On April 1st, I started a new job, or rather I switch roles. I have happily worked as System Administrator for MS Amlin. However, I had gotten stuck in an endless pit of issues to resolve and it had gotten to the point where I loathed going into the office so much I cried the evenings before. I was so stressed I completely went over every limit I ever had. So when I got 3 offers to switch roles; I took all three serious. One of the offers came close to my dream job, which still is development - preferably for Github or something similar. But I know Github cannot employ people in Belgium, whereas Gitlab can.
One offer was in the IT Security field; while it is an amazingly interesting field - I know who and how I am. I will always try to please people, so having to say ’no’ often would really weigh heavily on me. Hence I declined that offer, but the team lead and I ‘parted’ on the best of terms. The second offer was quite interesting as well, it came from my previous team lead’s lead - KTLO : Keep The Lights On. It would have been yearly renewals, and short term projects to keep our technology debt running. Since I have a family, I do need the job security.
So I took the third option; which was a DevOps Engineer. I still don’t - after 3 weeks - exactly knows what my new job means. This weighed heavily on me, to the point of sheer panic attacks. I would freak out at the thought of not being able to perform as I should. It just made me terribly nervous, because I just hate to fail.
The best part is; I have a wonderful fiancee; Ziggy, who supports me and keeps me sane. She told me to not see it as being lost, but seeing the lack of exact direction as a way to ‘create’ my own job description. I could just fill it in as I wanted, and learn everything I thought was useful and fun. So I did as I was told (which is not like me, but in this case it was warranted).
Turns out that studying JavaScript was fun, as was studying Ruby and ELK. I am back to using Linux, albeit under Windows 10 using Pengwin. Even this blog/site is completely done under Linux, just posting is occasionally done with prose.io because it’s handy to post while enroute.