I’m fortunate to work in an environment where we’ve been able to pay down some technical debt and stabilize our IT environment. With the hard work of an excellent team, a supportive manager, and some personnel stability, we’ve made significant progress. Working late nights, weekends, and the occasional holiday is now the exception.
It wasn’t always this way, though. The things that I’ve witnessed have made me a better troubleshooter, calmer under pressure, and exponentially increased my knowledge of how things work. I’ve seen domain controllers, and DNS servers fail, aggregates go offline causing VMs to lose their storage instantly, and authentication issues galore.
In this type of technical debt-ridden environment, you get used to phone calls at home and not knowing what’s broken when you walk through the office door. If you like to solve mysteries like “why is it broken,” working in this environment can be filled with lots of highs. One of my coworkers used to refer to me as Nancy Drew jokingly. ESXi host lost network connectivity? Have no fear; Nancy Drew is on the case.
It’s more than just getting used to this type of environment rife with technical debt. It becomes like the crazy girlfriend that you know is bad for you. You miss her like crazy when she’s gone.