yeah a lot of it depends where you work and what team/project you’re on
while i did consulting at microsoft i saw everyone on the team, including managers at all levels, putting in literally 80+ hours a week to meet ridiculous deadlines. and of course, this is while they are dealing with politics like you said. these are indians of course so they kinda put up with it. i didn’t. i worked during thanksgiving break last year and i was like fuck this, and started preparing to find new job :lol:
ah yes, you must love your duty pager? thank you for all your work as a sys admin. people like you are under appreciated by non techies even though the work you do is invaluable. i cannot stand companies who outsource key parts of their infrastructure. if there’s a high priority fix that needs to go live, i dont want to waste time receiving generic boiler responses from india about how the issue is going to be resolved in 2 weeks.
I have a corporate iphone (which is fucking stupid we should go blackberry and just get the fucking BES).
But yeah I’m the IT lead for our Washington DC office. I report straight to the CIO. My “hours” are 8-5, but I can show up and leave whenever I want. The catch is I’m on call 24/7 and I’ve pulled multiple 72 hour days to make sure shit was up and running. I’ve managed to reign in outside contracting and hold everything in house, unless we need vendor support for items, but I’ve advocated to only have parts delivered and let our staff handle it internally.
The company I work for is a non profit NGO that works in international development. Specifically fighting HIV in Africa and maternal/infant mortality rates. Along with training health care workers in foreign countries on a budget given to us by USAID and donors.
We currently fly our people out to build nerve centers in critical areas and one of my duties is trying to keep things flowing in low bandwidth areas, which is, rather complex.
If something hits the fan, no matter where, or what timezone, they know they can call me. If I’m busy (or drunk) they know I’ll kick the call to one of my peers and they’ll have a response in email and a phone call within 2 hours and that work has already started.
I don’t mind the work time, nobody cares if I show up at 10 and leave at 3 to have some fun, and nobody bothers to track what I do. They know that shit gets handled and they aren’t some random trouble ticket by a third party who really doesn’t give a fuck about them. Though I do wish they’d quit asking me why something costs xxx,xxx bucks and why we really do need to buy it.
Well… I have a Ph.D. in Econ and am teaching… but in the grand scheme of things, I’m not too important. I love my job, I can support my family, but I would say my life as a father and husband is infintely more important than my teaching.
Now with that being said, I am doing some pretty cool research on Constitutional constraints on macroeconomic decision making and on identifying regional specific negative externalities in black market transactions… maybe fishjie and I should talk about how much an escort goes for in the Pacific Northwest per hour lol j/k.
making 100k doesnt make you jack shit. making money though, it does. without money, you aint shit. the most important people in this world are the 1% of this worlds population that rule over us and make other dumb ass motherfuckers go fight their wars and get their spoils for them. theres a reason why 1% of the world owns 99% of the wealth in this world. in other words, the rest of us (6 billion give or take) have to do it with the 1% of wealth remianing to be split between us. it doesnt matter if you make 20k a year, 200k a year or 20 million a year. you aint shit, never will be. unless you litterally have 100’s of millions, you aint shit in this world. and even then, youd still be small time.
money = all.
edit: docters. yes. always. lawyers? fuck no. if ww3 ever comes, im pretty sure youd be happier to find a doctor instead of a lawyer after its over.
Eh? If you mean the make your own hours but get stuck on call that’s where things end up for sysadmins down the line. There are a lot of things I can’t do during work hours, and things do come crashing down on off hours and just because we are off doesn’t mean someone in say Thailand or Kenya doesn’t need file access. Plus I can remote a ton of stuff from home.
Non profits tend to be more relaxed and full of save the world types, also virtually 90% female. So you get a fair amount of goofy drama at work, and you make less, but you’re given more freedom to do what you want.
The best part is our CIO is down in NC, and I’m in DC (hell I can walk to work, that rocks). So I check in with him once a week and alert him if there is a disaster.