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#27 Mar 15 2013 at 4:59 PM Rating: Good
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Guys. Don't listen to Smash. He doesn't know what he's talking about.

Smasharoo wrote:
Cables? Do they drive their cable cart horses hard with their buggy whips? IT infrastructure physical build out is largely unskilled labor. Crimping cat 6 cable doesn't require a 4 year degree.


Yes and no. The cables kinda have to connect two devices. And those have to be configured. And the arrangement of switches/MDF/IDF/whatever and the cables connecting them have to be set up properly and according to some kind of a plan. Your statement is like saying that tightening a nut is largely unskilled labor so there's no value for anyone to get a job in the car manufacturing business. That's a gross simplification of all the work that is required and the different levels of skills needed.


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What you hear at high level IS conferences these days is primarily the transferring of the client side stuff to devices owned by employees.


Anyone who's been in the industry for any length of time knows that about 80% of what is projected at that level is pure BS. That's an idea that some people who don't understand the technology *want* to happen. Not because it's useful, or increases productivity, or even reduces cost, but because it seems like a smart thing to mostly business people who use the technology, but don't know how it actually works.

In the real world, businesses are backing away from that model (if they ever even entertained it in the first place). Want to know why? Because it's 100 times harder (and more expensive) to manage a network full of random devices any person might walk through the door with. And that's before even contemplating the massive incubation of cross network viruses, hacks, etc that would inevitably occur. There's a reason why companies are maintaining standard lists of devices allowed more than basic access to their networks, and requiring the installation of security kits on them.

If you want to do more than browse a network and run very light client portal appss, the BYOD model doesn't work. It's more expensive, more complex, and reduces productivity. Server side management is still (and likely will be for the foreseeable future) the model used, with clients consisting increasingly of very light weight apps to access said content. There's no shifting of that load to client devices, let alone to personal devices. I know it may look that way from the outside, but that's really not what's happening. Making your server side applications accessible to a wider range of thin client software doesn't shift the load at all. And if anything, it increases the demand for higher tier IT. Fewer guys lugging computers around, and more guys setting up wireless infrastructure and maintaining servers with applications, and architecting portal/device application/abstraction layers.


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If I log into my work network from my phone that I show up with, and data is held on a server, it costs a company a lot less in maintenance, primarily because they can hire a lot less (none ideally) local employees to maintain networks. The end game is a massive reduction in tech spending, offloaded to employees. Having a device that works will be like having a pencil.


Wrong. Because the company has to maintain a wireless network matching every protocol you might walk through the door with, and an array of server side apps to allow you to utilize the server processes and power and data from any such random device. And I'll point out again, that for any "real" applications, specially configured devices are often still used. Not a lot of EDA tools running on the ipad right now, and not likely to any time soon.

If the biggest app your company runs is email, that may go more BYOD. But then, that's not a tech focused company that the best jobs are at anyway.

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But you know, flying cars, sh*t happens, who knows how it'll really be in 10 years.


Yeah. Stop listening to the folks in the trade mags. They get it wrong 99% of the time.
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#28 Mar 15 2013 at 5:19 PM Rating: Decent
ITT: Gbaji still works in the 90s.
#29 Mar 15 2013 at 5:52 PM Rating: Decent
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Yeah. Stop listening to the folks in the trade mags. They get it wrong 99% of the time.

I don't, I listen to CTOs. Clearly your experience of working at one employer for your entire career as opposed to mine working in government service and then multiple fortune 50 companies, competing in the open consulting market advising on infrastructure and staffing levels would indicate you know the state of the industry far better than I would. Then again I didn't get an MSCE at a community college or anything, so it's hard to take me seriously.
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#30 Mar 15 2013 at 5:56 PM Rating: Good
Actually, for once Gbaji is right.

My office uses a managed services provider that has a lot of the grunt work outsourced to India. I'm the tech with the thankless task of communicating our wants and needs to the NOC team. Sure, they call us in ten minutes when a server goes down, but it takes them weeks to figure out wtf is causing a server lock up and stop responding, and they still want an "on site tech" to press CTRL SCRL SCRL and capture a memory dump because for some dumb reason HP's automatic system recovery interferes with it.

Relying solely on remote managed services sounds great on paper, until you discover that the BCM box for your phones died and you have no working phone lines and no one has any flipping clue how to jerry-rig one up until the new system can be replaced. (We had to do that last week. Phones were down for an hour while we cloned the hard drive to a spare workstation and squished the working bits of the dead custom VoIP box into it. They were at half capacity, but they had phone service. New part took four days to come in.)
#31 Mar 15 2013 at 5:58 PM Rating: Good
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Wrong. Because the company has to maintain a wireless network matching every protocol you might walk through the door with,

Yeah, like McDonalds does. Hey, there's an opportunity, someone has to keep each McDonalds wifi node up and running, I'm sure that's a lucrative gig.

Maybe we have different ideas of what a worthwhile job is. If you want to make 60 grand a year for the next ten years, you can probably do that with a BS. If you want to have a career, or make more than barely getting money, get a real degree. Or, you know, some marketable skills. Ideally both.

Anyway, doesn't matter to me, working is for the womenfolk. Better advise than any you've seen in this thread so far: Marry well, fellas, then make a large amount of money in an short period of intense work before you have a child, then retire and raise him while your wife/husband peruses their career in non profits they actually care about. I don't know why more people don't do that.

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#32 Mar 15 2013 at 7:54 PM Rating: Excellent
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As for software programmers, as far as I know all the good ones are incrementally teaching themselves new skills, new commands, new programming languages and new hardware interfacing throughout their lifetimes. Technology is a moving feast. My partner is frequently, but not always, reading recently released textbooks, or googling for new solutions, or reading trade forums, both in off hours when he isn't working, or while he's on the clock for billable hours.
#33 Mar 15 2013 at 8:05 PM Rating: Good
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Aripyanfar wrote:
As for software programmers, as far as I know all the good ones are incrementally teaching themselves new skills, new commands, new programming languages and new hardware interfacing throughout their lifetimes. Technology is a moving feast. My partner is frequently, but not always, reading recently released textbooks, or googling for new solutions, or reading trade forums, both in off hours when he isn't working, or while he's on the clock for billable hours.


When I was first looking into the technology field this was one of the first things I was told. I've always had a fascination with computers and when living in Washington State (North Bend). My wifes mother is a massage therapist there, and has many MS employees as clients (She even gave Steve Ballmer a few massages), but some of her personal friends worked there.

As a surprise one weekend, one of her friends came over and they gave me the private tour of the Bellvue Campus, and we bsed a lot about computers, the friend was a programmer at the time. She mentioned that when going to school because the technology moves so fast a BS isn't always as desired as it seems because in 4 years by the time you graduate the new stuff could be completely foreign to you. She told me to start with a AS and get my foot in the door, then just keep up to date on all the new stuff, get certs as they come out. Because in the end your way more valuable then someone green out of school, even if they have a BS and you have a BA.

That's why I look forward to getting the degree to get out there into the field, I love learning new stuff.

Edited, Mar 15th 2013 9:06pm by BeanX
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#34 Mar 15 2013 at 8:19 PM Rating: Good
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Smasharoo wrote:
Yeah. Stop listening to the folks in the trade mags. They get it wrong 99% of the time.

I don't, I listen to CTOs.


CTO's rarely know what's actually involved in making the technology they talk about actually work though. It's a business position. When you get a group of them in a room together, it's like a bunch of star trek fans talking about "how cool would it be if...". And they'll talk that stuff up in public because it wows people who don't know any better. But then they go back to their offices and talk to their subordinates who actually know what's doable and what's not, and the smart ones listen to those people and do something completely different than what they talked about.

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Clearly your experience of working at one employer for your entire career as opposed to mine working in government service and then multiple fortune 50 companies, competing in the open consulting market advising on infrastructure and staffing levels would indicate you know the state of the industry far better than I would. Then again I didn't get an MSCE at a community college or anything, so it's hard to take me seriously.


Yeah. Because we don't have conferences, and conventions, and inter-industry interaction. Oh wait! We do. All the time. And at that level, we talk about what's actually going on in the industry, not the current industry buzz you'd hear from the business end of things. The demand for physical infrastructure maintenance has actually increased as we've switched to server based models. The nature of the infrastructure has changed is all. It takes relatively minimal network infrastructure to connect a bunch of peers on a network. It does require a lot of direct management of the systems though. Shift to server model and you have less computers on desktops, but more computers in data centers *and* you have more network equipment required to maintain performance levels at the client end.

All of that still requires capable trained IT professionals to manage and maintain. Despite occasional promises to the contrary, physical location also still matters. You have to put your IT folks near where the equipment is, and you have to have the equipment near to the people who are using it. There are some exceptions of course, but honestly the pendulum is shifting away from "put our server farm in India and save money!" back to a regional data center model (for a whole host of reasons that I could list off if you really really want me to).

I always chuckle when people talk about "cloud computing" as though a cloud is some magical thing "out there" in the internet. Um... Someone has to build and maintain the physical systems that are part of that cloud. It's not magic. It's just a new label for the same thing. We're just getting better at hiding the man behind the curtain from the people like you sitting in front of it. I'm sure the folks you hang out with are sure this is a new paradigm in computing or something. Guess what? Laws of physics don't disappear magically because there are computers involved, despite what your experience watching bad sci-fi shows may have taught you.


You don't work in IT Smash. You've never worked in IT. You're a guy who wrote a script or two in a language designed to be easy to use for people who don't know how to code and think that this makes you qualified to speak about the industry in any meaningful way. Don't get me wrong, I run into people like that all the time. They're usually in the business side of things. Like advertising or sales. They'll stop me in the halls and have some kind of technical conversation about whatever, and I usually realize they have no clue what they're talking about 5 seconds into the conversation, but because I'm polite, I'll humor them and nod while they pontificate about something they heard in a meeting with a bunch of other people just like themselves that they think is the latest great idea but really is an idea that failed 20 years ago and is laughable anyway until I can find an excuse to leave.

I suspect you just interact with a lot of polite people Smash. The fact that you even brought up BYOD as some kind of serious shift in IT resources and focus shows you really know nothing about the industry. See. That's me being honest instead of polite. :)
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#35 Mar 15 2013 at 8:20 PM Rating: Good
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This is very true BeanX. At the same time, at least in Australia, there is a practical trap. My partner gave up on his degree because he knew more than his lecturers. He was already working part time as a programmer, and he went full time and worked for a few years, before he twigged that his employers were getting away with paying him a reduced rate because he didn't have a full degree. So he reluctantly finished his Bachelors and jumped several pay grades for doing the exact same job. His own desirable skills kept his pay leaping up every year, until he took a 50% pay cut to go work at a gaming company he wanted to work for. (Games companies in Australia have FAR more employees wanting to work there than they need, so they can get away with paying far less for the same quality). Even at the Games company, his pay packet kept leaping up yearly, until he was nearly back at his old pay rate. Much of that is down to him being good because he was a self motivated self learner/self teacher.

Edited, Mar 15th 2013 10:20pm by Aripyanfar
#36 Mar 15 2013 at 8:30 PM Rating: Good
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Ari, you said it better than I could of. I understand the lower wage for no degree but he already had his foot in the door, he kept learning, getting his certs, therefore became more valuable to his employers. That's why atm Im planning on just focusing on that, I understand an AS in Networking isnt going to make me $100,000 in my first year, but if i keep up with certifications and work on a BS on the side I'll get there.
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#37 Mar 15 2013 at 8:43 PM Rating: Good
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Some other people I know kept getting certs, which certainly helped their skillfulness and pay increments. But my partner never bothered with certs beyond that delayed bachelors degree. All his self learning was about useful improvement and tech stuff that interested him, but it didn't come with certifications. However, it kept him in very good standing in his workplace because his improving skill levels and problem solving kept him ahead of almost all his peers when it came to elegant, effective code that got the most out of hardware, and provided others with very friendly and efficient programming tools to use elsewhere. He was generally the go-to guy when management didn't know how something was to be done, but they'd really like it done.
#38 Mar 15 2013 at 8:56 PM Rating: Good
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I got away from helpdesk work during/because of the whole outsourcing thing and turned to field work. There will always be a cable somewhere that needs to be plugged into a different port somewhere else and I actually don't mind driving two hours each way to do fifteen minutes of actual work (as long as I'm paid for all the time, of course). Yeah, I know I won't be moving into Smash's neighborhood anytime soon but it gets me by without any edjumication.
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#39 Mar 16 2013 at 8:17 AM Rating: Decent
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CTO's rarely know what's actually involved in making the technology they talk about actually work though.

That's true. Too bad they still make the decisions.
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Disclaimer:

To make a long story short, I don't take any responsibility for anything I post here. It's not news, it's not truth, it's not serious. It's parody. It's satire. It's bitter. It's angsty. Your mother's a *****. You like to jack off dogs. That's right, you heard me. You like to grab that dog by the bone and rub it like a ski pole. Your dad? Gay. Your priest? Straight. **** off and let me post. It's not true, it's all in good fun. Now go away.

#40 Mar 16 2013 at 8:25 AM Rating: Decent
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You don't work in IT Smash. You've never worked in IT. You're a guy who wrote a script or two in a language designed to be easy to use for people who don't know how to code

Haha. I mostly worked in PL/SQL because most of my clients were Oracle shops and that happened to be the easiest option. Assuming that means I don't know C, or whatever, I'm not going to write a laundry list of languages is a little silly. I've written APIs from scratch on more than one occasion, I suppose that could qualify in the large sense as "a script designed to be easy to use." That said, I'm certainly not a software developer, largely because there's no money in it relative to other uses of my time. The idea that I couldn't be is a bit of a stretch from there, though.
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Disclaimer:

To make a long story short, I don't take any responsibility for anything I post here. It's not news, it's not truth, it's not serious. It's parody. It's satire. It's bitter. It's angsty. Your mother's a *****. You like to jack off dogs. That's right, you heard me. You like to grab that dog by the bone and rub it like a ski pole. Your dad? Gay. Your priest? Straight. **** off and let me post. It's not true, it's all in good fun. Now go away.

#41 Mar 16 2013 at 8:28 AM Rating: Decent
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The fact that you even brought up BYOD as some kind of serious shift in IT resources and focus shows you really know nothing about the industry.

That would be a major failure in marketing by your people then. They're one of the primary drivers of that paradigm. We'll see in 10 years, I guess.
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Disclaimer:

To make a long story short, I don't take any responsibility for anything I post here. It's not news, it's not truth, it's not serious. It's parody. It's satire. It's bitter. It's angsty. Your mother's a *****. You like to jack off dogs. That's right, you heard me. You like to grab that dog by the bone and rub it like a ski pole. Your dad? Gay. Your priest? Straight. **** off and let me post. It's not true, it's all in good fun. Now go away.

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