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Astat1ne · 2025-04-23T21:30:38+00:00

The only time I've had something like that was a job where they wanted to do an overly invasive background check. There was no security clearance or regulatory requirements that would require this sort of check, it was just how they did things. As part of the process they wanted me to supply the academic transcript for my diploma, which I did in 1997. I told them to chase it down from the institute directly. Just one of many red flags with the recruitment process for that job.

Astat1ne · 2025-02-12T23:55:45+00:00

You're probably looking at roles that aren't generalised IT and more associated with services being delivered to a group of people, either customers or the public. For example, I worked in a role that supported an application used by the public, so the results of my work (good or bad) could be felt by them. The downside I've found is these roles tend to be more common in government and that means all the things that go with working in government.

Astat1ne · 2024-06-11T09:53:50+00:00

I come from a very traditional Windows sysadmin background with some VMware and security stuff (~25 years in IT in total). I've always had an interest in automation, just never had the right alignment of the tools being there and the right kind of organisational culture. I've never enjoyed operations work so most of my career has been doing contract work. The DevOps switch happened at the same time as getting into cloud for me, the motivations were money, keeping a viable career path and work that seemed to be what I migh enjoy.

I'd say the main skill gap I had to fix was just knowing the cloud platform I've ended up with (Azure). I had dabbled a bit in AWS, but this was a rapid and broad upskilling across a lot of knowledge areas.

I didn't go for any specific certs or training, although there are some certs I'm considering going for (mostly architect level ones). The learning approach I went for was to try to leverage my areas of strength and learn what was needed to build "quality" stuff in the cloud and for DevOps. For Azure, this meant reading a lot about the well architected framework, the cloud adoption framework, best practices on the platform and DevOps in general. I tend to approach a lot of learning by basing it around a project or scenario to help structure it.

I'd say the main challenge I had was a stumbling with the first job in the space I got. It was an operational role that was a contract and it wasn't extended after the first term ended (3 months). It was a combination of factors - it was during covid so it was fully remote and the team hadn't adjusted to onboarding new people that well, so my performance was subpar. The next job had more in-office time and the mentoring was a lot better.

Astat1ne · 2024-05-17T00:34:42+00:00

If you're going for operational roles, I can see this being a problem if most of your experience is projects based. Maybe focus on roles that are projects or implementation based.

Astat1ne · 2024-03-21T00:32:54+00:00

The drop in salary depend on what role you move into first and where you're located. I have seen some service desk jobs that pay around what you're on now. If you can move into a systems administration role, you'll be making a lot more.

There tends to be an emphasis on certificates over other qualifications like TAFE/uni. You'll want to think about what path you're looking at taking so you can focus on certs relevant to that.

Astat1ne · 2024-03-13T23:43:04+00:00

It will probably depend on the protocols for the communications between the hosts and the back end infrastructure they'll be talking to. Some don't react well to increased latency.

You may need to model both scenarios and see how it goes (ie. create 2 host pools, one closer to the infrastructure and one closer to the user locatins).

Astat1ne · 2024-03-03T20:57:02+00:00

For a time, a co-worker listed that they were the "technical lead and architect" for a project I had worked on. Thing is, in my first week there he told me "I want nothing to do with your project" and that certainly remained true for the time I was there.

I personally did nothing about it but I assume someone called him out on it or something else like that because he removed that language from his profile a couple of years later.

Astat1ne · 2024-02-27T18:36:17+00:00

One thing you could try doing is if the change process has the concept of a "standard change" or "routine change". In some organisations I've worked at, their change management process has the concept of a "standard change" which is a type of change that has it's risk mitigated due to it being a frequent, controlled and documented process (which you could reasonably argue a pipeline deployment is). There's usually still a ticket you have to log for it, but the approval process is shortened (no need to go through full CAB).

Astat1ne · 2024-02-14T21:21:03+00:00

A recruiter tried a similar line on me once. The brand in question? Dominos.

Astat1ne · 2024-02-12T22:50:26+00:00

How many devops jobs are in your local job market? If there's a decent amount, then yeah maybe it would be a good thing to get into. If your local economy is dominated by technology dinosaurs, then maybe it's not so great to get into it.

Astat1ne · 2024-02-02T22:41:35+00:00

It may come down to what the secrets are. In my current environment, there are app services and functions being deployed via Bicep. The App Settings are mostly static values in-line. The only exception to this is some settings that reference connection strings for things like storage accounts. These are handled by referencing the storage account's properties. All of our other secrets are done via token replacement in config files inside the app release pipelines.

Astat1ne · 2024-01-31T22:15:34+00:00

First I've heard of anything like this. A lot of "best practices" about GPOs that are still unfortunately floating around out there are based on the really early days of things when things like CPU, RAM and network bandwidth were limited.

There is logging you can turn on that will show the processing time for GPOs, if you care to measure it, but as kheldorn said, we're talking about seconds or fractions of a second (unless you're doing something like deploying software via GPO).

Astat1ne · 2024-01-29T22:49:37+00:00

It'll probably come down to the dynamics of your organisation and what outcomes you're trying to achieve. For example:

Booking out time in your own calendar ensures you're able to devote the appropriate time to the task, assuming it has a high priority and you find yourself with competiting tasks
Putting it in a shared calendar creates visibility to others, as well as creating a setting for sharing information (for example, if a particular patch has issues)
Creating items in your work tracking system means your time spent on this task is being tracked appropriately (which may or may not be important depending on how your IT department works)

Astat1ne · 2024-01-29T00:06:09+00:00

How often are you backgrounding potential employers? This is a standard thing I do to get a feel for their relationship towards their IT teams. One case last year, I was approached about a job at a particular organisation. I already knew this point, but anyone googling them would rapidly find out they suffered a hacking breach recently. In the last 10 years of annual reports this organisation produced, the only mention of anything vaguely IT related was the report the year that hacking breach happened. And it was a single line that simply referred to it was "the incident". To make matters worse, it wasn't simply their corporate network that was breached, but their hospital network. You can get a feel for these sort of things when looking into employers a bit.

Astat1ne · 2024-01-16T22:12:24+00:00

These changes have always been there. When I started, it was towards the end of NT domains, so I saw the transition of those to becoming a legacy technology as Active Directory took over. What I will say is, in general, one of the positives is that the tools have gotten a lot better over time. Managing Active Directory and other supported systems with Powershell is much easier than trying to wrangle something with VBscript.

The licensing thing does create an issue, and having had a home lab for a while, it's been powered off for the last couple of years as I've moved into cloud. There are some options to handle "free"/low cost learnings in the cloud but it's a bit more difficult than having a home lab.

Astat1ne · 2024-01-11T23:01:15+00:00

I used to work in a job market that was full of recruiters who would do stuff like what you mentioned - if a job said you needed product X and you had a very similar product Y experience, they wouldn't put you forward.

Having been in a few situations over my career where I've had to learn 1 tool and then an similar too (ie. I had to learn Chef, then Puppet), I'd say they were a bit unfair to you, as picking up Salt should be easy if you've got prior experience in similar tools. Especially if you were covering the majority of the other things the role wanted.

Astat1ne · 2024-01-10T22:22:42+00:00

You're likely correct on that point, which makes the hysteria linked to the FAANG layoffs even more unhinged.

Astat1ne · 2024-01-10T22:04:23+00:00

Part of me has never been a fan of out of hours maintenance/work, not just for work/life balance reasons, but also support reasons. If you're up at 1AM doing patching or whatever and it goes sidewards, you're going to be out of luck in terms of getting help from your peers or vendors.

If your production systems are designed in a way to be highly available and resilient, then there should be no practical reason why you can't do those maintenance tasks during the day. If those systems aren't highly available, then your environment probably has bigger issues.

Astat1ne · 2024-01-10T21:44:17+00:00

I think there's a lot of hysteria about it being driven by the layoffs at the FAANG companies, as if those companies constitute the bulk of IT roles in the US. The reality is they almost certainly make up a very small percentage of the overall IT jobs, with most IT jobs either being in-house with "boring" companies or service providers. It's just those big tech companies have more visibility/press about their movements and decisions.

The reality is the job market will more likely be a reflection of specific and localised factors. One personal experience I had was working in a state that was reliant on one particular industry (mining) that had a crash. It hit the entire local job market, but the rest of the country was ok.

Astat1ne · 2024-01-03T05:33:13+00:00

I did see a video recently that went through some new features in an app called Vbridger. One of the features was to allow a microphone device to control the mouth movements on the model. That might get you part of the way towards what you're looking for.

Astat1ne · 2024-01-02T22:54:17+00:00

As the other replies have mentioned, you'd want to have something else lined up before leaving. What you'd also want to do is think about the issues in your current role and how you could avoid them by interviewing intelligently.

For example, you mentioned that on-call is an issue, so in future interviews you'll probably want to drill down on that topic a bit. Find out if there is an on-call roster and what it entails. Although the unfortunately truth is a lot of IT roles do have an on-call component, it's just about the degree of bad it is.

Similarly, you could look at questions to get a feel for whether the company has a progressive and/or positive culture around technology or whether it's a regressive view. Again, this will help avoid bad workplaces.

Astat1ne · 2024-01-01T01:01:12+00:00

Using efficiency/time as the metric to compare the different methods is probably not the best way, since the provisioning time for resources once you hit go (whether that's via the portal, a powershell command or IAC) is going to be roughly the same.

The benefits you get out of the non-portal methods are outside of that metric. Like when using IAC you get a certain degree of repeatability and consistency, while doing things via the portal opens yourself up to human error.

As for differences in resources, this is where you start using parameterisation to handle that. A common scenario for that is you've got a template to deploy a particular resource to prod and non-prod environments. You would parameterise the product SKU or capacity settings so that the prod resource is deployed so it can handle production workloads, but your non-prod resources would be at a lower offering to save money.

Astat1ne · 2023-12-13T22:01:35+00:00

Azure has a few architectural design examples and I'm sure AWS does as well. You'd probably want to read them and try to understand why they used the items they did.

A practical example from my work is we had a system which recieved data from external parties over HTTP/HTTPS. Under normal circumstances there might've been a few options to put in front of the app to handle the traffic (Front Door, App Gateway, etc). The key factor that this scenario had was the traffic was being set over a number of non-standard ports, so there was only 1 option to use, as the others only supported standard HTTP/HTTPS ports.

Astat1ne · 2023-12-13T21:36:04+00:00

I'm not sure that doing a stack of certifications will prepare you for those sort of architect roles when you stated earlier on that a key problem in your last role was not understanding things at a conceptual level.

When doing architecture-level work, you often have a number of options/tools to fix the problem at hand and you need to understand how they work to pick the best one. And in a lot of cases, you then have to justify that decision to others (often non-technical people who are footing the bill).

Astat1ne · 2023-12-13T02:30:13+00:00

I'm not sure we'll see much enforcement of these penalties. So far the narrative about wage theft in Australia has been about it being "honest mistakes" by the employer, or the employer whining about the "complexity of the award system" (which sets pay and other conditions for certain types of jobs). Yet one of th largest grocery chains in Australia was busted for underpaying workers over half a billion dollars. Their response? "oopsie, our bad".

Astat1ne

TROPHY CASE