Last Friday, I made a pretty sarcastic joke about Friday deploys. Hopefully the image macro let you know it was a joke, though!

Do you even Friday deploy, bro? pic.twitter.com/weqjgsZxfx

— Rob Nelson (@rnelson0) March 18, 2016

You shouldn’t be deploying on Fridays. Let’s qualify that a bit. “Deploy” in this instance means a high-risk change – a new product or equipment, a change in some protocol (moving from EIGRP to OSPF), or even some simple change that you’ve not done before so you don’t really know how risky it is – and “Friday “is your last day of the week. Patches on Friday? Up to you, though I don’t suggest doing so at 4:59PM. Is your shift 4×10, Monday through Thursday? Thursday is your Friday, get your deploys done by Wednesday. Is it a short week because of vacation plans? Maybe don’t deploy this week at all. Whatever the particulars are for you, “No Deploy Friday” is just the phrase for not deploying something brand new before you’re off for a few days.

Having the “No Deploy Friday” rule is a sign of IT maturity, for you and your company, in so many ways:

• Realizing you cannot do everything. Sometimes you can’t do something when you want to. It’s better to accept that than try and force it.
• Realizing that things go wrong. When you’re young, it’s easy to believe so fiercely that you know what you’re doing that you cannot accept that you might be wrong. With maturity comes the knowledge that even if you know what you’re doing, it can still turn out poorly.
• Realizing that your decisions affect those around you. It’s important to recognize that when something does go wrong, you don’t exist in a vacuum. Other people are affected. Your boss and coworkers. Your customers. Your family. Your coworker’s family. You can make the decision that YOU do not mind staying late if something breaks, but you should not make the decision for your coworker’s spouse that they won’t be home for dinner.
• Realizing that you matter. Work has to happen. But you don’t have to subsume yourself for it to happen. Your time off is yours. Friday movie night should be for watching movies, not fixing bad deploys. And instead of pushing a big deploy before you head on vacation, which pretty much ensures through Murphy’s Law that you won’t actually get to enjoy your vacation (or worse, you will but your company and users will suffer until you’re back on the grid!), talk to management and push the deploy out or find another owner. There’s also the more serious struggle with burnout that we all have. Reminder: You matter! If you need help, reach out to someone! We’ll listen!
• Realizing that no matter what gets done today, there will always be more tomorrow! When I was younger, I sometimes thought I might “work myself out of a job”. What BS. If I ever actually did get everything done, it would have just given me time to find something else to do. For most of us, we’ll never actually empty out our task list. Since that’s the case, there’s no need to kill yourself trying to do so. This isn’t the same thing as saying, “feel free to slack.” It’s a fine line to know what NEEDS to be done today and what would really be nice to do today but would be more likely to be successful on another day. Knowing when you should postpone work until you have the time to do it right is another sign of maturity.
• Realizing that “hurry” is the antithesis of “fast”. This one is counter-intuitive. We’re often told to, “move fast and break things.” I hate that saying. It really should be, “move fast and break things in development so you don’t break production.” That’s the real intent behind it. But even that’s not right. “Hurry” indicates your speed; “fast” is describing your velocity.  When you’re hurrying, it becomes easy to skip a step because someone hit you up on IM while you were working, or push through an error message because you want to leave to get to the movie on time. Those things end up costing you more time when you have to drop everything to troubleshoot or rollback. Now you’re hurrying at a high speed but have a negative velocity. You show maturity when you choose a velocity of zero over a negative velocity.
• Realizing that Friday is great for “non-work” work. We work in a fast paced industry. We spend a lot of time working, but we have a lot of other things we have to do that we don’t always consider “work”. No-one likes doing their expense reports, but they’re great Friday work. We also have to keep up with new technologies and processes, and if you have an 8+ hour day with no deploys, it’s a good candidate for some contiguous learning time. There’s lots of ways to be productive while avoiding deploys, and your manager and finances will also be happy that they don’t have to hound you for your expense reports anymore!

It’s often a difficult struggle for maturity in IT. Just knowing what maturity looks like, doesn’t mean you can just go ahead and do it. If you’re in a culture of Friday deploys, you may have to lead the charge on this. If you’re the rogue IT person breaking the “No Deploy Friday” rules, talk to your coworkers and see what wisdom you can glean. Let maturity be your badge of pride, not your scars and war stories!

Over the weekend, a really great hashtag came into existence, #FirstTechJob:

Lots of IT/software jobs ask for experience, but everyone starts somewhere. Lets encourage new folks with a tweet about our #FirstTechJob

— Gareth Rushgrove (@garethr) February 20, 2016

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This in turn came from a great question about the requirements in job listings:

Everyone wants to hire ops with 4+ yrs of experience. Where do they get the first 4 then ?

— Karanbir Singh (@kbsingh) February 20, 2016

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Please check out the hashtag, it’s a great sampling of the always humble, often mundane, beginnings of nearly everyone in IT. Some common themes were of course help desk support, managing printers and email systems, and managing or running ISPs (often including modems!). My, how times have changed. It did inspire me to talk a bit more about my journey in the hope that it may help some others on their own journey, whether they’re just getting started or have been at it for a while.

Getting Started

Assembling PCs in a neighbors basement in 1995. #FirstTechJob @garethr

— Rob Nelson (@rnelson0) February 20, 2016

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My very first professional job was working for a neighbor’s local PC business in the summer between high school and college. He sold then-high end computers (I think mostly 386s and sometimes 486s, but it’s been a while), with ISA graphics cards that took 30-60 minutes to render a single low-res frame, and needed assistance assembling them in a timely manner. The work itself wasn’t difficult – insert Tab A into Slot B, tighten Screw C – but I asked a lot of questions and learned a good bit about hardware. I made a few bucks, mostly spent at the local laser tag arcade, and most importantly was able to put “professional” work experience on my resume in addition to Wendy’s and KFC. Thank you, neighbor, for that first job!

After the first year of college, I lucked into a paid summer internship at a local engineering firm. The company’s owner was a friend from church and my Dad helped me get an interview – some of that was getting me in the door, but a good bit was getting me off my butt – and I was able to upsell my summer job and my schooling into experience. I did a number of responsibilities there over the next two summers. Migrating CAD files from an old unix terminal to the new NT 3.51 systems, then to NT 4.0; desktop support; network support; printers and plotters; and a bajillion other little things.

One memorable event was when Pittsburgh was struck by some severe weather (including tornados – a real rarity for that area!) and a lightning strike blew out the transformer outside our building. Always splurge for lightning suppression. Over half the hubs died and we got a fast track to switches. In 1997-98, that was ahead of the curve for many. There were of course many less memorable, but more important, things I learned. The most important was how to provide service and support to users and maintain a positive relationship. There were always trying people (I have actually seen someone stick a CD in a 5 1/4″ floppy and force the door shut, and it’s not pretty) but hey, I knew nothing about what they did, so why would I hold it against them for not being experts in my job area?

In spring of ’99, I was supposed to intern there again, but a hiring freeze changed that plan. I already had the college semester off and it was too late to schedule classes when I found out, so I canvassed and found two part-time jobs where I could maintain self-employment, my own schedule, and make money. I learned pretty quickly that I don’t want to be my own boss. That’s a lot of work, and sometimes I only had < 3 days of work in a week! I kept at this through most of ’99 and added “Y2K preparation” to my skillset. Note: you really want to retire before 2038.

In December of ’99, I found a full time job at a local IT consultant, except they weren’t local to me so I had to move. I am 99% certain the only reason I got the job was because I called the company every week asking if had openings and the owner decided it was easier to let me try a job on probation than to put me off anymore. Persistence pays off! This was my first full time, self-sustaining job. I stayed here for 3 years and did a little bit of everything: customer service was key to everything, large-scale OCR of court documents, web front-ends to said documents, Wireless WAN connectivity (pre 802.11b), and I really fell in love with network security.

Keep Going

That covers the first four years and a bit beyond, which gave me a really great foundation for the rest of my IT career. I would like to think I’ve done fairly well since then. These jobs may not seem like the kind of awe-inspiring jobs that everyone wants, but they were good jobs, with good people, and I appreciate how lucky I was to have them. I know it can be a struggle to get those first few jobs and years of experience, so if you can’t land a dream job out of the gate, know that you can find tons of other jobs that will benefit you and your career. IT is really diverse, and you may find something you didn’t know you were looking for; if not it will certainly help you with those “4+ years experience needed” jobs.

Good luck in your journey!