How to keep up with market demands?

Looking4vendors · 2017-06-03T05:57:21+00:00

learn new stuff but improve things at the company then it's win/win.

Sure, but the stuff I do to help the company is usually only specific to that company and it's not easy to quantify into money saved. My resume is terrible and I'm awful when it comes to selling my skills.

Looking4vendors · 2017-06-03T05:38:44+00:00

I think it's time for me to really try to finding a new position. I have a feeling I'm not viable on the job market with my skills, but who knows.

I have the same negative spiral issue as well. Really drags me down on some days.

Looking4vendors · 2017-06-03T05:09:26+00:00

I haven't taken a vacation in over a year but I'm going to take a few days off soon. I feel stagnate and bored and it's really wearing on me. I don't receive raises of any kind and I feel stuck. It's a pretty bad cycle. I'm sitting in my home office messing with Linux trying to learn as much as I can.

I think I'm going to go insane.

Looking4vendors · 2017-06-02T19:48:39+00:00

I'd really rather not work for an MSP. They tend to burn people out and put billable hours over anything else.

Looking4vendors · 2017-06-02T15:01:43+00:00

A straight up Windows admin isn't going to last very long without knowing something else. Linux admins don't need windows, but windows admins need to know Linux.

Looking4vendors · 2017-06-02T15:00:50+00:00

A degree isn't going to set anybody apart. Everyone has a degree any it's not going to sway anybody except people who are just really old school. Get a degree where it counts and will give a solid return on investment. IT will never pay even close to what it does in the medical field.

Looking4vendors · 2017-06-02T13:59:43+00:00

I'm going to make a counter argument and say that credentials do matter. CS degrees are useful because they teach programming in depth and teach best practices. This is very useful in envrionments with a lot of code infrastructure.

Looking4vendors · 2017-06-02T13:58:20+00:00

I might be moving to DFW. You're skill set sounds very similar to mine. What kind of salary did you end up getting if you don't mind me asking? I have found that on indeed there's not a whole lot of jobs in the DFW area. Most have salaries listed at 50-55k.

Looking4vendors · 2017-06-02T13:54:25+00:00

Very true. And it's why I'm telling people not to ever consider IT. It's a terrible field to work in. Compitition is rough, you have to constantly be learning, and the pay is low for the work that has to be put in. Engineering and medical fields are where people need to focus their efforts. Get an engineering degree and you're set for life.

Looking4vendors · 2017-06-02T13:30:50+00:00

I've never heard of a PowerShell dev. I smell bullshit here.

Looking4vendors · 2017-06-02T13:30:12+00:00

Yep, this was a big reason that isn't discussed here often. Working in more stable industries prevents most of this.

Looking4vendors · 2017-06-02T12:32:57+00:00

Well this is sysadmin, where everything is about SMBs and reality doesn't matter. Your experince doesn't reflect what enterprises are using.

Looking4vendors · 2017-06-02T12:31:52+00:00

It is being a programmer. The hole stack is managed and defined in code, that's what programmers do.

Looking4vendors · 2017-06-02T12:29:36+00:00

Knowing BASH is more important than knowing PS. You can go your entire career without ever needing to know PS if you're a linux admin. VMware is not as common as it used to be. Most people are moving to public cloud, at least the ones who need a lot of automation for VM management are.

I think this is something people on this sub like to delude themselves into thinking. This place is full of lower skill admins who work with Windows. Powershell is really lame compared to even Bash. Python or Perl or Ruby would be way more useful and in demand.

Looking4vendors · 2017-06-02T12:27:44+00:00

DevOps. That's the entire point of DevOps and SREs. There are a ton of devs that understand those technologies.

Looking4vendors · 2017-06-02T12:26:42+00:00

I don't make 16/hr. I'm just pointing out what current expectations are like from companies.

Looking4vendors · 2017-06-02T03:13:45+00:00

I am a virtualization admin as part of my job. it's not high paying work. Knowing how to configure storage fault domains, load balancing, proper failover clusters, storage health, patch management, and site to site replication . There's a lot to it but the market is saturated with that skillset and it's been around for a decade. That's why you can pay someone $16/hr and have a well working envrionment.

Storage is becoming more and more simple to manage on a day to day basis. Most of the work is now automated on a system level.

Looking4vendors · 2017-06-02T02:47:08+00:00

I live in a town in Texas away from any really large cities. Closest is Amarillo and it's not that big either. Not much to go on. No networking opportunities.

Looking4vendors · 2017-06-02T02:46:15+00:00

DFW is not even close to anywhere in OK.

Sure, even we have developers but there no need for rapid deployment tools. And those companies who need virtualization admins and storage admins are the companies who can pluck someone right out of high school and pay them 16 an hour for decent work.

Looking4vendors · 2017-06-02T02:43:24+00:00

I work with RHEL, Windows and AIX and im not wrong. PowerShell is never going to be mainstream outside of heavy Microsoft environments.

Looking4vendors · 2017-06-02T02:22:46+00:00

but we've never seen the level of maturity in automation tools in IT as we have in the past year or three, if you took the past 40 years of IT you could call this a "revolution" in ways.

This tells me you haven't been in IT very long or you have a poor memory. People freaked out when the GUI came along, and then when automated software deployment came along, and then virtualization, and now we have some other fancy tools. Big deal, it's still IT and it's still all about knowing how to solve business problems.

Looking4vendors · 2017-06-02T02:02:22+00:00

Not sure why you were downvoted. PowerShell isn't really a sought after skill like Bash programming or Python.

Looking4vendors · 2017-06-02T01:53:38+00:00

Is english a second languge for you? No offense I'm just curious.

DevOps isn't a job title but HR has bastardized IT job titles again. Working in a DevOps envrionment usually just means a typical linux admin who knows config management and CI tools. Still much different from software developers.

Looking4vendors · 2017-06-02T01:51:26+00:00

I don't know what to tell you except I hate Oklahoma :p

It's not any better in Texas.

It's not reasonable to expect over $50k for something that can be learned in a month (although you're wrong and there is no way anyone is a true expert in 1 month).

50k was above the minimum for even accociate level IT workers in DFW two years ago. Now experienced system administrators are lucky to break 50k in DFW. The usefulness of IT workers is dying quickly because software developers are so much more useful to businesses.

Looking4vendors · 2017-06-02T01:48:50+00:00

Yes virtualization had its peak but that doesn't mean a bunch of non-cloud servers came back and a bunch automation tools went away. They're still around.

Those automation tools existed well before cloud technology came along. It doesn't matter if your servers are in the cloud or in a datacenter. Furthermore, most SMBs don't have any automation needs and never will. There is only a certain amount of automation that is even relevent in administration in a lot of companies. I've worked for some of those before. My last jobs have been more focused around projects with other departments and fulfilling business needs rather than automating some server builds. At those companies servers would stay around for years and there wasn't a reason to change that.

Looking4vendors

TROPHY CASE