This place is my solitude from the "9 to 5ers". I come here and meet wonderful people who care about what they do enough to spend ample time researching new methods to do it. They work to help one another, sacrificing their own time to help someone they probably don't even know.

The "9 to 5ers" are the people who are in technology for the money and only the money. They come to work, do only as much as is necessary to get by, and then go home to their palaces where they eat lobster and entertain guests, never giving a thought to what they had done that day and whether they could improve on it. These folks write production code that an intelligent teenager could write after only 1 class. "Why bother trying harder?", they think to themselves, "This'll work and it only took me 40 minutes of cutting and pasting from previously crappy programs that I've cut and pasted. No matter that it does no error checking, and is algorithmically inferior.". I often feel as if I'm the only person who cares in this house of hell's mignons. While my co-workers check their stocks, talk on the phone, bullsh*t, and get paid more for doing it, I stress over system security and performance, troubleshoot broken boxes until my brain hurts, and write perl code to try to automate as much as possible. I need this perl code, without it I would have 5 times as much work.

Part of the reason I know my fellow Sysadmins don't do anything is the simple fact that they're not doing any coding. Anyone who spends any amount of time doing repetitive tasks on a Unix system, knows how to code. It's a matter of survival, code or be worked to death. Perl has truly saved my sanity. Admittedly, I make a lot of this work for myself, I have a strong work ethic, I have initiative, and more than anything, I enjoy technology. I'm not saying that I think about it 24x7, but it's not often too far from my mind, and I like it that way. I have no problem with people who don't always think about their jobs, none at all, I have a problem with people who fake their way through it. I have 4 other people collecting salaries, but not contributing, wouldn't it just be easier to throw the money straight to me? :^)

I'm glad to have met you all and hope very much to continue seeing you here. I'll most probably be here everyday, getting my fix of people who care, and who are in technology because they like it, not only because it pays well.

You're all "Saints" in my book.

In reply to Oh, this wonderful place by BastardOperator

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