How did you get into IT?

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There was a point in time when I was going on regular interviews, not necessarily to change jobs, but to build confidence. It helped as my ratio of successful interviews grew and grew. I got more and more offers, but they were not always that attractive (each company being very different). In any case, even when employed, it's a good idea to go on these as it really helps build character

Regarding Microsoft, I was very lucky to have a foot in the door from the get go as I was reference from an existing colleague. I started with a few calls to several different HR members (to see if I can behave on the phone and not be a total psycho ).
That in turn lead me to a few on-site interviews with local staff (managers and techies) from the Geneva branch office (where I'm located).
Finally I ended up going for a few visits to our Swiss HQ near Zurich for further meetings (the longest ones being half a day long, talking to 3-4 different people each time).

Some of those meetings where the kind where they called me in the late afternoon, asking me if I could be there the following day and to bring along a presentation describing a successful project... So yeah, spending ones evening making a PPT and asking permission from my existing employer to take a day off. And then driving 3 hours across Switzerland to be there the following morning at 9am or so.

I chalk it up as an experience where they were trying to push you and gauge your flexibility, stress levels, last minute challenges and the like.

It still took many months before they actually made a decision (economy was a little worse off and a short hiring freeze took place). But when they finally opened proceedings once more, I had a few final interviews and they signed me up.

No other company has ever made it a challenge at this level, but admittedly I do not know how things are at Google, VMware, Cisco and the like. I bet it's a challenge there as well. Doesn't hurt to try tho', you never know how things work out.

 

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I have friends who have worked at either Microsoft or VMware and as far as hiring is concerned they are pretty similar in tactics. I got close to working for Microsoft once, a guy I knew who was quite senior in the Systems Management side of things was due move to the US and wanted to try and bring me on board, things happened and it didn't pan out, not a loss I guess but it would have looked good on the CV.

As a younger me I would have jumped at the chance of working for one of them but the older, wiser, parental me has to take a step back and realise that I am no longer a single guy who can go anywhere at the drop of a hat.

I would probably chew my arm off even today to work for VMware (I bleed green) but the truth of the matter is that at my level it would require a decent amount of travel (international travel at that) and I rarely get to see my family enough as it is today, goodness knows what it would be like to work for the likes of MS or VMware.

 

Yeah, it doesn't make sense if you're worried about your work/life balance. I have no children, but occasionally being away bothers my fiancée. Also, the weeks can be long, especially if you chalk up travel time, and customer expectations are understandably very high, so you need to be alert and able to take stress in stride.

 

Wow, you guys are so high powered! I am still at the beginning, but it's a long story I'll try to keep short. So I started life training to be a tv and radio service engineer in 1983/84, did 2 years of a 3 year course, didn't start year 3 because I started a mechanical engineering apprenticeship, not what I wanted to do, only lasted 6 months. I was good at it, but very unhappy. So when I left there I did all kinds of things, firstly voluntary work, then mostly filling my time with hobbies whilst claiming benefits - electronics, photography, attempting to learn languages, cycling, trying to see as much of the country as I could on benefits and occasional bits of work. Eventually after a very bad relationship finally broke down, I went and did a "Using Information Technology" NVQ. That was 15 years ago. Made the mistake of using my new computer skills to do office admin jobs, did that for 8 years before realising I really needed to get back into technology. So I got out of admin, ended up doing market research for over 2 years whilst I applied for tech jobs, couldn't get one without the commercial experience. Took the number of an EPOS company off the side of one of their vans, they told me to get in touch with Cerco, so I did and that finally got me started in IT, I did my certificate with them in 2013, been contracting ever since, things like Win7 rollouts, EPOS upgrades, office moves, user migrations, basic stuff. But I had my Good News phone call last year, an agent had found me on CVLibrary, and wanted to put me forward for a permanent job with the company who's van it was I had written that phone number off! I didn't get the job, but when they had a further vacancy they asked for me - so I start work with them next week!

 

Glad to see CF with a few more posts. Grab a tea or coffee, I tend to dribble on so apologies in advance.

My story so far starts waaay (cough) back in the mid 1980's at the tender age of four when, according to my Dad, I typed my name into his BBC Micro B. Nowadays youngsters will be raising eyebrows and noses saying "Aged four? Really, I started at one!" but back then having a system at home was a luxury and I'm very thankful that my Dad had an interest that gave me an initial opportunity.

I was a gamer even back then, albeit losing every single game of Dogfight to him, but enjoying trying to beat Repton over and over despite the load times from tape. Skip on a few years to 1990 and Dad brought home a system from work to try for a weekend with Wordperfect and I forget which base OS. Needless to say in short order the home was equipped with it's first PC, a 386 SX 25Mhz with a stonking 90MB HDD and 4MB of RAM. Let the good times roll. DOS, XTree Gold and forcing Dune II to run in himem are my memories of those days before the internet arrived in the form of AOL 2.0 to the house, and so on as I progressed through the days of DOS, Win 3.1, 95 etc etc until I got my own rig for my 18th birthday.

At school IT really wasn't on the agenda at our place / time. We had some reasonably good number of machines available to us but no formalised courses except CLAIT Level 1. Myself and my friends established that we could probably teach Level 5 or above at that point but there wasn't anyone qualified at the school to assess so Level 1 it was. Our entertainment was figuring out how we could circumvent the singular IT admins security limitations., things happened, wrists were smacked etc.

GCSE's were pretty much the basics with a side of business studies, art and design tech:electronics as options. A-Levels were Maths, Chemistry and Physics which then lead onto entry to a Computer Science degree at Manchester University. During my A-Levels I did some part time work a local computer support startup who I ended up working for post uni, and that all started off by me joining their weekly LAN gaming sessions on a Wednesday evening. The second year of uni was a struggle with a number of topics that didn't hold a massive amount of interest and two courses where the lecturers, who may have been brilliant researchers, should really have been replaced with better lecturers. Having said that, I should have spent more time studying myself for those two to compensate, it's one of those life lessons that has stuck with me in other aspects. If you want to know/learn something, dig in and do it yourself. I finished it though, came out with a 2:2 and promptly headed back home to the lake district and dropped into the job at the local computer support company, having organised it the Easter before. It was handy as I'd met my future wife during the summer of 2002, if I hadn't then I might not have headed back to the lakes and things could be entirely different today, darn glad I did though as she puts up with my eccentricities and lets me geek out

We're finally onto the work thing eh! 2003 and the full time work life commences. Mixed in with A-Levels and uni were a number of evening/weekend jobs in bars and I remember those fondly, something that everyone should partake in at one time or another I believe.

Work at that first job was first line domestic support for a while. I dabbled in doing some web design for the company at the same time, and over the next 6 years moved up through the ranks as the company expanded to eventually become SLA Contracts Manager and Third Line Support. Being a small company of less than ten this involved a wide range of daily work from consulting, quoting, implementing, supporting, expanding etc and was a great breadth of experience in the small business area. They sent me on a few training courses at Lancaster University who were running their own 'Certificate in Microsoft Technologies' which comprised the four core modules of the 2003 MCSE tested with lab work and coursework which I enjoyed and then sat the MCP exam for 70-290. I should have sat the remainder of the exams to get my MCSA then but I was getting a bit disillusioned with IT, primarily because of the working environment I was in, and so I didn't. This was a mistake which I've reflected on a few times since.

Spin onto late 2008 and my wife dropped a small ultimatum... Settle down and start a family or go travelling... so we packed up the flat in early 2009 into my parents loft (Dads always regretted making the offer to use the loft since!) and hit the roads of Europe for nine months. Working for food and board via Helpx in France and Spain at rose gardens, spanish villas, bikers campsites and old silk worm houses. It was a great relaxing time and just the break I needed to refuel myself after a draining year or so before for a few reasons. The travelling wasn't over though and we put a couple of visa applications into Canada whilst we spent a wintery six weeks in the Czech Republic (highly recommended!) before dropping back into the UK for a few months before heading to Canada.

In those few months I did some contract work covering sick leave at a local college which was a great exposure to a larger IT setup with thousands of clients and a large number of servers.

We arrived in Vancouver, Canada, in March 2010 and it took a long month to find a job at a small (five person) local IT MSP but it was worth it as I then spent the next four years working for them. Yeah, that was unexpected, we only went over for a year! My employer took me on as a junior systems engineer and in short order raised me to a senior level after my probation period. IT job titles are all over the place, as we know, but it felt good to be put in that position by someone else with far more years experience in the industry. Four years worth of working with finance and mining companies, amongst others, in downtown Vancouver gave me a different perspective on the angles of IT work, with satellite offices in different cities/time zones etc. The attitudes to IT support and IT workers was also so much more positive over there than what I had experienced in the UK that I was very pleasantly surprised. It's nice to be appreciated. During my time there I also got to implement a managed services infrastructure for them based on my work at my previous company. They were already doing some contracted work but didn't have any formalised contracts or support plans in place, by the time I left everything was ticking over nicely. I did decide to tick some certification boxes during the last days of the CompTIA lifetime certifications and so crammed in the A+, Network+ and Security+ in short order. As we were implementing Office 365 for a number of clients I also sat the 74-324 Microsoft Specialist exam for 365.

All good things come to an end though and we decided that five years of travelling was enough and headed back home to the UK. Luckily my first employer had been trying to get me to come back each time my visa renewal was up in Canada. Handy to have your Dad living in the same town to remind everyone that you might be coming back. As it ended up it suited to head back to them for a temporary contract with the task of assisting them with upgrading their internal helpdesk and monitoring and management suites to the same ones I'd been using in Canada (Connectwise/LabTech) . It's turned out that there was a lot more work involved than just that so I've also ended up upgrading all the hardware and software stacks whilst getting involved in streamlining internal processes, improving the SLA contracts/provisions to the newer styles I'd used in Canada and providing level three consulting/support. Oh, and brewing/consuming an inordinate amount of tea!

My current job title: Systems Development Manager... but there's a lot of other small roles hiding behind that which I think is the same for a lot of us.

To keep up with some training I completed the Introduction to Linux course on edX recently, run by the Linux Foundation, as a refresher since not I hadn't properly touched Linux since uni except for my web server. It was a great primer/refresh and there's a second version out now for those interested. It's free to audit.

Currently I'm finally getting to build out my test lab at home now we're settled back into the country and I'm hitting the 2012 R2 MCSA track this year to finally get it. Yes those missed 2003 exams are still bugging me personally.

Throughout all of the above the gaming side of me has continued with all of my main PC's being gaming rigs first, test rigs second, photo editors third and general use machines as an afterthought. From those first days of Dune II I ended up spending an large amount of time organizing squads/playing in the top end of the Quake II Savage CTF Leagues, then onto leading forty-man raids in the World of Warcraft back when Molten Core was a challenge to everyone (By fire be purged!) and currently play testing Star Citizen. Go check it out if you haven't heard of it already, it's the largest crowd funded thing ever, $74million and counting.

Where too next? Well my work will be completed at my current employer this summer. My wife and I are looking to move to a different location in the UK, the travelling bug hasn't quite abated yet. From a job perspective I'm thinking of aiming more towards a larger MSP, or inhouse at a larger firm, so that I can concentrate more on third line work or specialise a little more in Virtualisation, Exchange/Office 365 etc. I feel that a decade plus in the SMB area is enough of a grounding to want to move on. The gamer and tea drinker isn't going anywhere though.

You can now removed the glazed expressions from your faces ;)