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[aaronjb]

If he wants to work on the networking side he will really need a maths qualification. Networking is all about 8 bit numbers!

Can't say we've ever looked for a Maths degree on anyone we've hired into a network engineering position.. IT degree perhaps, but more importantly experience and/or relevant industry qualifications (Cisco CCNP & CCIP mostly).

Yes sorry, didn't really mean a degree, was more that he needs to get his maths GCSE (or whatever they are these days!).

Ahh Yes, we definitely looked for someone having finished school with a clean sweep of grades (depending on what country they came from; we were often hiring language skills so had to figure out how various countries education systems worked! )

I think the OPs son sounds a little like myself at that age - I sailed through GCSEs because they were, IMHO, piss easy.. A levels, however, were another matter entirely - I ended up dropping out without even finishing them because I couldn't be arsed to put in the effort for subjects that ultimately didn't really engage me..

Still, all turned out alright in the end (although I'm not sure I'd recommend the path these days - much better to go through GCSEs, A-Levels and then do a decent science/engineering based degree as there are simply so many 'mediocre' candidates out there competing for every job and you really need to stand out above the rest :-/ )

[TheBoy]

If he wants to work on the networking side he will really need a maths qualification. Networking is all about 8 bit numbers!

Can't say we've ever looked for a Maths degree on anyone we've hired into a network engineering position.. IT degree perhaps, but more importantly experience and/or relevant industry qualifications (Cisco CCNP & CCIP mostly).


For the OP, though - generally speaking there's break all money in what he's doing right now (building PCs, SOHO servers etc) - if he wants to earn a decent wage then get into networking & application security, core networking or development (in decreasing order of salary potential, from what I see when I look around at jobs - I fall mostly into the app sec & core networking area personally).

Having said that, doing what he's doing now is precisely how I got into the industry - work experience at a SOHO IT support place turned into a job supporting Novell Netware servers (3.12, mostly, for those who remember that far back) which morphed into a job writing accounting software models. That turned into a job writing software for the travel industry when I moved down south, which turned into a period of self employment and then eventually to a job at F5 Networks - one of the largest network hardware manufacturers & vendors in the world (I forget what our market share is, but we usually place second to Cisco in most product areas).

One thing to keep an eye out for are entry level jobs where he can progress upward. Take F5 - we have a position called "Technical Support Coordinator"; it's largely non-technical and involves getting problem descriptions down from customers, finding e ngineers to work the issue and occasional non-technical problems - but people regularly can and do progress from TSC to NSE (Network Support E ngineer) and then from NSE to ENE (Enterprise Network E ngineer) and upward.. (I went from NSE to ENE and then swerved off to Data Analysis for a change of career). We regularly hire people into the TSC role who can demonstrate a history of working customer support roles but not necessarily with the technical acumen to work an NSE role..

NetWare 3.12...  ...thats a bit modern

[TheBoy]

Networking will get harder when IPV6 properly lands - most of us have got lazy, and just remeber cidr/masks etc

[aaronjb]

NetWare 3.12...  ...thats a bit modern

We still had some non-dedicated Netware 2.2 servers out there when I started but they were, thankfully, rare.. apart from the one that was sold to the guy on the basis it would be "Good for 20 years!". Er. Optimistic sales people..

Although non-professionally I still remember DOS 3.3 and prior all the way back to the Spectrum, I'm just not old enough to have worked on them in a professional capacity 

[aaronjb]

Networking will get harder when IPV6 properly lands - most of us have got lazy, and just remeber cidr/masks etc

Yeah - world of difference between four sets of 8 bits and 128bit addresses. Still, it's coming sooner or later - actually been quite prevalent in Japan for a while now, they were one of the first places we started getting a reasonable number of support calls from about five years ago asking "We need to do X with IPv6"..

Fortunately BIG-IP has been all IPv6 internally for about the same amount of time, so we haven't had too many teething troubles - aside from getting our heads around it

[TheBoy]

NetWare 3.12...  ...thats a bit modern

We still had some non-dedicated Netware 2.2 servers out there when I started but they were, thankfully, rare.. apart from the one that was sold to the guy on the basis it would be "Good for 20 years!". Er. Optimistic sales people..

Although non-professionally I still remember DOS 3.3 and prior all the way back to the Spectrum, I'm just not old enough to have worked on them in a professional capacity 

The original NetWare applicance, thats what grown ups supported

Mind you, NetWare 2.2, I have bad memories. Lots of bad memories.  Mostly because we used to slap it on ZDS servers, with software mirroring.

I also am old enough to remember Windows 1 - yes, the one with no overlapping windows . And would load every time from floppy. Although that was in a non professional capacity. Thank god


I too cut my teeth on a ZX Spectrum. Still got it upstairs. And the microdrives. And the ZX81. And QLs.  Bit of a Sinclair fan 

[aaronjb]

Windows 2.0 (2.something, anyway) was the oldest version I touched - and much to my dismay that was in a professional capacity! Non professionally I used DesqView quite a bit, much better task switching than Windows of the time, and then moved on to OS/2..

As for Speccys - ZX Spectrum was my first computer too, followed by a +3 (then, when the floppy drive died in that, an Acorn Electron, Amiga 500+ and finally PC) - but I always wanted a Sinclair QL..

[CaptainZok]

Ahh the ZX81 what a wonderful bit of kit that was.
Dodgy keyboard, ram pack held on by velcro and printer that printed on tinfoil.

[Kevin Wood]

Ahh the ZX81 what a wonderful bit of kit that was.
Dodgy keyboard, ram pack held on by velcro and printer that printed on tinfoil.

Breathe on the RAM pack, or touch that pesky power connector and it's good bye data.

Ahh, the first of the flaky computers that trashed everything when you least expected it. I wonder if we'll ever see the last? Doesn't look good so far.

[aaronjb]

Ahh the ZX81 what a wonderful bit of kit that was.
Dodgy keyboard, ram pack held on by velcro and printer that printed on tinfoil.

Breathe on the RAM pack, or touch that pesky power connector and it's good bye data.

Ahh, the first of the flaky computers that trashed everything when you least expected it. I wonder if we'll ever see the last? Doesn't look good so far.

My 48K could do a pretty decent job of that, too.. ahh, audio cassette, what a wonderful storage medium that was.

Program won't load? Better get the jewellers screwdriver out and mess with the head alignment again..

[CaptainZok]

Ahh the ZX81 what a wonderful bit of kit that was.
Dodgy keyboard, ram pack held on by velcro and printer that printed on tinfoil.

Breathe on the RAM pack, or touch that pesky power connector and it's good bye data.

Ahh, the first of the flaky computers that trashed everything when you least expected it. I wonder if we'll ever see the last? Doesn't look good so far.

My 48K could do a pretty decent job of that, too.. ahh, audio cassette, what a wonderful storage medium that was.

Program won't load? Better get the jewellers screwdriver out and mess with the head alignment again..

Then some prat invented turboload which made it even more sensitive. Screwdriver was always next to the tape deck then and having a monitor switch made tuning by ear loads easier.

[aaronjb]

Ah, those were the days! Simpler times..

[Teebee]

Scary discussion, all this talk about new fangled Windows, I started out on ICL ME29s and 2900s! Want to run a program, off you go and punch the cards yourself or try to sweet talk the punch card operator.

For the OP i'd be inclined to say try and get an oik job in a datacentre. Desktop (and home) support will always exist but it becomes soul destroying, classic one man band IT manager roles will (and have) start to disappear as cloud services take the sting out of managing complex systems so IMO try to get a job managing the cloud.

[TheBoy]

Some of you may asked if I still use the Spectrum.

Well, you know OOF has been running really slowly the last few days......

[CaptainZok]

Some of you may asked if I still use the Spectrum.

Well, you know OOF has been running really slowly the last few days......

Poke 23659,0 that will fix it.