How to DevOp 3: My Saga Begins

Part 5: You're a slob, I'm a slob.

3 parts in and you're still going strong. Congratulations, young (now old?) reader. If you're just coming in at this point, please feel free to read part 1 and part 2 of this series. Or skip ahead, I'm not a stickler for reading things out of order. I would like to keep my writing with a carefree attitude and keep all my former employers as anonymous as possible, assuming they still exist. My hope for this series is to help guide the less-experienced in the tech workforce, to let them know that their struggle isn't unique, and that other people haven't always been the steel-plated fortresses that they seem to be. This isn't just an IT phenomenon. Salespeople, managers, and every other boardroom warrior that you know is exactly one come-hither motion from breaking down in an HR meeting room when the company seeks a different direction, so don't feel bad when it happens to you. And when it doesn't, don't feel too good either. I'll get into the reasons why later on.

Last I left the story, I had been rounding out my time at a certain energy conglomerate-slash fund management-slash real estate company. And boy, I was tired. I'd seen something like four years go by without a meaningful raise and needed to find a new place to roost and reset. So one day I took a call for a potential position and somehow managed to land it (after many failed attempts). My chances were not quite as bad as would be in today's market, but it's always bad and it always feels defeating when it doesn't happen, so I followed up that call with a measly excuse for being sick and a long drive out to the suburbs to meet with the hiring manager. They decided to take me on as, yet again, a junior desk-level employee. And it was here that most of my memories of what can go well and what can go nightmarishly wrong were formed in the network-server-cloud apparatus that is modern information management.

During that initial meeting, I had been sold on the idea that I would be providing guidance and support to a number of different companies that occupied the same building on a pair of rapidly developing roads in the Northwestern edge of urbanizing Chicagoland. For those in the know, this was the corner of Buffalo Grove, just above Lake Cook Road, across the street from a golf course (and adjacent to much nicer office building that I never saw the inside of). What I didn't know was that the core business was essentially a carbon copy of the boiler salesroom from Glengarry Glen Ross.

Salespeople are interesting folks. I like them a lot. We used to joke that the home I grew up in was the 'House that Fonts Built,' from back in the day when my father worked as a fonts sales representative for Linotype-Hell, the German supranational corporation that brought you gems such as Helvetica Neue and Simplified Arabic. His tenure there, and the stories he told, would've made Don Draper blush. And of course, we would constantly make that joke: ABC. Always. Be. Closing. My time working at the real estate company taught me a lot about the urgency and importance of keeping these people happy. So of course I fucked everything up on my first week at the new job.

I can still remember it with piercing clarity. My job had been to plug in some ratty old computer for a presentation in a room where they didn't typically happen. But I failed to plug in the damn network cable after watching it power on, hopped in my car, and went home for the evening. The next morning, at the big sales meetup, nothing would turn on properly. So I got slapped with a PIP. Which is usually a death knell for any job. My boss then, who I would learn later on, was prone to yelling because he was too large to move ably, informed me that I'd have to promptly fix my shit or move on, in nicer language. This was a scary development, and leads me to my next corollary: get it done and test it out. Oddly enough, this has a lot to do with devOps. We'll also get back to that later.

Rather than walk to my tickets, I started to run. I made sure every contact with an end user ended in a gleaming review. When someone threw a laptop at my head, I caught it and moved on because I needed this work, and badly. I wasn't about to give up before the last glimmer of life had been crushed out of my body. When something of a fairly uneven miracle occurred. Let me explain.

One of my colleagues, whom I'll call Paul, was a very heavy smoker. And, granted this was a sales office, practically everybody smoked. But I remember clearly that this dude's car had an ashtray that absolutely overflowed with Marlboro Lights. And one day, when we had been tasked with rotating a number of servers into a third-party data center, he sat down on the stairs and said he wasn't feeling good. I, the recently PIP'd employee, wasn't willing to wait and find out what was wrong, and kept on plugging servers in, only to come back 20 minutes later to find building security leaning over his palled, but still animated body. My boss called and told me to take the day off. Paul had suffered a heart attack on the job. At 40. Which leads me to another general rule: take care of yourself. The world doesn't begin and end with code, networks, and data centers: but it does end when your heart stops beating.

Paul took a few weeks off. My position was rejiggered so that I worked under a separate boss. When he came back, I got to learn all about the complaints that had been made against our mutual, shouty boss. We hired a new Linux technologist who taught me all about cool stuff like apt and grep. But I eventually saw that this environment, for all its physical adventure in hardware and sales, was not for me. So when I got another call expressing interest in a new position, I snagged it as soon as I could, told HR every horror story I knew, and forgot that building entirely.

Last summer, I played in a golf tournament at the course across from that building. It's since been demolished. Sometimes, the universe bends towards making you smugly smile before pitching nine balls directly into a lazy river. That's exactly how it goes.

Part 6: DevOps in the Flesh

It's finally here, the part you've all awaited. Or maybe you knew was coming all along. For years and years, I'd worked on various chunks of onboarding employees, updating MacBooks, swapping out hardware, and by Jove, doing everything manually. Except for one time when my boss had shown me a cute, 3-line PowerShell script that would functionally forward emails from an Exchange server to an external email address and domain. It was that bare scripting knowledge that would catapult me into the world of easy living, three-martini lunches, and wondering where all the physical hardware had gone.

Okay, the martinis were a joke. I don't think I'd had so much as a lunch beer since one of my jobs in Part 1, but there was a nice salary bump and some new responsibilities. I found myself working at a consultancy, one of those fascinating places that are very nice for the right kinds of people. And thankfully, one of those joints that will give you exactly enough takeoff room for you to slam directly into the side of a mountain as soon as you're unready, and will do absolutely nothing to prepare you for the rock wall that you'll soon find yourself facing.

I'm going to keep myself as brief as possible, because I'm sure these snakes will find some fascinating way of pushing an NDA against me. Once I was hired, I was told to learn Nutanix. I started to feel out the learning videos that they had been pushing at that point in time, until our parent company (a large bank that no longer exists) pivoted when the internal IT team revolted against the prospect of using consultants (which they technically owned) and preferred to keep everything in-house. It was then that I was, like Polk's Army, sent down to Texas to free the Yankees from a different kind of oppression.

It was here that I started learning a product called Hashicorp Vault, now owned by the friendly family shop that is IBM. Vault is a piece of secret-keeping software. You knock on a given door, grant the password, and receive a secret piece of information. How you generate that secret is irrelevant: the important thing is that it is as secure as any physical vault, and that it can basically run on a potato. I still use it today and love it for what it does.

What I didn't love was spending 9 weeks in the sweltering San Antonio heat, flying home every weekend for enough time to kiss my girlfriend (then my fiancee), and hop back on a plane to fly right back. I also didn't enjoy having to publish polished instruction manuals on how to use the software, essentially rewriting the information available freely from the software provider's website, which should be tragically out of date six months after our contract ended. But in truth, nobody cared so long as the checks cleared. I was a warm body in a warm office in a very warm part of the world. I think we spent more time deciding on where to go to lunch than actually completing the product. I passed with flying stars.

This is, tragically, how consulting works. It might operate better off individual mercenaries who can vend their expertise for what it's actually worth, but this organization thought it was the next McKinsey or Deloitte without the offices in Hong Kong and London. One thing they did do properly was steering young folks into their portfolio before they knew better and working them thin. For whatever reason, companies will pay a lot of money for a fresh face to tell them that everything they know is wrong and leave in two months. The rationale behind this judgment mystifies me and any number of MBAs to this day.

I consulted in Madison for a while. Eventually I moved on. This time, I got a job that was actually worse, working as the head of IT for a health startup in Chicago. Not having to leave home every Sunday was a slight improvement, but I think that I had been fooling myself into believing that domesticity equaled superiority. This was not a great time for me: while the office view was excellent, the work was stressful for everybody, and we were constantly trying to fit the wrong hole with the peg that was available. At the end of the day, for the second time in a row, I felt no qualms about leaving my position. And this may happen to you: not every spot is a zinger, despite the joy you'll feel when you get any given job.

I took some time. And after that, there was a big change.

My hope with this series is that whoever reads it can understand that there are ups and downs to this field. One day you'll be marveling at your own significance, glowing under the assumption that you'll always be relevant in your field. Then a few months later you'll be trapped under what feels like a grueling march, stuck day after day researching what seems like mindless minutiae. If this section was a bit of a downer, try and understand that this period was sort of my Empire Strikes Back phase, the dark days before the big, exciting conflict. Sometimes the story gets better; but always, it changes.

Stay in touch for the next update. It is closer than it appears.