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Ah, alas, IT is a harsh mistress. She’s never happy with your progress. In a survival situation, such as being lost in the woods, they always tell you to “Remain where you are, that’s the best chance of being rescued”. But in the world that is Information Technology, standing still will cause you to be eaten by the Great Nothing of stale skills - and there’s no Sebastian to save you.¹

In the real world I’m known as an Application, Network, and System Monitoring Architect. I design, test, implement and maintain solutions for both Windows and Unix that help organizations monitor their crucial applications and processes. It’s one of the last great frontiers in IT - I’m a bit of a cowboy, sent out on my own with the community trusting I know how to get the bad guy. I like it, and it works well. For the last few years, I’ve been specializing in Windows technologies - most specifically Operations Manager.

Operations Manager 2000 was the first one, based off of a NetIQ application, and it sucked. Then came Operations Manager 2005 - it sucked much less, but still sucked and use MOM guys were forced as a collective whole to create some very ‘interesting’ solutions to problems. One of the issues with having a fairly open ended script based system is that you’re at the mercy of the admin.

Now, though, MS has released System Center Operations Manager 2007, and I’ve been deep into it for the past few months - and it’s a breath of friggin fresh air.

And I’m just in time too - according to Indeed.Com these new skills will be in a lot more demand then the old:

Another reason I need to up those skills is because it appears that being awesome is in a lot more demand then being decent:

Additionally on the job front I have good news, I was offered a full time position with the consulting firm I’m currently with - which is a wonderful thing. No longer do I have to worry about a current assignment ending early and leaving me high and dry. I get the full benefits of working for a company as an actual employee, but I get to go all over the twin cities and save the day! And more importantly, I have a training budget, so I can update my skillsets and not do it on my own dime. I don’t mind paying for some of it, but I like being able to get paid to learn at least!

Speaking of which, specializing in monitoring is a good way to work yourself out of a job. It takes about 2-3 years tops to come into a new organization, tear their existing solution apart and rebuild a new one from the ground up. When you’re done, you have next to nothing to do but surf the web all day and perform the tiny day to day maintenance tasks - if you’ve done it right, you won’t have a lot to do.  Being a full time consultant now ensures that I don’t have to worry - when it’s time to move on I’ll move on, without a 6 month + job search. When my skills are in demand, they need someone ‘now’, but the problem is it doesn’t creep up all that often.

1. Holy crap, I just made a Neverending Story reference. [↩]