The future is cloudy. And by that, I mean most medium/large businesses have taken the SaaS and PaaS bait because it means minimum infrastructure investment. Old-timers who have serious knowledge...
The future is cloudy. And by that, I mean most medium/large businesses have taken the SaaS and PaaS bait because it means minimum infrastructure investment. Old-timers who have serious knowledge are being displaced through IT personnel layoffs for all but the cheapest, freshly-minted CS grads, and a few project managers.
So if you're looking for ways to remain employable in the field, the major paths are:
Data analytics - learn to pull pretty reports with R, Tableau, MS SQL reporting tools, and specialize in statistics for business operations.
Hosted server management, VDI platforms, containerization, and advanced networking tools (SDN, SD-WAN, etc.). Nearly everything hardware-based is fungible and geography-independent these days. Even data-intensive applications like video have all kinds of caching and compression magic to cut latency. I'm not saying it's a universally good idea to abolish private datacenters, but NOC jobs are work-from-home now, and performed by people with significant programming skills to orchestrate all of that server ballet. There's some minor admin work available with Office 365 and SharePoint in large businesses (we have two mail admins for 20K users), but most smaller companies have already adopted GSuite because it's good enough.
Various programming stacks.
Project management and/or service delivery. Yes, Dorothy, there're still gonna be Hell Desk jobs, and people who know how to build a budget and herd cats will probably survive as well.
This is one of those situations that makes me seriously question whether there is such a thing as a psychic aether, or twins separated at birth from different mothers. I'm struggling to get out of...
This is one of those situations that makes me seriously question whether there is such a thing as a psychic aether, or twins separated at birth from different mothers.
I'm struggling to get out of your old job, and get into... Linux and devops for open source architectures. Likewise, any relevant certifications are years out of date (CCNA hasn't been kept up, etc.).
I'm grumpy and disgusted at the prospect of studying for yet more expensive brain dumps, and ready to quit my employer, for (among other things) ceasing to reimburse education or respect the time necessary for any coursework. Apparently, they've been burned too many times by people who got their certs on the company dime, and demanded higher pay or quit. [It's a freaking healthcare company, and the only reason clinical staff still receive paid continuing ed is because they also have non-competes.]
I found this interesting, but I am far, far too lazy, overworked, and cranky to even contemplate that kind of headlong undertaking right now.
If I can make the financials work, my goal would be to quit, do nothing but study for 6 months, and see if I can re-ignite the spark that got me interested in technology in the first place. If not, well, I may be seeking advice on writing pulp fiction.
I understand precisely what you mean about undervalued investment in your employer's business. At my last job, I virtualized everything, designed and trained a fairly sophisticated spam filtering...
I understand precisely what you mean about undervalued investment in your employer's business. At my last job, I virtualized everything, designed and trained a fairly sophisticated spam filtering system, got reliable on- and off-site backup working, created video security training for the clients, implemented a ticketing system (yeah, it was Spiceworks, but better than nothing), set up a whole suite of security/monitoring tools (Untangle/Snort/Splunk, Nagios/PRTG), was making a fair pass at web programming and providing spare hands for the DBA... I left complete documentation for everything. [Somewhere on the web, a comprehensive step-by-step I'd written about eight years ago for domain controller and Citrix server virtual migration is still floating around...]
I loved playing with the toys, to the point that I was building my own boxes, clustering them, running my own Linux mail server at home, writing shell scripts, and monkeying with little curiosities like Bitcoin mining.
Since then, my job has sucked the tech joy right out of me. Aside from random, unpredictable travel, stints of 80 - 100 hour weeks, and accumulated injuries, I'm also working with too many parochial specialists who won't believe me when I tell them why they're doing it wrong. And then I have to fix what they did wrong. Add an extra helping or two of sexual harassment and gender discrimination. Until two years ago, I was earning about 25% less than guys in less skilled roles. Top it off with being so "expert" at the old technologies that I've been passed over for any opportunities to work with the newer ones - I'm having to forcibly grab Azure projects away from people who aren't getting them done.
With very simple, cheap tools, I've automated away a couple of million dollars a year of wasted personnel time. Lately, I've been trying to push adoption of a very nice product which essentially replaces HL7 (and another multi-million dollar/year suite of expenditures, delayed contracts, and lost labor). I've tried to treat corporate bureaucracy as just another puzzle to solve.
This time, I've made no secret to my boss that I will be leaving as soon as I've trained my replacement, who's starting next week. [The person I had been grooming for the job quit for a $25k/year increase elsewhere.] I care about the clinical staff, patients, my team, and my co-workers, but the company can take a flying f*ck.
All that being said, I also have no idea what to do with myself. My interests and skills are fairly wide-ranging outside of tech - there's some professional-level technical/science/legal writing, the pastry cook years, community farming, a self-funding jewelry hobby...
I've usually squeezed in a course or two and some professional networking around work, but haven't been able to for a few years. I know that other people can usually strike sparks of enthusiasm when we get to talking about everyone's favorite toys, and I'm hoping that some face-to-face school time will provide me with a clue as to what's next. Meanwhile, I'm a 50+ y.o. woman, and any career change at this point will have to be self-started.
What you are experiencing is partially captured in this podcast. Most people (and especially small businesses) have no way of telling good technology from bad technology. Therefore, it becomes a...
Exemplary
What you are experiencing is partially captured in this podcast. Most people (and especially small businesses) have no way of telling good technology from bad technology. Therefore, it becomes a market for lemons: Companies get the impression that IT is about rebooting servers, so they aim to pay as little is possible.
To move up in the IT world, you must get businesses to see you as a partner, not a servant. Get them to describe a problem they have, ask them how much it's worth if you can solve it. Instead of immediately jumping to a solution, you should spend most of your time figuring out what the actual problem is, and how they will know when problem is solved. For example, most companies will tell you they want "WordPress". But WordPress doesn't solve any particular problem. Really, what they want is "more visitors to their website", or "better conversion to paying customers", or something like that. WordPress is just a tiny (and arbitrary) part of the full solution, and people who just install WordPress are a dime a dozen.
If you can actually connect your solution to the value they get, they will gladly pay you a fraction of that value. That tends to be 10x to 100x what you would have gotten if you just charged "per hour" to do a menial task like "Install WordPress". Nobody will care how many hours it took, nor how easy/hard it was. What matters is that you showed them the value they got.
Most nerds in IT just like playing with the technology, and when put next to the CEO, they will continue to talk nerd stuff. It sounds like you have the right people skills to do IT the "right" way. (See also: patio11 on HackerNews)
I really liked being the guy who's called in when everything is on fire, everything is completely obscure and foreign, and I can somehow figure out how to put out all the fires
Problem is, people very quickly get used to that. You are no longer the "Hero", you are simply "doing your job" and anyone could do that, right? It can feel good to be the hero, but it's really making up for an unhealthy company mentality elsewhere, and it's not sustainable. Someone is creating those situations where things get fucked up. If it's you, you should just quit. If it's someone else, it's better to point that out and let the system fail because of them. You can be sure the company will spend resources to fix the problem. If you constantly shield the company from it's own mistakes, they will continue making them.
but then when shit hits the fan, and something totally unpredictable happens, I prove my value by fixing everything.
That's the wrong way to value yourself -- That feeds into the "Hero" mentality. It's much better if you can ensure that the shit never hits the fan. (Of course nobody will ever appreciate that. But it sure beats not being appreciated after you knock yourself out playing the hero.) Don't put "being a hero" in the budget, instead set realistic expectations all around. Sometimes it's as simple as standing up and saying "If we budget X, we can be back up in an hour. If we budget Y, we can be back up in 8 hours. If we don't budget anything, our disaster recovery could realistically take 24 hours." Some companies will gladly choose the 24 hours. You will grumble, but that's their choice, and they won't yell at you when it happens, because they agreed to it. And likely the cost of their downtime is much less than X or Y.
The future is cloudy. And by that, I mean most medium/large businesses have taken the SaaS and PaaS bait because it means minimum infrastructure investment. Old-timers who have serious knowledge are being displaced through IT personnel layoffs for all but the cheapest, freshly-minted CS grads, and a few project managers.
So if you're looking for ways to remain employable in the field, the major paths are:
Data analytics - learn to pull pretty reports with R, Tableau, MS SQL reporting tools, and specialize in statistics for business operations.
Hosted server management, VDI platforms, containerization, and advanced networking tools (SDN, SD-WAN, etc.). Nearly everything hardware-based is fungible and geography-independent these days. Even data-intensive applications like video have all kinds of caching and compression magic to cut latency. I'm not saying it's a universally good idea to abolish private datacenters, but NOC jobs are work-from-home now, and performed by people with significant programming skills to orchestrate all of that server ballet. There's some minor admin work available with Office 365 and SharePoint in large businesses (we have two mail admins for 20K users), but most smaller companies have already adopted GSuite because it's good enough.
Various programming stacks.
Project management and/or service delivery. Yes, Dorothy, there're still gonna be Hell Desk jobs, and people who know how to build a budget and herd cats will probably survive as well.
Ugh. Thank you. This is everything I knew was coming but didn't want to hear.
This is one of those situations that makes me seriously question whether there is such a thing as a psychic aether, or twins separated at birth from different mothers.
I'm struggling to get out of your old job, and get into... Linux and devops for open source architectures. Likewise, any relevant certifications are years out of date (CCNA hasn't been kept up, etc.).
I'm grumpy and disgusted at the prospect of studying for yet more expensive brain dumps, and ready to quit my employer, for (among other things) ceasing to reimburse education or respect the time necessary for any coursework. Apparently, they've been burned too many times by people who got their certs on the company dime, and demanded higher pay or quit. [It's a freaking healthcare company, and the only reason clinical staff still receive paid continuing ed is because they also have non-competes.]
I found this interesting, but I am far, far too lazy, overworked, and cranky to even contemplate that kind of headlong undertaking right now.
If I can make the financials work, my goal would be to quit, do nothing but study for 6 months, and see if I can re-ignite the spark that got me interested in technology in the first place. If not, well, I may be seeking advice on writing pulp fiction.
I understand precisely what you mean about undervalued investment in your employer's business. At my last job, I virtualized everything, designed and trained a fairly sophisticated spam filtering system, got reliable on- and off-site backup working, created video security training for the clients, implemented a ticketing system (yeah, it was Spiceworks, but better than nothing), set up a whole suite of security/monitoring tools (Untangle/Snort/Splunk, Nagios/PRTG), was making a fair pass at web programming and providing spare hands for the DBA... I left complete documentation for everything. [Somewhere on the web, a comprehensive step-by-step I'd written about eight years ago for domain controller and Citrix server virtual migration is still floating around...]
I loved playing with the toys, to the point that I was building my own boxes, clustering them, running my own Linux mail server at home, writing shell scripts, and monkeying with little curiosities like Bitcoin mining.
Since then, my job has sucked the tech joy right out of me. Aside from random, unpredictable travel, stints of 80 - 100 hour weeks, and accumulated injuries, I'm also working with too many parochial specialists who won't believe me when I tell them why they're doing it wrong. And then I have to fix what they did wrong. Add an extra helping or two of sexual harassment and gender discrimination. Until two years ago, I was earning about 25% less than guys in less skilled roles. Top it off with being so "expert" at the old technologies that I've been passed over for any opportunities to work with the newer ones - I'm having to forcibly grab Azure projects away from people who aren't getting them done.
With very simple, cheap tools, I've automated away a couple of million dollars a year of wasted personnel time. Lately, I've been trying to push adoption of a very nice product which essentially replaces HL7 (and another multi-million dollar/year suite of expenditures, delayed contracts, and lost labor). I've tried to treat corporate bureaucracy as just another puzzle to solve.
This time, I've made no secret to my boss that I will be leaving as soon as I've trained my replacement, who's starting next week. [The person I had been grooming for the job quit for a $25k/year increase elsewhere.] I care about the clinical staff, patients, my team, and my co-workers, but the company can take a flying f*ck.
All that being said, I also have no idea what to do with myself. My interests and skills are fairly wide-ranging outside of tech - there's some professional-level technical/science/legal writing, the pastry cook years, community farming, a self-funding jewelry hobby...
I've usually squeezed in a course or two and some professional networking around work, but haven't been able to for a few years. I know that other people can usually strike sparks of enthusiasm when we get to talking about everyone's favorite toys, and I'm hoping that some face-to-face school time will provide me with a clue as to what's next. Meanwhile, I'm a 50+ y.o. woman, and any career change at this point will have to be self-started.
What you are experiencing is partially captured in this podcast. Most people (and especially small businesses) have no way of telling good technology from bad technology. Therefore, it becomes a market for lemons: Companies get the impression that IT is about rebooting servers, so they aim to pay as little is possible.
To move up in the IT world, you must get businesses to see you as a partner, not a servant. Get them to describe a problem they have, ask them how much it's worth if you can solve it. Instead of immediately jumping to a solution, you should spend most of your time figuring out what the actual problem is, and how they will know when problem is solved. For example, most companies will tell you they want "WordPress". But WordPress doesn't solve any particular problem. Really, what they want is "more visitors to their website", or "better conversion to paying customers", or something like that. WordPress is just a tiny (and arbitrary) part of the full solution, and people who just install WordPress are a dime a dozen.
If you can actually connect your solution to the value they get, they will gladly pay you a fraction of that value. That tends to be 10x to 100x what you would have gotten if you just charged "per hour" to do a menial task like "Install WordPress". Nobody will care how many hours it took, nor how easy/hard it was. What matters is that you showed them the value they got.
Most nerds in IT just like playing with the technology, and when put next to the CEO, they will continue to talk nerd stuff. It sounds like you have the right people skills to do IT the "right" way. (See also: patio11 on HackerNews)
Problem is, people very quickly get used to that. You are no longer the "Hero", you are simply "doing your job" and anyone could do that, right? It can feel good to be the hero, but it's really making up for an unhealthy company mentality elsewhere, and it's not sustainable. Someone is creating those situations where things get fucked up. If it's you, you should just quit. If it's someone else, it's better to point that out and let the system fail because of them. You can be sure the company will spend resources to fix the problem. If you constantly shield the company from it's own mistakes, they will continue making them.
That's the wrong way to value yourself -- That feeds into the "Hero" mentality. It's much better if you can ensure that the shit never hits the fan. (Of course nobody will ever appreciate that. But it sure beats not being appreciated after you knock yourself out playing the hero.) Don't put "being a hero" in the budget, instead set realistic expectations all around. Sometimes it's as simple as standing up and saying "If we budget X, we can be back up in an hour. If we budget Y, we can be back up in 8 hours. If we don't budget anything, our disaster recovery could realistically take 24 hours." Some companies will gladly choose the 24 hours. You will grumble, but that's their choice, and they won't yell at you when it happens, because they agreed to it. And likely the cost of their downtime is much less than X or Y.