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Are you an IT professional?

RavingMac

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Curiosity question spawned by another post implying Mac users are clueless from a tech standpoint. I am deliberately not specifying what I mean by IT pro (partly because I don't know enough to cover the gamut). But if you fit the description please fess up . . . I don't. I'm strictly an amateur
 

BrianLachoreVPI


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Couldn't you broaden the question? There are probably a few people on here who aren't IT professionals but have some other technical qualifications.
 
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IT Consultant here. Work for myself and focus on core networking, MS Exchange, Oracle, and whatever a day throws at me. I squeeze all of this into a 2.5 day schedule and do honey-do chores and kids the rest of the time. :)
 
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I'm a recovering IT professional with more certifications than I'd care to admit to getting for something I never considered my long-term career track. Worked on repair/maintenance of PCs, Macs, printers and network configurations for contracts with rather large clients, both commercial and government. I stayed in IT for longer than I'd like to admit to staying in a field I only ever considered a temporary thing as well, but let's not dwell on that. I've been clean for nearly a month now, and I have no intentions of looking back (never mind my freelance work, that shouldn't count >.>).
 
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no longer IT, moved into hardware engineering.

but yes to a computer technology career..
 
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Unix/SAP/Oracle SysAdmin full time going on 12 years. I prefer working on cars, but this works for now.
 
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I'm an amateur techie...there are something I don't know about computers, like programming (isn't that the same thing as coding?)

But I do know maintenance across all modern platforms. :D
 
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No, but I play one on TV.
 
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RavingMac

RavingMac

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Couldn't you broaden the question? There are probably a few people on here who aren't IT professionals but have some other technical qualifications.

I thought I left it wide open. ;)

Essentially, if you are paid to service, support, repair, develop, install etc hardware and or software I would consider you to meet the intent of the question. The purpose of phrasing it the way I did was to put a seperation between those of us who have technical knowledge (but are self certified as knowing something about computers) and those who have an external certification in that some one is willing to pay for their expertise.

Not implying that we don't have some really sharp and knowledgeable people who just happen to earn their living in some other way. Only trying to get a hard number to dispel this notion that Mac users are inherently non-tech.
From my experience, and the early poll results, this is definitely not true.

EDIT: As far as other technical qualifications, I agree we have those in plenty. I'm an engineer and have certifications in Systems Engineering, plus in a previous life (many years ago, but not on a distant planet) I was a Radar Repair Tech in the Air Force. Still, I do not meet my criteria so I am one of the No results in the poll.
 

bobtomay

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I'm just an old hippie. ;D


In my late 40's (mid-life crisis thing), did go get a bunch of those certs and did tech support for both Dell and MS for a couple of years - of course, that was over 10 years ago.

And since my brain has turned to mush from my hippie days, don't remember much about it.
 
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Network engineer now for 16 years, from UNIX and SGI IRIX through Windows and Linux with a bit of Mainframe thrown in, from local switches to WANs that cross oceans.
 
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RavingMac

RavingMac

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I'm just an old hippie. ;D


In my late 40's (mid-life crisis thing), did go get a bunch of those certs and did tech support for both Dell and MS for a couple of years - of course, that was over 10 years ago.

And since my brain has turned to mush from my hippie days, don't remember much about it.

I understand the mush thing. I moved from engineering to management 12 years ago and now I have absolutely no technical skills (other than making coffee). ;P
 
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Even though I am only 35 I have been working on pc's since the IBM PC XT (yes I was only 10 at the time so it was a hobby) but have built and replaced parts on every iteration of a pc 8088 80286 386 486 Pentium Pentium II Pentium III Pentium 4..... i3 i5 i7. Also maintained the datacenter for a while at the Casino I work at. Most of the servers I built are still in use (6 years removed from the job).

Even took a programming class on an apple 2e :)

Been working as a Paid PC Tech for 18 years now.

Currently teaching myself in ins and outs of MS Access for work use. VB is ok since I have a few classes of Pascal C C++ under my belt.(not that i remember any of it :) )

Looking for a good schooling program for SQL training.

So I have been around

and Yes This last November decided to move to Mac. Best move I ever made.
 
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My guess is that many IT professionals would not participate in forums like this. It's be too much like work. Now, if there's a forum for which you get paid to participate in, that's a different story. Me? I'm a rank amateur.
 
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RavingMac

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My guess is that many IT professionals would not participate in forums like this. It's be too much like work. Now, if there's a forum for which you get paid to participate in, that's a different story. Me? I'm a rank amateur.

Even so we are running a little under half (40%) in the poll that are paid Tech.
 
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Well, that's just because Mac-Forums in particular is kind of awesome. Honestly my favorite Internet forum community.
 
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Currently 13" Late 2010 MBA, 4GB/128GB; Early 2011 13" MBP, dual core i7 2.7ghz, 4gb ram, 500gb hd
IT Professional since 1997. Now working as an Infrastructure Engineer and project lead for our corporate Mac deployment.
 
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My moms family started Ash Brokerage Corporation and during the summer I work with the IT people and help them. They starting to get macs now so I help people that have questions.
 
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My Tech experience goes as far as writing code on a Commodore 64bit but then went down hill from there.
Will be going into force retirement soonish, and contemplating looking into IOS but as now im a amateur . . . .
 

cwa107


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I've been in IT since '99. Before that, computers were a big hobby for me - I got my start with the Commodore 64 and later became very involved in the Amiga community.

Since then I've been a network tech and administrator in varying capacities at the same company for the past 12 years. At times my responsibilities drift from tech support to security administration to training to executive hand-holding and even a little project management.
 

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