IT BS thread

i've found that most of the time management just wants someone to point a finger at... they care more about WHO caused a problem than WHAT caused a problem.

 

This is why I'm a contractor. I have a light at the end of the tunnel. I'm not going to deal with the corporate BS.

 

From what I've seen from 2 major fortune 100 companies, contractors are treated like crap.

 

Depends on the company. I'm in the Midwest so most people aren't assholes. If I was on either coast, then maybe that would be the case. They need me more than I need them. I provide a knowledge level that they don't have.

 

It's not about how the people are; I can tell you from personal experience(10 years now at MSFT) that for the most part, Full Time Employee's of major corporations treat contractors very fairly. It's the way that companies treat contractors vs FTE's that so often vastly differs. There's a reason companies opt to utilize contractors rather than hire everyone they need as full-timers.

Now that's not to say that it's that way across the board, just that usually, the larger the corporation, the greater the disparity between the two.

 

I've worked at 2 of the largest healthcare companies in the world. At one, contractors were treated like dogs. At the other, it was slightly better, but no where near as good as ftes.

 

I've worked in IT and Information Security for 22 years now, and if you are not fortunate enough to work for a company that sees Information Technology as a business enabler and/or competitive advantage, you are probably not going to be happy. So much of IT is a business expense, including the day to day, mind-numbing administrative crapola we toil through. Unless you have a company that is willing to automate or hand that off to mindless lemmings and allow you to focus on how to leverage technology to the company's advantage, IT work will be horrible.

I hated the last 4 years of my life, where 10 hour days were "short", 12-14 hours were the norm, repeated every day and only interrupted by something critical breaking and some VP stopping by my desk to tell me how that was the ONE DAY that they really needed that shit running. Don't even get me started on managing a team of the new generation of "IT Professionals" who can't work on any technology that doesn't have a GUI. All in all my family life suffered, my health suffered, and I'm so glad it's over. Now I work for a company that provides technology services, to companies that see us as a key partner, enabler, etc., and I'm loving the work again. I work with highly intelligent people who are willing to share what they know and who listen to others who know something they don't. I still put in a long day, but when I pack up for the night I'm happy and feel like I contributed towards success.

 

^^All I've ever been able to land are small companies that look at IT as a necessary evil. Have to have computer systems, but don't want to spend money on them.

I need advice. I need change. All I can seem to land for jobs are small companies with small budgets. I've been in my current position for 10 years now as the only IT person. That means if it needs electricity to work or is too hard for someone else to figure out, they come to me. Great, I get to learn something new - too bad its unrelated to anything anyone else uses. I don't have the budget to put in big name items like Cisco or VMWare. I've fallen so far behind that when I look for jobs, I feel like I don't meet even the minimum requirements. I can learn things quickly if need be (hell I just taught myself HTML, CSS and am learning Javascript to build our company website) but no employers seem to care about that. They want someone who can do the job "right now". I have Cisco experience, but it was 10 years ago at my last job. I'm sure a lot has changed.

I figure I'm going to have to buy myself some training material and start studying to get some certs to make myself more marketable. I guess what I'm trying to ask is what are the current skills in the IT industry that businesses are looking for?

Sorry if this seems like it bounces around a bit - like I'm rambling. I retyped parts of this so many times it probably doesn't make much sense...

 

Good luck, nursing is not a cake walk they earn everything they make but you likely know that by now. I work at the number one Hospital in the US and know a lot of the nurses well. Especially after spending a lot of the last year in the hospital with my youngest son who 12 months ago was diagnosed with advanced stage 4 cancer, he is 25. We have one of the lowest turnover of nurses in the nation and they are not in a union. Good place to work if you don't mind the cold. And are spending 22.5 Billion dollars in the next 20 years to become a Destination Medical Center. Although already have planes flying in to the little airport South of town from all over the world.

Been in IT more than 20 years. Did the contractor thing for a VAR in the beginning doing Novell and mid range conversions to Winblows client server and worked in pretty much every vertical market out there. After seeing enough I had clearly defined goals which I have now achieved. Work 40 hours a week and make a little more than twice what the gentleman in Oklahoma does, and expect the cost of living is about the same. I specialized and work in a specific area of IT where respect for people flows in all directions. Not exactly a cushy sit down gig but pretty damn close. Don't miss the IT jack of all trades aspect at all now. Still on call for a week every 4 months and even do get a call occasionally after hours. I can live with that after doing years of 120 hour work weeks on salary. Which was about on par for 20 years in the Navy.

 

That's exactly what I'm looking to do. Hard to specialize when you have to be a jack of all trades. I what area did you specialize? I need ideas.

 

I was one of the first Certified Document Imaging Architects. With that at the time came performance issues over a WAN with small pipes so got into Citrix back when it was Winview and OS2 based, my Citrix cert is windows 3.51 based. Haven't had to do much with Citrix over the last couple of years though. I know some on here have bitched about Citrix but people fear what they don't understand My focus is on image management not just documents in Business Office but medical images too.

For someone looking to specialize today security all the way, especially at the internet interface and DMZ. But internal is also in strong demand. Up until a few years ago we had 2 IT security people for 60k users. Now we have more than a hundred. And they are royal PITA so guess they are doing their job. I have to remind some of them from time to time when THEY become a denial of service.....

 

I could never bring myself to specialize. I get bored too easily, need the variety. I have spent most of my career working for small MSPs and that seems to be where I'll stay. I can't bring myself to work in any corporate environment. I know I'd make more but it's not worth the stress.

A good IT security guy knows when he's gone too far though. If you make stuff too "secure" you'll just drive users into insecure behavior (ex: changing passwords every 30 days, people will just write them down under the keyboard!). I would agree though, that security is the big thing to be in for the foreseeable future.

 

I understand citrix. Stay away from it. Far far away. I've worked on it for 6 years as a ccaa. I try to focus more on VMware now, but citrix is like herpes... That shit never goes away.

 

In my 20ish years, I've had to deal with Citrix for far too long. Its a rule I have now. I simply refuse to put up with that shit any more. It's trash, by trash, for trash. It gives shit a bad name. At least shit is compostable.

When I got my current job, during the interview my now-boss asked me if I had any Citrix experience. Shortly thereafter, he admitted that he'd never hard someone take a full minute of talking to accurately portray a technical platform as a sexually transmitted disease.

Then he asked what I would say if he told me that half their infrastructure was Citrix. I told him, "I'm sorry you had to work with such a moron that half your infrastucture is useless, insecure monkeyshit. The up side is, you're interviewing me so someone finally fired his dumb ass. I've already turned a couple of Citrix shops into actual functioning businesses on the back end, and would make Job #1 getting you away from that crap as soon as possible an onto a properly designed and actual performning hypervisor technology to run the store."

...


My boss likes me.

 

Foundation architecture policy is that Citrix will not be used to make application rollouts "easier" it is only for latency over WAN. But our Electronic Medical Record system is deployed over Citrix in Fl. and load balanced across more than 200 Citrix Servers. That EMR is for about a third of our Enterprise in the SE, the MidWest Regional sites and SW. The rest which is local is a fat client and a different EMR which is installed on more than 30K workstations that are locked down and standardized. We are switching to a common EMR now for all sites and guess how it will be deployed? Complex Web based apps either .NET or Java have too many issues yet and limited functionality. And security risks even inside the firewall, thank you Internet Exploder.

Delprof is your friend as are blended profiles. Don't install more than one app per server. Etc, etc. It does work if you do it right. I no longer have to worry about it though

 

Pvs and mandatory profiles are more your friend. Citrix is broke? Reboot it and it's like a fresh server that just had the apps installed.

 

Don't install more than one app per server?

You're doing it fuckin' wrong if that's a limitation

 

Yep the joys of freaking Windows. I Nix server can go like forever?! And then there is the mandatory security Windows patches. Oh and reboot... Great when your dealing with a 24x7x365 follow the sun in manufacturing. Or an Emergency Room...

LOL. I have a feeling you have been to DLL hell more than once also... Easier done in an Enterprise environment with Dev, Test, Mock and Prod environments for a single app.

 

Hell yes I have. I will admit, 2012R2, while a PITA interface, is pretty darn easy and solid as an app server.

I'd still rather have linux boxes, but for as much as they pay me, if they want winders servers, they can have windows servers. *shrug* Good excuse to learn powershell on the company dime, any ways!

 

Yeah Powershell is the future, and Microsnot has been pushing it for a long time. W2K12R2 does appear to finally have it together in many ways, I agree. My first programing language was APL (A Programming Language) in 1976. I still use .bat and .cmd where I can and have hundreds of scripts already written. But most things have gone to VBS, I am not above copy and paste thank goodness for the internet! Of course use one shell or another on the NIX serves.

I still think of Linux as edge servers, I can remember when it would take almost 24 hours to compile a new kernel on Red Hat with a 386, ah but she was a screamer back then Then again if you don't hate all OS's equally then you don't have enough experience with them LOL. My oldest son got hired a year ago by Apple and is now doing Level 2 tech support. I like to give him grief and tell him to drop out of the damn GUI and go to a CLI it is basically *BSD after all. We have a couple thousand Macs at work yet and deploy some apps via Citrix to those animals also.

Problem with .man profiles is it doesn't allow personal settings in apps to be saved between sessions. That is why we use blended profiles, but yeah they are locked down wherever possible. But still need to "enable the end user" too.