* Posts by Dan

3 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Jun 2006

IT pay jumps as skills gap widens

Dan

Not really for everyone.

I remember ten years ago going to school to get IT certifications to get into the industry and noticing that most of the class were not going to make it as IT people.

I think a lot of people tried to get into the sector because there were good paying jobs and they thought, "I can do that, I'm smart." But it really isn't for everyone, plenty of smart people would hate trying to troubleshoot database performance issues, or debugging MS Access VBA class modules, or IPSec VPN tunnels.

If you don't love the stuff, you won't stay current. Sysadmins who punch out at five and never touch a machine out of the office aren't going to last. Developers who don't code on their spare time for their own personal projects or start teaching themselves the latest language long before their employers ask, aren't going to last.

The common trait with successful IT people is that they all either have a server farm at their house or are fluent in five or six development environments, or both. The guy with the one MS certification who works from nine to five and doesn't want to touch a PC after hours just won't last.

I suspect there is probably a fixed percentage of people who actually enjoy the puzzles presented by IT work. Everyone else is short-timing it for the job / pay.

Date bug kills VMware systems

Dan
Flame

VMware haters, oh boy.

Virtualization needs to be done well, with the same level of planning and preparation as any other deployment solution. Some of you seem to think VM is a cop out for lazy or unskilled admins to not have to tune their boxes, but anyone effectively using VMs will tell you they had to do plenty of tuning to get the VMs humming.

The benefits of virtualization are obvious to people who are good candidates for virtualization. Not a good fit for you? OK. I run my shop with half the people I would need without VM's and I save my company tens of thousands of dollars every quarter and can deploy new servers in minutes.

Bottom line, we spend a lot less on hardware, electricity, and payroll. And our response times have gotten better every month. And our disaster recovery could not possibly be simpler and faster. We do a full DR simulation every year. Full rebuild from backup tapes. It's a breeze. Can't imagine doing this without VMs. Or maybe I can and don't want to.

Structured data is boring and useless

Dan

It's Friday, save it for a Tuesday.

The world cup is on, it's Friday, and we're about to head out early to the bar. And you unload this on us. Very interesting stuff, really. I'm gonna bookmark it and re-read it next week.

I promise.