@Carnival-Boy said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:

In small firms where there is no in-house IT expertise and they're trying to recruit then employing you makes great sense. How else can they identify if the candidates no anything about IT? But as an IT Manager recruiting and running IT teams, if I had to pay you to identify competent staff over bozos then I'd have question why the hell I'm doing my job. That was the original point I was making.

I believe all IT people in small shops should question this. I don't see any role for internal IT below very large companies because there is no way to be compensated for your value while providing good value to the firm. Either you get paid more than you are worth to the firm, or less than the job should be worth to you. Or meeting in the middle somewhere.

Life is one continuous stream of issues & problems.
Living is solving them.
Learning is everything.

@Jason said:

@hobbit666 said:

@scottalanmiller said:

You can be amazing but your career is over before you have a chance to demonstrate it because all of the managers are the 80% and have no way to know that you are doing well or, more often, do know it and need to crush you to support their own careers.

I've found everywhere I've worked so far that the IT Manager has ever come from the field, they have been managers in different fields e.g. Accounting, and "promoted" into IT. So I found this in one place and got out quick as the "manager" I felt was holding me back and taking advice from a poor MSP over my recommendations.

That's normal for IT directors and CIOs not to be from IT fields/backgrounds. They are usually a little bit technical. But they are business management jobs, not IT. Sounds like they just have bad management skills then. The CIO & IT directors are suppose to hire competent people, who they can trust and listen too their input. Because their employees would be the experts on the matter

Can't upvote this enough. A CIO is a business role primarily. Should they understand IT, sure. Should they have a clue, of course. But this is department management role, not a technical decision maker role. If you put an IT person there, which you can, they had better have some crazy good business skills and they had better not try to use their IT skills to micromanage or you have a disaster. No competent manager is going to micromanage, that's a newbie entry level management mistake, but bad companies promote bad people.

@jonezee said:

I've been thinking about getting some Linux experience and developing some expertise. I do have very light experience with it. I've been in the Windows sysadmin field for about 20 years and I'm considered to be a senior engineer I would say. I'm paid pretty well and I'm sure some will say just keep getting better at the Windows world, but I'm tempted by the potential that having Linux expertise might bring to my career. Thoughts anyone?

Linux earns, generally, far more than Windows and my estimate is that the gap will only widen unless you move into DevOps style Windows management and move to pure PowerShell or other code-based tools. Linux is a growing market, growing pay rates and the demand versus available resources just keeps getting bigger.

Good article, I enjoyed it.

@alexntg said:

A few years ago, I was recovering from burnout and took a helpdesk position. It was low-stress, low-workload, and extremely relaxing. Sometimes taking a step back isn't all that bad to do. If I hadn't been recruited away, I'd likely still be there.

That's kinda what I did with my current job, went from an MSP, to Goodwill, to another MSP to help desk / internal IT for a single office. All involved IT help desk in some way except this job, where it's software support only. Been less stressed and given some room to move and do things but I miss having projects and different environments.