searches and can't seem to get it. A little unsure about downloading a product key finder since they're trial versions and won't give/display the full key, and don't really feel like paying for the full version just to get it.

 

Speccy is legit and will give you your product key IF it is in the registry already.

Usually, depending on the laptop, they put the product key in the BIOS hidden inside and the OS is modified to look for it.

You might be in for a tough ride.