If you needed – which I doubt – any further proof that many of the job hucksters on LinkedIn don’t even bother checking your profile, here’s another installation in my series Adventures in Recruiterland. The day after the last post in that series was published, Kiran contacted me:
One of the complicating factors of my job is that I need to use the same tools, with different user credentials, often at the same time. For example, most of the companies I and my colleagues support use services that have some sort of integration with Microsoft Azure. As a result, I need to log in to the Azure portal for many of them on a daily basis.
Like so many of you, I arrange a fair number of meetings for various purposes. Among these are the ones I arrange for the members of my union local in my capacity as its head. Now, EU – and thus also Norwegian – data protection law clearly categorizes union membership as one of the numerous special categories of personal data. I understand this to mean that I am not allowed to share the membership list with my members.
A critical component to successfully closing a lot of the tickets I handle at work is the ability to search for – and find – Active Directory User, Computer, and Group objects. In about eight of ten instances, I’m able to do so using the standard search types (searching for Users, Contacts, and Groups or Computers). Sometimes, however, I need to find each and every object that has a name containing some predefined string. When that string might be found anywhere in the name, the standard search fails me pretty consistently. Luckily, there is another search type: Custom Search. Here’s how to use it:
Like so many other technologies, IT – Information Technology – has the potential to make a substantive difference in our lives. Sometimes it offers something entirely new, something it reinvents something that may or may not need reinventing in the first place, and sometimes it solves an issue created by IT in the first place.
Some time ago, I wrote about how low-skill recruiting is spam – an assertion I stand by wholeheartedly. Among the expectations I have for any recruiter contacting me is that they actually read my profile, and evaluate whether it appears my skill set is applicable to the proposed position. For your edification and entertainment, I offer you Ghulam:
Two and a half months ago, I checked another item off my ever-growing todo-list; writing and uploading a security.txt-file. I honestly don’t expect it to do much of anything, but at the very least, something now exists. I think having a way to easily contact me about potential issues is important enough that I don’t want people to have to hunt around for it. On the other hand, the amount of traffic to the site is an argument to leave well enough alone.
More than six years ago, I wrote a post, detailing how I could identify users’ Active Directory group memberships. While the method I detailed certainly works, it isn’t as simple as it might have been. Having recently found myself needing to perform that very same task again, I decided to revisit this topic, to show how I did it this time around.
As has become my tradition, I like to start the year off with a little look at the things that made last year better for me. This time around, it’s mostly tools. Here we go:
The year is very nearly over, and it is time, as I usually do, to look back at the year. Like 2020, it’s been a challenging year. Some of it is down to the Covid-pandemic which continues to plague the world, though that is certainly not the entire picture. Working, as I do, for a service provider to agencies under the Norwegian ministry of health, work has been focused on dealing with the agencies’ needs that arise from the pandemic, while also ensuring continued day to day operations. As a company, we’ve grown from around four hundred employees when I joined in 2017, to over a thousand as of this being written.
From time to time, I see a sentence that quite simply pisses me off. What’s that sentence? “Please contact us for pricing”. It’s dismissive, it’s arrogant, and it leaves me with the impression that you are looking to get as much money as possible from any prospective clients. If all you do is customised to the customer, I could understand it. If you’re selling a turnkey solution, there really is no defence.