What Are You Doing Right Now

WrCombs

@travisdh1 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@WrCombs said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Just had a call:

Customer:"yeah, our terminal is broke, we changed it out with a different one.. "

Me: "well what happened to the terminal.."

Customer: "It was dropped violently...."

"what...? "

I.E. Someone got mad about something unrelated and smashed it on a concrete floor somewhere.

That's the first thing i thought..
Then they wanted a new one sent out to them for free ....

Yeah no... Temper tantrums are not a part of your contract with us.

scottalanmiller

Just chilling this morning. Making coffee now.

black3dynamite

Cooking a late breakfast. Sausage gravy with buttermilk biscuits and scrambled eggs.

JaredBusch

@black3dynamite said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Discovered a wicked way of auto answering mysql_secure_installation.

Or just don’t use it.

You can do the same with 4 mysql commands

# Secure MariaDB (this does what mysql_secure_installation performs without interaction)
mysql -e "UPDATE mysql.user SET Password=PASSWORD('Generate a random password here') WHERE User='root';"
mysql -e "DELETE FROM mysql.user WHERE User='root' AND Host NOT IN ('localhost', '127.0.0.1', '::1');"
mysql -e "DELETE FROM mysql.user WHERE User='';"
mysql -e "FLUSH PRIVILEGES;"

EddieJennings

Busy weekend: Completed four videos for YouTube

EddieJennings

Monday morning E-mail purge.

Dashrender

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Looked at another house today, but it's just too small and needs too much maintenance stuff.

So the last place didn't accept your offer?

WrCombs

Was offered a job by a customer this past weekend- to move into a management position For their Bar.
I almost considered taking it.. LOL

Happy monday !

Dashrender

@WrCombs said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Was offered a job by a customer this past weekend- to move into a management position For their Bar.
I almost considered taking it.. LOL

Happy monday !

wildly different kind of job.

WrCombs

@Dashrender said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@WrCombs said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Was offered a job by a customer this past weekend- to move into a management position For their Bar.
I almost considered taking it.. LOL

Happy monday !

wildly different kind of job.

I agree, but they see how hard I work for the job at I'm at now, and need more people like that.

scottalanmiller

@WrCombs said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Was offered a job by a customer this past weekend- to move into a management position For their Bar.
I almost considered taking it.. LOL

Happy monday !

I think you should have. For real. You need out of where you are.

scottalanmiller

@WrCombs said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@Dashrender said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@WrCombs said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Was offered a job by a customer this past weekend- to move into a management position For their Bar.
I almost considered taking it.. LOL

Happy monday !

wildly different kind of job.

I agree, but they see how hard I work for the job at I'm at now, and need more people like that.

And you want to work at a place that values you.

WrCombs

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@WrCombs said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Was offered a job by a customer this past weekend- to move into a management position For their Bar.
I almost considered taking it.. LOL

Happy monday !

I think you should have. For real. You need out of where you are.

The offers is still on the Table. But I would become a Bar manager, rather than a tech.

scottalanmiller

@WrCombs said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@WrCombs said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Was offered a job by a customer this past weekend- to move into a management position For their Bar.
I almost considered taking it.. LOL

Happy monday !

I think you should have. For real. You need out of where you are.

The offers is still on the Table. But I would become a Bar manager, rather than a tech.

Is that a bad thing? So personally, I'd love being a bar manager. To the point that I'm actively trying to buy a bar. So obviously, for me, running a bar is something that I think I'd personally enjoy and am willing to put my own money on the line to make happen. So... perspective, right.

But in the broader sense, you have two key axis of any job. One is the "topic / genre" of the job. In this case, tech vs. service manager as broad categories. Both are service jobs, one is just non-management technical business service and the other is management of personal service. So you have to decide what matters, and how much. Does "tech" or "non-management" or "business" make a huge difference over "management", "non-tech" or "personal?" Also, you would probably have the right to decide on the IT for the bar. Sure, that's 1% of the job, but it's there. Talk to your friend, make that part of the deal.

The second axis is the quality of the environment. The one you are at now is full of incompetent, dishonest, pieces of human excrement who have zero concern for your professional development, their own professional development, the service to their customers, or just being good human beings. The other job at the bar is run by your friend, presumably you'd have huge influence over the work environment, and the foundation of the offer is that they value what you can do for them, rather than just putting up with paying you.

Does your preferences in axis 1 override the preferences in axis 2?

Then there is the question of what is good for you long term. The bar likely pays better and is more flexible. It also looks better on a resume and gives you a chance to move into real IT about 1,000x more than the first job. The job you are at now gives you essentially no experience - not in practice, and not on paper. You are in a powerless, non-management, bench job that isn't getting you IT offers because you aren't getting IT experience - in fact, it might be actively making it harder to get into IT.

The bar would give you management experience, let you run IT like IT for them (I'm guessing), give you flexible time to get IT ready (this is similar to how I did it, just hotel manager instead of bar) and provide you with more money and experience to do it all.

scottalanmiller

So think about your goals....

Is your goal to "Get into good IT where you do fun, rewarding IT work and move up the IT chain?" Or is your goal to "Never step outside of a job with an IT-like title even if you rarely do real IT work and it completely derails any career aspirations?" Or a third option?

Right now, I see the bar job as a dramatic step towards a future in IT, or a future of something else. But it gives you options to move up in loads of things, including IT. The current job gives you a job title and description that sounds technical and is, a little, bit isn't really IT but rather bench, and undermines essentially any upward mobility in any field you might ever want to pursue, especially IT.

So stat with your goals, and then look at the opportunities.

WrCombs

That's a different way to think about it. Thanks!
I'll probably ask for more information about it.

jmoore

@WrCombs said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

That's a different way to think about it. Thanks!
I'll probably ask for more information about it.

I'm going to agree with Scott here. You need to jump to that position if at all possible. I have a feeling you would love going to work every day, have better pay, have more options, and make decisions for yourself.

Scott did hotel work but was a manager there. That is the key. Managers often have the chance to decide what aspect of the business they want to specialize in. He specialized in I.T. You will probably have a similar opportunity.

When you talk to your friend about the job, just tell him you want to do the I.T. aspect of it too and make sure and explain what that is. Most people in no technical roles won't understand what I.T. is. So be descriptive in what you tell him. Examples are like deciding on what to buy or the direction the bar should go in the I.T. aspect. Things like that.

scottalanmiller

@jmoore said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Scott did hotel work but was a manager there. That is the key. Managers often have the chance to decide what aspect of the business they want to specialize in. He specialized in I.T. You will probably have a similar opportunity.

Actually we were barred from doing any IT or touching the computers at all. The hotel owners totally feared that we knew about computers and thought we were hackers. I used my hotel management time to study though, and the flexibility to take contracting jobs, and the hotel income to found my own company (maybe you've heard of it), and to make connections (my big initial customers were hotel guests and it was one of them that offered me my first executive position.)

His situation is likely better, I worked in hotels in the IT dark ages when computers were green screens and people didn't know what the Internet was and were terrified of everything.

scottalanmiller

@jmoore said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

When you talk to your friend about the job, just tell him you want to do the I.T. aspect of it too and make sure and explain what that is. Most people in no technical roles won't understand what I.T. is. So be descriptive in what you tell him. Examples are like deciding on what to buy or the direction the bar should go in the I.T. aspect. Things like that.

For sure. Use this time to explain that you are excited about a chance to...

Be valued for working hard and caring.
Work at a place you actually want to see succeed.
Do the work that he needs you to do.
Bring more value than he's anticipating because you are going to do the IT as well and handle an aspect of the business for him that he's probably not thought about (or much) and that this is important to you because you don't want to totally give up the tech side of things. So it's a favour for BOTH of you.

scottalanmiller

It also shows that you want to be comprehensively valuable and involved in the business, not just showing up to do the one thing he needs. And it's a bar, so it's IT that you know specifically - POS systems mostly.