How did you get started in IT?
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I'll give you guys the long story.
When I was a kid I had a bunch of surgeries to "correct" a medical problem that will... never go away. And when I was young I was huge into soccer. So I was a jock, I did sports, I loved soccer, but then I would have surgery and be taken out of the sport for a year with almost no physical activities I could do leaving me stuck inside either playing nintendo or PC. Which generally meant I was sitting in front of a computer for a year or two as a kid and a teen because I couldn't do what I wanted too.
After quitting a job for surgery, I needed to find a new job afterwards, I was 16 and needed to do something. I ended up landing a job as a Lab Technician at Ritz Camera, because the manager said I wasn't mature enough to sell (oh god if you can only imagine what I saw when I was 16 on a roll of film.... I think I wasn't mature enough for developing film :-P). Not really "IT" per say, but I fixed our giant printer, messed with the circuitry, installed new parts, took out parts, helped people from district fix our registers when they'd call in. Surprisingly all of our registers were command line even up into the companies final days. I found all of this kind of fun.
Ritz began to flounder as many of you know, having financial struggle after financial struggle and I came to the realization I like computers, I find them interesting and this company isn't going to give me a future, I need a way out. Due to lack of training I made a leap to Best Buy. Wanted to do Geek Squad, ended up doing sales despite my attempts to not do sales. But this did afford me one real new challenge that Geek Squad didn't. I had to know my product.... believe it or not I said "I need to know what I'm talking about, I don't want to lie to people" (I did once, and oh lord that guy tore me a new one). Best Buy offered training classes on a website you could do during work hours assuming you were slow, or up to two hours a week at home they'd pay for stuff.... that two hours of home time I went past... I went past far... and didn't care. Windows 7 was brand new, had tons of cool features, i series processors were coming out doing hyper threading and crazy new tricks, IT WAS FUN!!! So in a sea of salesmen saying "what the RAM does is it rams into the CPU to speed it up" and you had me.... a guy who to management took an initiative to learn new things. I legitimately did, it wasn't to excel as a Best Buy employee, it was because it was cool... and I'm apparently a great salesmen so... I shot up the ranks quickly, senior in the computer sales department in roughly a year or two. But I didn't feel complete...
A girl came to work there part time because she was a full time government employee, and just wanted the discount. After working for Best Buy for a couple months, they kept telling her she had to work more hours, or work during hours she wasn't available, and made it an effort to quit. But... she wasn't going alone... She knew I was the most tech savvy person in the whole store (tootin' my own horn, a thank you, a thank you) and asked me if I was interested in getting a job working for her mom. I was confused, I mean... I know I didn't want to be in retail my whole life, but could I put down my salesmen skills and focus only one what I wanted? Was I ready?
You never fail if you never try right? So here I am, two years in.
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my turn for a long story: When I was growing up I had some challenges learning by reading, my parents realized this and my dad starting bring home his companies suitcase computer where i was playing math munchers and number crunchers. It was at that point where everyone started to see I loved computers. When my parents bought their fist packered bell computer, within days I had that thing apart and back together numerous times. I enjoyed trying to figure out how this machine worked (for a reference I am 31 now and this was back when I was 8 or so). At my young age I was the go to for computer questions in my family (still am to this day like we all are). Fast forward to college where I didn't have a good enough gpa to get into the business school (where the IT degrees where held) I went for a communications degree majoring in video production (yeah a lot of good that has done). Once I graduated and had some internships in local production houses I had the oh s&&t moment and thought how am i going to support a family on $12 an hour. At that time I made the decision to dive headfirst into IT, I started part time in a help desk tier 1 role and worked my way up to a full time field support agent at a tv/radio station. Now I am an IT tech working on everything from phone systems to virus eradication.
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After my early stints in IT, I took a short break around 1996 and then in 1997 decided to switch from what I had been doing into more of an SMB IT realm and put in two years of just devouring books, doing certs, building out a massive home lab, introduced myself to Windows NT and Linux for the first times, got into online IT communities and just went crazy. Did basically nothing but eat, sleep and drink IT education for two years. Started a small MSP focused on SOHOs in Upstate NY, did any odd IT job that I could find, weekend work, night work, IT day labour, whatever. Then in 1999 got picked up based on my crazy hard work and have been on the more traditional career path ever since.
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So in January I will be celebrating 28 years in IT!
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Went to college locally and did 3 semesters. The whole point of going to college was for one class. CIS-292, which was part two of A+ training. CIS-291 was required for my major, but because I had my A+ already, I skipped 291. You had to be a sophomore to take the class, thus why I did three semesters. 292 was 4CH but only two hours of instruction in class. The other two were considered an internship they helped you get. I was the only one who got a paid internship, and I had planned to turn it into a job, which I did. Eventually discovered Spiceworks, began interacting with @scottalanmiller and also met @Minion-Queen and @Mike-Davis at a Spicecorps, where I got a business card from her. Sent her my resume, and started at NTG the next week.
But if you want to go back, my interest in IT started in high school. Took every IT, programming, and engineering course I could to see what I liked. Made as good of use of my time in high school as I could.
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I started as a Mechanical Engineer apprentice. After doing that for 5 years and people knowing I liked computers and gaming etc I was asked if I would like to go help the IT manager write reports. I said yes.
1st job was writing reports off a .......... bloody hell I can't remember the machine I want to say IBM4000 (I know it was running UNIX and informix database, and when a HD Failed the engineer had to raid his personal collection of old kit to find one that fitted lol), the reports were in ACE format.
From there the sales guys wanted E-mail as it was the new "in" thing to have. So bought some laptops and external 56K Modems......After a few months and E-mail taking off more people want it, so wired up a simple network and bought a PC and installed Windows 2000 Server on it and set-up some free internet sharing software and connected it to a ISDN 2 line for twice the speed
From there the network grow from just 5 people having network and internet to all machines connected (even CNC machines having config files uploaded) sharing internet and me creating a AD domain more advanced internet control etc etc. -
geezz this thread is almost 3 years old.
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Talk about necroposting @scottalanmiller !
My story is relatively short... Pops brought home a TI-99 and showed me how to type on it, and I was hooked.
I pretty much never walked away from computers after that. I've seen everything from an AS/400 to 8088 systems, 8086 systems, and up.
By 10, I was getting paid by neighbors to fix their computers, lol... and I never looked back.
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In 2003, started college and while in school I volunteered. In 2005, I was offered a part-time job at the college. And in 2006, I was offered a full time job at the college.
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Same as everyone else I think, killed my boss. As he was dying, mortally wounded by my sword, he whispered the admin credentials to me. As is tradition.
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@Dashrender said in How did you get started in IT?:
geezz this thread is almost 3 years old.
How can anyone find this old stuff?
I can't find stuff in threads from yesterday with the search.
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@BRRABill said in How did you get started in IT?:
@Dashrender said in How did you get started in IT?:
geezz this thread is almost 3 years old.
How can anyone find this old stuff?
I can't find stuff in threads from yesterday with the search.
Umm... Google?
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@BRRABill said in How did you get started in IT?:
@dafyre said
Umm... Google?
Bah. I like to use the search box and struggle for 15 minutes.
Me too, ha ha.
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@BRRABill said in How did you get started in IT?:
@Dashrender said in How did you get started in IT?:
geezz this thread is almost 3 years old.
How can anyone find this old stuff?
I can't find stuff in threads from yesterday with the search.
Tags.
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I guess I've always been in it. My dad had a side business and ran a PDP 11 for his company. He did all of their internal IT also. He gave me a Tandy 1000 when I was around 3 and it had a game called Amy's First Primer http://www.danielsays.com/ss-gallery-dos-sw-amys-first-primer-12.html
Load the truck was the best!Then moved to a 386 and then a 486. We had a program called HDM IV (I think). It gave us a menu interface that we could assign programs to. I mostly used it for games (like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom). I also did my 5th grade science fair project on the internal parts of a PC.
As I got older I started helping him with his business. I had a couple classes in high school and college. I was hired as a project engineer before I graduated and I did a lot of help desk stuff for them since internal IT was in a different area. I ended up starting my own consulting business which wasn't a super success money wise but I learned a ton by doing that. When Bentley was born I started working for a small manufacturing shop. Now I'm a systems engineer/administrator for a fortune 1000.
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@MattSpeller said in How did you get started in IT?:
Same as everyone else I think, killed my boss. As he was dying, mortally wounded by my sword, he whispered the admin credentials to me. As is tradition.
Was their lightening? I remember vaguely being electrocuted after beheading the previous admin.
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@coliver said in How did you get started in IT?:
@MattSpeller said in How did you get started in IT?:
Same as everyone else I think, killed my boss. As he was dying, mortally wounded by my sword, he whispered the admin credentials to me. As is tradition.
Was their lightening? I remember vaguely being electrocuted after beheading the previous admin.
Classic!
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I've always loved computer, they're logical, whereas people almost never are. Actually started as an assistant to the sole IT person at the county Career Center. I ended up as said assistant because nobody else knew a thing about computers/networking and I was in a program that was supposed to give me some training in that. One of the best things that could've happened for me, as I got a little real-world IT experience while still in high school, and also other business basics like accounting and management principals (or, what people say they should be anyway.) So I can have conversations with accounting, finance, marketing, etc and have a clue.
Spent two years getting a worthless piece of paper. "Associates of Computer Repair and Network Technician" between 1997 and 1999. During that same time I was working for a large car parts manufacturing plant as an IT Co-op, where I was hired on after graduating and continued to work there till 2002.
And that's where I got started.
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Pinging on this as it is a good topic and it would be great to see new stories coming out of it.
