That_GuyI don't wanna be that guyRegistered Userregular
I went from a general account tech to a sales engineer a couple years back. It's working really well for me. I'm designing IT solutions, ordering products and handing them off to the project engineers to install.
Thawm you 100% have the skills, don't listen to that imposter gremlin.
And tbh just ignore those acronym lists on job reqs, those are stupid wishlists that half the time were set up by some hiring committee five years ago and the actual manger looking to fill the role has no input on what the req says.
Like, read the job descriptions, if you think the work sounds good then apply. Whether you have experience in the specific tools/tech doesn't really matter if you have enough experience to learn the tools.
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Seconding the ignore the acronyms, or at most just look up what they mean. I write up our job postings and am guilty of the spewing every acronym possible in there in the hopes of getting a unicorn that knows it all but in reality I pretty much always hire someone who actually knows how to use 1 or 2 of them, is aware enough of the others that if I ask if they've used it they can say no but they know what it is and then it's down to if I think they'll be a good team culture fit
Controls: you can use a computer and printed circuit boards to run/stop/manage equipment such as pumps. Controls also manage data signals from sensors and internal programming can manage how to react to given plant states.
General project management would be something like where a new office building needs to set up their networking infrastructure. So you propose the scope and costs for the project and manage any contractors or internal personnel doing the work.
Yeah Project Managers are basically the people who plan the project and then tell the people who actually do the work to do the work, and keep them on schedule.
If you enjoy scoping and planning projects but then not actually doing the work, then project management might be for you, though it can be very much like herding cats sometimes.
Controls: you can use a computer and printed circuit boards to run/stop/manage equipment such as pumps. Controls also manage data signals from sensors and internal programming can manage how to react to given plant states.
General project management would be something like where a new office building needs to set up their networking infrastructure. So you propose the scope and costs for the project and manage any contractors or internal personnel doing the work.
Controls also has stuff like PLCs, HMI/SCADAs, etc. It's a large field, but also involves a bunch of hat wearing (electrical, software, some IT in the aspect of getting things talking to each other and sometimes how to make them talk to each other physically, etc.)
Yup! I was trying to stay high level. I work with controls engineers who manage equipment operation, instrument signals, machinery health, and SCADA type interfaces. It can be pretty cool stuff and even involves a bit of programming.
We typically use Rockwell for PLCs but we also have a bunch of GE proprietary stuff that a lot of people hate.
My current job description is split between facility management and project management. I manage the teams who fix bilge pumps and I manage the teams that install test equipment.
On the one hand, I do like managing projects and having people do things and follow up with them.
On the other hand, my job has reinforced for me, the past couple of days, that I'm fucking tired of it, as I have employees going awol and blaming each other and customers chewing my ass and employees chewing my ass because they don't want to help the customer anymore and everyone's threatening to quit and............fffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffuck it all!
Thawmus, spend a couple months googling the acronyms and terms you don't know. Half of them you do know, just not by those names. Get one new relevant cert and update your resume.
The hard part of job hunting is you can't just say, "here I am, I'm me the way I am." You have to figure out what kind of candidate people are hiring and dress your resume up in those trappings.
Yup! I was trying to stay high level. I work with controls engineers who manage equipment operation, instrument signals, machinery health, and SCADA type interfaces. It can be pretty cool stuff and even involves a bit of programming.
We typically use Rockwell for PLCs but we also have a bunch of GE proprietary stuff that a lot of people hate.
My current job description is split between facility management and project management. I manage the teams who fix bilge pumps and I manage the teams that install test equipment.
I'm at the point I just hate all of it, honestly. I want to switch career paths because I am so sick of the break/fix nature of a lot of my company's workload lately. I don't want to just try to limp along and tweak some other company's HMI with 10 year old software packages while being hamstrung trying to get anything working along the way.
Yup! I was trying to stay high level. I work with controls engineers who manage equipment operation, instrument signals, machinery health, and SCADA type interfaces. It can be pretty cool stuff and even involves a bit of programming.
We typically use Rockwell for PLCs but we also have a bunch of GE proprietary stuff that a lot of people hate.
My current job description is split between facility management and project management. I manage the teams who fix bilge pumps and I manage the teams that install test equipment.
I'm at the point I just hate all of it, honestly. I want to switch career paths because I am so sick of the break/fix nature of a lot of my company's workload lately. I don't want to just try to limp along and tweak some other company's HMI with 10 year old software packages while being hamstrung trying to get anything working along the way.
I have a pretty wide IRL sys admin social net and...I don't know a single person over 30 who doesn't want to gtfo out of IT and hates all their life choices up until this point.... myself included. le sigh... It's funny because way back when I remember my college instructors saying the same thing and advising us not to continue with this career path because they all grew to hate it lmao.
If only i could reach back through time and smack younger me in the back of the head.
My job is tolerable to good when I'm doing HMI/SCADA development and I don't have to deal much with the hardware end and/or PC wrangling, or trying to make some other company's rat's nest of code keep working. I haven't been on that former track since probably early 2020, and its swerving harder and harder into having to deal with more and more hardware specific shit and being somebody else's glorified computer monkey. But my software skill set is so ancient and out of times with modern dev trying to pivot over there has been... difficult.
Because if you're going to attempt to squeeze that big black monster into your slot you will need to be able to take at least 12 inches or else you're going to have a bad time...
I'm close to 15 years in IT now, last 8 working with MSPs. It's not bad, but user stupidity drives me insane.
Add a couple of years and that's where I'm at. My 2nd job ever (after working at Radio Shack in high school) was working for a little computer repair shop in town. From there I did tech support at some call centers and a couple of other repair shops. Finally, nearly 10 years ago I started working for an MSP. User ignorance has been the challenge of my entire career.
These days I'm doing inside sales engineering and rather like it. I get to use my tech and sales skills to design IT solutions. Best of all, once the quote is signed and the products have arrived, don't have to actually do all the work of setting up and deploying all of the equipment I've sold. Nor do I have to deal with fixing it later when it breaks.
Interestingly with this recent sales engineering talk my ex boss is now head of sales engineering for a very large company everyone here would recognize, just reached out and offered me a job as one..insane salary ( he tells me with commission per sale on top of salary most make over 200k) buuut I'd need to go full time into the office and probably travel at least twice a month across the us and Canada depending on sales.
I think I'd have gone back to the office from permanent WFH for that salary but the travel kills it for me I can't stand airports and flying, not scared of it just hate the being packed in like sardines and all the airport hassle
Any local powershell nerds have reading material they really liked when first learning? I know it's more of a learn by doing process, but I'm more of a read the book, take notes, try it out, re-read the book learner, and my brain is already for shit conceptualizing anything that even whiffs of the stink of programming, so I'm really feeling challenged by this new requirement I'm facing.
"I'm sorry, but we're rather looking for a more velvety mouth feel and less aftertaste for this position."
Even when you get feedback it's the least actionable shit ever, even when they reached out first because "you seem like a great fit that would contribute a lot to our team!"
( < . . .
+2
That_GuyI don't wanna be that guyRegistered Userregular
Any local powershell nerds have reading material they really liked when first learning? I know it's more of a learn by doing process, but I'm more of a read the book, take notes, try it out, re-read the book learner, and my brain is already for shit conceptualizing anything that even whiffs of the stink of programming, so I'm really feeling challenged by this new requirement I'm facing.
PowerShell for Dummies is a good place to start. PowerShell for Sysadmins would be a step up.
Any local powershell nerds have reading material they really liked when first learning? I know it's more of a learn by doing process, but I'm more of a read the book, take notes, try it out, re-read the book learner, and my brain is already for shit conceptualizing anything that even whiffs of the stink of programming, so I'm really feeling challenged by this new requirement I'm facing.
PowerShell for Dummies is a good place to start. PowerShell for Sysadmins would be a step up.
"I'm sorry, but we're rather looking for a more velvety mouth feel and less aftertaste for this position."
Even when you get feedback it's the least actionable shit ever, even when they reached out first because "you seem like a great fit that would contribute a lot to our team!"
It's unfortunate it is this way, but answering the question of "why didn't I get hired?" is a huge legal minefield no company wants to touch.
Just remember that half the people you meet are below average intelligence.
+3
That_GuyI don't wanna be that guyRegistered Userregular
Any local powershell nerds have reading material they really liked when first learning? I know it's more of a learn by doing process, but I'm more of a read the book, take notes, try it out, re-read the book learner, and my brain is already for shit conceptualizing anything that even whiffs of the stink of programming, so I'm really feeling challenged by this new requirement I'm facing.
PowerShell for Dummies is a good place to start. PowerShell for Sysadmins would be a step up.
"I'm sorry, but we're rather looking for a more velvety mouth feel and less aftertaste for this position."
Even when you get feedback it's the least actionable shit ever, even when they reached out first because "you seem like a great fit that would contribute a lot to our team!"
It's unfortunate it is this way, but answering the question of "why didn't I get hired?" is a huge legal minefield no company wants to touch.
Oh I know, but that doesn't make it any less frustrating after investing quite a few hours into interviews and prep.
Any local powershell nerds have reading material they really liked when first learning? I know it's more of a learn by doing process, but I'm more of a read the book, take notes, try it out, re-read the book learner, and my brain is already for shit conceptualizing anything that even whiffs of the stink of programming, so I'm really feeling challenged by this new requirement I'm facing.
I've never read any books, only looking up blogs and documentation as I'm figuring out specific tasks.
What I will say is learning programming basics will benefit you greatly. Things like variables, logic, loops, functions. None of that is powershell specific but you can learn them at the same time. So if you end up with a book make sure it covers those topics well before digging into the nuances of using them within powershell and how to use the pipeline.
There is a lot of good tutorial content on YouTube as well if you want to go that route. I remember watching some videos with Jason Helmick and Jeffery Snover years ago but that might have been through some Microsoft Learning attempt.
Any local powershell nerds have reading material they really liked when first learning? I know it's more of a learn by doing process, but I'm more of a read the book, take notes, try it out, re-read the book learner, and my brain is already for shit conceptualizing anything that even whiffs of the stink of programming, so I'm really feeling challenged by this new requirement I'm facing.
I've never read any books, only looking up blogs and documentation as I'm figuring out specific tasks.
What I will say is learning programming basics will benefit you greatly. Things like variables, logic, loops, functions. None of that is powershell specific but you can learn them at the same time. So if you end up with a book make sure it covers those topics well before digging into the nuances of using them within powershell and how to use the pipeline.
There is a lot of good tutorial content on YouTube as well if you want to go that route. I remember watching some videos with Jason Helmick and Jeffery Snover years ago but that might have been through some Microsoft Learning attempt.
I dunno I know a few languages, c++, c#, php.
The difference is most of them follow logic and have simple easy to remember commands and non user defined variables..PowerShell? Not so much.
To this day I think the team at ms coming up with it were all on crack.
Any local powershell nerds have reading material they really liked when first learning? I know it's more of a learn by doing process, but I'm more of a read the book, take notes, try it out, re-read the book learner, and my brain is already for shit conceptualizing anything that even whiffs of the stink of programming, so I'm really feeling challenged by this new requirement I'm facing.
I've never read any books, only looking up blogs and documentation as I'm figuring out specific tasks.
What I will say is learning programming basics will benefit you greatly. Things like variables, logic, loops, functions. None of that is powershell specific but you can learn them at the same time. So if you end up with a book make sure it covers those topics well before digging into the nuances of using them within powershell and how to use the pipeline.
There is a lot of good tutorial content on YouTube as well if you want to go that route. I remember watching some videos with Jason Helmick and Jeffery Snover years ago but that might have been through some Microsoft Learning attempt.
I dunno I know a few languages, c++, c#, php.
The difference is most of them follow logic and have simple easy to remember commands and non user defined variables..PowerShell? Not so much.
To this day I think the team at ms coming up with it were all on crack.
I'm surprised you think that then because PowerShell is very much like C# just with 95% of the functions you might need already written into libraries (modules) for you. It's just interpreted on the fly like VB because it's intended for scripting. For most daily tasks, it's a one-liner or at most a few dozen lines in a script with often the most complicated thing to remember what $_ refers to. It's far better to use and more logical to write than the horrorshow of VB.
SiliconStew on
Just remember that half the people you meet are below average intelligence.
I'm surprised you think that then because PowerShell is very much like C# just with 95% of the functions you might need already written into libraries (modules) for you. It's just interpreted on the fly like VB because it's intended for scripting. For most daily tasks, it's a one-liner or at most a few dozen lines in a script with often the most complicated thing to remember what $_ refers to. It's far better to use and more logical to write than the horrorshow of VB.
My "favorite" part of VB (at least, in the Controls side of things) is dealing with every vendor's interpretation of VB and their own tweaks and bullshits and limitations they slap on it. Sometimes its fine, other times its a complete mess ("oh, you didn't need the ability to do for loops, did you?")
Any local powershell nerds have reading material they really liked when first learning? I know it's more of a learn by doing process, but I'm more of a read the book, take notes, try it out, re-read the book learner, and my brain is already for shit conceptualizing anything that even whiffs of the stink of programming, so I'm really feeling challenged by this new requirement I'm facing.
I've never read any books, only looking up blogs and documentation as I'm figuring out specific tasks.
What I will say is learning programming basics will benefit you greatly. Things like variables, logic, loops, functions. None of that is powershell specific but you can learn them at the same time. So if you end up with a book make sure it covers those topics well before digging into the nuances of using them within powershell and how to use the pipeline.
There is a lot of good tutorial content on YouTube as well if you want to go that route. I remember watching some videos with Jason Helmick and Jeffery Snover years ago but that might have been through some Microsoft Learning attempt.
I dunno I know a few languages, c++, c#, php.
The difference is most of them follow logic and have simple easy to remember commands and non user defined variables..PowerShell? Not so much.
To this day I think the team at ms coming up with it were all on crack.
Not disagreeing with you, but I find PowerShell is easier when you design your scripts in a programmatic way. At least easier to come back on update.
Even if PowerShell doesn't lock you into certain conventions it doesn't mean you can't use them.
Us for weeks: Hey contractor, our equipment better be here on the 14th of July
Contractor: oh yeah! For sure!
Today
Contractor: we will definitely have it shipped tomorrow July 15th.
I have nearly a dozen people lined up to install something on Saturday that won't show up until next week. FML
Ordering shit is such a crapshoot right now. Everything is on backorder. Some vendors won't even bother taking an order if it's not for 200 fucking printers.
Any local powershell nerds have reading material they really liked when first learning? I know it's more of a learn by doing process, but I'm more of a read the book, take notes, try it out, re-read the book learner, and my brain is already for shit conceptualizing anything that even whiffs of the stink of programming, so I'm really feeling challenged by this new requirement I'm facing.
I've never read any books, only looking up blogs and documentation as I'm figuring out specific tasks.
What I will say is learning programming basics will benefit you greatly. Things like variables, logic, loops, functions. None of that is powershell specific but you can learn them at the same time. So if you end up with a book make sure it covers those topics well before digging into the nuances of using them within powershell and how to use the pipeline.
There is a lot of good tutorial content on YouTube as well if you want to go that route. I remember watching some videos with Jason Helmick and Jeffery Snover years ago but that might have been through some Microsoft Learning attempt.
I started with blogs and docs, and I just can't seem to crack through to basic understanding. I can run simple stuff, but actually putting together a complex query or series of actions just mystifies me even after months of exposure. I'm concerned my brain just doesn't do programming (or whatever you want to call scripting in an interactive shell). It's been really bumming me out to be honest - I've never run in to such a work-related brick wall, and I'm admittedly panicking a bit.
Us for weeks: Hey contractor, our equipment better be here on the 14th of July
Contractor: oh yeah! For sure!
Today
Contractor: we will definitely have it shipped tomorrow July 15th.
I have nearly a dozen people lined up to install something on Saturday that won't show up until next week. FML
Ordering shit is such a crapshoot right now. Everything is on backorder. Some vendors won't even bother taking an order if it's not for 200 fucking printers.
A large number of our equipment orders cut a year ago just went unfulfilled until the product line went end of life. Our CDW guy just sighs and says something about a few months no matter what we ask about. It's pretty wild. I would have thought some of the tail would have begun to unwind by now.
Any local powershell nerds have reading material they really liked when first learning? I know it's more of a learn by doing process, but I'm more of a read the book, take notes, try it out, re-read the book learner, and my brain is already for shit conceptualizing anything that even whiffs of the stink of programming, so I'm really feeling challenged by this new requirement I'm facing.
I've never read any books, only looking up blogs and documentation as I'm figuring out specific tasks.
What I will say is learning programming basics will benefit you greatly. Things like variables, logic, loops, functions. None of that is powershell specific but you can learn them at the same time. So if you end up with a book make sure it covers those topics well before digging into the nuances of using them within powershell and how to use the pipeline.
There is a lot of good tutorial content on YouTube as well if you want to go that route. I remember watching some videos with Jason Helmick and Jeffery Snover years ago but that might have been through some Microsoft Learning attempt.
I started with blogs and docs, and I just can't seem to crack through to basic understanding. I can run simple stuff, but actually putting together a complex query or series of actions just mystifies me even after months of exposure. I'm concerned my brain just doesn't do programming (or whatever you want to call scripting in an interactive shell). It's been really bumming me out to be honest - I've never run in to such a work-related brick wall, and I'm admittedly panicking a bit.
Are you able to outline what you want to accomplish with a complex script?
Even with experience it can be hard to mentally outline the entire thing on the fly. Writing it out can help as I note at each step what I need to do. As I get into writing the script I often find I didn’t enough detail.
You could also look into Bash for learning resources, powershell was written by people who used to work on Unix systems at Tivoli and most of it is designed based on their experience with Bash.
I’m not a sysadmin but this talk of PowerShell made me want to brag about my little contribution to our local IT desk side support team:
I recently wrote a few scripts to make my life easier and now IT is using one of them!
We have a bunch of PC on the production floor that are shared among a bunch of people on several shifts 24/7. Of course these PC’s have tiny storage drives that fill up quickly with a bunch of domain user profiles.
I’m always getting complaints about drives being full and slow. I’m the “unofficial IT guy” in my department so I get to deal with it. I was opening help desk tickets thinking they’d have some way to automate clearing out profiles, but to my horror, my buddy in IT told me he had to delete profiles one at a time!
I’d recently started learning Software Development/C# and figured there’d be some way to automate it. My research revealed there is a Group Policy setting to clear out old profiles but apparently there’s a bug that causes dates for all profiles to reset to the current date (possibly something with Trend Micro). So that’s not an option.
I check the C:\Users folders and see that the folder dates aren’t getting reset. I figured there should be a way to get a list of users based on their folder names and check their folder dates. After some googling, I found a few solutions that I combined and modified to fit my needs.
My PowerShell script gets a list of folder names older than 30 days, saves them to an array, and then the script loops through the command to properly remove all user profiles in the array. I also made a progress bar! Now my buddy in IT is working to have the script automatically run on all the PC's on a schedule.
Like someone else mentioned, knowing about programming helped me write the script - variables, arrays, methods. I've only been learning/studying C# for a few weeks now, but it was super helpful for PowerShell.
+11
That_GuyI don't wanna be that guyRegistered Userregular
Hey guys. Guess what your favorite technical sales engineer just spent all day doing? Deleting/recreating user profiles and installing printers on ~50 Macbook Airs from 2012 to 2014. This project should have been assigned to the newer guys on the project team. However, someone quit on Friday, 2 people are out on vacation and 1 person called out sick today. We have another person scheduled for vacation later in the week. So basically our team is drowning. This had to be done by the end of the week. The whole project was dumped on a service tech who has been with the company for around 9 months and was working at a restaurant before us. To his credit, he was ready to just spend the next week doing this by himself. He would have been well within his rights to send it back to the projects team and let the client wait. But he didn't.
This whole situation felt really shitty. I am a former tech and on the same technical level as the project guys. I did a little bit of everything and can basically handle it all. I would have been beyond pissed if I was in the same situation as the service tech. So I did what was right and volunteered to help out today. I laid the situation out for my direct manager and his manager. I told them in no uncertain terms that my coworker needed help and I was going to give it to him I simply told them what I was going to do and why I was going to do it. I got no disagreement and it wouldn't have mattered if they had. One of the other project guys was in the office at the time and overheard me laying it out and immediately volunteered to help. The only kicker is he had an onsite in the morning so he'd be late.
Today I meet the service tech onsite and we start working. A little while later one of our account managers (not on service or projects but still a former tech) showed up to help. We had a pretty good production line going. I was pulling laptops out, setting them up, running updates and deleting/recreating the user profile. I put those laptops in a pile for the service tech and account manager to customize the profile. (Apple makes it basically impossible to automatically pin icons to the dock). We got so close before hitting a roadblock. The PaperCut server wasn't talking to the Macbooks. All of our windows computers were working just fine. But the macbooks would never send the print jobs to the print server. For 3 hours me and the account tech were pounding our heads against a wall. For half of that time the other projects guy was pounding his head too. I was poking around in the Papercut admin interface and found a setting that was disabled. Something about mobility printing and the cloud. We were not deploying these printers through the internet and all the windows clients work but we were all out of ideas. We could even print if we installed the printers directly instead of using PaperCut. I figured, what the hell, I'll set up the cloud bullshit and go through the setup process on one of the Macbooks. Wouldn't you know it, it worked. IDK why but it worked. So we went through all 50 Macbooks and ran the new setup DMG and were finally done.
What a mess that was but it looks like we got through every one of them.
I just discovered our internal GitHub server that essentially holds all our work as a company and would end us if it disappeared was somehow left out of backup schedules and hasn't been backed up in 8 or 9 years..so uh..
Hurray for that server being rock solid I guess
I've figured out what I hate about Kubernetes: like every other container-y orchestration platform, it basically promises to do a lot of things you would like to do, and then does it badly. Namely, pretty much from the get-go the security and sandboxing story was still terrible and obtuse, with all sorts of footguns and traps.
Setup a virtualization platform correctly, and you can lock your users in a room where no matter how much they hammer on the doors they won't hurt anything. Set up K8S the same way and...well, it's why "kubernetes-as-a-service" became such a thing big thing: because its way too easy to screw up a cluster, and so just plain safer to have them completely isolated.
Which is insane. Like, why is this necessary? Why is this system, built in the modern age when we knew about security, still basically designed around "lol good luck buddy" You have to do too much god damn work to ensure `kubectl apply` doesn't blow everything up.
And in the end that's probably why cloud providers love it. Why sell people 3 VMs when you can sell them 5 controller nodes, 3 workers and a "dev" and "prod" "cluster". It seems extremely telling that "Kubernetes as a service" isn't sold by anyone as "container-on-demand" where you have a magic endpoint which looks like an infinitely sized cluster you pay-as-you-go for.
I've figured out what I hate about Kubernetes: like every other container-y orchestration platform, it basically promises to do a lot of things you would like to do, and then does it badly. Namely, pretty much from the get-go the security and sandboxing story was still terrible and obtuse, with all sorts of footguns and traps.
Setup a virtualization platform correctly, and you can lock your users in a room where no matter how much they hammer on the doors they won't hurt anything. Set up K8S the same way and...well, it's why "kubernetes-as-a-service" became such a thing big thing: because its way too easy to screw up a cluster, and so just plain safer to have them completely isolated.
Which is insane. Like, why is this necessary? Why is this system, built in the modern age when we knew about security, still basically designed around "lol good luck buddy" You have to do too much god damn work to ensure `kubectl apply` doesn't blow everything up.
And in the end that's probably why cloud providers love it. Why sell people 3 VMs when you can sell them 5 controller nodes, 3 workers and a "dev" and "prod" "cluster". It seems extremely telling that "Kubernetes as a service" isn't sold by anyone as "container-on-demand" where you have a magic endpoint which looks like an infinitely sized cluster you pay-as-you-go for.
Having never actually managed Kubernetes anything, I do wonder if there are advantages anywhere (for non-Google sized teams) over something managed like ECS. I'm kind of guessing that it's just used in most places due to Buzzword-of-the-day rather than an actual need.
ECS doesn't use kubernetes, that's the proprietary container orchestration thing.
From having researched it for some of our teams at a high level - you want a few experts who have done kubernetes the hard way, but most should be managed either through a native cloud offering like EKS/AKS/GKE or through a third party control interface like Rancher (or OpenShift if you're a RHEL shop).
ECS doesn't use kubernetes, that's the proprietary container orchestration thing.
From having researched it for some of our teams at a high level - you want a few experts who have done kubernetes the hard way, but most should be managed either through a native cloud offering like EKS/AKS/GKE or through a third party control interface like Rancher (or OpenShift if you're a RHEL shop).
Oh, I know they're not directly Kubernetes.
I'm mostly thinking that if you want to go the "managed container application" route, there are simpler offerings (like ECS.)
On the managed kubernetes thing; We use GKE and it's no end of problems. We started paying for a support contract so they could hopefully help us; and then it quickly became clear even their high level engineers don't actually understand anything about kubernetes or their own offerings. We had some major outages caused by issues on their end; with the versions they provide and have 1 click setups for that their support couldn't make heads or tails of...and we eventually figured out with help from stackoverflow /facepalm.
We had our own non managed cluster previously and we're actually thinking of transitioning back googles is so bad.
I can't speak to other products like amazons but if they're in the same state you're better off just building your own cluster and managing it yourself. It's honestly not that hard, it's just fine tuning the pod security policies etc. that are tricky but once you do a couple it all falls into place.
Posts
And tbh just ignore those acronym lists on job reqs, those are stupid wishlists that half the time were set up by some hiring committee five years ago and the actual manger looking to fill the role has no input on what the req says.
Like, read the job descriptions, if you think the work sounds good then apply. Whether you have experience in the specific tools/tech doesn't really matter if you have enough experience to learn the tools.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
General project management would be something like where a new office building needs to set up their networking infrastructure. So you propose the scope and costs for the project and manage any contractors or internal personnel doing the work.
If you enjoy scoping and planning projects but then not actually doing the work, then project management might be for you, though it can be very much like herding cats sometimes.
Controls also has stuff like PLCs, HMI/SCADAs, etc. It's a large field, but also involves a bunch of hat wearing (electrical, software, some IT in the aspect of getting things talking to each other and sometimes how to make them talk to each other physically, etc.)
We typically use Rockwell for PLCs but we also have a bunch of GE proprietary stuff that a lot of people hate.
My current job description is split between facility management and project management. I manage the teams who fix bilge pumps and I manage the teams that install test equipment.
On the other hand, my job has reinforced for me, the past couple of days, that I'm fucking tired of it, as I have employees going awol and blaming each other and customers chewing my ass and employees chewing my ass because they don't want to help the customer anymore and everyone's threatening to quit and............fffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffuck it all!
Contractor: oh yeah! For sure!
Today
Contractor: we will definitely have it shipped tomorrow July 15th.
I have nearly a dozen people lined up to install something on Saturday that won't show up until next week. FML
The hard part of job hunting is you can't just say, "here I am, I'm me the way I am." You have to figure out what kind of candidate people are hiring and dress your resume up in those trappings.
I'm at the point I just hate all of it, honestly. I want to switch career paths because I am so sick of the break/fix nature of a lot of my company's workload lately. I don't want to just try to limp along and tweak some other company's HMI with 10 year old software packages while being hamstrung trying to get anything working along the way.
I have a pretty wide IRL sys admin social net and...I don't know a single person over 30 who doesn't want to gtfo out of IT and hates all their life choices up until this point.... myself included. le sigh... It's funny because way back when I remember my college instructors saying the same thing and advising us not to continue with this career path because they all grew to hate it lmao.
If only i could reach back through time and smack younger me in the back of the head.
Add a couple of years and that's where I'm at. My 2nd job ever (after working at Radio Shack in high school) was working for a little computer repair shop in town. From there I did tech support at some call centers and a couple of other repair shops. Finally, nearly 10 years ago I started working for an MSP. User ignorance has been the challenge of my entire career.
These days I'm doing inside sales engineering and rather like it. I get to use my tech and sales skills to design IT solutions. Best of all, once the quote is signed and the products have arrived, don't have to actually do all the work of setting up and deploying all of the equipment I've sold. Nor do I have to deal with fixing it later when it breaks.
I think I'd have gone back to the office from permanent WFH for that salary but the travel kills it for me
"I'm sorry, but we're rather looking for a more velvety mouth feel and less aftertaste for this position."
Even when you get feedback it's the least actionable shit ever, even when they reached out first because "you seem like a great fit that would contribute a lot to our team!"
PowerShell for Dummies is a good place to start. PowerShell for Sysadmins would be a step up.
Cool, assuming it's the same https://nostarch.com/powershellsysadmins, a colleague immediately recommended the same. I'll take a look, thanks!
It's unfortunate it is this way, but answering the question of "why didn't I get hired?" is a huge legal minefield no company wants to touch.
That's the one. It's got a robot washing dishes.
Oh I know, but that doesn't make it any less frustrating after investing quite a few hours into interviews and prep.
I've never read any books, only looking up blogs and documentation as I'm figuring out specific tasks.
What I will say is learning programming basics will benefit you greatly. Things like variables, logic, loops, functions. None of that is powershell specific but you can learn them at the same time. So if you end up with a book make sure it covers those topics well before digging into the nuances of using them within powershell and how to use the pipeline.
There is a lot of good tutorial content on YouTube as well if you want to go that route. I remember watching some videos with Jason Helmick and Jeffery Snover years ago but that might have been through some Microsoft Learning attempt.
The difference is most of them follow logic and have simple easy to remember commands and non user defined variables..PowerShell? Not so much.
To this day I think the team at ms coming up with it were all on crack.
I'm surprised you think that then because PowerShell is very much like C# just with 95% of the functions you might need already written into libraries (modules) for you. It's just interpreted on the fly like VB because it's intended for scripting. For most daily tasks, it's a one-liner or at most a few dozen lines in a script with often the most complicated thing to remember what $_ refers to. It's far better to use and more logical to write than the horrorshow of VB.
My "favorite" part of VB (at least, in the Controls side of things) is dealing with every vendor's interpretation of VB and their own tweaks and bullshits and limitations they slap on it. Sometimes its fine, other times its a complete mess ("oh, you didn't need the ability to do for loops, did you?")
Not disagreeing with you, but I find PowerShell is easier when you design your scripts in a programmatic way. At least easier to come back on update.
Even if PowerShell doesn't lock you into certain conventions it doesn't mean you can't use them.
Ordering shit is such a crapshoot right now. Everything is on backorder. Some vendors won't even bother taking an order if it's not for 200 fucking printers.
I started with blogs and docs, and I just can't seem to crack through to basic understanding. I can run simple stuff, but actually putting together a complex query or series of actions just mystifies me even after months of exposure. I'm concerned my brain just doesn't do programming (or whatever you want to call scripting in an interactive shell). It's been really bumming me out to be honest - I've never run in to such a work-related brick wall, and I'm admittedly panicking a bit.
A large number of our equipment orders cut a year ago just went unfulfilled until the product line went end of life. Our CDW guy just sighs and says something about a few months no matter what we ask about. It's pretty wild. I would have thought some of the tail would have begun to unwind by now.
Are you able to outline what you want to accomplish with a complex script?
Even with experience it can be hard to mentally outline the entire thing on the fly. Writing it out can help as I note at each step what I need to do. As I get into writing the script I often find I didn’t enough detail.
You could also look into Bash for learning resources, powershell was written by people who used to work on Unix systems at Tivoli and most of it is designed based on their experience with Bash.
I recently wrote a few scripts to make my life easier and now IT is using one of them!
We have a bunch of PC on the production floor that are shared among a bunch of people on several shifts 24/7. Of course these PC’s have tiny storage drives that fill up quickly with a bunch of domain user profiles.
I’m always getting complaints about drives being full and slow. I’m the “unofficial IT guy” in my department so I get to deal with it. I was opening help desk tickets thinking they’d have some way to automate clearing out profiles, but to my horror, my buddy in IT told me he had to delete profiles one at a time!
I’d recently started learning Software Development/C# and figured there’d be some way to automate it. My research revealed there is a Group Policy setting to clear out old profiles but apparently there’s a bug that causes dates for all profiles to reset to the current date (possibly something with Trend Micro). So that’s not an option.
I check the C:\Users folders and see that the folder dates aren’t getting reset. I figured there should be a way to get a list of users based on their folder names and check their folder dates. After some googling, I found a few solutions that I combined and modified to fit my needs.
My PowerShell script gets a list of folder names older than 30 days, saves them to an array, and then the script loops through the command to properly remove all user profiles in the array. I also made a progress bar! Now my buddy in IT is working to have the script automatically run on all the PC's on a schedule.
Like someone else mentioned, knowing about programming helped me write the script - variables, arrays, methods. I've only been learning/studying C# for a few weeks now, but it was super helpful for PowerShell.
This whole situation felt really shitty. I am a former tech and on the same technical level as the project guys. I did a little bit of everything and can basically handle it all. I would have been beyond pissed if I was in the same situation as the service tech. So I did what was right and volunteered to help out today. I laid the situation out for my direct manager and his manager. I told them in no uncertain terms that my coworker needed help and I was going to give it to him I simply told them what I was going to do and why I was going to do it. I got no disagreement and it wouldn't have mattered if they had. One of the other project guys was in the office at the time and overheard me laying it out and immediately volunteered to help. The only kicker is he had an onsite in the morning so he'd be late.
Today I meet the service tech onsite and we start working. A little while later one of our account managers (not on service or projects but still a former tech) showed up to help. We had a pretty good production line going. I was pulling laptops out, setting them up, running updates and deleting/recreating the user profile. I put those laptops in a pile for the service tech and account manager to customize the profile. (Apple makes it basically impossible to automatically pin icons to the dock). We got so close before hitting a roadblock. The PaperCut server wasn't talking to the Macbooks. All of our windows computers were working just fine. But the macbooks would never send the print jobs to the print server. For 3 hours me and the account tech were pounding our heads against a wall. For half of that time the other projects guy was pounding his head too. I was poking around in the Papercut admin interface and found a setting that was disabled. Something about mobility printing and the cloud. We were not deploying these printers through the internet and all the windows clients work but we were all out of ideas. We could even print if we installed the printers directly instead of using PaperCut. I figured, what the hell, I'll set up the cloud bullshit and go through the setup process on one of the Macbooks. Wouldn't you know it, it worked. IDK why but it worked. So we went through all 50 Macbooks and ran the new setup DMG and were finally done.
What a mess that was but it looks like we got through every one of them.
Hurray for that server being rock solid I guess
Setup a virtualization platform correctly, and you can lock your users in a room where no matter how much they hammer on the doors they won't hurt anything. Set up K8S the same way and...well, it's why "kubernetes-as-a-service" became such a thing big thing: because its way too easy to screw up a cluster, and so just plain safer to have them completely isolated.
Which is insane. Like, why is this necessary? Why is this system, built in the modern age when we knew about security, still basically designed around "lol good luck buddy" You have to do too much god damn work to ensure `kubectl apply` doesn't blow everything up.
And in the end that's probably why cloud providers love it. Why sell people 3 VMs when you can sell them 5 controller nodes, 3 workers and a "dev" and "prod" "cluster". It seems extremely telling that "Kubernetes as a service" isn't sold by anyone as "container-on-demand" where you have a magic endpoint which looks like an infinitely sized cluster you pay-as-you-go for.
Having never actually managed Kubernetes anything, I do wonder if there are advantages anywhere (for non-Google sized teams) over something managed like ECS. I'm kind of guessing that it's just used in most places due to Buzzword-of-the-day rather than an actual need.
From having researched it for some of our teams at a high level - you want a few experts who have done kubernetes the hard way, but most should be managed either through a native cloud offering like EKS/AKS/GKE or through a third party control interface like Rancher (or OpenShift if you're a RHEL shop).
Oh, I know they're not directly Kubernetes.
I'm mostly thinking that if you want to go the "managed container application" route, there are simpler offerings (like ECS.)
We had our own non managed cluster previously and we're actually thinking of transitioning back googles is so bad.
I can't speak to other products like amazons but if they're in the same state you're better off just building your own cluster and managing it yourself. It's honestly not that hard, it's just fine tuning the pod security policies etc. that are tricky but once you do a couple it all falls into place.