Hi.
I've been a lurker reading these forums for a while, but only just recently registered an account.
I'm in charge of technology and infrastructure for a small business - about 175 people across three countries (London, Hong Kong, Singapore) - and the company has grown quickly and I am looking for paid help with all kinds of different aspects. We use a managed service provider for desktop support + servers, and I suppose our experience is about what you would expect so we are taking back control of things incrementally and in an organic way.
I have never been much of an enthusiast for the traditional enterprise technology approach to things and I think these days there's a value in actually understanding quite deeply how everything fits together and how individual parts work all the way down. If I go to a headhunter then I am going to get people who have a different set of capabilities and have been trained differently to what I need here - if you have a problem then reaching for a product or a solution might not be the best possible way to approach it.
There are some big projects, and little ones. So for example the quality of the phones in meeting rooms is often quite poor and I could do with finding people who would be able to log into the devices, figure out if it's a configuration problem, run tests on the network and get to the bottom of things. Or set up an asterisk server (I run freepbx in an LXD container at home), experiment with different hardware choices until we get to something much better. We can be a lot more patient than some other places - it's fine to take the time to try different things if it's going to be in the direction of moving towards excellence.
So if anyone is looking for work in this area, part-time or full-time, or has suggestions on where I can find people who are comfortable getting their hands dirty and figuring things out (whilst understanding that it's of course still a business) then I would appreciate any ideas.
I think you pay for what someone can accomplish and not based on some standard idea about what that job should pay - so over time I can pay handsomely for the right sorts of people.
Laeeth.
I've been a lurker reading these forums for a while, but only just recently registered an account.
I'm in charge of technology and infrastructure for a small business - about 175 people across three countries (London, Hong Kong, Singapore) - and the company has grown quickly and I am looking for paid help with all kinds of different aspects. We use a managed service provider for desktop support + servers, and I suppose our experience is about what you would expect so we are taking back control of things incrementally and in an organic way.
I have never been much of an enthusiast for the traditional enterprise technology approach to things and I think these days there's a value in actually understanding quite deeply how everything fits together and how individual parts work all the way down. If I go to a headhunter then I am going to get people who have a different set of capabilities and have been trained differently to what I need here - if you have a problem then reaching for a product or a solution might not be the best possible way to approach it.
There are some big projects, and little ones. So for example the quality of the phones in meeting rooms is often quite poor and I could do with finding people who would be able to log into the devices, figure out if it's a configuration problem, run tests on the network and get to the bottom of things. Or set up an asterisk server (I run freepbx in an LXD container at home), experiment with different hardware choices until we get to something much better. We can be a lot more patient than some other places - it's fine to take the time to try different things if it's going to be in the direction of moving towards excellence.
So if anyone is looking for work in this area, part-time or full-time, or has suggestions on where I can find people who are comfortable getting their hands dirty and figuring things out (whilst understanding that it's of course still a business) then I would appreciate any ideas.
I think you pay for what someone can accomplish and not based on some standard idea about what that job should pay - so over time I can pay handsomely for the right sorts of people.
Laeeth.