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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. 😒
Solarwinds Orion
We don't curse in this household.
Anyway, guessing it's the classic "sales sold the demo of a perfectly configured setup maintained by a dedicated team, management expects you to make that happen alone on top of everything else you already do" situation? Multiple years into cleaning up the mess of that shit at my place.
Hello fellow sufferer.
Not quite the same on my end but it ended up in the same place. When I started there were already two instances running (one for the parent company and one at my location, which had gotten acquired). Maybe a hundred nodes all together, and our job was just responding to alerts in a mostly out of the box setup. Then my boss got sick of trying to work around limitations of that setup and demanded admin access so our team could at least make adjustments. Which eventually turned into me being asked to add nodes, which turned into me being the primary administrator. Which was actually pretty sweet for a bit because I got to learn a lot, both about the software and the company. Finally convinced management to merge the two installations rather than rely on that EOC garbage.
Then the acquisitions started rolling in.
By the time I walked out there were 2000+ nodes in a dozen locations, and it was still just me and somehow still just a side job.
Orion has its faults but after migrating so many acquisitions from a handful of other platforms I still prefer it. Everything seems like it's optimized for small installations and/or specific platforms. When shit gets that big you need a team to run it properly. Which is why I'm allowed to say "Solarwinds" in my house, but guests are asked to leave if they mention the C-suite as anything but sociopathic leeches.