The arbitrary 8.5-9 hour workday drives me nuts, because a lot of the time, I really only have 3 or 4 hours worth of work to do. I generally work quickly and I value my time. Can I make a decent living doing something that gives me this kind of flexibility?
People have been saying this but I have yet to encounter such issues as a network engineer or sysadmin. I’m going to dodge this recruiting hell others are willing to go through until the day I die. More than 2 rounds of interviews are just HR buffoonery. Expecting expertise in every single branch of a field is nonsense and only accomplishes that applicants lie on their resumes. There are days when everything is running smoothly and all I have to do is sent 3 emails out of home office and there’s nothing wrong with that.
For software engineer resume rot is definitely a thing. Everything has a 5 year timer on it even thr stuff that doesn’t out right die. C# has been around for like 20 years something like that but try to only know about the ecosystem from more than 5 year ago and you’re gonna have a bad time.
I can’t speak on network or sysadmin stuff, but I do know from a coworker friend that they get paid way less are are considered more expendable, so you’re probably right that it’s work that doesn’t change much. Still I’m surprised to hear you say that you have a lot of downtime or maybe I have only worked at trashfires
I’ve been around for a while and there are plenty of IT Jobs that’ll burn you out but there are also super chill positions. My last job change was a downgrade money wise and my boss who I was supposed to replace soon made fun of me for that decision but he missed his daughter growing up because he was working 24/7. She’s an alcoholic now and doesn’t want anything to do with him but “if you want to succeed you have to make sacrifices” he always said. The guy next door to my office literally died in his sleep after being completely stressed out for a year. Heart just stopped. Mid fifties. I quit shortly after. I now only take jobs that are chill as fuck because I’ve learned from their mistakes.
Resume rot and working and to you drop are very different ideas. It’s not worth taking a chill job if it means that you’re unhireable for your next job. There are plenty of chill jobs that grow your resume.