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  • #61
    Originally posted by UtwigMU View Post
    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.
    Hey, Donny! We got us a German who wants to die for his country... Oblige him. - Lt. Aldo Raine

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    • #62
      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.
      Last edited by UtwigMU; 16 March 2022, 12:43.

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      • #63
        Originally posted by UtwigMU View Post
        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.

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        • #64
          Congrats!
          Join MURCs Distributed Computing effort for Rosetta@Home and help fight Alzheimers, Cancer, Mad Cow disease and rising oil prices.
          [...]the pervading principle and abiding test of good breeding is the requirement of a substantial and patent waste of time. - Veblen

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          • #65
            Great news, congrats!
            Dr. Mordrid
            ----------------------------
            An elephant is a mouse built to government specifications.

            I carry a gun because I can't throw a rock 1,250 fps

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            • #66
              Congrats! Best of luck!
              pixar
              Dream as if you'll live forever. Live as if you'll die tomorrow. (James Dean)

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              • #67
                Good luck with the new job!!!
                "For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism."

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                • #68
                  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.
                  Last edited by UtwigMU; 1 August 2022, 13:02.

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                  • #69
                    Sounds great!
                    Join MURCs Distributed Computing effort for Rosetta@Home and help fight Alzheimers, Cancer, Mad Cow disease and rising oil prices.
                    [...]the pervading principle and abiding test of good breeding is the requirement of a substantial and patent waste of time. - Veblen

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                    • #70
                      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.
                      Hey, Donny! We got us a German who wants to die for his country... Oblige him. - Lt. Aldo Raine

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                      • #71
                        Right now remotely upgrading one server that is probably close to Dr Mordrid in Carolstream near Chicago.

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                        • #72
                          Originally posted by UtwigMU View Post
                          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.
                          Last edited by Dr Mordrid; 11 August 2022, 08:44.
                          Dr. Mordrid
                          ----------------------------
                          An elephant is a mouse built to government specifications.

                          I carry a gun because I can't throw a rock 1,250 fps

                          Comment


                          • #73
                            Things are starting to go south in the new job.

                            Last year there were 3 sysadmins and 100% servers. One senior guy who worked on some special technology left two weeks ago so now the rest of team needs to spread his responsibilities. Yesterday I've found out another network/ansible guy who has been here for 4 months is leaving in two weeks. This leaves us with 2.5 (one is working on new features) guys and 50% more servers.

                            For our next servers which used to be Linux + 2 containers boss added virtualization, ZFS with semi-hourly replication and deduplication and containers in VM. With 32GB RAM existing version works fine but new version will run into low memory (there was already out of memory kill on test deployment) and SSD errors. 3 sysadmins (all excellent) told boss that 32GB is not enough and he overruled us. When he rolls out client-wide in September as planned we will have 5-time more failures so team will snap. Also besides giant industrial company we had two minor clients who left. It's been 1.5 years and we haven't added a new client yet.

                            On top of that everything is complex, convoluted, everything takes many meetings. This is <20 people company, I've worked in 50-100 people companies which weren't as convoluted. Overall employing here was the right choice 1.5 years ago as I had huge impostor syndrome for never really seriously running Linux servers in production and not using devops tools and the problems at previous place were even worse. Also the Covid restrictions were still in place so relocating abroad was harder.

                            I have two exit strategies. My side-gigs, freelancing is at about 30% salary. I have a plan to try quickly launching something with a coworker - so far we are in brainstorming phase. Other is to find remote/on-site job abroad.

                            Team here is good, money is OK for Slovenia. The problem is the boss who takes part in every decision and he is built-in as an owner, so this problem won't resolve itself.

                            I don't have to exit tomorrow but I need a solution by the end of the year.

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                            • #74
                              I left Plarium after nearly 10 years. Everybody I knew, cared about and appreciated left already. The current team is a bunch of back stabbing inept ****oles. Thankfully I received green light from my wife to resign, have some quality time with the kids and look for a new job calmly, which I'm doing.
                              "For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism."

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                              • #75
                                Originally posted by UtwigMU View Post
                                Things are starting to go south in the new job.
                                1. I may be wrong but as I understand it, you keep expanding your knowledge and skills and you've been in this for a while. You are qualified.
                                2. You're in a small firm that has the disadvantages of some large firms (bad management, bureaucratic)

                                Would you consider moving? I know that in the Netherlands at least, IT staff is in short supply. In EU, there must be loads of opportunities now. Heck, you speak how many languages?
                                Pretty sure you can get another job in Slovenia as well.

                                So basically, either of the exits you gave seem fine to me. Converting side-gigs into a company can work of course but then you need to be ready for a different kind of stress. And the risk that a partner doesn't perform is real.
                                Join MURCs Distributed Computing effort for Rosetta@Home and help fight Alzheimers, Cancer, Mad Cow disease and rising oil prices.
                                [...]the pervading principle and abiding test of good breeding is the requirement of a substantial and patent waste of time. - Veblen

                                Comment

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