Job for IT generalist ...

... seeking advice from most highly respected commentards ... please indulge me ... I'm an IT generalist. I know a bit of everything - I can behave appropriately up to Cxx level both internally and with clients, and I'm happy to crawl under a desk to plug in network cables. I know a little bit about how nearly …

[Vic]

Re: In response to your question

[Ding!]

Next patient, please!

Send in another victim

Of Industrial Disease!

Vic.

[Christian Berger]

So what _can_ you do?

I'm sorry, but you are really not selling yourself well here. From what it reads like, you can barely program.

If you want a high paying technical job, you need to be able to quickly learn about new things. To be able to do that you need to already have some knowledge about the world outside. There's plenty of people able to install Exchange, but those will likely be outsourced as running Exchange yourself provides little advantage over some cloud service.

[the spectacularly refined chap]

Re: So what _can_ you do?

I'm sorry, but you are really not selling yourself well here. From what it reads like, you can barely program.

I first read this on Friday and I was thinking pretty much the same thing. There's plenty of soft claims here but very little demonstrable, and things like that C# remark don't impress me but give me immediate cause for concern. What was this mistake? How did you know it was a mistake and not something that was simply incomplete? Is it possible things had been arranged like that for a reason.

Of course you are not going to post your entire CV here but I want to see evidence. Qualifications, certificates? Work history? Saying you can program in twenty different languages with nothing to back that up will get your CV deleted with no further thought. Two or three and you might have bought yourself a few more seconds consideration. Then I might start asking for evidence.

So you can program? Where's the two years experience as a programmer - no your degree doesn't count, but I'll accept a 10,000 line hobby project as alternate evidence. That takes a hell of a lot longer than two days to compose but anything less and you're not properly seasoned.

As it stands based on the limited information available I doubt I'd consider you even for a junior position. Instinctively you sound to me not as a generalist but as a pre-specialist, and trust me there is never any shortage of those applying for pretty much any job we advertise. That is to say you've got a minimal broad-brush knowledge and think you know the business when in reality you've yet to learn how much more you need to learn. The true generalists I know generally went through a specialist period, gaining advanced skills in one area and the ability to demonstrate them in a concrete manner, before slowly branching out again after they had gained a little mid-level experience.

Yes, I know my tone sounds harsh but it is reality. I focus you in to two basic options: Firstly take a graduate recruitment programme for one of the multinationals if you are eligible for those. Those will preserve you generality to at least some degree but you may not have as much choice in your initial career path as you would like. The second is to find a specialism and focus on that for two or three years. Once you have a concrete skill under your belt employers are more willing you invest in you, expanding your skill base into additional areas and allowing you to branch out into a more general role.

[Getriebe]

Re: So what _can_ you do?

I back up what the spectacularly refined chap says. Any CV has to have solid evidence of what you have achieved or done - must explain responsibilities and have numerical evidence. A list of things you know is useless

HR reject CVs if there is no sign of achievement before they send them to me as they know they will be binned.

[Pete 2]

Bridge the gap

There is an almighty gap between management and technical staff. In large companies the rift can be so big that the two camps have little in the way of communication, no trust or even a basic understanding of what the other guys do.

That's where you come in. As someone with a foot on either side of the divide, you can act as a translator between tech-speak and management-speak, arbitrate technical requirements that are clearly impractical, explain management strategies that appear nonsensical and be each side's "trusted friend and ally" in the common battle to get stuff done.

One day you might be explaining in business terms to the CIO why he/she/it needs to spend £100k on a new storage array and the next you could be telling the developers why their pet project is doomed to fail and they need to focus on testing the new products instead.

The big problem is that most companies have their heads inserted so far ... , that they can't recognise the need for such a person as yourself. Both sides are firmly convinced that they are right, if only "those idiots could see what we are doing" and neither side has any respect for the other's point of view. You need an "in" which would probably only come from a (social) networking contact, rather than through an agency - which would be blind to this sort of role. You also need a direct (if "dotted") line to a C-level person, so I suggest you take up golf, too.

As for a job title: Recto-Cranial Removal Specialist might work.

[ukgnome]

Reputation

It's a difficult one, but I found doing the contractor rounds very good for building my reputation. What's that company X, can I sort out your Citrix gateway?......Yeah of course I can.....and hope for the best.

Because of this foolhardy way I have applied myself I have found that I often get (got) contracts that were a bit above my mixed skill set. Although I have for the past two years started a full time in-house role. I don't get as much cash, but at least I know I can feed my family and stuff. I guess it's about money, and how much you want.

[Jim 59]

Generalist

Project management is a strong possibility. Or if you prefer to remain hands-on, seek work in a specific area and obtain specialist knowledge, rather than pure IT. Eg work for a silicon chip manufacturer on their CAD systems, or a mobile phone company and get skills in mobile telephony, or work for a car company and move toward engine management or whatever they do. The nearer you get to pure IT, the lower the salaries are.

Of the many skills you mention, your networking knowledge is likely to be most profitable. Choose a job that focusses on that area.

Cheers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, there has been some good advice on this forum.

As a fifty-something specialist/generalist myself, I fully appreciate how difficult it is navigating through a hiring economy obsessed with automated CV filtering, bullet lists and spotted unicorn recruitment.

But first, let me applaud some highly relevant material:

1) Thanks to ewozza who said you should present yourself as a specialist with a broad range of skills. DONE

2) Thanks to Don Jefe and others who said be true to yourself and find the kind of jobs you love to do.

YES !

3) Thanks to Pete 2 for providing a snazzy new skill-set to put on the resume.

MAYBE NOT! BUT I LOVED IT!

And although a bit off topic (well not really) read this article. It explores the differences between knowlege, wisdom and insight (experience is missing, but I couldn't find that link):

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/what-are-the-differences-between-knowledge-wisdom-and-insight.html

To apply a fairly simple example:

Knowledge is knowing what TCP-IP and the OSI layers actually are

Experience is spotting and replacing the frayed network cable that is helping pollute the network.

Wisdom is understanding how that frayed cable is just one small part of bigger problems in the client's infrastructure.

Insight is being able to succesfully design, recommend, market and sell a new network architecture and solution to C-level management.

All of the above resources are needed in our industry but some are very scarce. Figure out which one(s) the employer/customer needs and then pitch it. People with solid, broad generalized knowledge and lots of experience tend to rate highly on the wisdom / insight scale.

With 5000+ IT specialities out there, no one person can even list them all (let alone master them!). But anyone with hard-won experience, some balls and unafraid of hard work can hack through the jungle and find a job, even if it sucks sometimes.

Meeting the right people, marketing yourself and convincing contacts that you will provide better results than unicorn hunters and their recently hired unicorns is important. Remember that unicorn herding (PM or other technical management) is another useful skill, often overlooked.

You really need to go out there and sell yourself as a problem solver (not as a potential problem) and remember that YOU will have to make it happen. Mainstream hiring systems are broken and beyond all hope of repair. You must bypass them and find the people who are actually seeking value, as opposed to a risk-free existence.

Good luck!

[Vic]

I suspect the problem is not in your skillset, but in how you are selling it...

There's an old adage "A wise man knows what he does not know". Given the size of our industry these days, we're all specialists of some sort - one man simply can't hold much information about everything.

So when someone claims to be a generalist, that tends to come across as someone who hasn't yet realised just how much there is to know - and that's the point you are politely shown the exit.

My advice would be to do some head-scratching and work out where your forte really is - go through your last few jobs and write down five achievements and five responsibilities you had for each. Now look for correlation between them - and there's your speciality. That's what you do.

Sell that skill, then when asked if you have anything else, come up with a few bonus skills - that makes you look like a specialist who has read around the subject, rather than someone who hasn't bothered to learn anything properly. But the skillset you're selling is exactly the same...

Vic.

[0laf]

Information Security for you.

That was me. Have done programming, networking, support, web design, databases and lots of other odd things. Never to a degree to become an expert and never with any certs since no one pays the generalist to become a specialist.

Like you I've very good at problems solving and leading the experts, who can be blinkered, to come to good solutions.

I fell into Information Security / Information Assurance 10yr ago and it's a good fit for someone who knows a bit about everything and can learn about anything quickly. You need to be generally aware because the problems come from all angles on all subjects yet you can never be an expert in them all.

Not a lot of money until you have experience but if you can get CISSP or CLAS then plenty of well paid consultancy.

You might want to bone up on ISO27000, CISSP domains, PCI DSS, BASIL2, PSN.

[Anonymous Coward]

You sound like a Solution Architect to me; you just don't know it. Look at job specs for SA roles and see whether with a little re-writing of your CV, it could be applicable to the role. Most SA work is between the techies and the business; understand enough of the problem and enough of the potential solutions to marry them up. Many SA roles are more like technical PM. All the co-ordination activities without the hideous tedium of maintaining an MS Project file.

[Getriebe]

Money and people

" I can behave appropriately up to Cxx level both internally and with clients, and I'm happy to crawl under a desk to plug in network cables"

Can't do both. If you have the mind that lets you talk to a CEO of some multi-million turnover company you will not delight in scrubbing under a desk.

I am a waster of a manager with a magnificent superiority complex that most of you think you would hate. I also wheel my salary home in a wheelbarrow.

How come? - money and people. The two most difficult items to handle in any project It, bringing a car engine to market, or designing a thing. All of which I have done or been associated with.

If you can summarize a complex problem in the terms of your audience, relate it to their wants and also provide ££ based choices you can talk to a CEx, but those features are the opposite of sitting down trying to fix a buggy program.

I know enough about JSON, C#, IP routing, database design and so on that I can have a decent discussion with the people perpetrating the work, but more importantly I can translate that into something that people way above me or at a customer can understand just enough for them to make a decision which mostly I have made for them.

If you can't do that, stick to some aspect of computing but be fucking good at what you do - the best in your group. I do not employ generalists, only people highly skilled in their own area, but they can also communicate to their peers. They form ad hoc teams to build systems and solve problems, but unless you are damn good you can't do the work fast enough.

[Anonymous Coward]

Similar Boat

Sounds like i'm in a similar boat to the OP. I've been a sysadmin for 3 years but now i'm sodding it off to go study Mechanical Engineering instead.

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep an eye out for specialized roles that you can fill. Because you are a generalist, you will be able to apply to many of these types of positions.

One anecdote here: I had been playing with OpenStack for awhile at a previous job. I decided to try moving on due to some nasty internal politics. One of the interviews I got due to OpenStack was at a company that was a big EMC shop and a key qualifying factor was EMC experience. I had played around with a CX300 enough to be able to put it on my resume but I was certainly no guru (and told all the interviewers as much).

After a couple weeks of interviews I got the job which was a 50% increase in salary -- but the role ended up being a NetApp storage architect.

So my advice is to be flexible and tailor your resume to the particular position you are applying for. Many of these "specialist" positions are hard to fill so you have more of a shot than you think.

[Bene Pendentes]

Very many thanks!

I knew you folks wouldn't let me down! One of you suggested that if I really thought about it I'd know what to do - indeed, I did! I'm a long time resident of El Reg, and familiar with the wisdom of the commentarderate, so I created a new account, made a few posts to qualify as a topic starter (no anons allowed, apparently) and here we are. A most useful and entertaining thread, and I thank you all.

I'm not currently low paid at the moment - my compo is probably not far from $100k (not that it goes far in the UK) - but I work for one of those companies whose 'transformation' is just a synonym for making the old guard redundant and filling the ranks with offshore noobs, many of whom are not all that great, as we are too cheap to pay for any of the many offshore guys and girls who are any good.

The impending ax, and the low pay of the apparently available jobs, is what made me ask the question - do I have to go for a low pay role and start working my way back up again, or could I somehow transfer my own experience which, as you can see, is fairly unspecific - and definitely uncertified - to a rewarding role without taking a big pay cut?

Project management has been confirmed to me as an option, though I think the Scrum Master roles look like a more interesting approach here, I will look further into agile certification, many thanks to those of you who have opened my eyes to this path.

Perhaps, as some of you very kindly suggested, I am underselling myself; I just don't feel comfortable about saying, as one of you did, "I know a LOT about everything". It's one thing when your own managers or sales team introduce you to the client as "the smartest person in the room" - and it's nice when colleagues invent vaguely flattering nicknames. But I just cannot bring myself to really, well, I would call it bragging. And it's not completely fair, either. For instance, in terms of claiming credit for things I have done, these are almost all as part of a team. I'm pretty sure my team would have figured out why an FTP transfer mysteriously stopped working when they switched on encryption - but it was me who first realized an intervening smart firewall was no longer able to snoop on the PORT command. How much time / money have I saved over several such instances? I really can't say.

I was once client-facing technical lead on a team on a major production performance problem for a moderately well known financial institution. When we fixed it (which included a major fix to another vendor's well known architectural platform) the head of the division bought us all a bottle of very expensive single malt, and gave me two. When I said this was very generous, the CIO joked that, if the division had the budget, he'd have erected a life-size bronze of me in the car park! But I still wouldn't feel comfortable about saying "I did this" - a team I was part of did it. And again, I feel they could probably have done it without me, I can't be unique, can I? I know we, as a team, saved that institution a bucket load of cash, and rescued a badly broken client relationship for our own company. But I cannot say that *I* did it, and I blushed so much when a senior exec of my own company told me it 'was all down to you' that people just laughed at me.

And what about when you knew it was all going wrong, but you couldn't get anything changed? For instance, working on a major government contract which was going to go badly pear-shaped. How much credit can you claim for "knowing and saying all along" when you could never get any changes actually made?

Some of you were kind enough to challenge me with questions; and some of you were kind enough to be properly brutal. This tells me there is something very wrong with the way I sell myself. I'm not suitable for a 'graduate entry scheme', -- I'm a 50 year old with a 1st class degree, a PhD and two decades of IT consultancy. I call myself a generalist because I really am - no wonder some of you are jaded if you have people telling you they are generalists when they've only done a few years work and couldn't answer some basic questions (though I admit I don't know as much about Active Directory as I should :-).

If anyone is interested, I'm also not someone who can 'barely program' - As soon as I could read C# I spotted that the offshore code I was reading was rubbish because a multi-stage calculation was done pretty much by a single object with a single method, one of whose arguments was an integer which indicated which stage should be performed, and which sometimes called itself recursively - do I need to say more? I realized straight away their config management was wrong because they had branches named after test environments and were moving individual patch sets from one to the other as bug fixes were tested. Whilst resolving this, I gave the client the confidence that it was under control by being simultaneously honest about the problems and clearly explaining the solutions, in terms the business could understand.

Yet I feel uncomfortable even writing this under a pseudonym. It just sounds so bigheaded, and I guess my biggest concern is that people won't like me; I'm dreading the downvotes already. More than anything I want to be part of a team that revels in getting things done well - quickly, reliably, at a reasonable cost and at the highest quality that the time and budget allows. I'm not even that bothered about the money, to be honest (although I can't afford a massive drop), but I want to be doing something interesting, not wasting my time writing Word Documents for a lumbering behemoth whose idea of a solution is to immediately reach for a bunch of other vendors' proprietary technologies and stitch them together badly using hastily assembled teams of not always brilliant offshore labor.

tl;dr: thank you everyone for your input, you have really inspired me. Sorry for rambling.

[jcitron]

Bene, you sound a lot like me!

Don't knock your skills, Bene. You have a lot of good things to work with. I too was an IT generalist. I am now retired and no longer seeking employment.

Let me explain... I started as a hardware guy - a technician to be exact that repaired circuits right down to the component level. As these jobs disappeared, I ended up in MIS working with VAXs and IBM mainframes then transitioned to servers. Finally after a short stint in the graphics industry with a family-owned business and a couple of other graphics-related jobs, I ended up back in IT again and this time as a PC support specialist. This position went from a 3-month contract to a full-time network administrator/ system administrator position that lasted 11 years with the same company until that company closed. Eventually, I became a Tier-3 support guy at a very, very large company and retired from there.

On the way I learned about project management, built and designed computer rooms, moved a company twice, setup networks, servers, and tons of workstations, learned various operating systems, network protocols, Avaya, CISCO telecom, etc. In the end I was helping C-level management and became the go-to-guy for whatever technical problem the user base suffered from. I was there to help.

In the end, just before I retired early due to medical reasons, I earned two awards from upper management. One for bringing on line over 300 new employees and the other for always being there to help no matter what. Both I didn't expect as I was doing my job as I always did it.

Good luck.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry to hijack, but if anyone is interested, my company are looking for an IT generalist (based in central London).

https://www.linkedin.com/jobs2/view/12495700

[donaldrvogel]

Call yourself as a Client Technical Engagement Specialist or Network Administrator. It sounds like a professional and you can update your CV with these names. You will get best suited jobs in IT sector "http://finditjobs.com/ " by the top recruiters.

[sltech]

Excellent thread with excellent input.