Current Events > On Wednesday, I'll be taking my first real vacation in years. Can't wait.

(+) Yeah! (+)

At my old job, I was the only network guy, so I never got to take an extended break. Even during my "vacation time," I had to work. Even when I left my old job, they were calling me multiple times per day because they didn't know how to do stuff. I shouldn't have answered the phone, but I had a weird emotional attachment to the network I built there. I eventually stopped answering the phone, but that was after I started at my new job.

I'm gonna go visit my mom for a few days.

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Congrats. Do you feel safe traveling?
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Cool. You deserve it.
I still wake up at nights just to check my phone like it was at my old job out of habit.
It was weird hearing "you don't get paid to work after the day is done so there's no need to respond" at my new job.

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Sounds brutal man. Well congrats on doing that and not burning out or developing health problems.

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No_U_L7 posted...

Congrats. Do you feel safe traveling?

Yeah, I'm just going from San Antonio to Austin and I'm gonna try taking 130 even though it's a toll road because traffic on I35 is always horrible in Austin. I just got a txtag on my new car so I wanna see how much it costs to drive the whole way on 130.

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Well this is sad. Dont you get compensated after accumulating so many vacation hours and not using them?

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CreepySmile posted...

Cool. You deserve it.
I still wake up at nights just to check my phone like it was at my old job out of habit.
It was weird hearing "you don't get paid to work after the day is done so there's no need to respond" at my new job.

My new job is waaaayyyy more focused.

At my old job, being the only network guy meant I handled everything network and many things that were network-adjacent. Essentially, if any "random" device had an ethernet port, I was responsible for managing it.

Time clocks
Loading dock call button at the corporate office
SONOS music players... These things fucking suck to set up on an enterprise network because they use spanning tree protocol for some stupid ass reason.

Here, there are multiple teams of people in each region that do all on-site work. An entire team of people who handle network security configuration. An entire team of off-shore support to handle minor overnight issues...

It's sooo much better here.

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JuanCarlos1 posted...

Well this is sad. Dont you get compensated after accumulating so many vacation hours and not using them?

At my old job... NOPE

The general rule of thumb was that "If you have to work on your vacation, we'll give you some extra vacation days."

But if you always have to work on your vacation any way, that's not really an adequate solution.

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One thing that makes me leery of becoming a System Admin--even though it's the only path ahead in my career path--is being on-call during what should be my off-time. I talk to some of the System Admins at my job, and they says that they sometimes have to drop what they're doing in their private time and do work because of things that come up with the network and/or server afterhours.

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Solar_Crimson posted...

One thing that makes me leery of becoming a System Admin--even though it's the only path ahead in my career path--is being on-call during what should be my off-time. I talk to some of the System Admins at my job, and they says that they sometimes have to drop what they're doing in their private time and do work because of things that come up with the network and/or server afterhours.

Yeah, that's the life when you're responsible a company's critical infrastructure.

What I would recommend is just don't walk into a situation where you're the only system admin out the only network engineer.

Ideally, you'll want to be part of a team of people who do what you do. That way you aren't on call 24/7 365 like I was able you have people who understand your job and your can bounce ideas off of for troubleshooting and implementation efforts.

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