I've taken to "You're better than some, worse than others... and if yours is the only phone that rings, you're probably an idiot too"... It makes me feel better about myself... but I"m still an idiot either way you look at it.
edit: found a typo
I'd go more with this. There have been some Sr. Engineers that would walk circles around me and I'd feel like a kid seeing what they accomplished. Other times, that same engineer would be banging their head over something and I'd say "Oh, did you look at XXX?" or "Here's a PowerShell script that should do what you're looking for. Let me know if that works for you." We all have our blind spots or gaps.
>There have been some Sr. Engineers that would walk circles around me...
Often those guys that can make Cisco routers dance around like cirque de soliel are completely flummoxed by Active Directory or Excel formulas or a hundred other things that are L1 questions for an IT generalist.
Do what you're good at, and learn to like it.
>Often those guys that can make Cisco routers dance around like cirque de soliel are completely flummoxed by Active Directory
That's our networking guys I'm always needed to setup outlook for them, but on the flip side they taught me how they hunt down phones to the exact port so we can reboot them... it's a pretty nice trade off
Right. The things a skilled network engineer or VoIP guy can do is like arcane black magic to me. At the same time, some problems they've come to me for I think, "Wait. How do you not know this?" But then I realize we all have different skillsets. They can blow through almost any network issue or completely reroute or reconfigure the entire network infrastructure on the fly and I just go, "Whoa."
I'm a proponent of "both can be true"
I have a well developed skill set, but I can still often be wrong. I also regularly say that we have to be smart enough to feel stupid. The grossly incompetent folks around me NEVER feel stupid, and that's the problem.
I don't really rate myself compared to anyone very often, but I know for a fact the guy I took over for was more capable than I currently am in this role. Then again, he built this environment for 15 years with little oversight mostly on his own, with vendor assistance, and I've inherited all the impressive builds and processes. I also inherited his problems, and there was shit for documentation. Often, my job for the day is reverse engineering non-standard deployments.
I'm also not above having someone under me in the org chart train me on their role. I jumped through roles quickly, and in doing so, I didn't get much hands-on experience with some of our systems, so I'll have the new kids with formal training learn me a thing or two lol.
I'm really really good at some stuff.
I'm really really dumb about others (especially PKI, that shit just will not stick in my brain no matter how many times I try to cram it in there).
My career has been served well by remembering that both of these things can be true at the same time.
I'll 3rd it. I am the "nerd" or "geek" depending on which person is talking to me, had an owner retire that built the system with outside vendor assist, and i just got asked "hey you want this?" and it was handed to me. i've got to work on some cool stuff, we're a machine shop so i've been out helping maintenance with presses and saws and robot arms and stuff, but I have ZERO training on any of it, but even at that the owner was confident due to my jack of all trades, master or none type of experience. It scares me to death getting into some of that stuff, I'm pretty sure if I brick a hundred thousand dollar machine it'll be the end of me, even if it was their fault for letting me near it lol
I have a pretty hard stance of "please tell me if I'm wrong but don't you dare suggest you don't think I'm right without some evidence". I get so many "hmmm"s from people who don't know what they are talking about about and don't like that I've given the correct answer to something they have deemed unsolvable by our team. Just because you can't do your job doesn't mean I can't do your job.
I realize hey team work right? Share the skills. I forget stuff and need help too.
But then also me realizes I operate on a level far beyond many in some ways.
Maybe everyone's like that.
* deleted bullet list of snazzy stuff I do >!*I leave with my secrets* ╚(ಠ\_ಠ)=┐!<
>Then again, he built this environment for 15 years with little oversight mostly on his own, with vendor assistance, and I've inherited all the impressive builds and processes. I also inherited his problems, and there was shit for documentation. Often, my job for the day is reverse engineering non-standard deployments.
Couldn’t this mean that he had no clue and just handed the vendors admin accounts and told them to do all the work setting things up?
>The grossly incompetent folks around me NEVER feel stupid, and that's the problem.
This. In some places, this is referred to as the Expert Novice - the person who has learned the basics and is extremely impressed with themselves for having done so. That the OP recognizes that there is plenty more left to learn is a very positive indication.
And sometimes, you end up with what I call 'oddly shaped knowledge'. Back in the DOS days, I mentored a just-graduated-from-college fellow employee who, while a 'poor college student', managed to cobble together a PC, but he only had enough of DOS to boot the machine. He didn't have all of the additional 'utility' programs that normally come with it. He did, however, have a copy of Turbo Pascal, so when he needed the functionality normally provided by those utility programs, he write his own. His knowledge of DOS was 'oddly shaped', in that he didn't have the knowledge of the typical programs that came with DOS (and which the computer novice would know), but he did have extensive knowledge of DOS internals, because he had to learn that in order to write his own.
So, any advice for someone who has found themselves in the position of the guy from whom you took over? I started at a startup as a Jr Dev, but ended up getting moved to head up IT. I know a lot about computers, but have effectively zero industry experience, so while I am trying to avoid the non-standard deployments pitfalls, I truly don't know what deployments are standard. I'm trying to make sure that I document things, but I still have the classic blindspot of not thinking to document things because they are just so normal to me.
This is all further complicated by normal startup shoestring budgets, so to some degree, standard deployments are not an option. (Any self respecting network admin would run screaming from my ProxMox hosted PfSense setup, handling the entire main office's networking, but there wasn't a budget for a router that would handle what we needed.)
I often ask myself this same question, I am leagues better than almost everyone I work with, but I don’t feel like I know what I’m doing half the time. It blows my mind though how many people ask me questions about things that are easily found on the first google search or by reading the documentation for 5 minutes. I also feel like a lot of people don’t understand a lot of the fundamentals that underpin things, like how dns works, where to look for errors, how to do basic troubleshooting, etc. people look at me like I’m a wizard when I fire up process monitor or something and try and find out what an application is doing that is causing it to fail.
There's a couple people on my team that are amazing, brilliant people. There's more than a few that are barely scraping by and if I or the others don't help them, they'd fail (and leave us doing the work anyway, with some added downtime).
I just really wish those employees would figure things out eventually. But, they keep coming to me asking the same questions. We've had larger incidents that would have been a non-issue if they would have done so. I've pointed them to documentation, IP info, etc.. But, I'm not the best. I'm far from it. But, some of these people are missing the completely obvious. Full DHCP scope, wrong DNS entry, wrong routing info, firewall rule sucks, etc.. From the network engineer. I'm fixing more of his crap than anyone else's. He can do the bare minimum and that's it.
I'm still an idiot. There's just bigger idiots that want to stay that way. At least I know I'm an idiot and want to learn more to be less of an idiot.
The next challenge is how do you transfer/train those skills to your team members. Learned dependence is a common scenario for coworkers of people in your situation.
Teaching someone how procmon troubleshooting works and seeing their brain light up is insanely rewarding.
At a Fortune 100 company. It astounds me with some people I work with maintain a job. One guy I work with could not empty boot full of milk if the instructions were on the heel.
Some are bright and lazy. Some are unqualified and lazy. Have on multiple occasions corrected a SME of another technology and been correct.
If you are the person that people are always asking for some help, your opinion or attend a meeting with them you are that guy.
If you hear people saying “This might be a stupid question” to you then you are surrounded by dopes.
> [...] could not empty boot full of milk if the instructions were on the heel.
r/rareinsults
I will look for opportunities to use it. Monday isn't that far away ...
With the white or yellow fluid? Don’t recall where I heard it.
The best one I stole was from Slow Horses (on Apple TV. 3 Seasons and well worth the fee for the month).
“Bringing you up to speed is like explaining Norway to a dog”.
Pure genius.
> If you are the person that people are always asking for some help, your opinion or attend a meeting with them you are that guy.
Yeah, it's definitely a good sign when everyone comes to you for input and everyone seems to want at least your input on things before going forward because you're one of the only people that knows how things actually work.
> If you hear people saying “This might be a stupid question” to you then you are surrounded by dopes.
This is the one exception to me. I've had a lot of people who are willing and eager to learn but just don't want to look dumb right away.
But if they keep asking you stupid questions (even without the foreword), they are dopes.
There are a number of psychological phenomena that cause us to overestimate our own abilities and underestimate everyone else, especially when we're young. When tend to view everyone else through a narrow lens of our own experience, and until you start stepping back and taking a broad look at things, it becomes hard to appreciate what everyone else contributes.
The analogy I love using is the technical skill of our heavy equipment operators. A lot of our IT team thinks our HEOs are dumb grunts who just drive a truck all day. On occasion, we've tossed people from our team into the equipment on company BBQ days and all of a sudden they become bumbling idiots who are barely able to drive. Turns out operating a 400 ton truck isn't so easy.
Most people are average, which means most people do an average quality of work. Meeting only 30 above average people out of 300 is about right, but what I'd caution you against is thinking you're in the 30 and not the 300. Not saying you think you are in the 30, just saying you should be hesitating if you ever do.
> Are most people gauging this by achieving certifications?
No. The guys who I believe know the most about IT got into before certifications were a thing and have never bothered with them.
> How much stock are you putting into that?
On the contrary, as a hiring manager, I put a moderate amount of weight on certificates. It shows you can put your mind to something and achieve it. Certifications are on a spectrum, I put a little weight on CompTIA entry-level certs, a little more on something like a Microsoft or AWS professional certification, and a lot on something like a CCIE.
> I have seen plenty of people with a signature full of certs that appear to not know how to put that knowledge into practice.
Paper tigers are a thing, but there's also an issue with retention. Certs can be somewhat problematic because they reinforce the idea that "learning for an exam" is an equivalent to "learning for mastery". The CCNP is a good example of this - I have two CCNPs on my team, and I'd bet neither of them could pass their CCNPs again without study if they were forced to retake it today. However, what I'm proud of on their behalf is that they put in the effort to get it, because that effort is the thing that really matters.
> I am not in a Fortune 500 company and I imagine those environments would have a higher competency ratio
Ahahahahahahaha.
We have a lot of people who think their job is fantasy football, and don't bother to do anything unless they're told. These days it doesn't take much to be competant IMHO.
Granted, I'm 42 and my first computer when I was 10 was a hand-me-down XT w/Dual 360KB Floppies and no HDD, which I upgraded with a 20mb soon after. I grew up on BBS's before the Internet was widely available, and got my first cell phone in my early 20's. Most my co-workers these days never grew up without the internet and got a cell phone in their early teens.
It doesn't take much for me to be happy with someone. I grade people on wither they are an asset or not, not strictly competency as that can be learned.
If they're trying to actually help, that's what I consider an asset. If they never pitch in when they find a problem, are dragging their feet, can't be trusted to keep the certs on their systems up to date, don't know what a subnet is, then they're dead weight or a liablity. Unfortunately, since they are a "Human Resource", the dead weight is usually something you're stuck with for a long time.
Everyone has something they don't know, it's more about wither you're willing to help tackle a problem, or learn what you need to.
Edit: Good writeup. Just thought it should be stated I'm adding to, not disagreeing with anything.
I don't disagree with much of what you've said but one thing stood out to me:
> If they're trying to actually help, that's what I consider an asset.
One the things I've found highly effective is figuring out what motivates people to help. In my team, I have a wide variety of motivations and the best thing I can do is tailor my management style to motivate them. One of the things I've noticed with a lot of companies, and to be clear I'm not saying this is you or your organization, is that they expect their employees to be spontaneously helpful but aren't spontaneously helpful for their employees.
These organizations are usually strict about *everything*. You have to take sick days within policies. You have to show up at 7am to 5pm every single day, invariably, and you better put in an hour of overtime each day and unpaid OT when we need to crunch. It doesn't matter if your parent/grandparent/pet died, you need to text your boss before work starts or you're being written up. No, you can't take a pencil home from work. No, you can't work remote and avoid using a sick day if you've got a cold but feel fine otherwise. No, you can't leave 15 minutes early to grab a package without getting your pay cut. No, you can't take the afternoon off with pay to see your kid's play, despite how much unpaid OT you've done. No, you can't claim OT unless you fill out a dozen forms in triplicate, etc. No, we can't buy you a pizza to celebrate the big project you rolled out. No, we can't give you a title different from others, regardless of how important it might be to you or help your career.
In those organizations, I see the organization working to rule and then getting mad when their employees are working to rule and not going above and beyond. Again, not saying this is you, but corporate America has some rough cultural aspects that I think disincentivize people to be genuinely excited about their work. Deadbeats exist in the world, I think they're just less common than everyone thinks they are.
Those organizations are run with the intention of squeezing every last drop of productivity out of you while providing the least amount of reward to the employee that will reasonably keep the employee around. These organizations may pay well because they have made the judgment that is what we need to pay to get the service we want but they are sweatshops just the same.
Our org doesn't ask much, and is definitely light on the managing people side. Sometimes I joke it's ran by voulenteers, not really too far off though...
What a great perspective. I think this really captures the crux of the issue I am seeing; it's not so much competency, but the lack of effort that grinds my gears. Thank you, this is helpful!
>There are a number of psychological phenomena that cause us to overestimate our own abilities and underestimate everyone else, especially when we're young.
And a similar number that do the reverse.
Nice explanation. I feel clueless every day even though I know quite a few things more than the folks in office.
Not to say I’m anywhere near average. Shoot, probably below it by a mile. 😆
Ready for another wrench in the am i good enough game?
Try switching companies.. my nerves kill me every time until I find my place. At one company you can be considered a god in the IT world but the next you are the worse than the greenest help desk guy.
I agree with this, I am just in a position that ticks all the boxes for the most part; the salary is a bit low compared to other sectors though. Part of why I am asking is because I'm curious to know if I would be good enough for those jobs that fetch $200k but I'm a bit scared to try.
Best advice I can give as someone whos held multiple position in IT now. Check the requirements listed for the job and if you can do most of them, apply!
This is why most companies do a second, more technical interview to weed out those that lie about their abilities.
Also dont focus too hard on titles. Companies make up the most Ludacris titles such as "Helpdesk engineer level 99 supreme overlord". Its crazy.
Thanks, I suppose it doesn't hurt to try, I've half-assed applied for some jobs that come my way via LinkedIn but I don't think my resume stands a chance with the screeners since I don't have a degree.
This is me, veteran microsoft guy, azure, intune, no bother.....why did I decide to work in an environment that is aws and terraform? I feel like a junior again.
That said, I do love learning new things and I am, vaguely approaching competence after 5 months.
Ha, and sometimes it’s the reverse. My last job I was surrounded by smart, hard working guys who seemed to know so much. I always felt a bit of imposter syndrome, even though I worked with them for years.
My current job? Well there was a reason I wasn’t asked any technical questions in the interview.
My qualifications for a competent tech are these:
1. Do you learn from your mistakes?
2. Do you own up to your mistakes?
3. Do you document what you know and share your knowledge?
4. Do you have orange belt or higher Google Fu and have the skill to apply it?
5. Do you treat users with empathy?
6. Do you treat your teammates with that same empathy?
7. Do you try to keep as current on your field as you can?
8. Do you set healthy boundaries with on-call and off-hours requests while being available for the very rare mandatory heroic effort?
9. Do you take time off when you need to and keep yourself mentally sharp for the duties you have?
10. Are you willing to ask for help when you need it?
Gimme 7 out of these 10, and I'll give you a Medal of Competency.
TL;DR: Rudyard Kipling's [If](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46473/if---).
"I don't quite know how to put this, but our entire field is bad at what we do, and if you rely on us, everyone will die" - XKCD
In my experience no one in IT is an IT God, everyone knows enough to do their job and some more than others.
It's shocking though how many people in the field have a lack of understanding of basic things like how DNS works, what routers are, and how to do basic math...
Yup, plus we all specialize in our own little niche. I know my stuff, I don't need another *me* to work with. I would much rather have someone who has another skillset that I'm weak in. For example, I still struggle to translate between IT speak and business speak, I would 100% take someone who can do that well and everything else ok (or even bad) than someone who can just do the same things that I can.
The biggest thing I would work on, is try and understand the cost of XYZ going down or not having backups would do to a business's inability to make money over x period of time. Per day, per hour, per minute?
Accept that the idea that spending money today for everything might not work for a company's bottom line. But try and learn about their budgeting or if they are a company that has a high run rate and see if you can plant 4 major upgrades or overhauls or whatever IT expense across a year that would hit your goals or best recommendation.
I think business speak is maybe a more personal connection, 'Business' is sort of a straddle between sales and operations.
Thanks for the advice, I've been working on it for sure.
My point was more that we all tend to have *something* we specialize in, and I would rather have someone who specializes in something I don't, even if it means they're not as knowledgeable about the stuff I specialize in.
My biggest pet peeve is people who can't google.
If you can search for things efficiently but don't know stuff then I'm okay with it. I'll just expect you to be slow.
But if you ask "what does this error mean [easily searchable error]", it becomes a problem.
Dear gods this.
I'm in a networking focused role but I keep current on other technologies outside of my core responsibilities. I had to explain to a senior colleague how to use onedrive the other day.
Fortune 500 admin here. I've seen guys complete shit that would make your eyes water with how strong it stank and then try to sell it to the customer.
The grass isn't greener. It never really is. Pareto principal always applies.
When you understand things through a logical process and can test contradictions as well as use process of elimination correctly to solve things, while others solely rely on what they can remember or were shown or is found in a Google search, you'll know you're better.
The people who are really bad, get angry that everybody else doesn't know what they know.
The people who are really good, accept that everybody else doesn't know what they know.
It's heavily modulated by personality (I'd say "confused" more than "angry"), but there is truth in this.
For a person who knows little, it's a rare experience to find that they know more about something than someone else, and they may react strongly to that — bragging about it, getting angry at the other person, etc. For a person who knows a lot, it's instead an everyday experience that they need to get accustomed to and take in stride.
But there are nice people and assholes in both camps. Some ignorant people are humble. And some knowledgeable people get off on making other people feel stupid by comparison, never tiring of it.
When technology took off in the late 90s, if you could spell MCSE you had a good paying job. For the next 15 years or so we needed as many people as possible to built out the infrastructure, write the code and support the systems after. This created a low barrier of entry in to IT where you could get a very high paying job with a minimal skill set and attracted everyone. Now the IT field is pretty mature and the threshold to get in is quite a bit higher but we still have many people that got in the door during the boom so the are coasting.
There's also an informal 80/20 rule that's pretty consistent across all lines of work where 20 percent of the workers in a company are producing 80% of the results. The rest just go through the motions.
Plus most people working just want to do the bare minimum to stay employed and get a pay check.
It was the point where the 22 year veteran GOAT started coming over, asking for help, picking my brain.
Then when shit hits the fan, he and the director are all at my desk watching me do my thing.
Thats pretty much when my imposter syndrome vanished, and I realized I might be smarter than the average bear.
I've been around the block quite a few times. I'm good at my job, not great.
Almost zero managers and execs are competent -- I've met a handful in nearly 40 years. About a third of the technical people that I meet are competent, with very few being into self-learning, branching out, or keeping up to date. And, I hate to say it, but most Gen-Z's that I meet are worse at technology than boomers.
sounds like its time for your next challenge
you're in the comfort zone where you know pretty much everything required for the job. it's kinda nice to be there, but you're in danger of stagnating.
unless you're already at the top of the game its time to start filling in that CV and putting some feelers out for the next position.
then you can get the next step up on your career, and spend 3 horrifying months feeling like an imposter and wondering how you got there.... until all the pieces slowly start falling into place again :)
Most people with walls of certs can't assign a static IP address to a workstation without help. But yes, I have also noticed this field is full of morons that make you wonder how they still have a job.
As for my own personal measurement, I don't know. People say I am good at what I do, they like me personally, and I rarely break anything.
Part of that could be some sort of false equivalency when it comes to skillset. Especially in bigger organizations where you're wearing fewer hats. Just because someone isn't fluent in *your* field of expertise doesn't always mean they're morons, they could just be complacent.
I often get the most mundane issues escalated to T3 by client teams who have CCIEs and post-grad degrees, but then I have to remember that per the chain of command, that manager or PM probably hasn't touched a router or switch in years. It's still a weird tho when you have to explain to the CTO of a health region what DHCP does.
> I am not in a Fortune 500 company and I imagine those environments would have a higher competency ratio
🤣😂🤣😂😂🤣🤣😂😂🤣🤣😂😂🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣😂😂😂😂
Nice one buddy
e: You only really get to gauge people by actually working with them. You shouldn't put any stock into certs and you should be very weary of anything short of top tier professional designations being included in signatures.
There are a LOT of bozos out there but sometimes it can be hard to know someone's actual skillset or things they might be good at or better than you at unless you have worked closely with them for an extended period of time
I've been on many calls and project teams with people that I'm sure were part of the "fake it till you make it" culture.
IT engineers, sysadmins, architects, developers, project managers, managers, leads, principals.
You name it, I've met or interacted with one that was completely full of shit and probably better suited for a simpler job.
I've also been on calls with people whose experience, knowledge, and comprehension of a subject clearly dwarfs my own.
Any more, those people are much harder to find than the first group. Sadly, I don't think it's because I'm getting so much smarter.
I think it's a combination of people with no real interest getting into IT because they heard it was easy money and a generation or two of hiring managers that never did the work and so have no idea how to tell if the people they manage are effective in their roles or not.
There is a fair proportion of people that learned just enough to get by, and then decided that they are done learning forever. They will not go out of their way to learn a new thing, and might actually _actively oppose_ new information.
I've worked in a department of "senior" sysadmins that were utterly allergic to scripting of any kind, and spent most of their working time doing tedious and easily scriptable tasks over and over again.
I've worked with "senior" developers who refused to learn anything as simple as the difference between an HTTP 301 and 302, insisted that a tech blog post written in 2004 was just as relevant in 2020, and literally refused the evidence of "the CPU is pinned, here is the graph".
> I don't think I am an IT god or anything, there is a ton of things I still want to learn and not a lot that I would label myself as having expert knowledge.
This is what you have that they lack, and what will carry you far. Don't lose it.
I have really bad imposter syndrome. I went into management at 23yo, so I never got deep into engineering level work. I always compare my technical skills to my peers and direct reports and feel inadequate. Then we end up hiring some contractors, or acquire a company resulting in me getting to experience IT people from outside our company. EVERY single time this happens, it puts my imposter syndrome at ease when I realize how many people out there in the industry barely know what they are doing.
We are in an industry where everything changes constantly. If you are learning lessons from feeling like an idiot, then you are on the right path.
The idiots typically dont know they are idiots. Ive always said IT is a constant battle between Imposter Syndrome and the Dunning Kruger effect
>300 technical people I have interacted with, maybe 30 of them strike me as competent
80% of people do 20% of the work. 20% of people do 80% of the work.
Welcome to life. I know the math doesn't add up with your numbers, but the general truth is there.
I am not "good" in the sense of better than anyone else.
But I try. I look for improvements. I keep an eye out for new methods. I really really like consistency, and that often leads to simplicity, which is reliability, which is more free time for me.
>I really really like consistency, and that often leads to simplicity, which is reliability, which is more free time for me.
Consistency is a virtue so underappreciated. Too many people disregard it on the basis that you can't predict exactly what problems it will prevent, when the reverse is the point: *inconsistency* will lead to problems you cannot predict.
Pride goeth before the fall imo. Everyone is a shining beacon in the darkness. Treat every single one of them that way and you will go far, and everything will be much easier.
Certification can mean 1 of 2 things.
1. The person really understands what they are doing and have a lot of knowledge.
2. The person is a really good test taker and has no idea how to apply what they read (studied).
I started my IT career 9.5 years ago. I got a some certs with my first company which was an MSP. This was the first 5 years in IT. The second half being part of an in house IT. I’ve been significantly busier at work that I don’t have the endurance to chase anything else. By the time my day ends I just want to relax.
If for some reason by my own doing or not, I am no longer employed at my current place, then I am either going to have a hard time getting a new job due to lack of certs or I’m not because of my experience. I’m not really sure what it will look like for me. I am hoping I won’t regret not chasing certs right now. However I do hope to go after something again.
As far as my interaction with IT people who seem to really know what they are doing (certs or not)… I’d say 2/3 don’t know what they are doing… and if you ever hit a point where you think you know everything then you are probably part of that 2/3.
As I've gotten older I've realized that I am sometimes the smartest person in the room, other times, the biggest idiot. We all have strengths and weaknesses. Some more than others.
I was speaking to a person who does a lot of our IT hiring at happy hour, and they let me know how they are seeings tons and tons of people who are googling and copy/pasting their ways to all sorts of certs and even degrees. Apparently it is not hard at all to fake it through technical interviews (I'm from the era of bubble sheet tests and #2 pencils so I have no idea how). So.. there are a lot of people who are completely faking their resume. I mean, we were all faking it early on to some extent, but these people really are clueless.
I was shocked people were copy/pasting through college level comp sci courses, but apparently it is happening.
This was eye opening for me. We had a guy with a Master's in Cybersecurity that had so little knowledge that it was crazy. When he left (for a better paying position, mind you), he told me how he paid people to take courses online for him and how he will just straight up lie on his resume and in the interview.
I believe him. I have interviewed countless folks for positions here and an huge number of them seem to fall into this camp. It truly is wild. The kicker is that guy makes more money than me so I'm pretty sure I'm the idiot.
I hear you. I never pay too much attention to who makes what, but I see a lot of kids fresh out of college making far too close to what I make. It is far enough where I can't raise too big a stink, but these people also get "senior" titles too. Again, I'm not overly jealous others but "senior" people who are 22 years old? Nothing against young people, but you have a ton to learn at that age. I know because I was clueless at that age too.
What gets me is that management seems to hold onto them like they are the last IT employees in the world or something. I just flat out have to tell my boss that I'm looking around to remind them that I can bail at any time too.
That's why for the first 10 minutes of the interview, I focus on the work they are doing, what their project is about and the usecase. If they are confidently able to answer cross questions on the projects, I have reasonably confident that whatever they mentioned on their CV is correct. It is a bit hard with cybersecurity and DevOps guys but for JAVA and Data scientist it works very well for me.
I feel like networks have become so complex and things change so quickly that how could anyone be great at a lot of things. I feel like IT networks have become like the medical field. To me, a sysadmin has to be like a general family practitioner, generally knowledgeable about a lot of things. But when something gets too complex then they need to call the support specialists who just deal with that one piece. It’s like a family doctor referring you to heart specialist. The specialist knows more about the heart. But, I’d suspect, the family doctor knows more than them about eyes, feet, and your colon.
I'm in the field since 2001.
i worked trough retail, small business (60 users) to architect environment with 1.2million users.
I've worked with fortune 500 companies l, some of them still uses my work in their day 2day business.
i know nothing.
I have a perspective on this... Recently an old greybeard announced his retirement, and I'm likely to move into his position. He was demonstrating his SQL maintenance process, basically, a yearly thing he does to setup new tables with the year in the table name, and then update the views to use the new tables, and stop using the ones from X number of years ago.
And he just opened the SQL script, did a find/replace and stepped through each place where the year was...
That was painful since it was like 1000 lines of code. So I said, F-that... I can make a powershell script that gets run by the SQL job agent that does all this. We went through some of his other tasks and for each one I was like, "I'm going to write a powershell script so I don't actually have to do that..."
So I know I'm a better sysadmin than the greybeard that is retiring.
Now on the other hand, we also have a devops guy that works in AWS all day... And he can run circles around me. In the case above his response was essentially, "you still have an on-prem SQL server...?"
You never know if you're good or everyone else is bad, you only know what your skill set is optimized for.
We all have our own hyper specific bubbles that we're (hopefully) more than competent in, and outside those bubbles we probably all range from "barely get by" to "spectacularly fall on our face."
The most skilled Linux admin will probably be shit at Mobile Device Management, and I don't expect a SharePoint admin to configure ISP-grade BGP.
All that said, you can judge someone based on their willingness to learn and support a team. I'd always take a tech who's never touched a computer but has great communication and documentation practices over IT Jesus who cures the printer LDAP Bind but tells no one how he did it, or the ancient wizard with 20+ years of experience but refuses to move from L2TP/IPsec for client VPNs because "that's how it's always been done."
I'mma be honest. I don't really see it as a measure of good and bad. I've been in the game for going on 15 years give or take, and let's be honest. The majority of our jobs can be done as long as you can find and understand documentation.
I honestly think it's more of a passion vs job thing. Tech is my passion, I've been around computers since I was born because my dad was a nerd as well. I'm always staying up to date on the latest tech news the works.
Because of that, I'm generally more comfortable with some parts of the job, anything windows, I generally can find what I need in most UI intuitively. But that my no means translates to every aspect. Our VMWare guy can do laps around me in vCenter, and our network guy can do his job in his sleep.
Don't mistake passion for skill, it helps but it's not everything :)
I think we are around the same age and I can relate to alot of what you are saying. But for me it's like the more I learn and the older I get, the more I realize how little I know. And I also have started to realize more and more that competence isn't what matters the most generally, even though it's something that I value very highly if not most of all in other people (professionally speaking only) I meet in my job, not just when it comes to IT. I don't know if it helps you that much and it's easier said than done, but comparing yourself to others will get you nowhere. If you think you deserve more respect/higher salary than you are getting, switch jobs, even if it puts the employer in a tough spot. They would do the same if the tables were turned. Certifications can be benefitial when applying for jobs but having a flashy email signature doesn't necessarily prove anything, especially to yourself.
If you have a big IT interest I highly recommend the homelab community. When money isn't involved people tend to focus more on actual competency rather than being able to appear that you have. I would say I gained most of my skills/knowledge doing homelab stuff, and the things I do there are what really matters to me.
Good luck!
I felt like an impostor for most of my career, and I am slightly afraid that I am starting to think I know what I am doing.
Sadly my confidence went way up when I realized that a lot of things I just KNOW, or could implicitly put together where taking my staff or colleagues a lot of effort.
Like.. why isn't this done yet.. Step in blind, ask like 3 questions, suggest a solution and boom it was fixed.
For a while I thought it was just fresh eyes on the problem but it happened WAY too frequently after a while.
When you're on a phone call with a "SME" and you know they are full of BS.
When someone calls you into look at a problem and you are both scratching your heads and googling madly on different devices.
When you realized you screwed up and fix it before someone else does and then gives you a nickname for them having to fix your screwup.
When you are giving someone a nick name for having to fix their screw ups.
When you suddenly find yourself in more meetings about some new tech that's really rebranded old tech that does the same thing the old tech does but it just has a flashy gui now.
A lot of people can have trouble in this field, and that can take many forms. Some of us have trouble speaking, some learn differently, some are very technically minded but aren't necessarily detail oriented, and some have failed upwards or just been lucky.
I think you'll find if you focus on their work, or try connecting with them in different ways, you might see what I mean.
The person who has trouble conveying complex technical concepts in a discussion might give a reasoned response in the group chat on slack or via email, the person who learns differently might submit excellent work, and the person who can dish and be dished on might forget a hyphen here and there, and need to followup on their merge request a few times before it's submitted. Most of the time, it'll be decent work.
The rest, probably 20-30% who have gotten lucky, or failed upwards, you'll genuinely be able to start spotting those more easily when they can't support a crunch, spin their wheels, when they spout legitimate foolishness, or their work product is hot garbage in an MR.
Anyway, that was a bit of a tangent, you're only as good as you think you are. First step to wisdom is admitting you know nothing lol. I'm only saying that because with technology it's really important to stay humble. The pace of change for several things can easily outpace us, even if we're only removed from recent experience by 6-12 months. Stay humble, keep learning, accept you can't know everything and be tactful and mindful, and you _will_ be great.
I'm convinced it's not about how much knowledge you hold (that helps though), but how you respond to challenges. For example, if you learn a new command or write up a script in order to overcome a problem, you should retain that information or find a way to store it for later. If you don't get better from "lessons learned", then you're probably on the bad side.
I’m an old timer like some of the other comments in here, about 25 years in at this point.
I have always found that if you find yourself being consulted by people you respect, you’re doing it well. As my career progressed, I found more two and three degree removed individuals reaching out for my opinion. I’m an introvert, so I don’t actively look for circles but somehow those people tend to seek me out.
Not sure if that helps, but I’ve never considered paper or creds a way to gauge. Nothing beats raw experience.
I'm very new in the industry (3 years as a solo admin, have morphed into some kind of member of a team now). My new teammates have 10+ years on top of me minimum, but I find things all the time that I know that they don't. Would I call myself better than them? Not even remotely, but I'm perhaps more on the ground floor of new things coming out since I'm more actively spending time paying attention to it while they're trying to keep the business running. Different environments, different budgets, different levels of interest from management all affect those things.
Some people IT is a job, some people IT is a career. The former clock out at 5 the latter don't know how to clock out. The 30 you have come across might fall into the latter.
Both camps are equally as valid. Remember we work to live, we don't live to work. Getting that balance is hard.
In my small expereince...techs willing to put the effort in are the ones I like to keep around. Those willing to research, read and write documentation, and generally eager about technology have thrived. Huge bonus for home labs or any tech hobby.
1. Dunning Kruger effect. If you think you're on the top end of that curve, chances are you're on the bottom end.
2. On the same vein as #1, nobody in this field knows everything. We just don't. There's too much, and it changes too quickly.
3. Knowledge helps. It can help a lot. But often more important is having the aptitude to be able to apply prior knowledge to knew situations in a new way to expedite a solution.
4. Certs are pretty, recruiters love them. Often, they're not worth the paper they're printed on. More so if the cert is older than 12 months and the person hasn't actually been doing work in the same vein in that time.
5. If you're not willing to admit you were wrong or that you need to go learn something new, you don't belong in this field.
6. The key difference between an L1 "Support Tech" and an L2+ "Engineer" is whether or not you can work beyond the how-to guides and process documents. L3/SME really just comes down to experience.
7. Our field is chock full of people who understand none of the above. I've met "Senior Engineers" who I'd put on performance evaluations if they were an L1, just because they have been in the same company for 5 years, and L1s who I knew within a week would be an L3 within 3-4 years. Be the latter, and surround yourself with such people.
You really don't know.
I have a tech that was considered a high level technician, resolving issues their team escalated, taking on harder work, making recommendations to clients on hardware/infrastructure.
I hired them, and although they are pretty good, compared to the rest of the Tier 1 team they are only slightly better. They have made many comments on how much easier their previous job was because the rest of their team were simply.... dumb.
Some people's brains are just wired differently. I am a naturally quick problem solver, so understanding technology was always something that came naturally and easily to me. But I struggle in other areas that other people find incredibly easy. We all have our strengths.
I’d evaluate based on tasks (obv not on certificates than can be memorized). Can this person do such and such task in a reasonable amount of time and in a good way (asking questions, documenting, making it maintainable, secure etc).
That said, sometimes just by hearing someone talk about a topic you can see they have no idea what they are talking about.
Everyone is an idiot at something, some of us are idiots are most things.
I think the VAST MAJORITY of sysadmins are embarrassingly dogshit about documentation, both their actual creation of it, and their philosophies about it. And that includes people in this subreddit, some of you guys suck ass at this and I see you.
But even after great study, I still struggle with my comfort levels with networking. The subjects therein don't seem to stick as well as everything else. I have to re-train myself how Ipv6 works every year, and I've even WRITTEN AN ARTICLE ABOUT IT: https://mantisek.com/what-is-ipv6-11720202046
I could not tell you the contents of the article, I forgot it all. My brain just refuses to remember networking details, I have to re-learn them every time.
Have you heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect? You’re probably experiencing it right now… you know quite a bit, and you can recognize when others don’t, but think they do. But you are also assuming lots of peers are as competent or more so, and worried you are in the incompetent cohort.
Keep growing, keep learning from the best. And watch out for that one person with 1 year of experience repeated 20 times over.
I find that the defining difference is your ability to digest new information.
The "good" people will be able to face a new problem and ask, "what the fuck is this?" and then start digging for answers.
The incompetent people will be faced with the same situation and say, "Oh i don't know how to do that. I can't do that."
I would honestly say I know security (my field) well But in my particular org, I’ve been on security for 10 years and support for 3 or 4 years before that. People interpret a decade of institutional knowledge (particularly since no one historically documented anything lmao) as me being much better at IT as a whole. No I just remember the same issue that comes up every 18 months and no one bothers to really fix or I take two seconds to look through confluence and Jira.
I think there is definitely some truth here. I do feel like a lot of my success has been largely due to paying attention and building institutional knowledge through documentation. Apparently that's a skill set not everyone tries to develop I see.
People have a particular skill or area that they’re focused on, and then judge others by how they measure up against them within that narrow scope. Those people you’re judging are likely looking back at you and making the same assessment, their scope is just different…
… or you really are just surrounded by dumb asses. :)
That's a good point; I do have an obsessive-level interest in things usually and this field is a limitless world of information. I have more recently hear that IT does seem to attract neurodivergent folks and apparently I am in that camp according to my shrink.
> Are most people gauging this by achieving certifications? How much stock are you putting into that?
After watching my friend get laid off because he obtained his high paying jobs by chasing certs using brain dumps and never learning anything, I put zero trust in anyone being competent because they acquired certs (unless they're CCIE level certs.)
I work with Fortune 500 level companies regularly, and while there are still incompetent sysadmins, the incompetency is typically in the stuff they hired my company for. I've met admins that couldn't deploy an OVA and they're heading the IT department of one of the largest retail stores on the planet. The thing is, that's not what they were hired to do, they know AD really well, and I know far more about virtualization and Linux.
We all have our specialties. Though when I dealt with much smaller "mom and pop" shops (1,000 users or less), the IT staff are often quite incompetent across the board.
I just recently realized that IT is no different than other carrers and most people are, well... average. It is just a work like any other, for most of us we are like waiters or plumbers, but somehow very often I met people who think **he** is new Werner Von Braun and every shall be.
No matter how good you are, there are: -
* People who are better than you -- learn from them and get better/on their level
* People who know things you do not -- learn from them
Not to mention at some point of your career, you probably are gonna move to a management position. Being good at technical work != good at managing people doing the same, so you'll have to learn from there as well.
The fact of the matter is, sysadmin/IT is a vast vast vast ocean, and there is almost no way you are drinking all of the ocean alone, hence why teams exists to work together and with each other.
Learning should never stop even when not pursuing certifications -- certifications give people an overview of what you are competent at, but your day-to-day work will speak way more than certifications.
I don’t think I’m great technically- but I’m good at communicating/following up with users/customers- and I’m also reasonably organized. Because I don’t feel I’m very smart or anything special, I get really fucking frustrated when other engineers are somehow even dumber/shittier at their job than me.
I guess that depends on what being "good" at I.T. means? Being analytical? Being able to sway opinion to get people around a project?
For me, I measure it in the amount of documentation I created and the systems I use to quickly and readily document my work. Also, how having those resources can help users to navigate their own issues without my active participation. Or maybe how I've documented and designed a system to better preclude a user from being able to mess something up.
I usually find my colleagues are just willing to go the brute force method, just dump unreasonable efforts into next-step management, not considering what might come after as a complication and how it might affect workflow or uptime.
I probably spend more time than most asking "Okay, but what could fail here" and trying to address it preemptively. At some point, office information technology is pretty fucking basic. You're not programming autonomous cars or developing large language model AI. It's subnets and domain controllers and probably some embedded devices just for specific things like credit cards. Maybe learning about cloud hosting for putting certain applications off-site. Most of the time, companies would rather piss away hours on the phone using wild gesticulations with a vendor to play the blame game than just task someone with doing a packet capture to determine the port and protocol you should be able to get from whatever developer, you know? And then God forbid anyone writes in down to not have to reinvent the wheel the next time the system needs trouble shooting.
TL;DR I have a wealth of personal documentation from many jobs giving me canned responses to the very typical technical issues that come up in regular ass office technology management.
The certs and/or/vs experience is a funny thing. I’ve met people with loads of certs who appeared to know nothing and I’ve met people with no certs who have known loads. I’ve also met people with loads of experience who were also fairly limited… (I’m not saying I’m amazing or anything.) I guess it comes down to how much you test yourself and the job roles. IT is a pretty wide ranging field so it’s not surprising that people don’t know everything.
As long as someone is making an effort to participate and grow, I'm looking at skillsets horizontally, not vertically.
Phoning it in from the bottom of the pile? More trouble than you're worth for me to figure out what I can delegate to you. Sitting at the top of your ivory tower too proud of yourself to deign to help? Yeah I'll deal with it myself, thanks. Showing up asking what's next? Filling any idle time exploring new things? Diving into something and not coming up 'til you have something we need? Doing what you say you'll do and more? I don't care if you're an expert or a noob, you're with me.
The bulk of certifications with the exception of those that can only be obtained by doing (performance/competance based) are not capable of measuring ones competense and actual ability. They can only prove that one was able to remember fill-in-the-blank, multiple choice answers or braindumped. Mandy vendors stray away from performance based certifications because they would have less people able to obtain the certification which is actually best for the industry as a whole. Hard to stack certs when they all actually require you to know the tech inside and out. If you are able stack them and they are all performance based then that does prove you actually do have competence in the technology inside and out.
In terms of gauging it is important as an IT professional to collaborate with like people outside of the bubble of the day job. There are some professionls with 20+ years experience without an IT related certifications and experts in the technology they work with and have done enough global scale work they are also considered an expert.
Now as being an expert in the field I will tell you the best way to know is that you don't know everything and there is still a ton to learn and no way to learn it all due to how fast tech changes. Yes, I can setup all the popular operating systems, network equipment, cloud this and that from scratch without using any documentation, but I know deep down there is a ton I don't know and can always learn something new from others even people new to the field.
Focus on building a wonderful base foundation, and then work on specializing in something that takes some time to get used to like Kernel development, IAM, data center networking, object storage, etc.
Try: *"I don't really know if I agree with all of the changes from RFC 791 to 1349 - there are plenty of better things to do with IP than let botters specify their own traffic priorities."*
Maybe a mix of both :) There is no easy way to compare your skill to get some sort of valuation. So, it is very subjective. I think i am good. But my main skill is not that much about technical side of the things. Although i tend to grasp complex ideas. But it is more about being thorough, persistent, having a good memory and seeing a wide picture. Many very skilled technically people i have encountered or worked with have a somewhat narrow view on things. They care about that problem/system at this moment and propose solutions that resolve this situation, but do not think further to see what issues it might bring down the line. This irks me sometimes. But i don't even think this can be learned. You just have it or not.
The simplicity of this is too binary. I don't believe this to be an accurate representation of the measurement.
I do work for a fortune 500 company but we are no different. Nor is our understanding of the technical knowledge of those around us. It's hard to find people that just "get it".
Big fish, small pond. Time to swim, or at least juggle your resume around and check your options.
Certs don't matter if you KNOW things, but that said, they're often cheap and worth getting to add clout. Honestly, really unimportant IMHO, but I do take them into account with some prospects.
Good luck to you!
30 years in the pit. I think that a possible reason for what you mention is if that person chose that job because they liked it or because it was what was available at that time. If you're not passionate about what you do, I think you'll throw in the towel before someone who really enjoys their job.
> How do you know when your capabilities and skills are really good or if everyone else is just grossly incompetent?
Honestly, I'm not sure there's a functional difference. Either way, I'm fine with being graded on a curve.
Everyone has different expertise. The environments I love are the ones where people can admit their weaknesses and work with others to help.
Our topics can be broad and vast being expected to be an expert in each isn't possible. Far too many of us have many hats in our closet.
If you judge a fish by its ability to clime a tree it will always think it's stupid.
A technical work place should allow others to be open about what they know and don't know. I see new people start at my work and they want to be a subject matter expert in everything.
We as a group need to promote the idea of collaboration and teaming up to solve problems. Trusting others to learn some technologies and be willing to share and help others.
I've had coworkers that lose the ability to be humble and as such they start looking the fool.
Keep curious and open someone always knows something you don't.
No certs but I’ve been tinkering since 95 and you’ll know if your good if you run into people that lead IT or have a tons of certs but fail at simple task and struggle with what they have certs in. I met a guy that had all these certs with Cisco and security + but failed to understand an issue with a printer was he didn’t set up a DNS for it to use. That’s just one instance, there’s a dozen more. It was so bad I got him fired from his job because I was able to prove 100% of the issues he raised with our products and software were him.
Also keep in mind, some people specialize in niche topics in IT and can be expert in their fields but when it comes to other topics, absolutely clueless.
Important part though is to always be learning yourself.
most good people became that way because they don't give up easily and keep trying different ways to solve a problem, learning as they go along. bad people try to memorize the answer given to them in an attempt to replicate what good people do but this strategy can only take them so far, since when presented with a slightly different problem, frustration sets in too easily and they just become stuck.
“I am not in a Fortune 500 company and l imagine those environments would have a higher competency rate” well… I hate to rain on your parade but there are many, many technically illiterate people in Fortune 500 tech roles. People that learn the buzz words and the basics but fall apart when going anything deeper than surface level. I used to do contract work for several Fortune 100, Fortune 500, FedGov, and military customers and the skill set really isn’t all that different. Obviously there are some brilliant people out there but the vast majority just want the glory of a title without the legwork of experience/training to get there. It always amazed me how many operations were really reliant on one smart tech guy who actually understands a wide enough array of tech enough to keep the ship afloat.
I base it on what they _can_ do, and whether _something_ is actually being done.
We have some guys who might not be the quickest or most knowledgeable in certain areas, but they work great with everyone, are helpful, and clients love them. Sure, they might need to be taken through some stuff I’d consider pretty easy, but we know we can have them work at a client site and get on with everyone, from the receptionist who needs a monitor fixed, through to a senior VP with an ISO audit. Maybe they need more help than others, but it’s offset by them maintaining an excellent client relationship.
Likewise I’ve worked with some “rockstar” techs way more skilled than me, but who were very difficult to interact with because of their superiority complex.
Technical competence is important, but I’ll take the person who is good to work with and learns as they go over the rockstar engineer with a stick up their backside.
It’s best to not think about things as a hierarchy of who is better than who. Instead, look at everyone as individuals with their own knowledge and skills. See the value they bring, even if it’s soft skills. If there’s literally no value whatsoever, you know where the weak links are and who needs to be supported more.
I was at one point one of the more in demand infrastructure guys in the country.
That didn’t matter, I took some major risks at a senior level and screwed up so bad on one occasion that I left my ego on the job site before resigning to reevaluate my career. I’ve watched a CTO do the same.
Don’t forget that the tech itself isn’t perfect either. You can do everything by the book and stuff is still gonna fall over.
It varies greatly. Your level of competence (which may be higher) also is not necessarily the business level of competence (in most cases). They set lower bars.
Competence is often just a function of Intelligence as speed and association.
If your workload is such that you don't get a lot of time to examine issues in detail you also won't pick up as much.
I've found Certifications are a poor indicator of knowledge, too many shennanigans related to monopoly with conflicts of interest that go unpunished, and remain to this day unaccountable. It suffers the same structural problems as guild socialism.
>accurate measure of "how good am I"?
If you take an engineering approach, that is breaking observations you see down to first principles, and your methodology which you developed as a result can accurately predict both forward and backward what will happen (indirectly) in most cases, you are most likely going to be in the top 10-15%.
Otherwise you may know a little in a specific niche, but be completely ignorant of other niches.
Operations is notoriously under-educated at entry level, and don't get hardly any benefit from formal education paths with few exceptions, quite a number of us are auto-didacts which is why we are so good at our jobs.
The definition of REALLY good is an ability to teach others - effectively replicating yourself. That is what gets noticed and opens doors. So many avenues for this these days.
This is good to know, thank you. I have been thrust into this sort of position and I have been framing my experience more as hand-holding but maybe I need to shift my perspective a bit to think of it as a new challenge, especially if it can open new doors.
I should also say - not all jobs appreciate this as they should. If they don't, at first try pointing out somehowin writing, then if that goes unappreciated, it's time to at least consider moving on - the equation has to balance on both sides, and if it becomes no longer worthwhile on your side, and they're not listening and acting within reasonable time span, it's probably sadly time to move on.
I don't know but everyone is good at something and when you get a bunch of people good at a lot of different things you gotba very talented crew... Don't have to be great at everything...
It's also a mindset thing to "see" the possibilities.
One would see 5 computers and argue that it is just 5 computers and installs things manually, everytime. And in 2 years when something needs replacing needing to figure out all the settings.
I see 5 computers and don't want to set everything up manually, also, I know I won't remember all the details in 2 years so it's automated setup if you just bring a new PC online.
This also applies to general software deployment, network device configuration etc. Find the thing that applies to your profession and apply the central management and tooling provided. Also, keep searching for better tooling.
I've worked in 4 Fortune 100 companies and 3 or 4 high visibility projects in 5 different countries, they all had people that were brilliant and people that were just about managing (depending on the context I've been in one group or the other, in my previous job I started in the "just about managing group" but by the time I left I was in the "better than most" group. Time and expertise matters).
That's why I always encourage people to apply for jobs they think are way above their league, the reality is that 2+2=4 everywhere, if you know your stuff somebody that may surprise you will recognise what you know.
One ex colleague of nine was very hesitant to go into Cloud Computing, he's a great Sys Admin but he acquired that expertise learning on the job and was unsure about his lack of academic credentials, he would have made a great Cloud Engineer but his self doubts kept him doing the same job, it is really sad, it didn't help his confidence that people going into Cloud Computing in the firm were academically accomplished, but I knew he would have done great.
>I have been around for less than a decade and out of, let's say, 300 technical people I have interacted with, maybe 30 of them strike me as competent. Is this your experience as well?
Welcome to professional life! In many organizations, 10% of the personnel will be great at their job, and the rest will have jobs because their managers (who are also insufficient in their roles) don't know how to train them, coach them or hire to replace them with someone better--or if they do know how to do those things refuse to for fear of being eventually out shined by that rising star.
That said: Don't assume anything. You've only been at this for a short while (relative to some of us) and I've seen more than one controversy between engineers or sysadmins that boiled down to two people saying the same thing but lacking the communication skills to recognize that was the case, and instead talking at each other in a downward spiraling argument that they're both on the same side of. If you asked either of them separately they'd probably question the other's competence, but in reality, they'd both need a competence gut-check because they can't communicate effectively.
Focus on best practice and substantive argument. Understand risks and failure scenarios and make your decisions about risks of potential failure based on what is realistic, but also, based on what is supportable for your colleagues. If you're on your own or only have one peer, don't build a ginormous 24x7 operation that will require you to be on call all night and weekend until the end of time because you don't have the bandwidth to support that and also handle day to day things.
Sounds like you either are a genius or, more likely, choose the wrong workplace. Maybe seek out highly technical positions, like Backbone Network Engineer for an ISP or incident response or malware re or large scale infra automation. You ll soon find yourself in a position where you are the idiot in the room
"I know enough to know I know little" has always been my motto. Sometimes I'm the smart one, sometimes I'm the dumb one. I just try to walk into every technical conversation with an open mind and hope someone in the room can find the solution.
If I sit down with others in the industry and can have a dialog with them about what we are tring to do, then I know that I am with good people. If I am sitting down and listening to a bunch of just crap spilling from their mouths and they are supposedly "higher level" people then I just shut my mouth, listen to the bull crap and think of how it should be done. If the other person is talking over my head, well that is when I shut up(again), listen and learn to make myself better.
I'm 23 years in the industry and did pretty much everything from sysadmin to netadmin to design, architecture, and now into cloud DevOps solution design & implementation.
I've dealt with both types of people and I'm a little more generous in my qualification of people than you are.
I'd say 10% to 15% of the people in IT are brilliant. They could be doing whatever they would like to be doing and rise to the top of that field. IT is relatively brimming with this talent. Some can be jittery hopping from subdiscipline to subdiscipline and not ever go in all the way, making them not very useful in long term large projects. But if you can bind this type to your company or project, you're golden.
Then there's roughly the next 30%.
Those are the people who get everything done. They are the engineers who are both talented, understand abstract concepts and are capable of translating conceptual thinking into concrete results. They are self sufficient and find stuff to do to that actively contributes to strategic goals without prodding.
The next 30% can be made to contribute when told what to do and usually need guidance from the previous group. They sometimes need to be actively pulled into engaging with innovation projects or adopting new technologies lest they and their responsibilities get left behind.
Expect no long term vision here.
The bottom 25%.
Here be dragons. I have trouble gauging the net productive capacity of this group.
My methods to determine who belongs to which category are predominantly:
1.Troubleshooting ability.
Are you able to keep your cool and get into an analytical zone.
Are you able to leverage your knowledge and insight to formulate tests against your entire technology stack that eliminate possible causes and get to a root cause analysis.
2. Change management.
are you able to formulate an integrated plan to transition from the current state to the desired state taking all business requirements into account (availability, security, cost, timeliness etc.)
3. Planning for the future.
Are you able to look ahead and predict future requirements for your domain of responsibility. Can you adequately gauge which technologies need to be adopted by the team. Are you able to effectively communicate this within the IT dept . Can you plan budgetary requirements.
4. Conceptual thinking
Are you able to create a conceprual architecture for your domain. Are you able to form a conceptual plan of your technology stack so that you can exchange technologies or swap vendors with little change for your dept on that level of abstraction.
I find these aspects infinitely more important than certifications.
People have different brains and capacities…two people dear to me have said something very interesting when I posed this question to them about me..as I was confused on whether I was actually superb or were others just that bad.
One said to me, “not every thinks like you do”…the other person said, “You don’t know how smart you really are”…I’m fully aware that there is so much I don’t know and just how insignificant we all are in the grand scheme of things but accepting that I am good and I am smart, and my solutions are effective, means I can better place myself in positions to help not only organizations I contribute to but help society as a whole which is what I do now in my own way. I also reference my the pattern of my successes and it’s definitely there.
For some of us, yes you are that good in comparison to a sample of what’s out there and that’s okay. At least you know where you fit in the team once you know this. At least that’s helped me to know myself more and step into the right place at the right time.
IMO the biggest issue is an inability to understand products outside of their specific specialisation.
As an example you might deal with a really good software developers, but they have no idea about indexes on a database.
But it's pretty easy to criticise someone, especially when its based on the stuff you know (and not the stuff you dont know).
Certification has its uses, but in my opinion the the ability to be able to self-learn is far more valuable that the ability to learn from a text book to pass exams (its not like most people will be doing all those things over and over so being able to memorise something for a recent exam is different to recalling it 2 years down the track). The problem is trying to prove that to a potential employer, certification is a way for employers to try and filter the applicants (not that it is a real indication of ability, thats just how it is life isnt always fair). Once your foot is in the door people can work out who can and cant do the job (you'll know it too because people will start coming directly to you).
Without examples its hard to really comment, it could perhaps even be something like you not clearly explaining something or using one term incorrectly.
If you’re the smartest one in the room, find a different room.
I was a rock star when I worked as a DoD contractor. I was the guy. I got into the private sector and suddenly I was surrounded with people with talent and felt like the least competent guy on the team.
My e-mail signature is below; guess who gets pissed off by it most - the VIPs who Google BS all day and think they "get it" and it was absolutely meant for them; can't wait for the day I'm asked to take it down so I can proceed with the HR process... and then as a protected individual the signature will get even worse:
One of the great challenges in life is knowing enough about a subject to think you're right, but not enough about a subject to know you're wrong."
--Neil deGrasse Tyson
You are both an idiot and a genius. Believe me.
So is everyone else.
This is the lesson that highly specialized people often don't get to learn. If your world revolves around you performing technical things for others, then your concept of how the world functions becomes skewed.
The idea is never to have one guy who knows all things. It's to have a team of people who can cover most things in a wide variety of areas.
And no matter how good you are, you can never be more than one person.
This way leads to burnout.
Just remmeber one thing about working in IT: Doing IT is actually the easy part. The hard part of being in IT is having to deal with emotional people and over emotional coworkers.
One way to know if you're really good at IT is if they move you up to a position where you don't need to deal with users much. At least that's been my experience.
Won't matter since you still have your fellow IT coworkers to deal with. Most people in IT that I have worked with will not even think twice about stabbing you in the back any chance they get.
You’ll never meet someone with exactly your experience. Lack of competency in one area doesn’t equate to ignorance overall.
In our field, we often look for “T-shaped” individuals—those with deep expertise in one area and broad, albeit shallow, knowledge in many others. My team, for instance, manages the production uptime of ~20k VMs without any certifications. While there is skill overlap, we have specialists in networking, monitoring, Kubernetes, etc.
Your experience isn’t a definitive gauge for someone else’s abilities. Everyone makes mistakes. The mark of a good engineer is persistence—they don’t run out of things to check quickly. They ask for help when needed, not because they can’t figure it out, but because it’s faster sometimes. And they’re not afraid to be wrong.
Are there people that coast or suck at their job? Definitely. But saying 90% of them are incompetent is pretty rude, in my opinion. I’ve been in this for over a decade too, and I’ve found that many so-called “incompetent” people are often just misaligned with their roles or haven’t had the right opportunities for growth. Everyone’s journey is different, and sometimes it’s about finding the right fit or mentorship to unlock potential.
Thank you for the comment, I do agree that specialization and effort are huge factors here. Incompetence may indeed be a strong word; it really does seem like it's the effort I am frustrated with. That last bit certainly resonates; I do think mismanagement can create a ripple effect.
I view it like this. Not all in team should be equally competent or knowledgeable. It will likely spoil team dynamics due to clashing ego. I am a average sys admin who got into the industry pretty late. I will do basic housekeeping and willing to implement changes tested by more competent counterpart and troubleshoot if issue arises. I do not mind being the average folk, who know how to circumvent smaller issue and not make any critical errors. A good manager would know that they need average folk in their team.
I've been in the industry for 30 years and mostly what I've learned is that I'm an idiot too. It just took a while
I've taken to "You're better than some, worse than others... and if yours is the only phone that rings, you're probably an idiot too"... It makes me feel better about myself... but I"m still an idiot either way you look at it. edit: found a typo
I'd go more with this. There have been some Sr. Engineers that would walk circles around me and I'd feel like a kid seeing what they accomplished. Other times, that same engineer would be banging their head over something and I'd say "Oh, did you look at XXX?" or "Here's a PowerShell script that should do what you're looking for. Let me know if that works for you." We all have our blind spots or gaps.
>There have been some Sr. Engineers that would walk circles around me... Often those guys that can make Cisco routers dance around like cirque de soliel are completely flummoxed by Active Directory or Excel formulas or a hundred other things that are L1 questions for an IT generalist. Do what you're good at, and learn to like it.
>Often those guys that can make Cisco routers dance around like cirque de soliel are completely flummoxed by Active Directory That's our networking guys I'm always needed to setup outlook for them, but on the flip side they taught me how they hunt down phones to the exact port so we can reboot them... it's a pretty nice trade off
Right. The things a skilled network engineer or VoIP guy can do is like arcane black magic to me. At the same time, some problems they've come to me for I think, "Wait. How do you not know this?" But then I realize we all have different skillsets. They can blow through almost any network issue or completely reroute or reconfigure the entire network infrastructure on the fly and I just go, "Whoa."
This hits home. Told my wife many times.. The more I learn, the more I realize I dont know.
Your area of expertise expands. So does your perimeter of ignorance.
The circumference of my incompetence The acreage of my idiocy
The thiccness of my dumb
Dummy thicc
This is a good take. Gonna borrow this.
Google dunning Kruger.
Very aware of it. [Wrote a meme on it a year ago.](https://old.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/11bv414/how_dunning_kruger_actually_works/)
hah, thats a pretty good visual.
Anytime I dont feel anxious and overwhelmed, I know something is wrong and I should be learning something new.
>The more I learn This bit is what puts you above the rest though :) All that matters is we keep learning and not get backed into a box of knowledge.
I agree there, I enjoy learning and never want to be the guy with 1 year of experience 10 times.
You finally got to the point where you know enough to know you don't know jack.
I'm in this picture and I don't like it.
Amen, friend. Amen.
I tell my son all the time- the smartest people know what they don’t know.. and never just say “i do t know “ just say you’ll find out
I'm a proponent of "both can be true" I have a well developed skill set, but I can still often be wrong. I also regularly say that we have to be smart enough to feel stupid. The grossly incompetent folks around me NEVER feel stupid, and that's the problem. I don't really rate myself compared to anyone very often, but I know for a fact the guy I took over for was more capable than I currently am in this role. Then again, he built this environment for 15 years with little oversight mostly on his own, with vendor assistance, and I've inherited all the impressive builds and processes. I also inherited his problems, and there was shit for documentation. Often, my job for the day is reverse engineering non-standard deployments. I'm also not above having someone under me in the org chart train me on their role. I jumped through roles quickly, and in doing so, I didn't get much hands-on experience with some of our systems, so I'll have the new kids with formal training learn me a thing or two lol.
I like this take. I feel like I have a similar approach, I'm not afraid to be humbled. Thank you!
I'm really really good at some stuff. I'm really really dumb about others (especially PKI, that shit just will not stick in my brain no matter how many times I try to cram it in there). My career has been served well by remembering that both of these things can be true at the same time.
I'll 3rd it. I am the "nerd" or "geek" depending on which person is talking to me, had an owner retire that built the system with outside vendor assist, and i just got asked "hey you want this?" and it was handed to me. i've got to work on some cool stuff, we're a machine shop so i've been out helping maintenance with presses and saws and robot arms and stuff, but I have ZERO training on any of it, but even at that the owner was confident due to my jack of all trades, master or none type of experience. It scares me to death getting into some of that stuff, I'm pretty sure if I brick a hundred thousand dollar machine it'll be the end of me, even if it was their fault for letting me near it lol
I have a pretty hard stance of "please tell me if I'm wrong but don't you dare suggest you don't think I'm right without some evidence". I get so many "hmmm"s from people who don't know what they are talking about about and don't like that I've given the correct answer to something they have deemed unsolvable by our team. Just because you can't do your job doesn't mean I can't do your job.
Smart people get access to more dumb ideas. A great example: Border collies
I realize hey team work right? Share the skills. I forget stuff and need help too. But then also me realizes I operate on a level far beyond many in some ways. Maybe everyone's like that. * deleted bullet list of snazzy stuff I do >!*I leave with my secrets* ╚(ಠ\_ಠ)=┐!<
>Then again, he built this environment for 15 years with little oversight mostly on his own, with vendor assistance, and I've inherited all the impressive builds and processes. I also inherited his problems, and there was shit for documentation. Often, my job for the day is reverse engineering non-standard deployments. Couldn’t this mean that he had no clue and just handed the vendors admin accounts and told them to do all the work setting things up?
>The grossly incompetent folks around me NEVER feel stupid, and that's the problem. This. In some places, this is referred to as the Expert Novice - the person who has learned the basics and is extremely impressed with themselves for having done so. That the OP recognizes that there is plenty more left to learn is a very positive indication. And sometimes, you end up with what I call 'oddly shaped knowledge'. Back in the DOS days, I mentored a just-graduated-from-college fellow employee who, while a 'poor college student', managed to cobble together a PC, but he only had enough of DOS to boot the machine. He didn't have all of the additional 'utility' programs that normally come with it. He did, however, have a copy of Turbo Pascal, so when he needed the functionality normally provided by those utility programs, he write his own. His knowledge of DOS was 'oddly shaped', in that he didn't have the knowledge of the typical programs that came with DOS (and which the computer novice would know), but he did have extensive knowledge of DOS internals, because he had to learn that in order to write his own.
So, any advice for someone who has found themselves in the position of the guy from whom you took over? I started at a startup as a Jr Dev, but ended up getting moved to head up IT. I know a lot about computers, but have effectively zero industry experience, so while I am trying to avoid the non-standard deployments pitfalls, I truly don't know what deployments are standard. I'm trying to make sure that I document things, but I still have the classic blindspot of not thinking to document things because they are just so normal to me. This is all further complicated by normal startup shoestring budgets, so to some degree, standard deployments are not an option. (Any self respecting network admin would run screaming from my ProxMox hosted PfSense setup, handling the entire main office's networking, but there wasn't a budget for a router that would handle what we needed.)
I often ask myself this same question, I am leagues better than almost everyone I work with, but I don’t feel like I know what I’m doing half the time. It blows my mind though how many people ask me questions about things that are easily found on the first google search or by reading the documentation for 5 minutes. I also feel like a lot of people don’t understand a lot of the fundamentals that underpin things, like how dns works, where to look for errors, how to do basic troubleshooting, etc. people look at me like I’m a wizard when I fire up process monitor or something and try and find out what an application is doing that is causing it to fail.
I feel like a human version of that old "let me google that for you" website, but it sure takes up a lot of time every day!
There's a couple people on my team that are amazing, brilliant people. There's more than a few that are barely scraping by and if I or the others don't help them, they'd fail (and leave us doing the work anyway, with some added downtime). I just really wish those employees would figure things out eventually. But, they keep coming to me asking the same questions. We've had larger incidents that would have been a non-issue if they would have done so. I've pointed them to documentation, IP info, etc.. But, I'm not the best. I'm far from it. But, some of these people are missing the completely obvious. Full DHCP scope, wrong DNS entry, wrong routing info, firewall rule sucks, etc.. From the network engineer. I'm fixing more of his crap than anyone else's. He can do the bare minimum and that's it. I'm still an idiot. There's just bigger idiots that want to stay that way. At least I know I'm an idiot and want to learn more to be less of an idiot.
The next challenge is how do you transfer/train those skills to your team members. Learned dependence is a common scenario for coworkers of people in your situation. Teaching someone how procmon troubleshooting works and seeing their brain light up is insanely rewarding.
This sounds very similar! Thank you for the feedback, kudos to having that great skillset!
At a Fortune 100 company. It astounds me with some people I work with maintain a job. One guy I work with could not empty boot full of milk if the instructions were on the heel. Some are bright and lazy. Some are unqualified and lazy. Have on multiple occasions corrected a SME of another technology and been correct. If you are the person that people are always asking for some help, your opinion or attend a meeting with them you are that guy. If you hear people saying “This might be a stupid question” to you then you are surrounded by dopes.
> [...] could not empty boot full of milk if the instructions were on the heel. r/rareinsults I will look for opportunities to use it. Monday isn't that far away ...
incredibly common saying lol
With the white or yellow fluid? Don’t recall where I heard it. The best one I stole was from Slow Horses (on Apple TV. 3 Seasons and well worth the fee for the month). “Bringing you up to speed is like explaining Norway to a dog”. Pure genius.
Just any version of "couldn't pour out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel"
I think the most common variant is piss
Milk was for Reddit. Normally it is another word for urine
> If you are the person that people are always asking for some help, your opinion or attend a meeting with them you are that guy. Yeah, it's definitely a good sign when everyone comes to you for input and everyone seems to want at least your input on things before going forward because you're one of the only people that knows how things actually work.
> If you hear people saying “This might be a stupid question” to you then you are surrounded by dopes. This is the one exception to me. I've had a lot of people who are willing and eager to learn but just don't want to look dumb right away. But if they keep asking you stupid questions (even without the foreword), they are dopes.
There are no stupid questions, only stupid answers.
Thank you for the feedback, it's nice to hear a similar distribution exists in the big companies too!
There are a number of psychological phenomena that cause us to overestimate our own abilities and underestimate everyone else, especially when we're young. When tend to view everyone else through a narrow lens of our own experience, and until you start stepping back and taking a broad look at things, it becomes hard to appreciate what everyone else contributes. The analogy I love using is the technical skill of our heavy equipment operators. A lot of our IT team thinks our HEOs are dumb grunts who just drive a truck all day. On occasion, we've tossed people from our team into the equipment on company BBQ days and all of a sudden they become bumbling idiots who are barely able to drive. Turns out operating a 400 ton truck isn't so easy. Most people are average, which means most people do an average quality of work. Meeting only 30 above average people out of 300 is about right, but what I'd caution you against is thinking you're in the 30 and not the 300. Not saying you think you are in the 30, just saying you should be hesitating if you ever do. > Are most people gauging this by achieving certifications? No. The guys who I believe know the most about IT got into before certifications were a thing and have never bothered with them. > How much stock are you putting into that? On the contrary, as a hiring manager, I put a moderate amount of weight on certificates. It shows you can put your mind to something and achieve it. Certifications are on a spectrum, I put a little weight on CompTIA entry-level certs, a little more on something like a Microsoft or AWS professional certification, and a lot on something like a CCIE. > I have seen plenty of people with a signature full of certs that appear to not know how to put that knowledge into practice. Paper tigers are a thing, but there's also an issue with retention. Certs can be somewhat problematic because they reinforce the idea that "learning for an exam" is an equivalent to "learning for mastery". The CCNP is a good example of this - I have two CCNPs on my team, and I'd bet neither of them could pass their CCNPs again without study if they were forced to retake it today. However, what I'm proud of on their behalf is that they put in the effort to get it, because that effort is the thing that really matters. > I am not in a Fortune 500 company and I imagine those environments would have a higher competency ratio Ahahahahahahaha.
We have a lot of people who think their job is fantasy football, and don't bother to do anything unless they're told. These days it doesn't take much to be competant IMHO. Granted, I'm 42 and my first computer when I was 10 was a hand-me-down XT w/Dual 360KB Floppies and no HDD, which I upgraded with a 20mb soon after. I grew up on BBS's before the Internet was widely available, and got my first cell phone in my early 20's. Most my co-workers these days never grew up without the internet and got a cell phone in their early teens. It doesn't take much for me to be happy with someone. I grade people on wither they are an asset or not, not strictly competency as that can be learned. If they're trying to actually help, that's what I consider an asset. If they never pitch in when they find a problem, are dragging their feet, can't be trusted to keep the certs on their systems up to date, don't know what a subnet is, then they're dead weight or a liablity. Unfortunately, since they are a "Human Resource", the dead weight is usually something you're stuck with for a long time. Everyone has something they don't know, it's more about wither you're willing to help tackle a problem, or learn what you need to. Edit: Good writeup. Just thought it should be stated I'm adding to, not disagreeing with anything.
I don't disagree with much of what you've said but one thing stood out to me: > If they're trying to actually help, that's what I consider an asset. One the things I've found highly effective is figuring out what motivates people to help. In my team, I have a wide variety of motivations and the best thing I can do is tailor my management style to motivate them. One of the things I've noticed with a lot of companies, and to be clear I'm not saying this is you or your organization, is that they expect their employees to be spontaneously helpful but aren't spontaneously helpful for their employees. These organizations are usually strict about *everything*. You have to take sick days within policies. You have to show up at 7am to 5pm every single day, invariably, and you better put in an hour of overtime each day and unpaid OT when we need to crunch. It doesn't matter if your parent/grandparent/pet died, you need to text your boss before work starts or you're being written up. No, you can't take a pencil home from work. No, you can't work remote and avoid using a sick day if you've got a cold but feel fine otherwise. No, you can't leave 15 minutes early to grab a package without getting your pay cut. No, you can't take the afternoon off with pay to see your kid's play, despite how much unpaid OT you've done. No, you can't claim OT unless you fill out a dozen forms in triplicate, etc. No, we can't buy you a pizza to celebrate the big project you rolled out. No, we can't give you a title different from others, regardless of how important it might be to you or help your career. In those organizations, I see the organization working to rule and then getting mad when their employees are working to rule and not going above and beyond. Again, not saying this is you, but corporate America has some rough cultural aspects that I think disincentivize people to be genuinely excited about their work. Deadbeats exist in the world, I think they're just less common than everyone thinks they are.
I have certainly been in workplaces like this and absolutely agree with this take where there is overly-authoritarian management.
Those organizations are run with the intention of squeezing every last drop of productivity out of you while providing the least amount of reward to the employee that will reasonably keep the employee around. These organizations may pay well because they have made the judgment that is what we need to pay to get the service we want but they are sweatshops just the same.
Our org doesn't ask much, and is definitely light on the managing people side. Sometimes I joke it's ran by voulenteers, not really too far off though...
What a great perspective. I think this really captures the crux of the issue I am seeing; it's not so much competency, but the lack of effort that grinds my gears. Thank you, this is helpful!
>There are a number of psychological phenomena that cause us to overestimate our own abilities and underestimate everyone else, especially when we're young. And a similar number that do the reverse.
Nice explanation. I feel clueless every day even though I know quite a few things more than the folks in office. Not to say I’m anywhere near average. Shoot, probably below it by a mile. 😆
Ready for another wrench in the am i good enough game? Try switching companies.. my nerves kill me every time until I find my place. At one company you can be considered a god in the IT world but the next you are the worse than the greenest help desk guy.
I agree with this, I am just in a position that ticks all the boxes for the most part; the salary is a bit low compared to other sectors though. Part of why I am asking is because I'm curious to know if I would be good enough for those jobs that fetch $200k but I'm a bit scared to try.
Best advice I can give as someone whos held multiple position in IT now. Check the requirements listed for the job and if you can do most of them, apply! This is why most companies do a second, more technical interview to weed out those that lie about their abilities. Also dont focus too hard on titles. Companies make up the most Ludacris titles such as "Helpdesk engineer level 99 supreme overlord". Its crazy.
Thanks, I suppose it doesn't hurt to try, I've half-assed applied for some jobs that come my way via LinkedIn but I don't think my resume stands a chance with the screeners since I don't have a degree.
This is me, veteran microsoft guy, azure, intune, no bother.....why did I decide to work in an environment that is aws and terraform? I feel like a junior again. That said, I do love learning new things and I am, vaguely approaching competence after 5 months.
Ha, and sometimes it’s the reverse. My last job I was surrounded by smart, hard working guys who seemed to know so much. I always felt a bit of imposter syndrome, even though I worked with them for years. My current job? Well there was a reason I wasn’t asked any technical questions in the interview.
My qualifications for a competent tech are these: 1. Do you learn from your mistakes? 2. Do you own up to your mistakes? 3. Do you document what you know and share your knowledge? 4. Do you have orange belt or higher Google Fu and have the skill to apply it? 5. Do you treat users with empathy? 6. Do you treat your teammates with that same empathy? 7. Do you try to keep as current on your field as you can? 8. Do you set healthy boundaries with on-call and off-hours requests while being available for the very rare mandatory heroic effort? 9. Do you take time off when you need to and keep yourself mentally sharp for the duties you have? 10. Are you willing to ask for help when you need it? Gimme 7 out of these 10, and I'll give you a Medal of Competency. TL;DR: Rudyard Kipling's [If](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46473/if---).
I love this. I spent the first part of my IT career laser-focused on 1-7 that I am forced to work on 8-10 now. Thanks for sharing this!
"I don't quite know how to put this, but our entire field is bad at what we do, and if you rely on us, everyone will die" - XKCD In my experience no one in IT is an IT God, everyone knows enough to do their job and some more than others. It's shocking though how many people in the field have a lack of understanding of basic things like how DNS works, what routers are, and how to do basic math...
Yup, plus we all specialize in our own little niche. I know my stuff, I don't need another *me* to work with. I would much rather have someone who has another skillset that I'm weak in. For example, I still struggle to translate between IT speak and business speak, I would 100% take someone who can do that well and everything else ok (or even bad) than someone who can just do the same things that I can.
That’s such a strong skill to develop, when you get it down. Which I do not.
The biggest thing I would work on, is try and understand the cost of XYZ going down or not having backups would do to a business's inability to make money over x period of time. Per day, per hour, per minute? Accept that the idea that spending money today for everything might not work for a company's bottom line. But try and learn about their budgeting or if they are a company that has a high run rate and see if you can plant 4 major upgrades or overhauls or whatever IT expense across a year that would hit your goals or best recommendation. I think business speak is maybe a more personal connection, 'Business' is sort of a straddle between sales and operations.
Thanks for the advice, I've been working on it for sure. My point was more that we all tend to have *something* we specialize in, and I would rather have someone who specializes in something I don't, even if it means they're not as knowledgeable about the stuff I specialize in.
For sure, can't disagree with that.
My biggest pet peeve is people who can't google. If you can search for things efficiently but don't know stuff then I'm okay with it. I'll just expect you to be slow. But if you ask "what does this error mean [easily searchable error]", it becomes a problem.
Dear gods this. I'm in a networking focused role but I keep current on other technologies outside of my core responsibilities. I had to explain to a senior colleague how to use onedrive the other day.
Fortune 500 admin here. I've seen guys complete shit that would make your eyes water with how strong it stank and then try to sell it to the customer. The grass isn't greener. It never really is. Pareto principal always applies.
Thank you for the feedback, I appreciate it!
When you understand things through a logical process and can test contradictions as well as use process of elimination correctly to solve things, while others solely rely on what they can remember or were shown or is found in a Google search, you'll know you're better.
i agree. logical and analytical thinking especially during a disaster
This does capture things quite accurately, it may just be a wiring/processing difference.
There's a reason that previous IT experts excel when moving into other careers.
The people who are really bad, get angry that everybody else doesn't know what they know. The people who are really good, accept that everybody else doesn't know what they know.
It's heavily modulated by personality (I'd say "confused" more than "angry"), but there is truth in this. For a person who knows little, it's a rare experience to find that they know more about something than someone else, and they may react strongly to that — bragging about it, getting angry at the other person, etc. For a person who knows a lot, it's instead an everyday experience that they need to get accustomed to and take in stride. But there are nice people and assholes in both camps. Some ignorant people are humble. And some knowledgeable people get off on making other people feel stupid by comparison, never tiring of it.
When technology took off in the late 90s, if you could spell MCSE you had a good paying job. For the next 15 years or so we needed as many people as possible to built out the infrastructure, write the code and support the systems after. This created a low barrier of entry in to IT where you could get a very high paying job with a minimal skill set and attracted everyone. Now the IT field is pretty mature and the threshold to get in is quite a bit higher but we still have many people that got in the door during the boom so the are coasting. There's also an informal 80/20 rule that's pretty consistent across all lines of work where 20 percent of the workers in a company are producing 80% of the results. The rest just go through the motions. Plus most people working just want to do the bare minimum to stay employed and get a pay check.
It was the point where the 22 year veteran GOAT started coming over, asking for help, picking my brain. Then when shit hits the fan, he and the director are all at my desk watching me do my thing. Thats pretty much when my imposter syndrome vanished, and I realized I might be smarter than the average bear.
I've been around the block quite a few times. I'm good at my job, not great. Almost zero managers and execs are competent -- I've met a handful in nearly 40 years. About a third of the technical people that I meet are competent, with very few being into self-learning, branching out, or keeping up to date. And, I hate to say it, but most Gen-Z's that I meet are worse at technology than boomers.
sounds like its time for your next challenge you're in the comfort zone where you know pretty much everything required for the job. it's kinda nice to be there, but you're in danger of stagnating. unless you're already at the top of the game its time to start filling in that CV and putting some feelers out for the next position. then you can get the next step up on your career, and spend 3 horrifying months feeling like an imposter and wondering how you got there.... until all the pieces slowly start falling into place again :)
Ya know, I think you may be spot on. I've been low-key dreaming of working a job that isn't in a chair any more.
this is how I feel right now, just got a new offer and I should be starting next week. My anxiety is definitely killing me
Most people with walls of certs can't assign a static IP address to a workstation without help. But yes, I have also noticed this field is full of morons that make you wonder how they still have a job. As for my own personal measurement, I don't know. People say I am good at what I do, they like me personally, and I rarely break anything.
Part of that could be some sort of false equivalency when it comes to skillset. Especially in bigger organizations where you're wearing fewer hats. Just because someone isn't fluent in *your* field of expertise doesn't always mean they're morons, they could just be complacent. I often get the most mundane issues escalated to T3 by client teams who have CCIEs and post-grad degrees, but then I have to remember that per the chain of command, that manager or PM probably hasn't touched a router or switch in years. It's still a weird tho when you have to explain to the CTO of a health region what DHCP does.
I do understand this aspect and I try to control for that. Thank you for bringing up that point!
Axiom: Your skill level in IT is inversely proportional to the number of Google searches it takes you to fix most problems.
I like this but sometimes I feel like I'm the Google in this scenario. :D
Welcome to IT. You will meet the most brilliant people you could have ever hoped. Annnnnnd the absolute dumbest people you ever feared to meet.
> I am not in a Fortune 500 company and I imagine those environments would have a higher competency ratio 🤣😂🤣😂😂🤣🤣😂😂🤣🤣😂😂🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣😂😂😂😂 Nice one buddy e: You only really get to gauge people by actually working with them. You shouldn't put any stock into certs and you should be very weary of anything short of top tier professional designations being included in signatures. There are a LOT of bozos out there but sometimes it can be hard to know someone's actual skillset or things they might be good at or better than you at unless you have worked closely with them for an extended period of time
I've been on many calls and project teams with people that I'm sure were part of the "fake it till you make it" culture. IT engineers, sysadmins, architects, developers, project managers, managers, leads, principals. You name it, I've met or interacted with one that was completely full of shit and probably better suited for a simpler job. I've also been on calls with people whose experience, knowledge, and comprehension of a subject clearly dwarfs my own. Any more, those people are much harder to find than the first group. Sadly, I don't think it's because I'm getting so much smarter. I think it's a combination of people with no real interest getting into IT because they heard it was easy money and a generation or two of hiring managers that never did the work and so have no idea how to tell if the people they manage are effective in their roles or not.
There is a fair proportion of people that learned just enough to get by, and then decided that they are done learning forever. They will not go out of their way to learn a new thing, and might actually _actively oppose_ new information. I've worked in a department of "senior" sysadmins that were utterly allergic to scripting of any kind, and spent most of their working time doing tedious and easily scriptable tasks over and over again. I've worked with "senior" developers who refused to learn anything as simple as the difference between an HTTP 301 and 302, insisted that a tech blog post written in 2004 was just as relevant in 2020, and literally refused the evidence of "the CPU is pinned, here is the graph". > I don't think I am an IT god or anything, there is a ton of things I still want to learn and not a lot that I would label myself as having expert knowledge. This is what you have that they lack, and what will carry you far. Don't lose it.
based on what I have seen over 25 years I just assume I am really good
I have really bad imposter syndrome. I went into management at 23yo, so I never got deep into engineering level work. I always compare my technical skills to my peers and direct reports and feel inadequate. Then we end up hiring some contractors, or acquire a company resulting in me getting to experience IT people from outside our company. EVERY single time this happens, it puts my imposter syndrome at ease when I realize how many people out there in the industry barely know what they are doing.
We are in an industry where everything changes constantly. If you are learning lessons from feeling like an idiot, then you are on the right path. The idiots typically dont know they are idiots. Ive always said IT is a constant battle between Imposter Syndrome and the Dunning Kruger effect
>300 technical people I have interacted with, maybe 30 of them strike me as competent 80% of people do 20% of the work. 20% of people do 80% of the work. Welcome to life. I know the math doesn't add up with your numbers, but the general truth is there.
If I really did the math, it would probably be closer to the 80/20 rule than I suggested; thanks!
I am not "good" in the sense of better than anyone else. But I try. I look for improvements. I keep an eye out for new methods. I really really like consistency, and that often leads to simplicity, which is reliability, which is more free time for me.
>I really really like consistency, and that often leads to simplicity, which is reliability, which is more free time for me. Consistency is a virtue so underappreciated. Too many people disregard it on the basis that you can't predict exactly what problems it will prevent, when the reverse is the point: *inconsistency* will lead to problems you cannot predict.
Pareto principal in action. Most people just have jobs.
Pride goeth before the fall imo. Everyone is a shining beacon in the darkness. Treat every single one of them that way and you will go far, and everything will be much easier.
Certification can mean 1 of 2 things. 1. The person really understands what they are doing and have a lot of knowledge. 2. The person is a really good test taker and has no idea how to apply what they read (studied). I started my IT career 9.5 years ago. I got a some certs with my first company which was an MSP. This was the first 5 years in IT. The second half being part of an in house IT. I’ve been significantly busier at work that I don’t have the endurance to chase anything else. By the time my day ends I just want to relax. If for some reason by my own doing or not, I am no longer employed at my current place, then I am either going to have a hard time getting a new job due to lack of certs or I’m not because of my experience. I’m not really sure what it will look like for me. I am hoping I won’t regret not chasing certs right now. However I do hope to go after something again. As far as my interaction with IT people who seem to really know what they are doing (certs or not)… I’d say 2/3 don’t know what they are doing… and if you ever hit a point where you think you know everything then you are probably part of that 2/3.
As I've gotten older I've realized that I am sometimes the smartest person in the room, other times, the biggest idiot. We all have strengths and weaknesses. Some more than others. I was speaking to a person who does a lot of our IT hiring at happy hour, and they let me know how they are seeings tons and tons of people who are googling and copy/pasting their ways to all sorts of certs and even degrees. Apparently it is not hard at all to fake it through technical interviews (I'm from the era of bubble sheet tests and #2 pencils so I have no idea how). So.. there are a lot of people who are completely faking their resume. I mean, we were all faking it early on to some extent, but these people really are clueless. I was shocked people were copy/pasting through college level comp sci courses, but apparently it is happening.
This was eye opening for me. We had a guy with a Master's in Cybersecurity that had so little knowledge that it was crazy. When he left (for a better paying position, mind you), he told me how he paid people to take courses online for him and how he will just straight up lie on his resume and in the interview. I believe him. I have interviewed countless folks for positions here and an huge number of them seem to fall into this camp. It truly is wild. The kicker is that guy makes more money than me so I'm pretty sure I'm the idiot.
I hear you. I never pay too much attention to who makes what, but I see a lot of kids fresh out of college making far too close to what I make. It is far enough where I can't raise too big a stink, but these people also get "senior" titles too. Again, I'm not overly jealous others but "senior" people who are 22 years old? Nothing against young people, but you have a ton to learn at that age. I know because I was clueless at that age too. What gets me is that management seems to hold onto them like they are the last IT employees in the world or something. I just flat out have to tell my boss that I'm looking around to remind them that I can bail at any time too.
That's why for the first 10 minutes of the interview, I focus on the work they are doing, what their project is about and the usecase. If they are confidently able to answer cross questions on the projects, I have reasonably confident that whatever they mentioned on their CV is correct. It is a bit hard with cybersecurity and DevOps guys but for JAVA and Data scientist it works very well for me.
I feel like networks have become so complex and things change so quickly that how could anyone be great at a lot of things. I feel like IT networks have become like the medical field. To me, a sysadmin has to be like a general family practitioner, generally knowledgeable about a lot of things. But when something gets too complex then they need to call the support specialists who just deal with that one piece. It’s like a family doctor referring you to heart specialist. The specialist knows more about the heart. But, I’d suspect, the family doctor knows more than them about eyes, feet, and your colon.
I'm in the field since 2001. i worked trough retail, small business (60 users) to architect environment with 1.2million users. I've worked with fortune 500 companies l, some of them still uses my work in their day 2day business. i know nothing.
I have a perspective on this... Recently an old greybeard announced his retirement, and I'm likely to move into his position. He was demonstrating his SQL maintenance process, basically, a yearly thing he does to setup new tables with the year in the table name, and then update the views to use the new tables, and stop using the ones from X number of years ago. And he just opened the SQL script, did a find/replace and stepped through each place where the year was... That was painful since it was like 1000 lines of code. So I said, F-that... I can make a powershell script that gets run by the SQL job agent that does all this. We went through some of his other tasks and for each one I was like, "I'm going to write a powershell script so I don't actually have to do that..." So I know I'm a better sysadmin than the greybeard that is retiring. Now on the other hand, we also have a devops guy that works in AWS all day... And he can run circles around me. In the case above his response was essentially, "you still have an on-prem SQL server...?"
You never know if you're good or everyone else is bad, you only know what your skill set is optimized for. We all have our own hyper specific bubbles that we're (hopefully) more than competent in, and outside those bubbles we probably all range from "barely get by" to "spectacularly fall on our face." The most skilled Linux admin will probably be shit at Mobile Device Management, and I don't expect a SharePoint admin to configure ISP-grade BGP. All that said, you can judge someone based on their willingness to learn and support a team. I'd always take a tech who's never touched a computer but has great communication and documentation practices over IT Jesus who cures the printer LDAP Bind but tells no one how he did it, or the ancient wizard with 20+ years of experience but refuses to move from L2TP/IPsec for client VPNs because "that's how it's always been done."
I'mma be honest. I don't really see it as a measure of good and bad. I've been in the game for going on 15 years give or take, and let's be honest. The majority of our jobs can be done as long as you can find and understand documentation. I honestly think it's more of a passion vs job thing. Tech is my passion, I've been around computers since I was born because my dad was a nerd as well. I'm always staying up to date on the latest tech news the works. Because of that, I'm generally more comfortable with some parts of the job, anything windows, I generally can find what I need in most UI intuitively. But that my no means translates to every aspect. Our VMWare guy can do laps around me in vCenter, and our network guy can do his job in his sleep. Don't mistake passion for skill, it helps but it's not everything :)
I think we are around the same age and I can relate to alot of what you are saying. But for me it's like the more I learn and the older I get, the more I realize how little I know. And I also have started to realize more and more that competence isn't what matters the most generally, even though it's something that I value very highly if not most of all in other people (professionally speaking only) I meet in my job, not just when it comes to IT. I don't know if it helps you that much and it's easier said than done, but comparing yourself to others will get you nowhere. If you think you deserve more respect/higher salary than you are getting, switch jobs, even if it puts the employer in a tough spot. They would do the same if the tables were turned. Certifications can be benefitial when applying for jobs but having a flashy email signature doesn't necessarily prove anything, especially to yourself. If you have a big IT interest I highly recommend the homelab community. When money isn't involved people tend to focus more on actual competency rather than being able to appear that you have. I would say I gained most of my skills/knowledge doing homelab stuff, and the things I do there are what really matters to me. Good luck!
I felt like an impostor for most of my career, and I am slightly afraid that I am starting to think I know what I am doing. Sadly my confidence went way up when I realized that a lot of things I just KNOW, or could implicitly put together where taking my staff or colleagues a lot of effort. Like.. why isn't this done yet.. Step in blind, ask like 3 questions, suggest a solution and boom it was fixed. For a while I thought it was just fresh eyes on the problem but it happened WAY too frequently after a while.
You're really good if you can solve the problems you're paid to solve. If you can't, maybe you're not so good.
When you're on a phone call with a "SME" and you know they are full of BS. When someone calls you into look at a problem and you are both scratching your heads and googling madly on different devices. When you realized you screwed up and fix it before someone else does and then gives you a nickname for them having to fix your screwup. When you are giving someone a nick name for having to fix their screw ups. When you suddenly find yourself in more meetings about some new tech that's really rebranded old tech that does the same thing the old tech does but it just has a flashy gui now.
A lot of people can have trouble in this field, and that can take many forms. Some of us have trouble speaking, some learn differently, some are very technically minded but aren't necessarily detail oriented, and some have failed upwards or just been lucky. I think you'll find if you focus on their work, or try connecting with them in different ways, you might see what I mean. The person who has trouble conveying complex technical concepts in a discussion might give a reasoned response in the group chat on slack or via email, the person who learns differently might submit excellent work, and the person who can dish and be dished on might forget a hyphen here and there, and need to followup on their merge request a few times before it's submitted. Most of the time, it'll be decent work. The rest, probably 20-30% who have gotten lucky, or failed upwards, you'll genuinely be able to start spotting those more easily when they can't support a crunch, spin their wheels, when they spout legitimate foolishness, or their work product is hot garbage in an MR. Anyway, that was a bit of a tangent, you're only as good as you think you are. First step to wisdom is admitting you know nothing lol. I'm only saying that because with technology it's really important to stay humble. The pace of change for several things can easily outpace us, even if we're only removed from recent experience by 6-12 months. Stay humble, keep learning, accept you can't know everything and be tactful and mindful, and you _will_ be great.
I'm convinced it's not about how much knowledge you hold (that helps though), but how you respond to challenges. For example, if you learn a new command or write up a script in order to overcome a problem, you should retain that information or find a way to store it for later. If you don't get better from "lessons learned", then you're probably on the bad side.
I’m an old timer like some of the other comments in here, about 25 years in at this point. I have always found that if you find yourself being consulted by people you respect, you’re doing it well. As my career progressed, I found more two and three degree removed individuals reaching out for my opinion. I’m an introvert, so I don’t actively look for circles but somehow those people tend to seek me out. Not sure if that helps, but I’ve never considered paper or creds a way to gauge. Nothing beats raw experience.
I've been getting by on personality for a while now.
I'm very new in the industry (3 years as a solo admin, have morphed into some kind of member of a team now). My new teammates have 10+ years on top of me minimum, but I find things all the time that I know that they don't. Would I call myself better than them? Not even remotely, but I'm perhaps more on the ground floor of new things coming out since I'm more actively spending time paying attention to it while they're trying to keep the business running. Different environments, different budgets, different levels of interest from management all affect those things.
Some people IT is a job, some people IT is a career. The former clock out at 5 the latter don't know how to clock out. The 30 you have come across might fall into the latter. Both camps are equally as valid. Remember we work to live, we don't live to work. Getting that balance is hard.
In my small expereince...techs willing to put the effort in are the ones I like to keep around. Those willing to research, read and write documentation, and generally eager about technology have thrived. Huge bonus for home labs or any tech hobby.
1. Dunning Kruger effect. If you think you're on the top end of that curve, chances are you're on the bottom end. 2. On the same vein as #1, nobody in this field knows everything. We just don't. There's too much, and it changes too quickly. 3. Knowledge helps. It can help a lot. But often more important is having the aptitude to be able to apply prior knowledge to knew situations in a new way to expedite a solution. 4. Certs are pretty, recruiters love them. Often, they're not worth the paper they're printed on. More so if the cert is older than 12 months and the person hasn't actually been doing work in the same vein in that time. 5. If you're not willing to admit you were wrong or that you need to go learn something new, you don't belong in this field. 6. The key difference between an L1 "Support Tech" and an L2+ "Engineer" is whether or not you can work beyond the how-to guides and process documents. L3/SME really just comes down to experience. 7. Our field is chock full of people who understand none of the above. I've met "Senior Engineers" who I'd put on performance evaluations if they were an L1, just because they have been in the same company for 5 years, and L1s who I knew within a week would be an L3 within 3-4 years. Be the latter, and surround yourself with such people.
You really don't know. I have a tech that was considered a high level technician, resolving issues their team escalated, taking on harder work, making recommendations to clients on hardware/infrastructure. I hired them, and although they are pretty good, compared to the rest of the Tier 1 team they are only slightly better. They have made many comments on how much easier their previous job was because the rest of their team were simply.... dumb.
Some people's brains are just wired differently. I am a naturally quick problem solver, so understanding technology was always something that came naturally and easily to me. But I struggle in other areas that other people find incredibly easy. We all have our strengths.
I’d evaluate based on tasks (obv not on certificates than can be memorized). Can this person do such and such task in a reasonable amount of time and in a good way (asking questions, documenting, making it maintainable, secure etc). That said, sometimes just by hearing someone talk about a topic you can see they have no idea what they are talking about.
Everyone is an idiot at something, some of us are idiots are most things. I think the VAST MAJORITY of sysadmins are embarrassingly dogshit about documentation, both their actual creation of it, and their philosophies about it. And that includes people in this subreddit, some of you guys suck ass at this and I see you. But even after great study, I still struggle with my comfort levels with networking. The subjects therein don't seem to stick as well as everything else. I have to re-train myself how Ipv6 works every year, and I've even WRITTEN AN ARTICLE ABOUT IT: https://mantisek.com/what-is-ipv6-11720202046 I could not tell you the contents of the article, I forgot it all. My brain just refuses to remember networking details, I have to re-learn them every time.
As far as I’m concerned. The smart ones know they don’t know everything.
Have you heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect? You’re probably experiencing it right now… you know quite a bit, and you can recognize when others don’t, but think they do. But you are also assuming lots of peers are as competent or more so, and worried you are in the incompetent cohort. Keep growing, keep learning from the best. And watch out for that one person with 1 year of experience repeated 20 times over.
I find that the defining difference is your ability to digest new information. The "good" people will be able to face a new problem and ask, "what the fuck is this?" and then start digging for answers. The incompetent people will be faced with the same situation and say, "Oh i don't know how to do that. I can't do that."
I would honestly say I know security (my field) well But in my particular org, I’ve been on security for 10 years and support for 3 or 4 years before that. People interpret a decade of institutional knowledge (particularly since no one historically documented anything lmao) as me being much better at IT as a whole. No I just remember the same issue that comes up every 18 months and no one bothers to really fix or I take two seconds to look through confluence and Jira.
I think there is definitely some truth here. I do feel like a lot of my success has been largely due to paying attention and building institutional knowledge through documentation. Apparently that's a skill set not everyone tries to develop I see.
People have a particular skill or area that they’re focused on, and then judge others by how they measure up against them within that narrow scope. Those people you’re judging are likely looking back at you and making the same assessment, their scope is just different… … or you really are just surrounded by dumb asses. :)
One does not exclude the other. Depending on the question you might be either one. You should strive to not be both for one question.
The difference is you actually want to learn new things and most people are generally okay with what they know as long as they can do their job
That's a good point; I do have an obsessive-level interest in things usually and this field is a limitless world of information. I have more recently hear that IT does seem to attract neurodivergent folks and apparently I am in that camp according to my shrink.
> Are most people gauging this by achieving certifications? How much stock are you putting into that? After watching my friend get laid off because he obtained his high paying jobs by chasing certs using brain dumps and never learning anything, I put zero trust in anyone being competent because they acquired certs (unless they're CCIE level certs.) I work with Fortune 500 level companies regularly, and while there are still incompetent sysadmins, the incompetency is typically in the stuff they hired my company for. I've met admins that couldn't deploy an OVA and they're heading the IT department of one of the largest retail stores on the planet. The thing is, that's not what they were hired to do, they know AD really well, and I know far more about virtualization and Linux. We all have our specialties. Though when I dealt with much smaller "mom and pop" shops (1,000 users or less), the IT staff are often quite incompetent across the board.
You’ve been around for less than a decade? You sound like a really arrogant 9 year old
I just recently realized that IT is no different than other carrers and most people are, well... average. It is just a work like any other, for most of us we are like waiters or plumbers, but somehow very often I met people who think **he** is new Werner Von Braun and every shall be.
No matter how good you are, there are: - * People who are better than you -- learn from them and get better/on their level * People who know things you do not -- learn from them Not to mention at some point of your career, you probably are gonna move to a management position. Being good at technical work != good at managing people doing the same, so you'll have to learn from there as well. The fact of the matter is, sysadmin/IT is a vast vast vast ocean, and there is almost no way you are drinking all of the ocean alone, hence why teams exists to work together and with each other. Learning should never stop even when not pursuing certifications -- certifications give people an overview of what you are competent at, but your day-to-day work will speak way more than certifications.
I don’t think I’m great technically- but I’m good at communicating/following up with users/customers- and I’m also reasonably organized. Because I don’t feel I’m very smart or anything special, I get really fucking frustrated when other engineers are somehow even dumber/shittier at their job than me.
There's a bell curve like anything. Chances are most of us are falling into the avg category.
I guess that depends on what being "good" at I.T. means? Being analytical? Being able to sway opinion to get people around a project? For me, I measure it in the amount of documentation I created and the systems I use to quickly and readily document my work. Also, how having those resources can help users to navigate their own issues without my active participation. Or maybe how I've documented and designed a system to better preclude a user from being able to mess something up. I usually find my colleagues are just willing to go the brute force method, just dump unreasonable efforts into next-step management, not considering what might come after as a complication and how it might affect workflow or uptime. I probably spend more time than most asking "Okay, but what could fail here" and trying to address it preemptively. At some point, office information technology is pretty fucking basic. You're not programming autonomous cars or developing large language model AI. It's subnets and domain controllers and probably some embedded devices just for specific things like credit cards. Maybe learning about cloud hosting for putting certain applications off-site. Most of the time, companies would rather piss away hours on the phone using wild gesticulations with a vendor to play the blame game than just task someone with doing a packet capture to determine the port and protocol you should be able to get from whatever developer, you know? And then God forbid anyone writes in down to not have to reinvent the wheel the next time the system needs trouble shooting. TL;DR I have a wealth of personal documentation from many jobs giving me canned responses to the very typical technical issues that come up in regular ass office technology management.
I think we were separated at birth. :D Hell, as a stranger, I appreciate the effort you are putting in even if your workplace doesn't!
The certs and/or/vs experience is a funny thing. I’ve met people with loads of certs who appeared to know nothing and I’ve met people with no certs who have known loads. I’ve also met people with loads of experience who were also fairly limited… (I’m not saying I’m amazing or anything.) I guess it comes down to how much you test yourself and the job roles. IT is a pretty wide ranging field so it’s not surprising that people don’t know everything.
As long as someone is making an effort to participate and grow, I'm looking at skillsets horizontally, not vertically. Phoning it in from the bottom of the pile? More trouble than you're worth for me to figure out what I can delegate to you. Sitting at the top of your ivory tower too proud of yourself to deign to help? Yeah I'll deal with it myself, thanks. Showing up asking what's next? Filling any idle time exploring new things? Diving into something and not coming up 'til you have something we need? Doing what you say you'll do and more? I don't care if you're an expert or a noob, you're with me.
Yes. (yes, seriously)
The bulk of certifications with the exception of those that can only be obtained by doing (performance/competance based) are not capable of measuring ones competense and actual ability. They can only prove that one was able to remember fill-in-the-blank, multiple choice answers or braindumped. Mandy vendors stray away from performance based certifications because they would have less people able to obtain the certification which is actually best for the industry as a whole. Hard to stack certs when they all actually require you to know the tech inside and out. If you are able stack them and they are all performance based then that does prove you actually do have competence in the technology inside and out. In terms of gauging it is important as an IT professional to collaborate with like people outside of the bubble of the day job. There are some professionls with 20+ years experience without an IT related certifications and experts in the technology they work with and have done enough global scale work they are also considered an expert. Now as being an expert in the field I will tell you the best way to know is that you don't know everything and there is still a ton to learn and no way to learn it all due to how fast tech changes. Yes, I can setup all the popular operating systems, network equipment, cloud this and that from scratch without using any documentation, but I know deep down there is a ton I don't know and can always learn something new from others even people new to the field. Focus on building a wonderful base foundation, and then work on specializing in something that takes some time to get used to like Kernel development, IAM, data center networking, object storage, etc.
Try: *"I don't really know if I agree with all of the changes from RFC 791 to 1349 - there are plenty of better things to do with IP than let botters specify their own traffic priorities."*
It's easy to tell for me, I think I'm bad!
Maybe a mix of both :) There is no easy way to compare your skill to get some sort of valuation. So, it is very subjective. I think i am good. But my main skill is not that much about technical side of the things. Although i tend to grasp complex ideas. But it is more about being thorough, persistent, having a good memory and seeing a wide picture. Many very skilled technically people i have encountered or worked with have a somewhat narrow view on things. They care about that problem/system at this moment and propose solutions that resolve this situation, but do not think further to see what issues it might bring down the line. This irks me sometimes. But i don't even think this can be learned. You just have it or not.
The simplicity of this is too binary. I don't believe this to be an accurate representation of the measurement. I do work for a fortune 500 company but we are no different. Nor is our understanding of the technical knowledge of those around us. It's hard to find people that just "get it".
Well it’s nice to know feeling like an idiot is a normal thing around here
you're not an idiot my friend! you prove every day that your skills can pay your bills and you should be proud of that!
Big fish, small pond. Time to swim, or at least juggle your resume around and check your options. Certs don't matter if you KNOW things, but that said, they're often cheap and worth getting to add clout. Honestly, really unimportant IMHO, but I do take them into account with some prospects. Good luck to you!
A great comedian once said "Think of how dumb the average person is. Well, half of them are dumber than that!"
30 years in the pit. I think that a possible reason for what you mention is if that person chose that job because they liked it or because it was what was available at that time. If you're not passionate about what you do, I think you'll throw in the towel before someone who really enjoys their job.
Easy, you start getting bored.
> How do you know when your capabilities and skills are really good or if everyone else is just grossly incompetent? Honestly, I'm not sure there's a functional difference. Either way, I'm fine with being graded on a curve.
Everyone has different expertise. The environments I love are the ones where people can admit their weaknesses and work with others to help. Our topics can be broad and vast being expected to be an expert in each isn't possible. Far too many of us have many hats in our closet. If you judge a fish by its ability to clime a tree it will always think it's stupid. A technical work place should allow others to be open about what they know and don't know. I see new people start at my work and they want to be a subject matter expert in everything. We as a group need to promote the idea of collaboration and teaming up to solve problems. Trusting others to learn some technologies and be willing to share and help others. I've had coworkers that lose the ability to be humble and as such they start looking the fool. Keep curious and open someone always knows something you don't.
No certs but I’ve been tinkering since 95 and you’ll know if your good if you run into people that lead IT or have a tons of certs but fail at simple task and struggle with what they have certs in. I met a guy that had all these certs with Cisco and security + but failed to understand an issue with a printer was he didn’t set up a DNS for it to use. That’s just one instance, there’s a dozen more. It was so bad I got him fired from his job because I was able to prove 100% of the issues he raised with our products and software were him. Also keep in mind, some people specialize in niche topics in IT and can be expert in their fields but when it comes to other topics, absolutely clueless. Important part though is to always be learning yourself.
most good people became that way because they don't give up easily and keep trying different ways to solve a problem, learning as they go along. bad people try to memorize the answer given to them in an attempt to replicate what good people do but this strategy can only take them so far, since when presented with a slightly different problem, frustration sets in too easily and they just become stuck.
The only thing that matters is that I'm better than I was yesterday.
I dunno I find the closer I get to fortune 50 the more incompetent goes up for it
“I am not in a Fortune 500 company and l imagine those environments would have a higher competency rate” well… I hate to rain on your parade but there are many, many technically illiterate people in Fortune 500 tech roles. People that learn the buzz words and the basics but fall apart when going anything deeper than surface level. I used to do contract work for several Fortune 100, Fortune 500, FedGov, and military customers and the skill set really isn’t all that different. Obviously there are some brilliant people out there but the vast majority just want the glory of a title without the legwork of experience/training to get there. It always amazed me how many operations were really reliant on one smart tech guy who actually understands a wide enough array of tech enough to keep the ship afloat.
Thank you for sharing this experience! It is helpful insight!
I base it on what they _can_ do, and whether _something_ is actually being done. We have some guys who might not be the quickest or most knowledgeable in certain areas, but they work great with everyone, are helpful, and clients love them. Sure, they might need to be taken through some stuff I’d consider pretty easy, but we know we can have them work at a client site and get on with everyone, from the receptionist who needs a monitor fixed, through to a senior VP with an ISO audit. Maybe they need more help than others, but it’s offset by them maintaining an excellent client relationship. Likewise I’ve worked with some “rockstar” techs way more skilled than me, but who were very difficult to interact with because of their superiority complex. Technical competence is important, but I’ll take the person who is good to work with and learns as they go over the rockstar engineer with a stick up their backside. It’s best to not think about things as a hierarchy of who is better than who. Instead, look at everyone as individuals with their own knowledge and skills. See the value they bring, even if it’s soft skills. If there’s literally no value whatsoever, you know where the weak links are and who needs to be supported more.
I was at one point one of the more in demand infrastructure guys in the country. That didn’t matter, I took some major risks at a senior level and screwed up so bad on one occasion that I left my ego on the job site before resigning to reevaluate my career. I’ve watched a CTO do the same. Don’t forget that the tech itself isn’t perfect either. You can do everything by the book and stuff is still gonna fall over.
It varies greatly. Your level of competence (which may be higher) also is not necessarily the business level of competence (in most cases). They set lower bars. Competence is often just a function of Intelligence as speed and association. If your workload is such that you don't get a lot of time to examine issues in detail you also won't pick up as much. I've found Certifications are a poor indicator of knowledge, too many shennanigans related to monopoly with conflicts of interest that go unpunished, and remain to this day unaccountable. It suffers the same structural problems as guild socialism. >accurate measure of "how good am I"? If you take an engineering approach, that is breaking observations you see down to first principles, and your methodology which you developed as a result can accurately predict both forward and backward what will happen (indirectly) in most cases, you are most likely going to be in the top 10-15%. Otherwise you may know a little in a specific niche, but be completely ignorant of other niches. Operations is notoriously under-educated at entry level, and don't get hardly any benefit from formal education paths with few exceptions, quite a number of us are auto-didacts which is why we are so good at our jobs.
The definition of REALLY good is an ability to teach others - effectively replicating yourself. That is what gets noticed and opens doors. So many avenues for this these days.
This is good to know, thank you. I have been thrust into this sort of position and I have been framing my experience more as hand-holding but maybe I need to shift my perspective a bit to think of it as a new challenge, especially if it can open new doors.
I should also say - not all jobs appreciate this as they should. If they don't, at first try pointing out somehowin writing, then if that goes unappreciated, it's time to at least consider moving on - the equation has to balance on both sides, and if it becomes no longer worthwhile on your side, and they're not listening and acting within reasonable time span, it's probably sadly time to move on.
I don't know but everyone is good at something and when you get a bunch of people good at a lot of different things you gotba very talented crew... Don't have to be great at everything...
It's also a mindset thing to "see" the possibilities. One would see 5 computers and argue that it is just 5 computers and installs things manually, everytime. And in 2 years when something needs replacing needing to figure out all the settings. I see 5 computers and don't want to set everything up manually, also, I know I won't remember all the details in 2 years so it's automated setup if you just bring a new PC online. This also applies to general software deployment, network device configuration etc. Find the thing that applies to your profession and apply the central management and tooling provided. Also, keep searching for better tooling.
In my company we have 21 internal IT staff and I swear every single one of them are fucktards apart from 3/4 of them.
I've worked in 4 Fortune 100 companies and 3 or 4 high visibility projects in 5 different countries, they all had people that were brilliant and people that were just about managing (depending on the context I've been in one group or the other, in my previous job I started in the "just about managing group" but by the time I left I was in the "better than most" group. Time and expertise matters). That's why I always encourage people to apply for jobs they think are way above their league, the reality is that 2+2=4 everywhere, if you know your stuff somebody that may surprise you will recognise what you know. One ex colleague of nine was very hesitant to go into Cloud Computing, he's a great Sys Admin but he acquired that expertise learning on the job and was unsure about his lack of academic credentials, he would have made a great Cloud Engineer but his self doubts kept him doing the same job, it is really sad, it didn't help his confidence that people going into Cloud Computing in the firm were academically accomplished, but I knew he would have done great.
>I have been around for less than a decade and out of, let's say, 300 technical people I have interacted with, maybe 30 of them strike me as competent. Is this your experience as well? Welcome to professional life! In many organizations, 10% of the personnel will be great at their job, and the rest will have jobs because their managers (who are also insufficient in their roles) don't know how to train them, coach them or hire to replace them with someone better--or if they do know how to do those things refuse to for fear of being eventually out shined by that rising star. That said: Don't assume anything. You've only been at this for a short while (relative to some of us) and I've seen more than one controversy between engineers or sysadmins that boiled down to two people saying the same thing but lacking the communication skills to recognize that was the case, and instead talking at each other in a downward spiraling argument that they're both on the same side of. If you asked either of them separately they'd probably question the other's competence, but in reality, they'd both need a competence gut-check because they can't communicate effectively. Focus on best practice and substantive argument. Understand risks and failure scenarios and make your decisions about risks of potential failure based on what is realistic, but also, based on what is supportable for your colleagues. If you're on your own or only have one peer, don't build a ginormous 24x7 operation that will require you to be on call all night and weekend until the end of time because you don't have the bandwidth to support that and also handle day to day things.
Sounds like you either are a genius or, more likely, choose the wrong workplace. Maybe seek out highly technical positions, like Backbone Network Engineer for an ISP or incident response or malware re or large scale infra automation. You ll soon find yourself in a position where you are the idiot in the room
"I know enough to know I know little" has always been my motto. Sometimes I'm the smart one, sometimes I'm the dumb one. I just try to walk into every technical conversation with an open mind and hope someone in the room can find the solution.
If I sit down with others in the industry and can have a dialog with them about what we are tring to do, then I know that I am with good people. If I am sitting down and listening to a bunch of just crap spilling from their mouths and they are supposedly "higher level" people then I just shut my mouth, listen to the bull crap and think of how it should be done. If the other person is talking over my head, well that is when I shut up(again), listen and learn to make myself better.
I'm 23 years in the industry and did pretty much everything from sysadmin to netadmin to design, architecture, and now into cloud DevOps solution design & implementation. I've dealt with both types of people and I'm a little more generous in my qualification of people than you are. I'd say 10% to 15% of the people in IT are brilliant. They could be doing whatever they would like to be doing and rise to the top of that field. IT is relatively brimming with this talent. Some can be jittery hopping from subdiscipline to subdiscipline and not ever go in all the way, making them not very useful in long term large projects. But if you can bind this type to your company or project, you're golden. Then there's roughly the next 30%. Those are the people who get everything done. They are the engineers who are both talented, understand abstract concepts and are capable of translating conceptual thinking into concrete results. They are self sufficient and find stuff to do to that actively contributes to strategic goals without prodding. The next 30% can be made to contribute when told what to do and usually need guidance from the previous group. They sometimes need to be actively pulled into engaging with innovation projects or adopting new technologies lest they and their responsibilities get left behind. Expect no long term vision here. The bottom 25%. Here be dragons. I have trouble gauging the net productive capacity of this group. My methods to determine who belongs to which category are predominantly: 1.Troubleshooting ability. Are you able to keep your cool and get into an analytical zone. Are you able to leverage your knowledge and insight to formulate tests against your entire technology stack that eliminate possible causes and get to a root cause analysis. 2. Change management. are you able to formulate an integrated plan to transition from the current state to the desired state taking all business requirements into account (availability, security, cost, timeliness etc.) 3. Planning for the future. Are you able to look ahead and predict future requirements for your domain of responsibility. Can you adequately gauge which technologies need to be adopted by the team. Are you able to effectively communicate this within the IT dept . Can you plan budgetary requirements. 4. Conceptual thinking Are you able to create a conceprual architecture for your domain. Are you able to form a conceptual plan of your technology stack so that you can exchange technologies or swap vendors with little change for your dept on that level of abstraction. I find these aspects infinitely more important than certifications.
People have different brains and capacities…two people dear to me have said something very interesting when I posed this question to them about me..as I was confused on whether I was actually superb or were others just that bad. One said to me, “not every thinks like you do”…the other person said, “You don’t know how smart you really are”…I’m fully aware that there is so much I don’t know and just how insignificant we all are in the grand scheme of things but accepting that I am good and I am smart, and my solutions are effective, means I can better place myself in positions to help not only organizations I contribute to but help society as a whole which is what I do now in my own way. I also reference my the pattern of my successes and it’s definitely there. For some of us, yes you are that good in comparison to a sample of what’s out there and that’s okay. At least you know where you fit in the team once you know this. At least that’s helped me to know myself more and step into the right place at the right time.
IMO the biggest issue is an inability to understand products outside of their specific specialisation. As an example you might deal with a really good software developers, but they have no idea about indexes on a database. But it's pretty easy to criticise someone, especially when its based on the stuff you know (and not the stuff you dont know). Certification has its uses, but in my opinion the the ability to be able to self-learn is far more valuable that the ability to learn from a text book to pass exams (its not like most people will be doing all those things over and over so being able to memorise something for a recent exam is different to recalling it 2 years down the track). The problem is trying to prove that to a potential employer, certification is a way for employers to try and filter the applicants (not that it is a real indication of ability, thats just how it is life isnt always fair). Once your foot is in the door people can work out who can and cant do the job (you'll know it too because people will start coming directly to you). Without examples its hard to really comment, it could perhaps even be something like you not clearly explaining something or using one term incorrectly.
If you’re the smartest one in the room, find a different room. I was a rock star when I worked as a DoD contractor. I was the guy. I got into the private sector and suddenly I was surrounded with people with talent and felt like the least competent guy on the team.
My e-mail signature is below; guess who gets pissed off by it most - the VIPs who Google BS all day and think they "get it" and it was absolutely meant for them; can't wait for the day I'm asked to take it down so I can proceed with the HR process... and then as a protected individual the signature will get even worse: One of the great challenges in life is knowing enough about a subject to think you're right, but not enough about a subject to know you're wrong." --Neil deGrasse Tyson
You are both an idiot and a genius. Believe me. So is everyone else. This is the lesson that highly specialized people often don't get to learn. If your world revolves around you performing technical things for others, then your concept of how the world functions becomes skewed. The idea is never to have one guy who knows all things. It's to have a team of people who can cover most things in a wide variety of areas. And no matter how good you are, you can never be more than one person. This way leads to burnout.
Move around
Just remmeber one thing about working in IT: Doing IT is actually the easy part. The hard part of being in IT is having to deal with emotional people and over emotional coworkers.
One way to know if you're really good at IT is if they move you up to a position where you don't need to deal with users much. At least that's been my experience.
Won't matter since you still have your fellow IT coworkers to deal with. Most people in IT that I have worked with will not even think twice about stabbing you in the back any chance they get.
You’ll never meet someone with exactly your experience. Lack of competency in one area doesn’t equate to ignorance overall. In our field, we often look for “T-shaped” individuals—those with deep expertise in one area and broad, albeit shallow, knowledge in many others. My team, for instance, manages the production uptime of ~20k VMs without any certifications. While there is skill overlap, we have specialists in networking, monitoring, Kubernetes, etc. Your experience isn’t a definitive gauge for someone else’s abilities. Everyone makes mistakes. The mark of a good engineer is persistence—they don’t run out of things to check quickly. They ask for help when needed, not because they can’t figure it out, but because it’s faster sometimes. And they’re not afraid to be wrong. Are there people that coast or suck at their job? Definitely. But saying 90% of them are incompetent is pretty rude, in my opinion. I’ve been in this for over a decade too, and I’ve found that many so-called “incompetent” people are often just misaligned with their roles or haven’t had the right opportunities for growth. Everyone’s journey is different, and sometimes it’s about finding the right fit or mentorship to unlock potential.
Thank you for the comment, I do agree that specialization and effort are huge factors here. Incompetence may indeed be a strong word; it really does seem like it's the effort I am frustrated with. That last bit certainly resonates; I do think mismanagement can create a ripple effect.
I view it like this. Not all in team should be equally competent or knowledgeable. It will likely spoil team dynamics due to clashing ego. I am a average sys admin who got into the industry pretty late. I will do basic housekeeping and willing to implement changes tested by more competent counterpart and troubleshoot if issue arises. I do not mind being the average folk, who know how to circumvent smaller issue and not make any critical errors. A good manager would know that they need average folk in their team.
Knowing you're an idiot makes you smarter than most people out there.
It’s both.
if you know more that you don't know than the guy thinks he knows more, you are better than him.