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Want an IT Job? Add 'Cloud' To Your Buzzword List
jfruhlinger writes "There was a predicted uptick in IT hiring for late this year, but it's mid-November and it hasn't happened yet. Kevin Fogarty does see growth in one area, though: cloud and virtualization experts are being fought over, lured away from in-house jobs to cloud consultancies popping up everywhere."
I want an interesting job: administering java legoes written by computer idiots is not exactly a dream job.
Smile, don't click...
sounds like rather clouded judgement to me
they purdy.
I think it's important to define the word "Cloud" as no one else seems to, yet the definition itself lends great insight to the concept.
The "Cloud", as referenced here, is nothing more than the delegation of responsibilities...specifically those of infrastructure. That's it. It's not some mystical cure all. In fact, it's nothing more than a glorified way to outsource applications.
Now there are specific technologies which lend themselves to this concept ( those of virtualization, certainly ), but the overall goal is the same; the business doesn't want to worry about the infrastructure behind their app. They simply want it to work.
Which is why internal "clouds" have always amused me to no end...
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
hear their lies to avert their competition like how microsoft destroyed pc repair businesses and employment by involving mcse credentials priority over actual homebrew credentials and hobbyists to inflate payroll by a bunch of soulless transient accreditted peices of opportunistic shittards that want money and chinese hardware to further divide any chances of american chip fabrication from returning to it's former plantation in the states.
Johny Mountain will insurrect a foul pissy weather from the south that will rise again to push the cloud away.
guess im showing my age .
Might be true innovation in the long term. Or might be just another trick to lock us into proprietary systems. Or a bit of both.
I'll start... XML
Is there any way an amateur programmer with a CS degree but only 3 years work experience under his belt could add this to his resume in a reasonable time frame and thus become a shoe-in for entry-level cloud positions?
I am desperate for work. It has been 2 years now :( Reading that pile of SQL .NET and so on books doesn't seem to have helped my prospects at all, because recruiters and interviewers always only care about responsibilities I had in my last job, and wouldn't trust that I could do or know anything else.
The last recruiter I met pointed to the word "Linux" on my resume and said, "And LINUX, what the HELL is that anyway? I mean, you can probably tell me that you heard of it one time in college and it is an operating system or SOMETHING. Yeah?"
Sadly, the term means nothing if we're to believe MicroSoft.
If using a remote desktop application to watch pre-recorded video is considered cloud computing, then they must also classify single molecules of water vapor as "clouds" (or single droplets clouds, if you count routers).
Dilution of important terms like these into meaningless buzz-words is a shame.
I bet experience is the key here. Only candidates with at least 8 years experience in managing cloud computing in a virtualised environment will be considered.
And don't forget to list your four years experience with administering Windows 7.
Finally, these wound up IT types have found a way to chill out: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7b6hw_the-orb-little-fluffy-clouds_music
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
In my experience, there's plenty of choice. Not all of it great, of course, but there are some real gems passing along every now and then. They just get swamped in job offers for big Java enterprisey stuff. I try to scare them away by mentioning I don't want to work with Java, JSP or Struts, but since my CV contains the word "Java", they still contact me.
Interestingly, they also contact me when they need an Erlang or Python expert, despite the fact that I have no experience in those languages. But my CV says I want to learn them. Really, nobody ever reads CVs. They just do basic pattern matching and assume that's good enough.
My most interesting recent offer was from a company that wanted to switch to Scala. They had no Scala expertise yet, but needed some people wiling to learn and guide the transition. But it was almost an hour commute, partially by train, and I want to go to work by bike. But there's enough choice to be this picky, so the job market isn't exactly slow where I live.
Is that a bad thing not to want to worry about the infrastructure?
Yes, it's a VERY VERY bad thing if your business and it's reputation relies on said infrastructure.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
If you are in the web hosting business, you have to have the word cloud on your website. Otherwise customers think you are living in the stone age. Whether you actually offer cloud services doesn't matter. But using the buzzwords matter a lot nowadays.
Sudheer Satyanarayana
www.techchorus.net
You have to be careful around parenthetical expressions. They're supposed to be minor asides or quasi-unrelated to the matter of the sentence. But sometimes, they are the most essential statements in it; revealing not only the true meaning of their parent sentence, but very often the context of the whole piece.
May the Maths Be with you!
One very simple example: Do you have ever set up Google Apps for a domain, with email, contacts, calendar, Google sites and so on? Yeah, it's all in the cloud and all you have to do is clicking on buttons and filling out forms. Now go and look at some user trying to set this up. More likely than not he will get as far as configuring the MX-records and then he will cry for help.
All this cloud stuff seems to be so simple, but it very much isn't. And yes, this actually is nothing a real pro would like to bother with (you'll be fighting more with the UIs than anything else) but there is high demand for this, people think they can finally get away without someone who knows what he does, but they can't.
Most of this is in no way interesting or satisfying work but just fighting half-wit user interfaces. It's sometimes insulting, actually. Instead of really setting up things and controlling things you're hanging off someone else's setup and try to beat some sense out of it. It's often frustrating, you often will have to come to the conclusion that things you would like to do just can't be done because they're not offered and you can't do anything about that. But hey, it's just work.
Me? I'd rather setup a full server park from scratch with old PCs and Linux than fighting the "cloud", but guess what's in demand more. And yes, there's a whole army of trained monkeys out there, knowing every cloud service under the sun and with superhuman point-and-click abilities, but if you really know your job and also know about problems and limitations you can still easily make some money with this. Fun is this not, though. Fun is making things, not using things.
I think the world is divided into people who recognize the Jewish problem and people who don’t.
Why is this modded offtopic, surely he was talking about a zyklon cloud.
I always have a dark sense of humour, but I just realised that the above post goes beyond humour and could be really upsetting to people who's relatives were killed in the holocaust. I'm really sorry about posting this without thinking.
IT is one of the fastest growing job sector in the economy. There better be jobs or we are all doomed!
Cloud is a buzzword. And while it might be a good idea to add it to your resume, it will be gone in a few years. However, what will increase in the next decade or so are:
- Application services
- Platform services
- Virtual systems
All these services will be on demand. But this has different meanings in the different "cloud"-types. If you outsource your mail-service than this has to be available 24/7 the only thing which is variable is the system load. So the company providing email-services to you can do some load distribution if they have customers from different time zone (just for example).
However, outsourcing important information is always a problem. While you might outsource a shop system or a public relations website. You might not want to outsource accounting, engineering etc.
It can be interesting for private people. Because they want to use their data at home and when they are traveling. However, there is more a need in distributed computing and clever replication than storing all information in the net. Even though this might be a good idea for your email or music. It is still not such a good idea for your movies (that may change with more bandwidth).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buzzword_bingo. one of the best games ever. went to some congress with a few guys and played it, it was legendary.
Wait a minute. I'm a manager, and I've been reading a lot of case studies and watching a lot of webcasts about The Cloud. Based on all of this glorious marketing literature, I, as a manager, have absolutely no reason to doubt the safety of any data put in The Cloud.
The case studies all use words like "secure", "MD5", "RSS feeds" and "encryption" to describe the security of The Cloud. I don't know about you, but that sounds damn secure to me! Some Clouds even use SSL and HTTP. That's rock solid in my book.
And don't forget that you have to use Web Services to access The Cloud. Nothing is more secure than SOA and Web Services, with the exception of perhaps SaaS. But I think that Cloud Services 2.0 will combine the tiers into an MVC-compliant stack that uses SaaS to increase the security and partitioning of the data.
My main concern isn't with the security of The Cloud, but rather with getting my Indian team to learn all about it so we can deploy some first-generation The Cloud applications and Web Services to provide the ultimate platform upon which we can layer our business intelligence and reporting, because there are still a few verticals that we need to leverage before we can move to The Cloud 2.0.
MCP : "What's the matter Sark? You look Nervous."
Sark: "It's just we've never had a user before."
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Say, "LatestBuzz".
when the employer sees this keyword in the resume, s/he should understand that whatever latest buzz is about at that time, the applicant, 'has it'.
that could save both the employer and the applicant a lot of time - the employer, from trying to determine expertise of the applicant in an area employer has no knowledge about, and the applicant from lying about it.
Read radical news here
There are two reasons why scalability becomes a problem for most startups: stupid management and stupid developers.
Even the cheapest of modern servers are extremely powerful. A web-based startup can spend merely $3000, and for that they can get 4 to 5 servers. Using Linux, PostgreSQL, Python and other free and open source software means the only cost is in setting up the systems and maintaining them. Even that should never be an issue, because a good developer should have absolutely no problem with basic system administration tasks as part of their development job.
Those 4 to 5 servers should be enough to run the business for years. They'll give you 2 production web servers, 2 production database servers, and a server to use for hosting testing environments and other internal software. You get performance, you get redundancy, you get physical separation, and you get all of this at a relatively low cost.
Now, when it comes to the software, there are some guidelines. The first is that you shouldn't use MySQL, and you shouldn't use a so-called NoSQL database. Never use an ORM. Those are recipes for disaster. Use PostgreSQL or Firebird, and for crying out loud, write your queries by hand, and learn how to use indexes properly (or hire somebody who can).
Most of the scalability problems we hear about from startups are due to the fact that their developers are absolutely fucking clueless about how to use relational databases properly. I've dealt with some developers who don't even know what joins are, let alone what an index is or does.
You have to keep your architecture sensible. You know you're entering the danger zone when you start hearing terms like IoC, ORM, patterns, services, SOA, SaaS, and yes, Cloud Computing, coming up in meetings. The best way to achieve scalability is to just write the code as simply as possible at first, and only when you find true bottlenecks should very targeted improvements be made.
Once you start with crap like dependency injection and creating "services", you'll waste your development time building the architecture that's supposedly there to "support" your application, rather than working on the application itself. It'll be fucking hell to debug, and then it'll fall apart when even under a very minimal production load.
Scalability problems are usually just a sign of a startup hiring stupid developers, or hiring stupid managers who don't recognize the value of hiring good developers.
The latest instance of management by magazine.
You seem to have left out bandwidth.
[...] the app must be written against a specific cloud api (in some .net language)[...]
That's PaaS (Platform as a service), that's what I would expect from MS, leading to vendor lock-in with specific API's, it could have been more open and portable to your own servers or other PaaS providers. This is the "here are my balls, can you please hold them for a while?" IT planning strategy. It's just not good for you, the party on the squeezing side of the deal however...
From a customers point of view, IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) would make much more sense: paying for VM domains, memory, bandwidth as needed. Probably costs a few percents more than if you did it yourself. Perhaps some more risks for unavailability and nobody you can threaten to fire in that case.
From a software vendor's point of view, you would go for SaaS (Software as a Service). Pricing, continuous revenue, less versions to maintain,...
I had no idea that just adding a word to your resume, without having any experience in what the word describes, actually qualifies you in that area! And silly me's been spending all this time actually working with the stuff on my resume... How foolish!
Marketing killed IT conferences years ago.
"We're an IT solutions provider. We help small to midsized companies leverage the same technology that larger companies have today by providing these technologies in a solutions package to scale."
"You sell small business servers."
"Yes."
Now people are lapping up "cloud."
"We're a Cloud Solutions provider. We enable small to midsized companies to leverage the power of cloud technology by moving data from dated technology into the more vast infrastructure of cloud computing."
"You're taking our servers away aren't you."
"Yes."
As long as things actually do work, then that's a good thing: you're saved the effort of thinking about lots of frankly irrelevant crap (well, irrelevant to you; someone cares about it...),
IT is easy when things work. You're paying your IT staff money for when things break (and for fore sight and future/capacity planning).
A good IT stuff will generally (almost) put themselves out of work because everything runs tickety-boo.
What are some important issues when your application is deployed in a distributed computing environment?
Why do we have to think differently about transactions when we target a distributed database?
Give one or two general examples of problems that MapReduce helps solve.
Whether you can put a bunch of Cloud buzzwords on your resume or not, answers to questions like these will tell a lot about how well you can really deal with distributed infrastructure.
I'm tempted to buy a fog machine for my next job interview and put my code samples in the cloud it creates.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
A web-based startup can spend merely $3000, and for that they can get 4 to 5 servers. Using Linux, PostgreSQL, Python and other free and open source software means the only cost is in setting up the systems and maintaining them
4 or 5 desktop machines that you put a server OS on maybe. But if you want actual server-class hardware, that $3000 will get you one decent one.
"I'm experience with administering various cloud computing techniques." = "I setup a SQL Azure account a couple months ago and I know how to use Google Docs." ?
I RTFA'd and the word "Cloud" is not mentioned *once* except as a caption on the first article summary, not in any of the actual text. Aparently its gotten to the point where we just put the word "Cloud" on anything we want (to make it "kewl" ?) As for "Cloud Computing" being "boring" and a bunch of UI's ... I disagree. I've been working on Amazon EC2 and related services for several years now and find it everything but boring. Its challenging ! Fun, interesting. Having to work around its limits and discover what it is and isnt good at is a fresh experience after 30 of traditional computing. I can see why there are jobs openings, its *not easy* to do well.
You seem to have left out bandwidth.
Indeed. Doesn't matter what this guy might have on the back - 5 boxes or 20 boxes. No bandwidth (or expensive bandwidth) -> no scalability (or scalability that will drive his coffers to the ground.)
This guy's analysis doesn't take into account other factors that affect one's ability to scale - electric foot print, hardware leases, etc.
And why would I want to have my developer doing basic sysadmin work on a regular basis. Yes, I want my developer to be smart enough to do just that (vital for setting up dev sandboxes and working with the infrastructure guy.) But I want him to be focused on development. Beyond a certain size, a startup needs to have an infrastructure that facilitates development rather than depending on developers being swiss-army-knives.
Moreover, why would I want the same hardware to run for years. Hardware fail, specially cheap desktop boxes (the ones this person seems to get for 4-5 at $5,000.) Maybe I might want not one (as the AC suggests) but several boxes for development and testing - If you are a startup, you always want as many or if not more sandboxes than production boxes.
You want good hardware for production, specially if you expect scalability (and thus shitloads of 24/7 traffic). $5000 doesn't cut it. And you want similar hardware for unit/system/pre-production testing.
This guy is suggesting the most rudimentary and infantile of setups: one box for development and internal software. Who the hell can possibly suggest that????? What kind of novice approach would put developers to do development and test on the same box that runs internal production software?
A startup (at least the ones I've been) are not a garage shop nor a village's doctor's office. A start up that has legitimate worries about scalability needs more than that. And startup scratching scalability to stupid programmers or stupid managers is such a sophomore /. cliche devoid of reality and experience, it's not even funny.
A web-based startup can spend merely $3000, and for that they can get 4 to 5 servers. Using Linux, PostgreSQL, Python and other free and open source software means the only cost is in setting up the systems and maintaining them
4 or 5 desktop machines that you put a server OS on maybe. But if you want actual server-class hardware, that $3000 will get you one decent one.
Maybe he has never worked on an environment that actually requires server-class hardware or he thinks startups == home network at mom-n-pop's hardware store.
Really? I thought prop 19 failed. Oh. Different cloud.
Somewhat offtopic, but I'm finding it kinda difficult to believe that in this job market in the US, there are people lucky enough to be employed as developers that don't understand basic RDBMS concepts like indexes or joins. I'm just an undergraduate, but even at this level competition for jobs is incredibly fierce--I can't imagine someone being considered for code-writing positions lacking knowledge of crossjoin, outer joins, indexes, B+ trees, kd trees, etc. That kind of stuff comes up in almost every interview I've had so far, and I've got nothing yet for a while. :(
Do you actually encounter on a regular basis this kind of clueless-ness? How do these people manage to get hired?
What I have found is that no one likes to deal with the database, so they regulate it to the worst programmer.
Pity, since most performance issues with applications are bad SQL queries/database design at the backend. Table walks, using read/write when you just need read access, excessive data retrieval (where they then write code at the app level to toss out the unneeded data, rather than use SQL to return what they actually need)
What they should do is get a production quality DBA in to do all that for them, and figure out how to leverage him into the design phase so that they write code with DB optimization in mind. In other words, get some who LIKES databases to run your database instead of shanghaiing a programmer to do it.
Those projects that have that foresight do very well when it comes time to go live...
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
"Because I used Product X, my head is in a cloud."
Table-ized A.I.
The definition of "cloud" seems pretty nebulous to me.
But these days it seems clear that the market will continue in this protracted slugfest between MS and their legions of crappy, cheap programmers building one buzzword-laden kludge after another by benjamindees (441808)
on Thursday November 18, @03:02PM (#34272842) Homepage
Big security hole in Linux variant (ANDROID): http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/10/11/14/0115255/Android-Holes-Allow-Secret-Installation-of-Apps and Benny-Boy here says "Linux is SO much better" (yea, "ok there" Benny - when you grow up and act like an adult, instead of a fanboy *NIX zealot? Then we may pay you some heed).