Comment by eeeeeeeeeeeee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eeeeeeeeeeeee | Hacker News Reader

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I have experienced everything you cited. Especially the death threats. Even when we shut off a customer for non-payment we would sometimes get them at my one job.

The negativity seems to be pervasive at companies where tech is viewed as a cost center. At those kind of companies, IT tries to be proactive at first, but being proactive usually costs money, so it's often ignored. And then a failure happens as a result of ignoring that issue and then the tech people get yelled at.

I've seen a major difference in attitude when the executives are involved/invested in the tech team. Even when things are really bad, failures happening all the time, it is still a positive environment and people want to help each other. It is stunning the difference it makes to just have everyone invested in the decisions from top-down so you don't feel all alone.

As for IT being understaffed, I do think this problem could be improved if companies invested more in their employees (e.g. training). And maybe took more chances on peoples capability, instead of requiring 2-3 years of experience on a range of skills prior to hiring them.

>As for IT being understaffed, I do think this problem could be improved if companies invested more in their employees (e.g. training). And maybe took more chances on peoples capability, instead of requiring 2-3 years of experience on a range of skills prior to hiring them.

I disagree. There are people who graduate with a 3 year degree and they know absolutely nothing. I've interviewed 7 CCNAs with 3 year degrees in a row who didn't know the command 'sh run'. I gave them # cli access and asked them to tell me about what the hardware is and does. They didn't know 'sh run'. They ask for a tip or something and I'd say 'show running-configuration' and they'd type out 'show running configuration'

Sending them for 2-3 days of training isn't going to increase their skills to any legitimate degree when 3 years hasnt done anything.

As for what do I think is the fix? Lawyers have the same problem; bottom heavy. Their fix? The way lawfirms work is that those senior staff are treated better and compensated very well. That's where IT needs to go.

Is that a Windows thing? I'd investigate an unknown system starting with commands like `systemctl status`, `lspci`, `lsusb`, `apt policy`, `dpkg -l`, and `top`.

It's a cisco thing.

I was gonna say that that sounded like a really bad interview question... until I googled CCNA and saw that it was a cisco certification. That does sound pretty bad

Yep.

When I did a lot more router work (Cisco, Juniper, Ciena, Broke-aid!), my previous employer forked RANCID and wrote extensions for every router. From there, we then sent all the configs to a SVN server every hour. None of the fork was upstreamed, since it also had a ton of tie-ins to other inhouse infra.

The idea was that we had hourly backups of every router. And if bad happened, we could run RANCID in reverse and populate the configs in SVN to the router.

oh hey we did this too

'sh run' doesn't show hardware information.

"sh ver" works on a large swath of network gear, this is for familiarity reasons in that most are familiar with Cisco

also I would ask for a scope of how many devices you want to know about. if you have more than a few I would either script an expect with python netmiko to do the "sh ver" or do SNMPget in some kind of loop against the IPs

Huh? To better compensated as a lawyer,you need to make partner by getting good at sales, not being a better lawyer.

This is obviously some command to run on a Cisco router. A CCNA certification is squarely about knowing networking from a Cisco equipment point of view. So this would be like some "Unix certified engineer" not knowing "ps" or "netstat", right?

Probably more like a "Unix engineer" not knowing "cat"

"show run" (aka sh run) is about the first command anyone commits to muscle memory on a Cisco - if they have done absolutely any real work with them whatsoever.

It is, I have a grand total of a few hours experience with Cisco routers, and even I recognize it.

But doing my degree, I knew several people who hung out at the computer lab and relentlessly pestered people to do their work for them. And now people routinely pay for school essays.

I'm pretty sure there are a large number of people who invest enough effort into cheating that they could have learned the material.

Okay, but you'd think first rule of a CCNA cheater should be "know enough real material to at least fake it through interviews: like 'show run'".

(Small detail: A lot of admin shells have auto-abbreviation of commands; it works because their command syntax is largely fixed.)

This is sad. I taught myself this when I was 18... over 20 years ago. Someone dropped a router in front of me and told me to get a T1 line up and running.

IT tries to be proactive at first, but being proactive usually costs money, so it's often ignored. And then a failure happens as a result of ignoring that issue and then the tech people get yelled at.

Reminds me of a line I heard once, can't remember where but it was definitely in the very context you mention here, it goes: "When people realize they can't reliably work with you, they start looking for ways to work around you"

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