I.T. guys, how do you feel the market is progressing?

[Devaclis]

I have been stating for a couple of years, if not longer, that those of us who have been in I.T. for a while are becomming much more valuable. The outsourcing trend is revearsing and companies are looking for solid, experienced I.T. people that can be brought on board as full time employees. I have seen it evolve over the past 19 years and right now looks to be a very good time for us. What are you seeing out there? Any success/FALE stories recently?

http://arstechnica.com/business/news...it-destiny.ars


I

[tecknojoe]

I feel as though software engineering is a fabulous market, and it's not going anywhere

down with outsourcing

[DFab]

I'm currently looking for a new job in I.T. and or software engineering; not having any trouble finding jobs to apply for.

[Devaclis]

The local salary ranges have increaded about 20% from what I can see as well. This a great negotiating point for veterans in the industry.

1. Ask that the increased rate be returned in additional time off/reduced hours.
2. Use that increased salary to work fewer years or enjoy your negotiated vacation time more.

I always ask for more time off. I use ALL of it too. I know IT pros who get 3 or 4 weeks of vacation and take 1 or 2 of them. You are cheating yourself. You are working for less than you are being paid. You are working too much. As a seasoned member of our profession you owe it to yourself to relax a bit, take the time owed to you. You should be good enough and competent enough at your profession to have streamlined your work processes to allow for this. It is the golden age of your carreer right now. Go fishing lol.

[tecknojoe]

Oh I'm not golden years. I just want money.

[McVaaahhh]

Definitely picking up since I was laid off 2 years ago.

Outsourcing sucks. My company does a lot of it and I will never work for another company that outsources, it is unbelievably frustrating and inefficient. Yeah it's cheaper, but it takes 5x longer to get anything done, I have standing 6am meetings, and our India crew has a 45% turnover rate. (So we're constantly retraining)

With that said, the Indian's who have come here and gotten MIS degree's have turned into some of the best employees I've ever had.

[BlueRanger]

When I was approached with a job offer, my now employer told me if I did not accept the job their alternative would be to outsource and they specifically stated that is the last thing they want to do. This was earlier this year. However, I'm talking short term I guess, because I've barely been alive for 19 years.

[rforsythe]

It's picking up huge in areas involving virtualization technology, and in leveraging cloud tech. There are really very few people who are experts in how to actually get the most from using a cloud provider or know what it really all means, let alone ones who could actually build an internal private cloud. Building skills in these areas will make you extremely valuable.

[TurboGizzmo]

I have been swamped both at my day job and consulting. Even if companies outsource that want someone local to the company to handle day to day and deal with the outsourced department. Otherwise companies limp by and call in a consultant when things get really bad which normally means a few hours of work and a big bill.

Recession, what recession? I have 160 in vacation hours and am currently on a vacation freeze since we are so busy....ohhh the joy/hate on being loved and needed. (abused)

Project list:

Deploy ESX at a client
Deploy Exchange 2010 at a client and migrate stores from 2003 (ugh)
Learn the new XenApp
Upgrade over 300 machines to ESXi 5 and figure out datastore madness
Domain upgrade migration 2003 to 2008 (P2V as well)
Downgrade from Exchange 2010 to 2003 (ugh)
Get Citrix portal working for users to access remote domain.
Finish Cisco phone deploy
Day to day support


And thats just this week :P

[Devaclis]

Turbo, do you guys use UnityViewmail with Exchange/Cisco?

[Nick_Ninja]

I'm good to go for at least 6 years where I'm at. that will leave just three years until I WILL retire and then 'consult' for obscene amounts of moo-la

[TurboGizzmo]

Turbo, do you guys use UnityViewmail with Exchange/Cisco?

Not sure, honestly we were just acquired so the new company JUST invested in over a million in Cisco phones and gear so its trickling down to our now rebranded Colorado satellite office which i am helping head up.....we are on exchange 2010 here but the corp company is still on 2003 so moving back so that we can integrate into the whole domain to be globally upgrade to a Server 2008 domain and exchange 2010 in Q1 hopefully......always something.

[t_jolt]

It's picking up huge in areas involving virtualization technology, and in leveraging cloud tech. There are really very few people who are experts in how to actually get the most from using a cloud provider or know what it really all means, let alone ones who could actually build an internal private cloud. Building skills in these areas will make you extremely valuable.

This +1

With company ive been in with virtualizing since we started 3 years ago. Visualization is the future. If you can get any type of visualization and san knowledge, do it.

Tyrel

[~Barn~]

[Captain Obvious]

I have started to look for new Business Analyst / Project Manager positions, and I am seeing a number of postions. Rates seem to be down still from 3 years ago, but not too much.

I know my current company (IT Consulting firm) is struggling to find new contracts. Plenty in pipeline, but not a ton actually end up getting signed. Sales, closing, availability, hard to say what our issue is.

[puckstr]

We currently are looking for two more Helpdesk techs where I work.

[dm_gsxr]

Money's tight here so while we're down a dozen or so network and unix admins, we're not hiring at the moment. With 4 admins supporting over 400 systems it does tend to stress folks out a little. I started her making myself do 40 hours a week more or less but over the past few years I've edged up to doing between 50 and 60 hours a week pretty regularly. It's one of the reasons we were looking for a new sysadmin a month or so back. Unfortunately before we could make a recommendation we were put on hold until next year.

Carl

[rforsythe]

Money's tight here so while we're down a dozen or so network and unix admins, we're not hiring at the moment. With 4 admins supporting over 400 systems it does tend to stress folks out a little. I started her making myself do 40 hours a week more or less but over the past few years I've edged up to doing between 50 and 60 hours a week pretty regularly. It's one of the reasons we were looking for a new sysadmin a month or so back. Unfortunately before we could make a recommendation we were put on hold until next year.

Carl

Out of curiosity do you use any sort of automation to help you manage your hosts, or is 1:100 ratio all with manually-managed systems?

[dm_gsxr]

Out of curiosity do you use any sort of automation to help you manage your hosts, or is 1:100 ratio all with manually-managed systems?

Well, I have a suite of scripts that I created to help manage the systems. Lots of little ones to gather data and other stuff to capture log files for instance and bring them to a central place for review.

I started out as a programmer so I have lots of little tools here and there that I've implemented. I recently changed the methods creating a company directory on the unix systems where all the little scripts hang out. Then I have a master script that runs the little ones. This gives me a lot more control over the scripts and the ability to update 420 systems in 10 or 15 minutes vs a couple of days.

When I started in 2007, it was a 20 to 1 ratio. We've lost admins that haven't been replaced. Since I'm a prolific scripter and programmer, I've automated lots and lots of things to make us more efficient. But I think the downside is that we haven't picked up new admins because of it. It's a tough call

I've also written an inventory program for work over the past few years to better manage where our assets are. They're just getting an official one in place that's more cumbersome and less useful to the tech folks but certainly more useful for official asset tracking.

We've looked at other tools but the real problem I find is they all have per server license costs so not every server will get a license so we always fall back to the scripts I use.

I have a process where I retrieve the log files for all 400+ servers to a central location, then filter out keywords for things we don't care about. This changes the log file review from several hundred megabytes (to gigabytes at times) down to just a 100k or so most of the time.

So purchased automation? No. In house automation, heck yea. Just to save my sanity. It's why I'm such a proponent of unix admins who can script.

Carl

[dm_gsxr]

For the inventory program, I've added site cert tracking which is associated with the servers, software ownership which lets other teams use the inventory to manage the software on servers, and am working on a rapid server deployment page where someone can just go to the site, click "external access" for zone information, "web application server" for system configuration, and permit customizations to the standard build. This speeds up server deployments and again makes us more efficient.

I also wrote a status management application. Initially to track the work I do but it's being used by quite a few folks up to director level to see what's going on in the trenches. Since it keeps weekly track of my work, I can supply weekly reports (edited of course) to management and then at the end of the year for my performance review, I have a handy list of all the work I did throughout the year. I get my weekly timecard entered in just a few minutes plus it's extremely accurate (well, with the 15 minute blocks I use), and I know just what I did for my yearly review which also makes it quick.

From server management, in addition to the log review, the morning server audit (morning report) contains things we've been bit by over the years that are now checked regularly such as ntp configurations, interface errors, disk space, etc. Plus a user review to keep track of users who have left. When I first created that, I found almost a thousand accounts for folks who'd left the company that I disabled. Recently I've discovered a couple of thousand accounts (new auditing script) that have been identified as having privileged access.

The third bit is my performance monitoring. I've installed rrdtool on the systems and written scripts to input regular data (15 seconds) to the local database and create regular graphs which I retrieve every day. Since I don't need the information up to the second, I created it to work this way. It gives me a snapshot trending view since we're using another tool to give us "system has reached 75% cpu utilization" alerts.

Carl