The End of the IT Tech: Automation

[@TimothyWhiteheadzm]

Support: Try turning it of and on again. User: Ok, done that. Support: that was really quick. What did you turn off and on? Are you sure it wasn't just the screen? User: Oh, you meant this box under the table?

[@AugustusBohn0]

my last IT job consisted of trying and often failing to direct users to the power button on their iPad. There are five buttons on an iPad if you count the little do not disturb switch, and people are never able to find it.

[@kkeanie]

That hurts me too much ;-;

[@davidadams2395]

No! Please tell me that was a joke.

[@ShainAndrews]

So you stopped asking users to reboot, or power cycle... right? LOL

[@orangeActiondotcom]

wow, fantastic comment, groundbreaking humor. no one has done this before

[@michaeljoyce7548]

I've been Help Desk, I'm now Datacenter. Automation is great until it isn't. Experience has shown that you build a more foolproof system and users will take that as a challenge....

[@peterpain6625]

If you make it idiot-proof nature will make a better idiot ;) Been there ... reinstalling nvidia-linux-drivers on ~120-ish cluster nodes (with different amounts of it being broken) ain't fun at all :D

[@michaeljoyce7548]

Not to knock automation, but the problem is economy of scale. The more unit of work need doing, the more time and testing you get to build the automation. Small batch stuff tends to need quick turn around. No manager wants you spending 8-12 hours building automated deployments for 10 machines. Corners get cut, mistakes made. Garbage In = Garbage Out.

[@kennethhicks2113]

You mean "a better fool comes along"

[@Flimzes]

@@michaeljoyce7548 we deploy everything from profiles. One offs/hand installed are _only_ done in testing. No exceptions. If a machine suffers a major issue it can be redeployed in an hour. - once I have set up a machine, I never touch it again. The less time you have, the more important this becomes

[@Commissar0617]

@@Flimzes but $specialuser in marketing needs a beefier setup with special software that nobody else in the company uses.

[@nemz7505]

To everyone who thinks DevOps is beyond them, this may change your mind... I'm old and slow but did a bit of server ops in the late 2000's before moving to IT Service Delivery for many years, this was a completely non technical role. Knew UK IT was being moved off-shore so I asked for a technical role during my last year as the politics of Service Delivery drove me crazy. Joined our Azure DevOps and within a couple of months I'd learned enough around CI/CD fundamentals & Powershell to deploy & support almost everything we used (we were one of MS biggest Azure customers). Noting I'd not written any code since basic on the ZX Spectrum when I was a kid, but if you've ever messed around with game config files or crypto mining json, understanding how parameter files you'd use for deployment will fall into place really quickly. In fact after I thanked our MS account manager for his support on my last day he offered me a role on the spot and I'm about 10 gazillion miles away from Lord Wendell's level ;) Trust me, if I can pick it up - anyone can. This is the future and whilst I can't speak for anything other than Azure, it's a pretty amazing platform along with it's peers and is without doubt the end of IT as we currently know it.

[@einarabelc5]

I've only really used it for IdP and think is as any other M$ product: convoluted and not intuitive.

[@krisdphillips]

Family member: My computer is broken Me: OK Also family member: It was working fine until you touched it!

[@movement2contact]

*until you touched it a year ago.

[@nicholasbuckner5221]

And yet you want me to fix it again.

[@kristopherleslie8343]

Yea tell me about it I've lived that life and prefer not to.

[@Gunzy83]

I just tell them I don't work with Windows or Mac (the truth btw) so can't help.

[@hermannbjorgvin]

We have been automating the entire IT infrastructure at my workplace for a while now. I recommend learning programming and devops stuff to stay ahead of the curve and get the big bucks.

[@stephanematis]

Site Reliability Engineering

[@hermannbjorgvin]

@@stephanematis that's the word.

[@sirius4k]

yep.. started as devsecops last month.

[@davidadams2395]

Well, shēyit! I'm still not certified for CCNA. Now what am I to do if programming is not my forté?

[@Nomaran]

@@davidadams2395 In the same boat, I've tried many times and haven't got the hang of programming. Maybe time to become an electrician or some other trade.

[@golnectr]

As a comp tech for a school district, you're speaking to my soul.

[@EpicWolverine]

golnectr nice profile picture!

[@jeroen5838]

@Patrick Based on this video it looks like you're on eternal password reset duty.

[@lesliestandifer]

@@jeroen5838 Not really most major places have automated it already, it would just be a matter of time before it makes its way to smaller places.

[@lesliestandifer]

@Patrick Yes

[@17Codiferus]

I feel personally attacked. The only difference (in my experience) between a sysadmins system and Avg Joe's system is my entire network is a 'rats nest' of hacked together services/systems, and Joe's mess is localized to a single machine.

[@baltmatrix]

Speaking to my life.

[@Destroyer954]

that's what happens when you get "urgent request" from management

[@juanok2775]

You are a sissy admin

[@0M9H4X_Neckbeard]

When sysadmins start nesting you know you need to fire everyone and start over, there's few things I hate more than "IT folk" who do the same stupid shit they're supposed to prevent

[@EidolonSpecus]

That just means you obviously suck as a sysadmin.

[@JarrodsTech]

Seeing automation get more popular years ago is basically why I got out of the sys admin field.

[@Tudorgeable]

@@shameermulji they're called devops now, but yes, it's the same idea, different name and technologies

[@Demcurls]

​@@shameermulji Hi Shameer, I work as a Devops engineer and have been doing so for about 2 years. So, I can only speak to devops in the cloud, and for linux + AWS devops, but I've not seen much demand for networking certifications in the devops space, simply because networking in the cloud tends to be a bit simpler than the networking on prem. Things I would recommend to learn for someone looking to break into devops: -Python - you don't need to be a developer, but you do need to be able to call apis and write scripts -Linux + Bash - Linux is the defacto devops OS, a Red Hat RHCSA is a good cert to get. There are also Linux Foundation certs -Basic Networking - If you can explain DNS, DHCP, and IP subnetting you're probably good enough -A cloud provider cert of some sort - most of the work is on AWS but Azure is gaining ground. If you go AWS an entry level cert like the Cloud Practitioner is fine. -Infrastructure as code with Terraform (cloudformation is not popular in my XP) -Automatic configuration management (Ansible, puppet or Chef) This is a lot of tools, but please do not be intimidated. The core elements are: - ability to write scripts - understanding of the OS you intend to work on (Linux or Windows) - enough networking knowledge to deploy servers - understanding of at least 1 automation tool - The ability to learn Devops is a rapidly evolving field, and in my experience employers are happier to take an employee who is passionate and willing to learn on their own time and train them up, so as long as you demonstrate you are taking steps to educate yourself and show growth, you will potentially be preferred over more experienced candidates. However, don't be afraid to be a networking engineer if you are keen to do that instead - there's a lot of work for networking engineers still, and even more work for network engineers who have a devops mindset and can automate things at work. There are many devops engineers who started out as network engineers, and many network engineers who have the automation skills to be devops engineers but just not the title.

[@motolaoshin]

@@Demcurls This is one of the best explanation of devops that I have seen, and I have worked in IT for about 9 years. When you ask 10 different people what devops is, you will probably get 10 different answers. I also started as a Network engineer before transiting to Sysadmin, I hope to add scripting and automation skills to enable be work as a devops engineer.

[@orcbloodtech422]

Lol "Then they go and build a better idiot" 2:01

[@sirius4k]

And the problem is that creating an improved idiot is way easier and takes A LOT less time and effort.

[@rosswaterston]

Words to live by, words to live by.

[@firSound]

gold

[@trouncerrredits]

Wheatley?

[@jinx0192]

I love the way Krista backs away from the iPad like she's handling something that can explode lol.

[@qlum]

My strategy at work is similar yet different. Basically, we are a 50 employee company, we have no domain set up, just a shared NAS where people back up their stuff. If a pc goes fubar, I can look at it, save certain essential data if people are stupid but generally just asking them to move what they need to the NAS is enough. After that, it's a Windows reinstall + chocolatey for some programs. The NAS itself has 2 backups, one where it pushes data into a Backblaze B2 setup one where a second NAS pulls the data in. both NASes use ZFS snapshots which are kept for a duration of 2 years. While certainly not perfect it's good enough for a company this size and considering I am the guy doing this while also doing a heap of other stuff really there is not more I can do here. As for buying services to make things more secure / easier. Even a €50 a month extra costs will raise eyebrows. The only redeeming factor is that most people have at least some technical know-how, so while they may not like it, they try to bs around it, they will generally turn the machine off and on again when asked.

[@LJM2stepspain]

Your videos provide so much value to us just starting out in IT. I've got about 5 years of AV integration experience and these videos help keep me on top of other important trends and workflows I can play with. Great for internal use even if I can't sell the service.

[@wasabininja3494]

As a wireless and wired LAN/WAN engineer working for a fortune 50 company, we've been heavily moving more and more to automation. Cisco Prime, SDWAN and now moving into Cisco DNA centers away from Cisco Prime. I saw this coming years ago and the only reason I still have a job is because I prepared for it.

[@SomeGuyInSandy]

This is why my default option is to avoid working on family IT devices.

[@returntohome330]

Family maintenance is the best kind no pay & not a forking clue why their 10 year old dust trap throws a hissy fit!.

[@grantmurdock7385]

"Oh, no, I only know big company machines and servers and stuff. This is Totally Different. I'm sorry. You should try Anyone Else."

[@BladeTrain3r]

Working in an ops role I can say this: The burden mostly shifts to maintaining the pipelines, and although the work is less that just means people want faster processes and larger scale. There'll never be an end to ops work. From a support perspective, we'll probably need tech support folk around as long as there are people who don't want to do the research and work themselves. I mean once AGI is on the table all bets are off, but until then automation will need a human touch somewhere along the line.

[@peterpain6625]

Also what companies save on it they'll pay double for upping the legal department ;)

[@EpicWolverine]

iOS’s backup/restore is unrivaled (except maybe the Linux home directory?). The “profile” on the phone I’m typing this on (XS) started on an iPod touch 3rd gen on iOS 3 and has been backup/restored through a 4th gen touch, iPhone 6 and this phone, using nearly every version of iOS in the past 10 years (I think I jumped directly from iOS 6 to 8). That’s dang impressive.

[@Jamesaepp]

Outsourcing all of this automation to tech giants will work really well for businesses until they wake up one day to read the headline on the paper where their suppliers have become their competitors.

[@petrkisselev5085]

After having appropriated all of their intellectual property. ;)

[@madhuguru3130]

@@petrkisselev5085 That's probably the end goal. They saw what amazon did and want to emulate it themselves.

[@jaredflitt8887]

Love this video. My dad's company spans 13 offices with about 80 endpoints, but in many ways is still a mom and pop shop when it comes to technology. Everything is super manual - no AD, no image, etc. Trying to convince him to invest in those and how they can save a lot of money is very frustrating. I would love to deploy AD and Faronics and get to that "appliance" state.

[@toadbroz30]

HOW DO YOU KNOW MY STRUGGLES SO WELL GET OUT OF MY HEAD. Seriously though, thanks for the insight and appreciate everything you and the team do.

[@tknw]

Sooo good watch. I was L1 helpdesk tech, now I'm a trainer & knowledge manager for said helpdesk. This resonates so much with me :D

[@joeljohnston9339]

Love your feeds, you’re obviously very talented, so please take this with the good intention that comes with it. I worked with a software expert (by anyone’s definition,)for a number of years that predicted IT would be dead within five years. That was 8 years ago and our corporate IT has yet to wither away. Automation doesn’t end jobs, it simply changes what you spend your time doing. Are we doing less manual minutia? Yes. Are we automating desktop, server, vm, (and now container) deployments? Yes. Are we using SaaS to simplify tasks such as monitoring and alerting? Yes. Do some get laid off when they don’t adapt to doing these new things in the new fashion? Yes. All of that automation has come to fruition where I work and yet I’m busier than I’ve ever been. Why? When the business is able to do more faster, they do more faster. It’s called competitive edge. It’s easy to see something new and think, wow I won’t have to do that anymore soon and worry about when the axe is going to drop. However a conscientious IT pro knows that where something old is phasing out, something new is brewing elsewhere. If you’re on your game, you’re not surprised to see fully automated container ecosystems get deployed from beginning to end by the developers. Knowing that in advance you then realize how important it is for you to help them ensure that network connectivity is maintained, that backups and dummy restorations are taking place and automated, and that the application is performing in the cloud optimally at a competitive cost. Sure these tasks aren’t what we had to do ten years ago, but it’s a good thing that I’m not the bottleneck between my dev teams and the servers anymore. Now I’m a steward of the cloud, how it is networked, how it is secured, how logging is being managed en masse. And as kubernetes sweeps the earth, I know I have to learn how to maintain that environment and the ecosystem that surrounds it as well. So IT isn’t going anywhere because of automation, it’s just going to change and be expected to do more faster over time.

[@queirol2126]

Reverse uno card: Goverment IT

[@nolaw70]

Depends on wher you are at. Some are operating just as Wendell described.

[@ElDarric]

@@nolaw70 In my experience, it's much worse. In some ways. Depends on perspective ,maybe?... as a DoD IT mercenary I maintain super old SGI / Sun boxes. Should have been retired/replaced forever ago (can't be replaced due to platform dependency, common in production). That is bad, right? BUT.. we have managed to maintain 25+ year old computers and keep them working.. so.... yay!?

[@uraxii2944]

Yeah. I'm trying to get photos off a dying hard drive for my grandmother's friend right now. It's actually a nightmare.

[@djsensacion7]

As someone who has worked at a Support desk for several years... PREACH !!!

[@plhilmar1]

I don't work in IT do to circumstances, but having to help family, friends, friends of friends, co-workers, acquaintences. Really hits home and can totally understand where your coming from. The poor IT guys must be shedding a few tears from the bottom of their hearts hearing all that's been said. Great vid, you certainly bring up many good points, looking forward to the next upload.

[@TA-eo2ww]

As usual, you have some very interesting and enlightening comments. i am not an IT pro but used to work in it as a technician. it seams that most thing will eventually be fully "Plug N Play". Literally!

[@kalliste23]

LOL. I do IT support ... I literally had to show someone how to switch on his new macBook. Nothing can be simple enough that an end user won't be confused or be so durable as to be impossible for an end user to break. The corporate network gets outages because people randomly loop Ethernet floor boxes and trigger an autoconfiguration storm of the switches. Never mind when one of the 3rd line guys pushed out a BIOS update that destroyed 250 laptop motherboards. "Policy" ... LOL.

[@Tudorgeable]

Well yeah, policy, as in write a bunch of generic stuff so that people comply so that they themselves become generic and hopefully everyone can wash their hands of responsibility. The bigger the company, the less you do, becuase everything already works out of innertia, those 250 dead motherboards were probably a drop in a bucket.

[@AcidzDesigns]

I work in IT, had a user call for a new laptop as he drove over his current one

[@grocerylist]

Sounds like a good idea, who wants to wait the 3 years or whatever to get a new one?

[@jeffm2787]

Our policy is if IT staff cost + employee salary costs + lost productivity is close to the cost of the machine we replace it and perhaps refresh the bad machine at a later date. It makes no sense to loose money on multiple fronts.

[@jonboy2950]

IT is evolving, its no longer fixing problems and keeping things running, thats just a small part of what IT does. Our IT department leads the business and advises on technology and helps the business gain a competative advantage through technology. We are fully embedded in the business and drive processes to make them more efficient.

[@takawaka1000]

I have followed you since tek days haven’t watched for few years since then and, today in this midst all of this chaotic times I was wondering where’s your videos of rational analysis I’m glad you’re still doing it!!

[@Ramiel]

Only thing I'd say is the people hiring don't typically know anything about automated deployment. Plenty of fortune 500 companies don't have this and likely won't until they can be convinced it's 'the thing to do.' I think that gives techs time to adapt, and perhaps 'wow' some higher ups with even simple automated deployment.

[@Tudorgeable]

What would you consider an example of simple automated deployment to be?

[@peterjansen4826]

Even on Linux they are busy making it idiot-proof with those containers like Snap. (by the way, I hate Snap) Linux doesn't really need that in my opinion. If there is any issue for a regular user you just copy the home folder and maybe you look in some config-files and you are done. On Windows it gets everywhere, I count 5 user-folders on Windows with just 1 user, it is crazy!

[@kristeinsalmath1959]

1. Snap instal this 2. Open "this" 3. Use "this" I don't know where is the problem?

[@0M9H4X_Neckbeard]

@@kristeinsalmath1959 snap creates cache-files in everyones home directory, polluting it. It also has the most issues with privilege/access compared to AppImage and Flatpak and it has the most problems when it comes to GUI themes and window decorations being inconsistent. Snap is the worst of all modern package formats, just use Flatpaks or if you can and want to AppImages.

[@solocamo3654]

I'm part of a decent sized IT team for a health care company of 1,500 or so across the state. We've been slowly migrating to a platform like this. We've been using and dabbling with SCCM as well. I'm going to dig deeper into Autopilot, thanks! Biggest issue we have is the shear amount of different software and requirements between the offices as no two are setup the same. We have a lot of older and unique software as well. Plus, so many people still save 'vital' documents locally despite warnings against it. Squeaky wheel get's the grease and the upper management will not lock it down unfortunately so blasting systems is unfortunately a last resort still. The massive push to work from home has really opened up our eyes to a lot of flaws in our current process.

[@boomercorley1930]

Love this kind of content from your channel and forum. Great community!

[@alexanderdemontfort3022]

Trust me, SCCM and Intune are still so esoteric (implementing org policy and rules etc) that they have to pay an external contractor like me to help make it do what they want it to do. Mid to high level tech jobs arent going anywhere.

[@Tudorgeable]

Neither are lowwer level IT jobs, as technical issues shift to soft-skills issues. If you can't please people with automation and provisioning and sccm, and mdm and such, then there will always be a need of someone to answer basic stuff that barely scratches troubleshooting.

[@LukeAvedon]

Whoa: Multipath TCP looks amazing. We truly live in an age of wonders.

[@brianmccullough4578]

Multi pass TCP/IP is already in pfsense isnt it,sort of? I swear i saw an option to have redundant internet feeds, I guess that's just the router switching your feed to all your devices,not device specific switching. I'm just a noob,but I am starting to save specific iso's for my families devices,so when they blow up,I can just pull an iso from my NAS. I need to hook up a Linode server for a backup as well! Depressing yet useful! Thanks wendell,very informative. Btw I'm just a diesel mechanic and this is creeping into our field as well,I'm lucky that I'm really into computers,cause everything is computer controlled now,and the old timers just cant cut it anymore, sad to say

[@alexcart5116]

Video upload 10 min ago and you commented 2 days ago? What is wrong with KZbin?

[@brianmccullough4578]

Benefits of patreon my friend

[@alexcart5116]

@@brianmccullough4578 oh! Thank you buddy, I didn't thought about that.

[@excitedbox5705]

I am still waiting for multicast to gain wider adoption. Imagine being able to stream video to many connections at once but only having 1 outbound connection. Right now each location gets it´s own copy of the stream requiring massive bandwidth. All it would take is the network infrastructure that runs the internet getting updated because multicast has been available for many years. The main hold up is that ISPs havn´t figured out how to make money from that. It would take a huge load off servers and the connections though. It would just require the switches routing a single file to multiple places at once. So if you have 1000 people watching a stream in NY but it originated from a Datacenter in Europe you connect to a router in NY and that sends it out on many short connections instead of making 1000 connections from the source to the destination.

[@Gosu9765]

Asking people if they restarted computer and getting positive answer, only to realise they did "Turn off" computer instead of "Restart" and turned it back on again. There is huge difference between those two options in Windows and it wasted me countless hours.

[@NTmatter]

User closes lid, waits 10 seconds, opens lid. "Yes, I rebooted it!"

[@hammerheadcorvette4]

For the last couple years, All QA roles needed to have Automation experience, wether thats Selenium, SOAP etc. It's natural that this would move along to other parts of IT

[@itznotmytube]

Just saw this video 3 years after it came out. :) Azure and Intune have progressed and I'm mostly a novice at it, but we're increasingly using the White Glove feature to deploy machines and we don't even sign into those anymore, since the configuration is set up in the admin console. Users get a machine and sign in, and it should "mostly" be just click and sign-in for them. Using OneDrive to consume the Desktop, Documents, and Pictures folders takes care of most the risk of losing data in a system crash or wipe. And we "should" be able to kick off a wipe or reset remotely. It's really impressive but hella complex to configure initially! We still have plenty of manual setups too, as not every client has M365 or the needed licensing for Intune. 🐧

[@akurenda1985]

This is one benefit of working as an MSP. RMM tools and scripting takes care of most cleanup/onboarding. Autopilote and OOBE through Azure AD take care of remote deployments. This shelter in place has period has really opened people's eyes about having telecommuting or hybrid cloud options. Home support is almost a dead business. People can buy a new computer before they'll pay $175 an hour for you to properly fix their current one.

[@falconeagle3655]

Great video Wendell. As a software engineer I agree. We don't even have a IT guy in our office. And for most cases we don't care about security too.

[@TheRealThaenatos]

Having been in the IT field for 15 years I have seen the writing on the wall for a while now. I created a system for ease of use with fail safe systems for dummys and outside issues and even a little automation. Well turns out I made the system so good the tech savvy folks there decided they didn't need me to maintain and push the system further as it was so "easy" to work it and maintain it. Honestly I see IT moving to a few MSP and cloud based services and eventually even the MSP give way to the cloud services and support. As for helping folks....well its like being a mechanic(I was one of those too) you find out everyone wants to be your friend. Its like winning the lottery and you will meet all kinds of new "family" and "friends" ....

[@janesdisorder1565]

When i upgraded from an iphone 7 to an iphone 11, it was super easy to get all my data onto the new phone. Once the new phone was turned on, it automatically talked to my old phone, and initiated a full transfer of my music(music i put on it myself), apps, everything. All i had to do was fill in a couple codes for verification, and then watch it do it's thing. It was scary, but so efficient.

[@janesdisorder1565]

I figured i'd have to connect my new phone to my computer, so I could get my fubar 2000 library onto it, but nope. It was all transfered via bluetooth i think.

[@MrCodgedodger]

Moved our whole company over to AWS and all sites are now running Velocloud SDWAN. It's a good time to be alive.

[@Zarrx]

I don't see how you won't need IT to handle getting this rolled out... Contract or In house. Probably a rise of consulting?. As someone who is assisting with internal web application access control... it's hard to see as a large part of our IT is dealing with the applications and the servers they're hosted on. I'm with a large company that is doing a lot of internal development though. Also appreciate the info!

[@romevang]

He's hinting at the "low hanging fruit" will get automated. He's not the first person to mention this. Automation will depend on the company, but as a whole, automation of basic tasks is the first step to 'condensing' the size of the IT department. He said "death" but he really means a large reduction perhaps? Till will tell for sure.

[@kennethhicks2113]

Um, company pays MS, done!

[@chucknorres5885]

I haven't officially worked in it still a student but I was the system administrator of my school along with that I helped so many family friends and even random people with their computers that I know the pain I feel the pain

[@IslayAnderson]

the speed it takes IT at my place to do anything id have assumed they were already dead. turns out they have like 5 hardware techs for a whole university

[@fredEVOIX]

our shift work (5+ people using the same) computers/terminals all have two partitions C: and D: where we are supposed to store our non-important documents, after 15+ years the only folders on D: are mine and more than once we had C: become unusable because people fill it with garbage, most of the users have computers at home...what do they do on them ?!

[@rightwingsafetysquad9872]

All I took from this is that you can play Red Alert 2 on the notebooks at Walmart.

[@johncnorris]

It's a good thing that all disasters happen at regular predictable intervals and when Fortune 500 companies need to rebuild their IT infrastructure the experts they need will be available and prepared to get them back online. All hail the Cloud!

[@ToadalSimplicity]

This is my thought as well. Companies are an amalgam of random people and legacy systems. Jobs have continuously been getting simpler and simpler to perform. So maybe it means less people in IT support roles. But you still have to worry about people leaving or getting hit by a bus. You still have to worry about the level of support you're going to be able to receive from a third-party. You still have to worry about updates breaking things. As soon as anything goes less than ideally, you're fucked if you don't have your own internal IT staff.

[@gdrriley420]

Well i hope in the next 3 years of college I'll learn these or I'll guess I'll be learning these on my own. I'd much rather be a data center tech or system architect over fixing machines but help desk is always the first spot.

[@kaadhome5821]

I want to know where plumbers are $75/hr...

[@kraazed]

I work in a corporate setting for a mid sized I.T Service Provider (MSP) as a Microsoft focused full stack developer. I wouldn't say it is the "End of the I.T Tech", but I would say the skills requirement is shifting. Software automation is replacing low tier jobs in I.T where i'ts mostly configuration management and user administration. The one exception to this is the premium market where a large customer is paying for a superior support process where an actual person can provide reassurance of service quality. The demand for software developers right now is insane in Australia where I am from. The real reason for this is that a lot of corporations have purchased "out of the box" software solutions because it's easier to buy software for a small monthly fee than to spend big money on a talented developer, however the software will only do 90% of what they need and there is still 10% missing. This 10% is usually only found out after the product/platform has been purchased and implemented. The devil is always in the detail with software. My entire career has been making different software platforms and products share information or modify systems to have the features needed. Not one paid for software package has ever delivered on all the requirements and these constantly change as the business does. Software is procession based so if 99% of it it works yet 1% does not, then it's not completed, it's not fully automated. Vendors are not able to keep up with all the nuances of business specific processes and it is naive to think that they can. Software developers are the new "Tech" roles at any business. The pay and work-life balance is great, the demand is high, but be warned, to become a competent software developer it takes 10,000 hours of banging your head against a wall whilst you build an understanding of abstract and critical thinking. This is not clicking a button or doing a one-line command in console to fix an issue, this is reverse-engineering and designing your own fix. It has never been easier to build multi-threaded, scalable solutions in the cloud, on-premise equipment is dead and expensive. Such an exciting time to be a developer.

[@SGCSmith]

In regards to One Touch IT, there's a few problems I deal with regularly right now, and much of this is due to the imperfect environment that exists for One Touch. For example. Apple Macs support "One Touch" with MDM software like JAMF, and through Apple DEP Enrollment. In a perfect world, it would work reliably. In reality it does not. The DEP enrollment process of a Mac works fine, but when it comes to catching the MDM profiles and asking for corporate credentials, it is trivial to bypass. All the user has to do is forget to connect the machine to the network, run the battery to 0% which causes the clock to break, which then causes the machine not to catch MDM (Due to SSL/TLS failure), or bump up against a Captive Portal which is sufficient enough to cause the Mac to be "Jump happy" and forget to actually check for Internet first before proceeding onward to the account creation steps. There's a "bandaid" I can use to help Macs pick up on the MDM prior to shipping after DEP enrollment, and that is to connect the machine to the Internet and confirm it catches the MDM enrollment prior to shipping out. But that obviously defeats the purpose of one touch. iOS handles this much better in the sense that the device will always require an Internet connection in order to be set up, unless someone has "touched it extra" and caused the device to skip past the Activation Lock check steps prior to DEP enrollment. But until Apple fixes these problems with macOS, there are always going to be helpdesk tickets asking for help with machine enrollment. Then there is the issue of OS updates. With SCCM and Apple MDM you can force the OS to update. But it's a really lousy experience when you open the laptop / tablet device up, and enroll it, only to have to sit there for 12+ hours waiting for the OS to update, then to de-bloat (in the case of Windows). Not everyone downloads those monster 7GB macOS updates on a whim. So I've made it a policy when I deploy a machine with "One Touch" support, to always make an effort to clean the drive and put a fresh copy of the OS onto it. Out of the box. And said policy has big benefits for security and software licensing enforcement, too. Avoiding Superfish like issues, speeding up actual end user experiences (versus having to de-bloat during setup), and well, ensuring people don't do things like use Apple Pages for their work when they're supposed to use O365 for their work. As for Multipath TCP and IaaS, the biggest problem I'm seeing right now due to the global health issue is with the infrastructure in some areas being owned by dumb and dumber. Meaning, companies who, for whatever reason or another, sold their network as a billing system and not as a service. To those who don't know, this is a provider with data caps and throttling. I am seeing this a lot with cable companies, wireless companies, and even some DSL providers who, for years, didn't bother to fix congestion but instead charged customers for their "mistake" of trying to use the pipe. Multipath TCP has been supported by iOS and Android for a long time. Heck, Facetime on iPhone and Google Hangouts on Android both use it. The problem is, if you have to choose between very slow Wi-Fi access, and expensive and capped LTE service, you're going to disable any chance for Multipath TCP to help you out just because there isn't a good way to 1: Control the quality or data usage of many services using these technologies, and 2: You don't want the device silently deciding, at will, to start running your data meter. I can go on for a while on this whole subject. It's true IT is on the way out. But there are many obstacles holding back the advancement of tech. Blatant software flaws that haven't been fixed for years and crappy network providers are the biggest issues on my mind right now.

[@Kneedragon1962]

You're describing a nightmare....

[@longnamedude3947]

A haven for script kiddies, state backed groups, and your average every day criminal who can plug a cable into a box.... It is yet another cycle. And whether or not it goes ahead it still won't go as planned.

[@night4lover]

Using automation tools, IT professionals can support a variety of requirements. For corporate IT, a hold of 90% the permanent capacity required might be reasonable for hardware and software , the disaster and surge models would be setup on IAAS using the same automation scripts. If you do plan on decentralized office work on a permanent basis the internal network speed provides less advantage to fewer people but, your compliance audits may be more costly than when everything was centralized. Bottom line drives everything. Someone has to buy the computers and you'll probably use similar tools to configure and orchestrate the network of machines, regardless if you rent or own. I thought the fabric mention was interesting too, maybe that was the Easter egg of this video. I guess the point may not be stressed enough that you still have many different hardware types and each may require special software licenses and management and provisioning things is just the beginning because updates remove features sometimes. Finding this to be a pain point when working with modern web / app hosting providers. Causing me to think that I will really need to do more roll your own hosting.

[@pyric]

The problem with the apple argument is in IT yes I want to hand the user a disposable appliance they cant do anything on except what I say. However I need maximum control of the device. Part of why linux is growing in popularity.

[@Tudorgeable]

The other parts for linux's growth i'd say are privacy and security, both very important and omitted from this video. How can you pretend to be a responsible company dealing with sensitive data if you're putting it out on 'the cloud'? or depending on everythingAsAService... That still boggles my mind. In any case, right now is a bad time to give power like this to any one (single) company, even if M$ makes a foolproof automation solution, it doesn't have to be just M$, and with that come issues and 'dumpsterfires' like for Android, except this is an established market of help desk and techs doing support, the rat's nest just changes structure, but it's still there, nothing's dying really.

[@mdh.3421]

I’m sorry that is not an approved app I’m going to need you to uninstall it. No more coupon printers EVER!

[@Disco_Shrew]

2:25 I recall one call where a client daisy chained 3 UPS into eachother and blew the entire electrical circuit.

[@longnamedude3947]

Hmmm. Backing Up your backup with another backup. That's a lot to go wrong. Hopefully it made a good pop when it went, at least then the damage was worthwhile lol

[@jlirving]

Started as Helpdesk out of Uni. Then Application support for a little bit. Then got moved into Manual testing. Now I'm working on Automation Testing and I want to learn how to deploy AI Tools and ML to help me with my testing. Overall really enjoy where I'm fitting into the industry, I always wanted to move into that Agile/multi channel/technical BA space (and I still can) (any more buzzwords?) but I feel really good about spending some quality time on my programming skills (Java), learning more about AI and QA/QM as a more broad strategy.

[@cswann8]

The fact that practically nobody understands how using your domain credentials to log onto a laptop that is joined to said domain works (especially in the hours after a password reset while working remotely) means that helpdesk staff have job security "the likes of which God has never seen!"

[@JJFlores197]

LOL. I can attest to this. I work as a computer tech at a local school district and I regularly have to explain to my teachers/staff that their district login will get them on pretty much every web service they need for their job.

[@rubenvd3913]

As a tier 1 helpdesk tech for 2 years now, I have to agree with the statement about the calls we get. "What did you do, how did you even do this" is a daily occurence.

[@andljoy]

Storing masses of corporate info in OSX notes, without having them synced...... over and over again..... all the time......Did apple store them in text format so they are easy to backup ? Noooooooo that would be too easy, they are in some arcane format. I hate users. I can see things going more automated, but we have seen all this before with SCCM and Zero touch and that kind of thing. Yes for the rank and file peons, but for anyone who does more than email and office will still need more help.

[@ZoeyR86]

Im a hardware engineer I spend my days designing circuit board's and components mostly AI at the edge stuff now days. Windows is basically my only option for altium and orcad, i spend most my time in linux outside of work, i tend to write drivers and software for the very boards i design so not having full administration access to my test pc would be a nightmare. I have full administrative rights on all my work systems but I was also a senior tech and it security specialist (for another company) that has more or less just changed paths, getting admin rights to a pc in my company is like an act of god for just about anyone but the fact our IT staff know me and Know what I'm capable of and has seen my home network (puts the networks at our remote offices to shame) gives me a lot of pull i also if SHTF I'm an emergency backup contact for the head of our IT yet I'm not IT and I don't make as much as IT figure that out........i actually have 14 people in my office and when the human malware happened we had to move remote fast they all work off 3 servers located in my bedroom closet as it was faster for me to get my coworkers running then let IT catch up and mirror that data over and migrate the VM's to the head office. The company has over 10k employees and 14 People in IT i stepped in and took care of our office to reduce the load but still working off the home servers at IT request as the main office has hit major bandwidth limitations and i have dual gigabit fiber at home. And have now takin in almost 300 employees on my 3 servers ( 240 on my new gigabyte packing a 64 core rome, 1tb of ram, dual quadro rtx 6000's and 8tb of local nvme catch and 160tb sans array ) it's a Vdesktop beast. 1 server is purely use for pfsense and it's desktop gear but still a 9900k with 32g ram and a redundant psu just it runs my main pfsense and handles VPN tunnel's as well each user has a encrypted link vlan tagged directly to a private VM (don't trust users don't want anything jumping onto the work networks)

[@MKeehlify]

Same things happening in financial world. First we tried to optimization as much as we can and now ware are trying to automate to remain competitive. For me personally, snap/flatpak helps to move from one computer to the next even if there are different desktop environments on the new computer. I backup everything using cloud and local seaweedfs. I encrypt everything myself.

[@Disco_Shrew]

I and one other person provide support for 1500 iPads and iPods in basically the setup Wendell described. User threw iPad against the wall? Just buy a new one, enroll in DEP, Mail it.

[@marcelomafra]

8:55 ...by napalm. Changed phones, again, few days ago and there software that just didn't install back, configs not restore. Can't login to Level1Techs anymore because Google Authenticator isn't backed up.

[@KHos73]

How about keeping those nest or old pc's on a docker image.. or vm

[@leonardgrant6876]

I am working for a large international company and local IT is dying like crazy. Management is just trying to transfer every task to India a trying to do anything everything remotely as much as possible. That is why I trying to learn new stuff and do other professions.

[@supernerd6983]

The only channel that says "Hey downvote me if you want because everything I've taught you is now useless." Thanks?

[@kennethhicks2113]

Hehe, he knows down votes count same as up votes

[@heavy1metal]

Just deployed vxrail (dell "hyperconverged" solution) - totally automated over ipv6 .. which meant we didn't even need to configure IP addresses for each host. It just used a service (loudmouth) similar to apple's bonjour to find one another and rolled out the configuration from an json file. Was pretty badass to be honest.

[@eddraper]

I write scripts to create entire data centers in the cloud... They're called SDDCs (Software Defined Data Center), and they work well. Really well.

[@b2bb]

As a software dev for a government contracting company, you're speaking to my soul.

[@dolfinmicro]

I liked this. Not because I agree with you but because I want you to make more videos like this one.

[@excitedbox5705]

Right now the biggest slow down to eliminating almost every job out there is the slow company adoption rate and lack of investment. The technology is more than ready to automate most jobs. We are slowly seeing more companies investing in the technology but until that happens it is still gonna be a while. In Germany over 1 billion Bratwurst a year are sold in little stalls outside grocery stores and hardware stores. For about 20k I can build a vending machine to automate that away. That saves at minimum 36k a year per person working there which is usually 2-3 and reduce the initial investment for the stall by another 20-30k. In addition to payroll taxes and other fees. It would cut space requirements and rent expenses which can be up to 50-500 a day as well depending on location. Also making it viable in places where you normally wouldn´t have enough traffic for a full stall such as a Highway rest stop or small train station. You would eliminate 10 jobs for each 1 person required to service and refill these machines. Designing and something like this would take about 100k investment but the lack of investment in automation has left us with shitty vending food for 50 years plus even though the technology is not much different.

[@Knirin]

Myno Duesp it already is.

[@Yellowhound1]

I not only cried by 5:30 I am currently in the middle of re-imaging a machine cause of that reason...

[@Steve25g]

cloud, cloud.... , I guess any enterprise, or even smaller company should ask themselves 'who owns your data' .... I push whoever I can, to keep the services all in their own premises...

[@Tudorgeable]

thank you for your skepticism, it's much needed in this day and age. This is more valuable than whatever security measures or patching policy cloud hosting providers yap their marketing mouths about.

[@CrustyAbsconder]

If two 5 year old kids each have an iPad Pro are standing 100 meters apart, can they attach a stryofoam cup to the iPad, and run a string between the two devices and do something that kids in the pre-iPad Era could not do ?

[@kentwong3818]

Great video but I wanted to chime in.... Corporate Enterprise IT has been slowly dwindling because of software automation suites. I worked as a developer on an enterprise solution that essentially automated "The Active Directory Guys". Previous clients over the years would shrink a lot of their IT staff because menial AD tasks or etc was 100% automated. i.e. Onboard, offboard. IT Techs should start migrating towards DevOps. Just as much pay or more...sometimes even more than what devs get paid depending on your market/area

[@fluffyfloof9267]

oof, that sounds like a lot of loss of control …well, i don't have much experience in corpo it …that's probably why i'm tending towards self-hosting and total-control editions.

[@MMmmmVarley]

I laughed, I cried, I drank... and went back to laughing. Family/Friends asking to fix their system is a memory I wished I could repress. Damn coupon printer.

[@ShowsOn]

Freaky. I was marking some short essays on the Ship of Theseus when your reference to the Ship of Theseus occurred.

[@bluetrepidation]

This video reminds me of The Website is Down #1 Sales Guy vs Web Dude... Anyone else remember this epic video?

[@Starscreamious]

Uhhhh...Wendell...IT guy here...I think (1) users are going to balk at having to go to the MS Store in the middle of a pandemic and (2) users not having their files backed up might be something you can enforce for low level staff but as soon as managers and C level staff encounters the full brunt of your draconian security efforts your name is going to be mud. I would rather have a system that is impossible to save to the local drive for end users. Also I believe you can team/bridge/load balance/QoS network connections in Windows based operating systems (natively and 3rd party software and of course with an extra hardware device) which should provide a similar experience to the apple products you mentioned.

[@sundhaug92]

I may be too much of an optimist, but I think automation will take the repetitive tasks out of IT, and let IT focus on improving

[@VengFPV]

Come back when you have full automation of bespoke enterprise software config and management. Until then, only the most basic of IT roles are in jeopardy. As is ANY basic role in most industries.

[@PCmaster0]

They threw it down a flight of stairs.. oh thats whats wrong... Wow never a more true example given of dealing with End Users.

[@TrippSC2]

I think you'd be smart to embrace automation where it suits your business. If you're in IT or getting into IT, you should be learning what you can about automation solutions and looking for places you can apply them to help your companies. That being said, I am skeptical of IaaS being the correct answer for most businesses. My experience has been that the companies I've encountered who moved to IaaS that were larger than ~300 users regretted not continuing with a traditional colo and owning the hardware because of the unpredictability of cost and performance of IaaS services. I also think the adoption of automation is going be much slower than a lot are predicting, just based on the fact that free automation tools have existed for a while now and have minimal adoption. It will be a slow and steady process based on the needs of the business.

[@Tudorgeable]

in a similar fashion, ipv6 is also free, very good, and has existed for a while now....

[@drewwilson8756]

Honestly ever since I started going to internet cafes, I could not believe that the software didnt come with more automation. The updates to the machines were always pushed manually. Then again the personnel didnt have much to do so I guess the issue was moot.

[@Jagerbomber]

So my grandfather decided to give me the computer of the Marina he has his boat parked at to refurbish and retrieve the important data from, which started from Windows 95. At first it was neat seeing another computer that could have been a mix of my own and my mother's computer again with over 2+ decades of stuff on it. SIERRA ONLINE, some Sonic games, Big Fish games, still some AOL remnants, stuff like that. But then...... Have you ever come to the dilemma of trying to recover Quicken files from 95? omg..... Each version of Quicken only converted files from 2 versions back. There is no other way. There is no current tool or service (somebody was charging to do this themselves at some point) that goes that far back. I've never heard how critical those files actually are at this point, as they were actually the parts catalogue from the Marina's supplier, which itself has since moved on, but I never got confirmation of if the marina is actually still in good contact with them. I would hope so, but idk. Anyways, those files are not getting re-opened, even if I was somehow able to get running every version of Quicken since then. And by the way, that computer from the 90s now has an SSD and is running Windows 10, because my grandfather is insane (not exaggerating and not in a good way). I forget how much RAM we could get in it, maybe 2GB? And it actually functions, at least to begin with. Also, I had once interned at a place for just a few months and had already been summoned to plug in somebody's computer that they couldn't turn on.

[@rangersmith4652]

I already know a reboot can solve most issues. If corporate IT exists just to tell me to reboot, then it needs to go away. It's appropriate that everything should be saved to a backed up network drive, but here's the issue with that: I've been a member of at least four very large organizations at which policy told users to store documents on the network, but the default location for a new save--a setting users were not allowed to change--was the C: drive.

[@watcher333666]

In theory. And in a sales pitch. In practice there is a great resistance from IT and management for automation.

[@ZoeyR86]

I feel it deep into my bones, 18years in IT.. Also you missed an opportunity on your merchandise, the teaching sand to think is good but instead of a sad face the chip need to be realtek (crabs). Also another shirt idea is 404 error network not found your pc probably got crabs (poke at realtek network controllers that like to randomly stop talking especially USB under linux)

[@ZoeyR86]

When i first started out of high school i worked as a firedog tech at circuit city lol...i took everything they had us use, and built batch scripts for windows and custom live linux DVDs for backup and virus removal, when i first started 1 tech at best repaired 2-3 pc's a day, after i built better tools 1 tech with automated tools 10x jump in work rate. This ended with us going from 6 techs to 2 techs yet still completing 2-3x more work. Also all this was during the windows vista launch, i was the department head, 18 i had turned my school network inside out and had CS forced copied to every system in the school. So even in highschool I was a bit of network admin worse nightmare, I was very capable as a script kiddy but also found windows xp to be one of the easiest things to exploit as it had more holes then a screen door... also I'm the original creator of "desktop destroyer" the program was made as a joke, I had a script the change the path for IE to that app on all the schools PC's. (#&#)

[@DrewTNaylor]

techmasterjoe Going off KZbin search results, Desktop Destroyer looks like something else I remember using called Termite Toolbox, and they probably work similarly. Really cool software.

[@ZoeyR86]

@@DrewTNaylor termite is John's toy yep he has my source code lol suprising it's still around

[@ZoeyR86]

@Patrick it can be a very good job but i don't think it will still be around 10 years from now...for me i just got bored i was part of the usa cyber defense department E-9, worked as a head sys admin for Orange unified school district, and Lightspeed communications. The job is 90% or more just telling people to power cycle systems and such but like in this video most of the actual sys admin work like building custom images deploying custom network rules and what not is getting automated and cloud based and directly integrated into the windows licensing / update system.. so no more days of building a custom usb / iso's.. so most of the system admin job is basics tear one tech support. This rest is automated by scripts hosted on a cloud based user management system where you assign users to groups and give setup scripts to the groups and system auto configure based on microsoft store and a hosted repo with custom / non store software.. this has happened for the most part with apple microsoft is following suit as this is a indirect way to enforce licensing. Also forces use of the Microsoft store and ecosystem maximizes profitability.

[@ZoeyR86]

@Patrick also because of the early 2000's the number of high paying sys admin jobs and the number of qualified workers is out of balance "market flooded" but that said a very large quantity of System Administrators are not qualified for the job they have, this gives a very bad impression on companies and has a lot to do with the lack of proper universal testing and certification, "comp-tia certs can be bought" "Microsoft admin certification is badly outdated same with Cisco. The day a true non profit gets a real skills based testing system in that's is locked down so companies can actually believe in it then i can see pay

[@mrPCbuilds.]

The beginning of "cloud" hardware.

[@peterpain6625]

Not with the amount of companies i got out of the cloud because the "awesome cloud service provider" gave them the one finger salute about their problems after making them pay 10k€/m+ for months ;) Also dgsvo luckily prevents most european companies to put their trust in american service providers...

[@cassideyousley406]

you mean thin clients?

[@madant7777]

This kind of automatizing the corporation IT has been done years before, just by custom software for each corporation. And it works so-so, depending of the complexity of work/programs you're using. For an IT company it doesn't work so good/fast because of various complex processes you have to go through when installing, especially for a developer environment. You would have to have everything(!) bulk standardized - HW and SW, like in McDonalds, to have this idea complete.

[@justinnamilee]

It was a good ramble.

[@bearlydave]

Have an up-toot. I'm the guy that makes the decision on who gets to keep their job and I can tell you that there are lots of people that are holding onto the "old way" of doing things. It continually surprises me that certain IT people are so resistant to change. I want to ask them "Why the heck did you get into IT if you do not like change???". They should have become librarians... I'm pretty sure the Dewey Decimal System hasn't changed that much in the past 125 years.

[@Tudorgeable]

I love IT, I love the technology for the sake of technology. But I shouldn't be one put in charge of deciding if it's a good idea to get everything hosted in cloud servies or everything as a service, iregardless of cost, we're talking of the main issues overlooked in the video - security and privacy. I'm sure people can change if they believe the change is beneficial or won't threaten their livelihood, otherwise they grow jaded and reluctant. Again, technology for the sake of technology makes no sense in the business world, the tool is meant to do work for people, not the other way around.

[@Avean]

Cloud sounds good on paper but i have yet to see a huge customer take advantage of this yet. Its very expensive and you rely on Microsoft having theyre systems working, and from experience that is not always the case. Have had Intune devices just suddenly disappeared without a trace cause of a bug. Even with premium support you were sent to a technician in India who had no idea what to do. Very frustrating experience for us and for the customer. IT Technicians are a must still and i think the future is more of a hybrid. Like Intune is ok for small businesses, but its just not suitable for bigger more advanced companies. Then i believe in co-management with SCCM and Intune while Microsoft finishing up theyre Endpoint Manager.

[@GeordiLaForgery]

I worked somewhere where the IT Support Manager's desktop was just full to the brim with icons much like 07:58 lol, she wasn't setting a great example!