4 ms·

Funny timing. This Friday I talked to the HR person at work and told her I want to hire an IT person - someone to help me manage all the servers, users etc. Bas

by chime 17y ago

Funny timing. This Friday I talked to the HR person at work and told her I want to hire an IT person - someone to help me manage all the servers, users etc. Based on what I said, she did some research and made a draft job posting. It was a smörgåsbord of every technology I'd heard of in the past 10 years. I edited out a bunch of it but frankly, all I wanted it to say was "1. Must be able to learn anything when needed. 2. Must love technology and helping others." Frankly, the rest is just fluff.

Periodic 17y ago
IT is particularly like that, since there are so many different ways to do things. Is your storage iSCSI or FC? Are your server Windows or UNIX? Is your hardware Dell or Sun? The fact is that 80% of the technology is the same between them, and what matters is being able to learn new ones and adapt. People are still writing C99, but you'd be hard pressed to find someone still using Compaq hardware.
mmt 17y ago
For sysadmin postings, I like to see at least a blurb of "technologies we use," since it allows me to avoid, for example, Microsoft shops.
- grinich 17y ago
  Can you be specific in why you don't like Microsoft shops? A few years a go, I worked at a web design agency that used a ton of MS products. They produced some really top-notch work for their clients, and shipped it all on the MS stack. The impression I got was that they wanted to focus on the product and not spend time fixing ActiveRecord bugs, etc. Are there really no good MS hackers out there? Is it a cultural thing?
  - mmt 17y ago
    You do have to keep in mind that I'm talking specifically of my profession here, system administration. First and foremost, these days, MS is neither free nor open source. This is a huge factor in the kind of startups that seem to be more frequent on HN. They produced some really top-notch work for their clients, and shipped it all on the MS stack. Did they then administer it? Windows has been, traditionally, impractical (to the point of bordering on impossible) to administer remotely and in an automated fashion. Even the Mac has enough Unix under the covers that it can be integrated reasonably well into a Linux environment. There's another issue of hardware efficiency (or bloat). Using a minimal, obsolete machine as a boot server, I can install a fully functional LAMP stack "image" on at least a couple dozen machines, in parallel, in under 7 minutes. I'd be interested in hearing the comparable Microsoft numbers.
  - j_baker 17y ago
    To me, MS is practically a separate universe from everything else. That's not to say that there aren't any significant differences between the nixes, but they are at least similar in terms of the big picture. It would seem that learning to administer a Windows system would require a lot of unnecessary retraining for a nix admin. And I'm pretty sure that's doubly true of the opposite.
mapleoin 17y ago
You're concentrating on what you want, but how about what I want? I think job ads should be a bit (a lot?) more descriptive about what the technologies used are and what the employee will be working on. I've always liked job postings which instead of listing requirements list things you'll learn, though I mostly see these kinds of things advertised for free software communities rather than companies.

by chime 17y ago

Periodic 17y ago

IT is particularly like that, since there are so many different ways to do things. Is your storage iSCSI or FC? Are your server Windows or UNIX? Is your hardware Dell or Sun? The fact is that 80% of the technology is the same between them, and what matters is being able to learn new ones and adapt. People are still writing C99, but you'd be hard pressed to find someone still using Compaq hardware.

mmt 17y ago

For sysadmin postings, I like to see at least a blurb of "technologies we use," since it allows me to avoid, for example, Microsoft shops.

grinich 17y ago
Can you be specific in why you don't like Microsoft shops? A few years a go, I worked at a web design agency that used a ton of MS products. They produced some really top-notch work for their clients, and shipped it all on the MS stack. The impression I got was that they wanted to focus on the product and not spend time fixing ActiveRecord bugs, etc. Are there really no good MS hackers out there? Is it a cultural thing?
- mmt 17y ago
  You do have to keep in mind that I'm talking specifically of my profession here, system administration. First and foremost, these days, MS is neither free nor open source. This is a huge factor in the kind of startups that seem to be more frequent on HN. They produced some really top-notch work for their clients, and shipped it all on the MS stack. Did they then administer it? Windows has been, traditionally, impractical (to the point of bordering on impossible) to administer remotely and in an automated fashion. Even the Mac has enough Unix under the covers that it can be integrated reasonably well into a Linux environment. There's another issue of hardware efficiency (or bloat). Using a minimal, obsolete machine as a boot server, I can install a fully functional LAMP stack "image" on at least a couple dozen machines, in parallel, in under 7 minutes. I'd be interested in hearing the comparable Microsoft numbers.
- j_baker 17y ago
  To me, MS is practically a separate universe from everything else. That's not to say that there aren't any significant differences between the nixes, but they are at least similar in terms of the big picture. It would seem that learning to administer a Windows system would require a lot of unnecessary retraining for a nix admin. And I'm pretty sure that's doubly true of the opposite.

mapleoin 17y ago

You're concentrating on what you want, but how about what I want? I think job ads should be a bit (a lot?) more descriptive about what the technologies used are and what the employee will be working on. I've always liked job postings which instead of listing requirements list things you'll learn, though I mostly see these kinds of things advertised for free software communities rather than companies.