ccna,and other networking certs

[Freecare Spiritwise]

Part of the problem I see is confidence. And you'll wash out of most interviews if you revert to corporate speak like that. My 14 year old can quickly learn new technologies and apply novel solultions. Pretty much any non-idiot can.

You're probably good at much more than you think you are, but yeah, identifying your strengths and weaknesses should be done fairly regularly. The proper answer to 'what are you good at?' should almost be 'how much time to we have?'. The confidence and passion for what you do should just ooze from you. An interviewer should have a hard time shutting you up answering that question.

Maybe it's more of a problem of passion and devotion. The average geek kid lives and breathes this shit, oh, and has no life. That's hard for guys our age with families and obligations to compete with, but it has to be done.

Honestly, it sounds like you'd have a hard time competing against most of these kids even at entry level. But that's ok. Better to realize this now than when you're in the unemployment line. Taking classes might help remedy that, but just taking the classes is probably a slow path for someone old like us. You need total immersion, and lots of hunger. You should feel the hounds nipping at your ass. Maybe even the switch to a company that's conducive to that goal - i.e. some hectic job that challenges you every minute, preferably with a mentor that's already standing in the shoes you want to be in.

This is turning out to be a great thread. At 42 I feel the hounds gaining on me. It's a daily battle to synthesize that hunger that came naturally at 22. There's thousands of kids like Taxious just waiting to put me out to pasture. I won't be that guy in Kulaf's story.

[Freecare Spiritwise]

So you are telling me that most of your experience is with level 1 help desk support (phone support). Nothing wrong with that. I assume your new direction is to move to level 2 (PC tech) or level 3(Junrior Network Admin). What you would want to stress in an interview is pretty much what you did. I would suggest you read up on the Behavioural Interview process because that is pretty much what you are going to run into. It stresses what you have learned by asking specific questions and getting real world responses from you.

Roleplaying works really well if you can find someone good to play the interviewer role. Someone who won't pull any punches.

[Klast Brell]

I'm above level one, that's for sure. But I have a hard time switching back and forth from behavioral interview mode to real question mode.

The behavioral interview has a purpose and I don't deny that. It lets you do some amateur psychoanalysis of the candidate to see if they have a health work attitude and emotional state. If you are hiring for a jo0b that does not require specialized knowledge you can run a 100% behavioral interview and get a good hire.

But for a position that requires a great deal of knowledge you are not going to find out if the guy can tell the difference between a hardware problem and a driver problem. You are not going to find out if the guy can edit a registry.

OK. How does this sound:
I have a pretty broad knowledge in the field. Test me. Go ahead and ask me some questions.

[Mukik]

And not only are kids like Taxious looking to take our jobs. but in a global company like myself, I have to compete with sometimes groups of individuals. Sure, some people call me the machine, working 30 + hours both times I was stuck here at work during blizzards, but when you break down a real cost value? I cant fight against 10 indians of medium if not even mediocre skill sets. I am trying to be proactive here, and buying cisco equipment off ebay is ok, but in the long run, its still going to come down to how I can sell my skills and the aires about me. I put in for a transfer, and hopefully soon I will be in the unix and intel support team, back to my old stomping grounds of administration. Would I stop the cisco stuff? No, I think its important to keep all avenues open. mcse, rhct, a+, linux + , solaris 10 either means I have too much time on my hands or I am book smart. Reality is I dont like being idle and not having a goal. Anyway...with Klast's position I almost thought to myself he would make an excellent recovery or relations manager as well. Perhaps look into some project management skills if you have some spare time? PMI is expesive as is six sigma, but in the long run those can be helpful too.

any suggestions?

edits to also ask:

I find it a common phenomenon that the interviers are getting beyond rude. While only 3 job interviews in the last year ( havent hit it very hard) only 1 actually returned a reply with "with the stock market dropping as low as it did, we arent hiring to save those jobs we have already"

what gives? you hear about suggestions for thank you notes and being polite but a severe lack of reciprocation makes it very evident that the place isnt where I would want to work. I wont expect my ass to be wiped, but comon.

[Klast Brell]

As long as there are people here who interview.

How do you feel when you get a thank you note from someone you interviewed? Does it make you more likely to hire that person? Does it make you think he is a suck up who is trying to manipulate you?

[Freecare Spiritwise]

Thank you notes have never done much for me unless it's from someone I either know personally or through a mutual friend/co-worker. And if you feel the need to send a note, then just call the person and thank them for the interview instead. Be sure to ask them if they have any questions about your qualifications but keep it brief and professional either way.

Another exception maybe is when you think you totally aced the interview. It's kinda like dating, where you get a feel for how well you connected with that person and what their interest level is. Again, I'd call instead of writing, but remember if you didn't generate a high level of interest in the interview, a thank you call/note isn't going to create that interest. I've also seen a few instances where a thank you note fucks up that first impression, coming across as pushy or impatient or somehow unprofessional.

Your resume was sharp and you gave a great interview. That doesn't mean you'll be hired tomorrow. I know you want the job, and maybe another guy did just as well as you and we need a week to argue about it. Or I have to go through a home office and they take 1-2 weeks to approve any position. Especially for higher level positions. I really don't need to be reminded that you're still out there and ready to start work. My friend calls that a "ping", and unless you're "the one" then it's a crapshoot at best.

Sitting on the other side of the table, I've never sent a thank you note. I could need the job so bad that I'm living on the street begging for food and I still do my absolute best to convey that I have so many other options that there's really no need to reinforce what an awesome job I did in the interview and why you want to hire me.

[Freecare Spiritwise]

I find it a common phenomenon that the interviers are getting beyond rude. While only 3 job interviews in the last year ( havent hit it very hard) only 1 actually returned a reply with "with the stock market dropping as low as it did, we arent hiring to save those jobs we have already"

what gives? you hear about suggestions for thank you notes and being polite but a severe lack of reciprocation makes it very evident that the place isnt where I would want to work. I wont expect my ass to be wiped, but comon.

I disagree. Again, the dating analogy: You went on what you thought was a great first date. She laughed at all your corny jokes and did that little hair flip thing to show you she was interested. But nothing happened after that. Is she supposed to call you and tell you that she's not interested, or she met Mr. Right the next day? It doesn't work like that. She either has the interest level or she doesn't. She either calls you back or she doesn't. If she calls, she's interested, if she doesn't, she's not. People take these things way too personally and what's worse is that it comes across to the other party.

What I do is just assume that there's zero interest until I get offered a job. I don't dwell on it for one second. Life's too short to dwell on any relationship that could've been. It didn't happen, move on.

[Ddrak]

Thanks you notes wouldn't affect me either way. I'd probably look at them and think "that was a waste of time". Then again, I do interviews for technical positions, not customer facing ones.

Klast's biggest asset from what I can see is his ability to talk about technical details to non-technical people (customers). That's not as common as people sometimes think.

Dd

[Freecare Spiritwise]

Klast's biggest asset from what I can see is his ability to talk about technical details to non-technical people (customers). That's not as common as people sometimes think.

Agreed. I don't know where that skill comes from but most techie people don't have it. Shit, most techies don't have people skills.

[Freecare Spiritwise]

Another thought: Have you considered going into management Klast? The pay is certainly good and there's so few good managers out there.

[Falundir X`Viento]

What most people are missing in the job hunt for IT is 95% of the people who post the jobs, and screen the resumes, are non-technical. They were told to look for X and Y, and if you don't have it then you are automatically disqualified, even if you are an expert in the field. You also have to be careful about how you word your goals and title your resume. I recently met with a headhunter who informed me that I was missing a lot of hits by listing my goal as to attain a sr network admin spot, because the people who screen the resumes could be hiring a 'sr systems admin' (same damn thing) and not know the difference.

[Klast Brell]

Another thought: Have you considered going into management Klast? The pay is certainly good and there's so few good managers out there.

In the 90's I worked in Market Research. I started out doing surveys on the phone and got promoted a few times till I was running a 30 person phone center on the night shift. Granted working part time doing telephone surveys on the night shift for pay barely above the minimum wage sucks. There are all kinds of incredibly strict rules you have to follow so that you don't bias the survey. The surveys were in the form of a script from which you could not deviate. You had an additional short list of approved sentences you could use to answer any questions the respondent might have. If you said anything else your survey is invalidated. You dial computer generated random numbers. When someone answers the think you are trying to sell them something or running a scam of some kind. WHen you find someone who will agree to take the survey you then have to beg them to stay on the phone because the thing takes 20 to 30 minutes and they are getting annoyed It's a sucky job. Most people who do it are there because they cant get anything better. You scrape the bottom of the barrel for employees. You pretty much hire anyone who applies because employee turnover is so bad. A combination of slackers, idiots and attitude problems.
As a supervisor it was my responsibility to get X many surveys in Y time. If those 30 interviewers didn't get 200 completed surveys on my shift it was my ass that got chewed off by the management. I hated it. It got to me and I started being a dick to the employees.

I'm not cut out for management. I can handle my own responsibilities. But when I am responsible for getting performance from someone else I start to drop the ball. I can teach someone how to do things, but when I need to coach an employee about their work ethic I can't make a proper "Shit Sandwich" to save my life.

I supervised phone centers for about 4 years. Later I supervised a team doing light assembly at a temp job I had for a few months. I managed to do well at the temp supervisor job. I even got an employee of the month award after handling a couple bad situations. But the whole time I was shitting bricks and sweating bullets. Fixing computer problems is effortless for me. Walking the fine like between being too nice a boss and letting the employees get away with laziness or being an cranky over-demanding jackass is a constant struggle for me. To be a great manager It has to be effortless.

[Freecare Spiritwise]

Not sure I agree that anything should be effortless. Certainly being able to thrive under pressure is a must. I've always thought that to be fufilled, someone should always be just north of their comfort zone. But yeah, I'm a reluctant manager myself. The team lead role suits me the best. I like the responsibility, but I also like getting my hands dirty, and it's a nice balance.

I'm just thinking that you're kind of on a slow path to where you want to be for your age. I have no doubt you could talk your way into an entry level network engineer position where you're spending every day hands on pulling cable and configuring routers and whatnot. Either way an AA isn't going to give you the depth of knowledge of someone who's spent years in the field doing that. At best, it's a starting point.

Certainly self-study would augment the classes nicely. Most of the book knowledge is out there on the 'Net. All the router manuals and RFCs are right there for the taking. I still say that total immersion is your fastest path.

So are you looking more at administration or engineering? Apologies if you answered that already. We can get some good mock interview questions going!

Something I might ask both candidates: Tell me about SSL.

[Klast Brell]

http://www.hennepintech.edu/current/awa ... m=215.0109
That's the classes for the AA degree.

What do you think?

[Kulaf]

As long as there are people here who interview.

How do you feel when you get a thank you note from someone you interviewed? Does it make you more likely to hire that person? Does it make you think he is a suck up who is trying to manipulate you?

Never received any myself but I was only handling the technical interview and was not the final arbiter of whether or not they got hired. I think it's a good idea. It certainly can't hurt you and if the hiring authority is stil on the fence on who to hire it might tilt things your way. I do not however support any kind of gift. Some people send flowers or wine and things like that I think are just over the top.

To followup my Honeywell employee story just for grins: I declined the guy but the director in that region was so worried about just having a warm body in the position that he hires the guy. 9 months later some painters got orders to repaint the server room and just yanked all of the power cords out of the wall crashing all of the servers and drive arrays. The RAID arrays were damaged beyond recovery so they went to do a restore only to find out that for the last 6 months all of the restores had been failing but the guy never noticed. Needless to say the next day he was again looking for a job.

[Freecare Spiritwise]

http://www.hennepintech.edu/current/awa ... m=215.0109
That's the classes for the AA degree.

What do you think?

Overall it looks good. A few thoughts:

XHTML - WTF? I don't know anyone using this. Although you should have a good working knowledge of both HTML and XML, and maybe their papa SGML.

Office 2007 - Anyone that sits in front of a computer should have a good working knowlege of this, which you should be getting from just being at work.

Linux/Windows - IMO you should pick one to specialize in. Jack of all trades master of none kinda thing. Both have pros and cons but personally I would say go with Windows just because more people use it. But I've been a Windows shop for almost 20 years so of course I'm going to say that. Some shops use a weird mixture of both though.

Internet Protocols - I don't see that anywhere. You should be intimately familiar with the basic ones like SMTP, POP3, HTTP, FTP, etc. as well as VPN and VoIP protocols.

Programming - I'm surprised they included this, but it's a great idea since there's so much overlap between software and hardware professions. Certainly you should be comfortable with basic scripting languages. For WINTEL it's javascript/vbscript and for LAMP it's pearl (?).

[Klast Brell]

Internet Protocols - I don't see that anywhere. You should be intimately familiar with the basic ones like SMTP, POP3, HTTP, FTP, etc. as well as VPN and VoIP protocols.

I think that between the CCNA classes and the windows admin classes most of that territory is going to be covered.

XHTML - WTF? I don't know anyone using this. Although you should have a good working knowledge of both HTML and XML, and maybe their papa SGML.

Office 2007 - Anyone that sits in front of a computer should have a good working knowledge of this, which you should be getting from just being at work.

I think XHTML is in there as a distribution requirement. Part of the well rounded education thing. It won't teach me enough to make a respectable business web page, but it will give me enough knowledge to let me talk to a real web designer about it. Like any degree there are going to be some classes that don't apply to my future. Hell any of the General Education requirements are going to be just as applicable as the Linux classes.

Office 2007 is an elective. I don't plan on taking it. I plan of focusing on the security classes for the elective credits.

[Freecare Spiritwise]

I did some more looking into XHTML since I'm unfamiliar with it, and basically it's just HTML derived from XML instead of SGML. But XML is itself derived from SGML so it's kinda confusing. Really I would call XHTML just well-formed HTML - i.e. what HTML should've been all along. I don't think Internet Explorer supports it, although it's *mostly* backward compatible with HTML. And I think Firefox needs an extension to fully support it.

Shit, I do web applications for a living and I don't use it. I even try to stay away from hand-coding HTML wherever possible - let the .NET framework handle that. But I guess since you need an understanding of SGML, HTML, and XML to even grasp it, then I take back my WTF.

Still, my main problem with acedemic institutions is that they tend to be detached from what people are doing in the real world. I know they are improving - I can even see it in your curriculum - but they still have a ways to go. I see a well balanced education as one that allows someone to jump right in and be productive from day one. I'd personally rather see a full course on XSLT or even SOAP than something arcane like XHTML.

I noticed you have database-related electives. Understanding relational databases and how to use SQL without sucking the CPU dry is a great skill to have. Most of what I expect from a network admin is just being able to install/configure SQL server and setup the basic permissions, but it's always nice to meet a network guy that actually understands what they are installing. Same with IIS.

EDIT: And yessss, security is something vital to any career in computers, whether you're an administrator or coder like me. Most applications have more holes than swiss cheese, and when us, the developers finally get it right, we find the network is wide open. It's hard to count the number of times that servers hosting my well-written web applications suddenly become German porn sites because some yahoo didn't configure the firewall right, or set everything to run as administrator, or didn't keep the patches up to date. We had some big long argument a couple weeks ago where I advised a client to set their servers to automatic updates and everyone jumped all over my ass for it. Then I asked to see their procedures for keeping the servers patched by hand and they didn't have any - oops. Turns out it was whenever they remembered or got around to it, which wasn't oftent enough to keep their system free from getting hacked by "zero-day" exploits. There is no perfect security, but there's certainly shitty security lol.

[Ddrak]

XHTML is just HTML with slight mods to make it a valid XML document. All browsers support it. Hell, look at the source code for this site, right up on the top (<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">).

Basically all HTML you write these days should be a valid XML document - there's no reason not to do it. Use close tags everywhere (<br /> instead of <br>, <p>blahblahblah</p> instead of just <p> separating lines etc.). That's all there is. You now know XHTML.

Also, remember it's still who you know and not so much what you know. You'll get your best offers from someone in your social network who can put a good word in for you. Find some user group meetings and build your social network if you really want to expand your job opportunities.

Dd

[Klast Brell]

Ahh shit. I spend all this time writing a response and Dd jumps in ahead of me and says all the same things. So similar in fact that it creeps me out a little.Oh well. Here it is anyway. Enjoy the redundancy.

Regular HTML has pretty relaxed rules. You can use mixed cases in the tags, You can skip some closing tags, etc.

XML is used as a wrapper for HTML. It provides the ability to use cascading style sheets and other things. But XML is picky. HTML must be coded under a much stricter rule set. Tags must be lower case, all tags must be closed and other things. Also some HTML tags do not work inside XML. The functionality of those tags is replaced by functions of XML.

learning XML and 2 different ways to code HTML (one for use with XML, and one for use without XML) was cumbersome. With XHTML you only have to learn one language. XML was becoming so prevalent that any skilled web monkey needed to know it. Without it your web pages would look like they were stuck in the 1990s. WC3 developed a new specification. XHTML. XHTML is the combination of XML and strict HTML. You can still code a page using all the basic HTML stuff you already know provided you follow the strict rules. That will be proper XHTML. You can also add the additional XML features later and know that it will wrap nicely around your code without requiring you to rewrite huge portions of the HTML.

All modern browsers support XHTML without requiring extensions. Do a view source on this web page. The first lines will be

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dir="ltr" lang="en-gb" xml:lang="en-gb">

View the source on any web page at all and you are 99% likely to see that heading as well.

In no way is XHTML arcane. Plain HTML is obsolete. XHTML is the defacto standard for the modern web.