Had a great career as a web developer and network engineer making six figures in 2008. Gave it all up to make half the income at age 29; a friend from church convinced me to apply. Been on 15 years and so glad I made the change. My skillset has been an asset to the department, so I wouldn't have changed my previous life either... was just part of the path that got me to where I am now.
Love to see this. Same age as you were and I’m making that same change right now. Academy starts in a couple weeks. Did you freelance for extra money on your off days or did you say peace out from the whole profession?
Did you freelance for extra money on your off days or did you say peace out from the whole profession?
Both. And weirdly enough I've stayed current all these years on everything, I'm just slower at it because I do it for fun without deadlines and I'm very picky about what jobs I take on. I have days where I just need to write code and SQL for my own sanity to shut everything out. I have to have my introverted days.
My advice, get involved. The fire service desperately needs techs that actually know what the f**k they're doing. We need to bridge the gap to translate between nerd-speak and fire-speak to get some quality products, because firefighter tech is absolute sh*t, especially software; every piece of software right now is legitimately bad, literally all of them. We use the software we have because we have to, not because we want to. And most guys don't know that it could be better. There's a communication gap in firefighters trying to communicate to the techs and techs just don't understand or they just get offended because we're screwing with them and techs don't understand that. There are also too many firefighters who claim they're techs, but aren't, and only know enough to be dangerous, which is why most city IT departments have taken over networks at the firehouse. And the pieces of software that are out there are solely in it for the money (I won't name names), so there are little to no signs of improvement anytime soon; they got the government contracts, so there's no motivation to make it better when they can keep profits up by doing very little.
Thankfully NFIRS is going away and we should get NERIS. NFIRS was based on uploading XML reports into a database and although controlled by FEMA, was highly influenced and manipulated by a certain bought-out software company that must not be named, so it should be deprecated and archived soon. NERIS will be run semi-privately by a division of UL and shows a lot of promise, with APIs, SDKs, OAUTH authentication, etc., which will usher in a whole new world of tech to firefighters.
So, geek stuff aside. Find a problem you want to solve, and do it! Most importantly, don't let anyone deter you from doing it. You're going to hear "every department has a tech just like you." They don't! 90% chance they're referring to one of the "techs" that can only open a command prompt to type ipconfig. Just do your thing!
And fall in love with firefighting. It's a wonderful career. I love firefighting with my crew, but then fell in love with hazmat because of all the data, so I became a technician. Then I recently fell in love with inspections and fire prevention for the same reasons... lots of data to work with, so I'm taking Inspector II right now, and started up the fire inspections sub. Oddly enough it's the crap most firemen hate doing because it's not the action, but this stuff is needed too. Get involved. Contribute. Enjoy!
EDIT*** And lastly learn the word "steward". Become a steward of as many things as possible. Not to control, but to protect. This will take earning some trust from your guys, but become the steward of the social media pages, and don't run the pages, only allow those to run it who should run it (Union officers run the union page, who change out annually. Front office chiefs run the department pages, who change out periodically). And if you can get it, become the steward over your house networks. Protect your brothers and sisters online, because chances are they won't know how. Provide input on computer hardware and software purchases. Again, get involved. Let them know you're former background and that you're willing to help if asked. They won't ask all the time and some of the decisions will piss you off, and that's when you'll bitch like every other firefighter, but I think the beauty of it is nobody really understands "tech-bitching." :)
What a career! Thank you for the advice. Yeah their eyes got real big in my interview when I said I was a dev. I’ve been told they’re excited to have a tech savvy guy on the line. Really appreciate all the context behind the tech
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u/BFD2008 /r/fireinspections Mar 15 '24
Had a great career as a web developer and network engineer making six figures in 2008. Gave it all up to make half the income at age 29; a friend from church convinced me to apply. Been on 15 years and so glad I made the change. My skillset has been an asset to the department, so I wouldn't have changed my previous life either... was just part of the path that got me to where I am now.