[ale] [Mildly OT] Personal bliss or world conquest?

[Lightner, Jeff]

Years ago I was an accountant and worked my way up the ranks to the point where I was a Controller.

Although accounting takes intelligence to do and managing people presents may challenges I found myself bored by the former and annoyed by the politics of the latter.    Accordingly I left that career path and went into IT.   My first IT job was a massive pay cut and put me on a help desk.  I quickly worked my way up to Senior Technician for customer issues and was doing internal systems administration and systems staging for customers.    After that every job I've had has been Systems Administration (and pays better than when I was in management before)so  I've resisted suggestions to go back into management roles even in IT.

What I like about Systems Administration is that it doesn't get boring because:
a) It isn't exactly the same at every job.   Some places the admin owns the storage, the networking, the backups etc... and other (larger shops) might only own the actual OS administration.
b) It is always evolving.   What I was doing on UNIX in 1991 was different from what I was doing on it in 1996 and now with Linux it evolves even more quickly and is a far cry from the early days.

Having said all that I find that what I really enjoy most is solving different issues.   Once I truly know how to do a task it becomes mundane for me so I often think if I were to change jobs I'd look for another help desk situation just because the problems are more likely to vary from call to call.   In that Senior Technician role it was nearly perfect because I wasn't getting the calls for "add a new user" but was getting the ones for "adding a new user doesn't work anymore".   It seems to me you learn much more from what goes wrong than from what works.   In Systems Admin unfortunately you're often "learning" at 3 AM.




-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Pete Hardie
Sent: Wednesday, September 17, 2014 10:22 AM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] [Mildly OT] Personal bliss or world conquest?

Are you asking for help figuring out what you want to be when you grow up?
:)

Best of luck - I still haven't quite figured out my goals yet....

On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 10:05 AM, leam hall <leamhall at gmail.com> wrote:

> What I call "mental flexibility" my wife calls "waffling". Mine at
> least sounds dignified. This has been running around in my head for a
> few years now. Would appreciate perspectives, if you have them. Or
> just more coffee recommendations; I will get to ATL eventually...
>
> Solving technical problems, including some systems programming, is fun
> to me. I can get lost in it and be happy. However, I'm not a "real"
> programmer in that my work seldom gets more than a hundred or two
> lines of code and I only know the basics in a couple languages.
>
> Solving big problems is challenging. I've done datacenter project
> management and been successful. Especially since I often complain
> about "nobody fixing the real issues". I like fixing them but they
> aren't as personally fun.
>
> I'm not looking for a job but am looking to define my job to be what I
> want to do. I just wish I knew what I wanted to do...
>
> Leam
>
> --
> Mind on a Mission
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--
Pete Hardie
--------
Better Living Through Bitmaps
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