This was something I wrote after a bad, bad week at work. Late Friday, in fact. Things have gotten better…
I’ve completely lost my edge. After so many years of working with and in technology, staying ahead of the curve and being generally “on top of things”, I’ve lost it.
In the years that I’ve done various technical work, I’ve seen a lot of guys who get to an edge of what they do and then just stop, or maybe even get worse. Usually happens to those who go to the management route, and I can’t blame those who try to go management. It’s usually a move up the ladder, better pay, a little more responsibility, a bit more respectability. You give something up when you go that way and it’s usually your technical knowledge as you are now dealing with people. Technology is comfortable, predictable to a certain extent. For every technological problem there is a fix, of some type anyway. You may not like the time and/or money involved in that fix, but by God, there’s something for it. People, however, can be maddening. So the promoted either stays a good tech and a bad manager, or a fair manager but becomes a bad tech. Slippery slope, for sure.
Others who have lost their edge just seem to run up against it and their progress stops. In a way, it’s sad to see because it’s people who used to get it and now just can’t keep up. I’ve seen it more in programmers rather than desktop/network techs, but it can happen to anyone. These people just end up spinning the same wheels, doing the same tricks that they did to get them to their current career place.
And now there’s me. In the last three weeks, I’ve unsuccessfully tried to troubleshoot multiple server issues (both multiple servers and multiple issues), mis-diagnosed simple hardware issues on PCs, nearly broke a CPU/motherboard combination, improperly put a motherboard back into a case, failed to make any sense of programming a firewall and I just bricked a laptop by doing the fairly simple task of reloading a BIOS. The best I’ve got going for me right now is that I might have figured out why one server kept rebooting…and that is still just speculation.
All of this has me wondering if I’ve hit that wall. I’m not a manager, but I don’t have the confidence in what I’m doing any more. I used to be pretty good in that I could walk into a place and usually figure out a problem and come up with the various solutions. Now…it seems like what I touch, breaks further. I’ve gotten down on my skills before, but never a streak like this.
Okay, I did say things got better. Although one of my servers went tits-up again today, the laptop was not a total loss. Still takes half an hour to boot, but I fixed the initial problem with it. Boo-ya!
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.