Steps engineer. When the question "What's next?"
On Habré with an enviable consistency flashed publications about the stages of development of programmers. Sometimes serious, sometimes humorous.
Comprehending them with an eye to the picture as a whole, I came to the conclusion that this is a very special case, and any good (or not good - depends on his ability to self-criticism) a specialist rises by several steps.
The number of these steps and their height are determined by many parameters: place of work, attitude to this place and to the profession as a whole, from personal qualities, from the city and a lot more.
For me personally, a high-quality leap was a job change. And the authorities are the most important factor.
If not to consider seven years of work as non-core: a berry collector, a loader, a postman, a seller, a freight forwarder, a storekeeper, a teacher - then my journey began not so long ago. I studied at a mathematician-programmer and, as usual among students, did not realize who I would be after graduation. But I certainly did not expect to be an administrator. At that time, I still did not understand how far my programming in Delph hydrodynamics problems was from reality. Already closer to the fifth course, the words linux and cisco appeared over the horizon, The fact that they concealed themselves beneath themselves, but still did not loom as a prospect.
By a strange coincidence, in 2008 at the 5th year I got into the technical support of a local provider - for me it was a temporary part-time job, because at that moment I was sick with three-dimensional modeling and planned to become a three-dimensional designer. Therefore, the attitude to the work was appropriate - I did not even know the IP address of my computer.
The technologies used were very heterogeneous: optics, RRL, Wi-Fi, CDMA and even modem pools were. Provided Internet, IP-telephony, hosting and email.
')
The work does not hit the dead: once in 20 minutes, view the status of hosts in Nagios, once per hour load interfaces in the MRTG and answer calls of subscribers. The most difficult thing that I had to decide was to teach the user how to drive the Dial-Up settings. For all other applications, you need to collect information and transfer to Admins. Then they were just Admins for me - just omnipotent gods, not people. I looked with admiration as these people were picking at the racks and doing something from their workplace on the pieces of iron that were hundreds of kilometers away. The console, vlan, tsisko, patchcord - all this sounded to me like spells that made the network equipment come to life.
With my mouth open, I watched as someone called Radmin on any computer in a neighboring city or a couple of teams restored radio communication on a fifty-kilometer RRL span, which for me was also something mysterious - I imagined such big clicking relays in plastic boxes. In all this was romance.
The most interesting thing is that in more than half a year of work, I really did not even understand the meaning of the word IP-address. I did not even get acquainted with the network scheme. But I found out who the users are, what they need and how to talk to them. Generally, tech support is a great anti-stress school. In addition to this good lesson, the work attracted me to the IT world - it fulfilled its main function.
A few good people left their mark on my telephone directory.
Then suddenly, one Admin told me that someday I will also become beautiful and smart, they say, I have the potential. It seems to be just words, but they sunk into my heart and now I could not do otherwise.
Each person should have such an authority, whose word can determine an important decision. If a person says that he does not have authority, then, most likely, he is deceiving or just not far away.
I took out books on network technologies, put Packet Tracer and a month later I was on the advanced IT industry - WiMAX. And here, as in a pool of heads - an endless stream of knowledge and new information. Since the days of the university, I haven’t had one and I realized how pleasant it is to study. I lacked this hard work of the brain, a lively discussion in the audience, questions in my head.
At this place I tasted the delights of the installer and engineer. We designed and laid SCS, pulled cables, went into the cold to the fields, punched communication channels and locations of base stations.
That's what I said at the beginning - the manual. Two people - Khorunzhiy Dmitry and Aksyonov Vitaly - defined my aesthetic tastes and vector of development. They instilled in me the ethics of editing and maintaining documentation. “There is nothing more permanent than temporary”, “everything must be flawless”, “the best is the enemy of the good” - these are the slogans with which we lived.
I knew in person every cable, every piece of hardware in a rack, the characteristics of all devices. All interfaces were signed, on each cable (and even on power and grounding) a sticker indicating where and from where. Switching we had just exemplary.
But one problem - setting. I knew this question very superficially. Routers, Vlana, subinterfaces - it was still so far away and mysterious.
Then I ran into and literally touched the first level of the OSI model, learned the ethics of editing, the basics of business correspondence, and many good people.
I took from this work almost everything. During this period, I started my accounts on Habré and LiveJournal .
When everything became bad , and I decided to go further, my boss told me that it was easy to leave telecom, but it was difficult to return.
It was pretty scary to change jobs: after the training and two years in telecom, I would not want to refill cartridges.
Fortunately, I didn't have to leave.
At the new place of work, I was dragged out of the green telecommunications cycle. And then either the pan or lost: or during the trial period, I penetrate into the spirit of cisco to the fullest extent or to the same extent enjoy the search for a new job. Chose the first - not lost.
At first it seemed that I would never understand this terrible forest of routers. A little later, I thought I was one step away from nirvana - from knowing everything and everyone. And then it turned out that I did not even see the tip of the iceberg - I was standing on it and I could see only bits of snow under my feet.
Over the past two years I have met amazing people. These are real information combines. They are as out of reach for me now as those Admins. And most remarkable of all, these people are not just very strong ITshniki - they are erudite and developed in many areas. And even if I once needed to grow up to their level, in other matters I need to make up on my own.
At this point, I also did not disdain to go to the fields and engage in installation, despite the fact that there was a whole department for this.
I often do non-core activities for work. It doesn’t matter that they don’t pay extra for it, that I could sit in the office and read the bashorg, instead of leaving the village for the next time or setting up pieces of iron at the request of others. But I know that the benefit from this will be much greater and it is not necessarily material. In any case, there will be no worse from one more tick in the list of knowledge and skills. In addition, the world of telecom is small, even on a national scale, acquaintances and reputation play an important role, and here respect is usually not a status, but professionalism. At least I hope so.
Here are other clients, different scale tasks and other network sizes. And now I’m the admin who rummages in the rack and connects, sitting in the office, to the equipment hundreds of kilometers away. And it is especially pleasant that I control the whole process. If I set up a PBX, then I know which plinth this port goes to and where the telephone pair runs further along the building. If I connect a new communication channel, I know not by hearsay what is on the other side, which cable, how it is crimped, where it is plugged.
Ahead, as it turns out, there are still immense horizons and fantastic rainbows, but now I feel the lack of a theoretical basis. It is said that theory without practice is nothing. Learn, they say, is necessary in real conditions. And this is true, but the reverse is also true - practice without theory is a dead end. Only through reading did I manage to move from the first chapter of this article to the second, and from the second to the third.
Often, when a free minute is given, I go to LiveJournal, demotivators, and several IT resources, and the documentation on networks looks shyly out of the backpack. Sometimes I shyly turn away, reproaching myself with laziness and weakness, and sometimes I sit down and read.
And at each stage there comes a moment when I ask myself the question: “what next?”
And now such a moment. The first option is to stay here and continue working in anticipation of career growth. He will undoubtedly be, and I will get into the details of my entire large network and the subtleties of customer relations. The prospects are quite decent, given the growth rate of the company in which I work. The second is to find another job. There is no urgent need for this - for my region in my region is average, I have not exhausted my interest in current activities, it gives me pleasure to work here, but at the same time I understand the one-sidedness and limitations of my view on building networks. The fact is that in fact in this organization I am alone engaged in networking. My boss solves questions of another - political for the most part - level. Therefore, I bear the burden of responsibility for the choice. My approach is what I was taught and how I learned from the scheme of an existing network. For example, there is no clear Core-Distribution-Access structure, or there is no “ring” topology, NAT is not made on one central device, but distributed across routers in the network. I would like to study this issue from different sides, and not to become stagnant in the current situation.
So what next?
Probably everyone at some point stopped at this fork and painfully made a decision?
Comprehending them with an eye to the picture as a whole, I came to the conclusion that this is a very special case, and any good (or not good - depends on his ability to self-criticism) a specialist rises by several steps.
The number of these steps and their height are determined by many parameters: place of work, attitude to this place and to the profession as a whole, from personal qualities, from the city and a lot more.
For me personally, a high-quality leap was a job change. And the authorities are the most important factor.
Inception
If not to consider seven years of work as non-core: a berry collector, a loader, a postman, a seller, a freight forwarder, a storekeeper, a teacher - then my journey began not so long ago. I studied at a mathematician-programmer and, as usual among students, did not realize who I would be after graduation. But I certainly did not expect to be an administrator. At that time, I still did not understand how far my programming in Delph hydrodynamics problems was from reality. Already closer to the fifth course, the words linux and cisco appeared over the horizon, The fact that they concealed themselves beneath themselves, but still did not loom as a prospect.
By a strange coincidence, in 2008 at the 5th year I got into the technical support of a local provider - for me it was a temporary part-time job, because at that moment I was sick with three-dimensional modeling and planned to become a three-dimensional designer. Therefore, the attitude to the work was appropriate - I did not even know the IP address of my computer.
The technologies used were very heterogeneous: optics, RRL, Wi-Fi, CDMA and even modem pools were. Provided Internet, IP-telephony, hosting and email.
')
The work does not hit the dead: once in 20 minutes, view the status of hosts in Nagios, once per hour load interfaces in the MRTG and answer calls of subscribers. The most difficult thing that I had to decide was to teach the user how to drive the Dial-Up settings. For all other applications, you need to collect information and transfer to Admins. Then they were just Admins for me - just omnipotent gods, not people. I looked with admiration as these people were picking at the racks and doing something from their workplace on the pieces of iron that were hundreds of kilometers away. The console, vlan, tsisko, patchcord - all this sounded to me like spells that made the network equipment come to life.
With my mouth open, I watched as someone called Radmin on any computer in a neighboring city or a couple of teams restored radio communication on a fifty-kilometer RRL span, which for me was also something mysterious - I imagined such big clicking relays in plastic boxes. In all this was romance.
The most interesting thing is that in more than half a year of work, I really did not even understand the meaning of the word IP-address. I did not even get acquainted with the network scheme. But I found out who the users are, what they need and how to talk to them. Generally, tech support is a great anti-stress school. In addition to this good lesson, the work attracted me to the IT world - it fulfilled its main function.
A few good people left their mark on my telephone directory.
Then suddenly, one Admin told me that someday I will also become beautiful and smart, they say, I have the potential. It seems to be just words, but they sunk into my heart and now I could not do otherwise.
Each person should have such an authority, whose word can determine an important decision. If a person says that he does not have authority, then, most likely, he is deceiving or just not far away.
Beauty of structure
I took out books on network technologies, put Packet Tracer and a month later I was on the advanced IT industry - WiMAX. And here, as in a pool of heads - an endless stream of knowledge and new information. Since the days of the university, I haven’t had one and I realized how pleasant it is to study. I lacked this hard work of the brain, a lively discussion in the audience, questions in my head.
At this place I tasted the delights of the installer and engineer. We designed and laid SCS, pulled cables, went into the cold to the fields, punched communication channels and locations of base stations.
That's what I said at the beginning - the manual. Two people - Khorunzhiy Dmitry and Aksyonov Vitaly - defined my aesthetic tastes and vector of development. They instilled in me the ethics of editing and maintaining documentation. “There is nothing more permanent than temporary”, “everything must be flawless”, “the best is the enemy of the good” - these are the slogans with which we lived.
I knew in person every cable, every piece of hardware in a rack, the characteristics of all devices. All interfaces were signed, on each cable (and even on power and grounding) a sticker indicating where and from where. Switching we had just exemplary.
But one problem - setting. I knew this question very superficially. Routers, Vlana, subinterfaces - it was still so far away and mysterious.
Then I ran into and literally touched the first level of the OSI model, learned the ethics of editing, the basics of business correspondence, and many good people.
I took from this work almost everything. During this period, I started my accounts on Habré and LiveJournal .
When everything became bad , and I decided to go further, my boss told me that it was easy to leave telecom, but it was difficult to return.
It was pretty scary to change jobs: after the training and two years in telecom, I would not want to refill cartridges.
Fortunately, I didn't have to leave.
Out of the frying pan into the fire
At the new place of work, I was dragged out of the green telecommunications cycle. And then either the pan or lost: or during the trial period, I penetrate into the spirit of cisco to the fullest extent or to the same extent enjoy the search for a new job. Chose the first - not lost.
At first it seemed that I would never understand this terrible forest of routers. A little later, I thought I was one step away from nirvana - from knowing everything and everyone. And then it turned out that I did not even see the tip of the iceberg - I was standing on it and I could see only bits of snow under my feet.
Over the past two years I have met amazing people. These are real information combines. They are as out of reach for me now as those Admins. And most remarkable of all, these people are not just very strong ITshniki - they are erudite and developed in many areas. And even if I once needed to grow up to their level, in other matters I need to make up on my own.
At this point, I also did not disdain to go to the fields and engage in installation, despite the fact that there was a whole department for this.
I often do non-core activities for work. It doesn’t matter that they don’t pay extra for it, that I could sit in the office and read the bashorg, instead of leaving the village for the next time or setting up pieces of iron at the request of others. But I know that the benefit from this will be much greater and it is not necessarily material. In any case, there will be no worse from one more tick in the list of knowledge and skills. In addition, the world of telecom is small, even on a national scale, acquaintances and reputation play an important role, and here respect is usually not a status, but professionalism. At least I hope so.
Here are other clients, different scale tasks and other network sizes. And now I’m the admin who rummages in the rack and connects, sitting in the office, to the equipment hundreds of kilometers away. And it is especially pleasant that I control the whole process. If I set up a PBX, then I know which plinth this port goes to and where the telephone pair runs further along the building. If I connect a new communication channel, I know not by hearsay what is on the other side, which cable, how it is crimped, where it is plugged.
Mosaic of choice
Ahead, as it turns out, there are still immense horizons and fantastic rainbows, but now I feel the lack of a theoretical basis. It is said that theory without practice is nothing. Learn, they say, is necessary in real conditions. And this is true, but the reverse is also true - practice without theory is a dead end. Only through reading did I manage to move from the first chapter of this article to the second, and from the second to the third.
Often, when a free minute is given, I go to LiveJournal, demotivators, and several IT resources, and the documentation on networks looks shyly out of the backpack. Sometimes I shyly turn away, reproaching myself with laziness and weakness, and sometimes I sit down and read.
And at each stage there comes a moment when I ask myself the question: “what next?”
And now such a moment. The first option is to stay here and continue working in anticipation of career growth. He will undoubtedly be, and I will get into the details of my entire large network and the subtleties of customer relations. The prospects are quite decent, given the growth rate of the company in which I work. The second is to find another job. There is no urgent need for this - for my region in my region is average, I have not exhausted my interest in current activities, it gives me pleasure to work here, but at the same time I understand the one-sidedness and limitations of my view on building networks. The fact is that in fact in this organization I am alone engaged in networking. My boss solves questions of another - political for the most part - level. Therefore, I bear the burden of responsibility for the choice. My approach is what I was taught and how I learned from the scheme of an existing network. For example, there is no clear Core-Distribution-Access structure, or there is no “ring” topology, NAT is not made on one central device, but distributed across routers in the network. I would like to study this issue from different sides, and not to become stagnant in the current situation.
So what next?
Probably everyone at some point stopped at this fork and painfully made a decision?
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/114190/
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