IT Education

[LK]

I've been spending the last six months adrift after I left a financially lucrative but ultimately unfulfilling Quality Assurance position in the games industry. I realized after getting out and going to work small business IT service that being a gamer doesn't necessarily mean you know hardware or software.

I picked up some things over the years but I've had to get a crash-course in Windows Server, Microsoft Exchange, IT culture, etc. It's been a good area of study because of the amount of information available, though I admit it is overwhelming at times.

My first goal is to get A+ Certification after I get some income going, but how does one pursue an education necessary for a career in IT? I heard Microsoft Certifications were expensive and not all that useful. Also, there seems to be advanced technologies, like SQL, that I don't have the tools or resources to mess with. I need to actually get my hands on stuff and experience it to learn. I would appreciate any advice you guys can give!

As an aside, if you have any job leads in the Los Angeles area, I would appreciate that as well!

[Sky]

CCNA Security. It's the field to be in right now, imo.

[Yegolev]

I don't understand certifications for menu-driven systems that typically require a three-finger salute to fix.  I am biased but I like IBM stuff.

I would like to find out more about this financially-lucrative gaming QA position.

[Salamok]

I am biased but I like IBM stuff.

yeah remedy, websphere and bloated xml files are the bomb!

I've been spending the last six months adrift after I left a financially lucrative but ultimately unfulfilling Quality Assurance position in the games industry. I realized after getting out and going to work small business IT service that being a gamer doesn't necessarily mean you know hardware or software.

I picked up some things over the years but I've had to get a crash-course in Windows Server, Microsoft Exchange, IT culture, etc. It's been a good area of study because of the amount of information available, though I admit it is overwhelming at times.

My first goal is to get A+ Certification after I get some income going, but how does one pursue an education necessary for a career in IT? I heard Microsoft Certifications were expensive and not all that useful. Also, there seems to be advanced technologies, like SQL, that I don't have the tools or resources to mess with. I need to actually get my hands on stuff and experience it to learn. I would appreciate any advice you guys can give!

As an aside, if you have any job leads in the Los Angeles area, I would appreciate that as well!

Are you looking to freelance/open your own IT support services business or are you looking to land a job as an IT person?

[fuser]

stuff

If your looking to be an IT admin or just in an IT department I'd highly recommend not doing the A+ certification, it's a core competency always behind the times. Generally looking at a resume if someone is A+ certified they might have an in-depth knowledge of what cascade IRQ's are but no real practical knowledge of the current climate. Focus in on virtualization and learn the basics of VMware/Xen/HyperV so you can start building your own lab. So build/buy a small PC and a technet subscription and start tinkering. I cannot recommend enough just having hands on do it yourself and avoiding most certifications. Start to play with it and build things that have purposes like a clustered windows server, sql server, a lamp environment, then start moving into something specialized like puppet.

I found the ITIL foundation certification/course is a really good investment. It won't teach you any hands on with systems but lays out a very good practical way to handle working in an IT environment no matter what os/software is used. Noticed here in Canada it's becoming a defacto standard for most job postings with government positions and SMB.

[Ingmar]

Things I generally look for on an IT resume: actual experience with the shit we use, no obvious lies/bullshitting, and not covered in obvious spelling/grammar errors (this last one has been shocking lately)
Things I do not generally care about: certifications

I am not a hiring manager though - I just review resumes when we have an opening and help filter them down to the people we'll actually interview - and my tastes in these things may not be completely mainstream.

Best advice I can give is to try to get yourself into a helpdesk position at a smaller company (think 250-500 people) where you will have the opportunity to get involved in bigger stuff because they're short handed (they are all short handed). Kick ass at doing it, and you'll find you get your title changed and real responsibilities handed to you. The smaller company thing is important. If you go to a big company with a giant help desk organization you will be answering phones for years and will not have nearly the opportunity to branch out in your skill set. You don't want the REALLY small company though because then you will probably be dealing with outdated shit and just spending all your time duct taping stuff. You want a company with at least a semblance of an IT budget.

And yeah, virtualization is huge.

[Thrawn]

Focus in on virtualization and learn the basics of VMware/Xen/HyperV so you can start building your own lab. So build/buy a small PC and a technet subscription and start tinkering. I cannot recommend enough just having hands on do it yourself and avoiding most certifications. Start to play with it and build things that have purposes like a clustered windows server, sql server, a lamp environment, then start moving into something specialized like puppet.

Seconding pretty much all of this, I'm finishing my IT degree next month and have been working in the college's IT department for about 6 months.  I've had this conversation with our Sr. Systems Administrator a few times and he mostly echoed what fuser posted.  As a whole certs are becoming a joke because it's very easy for someone to just Google test training and answers and breeze through the testing without ever actually learning anything.  A few exceptions still exists, but they aren't going to get you hired by themselves in most cases.  You need hands on experience and you simply need to know what you are doing, even a degree is just a piece of paper to get you past HR requirements that won't get a job by itself if they have a remotely competent interview process.

If you can walk into an interview and actually talk about the technology and know what you are talking about instead of just saying "Yep, I have x cert." you are way ahead of a lot of people.

[Yegolev]

I am biased but I like IBM stuff.

yeah remedy, websphere and bloated xml files are the bomb!

I thought we were talking about getting jobs/careers, not choosing good apps or OSes.

[Lantyssa]

I picked up some things over the years but I've had to get a crash-course in Windows Server, Microsoft Exchange, IT culture, etc. It's been a good area of study because of the amount of information available, though I admit it is overwhelming at times.

Honestly, this is how I have learned the majority of what I know.  90% of my job is Google searches and relating what I've found to what I've learned over the years.  (Things were a lot harder when all I had was a 25 volume VAX-VMS manual set strewn throughout a server room closet...)

Pretty much every expansion of knowledge was being asked to do something I didn't have experience with and having to dive in.

All of my SQL knowledge started by working with mySQL, PHPAdmin, and web pages for organizations I was volunteering with.  They were grateful for any help whatsoever, and it's not like they were very picky.

[LK]

Thanks for the tips.

Are you looking to freelance/open your own IT support services business or are you looking to land a job as an IT person?

I don't want to open my own shop -- I don't think I could manage it at this time.

Pretty much every expansion of knowledge was being asked to do something I didn't have experience with and having to dive in.

All of my SQL knowledge started by working with mySQL, PHPAdmin, and web pages for organizations I was volunteering with.  They were grateful for any help whatsoever, and it's not like they were very picky.

This has been my last six months. "Do this." "Google, how do I do this?" I didn't even realize websites like Technet (Thanks fuser) existed, with all that information readily available. I spent far too much time on gaming news sites. >_<

Thrawn / Ingmar: thank you. I see VMWare popping up in places. Do you have any recommendations about the type of companies that would have the population levels you describe? My experience is games industry and they trend either super big or super small in my area. But I am willing to work in other industries, especially if the skills I learn aren't industry-specific.

[Hammond]

Vmware licensing is fairly expensive so you would be looking at most likely a midsize company to larger if they have a vmware cluster in house. 

IT requirements depend a lot on the industry that you are going to go into.    So I think to better answer your question do you have some idea of what you want to do?  Healthcare? Industry? Agriculture?  Big company small company? 

There are some general things to know though.  Having a idea of the whole cloud concept is a great place to start.  Since it is the hot buzzword right now people are going to ask questions about it. Have a general familiarity with both windows, office and apple products and how they interact.  As much as people like to blast Microsoft they are still the dominate player in the corporate world.   Play with Linux and have at least a general idea of what it is and how it works.  Since you are coming in with little knowledge most likely you are going to start as a scrub.  Knowing the general ideas, concepts and players is far more important than being deep in any particular subject.

Also get ready for long hours and being on call unless you get lucky.   It is just part of the life.

[Salamok]

My break in to professional IT was getting a job with a enterprisey custom software shop as an installer/trainer.  It worked out well for me as it exposed me to a lot of different environments.

edit - To be more clear I would suggest doing something like that over getting an entry level job in an IT department.  Desktop support doesn't really teach you much beyond the fact that user's are morons so try and avoid anything that strictly focuses on that.

[Sky]

You don't want the REALLY small company though because then you will probably be dealing with outdated shit and just spending all your time duct taping stuff. You want a company with at least a semblance of an IT budget.

WHAT NO ITS COOL MAN

[Daeven]

The key to getting into software is to not only grok the math behind Big O notation, but the WHY as well. Everything else ls gravy.

[Salamok]

I would thonk that big o would be totally unecessary for admin level as well as the majority of programming work.  It is only heavily used in it's raw form at the very foundation levels of the tech stack.  Most things higher than that already have big o considerations baked in.

As an alternative to the vmware route you may want to fire up a free dev instance of ec2 and toy around with deploying varous servers to it.  I know ec2 is often used instead of a non cloud based vm, for example EA uses them to meet online game requirements as needed.

[Viin]

I sure wish my developers did Big O analysis on their code, the performance is usually horrendous when under any load outside a few tiny test data sets.

[Daeven]

I would thonk that big o would be totally unecessary for admin level as well as the majority of programming work.  It is only heavily used in it's raw form at the very foundation levels of the tech stack.  Most things higher than that already have big o considerations baked in.

You just described, in a nutshell, the difference between a junior API user/scripter and a senior developer. And why their salaries are *very* different. No, knowing what sort of sorting algorithm to choose or when to use which data structure under load is not 'baked in' to anything.

[Salamok]

I would thonk that big o would be totally unecessary for admin level as well as the majority of programming work.  It is only heavily used in it's raw form at the very foundation levels of the tech stack.  Most things higher than that already have big o considerations baked in.

You just described, in a nutshell, the difference between a junior API user/scripter and a senior developer. And why their salaries are *very* different. No, knowing what sort of sorting algorithm to choose or when to use which data structure under load is not 'baked in' to anything.

Depends on what you are developing, 100% of my sorting is either done using SQL or one of the sort functions provided by the language.  When I was in school 25 years ago this was not the case but I can honestly say that I have not needed to write a sort routine for at least a decade.   SQL will attempt to optimize a query and where that fails you can always take a a quick look at what it is doing with an explain.  Don't get me wrong I think there is a great benefit in understanding the mathematical efficiency of a given solution to a problem but it is not any sort of guarantee that your solution wont totally suck or even work at all.

In a way you are right, though in my experience many a crappy performance problem has been caused by overly nested poorly written objects (not sorting), proper Big O analysis of these structures would most likely highlight their flaws.  On the other hand, I hate the whole "I have proven this solution is correct" approach to software.  I deal with many crappy examples of this on a daily basis, where people focus too much on the constructs and maths at the expense of actually looking at the friggen problem.  The only thing that should be proving your solution as correct is the end result, bureaucratic spec writing process + over engineered Big O solution to spec + unsatisfied client != successful project.

In my opinion the ability to understand the needs and correctly define a problem is one of the most critical skills you can have.  Beyond that you mostly need to gain an in depth understanding of all the tools available to you and how they work together, there is no magic formula or short cut to competency in this area, if you have an aptitude for this then you simply gain skills with use over time.

In short the senior guys are the ones who can solve the problem to everyone's satisfaction with the least amount fucking around.

[Sky]

In my opinion the ability to understand the needs and correctly define a problem is one of the most critical skills you can have.

This is actually my strongest skill. It's amazing how many times I have to deal with people focused on some solution and they've never addressed the problem. Hammers looking for nails.

It's almost an in-joke at this point that in a meeting I'm going to call someone out with 'but what other ways can we address the problem?' The convoluted stuff some people can come up with, just because they're intelligent and well-educated is amazing. Having an intelligent non-degreed person sitting in meetings can be very helpful to an organization.

[Slayerik]

What are you looking to do? I personally love my job as a Desktop support tech, but the path you take for that would vary greatly from a SQL guy or Exchange admin.

10+ years ago when I first got into IT, I just searched out and did any contracts I could find to get experience. Help desk and level 2 support, mainly. Found a contract at a major University, after a year they hired me. From here I could go any number of directions, if I had the energy/dedication but my life is crazy.

Basically, get experience. We continue to hire people from our 3rd party hardware contractors. I am on the other side of the country, so YMMV.

Also, I am involved in hiring and I personally like to see an A+ cert on a resume. Nothing worse than a tech that knows nothing about hardware.  MCP / MCSE shows basic windows knowledge. So, opinions vary.


To sum it all up, if I were trying to get hired in at my current place of employment I would:

Do some short term contracts, help desk/level 2 support. Try to find a contracting house that works with larger corps/universities. Get a contract there and impress the Regular techs. Get hired. Have them pay for your training and branch out and become a business analyst, network admin, SQL db admin, UNIX guy, whatever. This is a long term plan, but I have seen it happen plenty here....


Also, your resume. Lie. You need to show a year of experience. Put down some experience at Complete Computer Services for 6months-1year repairing machines or something easy to talk through if asked in a interview. That kind of work is the entry level of entry level.

http://jobsearch.monster.com/search/Help-Desk-Support_5?where=Los-Angeles__2C-CA&sort=rv.di.dt

I won't lie, help desk sucks. But it is the natural gateway to level 2 support, and is IT experience. It's a foot in the door.

[Yegolev]

It is also a coffin with a headset.  You need to plan your exit strategy right away.  I used to come into IBM on my days off to run through the training materials so I could get out of the call center.

Unless, of course, you like that sort of thing.  I'm more of a single-issue-chin-stroker than a ass-on-fire-but-be-nice-to-dummies person.

[Sky]

Also, I am involved in hiring and I personally like to see an A+ cert on a resume. Nothing worse than a tech that knows nothing about hardware.  MCP / MCSE shows basic windows knowledge. So, opinions vary.

It does serve as the most basic of bullshit detectors. I was shocked how many failed the Security+ (2 of 11 passed, I got a 94% and work with a fraction of the subject). Being responsible sucks, at some point I've got to transition to state government work (two of the guys who failed worked for the state, one for the school system). IMO, that was a cakewalk exam.

[Thrawn]

I was shocked how many failed the Security+ (2 of 11 passed).

Wait, what?  Is that an isolated thing that you ran into or is that an average?  I had no "formal" IT experience when I took mine, just read a book on it, took the test and passed no problem.  (No 94%, but passed.)

[Sky]

Just the test I took, I sat chatting with the girls at the desk after I got out - I was also the second to finish, first to pass.

[Daeven]

In a way you are right, though in my experience many a crappy performance problem has been caused by overly nested poorly written objects (not sorting), proper Big O analysis of these structures would most likely highlight their flaws.  On the other hand, I hate the whole "I have proven this solution is correct" approach to software.  I deal with many crappy examples of this on a daily basis, where people focus too much on the constructs and maths at the expense of actually looking at the friggen problem.  The only thing that should be proving your solution as correct is the end result, bureaucratic spec writing process + over engineered Big O solution to spec + unsatisfied client != successful project.

In my opinion the ability to understand the needs and correctly define a problem is one of the most critical skills you can have.  Beyond that you mostly need to gain an in depth understanding of all the tools available to you and how they work together, there is no magic formula or short cut to competency in this area, if you have an aptitude for this then you simply gain skills with use over time.

In short the senior guys are the ones who can solve the problem to everyone's satisfaction with the least amount fucking around.

I agree completely. Analysis paralysis and Frameworktopia coupled with 'Not Invented Here' can be even worse than poor algorithm analysis.

Get your shit done. Complexity is emergent so don't borrow trouble by baking it in at the start. But it *really* does help to understand how things work under the covers to get to the 'stop fucking around' bit.

[Viin]

In my opinion the ability to understand the needs and correctly define a problem is one of the most critical skills you can have.

This is actually my strongest skill. It's amazing how many times I have to deal with people focused on some solution and they've never addressed the problem. Hammers looking for nails.

It's almost an in-joke at this point that in a meeting I'm going to call someone out with 'but what other ways can we address the problem?' The convoluted stuff some people can come up with, just because they're intelligent and well-educated is amazing. Having an intelligent non-degreed person sitting in meetings can be very helpful to an organization.

If you like that, you should try (Technical) Product Management. It's all about identifying the problem, stating it clearly, and working with IT on a solution that actually satisfies the problem.