Guess Who's Got Two Thumbs and a New Job

Slowhand

After a long bout of searching, I finally landed a gig with a managed service provider located right down the street from where I live. Primarily it's going to be managing small networks of 25 - 50 users, mainly in Windows Server 2008 R2 domains with either an in-house Exchange 2010 server or a hosted solution, and from the looks of it most of the users will be running Windows 7. It's shaping up to be a very similar job to one I held a few years back; in fact, this company is a direct competitor of my former employer. With the exception of needing to kick my 70-662 studies into gear - having Exchange knowledge comes with the territory of being a Windows admin in the Bay Area - I'm in pretty familiar waters, technology-wise.

The job is part-time, somewhere between 20 - 25 hours per week, and my new boss seems very enthusiastic about my schooling, so he's going to work with me on scheduling me for hours and days when I don't have classes. I've gotten a serious bump in pay as well, earning almost as much for part-time as I did for full-time in the past. I'm also very keen on the fact that most of the client-sites are close by, either in Oakland or San Francisco, so I might not have to pay as much for driving and parking as I did before, but rather use the light rail to get around and save myself the hassle of the freeway commute.

My roommate and I are going to grab a larger apartment in the same building, now that we can justify the cost. I'm going to knock out some debts that have accrued over the past two, out-of-work years, which includes paying down my student loans and just pay for school myself from here on in. I'm also planning on getting myself a new(er) car and possibly plan a trip to see my parents in Sweden, since I haven't been back in quite a few years. All in all, things are looking up.

the_Grinch

Congrats man! I work for a managed service provider, it's not too terrible, you get to play with a lot so that is a plus (not that you didn't already know that). I always found the really small clients are just as demanding if not more demanding then the big ones. Either way, good luck!

Turgon

My advice on the schooling is to sit down with your boss and have a proper discussion about how you are going to help this company grow. The managed service provider arena is extremely competitive and many will go to the wall in the years ahead. It's not effective administrators that these companies really need, it's technologists that understand commercial opportunities to exploit. See if you can offer yourself as a contributor to the business strategy. You will get lots of investment in your education if you can get that across.

nel

Congrats man! it could not happen to a greater bloke! seriously, you deserve it!

I work in a managed services environment and ive found there are tons of areas to get into technology wise when compared to previous corporate environments.

Best of luck in the new job and with school!

Everyone

Congrats!

vCole

Congrats!

bryanthetechie

Right on, man. Grats!

earweed

Congrats on the new gig.

joehalford01

Awesome! Congrats!

networker050184

Congrats man! Movin on up!

TLeTourneau

Congratulations!

elTorito

Congrats! That sounds like a great opportunity, especially considering the free schooling you'll be getting.

veritas_libertas

Congratz! I'm sure you are happy to be back in

Slowhand

Thank you all for the words of encouragement. I had my first day yesterday (Friday), and it was a pretty good experience. I worked with the head of the company, along with one of the other techs, migrating an office full of users off their in-house Exchange 2007 box, (which was falling apart at the seams due to being mismanaged and incorrectly set up in the first place,) to a hosted solution. Nothing too mind-bending, really, but we did run into some DNS-related issues in the middle of the day, along with trying to fit the Outlook and Apple Mail setups into the various executives' busy schedules so we wouldn't be causing them too much downtime. I've got a Terminal Services setup to do next week, and then I'll be spending some time to get to know more of the clients. Something tells me I'm about to be the new go-to guy for Microsoft server technologies at this company.

As for working out my school-situation, that's something I hammered out with the boss before starting. I thought it best to lay all my cards on the table during the interview and let him know that I was planning to continue taking classes and that I'd probably never want to be a full-time employee with his company. He told me that, as long as I keep on top of my schedule and am able to do my job, he fully supports my decision to keep working my way through college. It works out nicely, since all the regular work we do is set up weekly or monthly with our clients and all I really have to do is mark my shared calendar as 'busy' when I'm in class well ahead of time to avoid scheduling-conflicts.

My schedule will be a little thin over the holidays since there probably won't be a whole lot of money for new projects coming from the clients until the start of the next quarter, but it looks like I'm going to have no trouble maintaining somewhere between 20 - 25 hours per week between new projects and being scheduled to do regular maintenance and client support in the coming year. Quite frankly, looking at the kind of work I'm going to be doing for this job versus my classes - multi-variable calculus, linear algebra, and MATLAB - I think the tech-work cause the fewer gray hairs.

Psoasman

Congrats! Good for you.

rogue2shadow

Congrats man. This is definitely good to hear