Best posts made by flaxking

Today I found out that I wasn't making it to the next round of interviews for a sysadmin position at GitLab. However, this has fueled me into starting an active job search. However, I'm not quite sure how to start it.

I'm not planning on moving, so the position would have to be a remote one. I'm looking for an IT or a Development job, or some combination of the two.

Is LinkedIn actually a useful platform? I deleted my account when MS bought it, but I didn't feel like I got any benefit from it at the time.

I see quite a few remote jobs that I think will just accept US applicants but they don't clarify in the posting. Is it a better use of my time to mostly focus on remote jobs based in Canada? (unless I know that the company is international)

I also know that some jobs will accept remote workers if they seem like a good fit, but don't advertise the job as a remote position. Is it worth my time to be looking at and applying for jobs that might not even allow working remotely?

If you're working within Excel, then Python is not what you're looking for.
If you're manipulating files, preferably csv files, then Python is your friend.

I bet you there's a nice module that makes it easy to work with csv files, and then saving into a csv file is pretty easy.

My biggest annoyance so far is that LinkedIn itself shows me jobs for stuff like Walmart Associate

@multiOTP Welcome to the community!

@wrx7m said in Starting a job search:

@flaxking said in Starting a job search:

My biggest annoyance so far is that LinkedIn itself shows me jobs for stuff like Walmart Associate

Do you have the word "associate" in your resume?

Lol, well I do, I guess I should have gone for the full MCSE after all. But it seems to me that there are so few LinkedIn job postings in a 200km radius of my location that they just list everything.

@multiotp said in RDP - Whitelist IP address with 2 step authentication?:

Hello,
What do you mean exactly by " in SMB, people would find it annoying to have to get a code every time" ?
Any proposal welcome, and we will adapt our Credential Provider (https://github.com/multiOTP/multiOTPCredentialProvider)
Regards,
Andre

What I mean by that is, with a small business that does not have it's own IT staff, the business owner often is the person who determines the security that is used based on their own personal availability tolerance. If they find it too annoying (aka availability/accessibility is too low) to enter in a code, they will simply tell a MSP they don't want that. The MSP has to either oblige, convince them otherwise, or drop them as a client.

Small businesses with IT staff runs into a pretty similar situation. Might actually be worse because there is not a peer-to-peer relationship between IT staff and owner, and the alternative is for the IT staff to quit.

@wwalker817 Do you ever get any opportunities that are open to Canadian candidates?

I think I will make a proposal, thanks for joining the community and reaching out @multiOTP

@wwalker817 Just saw your post on my other thread, I will be in touch

I can see how SMB IT can get sucked into this. When having a conversation with a VAR they specifically try to direct the conversation to areas they suspect you are less knowageable in and try to make you feel inadequate. Their sales pitch grinds to a halt when you prove you know more about it than their sales pitch covers.

In my job I do software development, as well as IT tasks such as the designing of environments and the occasional administration.

I found it easiest to list myself as a IT/Software Engineer. However Engineer is a protected title in Canada. Do I list myself as sysadmin/software developer, or is there a better alternative?

I'm kind of torn about the whole internal SMB IT thing. The problem is there are a lot of bad MSPs out there, and most owners don't know how to get a good MSP. I think internal IT is better than a bad MSP.

However, once a SMB is gotten into ship shape, the workload for an SMB tech is so small. I got into development because there was so little of my time taken up but technical IT related tasks. I tried getting into improving business workflow, but that didn't get very far because I wasn't trusted as more than a tech.

For internal SMB IT to really be worth it, IT has to be deeply involved in the business side of things. There's just not enough straight technical work.

Many of the sysadmin jobs I've been applying for want repo links. So when you have a family, and a job where sometimes you have to work 100 hour weeks - and that doesn't let you open source your configuration as code, you have to pick your battles.

And then there's the homework assignments, one job had me submit an architecture design even before I had an interview with the recruiter.

Somewhere in my email I have a PDF about deploying printers via Powershell. My plan was if I ever wanted to create something in salt to deploy printers I would look at that first.

I definitely miss my 1-man show job. I entered as a junior tech, and left as a intermediate tech. Then I came back and left again as senior tech (though I didn't realize it yet). I'd go back again if I could.

Now I work on a 6 person team and do way more overtime hours. At the 1-man IT job, when I complained about after hours 'emergencies' I was able to get a new design approved that made them not emergencies any more.

A big plus to the 1-man show was having the time to really dive into things and learn them thoroughly.

@scottalanmiller This makes me miss my old job. I was working on replacing all of our GPOs with Salt and printer deployment was coming up. However, as a solo SMB IT employee, I had an insane amount of time on my hands.

@JaredBusch said in How do you guys handle counter offers?:

You are in not in a position of massive importance to the employer. That is only in your head.

^^^ This for sure. Will things not run as smoothly? Likely. Will shit hit the fan? Possibly. But businesses of this size tend to be pretty resilient. And while your way might have been better, typically someone can step in and get them going when something happens, even if it means just swapping out a most of the previous setup.

@wrx7m said in Anyone Attempting Deploying Printers through SaltStack?:

@black3dynamite said in Anyone Attempting Deploying Printers through SaltStack?:

@wrx7m said in Anyone Attempting Deploying Printers through SaltStack?:

@flaxking said in Anyone Attempting Deploying Printers through SaltStack?:

@scottalanmiller This makes me miss my old job. I was working on replacing all of our GPOs with Salt and printer deployment was coming up. However, as a solo SMB IT employee, I had an insane amount of time on my hands.

I am a solo SMB employee and have no time on my hands. We just hired about 10 people in the last 4 weeks and 2 start in a week and 2 more possibly the week after. No real time to do anything more than setup new employees.

HR and Workday handles most of the onboarding and the rest is automated.

I am talking about account creation and computer setup, installation etc.

I can't think of any business case for why IT has to handle account setup. Most of the time it's just a technology deficiency as to why HR doesn't have the ability to do so.

98% of the time computer setup and software installation can be completely automated. Even when the software support says it can't. So you might be dealing with the 2%, or you could be bogged down with so much technical debt that you haven't been able to dedicate the cycle required in order to automate

Ok, well I might be starting to see a bit.

So with R2F, essentially there are just more job opportunities, even if temporary. And even if an employee jumps from 6 month job to 6 month job, that still means that there is less risk in quitting your job.

There's an RDS farm at work where the time zone is set to where the server is physically, so depending on which server you happen to hit, the time displayed is different. Doesn't make any sense to me.