If you’re a small or medium-sized business, open-source or cheaper third-party software is usually the solution. However, I just ran across a piece of software called Spiceworks IT Desktop that looks too good to be true! Spiceworks is a IT desktop and network management software that is completely free. The feature list is just incredible:

• Inventory management for all of your company’s hardware and software assets automatically with detailed reporting capabilities
  
• Software and hardware monitoring and troubleshooting info for all of the computers on your network
  
• Complete Help Desk package for easy ticket and solution management. Users can create tickets, which can be prioritized, assigned, and escalated as needed.

So why is it free you might ask? Because the software is sponsored by technology companies who will run small ads on the side bar for their own products and services. The ads are unobtrusive and help pay for the creation of the software. Personally, I’m fine with a few ads if I can get a great piece of software like this for free! Also, if you really don’t like the ads, you can contact SpiceWorks and they can actually replace the ads with your company logo, etc if you pay some money.

The inventory management module of SpiceWorks is quite advanced. It has the ability to discover not only Windows computers, but Macs, Linux PC’s, servers, routers, printers, and anything else that has an IP address! It’ll also grab the technical data on each computer such as RAM, Processor, software installed, patches installed, services running on the machine, etc. You can also enter your own information such as purchase price, location of the PCs, licenses you have, etc.

Using the Help Desk software, you can keep track of problems, projects, or tickets easily. Once all computers and users are in the system, you can create tickets that are “attached” to either entity. The cool thing is that users can create tickets via email or through a web portal. Users can see the status of their tickets and will receive email notifications of responses. Detailed reports are included and you can easily search all tickets created in the system.

You can also use SpiceWorks for monitor your network for such critical issues as missing Microsoft security patches or when unauthorized software is installed. You can be notified via email when new users are created, when you exceed the number of licenses for a piece of software, if a computer’s anti-virus is out of date, if the hard disk space is low, if the ink or toner is low on a printer, or if a server goes offline!

Other really cool features of SpiceWorks include the ability to troubleshoot issues on your network such as seeing what is causing a machine to run slowly, the ability to remotely control another computer from within SpiceWorks, and the ablity to compare two machines and see what is different.

And finally (if that’s not already enough), you can colloborate with the other 120,00 IT Pros who have already started using this software by asking questions, providing solutions, getting tips, etc.

This is a crazy cool piece of software that I had to write about. There is no way any IT Network or Systems Administrator should pass up such a great and feature-rich piece of software. This is certainly going to make my desktop management life much easier! Check it out!

[tags]Spiceworks, computer inventory, pc inventory, hardware inventory, network management, software inventory, IT management, network monitoring[/tags]

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Free IT desktop, helpdesk, and network management software

Anyway, if you want to put yourself to the test, than you can check out some of the questions here. I’m not sure how legit these questions are, but by browsing through them it seems that these were not just made up by some random person.

Apparently, the questions are broken into 4 types: riddles, algorithms, applications, and thinkers. So basically, how smart are you! Shit, that’s why I don’t work there…

Here’s a sample riddle:

There is a room with a door (closed) and three light bulbs. Outside the room there are three switches, connected to the bulbs. You may manipulate the switches as you wish, but once you open the door you can’t change them. Identify each switch with its bulb.

If you had an infinite supply of water and a 5 quart and 3 quart pail, how would you measure exactly 4 quarts?

Woo hoo, I figured these out after like 30 minutes!!! I guess you would need to be like “Hmmm…here’s the answer” if you were interviewing!

Algorithms example:

Implement an algorithm to sort an array. Why did you pick the method you did?

Give me an algorithm to shuffle a deck of cards, given that the cards are stored in an array of ints.

Ok, these I did not fare so well on. How the hell are you supposed to just come up with that! I can TELL you about various algorithms to sort an array, but I can’t just conjure one up off the top of my head!

Applications example:

How would you redesign an ATM?

How would you build an alarm clock for deaf people?

Thinkers example:

If you had to learn a new computer language, how would you go about doing it?

Why is it that when you turn on the hot water in any hotel, for example, the hot water comes pouring out almost instantaneously?

More stuff at the site listed above! Good luck! And if you get in because of this blog, then definitely give me a call.

[tags]microsoft interview questions, interview questions, microsoft[/tags]

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It’s really grown and now there is enough data to be of value. There are enough salaries posted in the major cities that you can get a good idea of what other people are making in your same position in your city! Here are a couple of graphs:

Median Salary by State or Province:

You can also narrow the results down on company size, city, experience, skills, and degree. So if you want to compare what small companies are paying for your position and compare that to what larger companies pay, you can do that very easily!

Here’s an example of Median Salary by Years Experience:

The one I liked the best is the Median Salary by Employer Type, so if you’re open to working for the Federal Government, etc, you might find it better for you.

PayScale.com also has a “Top Jobs” section which shows the jobs that it has the most amount of data on, so you can check these titles first to see if you fit into one becuase you’ll get a better idea since there’s more data.

[tags]payscale.com, job salary information, salary data[/tags]

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Nowadays, users are able to install programs, change browser settings, fool with the OS configuration, etc that it makes it very difficult to troubleshoot a task sometimes. Unless of course you have all your computers locked down, but then they’ll complain they can’t get any work done!

The Change Analysis Diagnostic tool is especially helpful because of the following issues:• Users may not be aware of recent changes to their computers.
• Users may not understand the relevance of recent changes.
• Users may be frustrated when support professionals ask them for detailed system information.
• Users may be unable to provide accurate information about recent changes.
• The user takes a long time to read computer information over the telephone.

The problems may result from updates, new software installations, or changes in hardware. The Change Analysis Diagnostic tool scans the computer for a specified date range that you choose (7 days, 14 days) and gives you an analysis of the following areas:

1. Software programs: Any programs added or removed on the OS
2. Operating system components: Includes updates and hotfixes info
3. Browser helper objects: COM components that IE loads
4. Drivers: Kernel-mode and file system drivers
5. ActiveX controls: COM objects downloaded through IE used on web pages
6. Other Auto-Start Extensibility Points: Programs that start without actions from the user

The tool then generates a XML file that can be loaded up in IE to view. You can download the tool here.

Once downloaded, in order to run the tool, you have to click on Start and then Run and type in statechangediag.exe and click OK.

Click Next and you can choose the interval you want to scan for. You can even pick the exact dates you want by choosing “Choose from calendar”:

The Change Analysis Diagonstic tool will take a couple of minutes to run and once you get to 100%, click Next.

Click View Report and the report will be loaded into your default XML reader. For some reason my computer opened it in Notepad, which was all gibberish, so I had to manually open it from IE.

Now you can browse through your new report which is broken into the sections talked about above! Great tool for help desk support teams or support pros who are not in the same building as their customers.

Source: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/924732

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How to create a shortcut on the desktop – Using this script, you can get a reference to the destop using the special folders function, so you don’t have to worry about the exact path for each user. Then just point to a URL or in my case, an internal web server.

set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject(”WScript.Shell”)

strDesktop = WshShell.SpecialFolders(”Desktop”)
set oShellLink = WshShell.CreateShortcut(strDesktop & “\Support Site.URL”)
oShellLink.TargetPath = “http://websvr/TechSupport”
oShellLink.Save

How to create a folder with items in the Start Menu

Set FSO = CreateObject(”Scripting.FileSystemObject”)

Err.Clear
objRegistry.DeleteKey lHive, strKey
End Sub

How to enable the Encrypt File shorcut in the context menu – This will allow a user to right click on a file and choose Encrypt, rather than having to open the properties of the file.

‘ Create an object to hold a reference to the Wscript.Shell object
Dim objShell
Set objShell = WScript.CreateObject(”WScript.Shell”)

‘ Create some registry keys and values using RegWrite with objShell
objshell.RegWrite “HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced\EncryptionContextMenu”, 1, “REG_DWORD”

How to open a Word document from your file server automatically – This little script does nothing but create a link to a Word Doc off the file server and then opens it. You can add some code to maybe open on the file only on Mondays, maybe like a once a week update to the company. Then all you have to do is update the Word file on the server.

Set FSO = CreateObject(”Scripting.FileSystemObject”)

‘ Open ITdocument.
link = strDesktop & “\Company News.lnk”
appWord.Documents.Open(link)

How to remove admin shares from a computer – This greatly increases security as long as you’re not using Admin shares on any of your desktops.

‘ Create an object to hold a reference to the Wscript.Shell object
Dim objShell
Set objShell = WScript.CreateObject(”WScript.Shell”)

‘ Create some registry keys and values using RegWrite with objShell
objshell.RegWrite “HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanManServer\Parameters\AutoShareWks”, 0, “REG_DWORD”

I’ll post some more later on when I have time!

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As a Systems Administrator you…

1. SHOULD NOT update ANYTHING on production servers unless you have tested it in a virtual environment first. This goes for the obvious patches, service packs, and drivers, but also for any software applications. If you can’t test it, then you should not install it. If it is a critical security patch and you are not able to test it in a virtual or lab environment, then you should be absolutely certain you have all the backups needed to fully recover the server in case of a system failure.

2. SHOULD document your current IT configuration including network setup, domain hierarchies, desktop configurations and server configurations. You should have documentation for your DNS configurations, DHCP scopes & scope options, IIS settings, database configurations, and Active Directory/Group Policy configurations. A year after you configure your DNS servers, you may not remember exactly what zones you created or their settings, so when a problem arises, you don’t have to waste time trying to remember what you did.

3. SHOULD make sure that all computers on the network get the latest security updates installed as quickly as possible. This does not mean all computers should be updated immediately, but after the updates are tested on a set of test machines that match the production network computers and everything is OK, the updates should be released to the rest of the network.

4. SHOULD NOT make live changes to a production network. A change in group policy setting may seem trivial, but there are too many services and applications that can be effected with even the simplest change. You should have test machines that have all of your company software installed and configured, so that when you change a security setting or something else domain-wide, you can test to make sure everything still runs smoothly before releasing the changes.

5. SHOULD NOT go wild with logon or logoff scripts that slow down the logon process significantly. It is always very tempting to use logon and logoff scripts to do something on a user’s computer since those are built-in points that you can configure system actions easily, but putting too many scripts in at these two points can significantly increase the time it takes for users to logon. Try to avoid scripts that transfer data back and forth from the user’s computer to the server.

6. SHOULD install anti-virus software on every computer on the network. Having anti-spyware software would also be a good idea. Making sure the anti-virus software is configured correctly is also important. Many real-time scanners can slow down your custom applications significantly and should therefore be excluded from the real-time scanning system.

7. SHOULD have all Internet traffic flow through a proxy server that monitors traffic and blocks access to black-listed web sites. Even if a user accidentally goes to a bad site, it can be blocked by the proxy server.

8. SHOULD make sure all user logins on the network have only regular user privileges on their computers. I have never seen any reason to give users full access to their computers unless they are traveling sales people or something similar. Giving full access will only allow viruses and spyware to spread themselves more easily.

9. SHOULD create an image of a fresh machine with all company software installed so that in case of a computer failure, a user’s computer can be brought back online very quickly. Spending hours re-installing the operating system and applications is unacceptable these days. Also, this point brings me to the next point.

10. SHOULD make sure all user profiles and My Documents are redirected to a file server, so that in case a user has to work on another computer due to a system failure, they can continue their work with all of their documents and settings just as before.

11. SHOULD rename the Administrator account on all servers and workstations using group policy. This is a simple yet effective strategy that has helped save my servers from being hacked into. Along with changing the account name, the password should be complex and as long as possible.

12. SHOULD check the computer logs on critical servers regularly to make sure that there is no unusual activity occurring. Checking the System logs may help expose certain problems that you were not aware of before such as time synchronization problems or network issues.

13. SHOULD not logon to servers with an Administrator account. All servers should be logged on with regular user credentials and if any administrative work needs to be done, the RunAs command should be used. This may help prevent a compromised system from compromising the rest of the network.

14. SHOULD make sure that the network is separated from the internet by a hardware firewall. All ports should be blocked except for those needed by services such as FTP, email, web, etc.

This does not cover everything and if there are more you can think of, let me know!

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First here’s the code and then I’ll explain it:

Set shell= WScript.CreateObject(”WScript.Shell”)
strUserName = shell.ExpandEnvironmentStrings(”%USERNAME%”)

Dim fso
set fso = CreateObject(”Scripting.FileSystemObject”)

lnDayOfWeek = weekday(now())

if lnDayOfWeek = 5 then

     If fso.DriveExists(”G:”) Then

          Dim lcDrive
          Set lcDrive = fso.GetDrive(”G:”)

          If lcDrive.IsReady Then

               newfolderpath = “\\servername\users\” & strUserName & “\EmailBackup”

               If Not fso.FolderExists(newfolderpath) Then
                    Set newfolder = fso.CreateFolder(newfolderpath)
               End If

                Dim file
               file = “C:\Documents and Settings\” & strUserName & “\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\Outlook.pst”

               If fso.FileExists(file) Then
                    fso.CopyFile “C:\Documents and Settings\” & strUserName & “\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\Outlook.pst”, “\\servername\users\” & strUserName & “\EmailBackup\Outlook.pst”

                    set fso = nothing
                    wscript.echo “Your email has been backed up!”
               end if
          end if
     end If
end if

Unforunately, the code is not indented very well here, so you’ll have to copy it and fix it so that you can read it correctly. Basically, it starts off creating a FileSystem object that will take care of copying the file to the server. Then I do a check to see which day of the week it is and I use 5 (Friday), so that the script only runs once a week. I also do a check to make sure the G drive is available (the network drive I’m going to be copying the data to) before I get to the copying.

Then I check to see if the folder exists that I want to copy to and if not, I go ahead and create that folder in the user’s folder on the server. I also check to make sure the file exists and if so, I then copy it to the user’s folder on the network. I use the shell.ExpandEnvironmentStrings(”%USERNAME%”) method to get the current user’s username.

You can then apply this as either a logon or logoff script using Group Policy!

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Anyway, getting to the fix: You need to restart the server in safe mode and log in. This will work because only the necessary services are started up. Once you’re in, go to your Event Viewer and check for any “Service Failure” entries in the System or Application logs. For me, it was the APS PowerChute service that was the culprit! I had installed it a fews days back, but since I had not restarted the server after the installation, I didn’t get any inkling this was going to happen!

Go to your Administrative Tools and go to Services. Find the service that is causing the error, i.e. APS PowerChute, and disable it! Now restart and you should be able to get in!

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1. What the user ask for may not be exactly what they want! They may ask you to do X, Y, and Z because that’ll make things a lot easier, but if you just go ahead and do that blindly, you will more than likely find that later on the users will complain and say that it’s not working in the best possible way or the way it “should”. In order to figure out what the users REALLY need, you must sit down with them and WATCH while they work. Meetings are great and they will try to remember how they do things (50% of the stuff they will not remember they do) and give you some warped view of their work. Not that they do this on purpose, but once you go sit down and see how people work, you’ll find there are tons of small little, but importants steps that they didn’t think were worth mentioning! Once you see the flow with your own eyes, then sit down with everyone and have a meeting about what they want and WHY.

2. Always ask WHY people are doing things the way they are…usually you’ll find that some problems can just be solved by telling someone to do it another way! Someone else told Person X to do it this way and so now they just keep doing it that way even though the process may have changed! People don’t like to change, even if it’s good for them! When you start asking why, people will begin to actually think about it and may figure out for themselves that they are wasting time or doing it in a complicated way that’s not necessary.

3. Always try to get a general view first! People will immediately begin to tell you about this problem with this particular feature or this step in the process, etc, etc, but you want to first get a clear understanding of the entire process from a higher level. If you get right into the details, you’ll end up making software or a process that might be overly complicated! It’s amazing how many times I’ve looked at processes and determined that the entire step can be eliminated!!! Always try to get the BIG PERSPECTIVE!

4. Make sure to document everything, so people don’t think you are wasting time. If you’re spending a lot of time with the people who actually do the work (which you should), then make sure you write everything down because you don’t want your boss to think you’re not getting anything done! It’ll also be easier to convince others that your solution is the best solution if you have lots of supporting evidence on paper.

5. Get sign off from all the top people, plus the users! If management wants it one way and users want it another way, those issues need to be resolved quickly and jointly! Don’t ever say you’ll do one thing before making sure it’s ok with the boss. Otherwise you’ll have to backtrack on your promise and people will get annoyed!

6. Lastly, but MOST IMPORTANTLY, TEST TEST TEST!!! Write out test scripts and test cycles. Don’t have to do anything fancy, use Excel to write it out. One column for the particular feature or function you are testing, one column for the expected outcome, one column for the inputs and one column for the expected outputs. You should always have expected inputs and outputs. And try to use varied data sets, small sets, large sets, and sets you know will cause errors (but hope to catch).

Hope this helps!

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Gathering software requirements for begining business analysts

But keep your figures realistic also…some folks have a tendency to over-estimate their worth, so you should really do some research first before you come up with your value. I would suggest a few places to look into: first is Salary.com, which will give you a free report and some basic information on the average salary in your field and area. It’s pretty accurate and will give you a general idea of how much you are worth. The second site is a newer one called Payscale.com, which works in an interesting way by having you submit your salary and work information in order to get access to others who have posted their information about their job. It’s apparently very accurate for information technology (because most of us are browsing the web when we should be working) and can give you a good picture of how others are faring against you.

Choose the number that you think you are performing at. Are you above the 75% of workers or are you more or less average when it comes to work? Do you do the things that were written out in the last post? Remember, just doing your job is average, so only take the higher value if you actively try to find solutions to various problems in your office.

Once you have this value, determine how much your current salary is off from this number. If you’re within 5%, you’re probably doing pretty good. Being 5 to 10% below your actual worth is fine and most bosses will try to give other incentives such as bonuses once a project is complete to make up for the last 10%. If you are in this range and don’t have any bonus system setup, sit down with your boss and tell him that you’d like to explore a system where you can make up to 10% of your salary by completing certain big projects during the year. It’s also a great way to keep you working even during the sluggish times.

If you’re off by more than 10%, you need to make a decision: either move on to another company because this one’s too cheap to pay you more or people are not recognizing your value and you need to promote yourself.

Another thing that I suggest before going to talk to your boss is to go out into the market and try to get an offer for a job. This process actually opens your eyes to just how comfortable you have gotten in your current position!!! I was shocked myself because my resume sucked, I had gotten rusty on some skills, and had lost the ways interviewing. This process may not seem useful, but it will give your actual real value in the market place. Not that you have to take the job if you get an offer, on the contrary, but it will not only feel good to know you can get another job, but this is the ultimate leverage for getting a raise. Remember you are in a business, so when you talk about salary, it’s business…don’t feel bad about looking for other jobs or telling this to your boss…he/she may be your friend also, but in the end you have to watch out for yourself and if they really are your friends, then they will understand when you tell them. Just like you understand when your boss tells you that they can’t give you a raise yet because of financials or HR won’t allow it or whatever other reason. You have your right to look for something better. That’s what keeps the market place competitive.

If you’ve done this and analzyed your position in comparison to others in your field and area and have determined that you are worth more, then TALK! Is your annual review coming up soon? Make sure it gets done on time and take print outs of salaries from both these web sites. Also, prepare a document in Word or Excel that lists all the projects you’ve worked on during the year and what you accomplished. Don’t be afraid to bring things into a meeting, be prepared! Just like when you go to buy a car, if you didn’t do your research, you will be screwed!

Anyway, let’s say you’ve decided to talk to your boss now, so what should you say? The one piece of advice that I found to be very key in bargaining is to begin talking first. If you wait until your boss starts and you let him/her go through what they have to say, then you might miss out on your chance to promote yourself. So have your points ready and the amount that you want. ALWAYS tell a number slightly higher than the number you are willing to take. If you want $55,000, do not ask for $55,000. Ask for $58K or $57K. You might feel a littel uncomfortable asking for a higher value, but it works I promise! If you start at $55K, the boss will drop it down from there without even thinking about it and then you’ll have to accept it.

So when you walk in, sit down, and start talking make sure to begin by saying you have done some research and analyzed the work you performed over the last year and have concluded that your worth is $$$$. Then begin going through each item that you have completed and what impact it had on the company. Now if your boss had hoped to give you something far less, he/she will have to re-think quickly and make a decision on whether they want to face the possibility of losing you or should they try and make you happy by getting closer to your number. And certainely throw out that you had a job offer at $$$ if your boss is not budging at all. If you can’t get your boss to budget, then either your boss is stingy or you don’t deserve the raise.

And be confident! Don’t twitch or shuffle about or lick your lips or say the same thing over and over or do other useless stuff that shows nervousness. Being confident will go a long way in helping you get what you want.

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A few more things about how to ask for a a raise in IT!

But if you do think that, it’s the first step to actually getting one! You need to have your mind working in that “I want a freakin raise” mode in order to actually accomplish anything! It’s like all these big self-help guru’s say, if you want to start doing anything (like selling something or meeting people), you need to start thinking you can do it and that you WILL do it. If you don’t think you can do it, then you never will and there is no point in you working! Why work and never get more than you are getting now!! That’s stupid right??? So think that you can get a raise first!!!

Ok, so thinking is great, but that’s not going to do anything right??? Well it’ll give you the courage to talk the people that control your salary and present your side of the story in a well-planned and effective way. And you have to prepare!! I’m totally with the bosses when some people just randomly walk into the boss’s and demand that they get paid more because they have been around for a long time or some other silly reason and the boss basically tells them that they are getting paid what they are worth to the company – sorry!

So how to prepare!? And what do you prepare? Prepare yourself for doing some work! Basically, you need to make yourself known…you cannot sit in front of your computer all day looking up cool new gadgets and checking out the latest server hacks because that’s not doing anything for the company! You need to do something that will improve a process that will lead directly to an increase in productivity or revenue. The more of these things you do, the more important you become and the move leverage you have when it comes time to talk to the boss.

Try to think in terms of making money for the company…helping the bottom line. First determine what is your company’s bottom line? What is it that if they stopped selling or producing or creating, would completely end our company? Once you figure that out, then you can start to think about how you can go about improving something. You might ask, well with all the daily IT stuff that needs to be done (fixing user issues, programming, managing the network and security) where do I get the time to do these other things? Well, you need to present that to your boss also and show them in exact amounts how much money, time or effort could be saved if you were to implement your solution.

For example, in my office once a product was complete, the production team would generate an invoice on paper with the client info, price, what was done etc, and then at the end of the day, they would take all of them to Accounting and ask them to send the invoice to the customer. Accounting would take the invoice, re-enter all the information from the paper into our Accounting program manually and then print everything out and give that to the mailing department. Now you can imagine all this work being done manually would cause lots of errors and you are right! Sometimes production would forget to give the invoices to accounting and then there would be a backlog of invoices. Accounting would enter the information into the system incorrectly and clients would complain about the billing. The amount of wasted time and energy, plus the frustration for the client was stupendous!!! So we created a system that would allow production to enter the information electronically and it would automatically be transferred to the Accounting system and all Accounting had to do was press “Print”. Now that saved time, money, energy and made our clients a lot happier!

These small projects can pay off big, especially in a small company! These things are hard to do in larger companies and can take months to years, but if you work in a small company (like I do), then you can get these solutions done from start to finish in a couple of weeks to a few months.

Other ideas to think about:

1. Does your HR Department have tons of papers flying about trying to manage absentee forms, late punches, time off requests, new hire orientation, resumes, etc. Can you create a internal portal web site to manage all of this without the paper and give automatic responses to employees or applicants?

2. Does your company carry inventory, but not have a way to track it effectively? Do people know how much stuff is coming in, how much is already there, and when to re-order? You can easily get a open source solution or pay a small amount for inventory management software to reduce over-stocking or shortages.

These are more generic, but your company will probably be doing something unique and that process will surely have it’s share of problems that can be improved.

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How to ask for a raise in the IT/Computer field!

1. You get to delve into any topic you are interested in (software, security, database, infrastructure) and there is probably going to be a lot of work to do in that area.

2. If you’re up for a challenge, then a small business is the place for you! Because there is absolutely nothing there to start with!!! You get to setup new servers, configure Active Directory, put in place a decent phone system, build out a redudant data system for your critical data, write all kinds of software to manage processes and workflow, etc, etc. But of course, this is assuming that you are ok with un-organized work places or work that is not handed to you, but instead you need to go figure out why people are spending 5 days to print invoices and mail them to the clients!

3. There is a lot less stress than working for a big company. In a small company, you don’t have to worry as much about deadlines and bosses haggling you…because you have to setup deadlines yourself and make sure you get the work done! If you’re a self-disciplined person, a small business is great in IT because once you produce results (no matter how small) people will start to think you are some kind of IT God. Which brings me to the next point…

4. If you work at a big company, you need to produce BIG results! That can be quite hard and stressful, considering you would have to work on a large team and coordinate with lots of people, which is defintely perfect for some people, but if you prefer to work in small teams and gets things done at your own pace, then work for a small company! Of course, you should not be lazy and sit around and do nothing all day, that’ll get your fired fairly quickly, but you can get things done in small steps that’ll make a big difference to a small company.

5. Also, once people know you and realize that you can get things done and do them well, it’ll be a lot easier to move up the ladder and become a manager or director. At a big company, you better be the best of the best if you want to even move up one or two levels. Big companies are good for some people, but not for everyone!

6. And lastly, you get to meet people, become friends, and continue seeing them for more than 6 to 12 months or however long a typical IT contract is for. Small businesses do have pretty high turnover, but usually not in the IT department, so if you’re working with some decent people, you’ll come to enjoy the small close-knit group you manage or work with.

I can’t think of anything else right now, I’m sure there are more! I’ll try and post reasons to work for a big company too though, since working for a small company is by no means the “right” way to go!

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Reasons to work for a small company if you’re in IT