Depending on the help desk they probably knew it was you. Did you call from a phone HR knows about? If it was a walk up, did they make the ticket before or after resetting your MFA?

I use it a fair bit. Mind, it’s something like formating a giant json stdout into something I want to read…

I also do find it’s useful for sketching out an outline In pseudo code.

Just to give an outsider perspective to anyone reading this. I live in the Seattle Metro, have worked for Microsoft, and now work at a unicorn. I have a list of skill and experience that any ops department would drool over. Amazon is is one of the companies I won’t even apply to unless I’m desperate for a job (and even then I’m not planning to stay).

And I know I’m not the only one.

Aka sso.tax

Which veggie dog worked for you? I can’t find one that grills correctly.

+1. We are a household of sysadmins/engineers. Sure I or my wife could design a PC for media in an afternoon - but I don’t want to deal with it.

An apple TV was a no fuss, no headache media box that can interface with the servers that store my media.

That’s the scary thing. It looks like this narrowly missed getting into Debian and RH. Downstream downstream that is… everything.

Enterprise tooling (aka a usable API) and it stays out if my way.

Let’s be clear - current AI models are being used by poor leadership to remove bad developers (good ones don’t tend to stick around). This however does place some pressure on the greater tech job market (but I’d argue no different then any other downturn we have all lived through).

That said, until the issues with being confidently incorrect are resolved (and I bet people a lot smarter then me are tackling the problem) it’s nothing better then a suped up IDE. Now if you have a public resources you can point me to that can look at a meta repo full of dozens of tools and help me convert the python scripts that are wrappers of wrappers( and so on) into something sane I’m all ears.

I highly doubt we will ever get to the point where you don’t need to understand how an algorithm works - and for that you need to understand core concepts like recursion and loops. As humans brains are designed for pattern recognition - that means writing a program to solve a sodoku puzzle.

There is more to a program then writing logic. Good engineers are people who understand how to interpret problems and translate the inherent lack of logic in natural language into something that machines are able to understand (or vice versa).

The models out there right now can truly accelerate the speed of that translation - but translation will still be needed.

An anecdote for an anecdote. Part of my job is maintaining a set of EKS clusters where downtime is… undesirable (five nines…). I actively use chatgpt and copilot when adjusting the code that describes the clusters - however these tools are not able to understand and explain impacts of things like upgrading the control plane. For that you need a human who can interpret the needs/hopes/desires/etc of the stakeholders.

That’s more or less it.

For example, I’ve got somewhere around 700 users. If we don’t have SSO (SAML preferred, oauth as a fall back, and good whiskey is required for ldap/ad) whatever your attempting to buy won’t pass review. Now Timmy the sales drone knows that, and so does their leadership - hence the SSO tax.

With how they keep shoving snaps at everyone? At my work a migration to Debian is starting to be openly pondered.

As an ops person I disagree! Our arbitrary changes are documented in a jira ticket in the ops project. If you can’t view the ops project fill free to open a ticket in ops and we will triage it when we feel like it.

First off, aiming to start in security is a fools errand. Security is one of the many paths that your career might take after you gain some knowledge.

Some more random thoughts before real advice. The two hardest things in IT are getting into help desk, and getting out of it. The reason is two fold: 1) help desk is the great entry point for the greater IT industry, and 2) one person in a help desk role is fairly similar to another when it’s time to move out of help desk.

Now: If you have the time, go to your local community college and take their it/networking/security program. The degree will help - you won’t skip help desk (unless your lucky), but you are better equipped for getting out of it. You will also learn a bunch of stuff, get some projects to stick on a resume, etc.

If you don’t have that time you can go the cert route. Be warned however - certs do not substitute for real experience. Do not fall for the trap of thinking that getting X cert is your ticket to Y job. You will be in for a ride awakening when your sitting across from someone like me that only asks situational, hypotheticall questions with no correct answer ( I care about how you think and approach problems over book smarts).

Ok. Last bit of advice: the 10 things I look for (in order) when interviewing entry level help desk.

1. customer service skills,
2. ability to learn,
3. customer service.
4. some mild interest in tech.
5. customer service.
6. the ability to learn troubleshooting.
7. customer service.
8. the ability to admit you don’t know…
9. customer service.
10. not being an asshole.

I can teach you how to fix a printer, design a network, or spin up infrastructure in the cloud. I can’t teach you how to act around people.

Yep c flat or b sharp. If the octave has a half step between notes (a full step is A to B, B to C, etc), then a sharp/flat is created. The octave dictates if we call it a sharp or flat, but from a mathematical perspective they are the same tone.