Posts made by scottalanmiller

@DustinB3403 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@DustinB3403 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Exciting moment.... new software product shown to the first potential customer just now. Years of work, and now the moment of truth.

Customer: Nah. . .

Likely

Let us know what the actual response is. But what software was pitched?

Vetastic. It's not public yet. Closed beta candidate for customers to see.

@IRJ said in Why IT certifications are worth more than you think...:

@scottalanmiller what's an established level to you? Is it based on experience and/or salary?

I'd say experience. If you have solid established experience, you can command the salary, if that is what matters to you. Lots of top end people take small salaries because they want other benefits. Including volunteers in many cases.

@IRJ said in Why IT certifications are worth more than you think...:

Yes I think you can put a $$ number on certifications. Some definitely mean guaranteed value.

None guarantee value. There is no cert that has a guaranteed ROI for everyone, absolutely none. Some are more likely than others, some have almost no value ever, some are almost always a loss. But you definitely can't say that they all have value, there is always someone high enough in any field that even the top cert, even every cert that there is, combined won't raise their salary one penny or open a single greater door. But every cert, every single one, has costs that need to be offset by something. Cost in money and cost in time.

Even the absolute best certs out there carry a reasonable amount of career risk. Maybe not a ton, and it feels good to earn the cert, but there is still a solid potential to actually lose money. Not that money is the only factor, hence why I said to put a dollar sign on the personal satisfaction to having the paper.

@IRJ said in Why IT certifications are worth more than you think...:

@scottalanmiller said in Why IT certifications are worth more than you think...:

@IRJ said in Why IT certifications are worth more than you think...:

If you spend $2k over let's say 5 certs, it will surely get you more than $2k return income on a yearly (repeating basis).

This is where I don't agree. On average I'd estimate that you'd lose money doing this versus either just investing the money (worst case) and/or using the money and time to focus on your career rather than a cert which is at best a proxy to your career.

It sounds obviously, $2K of certs will pay for themselves. But for the average person, this doesn't actually happen once they are past the entry level. Yes, when you are still getting your foot in the door this is going to be true almost always. But once you are established in your field, certs are really only going to be widely helpful in moving to an adjacent field.

Remember that there is a cost of lost opportunity in getting certs. They take time and money. And while they are unlikely to result in truly zero benefit, there is a lot of lost benefits that you can't measure and that people normally forget about.

That is opposite what I have seen and this may because I am working in newer specialized fields such Security and Cloud but certs are damn near required for almost any Engineering / Architect position.

If you have certs, you'll end up in shops with certs. From my own experience, the security heads on Wall St. were all uncertified. They hired people with certs, but the easiest way into those positions was just being in IT, being security minded, and taking an interest in that area of the field.

Those fields are specifically ones I had mentioned above as having cert benefits right now because of a hiring binge. But I'm guessing just like it ended in other IT areas like Windows, Networking, and Linux once people realized that the cert process was a train wreck, that it will end in the "buzz" fields, too. It's a common pattern.

@IRJ said in Why IT certifications are worth more than you think...:

I have talked about this with people before, the less experience you have the harder it is to stick out and having competencies in multiple areas is important and gives you an advantage to getting into the interview.

Absolutely. But without certs you can stick out much sooner. The more you get certs, actually, the harder I feel it is to stick out. Because everyone has certs and that's about it. Certs are a tough way to stick out. University is impossible to stick out. Not that they are bad, they just aren't a sticking out kind of thing. Every junior tech with zero networking experience or knowledge has a Cisco cert, for example. Dime a dozen.

But take that time, teach yourself unique or special or advanced skills, use the money to get equipment or experience, volunteer... there are great ways to use the time and money that really, really make you stand out.

Again, talking mid career, not first jobs. Like 3-5 years in. In my personal example, I got my first jobs without certs at all. But I used certs to at least attempt the next leap. But by my sixth year in IT, they were useless to me. I wasn't at $150K, but I was to the point where experience and skills were all that hiring managers cared about. The people with the certs weren't getting considered over me because of their certs.

For me, certs might have helped me in a two year window from year three to year five of my IT career. Before that I had none at all, after that they weren't considered valuable because I wasn't entry level enough any longer.

@IRJ said in Why IT certifications are worth more than you think...:

If you spend $2k over let's say 5 certs, it will surely get you more than $2k return income on a yearly (repeating basis).

This is where I don't agree. On average I'd estimate that you'd lose money doing this versus either just investing the money (worst case) and/or using the money and time to focus on your career rather than a cert which is at best a proxy to your career.

It sounds obviously, $2K of certs will pay for themselves. But for the average person, this doesn't actually happen once they are past the entry level. Yes, when you are still getting your foot in the door this is going to be true almost always. But once you are established in your field, certs are really only going to be widely helpful in moving to an adjacent field.

Remember that there is a cost of lost opportunity in getting certs. They take time and money. And while they are unlikely to result in truly zero benefit, there is a lot of lost benefits that you can't measure and that people normally forget about.

@IRJ said in Why IT certifications are worth more than you think...:

Most people you give advice to are on the junior level or mid level and are making under $150k a year.

true, but my goal is to show them how to break out of that. Often the ideas that get tossed around are based on the thinking that that's the cap and that that is all that there is. Often I would suspect that they are stuck there because of mindsets such as thinking that certs are the answer to show value, but once you are into that range, that really isn't the case much anymore.

I'm not espousing avoiding certs. My point all along is that the idea that certs are worth so much later in your career isn't really true on any scale.

@IRJ said in Why IT certifications are worth more than you think...:

Why go through all the effort and get nothing tangible to show for it. It's a huge mistake IMO.

Because effort to knowledge. Often the cert has zero value for someone, but costs a lot of money. Why spend money if there is no return on it (no ROI?)

Just to have the paper for yourself? Okay, but put a dollar sign on that.

@Dashrender said in MS Windows 7 SP1 Full Screen Alert:

I'm willing to accept than an R3/R5 are roughly equivalent to i3/i5, though if both options are available, the price would have to be noticeable before I would choose AMD - at least until I get some actual hands on experience.

Just got an R7 for the kids last week.

@Dashrender said in MS Windows 7 SP1 Full Screen Alert:

If you're saying the A9-9420 is better than a Celeron - WOW - that makes celeron a total and complete waste of silicon for a laptop.

My A10 I think is. Not sure about A9.

@DustinB3403 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Exciting moment.... new software product shown to the first potential customer just now. Years of work, and now the moment of truth.

Customer: Nah. . .

Likely

@Obsolesce said in Why IT certifications are worth more than you think...:

I also like to use certification paths as like a syllabus to learn technologies I'm very interested in. Like a way to help steer my career in the direction I want to take it. That has been working out well lately.

I agree, and I talk about this a lot. I think certs are an excellent way to know what is good to study. So much so, that I recommend nearly everyone do the cert paths, but only most people to actually get the certs. I regularly recommend doing all of the learning for a cert but not bothering to get the cert itself.

@Obsolesce said in Why IT certifications are worth more than you think...:

@Dashrender said in Why IT certifications are worth more than you think...:

@Obsolesce said in Why IT certifications are worth more than you think...:

@scottalanmiller said in Why IT certifications are worth more than you think...:

SME means you are the expert. Needing a cert means you are struggling to show basic competence. Those are the opposite ends of the spectrum.

I see SME's in the Microsoft spaces with backing certs all over. In fact, I don't see any Microsoft SME's that are not obtaining the relevant Microsoft certs.

If I work with something, and I've very good at it, I will go get the cert... first, it's easy, second, it's usually free, third, it shows on paper you know enough to pass the cert, which if you have taken the exam, would know it's saying a lot... i have seen first hand! It's great to see how you are doing by taking the certs.

Microsoft certs are the ones most famous for being worthless though.

Not for me, definitely not for me. Without them, I'd not have gotten as far, that is for sure.

The problem here, for you AND for me, is that we will never know how far we'd have gotten without them.

Had I kept them on my resume, would I have gotten offers that I did not otherwise? I don't think so, but I can't tell you for certain. That would be impossible.

In your case, you don't know how far you'd have gotten if you would have spent more time learning other skills or not worrying about the useless bits of the certs and instead applied yourself to learning something more useful or just looking harder for a job... the cost of lost opportunity. Yes, the opportunities that you actually got were because of the certs that you actually had. But you'll never know which jobs you missed out on because of them.

Whatever jobs / careers we end up with are always the result of whatever choices we made. But we can never know how far we'd have gone if we had done something differently. But I can tell you that people with and without certs both get to the top of the game. Certs can help, but they can also do nothing.

@Obsolesce said in Why IT certifications are worth more than you think...:

@Dashrender said in Why IT certifications are worth more than you think...:

@Obsolesce said in Why IT certifications are worth more than you think...:

@scottalanmiller said in Why IT certifications are worth more than you think...:

SME means you are the expert. Needing a cert means you are struggling to show basic competence. Those are the opposite ends of the spectrum.

I see SME's in the Microsoft spaces with backing certs all over. In fact, I don't see any Microsoft SME's that are not obtaining the relevant Microsoft certs.

If I work with something, and I've very good at it, I will go get the cert... first, it's easy, second, it's usually free, third, it shows on paper you know enough to pass the cert, which if you have taken the exam, would know it's saying a lot... i have seen first hand! It's great to see how you are doing by taking the certs.

Microsoft certs are the ones most famous for being worthless though.

Not for me, definitely not for me. Without them, I'd not have gotten as far, that is for sure.

For me they did literally nothing. Never had a job care in the least, and only did one or two jobs before I removed them from the resume. I got a few interviews because of them, but never got or took those jobs.

I did end up in a few scams because of them. Certs definitely make you a key target for more scam jobs.

@Obsolesce said in Why IT certifications are worth more than you think...:

You don't get to that point anymore, generally, through experience alone, unless you are a <1%er who gets lucky with a lot of things and is able to steer perfectly through life (such as yourself).

This isn't true. Getting there is way easier now, not harder. The world used to be so heavily focused on paper (uni, certs) but now with the age of the Internet we've really moved into a world of "results" that never existed before.

Everyone likes to say that we used to have it easy and that now it's hard. That's why everyone (Boomers, Gen X, Gen Z) all find Millenials to be annoying because they always act like it is so hard for them when, if you actually look at how people got into fields, they probably have it the easiest. They had all the same options as before, plus more. It was Boomers and Gen X who got screwed and actually had to go to uni to get access to computers and languages and knowledge. Gen Y could just Google it and teach themselves, for free, from a young age.

It's not the 1% of the lucky that get by like this. Trust me, anyone putting in the kind of effort that every good hiring manager looks for is going to excel and excel big time. That absolutely no one bothers is a totally different problem.

Find someone who actually took learning and skills seriously and didn't become wildly successful. That's your <1%. Certs or not, uni or not.

@Obsolesce said in Why IT certifications are worth more than you think...:

@scottalanmiller said in Why IT certifications are worth more than you think...:

There are a few exceptions, right now security still uses certs a tiny bit as a minimum bar, but most $300K+ security experts I guarantee don't have certs. It's still only up to the mid-range.

I think it is bad advice to tell people not to do certifications because people making $300k+ don't have certs.

Except no one gave that advice. The advice is... don't think of certs and showing any value because they don't.

@Obsolesce said in Why IT certifications are worth more than you think...:

If I work with something, and I've very good at it, I will go get the cert... first, it's easy, second, it's usually free, third, it shows on paper you know enough to pass the cert, which if you have taken the exam, would know it's saying a lot... i have seen first hand! It's great to see how you are doing by taking the certs.

Yes, exactly. But nowhere did you mention "telling others that you got the cert" or "feeling like the cert, rather than the knowledge, is actually useful." That's the difference. Sure you got the cert, so did I. But we know that it's our skills, not our cert, that has value. And a hiring manager who doesn't know that is a buffoon who isn't qualified to hire an intern.

@Dashrender said in Why IT certifications are worth more than you think...:

@Obsolesce said in Why IT certifications are worth more than you think...:

@scottalanmiller said in Why IT certifications are worth more than you think...:

SME means you are the expert. Needing a cert means you are struggling to show basic competence. Those are the opposite ends of the spectrum.

I see SME's in the Microsoft spaces with backing certs all over. In fact, I don't see any Microsoft SME's that are not obtaining the relevant Microsoft certs.

If I work with something, and I've very good at it, I will go get the cert... first, it's easy, second, it's usually free, third, it shows on paper you know enough to pass the cert, which if you have taken the exam, would know it's saying a lot... i have seen first hand! It's great to see how you are doing by taking the certs.

Microsoft certs are the ones most famous for being worthless though.

To the point where for a solid decade they had become a mark of shame. Not like that now, but their reputation is still pretty bad.

@Obsolesce said in Why IT certifications are worth more than you think...:

I see SME's in the Microsoft spaces with backing certs all over. In fact, I don't see any Microsoft SME's that are not obtaining the relevant Microsoft certs.

Well... that might be true, but no real SME is flaunting his certs. That they got them when they were juniors and later made it to SME level is very different from the cert showing that they are SMEs.

You never see any expert that didn't go to middle school. But no expert in any field is proud of having been to middle school.

@Dashrender said in deploy iPads - locked down - suggestions?:

uh, what? are you super short, like 5 ft 6 inches?

Damn, that's not THAT short.

Exciting moment.... new software product shown to the first potential customer just now. Years of work, and now the moment of truth.

@IRJ said in When should I use a Bastion Host?:

@stacksofplates said in When should I use a Bastion Host?:

@wrx7m said in When should I use a Bastion Host?:

@stacksofplates said in When should I use a Bastion Host?:

The whitelisting is probably a lot easier with Okta. But if you set up your SSH config for your profile you can use the bastion host automatically so it's probably 6 and half dozen.

Is this with Okta Advanced Server Access?

I'm not sure exactly what @IRJ is using. I just know he uses Okta. But with any zero trust whitelisting is easier because it isn't necessarily IP based.

I am not looking for a solution with this post, I just wanted to discuss in what situations do you use a bastion? Do you use if a different bastion for different environments or do you just do a single bastion and more granular control permissions with group permissions.

We use a different bastion host(s) for each use case. We often need special access to customer systems. So we isolate that to a single host per task.

@Dashrender said in MS Windows 7 SP1 Full Screen Alert:

I know that celeron are shit, i know that non i series Intel laptops are all shit, so I wouldn't even consider ordering one. I didn't know anything about AMD, so short of spending 1-2 hours researching the processors, which is ultimately what I wound up doing, I had no clue those A9's were shit!

I think that they are way better than Celerons. The hardware GPU really does make it do a good job. The A10 is plenty fast for normal business users.

@Dashrender said in MS Windows 7 SP1 Full Screen Alert:

he said - intel systems are all on backorder - would AMD be OK? I said sure - AS LONG AS THEY ARE i5 equivalents - he said, here look at these... I assumed he did his job of confirming them... and as I said i was in a crunch for time, so I didn't - and I wound up with a pile of shit.

Yeah, totally different category of processors. A12 and A10 are the tier below Ryzen 3 which is below Ryzen 5. R3 and R5 are very roughly on parity with i3 and i5. So an A9 would be like the lowest of two entire categories lower than an i5. An A6 is like another tier below that.

I use the A10 and it is great. But I'm extremely aware that it's no i5.

Youtube Video

@wrx7m said in Miscellaneous Tech News:

@scottalanmiller said in Miscellaneous Tech News:

@wrx7m said in Miscellaneous Tech News:

@scottalanmiller said in Miscellaneous Tech News:

@wrx7m said in Miscellaneous Tech News:

Google Cloud gets a new family of cheaper general-purpose compute instances

As soon as someone mentions Google Cloud in News, I assume that they are shutting it down to pursue other projects.

Yeah. I usually look at these in terms of how it moves the whole cloud industry forward (and making it less expensive).

For sure. I just keep expecting Google to forget that they do this and shut it down with little warning.

Quite possible. It has happened to many of their higher-profile "products".

Exactly, Google has conditioned me to just assume everything is going to go away.

@wrx7m said in Miscellaneous Tech News:

@scottalanmiller said in Miscellaneous Tech News:

@wrx7m said in Miscellaneous Tech News:

Google Cloud gets a new family of cheaper general-purpose compute instances

As soon as someone mentions Google Cloud in News, I assume that they are shutting it down to pursue other projects.

Yeah. I usually look at these in terms of how it moves the whole cloud industry forward (and making it less expensive).

For sure. I just keep expecting Google to forget that they do this and shut it down with little warning.

@jmoore said in What did you have for lunch or dinner today?:

@scottalanmiller that shrimp looks very tasty

It's so good. When in the DFW, hit a Rockfish location. It's like what Red Lobster should be.

@wrx7m said in Miscellaneous Tech News:

Google Cloud gets a new family of cheaper general-purpose compute instances

As soon as someone mentions Google Cloud in News, I assume that they are shutting it down to pursue other projects.

@Dashrender said in Why IT certifications are worth more than you think...:

@Emad-R said in Why IT certifications are worth more than you think...:

@Florida_man

Not really, I'm severely lacking in IT certs but I'm doing fine in Canada, Toronto nearly 100K salary range.

Just be walking portfolio, and have projects that you can demo and ace the interviews like I have a domain with a lot of my work publically available, and I tell them if they want to research me go to ML and read my posts

Also Im new to Toronto, been here for 4 months

And the vibe im getting is they want people with experiance and not certs, but hey i follow SAM ideas and concepts closely, so he said this many times when you have family or friend that has IT thing make project out of it and document it and mention it, get your hands dirty you know, but credit that. That said Im the type that go home and work on my shit and experiment with new tech nearly everyday or week at least. So YMMV

This works only if you can get past the HR goons. Which is the world that Scott and his level of experience gain him. His skill/knowledge is that that he's often being recruited, he's not sending in resume's looking for a job.. so I don't consider his experiences the norm.

I think the issue here is chicken and egg. But I was the same as everyone else. Until I started doing those things that flipped it for me. I didn't get jobs that wanted a walking portfolio and then get one. I built my career into a portfolio then started getting those jobs. Building a portfolio is something nearly any high schooler could do if they were interested and driven, it's well within almost anyone's reach (especially in the US.) It just takes effort. But pretty much the same effort you need to learn the skills in the first place. So not like wasted effort.