I have one semester of IT classes under my belt from my community college. That semester was a brief overview of all the areas in IT: a little web design, a little networking, a little programming, a little database, ect. During that semester, I gravitated towards networking, I signed up for networking classes so I am currently one semester in on a networking specific diploma (1 semester total, about to be 2 with 1 networking concentrated semester). On the side, I applied for an internship with my school one month before my first semester ended. To make this brief, I had two separate experiences with the internship: one as a help desk analyst, and one as a manager of a campus wide migration to windows 7; the first experience seemed liked your typical aspie working at a cash register experience, pushing a quota, thinking quickly while performing with accuracy, lots of multi-tasking, and having a "mental queue" of all the tickets (that's how we organized service requests). Unlike a cash register, however, the problems were almost completely unpredictable, dynamic, and demanded heavy ad-hoc problem solving, there was no protocol, study material, or past experience (for the most part) that could be leaned upon for reference. My second experience, the campus-wide migration, was easier by an enormous margin, we managed re-image requests, backups, re-images, and restores. I loved the repetitive nature of the backups, and I could focus and the scope of my responsibilities are very narrow...there were no "fix the printer now" out of the blue requests, nothing dealing with the e learning, just the migration and everything related. It was quiet, there was more autonomy, and deadlines long in nature...it wasn't "do this one thing right now!", it was "you have a ton of work to do and you have a ton of time to do it." To put a bow on it you could say I loved having control over the situation.
I have a knack for...being a perfectionist,so to speak....with my career choices, I was whimsical and floundering with the decision to pick a business major when I went to 4 year school, and actually went with marketing by default; after some therapy and consultation about my lack of stability, I have a new-found appreciation for sticking through a decision, even though it will have immanent drawbacks. As a result, I begun to pursue IT, but unlike with business I have put my flag in the ground with my decision, but haven't yet put my flag in the ground with networking. My concerns are about my pervasive and lifelong handicaps with lack of predictability, switching focus, spreading focus across a broad scope of responsibilities, short term memory, general cognitive fluency, and poor organizational skills. I understand that aspergians have to make compromises, that often they'll learn to adapt to moderately social jobs, and deal with some level of change, my concern is with jumping into something that requires above average abilities in the areas I am describing, and knowing when to say your peers are going to run circles around you as long as you work in this area. The danger, as you can tell, in switching out of networking would be feeding into the slippery slope of indecisiveness I am prone to; a never ending pattern of not following through with a career path because it wasn't perfect...now you see why I'm feeling so ambivalent.
I talked some people on forums and in person, and I realize that an inevitable compromise will have to be made as an IT professional, and my poor ability to "wear multiple hats at once." I'm trying to see if networking is going to have a role for me where I am least capable of being competent, even if it's not the most glamorous job. What I need to know is if all networking roles in IT are the metaphorical "cashiering" of IT (cashiering being the universal, stay away from this if you're an aspie job). I talked with an adviser with the school, and he told me that the closest thing to what you're looking for will be Linux Admin: I guess there are some network admins out there who use Linux to oversee/manage/troubleshoot a network instead of Windows, he said the job is relatively narrow in scope and repetitive. Do you agree with this, is there a networking job in IT that doesn't require the most dynamic and productive worker in the world (productive meaning works well under a highly demanding quota)?
Please feel free to be blunt if you think I'm "missing the big picture" here or anything like that. Thank you.
23 Apr 2014, 6:53 pm
