Recommendations for an IT laptop?

Soylent_gray · 2 days

Wouldn't be powerful enough to run a WiFi antenna and some rudimentary signal analysis software? Huh?

If you had said CAD, or database crunching, or 3d gaming...then I could agree with you. But WiFi stumbling? 5 year old phones do that.

Oswald_ · 2 days

That would be something to ask them. It's too good an opportunity to handwave. As sylver_dragon implied, some firms give you way to work in the interim.

Soylent_gray · 2 days

Good suggestion either way.

Funny handle, by the way. Reminds me of this.

Oswald_ · 2 days

The clearance opportunity is golden. It's rare to find someone that will actually to sponsor you for one at that level when you're just coming in the door. The interim check is quicker, and they'll give you moderate stuff to work on until the full clearance gets approved. Also TS/SCI is very, very marketable.

At the very least, you can invest a couple years there, and then transfer out if you're looking for a pay hike. DC is the place to be for government contractors. The SOL is a little high, but there are compromises you can make if that's a problem.

But...be wary if you have something sketchy in your background. The real hot buttons are things like felonies, bankruptcies, and being married to a foreign national. Those kinds of things make you statistically much easier to bribe or threaten.

NoyzMaker · 2 days

Normally you'd get a dissertation from me about this kind of post. However, since you provided such a nice concise list, we'll just go with that. I'll answer the first lines just as you wrote them, and provide some flavor text.

Assign tasks to me in e-mail. It's organizable, auditable, trackable, and cross-platform. Everyone can organize to whatever task-tracking method like like after getting a task assigned.
Provide original thread/info relating to a task, as well as any suggestions you have about how to do it. The tech is the expert. He'll choose the best course of action.
Have 1-on-1 meetings to learn what kind of time I am having with my particular work. As well of what he thinks of recent manager decisions. Granular stuff, don't need to rehash the status of group projects, unless that particular guy is having unusual problems with his part of the project. Long story short...this is your time for mentoring and counseling.
Stop having non-communicated or unclear expectations. This just causes others to become frustrated or apathetic because they can't figure out what the heck you want.
Start delegating enthusiastically, and empowering people to reach and grow in their jobs. Encourage them step up, rather than handholding them.
Continue being such a cool guy, while still firmly enforcing consequences when people make big mistakes. Telling someone they royally screwed up without insulting them is a fine line, and a skill to practice.
Make sure to cover deadlines, expectations, exact task delegation, and overall project statuses in our staff meetings. People don't like fuzzy efforts. They want to know exactly what they're going to need to do, so they can start thinking about how best to do it.
Stop covering "non-updates" in staff meetings. If nothing has changed, then no one cares. Stop covering fears (reactive), and focus on plans (proactive).
Provide me with whatever tools I request, within reason, to do my job. Your employees should be the experts about what they need. This is a good monthly topic. Is there any framework, tool, or standard that we need and don't have?
Let me organize my workspace and tools however I want. Let me research and test whatever I want. Good engineers will play around with all sorts of things. Don't limit their opportunity to research. This is another good monthly topic. What have you discovered recently, that you think may help the group/environment?
Help me learn how to work efficiently and communicate effectively. Most IT people don't need help learning IT. They need help becoming effective, organized, and communicative. I think the 7-habits should be required reading.

Whelp, that's it. Good luck, and feel free to nitpick or discuss.

Soylent_gray · 2 days

The problem isn't that I don't know how to change the settings.

If you pick a low res to match the small screen, then big consoles (like System Center such) don't fully display. If you pick a palatable res (like 1024x768), and then shrink it to a 10" smaller screen, then everything gets really small. So I usually compromised by picking fixed 1024x768, and then scrolling.

Soylent_gray · 2 days

Cisco console ports eh? So it needs a serial port, or you need to buy a usb-serial adapter. To be honest, it's probably going to have to be the latter.

When I was a consultant, I found that a good netbook served me pretty well. It was easy to hold in one hand and type with the other if I was standing in a Telco closet or wherever. The downfall was screensize for RDP sessions. I'd be scrolling around a lot.

If do you want to look at netbooks, Asus makes my favorites. You really have to lay your hands and eyes on one though to determine if it's sufficient.

Otherwise, I'd go for the Lenovo X series. As someone else said, their X1 carbon comes out soon, and it's even lighter.

Bosley · 2 days

Yeah, the best time to call them would have been right after the computer accounts were deleted out of the directory. They would have walked you through an AD restore and you'd be 100% functional right now, and also few bucks short. Nothing to do about it now, but a lesson learned is a future disaster averted.

After all, what's a few dollars for support, when compared to the cost of downtime and lost business?

Bosley · 2 days

Agreed. If OP restores his AD to a point in time before the original problem, then all the current servers that were re-added won't work because their SIDs and everything in the directory will go back to the old ones. So everything will be out of whack again.

Unfortunately, the path of least resistance is to trudge forward fixing everything as he comes across it. MS can assist with finding and plugging the holes, if needed.

trouphaz · 3 days

I've been at companies like that too. And yeah, that kind of culture can really cripple departments. Firms need to be able to effectively shed their dead weight. A good probationary period is the only saving grace at many places, which means you need to decide about people quickly.

trouphaz · 3 days

I find it a little odd that you're asking this after doing it for 6 years. Anyway, here's my 2c...

For me finding candidates is all about placement and volume. Tech people generally browse the following places for non-government jobs, so these are usually the best places to list them: Monster, Craigslist, major local paper (Post, Times, etc), LinkedIn, The Ladders (if over $100K), and maybe Dice. Post your jobs there, and get lots of hits. There's probably another option or two as well.

After that it's all about volume. When I was middle management, we did most of the interviewing and would interview about 6 candidates a week to stay ahead of the engineer turnover curve. If you're just interviewing to fill one or two spots then guesstimate on looking at 100 resumes, phone interviewing about 20 people, interviewing maybe 12 of those, and 2nd interviewing 4-6 of those. If you sort through enough people, then generally the good ones stand out.

Resume cutting with silly rules can seem impersonal sometimes, and people will lament that they were the best candidate but they lost out because they spelled something wrong. I look at it like this. I don't need to hire the greatest, most-right person. I just don't want to hire the wrong person. Anywhere in the middle is usually fine, and I'll train the rest into them.

Eventually, you're going to have a bad hire though. In this day and age of master bullshitters, it's almost inevitable. The only remedy is to cut that person early. Don't hang on to them through their probationary period, and try to "fix" them. It'll just make your life suck for the next 12 months. Don't make it personal, just tell them firmly to get their stuff together and find a new job before you fire them.

For screening, I like phone interviews, and then two face to face interviews with different focuses. I'll usually gear the first one towards technical knowledge, and the second more towards business acumen and organization fit. If you search around on this board for "questions" or "interview" you'll turn up some good sample questions.

Think I linked to a couple of good question threads in here: http://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/stm14/first_itis_management_job_advice_support_horror/c4gwa8s

ithinkyoumissedit · 3 days

We have them at my company as well, and I've grown to like them quite a bit. Although it should be noted that you need to spend a couple days adjusting the knobs and settings to find your true best fit.

I've had this aching/burning for the past 12 years or so at one spot in my upper back when computing for any long period of time. It's been getting worse year after year, but sitting in a properly adjusted Aeron every day for the last 18 months has caused it to almost go away.

greybyte · 3 days

There is a button you can click (one of those on the right side) to show the margin of error on the graph. It plots a line above and below your line. Everybody is a little different.

It's also possible that the graph is true for you, and your expectation is off. Or maybe your calorie estimate is a off. Most of us don't count them very precisely.

There's a lot that goes into it, and nutrition scientists can really only estimate with this broad stuff.

zerobeat · 4 days

Those two things may be the net effect of many of the actions that you take on a daily basis, but I wouldn't really call them the two primary goals of your position. That's a much longer discussion though.

Like Doormatty said, effective communication is what keeps everyone on the same page here. If your department fashions itself into just a bunch of order takers with technology, then you're going to get chastised for every problem. Alternatively if you want your concerns, challenges, and goals to be taken seriously by upper management, then your IT director needs to set them straight and assert his seat at the table.

The CEO doesn't throw his coffee mug on the ground when a good Salesperson says that they lost a sale. Because CEO knows that selling is fucking hard, and that Salesguy is good and trusted. And that's because the Director of Sales drills it into his head at every roundtable meeting.

All that being said, IT will never be a glory position. It will always be sort of like playing Offensive Line in football. You don't get noticed much until you let the Quarterback get sacked.

greybyte · 4 days

The simulator they posted on their website is pretty neat. It's a Java app (which I dislike), but it spits out some interesting graphs. It's pretty much dead on for my weight loss, activity, and calories.

a-ko · 4 days

That combination of skills looks pretty run of the mill to me. It's the SMB environment, and jack of all trades is the norm.

The only problem I see is that they are implying that this will be their only IT employee. For that many users, it really should be a 2-3 man department .

jnvilo · 4 days

If possible, I like to see single-sign-on or at least some kind of unified management. As you've seen though, it's really only a problem as environments get larger.

Identity Management can become a real bear if you let it creep up on you. Pretty soon you end up with 7 or more systems (AD, dev, accounting, CMS, Postini, etc) with separate accounts for each user. The bigger the company, the bigger the problem.

So as an overarching IT goal, I usually like to have people either build or plan integration (even just simple LDAP sync scripts) for those gaps between systems. If you can get it automated, then even better.

tapwater86 · 4 days

That's a bummer. We don't use them for that.

For another firm in the past, I've used LiveOffice. They had a pretty comprehensive solution, long retention times, and good secondary send capabilities (can log in and send from them when your server is down), and great indexing/searching. But it looks like they've rejiggered their solutions labels recently, and I can't figure out from looking at the site what the exact packages are. You'll need to talk to a Rep.

i_like_pretty_things · 4 days

We call this the Fear Sell. I dislike having to use it, but sometimes it's necessary. People need to wrap their heads around consequences.

tapwater86 · 4 days

Where did you hear that Postini is going away? I haven't read anything about that. We use them as well, and are a happy customer.

puerexmachina · 4 days

Eh, it looks about right. It skews a bit high in some parts, but that's because the major % of IT workers are in cities (with higher salaries) which inch the mean values up. The people in rural towns will feel underpaid when looking at these.

StrangeCaptain · 4 days

Do not doubt that your IT Manager will let shit hit the floor to prove a point.

There you go! People need consequences that matter to them. Otherwise, they just do whatever they want. If you teach them the lesson that their disorganization causes their webinar for the CEO to be late, then they'll remember next time.

Also, always back up your standards with the up-to-date policy.

milacekraise · 4 days

I feel you. Not going to repeat my reply to the other guy here. Suffice it to to say that the situation has to be right for it to not be counter-productive.

milacekraise · 4 days

Man, I dislike nitpicking arguments. I'm going to sum up for myself, and quit.

The difference here is one of perspective. You're portraying companies as faceless entities that will never trust you and will probably always exploit you. If that's the case, then you're damn right that they don't deserve the "extra mile" from you or I. Most of us have a good sense of when we're being taken advantage of, and those are not the times to contribute personal effort/money/whatever. I'm not arguing for this as a policy across the board.

However, there are many instances in some careers where you run into a business that is hard up, doesn't know any better, and that you can make a difference at. I've consulted to something like 150 companies over the years. And there are a few times where I've said, "I'm going to pull this solution out of the trunk of my car right now so your business isn't at risk in the interim, but we need to put it on your purchase list for next month. Here's the business case for it..."

It has always worked, because I've known the people who it would work with. Painting this issue as black and white, and labeling everyone as "ready to take advantage of you" is just short-sighted and judgmental.

Wamoz56 · 4 days

So you're stepping into an already established business. That's a lot different than "I'd like to start a business".

Either way, more power to you. Come back and post about how it turns out. Regardless of outcome, it should be a good story for everyone else on this board that's in your shoes.

RobotPirateMonkey

TROPHY CASE

RobotPirateMonkey

TROPHY CASE

you'll need to login or register to do that

create a new account

login