Ahh, infrastructure. From family help desk to “engineers” or “architects” in just a few years. What other profession could possibly allow you to earn six figures with no discernible social skills or ambition?

The skill level seems to vary from the smartest, least ambitious kid you’ve ever known to “how did this person even manage to drive to work this morning?” The alcoholism varies between the former straight-edge kid who is now a whiskey expert  to “how did they even make it home last night?” Overall though, you will find some of the people with the best Google™ skills in the world working in infrastructure.  The guys who can find a KB article faster than you can get Sanjay on the phone from support; and these are the guys you want.

As an “IT Manager,” I think the best skill an “engineer” can have is being able to successfully google something. Now I’d respect you if you have DuckDuckGo in your repertoire for privacy reasons alone, but you’re not going to find what you need searching there.  Google is where it is at when troubleshooting an infrastructure problem (As an aside, I do like DuckDuckGo and try to use it in my personal life until I can’t find something and just end up starting the search with !g).

They say you’re not a real “engineer” until you cause your first outage. Whether it’s from pushing random buttons at the data center, cutting the wrong cable when you’re trying to pull out old fiber, or plugging one too many things into the PDU/UPS. I was once working with a kid who plugged an ESXi node into a UPS and brought all three racks in the company down. It happened to be 1 amp too many for the breaker. This is why you don’t run the router and the phone system for a prison on a virtual appliance!