Staring Into The Abyss — Professional Death

Failed Normal
Aug 8, 2017 · 3 min read

I sit in a Panera bakery taping away on a Mac pondering my life past being a tech professional. In my hands I am using technology that literally was not imagined when I started in tech, and yet the need for me in this field as a professional is near worthless. My value was in making systems work. Where is that value when systems actually work?

When I learned electronics repair in the military it was still in the days of VCR’s. Electronics were expensive, and electronics repair was a valued skill set. That work has dried up with the advent of tech so cheap it’s disposable.

In the corporate world I did well when email was the king of apps, and scan.pst was a utility that was used on a daily basis. When Windows 98 was considered high tech, and the OS crashed if you looked at it wrong maintaining these systems made sense. Now… Gmail gives you unlimited storage and OS’s are stable. Why deploy and maintain an Exchange Server when for $8.25 you can buy an Office 365 which includes the Office Suite to boot?

As a consultant I did well as malware and viruses wiped out PC’s that simply were not built for the always on world. Offices that had never had network cabling run decided that now was the time to invest in infrastructure. Small business realized they could afford telephone systems like big companies. Deployments were cash cows that business owners will willing to pay for. Now with Google Drive… Gmail… 802.11ac… Unlimited LTE… Nextiva Hosted VoIP… and browsers that realize that access to the file system is a bad idea where is that work?

I did well creating training videos on YouTube, but much of my financial success there was dependent on a revenue algorithm that valued my content exponentially greater than the average content on the platform. Although it was annoying I could easily grasp why some viewers were skeptical of my financial success when compared to my views and subscribers. Over the past year the algorithm decided to value my content more in line with that of other creators. It still pays the bills, but is not on a trajectory that inspires confidence.

And so I sit in a cafe. Taping away on a Mac, drinking coffee, listening to bad country music, pondering my professional existence. I’ve been a n00b, a grunt, a team lead, a boss, a managed services business owner, and an educator in this field. I can see angles most people don’t realize exist, and every direction I look at this from comes to a single conclusion… my days as a tech professional are over.

I can take the skills, and resources, I’ve developed over the past 20 years to steer my career into a new direction, but this road is at its end.

The sad irony is how many college grads, and n00bs desperately ask me for advice on how to build their careers. I sit here on the cusp of 41, a veteran with a college degree, over 1600 of technical training, 600 hours of emergency services training, I’ve owned a brick and mortar business with employees, have made myself world famous within the technical niche on YouTube, and I don’t have an answer… Not for them… Not for myself…

The world is changing in ways that are hard to even grasp, much less understand the consequences of. There is more opportunity, and more money on the table now than ever before. But the path to those things is more obscure than ever before.

So I’m going to do what I always do… Suck it up… Drive on… and Hope like hell I’ve judged correctly how far I am away from the edge of the Grand Canyon in this pea soup fog…

N00b: How do you become successful?

Me: Ship Product…

N00b: Great! What Product do I ship?

Me: THAT is the real question…

N00b: Uhm..?

Me: Yup…

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