How do people become infrastructure engineers? Do you just like, start doing infrastructure work at your job?

— Tara Vancil (@taravancil) October 5, 2019

My path was a fairly long one, but it all started with being on the night shift (in a non-IT job), and being the only one who was able to find the power button to hard-reboot a hung production server at 1AM, preventing the on-call engineer from having to drive to work in the middle of the night.

Two other people had been in there, couldn’t find the power button. I found it (having never seen that model of server before) when I was still twenty feet away from the server….

It helped that I’d been playing with and working on computers since I was four years old. From there, helpdesk, then jr. sysadmin, then onward and upward…till eventually infrastructure engineer roles.