hullsean

I’ve been doing the above as a consultant for a couple of decades. Here’s what I see:

o As others have said it’s a lot. That said it sounds like management trusts uou. More than hiring someone off the street to take the reigns. This means there is room to breathe and room to fail a little bit.

o Talk to all biz units to learn what services they rely on. Thus will not be 1:1 with servers and applications as you see them. But it’s an important starting point.

o Inventory all the systems that you can see/find.

o identify backups, DR and put together a list of your concerns. Document this and share with management. This will give you cover.

o develop your own priority list. Be prepared for management to give you a different set of priorities. You will need to learn skills of push back and compromise.

o learn to reach “good enough” in the short term. If you try to fix everything elegantly and perfectly other problems will wait longer.

Prometheus… though you may not like what you find.

I recommend Julia Cameron’s book the Artists way. It’s designed as a course in creative recovery. With daily & weekly homework. Brilliant stuff…

Wow. That’s hot!

This is so classic, bravo!

Slack is a huge time waster. It is a constant distraction. As as it becomes standardized it’s assumed you will be on it all the tome. Through the workday and even after. The only time can get work done without distractions is after hours.

With slack the world becomes one big long meeting. Lol

Also as a consultant it is a problem. With email I have paper trails of conversations. But with slack when engagement is ending I lose all that discussion & history. It forces me to double up my note taking (more lost time) and try to hack a backup of some of that stuff as an engagement ends.

Yes I get the advantages but those have long since been buried by all it’s problems

Hard to change someone’s nature. I agree with @viraptor put them on something requiring indepth research. :)

The concept of “literacy” is relative to begin with.

Imposter syndrome. It’s a thing.

Yeah. Ditto. 49 myself. I enjoy coding as much as I did when I was 20. Do I need to be learning everyday? Yep. Same as back then. And I enjoy it just as much :)

The same way i did at 25. Be better!

Your mileage may vary of course. But i’ve been independent consulting now for 25yrs. Started doing primarily dba/unix work in the 90’s and now of course cloud heavy. Devops is in extremely high demand. i do docker, ecs, terraform, kubernetes, aws, gcp. Python. postgresql, mysql, redshift. athena. it goes on & on.

yes as others have mentioned you have to be willing to learn. to be also excited to learn. that’s key.

i’m also much more mature now. so i can work well with anyone and see perspectives others miss.

opportunities abound !

aws popup loft is free and matches your list pretty well

im in new york. been freelancing for 23 years. demand has never been greater.

differentiate. brand yourself. and learn to tell your story aka “sell” yourself.

how can you help? what problem can you solve?

as long as there are consulting services companies there will forever be work.

keep learning!