Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab
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@thwr said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
@scottalanmiller Thanks Scott, I think most of the people here now at least have an idea where your initial question comes form.
This indeed sounds
goodgreatawesome, but you also clearly mentionedthe downsidesfactors like the on-call and no-vacations thing, something that is hard to come by when you first encounter this as an employee. But I guess that NTG members don't see themselves as employees, but more like a family from what I've been reading here. Especially the "longevity" is something that seems to be uncommon in the US, at least in IT.Yes, that's a good way to think of it. People who want to be an employee probably won't like NTG. People who want to be a part of the company, might. It's anything but normal and some people just need time to grok it and then they like it. Many never will (or would, we try to figure those people out ahead of time.) We know that it is not for everyone. We've had lots of people try it for a year or two and bail. We've also had people bail and then beg to come back once they remembered what the outside world was like. Once you get the flexibility of NTG, it is hard to give it up.
Working at NTG really is a lot more like hanging out with friend and family, having some beers, eating some ice cream and talking about things that you enjoy (which just happens to normally be IT.) It makes nothing ever feel like work. And it makes for a busy, but far less stressful life. There is no "I need to go home and decompress" feeling. That's totally gone.
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@scottalanmiller said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
@thwr said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
@scottalanmiller Thanks Scott, I think most of the people here now at least have an idea where your initial question comes form.
This indeed sounds
goodgreatawesome, but you also clearly mentionedthe downsidesfactors like the on-call and no-vacations thing, something that is hard to come by when you first encounter this as an employee. But I guess that NTG members don't see themselves as employees, but more like a family from what I've been reading here. Especially the "longevity" is something that seems to be uncommon in the US, at least in IT.Yes, that's a good way to think of it. People who want to be an employee probably won't like NTG. People who want to be a part of the company, might. It's anything but normal and some people just need time to grok it and then they like it. Many never will (or would, we try to figure those people out ahead of time.) We know that it is not for everyone. We've had lots of people try it for a year or two and bail. We've also had people bail and then beg to come back once they remembered what the outside world was like. Once you get the flexibility of NTG, it is hard to give it up.
Working at NTG really is a lot more like hanging out with friend and family, having some beers, eating some ice cream and talking about things that you enjoy (which just happens to normally be IT.) It makes nothing ever feel like work. And it makes for a busy, but far less stressful life. There is no "I need to go home and decompress" feeling. That's totally gone.
Why aren't I working there yet?
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@scottalanmiller said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
Not everyone works remotely, but mostly everyone does.
If you don't only provide cloud services, I take this to mean that you guys end up doing a lot of traveling to local businesses?
How much do each of you end up traveling to clients in a given month, or the whole year? Do you outsource and hire local tech shops to do physical stuff like networking or replacing machines?
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@guyinpv said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
If you don't only provide cloud services, I take this to mean that you guys end up doing a lot of traveling to local businesses?
That's correct.
I don't have any other answer
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@guyinpv said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
How much do each of you end up traveling to clients in a given month, or the whole year? Do you outsource and hire local tech shops to do physical stuff like networking or replacing machines?
Oh boy, that I have no idea. i know that me personally, it's not that much. I did 25 hours of traveling this week and today I have customers who travelled to see us instead (internationally, no less.) But for an average, no idea. But it's light. Some people travel a bit, some zero. Some have been relocated in the past.
I think @gjacobse travels zero, for example.
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@guyinpv said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
Do you outsource and hire local tech shops to do physical stuff like networking or replacing machines?
Yes, we have remote hands services all over the place. Like Manhattan, we have a long term partner there that just is our eyes, ears and hands. They do no real tech work, they are just our remote controlled robots. That way our high cost, high skill staff can stay central and efficient while touching a lot of different localities.
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What is eerie is how similar @Bundy-Associates is to @NTG in some ways.
We are an ITSP as NTG is. We are not a reseller of a damned thing. If I recommend something, it is because I think it is the right thing for the client's business need. Not because we get a damned thing for it on the backside. I don't know how many vendors get all confused when they call me and ask me to sign on as a partner for this or that and I tell them to go fly a kite.
I live and work in Chicago normally. The rest of the employees are in the St Louis region, but that is a legacy of before we gained the ability to truly handle things remotely. I also work from Japan for a few weeks most years.
While NTG may be a Cloud of Support (btw I am so stealing that too...) because of the number of employees and people they have access to at any given time, we are more of a fog bank with only 6 permanent employees at the moment. But even then, the Cloud of Support metaphor works.
It does not matter if I am working form my desk at home, driving down the highway, at a desk at a client, or at my kids' swimming lessons. When a call comes in, it gets triaged and handled. One of us is always available to handle anything that comes in until the appropriate resource can be arranged.
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@scottalanmiller said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
- NTG is a bespoke software engineering house. This is where we started but this is now nearly phased out. We make our own software, you don't hire us to make software for other people. But we make SaaS applications for the medical industry since the 1990s, it's how we started.
We started as a software company only also. The owner created an accounting system back in 1984 or so for the System36 line of hardware. The last one we know of just went out of service 2 years ago.
We still do custom software as more than a third of our revenue
IT and network support for another thirdish
with custom web applications as the final third -
@JaredBusch said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
We are an ITSP as NTG is. We are not a reseller of a damned thing. If I recommend something, it is because I think it is the right thing for the client's business need. Not because we get a damned thing for it on the backside. I don't know how many vendors get all confused when they call me and ask me to sign on as a partner for this or that and I tell them to go fly a kite.
Totally had this with HDS today. They were 100% on board and cool with it, but they needed a sidebar conversation to understand our role because it was so unusual for them.
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Out of curiosity, and to help derail this thread just a little bit more... @scottalanmiller / @Minion-Queen and @JaredBusch , how do you setup your remote employees? Do you provide them with systems to work from and/or furnish a stipend for internet access? Or do you just build that into their salary to simplify things from your end?
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Systems. That is up to the person we are hiring. Some of my team just works from their own machines because they don't want a "work" desktop and a gaming one. One for everything is their choice. Some want to separate work from personal. Really up to each person. I work on my own personal desktop so that I can game and work at the same time if I want :P.
We do not use AD any longer as well it is dumb to pay for when we use Office365 for most everything or OwnCloud etc. We do provide desk phones and internet is not something we reimburse for.
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For when folks say it can't be done...
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@FrostyPhoenix my solution would be to use the usb ports to the left of the ethernet cable
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@Minion-Queen said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
We do not use AD any longer as well it is dumb to pay for when we use Office365 for most everything or OwnCloud etc.
It's Azure AD now.
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@RamblingBiped said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
Out of curiosity, and to help derail this thread just a little bit more... @scottalanmiller / @Minion-Queen and @JaredBusch , how do you setup your remote employees? Do you provide them with systems to work from and/or furnish a stipend for internet access? Or do you just build that into their salary to simplify things from your end?
We provide what is needed. All of our full time people have a company paid for PC and a desk phone. Mine is lacking a video card to be a serious gaming rig, but I could buy one if I wanted. Personal use of the machines is expected. We do not expect them to use two machines. On a non hostile termination, it is a negotiation based on depreciation and such if they get to keep any of the equipment. Our part time people have desk phones and one has a laptop while the other a desktop.
We also provide a $50 stipend auto deposited to their bank account technically for "mobile/internet/what have you." Honestly I forget about it most of the time. until I balance my accounts. Then I am like, oh yeah.
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@RamblingBiped said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
Out of curiosity, and to help derail this thread just a little bit more... @scottalanmiller / @Minion-Queen and @JaredBusch , how do you setup your remote employees? Do you provide them with systems to work from and/or furnish a stipend for internet access? Or do you just build that into their salary to simplify things from your end?
I'm honestly pretty surprised how few want a company setup. If I was a normal work from homer with normal desktop needs, like I used to be, I loved having a fully supported "just plug and go" company desktop and desk phone. So perfect for setting up your home office.
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@scottalanmiller said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
@RamblingBiped said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
Out of curiosity, and to help derail this thread just a little bit more... @scottalanmiller / @Minion-Queen and @JaredBusch , how do you setup your remote employees? Do you provide them with systems to work from and/or furnish a stipend for internet access? Or do you just build that into their salary to simplify things from your end?
I'm honestly pretty surprised how few want a company setup. If I was a normal work from homer with normal desktop needs, like I used to be, I loved having a fully supported "just plug and go" company desktop and desk phone. So perfect for setting up your home office.
Our company setup is an i7 desktop with 16GB of RAM and an SSD of some size. So if anyone wants to serious game with it, all you need is a dedicated video card added in. But most generation old games will run on any modern hardware.
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Home lab
2 x 5 bay Synology NAS's.
Managed 24Gbps port switch
7 x Intel NUC's (Some Gen6's with 32GB of RAM).
Firewall (Running Ubiquity edge router for VPN termination, and IDS, routing on a stick for things NSX isn't handling etc).Work lab.
I have access to a a lot of machines. Primary cluster right now is 12 hosts with 20 core boxes, 256GB of RAM, and 6 flash drives each, 10Gbps (2 ports) and 2 x 1Gbps ports (management) with enterprise out of band licensed. Currently running a storage lab to test some workflows, will likely be testing some monitoring and automation frameworks with it soon.
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@Dashrender said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
@thwr said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
@Dashrender said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
@thwr said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
@Dashrender said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
@david.wiese said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
The question that should be asked is does the dedication to the IT industry mean you should sacrifice your hobbies?
A better question, if IT isn't your hobby, should you have a different job? One that more closely matches you true likes and desires.
Would you ask a car mechanic the same who doesn't want to fix cars in his free time?
If I'm hiring a car mechanic for high end cars or something like Indy car racing - absolutely, and if they said no.. I'd bin their application. NTG is at the top of the field. Some companies put themselves there. They want the most enthusiastic for IT group they can get. As Danielle said, you can't teach enthusiasm, but you can teach skills. So far, their needs have been met buy people with either both enthusiasm and skills or just enthusiasm, and they taught them the skills. when the work pool starts to dry up, and they have fewer choices, they will have to be less picky on who they pick.
I agree from a personal point of view. But I can't expect everyone to be like this. Maybe someone just wants to do his job, that's ok. We should keep a few things in mind here:
- Salary
- Position
- Goals
for example. I wouldn't expect a Level 1 helpdesk tech to have a small datacenter in his basement, he care barely live from what he carries home. If we are talking about a 100-150k+ position, it's a whole different story.
and I wouldn't expect NTG to higher a Level 1 helpdesk person either. I had junk equipment in the mid 90's in my apt for lab gear that I paid pennies for, just so I would have stuff to learn on.
I suppose I could agree that as you get older (north of 35) the need for a home lab is less (especially because of today's options), but when you're young.... you need to be hungry! If you don't want to spend a lot of time learning/playing with this stuff, then I ask, is this really the field for you?
I have like 3 old systems that would be great for a young guy home lab that I need to dump on someone... As you get older the stuff you test isn't low level infrastructure so much as higher level stuff that you can lab out on other environments etc. Also you should have a work lab with the resources for this stuff. IF I really want I can use Ravello for free and spin up stuff on AWS.
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@JaredBusch said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
@scottalanmiller said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
@RamblingBiped said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
Out of curiosity, and to help derail this thread just a little bit more... @scottalanmiller / @Minion-Queen and @JaredBusch , how do you setup your remote employees? Do you provide them with systems to work from and/or furnish a stipend for internet access? Or do you just build that into their salary to simplify things from your end?
I'm honestly pretty surprised how few want a company setup. If I was a normal work from homer with normal desktop needs, like I used to be, I loved having a fully supported "just plug and go" company desktop and desk phone. So perfect for setting up your home office.
Our company setup is an i7 desktop with 16GB of RAM and an SSD of some size. So if anyone wants to serious game with it, all you need is a dedicated video card added in. But most generation old games will run on any modern hardware.
I like the idea of separation of work/personal so I always asked for a work laptop.
