Biggest Pros/Cons/Challenges of the fields you work in

[LynK]

For those of you who are with a re seller/hospital. I'm curious. What are the biggest pros/cons/challenges in your respective fields?

If you do not work in any of these... I would still like to know.

[deanwebb]

For hospitals, the biggest challenge is getting a change window. Over and above any petty politics doctors or administrators may pull, that change window is very hard to come by, more difficult than getting one in manufacturing.

For resellers, it depends on the firm, really. I'm familiar with the guys from two different resellers near me. Sometimes, you're a rack-and-stack trained ape that jumps through hoops. If you got skills, then you ride along with vendors to implement their solutions and never have to stay too long at any one location. Unless you're sold as a staff augmentation guy.

[icecream-guy]

For hospitals, the biggest challenge is getting a change window. Over and above any petty politics doctors or administrators may pull, that change window is very hard to come by, more difficult than getting one in manufacturing.

Airlines are another big challenge, we couldn't do maintenance with any aircraft in the air. With only about 12 aircraft total, that meant something like 2-3AM on a Monday morning. not much time to do anything, or leave enough time for a rollback.


for a var, i you are not with a busy company always wondering where you next job will be, that and where.  Personally I've never been one to run around the city going customer to customer and working on any odd issues that might come up.  Contracts is better since the terms can be mid length to long term.

[DanC]

For hospitals, the biggest challenge is getting a change window. Over and above any petty politics doctors or administrators may pull, that change window is very hard to come by, more difficult than getting one in manufacturing.

This.

I worked in a hospital for many years, it's good in one sense because everything needs to be highly available and fast, i.e. good routing and switching gear, lots of Wireless, Security, UC and enterprise goodies, however getting a change window can be a nightmare so the rate of change is slow. Also bear in mind that if you screw up, the impact can be that people die. This can be overbearing depending on how well you cope under pressure.

I've never worked for a reseller but the feedback I get from people I know is that if you get a good one and are top of the tree, i.e. IE level, then it can be very rewarding. If you're entry to mid level then you're just thrown wherever they need you to do pretty much whatever they need, i.e. lots of travel, lots of learning on the job etc.

[LynK]

Also bear in mind that if you screw up, the impact can be that people die. This can be overbearing depending on how well you cope under pressure.

That is why there is redundancy no? 

[deanwebb]

Also bear in mind that if you screw up, the impact can be that people die. This can be overbearing depending on how well you cope under pressure.

That is why there is redundancy no? 

There's redundancy, but there's also mistakes that redundancy doesn't cover.

***

Also, I see what you did with the title. Kinda opened up the field to include more lines of work.

[deanwebb]

Pharma, banking, other regulated industries: you will need to know something about IT governance before you go upgrading all those switches willy-nilly. Qualification documentation whenever there is a change made on a production system that affects a regulated area. Consequently, there tends to be resistance about changing those systems. Documentation can be a beat-down.

[dlots]

I do utilities, MASSIVE regulation.  We have sites that if they loose connectivity for 1/2 hour we get BIG ASS fines.

[icecream-guy]

Also bear in mind that if you screw up, the impact can be that people die. This can be overbearing depending on how well you cope under pressure.

That is why there is redundancy no? 

There's redundancy, but there's also mistakes that redundancy doesn't cover.

***

like having two UPS and plugging both your HA firewalls into only one UPS...Oops someone did that here.

[LynK]

like having two UPS and plugging both your HA firewalls into only one UPS...Oops someone did that here.

You really can't make this stuff up.



@dlots,

That does not sound like an enjoyable Gig. Serious question for ya... how long of an outage before they ask you to pack your bags and start looking for a new job?

[dlots]

Never seen it happen.  It's hard to find people who are qualified to run a 11K router/switch network, and willing to live with that kinda abuse.

[Nerm]

Consumer Goods / Manufacturing

Pros: Relatively low regulation compared to other industries (eg. Medical/Utilities/etc).
Cons: IT is pretty much last on the "budget" priority chart. Also leadership can be old school and very abrasive to change of any kind. (luckily this one not so bad at my current employer)

[deanwebb]

Vendor: No excuse when someone asks if you can please test a beta on your homelab. Buuut, you get to play with the beta - even if it blows up, it's still pretty good fun.

[wintermute000]

VAR/consultancy

Pro: you are the cavalry and get to see pretty much every single scenario conceivable

Con: you are the cavalry and if there's a vendor or technology you've never heard of or touched or wanted to touch you're guaranteed to run into it . Also, the customers expect you to be The Oracle on every topic involving 1s and 0s. Also, there are a lot of morans in the enterprise networking space. A LOT of them. And a lot of them are your customers...



No seriously, wouldn't be doing anything else (well, short of designing Google's segment routing and PCE traffic engineering arch or a hyperscale fabric etc. but I won't pretend to be THAT cool lol ). My only gripe is that the Enterprise space is very slow in moving to the software defined future. I read and lab far more stuff than the conservative 'nobody-ever-got-fired-for-buying-Cisco/VMware' mob ever let me get to grips with. THe gigs are not always glamorous as well, though a lot of that is determined by your company (pipeline, culture etc.) and your standing within the company (you're not going to 'waste' your good guys deploying 2960X stacks or installing branch routers are you).

Its also pretty stressful, but in a completely different way to 'OMG its 3AM and its on fire' operations stress. If you don't like making design decisions and having to defend them for technical or political reasons, then its not the job for you.... Especially when dealing with newer technologies there's often no possible way to know the 'right' answer or design (esp. if you don't even have all the facts despite your best efforts to gather requirements). Also, a lot your gigs will be to untangle horrific spaghetti messes that nobody's ever had the guts to look at... ever migrated stretched-cluster ASAs that have 7.1 years uptime with only an hours outage available? and 7 years of config cruft that you have to upgrade to 8.x NAT syntax? across 3 clusters? did I mention they are 6500 FWSM modules? did I mention that static routing to BGP is also in scope? That kinda thing is normal, i won't even talk about places where they broke the STP diameter etc. you name the horror scenario and I've likely seen it.

Finally, as you get more senior you get to deal with more and more of the sales/planning/scoping/proposal-writing/PM/quality-control/vendor-chairman aspects of the job. Some techies absolutely despise this but its absolutely essential for success.

[icecream-guy]

Depending on the agency, for me as a government contractor, it's pretty easy going, with proper funding there are enough team members so that one is not going solo on any single task, on call is fairly infrequent. Hardware modernization moves along slowly (albeit, at the speed of government) but does move along. The feds are pretty easy going, as long as one is doing their job and not causing trouble. if they are happy I am happy. 

For others, it can be difficult. demanding feds, that wont stick up for you or will throw one under the bus at the drop of a hat. Lack of funding means small teams, limited resources, no hardware upgrades.  not much going on but customer support in a break fix scenario.

Pay is good, but dealing with the contracting companies, contract renewals, possibility of changing companies every few years. (even if you stick at the same job/location/position) is a PITA