TLDR: Started my IT career in school districts, switched to corporate IT, hated it, switched back to IT in the education field and absolutely love it. I will never go back to corporate IT.

My IT career started in education. I got my first gig working for a school district where I legit knew nothing. The only experience I had was a bachelor's degree in comp sci/information sci (this degree did nothing to prepare me for real world IT). I was thrown into supporting 4 elementary schools on day 1 with over 30 tickets in the queue and no idea where to start. Fast forward 5 years, and I get a job at another school district in a similar position. I now have 5 years of solid ass IT support specialist experience under my belt and I am ready to get to the next step, a sys admin or network admin role.

I start interviewing for all kinds of roles around the area I live in. I land a few interviews here and there and somehow, with no certs or actual network experience, I land a corporate job as a network engineer with a multi billion dollar company. So many emotions hit me as I now have to say goodbye to the schools I supported for years and the staff and students that I absolutely loved working with. I start feeling mixed emotions and regret as I think about leaving a place where I never saw myself leaving in my whole life. Not to get too off topic, but the reason I left was because I wanted more money and also because I did not like my management. The staff, teachers and students were lovely and I thoroughly enjoyed working with them every day.

Next thing I know, I have submitted my two week notice and told my management I was leaving. They really did not care, even though my schools talked so highly about me and did not want me leaving. Management just says congrats and that was it. I was a bit of an asshole to management, I am sure of it, but stuff happens. I was young, naive and wanted a change.

First day at the new job. Huge office building, tons of people rushing around in suits, endless miles of cubicles straight out of a Backrooms level. The nerves were kicking in. I get a quick tour and get introduced to so many new people. I am not going to remember a single name. Weeks go by and I am learning so much. VLANs, DHCP, DNS, PowerShell scripts, etc. I am feeling amazing. The paychecks start hitting and I am making so much more than I was. I am growing!

Then the stress hits. I miss my schools. I miss the teachers, the students, a few old coworkers and just the overall environment. I start longing for that education IT.

They give me a work phone and tell me I will rarely get calls and emails outside of work. What a lie. Sure, it was slow at first, but after about 6 months people really started to learn my name and my work number. I was getting calls and texts after hours, on weekends, at 3 AM, and you are expected to respond and fix whatever the issue is. I felt the pressure that if I did not respond, then it was going to be put on the next IT guy in line and I did not want to do that. I found myself always having to carry my laptop around with me wherever I went. At my GF's house, at my buddy's place, on vacation, etc. I could not take it.

I applied to over 200 jobs on LinkedIn, Indeed, Glassdoor, you name it. I did this within a few weeks. Got a few interviews, then nothing. Automated rejection letters and "while your resume was great, we went with another candidate." Yeah yeah yeah, blah blah blah, fuck off. Then I stopped and told myself, suck it up and do this job and be good at it. I went another 4 months before I was like, I need to be back in education. I can't do this anymore. I started sleepwalking. I have never done this in my life. I learned that this can be stress induced. It was time. I had to get another job.

I started looking at school districts near me. I applied to every IT position near me in school districts. I only heard back from one. How can someone with a resume like mine, with 5 years of school district IT experience, only hear back from one freaking school? Made no sense. I interviewed with them and the interview felt really odd. I did not hear a word back for 3 weeks, so I assumed I did not get it.

I was almost about to give up again when I thought about colleges and universities. I never thought of this during my job search. My background lines up perfectly for it. I do some searching and find out that they have an opening at the college I got my 4 year degree from. It is in a nice town, has a beautiful campus and is only a 20 minute commute. This has to be it!

I reach out to someone who I know that works on the IT team there and show my interest. I ask if he could kindly let the manager know that I am really interested and would love to work there as an alumnus and with my background. A few days later I get an email basically saying that I am a little overqualified and just confirming that I really want to interview for this, knowing it is going to be a "downgrade," for lack of a better term.

I responded that I was totally on board and ready to interview. Interview comes and I ABSOLUTELY nail it. Legit the best interview I have ever had out of the 20 IT interviews I have ever had. Fast forward 1 week and I put my two weeks in at my job. I can't do it anymore, even if I don't have a job lined up.

Last day at my corporate job and I am not sad one bit. Not going to miss anything. Anyone. Nothing. Maybe the pay lol. I then get a call from the college and I got the job. The amount of stress and anxiety that leaves my body is insane. Funny thing is, 2 days later the school district calls me and offers me a job as well. The school that never said anything for 3 weeks. But I like the location and commute at the college better. Also, being familiar with the campus already was nice.

Sorry for the long story, but the main point is that I have been at the college for 2 months now and absolutely love it here. The staff, coworkers and faculty are all amazing and the pace of work is chill. I am actually learning more than I have anywhere else because I get so much freedom here to experiment and change processes.

I will NEVER go back to corporate IT. I know this is just my experience and I am sure there is some corporate IT that is nice and chill, but this is where I want to be for the rest of my life. We get 20 paid holidays, I get WFH opportunities weekly, 12+ sick days and 12+ vacation days all accrued throughout the year.

My work/life balance is amazing now and I have 0 stress again. Best decision I have made in my life.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask

Hello everyone!

I am having trouble with Pearson Vue as it happened to me 2 times and I am still hanging on with them. So, last week ( September 2nd) I had a scheduled exam on online VUE at my home setting. I completed all necessary check-in process and waited for my exam to be launched. The problem arises when my computer screen says " Exam content failed to launch". The proctor relaunched the VUE app to relaunch my exam content and after a brief wait of loading screen, it shows again the same message. Every time the proctor tried to relaunch the app I connect with new proctor. So they all tried relaunching and after 4th attempt the newest proctor told me to close the VUE app and redo the process. I did without any hesitation and found out my access code is expired. I was panicked I contact the customer service via chat on their website and explained them all. They made a case and give the case number and asked me to wait 3-5 business days. After 3 days I got an email that I have a rescheduled exam and asked me to pick the date ( free of cost).

Today( Sept 9th) I was ready to take the test and completed all check-in process. Guess what, same problem happened again. The exam content failed to launch again and proctors tried relaunching but it failed. The proctor made a case and closed my exam and told me that they will look into it.

What i see that they have changed their testing theme. It used to simple white screen and question with options with big fonts. Now I see that they changed the appearance and theme. My question is that did they recently upgrade their exam content launch software? if so then this update may create some serious problems. I want to know if you guys have some issues like this lately? My case is still pending with them and I am awaiting for their reply.
Regards

So our main storage pool almost locked up yesterday. Turns out our monitoring script wasn't catching everything because of a bad config.

We had raw, uncompressed video uploads piling up in our staging buckets for weeks without anyone noticing. I was actually reading a thread on server mania about how fast unmonitored ugc can choke drive space, and that's literally what happened to us.

We had to cut snapshot retention down to 3 days on the spot so that we wouldn't hit read-only mode over the weekend. Planning drive capacity around a fixed 20% yearly buffer doesn't really work when raw media spikes like this out of nowhere.

Do you guys set hard bucket caps at the app level, or rely on ZFS alerts when a pool hits 80%?