All posts by Scott Alan Miller

Started in software development with Eastman Kodak in 1989 as an intern in database development (making database platforms themselves.) Began transitioning to IT in 1994 with my first mixed role in system administration.
Career, Education

Choosing a University for IT Education

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In previous articles I have tackled the questions around approaching university education and selecting a degree program but, thus far, I have not provided any guidance in selecting an institution at which to study.  That will be rectified now.

There are basically five categories of universities in the United States that we need to consider.  These types of educational institutions are:

  • Unaccredited schools
  • Accredited Trade schools
  • Accredited Online schools
  • Accredited Brick and Mortar Private schools
  • Public Brick and Mortal schools

There are more types of schools than these but we can basically lump all schools into one of these categories as these are the general categories that a hiring manager will view schools on a candidate’s resume.  University education has two key benefits, the first is in broadening thought processes and introducing students to many topics through liberal studies.  The second is in providing beneficial resume line items and for this second category we need a university that provides a positive reaction.

So assuming that we are concerned about putting our degrees and education onto our resumes, we need to consider carefully how our choices of educational institution will reflect on us.  You will notice that I carefully did not say that universities provide skill training to prepare workers for the jobs that they will do.  This I have covered in other articles; the university system is not intended nor generally capable of training people directly for work.  There is no mandate to do this, no expectation and little potential capacity especially when we are considering highly technical or quickly changing career fields.  IT maybe be among the most extreme of these kinds of fields, but this issue applies across the board.

Because such a huge portion of the value of a degree comes from how that degree is perceived by a hiring manager, we have to consider that impression very carefully.  And this produces what I would consider “the dead line” in selecting educational institutions.

For a large percentage of hiring managers, and much of the population, only certain types of universities are considered valid.  This is not a judgment call, only an observation of hiring reality.  Whether the quality of education, rigors of study and such are valuable or not, certain categories of schools are considered non-valid in enough of the marketplace that we must effectively discount them from consideration.

From the list that I have provided, any school that is unaccredited, purely online or a tech/trade school should be completely avoided.  These three categories are routinely views as such a strong negative that in a great many cases a candidate will be eliminated based on this one factor alone.  It is commonly said that hiring managers will see one of these schools and throw a resume directly out without any further consideration, but in reality in many cases an HR filter will do this before any human even sees the resume.  The same logic that says that we use degrees to get passed human resource gatekeepers to get our resumes in front of hiring managers based on “black and white” filter requirements, also tells us that we must avoid schools that would be considered to be on a “black list.”

This leaves only two categories of schools for any serious consideration: private, accredited brick and mortar schools and public, accredited brick and mortar schools.  Now, it must be noted, that just because a school is brick and mortar does not mean that they do not also offer online or alternative classes.  And at no point has it been suggested that it is necessary to attend a school in person.  What is critical is simply that the school be perceived as a valid, traditional educational institution.  In many cases, online classes are the best option as they provide more flexibility and better use of time avoiding time wasted in commuting, moving between classrooms and such.

Of this remaining category, public schools fare far better than private ones because the lower cost of attendance lowest, quite dramatically, the risk inherent in spending time and money on education: the less money spent, the less risk taken.  In only rare cases are private schools any better than public ones and in very many cases, they are worse.  The risk/reward calculation on most public schools is simply far better in the majority of cases.

With any school choice, reputation matters.  Schools with a good reputation are best, especially those that are broadly known.  Schools that have no reputation can be fine, as long as they truly are unknown and fall into good categories.  Schools can get a bad reputation regionally or globally, however, and this poses a risk that is difficult to predict or to avoid.  What is a top ranked school today can be poorly viewed tomorrow, and vice versa.  Large schools have the advantage of increasing the chances that someone on a hiring team will have attended that school increasing personal affinity.

There is no simple answer to selecting the right school.  Does the school benefit you through education, reputation or association (with people that will help you later in your career) is unique to each person and school combination.  But he universal guideline to follow is to stick to accredited, broadly well respected, brick and mortar, public or private not for profit schools and consider cost carefully.  Avoid online and/or for profit schools or any school that lacks proper accreditation.

As a modern side note: many schools, even sometimes others good ones, that advertise heavily especially on television or radio, often earn a bad reputation simply because of the medium of attempting to lure students.  If you have seen a school because of their marketing campaign, assume that a hiring manager has as well and while some good schools do this, it may not matter.

Commissioned, Uncategorized

The Scale HC3 Advantage

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For years I have been pitching ideas about how a performant, highly reliable architecture for the small and medium business market should be approached.  Concepts like maintaining high reliability across all layers of the architecture, reducing the total number of points of failure whenever possible, reducing complexity, leveraging mirroring instead of parity for storage, keeping storage close to compute and so forth.

What I like about the Scale HC3 approach to hyperconvergence is that it addresses all of these items and more.  Scale takes all of the components of a complete platform and reduces them into a singular “package” that is deployed to all nodes in the system making every layer of the system as redundant as all of the other layers.  Even the management console itself is automatically replicated and available from every node in the cluster,  independently!

Compute and storage are integrated into the same package sitting together on each node.  This allows for the lowest latency in communications and the highest reliability both per node, as there is less to fail by way of having fewer moving parts, and also across the entire architecture by making each stable building block replicated so that nothing depends on any single node for computer, storage, management or orchestration.

Instead of the “traditional” approach so often associated with virtualization, where several layers of services are separate yet totally dependent upon each other, the Scale hyperconverged approach flattens these taking us to the opposite end of the spectrum from the infamous “inverted pyramid of doom” to a flat, broad “brick”.  No single points of failure, no highly fragile components.  Keep each component reliable on its own, then make them redundant anyway.

Digging down to the storage layer, the Scale HC3 uses a RAIN approach which can most easily be described as a “network RAID 1e” design.  RAID 1e is an interesting twist on RAID 10 which basically adds a striping mechanism inside the mirrors so that you never have anything but mirroring but the mirrors are not at the disk level but at the block level and spread out among many disks.  RAID 1e is more advanced and more flexible than RAID 10 and brings some minor performance and reliability advantages but, more importantly, allows a RAID 10 approach to be used effectively over a network without having to resort to the fragility of RAID 01.  Scale does not use actual RAID, but true RAIN, that does intelligent block mirroring in the cluster with logic not only about drives, not about nodes on which the drives sit.  We only use RAID as an example for comparison.

The Scale HC3 also adds powerful hybrid spinning disk and solid state drive tiering using a heat map approach to determining which blocks are being used regularly and which are predominantly idle.  This allows the system to intelligently move blocks from slow spinning storage to high performance SSD for performance without needing all storage to sit on SSDs.  This keeps cost down while also allowing for large capacity.  The heat map approach, coupled with a simplistic priority management system, makes this nearly transparent to end users.

Scale also takes the management of a complicated beast like a full virtualization stack and makes it simple and easy for a small business IT department to manage.  SMB IT departments are very busy places being pulled in a lot of simultaneous directions.  It is very important that their solutions, especially the critical ones on which the most depends, are elegant, well supported, effective and easy to manage.  Scale provides a solution that allows for growth, performance and high reliability while maintaining an astonishing degree of ease of use. Even an IT department with all of the resources and experience to manage the most complex and demanding infrastructure can benefit by not wasting time where there is no competitive advantage and, instead, putting their efforts to use where they can most benefit the business.

The Scale HC3 allows small and medium business IT departments to stop worrying about how to design a system to meet their needs, and instead focus on the what’s most important to their business and what provides them a unique, competitive advantage.

 

[Commissioned for the Scale Blog]

Commissioned

Leveraging Microsoft RDS on Scale HC3

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One of the great advantages of a centralized and unified infrastructure platform like the Scale HC3 is the ability to use the platform to provide centralized desktop and end user services along side traditional server services.  The high speed back plane allows server and desktop resources to communicate at high speeds and the centralized management lowers the total cost of ownership often associated with these types of services.  Applications like file serving and latency sensitive communications particularly benefit from the architecture.

For the majority of businesses, the approach that will make the most sense to add remote end user computing services to their environment will be through the use of Microsoft’s own Remote Desktop Servers or RDS, as most environments seek to provide an experience similar to  a traditional Windows desktop.  Microsoft’s RDS is a powerful toolset and relatively easy to implement.  It is a great starting point for offering a range of services.

Because of the high availability nature of the Scale HC3 platform we have good choices as to how to approach planning and provisioning an RDS deployment.  We can choose to keep our deployment small and simple and utilize the Scale HC3 cluster’s built in high availability features to maintain our environment through hardware failure or we can leverage high availability from the RDS environment for this.

In a small deployment, it would be most common to leverage the Scale HC3’s high availability features to maintain the availability of our RDS services.  Doing this allows us to run a single RDS instance with a minimum of licensing, resource and maintenance overhead.  This is the simplest approach and is very effective.  This is an excellent way for the majority of customers to make the best use of the Scale HC3 platform.  Scale can do the heavy lifting in this case and we are able to focus our efforts in places where they are more effective.

In large deployments having a single RDS instance may not be adequate.  At this point it would generally become reasonable to move to a multi-server RDS deployment with workloads load balanced across the instances.  Typically we would want to see no more than a single RDS server deployed per Scale HC3 node to best leverage the available resources.  In this way as many RDS server instances could be deployed as needed to handle the environmental capacity.

In most cases, even with the larger deployment across many nodes, we would use load balancing in front of the RDS farm, but we would still use the Scale HC3 cluster’s built in high availability features to handle hardware failures by moving running workloads from a failed node to an available node.  The load balancer would see the same instance with the same IP address allowing for a nearly transparent recovery that is fully automated and requiring a minimal of effort.

In more extreme cases where the full capacity of the cluster is required it is possible to configure one RDS instance per physical cluster node and to disable high availability features and instead utilize the load balancing functions to shift load to remaining nodes.  This would result in a graceful loss of performance rather than an outage.  Unless resources were extremely constrained already, user allocated CPU and memory would decline but system functionality would remain.  This is not as ideal a full high availability solution but can be a very functional alternative to the cost of hardware for that level of protection.

Microsoft Windows RDS and Scale make an obvious partnership.  Scale focuses on making the platform as easy and robust as possible while Microsoft’s Windows and RDS product provide us the simplest entry point into the shared computing space.  For small and medium businesses and especially for on premises deployments RDS is often the perfect choice for moving to centralized, thin client-based computing and can be a key enabler for workforce mobility, security and even bring your own device options.

[This piece was commissioned for the Scale Blog.]

 

Career

Finding A Job, or Finding THE Job

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Nearly everyone overlooks this incredibly basic question and yet nearly everyone has to face this it when thinking about their career decision making and their future. This applies to middle school students, those preparing for university, university grads and even mid-career professionals making key decisions about life goals.  Is our goal in our career and career preparation to land a job, meaning any job more or less (at least within our field); or is our goal to get to push our careers higher and higher looking for “the” job, the one that pays great, satisfies us, challenges us and fulfills us?  Everyone has to answer this question and nearly everyone does, even if they fail to admit it to themselves or anyone else.

Our answer to this question plays a part in effectively every decision that we make around our careers, and by extension in our lives. It affects what careers we choose to pursue, how we pursue them, what education we get, when we get it, which job offers we accept, to which jobs we submit our resume, when we start hunting for the next promotion or change, lateral shift or external opportunity, when we relocate, when we buy a home, if we take a consulting position or standard employment, what certificates we get, what books we read, what communities we participate in, when or if we decide to get married, when or if we decide to have children and how we interact with our colleagues among many, many other things.  And yet, with all of these things not just being influenced by this decision, but often being almost solely governed by it, few people really sit down and take the time to evaluate their personal career goals to determine how the decisions that they make and planning that they do will determine what kind of jobs they are likely to be able to pursue.  One of the most critical and defining choices of our lives is often given little thought and is treated as being practically a casual, trivial background decision.

People rarely want to talk about questions like this because the harsh reality is that most people, in fact nearly all people, cannot realistically achieve “the” job.  Their dream job or a top career position is likely out of their reach – at least while trying to maintain any kind of work/life balance, have a family, rear children or whatever.  No one wants to admit that they are the “majority” and are really just looking for “a” job and even fewer want to look at them and point out that this is the case for them.  But it is something that we should do (for ourselves, not pointing at others.)  We have to determine what matters for us, where our own priorities lie.

To our ears, going after any old job sounds horrible while seeking the pinnacle of the field sounds like a perfect goal, a natural one.  This is, to some non-trivial degree, an extension of that problem that we have all been talking about for a generation – the need for the glorification of the trivial, rewarding everyone as if average life events are something special (like having graduation parties for people moving from second to third grade, or awards for attendance because “just showing up” is worth an award?)

Life is not that simple, though, for several reasons.  First is statistics.  Realistically amazing jobs only make up something like .1% of all available jobs in the world.  That means that 99.9% of all workers have to go after less than apex jobs.  Even if we broaden the scope to say that “great” jobs represent just 2% of available jobs and 98% of people have to go after more mundane jobs, we still have the same situation: the chances that you are in the .1 – 2% is quite low.  Almost certainly, statistically speaking, you are in the 98%.  The numbers are not as terribly bad as they may seem because awesome jobs are not necessarily apex jobs, that is just one possibility.  The perfect job for you might be based on location, flexibility, benefit to humanity, ability to do rewarding work or compensation.  There are many possible factors, the idea of “the” job is not that it is purely about title or salary, but those are reasonable aspects to consider.

The second part is the other prices that need to be paid.  Attempting to go after “the” job generally relies on a lot of things such as being a good self starter, thinking outside of the box (career-wise), relocating, working longer hours, studying more, challenging others, self promotion, putting in long hours away from the office to improve faster than others, starting your career sooner, being more aggressive, etc.  None of these factors are strictly required, but commonly these and many others will play an important role.  Going after the dream job or apex role means taking more risks, pushing harder and setting ourselves apart.  It requires, on average, far more work and has a much less defined path from start to finish making it scarier, ambiguous and more risky.  High school guidance counselors cannot tell you how to get from point A to point B when talking about “the” job; they lack the knowledge, exposure and resources to help you with that.  When going after “the” job you are almost certainly forging your own path.  Everyone is unique and everyone’s perfect job is unique and often no one knows what that perfect job is exactly until they arrive at it, often after many years of hard work and seeking it.

These two mindsets change everything that we do.  One: we design our careers around optimum performance while accepting high chance of failure.  And two: we design our careers around risk mitigation and we hedge our bets sacrificing the potential for big payoffs (salary, position, benefits, whatever) in exchange for a more well defined job and career path with better stability and less chance of finding ourselves floundering or worse, out of work completely and maybe even unemployable.

If you spend a lot of time talking to people about their career goals you will often see these two mindsets at work, under the surface, but essentially no one will verbalize them directly.  But if you listen you can hear them being mulled about from time to time.  People will talk about priorities such as being able to live in the same house, town or region and their willingness to give up career options in exchange for this.  This is an important life decision, and a common one, where most people will choose to control where they live over where and how they work.  Another place you hear in the undertone of conversation is when people are contemplating their next career move – do they focus on the potential for opportunity or do they focus on the risks caused by instability and the unknown?

A major area in which these kinds of thoughts are often expressed, in one way or another, is around education and certification.  In IT especially we see people often approach their educational choices from a position of risk mitigation, rather than seized opportunity.  Very few people look to their education as “the path to this one, specific dream position” but instead generally speak about their education’s “ability to get them more interviews and job offers at more companies.”  It’s about a volume of offers, which is all about risk mitigation, rather than about getting the one offer that really matters to them.  Each person only needs one job, or at least one job at a time, so increasing the volume of potential jobs is not, realistically, a chance for greater achievement but rather simply a means of decreasing the risk around job loss and unemployment.

This is especially true when people discuss the necessity of certain educational factors for certain types of low paying, more entry level jobs – even people focusing on getting “a” job may often be shocked how often people target rather significant education levels for the express purpose of getting very low paying, low mobility, low reward jobs, but ones that are perceived as being more stable (often those in the public sector.)  This is mirrored in many certification processes.  Certifications are an extension of education in this way and many people go after common certifications, often in many different areas of study, in order to hedge against job loss in the future or to prepare for a change of direction at their current job or similar.  Education and certification are not generally seen as tools for success, but attempts to hedge against failure.

You may recognize this behavior expressed when people talk about creating a resume or CV designed to “get past HR filters.”  This makes total sense as a huge percentage (whether this is 5% or 80% does not matter) of jobs in the market place are gate-kept by non-technical human resources staff who may eliminate people based on their own prejudices or misunderstandings before qualified technical resources ever get a chance to evaluate the candidates.  So by targeting factors that help us to successfully pass the HR filter we get many more opportunities for a technical hiring manager to review our candidacy.

Of course, nearly everyone recognizes that an HR filtering process like this is horrific and will eliminate incredibly competent people, possibly the best people, right off of the bat.  There is no question that this is not even remotely useful for hiring the best potential employees.  And yet most everyone still attempts to get past these HR departments in the hopes of being hired by firms that have no interest, even at the most basic level, of hiring great people, but rather are looking mostly to eliminate the worst people.  Why do we do this so reliably?  Because the goal here is not to get the best possible job, but rather to have as many opportunities as possible to get, more or less, “a” job.

If we were seeking the best possible jobs we would actually be challenged in the opposite direction.  Rather than hoping to get past the HR filters, we might be more interested in being intentionally caught and removed by them.  When looking for the “perfect” career opportunity we care more about eliminated the “noise” of the interviewing process than we are in increasing the “hits”.  It is a completely different thought process.  In the “any job” case, we want as many opportunities as we can get so that we have one to take.  But in the “the job” case, we want less rewarding jobs (however this is defined for the individual) to filter themselves out of the picture as we would otherwise have them potentially wasting our time or worse, have them appear like a great opportunity that we might accidentally accept when we would not have done so had we known more about them up front.

When going after “a” job we expect people to accept jobs quickly and give them up reluctantly.  Those in the opposite position generally do exactly the opposite, giving a lot of thought and time to choosing the next career move but having little concern as to remaining at their last “stepping stone” position.

Somewhat counter-intuitively we may find that those wiling to take job offers more quickly may actually find themselves with fewer useful career opportunities in the long run.  The appearance of stability is not always what it seems and the market pressures are not always highly visible.  There are a couple of factors at play here.  One is that the path to the most common jobs is one that is well trodden and the competition for those jobs can be fierce.  So even though perhaps 90% of all jobs would be seen as falling into this category, perhaps 95% of all people are attempting to get those jobs.  The approach taken to get “a” job generally results in a lack of market differentiation for the potential worker (and for the job as well) making it difficult to stand out in a field so full of competition.

On the other hand, those that have worked hard to pursue their goals and have taken unique paths may be presented with technically fewer options, but those that they are presented with are usually far better and have a drastically smaller pool of competition vying for those positions.  This can mean that actually getting “the” job might be more likely than it would otherwise seem even to the point of being potentially easier than getting “a” job, at least through traditional means and approaches.  By taking the path less traveled, for example, the candidate working extremely hard to reach a dream position may find ways to bypass otherwise stringent job requirements, for example, or may simply leverage favorable statistical situations.

Also working in the favor of those seeking “the” job is that they tend to advance in their careers and develop powerful repertoires much more quickly.  This alone can be a major factor in mitigating the risk of going this route.  Powerful resumes, broad experience and deep skill sets will often allow them to command higher salaries and get into jobs in a variety of categories across more fields.  This flexibility from a capability and experience perspective can heavily offset the inherent risks that this path can appear to present.

At the end of the day, we have to evaluate our own needs on a personal level and determine what makes sense for us or for our families.  And this is something that everyone, even middle school students, should begin to think about and prepare for.  It requires much self reflection and a strong evaluation of our goals and priorities to determine what makes sense for us.  Because factors like high school classes and high school age interning and projects, university decisions, and more happen so early in life and are so heavily dependent on this realization of intention we can all benefit greatly by promoting this self evaluation as early on as possible.

And this information, this self evaluation, should be seen as a critical factor in any and all job and career discussions.  Understanding what matters to us individually will make our own decisions and the advice from others so much more meaningful and useful.  We so often depend on assumptions, often wrong, about whether we are looking for the chance to climb the ladder to a dream job or if we looking for a lifetime of safety and security and few, if any, are willing to outright state what factors are driving their assumptions and how those assumptions drive decisions.

How about you?  Are you looking at every career decision as “how does this get me to the best, most amazing position possible” or are you thinking “how will this put me at risk in the future?”  What are your priorities.  Are you looking for a job; or are you looking for the job.