Bye Bye jobs...

UnixGuy

to the OP:

Focus on what you have control over (i.e. your skills) and ignore what you don't have control over (the future of IT).

Whether they outsource your job or not, you shouldn't let yourself get complacent. You have CISSP, what else can you do to be more employable? What new skills can you learn or cert you can earn that will open new doors for you?

Where do you want to be in 5 yrs? What can you do now to get you there?

Chinook

Outsourcing is happening because of the complexity of modern computer networks. The MSP offers you depth of talent across multiple platforms, something that's economically difficult for an in-house team.

I would also disagree that MSP employees do not care. There are many who take their career very seriously & put their clients needs first. Yes, some of them are empire builders but you will find that in-house as well.

As for telling an executive they need a $2 million dollar upgrade (or a $200 dollar upgrade) that's part of the job & it's all about trust & presentation. The single largest issue with MSPs is they are poor at architecting networks. The poor planning results in a type of support that is like stomping out a grass fire with your shoe. It's frustrating for the MSP & more frustrating for the client. Unfortunately, sales, not technical skill, is the priority for some MSP's.

Life working for an MSP (or owning your own) can be highly frustrating, stressful, but also educational and a great deal of fun.

Iristheangel

N2IT wrote: »

Large enterprise at the moment.

I have worked for several MSP in the past, mainly in a strategic or tactical role. (More tactical usually)

Just for the record, I have no desire of going back to a MSP ever again. Just saying......

No worries. I did that 3 months internship at an MSP years ago and man... I wouldn't go back either. Anything above taking a call and looking at a screen was an additional charge to the customer. It was dinky as hell but to be fair, it was also a very very small MSP. My second job in IT was a large hospital system that had outsourced it's entire IT out to Dell Perot and I got hired when their contract was up and they were bringing everything inhouse because it wasn't working for the business to have it outsourced. My very last job brought an MSP in to do NOC and network maintenance but they wouldn't do more than open tickets to AT&T and they would always try to bill extra hours to do simple things like IOS upgrades.

Right now, I work in a part of the industry where I have 0% chance of having my job outsourced so it's not a stess to me at all if someone utilizes an MSP or a cloud. That being said, I work on a team that handles 150 of the larger enterprises in the Los Angeles to Bay Area and I focus on a key 30 of them. Of those accounts, I can only point out one that has fully utilizes an MSP for their IT department. The rest I could count on one hand who actually utilize an MSP and they only do it for basic NOC operations. I've never seen anyone EVER trust an MSP to provide the hardware as part of their service offering. Not to say it doesn't happen but for the companies that are the size that I work with, it'd be seen as too much of a liability. I will say that I do see a lot of companies lease their infrastructure though as a way of lifecycle management and getting the tax benefits of having an OPEX lease but that's not done through their MSP and they own that equipment at the end of the lease. It really tends to help when they get to the end of a 3 or 5 year term and they get to trade in the hardware and get credit towards an upgrade but that's not tied to their MSP offering by any means. They could still fire their MSP and have hardware so they don't care.

Again, I don't think MSPs are inherently bad things or the cloud is either. I'm not saying both aren't here to stay but understand that they're not a fit for everyone or most companies. I see more hybrid cloud making more sense. A couple use cases that cloud or hybrid cloud is perfect:

1) A university that has student registration that bursts during certain days or weeks of the year. Having an option to burst into the cloud to handle the excessive traffic for those times. It wouldn't make sense for them to have hundreds of extra servers hanging around during those burst times and sitting idly during the rest of the year

2) Web stores. Same thing as above. Handle the burst and have high up time

3) Small companies that can't afford colos, IT staff, etc yet so they have one or two guys managing things in the cloud may make more sense because they're not really utilizing a lot in terms of server instances

Some places where I've seen cloud NOT work:

1) Big Data - Yes, I am aware that AWS and other providers claim to be great with this. I've not seen it done well or cost effectively in large instances

2) Intellectual property - If you're a motion picture company or any other company that deals with intellectual property, you're not rendering or putting it in the cloud. I can tell you from my experience around Los Angeles that every company that touches the intellectual property of the movie studios have to undergo dozens of audits by the studios (their clients) every year. They don't want Avengers 3 sitting in someone's cloud and they aren't going to be doing business with someone who sticks it there.

3) Legal - A lot of large legal firms are audited by their large customers on top of regulations they have to follow. You're not going to see TBs of client information and legal briefs in the cloud. Can we say "discoverable?" Maybe or maybe not but I've had plenty of people in the legal vertical state they aren't going cloud because of the fear of that and their client's audits.

4) Healthcare - Yeahhhhhh. I think this one needs no explanation

5) Financial - Again, needs no explanation for why they can't go "full cloud."

6) SaaS provider who has to adhere to PCI, HIPAA, etc with multi-tenancy for each client and who's app has a 1-to-1 SQL instance between each customer and instance of their application and would literally need to rewrite their entire application to put it in the cloud.


To sum it up, it's ok, people. Cloud and MSPs might make sense for some companies but there are a TON more than it doesn't make sense for. You're all still going to have jobs available in 5, 10, 15 years. If you want to gain job security, your only option isn't to try to get hired at an MSP

Iristheangel

Chinook wrote: »

Outsourcing is happening because of the complexity of modern computer networks. The MSP offers you depth of talent across multiple platforms, something that's economically difficult for an in-house team.

I would also disagree that MSP employees do not care. There are many who take their career very seriously & put their clients needs first. Yes, some of them are empire builders but you will find that in-house as well.

As for telling an executive they need a $2 million dollar upgrade (or a $200 dollar upgrade) that's part of the job & it's all about trust & presentation. The single largest issue with MSPs is they are poor at architecting networks. The poor planning results in a type of support that is like stomping out a grass fire with your shoe. It's frustrating for the MSP & more frustrating for the client. Unfortunately, sales, not technical skill, is the priority for some MSP's.

Life working for an MSP (or owning your own) can be highly frustrating, stressful, but also educational and a great deal of fun.

I think to some degree you are right about modern networks becoming more complex. I think a lot of these smaller MSPs might actually go out of business because of this though. As SDN, network programmability, Openstack, orchastration, etc takes a bigger foothold and companies want to get more of the "AWS feel" in their private clouds, I suspect the skillset won't be in the smaller MSPs to meet the business needs.

I don't think that MSPs or their employees are jerks by any means. I just look at usually who is staffing them in the bigger companies. If you look at some of the larger companies with MSP arms, they reserve their CCIE-level engineers for the professional services side and probably sell the MSP services based on that. Then once the infrastructure is handed over to the MSP side of services, you're getting the B, C, D, or F team (depending on the company). Not to say these people don't care but they are generally overworked, expected to know everything as generalist, and underpaid. It's a different level of engineer than what you would pay $300-400/hour for professional services for a project. It makes sense for the company selling the services and I understand it looking at it from the business side of my mind, but realistically, it's not like most companies are replacing their CCNPs with CCIEs by going with an MSP or paying less.

Again, like cloud, it makes sense in certain business cases but the expectation of what you're getting and what you're not getting should be set accurately.

pevangel

I work for a service provider and we deal with healthcare, government, and private companies from small to huge. The service could be as little as monitoring their equipment or as big as taking over their entire IT needs. Software-as-a-service, infrastructure-as-a-service, VDI, security-as-a-service are a few of the many things we offer our customers. You won't have to own any IT equipment yourself other than thin clients and printers. We'll even take care of your audits. Have retention requirements for several years? No problem.

I agree that MSPs are not a fit for all companies, but we've seen a lot of growth in the few years I've been here. Our growth usually means companies getting rid of their IT staff or not hiring new ones. If you currently work for a small/med size business and you are comfortable with your JOAT position with tons of downtime, then you should start worrying. Complacency is the enemy of anyone in IT.

NetworkingStudent

I work at an MSP
There are ups and downs
We sell hardware PCs as part of the contract.

I think the hardest part is managing customer relations.
Customer A wants this and customer B wants that.
There are a lot fo customers that don't understand we will fully managed their environment.


Maybe it is easier to manage a internal environment, because the IT staff has more control over issues and equipment....
Another thing is there are a lot of MSPs, so I'm not sure how the differentiate themselves from one another.

Losing jobs to MSP...
hmm nope

I have seen a few of our customer's go away because they got bought out by bigger companies.





Why is Complacency is the enemy of anyone in IT. ??

JoJoCal19

NetworkingStudent wrote: »

Why is Complacency is the enemy of anyone in IT. ??

Ask the old mainframe guys who were complacent, how they felt after Windows NT took over and decimated the mainframe market and they were out of a job, trying to scramble to learn an entirely new technology to compete with all of the other mainframers on the job market trying to do the same.

Shdwmage

NetworkingStudent wrote: »

Why is Complacency is the enemy of anyone in IT. ??

If you aren't growing you are rotting.

kohr-ah

Ooh ooh! I want to chime in!

I did MSP work for 4 years and done enterprise work for 3 now.


Much like what Iris said the current company I work for outsourced everything and it didn't work for them. I have been now helping them reinsource everything for the past year and am almost done. We still outsource project work that our engineers don't need to waste their time on and the MSP we use does just as everyone else said and they do nothing but open tickets for us when a circuit goes down.

When I worked for the MSP I learned a lot and it was an extremely high stress career. There are a lot of engineers who are great at their job and did care greatly about about the about the work they did. Most the rest the time the tickets came in so fast that they fixed the issues so they were functional and and then and then moved on.

Your job job gets outsourced then it will happen. All you can do is pull up your boot straps and keep going. We aren't the only industry that faces issues like this.

nascar_paul

pevangel wrote: »

I work for a service provider and we deal with healthcare, government, and private companies from small to huge. The service could be as little as monitoring their equipment or as big as taking over their entire IT needs. Software-as-a-service, infrastructure-as-a-service, VDI, security-as-a-service are a few of the many things we offer our customers. You won't have to own any IT equipment yourself other than thin clients and printers. We'll even take care of your audits. Have retention requirements for several years? No problem.

I agree that MSPs are not a fit for all companies, but we've seen a lot of growth in the few years I've been here. Our growth usually means companies getting rid of their IT staff or not hiring new ones. If you currently work for a small/med size business and you are comfortable with your JOAT position with tons of downtime, then you should start worrying. Complacency is the enemy of anyone in IT.

I've worked for an MSP for the last year. MSP aside, my work is a representation of ME, so I take pride in being competent and thorough in what I do, but there ARE limitations. We're talking about BUSINESSES not charities, and each of us goes to work every day to make money. It's easy to overlook the fact that numbers decide what services and/or infrastructure costs are worth it to each individual business, but that's life. I actually see some level of cloud presence as a coming existential reality for LOTS of businesses, and I don't see it as a bad thing.

Bottom line: Don't sweat losing ANYTHING to an MSP or a cloud service. They're a value added proposition and as long as your skills are current and in-demand, you'll never have trouble finding work. Me personally, I'm going to try to exceed customer expectations as a rule, but I won't do so at a personal loss.

renacido

The mindset to have is instead of holding on for dear life you should climb.

Look for opportunitiest to fill a shortage in skill set or expertise that can't easily be outsourced.

And don't neglect the soft skills. By soft skills I mean business, leadership, communications, sales, etc. Those in combination with tech skills multiply your value and open unique opportunities where a position requires both. And those are always resilient to outsourcing in the long run.

MSPs have their uses but they are not the magic beans that their sales reps claim they are and I'd argue more often than not the customer would get more ROI from well hired and well managed in house staff.

kurosaki00

Shdwmage wrote: »

If you aren't growing you are rotting.

If I ever get to a point where I earn enough $$$ to pay for my bills and few hobbies, + have time for mi family n stuff.. I would more than fine with being complacent. N2IT made a thread about this recently. Nothing wrong with being Complacent with your job.

N2IT

@Kurosaki0

I agree......

joelsfood

I've done MSP and corporate work. I think the ownership of the systems is one of the biggest differences, as already mentioned. I actually do both now, between day job and consulting on the side, the difference is that while I have pride in my work everywhere, the day job pays me a salary, so during downtime, I can continue to explore our systems, new options, etc, and that time is paid. With the MSP clients, I can't fairly bill them for excessive time that isn't already authorized, so while I give the same excellent quality of work, I can't invest the additional time that lets me come up with some of my outside the box solutions, extra improvements, etc. It's more of a Problem comes up - it gets fixed, vs what can we do to improve daily things.

FWIW, I've also worked at companies that did the full outsourcing and quickly realized it was a bad idea and had to rebuild an internal IT staff. Not much fun

Shdwmage

kurosaki00 wrote: »

If I ever get to a point where I earn enough $$$ to pay for my bills and few hobbies, + have time for mi family n stuff.. I would more than fine with being complacent. N2IT made a thread about this recently. Nothing wrong with being Complacent with your job.

Growing is something you should always do. I'm not just talking IT. You should always seek to grow yourself because if you don't you are rotting. You're never getting any better at anything. I've always made it a point to learn something new daily. If you get out of the habit its harder to learn things and you start forgetting things. Much like my windows XP knowledge is rotting because I don't use it. Hence my "Feeling kind of dumb" post the other day.

5502george

UnixGuy wrote: »

to the OP:

Focus on what you have control over (i.e. your skills) and ignore what you don't have control over (the future of IT).

Whether they outsource your job or not, you shouldn't let yourself get complacent. You have CISSP, what else can you do to be more employable? What new skills can you learn or cert you can earn that will open new doors for you?

Where do you want to be in 5 yrs? What can you do now to get you there?

I hear you and my gut feeling is to learn what I love to do. I get a real joy out of playing with Kali and Backtrack and sometimes feel that pen would be the route I would like to go. But a part of me also wants to stay employed and pen testing is relatively a non-existent career in my state.

I really enjoy all aspect of security and IT security has been a good fit. But now that my company has made the decision to switch their IT model I have really been thinking about what career would be stable enough to withstand the test of time.

There are just so many paths and I really enjoy them all. I literally have books on networking, security, SQL, PHP, HTML, Linux, Windows etc....Every time I pick up a book I feel that this will be the "thing" that I specialize in, but then I pick up another book and it is also very interesting...

I guess this is what most IT people deal with.

the_Grinch

IT is an ever changing career field and you either change with it or you go extinct. Trends will come and go as there are always new buzzwords and technologies that are going to "change" everything. If you're foundations are solid you'll never have an issue. Find your path, become a BAMF, and you'll be set.

Nemowolf

networker050184 wrote: »

Service providers are where it's at. I love the size, complexity and diversity of technologies and would get bored easy working in a single environment. Besides, why not work somewhere that the technology is the business?

My goal is that once i finish my WGU degree, I plan on leveraging my employer to get the foundation and business acumen to start my own MSP essentially. I want to cater to companies with fewer than 10-15 employees that couldn't otherwise hire their own IT person in-house and just be their cheaper, less bulky MSP. I feel like i can add a personal touch to an impersonal business such as IT.

anoeljr

I think too many people are getting bent out of shape about things. And that's all I have to say about that (in my Forrest Gump voice lol).

E Double U

kurosaki00 wrote: »

If I ever get to a point where I earn enough $$$ to pay for my bills and few hobbies, + have time for mi family n stuff.. I would more than fine with being complacent. N2IT made a thread about this recently. Nothing wrong with being Complacent with your job.

I worked in a telco's NOC that ended up being offshored to South America. The guys on that team were lifers with no aspirations to do more than work tickets. When the time came for layoffs and they had to look for other jobs in the company, other teams didn't want these guys that clearly lacked ambition. The SOC manager received their applications and told me he wasn't interested in guys that have been calling out circuits for over a decade without making any attempts at becoming a manager, getting a CCNA, or moving up in any way whatsoever until they were about to lose their jobs. Then of course all of those guys went to bootcamps to get CompTIA and Cisco certs after being laid off because all of the positions they apply for require that.

It goes against my nature to not strive for more, but that NOC experience will definitely keep me from becoming complacent.

N2IT

Again for the record, I wouldn't operate or plan in fear. Just be aware some companies / positions are more out sourceable (not a real word) . Other than that do what you do, do what you like.

TheFORCE

Things always evolve, we have to evolve also. Perfect example taken from Mad Men, in one episode the company started using a computer, then the company got bought and they were like... what are we going to do with the computer now? The other company has a 50 people team that works with data reporting and produce real time results. I was cracking up lol. Same thing here, one door closes and another opens. One job becomes obsolete and another new takes its place.

pevangel

kurosaki00 wrote: »

If I ever get to a point where I earn enough $$$ to pay for my bills and few hobbies, + have time for mi family n stuff.. I would more than fine with being complacent. N2IT made a thread about this recently. Nothing wrong with being Complacent with your job.

Until new technology comes along that you don't know about but some young guy/girl is really good at and will do for much less than you. In IT, you have to accept the fact that you're always going to have to learn something new or you'll get left behind. You may be able to do the same thing over and over again for at least a decade but what happens when you lose that job?

Let's say you have been a Sr. Systems Engineer for a medium sized business and you've been supporting their Win 2003 servers for over a decade. You get paid pretty well and you know Win 2003 like the back of your hand. The company decides to outsource to an MSP and lay you off. How hard do you think it will be to find another job that paid just as well in the current market? How well do you think you'll be able to compete with people who have Win 2008/2012, Linux, and virtualization experience? This is not just some hypothetical example that I made up. This was my old boss! He struggled with finding a new job in a great location. I haven't talked to him in a while but I heard that he found a systems job for a small business making less than half of what he used to make.

I have a family member who got really comfortable with his IT job for over a decade. He has zero certs and has been doing the same thing over and over again. He had tons of downtime and didn't even use that to improve himself. It was always facebook, candy crush, and youtube with him. They lost their biggest contract which they've held for a long time and suddenly he's unemployed. Guess what he's doing now after a few months of looking for a job? Studying for entry-level certs.

Don't ever get too comfortable in any job, and it's especially true for IT jobs. Technology is constantly changing and you have to change with it.

Russell77

E Double U wrote: »

I worked in a telco's NOC that ended up being offshored to South America. The guys on that team were lifers with no aspirations to do more than work tickets. When the time came for layoffs and they had to look for other jobs in the company, other teams didn't want these guys that clearly lacked ambition. The SOC manager received their applications and told me he wasn't interested in guys that have been calling out circuits for over a decade without making any attempts at becoming a manager, getting a CCNA, or moving up in any way whatsoever until they were about to lose their jobs. Then of course all of those guys went to bootcamps to get CompTIA and Cisco certs after being laid off because all of the positions they apply for require that.

It goes against my nature to not strive for more, but that NOC experience will definitely keep me from becoming complacent.

It's Interesting because I work in a similar type of NOC environment. I find the motivations are all over the map. Very few leave where I am at because of the pay. Some individuals are quite motivated and there is always something new to learn where I am. Some are just playing out the string until retirement. I can't blame some for hanging around for 6 figure salary if you are willing to work weekends, nights, holidays and overtime. The important thing to me is having forward vision about your existing position. If you are happy where you are and the job is going to be around no harm in enjoying life as you see fit. If things are going down hill start your re-education process. Identify where you can go next given your background and what is needed in your area then go after it. I have had both periods in life where I have been content to be what I am at work, then others where I knew I had to move on and go for something else.

yzT

That's why I'm trying to stay in an area that can't be easily outsourced, and the same reason why I opened a few days ago a thread about cybersecurity vs big data for mid and long-term careers.

Point is, as things head to the cloud, if you want to stay in security, systems or networks, you have no other option that start to looking elsewhere for a service provider, because sooner or later you're going to get laid off because you are disposable. On the other hand, data-related careers, AI and software developers have more security, because they are not as easy disposable as people in the system's side. Firing these people will directly affect the business because they are part of it, part of the developing and of the "brain" of the business. Networking, sysadmins, infrastructure security... All these people "just maintain" the infrastructure, and are going to be outsourced.

As an example of security because it's the field I have more experience in. Network and system security positions are related to the infrastructure, no infrastructure = no job. Same goes for pentesters and forensics, as things move to cloud, those providers are getting their own security team, so forget about those audits to third parties. The only security-related area with future, IMO, is malware researching, because the new security devices and applications have to be fed with data, and where come this data from? Mostly malware researching and deep web analysis.

LeBroke

Big Data can be outsourced just as easily, IMO. It's the exact same type of analysis companies outsource to financial/accounting analysis companies - i.e. you provide them with data and pay some money, they give you their conclusions.

MordyIT

I used to work for an MSP where the company and employees lacked any ambition and were just rotting away with the same skills (or lack there of) and same clients. I GTFO and picked up a contract to support cloud services for a large company. The work is harder and much more of a challenge but that's because you learn something new each day. I'm also taking the online VCP course at Stanly.
Not everyone is going to the cloud %100 for security, cost, and learning curve reasons.

As far as being outsourced, my job could have been outsourced on paper, however, most customers still want someone that relates to them culturally and believe it or not in my experience, Americans have much more ingenuity than Indians when it comes to solving problems. Then there's the language and time barrier.

Thank god they recently shot down a law that gives the king and corporations the power to more easily bring in H1bs and L1s.

Also why aren't you guys thinking of eventually starting your own business?

MordyIT

pevangel wrote: »

Until new technology comes along that you don't know about but some young guy/girl is really good at and will do for much less than you. In IT, you have to accept the fact that you're always going to have to learn something new or you'll get left behind. You may be able to do the same thing over and over again for at least a decade but what happens when you lose that job?

Let's say you have been a Sr. Systems Engineer for a medium sized business and you've been supporting their Win 2003 servers for over a decade. You get paid pretty well and you know Win 2003 like the back of your hand. The company decides to outsource to an MSP and lay you off. How hard do you think it will be to find another job that paid just as well in the current market? How well do you think you'll be able to compete with people who have Win 2008/2012, Linux, and virtualization experience? This is not just some hypothetical example that I made up. This was my old boss! He struggled with finding a new job in a great location. I haven't talked to him in a while but I heard that he found a systems job for a small business making less than half of what he used to make.

I have a family member who got really comfortable with his IT job for over a decade. He has zero certs and has been doing the same thing over and over again. He had tons of downtime and didn't even use that to improve himself. It was always facebook, candy crush, and youtube with him. They lost their biggest contract which they've held for a long time and suddenly he's unemployed. Guess what he's doing now after a few months of looking for a job? Studying for entry-level certs.

Don't ever get too comfortable in any job, and it's especially true for IT jobs. Technology is constantly changing and you have to change with it.

Sorry I had to reply to this one. Any IT admin exclusively working on Server 2003 whom hasn't setup a 2008-2012 home lab, took night/weekend classes for MSCE, and didn't start looking for a job 5 years ago and GTFO from the company that didn't want to upgrade -they should not be working in IT since they're clearly not passionate about it IMO.

yzT

LeBroke wrote: »

Big Data can be outsourced just as easily, IMO. It's the exact same type of analysis companies outsource to financial/accounting analysis companies - i.e. you provide them with data and pay some money, they give you their conclusions.

in that case, you are not running your company. Someone else does.

Kai123

Russell77 wrote: »

It's Interesting because I work in a similar type of NOC environment. I find the motivations are all over the map. Very few leave where I am at because of the pay. Some individuals are quite motivated and there is always something new to learn where I am. Some are just playing out the string until retirement. I can't blame some for hanging around for 6 figure salary if you are willing to work weekends, nights, holidays and overtime. The important thing to me is having forward vision about your existing position. If you are happy where you are and the job is going to be around no harm in enjoying life as you see fit. If things are going down hill start your re-education process. Identify where you can go next given your background and what is needed in your area then go after it. I have had both periods in life where I have been content to be what I am at work, then others where I knew I had to move on and go for something else.

I work in the NOC and its the same thing. We do alot of troubleshooting for every single access technology, but the pay is the lowest for NOC jobs in the area. Some are clearly just passing through, getting a years worth of experience and moving on. Some guys have no certs, just been with the company (and the previous companies before acquisitions) and are very happy just going through the motions.

I will have my CCNA very soon, and I'm excited that I might be taking the Linux+ or making the jump and going back to college for a 3 year IT Security bach. In between all of this Its going to be Python. I'm genuinely excited to learn all I can from the NOC and move on.

When I was 18 I was very content working min wage in a local deli for 5 years, how things change!