One of the clear problems with the CompTIA A+ has always been that it clearly caters to promoting Microsoft products and not being vendor neutral as it has always claimed to be. With the latest release, literally half of the exam is Windows only. There is no section for macOS, any Linux, iOS, Android, Chromebooks, nothing, nada. It's become a Windows exam, which means that they don't just skip the underlying principles that they claim the exam is about, and skip the neutrality for the industry that they claim it is about, but they also leave people going into entry level positions totally unprepared for the real world where running into non-Windows OSes is common. If you were learning from nothing but the A+, you might not even be aware that non-Windows exists. Let alone non-PC hardware, which appears to also be completely skipped.

@Emad-R IOPS varies wildly by how it is tested. The question for your Windows tests would be... how was it tested? We know how the Linux was tested, it tells us. Knowing how the Windows was tested is the real need at this point.

@carnival-boy said in When Is It Too Costly for IT to Cover Bench?:

£100 per hour may seem expensive, but I couldn't find anyone that would do it cheaper locally. That was often an hour at a time, so represented two hours when you include travel to and from our site (we only paid for time on-site).

It does, but I think you are in London so compare to Manhattan and it's still high, but not crazy high.

However, in Manhattan we'd never be able to get someone full time for $30K. That shows how different the numbers are. NYC and London are similar in a lot of ways, but your employment costs are half ours, while your hourly on calls are higher.

@scottalanmiller said in The Difference Between IT and Bench Work SAMIT Video:

@flaxking said in The Difference Between IT and Bench Work SAMIT Video:

@scottalanmiller It is interesting that bench/IT cross discipline experience is so common, but it often happens from convenience/budget constraint or ignorance. (though sometimes it happens as a hobby) And thus being cross trained won't help you that much in advancing your career.

However IT/Dev cross discipline is super useful and there is an ongoing spike in demand for it. As well as being well paying. But Bench/IT is more common. That might be changing though. With the cloud providing another layer of abstraction from the hardware, and with learning Powershell scripting meaning you're starting to cross into Dev.

My personal belief is that DevOps is not the future of systems administration, only a stepping stone along the path. System admins aren't attempting to do something bespoke or unique, like developers are, so the use of development methodologies doesn't make sense abstractly within IT circles. Right now, a lack of advanced tooling for what admins need creates a need for DevOps, but only to fill an existing gap - one that I know of at least one company working to fill. Once the power of Devops exists without the need for developer knowledge or experience, I think that we will rapidly see that category disappear again.

I think you're probably right, when we're talking about interdisciplinary IT/Dev skills and the misnamed 'DevOps Engineer' role. Eventually that will be automated and abstracted away. At which point mixing IT and Dev will as inherently valuable as mixing any other discipline with Dev, and it would make more sense to be talking about the value of Bench/Dev vs. IT/Dev.

However the 'power of DevOps' is a whole other can of worms.