What is on Your Mind?

Nice eye catching title huh

I got laid off along with 55000 others from HP worldwide have been expecting this for some time and now it's finally my turn. Most of the folks I know get laid off at around this age of 40+ so do take note.

Ideas that ran thru my head this last few weeks: bitcoin farming, it security, audit/compliance, drive a taxi.

Anybody with 5 minutes to spare got any good ideas?

There is always a need for Unix/Linux Sysadmins. I have lot's of ideas, but what are you good at and what makes you happy doing it? Maybe you can do join talent fun?

It seems that HP is hiring again, maybe you can go back....
If you have good skills people will hire you. Working at HP might
even help, since many companies run HP servers. Stay with it,
you shouldn't need to drive a cab or sling coffee.

I've already gone back to work in HP 3 times previously before already once contract expired I left then later rejoined then resigned and rejoined again.

But in HP once you get laid off it means that position is considered redundant and can no longer be filled by anybody.

Also furthermore this time they have relocated the support overseas to low cost centers.

I think the industry is changing even shrinking with the advent of cloud computing, in time systems are going to get more efficient and cheaper and that will put pressure on operating costs, budgets, salaries they don't need so many sys admins or engineers to run around in-country anymore some places I hear they just have a pool of less than 10 people overseas datacenter can manage several thousand virtual servers on cloud.


Sure I think there are many sys admin jobs around still if I wanted to continue or maybe I should bite the bullet now and break out to try something else.


The only jobs in IT today I see that will be hard to farmed out are:

local desktop support - low pay
it security
audit and compliance

I saw Hp folk being laid here, was sad as I knew most of them...In common? were over 50, and were old HP Team not ex DEC...
HP hasnt finished making mistakes... The first big one was the abandon of PA-RISC...
Because of that, we have no more HP srvers here... I can hardly justify my position anymore, thanks I know a little more so now I do mostly SAS integration on AIX and help when I can on AIX Solaris and Linux...
If you want to stay as sysadmin, the easiest for you would be to integrate an AIX team as AIX (IMHO) is the closest in terms of management/administration to HP-UX, and you could be efficient quite fast as smit is more powerful than sam and a good help when you know what you are doing/looking for but dont know all the commands

I find this statement really odd. The reason why people liked RISC chips is because, at one point, they had faster clock speeds that CISC chips. However, since then CISC chips have become significantly faster, run at a higher clock frequency and can do more with each clock cycle. Hence anything RISC is in the past.

I worked in the VAX/Alpha world 20 years ago. That architecture was dying then, and is now all but dead. There is still a local steel mill that uses Alpha processors. But they only use it because they haven't yet rewritten all their old Cobol and Fortran.

I get the argument that cloud computing means fewer tech jobs. But companies will still want some knowledge in house. But maybe not forever.

Which is why the average North American now carries one or more RISC processors at all times, has several more in their home, and is increasingly using them for all computing.