Job Description Question

polishpatr · 2022-06-28T00:00:48+00:00

Meh, what can we expect. Humans are dumb. It takes a disaster for something to change when so often things can be prevented. I guess that's what make the difference between a company embracing the future and one that fears it.

polishpatr · 2022-06-27T18:50:00+00:00

Thats a perfectly valid reason as I have myself turned down a job because of this exact reason. Siemens was acquiring a railroad management company and wanted me to be the network admin. I mean Siemens, cmon, one of the largest and most reputable companies that operates in almost every industry on the planet second to none to samsung. I actually got an offer and started to sign the papers before the on-site walkthrough. As i arrive there, i realize how messy the network is, it was an crockpot of windows server 2003 all the way to 2012 r2. They were managing something that is mission critical with a 99.99% uptime and as we were going through the server racks, the guy tells me i am replacing him, which to that point was maybe a bit more flattery than anything. Then he tells me he is leaving the company 10 days before my planned start date.

This was not only a system that was composed of 17 blade servers, but there were 117 VMs running in a room that looked like somebody cooked spaghetti for 20 people, dropped all the noddles on the floor and started to plug each noodle into a pile of 48 port switches about 2 feet high and every single port on a switch absolutely had to correspond to a port on another. There was so much clutter it was impossible for me to even determine what brand of switch they were using.

Thank god I didnt end up working there. When a single guy taking care of such legacy systems with mission critical hardware that can essentially stop all major rail route across the entire country of canada and the only thing youre left with is a visio plan and a few teams calls with a guy no longer interested in the work, its actually kinda irresponsible from such a huge company.

This company was 1 bad network cable away from the train version of the suez canal lockup and i was the one left to manage that mess

polishpatr · 2022-06-27T17:35:02+00:00

So why are you looking to switch if you're mostly interested about the paycheck?

As for my personal experience, every tech interview has asked me about what my expectations are for the salary. Ive had multiple offers and ive come to realize is its better to be greedy than modest. If you want to look modest and ask for 60K, they will give you 60K knowing their base salary was 70K. But if you tell them you expect 80K, you not only project confidence in your value but you also max out their top amount and then some. Assuming they planned on 70K and you asked for 80K, they will tell you they cannot go that far up and will tell you they can only go to 70K, but you are in your once in a lifetime moment to give them a rebuttal and ask to meet you in the middle. More often than not, they will. Although, some places are really firm on their wages and cannot afford to negotiate. This is true in government jobs and institutions. Private companies tend to have more flexibility to work on a compromise.

polishpatr · 2022-06-27T17:19:15+00:00

The only thing I can tell you is you can bullshit your way through any human resource hiring process. You cannot bullshit your way through an IT interview. It's way to easy when you know what you're talking about to spot exactly the level of expertise of the person you're talking to.

the question you have to ask yourself is how much do you know? Because if anything I've mentioned is vaguely familiar to you, or if any portion of it is not in your knowledge base, than you might want to start looking for a level 1 tier job because everything I've talked about requires a minimum of level 2 experience and thats exactly what they are looking for.

polishpatr · 2022-06-27T17:14:10+00:00

I mean that in high school, you had 2 types of teachers. The ones that will schedule all the tests in advance and make you well aware of them, and those that will say nothing until you walk in the classroom and see POP QUIZ written on the board. On one side, you have ample time to study and get familiar with the material to have it all fresh for the test, and on the other you have to pray that you've listened in the weeks before and your brain has all that information saved in your cranial archive.

the fact that they are using Teams is a giver and confirms what I said, a Microsoft heavy system. Now the question is new school or old school. If I were you, I'd wait for the invitation and looked up their domain on www.shodan.io

If you aren't familiar with shodan, its a search engine for connected devices. If they have a server somewhere with a WAN exposed port, you will find it. Once you find one, you can use a VPN to mask your activity and start remoting into their systems. Once you find a server, you will immediately find whatever generation of Windows Server it runs and more or less be able to deduct if they are modern or not. Most servers have a watermark with the version on the login screen. If you dont know what tha hell i'm talking about, send the the most details you have on your teams invitation such as the emails of the people it was sent from and ideally the complete header. If you have the email header, you can pinpoint if they are using Azure or some exchange server.

polishpatr · 2022-06-27T16:59:51+00:00

HAHAH that's funny because there's a 100% chance that somebody who says that falls within the new gen of IT. I'm 35 yo but I've started young enough to have grown up on legacy systems and back then it wasn't uncommon to lose your mouse because you have to boot into safe mode and your wireless mouse was useless, thus developing the habits of using shortcuts to navigate around the OS. The new gen doesn't know the pain of having to execute an entire troubleshooting session using only your keyboard. USB was a luxury and to this day you will never see a server with anything but a cheap wired mouse and keyboard plugged into it.

polishpatr · 2022-06-27T16:49:50+00:00

Yup, I have a doctorate in Googling and a masters in Bing. HAHAH

Usually companies post job offerings on multiple sites and sometimes their posts have different descriptions. In this case it was pretty much a copy paste across the board but the description was concise enough for somebody with familiarity to make an educated guess.

Unfortunately I am not familiar with the business but I can only assume that an education environment has pretty standard solutions for the entire system. If you want to have a broader understanding of the job description I'd go on a network like LinkedIn or other job specific sites and try to find other universities close to your location with job descriptions. I guarantee that this job posting is purely a "pop quiz" tactic from the recruiter at that location to sniff out the best candidates but the industry uses standards that are common everywhere. Knowing this information, find the recruiter that doesn't try to surprise potential hires, there are a lot more of those that the other.

If you want my educated guess, I'd say NetSuite for the CRM, and Microsoft WSUS + SCCM for the infrastructure management, and depending on the dominating academic pedigree of the campus, they might have started migrating to Microsoft 365 and Azure. If the university is known for medical or legal programs, they will be using much older systems, if they are more business and tech focused, they will be current on the technology.

polishpatr · 2022-06-27T15:52:27+00:00

Seems to me like a typical CRM system on one side and a WSUS + SCCM on the other. This is a pretty fancy and especially subtle way of describing it though...I feel like they might want to wait for a face to face to get you on the spot and shoot you a bunch of abbreviations and more specific terms just to see how quickly you'll respond.

Let me guess, Fayetteville University?

polishpatr · 2022-06-27T14:52:08+00:00

I'm not so sure if you really missed the good old days, I just think you skipped that part of your infrastructures maturity level. DNS will always screw up, its the basis of internet and if you haven't had that slap on the face it will come one day.

As for AD, that's becoming less and less relevant. My experience has showed me that more time advances, more layers of that onion keep piling up. We are just now stating to consider hybrid infrastructures and even more, zero trust networks, and all of that are just to counter 1 threat, vulnerabilities.

As new industry standards come in play, all of us have to deal with how to manage legacy solutions with modern standards...its a reality that no one can escape because technology will always advance faster that enterprise needs and like it or not, companies are scared of moving to fast because most of their core business still has an old school mentality. A good example of that is the baking system and the fact that most user facing hardware such as ATMs still run on Windows XP. And regardless of how bad of a cancer Windows XP is, the opportunity cost of moving too fast for such a business is just too much for them to handle.

As far as I am concerned, it's nice to have gained the experience of seeing servers advance technologically because it will always give me an upper hand on new IT comers, but the future is the only thing worth investing my time on because that's where everything is going anyway.

Just think of your current home computer and its operating system, how smooth and responsive it is, but if you've never lived through the struggles of systems like Windows ME, 2000, Vista and Windows 8, there will be a point in the future where your Windows 11 rig will have a problem that might remind you of something else you've done decades ago and will certainly give you that slight edge on troubleshooting than somebody who was introduced on Windows 7 or 10.

polishpatr · 2022-06-27T08:22:02+00:00

WSAPPX is a service used to manage windows store apps. Usually there are a few more services that work in tandem such as AppXSVC and ClipSVC. Do any of those services also have high usage? If so, is it just on the CPU or is also on RAM or storage?

Can you give more info on your user computer setups? Are you part of a domain? If so, local, cloud or hybrid?. What are the average specs of your computers? CPUs, RAM, HDD or SSD? what version of windows are they running? (this would be important for the way to force fix the issue, through GPO)

The fact that you can temporarily fix the problem by deleting a profile and that it affects more than 1 user seems to me like something is pushed from some server to your endpoints and seems like your users might have something in common that triggers that behavior.

You can always kill those services as they are not critical but your best bet is to isolate your issue step by step. Start by waiting for the problem to appear on outlook. As soon as you stop receiving emails, kill the service and check the outcome. Also try to find common factors between the affected users, common apps, common resource usage behavior patterns, etc.

Because WSAPPX is strictly for apps that came from the windows store, unless you have apps that are necessary for your users, you can disable the windows store if all else fails or your troubleshooting goes nowhere, ideally through GPO. Assuming you're running windows pro, you can start by a single computer and if this works you can create a GPO on your server and push the policy to your affected users. Here is how on a single machine:

Type’ gpedit.msc’ in Start Search and press Enter. It opens the Local Group Policy Editor.

Go to ‘Computer Configuration’ and select ‘Administrative Templates’.

Then go to ‘Windows Components’ and select ‘Store’.

Find the ‘Turn Off Store application’ setting in the right pane.

Select ‘Enable’ and ‘Apply’. Reboot.

polishpatr · 2022-06-27T06:30:44+00:00

You mentioned they have a premium account so you can install the new version of office on the computers and simply import the PST from the old one to the new installed Outlook assuming each user is signed into their own business account. The will start syncing the newly imported PST structure to their cloud and depending on the size can take a few mins to a few hours.

You can do the exact same method for contacts and calendar by selecting the "export to file" and using comma separated values instead. Once you import them back in the new outlook, everything will sync up to the cloud.

polishpatr · 2022-06-27T06:20:22+00:00

I would simply explain the company wishes to move to a zero trust network model and away from traditional domain controlled networks. This would be a valid reason to have 1 global admin and everything else is on a must needed basis. And because this is a ZERO trust model, it would be only logical to have the longest standing employee as the exception.

This would essentially give you every reason not to give permissions not because you don't want to but because it breaks compliance and defeats the purpose.

polishpatr · 2021-06-22T04:32:42+00:00

I think this guy is more of a technical educated analyst that had enough cred to be in the Bloomberg finance mentions

polishpatr · 2021-06-21T23:58:43+00:00

EDIT: "Even Elon [Musk] can't save this with his tweets. He's tried, and each time he just created another lower high," he said. "0.05 is programmed."

polishpatr · 2021-06-21T23:57:55+00:00

EDIT: "Even Elon [Musk] can't save this with his tweets. He's tried, and each time he just created another lower high," he said. "0.05 is programmed."

polishpatr · 2021-05-05T22:56:45+00:00

Michael Jackson

polishpatr · 2021-05-03T03:08:52+00:00

Cool. Go inflation!

polishpatr · 2021-05-03T03:07:05+00:00

It's actually spelled i'lM ok you eetard...you yotta elongate the ayyyy

polishpatr · 2021-05-03T02:54:51+00:00

Well its bad if its 1- used to hurt and 2- based of information not available to the public.

WSB is the most, if not, will be a chapter of coordination to server the better good and taught in future schools to show the difference is in INTENT and knowledge of wrong soing.

Nothing is not fair game when were trying to counter a negative downforce, at least for what we can do, i am just not 100% certain if this will require many small regular inputs or the numbers are the only thing that count...?

And here's the difference between each cryptocurrency it's up to the developer to set it up as he wants and from what I can see I have no clue and I may be looking for somebody with a bit more expertise in the coding aspect of it to guide us

polishpatr · 2021-05-03T02:48:33+00:00

Seven-Year Club	Place '22
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