ARTICLES ABOUT CONTACT
The “IT Supremous” was a nickname that was given to me by a good colleague of mine that we worked together back in 2018. I was a one man show back then and I hired him to accompany me, on my quest to take over a dead system operations department, trying to figure out everything from scratch. It was the first small step that I took towards the dark side, i.e., slowly switching to management, although I was still hands-on.
Most people like us, that is, people who got a computer at a very early age and fell in love with them, more or less, at some point in the future, they are going to find an IT job somewhere. It doesn’t matter on which computer science field, but most likely we will be fiddling with computers for a living.
We love computers and we are pretty good at operating them. It feels natural to do something related later to make some money, so we can spend it for buying more computer related stuff. So in a way, it’s not a job, meaning, it didn’t start like that, it’s a hobby that we can take advantage of it. We didn’t get involved with this field to make money, we just like computers.
If you are lucky enough, and most people aren’t, you might end up working with a bunch of great guys that have similar interests, have some fun, and get paid on top of that.
So what was the main drive to slowly transform to the “IT Supremous”? Well, there are two reasons. The first one is about tech.
What threw me off from being a hands-on person, (only when working, it is important to distinguish that, more on the next section), were all the configuration management tools, containerization, programming languages with an expiration date, and the emerging cloud “technology”. Add to all that the manifestations that joined the party, and you have a vicious life cycle similar to the Xenomorph’s1. Eventually you have to kill the damn thing, there’s no other way to achieve redemption.
All of the toolchains and cloud providers that I’ve tried, at some point they gave me brain damage. I was slowly detaching myself from the systems themselves and all of a sudden the job switched from a system engineer to a babysitter for all these obscure layers. This is when I realized that I was not having fun. We started skipping system standards, we were creating technical debt, adding layer after layer, and it was getting quite stupid.
Nowadays, as being the IT Supremous, after having an incident, I always ask: “What went wrong?”, because I really want to know. In many cases the system engineers cannot answer this question. I’m not going to blame them. Maybe it’s just a job for them, and perhaps they don’t care. That’s fine as well. And since the system will “fix” itself, why should they bother right? I am not going to judge here their style of work, I guess we all had situations where, something at work that was basically working somehow, without fully understanding why, we wouldn’t touch it.
All I’m saying is, we don’t have the control that we used to. There is always a compromise and to keep adapting to all that is pointless to me. Sure, some people like to surf on these upper layers and they are indeed having fun, but the truth of the matter is that we created a great amount of obscurity.
The second reason, which is even more important, is basically burning out on doing things that you don’t like; mindless maintenance work, every, single, day. I was pushing my luck. I started losing the appetite to start a new project after work. This is way more serious than it sounds (as long as you have money to sustain yourself).
So at some point, I decided it was time to switch specilization. There were two choices: 1) jump into management, 2) switch computer field and go away from all the monstrosities that were created the last decade. I chose the first.
I felt that by choosing the second I was still going to waste time and my priority was my passion for computers. So to me, after all these years, even doing something technically that it’s more fun for a living, simply doesn’t cut it since it affects my hobby time. Perhaps a third option would be to do something completely irrelevant but jumping into management served me well. I actually like it, it’s not as easy as it sounds but I can do it well and most importantly, I can hack at night.
Let me mention also that I have great respect for code monkeys2. You don’t have to like your job, and being a code monkey doesn’t mean you’re bad with computers either. It’s just wasn’t suitable for me, or rather it worked for a small period of time.
Code Monkey think maybe manager want to write god-damned login page himself
Code Monkey not say it out loud
Code Monkey not crazy, just proud
We reached a point where we need one hundred tools to operate a simple infrastructure, which we are going to replace in N amount of years with new, “better” ones. The same goes for manifestations. Why try to understand our own working environment needs, when we can force a “guide” that some corporation wrote? If the market is the driving force, then we’re missing the point.
This vicious cycle will keep going. They will keep making things more complex for the sake of simplicity, but as long as your give-a-fuck-ometer stays at a low level, you will be fine. Keep hacking and being creative.