“gotta see shit to know shit” someone once said to me

It pops into my head semi-regularly

This fits. I denied an applicant recently because he had not yet acquired the level of fear necessary to succeed in the role. Lack of fear means stupid mistakes. I’ll take the battle-hardened veteran any day.

For real.
I joined this team two years ago and at 46 was the oldest with our PO. The tech lead had to leave after my first year. Then the PO jumped ship after 19 years at the company. Now our N+2, who’s mostly responsible for our PO leaving, is off dying in some hospital. The tech lead he finally got us, a mate of his, has done exactly 4 tickets in four months (I did 50 in my first four) and with good reason since he knows exactly none of the tech stack we use. At all. He’s ready to quit, just hasn’t found somewhere else.
The N+3, who joined at the same time as him, and knew the shit he was getting in, admitted to me this morning that he’s having a tough time honestly. The guys around me, all in their twenties and with one or two jobs under their belt have never seen shit like this and are all on the verge of ragequitting. Only thing keeping them is the difficulty of finding a job here as we’re in the arse end of France.
The (paid) students are kinda all taking it in mouth agape.

Meanwhile I’m just like “eh, sure it’s not perfect but it ain’t so bad. You should see the last place I was at!”.

And I still have to swallow twenty odd years of this shit?
Fuck me.

I can’t wait to meet the two people who just did a round of interview…

I’ve seen some shit. But I’m also old enough to not care. I’m a freaking system administrator, not a surgeon. No one has died if their email is unreacable for an hour or two. Shit happens, then you deal with it and that’s all. Difference between a junior and a seasoned veteran is that old guys with battle scars is that the seasoned guy knows that something will break, shit will hit the fan and everything might turn up into a chaos and plan accordingly. Juniors will either endure and learn along the way or crumble.

When you’ve been in the business for few decades it’s not that big of a deal to cause an outage. You know how to fix your shit, you know how to work with a severely crippled environment and you know how to build the whole circus from the ground up. And you also know that no matter how disappointed or loud the C** suits are, they’ll calm down once you get them out of the hole.

Just today I had a meeting with discussion on what to do if some obscure edge-case ruins our ~5k users and few continents wide AD tree. Sure, if that would happen, it would most definetly suck balls to get back up and it would hurt the company bottom line and it would mean few nights with very little sleep, but no one would still die and our team is up to the task to build the whole crap out of nothing if needed. So, it’s just business as usual. But all of us have been in the business long enough that we know how to avoid the common pitfalls and we trust eachother enough that should the shit hit the fan in the big way we could still recover the whole situation.

And still, even if the whole thing burns up in the flames, I’ve got the experience and skillset under my belt which will be valuable to some other business entity. I just don’t care if the main office building is on literal fire. It’s not my problem to fix immediately and when it is it’s still just work. I put in the hours they pay for me and do whatever I can but when I’m off the clock the employer doesn’t really exist in my world.

This is how my tech interview went this week. For every question the panel had I returned a battle story. They were laughing and serious at the same time. Bagged it!

But… HR stuck their nose in and wants their guy interviewed. So now I have to wait a week for them to (hopefully) say, “Thanks but we’re going with Shalafi71.”

I think one if the more stressful shit i saw was a bad driver update that made a specific model laptop completely unable to boot, unless you could get into BIOS to disable audio, then fully purge the audio driver (it was a hidden driver) and do a clean install.

This, with a 5 digit userbase in one location, with most of them having that specific model laptop, while working desktop support. It was practically an IT drive thru at one point.

DoD IT, hell of a way to start out with large scale xD

It’s actually about a security position and the candidate is asking the question.

Where is this? I’m pretty sure I’m overqualified.

Was recently ejected from a job along with a whole lot of other ship subsystems. Something about “downsizing operations in engineering”? Starfleet meatbags can never make up their minds.

Anyway, “has seen some shit” could easily sum up huge swaths of my CV.