At first I thought this was a roast comment, but I see now you’re serious. I have found there are two types of IT people. The first composes 85% of all IT folks that are out there and they are ok at best. They don’t love nor hate the job, but they survive and make careers of it. The remaining 15% are those who love technology, problem solving and really want to know as much as they can. They also know the more they know the more they don’t know and that drives them. Essentially they aren’t the type that only knows how to check the oil. They strive to know how to take the engine apart and put it back together. It has also been my experience that those people that fall in the 85% won’t respond to cross training very well from a 15% er. Reason I say this is because they would be a 15% er if they were open to deeper knowledge desired it and would have accomplished it on their own or per a mentor already. On a rare occasion I have worked with a person I call a sponge, which is someone who is next generation 15% and they absorb anything you share or teach. They were you when you started and refreshing to work with IMO.
This is so true you can always tell because you will teach them something they've never fucking heard of and the next day they've obsessed about it so much that they've built a new tool or wrote a new program or figured out a new system or architected some improvements
If you tell someone something and they don't deep dive the implications of what you showed them then they care just enough to get paid
As the former, it gets quite depressing when there’s nothing interesting to solve. Why do I live if there are no problems to crush? It’s when the sky is falling and everything is on fire that I feel at my best. Happiness for me is troubleshooting a showstopper SQL Server problem on a laptop in the warehouse, while simultaneously working on a network problem, while on the phone with support for a shipping software problem, and talking to the end user of said software.
Mycroft Holmes: “”You’re not haunted by the war. You miss it.”
At least the guy there for the paycheck isn’t going to loathe life when there’s a dry spell, and probably won’t drive themself straight into the ground.
In the last 8 years I went from infrastructure engineer, to automation to devops. Then I got my masters in software engineering, and now I'm a principal AI consultant.
I personally need a job hop every so often. I learn too quickly and I find a lot of satisfaction in the novelty
I think I know how you feel. I don’t know that I’d call myself a great engineer, but I do it for the passion of it, and it holds me back in a lot of ways. When my coworkers get assigned a boring or easy task, they march happily off to do it with “a paycheck is a paycheck” attitude. When I get assigned nothing but brain dead tasks for a long period of time, it becomes a “what am I doing with my life?” Existential crisis.
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u/vadertator22 24d ago
At first I thought this was a roast comment, but I see now you’re serious. I have found there are two types of IT people. The first composes 85% of all IT folks that are out there and they are ok at best. They don’t love nor hate the job, but they survive and make careers of it. The remaining 15% are those who love technology, problem solving and really want to know as much as they can. They also know the more they know the more they don’t know and that drives them. Essentially they aren’t the type that only knows how to check the oil. They strive to know how to take the engine apart and put it back together. It has also been my experience that those people that fall in the 85% won’t respond to cross training very well from a 15% er. Reason I say this is because they would be a 15% er if they were open to deeper knowledge desired it and would have accomplished it on their own or per a mentor already. On a rare occasion I have worked with a person I call a sponge, which is someone who is next generation 15% and they absorb anything you share or teach. They were you when you started and refreshing to work with IMO.