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As a previous IT Manager (SRE last decade), honestly, most IT Admins I know literally do nothing beyond click Auto Update checkboxes and let things churn until they break. I hate to put that career down but I worked at all levels of it starting from tech support in a call center. It's a very easy job to get either get complacent with your skill set, comfortable, and really just half ass things. I have a lot of friends that are on IT teams and most of them don't have any interest in what I do, like learning to write golang, rust, python, learn kubernetes, docker, etc.. I tell them all the time about how much money they can make if you really buckle down and learn to program or just learn a cloud and terraform. They all bitch about how much they hate their jobs because they're doing basically line tech support but are fine where they're at. I had horrible IT jobs so I'm super sympathetic to it and always try to hire them when I can. I hired one last year, not a nepotism hire I didn't know him, but he was an IT guy wanting to move into SRE.

They just use Windows and let it do its thing. Its their day job and they don't work on improving so their skillset is super subpar. To them it's all they need to do their job, I don't have that personality, I'm obsessively min-maxing things.

I even worked at MSPs (Managed Service Providers) so I did IT/Network admin work for tons of companies around different cities and every single MSP just either puts everything on auto update or has a strict rule of NOTHING on auto update which just means nothing ever gets updated until a customer calls in for $$ hourly support. You throw the updating in because you get more hours. Or you have a scheduled update ticket every month/etc.

I also saw a comment or a meme about Crowdstrike being able to update whenever wherever, no idea if that's true or not.

I wrote this post from my point of view which is that of being a Windows SysEng at 4-5 big webhosts over a decade. I had to write a TON of my own security and backup and whatever services because Windows was so barebones and at the fleet (tens of thousands) server level I was managing, with the revenue webhosting makes, we definitely couldn't buy expensive software. Most of my customers paid $10/mo and we were cramming thousands of them on one server the licensing was a huge pain for any software.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41007824




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