Tomorrow is the first day of new IT career

flhrci

flhrci

Final Approach
Joined
Jan 26, 2007
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Groveport, OH
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Display name:
David
Its taken nearly 2 years to get to the point of being hireable. I am still in school one more semester but I start a 4-month paid internship with the State of Ohio tomorrow morning. I will be in the Information Security department. I hope at age 48, this will be my last career change and it will enable me to get back to being a part-time CFI again some day and have a better quality of life.

Tomorrow I battle the rush-hour traffic suck and downtown city parking suck. (And I have to dress business casual. No more Harley-Davidson t-shirts and jeans at work. ewww)

Wish me luck!

David
 
You won't need luck. You have worked hard enough to call it just rewards.

Congrats!

PS, My last career change was at age 48 too. I opened my business in 1990. Sold it in 2015 and retired.
 
flhrci said:
Its taken nearly 2 years to get to the point of being hireable. still in school one more semester but I start a 4-month paid internship with the State of Ohio tomorrow morning. I will be in the Information Security department. I hope at age 48, this will be my last career change and it will enable me to get back to being a part-time CFI again some day and have a better quality of life.

Tomorrow I battle the rush-hour traffic suck and downtown city parking suck. (And I have to dress business casual. No more Harley-Davidson t-shirts and jeans at work. ewww)

Wish me luck!

David
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2 things I would never do, dress up. I never been interested in wearing but basic Ts whether Harley or plain.

Next I barely want to do city driving when traveling, would never consider everyday no matter how good the pay. That is one thing that held me back, as I always refused to leave rural mountains, turned down many job offers when I was younger. Recently had offer by competitor over 50 miles away, but I know area and refuse to deal with traffic. 1 coworker, and 2 bosses went.
 
Good luck. Let's hope it leads to great things.

Rich
 
flhrci said:
Its taken nearly 2 years to get to the point of being hireable. I am still in school one more semester but I start a 4-month paid internship with the State of Ohio tomorrow morning. I will be in the Information Security department. I hope at age 48, this will be my last career change and it will enable me to get back to being a part-time CFI again some day and have a better quality of life.

Tomorrow I battle the rush-hour traffic suck and downtown city parking suck. (And I have to dress business casual. No more Harley-Davidson t-shirts and jeans at work. ewww)

Wish me luck!

David
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Get in there. Get things all set up and programmed so only you know whats going on and only you can fix things. Then you can go to work dressed anyway you want. Anyway, Congrats, hope you enjoy it.
 
Congrats and good luck! My son recently started an IT career and so far he loves it. Hope it works out well for you, too.
 
Congrats.

My sister is an RN, I'm a database developer/DBA, we were discussing jobs, they all have pluses and minuses. RNs get to go home at the end of their shifts and leave the patients to someone else. In IT, you will be 100 percent tasked from the day you walk in the door until the day you leave, you will never be "caught up." On the other hand, I've never had someone die in the office, so there is that plus.

Just take it as it comes, give it your best effort for eight or nine hours, and go home. unless there is a crisis going on. If there's a crisis always going on, you may want to consider changing employers.
 
Good luck with you IT career. It’s been a love hate career for me the last 25 years. It’s rewarding and demanding. Sometimes it’s a downer. Just like most any job. You will always be employed if you have the right skill set.
 
Good luck, Dave. IT is a profession that will certainly be in demand as long as you're able to work.

old_biker said:
2 things I would never do, dress up. I never been interested in wearing but basic Ts whether Harley or plain.

Next I barely want to do city driving when traveling, would never consider everyday no matter how good the pay. That is one thing that held me back, as I always refused to leave rural mountains, turned down many job offers when I was younger. Recently had offer by competitor over 50 miles away, but I know area and refuse to deal with traffic. 1 coworker, and 2 bosses went.
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I've had the saying that you can either live where you want or do what you want to do. I try to keep a balance there. I did turn down a job because of the location (New Jersey). I took another job despite the location (Ohio) but we didn't stay long. We seem to have hit the jackpot with the job that brought us to Kansas City.

I agree fully on dress. The first nearly 10 years of my career I had to dress in business casual every day (except for Fridays being "jeans day"). My happiness with my job went up an order of magnitude taking the current job for which I can wear jeans every day. I'd have a hard time going back to business casual.
 
The good news is that companies are slowly realizing they can let people work from home and they still get stuff done, as well as saving money on office space. Personally I'm a consultant so I never have to go to the office of the company I work for but sometimes I do have to go to customers locations and then the customer has to pay for all the travel and expenses. More companies are realizing they don't want to pay those expenses either, so I can just sit on the deck and work.
 
FormerHangie said:
ts.

My sister is an RN, I'm a database developer/DBA, we were discussing jobs, they all have pluses and minuses. RNs get to go home at the end of their shifts and leave the patients to someone else. In IT, you will be 100 percent tasked from the day you walk in the door until the day you leave, you will never be "caught up." On the other hand, I've never had someone die in the office, so there is that plus.

Just take it as it comes, give it your best effort for eight or nine hours, and go home. unless there is a crisis going on. If there's a crisis always going on, you may want to consider changing employers.
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As far as I know, your sister is wrong, if someone doesnt show for work, she may be required to stay! If leave they call it abandonment, and can lose license over that, and no mercy, 2,3,4, or 5 shifts without rest. If make a mistake its your fault. But the whole abandonment issue ****es me off. My first wife was forced to do many shifts due to call ins, her health suffered, she finally had enough and quit, said would never work in health care again.

So do check about that. It may be more issue with sorry workers, and if a lot of good workers, may not have an issue. She was in a bigger city hospital, about 80 miles from where I live
 
Congrats and welcome to the nuthouse. Especially in Security. You won’t have any job security issues in that specialty.

If Ohio is going the way of all the other States, welcome to the hell of FedRamp. :)

Just think. You only have to be better at it that CapitalOne. Every new mega-loss of Personal information lowers the already low bar of protecting it, even lower. :) :) :)
 
An exciting time. Good to see you go for something fun.
 
old_biker said:
As far as I know, your sister is wrong, if someone doesnt show for work, she may be required to stay! If leave they call it abandonment, and can lose license over that, and no mercy, 2,3,4, or 5 shifts without rest. If make a mistake its your fault. But the whole abandonment issue ****es me off. My first wife was forced to do many shifts due to call ins, her health suffered, she finally had enough and quit, said would never work in health care again.

So do check about that. It may be more issue with sorry workers, and if a lot of good workers, may not have an issue. She was in a bigger city hospital, about 80 miles from where I live
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She works 12 hour shifts 3 days in a row, so no, they won't ask her to stay, they'll float someone up from another floor if things are too hectic on hers being one nurse short.

My wife, who is also an RN has gotten stuck at the hospital but that was because of a snowstorm, she couldn't leave until the replacement nurse got in, but that only happened once. It happened to my mother (also an RN) once as well when a tropical storm socked them in and they needed extra personnel for that. These have been very, very rare.
 
Congratulations, and I'm wishing you the best.

My dad worked for IBM and made sure I was lined-up for a career in IT, as well.

I've been doing this type of stuff since working in my dad's computer store. (Yes, those used to be a 'thing')

Nearly 40-years in industry (can't believe I just typed that), and I can't think of anything else I'd rather do.

I hope you've got a great experience ahead of you.
 
FormerHe said:
She works 12 hour shifts 3 days in a row, so no, they won't ask her to stay, they'll float someone up from another floor if things are too hectic on hers being one nurse short.

My wife, who is also an RN has gotten stuck at the hospital but that was because of a snowstorm, she couldn't leave until the replacement nurse got in, but that only happened once. It happened to my mother (also an RN) once as well when a tropical storm socked them in and they needed extra personnel for that. These have been very, very rare.
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Awesome! Heard many similar stories to my ex wife in VA. Glad your sister is treated great.
 
Thank you for the well wishes every one! The first day was pretty nice. I was welcomed by my new coworkers, received a welcome letter from HR, got a nameplate for my cubicle entry area, and LAN access plus one of them new fang dangled security fob thingies. I also have 15 gazillion passwords now. Already got locked out twice and had to choose a better password. LOL

I like the position so far. I got a lot of info thrown at me today but they are understanding I only know basic stuff. Every one is understanding and wants to teach me things. Traffic was not as bad as I was expecting until I went home. It took me a lot longer than I expected.

@denverpilot I did hear the term Fedramp used today in a meeting in combination with Azure for a git repository only. The state is in the process of migrating each State Bureau's data center to one common one that is supposed to take 1-2 years. After that they may do more with that Fedramp. For now, they have a lot of issues to work out for the migration.

I did get introduced to IBM Qradar today which is a pretty cool piece of software for detecting anomalies. I get to help tune it over time.

Any way, I am pooped for the day. Tomorrow I get a break with orientation. :) After one day, this seems like the right path to go down finally.

David
 
flhrci said:
@denverpilot I did hear the term Fedramp used today in a meeting in combination with Azure for a git repository only. The state is in the process of migrating each State Bureau's data center to one common one that is supposed to take 1-2 years. After that they may do more with that Fedramp. For now, they have a lot of issues to work out for the migration.
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Yup. Fun stuff.

States come to us asking if we will do FedRamp.

We tell them... sure, we’ll re-price the product to hire the staff and pay for the audits and get back to you. Hahaha.

They usually don’t want the price jump. Go figure.

Haven’t talked to one who does, yet, anyway. :)
 
flhrci said:
Its taken nearly 2 years to get to the point of being hireable. I am still in school one more semester but I start a 4-month paid internship with the State of Ohio tomorrow morning. I will be in the Information Security department. I hope at age 48, this will be my last career change and it will enable me to get back to being a part-time CFI again some day and have a better quality of life.
Click to expand...

Congrats! IT has provided a lot of funding for GA for many of us. ;)

Ted DuPuis said:
Good luck, Dave. IT is a profession that will certainly be in demand as long as you're able to work.
Click to expand...

Truth.

I've had the saying that you can either live where you want or do what you want to do. I try to keep a balance there. I did turn down a job because of the location (New Jersey). I took another job despite the location (Ohio) but we didn't stay long. We seem to have hit the jackpot with the job that brought us to Kansas City.
Click to expand...

I'm getting to do both right now... But my commute sucks, by far my longest ever at about 75 miles round trip. 40 minutes without traffic, an hour with, regardless of whether I'm in the office downtown or going to the airport to fly.

That said, it is the best work environment I've ever been a part of. The perks are fantastic - The company has about 120 employees total, but there are two massage therapists, two personal trainers, and a chef among them... And the owners/management are great. If I need a tool to do my job, they OK the purchase immediately, no questions asked. Everyone respects everyone... Add all that together, and what creates the environment is that *everybody is happy* to the point that it's infectious. I love it.

So, the commute is worth it... I'd rather do the drive than work a job I don't like or have to live near downtown. I like my space.

I agree fully on dress. The first nearly 10 years of my career I had to dress in business casual every day (except for Fridays being "jeans day"). My happiness with my job went up an order of magnitude taking the current job for which I can wear jeans every day. I'd have a hard time going back to business casual.
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"Business casual" is easier these days, with jeans that come in khaki, dark gray, etc... It's gotten to the point where it's pretty much what I'd be wearing to go anywhere (like out to dinner or something).
 
Half Fast said:
View attachment 77052
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A classic. I just sent that one to someone last week.

Another good one for IT geeks:

tech_support_cheat_sheet.png
 
30 Sept is my last day in IT - the "rate of change" is greatly exaggerated - wake an IT guy from a 10 year coma (any arena; dev, networking, cyber, whatever) and he'd be back up to speed in a month. 20 years back? Give him another six weeks. Three or four months for a Rip Van Winkle from 1990. Likely their only surprise would be mobile device expansion. "Cloud"? Another re-name of another ancient concept, just with a slicker set of management tools, but definitely not an original idea from this century. . .

Application development has devolved, both slower and more expensive, and less flexible that in the distant and not so distant past. AI isn't. Intelligent, I mean; It is, actually, heart-breakingly stupid. Big Data still relies on the skill, luck, and experience of the practitioners. The "S" in IOT stands for security, and the quality of app software is sh*t. Dev teams are bloated, and Agile is re-hashing management techniques from 30 years ago, just with different naming conventions. Machine learning? My Labrador Retriever learns faster and more effectively, and with greater success.

Organizations that get hacked are still treated as victims, instead of the incompetent, careless, clowns they are - and still aren't being held accountable for their negligence. . . 1/3 of ERP implementations are failures, another third are semi-crippled, kludgey mash-ups, and maybe the final third are somewhat truly successful. Rant complete.
 
flhrci said:
... got a nameplate for my cubicle entry area,
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By the way. Didn’t notice that before, but I recommend hiding it in a desk drawer. Why make it easy? Hahaha. 99% of the time, someone looking for you in person when they have email, chat, video conferencing, and lord knows what else these days ... isn’t anything good. Hahahaha.
 
In a tangent to Sundancer's rant. I'm not a programmer, but I dabble from time to time. A couple years ago I was looking at making one of the open source aviation apps compatible with my charts. They were using 512 x 512 pixel rectangles and mine are 256 x 256. Easy fix, might be a little slower. It turns out it wasn't 4x slower(4x the number of rectangles) or even 16x slower... it was 64 times slower. I sent them a suggested fix and then backed away slowly.

I'm sticking to my side projects being things like microcontrollers these days where efficiency matters.
 
I lived the XKCD cartoon above many years ago when I went to work for Oracle. Consulting staff was given a code word to bypass the first line of defense and get to a higher level support technician. :)
 
denverpilot said:
By the way. Didn’t notice that before, but I recommend hiding it in a desk drawer. Why make it easy? Hahaha. 99% of the time, someone looking for you in person when they have email, chat, video conferencing, and lord knows what else these days ... isn’t anything good. Hahahaha.
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Well, they know where I live on the floor so I don't think it matters much. I am also shadowing people right now so my cubicle isn't much more than storage for my stuff and the computer and phone.

But you are right. Email and Skype IM are operational. Oh yeah, I forgot I have my own Cisco VOIP phone to with my name on the screen. Woo, woo! LOL
 
denverpilot said:
By the way. Didn’t notice that before, but I recommend hiding it in a desk drawer. Why make it easy? Hahaha. 99% of the time, someone looking for you in person when they have email, chat, video conferencing, and lord knows what else these days ... isn’t anything good. Hahahaha.
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I forgot one other thing. If I can get a job out of this internship with this agency, I will not have to worry about being cut out by the State budget. The Bureau of Workman's Comp is funded by employers and my pay comes out of the big investment pot. Supposedly worth over $28 billion. And I like it there!
 
Infosec. You will be among the most hated folks in a company, web more so than the IT Help Desk. But you will he serving a purpose greater than any other IT position in the firm.

You will wield great power. You will say no much more often than you will say yes. And you will likely be consulted to greenlight projects and ideas without being given all pertinent facts since people have learned how to whte wash ideas before InfoSec can stop the idea.
 
Sundancer said:
30 Sept is my last day in IT - the "rate of change" is greatly exaggerated - wake an IT guy from a 10 year coma (any arena; dev, networking, cyber, whatever) and he'd be back up to speed in a month. 20 years back? Give him another six weeks. Three or four months for a Rip Van Winkle from 1990. Likely their only surprise would be mobile device expansion. "Cloud"? Another re-name of another ancient concept, just with a slicker set of management tools, but definitely not an original idea from this century. . .
Click to expand...

Good rant. No real arguments against it. Most of my "rate of change" / "learning new ish" is really just figuring out the syntax of the new flavor of the week that the people handing out contracts to build "MVP"s and secure B round funding want to see. It used to be "hey I made some proof of concept here, if it's useful, we can make it for real and make it good" -- now it's "I built the flimsiest of POCs in a few months, called it a minimum viable product, and you can use it to secure 4 million in funding please and thank you. Then you can hire the cheap clown labor to build it for real while I jump to the next POC"

It is work for me to stay buzzword relevant and in the upper hourly range for an individual contractor. I hop lilypads every 3-6 months, and my resume is a stew of nonsense and passe' fashion as a result. But holy cow is my resume spanish fly to a recruiter.

R and ML/AI are the current flavors for me. Funny how 90% of my work is data corral / sanitize / ETL stuff I did 15 years ago. But now it has a fashionable veneer and adds a "0" to the hourly rate. Works for me. Works for my masters, who sell it to dipsh*t investors who are investing in buzzwords and not technology. Outside of my own side projects, I can't think of a single solid thing I've built that was good engineering, or benefitted humans anywhere. Then again, I billed a full day today and put 4 hours on the airplane. Being remote is rad. :D

+1 on whoever said Infosec. God that's such a massive wave right now. Slightly too far out of my wheelhouse to pursue, but that's a decade of rich, golden opportunity at least to mine. :D
 
I made the masses unhappy today. Forced windows reboots have begun after asking nicely with full screen pop ups for a couple of months after patches ran. 40% compliance. Okay then.
 
denverpilot said:
I made the masses unhappy today. Forced windows reboots have begun after asking nicely with full screen pop ups for a couple of months after patches ran. 40% compliance. Okay then.
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A couple of months ago my boss came to me and saw my Windows VM was updating. He, in all seriousness, told me "I've found a way around that. I just put mine to sleep and never reboot." After an internal face palm, I explained that these are primarily security patches and he should really let them. He's actually a pretty bright guy, but had target fixation this time.

Since then, our IT folks have put in policies that give you a week or so, then force it.

And dang but Windows 10 updates a lot.
 
jsstevens said:
And dang but Windows 10 updates a lot.
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Everything updates a lot. Been saying this is a bad trend for quality software for years now. If you can just babble about your “agile” release cycle or “continuous release”, you never have any consequences for bad releases and “we’ll just fix it next week”.

That combined with the mega-trend toward all software being a rental and not ownership of what’s purchased...

Just about zero chance of it getting better any time soon. LOL. The industry avoids culpability for crap code exceedingly well now. It’s culturally ingrained.

The chances we’ll see truly engineered products and not just coded slapped together crapola is pretty low before I retire.

My generation saw something close in critical systems a couple of decades ago when economically, a new release cost a company big money. With the Internet, your customer pays for the distribution of gigs and gigs of updates, and you don’t have any built in penalty for garbage releases anymore.

As long as everyone releases garbage at about the same rate, the frog slowly gets boiled.

The good news is, for those going into “security” they have a guaranteed lifelong job. :)
 
denverpilot said:
Everything updates a lot. Been saying this is a bad trend for quality software for years now. If you can just babble about your “agile” release cycle or “continuous release”, you never have any consequences for bad releases and “we’ll just fix it next week”.

That combined with the mega-trend toward all software being a rental and not ownership of what’s purchased...

Just about zero chance of it getting better any time soon. LOL. The industry avoids culpability for crap code exceedingly well now. It’s culturally ingrained.

The chances we’ll see truly engineered products and not just coded slapped together crapola is pretty low before I retire.

My generation saw something close in critical systems a couple of decades ago when economically, a new release cost a company big money. With the Internet, your customer pays for the distribution of gigs and gigs of updates, and you don’t have any built in penalty for garbage releases anymore.

As long as everyone releases garbage at about the same rate, the frog slowly gets boiled.

The good news is, for those going into “security” they have a guaranteed lifelong job. :)
Click to expand...

The testing/fixing cycle was certainly more rigorous when we had to burn media, shrink wrap and deliver through the 2-tier distribution network for retail software. And pay for stock rotation when we had updates.
 
denverpilot said:
The good news is, for those going into “security” they have a guaranteed lifelong job. :)
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That's good cause I had a really good IT day today. I know its only the 3rd day, but I like what I am learning and I feel like I am learning something important and have something to contribute. :)

In a week or so, I get to configure and install around 20 internal Linux honeypots. That should be fun!
 
flhrci said:
In a week or so, I get to configure and install around 20 internal Linux honeypots. That should be fun!
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That does sound fun.

I walked, er, limped around today booting stuff that isn’t on UPSes and reconfiguring BIOSes to come back online after power outages. LOL.

Guess what happened last night at the office.

At least the UPS batteries on the critical stuff got a little exercise. :)
 
denverpilot said:
That does sound fun.

I walked, er, limped around today booting stuff that isn’t on UPSes and reconfiguring BIOSes to come back online after power outages. LOL.

Guess what happened last night at the office.

At least the UPS batteries on the critical stuff got a little exercise. :)
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Sounds like a little bit of a hassle. How many machines do you have to take care of? I can imagine your condition doesn't help any. You need an intern to help you out. I heard some one talking about needing another intern today to do some equipment moves so I ducked in my cubicle. LOL
 
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