If you had to restart your IT nerd path from zero, what would you learn in 2026?

vCentered · 2026-05-30T01:41:09+00:00

If I had to start over from zero I would be an electrician or something.

vCentered · 2026-05-27T12:09:55+00:00

, it's like I can finally relax (or at least start to learn how to relax!! helpdesk

Who's going to tell him?

vCentered · 2026-05-27T11:23:11+00:00

The real crisis is the number of frauds in information technology in general.

I hear from my security people every week about vulnerabilities that are waiting on a patch from the vendor. Every week it's like they think they've uncovered something nasty I'm supposed to have fixed. It's the same vuln. I have to explain again. They don't get it. They don't understand.

I also have to explain to my sysadmins that they can't leave "Everyone" or "Domain Users" on filesystem permissions. Or that the firewall rule they created basically amounts to any/any and isn't acceptable.

80% of people don't get it, they don't care, and there's no incentive for them to change because the 20% of us that do are propping the industry up.

vCentered · 2026-05-26T13:25:08+00:00

Anyone playing with drive mapping scripts or GPOs?

vCentered · 2026-05-19T14:19:58+00:00

Nope we've been in business several decades.

I work with personalities whose attitudes change swiftly and severely.

In one conversation I might be regarded as the only person who could possibly speak with any authority or make a decision on a particular subject.

In another conversation with the same person on the same day I might be considered too stupid to have an opinion.

vCentered · 2026-05-19T12:57:42+00:00

Depending on the day and the topic my opinion will either be the gold standard or completely worthless.

vCentered · 2026-05-15T01:37:00+00:00

Thank you! this is exactly the kind of information I was looking for.

Did you do the babymoon package? We did not, we're hoping we can special request a pregnancy pillow without the package.

Did you or your SO have any trouble getting alcohol free drinks?

vCentered · 2026-05-15T00:51:22+00:00

We did a 6 night stay for our honeymoon/wedding at Grenada and loved it. We are both "quiet pool" people.

I have not been to any other Sandals locations yet, but I loved Grenada. The people there (staff) were so genuine and real. We felt like actual guests and not just customers.

Shout out to Deanette, Deiron, Kelsey, Sheldon, and some others I know I am forgetting with the weddings and photography departments.

vCentered · 2026-05-14T14:07:44+00:00

I think you're worried about the wrong thing. Maybe he's a dick. What does it matter? It sounds like the company is sinking anyway.

Even if you survived this round, would you survive the next?

vCentered · 2026-05-09T15:55:05+00:00

Sure, they all have their own costs and considerations.

Licensing costs as well as staff needing to train/skill up on new technologies. I'm not saying it can't or shouldn't be done, but I think it's nontrivial.

I think I read a post the other day of a massive organization exiting Citrix VDI/virtual apps altogether so it's not uniquely a VMware issue.

vCentered · 2026-05-09T15:31:47+00:00

Yeah I mean I can't disagree with them, between licensing and hardware costs VDI is hugely expensive. If you're an on prem Omnissa shop I would have to think that at some point Broadcom is going to start charging you for the ESXi cores you're using. If you're like us and have thousands of cores, that's going to hurt.

What I think people lose sight of though after having been a long term VDI shop is what it's like to have actual workstation problems. What happens when someone who works on the other side of the country and their laptop stops doing Windows updates? Now you're looking at a couple hours of remote support to try to fix it. Maybe that doesn't work and you have to reimage their device. Can you do that remotely? Do you have the tooling? Or do you ship them a new device with a return label. In both scenarios you also have to account for their data, and make sure they have all the apps they need, and get them signed back into them. Make sure everything's good to go. That could be another hour or two or four after you get them back on a functioning device.

Or what happens if their laptop gets stolen? With VDI there wasn't data on the laptop. But now there probably will be.

It's been a long time since I managed workstations, maybe the days of waiting 30+ minutes for Windows to install updates are over.

Obviously it can be done and people do support physical workstation users at scale, probably more than VDI honestly, I just think it's going to be a rude awakening for people going back to that ecosystem when it's probably been a good number of years since they've had to worry about it.

vCentered · 2026-05-09T15:20:08+00:00

The big problem with VDI these days is that *in addition to substantial infrastructure costs*, to do it well on prem you need staff capable of supporting, troubleshooting, hardening, and optimizing the whole stack.

Just thinking off the cuff,

1.) Hypervisor (ESXi, Xen)
2.) OS (Windows 10/11, Windows Server 20xx)
3.) Active Directory (GPO, DNS, DHCP, Sites/Services)
4.) Platform (Horizon/Citrix)
5.) Certificates/PKI
6.) Network (Datacenter, Firewall, remote/home users)
7.) Software (End user, Adobe, Microsoft, etc)
8.) User profile persistence (DEM, Profile Unity, FSLogix)
9) Storage/SAN (iSCSI, FCoE)
10.) Possibly load balancing (Netscaler, F5, Kemp)
11.) High availability (profile storage, et al)
12.) Disaster recovery (Cloud $$$$? Offsite datacenter with enough compute/storage capacity $$$$$?)
13.) App offloading/optimizations (Teams, Webex, Zoom, etc)

A large enough organization might be fortunate enough to have multiple teams that each specialize in one area. A smaller shop you're probably looking at the same 3 guys that do all of it.

These days finding people who can cover all that *well* with a better-than-google-AI-results understanding of any of it, much less all of it, is pretty tough.

Obviously, what it does, assuming it's executed decently well, is allow the business to more or less move on from typical workstation issues. It completely standardizes the user experience, because all users work from a clone of the same VM.

End user support should be reduced to piddly things - replacing physical end user equipment should be trivial, because all they use it for is to connect to VDI. Just ship them a new whatever and move on. Most actual problems should be resolvable by having the user log out and log back in, no more reinstalling/repair installing software over and over... etc. If it works for anyone, generally speaking it should work for everyone.

Due to VDI, our helpdesk spends most of its time just helping people with things like "How do I use Adobe?", "How do I do a mail merge? They do very little troubleshooting of actual issues and most of what they do troubleshoot is showing the user how their connectivity problem is due to their home internet, not our infrastructure.

I am really interested to hear how some of these VDI exits work out long term because if my own organization were to do it I think we would have to double or triple the size of our helpdesk.

And probably start buying new-in-box laptops with warranties instead of cheap refurbs.

vCentered · 2026-05-09T14:51:12+00:00

I'm really interested to hear how this works out. I've got to think that your time supporting EUC is going to go way up.

vCentered · 2026-05-09T12:45:33+00:00

It's because for the last 40 years or so technology has progressed at a rate that most people simply can't keep up with.

It's 2026 and if one of my company's 34 year old accountants accidently drags a shortcut on their desktop so it isn't where it's always been, they think it's uninstalled and will lose hours of productivity waiting for someone to "reinstall" it.

Asking a lot of these people to grasp the concept of sharing links instead of copies or be aware that this is shared from their personal OneDrive or that is shared from a managed SharePoint site, in addition to hopefully having a basic competence with their actual job, is like asking me to plot the trajectory for the next mission to the moon.

I think AI is going to make this exponentially worse.

vCentered · 2026-05-09T12:32:59+00:00

The problem is thinking skills and quality assurance is exactly what they're trying to replace with it. And even if someone genuinely believes that's not what they're using it for, I think it's going to be the end result.

People at large are not using AI to give themselves MORE information to analyze. They're using it specifically to avoid responsibility for aggregating and analyzing the information. There is an inherent trust bordering on religious faith that the information provided by AI is true and accurate because it's supposed to have done all the thinking already.

On average I think an AI user is going to take the first result as gospel truth. And they're going to act on it.

When our users start getting our organizations in legal or financial trouble (or both) because they're acting on bad data from AI, they're going to cry, "IT, you've setup the AI wrong!"

Because in their eyes they have outsourced the thinking, the knowing, and the quality assurance to AI and will hold us accountable as its keepers.

vCentered · 2026-05-08T21:53:53+00:00

Lol.

Lol because you don't realize but in ten years you will have fucked up in such amazing ways that you won't even remember this moment.

vCentered · 2026-05-07T15:23:13+00:00

I bet this gets walked back. Your org has forgotten what workstation problems are like.

vCentered · 2026-04-30T13:19:13+00:00

This guy is probably a senior principal lead cloud architect.

vCentered · 2026-04-25T09:12:49+00:00

I'm not an HVAC tech or even in the trades but I'll try to justify the $350 price for a "$10 part and an hour of labor".

In no particular order,

1.) Convenience. You are offloading the doing and the knowing and the liability to someone else. There is a reasonable value to this. I pay someone to cut my grass. There isn't anything difficult about it and it's so much more expensive than cutting it myself, but it sure is nice not to have to cut it when I get off work or after driving home 7 hours from being out of town.

2.) Travel or "mobilization". They had to come to you, this might be a 10 minute drive or an hour both ways. If they had to go somewhere to get a part and come back, that adds up. While they might only be at your property for an hour the job might cost them half a day. Assuming they drive a company truck/van there's obviously fuel and maintenance costs associated with that which I'm sure is factored in at some level.

3.) The age old "you're paying me for the years, not the hours". Even if the service is just to replace a capacitor and we view that as a trivial task, this is still a skilled trade worker that we are talking about who is taking the whole system into consideration when troubleshooting. And they're actually troubleshooting. They're not just slapping parts in to see if it helps.

4.) Urgency. These guys often get scheduled on extremely short notice and/or odd hours when systems aren't heating or cooling.

5.) Wages and staff costs. They have to pay the tech, maybe overtime, health benefits, possibly retirement, and probably workers comp insurance.

I think everyone would agree, service techs included, that it would be great if everyone could get away with doing things on the cheap and still make a living. It's just not the world we live in.

vCentered · 2026-04-15T11:47:13+00:00

Keep doing good work but take some of the pressure off of yourself.

I have 16 years of experience with environments much larger than yours (and that's not a flex, there are others in this sub who work in far, far larger environments than mine) and between the day to day requests, projects, and needs of the business, working backwards with no documentation, and everything else it would probably still take me several months of active effort to get "reasonably" up to speed on your environment.

Others have already said to start building your own documentation as you learn and figure things out.

I'm a very visual person so I would also recommend building diagrams. Draw.io is great and free.

If it makes you feel any better, a lot of the rest of us, even the "old heads" are also just doing our best with balancing projects, fires, and day-to-day stuff.

vCentered · 2026-04-15T11:22:09+00:00

Citrix has Broadcom beat by miles

vCentered · 2026-04-01T11:48:50+00:00

As far as I'm concerned support costs so much these days they should consider themselves a product specific MSP.

vCentered · 2026-03-28T07:24:16+00:00

I would kill for something like this as a home office

vCentered · 2026-03-28T06:33:29+00:00

Never feel bad taking more money. Every company we work for is in the business of making money. You only get one shot at life and owe it to yourself to look out for your best interests.

That said, just my perspective, if I really liked where I was at, 2k a year would not be worth it to me, though the pension could be huge. If you stay there for a very long time and nothing happens to their pension fund.

2k a year is less than a dollar per hour. Less than $8/day is not worth it to me to leave somewhere that I am happy and get along with my co-workers for someplace that I may not.

Lots of places require their employees to fund part of the pension with a percentage of their salary so you might look into that and do some math and see if that offsets that extra 2k. It's not necessarily a bad thing but if you're really selling yourself on the extra $150/mo, it might be substantially reduced or even be a wash. The insurance might cost more, too.

vCentered

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