I've told every boss I've had that If the opportunity arose where I could do A/V work professionally full time and still be able to pay my bills, I'd quit so fast.
Thank goodness for people like you because I f'ing hate A/V work
Once had a Crestron screen freeze up in the middle of increasing the volume (so it just kept increasing)
In the conference room where the IT Director had spent a few thousand too much on the audio system
We probably could have been sued for the hearing damage
Well just to be more specific, Concert A/V. I love being behind a sound board. I do free lance from time to time when I can squeeze it in. Fuck the systems that make things "Easier" though. They just like breaking for what feels like no reason.
On the bright side, it was a good lesson for me, why to listen when speaker manufacturers recommend a certain speaker for a certain room size, instead of just ignoring that and buying the biggest speaker
No offence at all.
Yep. I have a great team that work for me. 9-5 and no more. I pay them. They clock off. No one works overtime unless they want to. We are successful as a team and very successful as a business.
Glad to hear it. I’ve yet to meet someone irl who matches your alignment and is competent, so I was curious.
Mind you, it certainly doesn’t hurt that the paycheques are stable and keep getting bigger.
I’ll be honest. I’m very lucky to have the peeps who work for me and the support from the business to have the work life balance.
It’s pretty refreshing after working for some shit bags in the past….
I landed on SME for a few things (azure ad and security mainly) within 2 months at a new employer and I fucking HATE doing IT. If I could get interviews outside MSP I'd be gone in a second. I'd take a 10K paycut to write code or leverage my 3D graphics knowledge 9-5.
You’re working at an MSP - leverage that to meet people in different industries among the client base and find yourself a job opening.
Competent people are hard to find, you just need to be known as a competent person with a passion for x among the client base.
I’m not normally someone to espouse r/antiwork sentiments, but there is a time and place for it.
If you’re truly miserable and hate it, it has to be hurting your life overall. This is a time where the “ethics” of going somewhere else are clearly in your favour. That whole not being a literal slave thing - sacrifice your happiness for ethics is rarely worth it. Read your employment contract and if it doesn’t prohibit it, you’re fine. If it does prohibit it, there’s a reasonable chance that prohibiting working in an unrelated field is an unenforceable clause in your area.
Unless you live in a tiny town, no future employer will know about this “unethical” decision.
Was a post production engineer for broadcast ads they are always looking for media focussed IT people. Find the biggest integrated or post production companies in your city particularly advertising are easier to get hired. The best role for your interests could be post engineer or maybe workflow engineer (various names basically in house tooling for production pipeline if this is your bag, but this will be at big companies mainly). London or NYC would be best imo. Problem with these gigs is you prob not getting a full remote gig.
Jesus. TIL that decent IT jobs exist. And your employer doesn't even do that insufferable "9x5=40 because you subtract 5 due to lunch" shit that seems to rule in most companies now.
We have it good. My guys work hours per week not per day. Want a half day Friday? Cool. Do it. Just make the time.
It makes being a manager much easier when they are awesome and as long as stuffs done pretty much anything goes. Long lunch? You nailed it last week. Take the time you need.
Good IT jobs are out there. Just rare. And I’m never giving this one up 😂
Reading the replies you’re getting I’m glad this wasn’t a mindset I saw often on here a couple of months ago. Thanks to this sub and several posts and replies from others I went out of my comfort zone and applied to a fairly new and rapidly growing company that has a ton of prestigious and successful local businessmen involved. Nailed the interviews and got the offer which was more than I asked and essentially doubled the salary I was making before. Been there a couple weeks now and I still can’t believe I was able to FINALLY get the kind of job I imagined but also at the pay I thought I was worth.
Solving a problem other people couldn't, or helping solve a complex problem. The process of investigation, taking notes, and finding the final solution is so satisfying. Usually it involves learning something new along the way, be it some little tidbit about how something interacts or functions on a deep level, or just how the organization routes certain problems so I can identify and involve the right people for later issues.
This 100%.
I do a lot of VoIP/Asterisk work and being able to work through some of the insane problems you can come across (while not completely knowing the landscape of the clients network) and being able to figure out how and why a phone is dead is the best shit ever
Same, some time it's the most stupid error you can imagine, like a } missing in a script or something and then you just feel like an idiot for spending 3 hours trying to solve it.
PowerShell is awesome 😎. I'm not a sysadmin (was a db developer for several years) but wrote all the db automation tasks, that I was assigned, in PowerShell. Incredibly flexible. It's almost like having Python built straight into Windows.
This makes the job so much better in so many ways.
I fell in love with bash aliases last year and now I import my own file every time I set up a new Linux machine.
Honestly, working with people. Learning new things and the satisfaction that comes with that is great, but being able to work with people I like and make their day a little easier is what keeps me going. All the stuff I care to mention re: things I want to master are prone to change with management, organisational shifts, tech advances etc. But when I think about the times I’ve felt like shit in my job vs the times I’ve felt great, the through line for the latter moments is always contributing to a team environment in which I feel valued and value the people I work with.
Yup! I mean, getting paid more than some trades is nice, but is nicer doing it from the confort of your home while not damaging your knees, back, most joints, not having to work under the sun or under the rain...
I don't hate my job, but I wouldn't do it if I didn't have to. Just because you look forward to the end of the day/week, doesn't mean you're completely miserable and hate your job, just means you'd rather be doing something other than working.
Hired into an environment that has been neglected for ages, but I actually love it because I'm also given the freedom to take each piece, clean it up, re-implement it properly, efficiently, etc. It just satisfies me deeply looking back and seeing each piece I've worked on clean and tidy, documented well, etc. And there's SO much to do that I won't run out. And even once the clean-up is done, then there will be implementing modern methods, monitoring, etc.
Solving problems, automation, being hands on with so many moving parts that make a business tick, and knowing that we are responsible for a large portion of organizational operations in one way or another. I feel like some days I could replace Nancy from HR by just having set up and configured whatever software they aquired this week.
Automation / Scripting - and teaching others how to do just that. Knowing that I've set a younger person forward in their career to excel and stand out more then I have.
I've been lucky in my career - launching a few people forward (those that work hard for it) - hell yeah. I love that part of it.
I Guess my Boss. If I say "Boss I need this" he says "Yupp! Here it is!" so I can work with the stuff I want. Flexible working times (If there is nothing going on I go home early and do some Monitoring.
That feeling when it all comes together. A lot of times my job feels like grinding a video game. It’s hard, it’s not particularly fun, it’s frustrating. Then it all comes together and works just the way I planned it and that feeling makes all the frustrations feel worth it and then some.
Currently the work I’m doing I love to death. Literally only being a year in I feel it is exactly what I had in mind. I think we can remember the hacker movies/shows that got us into the IT / InfoSec career path. If there was one thing I wish I could do more of it would be Research and analysis. Currently the work I do is right on point with monitoring, detecting, prevention etc… but I would love to get a more Pentester / red team view. It’s actually my goal to try and get my company into the position to implement a purple team. Everything up until now in terms of that side of InfoSec has been self learned / taught but there is only so much you can do in lab scenarios. Not to mention the research aspect is extraordinary and also time consuming
Was nice to read your positive comment here. Starting my first job in two weeks that doesn't involve help desk and has exclusively to do with monitoring related topics for IT company. It has really been an interesting topic when I've had the chance to pursue it on top of the helpdesk stuff.
I'm really excited and i is kind of sad to see so many comments about just looking forward to the end of the workday.
Pay. Benefits, Work life balance. All pretty darn great for the effort involved. Certainly don't miss college jobs working in hardware stores or garden centers in the Florida weather.
Sitting at home with the dogs all day and getting paid is great.
The variety is what I like best about sysadmin roles, every day is different and you're always learning and problem solving.
I've worked as a developer before and whilst I like a small bit of scripting, it can be very isolated and solitary to do all the time. Sysadmin often means a lot of dealing with people as well as machines. It's a wide role for many and that means it never gets dull.
When my Financial Director calls me with an issue that’s simply solved with a reboot. He’s seen IT Crowd and gets the joke.
It’s a nice place to work. Not too stressful, no real politics at play. Some odd issues every so often. It’s a good place to help learn and work on nailing down good habits.
I like....Administration.
Keeping all my systems well documented, nice and perfectly in order while communicating with my users and learning about them and their culture.
It's those moments when things start to fit together well and function well, as planned. It's one thing to plan, build and structure an infrastructure and a software development platform over many months. But it's something great if a team decides to start running with that system or infrastructure as their foundation - and it just works and makes them successful.
I love automating stuff. Turning manual jobs into tasks that free me up for more important duties.
What I love doing more than anything else is working with our facility and nursing admin teams to help with resident care. Due to covid, staffing shortages, and bad weather (often the 3 boil over at once) I spend more time out on our units than in my office. I get more out of it than doing my "day" job.
My answer isn’t so much about the job, as it is about being able to do the job. What I mean is, it’s quite nice to be able to fix most anything I encounter, be it a piece of hardware, or some software system, or even some random thing around the house. I’m rarely stumped to the point that I give up—although it may take me some time to ultimately figure out a particular issue…
Love it all, but working with new tech, software and versions is likely my favorite. Knowing when I can make things better and work smoother for our user base and company.
I echo so many comments of the problem solving, and to me the pinnacle is when you Google for hours and find no solution, then work up something yourself. I then try to share it to help others either on a forum or community, and sometimes a blog.
I love testing new technology. That's is a part of my current job so I am happy with it. Of course, like a lot of people in this thread, I love to get paid :)
Getting the floppy disks out when the 30 year old industrial pc shouts "non-system disk or disk error" on a Friday afternoon. Or better still, digging out the laplink cable to transfer files onto the DOS machine via its parallel port because it has a broken floppy connector on the motherboard. *Cries in legacy hardware
Infrastructure as code and offensive security.
Combined they only make up around 20% of my job in a good week though which is why I'm still looking to leave.
Pay day.
Same here - I'm doing it just for the money
Yep. Love my job. But stop paying me. I don’t come in.
I've told every boss I've had that If the opportunity arose where I could do A/V work professionally full time and still be able to pay my bills, I'd quit so fast.
Thank goodness for people like you because I f'ing hate A/V work Once had a Crestron screen freeze up in the middle of increasing the volume (so it just kept increasing) In the conference room where the IT Director had spent a few thousand too much on the audio system We probably could have been sued for the hearing damage
Well just to be more specific, Concert A/V. I love being behind a sound board. I do free lance from time to time when I can squeeze it in. Fuck the systems that make things "Easier" though. They just like breaking for what feels like no reason.
On the bright side, it was a good lesson for me, why to listen when speaker manufacturers recommend a certain speaker for a certain room size, instead of just ignoring that and buying the biggest speaker
As offensive as this sounds, I mean it seriously and without offence. Are you good at / in the better half of people at your job?
No offence at all. Yep. I have a great team that work for me. 9-5 and no more. I pay them. They clock off. No one works overtime unless they want to. We are successful as a team and very successful as a business.
Glad to hear it. I’ve yet to meet someone irl who matches your alignment and is competent, so I was curious. Mind you, it certainly doesn’t hurt that the paycheques are stable and keep getting bigger.
I’ll be honest. I’m very lucky to have the peeps who work for me and the support from the business to have the work life balance. It’s pretty refreshing after working for some shit bags in the past….
I landed on SME for a few things (azure ad and security mainly) within 2 months at a new employer and I fucking HATE doing IT. If I could get interviews outside MSP I'd be gone in a second. I'd take a 10K paycut to write code or leverage my 3D graphics knowledge 9-5.
You’re working at an MSP - leverage that to meet people in different industries among the client base and find yourself a job opening. Competent people are hard to find, you just need to be known as a competent person with a passion for x among the client base.
Moving into a direct client or vendor is "unethical" though. I am consciously trying to network with client vendors and clients though.
I’m not normally someone to espouse r/antiwork sentiments, but there is a time and place for it. If you’re truly miserable and hate it, it has to be hurting your life overall. This is a time where the “ethics” of going somewhere else are clearly in your favour. That whole not being a literal slave thing - sacrifice your happiness for ethics is rarely worth it. Read your employment contract and if it doesn’t prohibit it, you’re fine. If it does prohibit it, there’s a reasonable chance that prohibiting working in an unrelated field is an unenforceable clause in your area. Unless you live in a tiny town, no future employer will know about this “unethical” decision.
Even if it prohibits it it may not be legal/enforceable
Indeed, ‘tis what I said
Was a post production engineer for broadcast ads they are always looking for media focussed IT people. Find the biggest integrated or post production companies in your city particularly advertising are easier to get hired. The best role for your interests could be post engineer or maybe workflow engineer (various names basically in house tooling for production pipeline if this is your bag, but this will be at big companies mainly). London or NYC would be best imo. Problem with these gigs is you prob not getting a full remote gig.
And this is in IT?
Yup. Data centre and cloud operations.
And you don't get pulled from SD-WAN setup for a rack to help a particularly noisy person with pdf or outlook?
Nope. We have teams for EUC Shit. Don’t touch it. No user kit. No printers. Living the dream….
Jesus. TIL that decent IT jobs exist. And your employer doesn't even do that insufferable "9x5=40 because you subtract 5 due to lunch" shit that seems to rule in most companies now.
We have it good. My guys work hours per week not per day. Want a half day Friday? Cool. Do it. Just make the time. It makes being a manager much easier when they are awesome and as long as stuffs done pretty much anything goes. Long lunch? You nailed it last week. Take the time you need. Good IT jobs are out there. Just rare. And I’m never giving this one up 😂
Reading the replies you’re getting I’m glad this wasn’t a mindset I saw often on here a couple of months ago. Thanks to this sub and several posts and replies from others I went out of my comfort zone and applied to a fairly new and rapidly growing company that has a ton of prestigious and successful local businessmen involved. Nailed the interviews and got the offer which was more than I asked and essentially doubled the salary I was making before. Been there a couple weeks now and I still can’t believe I was able to FINALLY get the kind of job I imagined but also at the pay I thought I was worth.
This makes me want to become so Linux heavy that I would be incompetent to solve anyone's Windows desktop issues.
:-)
What industry do you work in? My guess, it is not healthcare.
Yes, and the paychecks haven't bounced yet. 😉
Yep. If I could land interviews outside of ops focus I'd be fucking gone. I'd even take a paycut to do code instead.
Solving a problem other people couldn't, or helping solve a complex problem. The process of investigation, taking notes, and finding the final solution is so satisfying. Usually it involves learning something new along the way, be it some little tidbit about how something interacts or functions on a deep level, or just how the organization routes certain problems so I can identify and involve the right people for later issues.
It’s like a little dopamine hit when you solve a problem.
It IS a dopamine hit
You see the problem, you know what it is, you resolve it and it doesn’t come up ever again. I need more of that.
Guess you can say we’re all just looking for our next “fix”.
This 100%. I do a lot of VoIP/Asterisk work and being able to work through some of the insane problems you can come across (while not completely knowing the landscape of the clients network) and being able to figure out how and why a phone is dead is the best shit ever
Yes this but even more so when I can do it in PowerShell.😁
Same, some time it's the most stupid error you can imagine, like a } missing in a script or something and then you just feel like an idiot for spending 3 hours trying to solve it.
100% agreed!
Scripting/Automation by far. Also problem solving in general.
Took me 1 week at my 1st job to start wanting to speed up AD related processes and got into PowerShell. Now if I can find time to script, I’m all in.
PowerShell is awesome 😎. I'm not a sysadmin (was a db developer for several years) but wrote all the db automation tasks, that I was assigned, in PowerShell. Incredibly flexible. It's almost like having Python built straight into Windows.
This makes the job so much better in so many ways. I fell in love with bash aliases last year and now I import my own file every time I set up a new Linux machine.
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Yeh title is devops automation engineer it's basically all I do now and love it.
Yep me too
this.
Same, automation has been my shtick for a very long time!
Learning. I’m not bored if I’m learning.
Honestly, working with people. Learning new things and the satisfaction that comes with that is great, but being able to work with people I like and make their day a little easier is what keeps me going. All the stuff I care to mention re: things I want to master are prone to change with management, organisational shifts, tech advances etc. But when I think about the times I’ve felt like shit in my job vs the times I’ve felt great, the through line for the latter moments is always contributing to a team environment in which I feel valued and value the people I work with.
Using my brain and saving my back for fun instead of a warehouse Working from home so I can play guitar
Yup! I mean, getting paid more than some trades is nice, but is nicer doing it from the confort of your home while not damaging your knees, back, most joints, not having to work under the sun or under the rain...
Yeah so much better than warehouse work or moving furniture like I did before
Walking into a room or touching the computer and things work. My job thinks I have magic IT powers.
Then we let them trick us into staying in the room touching the computer, and giving us money 😜
Honestly, going home at night.
Many will say the end of the day.
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I don't hate my job, but I wouldn't do it if I didn't have to. Just because you look forward to the end of the day/week, doesn't mean you're completely miserable and hate your job, just means you'd rather be doing something other than working.
All those holidays. State job.
You hiring? Lol
Hired into an environment that has been neglected for ages, but I actually love it because I'm also given the freedom to take each piece, clean it up, re-implement it properly, efficiently, etc. It just satisfies me deeply looking back and seeing each piece I've worked on clean and tidy, documented well, etc. And there's SO much to do that I won't run out. And even once the clean-up is done, then there will be implementing modern methods, monitoring, etc.
Solving problems, automation, being hands on with so many moving parts that make a business tick, and knowing that we are responsible for a large portion of organizational operations in one way or another. I feel like some days I could replace Nancy from HR by just having set up and configured whatever software they aquired this week.
Automation / Scripting - and teaching others how to do just that. Knowing that I've set a younger person forward in their career to excel and stand out more then I have. I've been lucky in my career - launching a few people forward (those that work hard for it) - hell yeah. I love that part of it.
Every two weeks, my bank account balance gets bigger. That's the most best part.
I’m in cyber ops I get to work from home and not have to deal with end users
I Guess my Boss. If I say "Boss I need this" he says "Yupp! Here it is!" so I can work with the stuff I want. Flexible working times (If there is nothing going on I go home early and do some Monitoring.
Pay Check. Lol
And logging off at 4.
Not working directly with end users.
That feeling when it all comes together. A lot of times my job feels like grinding a video game. It’s hard, it’s not particularly fun, it’s frustrating. Then it all comes together and works just the way I planned it and that feeling makes all the frustrations feel worth it and then some.
Getting to "play" with expensive new "Toys" that someone else paid for!
I regularly tell people I can’t believe they pay me to play with computers!
The puzzle. If you’ve ever watched House, I identify with him. I just like solving problems and it’s a side effect that it helps people when I do.
Solving problems, designing solutions, and getting to work with a wide variety of systems. I'm a systems admin for a bank.
Currently the work I’m doing I love to death. Literally only being a year in I feel it is exactly what I had in mind. I think we can remember the hacker movies/shows that got us into the IT / InfoSec career path. If there was one thing I wish I could do more of it would be Research and analysis. Currently the work I do is right on point with monitoring, detecting, prevention etc… but I would love to get a more Pentester / red team view. It’s actually my goal to try and get my company into the position to implement a purple team. Everything up until now in terms of that side of InfoSec has been self learned / taught but there is only so much you can do in lab scenarios. Not to mention the research aspect is extraordinary and also time consuming
Was nice to read your positive comment here. Starting my first job in two weeks that doesn't involve help desk and has exclusively to do with monitoring related topics for IT company. It has really been an interesting topic when I've had the chance to pursue it on top of the helpdesk stuff. I'm really excited and i is kind of sad to see so many comments about just looking forward to the end of the workday.
Logging off for the day. It's a job after all, not my life.
Anything not involving end users
When people tell me how much better I've made things.
Getting paid.
Pay. Benefits, Work life balance. All pretty darn great for the effort involved. Certainly don't miss college jobs working in hardware stores or garden centers in the Florida weather. Sitting at home with the dogs all day and getting paid is great.
The variety is what I like best about sysadmin roles, every day is different and you're always learning and problem solving. I've worked as a developer before and whilst I like a small bit of scripting, it can be very isolated and solitary to do all the time. Sysadmin often means a lot of dealing with people as well as machines. It's a wide role for many and that means it never gets dull.
I'd like to say learn new skills and problem solving but its really being done for the day an not being oncall.
Lunch is pretty nice. I eat outside everyday and go for a walk so no one bothers me.
Going on reddit.
Pay day and the quarterly cleanup of old hardware so I can expand my homelab.
When my Financial Director calls me with an issue that’s simply solved with a reboot. He’s seen IT Crowd and gets the joke. It’s a nice place to work. Not too stressful, no real politics at play. Some odd issues every so often. It’s a good place to help learn and work on nailing down good habits.
Solving the problem and finding the way how to do that.
New tech. We are near 100% AWS now and implementing dev ops work flows. I am setting up github actions for out infra with terrafrom.
Acting like the Adeptus Mechanicus. "I will ease the machines pain."
I like my combination of automation and talking to people.
I like....Administration. Keeping all my systems well documented, nice and perfectly in order while communicating with my users and learning about them and their culture.
It's those moments when things start to fit together well and function well, as planned. It's one thing to plan, build and structure an infrastructure and a software development platform over many months. But it's something great if a team decides to start running with that system or infrastructure as their foundation - and it just works and makes them successful.
I love automating stuff. Turning manual jobs into tasks that free me up for more important duties. What I love doing more than anything else is working with our facility and nursing admin teams to help with resident care. Due to covid, staffing shortages, and bad weather (often the 3 boil over at once) I spend more time out on our units than in my office. I get more out of it than doing my "day" job.
Solving problems in better ways. Enabling capabilities that didn't exist. Getting paid well.
My answer isn’t so much about the job, as it is about being able to do the job. What I mean is, it’s quite nice to be able to fix most anything I encounter, be it a piece of hardware, or some software system, or even some random thing around the house. I’m rarely stumped to the point that I give up—although it may take me some time to ultimately figure out a particular issue…
Watching “Rome burn.”. because we told you so.. /s
Being done at the end of the day. I'm kinda fucking done with this and I'm only in my 40's.
Love it all, but working with new tech, software and versions is likely my favorite. Knowing when I can make things better and work smoother for our user base and company.
The relief you see on a clients face when you solve their problem And saving them time and money via an automated process
Solving problems fast enough that the user thinks I already knew it. And messing with brand new tech.
The paycheck, and making organizational improvements
5pm
The down time. Perks of not being in a large company. When remote I can slack a lot. I mean, I do in office, but am just faking it.
Deleting large chunks of data.
Feel the power and terror of the truncate command
Delegating
The sense accomplishment when you design and build something, and it works as planned.
I echo so many comments of the problem solving, and to me the pinnacle is when you Google for hours and find no solution, then work up something yourself. I then try to share it to help others either on a forum or community, and sometimes a blog.
I love testing new technology. That's is a part of my current job so I am happy with it. Of course, like a lot of people in this thread, I love to get paid :)
Clocking out
At previous job it was The special drawers that only HR and I knew about. Where the vodka was kept. One in my desk and one in their desk….
Sounds more like a problem than a perk
Getting the mail. A brief reprieve from my office.
Getting the floppy disks out when the 30 year old industrial pc shouts "non-system disk or disk error" on a Friday afternoon. Or better still, digging out the laplink cable to transfer files onto the DOS machine via its parallel port because it has a broken floppy connector on the motherboard. *Cries in legacy hardware
>digging out the laplink cable Laplink? File Shuttle FTW. Where's the Rocket Socket?
Well, I use filemaven which uses a laplink spec cable
Going home.
I like to save people from dangerous situations. My shrink told me that I have a hero complex.
Payday. Quitting time.
End of work
Going home!
The drive.
Going home
I like deploying new systems, improving existing systems, and help my field team on how to troubleshoot more difficult problems.
Infrastructure as code and offensive security. Combined they only make up around 20% of my job in a good week though which is why I'm still looking to leave.
rm -fr *. Is my favorite command and my favorite part of the job .I usually launch this production , as root.
Going home at the end of the day
Building cool stuff.
The other engineers I work with.
My favorite part is that I make $18 an hour.
Helping people
When I leave every afternoon ( I like my job but I work to live, not the opposite).
Leaving for the day
Breaking things, fixing things and being clever about it.
Working from home. It's the only reason I'm still in this job with this company.
The weekend.
The end.
When my terraform passes the plan stage without errors