I work in a niche inside a niche. I deal with terabytes of storage, massive servers, a variety of storage tech, and I’ve been in interested in computers in general for… Around 40 years. (Yeah, I’m old.)
I have my own single person company and have worked in 40+ US states, done assignments in the UK, Norway.
AMA.
How did you end up in that niche? Was it a conscious decision or was it something that was thrust on you?
Follow-up question: Did you take any courses for the archiving portion of your job, or is it entirely self-taught? Any certifications or additional (formal) training?
Heh. I told my boss to fuck off after I got back from a vacation and she yelled at me because the people who were supposed to do my work couldn’t do it – because it was too technical.
I went back to my cube, cleared out my desk, and waited for security to escort me out. Three days later, my boss came to my cube and said “Go to the 11th floor and ask for Dave.” then they walked away. I was sure it was an exit interview with HR. I put my box on my desk and went downstairs where… I got a job interview in the IT department, managing their new archive.
As part of the transfer to IT, I got a week’s training in the USA, and several boxes of software manuals. Dave (my new IT mentor) said he wanted me to read all of them. He’d stop by, ask me which manual I’d read most recently, flip through it, read something, and say “Tell me about… X Y Z”, and I’d have to barf out what I’d learned about storage management or database indexes, or server OS commands or functions.
After that, everything was self-taught. I ended up buying some old decommissioned server hardware from a friend that worked at the manufacturer, borrowing the install CDs from work, and building my own server to repeatedly fuck up / learn on.
Wow, what a story. The reason I asked is because I am (hopefully) coming from the other side: librarianship, trying to get into records management and archives and eventually into digital archives.