I.T Job - abbreviations

[Deleted member 77746]

A lot of you are forgetting (or in some cases you just don't understand) that a managerial role shouldn't require you to know every single technical know how... the concept yes but the how not so much as getting a degree doesn't mean you should be technical. I would say it's more knowing how to manage businesses correctly rather than the fundamentals of fixing things.

 

[N19h7m4r3]

Yup, the majority of networking was all theory( we actually had a lecturer that said, " you don't need to understand or know exactly how it works, just how to manage it and your team"). The cat 5 cabling was in the first few weeks after starting college.

I do wish we had more practical work, especially for software packages. In the end it ended up more business, with IT to help understand and run a department and help mediate and solve problems.

Although being educated for a managerial role is fine, I do find that missing the basics/essentials can hurt getting a nice entrance position.

Edit; For instance, they deemed knowing management accounting and the understanding concepts of ERP to be essential' but we never used ERP packages or accounting ones ( we did it all by hand. Our ERP studies was all about how to select, and evaluate the correct IS's for the correct role/need to help the business.

 

[aln]

A lot of you are forgetting (or in some cases you just don't understand) that a managerial role shouldn't require you to know every single technical know how... the concept yes but the how not so much as getting a degree doesn't mean you should be technical. I would say it's more knowing how to manage businesses correctly rather than the fundamentals of fixing things.

Funnily enough, on a huge tangent, I read an article the other day how costco doesn't hire MBAs but recruits from within and sends those people to get MBAs on the basis that you cannot effectivly manage without domain relevant experience. I suspect they're on to something.

 

[N19h7m4r3]

Funnily enough, on a huge tangent, I read an article the other day how costco doesn't hire MBAs but recruits from within and sends those people to get MBAs on the basis that you cannot effectivly manage without domain relevant experience. I suspect they're on to something.

Not just them, we were actually taught in our HRM lectures that most companies would recruit and educate internally for managerial roles. As people all ready there understand the business, people and work better. So there is a lower loss of productivity as opposed to someone new that has to learn everything about their role, department, the people, and how the teams work.

Quite a few IT companies in Ireland stated the same, when I was at a GradIreland it conference.

 

[Deleted member 77746]

Funnily enough, on a huge tangent, I read an article the other day how costco doesn't hire MBAs but recruits from within and sends those people to get MBAs on the basis that you cannot effectivly manage without domain relevant experience. I suspect they're on to something.

I also agree with this too, however most managers just delegate and in some cases extreme plausible deniability.

 

[Raumarik]

Funnily enough, on a huge tangent, I read an article the other day how costco doesn't hire MBAs but recruits from within and sends those people to get MBAs on the basis that you cannot effectivly manage without domain relevant experience. I suspect they're on to something.

Whilst I agree with it in principle having been managed by ex-IT support staff who have been promoted to management it's never as simple as that. You can train someone to be a manager, but you can't train them to manage.

My ex-support managers spent more time fiddling with IT kit than actually doing their new posts, which meant the departments went to %$£ under them. This was more than one organisation - but private and public sector. It's a rare thing to find a tech who can manage properly, likewise there are few who can project manage with any level of competence despite many having project manager qualifications.

Some skills can be learnt, others are simply natural. I'd suggest the best techs naturally have that excellent troubleshooting/initiative skill and managers simply tend to be more organisation/comms orientated. It's impossible to pigeon hole someone though and whilst Costco may recruit from within, I doubt it'll work out for a majority of those who manage to pass their MBA.

 

[JBod]

You don't get a degree so you can learn to admin AD/GPO. What's with the "IT Guys" on this forum who think the world lives and breaths MS and "Enterprise solutions"? Screw you guys, I'm installing openstack or you know, spending the couple of months or so it'd takes to roll your own.

@OP, I do find it slightly strange that you don't even know what Active Directory is, but I'll happily give you a pass on that since you might be a fellow open source bro, but come on, you seriously didn't think about googling the acronyms before posting?

Oh and just for a kicks, raise of hands who has a degree that taught them AD? Because yours was probably just as pointless.

Too many people think that "IT Support" is System Administration. I've spent the last 12 years of my life managing FreeBSD, Redhat, CentOS and now Debian infrastructure. Our key skills right now are Cisco Switches/routers and Juniper firewalls along with NGinx, HAProxy, Solr, CFEngine, Logstash, Elasticsearch, KVM virtualisation.... automation is king with Devops mindsets coming in.

But then we are at the bleeding edge of the IT technology industry and large corps or ignorant ones won't be catching up for years, I rarely look at the OCUK "Enterprise" or Linux sections as it is just so much noddy stuff.

 

[aln]

Not just them, we were actually taught in our HRM lectures that most companies would recruit and educate internally for managerial roles. As people all ready there understand the business, people and work better. So there is a lower loss of productivity as opposed to someone new that has to learn everything about their role, department, the people, and how the teams work.

It's not just that, they literally just don't get it. Anecdotal example: A bean counter cuts "free soda" at a software startup, effectivly removing a benefit from staff that are already under-rewarded. This singals the change in culture, lowers the moral of essential staff, and results in the company spends far more money finding suitable replacements. An outward observer would deem that as crazy, but it's literally a real thing.

Whilst I agree with it in principle having been managed by ex-IT support staff who have been promoted to management it's never as simple as that. You can train someone to be a manager, but you can't train them to manage.

My ex-support managers spent more time fiddling with IT kit than actually doing their new posts, which meant the departments went to %$£ under them. This was more than one organisation - but private and public sector. It's a rare thing to find a tech who can manage properly, likewise there are few who can project manage with any level of competence despite many having project manager qualifications.

Some skills can be learnt, others are simply natural. I'd suggest the best techs naturally have that excellent troubleshooting/initiative skill and managers simply tend to be more organisation/comms orientated. It's impossible to pigeon hole someone though and whilst Costco may recruit from within, I doubt it'll work out for a majority of those who manage to pass their MBA.

I just don't agree with you. Tech is filled with people who have crappy interpersonal skills or are too focused on tech because they believe that's what it is, when in reality tech is all about providing a service. We can deal with those people but it's folly to ever promote one into managment but I'd rather suggest you still need to promote the right candidates.

That said there does exist good managers who aren't domain experts but that requires actually listening to your staff, but without a proper basis I imagine it comes down to luck whether or not you trust the right subordinate, the folks entrenched under the said manager are those who probably can't move on and get a better job over the longer term.

P.S. I'm speaking from an experience where I find most managers are bad managers, thus finding the special gems is worth a lot.

 

[N19h7m4r3]

It's not just that, they literally just don't get it. Anecdotal example: A bean counter cuts "free soda" at a software startup, effectivly removing a benefit from staff that are already under-rewarded. This singals the change in culture, lowers the moral of essential staff, and results in the company spends far more money finding suitable replacements. An outward observer would deem that as crazy, but it's literally a real thing.

Actually had our HRM lecturer go on about that. The employee-employer relationships. Psychological contract, and intrinsic vs extrinsic rewards.

People are the prime asset, as we were taught.

On the note of the bean counter, it's essentially why were did management accounting. To understand where decisions come from, how to better make them and run the department.
One day I'll get to put it all to use, just need to get a nice starting position somewhere.

 

[aln]

Too many people think that "IT Support" is System Administration. I've spent the last 12 years of my life managing FreeBSD, Redhat, CentOS and now Debian infrastructure. Our key skills right now are Cisco Switches/routers and Juniper firewalls along with NGinx, HAProxy, Solr, CFEngine, Logstash, Elasticsearch, KVM virtualisation.... automation is king with Devops mindsets coming in.

But then we are at the bleeding edge of the IT technology industry and large corps or ignorant ones won't be catching up for years, I rarely look at the OCUK "Enterprise" or Linux sections as it is just so much noddy stuff.

I dare say most of what you have just mentioned does fall under the remit of a sys admin*. But when I think of a sys admin, I think about someone doing a bit more than your MS desktop cluster tech.

Funnily enough, I used to work for a now defunt webhosting providor who developed managed their hosting services via the operations team using CFEngine. I constantly argued that the people who design such a system should either fall under devs remit or be capable developers but that fell on deaf ears. Back there, the term devops didn't exist as far as I know, it's a relatively new buzzword.

I agree with you though, don't happen to work north of the border do you?

* I just realised I misunderstood/misread your first sentence. Indeed their talking about what I could call IT support and what you do is a sysadmin, but actually maybe you're a bit more than just a sysadmin or at least a higher end one.

Oh and the entirpise section of this forum is mostly advice on how to misappropriate your companies money because well, it's not good unless they're charging for it, right?.

 

[aln]

Actually had our HRM lecturer go on about that. The employee-employer relationships. Psychological contract, and intrinsic vs extrinsic rewards.

People are the prime asset, as we were taught.

On the note of the bean counter, it's essentially why were did management accounting. To understand where decisions come from, how to better make them and run the department.
One day I'll get to put it all to use, just need to get a nice starting position somewhere.

Right but that was just a single example in a sea of idiosyncrasies which you'll always struggle to understand unless you've been part of the culture. Sure there are exceptions and I wish you all the best, but from my experience most pure managers I've came into contact with have been running business on a death march cycle.

Actually it's more like zombies, the bigger companies seem to be able to live a long time without actually ever doing anything right or interesting, they just need enough money to eat the brains of everyone smaller.

 

[HangTime]

For what it's worth I've worked in IT for years and have a postgraduate diploma in an IT subject and I don't know anything about SCCM either (other than what I've just read online, obviously ).

It seems to me that people working in support roles such as the OP might need to have experience in that area (widely used admin software) but I can understand why people like N19h7m4r3 wouldn't.

 

[Nash]

IT is such a broad area that SCCM and AD is not necessarily something that is known. Would an SQL Server DBA need to know what SCCM is? Would an Oracle analyst or developer need to? No.

 

[JBod]

I dare say most of what you have just mentioned does fall under the remit of a sys admin*. But when I think of a sys admin, I think about someone doing a bit more than your MS desktop cluster tech.

Funnily enough, I used to work for a now defunt webhosting providor who developed managed their hosting services via the operations team using CFEngine. I constantly argued that the people who design such a system should either fall under devs remit or be capable developers but that fell on deaf ears. Back there, the term devops didn't exist as far as I know, it's a relatively new buzzword.

I agree with you though, don't happen to work north of the border do you?

* I just realised I misunderstood/misread your first sentence. Indeed their talking about what I could call IT support and what you do is a sysadmin, but actually maybe you're a bit more than just a sysadmin or at least a higher end one.

Oh and the entirpise section of this forum is mostly advice on how to misappropriate your companies money because well, it's not good unless they're charging for it, right?.

We are firmly London based like so many of the tech companies with an office over in San Francisco. These days it is either Cambridge or "Silicon Roundabout".. aka. Old Street (Shoreditch).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_London_Tech_City

(I work for one of the companies listed)

 

[Jackaby]

Wow, didn't expect this much response.

Also I kinda followed the first guys response, after some googling I realise It's not something I can just blag. From what I was told by a friend it was a basic I.T job in a school so I assumed the easiest of things, although she knows nothing about PC's.

Thanks for all the positive + negative responses (was expected).

<3 you guys!

EDIT: To all the people asking me to google these abbreviations, try typing in such things such as AD SCCM and GPO's, you'll probably get results for League of legends. ALSO, dreams not crushed at all.

 

[N19h7m4r3]

Wow, didn't expect this much response.

Also I kinda followed the first guys response, after some googling I realise It's not something I can just blag. From what I was told by a friend it was a basic I.T job in a school so I assumed the easiest of things, although she knows nothing about PC's.

Thanks for all the positive + negative responses (was expected).

<3 you guys!

EDIT: To all the people asking me to google these abbreviations, try typing in such things such as AD SCCM and GPO's, you'll probably get results for League of legends. ALSO, dreams not crushed at all.

Keep looking chap, we'll hopefully all find something.

 

[Deleted member 77746]

OP if you did research before the interview you might have blagged it. You could have done some research on AD / SCCM / GPOs e.t.c and note the definition down and learn them quickly.

 

[aln]

We are firmly London based like so many of the tech companies with an office over in San Francisco. These days it is either Cambridge or "Silicon Roundabout".. aka. Old Street (Shoreditch).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_London_Tech_City

(I work for one of the companies listed)

London sucks.

No but really, most interesting devops roles seem to be down there. Big meh. ;P

Keep looking chap, we'll hopefully all find something.

OP if you did research before the interview you might have blagged it. You could have done some research on AD / SCCM / GPOs e.t.c and note the definition down and learn them quickly.

If it's a pretty junior role, you need to remember we're talking about a wish list and if the pay is low, they're not going to achieve that list. No harm in applying, they can only say no. Don't lie, reading up and displaying knolwedge might be fine despite never using in anger.

 

[Deiwos]

Wow, didn't expect this much response.

Also I kinda followed the first guys response, after some googling I realise It's not something I can just blag. From what I was told by a friend it was a basic I.T job in a school so I assumed the easiest of things, although she knows nothing about PC's.

Thanks for all the positive + negative responses (was expected).

<3 you guys!

EDIT: To all the people asking me to google these abbreviations, try typing in such things such as AD SCCM and GPO's, you'll probably get results for League of legends. ALSO, dreams not crushed at all.

I'm not going to jump down your throat or anything but I googled the 3 acronyms and only the acronyms and the first results were the computing related ones, so you can't try and defend yourself with that argument.

 

[Gaijin]

A lot of you are forgetting (or in some cases you just don't understand) that a managerial role shouldn't require you to know every single technical know how... the concept yes but the how not so much as getting a degree doesn't mean you should be technical. I would say it's more knowing how to manage businesses correctly rather than the fundamentals of fixing things.

It's shades of grey though, I agree that a manager shouldn't HAVE to know the granular details of how to configure system X, but he should at least - as you said - have a reasonable conceptual overview of what is going on.

For instance, one of my current managers is totally lost without the rest of us. He actually doesn't have a clue. He can barely work a printer, holds a radio like a telephone and I have no idea how he got the job. He can't function with suppliers unless half the team is sitting in the room.

The degree of "IT Management" is a paradox to me. Does anyone taking that course think that they are going to walk out of uni into ANY role that has leadership?

Also, the reason AD etc isn't covered in a lot of uni courses, is that they are largely vendor agnostic for bias (or lack of) as well as cost reasons. I don't think it is necessarily a good thing, but then what do you have? A uni degree where you can choose your vendors and languages. Can see that getting messy.