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

TJT

Mr. Poopybutthole
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They did the mass layoffs yesterday at GM, where I currently work. Got to see my shitty manager walked out of the office. So that was cool! But I really would have preferred that severance package. It was quite generous. So its actually disappointing. The reorganization will be pretty interesting and might be an opportunity to escape my SILO. But I still fully intend to leave the company once I do find another job.

In the meantime it does mean that a whole lot of nothing will be going on so I can pursue some more certifications on company time and not give a shit. Our temporary director halted all dev work until the re-org is complete which will take until mid March. I think this is all pretty weird. They spent the past 3 months at minimum planning layoffs but have no idea where everyone is going to?

I think they did the layoffs in an ass backwards way though. They did the directors then the managers then the rank and file. So to speak. The Axe room in our area was right next to where I sit. But having directors/managers walked out by security in front of their own teams seemed really unprofessional to me. At GM you also get the perk of a company car that rotates every quarter. So most of these dudes don't have personal cars anymore. You got a Lyft voucher for a ride back to your house lol.

Later in the day a director I don't really know from Detroit contacted me via Skype call. I thought was going to be to tell me to go to the Axe room. But it was to tell me that there were no further re-orgs within my team.

On the other side my teammate who spent the past several years riding our manager's dick and several directors dicks to climb the ladder just lost all of his patrons but didn't get cut himself. He was quite depressed today as that has been his angle to get more bonus/raises for like three years. I mean that's one way to play the game and all but being a buttboy to do obviously stupid pet projects is your own fault. (IE write me an application that captures such information so I can say that the ROI for my team's work is 500% on my performance review). I am quite certain our manager's pursuit of highly questionable, "improvements" to the development process and purchase of extremely expensive useless software is not unrelated to why he was removed.
 
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Lendarios

Trump's Staff
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They did the mass layoffs yesterday at GM, where I currently work. Got to see my shitty manager walked out of the office. So that was cool! But I really would have preferred that severance package. It was quite generous. So its actually disappointing. The reorganization will be pretty interesting and might be an opportunity to escape my SILO. But I still fully intend to leave the company once I do find another job.

In the meantime it does mean that a whole lot of nothing will be going on so I can pursue some more certifications on company time and not give a shit. Our temporary director halted all dev work until the re-org is complete which will take until mid March. I think this is all pretty weird. They spent the past 3 months at minimum planning layoffs but have no idea where everyone is going to?

I think they did the layoffs in an ass backwards way though. They did the directors then the managers then the rank and file. So to speak. The Axe room in our area was right next to where I sit. But having directors/managers walked out by security in front of their own teams seemed really unprofessional to me. At GM you also get the perk of a company car that rotates every quarter. So most of these dudes don't have personal cars anymore. You got a Lyft voucher for a ride back to your house lol.

Later in the day a director I don't really know from Detroit contacted me via Skype call. I thought was going to be to tell me to go to the Axe room. But it was to tell me that there were no further re-orgs within my team.

On the other side my teammate who spent the past several years riding our manager's dick and several directors dicks to climb the ladder just lost all of his patrons but didn't get cut himself. He was quite depressed today as that has been his angle to get more bonus/raises for like three years. I mean that's one way to play the game and all but being a buttboy to do obviously stupid pet projects is your own fault. (IE write me an application that captures such information so I can say that the ROI for my team's work is 500% on my performance review). I am quite certain our manager's pursuit of highly questionable, "improvements" to the development process and purchase of extremely expensive useless software is not unrelated to why he was removed.


YOU HAVE OUTPLAYED / OUT LAST HIM!!!

congrats.

Also there really is no easy way of doing layoff.
 

Needless

Toe Sucker
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Anybody have a good solution on backing up a webserver to an external drive locally? and recommended extrenal drives for it? i run on a mac if that makes a difference.

my company just got hit by a huge ransomeware attack and they lost sooo much shit, lucky it didn't seem to affect my linux box but it scared the shit out of me and i want like 3 backups a day now.
 

Ao-

¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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I moved from worker bee to management about 8 months ago, and though I've done plenty of the annual review cycles on the worker side, this is my first time going through the process on the other end. Holy shit does this suck. I have an ok team that runs two different but similar programs (2 decent employees, 1 good employee, 1 great employee, 1 unicorn), and I can't even get a promotion for the unicorn because he's "too new", even though he's been there for year. There are all kinds of bull-shit HR hoops for progressing... it feels insane that anyone would stay in a position for more than a year. Is this standard at most large/gigantic enterprises? Why the fuck would anyone stay at a company that treats people this way?
 
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Siliconemelons

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Anyone work with AMD MXGPU's and Horizon / VCenter based VDI...

This VDI project i am on is going well, but the 3d GPU shit is just, sucking balls and not performing anywhere near what it should.
 

alavaz

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Little room for profession advancement if the skillset or performance merits it?

That's normal. I've always had to move out to move up. If it's a non high tech company, then 100k is usually the range where movement starts to slow down. Prior to that, you can get anywhere from %20-%100 increases by moving on to another company after a year or two of experience.
 
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Deathwing

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Little room for profession advancement if the skillset or performance merits it?
A year though? Seems suspect if someone hope around that much.

I've been with the same company for almost 5 years, promoted once, but I'm making 36% more than when I started. Pretty common to get 5% raise per year, maybe this place is an exception?
 
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Ao-

¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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A year though? Seems suspect if someone hope around that much.

I've been with the same company for almost 5 years, promoted once, but I'm making 36% more than when I started. Pretty common to get 5% raise per year, maybe this place is an exception?
Eh... that's sort of stale. Hopping at 1 year isn't great, but not being able to be promoted because you haven't been there a year is dumb. To put it in perspective, I'm at year 10 at current company, job number 6, and 300% of my starting salary. I want to be able to promote the people who are literally carrying way more than their workload, rather than have them leave somewhere else.
 

a_skeleton_03

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Anybody have a good solution on backing up a webserver to an external drive locally? and recommended extrenal drives for it? i run on a mac if that makes a difference.

my company just got hit by a huge ransomeware attack and they lost sooo much shit, lucky it didn't seem to affect my linux box but it scared the shit out of me and i want like 3 backups a day now.
Set up an NFS server on the Linux box and mount your web folder. Set up NFS on the Mac and just drag and drop or you can time machine I bet.

Real easy process you can google.
 
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Kiki

Log Wizard
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Anybody have a good solution on backing up a webserver to an external drive locally? and recommended extrenal drives for it? i run on a mac if that makes a difference.

my company just got hit by a huge ransomeware attack and they lost sooo much shit, lucky it didn't seem to affect my linux box but it scared the shit out of me and i want like 3 backups a day now.

You might try veeam, it's great for vms but now they do physical as well. Free Backup for Linux workloads - Veeam Agent for Linux

The real issue is you don't want anything connected to each other or sharing credentials because you'll just get your backups or your machine encrypted if you copy something bad. Tapes are good for this because they are disconnected after. You can rotate usb drives/whatever you want, on different days or just unplug it after you backup once a day in 5 minutes. You'll have to adapt to your specific situation.

Edit: do your local machine while you're at it too
 
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Deathwing

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Eh... that's sort of stale. Hopping at 1 year isn't great, but not being able to be promoted because you haven't been there a year is dumb. To put it in perspective, I'm at year 10 at current company, job number 6, and 300% of my starting salary. I want to be able to promote the people who are literally carrying way more than their workload, rather than have them leave somewhere else.

Well, there's maybe 100 employees at my company, I'm willing to bet you have at least 10x that from how easily you've been able to move around. I'd expect promotions and such if they were feasible too.

300% of my starting salary would be nuts, I wouldn't give a shit about my career advancement if I was making that much. I think we're talking from very different perspectives.
 

alavaz

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Hopping at 1 year will not hurt you at all as long as it appears to be a step forward.

In ten years I've gone from making 30k to 107k at the moment. I actually was making more 3 years ago, but that was in the Seattle area so I actually fare much better making what I make in NC now.

I've looked and the only way I can really get a noticeable raise is to go high tech in Raleigh and do some sort of sales engineering type deal, or junp into management. I could go overseas too I guess. I don't really NEED more money though, so job satisfaction is way more important at the time being and my current job really delivers in that aspect.
 
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Noodleface

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The only way I've been promoted is leaving every 2 years. This is my longest job I've held at a little over 2 years
 

TJT

Mr. Poopybutthole
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Hopping at 1 year will not hurt you at all as long as it appears to be a step forward.

In ten years I've gone from making 30k to 107k at the moment. I actually was making more 3 years ago, but that was in the Seattle area so I actually fare much better making what I make in NC now.

I've looked and the only way I can really get a noticeable raise is to go high tech in Raleigh and do some sort of sales engineering type deal, or junp into management. I could go overseas too I guess. I don't really NEED more money though, so job satisfaction is way more important at the time being and my current job really delivers in that aspect.

Yeah about the same. I'm 31 and I started working at 18 when I joined the Army. I've only had two jobs but I've steadily increased my salary from uh, whatever E3 makes to 95k here in Austin. I am seriously considering moving now though. While Austin has a lot of tech jobs it also has a glut of tech talent I'm learning. Such that you can be passed over for jobs just because you were a developer who didn't use some tool (because your shop used product X instead of product Y to do some task) over one who did. Which is extremely frustrating.
 

Borzak

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When I worked in San Antonio they had been running ads online and such for project managers, project coordinators and kept getting responses from people in Austin that appeared like they applied with a bot. They had experience in project management on IT oriented stuff but nothing to do with the actual job at all. Kind of wondered about that, I told the HR lady maybe they applie for jobs semi professionally or something. It's like their program saw project management and automatically sent in a resume.
 

alavaz

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I like to employ a technique I call "lie but don't lie." What I mean is, don't get in over your head but if you know you can do the job find a creative way to "learn" the technology they want.

As a systems engineer, I basically set up storage, hypervisor's, operating systems and applications that comprise some greater system of systems.

There's lots of products that do those things, but most of them are fundamentally similar. Being that I have a very solid grasp of those fundamentals, learning any specific product is just a matter of filling in a few details.

I don't have much experience with software engineering, though I have loads of experience building tools with lots of languages, but I imagine it's similar. You know git, you could probably figure out TFS. You know VS you could private figure out eclipse. Etc, etc.