Six years of working professionally as a systems administrator and last week I realised that I really don’t know much about the ‘theory’ behind the stuff I do. I couldn’t have told you what a ‘sticky bit’ was, but I could tell you how to implement one. Making sense? Anyway, so I’ve spent the weekend getting re-acquainted with low-level Unix stuff. This has mostly involved installed FreeBSD on my laptop and reading man pages for almost every command I’ve run. Along the way, I wanted to install mackers’ o2sms and found out that FreeBSD’s default perl doesn’t have threading enabled. So I had to recompile perl – something I haven’t had to do since 1998.
Never mind OS X which has made my daily computing life a joy, even binary Linux distributions like Ubuntu have made me very lazy. Given a choice between downloading a pre-compiled binary and running that, and having my machine download the source code and waiting 30 minutes while it whittles the software out of 1s and 0s, I’ll choose the one that has me up and running as soon as possible.
I want out of computing completely. It’s not like I can’t do this stuff any more, I just don’t want to.
I really am sick of working in I.T. too. But I feel like i’m stuck in a rut. I’d like a different career, but I worked out i’d need to earn 30k to cover my expenses, and how many entry-level jobs will pay that?
We need to win the lotto.
I don’t know. There’s a lot of anecdotes about people starting out as barristers and dropping out to learn a ‘trade’ (plumbers, sparks, whatever) and earning a good bit more just starting out than they would after years of being a barrister.
But these are just anecdotes. And I guess my IT job is just a means to an end. I think my problem is finding out what end it’s a mean to. Though I think I’ve got that sorted.
Yeah but you still have to take a huge wage drop if you want to re-train. I’m not quite what I want to do. I’m thinking of going to one of those career guidance places that charge you 500 bucks to tell you you’re already in the right career.
You’ll be back.