Looking for a Career Path
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@ajstringham said:
@katie So does Apple use Windows Server to manage their computers or is it just a free-for-all at HQ?
I cant remember, since it's been about 7 years since I worked for them. I vaguely remember a mixed server environment. It's likely quite a bit different now.
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@Katie said:
@ajstringham said:
@katie So does Apple use Windows Server to manage their computers or is it just a free-for-all at HQ?
I cant remember, since it's been about 7 years since I worked for them. I vaguely remember a mixed server environment. It's likely quite a bit different now.
I think that'd be pretty funny...
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@scottalanmiller said:
@ajstringham said:
UNIX is more proprietary. Linux is basically Unix that a Norwegian named Linus Torvalds took and modified.
UNIX is only an open standard. There is nothing proprietary whatsoever in UNIX.
Bell Labs begs to differ.
True System V UNIX is closed to the core. BSD is "open" but has tight control over the kernel. Linux is GNU open, so it's not proprietary at all.
Linux is not UNIX, even if it looks and feels the same.
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@PSX_Defector said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@ajstringham said:
UNIX is more proprietary. Linux is basically Unix that a Norwegian named Linus Torvalds took and modified.
UNIX is only an open standard. There is nothing proprietary whatsoever in UNIX.
Bell Labs begs to differ.
True System V UNIX is closed to the core. BSD is "open" but has tight control over the kernel. Linux is GNU open, so it's not proprietary at all.
Linux is not UNIX, even if it looks and feels the same.
Bell sold UNIX long ago. And it was Dennis at Bell who made the statement.
Bell's UNIX distro might be proprietary. But UNIX refers to the standard, not any implementation. UNIX is purely open. Any given implementation, a la AIX, may opt to be open or closed.
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System V wasn't closed either. Even though it was non-free it actually was sold as code originally.
But don't mix UNIX with System V. They are not the same thing. System V is UNIX and implements the open ABI. But UNIX is not System V.
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If your goal is not to deal with customers, I'm assuming that dealing with users is out of the question as well. In that case do not go into a support role, such as system admin, network admin, and service desk. You'll want to specialize right away into something you could become an engineer for. DBA, storage, programming, web design, engineering of some kind.
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Web design almost always has customers. Rarely does it face internal IT, normally it faces end users.
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Rather than focusing on certs right off the bat, immerse yourself in different areas of IT. When you find the area(s) that interest you, you'll just know it. From there, you can plan your career path.
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@FiyaFly said:
If you don't want to deal with a lot of customers/users, you will probably want to try to hit the engineer level in my opinion. I spend a lot of time on the front lines, as it were. I still don't entirely know which direction I am pursuing in the IT field, but I am keeping wide open to suggestions.
Even for non-customer facing, IT is a wide field. You can be a programmer, an engineer, system admin. When I was focusing on certs, I was intending to get a cert for A+, Network+, and Security+. That is where I intended to start, and that will almost certainly help you to get a foot up.
Hope this helps.
Engineering's still very customer-facing, whether it's internal customers or external customers. It just isn't about answering the phones and dealing with end users. I daresay that spending time on a helpdesk helps with some career skills, such as learning about different types of people and how to interact with them. It also gives you a solid foundation so that as you're designing systems, you have the insight to see how it would impact the end-users. Jumping right into Engineering/Systems makes you more of a 30,000 foot tech pilot with no idea how to land the plane.
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Reading your post here makes everything clear to me. I am glad that most of the discussions here are about Linux stuff.
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Follow up, he decided to leave IT and work in automotive repair.
