bitshepherd

OS X isn't a huge cultural shock. It's mostly getting your head wrapped around the dock and some hotkeys, and it mostly Just Works. I made the switch a couple years back after over a decade of hardcore Linux or BSD on the desktop.

Once you get a terminal to your liking, it should make things less obtuse and let you get a feel for the operating system.

Referral... bonus? These are things? Seriously, though. Every referral I've made in my career has flaked out at some point. It doesn't matter if it's a person I've known for years, or someone I recently met at a meetup or over coffee.

I've made it a point to refer not a single person again because I'm tired of my and my employer's time being pissed away, when we can just dispense with the bullshit and get back to doing real work.

Got let go after showing up late to mandatory retraining (I found out the day of, and we didn't have smartphones then), which resulted in moving to another company across town for a contract where conversion was a "sure thing" just to have the contract run out 3 months later and not get renewed. No official reason given for either, but I can read between the lines.

As I was still reacting to the news about the contract, the IRS seized my assets based on a clerical error on their part, resulting in an already tight financial situation turn into a nightmare. After being unable to find paying work for months, my vehicle was repossessed and I was evicted, broke with no support network.

Over the years since then, I've hustled to get back on track, but that one year's repercussions are still being felt today.

I'll bring it from the other angle. I know why I wasn't hired (though I wasn't told):

- No formal background

- I don't code on the spot, and not on a whiteboard with zero resources but rote memory

- I'm not "senior" enough (with >15 years in roles with progressively increasing responsibilities and contributions)

- Buzzword trivia was fun in 2003. Not so much.

- Had an off day

The roles I've been hired into where I wasn't subject to a dog and pony show have arguably been the best, as I've been approached as a person and a professional, and not as a little blue box filling an opening in the calendar.

If you need to take time, do. If you don't need to, don't. That's the most I can say on that matter. I didn't go to school in the traditional sense, so whatever makes sense for you makes sense.

What made the year off sort of a zero sum was that I had roughly enough cash to last roughly a year, but at about the halfway point I started looking for areas that I wanted to relocate to and worked on securing employment there. The stress of re-entering the workforce undid some of the decompression from leaving the corporate world in the first place.

It was a great period for figuring out just what I wanted to do and what really mattered in life. If I had to do it again, I'd have more FU money, or at least have a more solid income stream that wasn't wholly dependent on me being at an office for ~8 hours a day.

Lessons were learned, some easy, some hard. Plans are in action so that history won't repeat itself so closely next time I decide I need some time off.

I have taken a year off. It was great the first six months, then life caught up and it was just a race to get back to cashflow positive. The last six months undid everything good the first six did.

Some companies will set up their own internal MPLS network, and it starts making sense when you grow to a certain size.

As a buddy of mine said to me "you don't keep up, you find 1 or 2 things to follow and stick with it".

I "pursued my passion" for a while, but the comfort of having a full-time job with a relatively fixed schedule for getting paid was too much at the time, so I started chasing the dollar. To the point where I moved to SV to enter the ratrace. It's starting to pay off a little, but I'm still clocking in at a cube farm for ~8 hours a day. YMMV

It's also good to think /why/ Marcus wrote the things he did, why they meant so much to him that he felt it necessary to do so.

I can design, architect and build scalable, performant and maintainable systems. I've been doing so for over 15 years. In a professional setting, I might be "the guy" you go to with the problems nobody else can solve.

Put me in a room with a couple of people, a not-real-world problem, a compressed timeframe and tell me to go, and it's a different story. After that time is up, you'll swear I don't know the first thing about technology and go to the next guy.

Why is this? Interviewing psyches people out sometimes. In my case, the act of being judged by my peers gets me to the point where I actually do blank out.

You could use a configuration management framework like Chef. Granted, it takes a bit longer to put in place as opposed to a just-get-it-done method, but the end result is something that is repeatable and, hopefully, less painful to triage.

As a reformed sysadmin, I suggest giving devops a closer look. It's less of the handwavy voodoo buzzword it was a few years ago and has taken root in many orgs as a means to enact real change on the status quo, not only technologically but culturally.

It's still engineering, so that part isn't going away. Just pay no mind to the rainbows and glitter, unless that's your thing.

Nothing is the antithesis of something. The one constant there is, is nothing. Nothing isn't what you can see, but what you cannot. What is becomes nothing. Everything is nothing.

You should be shocked they're not longer.

Source: engineer that used to dabble in adtech

6 days a week at, on average, 8 hours a day is just not sustainable. You'd have to scale that back to about 6 hours a day, and that's still pushing it because you're not giving yourself enough time to unwind and work on you and yours. I cannot stress this enough: you need time away from work, whether or not you think you need it

Anything over 40 hours is not sustainable in most professions, but in technology it's even more evident, whether it's ops, dev, networking, or even management. Overextending yourself will lead to careless mistakes, leading to increased work throughout the team just to clean up the fallout, leading to burnout because you and your peers have simply taken on too much, resulting in an eventual disgust of the profession altogether. Sure you can do it for a while, and money definitely smooths over some bullshit, but it's just not sustainable.

My point is: work to live, don't live to work

This was the only way to start manual transmission vehicles when I was growing up, not out of necessity but because it could be done. Living at the top of a hill, I'd let the car start rolling and pop the clutch once I got going. Worked every time after, like you said, some practice.

If you want to get your feet wet, spin up a virtual machine with something you want to get to know, and do stuff with it. Build things manually and learn how they all fit together, then try to repeat the process with automation. Through that, you can build a development environment that you know in and out, which you can then build upon using whatever technology/framework/language you decide on using.

Nobody cares how long you went to college, where you went to college (okay, some people DO care about that), or even what your GPA was when you graduated.

Here's what employers do care about in my experience: if you went to school, did you graduate? can you do the job at hand? even if you don't have all of the skills, can you learn without handholding?

If you take an extra semester to get a degree, big deal. The end result is that you're a college graduate, not that you took 4 years and a semester. Anyone that gives you a hard time about something that trivial is not someone you want to be working with or for. If a prospective or current employer does give you flak, let that be a signal to cut ties and move on.

The messaging protocols that are still here from the older days of the Internet are not going anywhere. Email is here to stay. IRC is still going strong. Hell, even Usenet is still kicking. Ignore the FUD.

You've done your part. It's in their hands now. Whether or not you'll be contacted remains to be seen, but for now assume that it's in a black hole. If you get a response, cool, awesome. Cross that bridge when you come to it. What to do now is to go find 10 more jobs like it and apply. Then find 10 more, rinse, repeat.

You can take delivery yourself, or you can contract it out to another company like Redapt or one of the other systems integrators. Authorize them to act on your behalf with the data center and tell them what you want to be done.

I've used companies like that for small scale (<=500 node) deployments and their cabling is top-notch from what I saw. It made me sad when I had to bust up their awesome cable bundling to move some servers around in the stacks.

It's way overkill if you're doing a single server, or anything under a cabinet, really.

As a mid-career professional, this strikes me as the kind of thing that might have appealed to me when I was 19-23, but even then I hung out with 40 somethings. Perhaps I'm just not the target audience. Cool idea, nonetheless.

I'll let you in on a little secret. I've worked at 5 different companies over the past 2 years. On my resume, you'll see 2.

Why do I do this? Those companies I was at for a month on short-term projects don't add any intrinsic value, aside from an additional term in my skill soup, if that. What should I say, I picked up a short term gig to pay the bills? Isn't that why we work in the first place? It's less awkward in interviews, as I don't have to explain the employment gap or what made me leave XYZ Corp.

The resume is a sales flyer. You don't get the full story. You get just enough information to get you interested enough to come in to the showroom to check the car out in person, maybe take it for a test drive.

I used to get crippling anxiety interviewing remotely. My trick was to pour a double of something (usually whiskey) and drink on that. Of course, you can't do that before an in-person, but it helped me overcome the anxiety of interviewing. The words seemed to flow easier with a drink or two in me. They don't call it 'liquid courage' for nothing. YMMV, of course :)

Focus on the message, not when it gets there. Sure, you want to submit before the deadline, but even if it's zero hour, as long as it gets in.

I find it difficult to remember the jargon and idioms, and this day in age when one might switch between a few different languages just to solve one problem, it just gets more difficult.

I don't have a degree. Hell, I barely completed high school. But if push comes to shove, I can dig deep in a foreign codebase in a foreign language and figure out where something is going wrong.

Just one thing? The whole process of the job search is tedious, painful and just downright frustrating, and employers make it harder and harder because reasons. Not to mention the whole dog and pony show that the candidate has to go through just to even get a chance to maybe plead their case with someone with hire/fire power.

Having been on both sides of the table, I don't like participating in either process. It's broken all around, and the only solution is to burn it down for the insurance money.

Do the interview but don't invest yourself emotionally. Approach the interview like you don't want the job (even if you do). If they like you, cool. If not, cool.

One thing you can try is contracting/consulting with an established firm. It got me into a couple of positions I'd have otherwise been screened out of, because I was able to bring what I know and can do to the table without fear of rejection or concern of being screened out.

Also, get out of your head. :)

After over a decade of fiddling, twiddling, tweaking, breaking, fixing and generally trying to use Linux on a desktop, I gave up and went the opposite direction, and I couldn't be happier.

I no longer actively fight my package manager because it decides that my kernel needs to be broken at this very moment (looking at you, openSUSE). I don't have to deal with the twiddling that one must do to get a working laptop setup. Drivers just work. Suspend/resume just works out of the box. Best of all, I can get shit done without fighting with the OS.

When I ran Linux as my desktop of choice, I floated between most distros with a pulse, trying out the ecosystem to find something that suited me. RPM, DEB, source, you name it I ran it. I avoided the forks of forks, sticking to mostly popular projects. In doing so, I learned that I really dislike KDE and Gnome, and I'm not too crazy about Xfce. I've tried the minimalistic approach (starting as far back as blackbox days) and something felt not quite right, like there was always something missing, and no amount of fiddling, tweaking or twiddling could rectify it.

I guess my point, if there is a point to this, is that your mileage will vary with Linux. Caveat emptor and all that.