This happend to me around 2 weeks ago. For some reason, I decied to post this now.

I won the lottery, yey! I mean, bot really, but I am <19yo student, "less than junior dev" in my office, but sonce I am the only one who is capable of working with hardware, I was working month back as a sysadmin for a few days. Our last sysadmin was really good working but really, really toxic guy, so he got fired on a spot after argument with some manager or whatever, no big deal, we could have another guy hired in a week. But, our backup server literally was on fire, all data probably dead because bad capacitor or whatever. This was our only backup of everything at the time. Everyone in full fucking panic mode, we had literally no other working HW we could use for backup, but then comes me, intern employed on his first dev job for 3 months. That day I bought some HW for my own personal server at home (Intel NUC with some Celeron, 4GB DDR4 RAM and two 240GB SSDs for RAID 1. My manager asked everyone in the office for sollution how to survive next 4 days before new server arrives. People there had no idea what tk do and no knowedgle about HW, I just came from a break and offered my components for a week, since there was noone else who can work with HW, servers and stuff like this, manager offered me $500+HW cost if I, random intern, can make it work. I installed Debian on that little PC, created RAID1 from both SSDs, installed MySQL server and mirrored GIT server from our last standing server (we had two before one of them went lit 🔥), made simple Python script to copy all data on that RAID, with some help of our database guy copied whole DB from production to this little computer and edited some PHP so every SQL request made on our server will run on that NUC too. Everything after ±2 hours worked perfectly. Untill a fucking PSU burned in our server and took RAID controller with him in sillicon heaven next night, so we could not access any data unltill we got a new one. Thanks to every god out there, I was able to create software RAID from survived HDDs on our production server and copy all data from that NUC on the servers software RAID and make it working at 3 AM in the night before an exam 😂. Without this, we would be next ±40 hours without aerver running and we might loose soke of our data and customers. So my little skill with Linux, Python, MySQL and most importantly my NUC hardware I got that day running as a backup server saved maybe whole company 😂.
Btw, guess who is now employee of the year with $2500 bonus? 😀
Sorry for bragging and log post, but I was so lucky an so happy when everything worked out, good luck to all sysadmins out there! 👍

TL:DR: Random intern saved company and made some money 😂

College can be one of the worst investments for an IT career ever.

I've been in university for the past 3 years and my views on higher education have radically changed from positive to mostly cynical.

This is an extremely polarizing topic, some say "your college is shite", "#notall", "you complain too much", and to all of you I am glad you are happy with your expensive toilet paper and feel like your dick just grew an inch longer, what I'll be talking about is my personal experience and you may make of it what you wish. I'm not addressing the best ivy-league Unis those are a whole other topic, I'll talk about average Unis for average Joes like me.

Higher education has been the golden ticket for countless generations, you know it, your parents believe in it and your grandparents lived it. But things are not like they used to be, higher education is a failing business model that will soon burst, it used to be simple, good grades + good college + nice title = happy life.

Sounds good? Well fuck you because the career paths that still work like that are limited, like less than 4.

The above is specially true in IT where shit moves so fast and furious if you get distracted for just a second you get Paul Walkered out of the Valley; companies don't want you to serve your best anymore, they want grunt work for the most part and grunts with inferiority complex to manage those grunts and ship the rest to India (or Mexico) at best startups hire the best problem solvers they can get because they need quality rather than quantity.

Does Uni prepare you for that? Well...no, the industry changes so much they can't even follow up on what it requires and ends up creating lousy study programs then tells you to invest $200k+ in "your future" for you to sweat your ass off on unproductive tasks to then get out and be struck by jobs that ask for knowledge you hadn't even heard off.

Remember those nights you wasted drawing ER diagrams while that other shmuck followed tutorials on react? Well he's your boss now, but don't worry you will wear your tired eyes, caffeine saturated breath and overweight with pride while holding your empty title, don't get me wrong I've indulged in some rough play too but I have noticed that 3 months giving a project my heart and soul teaches me more than 6 months of painstakingly pleasing professors with big egos.

And the soon to be graduates, my God...you have the ones that are there for the lulz, the nerds that beat their ass off to sustain a scholarship they'll have to pay back with interests and the ones that just hope for the best. The last two of the list are the ones I really feel bad for, the nerds will beat themselves over and over to comply with teacher demands not noticing they are about to graduate still versioning on .zip and drive, the latter feel something's wrong but they have no chances if there isn't a teacher to mentor them.

And what pisses me off even more is the typical answers to these issues "you NEED the title" and "you need to be self taught". First of all bitch how many times have we heard, seen and experienced the rejection for being overqualified? The market is saturated with titles, so much so they have become meaningless, IT companies now hire on an experience, economical and likeability basis. Worse, you tell me I need to be self taught, fucker I've been self taught for years why would I travel 10km a day for you to give me 0 new insights, slacking in my face or do what my dog does when I program (stare at me) and that's just on the days you decide to attend!

But not everything is bad, college does give you three things: networking, some good teachers and expensive dead tree remnants, is it worth the price tag, not really, not if you don't need it.

My broken family is not one of resources and even tho I had an 80% scholarship at the second best uni of my country I decided I didn't need the 10+ year debt for not sleeping 4 years, I decided to go to the 3rd in the list which is state funded; as for that decision it worked out as I'm paying most of everything now and through my BS I've noticed all of the above, I've visited 4 universities in my country and 4 abroad and even tho they have better everything abroad it still doesn't justify some of the prices.

If you don't feel like I do and you are happy, I'm happy for you. My rant is about my personal experience which is kind of in the context of IT higher education in the last ~8 years.

Just letting some steam off and not regretting most of my decisions.

This happen last year during a one day workshop over zoom. We where around 16-18 strangers plus the tutor. We started with everyone introducing themselves (most showing their faces on camera), then it was just the tutor with his shared screen. Two hours in, one of the participants accidentally turned her camera on. I know it was accidental because I still cringe from what happened next: she started picking her nose. At this point, I have to clarify that I'm not familiar with zoom, because I'm on Microsoft teams almost exclusively thanks to my organization. While I looked frantically on how to DM this person (something along the lines of "hey, your cam is on :)" or whatever), I watched in horror as the second act of this play unfolded as she put her finger in her mouth and started to eat it. At this point I was actively dying from second hand embarrassment. Like girl, our orgs payed good money to be on this workshop, gave us a day off (so to speak) and know all I can focus on is you going gold hunting and bringing home some cured cave meat. My boss basically paid so I can get traumatized! And all this while being being in the comfort of my own home. Thanks, zoom! Anyway, she went in for seconds. That is when I died. I am dead at this point. My eyes glued to the screen. Ears ringing. Brain fried. It is done. Now, that the cringe has peaked, does it even matter If I figured out how to dm her? It is too late at this point. We all saw it. The tutor must have seen it. We all witnessed it. We are all witnesses, your honor. She has been witnessed! What else can I do at this point? Me, one bystander amongst bystanders. Idle and powerless.This is exactly how the holocaust started! At this point, I'm no better than your average Joe, who doesn't really like the new regime but doesn't fight it either. At this point, I ask myself what would Jesus do? Or Hollywood? What would happen in the movies in this situation? If I cant fight them, join them? Starting my cam, knuckles deep and double fisting my air holes to save what? It is done. Nothing left. She made her statement. She basically played us for fools. By god, what a freaking boss move that was! Like, can you imagine? Here we were, during the end of a world wide pandemic, bound to our homes, advised to regularly clean our hands, protected ourself and our loved ones and, yes, not eat buggers. And here comes miss fuck-it-all showing us degenerates how its done. You go girl! You showed us the light while we dwelled in darkness. You are our queen! Long may be her reign and just her punishments! I have seen true power and wept with the angles! I was born again. My mind at peace. I was Gandalf the Grey, now I am Gandalf the White. This is the day I will tell my children about. Songs have been written for less. I will never forget this!

Anyhow, I could go on, but that this is basically what happened over the span of a couple of moments in late 2022. I will never forget her. And now you won't either ❤️