And rednecks are rednecks, north or south. I have lived for forty years in what was, and still might be considered, a rural area, where there are a lot. They're human too.
20171129 Wednesday GMT 92117102
- Thread starter mandown
- Start date
Got a functioning sump pump? Any idea what the water table in that area looks like?
Might be worth picking up one of these bad boys to alert you if there is water incursion.
https://www.homedepot.com/p/Basement-Watchdog-Battery-Operated-Water-Alarm-BWD-HWA/100038838
My boss is an idiot and doesn't care to understand what it is I do. I have tried just about everything from status reports broken down to the hour, flow diagrams with pretty pictures, formal process documentation, test plans the outline the approach and tools used, and I have played an important roll in a number of very high dollar projects that were very successful, but she didn't hear about it from the right people or whatever.
Half the people I work with love what I do, the other half hate me because as a QA engineer, I call them on their sh!t and they aren't used to anyone doing that (I am the first person ever in this role).
So it seems my boss has decided to eliminate my position from her team (I am the only technical person on my team of 8) and me with it. I thought yesterday was my last day, it just just my "last warning" or whatever. HR was there, I called her on a number of things, I have also had a few emails to and from HR on the matter.
tldr;
Bottom line, nothing I do will make her care and she doesn't see the value in something she doesn't give a sh!t about. I have about a month to find something or go on vacation.
[QUOTE="j<snip> I have about a month to find something or go on vacation.[/QUOTE]
ALWAYS go on vacation. ALWAYS. HTH.
ALWAYS go on vacation. ALWAYS. HTH.
The only issue with vacation is the longer they are, the worse it looks on the resume. Unless I can mask it as time spent building huts in Haiti for hurricane relief or something.ALWAYS go on vacation. ALWAYS. HTH.
FUCK YOUR RESUME. Seriously - if you tell potential employers, "I took some time off from the rat-race to recharge" nobody is going to give two fucks.
Probably the biggest risk is that the person interviewing you might get jelly of your choices.
Long vacations rule.
I used to look for gaps in resumes; never had anyone with the honesty to say something like taking time to recharge, but I would have reacted positively to such a statement.
The big red flag for me was job hoppers. A year to two years, then boing. No thank you, I have seen too many people stay just long enough to leave a mess behind.
What did you used to do, JBP?
He was an IT nerd like a bunch of the rest of us, IIRC.
He was making fun of Nashville as South thos morning. Chattanooga is as North as you can get in the South, ala Ashville.
- Unloaded fertilizer trucks.
- Delivered newspapers.
- Repaired lawnmowers.
- Assembled cabinetry.
- Operated wire stranders.
- Drove truck.
- Welder.
- Assembled Fords.
- Skipper of an LCM-6 in the Army.
- Electromechanical technician working on SABRE guidance system, taught myself FORTRAN.
- [EE degree, 1975, at age 30]
- Designed circuitry in Space Shuttle orbital maneuvering subsystem (OMS), wrote APL software to do worst-case analysis for component variations.
- Worked on some optical fuel gauging stuff.
- Designed commercial nuclear reactor control system stuff.
- Listened to Three Mile Island melt.
- Manufacturing engineer for switching power supplies, power controllers, and battery backups. Designed various associated test equipment.
- [learned VMS administration as a hobby]
- Did research in direct bonded copper as applicable to power systems.
- [Computer science coursework]
- Application maintenance and development - Cobol, Visual Basic, HTML.
- Systems and network support. Wrote a big glue application in C++.
- Monitoring, support, and capacity planning for some pretty major e-commerce sites.
You had me at glue.
So, you worked with horses?
So, you worked with horses?
This is an issue with my resume now. Lots of 1 year contracts combined with failed start ups means a lot of changes. Half the companies I have worked for have either gone away or been purchased. I have never taken a job with the intent to leave, it just ends up this way. Hell, I thought I might retire here since most folks do, but I seem to be caught in the middle of a war between ITIL (director of IT) and Agile via DevOps (considered by some as a pilot project that will go away). DevOps has done more in the last 6 months with 8 people than the IT department has done in 2 years with 20+. But who knows who the CIO will be Jan 1, so it might be interesting. If the director of IT gets it, DevOps will die.
I suck at workplace politics and with a boss that doesn't get it, I am left alone trying to do what is right for the department and the company while getting push back from management that isn't fully on board with a modern process.
That's not job-hopping. At least not in my book.
Example:
JD: We need to be doing performance benchmarking and load testing on infrastructure as part of project releases.
Boss: Who is asking for this other than you?
JD: You brought me in because I have experience in this area and you don't. I say as an organization we should be doing this to understand who the system performs under a projected load so we can look at efficiency and capacity planning.
Boss: But if nobody is asking for it, do we really need it?
JD: We wasted $3M last year trying to deploy a project to hardware that didn't meet the minimum requirements and then wondered why it failed. Then we spent $5M on a VBlock storage array because someone said it would make all the things faster only to find out not all our applications can run on block storage, and not all performance issues are I/O related. I would say we could have saved a solid $7M of that had we done proper vetting o infrastructure and requirements prior to launch.
Boss: All I heard was Blah, Blah, Blah, buzzword, buzzword, Blah, Blah, Blah.
And this is why we can't have nice things.
JD: We need to be doing performance benchmarking and load testing on infrastructure as part of project releases.
Boss: Who is asking for this other than you?
JD: You brought me in because I have experience in this area and you don't. I say as an organization we should be doing this to understand who the system performs under a projected load so we can look at efficiency and capacity planning.
Boss: But if nobody is asking for it, do we really need it?
JD: We wasted $3M last year trying to deploy a project to hardware that didn't meet the minimum requirements and then wondered why it failed. Then we spent $5M on a VBlock storage array because someone said it would make all the things faster only to find out not all our applications can run on block storage, and not all performance issues are I/O related. I would say we could have saved a solid $7M of that had we done proper vetting o infrastructure and requirements prior to launch.
Boss: All I heard was Blah, Blah, Blah, buzzword, buzzword, Blah, Blah, Blah.
And this is why we can't have nice things.
But the resume looks like that on the surface. If you try to find Playhaven (the mobile game monitization company) you won't. Unless of course you google "donglegate" then you will learn a little too much about them.
I did some amazing work when I was there but couldn't even get a hold of the CEO to verify my employment when I took this job.
Please tell me they bought this Vblock JUST before Dell/EMC announced they were dumping it as an offering?
Dude - you're in IT. You can do anything you want. And make gobs of $$ doing it. I'm happy to be the bearer of this good news!But the resume looks like that on the surface. If you try to find Playhaven (the mobile game monitization company) you won't. Unless of course you google "donglegate" then you will learn a little too much about them.
I did some amazing work when I was there but couldn't even get a hold of the CEO to verify my employment when I took this job.
No chance to get a contract gig and work remotely? IT seems like it's one of the few fields that could be done from anywhere with little impact on your efficacy.
We JUST put that bitch in like 2 months ago. EMC even paid for a party cruise on the Portland Spirit to celebrate our launch. (they laughed all the way to the bank).Please tell me they bought this Vblock JUST before Dell/EMC announced they were dumping it as an offering?
I will say I did benchmarks on it, that bitch is fast.
At my last company they bought a Vblock and sat on it for almost TWO YEARS. Nobody could figure out where it was going to be deployed... every time it looked like they were going to spin it up, someone/something got in the way.
Last I heard, they were going to physically ship it to a DR site or something...
I get contract offers all the time, the issue with contracts are the bennies usually suck AND are expensive. The ex bitches every time I have a change to medical/dental even though I pay 100% of all costs. When the wife had good bennies, it was less of an issue. My job is sometimes more hands on o at least involves more interaction/collaboration and face time is nice. I am also a rare extrovert for an engineer so I don't mind people sometimes.
We did a ton of electrical upgrades, cooling upgrades, had to change to some funky floor tile. The hardware itself was about $3M, the EMC support and other changes were the other $2M. I know the first one was damaged in shipment. The second one had the wrong power cord or plug? I forget, but there were a ton of issues just getting them here (one here, one at DR).At my last company they bought a Vblock and sat on it for almost TWO YEARS. Nobody could figure out where it was going to be deployed... every time it looked like they were going to spin it up, someone/something got in the way.
Last I heard, they were going to physically ship it to a DR site or something...
<edit> TBT I decided to google donglegate and it is listed on Know your Meme.
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/donglegate-adria-richards
heuheuheuheuheuheuhuheuhuehuheuhe
You're 72? I occasionally ride with a guy who is 70. He's fast!
have you met millenials? you’re gonna love millenials!
A glue, or shim (moar shimz?) application is software that intermediates between other applications, in this case HP Openview, a network monitoring application and Attention!, a notification, in our case mostly paging, application.
Openview would detect a condition requiring our services, my glue app would filter out crap, do some reformatting, and pass the information on to Attention!, which would wake up the right person in the middle of the night so they could try to fix things.
If a company fell out from under you, it wouldn't be a negative if I was reading the resume. You'd just have to make it clear that that was the case.
Hiring in IT is messed up and if you don't have buddies who inject you into an open position, good luck. The level of crap I am going through by just monitoring available openings is terrible.
This is often a topic of conversation because there are a LOT of companies here and things often change quickly. I guess I could add (closed for business) next to each entry.
Dude... you're in the wrong part of the country, then. Have you thought about the Bay area or perhaps even the Denver area?
Being you're East Coast, the traffic probably wouldn't even bother you.
I certainly think so. Gotta fix up the house and change scenery, that should only take me about 15 years.
That should be right around retirement-time, no?I certainly think so. Gotta fix up the house and change scenery, that should only take me about 15 years.
