If I had the chance to follow my dreams, I would have been a paramedic, followed by either park ranger or some form of rescue team. Unfortunately, as a poor immigrant, I had to focus on pay, and paramedic pay was only about 2x minimum wage where I live, so I decided not to follow my dream. Thankfully I ended up in something else I enjoy. All that to say, you’re a hero in my book, and I’ve always thought paramedics should be paid significantly more.
Yeah, in my case, the decision to hire me had been made, but HR would of course onboard me. I got kind of blindsided as the person who asked me wasn’t the person who would be making the decision, she was basically a proxy. I asked what the range was and I got some generic “it depends”… I checked most of the boxes for skills but I don’t have a degree and for some reason that’s off-putting to large companies. Anyways yeah it didn’t feel right to be pushy so early
I’ve heard from some friends/family that are trying to break into entry level cybersecurity or programming roles and it’s extremely difficult right now, why do you think there seems to be such a high demand for skilled workers but seemingly no demand for entry level?
That’s great, can you elaborate what you mean by ops>devops? Do you support infrastructure or applications? I know devops is kind of a catch-all term now for automation, did you work on understanding cloud deployments from the POV of the servers/application or from infra?
I only ask because some of what I do is considered “devops” in the sense that I’m working on network automation, but a lot of times when I hear people discuss devops they’re talking about supporting applications
I think you’re right. Despite my bandwagon fandom, I Believe Go is more appropriate for my needs. I think a compiled language with more intuitive parallelism is what I need
Thank you, great response. Based on your opinion and another, I believe I will focus on learning Go. I mostly need the benefits of compiled languages in order to easily distribute, as well as easier parallelism, as I’ve always found that to be a pain in the ass with Python. Not sure if Threading, Concurrency, or Asyncio are the “best” way to handle threading of non CPU intensive tasks, such as sending a request and waiting for a response. But I know that it seems since Python has taken so long to attempt to allow easier bypassing of the GIL, you get a lot of decent ways of doing something, but no great ways.
yes, I’ve seen how mangled python code can be, some of the code that our automation team uses barely makes use of functions or classes, which has made working on other people’s python code a nightmare. There’s one application that is thousands of lines long that I’m pretty sure I could condense into a few hundred lines.
Perhaps that’s a drawback of people who use python, they are not typically focused on the scalability of their code until it is actually used in prod. I believe for this reason, I would prefer a language that is compiled.
Last question, is using Rust on Windows as difficult as it seems at face value? It looked like to me that for using rust, it’s preferable to use linux or mac, as they don’t require you to install a compiler. For some reason, my org requires me to submit an exception for being able to install rust on my work computer. Is there anything that is inherently risky about using Rust, or is it because once the code is compiled, it cannot be reverse engineered?
To be fair, most of the work that you have to do in a NOC is total bullshit. About 30% of the time you will be working on technical issues, and for most other people in the NOC, that would mean escalating the technical issues to me. Unfortunately, I had to earn the stripes, which means I had to work harder than everyone else, which meant doing their work as well as handling all escalations. Eventually, I was promoted to a supervisor for my efforts, but I did not want to be in a managerial role.
The real bulk of NOC work that is tiresome is the amount of alarms that are unnecessary. Managing SNMP is a nightmare, and configuring it properly involves a deep level of engineering knowledge. You can either tune the alarm board to only show certain alarms(which means parsing through many alarms to find out what is necessary and what isn’t), or you make sure that devices that are onboarded are configured locally for what SNMP traps they will alert for. Typically, the devices’ SNMP settings are not configured, so all alarms get sent to the SNMP server, and the SNMP server was never tuned to know which alarms it should show or it shouldn’t, so there are alarms which don’t really “mean anything” and alarms that “could potentially mean something if it’s correlated with this other alarm,” but most of the work is sifting through so much shit, to then have to troubleshoot a network issue for a network that was never documented in the first place.
I know I am just a random nobody to you, but I’m not satisfied with this response. If you have exhausted all options, then you need to be working on updating your resume. Your boss might not have enough juice to push this through for you, and in that case, it’s probably better that you find a new job. I don’t think you’ve exhausted all options, I think you came face to face with the reality of the corporate workforce, the reality is that most people are trying to get by with “good enough.” They are afraid of the implications of you outworking them and making them look worthless, or you automating something so much that it cuts the departmental budget. If what you’re saying is true, and you can reduce hundreds of man hours, then you should fight for your ideas. Know that fighting for your ideas doesn’t mean that you will be praised from day one. People will poke and prod, criticize, kick the tires, make excuses, etc. Stand by your work and always come back to the table.
"Okay, I heard your proposal on how to validate data integrity in the event that we become a multi-vendor environment. I understand that parsing/wrangling data can be challenging. However, in the event that our environment adopts XYZ infrastructure, I am using tried and tested industry standard modeled languages. All major vendors support this language model, so it would not require a complete re-engineering.
life is too short to work for shitty bosses man. But don’t spend time feeling sorry for yourself.
Look, I can’t advise you to do one thing or another, but I’ll give you some career advice that has worked well for me: don’t ask permission. Most of the time, the documentation is out there on how to get what you want and you can do it yourself. I won’t have my work be wasted by someone else’s laziness. And if your direct report doesn’t like the idea, tell him you want to discuss it with his boss. Make your case to someone who cares. You have every right to make use of whatever tools will help you do a better job.
What does making your case look like? It looks like making PowerPoint presentations, detailing a cost(man hours, oversight responsibilities, etc), detailing desired results, showing what impact this will have on the team, showing how long it will take to train your average joe on using these scripts, showing how much time can be saved.
Your boss might be chilling because he’s waiting out the clock on his career. You’re not. Stand by your ideas, people will stand by you. But you will have to fight for your ideas, and you need to be comfortable doing that. I’m not saying it’s not hard, it is soul crushing to get your ideas shot down. But you can push through.