Although I’ve been monkeying with computers since i was a tike, I didn’t make a career out of it until I was in my mid-40s when I graduated from college with a degree in computer information systems.
One thing they didn’t teach me was basic troubleshooting, which is probably one of the most basic skills a person in my field can have. I used to think that I had to know everything about an OS, the network, software stack, middleware tools. But as I moved into my new career, I learned the most important lesson of all: knowing where and how to find the answers to problems is more important than knowing all of the answers.
Computer systems are very complex and we use software tools to manage our servers. I wasn’t taught how to use any of these tools in college. I am proficient enough to learn my way around new software, especially when I have good documentation, but I always thought that my usefulness in the industry would be in how much I knew about various subjects. But truth be told, computer systems are often too complicated nowadays for anyone to know everything about them, especially when you’re talking about hundreds of servers in an enterprise environment.
We have people who specialize in databases, others work on networking hardware. People like me deploy and manage servers and their software. If there’s ever a question, the answer is usually a few clicks away, which is something they never bothered to mention in college. In fact, that was probably my biggest impediment until I overcame it. It was a relief to learn that I didn’t have to know ALL the answers, but I do need to know how to find them, and that’s what matters most.