The company where I currently work definitely appreciates me, so I am not complaining about that. I didn’t get made a CTO for nothing. However, I don’t think they really understand that they’d have to hire 4 or 5 people to replace me or how hard I have to work to keep up even with my own field.
Right now, I hold six different intermediate or professional-level certifications in different areas of technology, ranging from networking to security to cloud operations. These need to be renewed every so often, so I am constantly studying for certifications and exams. It’s never-ending, really. One day, I’ll get tired of it but haven’t yet.
And this is real knowledge, not just test peacocking. For instance, yesterday I worked on and completed a bit of combined t-sql and PowerShell that retrieves an xml feed from the web, parses it, and then inserts the data into a SQL table for later use. Note that this isn’t even an infrastructure task, but truly is light programming.
Today, I will be troubleshooting a broken site-to-site VPN connection. (I actually already know what’s wrong with it*. Convincing the other side of how they are misconfigured is always the hard part.)
Next week, I will be doing an Office365 email conversion. The week after, I will likely be advising on purchase and installation of physical and cloud infrastructure as well as doing most if not all of the implementation.
You get the idea! It sounds a little arrogant even to me, but if you can find someone else who can do all this, and as quickly as I do it, you better fucking hire them because I’ve met a few IT people better than me but hardly any as broadly knowledgeable or as blazing fast at troubleshooting.
*I know what’s wrong with it because I’ve done dozens and dozens of these, while most IT people haven’t, so I’ve seen every error and I can troubleshoot them almost instantly.
