What event in your career made you decide to go a different direction?

Posted by JetreL@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 17 comments

Looking back on my career, there was one moment that really changed my path as a sysadmin. Years ago, I was stuck in front of a bare metal Windows server, patching it in the days when KVM switches were the norm and modern update tools hadn’t yet made things easier. It was a painfully slow process. I remember micro-sleeping at my desk, caught in that frustrating loop of waiting—no updates, no notifications, just watching a screen with no feedback and wondering when it would end. After what felt like an eternity (I think it was over two hours), it finally finished. But by then, I’d had a realization: there had to be a better way to spend my time than watching progress bars.

That experience led me down a different path. I decided to dive into networking and the Unix/Linux world. Sure, it had its own learning curve with compiling, configuring, and managing dependencies before package managers streamlined everything. I’d spend hours wrestling with ./configure; make; make install routines and tracking down missing dependencies, but at least there was feedback—a real sense of control over what was happening. I found that to be more rewarding and a better fit.

I’m curious if anyone else has had a similar “Aha!” moment that pushed them in a new direction. What was the experience, and what did it inspire you to do differently in your career? Would love to hear about those game-changing moments that steered your path!

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bitslammer@reddit

I was doing Novell at the height of Novell, around the 4.11 days. To me this felt like a career pinnacle because things were really simple back then.

I was asked to fill in for 2 1/2 weeks for the site network manager as she was taking a long vacation. At that time the LAN was just Ungermann Bass hubs on some goofy thick coax cable. I was not happy. I though it was going to be an awful boring 2 weeks or I'd be dealing with these dumb boxes with tons of wires coming out of them in dusty closets.

Before she left the network manager showed me a few things including this new thing called a 'Sniffer" that she hadn't had a chance to work with yet. I figured I'd give it a try and BAM! It was like a blind person being given instant 20/20 vision. DHCP? Yep, I grabbed a trace of that and could see ever step happen packet by packet. Same for DNS, a Novell login, CCMail login, web page being fetched, ping, traceroute....you name it.

I learned more in those 2 1/2 week than any other time in my career or maybe life. Things just all made sense now and I was able to do what seemed like magic when it came to troubleshooting because I could see everything. I setup a sort of library of packet captures of things when they were working right so you could compare them to when things went wrong and the network manager was so happy to have that she asked if I might want to move over to help her as there was a huge project to migrate the old gear to this kind of new company called Cisco. I jumped at that chance it it kind of put my career on turbo. So thankful to her for giving me that chance and so happy I didn't blow it with a bad attitude.

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ErikTheEngineer@reddit

Sniffer

Seeing that go from a physical luggable proprietary laptop, to super-expensive proprietary software, to WireShark, has been quite a ride.

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BrainWaveCC@reddit

I setup a sort of library of packet captures of things when they were working right so you could compare them to when things went wrong

Brilliant! That would have been helpful to me back in the day, when setting up a packet capture was far more laborious than today. Today, I can just run one on a good system for comparison...

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JetreL@reddit (OP)

That's pretty awesome! I manage engineers and developers now and I do my best to find ways to repay all the hand-ups everyone gave me when I was still pretty fresh. I even celebrate with others when I lose them to other companies that will pay them insane amounts of nickels.

DrDan21@reddit

I really despised databases but after enough years in desktop I was more than ready to move along. The company decided to open a DBA role our first ever and I applied and actually got it with near no actual experience

Started getting pretty good at the job and once I broke into six figures it was too late to go back

When I was younger I thought I’d end up being a windows sysadmin or a network admin specializing in Cisco devices

Special_Luck7537@reddit

I guess that would be when I was told that there was no next step up for me because I was irreplaceable, despite getting a masters in Mgt of Tech. So, they had to replace me.

WaldoOU812@reddit

It wasn't really anything in my career, but rather a PC video game, of all things. Computers weren't really all that common when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, but I've always enjoyed games of various sorts, and while I had been exposed to them before and had even owned an Apple IIe, I was mostly a console gamer.

I always enjoyed looking at the PC games in my local Virgin Megastore, though, and one day I saw Darklands. I was enthralled, immediately purchased it, and convinced my mom to drive me to Best Buy the next day. Given that I only had about $50 to my name at the time, I applied for a credit card, was approved for $3,400 in credit, and took the voucher to the computer department, where I asked the guy what his "best" PC was. I couldn't afford the Acer he pointed at, since I also wanted a printer, so I bought a Packard Bell.

Spent three days manually sorting out IRQs, DMAs, and all that other nonsense, just so I could get the keyboard, mouse, video, and sound all working together, and from that point on decided I wanted to do that for a living.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darklands_(video_game)

Fake_Cakeday@reddit

🫡

All those hoops to jump, just to play a video game and then you've spent hours getting it to work just before bedtime.

But then realizing you still had a fun day doing it.

I did. I had a blast. Of course, this was back when I was a lot younger and had a lot more patience for puzzles.

Patience and time for me as well.

Now I just want it to work before I'm too tired to bother with it.

IRQs, DMAs, and all that other nonsense,

I know you're largely taking linguistic liberties, but all that nonsense we had to understand before, has helped us better understand what goes on behind the scenes even today. I'm grateful that I got to touch PCs just a they were making their mark in the enterprise...