Prepping for an interview on Friday hopefully allowing me to get away from where I work now!

Just finishing off agreeing and signing a new job! Exciting news

Watching the British Inbetweeners, drinking Cobra, looking forward to asking GFs dad tomorrow over dinner and beers for permission to propose to his daughter. Fun fun.

Hi folks,

This position is based in London, Camden, UK. If anybody in UK/London knows anybody that could be interested feel free to have them message me. Probably good for somebody interested in training/law, or a recent graduate within law.

Location – Camden Town, London. Salary, £24k pre probation, £26k post probation. 20 days holiday plus bank holidays. Hours: 9am - 5:30pm with 1 hour lunch.

Company

We are a London based legal technology company specialising in the development and distribution of digital research platforms involving case law and legislation. Our partners and clients include law professionals in over 50 countries, including law firms, governments and academic institutions. With the recent release of a brand-new product we are looking for talented individuals to join our company at a very exciting time.

The Role

As a Training Executive you are a high achiever, with a passion for training, technology and the law and have joined our team based in Camden Town, London.

Your role will primarily focus on, but not be limited to:

• Organising, improving and performing customer training
• Planning and running online sessions for existing and potential customers
• Working and improving the customer helpdesk and becoming an expert on our platforms

Training is performed online and in person therefore national and international travel is required.

We track performance through a range of KPIs including, but not limited to:

• Customer feedback
• Helpdesk response time
• The volume of training booked and performed

This role is office based in Camden Town, Monday to Friday, 9am – 5:30pm with flexibility and travel required.

Key Attributes

Candidates should be:
• Confident in dealing and liaising with a variety of customers
• A strong and confident presenter
• Able to meet and exceed targets
• Able to work well within a tight knit team
• Efficient with their time management skills
• Able to communicate professionally, both written and verbally
• Able and eager to learn
• Familiar with MS Office

Any questions, feel free...

Best,
Jim

For real, if 55k is similar to what you make now, and the benefits are the same, but the drive is 4x longer, and you don't need to move jobs... Pass. Nope. Not for you. Working g for an MSP sucks imo.

"Dear xyz,
Thank you for the offer of 55k. I appreciate your offer but must decline. I am comfortable in my current role; to entice me to leave a comfortable job with a far longer commute I would need a fair increase in wages and benefits. I'd reconsider for 65k and 10% bonus, private healthcare and life insurance, and x days leave per year.

I'd be very excited to work with you but the finances must be financially viable. Sadly, 55k does not meet that requirement for me.

If you can reconsider I'd look forward to agreeing a contract. Otherwise I wish you luck in your search."

Boom.

Applied to a job earlier today and just had an email confirming an interview. The interview details say the format is an online meeting where I sit in front of a webcam and answer automated questions which may be reviewed later... and is scheduled for 2h 40m minimum... PASS... too impersonal to me.

From those, option 2.

Laughing my ass off at red tape. Get a project. Reach out to specific vendors and get get the pricing and options. List four good options, with a #1 recommendation suitable for us. Get together with the C levels, and get it shot down as 'C' levels want to verify what we actually need from the options (which I did already). C levels spend several weeks in meetings, internally, externally... and come back with the exact same #1 recommendation. Pfft.

I've only worked SMB. I'd like to try Enterprise some day but worry everything would be too impersonal. With SMB, some of them have been like a family. Real nice. I've worked some that were truly nasty though - I'd go SMB, but move until the right SMB is found.

Wow. Poor. Feel sorry for anybody applying.
"I want a performer! Not someone watching the clock!" - that says it all. Bad first impression!

^ it goes with saying they no doubt want somebody to work above their normal hours too all the time, be always contactable, never take holiday and be willing to only be paid peanuts.

Possibly something like Arctic Wolf.

A lot has changed within the company I work for, I find the daily grind now to be frustrating and stressful with a new boss, with myself now having little to no authority to get anything done, despite requirements to make work progress. Other than finding a new job, does anybody have any ideas on how to cope, or ways to get work items done? I have tried discussing this to no avail with my new boss.

One example. I am responsible for the IT infrastructure within around 30 offices globally. We have them all over. Not driving distance. We only have IT people in around 5 of the offices, leaving 25 unmanaged. Yet, these offices still have have infrastructure requirements. The people in the office are not IT people and do not do IT work, they are busy and refuse. Its infrequent, but we have items like the below from time to time:

• ISP line speed is not what is expected or paid for. Appears to be 30% lower. ISP requires somebody hook up directly to the link and perform iPerf testing showing bandwidth issues to continue giving us help as their kit is configured correctly. Local people cannot help as they are not in IT and busy. I am not being given budget to outsource to a local IT provider or contractor to get them to do the testing. I cannot travel there myself, think UK -> Australia. I cannot hire a junior IT person in every office. How on earth can I get items like this accomplished? Despite these issues, i'm told 'make it happen'.

Similarly to the above, I have offices where we need switches installed to a second WAN link to provide local HA. The company does not want downtime in the office, yet, I cannot get anybody to install and configure the equipment, the local staff cant, and I cannot thousands of kilometers away from the room and hardware.

Another example would be fixing cabling. The cabling is a mess from M&A, we purchased companies that have terrible cabling in the IT comm areas. Yet, I won't be given budget to get professional services in to fix the cabling properly. For the smaller sites, sure, I can do the work myself. But, the company are not willing to allow travel. As before, its not the local peoples jobs. Plus, given the sites demand no downtime, this needs to be weekend or evening only work.

I guess, i'm not sure what I am really asking, just venting. Its so disappointing to be told to accomplish something with little to no available paths. We used to have Splice to do the remote work but this was taken away.

I feel its time to move on. How can I possibly manage this stuff without resources?

@scottalanmiller said in Marketing - Video Editing Storage:

@Jimmy9008 said in Marketing - Video Editing Storage:

This looks like another option, although, it does just look like a NAS to me, just through a specific 'media' vendor.

https://www.studionetworksolutions.com/

That's a scam. I use those guys about once a week as an example of "market vertical scams." I've had customers get seriously screwed over by them.

Never buy "industry" IT equipment, it's always a scam. IT is IT, anything industry specific is another way of saying "not good enough to pass IT muster, so we try to bypass IT by claiming it's specifically made for an industry."

They literally make the worst storage you could possibly imagine.

Could you tell me more about this? I am not sure I fully understand but would like to. Is the thought that because its a "NAS for Editors" and not just a "NAS" that its not good, otherwise it would be a NAS for everybody regardless of need?

@scottalanmiller said in Marketing - Video Editing Storage:

@Jimmy9008 said in Marketing - Video Editing Storage:

@Obsolesce said in Marketing - Video Editing Storage:

@Jimmy9008 said in Marketing - Video Editing Storage:

Originally, I was looking at proposing a 20 - 30 TB NAS populated with SSDs in the local office, with 10 Gbps NIC. This would provide high speed local access over the LAN to 6 marketing users.

If their PCs accessing a NAS at 1-10Gbps isn't good enough because their primary concern is speed, why would they push for way slower cloud storage, assuming no on-prem cache?

1 - 10 Gbps would be more than fine. That is what I proposed. But, the CIO is asking that the storage is Cloud only. Leading to this issue where the editing workstations are in office and the storage is remote.

I would connect the CIO with the users and ask if waiting hours or days to work on a file is good enough. Let the CIO take that up with users.

The CIO is pretty much of the opinion that the user should plan better and download files they need for editing whilst working on something else.

This looks like another option, although, it does just look like a NAS to me, just through a specific 'media' vendor.

https://www.studionetworksolutions.com/

@Dashrender said in Marketing - Video Editing Storage:

Sounds like all the bases have been covered.

It's unrealistic to work with files of that size (even 10 GB files are unrealistic to work on from cloud).

As Pete said - show the owners the time it takes to move the data, then show them the cost of a potential VDI solution with hosted storage - your solution of a NAS will quickly be back on the table with backups to cloud.

I have been doing some research and am interested in this company, they seem to have both storage in cloud and editing via browser. Any thoughts on this, or better alternatives?

https://www.blackbird.video/

Does anybody know if Adobe has a similar entirely cloud solution for video editing? When I go to their site I find it a mess and confusing.

@scottalanmiller said in Marketing - Video Editing Storage:

@IRJ said in Marketing - Video Editing Storage:

What kind of marketing department is this? A movie firm? It seems insane to have video files average 10-20gb. Even high budget commercials are probably only that size.. Is this a bunch of templates or something?

Check your Olympus EM-1 MK2 for video, it'll produce that amount fast (but breaks up the files, but just imagine that it kept them as a single file like newer cameras do.)

If you are shooting with a Fuji XH2 or similar, you'll produce 20GB files every few minutes.

I'm just on a GoPro 11 and all my files are 10GB because that's its file limit. If the GoPro kept the files together, I'd routinely have 20GB - 40GB files. And that's low bit rate compared to serious cameras. Imagine if you shot on Panasonic GH6 or better, especially if you go to 6K or 8K! And I'm using H.265 which is tiny. If you shot on ProRes, which is what most do, the file sizes will explode quickly. 100GB or more would be nothing.

I've not seen the files first hand, am just told these are the sizes by that team. They are telling me the cameras will do 40 minutes to 1 hour recordings of presentations and stuff like that at 4k and 8k, and they are usually 300 GB - 400 GB.

@Obsolesce said in Marketing - Video Editing Storage:

@Jimmy9008 said in Marketing - Video Editing Storage:

Originally, I was looking at proposing a 20 - 30 TB NAS populated with SSDs in the local office, with 10 Gbps NIC. This would provide high speed local access over the LAN to 6 marketing users.

If their PCs accessing a NAS at 1-10Gbps isn't good enough because their primary concern is speed, why would they push for way slower cloud storage, assuming no on-prem cache?

1 - 10 Gbps would be more than fine. That is what I proposed. But, the CIO is asking that the storage is Cloud only. Leading to this issue where the editing workstations are in office and the storage is remote.

Hi all,

I am being asked to find a storage solution for our video editing department. They use various Adobe tools on Mac clients.

They have around 40TB of files they use, with the largest files being RAW files of 300 GB - 400 GB. Average file sizes are 10 GB - 20 GB.

1/2 of this is archive and can be stored on cloud storage for pull down should they require again. Leaving around 20TB live data and 20TB in archive.

Originally, I was looking at proposing a 20 - 30 TB NAS populated with SSDs in the local office, with 10 Gbps NIC. This would provide high speed local access over the LAN to 6 marketing users.

Marketing said speed was the main concern. Accessing the large files is currently slow causing many delays. They have so far been sharing USB 3.0 devices between each other, without backups.

Our CIO is now pushing for cloud only solutions for the storage where marketing can check in/out the files they need, killing my NAS idea. I have concerns on this but am open, so would like some advice. What have you used or what would you suggest to use to provide this?

I am concerned that when an editor wants to do something with the 300 GB file, that will have to pull down from the cloud, bringing our WAN link to a crawl until the download finishes. Then, once they have finished editing, they have to upload the end product, again causing bandwidth issues. This is exacerbated shoudl multiple editors be pulling multiple files at the same time. Even at 500 Mbps with no overhead that is around 1.5h of time to sit and wait for a 300 GB file whilst everybody else is affected on the same WAN link.

I assume the'video editing' cloud storage providers are like OneDrive or DropBox, where each machine has a local cache so do not have to pull from cloud each time. But, wouldnt that mean that our video editing workstations all need to have a 20 TB local drive to store this local cache?

Kind of all over the place on this one, any ideas folks?

@scottalanmiller said in SAMIT: Should You Provide Equipment for Work from Home Staff?:

@Jimmy9008 said in SAMIT: Should You Provide Equipment for Work from Home Staff?:

but if its for work, its must be procured by work.

Just to earn less money? What's your goal in that statement? Why lower your value only for the sake of doing so?

Are their cases where it makes sense, sure. But are there cases where it makes little sense? Yes, many.

And I ask again... if you feel that way about computers, why not Internet access, power, or even the house you are in? Where do you draw the line and why?

It feels like cutting off your nose to spite your face. It feels like you see your employer as the enemy and you want to hurt them. While that might be the case, instead of taking an antagonistic approach, look for an employer you like and who likes you. Your employment should be a positive thing for both parties, both working together, not against each other.

Let’s be real here. The argument you make is BS. If a business doesn’t have to buy a laptop, do you really think that money is going to your salary? Talk about head in the sand. That will go straight to investors or somewhere else. The decision isn’t ‘buy Scott a laptop or pay him 2k more’. You’ll never see that 2k.