I am rapidly approaching my first year with Stack Exchange. I know this because the management company that collects my rent sent me notice that my lease can be renewed for another year, and I signed when I first came to the city to start my new job.
I have been trying to look back and get a feel for what progress, if any, I've made. There are always things that could use improvement, and I think that the knowledge of just how much I don't know is part of what feeds my feeling of inadequacy. I try to keep perspective by reminding myself of the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Unfortunately that's not always effective.
It's especially hard when I work with a number of young, intelligent, highly competent people. They are a reminder that had I taken a different path, instead of deciding to go into the IT department in a public school system, I may have more marketable skills and experience.
I do have a tendency, surrounded with a pool of talented younger people, to focus on the skills I am lacking in and they excel in. And that is why, upon reflection of the past nearly-year, I have at least two moments of clarity that struck me square in the melon.
First, one of the more routine tasks I've been performing involves ownership of the tape backup rotation. We have logs of every hit our balancers get, and these logs get pretty large pretty fast. Despite having an 8-tape LTO-4 jukebox, we're hitting low-tape alarms in the course of about a week or so. Usually I'm the person that heads to the data center, about 25 minutes from the office, to perform a tape swap.
We recently hosted a summit wherein remote community, system administrators, and developers came to our office. Several of the technical people spent their first days playing in the datacenter, and one day coincided with the need to swap tapes. "Hey, while you guys are there, could you...?"
They needed a cable brought out to them from the office, and the sysadmin who mentored me on the backup system volunteered to take it out to them. When he came back, he said that they were having...issues...with swapping out the tapes.
These are people I hold in high regard. Very high regard. They're very good at what they do, and tape backups are not what they normally handle as an everyday task. So having issues with figuring out how to work the tape system is not something to hold against them. But he had no idea how much pride that gave me to know that there is something I'm able to do as a routine task that people I look up to with envy could not.
I have a skill that is useful and fills a niche to them. He had no idea how much this made my day.
Then there was a more recent example of skill development.
We have several hires coming in. I'm working on getting equipment and accounts set up. I was setting up a phone (Polycom VOIP phone) for one of the new hires.
I brought it into the build room and thought I'd get the configuration done in Asterisk (The sysadmin that owns the phone management has it mostly simplified through macros in the config files) and test the phone.
I ran through the checklists. Updated phone numbers and extensions in documentation. Started the phone...no configuration.
I double checked the phone's MAC setting on the server. Matched.
I checked that the FTP server was running on the server. Running.
Asterisk was running after the service reload for changed configurations.
I then went into the phone and reset it to factory defaults, thinking something was "stuck." It reset to defaults...and wouldn't pull the new settings.
Next I went on the switch. It saw the phone's MAC in the address table.
I looked at the port it was plugged into; that port, for some reason, was missing the phone VLAN. A couple of lines added and running config saved, the phone pulled its configuration without a hitch.
I was finally able to close the loop on a troubleshooting issue that before coming here I wouldn't have been able to do; I would have been stymied at the Cisco switch. I simply haven't been buried in the Cisco infrastructure enough to know the necessary configuration and diagnostic steps to take without the fear of screwing something up or knocking the office's Internet access offline.
That ability to close that loop...troubleshoot from start to finish something that a few months ago I wouldn't have been able to do...that's progress. And it was a moment of clarity for me.
I am improving.
I now can tell if a remote office has a computer or phone plugged into the network by looking for the MAC in the address tables of a switch across the country or on the other side of the ocean. I was mapping out what ports are active in a remote office, as well as checking what ports aren't configured for any devices. I'm confident doing this now, something I wouldn't have done before.
I'm always afraid that I'm not improving enough, or not showing skill enough to be worthy of working at a startup with so many great people. My goal now is to keep improving, while accepting that improvements don't come in sudden waves so much as a series of smaller steps that build up over time.
My first year is coming up. With it I believe there will be a review of my progress; I am hoping my peers have noticed improvements over time, and I look forward to guidance of what really needs tuning. But if they ask if there's something I feel I am proud of, I can say that I can swap tapes at the datacenter and I configured a phone without resorting to bothering other people for help.
Look for moments of clarity in your work life. Reflect on what you have done, and how you've improved. Perhaps you're like me and you get caught up in the frustration of things you can't do right or things you screw up, and forget the things that you are doing right and the skills you are learning. If you really reach a point where you go weeks at a time without any such moments of positive clarity it may be time to reach for a change.
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