Let's see your First Gen Toyota Tundra in scenic places

Oh yeah, should have said senior linux systems engineer. I've done remote, went remote when I first moved up to the PNW. I'm weird in that I still prefer hybrid and have had good experiences with it with the right team. One or two days a week in the office for meetings, two days a week wfh for actual productivity, and one floater for whatever is a priority that week. Floater day was usually good for heading to the DC to swap out some dying hardware and get out of town for the day.

My biggest problem up here(besides the years of on call burnout) is that this is MS territory and I hate windows. Linux roles are pretty rare around here outside of being a rack monkey at a data center or doing contract work for Intel, also usually just rack monkeys.

I've used all the various VM flavors. Hypervisors are the one thing that I've had to use windows for over the years, but usually just a VM. I have a small VirtualBox cluster at home for spinning up test environments, and manage my home Ubiquiti network from a linux VM on my NAS.

I remember when the change started getting pushed on us to pivot from sysadmins to devops. Coworkers and I were wondering why we needed to start splitting part of our time with our assigned dev teams, still do our own jobs, and still be on call, without a bump in pay. The company I was at at the time was also drinking the Atlassian kool-aid straight from the fire hose and trying to force it on us. Stop planning out your long term projects, be agile, move fast and break stuff, blah blah blah...

I listen to guys around what I presume is both our ages that work in middle management talking about how much easier their lives have gotten with AI. Every time they start going on and on about how they were on vacation for a week and all they had to do was ask their AI to summarize the chat and emails they missed, I want to slap them and ask them if they realize they're training their replacement?

The other problem with all the cloud stuff is a lot of the junior and mid level people now don't even know how to use a command line anymore. If it doesn't have a GUI, they can't use it. I've had friends in larger corporations explicitly told to stop talking about doing things from the CLI because it's making other employees feel uncomfortable because they don't know what he's talking about.

Also I'm sure you're totally aware of how rampant ageism is in tech. All of us that have been doing this for 30 years are expensive and we tend to have expensive healthcare now, much easier to hire someone in their 30s for less money and they can either figure it out or burn out. Either way, profit!

@CC80guy I'm guessing Y2K was a lucrative reason to come out of retirement for you initially? I really wish the linux date bug wasn't still 13 years away, I'm sure as it gets closer there's bound to be a lot of work for the crotchety old neck beards to come out of retirement for. Not really keen on waiting that long though. I still keep debating teaching myself Fortran again. I took it in college, and I know it's still relied on a lot in certain industries, also know that most of the people that know it are retired now.

Hahaha, I ride motorcycles so I don't have to deal with tech and I keep maps in my truck.

I'll take my truck somewhere scenic and take a photo of it this week for fully derailing this thread.

 

Y2K did, in fact, provide a lot of contracts for me, especially the closer it got. Mentioning Fortran brought back some memories. At one time I was coding in COBOL, Fortran, C, and 4 variations of Basic, Quickbasic, etc, even some Assembly, and eventually HTML & Java. Those were hectic days I do not miss. These days I still do a bit of HTML5 but for personal stuff. Mostly just tinker with my ham radio stuff.

 

OMG - Burroughs B6700, ALGOL, punch cards, oh shit - I dropped em, syntax error, syntax error…PTSD!