Sysadmin here. Just thought I'd see what all the other nerds do. 
What's your occupation?
- Thread starter Giga Hertz
- Start date
I do freelance work and have a blog. I am also a professional cat keeper and have a bachelor's degree in cat hair physics.
If a cat leaves West City traveling at 417km/h and another cat leaves Kame House at 492km/h, at what point do you look inside the box and determine if the cat is actually alive or dead?
Well... I'll have to take your word for it.That is a trick question, everyone knows cats are liquid!
Former Java programmer here, now full-time caregiver to my mother with dementia.
Both those things sound rough (but definitely the latter of the two). Hope things are otherwise going well for you!
Java programming was nice, worked on loan origination software for banks, it was a pleasant challenge. The caregiving is far harder!
When I was in high school I learned VB6 for Software Design class. It was fun, but I definitely know I couldn't do programming for a living.
But if I had to choose between that and caregiving...
Ah, yeah, VB's a cruel mistress! I like languages like Java, Python, PHP, very easy languages to get to know and use. I always advocate for people to get into programming, or give it a try, it can be great for keeping the brain active and finding creative solutions to problems.
Most of my previous job was creatively tiptoeing around head office when they wouldn't give me access to things I needed to do my job effectively. That was fun.
Gotta' love the big bosses, they never know what they're really doing, then get angry when they don't understand why you can't get on with things.Most of my previous job was creatively tiptoeing around head office when they wouldn't give me access to things I needed to do my job effectively. That was fun.
As a sysadmin, though, that's gotta' be fun! Working with different systems and troubleshooting problems. Or, if you take the IT Crowd approach, spending all day asking people if they've tried turning it off and on again.
Well this was for a private school that was part of a larger group. So I was hired by the school for, essentially sysadmining, but the head office took care of the network and stuff. So initially it was fine, and I had a reasonable amount of leeway to get things done. When I hit a roadblock, I learned how to do things to get around it until I could get a more diplomatic resolution. Fortunately this was also an attitude shared by most staff who weren't (and probably still aren't) happy with the head office.
Unfortunately as time went on, they took more control and restricted less access. Initially the department was okay, but the manager was replaced by this guy who has absolutely no idea what he's doing and kept treading on toes. They'd also make a lot of decisions or just say "we're doing this" without talking to, or giving a heads up to any IT staff at any of the schools. When the principal who hired me left, I started looking for a new job as she seemed more concerned with doing things in line with what they wanted, and also said "we're doing this" without asking my input. Fortunately my brother-in-law is IT manager at a large company and they had an opening, so I applied (through official channels, of course, not nepotism).
My old job was very IT Crowd-y in that regard. I have okay people-skills, but it did boil down to "Reboot then call me back". I was also the only IT person at that particular site. My new job is far more interesting since it's in an agricultural company, so we deal with a lot of different sites, programs and setups. I have a lot more freedom and can do far more interesting things. The schools were Google based, and I was't allowed access to the Admin Console (I was allowed basic access at one point, but then a lot of silly changes and politics happened), but here it's Microsoft so I'm learning a lot of things about Azure, and on some great projects.
I probably could have just faded at my job for a few more years (I was there 6) and it wouldn't have been so bad, but I definitely would have fallen way behind - I can certainly experiment with Server and networking stuff on my own time, but not getting a foot in the door with Azure would have been a career killer.
Plump, juicy, fully vetted hot dogs to the Canadian people.I sell hotdogs.
Eww, hate it when they start to take control and have no idea what they're actually doing. I make the decisions...now...what does this button do?
Sounds like quite an interesting position at the new job, and you're right, Azure's a must-know these days, so good that you get to learn so much about it!
I used to have quite a good working relationship with the network admin at head office - he'd give me under the table access to things I needed (like write-access to Meraki console, and being able to edit group policies). It was under the provisio he trusted me not to touch things I didn't understand (there was a guy at another school who had no idea what he was doing and cause trouble) and that this was pretty much what I was hired to do. He left quietly at the start of the year, and that was my cue that I should probably haul on out ASAP.
He used to give me a lot of inside information, and the way the manager operated was quite bleak. Apparently one thing he suggested was adding a UPS to each phone - not the switches that provide the power and communication - the individual handsets.
Yeah it's good. And I already knew most of the department personally before I got hired anyway, so that was a bonus.
I'm getting the ins and outs of a lot of parts of it. The problem is how fractured all of Microsoft's cloud services are, so there's about 10 different web addresses I need to go to in order to access something vaguely related, from Intune to Exchange to Defender to Azure itself.