IT stories and rants

[MultimediaMan]

Do you think Intel will make a comeback again and get their stuff in order?

Honestly? No. Their best talent was let go/ retired-out in 2012-2016. That kind of engineering expertise is very hard to replace. The problems with Meltdown and Specter have also seriously hampered development cycles... there is LOTS more to test and the test criteria is ever more burdensome and exhaustive. AMD and a raft of other chip makers are in the same boat. With nearly all National Intelligence agencies/ organizations looking at chips for Hardware-Introduced/Firmware Introduced backdoors now, there is further pressure on the pool of skilled engineers in this space. UEFI has turned out to be a real security nightmare, not as secure as hoped and far easier to subvert and weaponize than envisioned. Most folks warned Intel about this but Chipzilla was steadfast on incrementalism. And now, we are paying for it.

[UtwigMU]

So I changed the job. I had one more interview with app company but I was in the process of signing for automation company already.

The way things are done here is completely different from previous company:
I got a company managed Chromebook and Chromebox and 49" monitor that I'll install at home once I fully move. While Chromebook chokes with dual screens, i7 Chromebox with 8G is responsive and has no problem with multiple tabs.
They take security very seriously, 2FA for everything, all work is done over VPN from Linux jumpboxes, production is all RHEL family Linux. They only have one Windows VM for testing.
Almost all work from home, typically there are only couple of people in the office in a given day. There is a 15' min video company meeting in the morning and then you use meetings or Slack to communicate, Jira for timekeeping, email is hardly used.
Owner is French, very technical (he told me to become guru in Linux pam.d and explain it to him) and usually available for questions. Company has a startup culture, guys are down to Earth, swear and joke during meets, didn't notice highheadedness you see in some startups. Had a pizza-beer meet with Slovenian team. The guys I work with are very knowledgeable but I also brought some new ideas so while I'm a noob, I'm not a complete noob.

Our clients are big industrial companies and this means physical servers in factories. For now they've put me to work on research and writing Ansible playbooks for their infra, need to do a lot of reading on stuff I don't know. The tempo of work is higher here compared to previous job but a lot more interesting. I already rented apartment very close to new job but It will take around 2 months to fully move.

So far it looks like I made the right choice.

[dZeus]

So I changed the job. I had one more interview with app company but I was in the process of signing for automation company already.

The way things are done here is completely different from previous company:
I got a company managed Chromebook and Chromebox and 49" monitor that I'll install at home once I fully move. While Chromebook chokes with dual screens, i7 Chromebox with 8G is responsive and has no problem with multiple tabs.
They take security very seriously, 2FA for everything, all work is done over VPN from Linux jumpboxes, production is all RHEL family Linux. They only have one Windows VM for testing.
Almost all work from home, typically there are only couple of people in the office in a given day. There is a 15' min video company meeting in the morning and then you use meetings or Slack to communicate, Jira for timekeeping, email is hardly used.
Owner is French, very technical (he told me to become guru in Linux pam.d and explain it to him) and usually available for questions. Company has a startup culture, guys are down to Earth, swear and joke during meets, didn't notice highheadedness you see in some startups. Had a pizza-beer meet with Slovenian team. The guys I work with are very knowledgeable but I also brought some new ideas so while I'm a noob, I'm not a complete noob.

Our clients are big industrial companies and this means physical servers in factories. For now they've put me to work on research and writing Ansible playbooks for their infra, need to do a lot of reading on stuff I don't know. The tempo of work is higher here compared to previous job but a lot more interesting. I already rented apartment very close to new job but It will take around 2 months to fully move.

So far it looks like I made the right choice.

Congrats on the new job!

Good to hear you work with Ansible; I see Ansible Tower and Hashicorp's Terraform everywhere nowadays.

[Umfriend]

Congrats!

[Dr Mordrid]

Great news, congrats!

[VJ]

Congrats! Best of luck!

[TransformX]

Good luck with the new job!!!

[UtwigMU]

5 months in. Got permanent contract, get along with team. Speaking a bit French (boss, project manager) and Russian (HR woman from Ukraine who recruited me) helps. Got the Ansible process of standard VM provisioning with ldap 2FA, CIS, close to airgap, internal only repos working. Rebuilt some 10 Centos 7 servers with different internal infra roles on Oracle 8 (RHEL 8 clone). Stuff like elasticsearch cluster, guacamole server through which sysadmins and devs do the work. Switched it from Gnome to KDE. After finishing that I'm supposed to go to Switzerland to build new Proxmox rack for our datacenter. Working on tickets also and it's a bit more complex. Factory in China wants to print labels from Linux container. Teams meet with their Indian head IT woman, Indian dev who wrote software and Chinese worker who is on the factory floor showing what comes out of printer on his phone + some 4 random Indian guys who are just silent during entire meeting. The Chinese and Indians don't entirely see eye to eye.

Otherwise all good, a bit tired from the move and working hard early on.

[Umfriend]

Sounds great!

[MultimediaMan]

Still at the Head Apparel Company (from Hell)...

Things are actually looking better:

We finally got a competent CIO (first time in years).
They let us spend some money on a 10GbE SAN + Backup software which gets out of the early 2000's.
They are starting to understand the Strategic Value of IT Managed and Curated Intelligently (instead of just "what they want")... Much better. We'll see how long they can stay the course... in the meantime, fixing everything I can while the money is there.

[UtwigMU]

Right now remotely upgrading one server that is probably close to Dr Mordrid in Carolstream near Chicago.

[Dr Mordrid]

Right now remotely upgrading one server that is probably close to Dr Mordrid in Carolstream near Chicago.

Missed by ~280 miles. We live in the near-rural suburbs west of Detroit. Population under 25,000.