IT Certs

[Chimpy]

Sharepoint is like any database software really, at least in my experience. It is this great piece of technology with all of these amazing uses that people implement in ridiculously fucktarded ways because they don't have someone who understands how to design a database implementation properly set it up.

[Salamok]

I've always thought of sharepoint as Microsoft's answer to the wiki with a dose of Google apps thrown in.  Also seems like admins love it because they can point users at it as a self help solution for fucktarded requests, users seem to hate this because most of them are not organized enough to accomplish anything useful with it.

[Ingmar]

The database underneath is just SQL, it is all the collaboration stuff on top of it where all the value gets added.

[JoeTF]

Lean away from the administration and head towards the construction and design.

Seriously.

Why?

Could you elaborate more on that, for us newbies?

[fuser]

Could you elaborate more on that, for us newbies?

I'm guessing per any IT related activity sysadmin sucks and an unrewarding job. Designing and building things get seen by management for better compensation and parlay over to consulting.

I swear to god if there was a Splunk certification i'd recommend it in a heart beat. There is so much business logic reporting/dash-boarding you can do it's insane.

[Ironwood]

It's exactly that.  Administration of existing systems is seen as an easier ride and pays as such.  Every now and again you'll get an Admin that will push the envelope and do nice things to your system, but for the most part you're paying a caretaker.

With the Design and Development role, you're asking to build something new, something that fits new purpose and something that's flexible.  That's inherently added value right there and gets more grease.

Who would you pay more ?  The guy who says 'Aye, it's all ok' every day or the guy who says 'Chaps were having problems with repeated manual inputs, so I built this new input form to deal with it.'

Yeah.  That's what I thought.

[Lantyssa]

The person who says "Aye, it's all okay" is also prime territory for being cut because no one realizes just how shitty their life is without them until after everything falls apart.

[Trouble]

Reading this thread reminds me the term "IT" really needs some sort of update to reflect how it currently represents way too broad a swath of actual job functions and area of expertise. As a software developer, and even moreso as a web developer, I'm technically classed as "IT" but almost nothing in the system/network/security admin area crosses over. I personally know how to admin and run a webserver and I know how to maintain my own computer as a pretty high level, but neither of those skills are actually required or part of my job. The separation between development and hardware + network/sys admin is growing even bigger every day, as the whole stack is becoming commoditized via cloud hosting and one-click virtualization that requires zero knowledge of how anything besides your development stack (programming language, database, etc.) works.

I just had to laugh at the thought of some sort of certification existing in web development. I have 300 feeds piping into my reader and I spend an hour every day just to keep current on shit because of how quickly things are changing, being added, and how quickly new platforms (mobile/tablet) are popping up each with specific quirks and considerations and technical specs. A certification in all but the most basic stuff would be out of date in a month or three.

[Morat20]

Sharepoint is like any database software really, at least in my experience. It is this great piece of technology with all of these amazing uses that people implement in ridiculously fucktarded ways because they don't have someone who understands how to design a database implementation properly set it up.

I'm job-hunting right now and Sharepoint comes up all the fucking time. I hate saying "I have very little clue what that is" since, you know, that's never good on the interview.

On the other hand, I've never used it for anything.

[Ironwood]

The person who says "Aye, it's all okay" is also prime territory for being cut because no one realizes just how shitty their life is without them until after everything falls apart.

And as Trouble rightly points out, this is the guy who gets outsourced when the infrastructure gets put up in the cloud at Amazon or Rackspace or, God Help Us, Salesforce.

The designer is the chap that's needed to translate.  Trust me on this, I have personal experience;  Just before I resigned the last place, we were in discussions to fire all 3 Admin/infrastructure people and then make a decision on whether to hire new tech developers or retrain the current developers.

The IT Dept as it has been known for the last ten years is over.  Utterly over.  Just like the chaps that used to look after the electricity generators in the factories.  Heh.

[Ironwood]

Sharepoint is like any database software really, at least in my experience. It is this great piece of technology with all of these amazing uses that people implement in ridiculously fucktarded ways because they don't have someone who understands how to design a database implementation properly set it up.

I'm job-hunting right now and Sharepoint comes up all the fucking time. I hate saying "I have very little clue what that is" since, you know, that's never good on the interview.

On the other hand, I've never used it for anything.

So use it.  It's fucking easy.  Get yourself a 'SHAREPOINT FOR ASSHOLES' book and then install an Amazon server to play about with it.  It'll cost you buttons and it's well worth it to figure it out.

[fuser]

The designer is the chap that's needed to translate.  Trust me on this, I have personal experience;  Just before I resigned the last place, we were in discussions to fire all 3 Admin/infrastructure people and then make a decision on whether to hire new tech developers or retrain the current developers.

The IT Dept as it has been known for the last ten years is over.  Utterly over.  Just like the chaps that used to look after the electricity generators in the factories.  Heh.

I'll disagree in some respects that the day of an IT department is over, and yes the role has shifted (at least for most people). An IT department is still needed in quite a few scenarios in big business where they have a current infrastructure that doesn't make sense to migrate away from. Besides that there is still a lot of planning and management that you need to do with services like EC2 as its not a straight developer stack to hosted mode but more a physical to cloud migration of your existing resources. My admin role has switched from managing most physical hardware to VM/hosted instances and planning. I cannot even remember the last time I had to crack open a machine for service that OEM hardware has gotten so reliable, and that use to be a major focus of the department. An admin today needs not to be proficient in one technology but riding the edge of whats out there and helping shape where a company should move to.

Trouble just as you mention trouble that you need to keep up on so many feeds to keep abreast on html the sysadmin world is moving at the same pace for every piece of technology that an admin needs to be following today. If a client asks you can they use OS X for their work email you need to be aware that 10.6 introducing support for outlook via web with Exchange, if they have a smart phone what will or won't work plus how do you set it up. As a real world example I cannot begin to describe how many changes there has been to hosting Ruby code. Our application stack changed so much due to needs of the application from cgi, fastcgi, mongrel, thin, passenger, unicorn in the past 5 years. If you consider then database planning from the development shift from SQL to NoSQL databases an admin generally has to be on the bleeding edge or ahead of the pack.

It's totally silly to even consider doing an Exchange roll-out as it's way more cost effective and feature rich to migrate a SMB service to a platform such as Google apps just to refocus the IT efforts. Seriously try to use Outlook Web Access and tell me it's not in the dark ages. Managing a SMTP in this day and age is time consuming and stupid waste of resources(data link, servers, licenses, user management, power, redundancy, etc), its somewhere Google has a huge lead in the market that is killing off the needs for "traditional" admins to support user email/office/desktop.

Of all the talk of SharePoint training and development, I have yet to see one SharePoint server used in any sort of respectable way, everyone uses it as a wiki or document change control. It's a technology that requires a big buy in(Server, Office, Desktop OS, Sharepoint server licenses/cals) and a key resource (a business analyst) to do your business logic workflow inside of it and tons of user training.

[Ironwood]

I'm not sure you actually disagreed in any respects.

 

[fuser]

The IT Dept as it has been known for the last ten years is over.  Utterly over. Just like the chaps that used to look after the electricity generators in the factories.  Heh.

Just wanted to clarify anyone looking in how most it departments have transitioned but some big business is still the same. When I originally read your post it was like "We're gutting IT, death to them!" 

[Ironwood]

We're drifting farther and farther away from the point of the thread and into our own thread, so all I'll say in answer to that is :

Do you think your business would scruple to get rid of IT departments if they could do so ?  Given your obvious answer to this, and given the rise of outsourcing and SaaS opportunities that are more commonly available with decreasing costs, do you think a career move that relies solely on adminstration is a good idea ?


You say Big Businesses aren't moving yet and you're correct :  My point is that it makes most sense for big businesses to do so, given cost savings and other benefits, and once the scales tip that's Just What They're Going To Do.

This isn't just my opinion either....

[Sky]

Someone has to do the work. If it's outsourced to a third party, go work for the third party.

I start the Security+ stuff next week. We'll see how that goes, the management of the program doesn't instill much confidence. And the 'career specialist' just sent all the emails with everyone in the To: field. 

[Ironwood]

You're entirely correct.

Except for that pesky 'Limited Seating Available' thing.

[Sky]

Welcome to the end game of global capitalism.

[Salamok]

IT Administration seems to be 90% wiping users noses and 10% systems admin.  It used to be much more fun when it was 70-80% building, balancing and supporting all the fledgling systems that have since become robust enough to not require the attention they once had.  Pretty much why I bailed for the dev side was I just got tired of expending nearly all my energy supporting moronic users from themselves. 

[Trouble]

Despite hardware platform quantities technically increasing, the relatively relability and need to for manual maintenance is going down at an incredible rate. In computers/IT "disruptive" technologies are more common than not (where the rest of the world only gets to see the crazyness of it occasionally). The whole cloud thing sounded like a bullshit marketing technique for a couple of years. But no, it's actually how shit it is going from top to bottom. When you can deploy pre-optimized images on demand to shards of computers, guaranteed 100.000000% uptime given the fact you're delivering from a hundred geographically disparate data centers nearly instantly and it's 100% transparent to clients/users... Well let's just say that it's not going to be long before the majority of that job force from the past and and the current is going to be fighting over the small to mid size companies who haven't figured out Google Apps is far better, cheaper, and more effective than anything they could do themselves.

There absolutely is room for people manning datacenters, people doing the hard planning and thinking, etc. But that's like talking about the guy who runs 100 robots at the car factories. Be that guy and you're good.

[JoeTF]

From what you say, old-style IT-admin is shrinking field. Yet bunch of job growth reports (ie. US Department of Labor)  say that there will be positive growth in number of sys- and net-admin jobs.

So, wtf? Are those guys totally out of touch with reality, or are we missing some part of the puzzle?

[Ironwood]

As Sky pointed out, as the Cloud and SaaS operators grow, more will move into the market to compete.  This will create the short-term growth of positions available :  The admins will be needed at the big farms.  The competition here will be large, I suspect, with a lot of currently well-off 'dabblers' not making the cut.

Like any other competitive marketplace, this will eventually shrink and stabilise until the next thing comes along to kick its ass.

In My Opinion.

[Trouble]

Yeah admins of various kinds will be a growth industry for a while. But the technology very much lends itself to automation as well and automation wins out long term wherever it's viable. Stuff like security focused It guys will see a growth piece of pie short and long term I'm guessing.

[Sky]

Dep't of Labor is investing in security training right now, that's where the grant for my cert is coming from, and they dropped all but security-focused certs from the program. Somebody is fed up with teh hacks.

[Morat20]

So use it.  It's fucking easy.  Get yourself a 'SHAREPOINT FOR ASSHOLES' book and then install an Amazon server to play about with it.  It'll cost you buttons and it's well worth it to figure it out.

One of the companies I'm interviewing for is pretty big with Sharepoint, but their first statement was "You do C#? Web development? SQL? Yeah, no, you can already do the hard stuff. We'll teach you Sharepoint. How do you feel about travel?"

Admittedly, that's just the nice HR person and not their hard-ass "I'm going to screen you for technical skills" actual phone interview. This was the buzzword person.

OTOH, they're also a Microsoft Gold-something or other group, so I'm pretty certain that means working there would lead to certifications.

Of course, on the third hand, they're basically consultants and trouble-shooters for document management, meaning it's basically custom tweaks to fit client needs. (So travel sounds like 'Requirements and Spec meetings" and "Implementation/prototyping handholding")

[Yegolev]

IT Administration seems to be 90% wiping users noses and 10% systems admin.  It used to be much more fun when it was 70-80% building, balancing and supporting all the fledgling systems that have since become robust enough to not require the attention they once had.  Pretty much why I bailed for the dev side was I just got tired of expending nearly all my energy supporting moronic users from themselves. 

See, you need yourself a nice batch of people across an ocean or two to handle this for you, then you can start attending meetings and proposing shit.  I've said recently, more than once, "I think Manilla is supposed to be doing that."

[Ironwood]

One of the companies I'm interviewing for is pretty big with Sharepoint, but their first statement was "You do C#? Web development? SQL? Yeah, no, you can already do the hard stuff. We'll teach you Sharepoint.

If you can do all that, Sharepoint is just a name.  You should poke your nose into it to reassure yourself of that and then put it on your CV.

[Salamok]

IT Administration seems to be 90% wiping users noses and 10% systems admin.  It used to be much more fun when it was 70-80% building, balancing and supporting all the fledgling systems that have since become robust enough to not require the attention they once had.  Pretty much why I bailed for the dev side was I just got tired of expending nearly all my energy supporting moronic users from themselves.  

See, you need yourself a nice batch of people across an ocean or two to handle this for you, then you can start attending meetings and proposing shit.  I've said recently, more than once, "I think Manilla is supposed to be doing that."

Working for the government, in addition to not being allowed to outsource to non US citizens, they need to be a pre-approved vendor (usually a HUB).  This pretty much means outsourcing the mid-sized web apps we do results in a circus of 250k+ bids (who then back door it overseas).

One of the companies I'm interviewing for is pretty big with Sharepoint, but their first statement was "You do C#? Web development? SQL? Yeah, no, you can already do the hard stuff. We'll teach you Sharepoint.

If you can do all that, Sharepoint is just a name.  You should poke your nose into it to reassure yourself of that and then put it on your CV.

You are literally the 1st person I have ever run across that doesn't on some level agree that sharepoint is a total piece of shit, is your positive experience coming from actual use of the product or is your exposure limited to a "managed it to a successful deployment w/o having to use it on a daily basis" role?

[Ironwood]

You are literally the 1st person I have ever run across that doesn't on some level agree that sharepoint is a total piece of shit,

Point to the part of the thread where I mentioned anything positive or negative about Sharepoint itself.  I dare you.

[Lantyssa]

*points to the post above this one*

I can hear it.  In your voice.  Right there.

[Sky]

I'm pointing at the thread's private parts.

[Ironwood]

*points to the post above this one*

I can hear it.  In your voice.  Right there.

Silence, or I shall bring you to your knees.

[Morat20]

If you can do all that, Sharepoint is just a name.  You should poke your nose into it to reassure yourself of that and then put it on your CV.

I might just do that. *sigh*. My problem with resumes -- and interviews -- is I'm just not big on padding myself or my resume. I seem to be forced to say things like "Oh, yes, I've done four or five years of that -- but that was ten years ago" or "Well, admittedly C# is the bastard love child of Java and C, which I have so much experience I could probably write the compiler in my sleep, but I technically only have like 3 years experience. Really only 2".

Whereas I'm pretty sure that, to most people, they say "I've fucked with C# for like a month, and it's so much like Java that I'll just say I have five years of it, and hide my learning curve under "I'm a bit rusty" if hired."

So I get the nasty feeling my resume is being taken with a grain of salt I technically already applied, because I can't seem to exaggerate at all.

[Yegolev]

Well, perhaps the less said the better.  Cut yourself off after the comma in each case.  At least don't undercut yourself, even if you can't exaggerate.

To circle back on my previous posting on the Peter Principle, I will say that I have spent much too long being much too bitter about something that is actually a good thing.  Also, certain lackluster elements of the organization are being or have been replaced, and the remaining people seem a fine enough sort.  After 12+ months, the culling is coming to a close.

[Zetor]

I'm forced use Sharepoint at work, but it's not that bad. Well, we actually don't use the web interface at all, just the ability to share documents and edit them concurrently with office2010. As soon as we discover another collaboration suite that allows us to do that, we're so outta there!

Re C#: it is kind of like a sucky Java. Or Java is like a sucky C#. Depends on who you ask...