Drinking from the Firehose (TM)

Interesting how little you tend to follow American News when you are drinking from the "tech firehose"...

I enjoy my time at Rackspace.

Yes, I know that few people can honestly say they like working at work, but I have a personality that craves intensity (and sometimes praise), and Rack fills that need. Today was no exception - considering how many people out there expect to make a buck off a fairly generic Dell rackmount server and a few customized Linux apps.

What is the crux of Linux Support at The Rack?

Easy.

You take 1 part detective work and 1 part "people skills" (aka, talking on the phone) and you have a recipe for figuring out what ails your customers. This is simpler than it sounds - most folks running a LAMP server (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) can get stuck in some interesting quandaries. And it is up to YOU to figure out how to pull them out of the muck.

One might relegate this form of fanatical support to a thing of the past, perhaps the 90's Venture Capital Startups, but I beg to differ. If you remember back then, EVERYONE had a million-dollar idea that could be webified. The difference between you and the bike-tech-turned-net-security-consultant was that you KNEW how to get a business off the ground with tried-and-true concepts. Not brick and mortar business smarts, but the basics of what made America great - Sweat and Tears and Hard Work..

With so few Gen X'ers around in tech nowdays, at least those who slog the front lines, one often wonders if they will ultimately figure out that "hard work" will not pay off for them like it did for their parents.

And they will leave in droves. Or already did.

Nevertheless, I am happy to be in the minority of techs who trudge onward, hoping to make a difference in a few people's lives before I grow too jaded about life and its just rewards...

True hard work never hurt anyone. It just seems to hurt at first.

The rewards are infinite.