Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab
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@scottalanmiller said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
@RamblingBiped said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
Out of curiosity, and to help derail this thread just a little bit more... @scottalanmiller / @Minion-Queen and @JaredBusch , how do you setup your remote employees? Do you provide them with systems to work from and/or furnish a stipend for internet access? Or do you just build that into their salary to simplify things from your end?
I'm honestly pretty surprised how few want a company setup. If I was a normal work from homer with normal desktop needs, like I used to be, I loved having a fully supported "just plug and go" company desktop and desk phone. So perfect for setting up your home office.
Our company setup is an i7 desktop with 16GB of RAM and an SSD of some size. So if anyone wants to serious game with it, all you need is a dedicated video card added in. But most generation old games will run on any modern hardware.
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Home lab
2 x 5 bay Synology NAS's.
Managed 24Gbps port switch
7 x Intel NUC's (Some Gen6's with 32GB of RAM).
Firewall (Running Ubiquity edge router for VPN termination, and IDS, routing on a stick for things NSX isn't handling etc).Work lab.
I have access to a a lot of machines. Primary cluster right now is 12 hosts with 20 core boxes, 256GB of RAM, and 6 flash drives each, 10Gbps (2 ports) and 2 x 1Gbps ports (management) with enterprise out of band licensed. Currently running a storage lab to test some workflows, will likely be testing some monitoring and automation frameworks with it soon.
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@Dashrender said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
@thwr said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
@Dashrender said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
@thwr said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
@Dashrender said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
@david.wiese said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
The question that should be asked is does the dedication to the IT industry mean you should sacrifice your hobbies?
A better question, if IT isn't your hobby, should you have a different job? One that more closely matches you true likes and desires.
Would you ask a car mechanic the same who doesn't want to fix cars in his free time?
If I'm hiring a car mechanic for high end cars or something like Indy car racing - absolutely, and if they said no.. I'd bin their application. NTG is at the top of the field. Some companies put themselves there. They want the most enthusiastic for IT group they can get. As Danielle said, you can't teach enthusiasm, but you can teach skills. So far, their needs have been met buy people with either both enthusiasm and skills or just enthusiasm, and they taught them the skills. when the work pool starts to dry up, and they have fewer choices, they will have to be less picky on who they pick.
I agree from a personal point of view. But I can't expect everyone to be like this. Maybe someone just wants to do his job, that's ok. We should keep a few things in mind here:
- Salary
- Position
- Goals
for example. I wouldn't expect a Level 1 helpdesk tech to have a small datacenter in his basement, he care barely live from what he carries home. If we are talking about a 100-150k+ position, it's a whole different story.
and I wouldn't expect NTG to higher a Level 1 helpdesk person either. I had junk equipment in the mid 90's in my apt for lab gear that I paid pennies for, just so I would have stuff to learn on.
I suppose I could agree that as you get older (north of 35) the need for a home lab is less (especially because of today's options), but when you're young.... you need to be hungry! If you don't want to spend a lot of time learning/playing with this stuff, then I ask, is this really the field for you?
I have like 3 old systems that would be great for a young guy home lab that I need to dump on someone... As you get older the stuff you test isn't low level infrastructure so much as higher level stuff that you can lab out on other environments etc. Also you should have a work lab with the resources for this stuff. IF I really want I can use Ravello for free and spin up stuff on AWS.
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@JaredBusch said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
@scottalanmiller said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
@RamblingBiped said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
Out of curiosity, and to help derail this thread just a little bit more... @scottalanmiller / @Minion-Queen and @JaredBusch , how do you setup your remote employees? Do you provide them with systems to work from and/or furnish a stipend for internet access? Or do you just build that into their salary to simplify things from your end?
I'm honestly pretty surprised how few want a company setup. If I was a normal work from homer with normal desktop needs, like I used to be, I loved having a fully supported "just plug and go" company desktop and desk phone. So perfect for setting up your home office.
Our company setup is an i7 desktop with 16GB of RAM and an SSD of some size. So if anyone wants to serious game with it, all you need is a dedicated video card added in. But most generation old games will run on any modern hardware.
I like the idea of separation of work/personal so I always asked for a work laptop.
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Not all hires require a Lab, some just need a laptop with Virtual box or maybe even a pad and paper.
It really depended on the expectation of their position and what they are being hired for. Working on DC stuff or PC then absolutely, they need lots of exposure to the variety they will come in contact with, loving what they do doesn't hurt :).
Working on or with the type of equipment they will come in contact with is a huge ++. In some cases, there are people who have been exposed to a CompTia, A+ or other type of course, loved it and they may not be able to afford it all, so I would still expect they have some small amount of parts, but if not, it never stopped me from giving a server to them, even when they applied for the job, as we always have spares or old servers coming in. A small refresh and they can practice.
Since a picture is worth a thousand words, I figured I would share,
Do I get extra credit on LM *grin *We just moved in to our new place a few months ago and still have painting and renos to do,
but needed a place to set up my lab *wider grin * in the mean time.
A quiet place to have a conference or one to one meetings
and a place to hide a box or two.
Also, what I now call the largest most expensive phone booth, but cozy and quiet when you need it.
Still unpacking with the help of my friends, and still sorting from the move, can't wait to put my HP Signage Display on wall
so excited.
Spare parts and archived projects, including some hobbies
Now it wouldn't be right without spare servers, correct? I love my HP left-hand serialized servers in the middle, so identical, even the serial matches. HP tech and I had a blast trying to hunt down the model and parts, but we ordered great pizza and had at it :D.
The pizza and the work lol.
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@JentuTechnologies said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
Not all hires require a Lab, some just need a laptop with Virtual box or maybe even a pad and paper.
That's a lab, though, in most cases. Might not be the coolest one, but it's a lab. If your lab is to learn server hardware, no, that would not be that kind of lab. But if your lab is to learn systems administration, that would definitely be a lab.
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@FrostyPhoenix said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
I like the idea of separation of work/personal so I always asked for a work laptop.
Funny I was talking to @Dominica today about Jentu use cases and one that I proposed as an ideal one is for enabling strong BYOD so that you would not need to do that kind of stuff anymore (in cases where it applies) because you could have your own laptop that you take to work, but when in the office you load it from Jentu rather than with the local disk and it becomes a work laptop but reverts to your personal one once you take it off of the office network. Magic... BYOD hardware, not BYOD software. Not exactly a new concept, but one that is rarely broached and discussed as an option.
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@scottalanmiller Never thought of that, thats an elegant solution.
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@tiagom said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
@scottalanmiller Never thought of that, thats an elegant solution.
I need to write a paper on that (and like a million other things.)
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@scottalanmiller said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
I have my reasons that I can go into, but first I want to hear... who here does not have a home lab or equivalent or better? And how many of you, looking to hire others would be willing to hire or at least seriously consider someone who did not have a home lab?
I've never had one. I have very little interest in IT outside of work hours. I don't know if the people I've employed have home labs, I suspect generally not, because it's never come up. I don't really care what people get up to outside of work hours. I try and ensure that they have time to learn and experiment in a lab whilst they are at work.
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@Carnival-Boy said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
@scottalanmiller said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
I have my reasons that I can go into, but first I want to hear... who here does not have a home lab or equivalent or better? And how many of you, looking to hire others would be willing to hire or at least seriously consider someone who did not have a home lab?
I've never had one. I have very little interest in IT outside of work hours. I don't know if the people I've employed have home labs, I suspect generally not, because it's never come up. I don't really care what people get up to outside of work hours. I try and ensure that they have time to learn and experiment in a lab whilst they are at work.
It's not "outside of work hours" that we want to gauge. It's passion and drive.
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"Outside of work hours" simply means "at home", which is what a home lab implies.
I wouldn't necessarily say I lack passion and drive. I think it's more a case that I have more passion and drive for other things outside of IT. For that reason, and because life is frighteningly short, I do other stuff unrelated to my career whilst I am at home / not at work. Hence, I've never had a home lab, or done anything IT related outside of work hours.
For others, IT is also their hobby, which is great, but not a requirement.
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@Carnival-Boy said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
"Outside of work hours" simply means "at home", which is what a home lab implies.
I wouldn't necessarily say I lack passion and drive. I think it's more a case that I have more passion and drive for other things outside of IT. For that reason, and because life is frighteningly short, I do other stuff unrelated to my career whilst I am at home / not at work. Hence, I've never had a home lab, or done anything IT related outside of work hours.
For others, IT is also their hobby, which is great, but not a requirement.
It's passion and drive in IT that we are looking for, though. That's our number one hiring criteria, far above experience or existing skills. It's the only criteria that we can't fix. We can give people experience, we can train them, but we can't make them passionate about IT, so that's what we look for more than anything else.
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@Carnival-Boy said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
For others, IT is also their hobby, which is great, but not a requirement.
Different hiring goals, I suppose. It's really, more or less, our only criteria. Not exactly, you still have to gel with the team, have a clue (you can be clueless and passionate), etc. But being generally smart, fitting in with the team, being a nice person, and being passionate about the field... we can't provide those. Those are the things that the candidate brings. We bring everything else.
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@Carnival-Boy said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
I wouldn't necessarily say I lack passion and drive. I think it's more a case that I have more passion and drive for other things outside of IT. For that reason, and because life is frighteningly short, I do other stuff unrelated to my career whilst I am at home / not at work. Hence, I've never had a home lab, or done anything IT related outside of work hours.
That's exactly the same reason (that life is short) that we want to hire people who love the work and for whom it isn't work, just an extension of life. If you feel that work is something that isn't fun that you have to do "outside of life", that's horrible. If I felt like IT was work, I'd change careers to find something that I was passionate about - precisely because life is short and you shouldn't have to dislike work. You shouldn't want to go home at the end of most days, we are trying to fix the problem completely, not just let people work a little less and go home at the end of the day. We don't want them to have to stop their lives to do work, we want them to feel like they don't work at all and that "work time" is fun time.
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You can have a conversation with the candidate about his/her setup at home to get the information you need. I think that it's pretty crippling to not hire someone without a home lab. I don't have a home lab, but I have home automation setup throughout my house. Such as text messages if I forget to close my garage door, security camera door bells, light automation, etc... I played around with setting up an FreePBX and had a full FreePBX working in my house for awhile. To the point where you would my dial my home phone and you could press 1 for the kitchen, 2 for office, etc... I've now just went the voip.ms route. I'm a cordcutter as well, and I could go on and on about the geekyness of the cordcutter setup to free myself from paying for cable too. I got my VCP without a home lab. So really, I think if you can have a conversation about their setup at home to learn how geeky the person is, and what they have figured out on their own to use technology should not be overlooked.
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@magicmarker said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
You can have a conversation with the candidate about his/her setup at home to get the information you need. I think that it's pretty crippling to not hire someone without a home lab. I don't have a home lab, but I have home automation setup throughout my house. Such as text messages if I forget to close my garage door, security camera door bells, light automation, etc... I played around with setting up an FreePBX and had a full FreePBX working in my house for awhile. To the point where you would my dial my home phone and you could press 1 for the kitchen, 2 for office, etc... I've now just went the voip.ms route. I'm a cordcutter as well, and I could go on and on about the geekyness of the cordcutter setup to free myself from paying for cable too. I got my VCP without a home lab. So really, I think if you can have a conversation about their setup at home to learn how geeky the person is, and what they have figured out on their own to use technology should not be overlooked.
So you describe your home lab after saying that you don't have one. I'm confused. What is all that stuff if not your home lab? And doesn't that support the idea that having a home lab is a good sign (but I realize not the absolute only one) that someone really loves what they are doing? You just didn't call it a lab, but you described having a home lab as a way to figure out if they are passionate. So exactly what we had been thinking.
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@scottalanmiller I guess after reading my reply that I should be considering my setup as a home lab. I had it in my head that a home lab would include physical rackmount servers/switches and/or an account setup on Azure or AWS to setup VM's to play with. I just wanted to make the point that if the person has geeked out their home, that the candidate shows a passion for the work.
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@magicmarker said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
@scottalanmiller I guess after reading my reply that I should be considering my setup as a home lab. I had it in my head that a home lab would include physical rackmount servers/switches and/or an account setup on Azure or AWS to setup VM's to play with. I just wanted to make the point that if the person has geeked out their home, that the candidate shows a passion for the work.
Well it might, which is why we mentioned a few times that "home lab" might include any number of similar things for learning off hours, like having Amazon AWS, colocation, a home development environment or other creative learning, but hands on, scenario. It especially varies by what you want to be learning.
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So in summary, it would seem you cannot be passionate about technology without a home lab. And if they don't have one, they aren't worth hiring.
Not being facetious here, just seems this is still the position. No other good contenders for determining a candidate who loves/is passionate about tech?
