Smart Co-workers Considered Non-harmful

At the last couple of places I’ve worked I’ve ended up being the only real sysadmin in the company. While this gives you a fair amount of control over what you’re doing from hour to hour, it also means you don’t have any one with the same professional interests to bounce ideas off or sanity check you; caveat: most Perl developers I’ve worked with have a pretty comprehensive knowledge of UNIX.

At each place I’ve been lucky enough to have some incredibly talented developers nearby to talk tech too but I’ve missed dealing with people that live and breath systems. It might sound weird but I’ve missed being out of my depth.

Today I got involved in a project that’s put me right back in to the middle of it. Managing hundreds of systems without going insane. What’s made it odd is we’re using some ideas I came up with a couple of companies ago but never got time to implement. The guy I’m working with has got involved and in under a day understands it better than I do, has found a number of parts that need attention and has already got a small prototype up and running. And it was damn scary to watch.

The point of the post? If you’re not working for people that are better at your job than you are either change jobs or charge a fortune to make up for missed opportunities. And be thankful for clued co-workers. They make those eight hours a day go so much faster.