@scottalanmiller said in Overthinkers Drawn to IT?:

IT is especially tough because so many companies only need one or two people. You rarely get a large department of people doing similar work.

But when you do, and you're working with a group of good people to solve a tough technical issue, and you finally get it from working together, it's an awesome feeling.

That's kind of what I meant. Either you should be watched over and not need to prove yourself... or you should be trusted and only do it when you want to.

I always recommend keeping it updated and ready to go. That way you are always thinking about it, thinking about what goes on it, where it is weak and it is ready when it is needed.

@LAH3385
Needless to say but stay clear of Comics Sans!! I've seen some resume that used Comics Sans and it went from "possible candidate" to "denied" bin within seconds.

ps. I hang out with my HR manager often. She's a cool HR lady. 😉

@scottalanmiller said in New to Exablox?:

Copying this over from the other thread that this was forked from...

@scottalanmiller said in How Do You Teach Everything in IT?:

@wirestyle22 said in How Do You Teach Everything in IT?: Too expensive for 488GB I'm afraid :) @SeanExablox could tell you some starter prices.

@wirestyle22 it depends on how important the 488GB is to your organization. Lake Chelan Community Hospital has 1TB of medical records they need to protect from ransomware. They purchased OneBlox and with our immutable CDP they can recover from any ransomware infection.

OneBlox is $11,995 and you purchase drives at retail pricing (up to 8TB drives). We're running a promotion this month where we're giving away 72TB of storage when you purchase OneBlox...

Thanks!

@scottalanmiller said in IT Architect:

And it's not common, so you pretty much HAVE to say "System AND Network Admin" to make it clear that it is a 50/50 role.

Yeah the only reason I am is because I know both, and when you have issues that cross over both sometimes it can be hard for people that only know one to work together to fix the issue.

@tonyshowoff said in IT Help Desk Specialist Needed - Oxnard, CA:

+1 For not saying "fast paced team environment"

Need someone to synergize the organization

@coliver You know what I meant though.

AND...I have three one-off project-type gigs for this week too!!

Microsoft Virtual Academy is free and very thorough if you decide to go the Microsoft Route.

https://mva.microsoft.com/

@Dashrender said:

Where does bench work and and support work begin with regards to desktop systems?

There is almost always some bench work that will be done by IT for practical reasons, just like with anything. You don't call an electrician to plug in a lamp, it's part of just using the lamp. IT might set up a desktop on someone's desk, but the actual placing it there isn't IT work. Any department might do tasks like plugging the desktop in.

Desktop support would be the support of the user and the system. If the task involved opening the computer case, that's bench work. If the work does not require knowing the end user, knowing the system or special privileges, likely it is bench work. Bench work can be scripted (if this, then this) and does not require operating system knowledge or application knowledge to do. One can replace a hard drive without knowing what a computer or a hard drive even is, it is a purely mechanical task and is not IT. IT requires understanding the role and the infrastructure, bench does not.

While it is totally possible that bench work would be done at the user's location, typically it is not. Normally, bench work involves delivering the computer to the repair location where the work is done. This is generally not true in a datacenter, although one could argue that a datacenter itself is a bench location and hence supports that rule as well.

Nice Document

@ryanblahnik said:

If a lot of these seem to have more value from the material studied than from the cert itself, are there any others that stand out as covering important ground?

I found the process of getting my certs to be incredibly valuable. Probably on par with any of my top learning for my career. It was the late 1990s and I did every CompTIA exam at the time and the hardest, longest Microsoft track and a huge number of Brainbench certs all over just like two or three years. I never once attended a class, I bought loads of books, got an ancient Pentium server (yes the original 586 single proc box!) and about five old desktops mostly 486, one Pentium and two PPros and built everything from scratch and did every lab and tested every configuration. No virtualization back then. And MS trials were 90 days, not 180. And an NT4 install could take two days!! And 33Kb/s dial up Internet access at best.

Reading the books, cover to cover, doing every example as I went forced me to learn the material including the concepts. Doing the actual certs forced me to not skip over details that seemed unimportant. It made me work to completeness and many of the concepts that I would have ignored when I was young turned out to be very important and the people writing the books had a good idea of what I needed to know 🙂

@antonit said:

I am referring to the following:

AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate
AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional
AWS Certified Developer - Associate
AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate
AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional

Which one of these would fit the bill better for my career?

Solutions Architect is not what you have done in the past and not where you are looking at being currently. So those are more for a change in career direction more than anything.

The Developer is not at all what you do, so that is out.

DevOps, likewise, would be a major career change. Not a bad one, but it's a very different role and would be a long term transition.

SysOps Admin would be the logical starting point as it leverages where you have been and where you have been thinking of going.

For all of them, Associate is the starting point, you would do that before considering the Professional level.

@scottalanmiller said:

@wirestyle22 said:

@dafyre There is an Azure on Linux cert. That seems like it would be useful if SAM is correct in their direction. Virtualization as well as Configuration Management (Puppet) would be useful.

Azure is an odd one for Linux certification. If you are specializing on Linux on Azure, sure. But that's relatively uncommon, especially because Azure is so expensive and poorly performing for Linux workloads.

Thank you for the input.