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?

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

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....

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Reverse uno card: Goverment IT

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

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.

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!

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!!

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.

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.

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!

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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. 🐧

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

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" ....

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.

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.

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.

This was a great episode 👌

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

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.

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

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

great video. thanks!

Love this content. Sysadmin in the crosshairs right now of this eating my job role.

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.

It was a good ramble.

You're describing a nightmare....

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!

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

extremely informative!

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.

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

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

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

I didn't know that autopilot thing, thanks!

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.

Interesting stuff thanks for the video.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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!

NetworkChuck has been hinting at a lot of what you've said. I can see why Cisco put out the DevNet Associate cert. I've been a computer science student on hiatus, but if my local university wont take me back in, i may try the DevNet associate path or something similar with an emphasis on automation.

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.

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.

love the reference to Eugene Victor Toombs

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

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)

This is why we have a /home/ folder in Linux, and why we have the option to have a seperate partition for said home folder

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.

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

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!

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.

4:24 lol back in the day I helped a client with a work machine that looked like this (not as bad - but you get the idea) - made my brain hurt.

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 ?!

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.

I'm a sysadmin and this video was great!

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.

i understend your pain brooo!

As Eng Lead for an MDM system, nice video man :D

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

interesting, now it all depends on the support for 3rd party applications required on different projects in the organization.

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 ?

You can deploy thin clients on a 6 meg connection. I worked on one for several years.