Frank
A senior systems engineer with nearly three decades of experience reflects on the gap between professional aptitude and personal temperament, tracing how an accidental entry into IT became a career through compounding competence rather than genuine calling. He argues that IT’s invisible feedback loop, where success looks identical to failure – never satisfied a brain wired for tangible, visible results.
Drawing on an AuDHD diagnosis received in adulthood and a formative memory of watching a dozer operator work, he concludes his temperament was better suited to land, livestock, and heavy equipment. He frames the analog-to-digital transition era of 1983 to 2005 as his closest historical fit, while acknowledging the life he built in IT was real and worthwhile.
There’s a memory I keep coming back to. I’m about sixteen years old, standing in a muddy field somewhere in Baldwin County watching a dozer operator clear a lot line. I don’t remember why I was there or who brought me. What I remember is the operator. He was probably fifty-something, thick-necked, wearing a faded ball cap, and he was working that machine the way a good musician plays an instrument. Not fighting it. Reading it. He’d drop the blade at exactly the right moment, curl a perfect windrow of red Georgia clay, back off clean, and start the next pass without hesitating. No wasted motion. No second-guessing. At the end of that field there was a result you could see, stand on, and measure. Something had permanently changed about that piece of ground, and one man with one machine did it.
I thought about that guy for years afterward without really understanding why. Now I think I do.
I became a systems engineer because I’m decent with computers and somebody hired me cheap at twenty-six years old. That’s the honest version of the story. I graduated from Georgia College, needed an adult paycheck, knew the right person, and walked into an IT Manager job at a bank in Milledgeville with roughly zero qualifications beyond the fact that computers made intuitive sense to me. They could pay me peanuts because I had to learn everything on the job. I stayed because I kept getting better at it. Competence became momentum. Momentum became a career. Twenty-eight years later I’m a Senior Systems Engineer at one of the largest nonprofit health systems in the country, supporting Exchange infrastructure for a hundred and sixty-two thousand employees, and I’m genuinely good at it.
I’m also pretty sure that if I’d had slightly different circumstances at twenty-two years old, I would have ended up driving a dozer or running cattle, and I would have been happier for it.
That sounds like ingratitude. It isn’t. IT gave me a real living, supported my family, and let me build things I’m proud of. I have a homelab at the house in Gray that runs circles around what most small businesses operate on. I’ve built actual working applications in React, PHP, Python, and PowerShell. My flagship project is a music workstation that integrates four different AI APIs and does things that didn’t exist as a category two years ago. I’m not complaining about what I built. I’m being honest about what I’m built for.
The difference between aptitude and temperament is something I didn’t fully understand until I was well into my forties. Aptitude is what you’re capable of doing. Temperament is what your brain actually wants to do with its days. Mine want visible results. Tangible cause and effect. The kind of progress you can turn around and look at when the sun drops.
IT doesn’t offer that very often. You can save a production environment at two in the morning and the visible result is that nothing happened. That’s the job. You solve ten invisible problems before lunch and success looks exactly like nothing. An Exchange hybrid environment running clean has the same appearance as an Exchange hybrid environment that’s about to fall apart. Nobody drives past it and notices the craftsmanship. Nobody stands next to a properly configured distribution group and says, “Frank, that right there is beautiful work.” You do it right, things run. You do it wrong, your phone doesn’t stop ringing. The feedback loop is almost entirely negative, and the institutional memory for what you’ve actually prevented tends to be approximately zero.
Six months of no major incidents, and somebody in management starts wondering why there are so many engineers.
At the end of a day on a dozer, you can turn around and see the road you cut, the pond you dug, the field you cleared. The result exists outside a ticketing system. It has physical weight. You drove that thing all day and now there is something on the planet that wasn’t there before, or something is gone that needed to go. That is a satisfying feedback loop for a certain kind of brain, and I am pretty confident I have that kind of brain.
The question I’ve been thinking about lately is which historical era I would have actually thrived in. The romantic answer is the Old West. I’ve got enough of a fascination with Montana and Wyoming ranch culture that it would be easy to point there and say, yes, that’s my world. Cattle, horses, open country, working with your hands, self-reliance. I romanticize it the same way a lot of Gen-X Southern men do.
But the romantic answer is wrong.
The Old West was beautiful and brutal and medically catastrophic. I have sleep apnea, hypertension, diabetes, kidney stones, and a lipid panel that requires pharmaceutical management. The frontier had excellent aesthetics and essentially no healthcare. I would have been dead at forty-five from something entirely preventable. History sounds great until you remember what history actually felt like from the inside.
My honest answer is that I was born at almost exactly the right time, which is both satisfying and slightly maddening.
I came of age during what I’d call America’s analog-to-digital frontier, roughly 1983 to 2005. That was the window when mechanical culture, blue-collar competence, personal computing, and enterprise IT all overlapped in a way that has never existed before and will never exist again. A guy could understand a carburetor, rebuild a PC, wire a stereo, administer a server, and still be considered one coherent kind of person rather than five separate specialists with competing certifications and different org chart reporting structures.
I was thirteen in 1983. I was thirty-five in 2005. I lived the whole thing.
From thirteen to twenty I had analog culture at full strength. Southern rock was still culturally alive. The Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd, .38 Special, and the Atlanta Rhythm Section weren’t classic rock yet, they were just rock. You bought albums at a real record store and listened to them all the way through because you had paid for them. Cars had personality. Muscle cars were old enough to be interesting and cheap enough to actually touch. Stereo equipment mattered. People built serious home audio setups and argued about them. The internet didn’t exist and nobody missed it because nobody knew it was supposed to arrive.
From twenty to twenty-eight, PCs and networking became real careers and curiosity could outrun credentials. That’s exactly the window where I walked into my first IT job. Documentation was thin, vendor support was uneven, Stack Overflow didn’t exist, and troubleshooting required actual reasoning rather than searching for someone else’s identical error. People who could walk into a broken environment, look around, and say “here’s what happened and here’s what we’re going to do about it” had genuine authority. That was my lane. Still is.
From twenty-eight to thirty-five, enterprise IT exploded. Windows domains, Exchange, Active Directory, broadband, servers, storage, home networking. The 1994 to 2003 window specifically is probably my sharpest era. Enough computing maturity for a serious career, enough technological chaos for broad expertise to matter, and everything still mechanical enough that one determined person could understand most of the stack without needing a committee meeting to change a checkbox.
I fit that era almost suspiciously well. I’m a generalist by nature, not a specialist. I was the guy who knew how the whole thing worked, which made me indispensable in early enterprise computing and increasingly awkward in modern enterprise computing, where depth of specialization is prized and the guy who understands everything from the hardware up is sometimes viewed with mild suspicion rather than relief.
But here’s what I keep coming back to. Even within that era, even as good a fit as that window was for my aptitude, I think my temperament was always somewhere else.
I got into IT by accident and I stayed because I kept succeeding. That’s the real story. Had I been mediocre with computers, I might have left early and found work that matched my nature more directly. Instead, I understood them unusually well. Every success created another reason to stay. Better pay, greater responsibility, a growing family, benefits, seniority, and too much invested to walk away from. The accidental job gradually became the safest path. The safe path eventually became difficult to leave.
What I actually wanted, somewhere underneath all of it, was probably a few hundred acres, a cattle herd, and a dozer with a permanently greasy seat.
That is an extremely specific Southern archetype, and I mean it without any irony. Running cattle is systems engineering with mud and weather and animals and fencing and feed and water and economics all interacting at once. Diagnosing why a hydraulic cylinder is leaking on an excavator is not fundamentally different from diagnosing why an Exchange transport rule is misfiring. The thinking process is the same. You isolate variables, check the obvious first, follow the failure point backward to its source, and fix the actual problem instead of the symptom. The difference is that one of those jobs ends with grease on your hands and a field that looks different than it did this morning.
I would have been the operator who could both run and diagnose the equipment. The same pattern recognition that makes me good at IT infrastructure would have made me good at reading soil and grade and machine feedback and slope. The same instinct for keeping things running, for understanding what’s about to break before it breaks, would have applied directly. I would have ended up with a dozer, an excavator, some acreage, a few hundred head of cattle, and a workshop full of parts I absolutely refused to throw away.
And I would probably still have had computers in the shop, because that part of my brain doesn’t turn off. I would have automated the gate, tracked the herd, mapped the property, monitored the equipment hours, and built something that didn’t exist commercially because I wanted it to work a specific way. But the technology would have served the life instead of being the life. That distinction matters more than I realized for a long time.
I have an AuDHD diagnosis that I didn’t get until I was well into adulthood, and understanding that has reframed a lot of things about my own history. One of them is the texture of what kind of work actually satisfies my nervous system versus what kind of work my nervous system merely tolerates. Hyperspecialized modern IT environments, with their managed complexity, subscription dependencies, cloud abstraction layers, and systems that get “improved” every six weeks into something worse, are not a natural fit for a brain that wants to own things, understand things end to end, fix things, and see the result. I function in that environment. I do not flourish there.
I was built for work where you can see exactly what you’re responsible for and exactly what you’ve done. Land doesn’t lie to you about that. Equipment doesn’t lie to you about that. A herd of cattle doesn’t generate a ticket telling you the issue has been escalated to Tier 2.
There’s a version of my life where I come out of Georgia College and instead of walking into a bank’s IT department, I go to work for a grading company or a utility contractor. I’m operating equipment inside of six months because I learn machinery the same way I learn computers. By twenty-eight I’m running a small land-services operation with a used dozer I bought and repaired myself. By my mid-thirties I’ve got acreage, cattle, a small herd, and a reputation for fixing problems nobody else wants to touch.
I’d still be Frank. Still the guy who builds his own tools, still the guy with opinions about what’s actually broken versus what management thinks is broken, still the guy listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd while everybody else has moved on to whatever format replaced it. Still a little too blunt, still a little too intense, still carrying around more than I probably should.
But at the end of the day I’d be looking at something I built with my hands and my judgment and my stubbornness, and it would be sitting there on the ground where I left it.
That’s what I keep coming back to when I think about a dozer operator clearing a lot line in Baldwin County in 1986. I was sixteen and I didn’t have the language for it yet. Now I’m fifty-five and I do.
Some men are built for infrastructure. I mean the kind you can stand on.
