Master of my domain — Bitfield Consulting
This is the third of a five-part series about my horrible career: how it started, how it’s going, and what I learned from making every mistake imaginable.
Devex supercharger Zack Proser and I have been talking about my history of bouncing around the tech industry like a pinball, the times I went on tilt, and how I (mostly) avoided going down the drain. (Wait, do people still play pinball, or is that a bad reference? How do you do, fellow kids?)
This time, we’re talking about how I made the leap from being a (clearly not very good) employee to running my own independent business.
So, when we spoke previously, you were becoming a master of Puppet, writing code to manage servers and networks. What happened next? Promotion?
Nope. Redundancy. A manager at the company asked the question “Why do we need all these sysadmins, when the servers never go down?” Now, there’s a very good answer to that question, but somehow they didn’t seem that interested in learning what it was. (They found out eventually, though.)
Although technically I was self-employed, this company had been my only significant client, and so without them, I became self-unemployed. Oddly enough, it was the biggest favour they ever did me.
