How can you understand IT infrastructure?

 

These are the essential skills and ways to approach work that is going to stand you in good stead for you to know in the future for generations to come so I think if this may not be comprehensive but if you I guarantee that if you you know kind of went through these steps and actually understood how you know how you can make yourself impervious to all of these market conditions and changes make yourself stand out if you're somehow unique it doesn't matter what companies think companies only cut more clothes and let people go and things like that if if you are no different from the thousands of other people like you if you are some are unique no matter what the market conditions they're going to want to keep it because you are valuable to them so become valuable in that sense so that those are my thoughts I do obviously want to spend the intention was always to spend a lot of time answering some of your questions.

So if you have any please feel free to ask those questions and I see a few of them and I'm going to start answering some of them right now okay so one of the questions is about this person who was in the I think infrastructure industry focusing on VoIP implementation project management and so on has an MBA you know how do you think they should cope with the new paradigm well first off I think you know an if you look if you understand IT infrastructure and it sounds like from your background with your MBA and with some of your kind of project management experience and so on that, you understand the business imperative and how to translate you know business problem into you know the IT infrastructure needs then you are no longer completely you know fungible you're not completely replaceable right you do have the business context.

I think the two areas that off the top of my head that sound like they would help a lot, is our you know one obviously if you understand IT infrastructure in the current moment you need to stay on top of what's coming in the future and be proactive in understanding what is the IT setup on the framework going to be over the next five-seven eight-ten years it can put yourself in the shoes of a CIO and say hey if you know if I was here this company what am I going to do what is the kind of infrastructure decisions I'm going to make now think about okay what is the question box right chances are the question much that you have are the same question marks with the CIO and the CTO are actually having right now so that becomes a great place to go and focus your energy right so again goodnight infrastructure person thinker.

Let's for example take the case of you to know everything moving on on the cloud and people setting up big data environments you know what does all that mean to you what is that going to mean in terms of administration of all of the infrastructure what does that mean in terms of actually you know maintaining and handling those you know the vast network is your entire infrastructure going to go away if it's not going to go is that going to change some things like that is really those are really the questions that will answer your own question but in the short run I think I would say think a Casilla one in that respect another question about somebody who is in who's been in manual testing and the question is should he or she pursue automated testing I'd say go for it wait and like.

I said think about adjacencies prospect obviously you can change and now you can change your track and go to something completely different but the chances are okay so what's the difference between you who has 5-10 years of experience in one particular area but wants to do something completely new and somebody who's starting from scratch and let's say I want her to go become a journalist tomorrow right and if you were hiring journalists would you hire me who has no experience in journalism but has 15 years of experience in other industries or would you hire somebody coming out of college who's worked for the college newspaper who has about one year of beat experience and potentially you could pay them one-third of what to baby and we put yourself they just ask to answer that question for yourself.

I think the answer is pretty obvious that you should be looking at something that uses the skills you've already developed so in this case the automated testing earlier seems like a natural fit okay a question from somebody who has actually been in the unfortunate position of being laid off and learning Big Data and Hadoop but it's difficult going in the beginning as it's a kind of vast area short answer there's not much I think you can do about it except stick with it right yes it's a vast area and just as I answered to the previous person's question it's not going to immediately make you incredibly valuable to somebody who's hired for better or worse I think one of the unfortunate reflections of the industry especially in India is that you know gaps and give us better beauty which is patient like I said good human if you just think back to the points.

I made a couple of those areas is kind of a really good stick to adjoin a big Gator nor do community go to meetups and cycle understand what are the kind of problems that people are trying to solve I just try to sit on the abstract it's like saying I want to learn physics I could learn you know I when I was in school I learned physics for I guess the best part of a decade like in some form of the edge of starting from science or where pasilla can and I could go to college for physics I could do all of that right are you going actually going to learn every single square inch of everything that is to learn and because I'm over but are you going to learn about a couple of very pertinent problems that doesn't mean that you're the expert in everything but that does make you know really good at one or two things right so focus on that.

So if you join these communities you get a good sense of who those are so go to a meet-up go to you know some of these community discussions and try to understand what are the kind of challenges that people are working on find one that you like in and focus on that secondly build a body of work into a portfolio that you're learning all of these areas you know be able to show it these days everything's on a cloud you can actually get a Google cloud account for free you can set it up you can take what amounts of data you can manipulate it you can you know understand how to visualize this data you can put that up on GitHub it's all open source and its cost you almost mapping right so you think about.

How you know you can it you know to take this really big drug problem area and break it down into smaller pieces and secondly how do you then demonstrate your expertise in one or two areas it's not to say that people are suddenly going to give your job because you know this area but it does help it helps a lot more than you know just doing a bunch of courses and then going and telling people that's all I could do it to the last year going through these questions sequentially very quickly.