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Oh... and almost ALL the guys I worked with at Maxey's computer store, the Byte Brokers - are still in touch with me on Facebook - many were users on my Citadel BBS - and were friends on Sacramento 916 Citadels back in the day - they're almost all successful in Information Technology careers. I'm kinda of the MOST successful - I was back then - I still am - at least in net worth - but most of them are still employed in IT and making salaries - where I am virtually unemployable at this point. "I figured out how to run a pirate Citadel BBS on my Cox home internet with a full production environment using Linux Proxmox VM servers in redundant clusters," just won't get you a corporate job these days.
Now if IG opened a startup - I bet I could convince him to hire me as a Citadel Systems Engineer III and pay me $75,000 a year - which would be exploiting TF out of me. And he would be making 7 figures a year if he could afford to give me that opportunity. And I'd nail it. But if that doesn't pan out - I'm working remotely in the medical industry doing billing collections making $24,000 a year when the CEO is making MILLIONS.
And healthcare is a whole other ballgame on how effed things can be.
Heh. Don't count on it :) My work on Citadel has opened career doors for me, but it's never been a revenue generator in the direct sense. If there was a way to turn it directly into revenue I'd have done that a long time ago. I always thought that if I somehow became mega-wealthy some other way, my post-employment effort would be to open a Citadel Software Foundation and have people working on software projects that empower people to be independent of the big tech firms.
But then I'd have to worry about corruption. I'd have to worry about it becoming like Wikipedia or Mozilla, taking in non-profit money and 95% of it getting spent on activism. (Wikipedia for example -- made $185 million this year, spent $3 million on hosting, and the rest they spent funding domestic terrorists.)
I worked my way through a career and I'm sitting in a pretty good spot right now. The company has been relatively good to me, after the most recent move I'm with a really great group of people that treat each other well and work on cool projects, but I can't retire early or anything like that. But you know what -- I'm happy and content and joyful. That matters.
i tell my engineers, if you wanna get rich go be a plummer. the ones that do.... get rich. the ones that don't, languish on the corporate sofa hoping for their 3% raise every year with the occasional 5% promotion. 7% if they're extra special. welcome to workin for da man.
or in our case the last few years instead of a raise we got a bonus of about the same amount as if we got the normal COL increase..
While on the surface it sounds ok " we got money " and lots were ok with it. its not ok. Its subject to not getting anything next year, and it does not count towards your pension as that is tied to your last 5 years of salary.. And few people are bothering to 'excel' for their yearly review.. why bother. just do enough to stay employed. Only way to get more is change jobs.
Sat Dec 13 2025 04:44:03 UTC from test2i tell my engineers, if you wanna get rich go be a plummer. the ones that do.... get rich. the ones that don't, languish on the corporate sofa hoping for their 3% raise every year with the occasional 5% promotion. 7% if they're extra special. welcome to workin for da man.
or in our case the last few years instead of a raise we got a bonus of about the same amount as if we got the normal COL increase..
At the most simple level that is Teh Sux0r, for the most obvious reason: it is not cumulative. Next year you will not get X% on top of that X%. For example, a $3000 raise on a $100000 salary is actually $4031 over ten years. Plus the base amount is last year's amount next year.
to your last 5 years of salary.. And few people are bothering
to 'excel' for their yearly review.. why bother. just do enough
to stay employed. Only way to get more is change jobs.
I was just unemployed for almost 18 months. I have a job now, but this economy is the worst in living memory. Anyone who is doing "just enough" is committing career suicide, in an environment like this.
I mean... net worth, personal wealth, I'm excelling. I just bought a $150,000 car with my 401k - significantly with investments from Intel I made back in 2001-2003. I could only afford to liquidate those stocks - which have been mostly underwater for the last 20ish years - because of how well we are doing everywhere else, despite my personal career taking a nose dive. Destroying my straight-white privilege through DEI didn't work quite the way it was intended, as far as I can tell.
As a bay area techie - sitting around at one company collecting a 3% raise every year was never the way to increase your base salary. Every 2-5 years - you left the company you were at, and shopped yourself around to someone who would pay "current market" for your skill set - which was generally more like a 20% raise - and that strategy worked pretty well from about 1991 to 2003, when the dot.com economy imploded. Since then, that has been a struggle - but those few years at the start saw me go from $24k/yr at a used computer store to 6 figures plus options at Intel. I imagine that is STILL the strategy to see significant gains in your salary in technology... but it is a "no balls, no glory," higher risk strategy. You're leaving the comfort of what you know and what is comfortable - the devil you do know - for something outside of your comfort zone and risky - the devil you don't know. You might see an increase in salary but HATE what you end up doing - and that happened several times - and you have to bear down and deal with it for at least a couple of years before you move on. You can't seem like you jump jobs TOO quickly on your resume.
But I always noticed that the forward tech guys... admins, engineers, security, networking - they were less risk adverse than the coders, developers, designers. And this site seems, tech wise - to be dev oriented. You guys are a special breed in IT. You're not quite the same as us systems guys. And in the long run, when it changed to the cloud and colocation and hosted services - your jobs were more secure than us systems guys - who could easily be outsourced and offshored - and simply the environments required LESS of us as the cloud and cohosting datacenters caught on.
I never thought server-side thin solutions would really replace local applications.
As someone out of the business, but still working with technology solutions - I think about it all the time. Everything I use is portals and VPNs and hosted solutions and remote access - and I spend SO much time waiting for authentication to complete, for pages to render - that all the apps necessary to do my job are slower today on an i7 with 16 gb of memory in Edge or Chrome than those same CRM and ticketing and portal solutions were 20 years ago. I sit around waiting for things to render and be accessible and waste so much time, so much productivity - and then when I think there are 20 other people doing the same things - and they're LESS technically adept than me - they're just data-workers... the amount of manpower time lost is HUGE. That is the progress we have. But every corporation has to deal with it - because it is the ONLY solution available today. You can't run these systems locally - everything is dependent on networked, remote web based solutions. Which have become so bloated and dependent on struggling browser platforms.
Larry Ellison was right, I guess.
There is a tech CEO who deserves as much hate as any other, but doesn't get nearly as much as he deserves.
And someone here once told me, probably some 30 years ago, "with *your* head?
You should be a developer!"
I suppose everyone in IT is a developer now, to some extent. At least the ones whose jobs aren't getting shipped off to Bangalore, or getting automated away. In the DevOps world, that's how it works. Serendipitously, my ability to write code has become part of my skill stack.
But here's the thing: there have been lots of opportunities where I could have gone to a startup or some other place and got a big compensation package with a big paycheck and options, and it might have worked out. But I value stability over maximum compensation, and the company I work for has taken pretty good care of me over the years. Yes, I was a wreck during the dot bomb when many of our customers were going out of business and we were in the red for quite a while, but we survived. Nowadays I'm considered the seasoned veteran who can help anyone with almost any question, and I'm enjoying it.
As for your paragraph about everything being slower even on the newest and best hardware: you're absolutely right, the way I usually phrase it is "we've been automating the same business processes for half a century and we get less efficient at it every year."
I don't think anyone actually likes Larry Ellison, by the way. But that's been a slow steady burn pretty much forever.
I was just unemployed for almost 18 months. I have a job now, but this
economy is the worst in living memory. Anyone who is doing "just
enough" is committing career suicide, in an environment like this.
It is career suicide except when every employee is doing it. If the firm you work for is not the sort where anybody will notice you are going beyond the call of duty, it is stupid to do so too.
I am happy for the time being because I get plenty of praise for what I do but I don't think that is common at all. When you work some place where your efforts are not noticeable at all, it becomes very draining.
I suppose everyone in IT is a developer now, to some extent. At least
the ones whose jobs aren't getting shipped off to Bangalore, or getting
automated away. In the DevOps world, that's how it works.
Serendipitously, my ability to write code has become part of my skill
stack.
Yes, and it sucks big time.
I remember a customer that showed up at our facilities because he had an appointment with a sales representative who was late as fuck. The boss prety much sent me to "entertain" the guy while the representative arrived. It turns out he was a senior sysadmin for a company that was seriously understaffed.
I showed him around the data room and told him about the architecture of some of the services. The guy told me he was blown away by how cheaply everything was running and that they really needed guys like me at his company. He took my CV and handed it to his upper ups.
Next thing I heard from this guy was when he showed up a month later, and I managed to escape for a couple of minutes to talk to him. He told me my CV ended up in /dev/null because I have no demonstrable experience as a programmer.
services - your jobs were more secure than us systems guys - who
I'm not so sure. I feel like system management is less amenable to AI automation, but I've never worked at one of the FAANG's--it's probably a lot more code-oriented for those guys.
Yeah, you can use Claude to generate Terraform scripts, but...
Anything that has a defined workflow, even if there is some 'thinking' involved along the way, can be eventually replaced with AI. No, not today, but soon. I'm not in the business, but even i can see it..
And some of the new robots china is putting out, even if part of the flow is physical labor, that is at risk too. And to an extent its already happening, has been for decades, like in factories and warehouses.
Tue Feb 03 2026 20:45:23 UTC from LoanSharkservices - your jobs were more secure than us systems guys - who
I'm not so sure. I feel like system management is less amenable to AI automation, but I've never worked at one of the FAANG's--it's probably a lot more code-oriented for those guys.
Yeah, you can use Claude to generate Terraform scripts, but...
No... I can't code. VBA for Access is as far as I ever got - and I got pretty far with that... web front ends, backend relational databases... understanding the rows and columns and the front end code and how to make it web faced - and I suppose I could have leveraged that into a MS-SQL and VBA career - but I'm not GOOD at it. I'm GOOD at systems... I'm good at figuring out Proxmox and Linux on Dell NUCs and making redundant servers in a shared cluster with failover and... I guess so are a lot of guys named Samir or VJ.
But everyone I came up with who still has a solid, stable career in IT is a DevOps guy now - for sure. I always HATED you guys as a Systems Engineer. Traditionally, they always wanted the LEAST restrictive permissions, to make it the easiest for their apps to work - less permissions restrictions makes code easier to write. I know THAT much. And that is the opposite of everything that makes MY job easier. I want you to have as many permissions hurdles to overcome to make your code work as possible.
But increasingly - I see that Ai is going to replace ALL of us - from me in the datacenter, to you in your cube writing code, to Sandeep in a call center in Bangalore reading from a script telling people to reboot their laptop and hold down the DEL key. You're all just going to make it to a reasonable retirement age - while mine was at about 45.
I hope you got better options and they do better than mine.
But healthcare and shitty health insurance will probably bleed off all our collective wealth before we're done - because I know you lived on a diet of Mountain Dew and Doritos staring at a green screen until 3 in the morning trying to figure out where the exception fault in your code was for mos
Post messaget of your lives - and that isn't healthy.
When you weren't at corporate meetings at Red Robin eating bottomless fries with the guys from the IBM XIV or Peoplesoft team talking about your vertical integration plan, of course.
When you weren't at corporate meetings at Red Robin eating
bottomless fries with the guys from the IBM XIV or Peoplesoft
team talking about your vertical integration plan, of course.
Now I know what my career has been missing all these years. 28 years in the trenches and nobody ever took me to Red Robin for nothing.
Making a computer appear to have thoughts is now a straightforward process.
Making it *actually* have thoughts, not so much.
I'm now a security architect. My career took a gigantic turn in a timespan of less than a year, just because the security guys appreciated my chops and needed someone like me to straighten out their infrastructure mess. It's the most AI-forward group in the entire company and we still use people. We use the tools for the data, and we use people to wrangle the tools.
Now what I didn't know was that you can hold down the DEL key. Is that for real? I've always just spammed the key and hoped that one of the keypresses arrived at the right time.
Intuitive operations - how I slam danced myself into a Proxmox virtualized clustered Citadel on Debian when I am not...
A Linux guy, a proxmox guy, a developer.
I just kept breaking shit and asking dumb questions and annoying everyone on this BBS until I got it.
Like spamming the DEL key and hoping one of the keypresses was interpreted at the right time.
It is like how people say "being a good IT engineer is just knowing how to Google really good."
Same/Same. I'll keep banging my head against the IT wall until it works. Changing a little thing here, there - until it falls into place. This is what being a "tEh h@x0rZ" is really about.
You're smarter than me at technology - you understand things I don't - but in the end game - we're still both basically doing the same thing... breaking things until things work.
I'm not going to panic. --
Now what I didn't know was that you can hold down the DEL key. Is that for real? I've always just spammed the key and hoped that one of the keypresses arrived at the right time.
I'm socially intelligent for a tech nerd - so... I get the C level on my side - they like that I can bridge from "nerd to BS in business-esse." Most of us aren't. We can't dumb it down for the rest of the executive staff in a way that doesn't feel - condescending. We're almost all gifted, accelerated - hyper-intelligent. Most of us are socially awkward. I am. But early on, I got into drugs, and mainstream cultural things - well - drugs - that dumb you down and make you think less - less likely to overthink - and also make you literally dumber. I figured out how to self medicate to make my invasive overthinking quieter.
It didn't turn out WELL, overall - I think. Because if I had applied my intellect and ignored being alienated among my peers and just - achieved - I'd be further along. But it did pay dividends in that I learned how to be the management level bridge between the IT/Dev departments and the rest of the corporate team - an interpreter. I'm not an idiot - but I'm nowhere near the most brilliant person that logs into this BBS. And I'm probably not the wealthiest - there is probably someone smarter, quieter, and more modest that makes my wealth look like boolsheet - and we'll never know, because no matter how much I strut around - that person is too smart to be as loud and obnoxious as me. But... for someone as loud, stupid and obnoxious as I am - I'm doing pretty good.
And I got to eat a lot of bottomless fries at Red Robin on my way up. And I suppose that counts for something - if that kind of thing matters to you. If it doesn't - then you don't care that I had a lot of free lunches at corporate chain restaurants. I can't argue with you there. All it did was make me fat in the final analysis. But - at least I got fat for free on the corporate teet.
Now I know what my career has been missing all these years. 28 years in the trenches and nobody ever took me to Red Robin for nothing.