IT Certifications and Careers (Official Discussion Thread)

nomoreneveragain

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anyone done the SCCM 2012 training yet? my company is sending me to it in two weeks.

My fukking bum ass Manager hasn't let me touch it yet.

Looking at it from afar it doesn't look difficult I'm sure if you play around with it create a few task sequences, push out updates ... You'll get comfortable real fast.
 

duckbutta

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Passed the CISSP exam today breh's :lolbron::takedat::blessed:

Damn ya'll, 5 months of non-stop studying broke me off today. Took 3.5 hours straight through, then I went backed and rechecked a lot of shyt (glad I did). All in all, I was on the computer for 6 hours fukking hours:whew:

I clicked "submit"... walked over to the test proctor and while I was gathering all my snacks, ol' boy was like "Congrats Captain, you passed!" :salute:

5 months of studying and it finally pays off :banderas::banderas::banderas:

Now I'm gonna work on my CEH :jawalrus::takedat:

:salute::salute:...the CISSP is a big boy cert...congrats...
 

duckbutta

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IT Brehs....Watchu think of this internship?:lupe:


LAN/WAN Internship - $90,000 to $180,000 (IT Pros & TOP Grads Only)




This is a scam that has been around forever...I think the name of the company is Wipro...or at least that is what they called it in the Dallas area...

What happens is you pay for the "schooling" and at the end they teill you how to find a job...

That company cannot place you into an IT job...the can submit your resume to an HR department of a company be they themselves cannot get you an IT job...

As a rule any IT shop that says you got to pay us and we find you a job should be avoided...

I know several people who signed up for this and all ended up with no job and about 10 G's in debt
 

duckbutta

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This thread has helped me alot, I just wanna thank everyone who has contributed something because many of us were looking for answers and experiences all over the web. Like everyone said, start from the bottom cert up, get that experience and grow from within. That is my plan now.

I just landed a Desktop support internship at a healthcare company, with high rate chance of getting hired. I do not have A+ yet but will work on getting it (they will reimburse me after I get the cert).

My plan is to go into Networking after a year or so (CCNA route), I understand it will be difficult to transition from Desktop support to Network.

What will be the best advice to do so? Talk to the networking department? go to IT events such as Spiceworks? brows craigslist etc everyday until I see entry level position?

I do not plan to stay Helpdesk/desktop more than a Year.

If you are planning to stay at the healthcare company, talk to the network guys, but don't do that until after you have gained some credibility as a help-desk guy...Don't go in the first day and just go to the network department and be like " I want to work with you guys" because they are going to hit you with the "you need to worry about the helpdesk stuff first"

Since you are starting out it would probably be better to try and move to the network department of where you are now, because if you do a good jop at helpdesk you will have some pull with those guys, they will know you are a good worker. You go on craiglist looking for a job that is basically starting over, they won't know you from the other 500 who submitted resumes.

A good rule to follow is this. If you want the money you will probably have to go work at another company, but if you want the experience then you will probably have to transfer to another part of the company you are already in.

Going to networking events this early in your career is not going to be real helpful. Those things tend to turn into senior engineer / management jerk fest when a new guy fresh in the industry is just ignored or brushed off. It would be helpful to go say, 2 years after you get into networking ( though i do virtualization and you could not pay me to go to VMworld again )....

Good luck breh
 

gho3st

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If you are planning to stay at the healthcare company, talk to the network guys, but don't do that until after you have gained some credibility as a help-desk guy...Don't go in the first day and just go to the network department and be like " I want to work with you guys" because they are going to hit you with the "you need to worry about the helpdesk stuff first"

Since you are starting out it would probably be better to try and move to the network department of where you are now, because if you do a good jop at helpdesk you will have some pull with those guys, they will know you are a good worker. You go on craiglist looking for a job that is basically starting over, they won't know you from the other 500 who submitted resumes.

A good rule to follow is this. If you want the money you will probably have to go work at another company, but if you want the experience then you will probably have to transfer to another part of the company you are already in.

Going to networking events this early in your career is not going to be real helpful. Those things tend to turn into senior engineer / management jerk fest when a new guy fresh in the industry is just ignored or brushed off. It would be helpful to go say, 2 years after you get into networking ( though i do virtualization and you could not pay me to go to VMworld again )....

Good luck breh
breh you a hiring manager right?? What do you do when the person you are interviewing is nervous as hell and fukks up the interview even though that person might be qualified for the job?
 

duckbutta

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breh you a hiring manager right?? What do you do when the person you are interviewing is nervous as hell and fukks up the interview even though that person might be qualified for the job?

I generally have a first 4 question rule as in you have to get all of the first 4 questions right. These are not hard questions, these are just typical questions you have to know the answer to just to work in the section of IT I do. I feel like if a candidate cannot answer these first 4 fluff industry questions, then they cannot answer anything after that. I work in virtualization, so if someone can't tell me what a vmotion is, they sure as hell can't tell me why you want to have vmotion network traffic separate from everything else, or how to separate it.

As far as being nervous, I don't really pay attention to it. A job interview is a high pressure situation for both parties. It is a high pressure situation for the candidate because they are looking for a new job, generally for a reason that is pretty serious to them ( trying to break into the industry, job they have sucks, they got laid off ). Contrary to popular belief by IT workers it is also a high pressure situation for me, because I either have to replace a guy who left or moved to another group ( and his work is just sitting around not being done ) or I got to hire a new guy because our work load increased ( and all my guys are starting to feel overworked and shyt if I don't get someone in here soon then they are going to start leaving ) or some manager over my head passed some corporate mandate that says "grow your team" and I got some HR person standing over me saying "you got your group up to 13 people yet?" So I am expecting the person to be nervous, I am expecting them to cross up some words. Now if it is something that is overt...and I have had people who get overtly nervous, I interviewed a dude one time who literally passed out, I interviewed a dude who started sweating so bad that it literally started pooling in his chair and falling on the floor, if it is something that bad then I cannot hire that person. If they get that nervous over an interview, what will happen if I hire them and they got a deadline to meet with a bunch of people emailing them saying "you know if we do not deliver tomorrow we lose a 5 million dollar contract right?"

To me if the person fukks up the interview then they are not qualified for the job. There is more to an interview than just answering technical questions. There is more to IT than just knowing technical stuff and being good at it. I would say unless you get to the super duper senior level where you have to be a walking wki page for whatever your IT discipline is, the actual art of being smart and knowing the technology is maybe a 3rd of what you really need to make it in IT. Most IT people do not take the time to really develop problem solving and people skills, and in IT that stuff will take you way further career wise than being some guy who can re-write the entire inventory application using powercli...

The only exception to that rule, again, is if you get to the super senior level. When I do an interview for those jobs I only care what you know and that is it, any other personality traits, as long as they don't strike me as severe, I ignore. In most IT disciplines once you reach the Engineering \ Architect level you are just being a walking dictionary all day and the only thing people expect of you is to spout out some random technical stuff on command and by that time you have seen so much IT shyt and worked so many projects that you can find the problem with an issue in a fraction of a time it used to take you.

When it comes to interviews, especially for people breaking into the field, I would say go on as many as you can. Doesn't matter if you are over qualified, under qualified, go to it. Do well at it. Bomb at it. But go on a ton of them to get familiar with the questions asked. Most IT interviews are going to be some standard industry questions and then some questions internal to how that company does things. You want to be able to nail those standard industry questions at the drop of a hat and you can only do that with practice.
 

Pain

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When it comes to interviews, especially for people breaking into the field, I would say go on as many as you can. Doesn't matter if you are over qualified, under qualified, go to it. Do well at it. Bomb at it. But go on a ton of them to get familiar with the questions asked. Most IT interviews are going to be some standard industry questions and then some questions internal to how that company does things. You want to be able to nail those standard industry questions at the drop of a hat and you can only do that with practice.



I just came out of an interview, probably the most intense interview I have ever been on. 12 member team each prepared with their own set of complicated questions and this is to get my foot in the door. I answered their soft skill questions flawlessly but the technical ones were just foreign language to me. I had the guy who set up the "possible" internship with me and he agreed that he has never seen a "foot in the door" interview get that intense in all the years he was doing. It was like 1 hour of just being grilled breh
:damn:

I think there was a misunderstanding because they never had an intern before and they interviewed like I was an IT expert, right before I left I asked them "what does it take to be a successful intern" and they were like "We don't know...we wanna get that experience too".

I'll know if I got that postion in one hour or so.

btw...thanks for the info few posts above, I will have take my time and slowly climb up the ladder.
 

Pain

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( though i do virtualization and you could not pay me to go to VMworld again )....Good luck breh

:lupe: what do u mean breh? is the virtualization route now the way to go? because literally everyone is telling me that is the route to go.
 

duckbutta

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I just came out of an interview, probably the most intense interview I have ever been on. 12 member team each prepared with their own set of complicated questions and this is to get my foot in the door. I answered their soft skill questions flawlessly but the technical ones were just foreign language to me. I had the guy who set up the "possible" internship with me and he agreed that he has never seen a "foot in the door" interview get that intense in all the years he was doing. It was like 1 hour of just being grilled breh
:damn:

I think there was a misunderstanding because they never had an intern before and they interviewed like I was an IT expert, right before I left I asked them "what does it take to be a successful intern" and they were like "We don't know...we wanna get that experience too".

I'll know if I got that postion in one hour or so.

btw...thanks for the info few posts above, I will have take my time and slowly climb up the ladder.

That is a place you probably don't want to work at. Having that many people for a damn intern position is beyond ridiculous. More than likely they wanted to just grill you on IT questions so they can feel like they are smarter than you are and have something to talk about at work. You will run into this a lot at IT, dealing with miserable people who having nothing going for them but how smart they think they are. Each person is different, but at some point you as a job seeker have to determine when enough is enough. If it is the only way to get your foot in the door and they offer it you should take it, but expect those dudes to be clowns. "Senior" IT guys are almost always clowns to people trying to break into the industry but that is a whole other thread.
 

duckbutta

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:lupe: what do u mean breh? is the virtualization route now the way to go? because literally everyone is telling me that is the route to go.


Virtualization is one of those "black box" IT disciplines that is very hot because most people do not understand it and it is something you have to work with for awhile to get good at. It is very hard to study for on your own and can be very expensive. I have a VCP and a VCAP and the lab I built cost me around 1500 and I took a lot of shortcuts, and i spent that out of my own pocket. My company paid for classes and test but if they had not, just the VCP class alone would have cost me 1300 at the time. Vmware test are very difficult because they are all conceptual questions...or design questions. Since the classes are so expensive...since the certs are so hard...since their are so few people who really understand virtualization...it becomes a black box that most companies don't understand and don't want to understand...they just want to hire a guy with the supposed credentials and tell him "virtualize my shyt. Turn my desktop and laptop into a screen I log into and save me 100 of thousands of dollars a year by allowing me to close a datacenter and have my entire IT infrastructure in one cabinet " Because of this virtualization guys make a lot of money and are always going to be in demand because virtualization is associated with "the cloud" and "getting rid of datacenters"

If you want to make a lot of money in IT it is the way to go, but the issue most people start to have is that eventually you have to know much more than just virtualization. You have to know networking because without networking knowledge you will have no idea how to set up a virtual network for your infrastructure, or have no idea how to configure a nexus, and those are things you have to know. You have to know about storage, how to connect it, what types, what the good and strong points are of each type. You have to know about blade technology and architecture because virtualization has moved toward the Cisco UCS, so you need to understand the difference between the physical cpu and ram in the blade and the logical way you can set it up to be used in a virtual environment. You have to know about a lot of virutalization technologies. Vmware is the major player but you have to know Microsoft Hyper V as well since it is basically free if you are a windows shop. You have to know citrix and how to set up citrix farms. It is essential that you be able to script as well, because you will be doing some of the task perhaps dozens of times and at some point from just a time constraint it will not be feasible to do it manually.

Storage is another "black box" IT discipline where you can make a lot of money. Where I work the storage and backup positions START at around 72k. However, storage is a very high stress job, because you are dealing with company data, and the first time you fukk up and lose or fukk up and can't restore company data, you will be fired. Most storage guys I know never get a second chance. They make bank though...

If you are interested in Virtualization I would look up some stuff on Vcenter from Vmware...it is pretty much the defacto standard app suite for virtualization now.
 

FreshFromATL

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That is a place you probably don't want to work at. Having that many people for a damn intern position is beyond ridiculous. More than likely they wanted to just grill you on IT questions so they can feel like they are smarter than you are and have something to talk about at work. You will run into this a lot at IT, dealing with miserable people who having nothing going for them but how smart they think they are. Each person is different, but at some point you as a job seeker have to determine when enough is enough. If it is the only way to get your foot in the door and they offer it you should take it, but expect those dudes to be clowns. "Senior" IT guys are almost always clowns to people trying to break into the industry but that is a whole other thread.

A1-level advice right here. @Pain if this is the way they came at you in the interview, just imagine how the work environment is? A bunch of nikkas sitting around measuring dikks all day, SMH. Is these the type of cats you want to be around daily?
 

JT-Money

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A1-level advice right here. @Pain if this is the way they came at you in the interview, just imagine how the work environment is? A bunch of nikkas sitting around measuring dikks all day, SMH. Is these the type of cats you want to be around daily?

Most companies treat interns like dirt and will try and dump any and all work they can on them. All the crap duties nobody else wants to deal with will be dumped on the intern. Usually it's the IT people who suck most at their job who will look to dump the most work on interns. And if the intern is smart they'll usually steal their ideas and pass them off as their own. There are way more grimey people in IT than in most other professions. Partly because upper management has no clue what's going on inside their technology departments due to ignorance about technology.
 

semtex

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:snoop: Have to create a linkedlist and a hashtable from scratch, no references to the built in classes. Senioritis is too strong for this.
 

McTwerk

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Just ordered my All-in-one box set for CEH... i'm fittin to eat real good :banderas:

I felt the CEH 7.0 was fairly easy. Got a 900/1000 on that test.
I am looking to tackle the OSCP next myself :cape:

Good luck though breh, paired with the CISSP, that is a hot combo to have right there.
 

HabitualLineSteppa

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Brehs...

I'm in a SQL server course presently and I am in dire need of assistance. To all my programming/DB heads, pardon the basic-ness of the following request however I've searched high and low and honestly the reading material in the course alludes me..

Here's the issue:

"Assuming that today’s date is 12/2/2025, create a temporary field that calculates the total service time (in years) of each
employee.

In the same query, use a CASE statement to identify employees who are over 54 years old and have over 20 years of service time with the company. Identify them as “Potential Retirees”".

For reference, these are the tables and column I at least KNOW this data will derive from

Table Names: Employee

Columns needing to be manipulated: employee.HireDate, employee.FirstName, employee.LastName


Any help will be greatly appreciated!!!!
 
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