Hello IT Community!
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@ls_tech said in Hello IT Community!:
@JaredBusch I see, well in a very real since, id like to go-in System Administrator... I like the idea of setting up my own networks aswell but i think im seeing my interests lay with security specialist by cyber security field.
Well, System Admin can lead to Cyber Security, or vice versa. Security is kind of a buzz word thing right now. But the A+ is a bench cert and will lead you away from, not towards, IT, especially not going to ever help get anywhere in the direction of a system admin.
Programming is absolutely great, but as everyone is pointing out, it's a totally different career. And while all learning is good, it seems like you are focused on educational goals that are totally at odds with your career goals. If you want to get to being a system admin, you should study things that will lead you to that, rather than things that will lead you away. Nothing wrong with learning other skills, but consider it like taking up woodworking on the weekends. A+ (bench) and programming are wonderful hobbies, but as long as you are spending time learning those skills, you aren't learning things in IT that will get you to system admin.
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@ls_tech said in Hello IT Community!:
@JaredBusch I see, well in a very real since, id like to go-in System Administrator... I like the idea of setting up my own networks aswell but i think im seeing my interests lay with security specialist by cyber security field.
System Admin (when you ACTUALLY mean system admin and not just a totally different job that people call that to sound cool) is a huge field of its own and pays more than anything else in IT (until you start getting to the uber-generalist roles like architect and CIO), so "going in" at the top of the game to "work up to" a lesser job makes no sense. If Cyber Security is what you want, start there. It's vastly easier to get your foot in the door of security than system admin work right now as everyone thinks that they need a security specialist, and since no one is sure what they do, all most shops look for is some paper certs. Not a great thing for the industry, but for someone wanting to work in that area, it's really easy to get into.
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@ls_tech said in Hello IT Community!:
It 100% is hard to figure out where id like to branch off too with Informational Technology
It absolutely is, IT is a massive field. But keep in mind that the A+ is not an IT cert (and anyone that's promoting it to you is likely not actually in IT themselves) and programming isn't an IT field. So while figuring out what you want to do in IT is really, really hard, it's much harder when you are spending a lot of your time investigating ancillary fields that aren't actually IT. Both have some IT overlap, both are quite complimentary. But compare it to wanting to be a race car driver (IT), but instead of driving cars you spend your time split between volunteering in a pit crew (bench) and doing engine design with the engineers (programming.) Obviously knowing a lot about how your pit crew works, and a lot about how engines are designed, can benefit you as a driver, even knowing everything that there is about both won't elevate you from beginning to even moderate car driver. You need to actually drive the car.
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@ls_tech said in Hello IT Community!:
At this time, i like building/taking apart old computers as a hobby and don't see that as a viable carrier path
It's not. And that is the Bench career path that the A+ is for. NOt that there are zero jobs, but the jobs that there are are few and low paid. High paid bench is datacenter work and it gets decently high pay but only for the top .001% of the field. 90% or more of bench workers work in stores like Best Buy or MicroCenter and earn around minimum wage with no advancement options. Only datacenters or high risk positions like working on a nuclear ship, in the military / in a war zone, or in Antarctica are going to get normal bench workers to earn over $20/hr.
Nothing wrong with bench as a career, if that's what you love. But it's very different from IT in reality, and it has essentially no career ladder to climb. There's only two certs for the career, the A+ and it's sequel the Server+, and the market caps out around $120K/year and that's only for the absolutely top end guys in Manhattan doing insanely high end work in the world's biggest datacenters. And no, cloud bench datacenter works won't earn that because the nature of cloud makes the value of their bench work much lower (part of the magic of keeping cloud costs down.)
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@ls_tech said in Hello IT Community!:
So we got the position figured out guys System Administrator... Thing is i think most major companies are Linux/Redhat based now right?
Well, until the CentOS disaster last week, lol. Now nearly every shop is questioning if Red Hat has any future as IBM hasn't made anyone confident that they plan to keep it around. Removing CentOS is seen as a warning shot that IBM doesn't have the same plans for RHEL as we thought that they did and no one is sure what to do.
Ubuntu is not just the most deployed Linux overall, it's the most deployed OS period. RHEL/CentOS currently are still ahead in really large enterprise deployments, but the shift away has been going on for a long time and the future is looking dramatically more like it is going to be Ubuntu than RHEL as the top dog across the board. Cloud computing has heavily favoured Ubuntu as well (it's lighter and leaner.)
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Cross educated people are valuable, and IT/Dev is kind of standardly recognized. However, being a beginner in both doesn't fit that mold and can actually hurt your resume when trying to get into the field. If you highlight IT on a junior Dev position, it can look like you don't understand the position the job is for and your resume could get instantly tossed right there.
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@scottalanmiller How do you define IT?
To me a programmer is doing IT, but development and not operations. -
@Pete-S said in Hello IT Community!:
@scottalanmiller How do you define IT?
To me a programmer is doing IT, but development and not operations.One of the big things this forum has said for years is that programming - a developer - is not IT. They are coders/developers. but they aren't managing systems/networks, etc in general.
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@Dashrender said in Hello IT Community!:
@Pete-S said in Hello IT Community!:
@scottalanmiller How do you define IT?
To me a programmer is doing IT, but development and not operations.One of the big things this forum has said for years is that programming - a developer - is not IT. They are coders/developers. but they aren't managing systems/networks, etc in general.
Thanks, I think I understand but managing to me is IT Operations.
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@Pete-S said in Hello IT Community!:
@Dashrender said in Hello IT Community!:
@Pete-S said in Hello IT Community!:
@scottalanmiller How do you define IT?
To me a programmer is doing IT, but development and not operations.One of the big things this forum has said for years is that programming - a developer - is not IT. They are coders/developers. but they aren't managing systems/networks, etc in general.
Thanks, I think I understand but managing to me is IT Operations.
I agree, managing systems, etc is IT operations, but programmers/coders/developers don't typically do that.
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@flaxking said in Hello IT Community!:
Cross educated people are valuable, and IT/Dev is kind of standardly recognized. However, being a beginner in both doesn't fit that mold and can actually hurt your resume when trying to get into the field. If you highlight IT on a junior Dev position, it can look like you don't understand the position the job is for and your resume could get instantly tossed right there.
This is very true. For me, being both a developer and an IT guy has been hugely beneficial, but when I entered IT I did so without ever showing or talking about my development creds. The one helps me understand the other, but it's not part of my resume in any strong sense (it's there, but minimized.)
As a hiring manager, if you come to me and want to work in field X and show that you spent time in fields Y & Z instead of X, and don't have a really good story as to why (my dad's company needed my help and I wanted to help the family) then I'm going to assume that either you are confused and don't know any of these things, or that you are floundering going from career to career trying to find something that you like.
The worst, as a hiring manager, is getting someone in IT with a degree in Computer Science. CS is so dramatically unrelated to IT that I have to assume that either they were super confused going into college, super confused all the way through college, or spent all that time in college and only when done realized that they'd screwed up for all those years. None of those things bode well.
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@Pete-S said in Hello IT Community!:
@scottalanmiller How do you define IT?
To me a programmer is doing IT, but development and not operations.IT is business infrastructure. IT delivers solutions to a business. Development produces products.
Programmers never consider themselves IT. IT people often lump them in, but they never do so themselves. It's extremely different skill sets in most cases. To IT, programmers are "just more end users." And to programmers, IT is their support people.
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@Pete-S said in Hello IT Community!:
Thanks, I think I understand but managing to me is IT Operations.
Agreed, but IT is Operations. What IT isn't operations? Every role in IT is related to business operations. IT builds and operates the infrastructure of a business (which is why I prefer the term BI.)
Developers make tools. Tools that IT generally uses. IT are the customers of development. The business is a customer of IT.
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If you spend time with developers, they're always shocked that anyone, including IT people, think that they are IT or related to IT. Programmers are like accountants, they use computers for everything that they do, but they use them like end users. They don't oversee them, they don't manage them, they don't really care about them.
Think about it like a racing team. One team (software engineers) designs the cars. Another team (IT) races the cars. Related? Of course, codependency. Can't race without a car, no reason to design a car without a driver. But the roles are very different. They serve a common goal, for sure, but in very different ways with different deliverables.
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@scottalanmiller said in Hello IT Community!:
For me, being both a developer and an IT guy has been hugely beneficial
I bought the VB 95 book and taught myself visual basic back when it was new.
I subsequently swore I would never be a developer.
Then I spent 5 years developing bespoke software.
I'm quite happy to be not doing it anymore.
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@scottalanmiller said in Hello IT Community!:
Think about it like a racing team. One team (software engineers) designs the cars. Another team (IT) races the cars. Related? Of course, codependency. Can't race without a car, no reason to design a car without a driver. But the roles are very different. They serve a common goal, for sure, but in very different ways with different deliverables.
I buy that but then that would put a whole lot of people outside IT. For instance a network engineer or an IT architect. Both are engineers / designers. They don't manage or operate anything, they design different aspects of the car.
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@scottalanmiller said in Hello IT Community!:
@Pete-S said in Hello IT Community!:
@scottalanmiller How do you define IT?
To me a programmer is doing IT, but development and not operations.To IT, programmers are "just more end users." And to programmers, IT is their support people.
This is truth. Even for the product that the developers develop.
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@Pete-S said in Hello IT Community!:
@scottalanmiller said in Hello IT Community!:
Think about it like a racing team. One team (software engineers) designs the cars. Another team (IT) races the cars. Related? Of course, codependency. Can't race without a car, no reason to design a car without a driver. But the roles are very different. They serve a common goal, for sure, but in very different ways with different deliverables.
I buy that but then that would put a whole lot of people outside IT. For instance a network engineer or an IT architect. Both are engineers / designers. They don't manage or operate anything, they design different aspects of the car.
Actually they do. They design the solution, not the product. Race cars aren't a perfect analogy. But they plan the route, so to speak. It's still "delivering product" vs "delivering solutions".
A network engineer and a network admin are definitely different hats. But designing a network and managing a network are extremely related tasks - very clear to see that they are both IT. One is configuring the system, one is making configuration changes. They both "work on network gear for a customer/business."
A programmer writing the OS or the GUI of a firewall is clearly a totally different animal. They don't need to know who the customer is, how it will be used, or know anything about IT at all.
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@Pete-S said in Hello IT Community!:
They don't manage or operate anything, they design different aspects of the car.
Well, in the race car analogy, lol, yes. But in IT they don't.
Software Engineer: Writes the code that runs on a router or switch.
Hardware Engineer: Designs the chips and motherboards of the router or switch.
Network Engineer: Determines which routers or switches to buy, how many, and how to initially configure/deploy them.
Network Admin: Maintains and adjusts routers and switches that are already in use.The first two roles are software engineer and electrical engineer. They make products that you can sell and buy and neither would ever consider themselves IT in any way, and as IT we should naturally feel that they are very different.
The second two roles are IT. They don't make products, the configure and manage the products. The first two roles sit on the "Vendor side" of things . The second two sit on the customer side. The IT jobs are all about "using whatever products are right for our network and business needs", that's where they become IT.
