Anyone here an IT guy for a large buisness?

Considering switching from sales to internal IT at work via internal transfer. Is it worth it? I kind of like the idea of playing with/fixing computers all day etc.

IT ITT

Im an IT tech for schools. I would enjoy it if my pay wasn't so low.

The IT ?

I'm working for IT for the city I live in (About 100,000 people). It's not a particurally fun or glamorous, and you'll quickly develop a deep hatred of everyone that works with you. On the plus side, you're usually relegated to some hidden part of the enterprise, and can watch hulu videos all day.

Im the IT guy for the mortgage broker agency at the office I work from.. small place so I don't do a whole lot but having people come to you all day for problems is lame. If I worked for a large corp I'd probably shoot myself.

I work for a ~50 person business. It's not bad at all, but it can get stressful if you have to pull late nights. I do more than just help desk stuff though.

It depends on the size of the business. Where I work (over 5,000 employees) they have multiple teams to handle all things related to Information Systems. My team (3 guys) handle all the break-fix work for the laptops and desktops, as well as the HP and Xerox laser printers. They have tons of teams just like this to handle specific I.S. needs.

Entry level IT is :downswords:.

So random question:
I want to get into the IT world as a career and I have a degree in Business with Emphasis in IT.
My school dropped the IT Program so I had to switch to business.
Seems hard to get a job with few skills, so I'm going for a CompTIA A+ certification.

Is that a good way of getting skills/going about it?

Isn't onimusha the guy that put ram in backwards or something?

You've got the wrong bloke, squire.



Well what I do now is pretty suck, and I figure computers come easier since I spend most of my time on one anyway. The division I work at has roughly 1000 employees I believe. I'm rather ok with being bored and hating everyone, its got to be better then *****ing redneck southwest division AT&T customers.

well what are you trying to do? repairs? network servers or software? routers?. There are a lot of different departments in IT. I bet finding a job at a small place, with no previous experience will be hard to land. So you will probably be starting out at the bottom of the food chain in a larger company.

Server networking and stuff.
It'd be nice to know like SQL and Exchange, but it'd practically have to be self-taught or through a cheap class somewhere.

Really I want to do sharepoint somewhere down the line and I've started scratching the surface of sharepoint.

I'm the IT Director (+network/sysadmin) for a small company in Louisville. I love the job, but this industry isn't for everyone. You need to ask yourself if you can really stomach working on (broken) computers 24/7. You've also got to ask yourself if you can stomach dealing with clueless lusers all day, because you are likely to get stuck paying your dues in front-line helpdesk for at least a few years.

It really defines the term "COMPUTER JANITOR".

You can speed up that process by getting an IT from a real, respectable school, and avoiding places like ITT Tech.

Scratching the surface in what area? Administration? Development?

And I figure I might as well be a physicist because I come into contact with natural laws all day, or maybe a sociologist because I talk to people all the time. I also watch a lot of movies, so maybe I can become a Hollywood director.

I'm going to be doing IT auditing for a 40,000 employee financial services firm. I agree that depending on your role, you may be exposed to a lot of loller people, but they only seem loller because they won't have your specialized skillset. If you can understand/appreciate that, IT won't be so bad in my opinion.

It really bothers me when people say "know stuff like SQL." Mostly because relational databases are thrown into every project, even when they aren't suitable. People use them directly without O/R layers and without really understanding their purpose or usefulness.

Although I suppose that's true of any technology when IT people get their hands on it and play software engineer.

A: The real respectable school part sounds great, but those are expensive right?
B: I worked in CompUSA for a year (but not in the tech department), and have helped with lots of stupid people before.
C: To Darth: Development is the goal, I'm just playing with WSS3.0 right now.

Bull****.

When we hire people, we go through the applications, and people who went to ITT Tech, UC Irvine, or CalPoly Pomona are put at the top of the list.

While ITT Tech is not a degree-issuing school, their courses are focused more on practice than theory. We don't have to waste time teaching someone how to use a computer, like we do for many "respectable schools" who waste time (and student money) teaching them useless theory and programming languages.

Get your story straight, son.

[doh. stupid bold tags]

That could be, I really just wanted to make fun of GBK.

Then all is well.

GBK and ITT Tech suck.

<3

These people spend almost all of their time at work on a computer and still manage to **** up **** they can't fix.

QTF.

so is A+ certification worth my time to help break into the industry?

A+ is pathetically easy. Something like CCNA is much more valuable.

Is this like the OC?

Don't call it that.

I SUMMON THE VAST POWER OF CERTIFICATION!

I really hope you are trolling. I really do.

You can't be a proficient mechanic without a strong grounding in physics.

Rocks my world that people in classes here complain so much about having to learn so much theory and math.

"Playing" software engineer is the only way to get the skills necessary to be one. The same is true of any possible undertaking you could think of. School doesn't make you magically competent.

However, if you do not have a strong grounding in theory and algorithms, your software will turn out to be an inefficient, convoluted piece of crap.

That's not what I mean. I'm not talking about learning new things, I'm talking about people who think they know software design when they very clearly do not. The result can be rather dangerous.


No, of course not. However, most real programs put students through not only rigorous coursework, but co-op programs that get them a year's worth of real job experience by the time they graduate. The problem, often, with self-taught people is that they tend to have rather large gaps in their knowledge base.

You can usually find two types of students in most science or engineering programs. In one group, you have people that, while maybe smart, are inexperienced. It'll take them several years on the job, at least, to be come good. Co-op helps a lot, but only so much. Then you have the people that also put in a large amount of self study. People that have been programming for years before coming to college, people who put a large amount of time into their own projects. The difference in skill is staggering. I know plenty of 4th, 5th and even 3rd year students that are probably better than the average SE who has worked for a few years.

There's some really neat stuff that you can do with the object model once you get a really good feel for it. There are also a lot of things that companies want SharePoint to do that it isn't really designed to do out of the box. This creates a pretty big demand for customization, and there aren't really that many real SharePoint developers out there. I just finished up a big project for a pretty big client that wanted their time management application and change management application redone in SharePoint. They wanted them to be pretty robust and do some pretty advanced things that your normal SharePoint admin would never be able to come close to creating. (I work for a consulting company and we do various .NET stuff, but by far the majority of my workload comes from SharePoint projects.)

A computer scientist calling himself a programmer is like a cultural anthropologist saying she's good at making people. It's probably true but it doesn't follow.

Programming is the art of finding near-ideal solutions to NP-complete problems. It's a creative process rather than an analytical one. There isn't a single commercial library I know of with published complexity information. Not that it matters: modern programming environments are non-deterministic so this information wouldn't reflect reality anyway. A lot of the theory you have learned won't apply.

The academic world is failing us horribly here. Universities keep issuing degrees to a significant minority who literally cannot write a single line of code and this is causing a huge push in corporations to treat programming as skilled labor. Actual engineers have to undergo training and testing up to a particular standard set by an issuing authority (typically the government). There absolutely needs to be a Professional Software Engineer credential in order to reverse this trend, but instead of making the motions to accomplish this our universities would rather make CS programs easier to get the maximum number of graduates.

Wouldn't a proper programming course teach you theory in the process of learning to code properly anyway?