> Just fair warning: you seem to be under the assumption that “boring” means “straightforward and just makes sense.” It does not. If you’re looking for that… good luck! Update if you find somewhere and I’ll join you.
I suspect that there's a fair amount of overlap—not total, but quite a bit—between companies that were doing old stuff The Right Way, with lots of well-considered automation and high-quality backups and well-documented, repeatable, largely scripted configuration, and companies that are on some of the "sexy" tech now. So it might be even harder than it used to be to find a company doing things the "boring" way but who don't have a horrible, barely-functioning mess on their hands.
I'd think some of the nerdier, niche tech places probably run things OK and not super new-school. Something like Rsync.net, maybe. Possibly places that like BSD in general will tend not to be on the new hotness. Difficulty: those sorts of places tend to have pretty low head counts so it may be hard to land a job at one (go figure, much of the tried and true stuff Just Works and doesn't require a ton of babysitting if you halfway know what you're doing)
>> companies that were doing old stuff The Right Way, with lots of well-considered automation and high-quality backups and well-documented, repeatable, largely scripted configuration
Are there any examples of this? I’m coming up on 20 years into my career and i’ve genuinely never seen a large company that had their IT function ticking over sweetly. Every single one had aspirations and had some things nailed to a greater or lesser extent but none were “done”.
If anything, things are a LOT better today. The old mis-configured MS Exhange host hanging off the office DSL line is gone these days. The MD / CEO’s password is unlikely to be Password1 nowadays.
> The MD / CEO’s password is unlikely to be Password1 nowadays.
Well, yeah. It’s been 10 years, and we need to change the password every 3 months, also, you told me not to use ‘Password’, so the password is now ‘CompanyName40’
I suspect that there's a fair amount of overlap—not total, but quite a bit—between companies that were doing old stuff The Right Way, with lots of well-considered automation and high-quality backups and well-documented, repeatable, largely scripted configuration, and companies that are on some of the "sexy" tech now. So it might be even harder than it used to be to find a company doing things the "boring" way but who don't have a horrible, barely-functioning mess on their hands.
I'd think some of the nerdier, niche tech places probably run things OK and not super new-school. Something like Rsync.net, maybe. Possibly places that like BSD in general will tend not to be on the new hotness. Difficulty: those sorts of places tend to have pretty low head counts so it may be hard to land a job at one (go figure, much of the tried and true stuff Just Works and doesn't require a ton of babysitting if you halfway know what you're doing)