You know, I think my main reason for going into IT was that it is constantly changing and there is so much to learn that it seems constantly new. I started in consulting and loved it. Everyday somewhere new, a new task with new technologies. After a while, I grew curious of what it would be like to work in a dedicated environment. This period coincided with a time of downsizing at the consulting firm I was with. I took the opportunity to hop on at a data center with Lockheed Martin. At first, I thought it would be exciting, learning about clustering and the different issues that are involved with large enterprise environments. Honestly, though, it’s pretty boring. At our office, we have no senior systems administrators, so there isn’t really anyone to observe or learn from. I’m not saying that the guys I work with aren’t smart, not by any means. We just all lack that experience and the other benefits that come with it. The environment we are in is pretty stale, it has been running for a couple years now and is 90% stable and with everything being redundant, there never seems to be an emergency. Really, this is what most companies want and something that I would love to set up, but i feel no connection to the environment as I had no part in the installation or configuration of any of it.
One thing that has made my time with Lockheed wonderful is the scripting. I got to really dive in and learn scripting and WMI and how AD works because there are constantly large, mundane tasks that need done across the network. I started doing a lot of scripting. I think that my big debate right now is “Where do I want to go with my career?” I like the consulting work and administration when there is opportunity for change, but really, i feel like my true passion for IT comes with the idea of creation. I loved setting up networks from scratch, from the routers, to switches, to deciding which servers, desktops, and OS’s to use. There was a lot of control there, but I don’t think the control is the main thing that made me love it. I have been studying up on Visual Basic and .NET 3.5 lately, to try to get into application development. I would like to move to C++, but already have a fairly solid knowledge of VB to start there. My thought is creating versus maintaining, obviously creating is more exciting(at least to me). I guess I’m not sure what I want, I just feel a bit burnt out and can’t seem to focus today. There hasn’t been anything too exciting for me to post lately, either, so I thought I would just throw my thoughts up as an update.
