[GeekLucanis]

I own my own Computer and Tech Repair business, and I was a school bus driver, took some time off to work at another Tech Support job, but plan on going back to School Bus driving when I have a chance.

[Knezzen]

I work with the IT systems surrounding the DCS (distributed control system) at a paper plant/factory. There are still many Sun and HP (PA-RISC) machines running here, so even if we don't have any SGI's laying around or running I still get to work on old proprietary Unix systems every day.

[micrex22]

I work in I.T. (shocker) as it was the easiest and quickest thing for me to get into (we just do outsourced support and management for clients). Really nothing of Unix or any alternative OSes to speak of. Actually that's not true, we have one client who has an AIX box, but we don't directly manage it since we point the client to the vendor and won't have anything to do with it (I woudln't mind getting xming running on it just to see--although I'd probably have to get the vendor to get me credentials). We had some clients who had some POWER towers running OS/400|IBMi.

Except for this one time we had a client who was recycling their old PBX system--it was a pentium 3 running OS/2 Warp! It still booted and ran OS/2 with some big-daddy dual sandwiched ISA cards and more RJ11 than you could count on two hands. That's the first and last time I'll ever see OS/2 at work!

[VPCII]

Used to do sys/net admin stuff, wound up doing the hobby for cash and became a graphics/front end developer. Eventually went fullstack. You know, that old chestnut.

[Raion]

As of April, I'm now a L2 sysadmin which essentially is compliance, support and system monitoring. I make $32k/year.

Basically I sit behind my desk, watch our Check_MK system, work with the devops team when stuff breaks, do database admin work, and handle escalated issues from both support and management. I still help out compliance relatively often. I'm inexperienced because I hate dealing with Linux's network stack and hate Apache. Most of our internal infra is using 2.6.32-era RHEL 6 and our external stuff Cloudlinux 7, an RHEL 7 based distro for webhosting.

My specialization is in MariaDB, Postgres, and PowerDNS as I'm usually the go-to guy on my shift for that. I get two weekdays off, which I prefer since I don't have to deal with businesses being closed.

[Trippynet]

As from late April, I'm now an IT Service Manager, meaning I manage the IT service delivered by my company to two of our large clients, currently covering UK, Ireland and Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg) and covering around 75 IT engineers.

I don't really get too involved with the techie side of things these days - which is probably for the best given that I despise Windows 10 and hate how bug-ridden Office 365 is. I had enough of trying to fix problems caused primarily by Microsoft's shitty coding for the few months last year I covered some VIP support for my company!

My main tech support these days (away from home) is for my wife's university labs as she has a whole pile of machines there, including a dual-Xeon workstation I cobbled together for her that runs XP (no, it isn't networked) that controls an Optotrak motion tracking system (worth about £35k - which is why it hasn't been replaced, and the software for it doesn't support Windows 7 and higher).

[pcar]

I'm a Devops/Cloud Solution Architect for a Fortune 500 finance company. Recently I've been building large scale Docker/Kubernetes clusters to run a bunch of specialized GPU AI/ML/NLP workloads all based around AML (anti money laundering, let the machines loose on that data and have them tell us what the anomalies are). I also work with all kinds of other Devops tech like Terraform, Redis, Elasticsearch, NATS, Postgres, Kafka, Cassandra.

I write code in Python and Go and run it in containers/k8s.

[commodorejohn]

I do technical support, currently for a managed service provider that isn't very managed (head honcho is one of those glib "gonna pretend this is a late-'90s Valley startup" types who doesn't see any need to bother being organized or keeping a regular schedule; despite having already hashed out what shift I'm supposed to be covering with every person in "management" individually, he keeps telling everybody to come in at whatever random hour he feels like the next day, sending us out to client sites on a whim, etc.) Probably going to start looking around for a less haphazard employer after Christmas vacation...

Funny to read this in retrospect, since as it turned out they let me go the very next day (they made half-hearted attempts to avoid admitting it, but we both knew it was because head honcho couldn't come to terms with the fact that I don't like smartphones - not that I refuse to use them for work purposes, mind you, or that I was haranguing clients about them or anything like that, just that I personally don't like them - but they told me to my face "well, it's obvious that you have a negative opinion of Technology...!")

Anyway, after frantically scrambling to line up work for the next few weeks, I ended up starting at another Sacramento-area MSP at the beginning of the year. Still there now; the good part is that there's no stupid unspoken ideological code demanding adherence to the High Church of the Noophile, while the bad part is that management is no less haphazard; there's less spur-of-the-moment schedule changes, at least, but on the flip side there's serious personnel/management issues and what goes on in the head honcho's Grand Visionary mind bears no meaningful correlation to anything in the objective reality of the daily service-desk stuff. We're slammed half the time trying to keep up with stuff because we've spent months not dealing with a useless employee who drags everyone else's efficiency down, but I'm due to spend the rest of the damn week at some stupid conference on the other side of the country because head honcho is delusionally certain that Automation!!! is magical pixie dust that will solve all our problems, so obviously I have to take a whole massive chunk of time I could be working on actual issues in and spend it at this conference for shit I could just learn about by binging the documentation, if we could just get someone useful in to replace Mr. Useless so that I could have enough downtime to do that.

It'd be awfully nice to work at one place that wasn't a complete shitshow...

[Irinikus]

I don’t think that any place to work at that isn’t a complete shitshow, unless you work for yourself!

[VPCII]

Irinikus is right.

There is always something that makes it a shitshow. The place could be almost perfect, yet you will get that one thing that you cannot overcome and that haunts your sleeping hours. If not, if all seems perfect and you cannot find what makes it a shitshow, it might be you. You might not be learning enough to stay relevant while you get older and less palatable to those who do hiring and firing. You might be a little too open, or your personality might not fit just right. Hell, the office dog might not like you.

Or maybe you are that asshole who sends xkcd comics to the rest of the department, as if stick figures and smarmy virtue signaling belongs anywhere outside elementary school. 

Shit its Wednesday already.