IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

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Quineloe

Quineloe

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TJT said:
Are you a SAAS product? If so this would be included in the support you're paying for. If not, $500 eh?
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No, we don't do SAAS. We sell software for industrial electricity meters, power monitoring and other stuff which I don't understand since I'm IT; not an electrical engineer (we bought Dranetz if you're familiar), we offer installation support for the server/client solution but we don't offer any form of maintenance support. Once the system is sold or up and running, customer is on their own and they don't owe us any more money either.

I joined the company a month ago after my 12 month paid parental leave, I've never done any billing or sales, my last job was in-house IT for a law firm so billing was just done in theory for controlling reasons. I just know these guys did that kind of stuff *for free* in the last 18 months since this software was launched, which our boss-boss wants to put a stop on asap. So we're guessing prices now lol.
 
Borzak

Borzak

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Not in the computer industry at all. I would take a rough guess of the money they would lose if locked out forever. Then figure a percentage of that. Even a small percent. Just like I charge a shitload more for the dinkiest structures when it's stopping a turnaround with a 1,000 guys standing around waiting than I do for the same structure months in advance of anything.

Years ago used be able to get a rough calculation from the signs "Exxon is losing XXXX per hour during this turnaround". OSHA killed that off.

For another company now that I think about it you would have to swag it since the money angle would likely be held pretty close.

Maybe put it in your contract ahead of time for "help and recovery". You can easily pad the hours much like cost plus contracts.
 
Noodleface

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Long time no post, as of last week I'm now a fully remote worker. Feelsgood

Heard layoffs are coming though
 
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Kuro

Kuro

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So, started in on Java and realized I recognized it.

Turns out, years ago, while I was working at Alderac Entertainment Group, my playtest team was responsible for creating the files for our online play program for playtesting Legend of the Five Rings. These files were in Java. So I spent about 5 years maintaining and creating Java files/database without realizing I was doing that.

Is that something I should include on my resume going forward? Obviously leaving out the fact that I didn't know it was Java at the time.
 
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Neranja

Neranja

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Kuro said:
Is that something I should include on my resume going forward?
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Considering you spent a lot of time at it, and HR basically is looking for virgins with years of experience with sex, I'd say it's fair game to call it:
"Writing and maintaining Java unit tests, automated testing and data generators for the QA of a database driven application with strong transactional and security requirements."
 
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Vinen

Vinen

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Neranja said:
P2V -> Physical to Virtual. VMware offers a tool to convert real hardware to VMware images.
Blades: Was once the hotness to save rack space and have a centralized management for server systems. Many manufacturers made their own ecosystem. Evolved into software defined infrastructure with newer platforms like HPE Synergy.

View attachment 297033
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Which software are people using for P2V right now? AFAIK the one VMware shipped is EOL (vCenter Converter).

The customers I've spoken with recently (Fortune 50) that still have some physical intend to remain physical for the current workloads that are or do fresh installations on virtual infrastructure.

Everything now is about Hyper Converged Infrastructure. vSAN, Nutanix, etc. Just buy your HCI device that has Compute, Network and Storage all in one. Wire them together and slap on VMware VCF. Instant DataCenter. I've seen one company I work with standup something like 30 vCenter clusters of 20+ hosts in < 1 day.
 
taebin

taebin

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HCX. I think it comes standard as part of the VCF package. At least some version of it. We typically have PS do it for us (us being DTMS).
 
Mist

Mist

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Vinen said:
Everything now is about Hyper Converged Infrastructure. vSAN, Nutanix, etc. Just buy your HCI device that has Compute, Network and Storage all in one. Wire them together and slap on VMware VCF. Instant DataCenter. I've seen one company I work with standup something like 30 vCenter clusters of 20+ hosts in < 1 day.
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This is the biggest growth in our current company. We were primarily telecom, with some networking, and now we're doing all these midsize Cisco UCS, NetApp, Nutanix installs. (We were a Simplivity partner but fuck HP. We're not even doing much Aruba anymore because fuck HP.)

I'm not sure I get the point though, for midsize customers. The benefit of the HCI stuff is that it's very scalable, but for most people that aren't realistically going to scale like Uber, you'd be cheaper with just generic ESXI hosts and standard SANs, and for people who are going to scale rapidly, why not just go full cloud? I dunno. Maybe we just have good sales people.
 
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Vinen

Vinen

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taebin said:
HCX. I think it comes standard as part of the VCF package. At least some version of it. We typically have PS do it for us (us being DTMS).
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I see. I didn't realize it was built into HCX. My only experiences with HCX was Cloud to Cloud migrations (Such as evacuating vCloud Air for VMware Cloud on AWS).

I work on the management side of the company so I don't go that deep in that area.

Mist said:
This is the biggest growth in our current company. We were primarily telecom, with some networking, and now we're doing all these midsize Cisco UCS, NetApp, Nutanix installs. (We were a Simplivity partner but fuck HP. We're not even doing much Aruba anymore because fuck HP.)

I'm not sure I get the point though, for midsize customers. The benefit of the HCI stuff is that it's very scalable, but for most people that aren't realistically going to scale like Uber, you'd be cheaper with just generic ESXI hosts and standard SANs, and for people who are going to scale rapidly, why not just go full cloud? I dunno. Maybe we just have good sales people.
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Won't scale? Hahahahahha. Not the case. I've worked with a Telco and a large Bank over the last 6 months who both have massive HCI deployments leveraging VCF (and such vSAN). We are talking hundreds to thousands of hosts in each data center with 6+ data centers.
 
Mist

Mist

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Vinen said:
Won't scale? Hahahahahha. Not the case. I've worked with a Telco and a large Bank over the last 6 months who both have massive HCI deployments leveraging VCF (and such vSAN). We are talking hundreds to thousands of hosts in each data center with 6+ data centers.
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I think you completely missed what I was saying.

I said it scales great, but most mid-size companies don't need the scalability, and are therefore just overpaying versus generic platforms (aka some Dell servers running ESXI and vCenter and a standard EMC SAN.)
 
Phazael

Phazael

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Mist said:
This is the biggest growth in our current company. We were primarily telecom, with some networking, and now we're doing all these midsize Cisco UCS, NetApp, Nutanix installs. (We were a Simplivity partner but fuck HP. We're not even doing much Aruba anymore because fuck HP.)

I'm not sure I get the point though, for midsize customers. The benefit of the HCI stuff is that it's very scalable, but for most people that aren't realistically going to scale like Uber, you'd be cheaper with just generic ESXI hosts and standard SANs, and for people who are going to scale rapidly, why not just go full cloud? I dunno. Maybe we just have good sales people.
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The people who sign checks and make big purchase decisions are typically years behind the boots on the ground when it comes to technology, at least in my experience. One of the few things I liked about working at a community college was that most of the hardware choices were made by us grunts instead of some fucking dinosaur who hasn't had to actually maintain anything since the days of "Don't Copy That Floppy".

Also, sales reps are invariably attractive 30ish single women who wine and dine the shit out of you, so yeah your sales team is doing its job offloading old shit too.
 
Mist

Mist

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Phazael said:
The people who sign checks and make big purchase decisions are typically years behind the boots on the ground when it comes to technology, at least in my experience. One of the few things I liked about working at a community college was that most of the hardware choices were made by us grunts instead of some fucking dinosaur who hasn't had to actually maintain anything since the days of "Don't Copy That Floppy".

Also, sales reps are invariably attractive 30ish single women who wine and dine the shit out of you, so yeah your sales team is doing its job offloading old shit too.
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You guys keep reading my post backward or something. Try again.

What I'm saying is that for what most of our midsize customers are buying these HCI platforms for, they really don't need, and could just go with more traditional, cheaper, generic ESXI servers.
 
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Phazael

Phazael

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Actually I was basically saying old guys at companies tend to buy older shit out of habit and familiarity, as well as your sales force probably being stuffed with wall to wall dolled up 30 something women to reel in the money. Thats been my consistent experience sitting in on sales meetings. Institutions, especially private sector ones, do not always make the most efficient choice. And the sales departments job is to make the company money, not save the customer costs, so a lot of times they will pimp something less ideal just to get it the fuck out of inventory. And if I am an aging CTO with out of date knowledge retired on the job, I am probably going to blow my companies money on something I am more familiar with, especially if some MILF with a push up bra is pimping it to me over some free surf and turf.
 
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Noodleface

Noodleface

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Vinen said:
You make it? Sounds like the layoffs are hitting at DELL today?
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I haven't been notified so I guess I'm ok. But I honestly have no idea. It's kind of scary, I can't lie. Firmware is a pretty small but integral org so maybe we'll be ok
 
Mist

Mist

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Noodleface said:
All hands invite sent out at 530 today for 10am tomorrow. Kind of thinking maybe we lost people
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Having survived 3 of them so far, yeah that's definitely what that is lol.

They don't send out the invite until after they've finished the firings generally.
 
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