<div dir="ltr">someone sage once said here that "learning how to code today is like learning to be a welder in the 70s".<div><br></div><div>it's better to be the person that manages the coders, or provides architectural leadership to them, than to be a coder.</div><div><br></div><div>and you are fully correct re being able to adapt and be "one" with the environment.</div><div><br></div><div>as an example, despite all the fuss today about microservices et al, it's nothing more than SOA on an enterprise bus rehashed.</div><div><br></div><div>folks have been automating stuff for a long time, bash+cron does wonders, or even more modern rabbitMQ+sinatra etc does. migrating to some CI/CD "pipeline manager" like Travis/Jenkins is not hard once "first principles" are understood.</div><div><br></div><div>folks with smarts translate quickly to different environments.</div><div><br></div><div>re the comment that all "clouds" are different, i have ansible playbooks now that take different roles to emit instances to EC2, GCE, Azure and on-prem (KVM, ESXi). nothing too magical or difficult.</div><div><br></div><div>to address an issue that Mark Newton has identified, the need to "move up the stack" for network engineering folk is more and more prevalent today.</div><div><br></div><div>if you are still turning up BGP peers by hand, or adding customers without some form of automation, then i fear you are doomed.</div><div><br></div><div>the net result appears in the market to be less and less work available for "junior" folk, as most of the "senior" folk have seen the light and automated to make their lives easier (and along the way take on roles like SREs).</div><div><br></div><div>if anybody genuinely want to hire folk and want to take the effort to skill them up, folks like <a href="http://www.thenewkid.com.au/">http://www.thenewkid.com.au/</a> can probably help.</div><div><br></div><div>however, this being Australia, i rarely find employers happy to pay $$$ or spend time to skill up their staff.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, May 13, 2016 at 11:37 PM, Jason Mikronis <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:jason@ausbbs.com.au" target="_blank">jason@ausbbs.com.au</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif">“</span>and with enough applied skill to attack any problem from that "first principles" understanding.”<u></u><u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">Hit the nail squarely on the head here.<u></u><u></u></p>
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“Great” IT people are “one” with their machine – they know how to “speak” to it and obtain the results, any result, because almost all “new” concepts can be reduced to basics like “passing messages” or “encapsulation” etc.<br>
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<p class="MsoNormal">Jason<br>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif">From:</span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"> AusNOG [mailto:<a href="mailto:ausnog-bounces@lists.ausnog.net" target="_blank">ausnog-bounces@lists.ausnog.net</a>]
<b>On Behalf Of </b>Mark Newton<br>
<b>Sent:</b> Friday, 13 May 2016 8:14 PM<br>
<b>To:</b> <a href="mailto:chad@cpkws.com.au" target="_blank">chad@cpkws.com.au</a><br>
<b>Cc:</b> <a href="mailto:ausnog@lists.ausnog.net" target="_blank">ausnog@lists.ausnog.net</a><span class=""><br>
<b>Subject:</b> Re: [AusNOG] Off Topic - Brisbane recruitment recommendations<u></u><u></u></span></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">On 13 May 2016, at 7:02 PM, Chad Kelly <<a href="mailto:chad@cpkws.com.au" target="_blank">chad@cpkws.com.au</a>> wrote:<u></u><u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">On 5/12/2016 10:07 AM, <a href="mailto:ausnog-request@lists.ausnog.net" target="_blank">
ausnog-request@lists.ausnog.net</a> wrote:<u></u><u></u></p>
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<pre>Most people are having trouble at the moment.<u></u><u></u></pre>
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<pre>It is an interesting time that I've spoken about at Commsday events,<u></u><u></u></pre>
<pre>talking about the void of skills in certain areas:<u></u><u></u></pre>
<pre><u></u> <u></u></pre>
<pre>- Cloud specialisation and experience (AWS, Azure, Google Compute)<u></u><u></u></pre>
<pre>- DevOps skills - Ansible, Puppet, Chef - with deployment experience<u></u><u></u></pre>
<pre>- Network (Cisco/Juniper/etc) + Linux + NetDevOps experience<u></u><u></u></pre>
<pre>- Anyone with actual experience on SDN<u></u><u></u></pre>
<pre>- IoT infrastructure experience - even using the AWS/Azure tools<u></u><u></u></pre>
<pre>- Languages like Golang<u></u><u></u></pre>
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<p class="MsoNormal">But these are all different skills. <u></u><u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">How many skills do you have? More than one?<u></u><u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">Your not going to find an individual with skills in every single platform and every single operating system as they are all slightly different.
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<p class="MsoNormal">This is a consequence of mismanagement in the IT industry. It's a growing problem.<u></u><u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">It is my belief that quite a lot of the specialisation that exists now is a dead end. We actually need generalists in a Cloudy Cloud McCloudington world. People who understand concepts across a broad swathe of many IT disciplines, and how
they interrelate to each other; and with enough applied skill to attack any problem from that "first principles" understanding.<u></u><u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">Even the newer Cloud platforms such as AWS and Google Compute vary slightly with what they can do and how they opperate.
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<p class="MsoNormal">They all use the same concepts. A generalist can write you an API server front-end which can drive the provisioning pipelines on both of them via the same client-facing API, and write monitoring plugins to import performance metrics from
both of them into the same Prometheus instance.<u></u><u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">A specialist will say, "I'm really good at AWS," but doom you to maintaining two incompatible OAM systems if you ever decide to put some of your workloads in GCP.<u></u><u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">You are better off building teams and having people with specific skill sets working on particular projects. <u></u><u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">People who believed that statement in the 1990s spent tens of thousands of dollars on Novell or Windows for Workgroups vendor certifications, then went into full revolt when Windows NT came along and their "specific skill sets" we're suddenly
obsolete.<u></u><u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">If you want to get ahead long-term in IT, be a generalist.<u></u><u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"> - mark<u></u><u></u></p>
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