I recently got a job as an IBMI system administrator, thanks to the Yellow Tail Tech program and the Procorre Plus internship on top of that. It helped me get prepared for this job.
Have you started yet, or are you about to start?
I started on Monday. Hurricane Idelia came in and gave me a free day off. I still got paid for it because it’s a salary position.
Tell us a little bit about what you’re going to be doing. Do you have a good sense yet?
It’s not so much Linux like we did in the internship, it’s going to be with the IBM I servers. These are very outdated. It’s IBMI, or as it’s known, AS/400. They were first created in the 1980s.
A lot of banking companies, insurance companies, and government agencies, anyone that requires very secure data, still use these IBM servers. I’ll primarily be managing the day-to-day operations of that.
My boss is the IT manager, and he’s been handling that role. I’m going to be trying to take that off his plate and take over everything he managed before I came.
Tell me a little bit about how Yellow Tail Tech helped prepare you for this opportunity.
I think the internship helped me the most by giving me experience, not only from the mock interviews but also by providing leadership opportunities. I’ve tried implementing that now that I’ve moved on. I’m trying to divvy up the responsibilities I took on during the internship to people I think are up for the task.
We implemented the on-call system and the scrum meetings, figuring out how to manage all of that in a timely fashion, just going through that grind process, and taking on those responsibilities without being scared to run them properly. That’s what I think set me up the most to be confident and take this leap of faith into a completely new job.
I’ve never had any experience with IBM I or IBM products in general, let alone these specific servers.
Was there a technical training connection between what you did at Yellow Tail Tech and this role, even if you’re not using Linux now?
There are some similarities. The AS/400 or IBMI series is very CLI-based. I had experience with Linux before Yellow Tail Tech, I majored in cybersecurity and worked on the CLI with the Kali distribution of Linux.
Coming into Yellow Tail Tech and the internship with Procorre helped progress my knowledge of the CLI. Now it’s just a matter of learning all these new commands. That’s the biggest challenge, but it’s not too hard for me because I like learning each step in a process.
Whether it’s exams, issues, or tickets, I want to understand each step: run this command first to set up the next one, and so on. That’s how I did it in the internship and college, and now I’m trying to apply that to this new job.
I always try to teach fellow interns or people from my cohort, especially for the RHCSA exam. If you can think through every command and visualize how you’d tackle each problem, you’ll be ready for anything that comes up.
That’s the approach I take when people ask me for help. I won’t give them the answer, I’ll give them a hint, like “maybe try thinking about it this way.” I’ve had people tell me they hated that at first, but later they were thankful.
Has your financial status changed now that you’ve landed this job?
They ended up giving me more than I was asking for, so I’m very grateful.
Have you thought much about what comes next?
Not quite. I don’t want to look too far into the future just yet. I want to focus on what I’m doing now and understand it before thinking about what lies ahead.
What advice would you give to someone who’s thinking about a tech career but hasn’t leaped yet?
I think you need to have a passion for it. It’s not something everyone can grasp. If you can be motivated or at least be a self-motivator and stay determined to get everything done that you need to reach your goal, that’s the best setup.
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