I was a systems engineer for a couple years. I loved that job, but the job didn’t love me too much. I worked for a medium-sized non-profit, a couple hundred employees and was paid a non-profit rate. I was hourly, which worked in my favor given the weekends and late nights and early mornings I had to pull. The best parts of that job were on-site, in the data center or the server closests around the campus.
When I was younger, which is to say in the 90’s, computers were square and hefty. They had a weight to them that felt sturdy and secure. The internet was a place in your house, you had to walk there. I got to tour a datacenter and watch a guy flip a big, industrial switch to turn a series of racks on. It looked straight out of a Frankenstein movie:
It is very possible I will never get to throw a switch like that in the course of my career. At this point, it feels like the cloud has overtaken every aspect of compute. I’m not sure who said it, but some dickhead billionare was talking about “why would I sell you a computer to play games on when I could rent you space in my cloud?” Capitalism is killing me, one day at a time.
I left that job in search of greener pastrues and now work fully remote. I like some of the work that I do, but I no touch nothing, no physical part of my job exists. In another few months, I could try again. I could even relocate. Maybe there’s a midsized radio station somewhere that needs a guy to build out a Nutanix cluster and can also pay him a six figure sallary and help him move to town.
And the town isn’t too far off from a bustling metropolis.
And the town also has an active goth scene...
A guy can dream, right?