Oxtail soup.

@Carnival-Boy said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:

@scottalanmiller said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:

• You must have someone doing the hiring that is dramatically more skills and experienced than the person you are hiring. This is the case for all jobs, not just IT. If the person interviewing is confused because the interviewee knows way more than them, they will just as likely think that the person is an idiot as a genius because they don't know enough to know if the person is right or wrong (seen this a lot.)

How? Are you suggesting firms should employ you to do the hiring or something? That's not normally practical.

Cost to hire a bozo and not fire him for 90 days.

Use cut rate recruiter who charges 10% = $8K
20K Salary.
7K Benefits.
40K to operations being impacted (outages, work not getting done).

Cost to hire me to interview candidates and help you go thru resumes ($250HR, for 30 hours) ~$7500

One of these looks a HELL of a lot cheaper to me....

@scottalanmiller said in Notorious Short-seller labels Ubiquiti Networks $UBNT as FRAUD:

I would have said the opposite, he seems awfully focused everywhere else. It's the public that knows he owns the Mavs and focuses there.

Honestly, I forget he owns the mavs. he's got 9 movies, dozens of television appearances (as well as a show) and has sold several tech companies (one Caching one to Akamai, Broadcast.com, something else to AOL).

A entry level ASA is ~$500 and you can smartnet it.

http://vspeakingpodcast.com Episode 55 - talking about automation and the upcoming hackathon.

@NetworkNerd I hear is leading a team!?!

@Tim_G said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:

@scottalanmiller said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:

@Carnival-Boy said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:

But I could recruit an IT support technician, even though I'd hopefully know less about IT than the candidate - because I know something about IT.

how would you do that? If the candidate knows more than you, how would you know if he was bluffing or if he was amazing? Wouldn't they seem the same?

Headhunter: "How do you fix a VM that is non-responsive in KVM."
You: "In the options, you change the setting to use left-handed keyboard and then it should start responding to ctrl+alt+delete so you can reset the virtual CPU cache."

Now if a headhunter knows nothing about IT, that may seem like an amazing answer.... maybe not, but just trying to make a point.

Why would a headhunter be playing IT trivial? A headhunter shares what the role is supposed to be, discusses benefits to make sure it will fit your salary requirements and sets up interviews.

@jmoore said in Notorious Short-seller labels Ubiquiti Networks $UBNT as FRAUD:

@scottalanmiller I do a little bit of investing. Nothing too outrageous, just to diversify some of my savings.

If you want to diversify a savings account do a couch potato mix, or if your feeling lazy get a robo to manage it for you.

Just throw it in a couch potato Index mix and call it a day? IF you really want to ignore it a robo mix (Wealthfront, etc)

https://creativemornings.com/talks/mike-monteiro--2/1

This video is something you should watch.

@scottalanmiller said in Hurricane Harvey:

@nerdydad said in Hurricane Harvey:

@dafyre said in Hurricane Harvey:

What about @StorageNinja ? Did he make it out of Houston the other day?

I would assume that he has either vacated or is bunkering down because he hasn't been active for the last day or so.

He mentioned escaping like yesterday. But I spoke to him within the last hour on IM.

Plane got delayed but I'm out and safely in Vegas (about to take a nap for an hour or so it was a late night in Jamaica beach locking down the boats). Left the wife and dog with water, beef jerky, cliff bars, and some twinkies. She's tagged as essentials personal for some stupid reason for Katy (which she will not be able to reach from midtown, and they don't have a bed for her so she's told to wait at home).

@scottalanmiller said in Negotiating for a Job You Are Leaving:

@wirestyle22 said in Negotiating for a Job You Are Leaving:

@scottalanmiller said in Negotiating for a Job You Are Leaving:

@matteo-nunziati said in Negotiating for a Job You Are Leaving:

@scottalanmiller said in Negotiating for a Job You Are Leaving:

@EddieJennings said in Negotiating for a Job You Are Leaving:

If the employee has zero desire to continue their employment at the company, would it not be a waste of everyone's time for the employee renegotiate the position? This is assuming there is no offering that would rekindle said desire.

If you truly believe that there aren't enough monies and benefits in the universe to convince you otherwise, no don't waste the time. But that's never really the situation. This is a job that you were okay with at a current salary today, but a change to that job tomorrow would make no salary good enough? While theoretically possible, it's not realistically plausible. This may happen once or twice in the whole of human history.

add one: I'm going to leave next year after a renegotiation last year. and for sure no one will pay me more. also, it is not sure I will quict with a new job agreement already in place.

anyway the main reason I've stayed another year here was not more money (even if they offer me and I accepted) but more time flexibility. I think that if money is "enough" better time is always the thing to attain.

That's why I was careful to add benefits, I agree. I've taken a 90% cut in pay over my last corporate offer to have a lot more time with the family and freedom to do what I enjoy.

Not everyone has the luxury of making that choice though. You have a very unique situation

Most everyone has the luxury, very few take it. Had you asked me before I did it if I had that luxury, I'm sure I would have said "no" too.

There are so many poorly qualified individuals at the upper levels of IT in large companies I'm pretty sure a mildly intelligent coconut would have the opportunity at the right time. Anyone with a room temperature IQ or higher can make 6 figures in IT somewhere.

@jmoore said in Notorious Short-seller labels Ubiquiti Networks $UBNT as FRAUD:

I do enjoy the fun of researching companies and buying a few shares of stocks too. I have never lost money over a years time but dont make much either. Depending on the year its like 5-15% increase. Not sure if that keeps up with inflation at the low end lol.

The problem with lots of buying and selling is that trading fee's add up (unless your doing very large orders for single stocks, in which case your taking on a LOT of risk).

@crustachio The VDX's issues with bugginess were for layer 3 bridges back in the day. The only outstanding issues I"m aware of involve Cisco wireless controller gratuitous arps. They are limited on multicast PIM-Sparse was another gotcha on the big chassis. They are pretty stable these days, and most people for "serious" BGP edge layer 3 use MLXe's anyways. The VDX is more about having a L2MP fabric for heavy east/west workloads.

@brandon220 said in Hurricane Harvey:

I'm west of Houston. I've never witnessed the amount of rain projected for us.

I was camping in West Columbia when Allison parked over us. You will survive (I had no warning, roads out got washed out).

IKE didn't rain much but the cat 3 winds destroyed the grid. We will at least be spared of that. (I was keeping a datacenter online in that. Got to work on 3 phase power in the storm outside, and had a shotgun to defend my generator).

@scottalanmiller I think people who are payed low wages sometimes internalize that that is all they are worth (and SMB managers often try to instill this "don't view yourself as valuable or increase your value because I can't pay you more!").

If your feeling this go listen to Katy Perry or something...

@scottalanmiller said in Amazon AWS Leaving Xen for KVM:

@dafyre said in Amazon AWS Leaving Xen for KVM:

@scottalanmiller said in Amazon AWS Leaving Xen for KVM:

@dafyre said in Amazon AWS Leaving Xen for KVM:

It's $25 a month 8-Core Intel / 16GB RAM / 2TB SATA / 100 mbit unmetered internet / 1 public IPv4.

That's not too bad. Of course, I'd argue that it would be way cheaper to get four people together, and get a "real" server in colocation and split it. Each of you getting way more than this.

Cheaper? Yes. Easier? Nah. I don't want 3 other people mad at me when reboot the host randomly.

It really isn't bad, and as far as I can tell, they've had amazing reliability at the facility.

I bet that they are using something like SM Blades.

Youtube Video

It's actually pretty cool.

@crustachio I thought their tier system was based on a mix of drives in a node, not a mixture of host types in the cluster. From my understanding of SCRIBE you would end up with 1/2 the IO coming from flash and 1/2 coming from NL-SAS disks (until you fill up one tier). That's going to make for interesting latency consistency, unless they added some extra intelligence onto it (So both copies will always be on one tier or another).

@scottalanmiller said in Which skills is more valuable to you? Hard skills or Soft skills?:

This, HUGELY depends on role. For some roles, I don't care at all. For others, soft is all that matters, more or less.

The problem is roles where you need more technical than soft skills, in consulting end up with that person "fronted" by a project manager etc. If that person doesn't communicate with the PM then eventually that can be a problem. If they only work with other technical team members, eventually toxic personalities cause problems. There are fewer "truly isolated" IT jobs than I think people realize.

@tirendir said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:

@dashrender The fix would have run us some 10s of thousands of dollars, because the Host was setup on RAID5 with four drives prior to my arrival. We had a triple-drive failure on that Host, and the backups they were supposedly managing never actually happened off-site, and the on-site backups it turned out were scrambled so badly by the box they were being sent to on-site, that they were completely un-readable, meaning that the only fix they could offer was essentially a complete software-side environment rebuild from the ground with an on-site exchange orphaned from it's domain in that case.

What's great about this story is it has nothing to do with a MSP, or a MSP model. In house IT can not pay attention to backups, or setup everything in RAID 0 (Working at a MSP we had to clean this up a lot, when onboarding clients).

@Dashrender said in Nine Out of Every 10 Silicon Valley Jobs Pays Less Than In 1997, Report Finds:

The stock options idea sounds good as long as the company's value keeps ratching up.

Stock options are different. Stock Options are generally given for private companies (like Uber, or Slack) and while there are secondary markets to sell these (or the company will generally buy them back at a valuation rate by a 3rd party, this is typically a LOT lower value than publically traded stock that has access to more investors and the liquidity of the HFT bots etc). Options requires some "risk" on the employee, as he can pay taxes on their current value (which is a lot lower) in advance so he doesn't have to pay the full tax value later (It's actually a bit more complicated and in theory you can do this for RSU's but given RSU's are a lot less likely to shoot up this is a lot it's 100x less common). Yes, in this case you could end up paying taxes on stock that never has a real value (the IRS always wins).

What I'm talking about are Restricted Share Units (RSU's). These are stock that is given at zero cost to the employee, and at vestment, if sold can be sold on the open market (I sell mine on E-Trade). If sold on the day that the shares are released they carry the same tax liability as regular income tax (In fact ESPP sold this way will show up on your W-2 and your 1099-C from your brokerage so if you are not careful you can end up paying double taxes).

@Dashrender said in Nine Out of Every 10 Silicon Valley Jobs Pays Less Than In 1997, Report Finds:

If it was a sure thing, why wouldn't the company just keep the stock and sell some when it needs cash.

First off for Options only a Qualified Investor (Someone with over xxx income, or xxx assets) is allowed to invest in a private company's funding rounds. Typically this is done with Venture Capital rounds (or early on with Angel Investors). If you want to see how these deals can go crazy Watch Shark Tank, and read up on what a "Ratchet Clause" is.

If it's a public company the RSU is a PROMISE of future shares assuming the employee stays. It does a few things that are better than paying straight line cash...

1. It lets them spend cash today on expansion (Again, Hypergrowth!) as Time Value of Money means a lot to a company growing triple or double digits YoY. Remember the first 1/4 of that 4 year grand isn't due until one year in.

2. If the Employee leaves the stock is absorbed back to the company. It's a form of "Golden Handcuff".

3. It costs them less than cash. Given my companies stock has gone from a low of ~43 to 149 (today's close) if I had RSU's issued at that dip (or near it) The company can basically have to pay 1/3 today to keep me because it made promises 3 years ago.

4. If you want to get uber machiavellian the company can easily track how much outstanding I have and use it to manipulate who stays and goes. The stock gets cut from 80 to 43? and we want to keep Bob? Let's give him some more shares on a two-year vestment to keep him around until it recovers. Want to get rid of Tom? Stop paying him a variable bonus, and stop re-arming RSU's. He'll leave on his own and not ding your unemployment. This actually makes it safer to "make it rain" for key rainmakers because you are not having to spend as much money, and if it turns out you don't need their skills in 4 years, cutting back on RSU's will claw back that ridiculous compensation package.

@Dashrender said in Nine Out of Every 10 Silicon Valley Jobs Pays Less Than In 1997, Report Finds:

but if it hickups or fails, the employee is boned

True, but if the alternative is 120K vs 100K + [0 to the Moon!] smart employees who can see the momentum of a company are going to bite on the roll of the dice.

@BBigford said:

slack

We just adopted it. its how 90% of my team's communication is done. Its good for teams, less good for 20K users.

/giphy is the greatest integration ever.