IT Unprofessional

People keep asking me how I got into IT. I got into IT because I was too socially awkward for sales and too impatient for engineering. In 2009, I was the only IT person at a 40-person startup. Everything was my fault. Server down? My fault. Email slow? My fault. Someone's laptop got a virus because they opened an email from their own mother? Also my fault, apparently. One day the CEO asked me why our internet was "acting slow." I told him it was probably DNS. I had no idea what DNS was. I just knew it was the answer to everything. He asked me to fix it. I told him I needed $8K in equipment and three weeks. I spent two weeks watching YouTube videos about DNS, bought $200 in equipment, and told him it was fixed. It wasn't. The internet was still slow. But nobody asked about it again because a month later the company ran out of money and shut down. I got hired at the next place and immediately told them our DNS was probably the problem. They believed me. That was 15 years ago. I'm now an IT Director at a Fortune 500 company. My entire career is built on the fact that I got lucky once and nobody's fact-checked me since. Last month someone asked me a technical question during a meeting and I just said "DNS" and everyone nodded and moved on. I'm convinced my entire C-suite reputation is based on a YouTube video from 2009 I watched while pretending to work.

My phone's storage is always full. Photos of food I ate three years ago. Apps I downloaded for one trip and never used again. Why can't I delete anything? It's like digital hoarding. Last night, I spent an hour clearing space. Felt productive until I downloaded a new game. Now it's full again. Apple says buy more iCloud. That's their solution to everything. I'm convinced it's a conspiracy. One day I'll go minimalist, delete it all. But not today. I need that meme folder.

My kid just asked why we don't have a pool. I said because we don't need a pool. He said "Tommy's house has a pool." Tommy's house has a lot of things. Tommy's dad is a surgeon. I'm not getting into a "my dad versus Tommy's dad" economic comparison with a 10-year-old. I said pools are expensive to maintain and we wouldn't use it enough to justify the cost. He said "but we could use it every day in summer." We wouldn't. We'd use it for two weeks, get bored, and then it would sit there costing money. I've seen this play out with our neighbors. They put in a $60K pool. Used it constantly for one summer. Now it just exists. But I can't explain this to a kid who just wants to swim. So I said "maybe someday" which is parent code for "no but I don't want to argue about it." He seemed satisfied with that answer. I'm not getting a pool.

It's Sunday night and I'm thinking about how different my job is from what I thought it would be. I got into IT because I liked solving technical problems. Computers made sense. Logic made sense. Now I spend most of my time solving people problems disguised as technical problems. The server isn't slow. Karen opened 50 tabs and is running Zoom while uploading a 2GB file. The network isn't down. Someone unplugged the router to charge their phone. The deployment didn't fail. Someone skipped the testing phase and pushed broken code. Technical problems are easy. They have solutions. You debug, you fix, you move on. People problems are infinite. You fix one thing and they create another. And everyone thinks their problem is the most important problem. Marketing thinks their website loading 0.3 seconds slower is a crisis. Sales thinks their CRM being slightly slow is costing them millions. Finance thinks every IT expense should be cut in half. And I'm stuck in the middle trying to keep everything running while everyone complains that it's not running perfectly. Some days I miss just writing code and fixing servers. But that job pays $80K. This job pays $270K. So I deal with the people problems and save the technical problems for when I need to feel competent again. That's the trade-off. More money, less actual problem-solving, more politics. I'm not sure it was worth it. But I'm too deep in now to go back.

Woke up to 14 emails from our monitoring system. All from the same server. Memory warnings. CPU warnings. Disk space warnings. I looked at them. Looked at the time. 7 AM on a Sunday. Closed my laptop. If it's actually critical, someone will call. If nobody calls, it can wait until Monday. This is the skill you develop over time. Knowing what's actually urgent versus what just seems urgent. A server throwing warnings at 7 AM on Sunday is probably fine. It's been throwing warnings for hours. If it was going to crash, it would have crashed already. Monday morning I'll look at it. Probably just a log file that grew too large. Five-minute fix. But if I fix it now, I'm training the system that I respond to weekend alerts. I don't respond to weekend alerts unless something is actually on fire. My phone didn't ring. Nothing's on fire. I'm going back to sleep.

Just paid $47 for a haircut. Not because it's a particularly good haircut. Because the barber shop near my house charges $47. I used to pay $18 for haircuts. Then I moved to a neighborhood where barber shops have exposed brick and serve complimentary beer. The haircut is identical. But the ambiance costs $29 extra. My wife asked why I don't just go to my old barber. He's 25 minutes away now. I could. But then I'm the guy making $270K who drives across town to save $30 on a haircut. That's somehow worse than just paying the $47. This is what lifestyle inflation looks like. Not buying Ferraris. Just accepting that haircuts cost $47 now because everyone around you pays $47. The barber showed me a $15 pomade he recommends. I bought it. I don't need $15 pomade. But I already paid $47 for the haircut. What's another $15? This is how rich people stay rich. They nickel and dime themselves into normalizing absurd prices. Next year the haircut will be $52. And I'll pay it. Because that's just what haircuts cost now.

Our company just hired a "Workplace Experience Manager." Her job is to make sure the office has good vibes. She's in charge of: selecting the right coffee beans, choosing Spotify playlists for common areas, managing the snack selection, and organizing "culture events." She makes $95K. We pay someone nearly six figures to decide between Colombian and Ethiopian roast. I asked HR what happened to the office manager who used to handle this stuff. They said the office manager handles facilities. This is different. This is about experience. I asked what the difference is. They said the office manager makes sure things work. The Workplace Experience Manager makes sure things feel good. We're paying someone $95K for vibes. And honestly? The office does feel nicer since she started. The coffee is better. The snacks are more interesting. The playlist isn't just corporate safe pop music. But also we're paying $95K for this. I have engineers making less than the person who picks which brand of sparkling water to stock. This is what companies do when they have too much money and not enough problems. They create jobs that sound important but are fundamentally about making rich people more comfortable. And it works. Because I genuinely enjoy the better coffee.

Just found out we're being audited by our cyber insurance provider. They want to verify we actually have all the security controls we claimed we have. Problem: we don't have all the security controls we claimed we have. When we applied for the insurance, the application asked if we had multi-factor authentication on all admin accounts. I checked "yes" because we were planning to implement it. We never implemented it. Now the auditor wants to see our MFA logs.I have 48 hours to either: 1. Admit we lied and probably lose our coverage 2. Implement MFA across the entire company in two days 3. Get creative I'm going with option 3.I just enabled MFA on every admin account. Forced enrollment. Everyone had to set it up in the last hour. Then I backdated our MFA implementation logs to show it was enabled six months ago. Is this fraud? Technically maybe. But the security is actually in place now. We're just adjusting the timeline of when we claim we did it. The auditor comes on Monday. By then we'll have 48 hours of MFA logs that I'll present as "recent activity" from our "six-month implementation." Did we lie on the application? Yes. Are we fixing it before anyone finds out? Also yes. Corporate compliance is just staying one step ahead of getting caught.

My kid's school just sent an email about their "1:1 device program." Every student gets an iPad. The school is very excited about "technology-enhanced learning." The iPad costs $800. Paid by parents. Plus $200/year for "device insurance and management." I asked what happens if we don't want to buy the iPad. They said it's mandatory for the curriculum. So it's a $1,000 textbook that plays games and breaks when you drop it. I asked what software they're using that requires an iPad specifically. Teacher said "various educational apps." I asked which ones. She sent me a list. I looked them up. They all have web versions that work on any device. So they don't need iPads. They want iPads. And they're making parents pay for it. But I can't be the parent who fights the iPad program because then I'm the asshole who doesn't support education technology. So I'm writing a $1,000 check for an iPad my kid will use to watch YouTube during class. The school gets to say they're "innovative." Apple gets to sell 500 iPads. Parents get to fund it. And in three years they'll switch to Chromebooks and we'll do this again.

Just found out our "carbon neutral" initiative is complete bullshit. We bought carbon offsets from a company that plants trees in Madagascar. Sounds good until you read the fine print: the trees won't actually offset our carbon for 30 years. Because that's how long it takes trees to grow. So we're carbon neutral... in 2055. But the press release says we're carbon neutral now. The CEO knows this. The sustainability consultant knows this. Everyone involved knows this. But nobody cares because the headline works and that's all that matters. We get to put "Carbon Neutral" in our marketing. Our competitors have to respond by buying their own fake offsets. The offset company makes money. The trees might get planted eventually. Everyone wins except the actual environment. I brought this up in the meeting. Got told I'm "missing the bigger picture of corporate responsibility." The bigger picture is we're lying and calling it leadership. And it's working. We already got positive press from three industry publications. Nobody fact-checks the carbon math. They just report that we're "taking bold action on climate." This is how greenwashing works. You don't actually change anything. You just buy the right to say you did.

Our intern just asked me why we don't use Kubernetes. I said because we don't need Kubernetes. He said everyone uses Kubernetes. I said everyone TALKS about using Kubernetes. Most companies are running Docker containers on three servers and calling it a day. We have 40 employees. Our entire infrastructure runs on AWS with auto-scaling groups. It works fine. Kubernetes is designed for companies running thousands of services across hundreds of servers. We have twelve services. But he read that Kubernetes is "industry standard" so now he thinks we're behind. This is what happens when people learn from tech Twitter instead of actual experience. They think every company is Google-scale and needs Google-scale solutions. We don't need Kubernetes. We need our MySQL database to stop running out of connections because someone wrote a query that doesn't close properly. But that's not exciting. Nobody writes blog posts about "I fixed a connection leak." They write about "How we migrated to Kubernetes and saved millions" even though the migration cost more than they saved. I told the intern he should learn why tools exist before learning the tools themselves. He looked disappointed. He wanted to put Kubernetes on his resume.

My 10-year-old nephew asked me today if robots are going to take everyone's jobs. I said probably not everyone's. Someone has to fix the robots. He said what if the robots fix themselves. That's when I realized I was having an existential crisis with a fourth grader. I've spent 15 years building a career in IT. Every few years the technology changes and I adapt. Servers to cloud. On-premise to SaaS. Manual to automated. But what happens when the automation automates itself? I'm not worried about next year or even five years from now. I'm worried about 15 years from now when my nephew is entering the workforce and half the jobs that exist today are just... gone. He asked what I would do if I wasn't working with computers. I genuinely don't know. This is all I've ever done. He said maybe I could be a teacher. Teach people about computers. I said maybe. But who needs teachers when AI can explain everything better than I can?He looked worried. I changed the subject. But the question is still sitting in my head. What do I actually do if this entire career path just evaporates?

My wife just sent me a TikTok of someone organizing their garage and asked why our garage doesn't look like that. Because that person spent $3,000 on custom shelving and labeled bins and has nothing else to do. Our garage has bikes, tools, boxes from when we moved in four years ago, and a lawnmower that hasn't worked since 2023. I could organize it. It would take a weekend and some money and it would look great for about six weeks. Then we'd start throwing shit in there again and it would go back to being a disaster. She said "but don't you want it to be organized?" Not enough to actually do it, apparently. This is the gap between wanting something and wanting it enough to make it happen. I want an organized garage the same way I want to learn Italian. It sounds nice but I'm never actually going to do it. I said "yeah we should definitely organize it" and went back to what I was doing. She knows what that means. That means no.

Deel IT: Identity & Access Management – Control who gets access to apps and devices with automated onboarding/offboarding. → memelord.link/IWbonPA

Deel IT: Endpoint Protection – Secure all employee devices from malware and cyber threats automatically. → memelord.link/AfQx0ji

Just found out my company is in a lawsuit because someone hacked our customer database two years ago and we never told anyone. I didn't know about the hack. Nobody told IT. Turns out our VP of Sales discovered it, decided it wasn't "that bad" and just... didn't report it. To anyone. Including me. Now we're in federal court and the lawyers are asking me why our security was so weak. I genuinely don't know. Because nobody told me we got hacked. I can't defend against threats I don't know exist. The VP of Sales is blaming IT for "inadequate security measures." I'm sitting in depositions explaining that I can't implement security for breaches I'm not informed about. My CEO pulled me aside and asked if I can "make this go away technically." Make what go away? The hack happened two years ago. The data's been on the dark web for 18 months. He suggested maybe I could "show we've upgraded security since then." We have upgraded security. But not because of the hack. Because I do routine upgrades. Now I have to pretend we did a comprehensive security overhaul in response to a breach nobody told me about.

My company just got named in a "Best Places to Work" list. We're ranked #47 in our industry for "work-life balance" and "employee satisfaction." This is completely insane. We had three people quit last month citing burnout. Our average employee tenure is 18 months. We just cut mental health benefits. But we're on the Best Place to Work list (can't tell which number because I don't wanna dox myself). Here's how this happened: six months ago, HR sent out an "anonymous employee survey." I saw the results. They were fucking terrible. 2.1 out of 5 overall satisfaction. Then the survey company called HR and said "for an additional fee, we can help you improve your scores." What they actually did: changed the survey methodology, reweighted the questions, and excluded responses from employees with less than six months tenure. Suddenly our score was 4.2 out of 5. They submitted that to the "Best Places to Work" organization, paid the $15,000 application fee, and now we have an award. My CEO is tweeting about it. HR is putting it in recruiting materials. I'm watching people quit in real-time while we celebrate our amazing workplace culture.

Guys I left work at noon today, on a Wednesday afternoon. Didn't ask permission or make up an excuse. Just left. Three hours later my phone hasn't buzzed once. This is how I know most of my job is completely unnecessary. If the building was actually going to burn down without me, someone would have noticed by now. Instead everyone's just assuming I'm somewhere important doing important things. The system runs itself. The team handles issues. Nothing requires my immediate attention. I could probably not show up for a week and just send a few emails and nobody would notice. That's either a sign that I've built great systems and hired great people, or a sign that middle management is mostly decorative. Probably both.