You in I.T? What do you then?

[Ginger Tosser]

A few of us spent a whole summer once doing application packaging for SCCM. What joy that was!
Do you find SCCM stupidly slow and unreliable? It's great when it works but some days it just doesn't seem to be arsed to deploy anything. We're running 2007, looking to upgrade next year.

Yes it's quite slow, the mmc interface is the primary reason for its ****ness. Our deployments generally go ok, though if you loose a distribution point (easily done with our ancient IBM x3550 servers) then sccm 2007 decides not to deploy anymore. It's apparently fixed on 2012, but then again Microsoft told us so client issues were fixed on 2007 r3 and we believed them.

Good news on 2012 is the mmc is history, bad news it's still just as slow. But the interface no longer dies - it just pauses. That said we're still on 2007 - we may not get 2012, maybe we'll skip it until the 2015 version. Personally I'm looking to move away from Microsoft stuff, if I can get into tsm/unix then I'll be happier. Might have to get some sandles and a beard first.

[Decider-VT]

My helpdesk job involves taking Japanese messages for help, bunging them into Google Translate and then forwarding them to the relevant US IT team when necessary. Any words I don't understand go into a groovy Excel sheet.

I need to learn C# because the plan is to have me support/create internal software within 1-2 years.

I do wonder about this mentality from employers sometimes. There's a few people on my team who are being actively pushed to code but they don't have the interest in it or aptitude necessary to do it well. I'd think that a few good QAs who have a lot of domain knowledge are preferable to people that might turn out to be mediocre programmers who end up hating their job.

It's all part of a drive toward test automation that would eventually result in continuous deployment but I'm not wholly convinced by either concept, really.

[Mayhem]

We're eventually getting to doing some test automation at long last in our team, my colleague Chris is the bloke with the Unix/scripting skills so he's mostly assessing which platform and language will be best suited.

[Decider-VT]

I'm told that it's part of the reason I've been brought in, as I have a CS background- other people on the team haven't programmed before or have a background in compliance. We're using C# with Resharper NUnit tests (and NCrunch for parallel execution) while we're writing them but it's still in the very early stages and I haven't been exposed to the main automation framework yet. It's a little bit of a mess, to be honest- some of us are writing direct C# code to drive Selenium while others in different teams are reliant on SpecFlow. Maintenance of those tests is going to be a mess if people start moving around. I tempted to push for some in-house standards before things go too far and become too fragmented.

[nonny]

I've been in software QA for 20 years. I've been heavily involved in automation the past 10 generally around the HP toolset but also stuff like Selenium etc...

For the past 8 years I've been in the financial industry which has paid better but less bleeding edge, actually more like paper cut in some respects. I'm currently teaching a load of teams how to actually use most tools properly. Sometimes I swear these people write things on their CV and never get quizzed about them.

[randombs]

I do wonder about this mentality from employers sometimes. There's a few people on my team who are being actively pushed to code but they don't have the interest in it or aptitude necessary to do it well. I'd think that a few good QAs who have a lot of domain knowledge are preferable to people that might turn out to be mediocre programmers who end up hating their job.

The job was for a help desk engineer with coding skills but they made a concession for me because I ticked enough boxes. I've seen all the documents relating to the position and there were some coding tests. It wasn't that they hired me for help desk and then started asking me to code.

[k0pp0]

Yes it's quite slow, the mmc interface is the primary reason for its ****ness. Our deployments generally go ok, though if you loose a distribution point (easily done with our ancient IBM x3550 servers) .

*SPEW* IBM servers are terrible. Had to support a number of them and they were just horrendous - I much prefer HP.

I've spent many hours packing apps/scripts etc with Bladelogic. Immensely powerful tool, but a bit of a sod to learn.

[k0pp0]

I do wonder about this mentality from employers sometimes. There's a few people on my team who are being actively pushed to code but they don't have the interest in it or aptitude necessary to do it well. I'd think that a few good QAs who have a lot of domain knowledge are preferable to people that might turn out to be mediocre programmers who end up hating their job.

It's all part of a drive toward test automation that would eventually result in continuous deployment but I'm not wholly convinced by either concept, really.

Automation really needs to be end to end for the business.. home growing a solution rarely works. And pushing people into programming is another rubbish idea. I used to work at Lucent and it was expected that you would get a HND in computer science, then move on to programming 'stuff' for the business. I pointed out at the time (as a windows support guy) that surely investing in training in Microsoft technologies would be a far better fit.
Still didn't stop them sending me on a college course for it. 1 night a week. after work. 60 minutes drive to the college as well.

I dropped out after 3 months.