IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

I think that if I had to give blanket, generalized advice on the best career path for someone looking to get into software development right now it would be to familiarize yourself with HL7 standards and FHIR. And then pick a technology/application meant to harness/ease development for those standards. Not only is healthcare pretty insulated from economic downturns and volatility but meaningful use initiatives and HITECH mean there is a lot of money to be made.

The work is also pretty interesting because you tend to be building brand new systems from the ground up to bring hospitals and doctor's offices out of the technological dark ages.

Cukernaut said:

Haha yeah, fair enough. I’m partially curious where you guys see your individual companies and respective industries heading with on site / offsite etc.

I see small companies all saas, medium sized to large pushed into the cloud, realized the cost and now it’s a hybrid strategy, and then gov following years old mandates and funding allocations.

What do you guys see / what are your thoughts. How would you run your organizations it footprint if you fully had the reigns ?

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I personally feel cloud based hosting and SaaS for any company of a decent size is just a play by software vendors to milk companies for a constant stream of predictable income. Imho, I've had stuff on premise, and I've had stuff in the cloud, and nothing can beat the reliability and performance of on premise assuming you have the right infrastructure and staff. CFO's and CIO's have been brainwashed into thinking the Cloud is the way to go, but in reality it is more expensive in the long run than on premise, won't save you as much as you'd think on IT staffing, and in reality is more of a boon to the IT department than the Firm itself. Why? Because while your company will be paying more in the long term than on prem, your IT department now has the frequent luxury of just pointing at the cloud and shrugging when shit goes down or performs poorly.

The reality is that Cloud hosted stuff just introduces almost as much troubleshooting pain as on premise, just a different type (internet latency and a dependence on tech support). Any little problem that you had on premise that you could fix in 5 minutes is now replaced by opening a ticket and talking to offshore support for hours. While the cloud services won't have frequent outages, they will have constant performance issues and bugs as they try to squeeze as many custies as they can into every 1U of space.

Ultimately, the only stuff that I choose to put in the cloud are things that a) are not latency sensitive (web apps) b) stuff I want segregated from my network (public websites) and c) Stuff where I know I will never need access to the underlying OS/registry.

a_skeleton_03 said:

Do you think that you can get a security clearance?

You have sec+ and a network one like CCNA or Net+?

I could get you a job pretty easily on the .gov/contractor side that would at least have a pretty defined role.

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I have a teenage son interested in computers and networking. Have any advice on what military service he could go into to get a security clearance and what the best route there is?

Man we got tthis new guy and if he catches me in the hallway he complains non fucking stop about work. He's s principal engineer too. I predict he leaves within a year.

Like I get it, sometimes work sucks, but goddamn shut the fuck up

Lendarios said:

Rackspace, go daddy, datacenters at all are not the cloud.

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The cloud is just a fancy term for a remote data center you don't manage. If you do, then it's just called a "private cloud".

Lendarios said:

We are talking about different things.


For me the cloud is aws, azure, distributed computing. Not virtual machines/ boxes in a data center.

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If you want to boil it down all those services you mentioned are just boxes/vms in a datacenter. I would agree with you though that a true "cloud" service requires some level of abstraction from the underlying infrastructure. It got it's name from the cloud symbol in a network diagram that represented the portion of a network you did not control, i.e. the internet.

I think things like office and email are probably staying off prem but any org with large storage or compute needs is going to have stuff on premise. It's just not cost effective otherwise. Hell these days I can run more shit in a 4U footprint than I probably could 10 years ago in 4 full racks. The thing that people often forget is that computing needs only accelerate. Open systems didn't become popular because they were better than mainframes, it was because they were cheap. Same thing is happening with clouds. I can setup and maintain a private cloud for seriously cheap.

a_skeleton_03 said:

Have him go Army and look at the 25 series MOS like a 25B or 25N.

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Why army over say, air national guard?

I was in the Army (25S/25N) and then transferred to the Air National Guard (3D0X2). I can't speak for the quality of the training the Air Force provides to junior enlisted (I got a waiver for tech school), but it can't be worse than the Army: an eight month PowerPoint presentation over archaic systems that you would never see again. Leaving tech school, your son would at least have Security+, a security clearance (possibly TS), and a rudimentary grasp of the career field. Training opportunities are constantly offered, and destinations for annual training are places that people actually enjoy. There's also an order of magnitude less bullshit to deal with.

The available positions will depend on your state and the surrounding bases. I'd recommend something like 3D0X2 (Cyber Systems) or 3D1X2 (Cyber Transport), and look for openings where he'd be supporting base comms or an intel mission.

Does he want to be in a military branch? You can get clearances as a contractor

alavaz said:

If you want to boil it down all those services you mentioned are just boxes/vms in a datacenter. I would agree with you though that a true "cloud" service requires some level of abstraction from the underlying infrastructure. It got it's name from the cloud symbol in a network diagram that represented the portion of a network you did not control, i.e. the internet.

I think things like office and email are probably staying off prem but any org with large storage or compute needs is going to have stuff on premise. It's just not cost effective otherwise. Hell these days I can run more shit in a 4U footprint than I probably could 10 years ago in 4 full racks. The thing that people often forget is that computing needs only accelerate. Open systems didn't become popular because they were better than mainframes, it was because they were cheap. Same thing is happening with clouds. I can setup and maintain a private cloud for seriously cheap.

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I don't even want to put my Exchange servers in the cloud (O365) no matter how much Microsoft is pushing it, and even if e-mail is designed to be latency insensitive, because again you lose so much control, and the integration with other 3rd party systems like mail gateways, Fax servers, workflow products, network scanners, and archiving solutions are now more difficult to implement and troubleshoot. Any changes to exchange that can't be done through powershell are basically off limits, so if you want to tweak something related to say activesync or OWA that requires access to IIS or a config.xml file, your SOL.

O365 is great for small business that don't have many integration needs or a large infrastructure, otherwise it's just more money grabbing by Microsoft.