IT Certifications and Careers (Official Discussion Thread)

[Rhyme n Tekniq]

Missed a few 6 figure offers the past year and been stuck in the 80k-90k range for a minute. Gotta break that ceiling this year
RHCSA still collecting dust, although I came made close to landing a Linux Admin gig with Rackspace, but that place is horrible, annual mass layoffs, pays abysmally, criminally below the market rate

They offered me 45k for a Linux Admin role....When I heard that shyt I reflexivly, without skipping the beat, asked him if he meant 45 an hour,

then wanted me to sit for a fukkin 7 person technical panel interview with the team Plus two more interviews, after I already crushed the technical interview, for a role paying less than half of the market rate

Big Nope.

 

[Uno Venova]

easy, take the earlier offer

• smaller team, means you're going to get a ton of experience and wear different hats, which is going to set you up for your next gig
• It's salaried, which means no submitting time cards and waiting for some incompetent jack azz service delivery manager to approve it at the last minute because he's out of office on vacation until the middle of next week, it happens.
• 10 day PTO/ 9 personal days is better than the 0 you would get at the second option
• 100% remote is better than remote with 5 days in the office
• Weekly pay is preferable, but hey at least the checks look fatter every bi-weekly
• Far as the desire for easy work, if you're doing enterprise IT (Working for a big finance firm or multinational company) there will be plenty of opportunities for 'easy work', so much fukking down-time that it's easy to get lost in the shuffle, because there are so many projects, meetings, infrastructure changes going on at any given moment, long as you are knocking out your fair share of tickets, no one will give a shyt about you.
• Far as No Weekends or after hours support, I'd prefer that too, but do you even know if the 1st company expects those things from you? if its a team of four guys supporting a hundred end-users, that's mad small. After hours support typically means your working with end-users from countries with wildly different timezones like India, which is usually found in BIG corporations. the only way I see a team that small doing any after-hour or weekened work is to make infrastructure changes they cant normally make during regular production or business hours. E.G. network installations, server racking and stacking, cabling, patching, image pushes etc
• IMHO, the 1st job is going to give you more experience to walk away with when you leave while also having most of what you want in terms of working conditions/benefits

So there's my reasoning for that

Preciate the insight bro yeah that's what I decided to go with that day, the consistent pay was too tough to pass up.

He did make the weekend work seem very light (you were on the money, just checking to see if an update was pushed correctly) but I'm untrustworthy, but all in all I really don't expect it to be bad at all.

Sidebar: I'm thinking too far ahead here, but do ya'll nikkas be traveling while doing remote work using hotels/bnbs etc?

 

[Rhyme n Tekniq]

Preciate the insight bro yeah that's what I decided to go with that day, the consistent pay was too tough to pass up.

He did make the weekend work seem very light (you were on the money, just checking to see if an update was pushed correctly) but I'm untrustworthy, but all in all I really don't expect it to be bad at all.

Sidebar: I'm thinking too far ahead here, but do ya'll nikkas be traveling while doing remote work using hotels/bnbs etc?

No problem my g

Far as the traveling question...


hell yeah I be traveling all the time

Just cop you a portable wifi hotspot and a decent plan

Also when you can, cop you a portable monitor to attach to your laptop and maintain a dual monitor setup even on the go: Peep these here

 

[LiquidMasterSwords]

Preciate the insight bro yeah that's what I decided to go with that day, the consistent pay was too tough to pass up.

He did make the weekend work seem very light (you were on the money, just checking to see if an update was pushed correctly) but I'm untrustworthy, but all in all I really don't expect it to be bad at all.

Sidebar: I'm thinking too far ahead here, but do ya'll nikkas be traveling while doing remote work using hotels/bnbs etc?

nikka yes, I had to take a day off because of the flight but was definitely in Orlando with my coffee cup on the space bar to keep me active on Teams. Took the occasional break/in meeting that didn't exist so I wasn't just green/available for a week, just make sure you stay close to your laptop and can quickly jump on a call in a moment's notice. As soon as 5pm hit, I closed the laptop and started pouring shots

I actually was cool with one of my coworkers and we agreed if we went on trips the other person would pick up the slack. Nothing worse than being on a trip and then suddenly a server goes down or something stupid.

 

[AyBrehHam Linkin]

new level 3 gig with a 3 dollar raise

 

[Uno Venova]

No problem my g

Far as the traveling question...


hell yeah I be traveling all the time

Just cop you a portable wifi hotspot and a decent plan

Also when you can, cop you a portable monitor to attach to your laptop and maintain a dual monitor setup even on the go: Peep these here

nikka yes, I had to take a day off because of the flight but was definitely in Orlando with my coffee cup on the space bar to keep me active on Teams. Took the occasional break/in meeting that didn't exist so I wasn't just green/available for a week, just make sure you stay close to your laptop and can quickly jump on a call in a moment's notice. As soon as 5pm hit, I closed the laptop and started pouring shots

I actually was cool with one of my coworkers and we agreed if we went on trips the other person would pick up the slack. Nothing worse than being on a trip and then suddenly a server goes down or something stupid.

That's wassup

Imma be on the same wave soon

Gonna grind and get to know these systems inside out, get cool wit everyone and rock out

 

[JT-Money]

Tech workers face a 'burnout crisis' unless employers act now | ZDNet

Tech workers face a 'burnout crisis' unless employers act now
A study of more than 36,200 tech workers finds that two in five employees want to quit due to excessive stress, exhaustion and a broken work-life balance.

 

[winb83]

Been trying to avoid the fact that I've reached the peak of what I can make at the job I'm at. I mean I wasn't smart with my money at the beginning but I've cleaned that up and I'm not stupid with my money. I live off half of what I make and because of that I'm comfortable but I've begun to dream of something more. 39-40 is a hell of a time to start all over again though.

It might be time. I just look at the people that have what I know I'll never have working this job and think why can't I have that? A single male with no kids making $70K in mid-Michigan isn't bad at all but it's not great either when you've peaked out and all you're gonna get going forward is cost of living raises that barely keep up with inflation.

Mines is a sad story of a guy that got BAS Computer Information Systems degree and took the first job I could get out of college and worked it 11 years. Got comfortable and because I didn't really need more I didn't aim higher.

 

[JT-Money]

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/05/the...valley-boom-in-the-middle-of-russias-war.html

Eastern Europe created its own Silicon Valley. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine risks it all
PUBLISHED SAT, MAR 5 20229:04 AM ESTUPDATED SAT, MAR 5 20229:10 AM EST

 

[Ish Gibor]

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/05/the...valley-boom-in-the-middle-of-russias-war.html

Eastern Europe created its own Silicon Valley. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine risks it all
PUBLISHED SAT, MAR 5 20229:04 AM ESTUPDATED SAT, MAR 5 20229:10 AM EST

Ok, that explains the disinformation, meddling attacks on US politics, and racist social media posts coming from the Ukraine. Deployed by Russia.

 

[Sonny Bonds]

Is it true you have to work harder at tech start ups versus established businesses?

Didn’t mean for this post too be so long. Sorry.

I’m the IT Admin at a startup.

This is my 2nd week. This morning I had to onboard a new contractor based in Portugal, but the Azure SSO didn’t work in Google account. I thought it was because I had changed the email address after I created it last week. I made a brand new account with a different name. It still didn’t work. This was all while on a call with the contractor and my boss, the head of engineering. There was a bunch of dead silence and it was awkward.

Then there was an ops team meeting. I was supposed to have an hour between meetings, but I was trying to fix the Azure thing. So I joined this call late.

So there’s like 10 people starting from next week through the end of April. I have to make sure they get computers and ship them out in time.

I have to design a better onboarding experience with slides and shyt. People are using redundant tools, like both Dropbox and Google Drive. Also Google Meet and Zoom. So I have to decide what tools to keep and deal with the whining that’s sure to come.

There’s also inventory stuff I have to do. Right now, there’s no locked storage in the office. So brand new MacBooks are just sitting in the office. But we’re moving offices in a couple of weeks. I’m going to have to setup a couple of conference room.

After the ops call, there was the weekly All Hands. Right now, I’m sitting in a call about AWS and MongoDB. One of the devs is setting up a new environment. She says it’s in part, a knowledge sharing call. But I have no context for any of this and I’m just confused. And I don’t really care right now because…

The contractor still can’t login and the IT consultant is leaving on Friday. How broken is the Azure/Google SSO? Is it every new account that’ll have this problem? Why did they choose Azure (and Intune) when we’re a 100% Mac company?

And I’m probably going into the office at least once a week for the next couple of months to deal with inventory and the new office conference rooms. I was told that this job was remote when the recruiter sent me the job description.

Why is this MongoDB meeting still going?

 

[winb83]

Figured I'd start on trying to get an A+ certification. I bought Dion's practice test off Udemy and took it with absolutely no studying done on my part. I failed the first one right away with 73 questions right out of 90. They ask a fair amount of questions you would just look up on Google if out in the field working on something. I was surprised.

 

[Obreh Winfrey]

Figured I'd start on trying to get an A+ certification. I bought Dion's practice test off Udemy and took it with absolutely no studying done on my part. I failed the first one right away with 73 questions right out of 90. They ask a fair amount of questions you would just look up on Google if out in the field working on something. I was surprised.

That's the annoying dichotomy with tech work. We're expected to know everything (at least during interviews) but most of that is stuff you'd check a reference for when the situation arises. It's a dumb part of the process.

 

[winb83]

That's the annoying dichotomy with tech work. We're expected to know everything (at least during interviews) but most of that is stuff you'd check a reference for when the situation arises. It's a dumb part of the process.

Do you really have to memorize all these TCP and UDP port numbers? That's more or less what I mean. Understanding the concept is more important than knowing the numbers because stuff like that can be referenced if needed. It almost comes across as this cert industry only exist to justify it's own existence rather than to show you can handle stuff because memorizing and regurgitating this stuff short term on a test doesn't prove much beyond your test taking abilities.

 

[Obreh Winfrey]

Do you really have to memorize all these TCP and UDP port numbers? That's more or less what I mean. Understanding the concept is more important than knowing the numbers because stuff like that can be referenced if needed. It almost comes across as this cert industry only exist to justify it's own existence rather than to show you can handle stuff because memorizing and regurgitating this stuff short term on a test doesn't prove much beyond your test taking abilities.

I never took the A+, but port numbers do come up pretty often. HTTP/HTTPS, FTP/SFTP, SMTP, MySQL, Postgres, RDP, etc. Someone can say one of those in regards to a port and for the most part it should spring to mind. But I've never seen anyone get come at sideways because they didn't know a port for a service. You're 100% correct, the cert industry is a racket be it in tech, education, whatever. Companies come up with these certs so people can "show" they know the topic, but then the cert becomes the barrier, not knowledge and ability.