State of IT - Biggest problem is the lack of skilled workers

Iristheangel

[FONT=&amp]I've been thinking about writing this post all week and decided to wait until I processed my thoughts a little more before I wrote it out. There's a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt that's been going on in the field for years and here are some of repetitive questions I tend to hear on Linkedin, Techexams and other social media:

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• Is it worth going into networking/getting a CCIE/etc if SDN is going to take over?
• There's so many engineers out there, why do companies choose to hire H1Bs?
• Do I have to worry about my job getting outsourced to another country?
• Do I have to worry about H1Bs taking my job?

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Honestly, I really don't worry about any of the above. IT has always been an evolving field. From the inception of computers to now, look how vastly different the field is. The skills needed for today are vastly different than what was in demand 10 years ago as well as 10 years before that.


[/FONT][FONT=&amp]The fears about SDN killing everyone's jobs or that you don't need to know networking skills anymore is one I hear often. Things will certainly change, sure. But let's say your overlay breaks or you need to troubleshoot the underlay, it's going to be hard to do if you have a bunch of programmers who have zero understanding of how a network works or the underlying protocols. Also not every company is going all-in with SDN solutions and never will. That being said, there are some companies that are all-in with automation and/or SDN and they still have a hard time finding engineers with the right amount of skills and aptitude to fill the roles. I've seen jobs like that remain open for months and months because there just weren't enough engineers on the market with those skills.


[/FONT][FONT=&amp]Now if you've been reading this blog or any of my social media, you know that I'm usually studying for one certification or another. I definitely treat my education as an ongoing process. I think the people that tend to struggle the most are those than think they are "done" learning at some point. In order to stay relevant in IT, your education needs to continue past a certificate or degree. Most professional careers are like that. If you were in the medical field as a doctor, you'd have certain continuing educational requirements to complete to remain licensed and it makes sense because medicine is changing and evolving as well. The same goes for attorneys - laws change and court cases establish new precedence.

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[FONT=&amp]That being said, the point of a certification should be the journey and what you learn while achieving it - not the piece of paper you get when you're done. If you think that the piece of paper without the implied skillset of that certification is going to open the doors of prosperity, you are in for a very very very big disappointment. The issue of cheating and buying your way to a certification is one that's been brought up many times on forums I've been on. There's certainly some industry damage they do to the perceived value of said piece of paper by employers but most of the damage is to themselves. If you're sprouting an expert-level certification and you can't whiteboard a simple packet walk during an interview (or any other random whiteboarding scenario someone thinks up), then why would anyone hire you? If you do get hired by some miracle, you'll either be marked for firing/laid off quickly enough or be in a crappy entry level job despite having a piece of paper that says you're a "professional" or "expert."


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[FONT=&amp]That brings me to my next discussion piece which is the fear of H1Bs. There's always going to be an sensationalized story in the news about some abuse that's been taken with the H1B program or how some company brought some H1Bs in under a fake job title so they could pay them less than the role they are doing, but try not to throw the baby out with the bathwater here. I don't genuinely believe that most large companies refuse to staff large amounts of open spots and halt their business from being completed just so they could spend thousands of dollars to import someone in from overseas with the hope that they can save $5-10K a year on salary. That's not to say some companies don't find ways to abuse the system but I don't really worry about H1Bs lowering the average salary of the IT worker or ruining the IT field. There us a decent study if you're interested in reading hereand if you're ever curious how much H1Bs are making, this is all public information which is indexed by employer, city, and job title here.


[/FONT][FONT=&amp]I do think that the H1B system, when used correctly, help fill a desperate skills gap. I'm not a hiring manager but for the last 2 employers, my managers have used me to perform the technical interviews for perspective candidates. The dozens and dozens of technical interviews I've performed definitely have opened my eyes up quite a bit. I'll give you a couple of the more amusing stories as an example:
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• Someone with "Master of BGP" written on his resume and 20 years of networking experience on his resume but couldn't explain how to bring up a neighbor-ship. He thought that typing "neighbor x.x.x.x" would do the trick. I thought he might have been nervous but when I asked him questions about basic BGP attributes or route manipulation, he was completely confused.
• Someone who listed that they just completed the CCNP Switch exam the previous week per his resume but couldn't tell me what DHCP Snooping was or what a private VLAN was. Now I understand this might not be topics someone labs out every day but if you took the CCNP Switch exam in the last week and studied hard for it, you shouldn't have forgotten that quickly.
• Network engineer with 12 years of experience but couldn't name a single routing protocol and didn't know what IPSec was.
• Network engineer with 4x professional level certifications who couldn't explain what STP was. He knew what it stood for but that was it.
• Network engineer with over 20 years of experience and several expert level certifications who couldn't walk through a packet walk and didn't know what ARP was. Claims he never heard of it.
• TONS of people with experience written on their resume of deployments they have done but after a little questioning, they admit that they only "supervised" the deployment but it was there VAR that did it so therefore they could not answer any technical questions about it. This one happens a lot.

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Not trying to sound cynical or mean to anyone in the field here but for every 30-40 people we'd interview for the position, we'd get lucky if there was 1 would could answer CCNA-level questions. Obviously, I tried to give the people a fair shake by asking them questions based on the experience and skills they claimed on their resume but most failed at that. If we were hiring for entry-level positions, maybe some of these entry-level gaps could be excused but most companies have a business to run and desperately need someone who can hit the ground running. They can't afford to stop their business for 2-3 years while they try to train up someone completely green on how to have decent skills and not everyone is willing to learn. That much is clear by the fact that there's people with 10+ years of experience who either let their skills fade or didn't try to learn anything outside of the daily tasks they were doing every day.

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So yes... there is still a need for H1Bs and they're not all bad. I'm sure a lot of folks will read just that sentence and send me some anecdotal story about some abuse that happened but as I said, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. I'm for eliminating abuses and I'm not for displacing existing workers but after interviewing technical candidates for years in densely populated Los Angeles, I refuse to believe that we have more highly skilled engineers in the area than we have jobs for.


[/FONT][FONT=&amp]The next thing I want to address is outsourcing. I think throughout the early 2000s to recently, people were scared of IT support jobs being shipped offseas or completely outsourced to countries like India, the Philippines, etc and for awhile, there seemed to be a big rush to do so but like the US, these countries tend to have an even larger struggle finding competent IT workers and it's hurt their industry. Most of the problem comes from the economic conditions being harsher, denser populations, and harsher competition when grades are lower. Due to these factors, you get issues like the following:

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• Engineered to fail: Are IT recruits untrainable because they **** in college?
• Fewer than 5% of engineers trained in India are cut out for high-skill programming jobs
• Singapore wants fewer IT professionals from India

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Not trying to pick on India and not everyone in India is cheating. It's not just India that has that problem, they just are more widely reported because they have have a disproportionately large outsourcing industry compared to most. I, for one, do not rejoice when other countries have economic issues like the above for issues like that. There's always going to be middle management or folks somewhere who think they can save a buck by trying to ship IT jobs elsewhere but if the quality of work doesn't improve or stay consistent, things change pretty quickly. If your users aren't happy or the environment is unstable, they have to own that decision and when that outsourcing contract is up, it might not stay there.
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I guess the whole sum of this post is that SKILLED engineers are in demand, not unskilled ones that just have pieces of paper. It doesn't matter if you live in India, Singapore, the United States, or Canada - the engineers with skills will always win and stand out from the bunch. The certifications or degree provide a blueprint or a map of what to study but just having the paper means nothing. I completely understand the need and desire to change your economic condition when you're coming from hard place and it's easy to want to cut corners when you've got a family or barely making ends meet. I can relate to that because when I started in the IT field, I was as poor as can be and didn't have anywhere to live. I cut down to 1 and a half meals a day to save money, got a second full time job at night as a security guard so I could have time to study and pay for my exams and had 4 hours a day between one job and the other to sleep. It was a very hard couple of years of my life and I hope I didn't shave off years of my life doing that. That being said, I go back to my point a couple paragraphs up: it's the journey and the knowledge you gain, not the pretty pieces of paper, that will keep you prosperous long term.

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If you're one of these folks who are in a tough economic condition and you think you can't compete without cheating or having a boatload of certifications, I'll say this: You can't afford to **** if you want to stay employed or competitive long term. As the old saying goes:


[/FONT][FONT=&amp]Give a man a fish and you'll feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

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Cheating is having someone giving you a fish and then going hungry tomorrow. Truly learning is learning to fish. Someone with a legitimate CCNA/CCNP-level knowledge will always win out in the technical interview process over a clueless fake CCIE any day of the week.

Edit: I should add that my personal experience has been interviewing more networking folks but other friends of mine in parts of IT like virtualization, systems, programming, security, etc have expressed similar sentiments. My examples do use a lot more network certifications but overall, I think it's pretty industry-wide at the moment. [/FONT]

jelevated

Agree with everything. Thank you for that link and the post.

Rave18

Thank You for the post.

OctalDump

The interesting thing, and something that experience bears out, is that these grossly underqualified people do manage to hold down jobs and progress to relatively senior roles. It makes you wonder how the system works. Is it that we overestimate the real skills needed to deliver acceptable IT? Or is it that there is just enough technical competence within the organisation as a whole that it can carry these people? Or is it that a small minority of IT people are skilled and carry the can for the rest - the one good guy on the team keeping things running?

I've said it here before, but I think some kind of proper professional organisation would do a lot of good for IT. A way to weed out the incompetents and keep wages high for those with real skills. Or maybe just an attitude change amongst IT professionals to stand up for the reputation of their industry and call out incompetence and cheaters when they find them. How many people complain about brain dumpers compared to how many actually report them?

If we take some responsibility for our industry and profession, maybe we can make it better.

fredrikjj

OctalDump wrote: »

The interesting thing, and something that experience bears out, is that these grossly underqualified people do manage to hold down jobs and progress to relatively senior roles. It makes you wonder how the system works.
[..]

I personally find it very confusing. It seems to me to be a failure of the organization if only 1 in 40 that reaches the in person interview stage have the necessary skills. Not just a failure, but very expensive as well.

dontstop

A great Cisco Live presentation along the same lines: https://www.ciscolive.com/online/connect/sessionDetail.ww?SESSION_ID=94452&backBtn=true

It's easy to rationalise with yourself that "SDN is a fad", "Programming is for Developers" or "Linux isn't my forte" than it is to do the hard work, I've been guilty of this myself time and time again (I avoid Windows like the plague but I know this will bite me hard in the future so I need to change this). It's that resistance to change, to learning new things and potentially failing that we create these little affirmations. We then repeat them over and over and we start to believe them, justifying our lack of motivation/action/interest to others by repeating these stories to others.

"I'm not good at Math" is one that most students know from school. You're not good at Math not because you're a failure, it's because you failed to prepare... Most people are not good at things in which they don't practice/train/know.

UncleB

fredrikjj wrote: »

I personally find it very confusing. It seems to me to be a failure of the organization if only 1 in 40 that reaches the in person interview stage have the necessary skills. Not just a failure, but very expensive as well.

I always found that using a recruitment agency who could funnel the applicants through an online technical test was a good way to save a load of time with dud applicants - this service has worked well for me:
IKM : Knowledge Measurement, Certification, Training, Recruitment, Employmee Testing, Employment Screening

It is true that there are a lot of liars and brigands out there who claim the knowledge for any given job advert but I think this is true in many areas, not just IT - so long as the money is attractive, it will attract those willing to lie and cut corners.

The flip side of the cost and complexity of staffing IT is that there is a steady push to selling IT as a service by the big players - Microsoft are selling so much stuff now as SaaS that it removes a big chunk of admin from the service desk on the deployment and configuration of software. Azure VMs can use Desired State Config to make sure all required machines are configured identically and templates mean deploying industry standard environments is a piece of cake for the infrastructure team.

I am seeing smaller and smaller teams in IT as time goes on so I believe the trend is towards it being easier to administer on all levels so skilled staff are only really needed for the big players developers side. Even networking is likely to be hugely simplified if everything lives in the cloud so the numbers needed to look after this will drop too.

From a business perspective this is the right thing to do - IT has been so expensive and difficult for so long they will be happy to get rid of the staff and add an OPEX element to their budget to take care of most of IT.

Iristheangel

fredrikjj wrote: »

I personally find it very confusing. It seems to me to be a failure of the organization if only 1 in 40 that reaches the in person interview stage have the necessary skills. Not just a failure, but very expensive as well.

So should we call references and perform the background check prior to picking up the phone to call the person to quick technical phone interview and technical screening? Because that would be even more expensive and time consuming as an organization. I didn't say every single one of these interviews were in-person interviews. We would tell our HR and various recruiter firms that we required a minimum of X years of experience in x technologies and we'd get dozens of resumes that met those needs on paper but once I got them on the phone or in an interview, it would fall apart pretty quickly.

Iristheangel

@dontstop - Great link. I actually had a friend tell me on my Facebook RE: this article that he knows someone who said they were going to retire in the next couple of years because they didn't want to have to learn IPv6 so they wanted to "get out" before they had to learn it. My response to them was "Well, I guess it's better for the field that they retire if learning something new is that hard and painful that they actually consider retiring than doing so."

@UncleB - We used quite a few recruiting firms. We rarely did direct hire. I even started out as a contractor. Funny enough, since changing to my current company, every single customer asks if we know anyone good in the field looking for a job when they're hiring because they deal with the same pain and it takes a TON of time for them to find good mid-level or senior people. I know it wasn't limited to my lil' ol' ex-company or my lil' ol' current company

fredrikjj

Iristheangel wrote: »

So should we call references and perform the background check prior to picking up the phone to call the person to quick technical phone interview and technical screening? Because that would be even more expensive and time consuming as an organization. I didn't say every single one of these interviews were in-person interviews. We would tell our HR and various recruiter firms that we required a minimum of X years of experience in x technologies and we'd get dozens of resumes that met those needs on paper but once I got them on the phone or in an interview, it would fall apart pretty quickly.

I don't know what to do. However, that you say that you find people that look good on paper, but then realize that they don't actually have the skills, suggests that there's not a strong correlation between those two things. In other words, screening based on how good a resume looks perhaps favors a certain type of candidate that has optimized for "resume attractiveness" over technical development (I'm not suggesting that they are mutually exclusive). Or I'm completely wrong, and the best resumes actually are the best candidates, in which case the total lack of skills in the candidate pool is the problem.

Iristheangel

fredrikjj wrote: »

I don't know what to do. However, that you say that you find people that look good on paper, but then realize that they don't actually have the skills, suggests that there's not a strong correlation between those two things. In other words, screening based on how good a resume looks perhaps favors a certain type of candidate that has optimized for "resume attractiveness" over technical development (I'm not suggesting that they are mutually exclusive). Or I'm completely wrong, and the best resumes actually are the best candidates, in which case the total lack of skills in the candidate pool is the problem.

Well... a resume (and whatever the recruiter does in the background) is initially what you have to judge someone off of. If they say they have X amount of years in the field with X amount of years working with the technologies you need them to know how to use and a list of recent certifications, that would imply they have the skills for the job. When I get them on the phone and they don't even have foundational network knowledge, there's not much I can do with that.

And again, if this was an issue based on just one company I worked with then it would be easy to say we just weren't attracting the best candidates through the job description or whatever but this is a pain that MANY of my customers in the area feel as well as our own hiring within my current organization. It is harder to believe that most larger companies in the Los Angeles area are just somehow not attracting the great candidates and there's just way too many technical rockstars out of work to fill all the jobs.

jdancer

Isn't funny there will be no "IT shortage" if organizations pay a competitive compensation package?

IT is nothing more than a race to the bottom.

If an organization wants a highly skilled professional, prepare to pay for it.

Iristheangel

Both companies I mention were paying $120-170K starting for a mid-level to senior engineer FTE. We had lots of applicants that were qualified on paper but fell apart in the interview. This was not a matter of us offering more money would solve the problem. Look up the average salary for a network engineer in Los Angeles and you'll see that $120-170K is extremely competitive. For the first job, if we weren't going to onboard them to an FTE position and they were just contracting, we would pay a mid- to senior- $75-150/hr (depending on experience - only one guy got the $150/hr so that's the top that I knew of). I had one person I hired negotiate in cost of hotel stay and driving costs for the week since he lived in Santa Barbara and he was the only guy who was near qualified on paper and in person.

The other companies I work with but not directly for tend to pay pretty competitively as well with the one-off here and there that might be a bit under.

Edit: Also, I'd like to add that $150/hr for contracting isn't as unheard of as one would think based on the salaries out there. If you have some solid skills in some niche technologies (ISE, ACI, NSX, VoIP, etc) and you're a one man/woman wrecking crew, you're cheaper than VAR professional services at $150/hr. Depending on the technology and the scope of the work, companies will pay $200-300+/hr + project management fees (them project managing their own resources, not your project) for the same professional services. I know of some folks who sub-contracted for VARs at $150/hr and the VARs still made tons of profit off it so that's food for thought too.

volfkhat

As in Sports... as in Life,

Cheaters gonna ****.

The solution is to build a better mouse-trap.

"Multiple-Choice" Certs aren't worth the paper their printed on.
But, honestly, i don't think the Cert-makers care; they're too busy making $$$ from those exam fees.

Their greed/laziness has helped create a cert-bubble, and OP's anecdotes are part of the end result.


12 years ago, i attended a Novell Suse Linux bootcamp.
The course included a free voucher for their CLA exam; which i took on the Last day.

There were NO questions on the test.
Instead, I was connected to a remote Desktop session with a dozen things to do:
Task 1: Create x user, and x groups.
Task 2: Configure apache to do this..
Task 3: Configure dhcp to do that...

i did NOT pass.
lol

But i was blown away by this revolutionary exam.
"Wow", i thought, "this is gonna be the future of testing!!"

12 years later.... not so much.

/shrug

Iristheangel

I agree. I still think there's importance to certifications as far as getting them and using them as a blueprint to learn but you (anyone) should expect to show up to a job interview and prove you're a CCNA/CCNP/CCIE/etc and not just assume that the company is going to "take your word on it" that you have the skills

dhay13

Or there is me. I know the jobs and how to do them well but stumble in face-to-face interviews. I seem to do very well in phone interviews and can write reports and documentation very well but face-to-face I struggle. I am trying to get better with it but I know it has cost me a few jobs. The interviewer probably felt the same as those mentioned in this article and I knew it but it's too late at that point. I'm sure a few you mentioned fell into this category.

Iristheangel

@dhay - Maybe a small fraction of those could be written off as bad nerves but not a majority by any means.

Also if you do have problems with interviews and the pressure of them, there's still ways to improve those skills like doing mock interviews with friends and mentors, toastmasters, etc. Communication skills, being able to articulate yourself, and being able to perform under pressure is still important in IT. It might be you just psyching yourself out and you might get 1 or 2 questions wrong because of it but there gets to be a point where you start to answer questions because you actually do have the technical skills or you don't. Even if you stutter them out, you should still have that technical knowledge to answer the basic questions. If you're working on a team of engineers, there's going to be points where you have to pitch your design or talk through problems.

dhay13

The one I regret blowing was the one mentioned above. I had another interview a week or so prior with another company and heard that they were very impressed with me (that one actually went very well as it was more of a friendly chat) and really wanted that one so didn't put 100% into the 2nd one. Likely a subconscious move to prevent having to make a decision but either way a few days later I started wishing I had put more effort into it and then the 1st job fell through. That 2nd interview seemed more adversarial and threw me off my game even more. I'm still trying to get in there and had a phone interview there a few weeks ago but haven't heard back. HR said the Security Director remembered me and wanted her to call me so still hoping for that one.

Anyway, that's my story. Adversarial interviews are harder for me. If we are chatting like friends I am much more at ease and do much better. What seems to be the norm? Adversarial type of friendly chat?

Iristheangel

Hmmm... I don't think adversarial type is the norm by any means. Depends on what you define as adversarial. If someone is trying to be aggressive and push your buttons, then no. That is not the norm and I don't think I would want to work for someone like that no matter how they justify it to themselves (i.e. "I just wanted to see how they behave under pressure") but if you define adversarial as them not being buddy-buddy with you why they attempt to gauge your skills, I would think that's more just them trying to remain professional while they do their due diligence. Don't get me wrong - the "friendly chat" interviews here and there are great for trying to assess cultural fit but unless they're trying to throw in technical questions at you, whiteboarding, giving you a lab, etc, it's not as much a gauge of whether or not you're a technical fit for the job role.

A lot of companies understand that cultural and technical fit are important and I think that it's good to have both kind of interviews imho.

boxerboy1168

I think it has a lot to do with hiring practices.

ande0255

I can attest that cheating might not get you to the top, but con artists can make a killing in IT.

I know someone who would call into Cisco TAC and while troubleshooting ask where the engineer was located, then Google places in the area and ask them if they've been to restaurants and such in the area, acting as though he had been there or was planning to vacation there.

Point is he added these TAC engineers to his Jabber via social engineering, so when there is a high level issue at my company he Jabbers them the issue, and he regurgitates a fix as if it were his own.

So just wanted to clarify, cheating maybe not so much entirely, but if you are a very good con artist you can make your way up the ladder faster than anyone - So be inovative with how you **** the industry!

Btw, did you ever tell the BGP master he forgot the remote-as on his command?

boxerboy1168

Something I learned that I rarely see applied is that you measure a persons value not by their current skills but by their potential.

It's not always about what someone can do right now it's about what someone is capable of doing in the future.

Often forgotten about.

Iristheangel

My experience hasn't been that they get up the ladder fast. I usually see them either going in and out of jobs fast since their "impostor syndrome" is reality, not perceived reality. The ones that do get employed will try to burrow themselves into that job and stay off the radar so they can collect a paycheck as long as possible. The ones that get employed and stay employed usually are doing so because they're staying off the radar which means they're not getting hired at senior levels in most cases or getting large raises or promotions. There are exceptions of course but it's hard to hold a con long term if you're remaining in the spotlight and it's a catch-22: you either have to show that you're being proactive to problems which your fraud gets exposed or you're not being proactive and people start to notice if you're trying to stay in the spotlight.

As far as the TAC engineers on Jabber, he must have gotten a REALLY nice TAC engineer because adding someone from another company on Jabber has to be accepted by that TAC engineer *and* answering random requests via Jabber might be easy 1 or 2 times but eventually it will start to affect the TAC engineer's SLA if someone's pinging them in the middle of every incident they're having and asking them to fix it. If the TAC engineer is already on another call and that one goes for hours, the ticket they have assigned to them is the priority. If that slips or they start having unaccounted time, that TAC engineer's boss will start to notice and they'll eventually put a stop to it. There's actually some behind the scenes controls to prevent things like that from happening - especially long term - so it might have worked for a short period of time for that one guy but it wouldn't on a long term nor would it work if hoards of cheats tried to copy.

Not to say cheaters can't find they own way to do stupid things to get a job - i.e. that anecdotal story of that guy who had a job programming and he outsourced it all to china for years before his company figured it out - but on a larger scale, cheaters don't really prosper unless low-tier or siloed jobs are the goal. I wouldn't exactly consider that a killing.

Also in the OP, I referenced a couple good stories about India, the cheating problem over there, and how less than 5% of the 36,000 graduating programming students are actually holding the skills needed for modern day programming and how most couldn't do simple coding. I wouldn't say the layoffs happening at WiPro and other companies in that country and the payrate of a CCIE there dropping to the floor over the last 8 years as a success story. While I definitely don't want something like that to happen in this country, I do think as the need for more skilled engineers become more and more in demand, it's going to be harder and harder for folks that **** themselves or refuse to learn anything new to have any sort of upward or lateral mobility from job-to-job. For the ones that do find a lifer job that they can hide at, they'll never be competition for someone who's got a solid skillset.

Iristheangel

boxerboy1168 wrote: »

Something I learned that I rarely see applied is that you measure a persons value not by their current skills but by their potential.

It's not always about what someone can do right now it's about what someone is capable of doing in the future.

Often forgotten about.

That's true but that doesn't often apply in interviews for mid- and senior-level jobs. A job might list requirements for someone to have XYZ skills and the senior engineer might only have X & Y skills but displays aptitude to learn Z, but if you need to get someone senior to get projects that are piling up now done, most companies aren't going to hire someone that doesn't know X, Y or Z and put their business on hold for 2-3 years while they learn all the technology required.

My original post more applies to mid- and senior-level jobs and those tend to be the ones that remain open the longest.

gkca

volfkhat wrote: »

12 years ago, i attended a Novell Suse Linux bootcamp.
The course included a free voucher for their CLA exam; which i took on the Last day.

There were NO questions on the test.
Instead, I was connected to a remote Desktop session with a dozen things to do:
Task 1: Create x user, and x groups.
Task 2: Configure apache to do this..
Task 3: Configure dhcp to do that...

Exactly the reason I'm so proud of my RHCSA and RHCE

nisti2

Wow really sad but true.

PC509

dhay13 wrote: »

Or there is me. I know the jobs and how to do them well but stumble in face-to-face interviews.

Them - "How do you enable an interface on a Cisco router?"

Me - "Uhhhhhh....."

Second I leave the place - "No shutdown. ****.".

I've found there are some places where I just get so stressed out I can't recall very basic things. Interview skills are huge. I suspect there are some people mentioned in OP's post that may have had a similar issue.

Other interviews go amazingly well. Interviews go both ways. Sometimes, the interviewer and I just click and it goes very smoothly and we can talk for a long time about the job and other related things. It just goes great. Other times, it's almost too formal and intimidating. Some people like that, though. I fit in great at my current company (interview went great, and we did talk for a while about various things not related to the basic interview questions).

Certs aren't the end-all, but they also aren't worthless. You should keep learning something new. IT is moving so quick, you always want to be learning something new and moving forward. Studying for certs is an easy way to do that.

H1B's... I hear horror stories. But, every one I've worked with has been brilliant and paid well...

Great post.

dontstop

Iristheangel wrote: »

they were going to retire in the next couple of years because they didn't want to have to learn IPv6 so they wanted to "get out" before they had to learn it.

That attitude reminds me of a few places I've worked in the past. So many people just want to find themselves a nice nook in which they can hide in until retirement.

ande0255

That's why I continue to study, even while said con man coworker is in the under the radar stage of his career there.

And TAC offshores is not like the CCNP forums here and on Cisco, I believe he talked off the record about doubling their salaries by starting an MSP. in South America, apparently TAC there is very skilled but not very smart essentially giving away support on a hope of going from $13/hour to $26/hour.

He is a real piece of work, I've never met anyone so evil but brilliant in person, hopefully he gets smoked back onto the radar soon.

jelevated

ande0255 wrote: »

Point is he added these TAC engineers to his Jabber via social engineering, so when there is a high level issue at my company he Jabbers them the issue, and he regurgitates a fix as if it were his own.

Ha, that sounds pretty Bizarre.

Love having the chance to work with TAC before I moved completely out of networking. I remember calling into the wireless div, the guy spent two hours explaining how their antennas work, it was like getting a having a 1 on 1 cooking lesson with Gordon Ramsey.

Iristheangel

LoL. You must have been talking to someone in Texas since that's where the hardcore wireless folks are in TAC