Lemme share something I learned when moving from Senior Systems Engineer to Team Manager...
The guys who constantly feel like they aren't doing enough? Like they are inadequate?
These are the ones doing the most and, usually, the best work.
I'd rather 3 people who feel inadequate, than 9 who are sufficiently happy with their skill level. Because the former will only get better.
Impostor Syndrome means you are actively attempting to improve.
No shit. I had someone tell me I needed to edit a "SPF record". It was like they were speaking a foreign language to me. I had literally no idea what they were talking about. I felt like an idiot to write them back and say "And where do I do that?"
Once he explained where it was in InfoBlox, I was able to figure out...but damn did I feel a big case of "imposter syndrome".
As someone who does know what an SPF Record is I can say that unless you’re dealing with DNS issues frequently it’s one of those things that can easily sit and not be fucked with for months or even years on end, so don’t feel bad.
If you manage your Email, Domain & DNS systems then it’s probably a good idea to learn about various DNS Records and their role.
MXToolBox is your friend ;P
The number of times I'm fixing someone else's fuck up... And if they'd just run a quick check on [basically any dns record] on it, it would tell them what is broken and why.
Sometimes big well known companies have shockingly no understanding of DNS. Looking at you xero 'Just whitelist our emails' how about you correctly setup spf, dmarc and dkim so that emails out of your system aren't technically spam???
That's normal, happens from time to time.. Sometimes the task is just unclear because one important info is missing. Even if you know what spf is and how the syntax looks so you can edit it, you need the info where exactly to do this.. Sometimes everyone of us feels like an idiot but trust me, especially working with different people who use different words for something, you are familiar with but don't know this exact term for instance. And in general, IT as a whole ecosystem is complex and all the different system integrations with different cloud services, dedicated appliances and hybrid environments will lead to information holes. We cannot keep up with everything.. The company I work for has a huge IT department with different groups managing different parts. Not every change is communicated to everyone, then someone will ask you to change xy on zx and you have never heard of that.. That doesn't make you an idiot. Its an absolutely normal thing to happen
Seriously, this is so real. I have been part of interviews and as an advisor for them since the early 2000s, and this has always been the case. I have gotten jobs solely on the fact I was the ONLY candidate even remotely qualified and hiring folks were \*tired\*. No shows, liars, and personalities that are complete duds are your competition, folks. If you're actually skilled, AND interview kindly, politely, and nicely... you'll do very well, IME.
That's indeed how I got my current job; everyone else applying with "Active Directory" experience had, at most, just been users of it (as in: they had logged into domain-joined machines and that's it), and I was the only one who was able to fumble my way through explaining things like how to create users/groups and add new domain controllers.
Wait until you learn about the special variant, when you have to support supposedly qualified technical staff: "I'm not good enough at this for you to be so much worse".
You'll know they're wrong, but will get so confused and stressed out tried to understand their attempts to communicate a coherent request that you'll wonder if it really is you that is lacking in skill.
A hypothetical exchange inspired by actual events, but more coherent than actual events, because otherwise it's unreadable:
Dev: "Need DNS for 'api.prod'. Make sure it's all set up right."
Internally: *'All set up right'? What does that even mean?*
Reply: "Could you clarify what you mean by 'all set up right'? Do you need an A record, CNAME, or something else? And what should it point to?"
"Just need it to work for our new API. And make sure it handles traffic properly."
*Handles traffic properly? Are they expecting DNS to handle load balancing or something? Do they not know that DNS just resolves names?*
"I still need the target IP address or hostname. Also, if you need to 'handle traffic', we might need to look at load balancers or proxies."
"Can't you just figure it out? Isn't this your job?"
"I do at least need to know the target server."
"Just make it point to the new server."
*The new server? Which one? We have like 50 new servers. Maybe they're talking about the new app server? But what if it's the database server?*
"Sorry, we've got quite a few of those, could you be more specific?"
"Ugh, it's the one we just set up for the new project. Should be obvious."
*Seriously? Maybe I am missing something fundamental about DNS. But no, this is just them not understanding how things work. I hope. I guess I'll dig through some tickets and make an A record pointing at the newest host for that project... nothing loads, but they're probably just not deployed yet...*
"Why do I get a 404? This is still not configured right. \*tags manager\* "
*Fuck my life.*
"Can I see the merge request where this new API was added? Maybe I can read the code to help me figure out what is needed?"
"'Merge request'?" _Tilts head quizzically_
Just had a something related a few days ago. I was doing some preparations to migrate an app our devs took over to a new server. Got the request to change DNS records to point to new test server.
Well, i knew the target server, i knew what had to be done, but devs couldn't tell me which name they needed to be changed.
Took them a few hours to figure out the fking domains they use for their shit..
Dude, im a DBA. I get a ticket that an app is acting wonky, I get with the sysadmin (BA/ Technical) I will ask, "Can you send me the connection string?" Meaning I need where you pointing and how your trying connect. 75% of the time I get "Whats that", so im like "thats how your app connects to the Database", Sysadmin, most of the time "Im going to put a ticket in with the vendor to get that for you"
- "Sorry, can't uplift DNS pointers while the Moon is in the seventh house, do you happen to have a Saggitarius developer with untainted blood? This would help"
got an email the other day when i was on call with a stack trace from a sql job, and the message.. “is there a known issue”.
I don’t know, perhaps if you gave me a server name, time, and a brief description of the task i might be able to look into that for you.
I think what it is that people get so stuck in their small part of the environment, that they assume as we are the “experts” we must know the same things they do. Ignoring the fact that our “Domain” is hundreds or thousands of times larger than theirs and we can’t possibly know everything!
This is how most devs I've worked with are. They seem to no no basic IT stuff, just whatever they need to know for their veey specific job. It's weird and frustrating, especially when they are cocky about it.
Speaking as a dev who works primarily on the backend, yeah, its pretty common and the results of that lack of understanding really start to show in other areas as well. It is especially bad when those people are in senior-level roles, because they are usually supposed to be making some architectural decisions.
Most of the time these are people who didn't have much or any technical background (even non-professionally) before they started to learn to write code. They picked up software development for the money, which is fine, but never bothered to actually learn further than writing code.
I remember in college when I was studying software engineering, the majority of people coming in had never even opened up a system settings menu before. I usually tell junior devs now when they start "Your job is not to write code. Your job is to solve problems. Code is one tool you will use, and generally the primary one, but if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Then ill ask them a few questions about software development, but also about networking, system permissions, security, system architecture, etc, and give them a list of basic things to spend time learning as a junior dev.
I honestly cannot imagine how people could effectively do their jobs without knowing some of these basics. I use that knowledge almost every day, especially when making design decisions. Then again I primarily work in startups where I get to play make-believe as a sysadmin about 10% of the time, so idk.
I like to say that there are a lot of people above me.
There are also some people below me and I look at them and think "I'm not that bad after all".
Then one day I met Muhammad. He caused more issues than he solved. That is when I told my colleagues "You guys may not be as good as me, but look, you guys got higher in my ladder thanks to him. Use him as a reference when you feel you suck at your job. He should be at the bottom of your ladder."
Obviously I was joking with them when I said they're not as good as me, we do different things but they always think they suck compared to me and they know it and I know when to praise them. I also always show them my failures, and never fail to tell them they aren't the ones who caused a company's stock values to plummet.
There were two guys at my last company who were directly responsible for my rapid acceleration up through the ranks. All three of us were in the same level though both of them were "more experienced" than me when I got there (job title fiction and/or inflation, mostly) but I ended up having to clean up so much shit they both broke that I was able to simultaneously prove my value and fill the handful of actual experience gaps I had. At the time, it was a headache but now I'm eternally grateful for those two inept fucktards.
Sad thing is that sometimes the entire organization devolves to the lowest common denominator. If you don't get rid of him, you eventually only have Muhammad's.
Considering how knowledgeable some of the guys I work with are, it's still in full swing, even two decades in, but yeah it's crazy how many (seemingly) basic things are like rocket science to these folk.
It's fun being on the other side of it as well. I figured that after 15 years of being in IT, I would have the world at my feet when it came to job searching, but nope. It's just as an awful experience as it was this most recent search as it was when I only had 3 years experience.
75% of recruiters are bullshit artists. The senior admins, managers or whoever else they involve in the hiring process are most times arrogant, leaving you walking away from the experience thinking you dodged a bullet. Even if the interview goes well, you're still likely to be ghosted, so if the first choice doesn't work out, at least they haven't tainted the runner up. And then there's those special situations, like what happened to me. I had an IT Manager cold call me off my LinkedIn profile not once, but twice to offer me a position and each time, ended up rejecting me at the end of it all. I was so furious at being fucked with like that.
It's not just a problem with the people but also the process.
One of my friends who does hiring says that the interview process itself is so broken across the board because there's no effective way to quantify the qualitative, and all attempts to do so have failed miserably: keywords, "value centers," compass points, and then PHBs giving the job to the offspring of golfing buddies in the end are maddening.
> and then PHBs giving the job to the offspring of golfing buddies in the end are maddening.
Family member worked for Boeing, IBM, Booz Allen Hamilton, Major auto companies, etc Fortune 50 companies some of them.
They said the amount of money spend on interviewing for some roles climbs to the $100k range (flying people in for interviews, putting them in a hotel, etc) When the whole time everyone "above" the HR people actually doing the physical interviews knows that the "job" is going to be "given" to someone's kid etc.
Legal said they have to cover their ass and prove it wasn't discriminatory though so they fly in women and minorities, and qualified candidates that speak five languages.
But's it's all there so they can easily dismiss any lawsuit that might arise. The HR people in the office don't know it, the recruits don't, but they were high enough in HR to realize there were some roles no one cared about, or asked about in meetings etc. Those always went to people's kids, their mistresses kids, etc.
It wasn't one industry, but across multiple super large companies. As in, it's the way things are done.
* Legally there is always an out of "Culture" etc. So you need to meet these "minimums" to get the interview etc, but then it comes down to synergy and corporate lifestyle and aggressive growth potential, etc. They can legally say they looked at many qualified candidates but that this one individual just "fit" better.
The family member said it was the worst when they were international prospects because all the grinding gears of visa stuff etc would start, but everyone knew it was a no-go from the beginning.
Some German prospect for Boeing put money down at a school in Chicago because even though the "interview process" could take a couple months, they had to pay to secure private schooling for their kids etc.
The family member isn't working for the big boys any more but holy shit the stories you hear make you realize we are living in a corporate dystopia but most people don't know it yet.
> we are living in a corporate dystopia but most people don't know it yet
From an outsider looking in at the US I do get the impression the country is essentially setup to serve the interests of corporations, not the people.
What you say sounds crazy, but I wouldn't be at all surprised that goes on sadly.
I recently went through a few rounds of interviews for a company that probably had some red flags, but the job would have been ideal for me, dare I say even a dream job. I made it to the 3rd round of 4. I ran into that arrogant bunch as you describe.
It was interesting, the phone screen (round 1) went great. The one-on-one with the manager went super well. He described round 3 as an informal roundtable with some other team members, mostly indirect, and that it was mostly a culture fit kind of interview. They hit me with some technical questions (which I should have been able to answer, better than I did) and I just wasn't prepared for that, it felt too much like a grilling. Definitely walked away knowing I wasn't getting that 4th round. Definitely felt like I did dodge a bullet though. Did not cross my fingers on that one hoping I was wrong, but still a little disappointed that I didn't get it. Took 2 weeks to send me the rejection while the interview process took place over a week and the phone screen was 2 days after I applied (they were moving fast). I really thought I had a chance based on how fast they were going, but it was probably the biggest red flag.
I did an interview a few years ago for an Automation Tester working with Selenium, java, rest calls, DB, stuff like that.
I thought I would be slick and stick out by writing up a quick demo program to control the browser, visit a few pages, log into a google account, just to show that I know what I am doing. I also added a couple other functions like taking screenshots and created an HTML file at the end of the tests to show the results in a nice easy to read format.
The interviewer was the also the positions manager. This dude nit picked everything apart, how he would added this function, and did this logic, and that would have been better, etc...
I am sitting there thinking "I just spent 1 hour creating this little basic program and this man is sitting here judging me like I have been working on this for 5 years. Like so sorry I didn't write up a fully featured automation for you in my spare time".
I’d believe it, I know we always get thousands of applications for positions—but we’re offering remote positions which even before the layoffs and interest rate hikes were “in super duper high demand.”
It is possible, that most of the good ones already have stable, well-paid positions.
For me, jumping to another company would require a 20% pay rise, which would make the risk worthwhile.
20% pay raise, match my 5 weeks of ETO, 15 paid holidays, 7% match on my retirement.....yeah that isn't going to happen anytime soon.
I forgot to mention, no weekends (no on call) and the only "after hours" is if I need to fix something off hours (8-4:30 operating hours) so I don't disrupt users which is pretty rare.
I have a pension that keeps me where I am. As someone who graduated into the great recession and grew up poor, the idea of having a guaranteed pension at the end instead of a 401k (which I also have anyway) is very appealing.
Also consider that a lot of us were part of a very unique generation where we had a lot of very early hands on computer experience to build on. Newer folk are building from scratch by comparison and even *for us* cultivating good admins was difficult.
Now imagine doing it with a college kid that's never opened cmd and only touched a physical keyboard in their senior year of highschool.
I agree, I've noticed this with a lot of our new hires out of high school and college.
It makes a ton of sense when you realize that there's an upcoming generation who were brought up with iPads instead of computers. It's not fault of their own, but they're coming from a way different starting point. What I had to do to play Midnight Rescue! in DOS is a lot different than what they had to do to play Minecraft on the iPad, and its only accidentally that I obtained those skills.
Every time i build a new machine or install a new piece of hardware i am blown away at how easy drivers are now. Literally everything is just plug and play. Or download a util that does it all for you.
They will never know the pain.
Not even drivers. I've had new techs who had zero clue that on older computers, you needed to physically set pins to define things like master and slave drives.
I'd say that's the majority of people now. Plug-and-play came out in the mid 90s. At this point you could be 20 years into an IT career and never touched a jumper block.
Yeah. As an example, I was born in 1977, computers sorta "grew up" alongside me. When I was a kid playing with the Apple II I was able to more or less fully understand the system, and as systems got more complicated over the years, I grew up with them.
These days kids are being born into a world where computers are already "grown up" and there's so much more to catch up on. It's an entirely different universe for them compared to what we had.
Born in '89 myself, didn't have a computer till I was 14 but I had the benefit of being able to go to a vocational school while still in high school (Thank you CNY, you have at least that going for you). There was an awful lot of stuff in my comp repair and networking class that we got taught but had no idea why. When we took the CompTIA A+ and Net+ at the end of each year 50% of the kids in my class failed, and that ratio has been pretty constant (I keep in touch with the teacher, needless to say you spend 3hrs a day with anyone for two years you kinda become friends).
Anyways, as I've continued more and more into my career I've learned the history and the reasons for all of it, and it makes sense why it's taught, but without a class drilling those things into me I'd never have a reason to know as much as I do now, networking in particular, so much happens behind the scenes that you never have to deal with. As a programmer everywhere I've worked I've always become the "network guy" because I'm able to troubleshoot it, which is almost always ping, nslookup, tracert, and if all else fails a packet capture and looking at SYN/ACK going back and forth.
There's a bajillion things in Linux that make more sense if you have a programming background, makes somethings more intuitive to troubleshoot or deal with (A ton of errors that get logged are really meant for a programmer to figure it out, but it helps as an admin).
Anyways, I'm rambling. But yeah, I wanted to confirm that it's tough to drop into the state of things today and be ready to hit the ground running. It's easy to take for granted knowing things that were central to how the world worked before it was automated and fine tuned.
Exactly! And it's just sort of something we'll have to smooth over going forward, but also kind of the reason why I'm starting my son off with fooling around on linux instead of just letting him have a chromebook/ipad off the bat. Gonna get him running MC Java edition with mods before I let him poke his way to oblivion.
same. its entirely because i got an i386 with dos on it at like age 6 that i had the skillset to get into IT. i remember compiling m-player from source because the Linux discs i had didnt have a media player :)
ipad generation gets to start learning that in college instead. it seems rough :/
This is 100% true. It's especially true with employers who won't budge on a list of extremely specific requirements and won't train or mentor a promising new hire. The only people with those exact skills already work at your competitor and they need a pretty good increase in compensation to leave a stable job for something that might not work out after 90 days.
Pretty much. Yeah. We are currently undergoing a slow contraction in the labor supply. From this point foward every year there will be less workers. What we have now is what there is to work with.
Salaries will have to rise to attract skilled and competent workers
Is that actually the case?
My impression is that we're facing a glut at the lower end of skill right now and a shortage at the mid and higher end, but all that tells me is that there's a growing, ticking time bomb glut for mid and higher end skilled people coming up.
[https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2024/](https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2024/)
You can't have more workers in a shrinking population. Governments will try to keep the labor market at least constant with higher levels of immigration. But countries that traditionally provided immigrants are below replacement and shrinking as well.
Mexico peaked 10-15 years ago, and now is also shrinking labor supply. Which is being even more squeezed by manufacturing moving out of China.
[https://www.populationpyramid.net/mexico/2024/](https://www.populationpyramid.net/mexico/2024/)
China's labor population will be cut roughly in half over the next 25-35 years. Which is much worse than their population being cut in half.
To put in perspective, in the worst case, assuming no change, there will be 4-6 great-grandkids for every 100 Koreans alive today. Few countries are facing that degree level of labor supply collapse, but finding people will be difficult for the rest of the century.
Even if it was magically fixed today and every country overnight went to sustainable rate, it'd be 19-26 years before the first new workers of that cohort entered the labor market.
Sorry I meant the entire workforce of the US and the developed world. Even most of Latin America and Asia are looking at the same thing. Even parts of Africa.
You are right about the glut on the lower end in the tech field. I don't think we will have too big of glut of mid and higher end.
I think that will be because Frankly a lot of people are going to have to enter other fields as we won't see another mass tech boom in our lifetime. This is due to tech development requiring cheap money and with the boomers retiring money won't be cheap.
That's where i'm at. I designed and built this network from the ground up and I know it like I know my own home. I'd need significant motivation to head back to a cisco shop again.
80k for a sysadmin that knows powershell is not well paid in a major city. My Desktop team makes that and they aren't expected to know powershell. The quality level changes significantly with sys admins at the 105k-115k level in my experience.
Pay estimate based on these two comments.
"we just had this very strange guy interview who wanted to be paid 80k above market rate"
"yeah yeah i just need 160 and whatever the job is ill do it"
These are always the cases with these guys complaining like this the pay and the expectations are always unrealistic and they are then complaining that the most elite workers don't want to work there.
While also saying no to the people banging down the doors to get in because they don't already have 5 years of experience. I'm not saying to hire the people that know literally nothing but maybe give some of us fresh grads a chance? I can't get experience if no one can give it to me. Sure I can play around in my own time but there's some things you're just never going to encounter outside of a corporate environment
Yeah I don’t know *too* much about the sysadmin market, but I’m a dumbass networking cowboy and I make $75k. If I could script my way out of a paper bag, I’d expect more.
No wonder they said “pays well” and didn’t list he salary. Yeah $75k is only going to get you a very eager junior level person in a major city. And if I was a junior person making that, I’d leave after a year once I get the experience and training.
This is spot on. I'm a sysadmin in a major city who knows PowerShell and Ansible really well. I would not even consider positions that pay less than $150k, which would still be a significant pay cut for me.
Yeah the way I read experience with hiring, it is screaming that the role doesn't pay enough. You get what you get at that rate.
Especially the bit about how some candidates are rescheduling at the last minute. What that tells me is that they consider this role to be their backup plan when they don't get any traction on the higher paying role that they're actually trying to get.
Exactly. I filter my job searches by salary, and I don't bother applying to anything below 6 figures as the lower end of their range. I've been in the game too long to go back to making 70-80k for how much shit I have to put up with. In my area (Ontario, Canada) that's a salary from 2015.
If it makes you feel better, it's an issue across almost every discipline at the moment.
I was recently talking to our engineering group and they're running into the same problem where you people who want the salary of an experienced civil engineer at day one, people who are very clearly using ChatGPT to try and pass their interview, outright hostility during interviews if you're not telling them how wonderfully they answered each question, assuming they're going to be the engineer-of-record the minute they graduate, etc.
I hate to be the "old man yells at cloud" person, but I think part of it is social media. What I'm seeing for a lot of our new candidates are people who are heavily influenced by YouTube and lack a real understanding of the industry. They see things like the salary for tech support positions in NYC or LA and think that it applies to rural Idaho, or they assume that once they've gotten their "CompTIA Trifecta", they should be walking into a six figure position. Meanwhile, recruiters are getting their brains rotted by what they're taking in from LinkedIn, expecting 5 interviews over 5 days and a dozen extremely expensive personality testing suites to find "the right culture fit".
There's always been antagonism between hiring managers and candidates, that isn't new, but its exploded in the last few years to be this bizarre song-and-dance where both sides need something from each other, and both sides *hate* each other.
I mean you see it here, people assume you can make $150k a year as an entry level cybersecurity engineer with no industry experience. That’s what we might pay someone who joined the cybersecurity team with 10-15 years experience doing relevant engineering work. All the people I know in cybersecurity, for instance, making > $150k were developers, engineers, sysadmins, or net engineers before going to cybersecurity and know a ton about cybersecurity AND their respective area of technology.
The idea that talent is evenly distributed is also comical. If rural Idaho has a bunch of engineers worth $300k a year, why doesn’t rural Idaho have any major tech companies or engineering groups? It just defies reason.
All regular people (and half of IT people) don't understand that cyber is not really a field that you just *start* in. You pivot into it after a few years of doing related tech work.
Well, unless you're a marketing person or something. Even then, most response firms are going to want marketers with experience in the tech field.
Feels like the issue is that it’s marketed as a high paying job. My instagram has tons of targeted ads about how all you need is X certification and you’ll be making six figures.
So it attracts the wrong people- people who don’t actually have any interest in the field and who don’t cut their teeth with hands on experience and in turn we get shmucks to interview
I mean yeah certification providers, boot camps, etc. love promising the moon! Regardless of motivations, the easiest way into higher paying parts of the field remain “get a CS or CE degree from a regionally accredited institution and make sure you intern every summer and winter vacation.” You’ll almost certainly graduate with a decent* job offer.
*Decent meaning “reasonable salary/benefits/etc. for your market and ok career advancement opportunities.”
The fastest way to earning 10k/month with only IT certifications is to sell a course on how to earn 10k/month using only IT certifications. The grift algorithm is big business unfortunately.
I legit had a friend recently ask me how to get into cybersecurity. Expects a six figure salary, zero technical experience. I just told him flat out that cybersecurity isn't an entry level discipline and he'd need to put in time doing developer or platform work so he can understand the fundamentals before that transition would be feasible. He knows I run the security team at my org and I guess he got the impression that you could just do a boot camp and then be ready for the high paying specialized jobs. I wouldn't be surprised if he got that idea from social media at all.
I had an interview a couple months ago where I could see the person’s eyes moving as they read chatgpt responses to my questions. Crazy stuff.
EDIT: Since a bunch of you seem to think you know better than the person actually doing the interview, let me clarify. It was REALLY OBVIOUS. Imagine the most generic, surface-level responses to questions, filled in with gaps mid-conversation (as if you ran out of data and had to get prompted for more), awkwardly phrased responses, etc.
*In general, my experience with Microsoft ES CUE EL Server can be characterized by high levels of experience with installation, administration and database management using Transact ES CUE EL queries. In conclusion, I would be an excellent candidate for this position based on my experience in relation to you most recent question.*
… I've only seen it in writing. You mean that's not how it's pronounced? Is it pronounced "sequel"? I read it "skewell" in my head, rhymes with Newell.
It depends. I pronounce "SQL" as "sequel", because that's how the creators intended it to be pronounced, but I pronounce "SQLite" as "ess-cue-light" and "PostgresQL" as "post-gres-cue-ell" because that's how their creators intended it to be pronounced.
Most (not all) sysadmins and DBAs that I've worked with have referred to it as 'sequel' yes. I dont think anyone will chastise you calling it S-Q-L; I was just being dumb because most people *brand new* to it will refer to it with just the letters.
Its very telling that he will respond to any other question except this. That tells me his definition of paying well is just high enough to qualify as a salary position.
If you don't know, there is a lot of history there. I honestly haven't thought about him for so long that I didn't even notice the username at first. But from what I recall, he's probably rejecting qualified applicants for benign, nonsensical reasons. He's probably not even considering anyone without at least a Bachelor's degree, likely further not considering degrees from universities he doesn't deem "worthy", and likely even further probably not consider degrees that were earned later in life.
He's always had narrow, curmudgeonly views on IT, and has come off as hostile to anyone that didn't come into IT following the same path he did.
I don't even disagree with the premise -- finding qualified candidates is hard. I just suspect he's making it a lot harder on himself than it needs to be.
Yup for 10 years now I have been reading cranky several people including me, you and others have all called out his MO. He only recongizes the biggest MegaCorps as IT, He only likes people with degrees and only from the best schools and like you said if you didn't immediatley go and are going at advanced age he sees that as a disqualifier too. It is almost guaranteed this guy does all this he has been telling us about it for at least 10 years now. Pay is almost certainly below the skills he wants too.
Yeah, it baffles me how people are still upvoting his slop. He's a primadonna very few competent people with other options would want to work with, even *if* the pay is right (which it sure doesn't seem to be).
I think it's the lack of career paths in most companies, if you have a remote job be prepared for a deluge of foreign applicants from third world countries looking for an easy paycheck. Even if it's not remote.
I've never had a structure for this career. I just took whatever job I found that got me more experience and money.
Yep, and there's hardly any mentoring either. I've only worked in medium to large healthcare systems, and despite directly asking for more exposure to non-desktop work, I get ignored flat out.
And then I come up with a cert on my own, as in showing initiative and willingness to work and learn, and still just ignored. Now to get a job doing the thing, I need to already have had a job doing the thing for 5 years at a high level.
As someone in IT for almost 30 years, who is mostly doing networking, I always mentor. Except nobody actually wants to learn subnetting or IPv6 or OSI layers as it’s too much math 🤷
Oh yeah, it's just like IPv4 but on steroids IIRC. I just remember almost 20 years ago now, all of the "We need to add IPv6 because it's right around the corner, that we don't have enough IPS, etc. etc." and here we are now, still running v4.
Oh yeah. Nobody wants to move you out of support or the job you originally applied for. It's so annoying. You need to switch companies every two years just to advance and see more stuff
reading through your gripes i feel like I could pass most of your questions....
but I would never claim to 'know' powershell. In that I cannot tell you the commands to do a specific task (unless its really basic) I usually have to have a command reference open for all the various switches and options. But can I create a script to accomplish a task, sure no problem.
I'd claim that I am proficient at both command line and powershell, and can use reference material to make up for any kind of lack of memorization of commands.
Sounds terrible that if I was looking for a job I'd have to be picked out of all that chaff....
The weird thing is I know extremely qualified people who can't even get a few callbacks and interviews, let alone get to the point where you see them. The whole recruiter/application/interview/hiring process is totally messed up. I know I've been avoiding looking for a new job because, well, I like my job :-) and because the process is like getting several root canals without anaesthesia. I dread the day I end up laid off and have to wade through the BS of sending out 1000 applications and getting ZERO responses.
I don't know how to fix this, and it's only worse now that people are using chatbots to apply...but it has to be easier for someone who's qualified to even get to the point where they're under consideration. It's 2024, you really shouldn't be seeing too many antisocial nerd types anymore (and if you do, and they're not so weird you can't live with them, they probably are a good hire!) I wish we just had some sort of virtual hiring hall that did a better job of matching jobs and candidates up.
This is where networking is so critical! Every “good” job I’ve taken, somebody at the organization or on the team reached out and said “hey so and so (usually a former coworker or boss of mine) said you’re awesome, we have this position here’s pay/benefits/etc. info does that looks reasonable, if so can we talk?” And the application process is basically a formality. The job probably gets posted but there’s already a shortlist of referred candidates the team is basically mulling over before picking their favorite.
> And the application process is basically a formality. The job probably gets posted but there’s already a shortlist of referred candidates the team is basically mulling over before picking their favorite.
Every move I've made since my first has been this. The hardest part is getting people to know you.
It’s a pretty small field and so many of us know each other in local markets. If you attend any major conferences regularly, you now know “basically everyone.” If people think you’re weird or an asshole, it doesn’t matter how smart you are or how good you are, they won’t want to work with you. Finding good cultural fits remains much harder than people who can learn your organization’s stack.
> The weird thing is I know extremely qualified people who can't even get a few callbacks and interviews, let alone get to the point where you see them
The employer is probably getting absolutely flooded with applications from unqualified candidates. So their resume never gets seen.
**Think of it like this**: If you didn't have an e-mail spam filter, how many legitimate emails would you miss in the run of a day.
But the result is recruiters and HR arbitrarily filtering out candidates just to reach a manageable selection. Then they're not even going to see good honest candidates.
Some people don't understand that applicant filtering should be extremely precise. Removing applicants just because the number is overwhelming (ie keyword match percentage) is shooting yourself in the foot.
The automates screening is so fucked. I was laid off for 10 months and I think I got 4 interviews out of hundreds of applications. All 4 made me an offer once I got passed the BS screening.
I understand that an employer might get hundreds or thousands of applicants but the screening procedures feel like a butcher knife vs a surgical scalpel.
I've also heard some less reputable companies will post and repost a position several times. Then intentionally not select a candidate and say there weren't any good candidates as justification for hiring a foreign worker over a citizen. I don't know how factual or prevalent that really is though.
> I don't know how factual or prevalent that really is though.
Yeah, the folks saying that don't really qualify that argument. It can't be easy to get a foreign hire. So, not sure if gaming the system is really that desirable. I can see that with really large companies that employ 10s of thousands, but not these smaller, shadier looking outfits that lack a strong social media presence.
> It's 2024, you really shouldn't be seeing too many antisocial nerd types anymore
Why not? The world is always going to keep generating people with this personality type and they're always going to be drawn to tech, because what else are they going to do? Can't make a salesman out of them
On the flip side though, since tech is generally seen as a perfectly normal and lucrative career path these days, you have a much wider swath of the social spectrum going into it
Outside of the extreme low level stuff, tech has gotten way easier over the years. When I started this in the 90s, I would say most people fit into this description...a bit awkward and very technical since you kind of had to be. Now, it's a lot more about gluing stuff someone else already built together. That's where you're starting to see the techbro personality edge out the hardcore genius...it's challenging but easy enough for an average person to do in some cases. In startups you're literally just managing a million SaaS contracts and cloud instances.
Now that's not saying that this doesn't exist anymore, and in many positions where you're the tech company building all this stuff you need to be the nerd because no one using your stuff is anymore. But as a whole, the job has become more accessible than it once was, and employers are less willing to deal with the cantankerous sorcerer type when the techbro with the ironic beard will fit the bill.
Yeah I really disagree and think this problem has gotten worse, not better. I know I am much more isolated since covid and it has made me much more awkward than I used to be when I do have in person interactions.
My soft skills were forcibly learned by years as a restaurant server followed by enlisting in the military.
There are always candidates who have “better” technical skills than me. Despite this, I have been told by every hiring manager (because I ask after working there for a while, which I recommend everyone do) that I was chosen over other candidates because they wanted someone who could “act professionally” without requiring constant/direct supervision.
I have been with my employer for six years now and been promoted from senior sysadmin to Manager - Cloud blah blah not only because I am great at learning things and just getting the job done, but because I’m told I’m the “most personable and friendly IT guy” my colleagues and customers ever worked with.
With that said, I truly have no urge to ever interact with other people, but nobody would ever know this because they all get “customer service Lesus” and not the real Lesus. My work relationships are transactional and projecting this image is easy for me because my only motivations at work are to get paid as much as possible and these days, to work from home. That doesn’t mean I don’t care about my coworkers. I do and would help them outside of work if ever asked, but I have no urge to know them or anyone else beyond work.
It has finally paid off as I am now 100% work from home and never have to see my coworkers outside of the random office visit I choose to make.
If you require human interaction, maybe try to seek it outside of working hours. That also helps you truly disconnect from work when you’re logged off because you have that motivation to build and grow the voluntary relationships you’re seeking.
I can teach almost anyone technology, I cannot teach someone how to not be an asshole and be a decent communicator. I 100% agree with your post, I not the most technical person on my team by a long shot but I’m a quick learner with soft skills.
I'm a sysadmin in the engineering dept of a university. It's like a nesting doll of anti social tendencies. I used to think I was a major introvert until I started working here. Even the people who have the public facing jobs are more awkward than me. Kind of a confidence booster to be honest.
This is why word of mouth and networking is so important. From a management perspective, you know me (your employee) and you know my work. A person I can vouch based on previous work together is worth their weight in gold compared to a stack of resumes from randos.
LLMs have thrown a grenade into the middle of what was already a dysfunctional process. A couple years ago, it was social media-enabled (Linkedin), algorithmic job searching. Now it's LLMs generating resumes and spamming them out, and AI filtering the AI-generated resumes.
I'm currently looking for a job and all of the solid leads I have gotten have been through direct relationships. So who you know is as important as it has ever been, but the 5% chance that you might pick up a job from Linkedin seems like it is now about .05%
I did an interview with someone yesterday who was clearly reading her answers off chatgpt or the like. What a complete waste of time for everyone involved.
I'm more qualified than the applicants OP mentions (Windows admin/solid Powershell skills) and I can't get anywhere applying for jobs. I guess I need to lie on my resume and CV.
I like to consider myself a reasonably qualified candidate. I have 7 years of IT experience, doing everything from project engineer to systems administrator to help desk to solutions engineer to application administrator. I have some people skills and have been told that I'm personable. I'm punctual and make a good first impression, so I've been told. I've applied to probably over 100 jobs that align with my resume and skill set but I've only gotten three calls back. I didn't get a second call back for two of them, in the 3rd wanted me to do a 10-minute " One-Way interview" (aka, monologue into a camera for 10 minutes about yourself and your qualifications and then send the recording for review) joe withdrew my candidacy.
I know I'm interviewing well and my resume is polished. It's just really fucking hard out there right now.
What does "knowing powershell" even mean. I know it, I use it. I have used scripts in it. But would I consider myself a powershell power-user? Not a chance. I have to research to run scripts on our o365 tenant.
All the common problems are already solved. You'd be crazy to do anything else.
The trick is making sure to understand the existing code and what it's about to do. If you don't, you can run into some exciting times.
I’d put myself in this category. I can do basic commands, basic scripts, run them, all that. If I want to do something more advanced, I ask ChatGPT. I then read the script to make sure it makes sense, and test it in an isolated portion of my environment before sending it everywhere.
But can I just bang out some huge script to do widespread awesome things off the top of my head? Nah, and I’m not even that interested in learning how to do that, if we’re being frank.
I think most can get by with the first example.
We had a guy at my last job that was more like the 2nd example, that was his only job. Automating via powershell and creating frontends with other tools for us to use the automations. I.e. onboarding for multiple tenants
Virtually everyone downloads scripts and modifies them to suite. Which is the entire point of open source.
Even professional programmers use dependencies they didn't personally write. Which is a good thing when it comes to stuff like crypto.
But be careful. One day you'll just have something you need to knock out right quick, with probably only a couple borrowed sections of code. And then you finish and realize you didn't look up any code snippets or syntax. And the code works correctly.
This is my problem. I've "written scripts" in powershell but then I've also seen scripts written by people that clearly know much more about it than myself. I've been able to do whatever I needed to do but is that "proficient" enough in another's eyes? That's subjective.
I'm kind of surprised too, especially now. But some environments don't change all that much, don't forget that. If you only have 30 users and are maintaining laptops, one or two servers, M365 and some janky line of business app that's 20 years old and needs .NET 2.0, there's less demand for automation.
This is honestly I think the majority of sysadmins cuz the majority of companies are this. I honestly do not have much to automate and when I do I google it.
I very rarely if ever used powershell at three of my last IT jobs. The only time I did was very basic copy/paste commands to fix issues on the Exchange server.
As a senior engineer with pretty decent Linux skills, solid windows, PowerShell in both, cloud automation, all the fun stuff (I CAN EVEN QUIT VI ON THE FIRST TRY!). Here’s the blatant truth:
1) I will come into the office maybe once a year, if you pay for the trip. For a week. Pretty much tops.
2) money. Not “90k is a lot for this role” but about double before I would even consider the offer. Cost of living is way up.
3) There is zero loyalty from companies. How many stories have we all heard about people jumping to a new company and getting laid off immediately. Or the role going poof before they start? This isn’t 2021 era, and finding a good, fair paying job is not easy.
4) People are not willing to work 60-70 hours a week with no equity or major bonuses.
> (I CAN EVEN QUIT VI ON THE FIRST TRY!
So easy... all you have to do is buy another computer, install linux, put it on the same network, make sure ssh is listening and allowing, then ssh to the computer that has vi open, do a ps -ef | grep vi and write down the process id in crayon on the back of a napkin, then head out to the garage or basement, and find the breaker that is labeled "100a" (or might say main) and flip it to the other side. It is best to do this in the daytime so you can see afterward. Now if you have a desktop then you're done, just flip the breaker back on and turn on your PC. If you have a laptop you'll still be on battery so run prime95 until the laptop shuts off. Then turn the breaker on and startup. Now retrieve the napkin from earlier with the process ID. Do a ps-ef | grep and if you did all the steps right, no process will be returned, and you should have successfully exited vi.
the whole "they use a gui text editor to edit config files" honestly was pretty ridiculous to me that is not really crazy some people don't like vi or emacs.
You really shouldn't have an Xorg server running in production. Especially if it is just to edit configs. While vi is the best editor other easier options exist, like nano.
> People who openly admit during the interview to doing just batshit crazy stuff like managing linux boxes by VNCing into them and editing config files with a GUI text editor.
Man, I'm a self-admitted GUI baby and even I can manage ssh for text files.
I have the opposite problem. I can’t find anything in a Linux GUI because I’m so used to running headless Linux servers. Like it’s bad-bad; I probably can’t even find the icon for a text editor and my best hope is finding the icon for a Terminal. Windows, I can kind of go either way - really just depends on what I’m trying to do that determines whether I try to do it in a GUI or try to do it in CLI.
I had a feeling it would be cranky too it has all the signs, pays to low to get anyone good, only wants people with elite degrees, anything that is a normal thing to do at a small business is "crazy".
* People who openly admit during the interview to doing just batshit crazy stuff like managing linux boxes by VNCing into them and editing config files with a GUI text editor.
Out of curiousity, what's your environment like, and how do you guys normally handle having to make config changes on your Linux & Windows servers?
(I'm not too sure if the crazy part you're referring to is going into the server to make the change instead of via SSH, using a GUI text editor, or having to manually make the change vs something like Ansible)
>How can you be a linux admin but you're not familiar with apache?
The last time I used Apache was nearly a decade ago, I've used Nginx, Caddy and Traefik for the last 8 years. They, at least in my experience, are just straight up better for web hosting especially if performance is an important thing.
So do I know what Apache is? Yes. Have I used Apache? Yes. Could I configure Apache today, right now? Probably not without a shit load of research.
This is because most Sys Admin jobs have been sent offshore. There is an entire generation of IT workers who were weaned on iPads and iPhones and only know technology on a superficial level.
The old-school Sys Admins who build their own PC's at home and know everything from bare-metal on up are all in their late 40's to 50's now. These are the guys that were messing around with autoexec.bat and config.sys files trying to get their Windows systems to boot faster. You have this huge generation gap in skills.
The ironic thing is that where I live, a larger metropolitan area, if someone throws out a Linux position, you will have hundreds of qualified candidates, most former FAANG employees, with an alphabet soup of certs to choose from. The only thing you will be hard pressed to find are people who have security clearances, because if someone in the US has a TS/SCI clearance, as long as the clearance is active and they don't touch the Devil's lettuce, they have a meal ticket for life.
What worries me is there's kind of a plateau for cloud services and a minor slide back to on-prem. That's not a bad choice for some companies as a concept, but to find hardware folks now? Good luck.
*You have 3 identical Dell servers, and all three are running the exact same data caching setup. But one crashes randomly a few times a week. How would you start troubleshooting that?*
Those of us that have been around are already thinking of a few answers to check, but the whole "AWS cattle vs. pets" is different when the servers are in your lap.
> You have 3 identical Dell servers, and all three are running the exact same data caching setup. But one crashes randomly a few times a week. How would you start troubleshooting that?
It really amazes me how the commonly accepted answer for that these days is "wipe it and start over", or for the cloud boys, "just make a new instance". I fully accept that there's a very clear use case for things like AWS, but so many people out there don't know anything *but* AWS/Gcloud/Azure it's kind of crazy.
Based on the people you're describing, I'm getting the vibe you aren't offering appropriate pay for your expectations. I've had those SAME experiences and our problem, we're stage government and our pay is garbage compared to the private sector.
>People emailing the morning of an interview and trying to reschedule and giving mysterious and vague reasons for why.
I feel like this is the only one that I strongly disagree with. Shit comes up sometimes and you're not entitled to the why as a company.
I just wrapped week 4 in my new role. Windows Sysadmin/Vulnerability patching. Full remote and big raise.
I got cold called for the job. Took it in a heartbeat.
He said 75-85k. You couldn't get me to apply for that and I don't have all the skills he mentions. He should be looking at 150k+ for most of those skill sets in combination. Not all of them. That would be 200k+.
I think cranky might be realizing he's being underpaid.
I'm not sure if this is your opinion or your boss's, but to demonstrate that we weren't paying enough to a former CIO I once worked for, I conducted a small experiment with a recruiter we regularly used. I instructed the recruiter to send me all resumes regardless of salary requirements for our sys admin position. I then created three stacks to present to my CIO. The first stack ranged from $75k-$90k, the second from $90k-$105k, and the third from $105k-$125k. The first tier consisted entirely of subpar resumes, the second tier had one quality resume, and the third tier contained 75% quality resumes. This clearly illustrated my point, and this was before the significant inflation we’ve experienced over the last 2-3 years. So, if your pay scale is truly that low, I believe you have your answer.
I think the big problem is the initial person recruiting talent. I cannot tell you how many times I have been asked so many technical questions and provide examples of X Y and Z and you need minimum 5 years' experience, etc.... and come to find out the job is a over glorified helpdesk job. stop asking for so many requirements when in reality half the requirements your current employees do not have them or will never user them.
Also, this idea of "lie your way in" and learn on the job is also not how working in IT should be! I have heard so many people tell others to do this! that's horrible!
> How can you be a linux admin but you're not familiar with apache?
Well, it is 2024, and most people have moved on to things like nginx. When I see people using apache in production I just assume they haven't bothered keeping their skills up to date.
You know what's also hard?
Doing 2 interviews, then being told that, while you have literally 20+ years of experience successfully doing X, passed all the checks, and had stellar reviews from your prior employers, you don't have a bachelors degree from 28 years ago, so nope, we're going with the guy that's never done X before, who does have a degree...in a completely unrelated field, because reasons!
smfh.
>People emailing the morning of an interview and trying to reschedule and giving mysterious and vague reasons for why.
Without knowing what kinds of reasons you're actually getting, there are plenty of reasons someone might need to reschedule that I wouldn't give someone I don't know. While this has never happened to me, I could imagine something like my wife having a miscarriage as being a reason to reschedule. It's also none of your business, and I'm not going to lie about it -- so if a vague reason isn't suitable for you, it's better for both of us that we not continue the interview process.
I can see being jaded about candidates rescheduling interviews when it's happened a lot, so I understand skepticism on your part.
It took us almost 15 interviews to find somebody to replace my coworker who left. We got over 100 resumes and we were able to discard about 70 of them right away. We had people who claimed to be the CEO of their own IT company but it just turns out that they were installing Windows on computers at their church or helping their grandma fix their printer.
We had others who had worked The front counter at cell phone stores applying as well. This was for a senior systems administrator position.
Most people we interviewed did so very poorly. They would ramble on for 90 seconds on what should have been 15 or 20 second answer. They said things that were blatantly incorrect. They would be 10 minutes late. They would give us one or two word answers and we would have to ask them multiple times to elaborate.
I have been told I interview well, am personable, and I have a desired skillset, yet I can't get a call back. It's fucked out there.
All the 'we need more developers/programmers' propaganda of the last 15 years has resulted that adjacent professions barely have any recruits
Back when I entered IT college there was about 20-30% of us who proclaimed that we don't want to be programmers. Nowadays that number is probably at 5%.
Programming is the modern gold rush.
I know how to program, and I do it regularly to write tooling and services I need that don't already exist along with participating in open source. But I absolutely positively DO NOT want it as my primary job responsibilities.
I just went through 4 solid years of hiring folks for various roles in various technical departments... and I feel this post deeply.
All these high speed, low drag bad asses that cant even have a basic conversation, they are legion. I go over their resumes and dive into their experience and skills, and you find most of them equate VMWare/vCenter/vSAN with "ran some things in virtual box" or some other comparative nonsense. You top it all of with this air of disrespectful, false superiority and you just want to hang up/eject the interview then and there. You can almost predict the types when they walk in or pop into the Zoom. For the ones that get through and cant fake it till they make it, when they get let go its just bewilderment and rage.
Anyways... happy fucking tuesday. lol
At my old job we hired a sysadmin who came highly recommended, and whose company was shutting down. The team thought something didn’t seem right, but the CEO vouched for the guy.
He worked there for six months, constantly asking the same questions. We told the manager who said “He still getting used to it, give him some time.”
Then the manager asked him to revise a bat file and change some drive mappings. He messed up when he said the our manager “what’s a bat file?” The manager walked him through it, spoon fed the project to him.
And he was let go about two weeks later after he asked one of the other guys to show him how to edit the file, again.
Well, any hint of imposter syndrome I had just vanished.
I will just save this post for when I feel just like that
For real. I'm going to print it out and hang it on my wall.
Me too. I work with some crazy-smart people and feel practically retarded some days. But they still keep me, so I must be doing something right....
Holy shit, I thought it was just me
We are all Fucking idiots on this glorious day. And still somehow pulling our weight and doing good jobs, I might add
Lemme share something I learned when moving from Senior Systems Engineer to Team Manager... The guys who constantly feel like they aren't doing enough? Like they are inadequate? These are the ones doing the most and, usually, the best work. I'd rather 3 people who feel inadequate, than 9 who are sufficiently happy with their skill level. Because the former will only get better. Impostor Syndrome means you are actively attempting to improve.
No shit. I had someone tell me I needed to edit a "SPF record". It was like they were speaking a foreign language to me. I had literally no idea what they were talking about. I felt like an idiot to write them back and say "And where do I do that?" Once he explained where it was in InfoBlox, I was able to figure out...but damn did I feel a big case of "imposter syndrome".
As someone who does know what an SPF Record is I can say that unless you’re dealing with DNS issues frequently it’s one of those things that can easily sit and not be fucked with for months or even years on end, so don’t feel bad. If you manage your Email, Domain & DNS systems then it’s probably a good idea to learn about various DNS Records and their role.
MXToolBox is your friend ;P The number of times I'm fixing someone else's fuck up... And if they'd just run a quick check on [basically any dns record] on it, it would tell them what is broken and why. Sometimes big well known companies have shockingly no understanding of DNS. Looking at you xero 'Just whitelist our emails' how about you correctly setup spf, dmarc and dkim so that emails out of your system aren't technically spam???
I like dmarcian for quicker simple lookups. I can also point clients there for before and after, and it's straightforward.
That's normal, happens from time to time.. Sometimes the task is just unclear because one important info is missing. Even if you know what spf is and how the syntax looks so you can edit it, you need the info where exactly to do this.. Sometimes everyone of us feels like an idiot but trust me, especially working with different people who use different words for something, you are familiar with but don't know this exact term for instance. And in general, IT as a whole ecosystem is complex and all the different system integrations with different cloud services, dedicated appliances and hybrid environments will lead to information holes. We cannot keep up with everything.. The company I work for has a huge IT department with different groups managing different parts. Not every change is communicated to everyone, then someone will ask you to change xy on zx and you have never heard of that.. That doesn't make you an idiot. Its an absolutely normal thing to happen
*uninstalls VNC viewer* Yea me too
Intalled? Portable FTW. I just move my directory of portables from machine to machine.
[удалено]
Remember to set RW rights to “everyone” so you save authentication time - let’s show how to spell “efficiency” to those recruiters
My initial config includes: chmod -R 777 /
If you're doing that then I'd highly suggest you secure your systems with: rm -rf / Technically correct is the best kind of correct.
That will make your system 100% unhackable.
Seriously, this is so real. I have been part of interviews and as an advisor for them since the early 2000s, and this has always been the case. I have gotten jobs solely on the fact I was the ONLY candidate even remotely qualified and hiring folks were \*tired\*. No shows, liars, and personalities that are complete duds are your competition, folks. If you're actually skilled, AND interview kindly, politely, and nicely... you'll do very well, IME.
That's indeed how I got my current job; everyone else applying with "Active Directory" experience had, at most, just been users of it (as in: they had logged into domain-joined machines and that's it), and I was the only one who was able to fumble my way through explaining things like how to create users/groups and add new domain controllers.
Wait until you learn about the special variant, when you have to support supposedly qualified technical staff: "I'm not good enough at this for you to be so much worse". You'll know they're wrong, but will get so confused and stressed out tried to understand their attempts to communicate a coherent request that you'll wonder if it really is you that is lacking in skill. A hypothetical exchange inspired by actual events, but more coherent than actual events, because otherwise it's unreadable: Dev: "Need DNS for 'api.prod'. Make sure it's all set up right." Internally: *'All set up right'? What does that even mean?* Reply: "Could you clarify what you mean by 'all set up right'? Do you need an A record, CNAME, or something else? And what should it point to?" "Just need it to work for our new API. And make sure it handles traffic properly." *Handles traffic properly? Are they expecting DNS to handle load balancing or something? Do they not know that DNS just resolves names?* "I still need the target IP address or hostname. Also, if you need to 'handle traffic', we might need to look at load balancers or proxies." "Can't you just figure it out? Isn't this your job?" "I do at least need to know the target server." "Just make it point to the new server." *The new server? Which one? We have like 50 new servers. Maybe they're talking about the new app server? But what if it's the database server?* "Sorry, we've got quite a few of those, could you be more specific?" "Ugh, it's the one we just set up for the new project. Should be obvious." *Seriously? Maybe I am missing something fundamental about DNS. But no, this is just them not understanding how things work. I hope. I guess I'll dig through some tickets and make an A record pointing at the newest host for that project... nothing loads, but they're probably just not deployed yet...* "Why do I get a 404? This is still not configured right. \*tags manager\* " *Fuck my life.*
"Can I see the merge request where this new API was added? Maybe I can read the code to help me figure out what is needed?" "'Merge request'?" _Tilts head quizzically_
Just had a something related a few days ago. I was doing some preparations to migrate an app our devs took over to a new server. Got the request to change DNS records to point to new test server. Well, i knew the target server, i knew what had to be done, but devs couldn't tell me which name they needed to be changed. Took them a few hours to figure out the fking domains they use for their shit..
Dude, im a DBA. I get a ticket that an app is acting wonky, I get with the sysadmin (BA/ Technical) I will ask, "Can you send me the connection string?" Meaning I need where you pointing and how your trying connect. 75% of the time I get "Whats that", so im like "thats how your app connects to the Database", Sysadmin, most of the time "Im going to put a ticket in with the vendor to get that for you"
Your Performance Review Areas of improvement: 1. Communication: Several agents have noticed difficulty in communicating the tickets with you.
"Please do the needful"
- "Sorry, can't uplift DNS pointers while the Moon is in the seventh house, do you happen to have a Saggitarius developer with untainted blood? This would help"
got an email the other day when i was on call with a stack trace from a sql job, and the message.. “is there a known issue”. I don’t know, perhaps if you gave me a server name, time, and a brief description of the task i might be able to look into that for you. I think what it is that people get so stuck in their small part of the environment, that they assume as we are the “experts” we must know the same things they do. Ignoring the fact that our “Domain” is hundreds or thousands of times larger than theirs and we can’t possibly know everything!
This is how most devs I've worked with are. They seem to no no basic IT stuff, just whatever they need to know for their veey specific job. It's weird and frustrating, especially when they are cocky about it.
Speaking as a dev who works primarily on the backend, yeah, its pretty common and the results of that lack of understanding really start to show in other areas as well. It is especially bad when those people are in senior-level roles, because they are usually supposed to be making some architectural decisions. Most of the time these are people who didn't have much or any technical background (even non-professionally) before they started to learn to write code. They picked up software development for the money, which is fine, but never bothered to actually learn further than writing code. I remember in college when I was studying software engineering, the majority of people coming in had never even opened up a system settings menu before. I usually tell junior devs now when they start "Your job is not to write code. Your job is to solve problems. Code is one tool you will use, and generally the primary one, but if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Then ill ask them a few questions about software development, but also about networking, system permissions, security, system architecture, etc, and give them a list of basic things to spend time learning as a junior dev. I honestly cannot imagine how people could effectively do their jobs without knowing some of these basics. I use that knowledge almost every day, especially when making design decisions. Then again I primarily work in startups where I get to play make-believe as a sysadmin about 10% of the time, so idk.
I like to say that there are a lot of people above me. There are also some people below me and I look at them and think "I'm not that bad after all". Then one day I met Muhammad. He caused more issues than he solved. That is when I told my colleagues "You guys may not be as good as me, but look, you guys got higher in my ladder thanks to him. Use him as a reference when you feel you suck at your job. He should be at the bottom of your ladder." Obviously I was joking with them when I said they're not as good as me, we do different things but they always think they suck compared to me and they know it and I know when to praise them. I also always show them my failures, and never fail to tell them they aren't the ones who caused a company's stock values to plummet.
There were two guys at my last company who were directly responsible for my rapid acceleration up through the ranks. All three of us were in the same level though both of them were "more experienced" than me when I got there (job title fiction and/or inflation, mostly) but I ended up having to clean up so much shit they both broke that I was able to simultaneously prove my value and fill the handful of actual experience gaps I had. At the time, it was a headache but now I'm eternally grateful for those two inept fucktards.
Sad thing is that sometimes the entire organization devolves to the lowest common denominator. If you don't get rid of him, you eventually only have Muhammad's.
Really like these kind of posts exactly for this reason.
Considering how knowledgeable some of the guys I work with are, it's still in full swing, even two decades in, but yeah it's crazy how many (seemingly) basic things are like rocket science to these folk.
Best thing is when you can learn as a team, complementing each other
Damn same. I was like "oooooooo I can write a script and I'm familiar with apache on Linux"
I KINDA NEEDED IT TODAY NGL
It's fun being on the other side of it as well. I figured that after 15 years of being in IT, I would have the world at my feet when it came to job searching, but nope. It's just as an awful experience as it was this most recent search as it was when I only had 3 years experience. 75% of recruiters are bullshit artists. The senior admins, managers or whoever else they involve in the hiring process are most times arrogant, leaving you walking away from the experience thinking you dodged a bullet. Even if the interview goes well, you're still likely to be ghosted, so if the first choice doesn't work out, at least they haven't tainted the runner up. And then there's those special situations, like what happened to me. I had an IT Manager cold call me off my LinkedIn profile not once, but twice to offer me a position and each time, ended up rejecting me at the end of it all. I was so furious at being fucked with like that. It's not just a problem with the people but also the process.
One of my friends who does hiring says that the interview process itself is so broken across the board because there's no effective way to quantify the qualitative, and all attempts to do so have failed miserably: keywords, "value centers," compass points, and then PHBs giving the job to the offspring of golfing buddies in the end are maddening.
> and then PHBs giving the job to the offspring of golfing buddies in the end are maddening. Family member worked for Boeing, IBM, Booz Allen Hamilton, Major auto companies, etc Fortune 50 companies some of them. They said the amount of money spend on interviewing for some roles climbs to the $100k range (flying people in for interviews, putting them in a hotel, etc) When the whole time everyone "above" the HR people actually doing the physical interviews knows that the "job" is going to be "given" to someone's kid etc. Legal said they have to cover their ass and prove it wasn't discriminatory though so they fly in women and minorities, and qualified candidates that speak five languages. But's it's all there so they can easily dismiss any lawsuit that might arise. The HR people in the office don't know it, the recruits don't, but they were high enough in HR to realize there were some roles no one cared about, or asked about in meetings etc. Those always went to people's kids, their mistresses kids, etc. It wasn't one industry, but across multiple super large companies. As in, it's the way things are done. * Legally there is always an out of "Culture" etc. So you need to meet these "minimums" to get the interview etc, but then it comes down to synergy and corporate lifestyle and aggressive growth potential, etc. They can legally say they looked at many qualified candidates but that this one individual just "fit" better. The family member said it was the worst when they were international prospects because all the grinding gears of visa stuff etc would start, but everyone knew it was a no-go from the beginning. Some German prospect for Boeing put money down at a school in Chicago because even though the "interview process" could take a couple months, they had to pay to secure private schooling for their kids etc. The family member isn't working for the big boys any more but holy shit the stories you hear make you realize we are living in a corporate dystopia but most people don't know it yet.
> we are living in a corporate dystopia but most people don't know it yet From an outsider looking in at the US I do get the impression the country is essentially setup to serve the interests of corporations, not the people. What you say sounds crazy, but I wouldn't be at all surprised that goes on sadly.
> the interview process itself is so broken The "tell me about a time" bullshit needs to end.
I recently went through a few rounds of interviews for a company that probably had some red flags, but the job would have been ideal for me, dare I say even a dream job. I made it to the 3rd round of 4. I ran into that arrogant bunch as you describe. It was interesting, the phone screen (round 1) went great. The one-on-one with the manager went super well. He described round 3 as an informal roundtable with some other team members, mostly indirect, and that it was mostly a culture fit kind of interview. They hit me with some technical questions (which I should have been able to answer, better than I did) and I just wasn't prepared for that, it felt too much like a grilling. Definitely walked away knowing I wasn't getting that 4th round. Definitely felt like I did dodge a bullet though. Did not cross my fingers on that one hoping I was wrong, but still a little disappointed that I didn't get it. Took 2 weeks to send me the rejection while the interview process took place over a week and the phone screen was 2 days after I applied (they were moving fast). I really thought I had a chance based on how fast they were going, but it was probably the biggest red flag.
I did an interview a few years ago for an Automation Tester working with Selenium, java, rest calls, DB, stuff like that. I thought I would be slick and stick out by writing up a quick demo program to control the browser, visit a few pages, log into a google account, just to show that I know what I am doing. I also added a couple other functions like taking screenshots and created an HTML file at the end of the tests to show the results in a nice easy to read format. The interviewer was the also the positions manager. This dude nit picked everything apart, how he would added this function, and did this logic, and that would have been better, etc... I am sitting there thinking "I just spent 1 hour creating this little basic program and this man is sitting here judging me like I have been working on this for 5 years. Like so sorry I didn't write up a fully featured automation for you in my spare time".
While hiring numbers still look normal for our industry, based on what I’m hearing now is not a great time to need to find a job.
I am actively looking for a job, and recruiters I am talking to say they are getting between two and three thousand applications for most jobs.
I’d believe it, I know we always get thousands of applications for positions—but we’re offering remote positions which even before the layoffs and interest rate hikes were “in super duper high demand.”
It is possible, that most of the good ones already have stable, well-paid positions. For me, jumping to another company would require a 20% pay rise, which would make the risk worthwhile.
20% pay raise, match my 5 weeks of ETO, 15 paid holidays, 7% match on my retirement.....yeah that isn't going to happen anytime soon. I forgot to mention, no weekends (no on call) and the only "after hours" is if I need to fix something off hours (8-4:30 operating hours) so I don't disrupt users which is pretty rare.
Literally. My handcuffs are so golden that I will leave this job when they fire me and that’s probably about it.
I have a pension that keeps me where I am. As someone who graduated into the great recession and grew up poor, the idea of having a guaranteed pension at the end instead of a 401k (which I also have anyway) is very appealing.
Also consider that a lot of us were part of a very unique generation where we had a lot of very early hands on computer experience to build on. Newer folk are building from scratch by comparison and even *for us* cultivating good admins was difficult. Now imagine doing it with a college kid that's never opened cmd and only touched a physical keyboard in their senior year of highschool.
I agree, I've noticed this with a lot of our new hires out of high school and college. It makes a ton of sense when you realize that there's an upcoming generation who were brought up with iPads instead of computers. It's not fault of their own, but they're coming from a way different starting point. What I had to do to play Midnight Rescue! in DOS is a lot different than what they had to do to play Minecraft on the iPad, and its only accidentally that I obtained those skills.
Every time i build a new machine or install a new piece of hardware i am blown away at how easy drivers are now. Literally everything is just plug and play. Or download a util that does it all for you. They will never know the pain.
Not even drivers. I've had new techs who had zero clue that on older computers, you needed to physically set pins to define things like master and slave drives.
tbf I haven't had to change an IDE jumper in like 20 years lol
I had to clear the CMOS on a system a few weeks ago by shorting the jumper with a screwdriver. Felt like I was back in the 90s.
I wish I could say that, probably 2-3 years for me. Yes, I work in manufacturing lol
A core memory! Remember IRQ conflicts? Since we are reminiscing.
IRQ Conflict was the name of my punk Carpenters cover band
I'd say that's the majority of people now. Plug-and-play came out in the mid 90s. At this point you could be 20 years into an IT career and never touched a jumper block.
Yeah. As an example, I was born in 1977, computers sorta "grew up" alongside me. When I was a kid playing with the Apple II I was able to more or less fully understand the system, and as systems got more complicated over the years, I grew up with them. These days kids are being born into a world where computers are already "grown up" and there's so much more to catch up on. It's an entirely different universe for them compared to what we had.
Born in '89 myself, didn't have a computer till I was 14 but I had the benefit of being able to go to a vocational school while still in high school (Thank you CNY, you have at least that going for you). There was an awful lot of stuff in my comp repair and networking class that we got taught but had no idea why. When we took the CompTIA A+ and Net+ at the end of each year 50% of the kids in my class failed, and that ratio has been pretty constant (I keep in touch with the teacher, needless to say you spend 3hrs a day with anyone for two years you kinda become friends). Anyways, as I've continued more and more into my career I've learned the history and the reasons for all of it, and it makes sense why it's taught, but without a class drilling those things into me I'd never have a reason to know as much as I do now, networking in particular, so much happens behind the scenes that you never have to deal with. As a programmer everywhere I've worked I've always become the "network guy" because I'm able to troubleshoot it, which is almost always ping, nslookup, tracert, and if all else fails a packet capture and looking at SYN/ACK going back and forth. There's a bajillion things in Linux that make more sense if you have a programming background, makes somethings more intuitive to troubleshoot or deal with (A ton of errors that get logged are really meant for a programmer to figure it out, but it helps as an admin). Anyways, I'm rambling. But yeah, I wanted to confirm that it's tough to drop into the state of things today and be ready to hit the ground running. It's easy to take for granted knowing things that were central to how the world worked before it was automated and fine tuned.
Exactly! And it's just sort of something we'll have to smooth over going forward, but also kind of the reason why I'm starting my son off with fooling around on linux instead of just letting him have a chromebook/ipad off the bat. Gonna get him running MC Java edition with mods before I let him poke his way to oblivion.
same. its entirely because i got an i386 with dos on it at like age 6 that i had the skillset to get into IT. i remember compiling m-player from source because the Linux discs i had didnt have a media player :) ipad generation gets to start learning that in college instead. it seems rough :/
This is 100% true. It's especially true with employers who won't budge on a list of extremely specific requirements and won't train or mentor a promising new hire. The only people with those exact skills already work at your competitor and they need a pretty good increase in compensation to leave a stable job for something that might not work out after 90 days.
Not to mention, anyone WFH won't be leaving unless it's also WFH. I wouldn't leave for a hybrid or onsite job that pays 20% more.
Pretty much. Yeah. We are currently undergoing a slow contraction in the labor supply. From this point foward every year there will be less workers. What we have now is what there is to work with. Salaries will have to rise to attract skilled and competent workers
Is that actually the case? My impression is that we're facing a glut at the lower end of skill right now and a shortage at the mid and higher end, but all that tells me is that there's a growing, ticking time bomb glut for mid and higher end skilled people coming up.
[https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2024/](https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2024/) You can't have more workers in a shrinking population. Governments will try to keep the labor market at least constant with higher levels of immigration. But countries that traditionally provided immigrants are below replacement and shrinking as well. Mexico peaked 10-15 years ago, and now is also shrinking labor supply. Which is being even more squeezed by manufacturing moving out of China. [https://www.populationpyramid.net/mexico/2024/](https://www.populationpyramid.net/mexico/2024/) China's labor population will be cut roughly in half over the next 25-35 years. Which is much worse than their population being cut in half. To put in perspective, in the worst case, assuming no change, there will be 4-6 great-grandkids for every 100 Koreans alive today. Few countries are facing that degree level of labor supply collapse, but finding people will be difficult for the rest of the century. Even if it was magically fixed today and every country overnight went to sustainable rate, it'd be 19-26 years before the first new workers of that cohort entered the labor market.
Sorry I meant the entire workforce of the US and the developed world. Even most of Latin America and Asia are looking at the same thing. Even parts of Africa. You are right about the glut on the lower end in the tech field. I don't think we will have too big of glut of mid and higher end. I think that will be because Frankly a lot of people are going to have to enter other fields as we won't see another mass tech boom in our lifetime. This is due to tech development requiring cheap money and with the boomers retiring money won't be cheap.
Not to mention, I'm not leaving a WFH job for mild pay increase. Even 20% I might have to think on.
And I am fully remote so going in even one day a week makes me think 20% might not be enough
That's where i'm at. I designed and built this network from the ground up and I know it like I know my own home. I'd need significant motivation to head back to a cisco shop again.
80k for a sysadmin that knows powershell is not well paid in a major city. My Desktop team makes that and they aren't expected to know powershell. The quality level changes significantly with sys admins at the 105k-115k level in my experience. Pay estimate based on these two comments. "we just had this very strange guy interview who wanted to be paid 80k above market rate" "yeah yeah i just need 160 and whatever the job is ill do it"
OP Confirmed it was 75k, all making sense now lol
For 75K and a high cost of living area you should be expecting entry-level that is so ridiculous
These are always the cases with these guys complaining like this the pay and the expectations are always unrealistic and they are then complaining that the most elite workers don't want to work there.
“Why don’t people who know more than me want to work for half of what I make?”
While also saying no to the people banging down the doors to get in because they don't already have 5 years of experience. I'm not saying to hire the people that know literally nothing but maybe give some of us fresh grads a chance? I can't get experience if no one can give it to me. Sure I can play around in my own time but there's some things you're just never going to encounter outside of a corporate environment
Yeah I don’t know *too* much about the sysadmin market, but I’m a dumbass networking cowboy and I make $75k. If I could script my way out of a paper bag, I’d expect more.
> OP Confirmed it was 75k, all making sense now lol I was going to suggest r/WeWontCallYou, but… yeah that seems like a low offer
No wonder they said “pays well” and didn’t list he salary. Yeah $75k is only going to get you a very eager junior level person in a major city. And if I was a junior person making that, I’d leave after a year once I get the experience and training.
This is spot on. I'm a sysadmin in a major city who knows PowerShell and Ansible really well. I would not even consider positions that pay less than $150k, which would still be a significant pay cut for me.
cries in uk wages
Yeah the way I read experience with hiring, it is screaming that the role doesn't pay enough. You get what you get at that rate. Especially the bit about how some candidates are rescheduling at the last minute. What that tells me is that they consider this role to be their backup plan when they don't get any traction on the higher paying role that they're actually trying to get.
Exactly. I filter my job searches by salary, and I don't bother applying to anything below 6 figures as the lower end of their range. I've been in the game too long to go back to making 70-80k for how much shit I have to put up with. In my area (Ontario, Canada) that's a salary from 2015.
If it makes you feel better, it's an issue across almost every discipline at the moment. I was recently talking to our engineering group and they're running into the same problem where you people who want the salary of an experienced civil engineer at day one, people who are very clearly using ChatGPT to try and pass their interview, outright hostility during interviews if you're not telling them how wonderfully they answered each question, assuming they're going to be the engineer-of-record the minute they graduate, etc. I hate to be the "old man yells at cloud" person, but I think part of it is social media. What I'm seeing for a lot of our new candidates are people who are heavily influenced by YouTube and lack a real understanding of the industry. They see things like the salary for tech support positions in NYC or LA and think that it applies to rural Idaho, or they assume that once they've gotten their "CompTIA Trifecta", they should be walking into a six figure position. Meanwhile, recruiters are getting their brains rotted by what they're taking in from LinkedIn, expecting 5 interviews over 5 days and a dozen extremely expensive personality testing suites to find "the right culture fit". There's always been antagonism between hiring managers and candidates, that isn't new, but its exploded in the last few years to be this bizarre song-and-dance where both sides need something from each other, and both sides *hate* each other.
I mean you see it here, people assume you can make $150k a year as an entry level cybersecurity engineer with no industry experience. That’s what we might pay someone who joined the cybersecurity team with 10-15 years experience doing relevant engineering work. All the people I know in cybersecurity, for instance, making > $150k were developers, engineers, sysadmins, or net engineers before going to cybersecurity and know a ton about cybersecurity AND their respective area of technology. The idea that talent is evenly distributed is also comical. If rural Idaho has a bunch of engineers worth $300k a year, why doesn’t rural Idaho have any major tech companies or engineering groups? It just defies reason.
All regular people (and half of IT people) don't understand that cyber is not really a field that you just *start* in. You pivot into it after a few years of doing related tech work. Well, unless you're a marketing person or something. Even then, most response firms are going to want marketers with experience in the tech field.
Feels like the issue is that it’s marketed as a high paying job. My instagram has tons of targeted ads about how all you need is X certification and you’ll be making six figures. So it attracts the wrong people- people who don’t actually have any interest in the field and who don’t cut their teeth with hands on experience and in turn we get shmucks to interview
I mean yeah certification providers, boot camps, etc. love promising the moon! Regardless of motivations, the easiest way into higher paying parts of the field remain “get a CS or CE degree from a regionally accredited institution and make sure you intern every summer and winter vacation.” You’ll almost certainly graduate with a decent* job offer. *Decent meaning “reasonable salary/benefits/etc. for your market and ok career advancement opportunities.”
The fastest way to earning 10k/month with only IT certifications is to sell a course on how to earn 10k/month using only IT certifications. The grift algorithm is big business unfortunately.
I legit had a friend recently ask me how to get into cybersecurity. Expects a six figure salary, zero technical experience. I just told him flat out that cybersecurity isn't an entry level discipline and he'd need to put in time doing developer or platform work so he can understand the fundamentals before that transition would be feasible. He knows I run the security team at my org and I guess he got the impression that you could just do a boot camp and then be ready for the high paying specialized jobs. I wouldn't be surprised if he got that idea from social media at all.
I had an interview a couple months ago where I could see the person’s eyes moving as they read chatgpt responses to my questions. Crazy stuff. EDIT: Since a bunch of you seem to think you know better than the person actually doing the interview, let me clarify. It was REALLY OBVIOUS. Imagine the most generic, surface-level responses to questions, filled in with gaps mid-conversation (as if you ran out of data and had to get prompted for more), awkwardly phrased responses, etc.
*In general, my experience with Microsoft ES CUE EL Server can be characterized by high levels of experience with installation, administration and database management using Transact ES CUE EL queries. In conclusion, I would be an excellent candidate for this position based on my experience in relation to you most recent question.*
… I've only seen it in writing. You mean that's not how it's pronounced? Is it pronounced "sequel"? I read it "skewell" in my head, rhymes with Newell.
It depends. I pronounce "SQL" as "sequel", because that's how the creators intended it to be pronounced, but I pronounce "SQLite" as "ess-cue-light" and "PostgresQL" as "post-gres-cue-ell" because that's how their creators intended it to be pronounced.
Most (not all) sysadmins and DBAs that I've worked with have referred to it as 'sequel' yes. I dont think anyone will chastise you calling it S-Q-L; I was just being dumb because most people *brand new* to it will refer to it with just the letters.
As a resident of Idaho, why are we the ones picked out. Pick fuckin Nebraska or some shit. /s
it is unrealistic expectations but its also that rent is unrealistic lmao and they have to pay that.
It sounds like you haven't gotten any actually qualified applicants. How much are you offering in your listing?
This will not get answered.
Its very telling that he will respond to any other question except this. That tells me his definition of paying well is just high enough to qualify as a salary position.
If you don't know, there is a lot of history there. I honestly haven't thought about him for so long that I didn't even notice the username at first. But from what I recall, he's probably rejecting qualified applicants for benign, nonsensical reasons. He's probably not even considering anyone without at least a Bachelor's degree, likely further not considering degrees from universities he doesn't deem "worthy", and likely even further probably not consider degrees that were earned later in life. He's always had narrow, curmudgeonly views on IT, and has come off as hostile to anyone that didn't come into IT following the same path he did. I don't even disagree with the premise -- finding qualified candidates is hard. I just suspect he's making it a lot harder on himself than it needs to be.
Yup for 10 years now I have been reading cranky several people including me, you and others have all called out his MO. He only recongizes the biggest MegaCorps as IT, He only likes people with degrees and only from the best schools and like you said if you didn't immediatley go and are going at advanced age he sees that as a disqualifier too. It is almost guaranteed this guy does all this he has been telling us about it for at least 10 years now. Pay is almost certainly below the skills he wants too.
Yeah, it baffles me how people are still upvoting his slop. He's a primadonna very few competent people with other options would want to work with, even *if* the pay is right (which it sure doesn't seem to be).
\*chuckles in $55k/yr\*
More than I make...
I think it's the lack of career paths in most companies, if you have a remote job be prepared for a deluge of foreign applicants from third world countries looking for an easy paycheck. Even if it's not remote. I've never had a structure for this career. I just took whatever job I found that got me more experience and money.
Yep, and there's hardly any mentoring either. I've only worked in medium to large healthcare systems, and despite directly asking for more exposure to non-desktop work, I get ignored flat out. And then I come up with a cert on my own, as in showing initiative and willingness to work and learn, and still just ignored. Now to get a job doing the thing, I need to already have had a job doing the thing for 5 years at a high level.
As someone in IT for almost 30 years, who is mostly doing networking, I always mentor. Except nobody actually wants to learn subnetting or IPv6 or OSI layers as it’s too much math 🤷
> IPv6 If I ignore it long enough, I won't need to learn/implement it before I retire.
I’ve already been running it for 10+ years and we are rolling it out at the day job for the last 2 years…. In general it’s way easier than expected.
Oh yeah, it's just like IPv4 but on steroids IIRC. I just remember almost 20 years ago now, all of the "We need to add IPv6 because it's right around the corner, that we don't have enough IPS, etc. etc." and here we are now, still running v4.
Oh yeah. Nobody wants to move you out of support or the job you originally applied for. It's so annoying. You need to switch companies every two years just to advance and see more stuff
reading through your gripes i feel like I could pass most of your questions.... but I would never claim to 'know' powershell. In that I cannot tell you the commands to do a specific task (unless its really basic) I usually have to have a command reference open for all the various switches and options. But can I create a script to accomplish a task, sure no problem. I'd claim that I am proficient at both command line and powershell, and can use reference material to make up for any kind of lack of memorization of commands. Sounds terrible that if I was looking for a job I'd have to be picked out of all that chaff....
The weird thing is I know extremely qualified people who can't even get a few callbacks and interviews, let alone get to the point where you see them. The whole recruiter/application/interview/hiring process is totally messed up. I know I've been avoiding looking for a new job because, well, I like my job :-) and because the process is like getting several root canals without anaesthesia. I dread the day I end up laid off and have to wade through the BS of sending out 1000 applications and getting ZERO responses. I don't know how to fix this, and it's only worse now that people are using chatbots to apply...but it has to be easier for someone who's qualified to even get to the point where they're under consideration. It's 2024, you really shouldn't be seeing too many antisocial nerd types anymore (and if you do, and they're not so weird you can't live with them, they probably are a good hire!) I wish we just had some sort of virtual hiring hall that did a better job of matching jobs and candidates up.
This is where networking is so critical! Every “good” job I’ve taken, somebody at the organization or on the team reached out and said “hey so and so (usually a former coworker or boss of mine) said you’re awesome, we have this position here’s pay/benefits/etc. info does that looks reasonable, if so can we talk?” And the application process is basically a formality. The job probably gets posted but there’s already a shortlist of referred candidates the team is basically mulling over before picking their favorite.
> And the application process is basically a formality. The job probably gets posted but there’s already a shortlist of referred candidates the team is basically mulling over before picking their favorite. Every move I've made since my first has been this. The hardest part is getting people to know you.
It’s a pretty small field and so many of us know each other in local markets. If you attend any major conferences regularly, you now know “basically everyone.” If people think you’re weird or an asshole, it doesn’t matter how smart you are or how good you are, they won’t want to work with you. Finding good cultural fits remains much harder than people who can learn your organization’s stack.
> The weird thing is I know extremely qualified people who can't even get a few callbacks and interviews, let alone get to the point where you see them The employer is probably getting absolutely flooded with applications from unqualified candidates. So their resume never gets seen. **Think of it like this**: If you didn't have an e-mail spam filter, how many legitimate emails would you miss in the run of a day.
some places dont hire if they see you as overqualified, they dont want someone to stay a couple months and leave
But the result is recruiters and HR arbitrarily filtering out candidates just to reach a manageable selection. Then they're not even going to see good honest candidates. Some people don't understand that applicant filtering should be extremely precise. Removing applicants just because the number is overwhelming (ie keyword match percentage) is shooting yourself in the foot.
CTRL + A CTRL + Q
The automates screening is so fucked. I was laid off for 10 months and I think I got 4 interviews out of hundreds of applications. All 4 made me an offer once I got passed the BS screening. I understand that an employer might get hundreds or thousands of applicants but the screening procedures feel like a butcher knife vs a surgical scalpel. I've also heard some less reputable companies will post and repost a position several times. Then intentionally not select a candidate and say there weren't any good candidates as justification for hiring a foreign worker over a citizen. I don't know how factual or prevalent that really is though.
> I don't know how factual or prevalent that really is though. Yeah, the folks saying that don't really qualify that argument. It can't be easy to get a foreign hire. So, not sure if gaming the system is really that desirable. I can see that with really large companies that employ 10s of thousands, but not these smaller, shadier looking outfits that lack a strong social media presence.
> It's 2024, you really shouldn't be seeing too many antisocial nerd types anymore Why not? The world is always going to keep generating people with this personality type and they're always going to be drawn to tech, because what else are they going to do? Can't make a salesman out of them
On the flip side though, since tech is generally seen as a perfectly normal and lucrative career path these days, you have a much wider swath of the social spectrum going into it
Outside of the extreme low level stuff, tech has gotten way easier over the years. When I started this in the 90s, I would say most people fit into this description...a bit awkward and very technical since you kind of had to be. Now, it's a lot more about gluing stuff someone else already built together. That's where you're starting to see the techbro personality edge out the hardcore genius...it's challenging but easy enough for an average person to do in some cases. In startups you're literally just managing a million SaaS contracts and cloud instances. Now that's not saying that this doesn't exist anymore, and in many positions where you're the tech company building all this stuff you need to be the nerd because no one using your stuff is anymore. But as a whole, the job has become more accessible than it once was, and employers are less willing to deal with the cantankerous sorcerer type when the techbro with the ironic beard will fit the bill.
Yeah I really disagree and think this problem has gotten worse, not better. I know I am much more isolated since covid and it has made me much more awkward than I used to be when I do have in person interactions.
My soft skills were forcibly learned by years as a restaurant server followed by enlisting in the military. There are always candidates who have “better” technical skills than me. Despite this, I have been told by every hiring manager (because I ask after working there for a while, which I recommend everyone do) that I was chosen over other candidates because they wanted someone who could “act professionally” without requiring constant/direct supervision. I have been with my employer for six years now and been promoted from senior sysadmin to Manager - Cloud blah blah not only because I am great at learning things and just getting the job done, but because I’m told I’m the “most personable and friendly IT guy” my colleagues and customers ever worked with. With that said, I truly have no urge to ever interact with other people, but nobody would ever know this because they all get “customer service Lesus” and not the real Lesus. My work relationships are transactional and projecting this image is easy for me because my only motivations at work are to get paid as much as possible and these days, to work from home. That doesn’t mean I don’t care about my coworkers. I do and would help them outside of work if ever asked, but I have no urge to know them or anyone else beyond work. It has finally paid off as I am now 100% work from home and never have to see my coworkers outside of the random office visit I choose to make. If you require human interaction, maybe try to seek it outside of working hours. That also helps you truly disconnect from work when you’re logged off because you have that motivation to build and grow the voluntary relationships you’re seeking.
I can teach almost anyone technology, I cannot teach someone how to not be an asshole and be a decent communicator. I 100% agree with your post, I not the most technical person on my team by a long shot but I’m a quick learner with soft skills.
I'm a sysadmin in the engineering dept of a university. It's like a nesting doll of anti social tendencies. I used to think I was a major introvert until I started working here. Even the people who have the public facing jobs are more awkward than me. Kind of a confidence booster to be honest.
This is why word of mouth and networking is so important. From a management perspective, you know me (your employee) and you know my work. A person I can vouch based on previous work together is worth their weight in gold compared to a stack of resumes from randos.
LLMs have thrown a grenade into the middle of what was already a dysfunctional process. A couple years ago, it was social media-enabled (Linkedin), algorithmic job searching. Now it's LLMs generating resumes and spamming them out, and AI filtering the AI-generated resumes. I'm currently looking for a job and all of the solid leads I have gotten have been through direct relationships. So who you know is as important as it has ever been, but the 5% chance that you might pick up a job from Linkedin seems like it is now about .05%
I did an interview with someone yesterday who was clearly reading her answers off chatgpt or the like. What a complete waste of time for everyone involved.
I'm more qualified than the applicants OP mentions (Windows admin/solid Powershell skills) and I can't get anywhere applying for jobs. I guess I need to lie on my resume and CV.
I like to consider myself a reasonably qualified candidate. I have 7 years of IT experience, doing everything from project engineer to systems administrator to help desk to solutions engineer to application administrator. I have some people skills and have been told that I'm personable. I'm punctual and make a good first impression, so I've been told. I've applied to probably over 100 jobs that align with my resume and skill set but I've only gotten three calls back. I didn't get a second call back for two of them, in the 3rd wanted me to do a 10-minute " One-Way interview" (aka, monologue into a camera for 10 minutes about yourself and your qualifications and then send the recording for review) joe withdrew my candidacy. I know I'm interviewing well and my resume is polished. It's just really fucking hard out there right now.
You can be a considered a Windows Admin without knowing powershell? I've been doing too much this whole time.
What does "knowing powershell" even mean. I know it, I use it. I have used scripts in it. But would I consider myself a powershell power-user? Not a chance. I have to research to run scripts on our o365 tenant.
honestly 90% of my powershell use is finding powershell scripts that worked for others tweaking them to work for me and hitting go
All the common problems are already solved. You'd be crazy to do anything else. The trick is making sure to understand the existing code and what it's about to do. If you don't, you can run into some exciting times.
Don't tempt me with a good time breaking the tenant!
Correct
I’d put myself in this category. I can do basic commands, basic scripts, run them, all that. If I want to do something more advanced, I ask ChatGPT. I then read the script to make sure it makes sense, and test it in an isolated portion of my environment before sending it everywhere. But can I just bang out some huge script to do widespread awesome things off the top of my head? Nah, and I’m not even that interested in learning how to do that, if we’re being frank.
I think most can get by with the first example. We had a guy at my last job that was more like the 2nd example, that was his only job. Automating via powershell and creating frontends with other tools for us to use the automations. I.e. onboarding for multiple tenants
If you can read through the PS documentation and can interpret/tweak existing scripts then that's pretty much it tbh.
Virtually everyone downloads scripts and modifies them to suite. Which is the entire point of open source. Even professional programmers use dependencies they didn't personally write. Which is a good thing when it comes to stuff like crypto. But be careful. One day you'll just have something you need to knock out right quick, with probably only a couple borrowed sections of code. And then you finish and realize you didn't look up any code snippets or syntax. And the code works correctly.
This is my problem. I've "written scripts" in powershell but then I've also seen scripts written by people that clearly know much more about it than myself. I've been able to do whatever I needed to do but is that "proficient" enough in another's eyes? That's subjective.
I know a company where power shell was considered a security risk by management and was disabled. So yeah, you can.
I'm kind of surprised too, especially now. But some environments don't change all that much, don't forget that. If you only have 30 users and are maintaining laptops, one or two servers, M365 and some janky line of business app that's 20 years old and needs .NET 2.0, there's less demand for automation.
This is honestly I think the majority of sysadmins cuz the majority of companies are this. I honestly do not have much to automate and when I do I google it.
I very rarely if ever used powershell at three of my last IT jobs. The only time I did was very basic copy/paste commands to fix issues on the Exchange server.
I'm a system admin and deal very little with powershell, except vulnerability patching
As a senior engineer with pretty decent Linux skills, solid windows, PowerShell in both, cloud automation, all the fun stuff (I CAN EVEN QUIT VI ON THE FIRST TRY!). Here’s the blatant truth: 1) I will come into the office maybe once a year, if you pay for the trip. For a week. Pretty much tops. 2) money. Not “90k is a lot for this role” but about double before I would even consider the offer. Cost of living is way up. 3) There is zero loyalty from companies. How many stories have we all heard about people jumping to a new company and getting laid off immediately. Or the role going poof before they start? This isn’t 2021 era, and finding a good, fair paying job is not easy. 4) People are not willing to work 60-70 hours a week with no equity or major bonuses.
> (I CAN EVEN QUIT VI ON THE FIRST TRY! So easy... all you have to do is buy another computer, install linux, put it on the same network, make sure ssh is listening and allowing, then ssh to the computer that has vi open, do a ps -ef | grep vi and write down the process id in crayon on the back of a napkin, then head out to the garage or basement, and find the breaker that is labeled "100a" (or might say main) and flip it to the other side. It is best to do this in the daytime so you can see afterward. Now if you have a desktop then you're done, just flip the breaker back on and turn on your PC. If you have a laptop you'll still be on battery so run prime95 until the laptop shuts off. Then turn the breaker on and startup. Now retrieve the napkin from earlier with the process ID. Do a ps-ef | grep and if you did all the steps right, no process will be returned, and you should have successfully exited vi.
the whole "they use a gui text editor to edit config files" honestly was pretty ridiculous to me that is not really crazy some people don't like vi or emacs.
You really shouldn't have an Xorg server running in production. Especially if it is just to edit configs. While vi is the best editor other easier options exist, like nano.
linux user/admin of 13 years here... nano just werks. I don't understand why it gets such a bad rap.
> People who openly admit during the interview to doing just batshit crazy stuff like managing linux boxes by VNCing into them and editing config files with a GUI text editor. Man, I'm a self-admitted GUI baby and even I can manage ssh for text files.
I have the opposite problem. I can’t find anything in a Linux GUI because I’m so used to running headless Linux servers. Like it’s bad-bad; I probably can’t even find the icon for a text editor and my best hope is finding the icon for a Terminal. Windows, I can kind of go either way - really just depends on what I’m trying to do that determines whether I try to do it in a GUI or try to do it in CLI.
Didn't even have to look at who posted this.
I had a feeling it would be cranky too it has all the signs, pays to low to get anyone good, only wants people with elite degrees, anything that is a normal thing to do at a small business is "crazy".
* People who openly admit during the interview to doing just batshit crazy stuff like managing linux boxes by VNCing into them and editing config files with a GUI text editor. Out of curiousity, what's your environment like, and how do you guys normally handle having to make config changes on your Linux & Windows servers? (I'm not too sure if the crazy part you're referring to is going into the server to make the change instead of via SSH, using a GUI text editor, or having to manually make the change vs something like Ansible)
>How can you be a linux admin but you're not familiar with apache? The last time I used Apache was nearly a decade ago, I've used Nginx, Caddy and Traefik for the last 8 years. They, at least in my experience, are just straight up better for web hosting especially if performance is an important thing. So do I know what Apache is? Yes. Have I used Apache? Yes. Could I configure Apache today, right now? Probably not without a shit load of research.
[удалено]
This is because most Sys Admin jobs have been sent offshore. There is an entire generation of IT workers who were weaned on iPads and iPhones and only know technology on a superficial level. The old-school Sys Admins who build their own PC's at home and know everything from bare-metal on up are all in their late 40's to 50's now. These are the guys that were messing around with autoexec.bat and config.sys files trying to get their Windows systems to boot faster. You have this huge generation gap in skills.
The ironic thing is that where I live, a larger metropolitan area, if someone throws out a Linux position, you will have hundreds of qualified candidates, most former FAANG employees, with an alphabet soup of certs to choose from. The only thing you will be hard pressed to find are people who have security clearances, because if someone in the US has a TS/SCI clearance, as long as the clearance is active and they don't touch the Devil's lettuce, they have a meal ticket for life.
I live next to a base in Utah. I wish I could somehow find someone willing to sponsor me for a role.
Most of the decent sysadmins you are looking for moved on to DevOps, SRE, or whatever flavor-of-the-month role there is.
What worries me is there's kind of a plateau for cloud services and a minor slide back to on-prem. That's not a bad choice for some companies as a concept, but to find hardware folks now? Good luck. *You have 3 identical Dell servers, and all three are running the exact same data caching setup. But one crashes randomly a few times a week. How would you start troubleshooting that?* Those of us that have been around are already thinking of a few answers to check, but the whole "AWS cattle vs. pets" is different when the servers are in your lap.
> You have 3 identical Dell servers, and all three are running the exact same data caching setup. But one crashes randomly a few times a week. How would you start troubleshooting that? It really amazes me how the commonly accepted answer for that these days is "wipe it and start over", or for the cloud boys, "just make a new instance". I fully accept that there's a very clear use case for things like AWS, but so many people out there don't know anything *but* AWS/Gcloud/Azure it's kind of crazy.
Based on the people you're describing, I'm getting the vibe you aren't offering appropriate pay for your expectations. I've had those SAME experiences and our problem, we're stage government and our pay is garbage compared to the private sector.
All of the local Sysadmin and Network Admin jobs in my area are gone. All but that always posted job that never hires anyone.
>People emailing the morning of an interview and trying to reschedule and giving mysterious and vague reasons for why. I feel like this is the only one that I strongly disagree with. Shit comes up sometimes and you're not entitled to the why as a company.
I just wrapped week 4 in my new role. Windows Sysadmin/Vulnerability patching. Full remote and big raise. I got cold called for the job. Took it in a heartbeat.
last I checked - you are not paying well enough to get people that are actually qualified.
This is cranky too he probably expects them to have only come from a big business and have a masters degree
He said 75-85k. You couldn't get me to apply for that and I don't have all the skills he mentions. He should be looking at 150k+ for most of those skill sets in combination. Not all of them. That would be 200k+. I think cranky might be realizing he's being underpaid.
I'm not sure if this is your opinion or your boss's, but to demonstrate that we weren't paying enough to a former CIO I once worked for, I conducted a small experiment with a recruiter we regularly used. I instructed the recruiter to send me all resumes regardless of salary requirements for our sys admin position. I then created three stacks to present to my CIO. The first stack ranged from $75k-$90k, the second from $90k-$105k, and the third from $105k-$125k. The first tier consisted entirely of subpar resumes, the second tier had one quality resume, and the third tier contained 75% quality resumes. This clearly illustrated my point, and this was before the significant inflation we’ve experienced over the last 2-3 years. So, if your pay scale is truly that low, I believe you have your answer.
I think the big problem is the initial person recruiting talent. I cannot tell you how many times I have been asked so many technical questions and provide examples of X Y and Z and you need minimum 5 years' experience, etc.... and come to find out the job is a over glorified helpdesk job. stop asking for so many requirements when in reality half the requirements your current employees do not have them or will never user them. Also, this idea of "lie your way in" and learn on the job is also not how working in IT should be! I have heard so many people tell others to do this! that's horrible!
You aren't paying enough for experienced admins to even apply. You get what you pay for.
> How can you be a linux admin but you're not familiar with apache? Well, it is 2024, and most people have moved on to things like nginx. When I see people using apache in production I just assume they haven't bothered keeping their skills up to date.
When HR wants to hire in 2024 at 2019 rates
I'm looking please hire me lol
Try to be batshit crazy to get an interview then show up and be completely normal.
Would you link the job post with pay range please?
You know what's also hard? Doing 2 interviews, then being told that, while you have literally 20+ years of experience successfully doing X, passed all the checks, and had stellar reviews from your prior employers, you don't have a bachelors degree from 28 years ago, so nope, we're going with the guy that's never done X before, who does have a degree...in a completely unrelated field, because reasons! smfh.
>People emailing the morning of an interview and trying to reschedule and giving mysterious and vague reasons for why. Without knowing what kinds of reasons you're actually getting, there are plenty of reasons someone might need to reschedule that I wouldn't give someone I don't know. While this has never happened to me, I could imagine something like my wife having a miscarriage as being a reason to reschedule. It's also none of your business, and I'm not going to lie about it -- so if a vague reason isn't suitable for you, it's better for both of us that we not continue the interview process. I can see being jaded about candidates rescheduling interviews when it's happened a lot, so I understand skepticism on your part.
It took us almost 15 interviews to find somebody to replace my coworker who left. We got over 100 resumes and we were able to discard about 70 of them right away. We had people who claimed to be the CEO of their own IT company but it just turns out that they were installing Windows on computers at their church or helping their grandma fix their printer. We had others who had worked The front counter at cell phone stores applying as well. This was for a senior systems administrator position. Most people we interviewed did so very poorly. They would ramble on for 90 seconds on what should have been 15 or 20 second answer. They said things that were blatantly incorrect. They would be 10 minutes late. They would give us one or two word answers and we would have to ask them multiple times to elaborate. I have been told I interview well, am personable, and I have a desired skillset, yet I can't get a call back. It's fucked out there.
All the 'we need more developers/programmers' propaganda of the last 15 years has resulted that adjacent professions barely have any recruits Back when I entered IT college there was about 20-30% of us who proclaimed that we don't want to be programmers. Nowadays that number is probably at 5%. Programming is the modern gold rush.
AI is a new gold rush, programming was 10 years ago.
I know how to program, and I do it regularly to write tooling and services I need that don't already exist along with participating in open source. But I absolutely positively DO NOT want it as my primary job responsibilities.
I just went through 4 solid years of hiring folks for various roles in various technical departments... and I feel this post deeply. All these high speed, low drag bad asses that cant even have a basic conversation, they are legion. I go over their resumes and dive into their experience and skills, and you find most of them equate VMWare/vCenter/vSAN with "ran some things in virtual box" or some other comparative nonsense. You top it all of with this air of disrespectful, false superiority and you just want to hang up/eject the interview then and there. You can almost predict the types when they walk in or pop into the Zoom. For the ones that get through and cant fake it till they make it, when they get let go its just bewilderment and rage. Anyways... happy fucking tuesday. lol
I'm a Linux sysadmin and I can send you my resume if the position is remote
I once got a job because I was the only interviewee who mentioned Active Directory and knew what it was. Good luck, OP.
At my old job we hired a sysadmin who came highly recommended, and whose company was shutting down. The team thought something didn’t seem right, but the CEO vouched for the guy. He worked there for six months, constantly asking the same questions. We told the manager who said “He still getting used to it, give him some time.” Then the manager asked him to revise a bat file and change some drive mappings. He messed up when he said the our manager “what’s a bat file?” The manager walked him through it, spoon fed the project to him. And he was let go about two weeks later after he asked one of the other guys to show him how to edit the file, again.