@scottalanmiller This is why I like our system. It accepts that non-management personal will be "higher" than management in some cases.
Overly simple systems (How many degree's away from the CEO on the org chart are you?) lead to area's with highly over and underpaid (or artificially inflated or non-inflated management layers). Our company is pretty "lean" on management overhead as a result.
We use the Radford system. I know that my current "Track" startles the manager track to where I make as much (or more) than some managers within the company. Now there is a "wall" as an individual contributor where management tracks will be required to go higher... but there are a lot of tracks and sometimes just changing to a different one can provide mobility up in compensation without having to go into management. It's a quite nice system as it allows you to know where you are going. My current job on my track a band 5 (Senior TMM Architect). I know the next step up is Staff Architect. There are points where in order to get further raises, and bonus % and RSU grant sizes I'll need to move up and I have a clear document with expectations across 7 categories of what skills are required to get that band and it's title. I also know that if I want to go beyond band 7 I'll need a new Track and have to change my job role.
https://radford.aon.com/insights/articles/2015/radford-global-job-leveling
@Breffni-Potter We have this in Houston (3rd ward). I wouldn't go into some area in the middle of the day without a roof gunner. I lived in 6th ward (not quite as bad) and ambulances wouldn't come to my house without a police escort.
@matteo-nunziati The issue isn't the cost, the issue is operation issues. SMB's often dangerously live with institutional knowledge and relationships for sales being tied to 1-2 people. The wrong people go on leave and the company will implode.
You actually reach a point to where this leads to discrimination in hiring. I worked for a SMB that hired someone in a critical 1 person role who got pregnant and went on leave. We had to pay significant premiums to bring back old staff to consult and if they had not been available that entire piece of operations might have fallen apart (even beyond the cost of the supplemental labor). I can see unscrupulous managers avoiding hiring younger women for this reason.
@scottalanmiller At the MSP I worked at we were the low cost operations/network team for some nordic companies because their benefits made it borderline impossible to have operations staff...
38 hour work week means you often have IT staff stop responding to email/calls before Thursday.
2-3 week holidays where the whole country shuts down effectively. (China and Thailand are bad about this too).
I've been watching the hiring process for a new team member in EMEA and it's insane all the crazy paperwork and weird stuff.
@Tim_G said in SMB vs Enterprise:
European work law is great, especially if you have a family. It's similar to Italy or better in most European countries.
In the U.S., it's hardcore capitalism... all about pinching pennies and screwing the employees if need be. There's a lot of exceptions (of course, like where John Nicholson works, and my employer is great), but generally speaking I mean. If you have a higher position in an F500 company it is most likely OKAY. But still, never even close to how good it is in Europe. That's why they are always named the happiest countries, especially the Scandinavian counties and Canada.
My sister gets 6 months in DC working for a non-profit.Plenty of companies offer generous benefits like this, they are just normally not SMBs.
@scottalanmiller said in Vendor Neutral IT Strategist Conference:
@Kelly said in Vendor Neutral IT Strategist Conference:
@scottalanmiller said in Vendor Neutral IT Strategist Conference:
@Kelly said in Vendor Neutral IT Strategist Conference:
It sounds like you liked what Gartner's analysts had to say.
No, he likes IDC, not Gartner.
Thanks for clearing that up. It makes more sense now.
I've not worked with IDC but have no knowledge of them working like Gartner does. And it is hard to hide because if you have any vendor side exposure, that Gartner reaches out to extort vendors is common knowledge as they do it to everyone. Same kind of thing that Dunn & Bradstreet do. Give us money, or we'll report bad things about you.
The biggest issues with Gartner I have is how they arbitrarily define what a market is. They will ignore the #1 vendor in a space by making an artificial distinction (HCI must be an appliance and not software, All Flash arrays must be an array that isn't just sold with only flash, but has a magic SKU that prevents you from installing non-flash drives) etc.
@scottalanmiller The enterprise is way more diverse.
I don't know Scott, I think being in the enterprise means everyone is just a guy who is an expert at 1 skill or app and would be helpless if dropped in a SMB. It's SOOO NARROW and soooo focused!
Lets look at the life of a dedicated "VDI architect in the enterprise and at how "Narrow" his job is.
Now it's true that some of these would be handled by other teams, but if you don't know how to explain your ask of those teams (or don't have 100% Competent people in those teams) get ready for your VDI deployment to get stuck for 6 months in ITIL change control hell.
BTW, I'm only joking. In some shops the VDI guys can often wear other hats too.
@Jimmy9008 said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@Dashrender said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@Jimmy9008 said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@coliver said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@Jimmy9008 said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@IRJ said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@Jimmy9008 said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@IRJ said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@Dashrender said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@Jimmy9008 said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@IRJ said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@Jimmy9008 said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@IRJ said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@Jimmy9008 said in SMB vs Enterprise:
I'm a generalist too; I don't think that puts me at a disadvantage compared to specialists. Where many specialists would get caught up on a project, I have a range of experience which will get me past that problem.
That is a key point. In enterprise, you take a very small amount of responsibility for specific functions vs doing everything across the board. It's both good and bad, but at the end of the day you'll learn more if you have to do everything. Although you may not master a specific area.
Do you have an example of a specialist role? I'd like to see how they compare to a generalist role...
There are so many examples. Let's just take a look at a windows server admin. There is a team for handling group policy, several builds, server patching, server OS troubleshooting, application support for specific applications (these are the guys troubleshooting with the vendors), package deployment, and more.
You probably do alot more than sever admin in SMB. You're evaluating products, talking vendors, deploying actual physical hardware like racks and servers, configuring network equipment, and many more roles that aren't windows admin related.
I see what you mean, but never assumed that to be specialist.
What did you assume them to be?
Yeah, I am not sure what you were expecting? I am just using a very broad role (windows admin) as an example of how many sub specialist roles you might see in enterprise. I am pretty sure I missed some
Me neither, hence asking
Maybe i'm not a generalist, but just assumed I am. GPOs, Patching, Server Deployments etc, I do all of them... so am I a specialist!? lol
No. A Specialist does 1 or maybe 2 of those roles.
But why? They are easy roles. It is not special at all to be good at 1 or 2 of them. They are easy. I'd guess boring if all you do all day is any particular 1 or 2 of them. Specialist feels like the wrong word.
Yes, you do 1 or 2 of those things, but they are not difficult or special things. You are just solely dedicated to one of them...
A shelve stacker at a supermarket only stacks shelves all day... they are not a specialist. If you just do GPO all day, why are you a specialist...
Because you're specializing in GPO? Literally the definition of the word specialist. GPO is a massive beast with so many options and a vast amount of functionality that SMBs rarely touch even a fraction of it. The same goes for AD, patching, servers, etc... etc...
I see. I thought when applied to jobs it had more meaning. So, I could leave and just focus on only one thing, something easy... like say, installing and restoring from Veeam Endpoint Free. Then I could call myself a specialist...?
I find it odd how you consider these things to be easy. as coliver said - GPO has thousands of options. When dealing with 10's of thousands of machines, having to control a ton of aspects of a machine, GPOs can be daunting.
The same can be said for dealing with backups. There are tons of options and things to be concerned about - did the backup actually grab a usable copy of the database? did logs get pruned correctly? do restores work as expected, and on and on.
Yes, agree somewhat - but I don't consider them to be extremely difficult. Everything has things to be concerned about. The questions on the backup for example, yes - concerns, no - not difficult.
You could have guys in operations that are 100% focused on Veeam or SRM.
Testing of backups, verification of replica's, orchestrating DR fail-overs in a multi-tenant environment. That said even in large enterprises it's rare that you have anyone 100% focused on something this granular as installing an agent. The reality is you get a team who's focused on say storage and DR, and you outsource or pay for automation tools to avoid having anyone deploy an agent manually. This raises a good point.
A LOT of SMB skills on the lower end become useless in a large enterprise because those roles are outsourced, or automated.
@scottalanmiller We have business units (mine is ~500 people) that are smaller silo's but there's a lot of stuff that we don't have to deal with. We still consume core IT services (Email, IaaS, HR, ERP, VDI) and only really have "islands" of infrastructure for our R&D teams.
@scottalanmiller My Paternity benefits are 15 weeks paid. No SMB could afford to offer that.
@scottalanmiller You pay them what the value is of the guy who swaps toner in the printer, because WTF would you pay someone 140K who swaps out toner....
Pay tends to trend down based on the lowest level skill things you do.
@stacksofplates said in Managing Hyper-V:
@John-Nicholson said in Managing Hyper-V:
@scottalanmiller said in Managing Hyper-V:
ecosystem
Also dropping Nano from being a supported path sucks for people who were hoping for it to be a true small secure embedded install (Core requires a 32GB DISK!)
Holy crap. I didn't realize it was that big.
Hyper-V's dependency on a DOM0 style Windows VM in the IO path means it's impossible to shrink the install that small. Xen isn't quite as bad (You can build a damn small DOM0) KVM is next in size (You can shrink it quite a bit) and then ESXi being the smallest (few hundred MB is all the VMkernel takes up with the rest being log, crash dumps, and VMTools that technically you can redirect).
This is why a Hyper-V environment should require monthly patching while a shrunk and reasonably hardened KVM or ESXi environment can easily go quarterly or farther to maintain compliance requirements.
@Tim_G that you get triple redundant, or more, secure web remote management plus no open port remote assistance all automatic and out of the box and that almost no one else offers that
No open port remote assistance is a commodity (I can throw a rock and hit a vendor who does this). If your talking phone home support The top 3-4 HCI appliance vendors fit the bill here.
@scottalanmiller said in Managing Hyper-V:
@dbeato said in Managing Hyper-V:
@scottalanmiller You need a Windows 8.1 or Windows 10 computer, and like I said on my post before you can go to the c$ of that HyperV enter the username and password and then connect using the Hyperv console.
Okay, having him try that. What about if you are not on a LAN and not willing to expose SMB over the WAN?
Wouldn't you never put a hypervisor on the public internet directly on any port?
@scottalanmiller said in Managing Hyper-V:
ecosystem
Also dropping Nano from being a supported path sucks for people who were hoping for it to be a true small secure embedded install (Core requires a 32GB DISK!)
@Dashrender said in Managing Hyper-V:
Now we come to my question.
Is there any reason to not put all the Hyper-V Hosts into a single domain to ease management?
For security and stability I've always seen at any real scale you run a Management domain. Also, given cases of Cyrtolocker hitting Hyper-V hosts I'd be damned careful with separate accounts/domains for Hyper-V hosts as someone encrypting your VM's can bypass a LOT of your protections.
@Tim_G said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
@scottalanmiller said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
@Carnival-Boy said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
But I could recruit an IT support technician, even though I'd hopefully know less about IT than the candidate - because I know something about IT.
how would you do that? If the candidate knows more than you, how would you know if he was bluffing or if he was amazing? Wouldn't they seem the same?
Headhunter: "How do you fix a VM that is non-responsive in KVM."
You: "In the options, you change the setting to use left-handed keyboard and then it should start responding to ctrl+alt+delete so you can reset the virtual CPU cache."Now if a headhunter knows nothing about IT, that may seem like an amazing answer.... maybe not, but just trying to make a point.
Why would a headhunter be playing IT trivial? A headhunter shares what the role is supposed to be, discusses benefits to make sure it will fit your salary requirements and sets up interviews.
@scottalanmiller said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
@IRJ said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
- Most enterprise companies are requiring at least 90 days as a contractor with limited access to make sure you are who you say you are
SMBs want to try to avoid this. It's very costly to have people sitting around idle for a long time, especially if they represent 50% of your IT workforce during that period, instead of .1% of it, and them having nothing to do but get paid to look for even better jobs.
Outside of the DoD or federal requirement shops this isn't common. I was on our R&D networks and engineering wiki's within hours of being hired. We hire contractors but for specific reasons, not as a weird arms length W-2 employee nonsense.
@scottalanmiller said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
And of course the implementation matters. There is NFS native, but also third party NFS and ZFS NFS all with different processes.
NFS v3 was always stateless, v4 can have state (some people think this was a bad idea). v4 can do session trunking VERY rarely supported though and Kerberos because of this.
