Depends on their level of interest and/or knowledge. My job isn’t exciting or prestigious, just niche/specialized. Most of the time when I say what I do, I get a blank stare. If that’s the case I’ll just say “I babysit computers” and leave it at that. I’ve had the conversation enough times that I know it’s not worth the effort to try explaining it further. “Oh, you work with computers? My brother in law is a programmer, perhaps you’ve met him?”
Sometimes people will get the gist of it just from the title, and these are usually the most interesting conversations because they’ve made the (un?)conscious effort to understand something new to them. I am totally down with that.
On very rare occasions someone will actually know what it is that I do. This inevitably leads to trading war stories about redundant alerts to please management, unbalanced power loads, poorly defined environments handed over with little to no explanation, cable curtains, and how even other IT people have no clue what we’re on about half the time.
those who know dot jpeg
I juggled datacenter design/management/maintenance, infrastructure, and enterprise monitoring, but only one of those was tied to my “Senior Engineer” title. The rest were just things that ended up as my job because I was good at them. So my resume looks like I’m lying through my teeth. Thanks, aversion to change!
Shout out to any other Solarwinds Orion admins who got that mess duct taped to their position. Drinking game idea: take a shot for every 100 nodes being managed. Or don’t, if it’ll lead to alcohol poisoning. 😒
Depends on their level of interest and/or knowledge. My job isn’t exciting or prestigious, just niche/specialized. Most of the time when I say what I do, I get a blank stare. If that’s the case I’ll just say “I babysit computers” and leave it at that. I’ve had the conversation enough times that I know it’s not worth the effort to try explaining it further. “Oh, you work with computers? My brother in law is a programmer, perhaps you’ve met him?”
Sometimes people will get the gist of it just from the title, and these are usually the most interesting conversations because they’ve made the (un?)conscious effort to understand something new to them. I am totally down with that.
On very rare occasions someone will actually know what it is that I do. This inevitably leads to trading war stories about redundant alerts to please management, unbalanced power loads, poorly defined environments handed over with little to no explanation, cable curtains, and how even other IT people have no clue what we’re on about half the time.
those who know dot jpeg
I juggled datacenter design/management/maintenance, infrastructure, and enterprise monitoring, but only one of those was tied to my “Senior Engineer” title. The rest were just things that ended up as my job because I was good at them. So my resume looks like I’m lying through my teeth. Thanks, aversion to change!
Shout out to any other Solarwinds Orion admins who got that mess duct taped to their position. Drinking game idea: take a shot for every 100 nodes being managed. Or don’t, if it’ll lead to alcohol poisoning. 😒