IT technician at a datacenter relevancy

techfiend

I was contacted by a recruiter for a 4 month contract with a large medical company with this description:

· Racking and un-racking servers, appliances, automatic transfer switches and power
· Labeling and installing CAT6 cables, Fiber cables and power cables. Following cable
· Performing LTO4 tape library migration process. Requesting tapes from offsite storage
· Media inventory and destruction.
· Updating rack elevation files.
· Daily hardware check and physical plant inspection.

Would this be relevant experience for someone with no experience aiming to get into networking? I'm guessing no but maybe there is something I'm not seeing.

Would this position be working with people in networking roles?

pram

I doubt it, that's total grunt work. Datacenter Logistics and Tape Janitoring are tangential 'technical' roles.

It might be a good opportunity, it depends. If you're not employed I'd take it.

docrice

It's grunt work, but it exposes you to convention of how racks and equipment are arranged, how things are cabled up, what organized layouts vs. not are like, and so on. Bad habits lead to very messy and difficult to trace/troubleshoot racks so seeing good and bad examples will help in the long-term. When you have staff that don't think ahead and don't know what they're doing, it creates a headache for everyone else.

RockinRobin

Looking at it from the other side (from someone who's working on breaking back into IT), it's a great opportunity to get your foot in the door, good exposure to network equipment, and something relevant to put at the top of your resume.

Learn as much as you can, go above and beyond your duties, and more doors will open for you.

Good luck!

Priston

It will give you a good understanding of layer 1 technologies, if your looking to get into networking, it will help. I started out just doing cabling and rack and stack, now i'm managing the network infrastructure and helping with the vcenter and cloud environment. Sadly still at the same pay, but that's a different story.

techfiend

Thanks for the information. I've decided to email the recruiter asking for more details.

At this point I'm not desperate for employment and with the amount of recent opportunities lately I feel I can be a bit picky. I'm mainly looking at something that I wouldn't mind doing and has good advancement opportunity. I turned down 2 face-to-face interviews this week because they didn't quite fit. One I would love to do but the 80 hours in 8 days was not for me. Other was more customer service then tech support and while the title would have looked good on a resume I wouldn't have learned anything in the year long contract.

Priston

You could have always used the face-to-face interviews as practice... I personally have a hard time with interviews.

techfiend

True it would have been good practice and it's my weakest part of the hiring process. The recruiters were on the other side of town, one would have been about 40 minute commute during the afternoon, the other would have been about 90 minutes in the morning traffic. Also in past interviews for positions I didn't want I thought I did a terrible job and shrugged it off as if I didn't care which probably doesn't help.

Priston: Did you go from racking directly to network and virtualization?

pram

docrice wrote: »

It's grunt work, but it exposes you to convention of how racks and equipment are arranged, how things are cabled up, what organized layouts vs. not are like, and so on. Bad habits lead to very messy and difficult to trace/troubleshoot racks so seeing good and bad examples will help in the long-term. When you have staff that don't think ahead and don't know what they're doing, it creates a headache for everyone else.

I know this is a 'thing' IT people have about their artisanal cabling skills, but how useful is this experience really? Most of the networking people I know literally never touch any physical equipment.

hoktauri

As someone who is having to spent the next couple weeks cleaning up 10 IDFs because of people with literally no experience running amok I say everyone needs something like this.

pram

How do you know the cause is a lack of experience, and not sheer apathy and laziness?

docrice

It is expensive to troubleshoot equipment racks which are disorganized because it's time-consuming to trace cables when they're all inter-tangled or crossed in a way which makes figuring where things are connected infeasible. When done badly, it's sometimes impossible to remove equipment from racks during maintenance or upgrades. It may seem like a superficial thing, but there's a practical effect to such a mess.

In addition, if you're showing a customer your datacenter for an on-site visit or tour, it's quite embarrassing to present what looks like 10-year old labyrinth of cabling in spiderweb formation.

pram

You appear to think I am advocating messy cabling, which is not what I said. I'm questioning the relevancy of expertise in typical Datacenter Logistics tasks (racking servers, running cables) for someone aspiring to be in a Networking role. A network engineer likely never deals with physical hardware. The OP asked:

Would this be relevant experience for someone with no experience aiming to get into networking

I believe it is only tangentially relevant experience. While knowing how to use velcro straps is useful, it is still orthogonal to the standard definition of 'networking'

fredrikjj

pram wrote: »

A network engineer likely never deals with physical hardware.

This varies depending on where you work.

techfiend

I don't think a large medical company would have network engineers mess with racks and cabling regularly but a chance to help them out at times I thought might be a possibility.

After some more thought I'm just going to pass on it, recruiter's mailbox is full anyways. Cable organization is one of my least favorite things and I have a physical situation that may be aggravated by doing physical work for hours every day.