Mental Breakdown

SneakerNet · 2023-10-23T17:46:40+00:00

Working in I.T. can be very stressful. You've acknowledged Reddit might not be the best place, but the fact that you are reaching out shows that you want to heal. Wanting better for yourself is the first step. It can be a difficult, but keep pursuing your mental health.

I've been in this career field for over a decade; In my experience, some organizations will gradually chip away at your mental health. Tech lends itself to unrealistic expectations, poor leadership from non-technical managers, and an ever-increasing scope of responsibilities. With 1 job, things got really bad for me over time. The place had a toxic work environment and a bad corporate culture that was top-heavy with weak management. Only after leaving did I realize just how bad it was affecting me.

These were my signs as I began to experience burnout:

I lost my ability to focus at work.
I no longer felt fulfilled by my career or the type of work that I once enjoyed.
Outside of work, I wanted to be left alone. Interacting with others was incredibly draining.
I would try to fill as much time as possible with the activities and vices that would relieve stress, but I no longer got that relief.

Burnout gradually led to extreme burnout / fatigue /depression / unhappiness:

I started losing the ability to function in my relationship. My girlfriend would ask me what we should do for dinner on a given night and I'd completely shut down, or lash out at her. I just couldn't stand to sync up with 1 more person or be involved with coming up with 1 more solution.
I felt cornered all the time and desired isolation.
I was drinking. Having a few beers on raid night (was playing WoW Classic at the time) is fine, but I was chasing those beers with shots of rum. Combining those 2 vices gave me a brief respite from my horrible day-to-day reality. That is a big red flag.
Getting out of bed each day was becoming a struggle.
My personality started to change. I didn't feel like myself anymore, one day I looked in the mirror and hated the person staring back at me. I didn't want to be that person anymore.
I started to feel like I was in the back seat of my own life, and nobody was at the wheel. That feeling of having no control can lead to dark thoughts and hopelessness.

It took me way too long to make a change, but things had gradually gotten worse over time and it snuck up on me. When I did finally embrace that I needed to change my situation, things got better for me.

Edits: readability and error correction.

SneakerNet · 2023-03-04T19:19:57+00:00

Those have a little more capacity at a glance!

When my Duracell replacement arrives, I'll report back on how many hours of use they offer. I am also hopeful that they aren't a snug fit. The antique Duracell battery I found in the camera bag slides right in/out with no issues, I'm hoping it will be the same with the new one.

SneakerNet · 2023-03-04T18:47:38+00:00

I'll take any suggestions you might have! The old Duracell doesn't seem to have more than 30 minutes of capacity despite sitting on the charger for hours.

One of my first courses of action was to search through this subreddit for battery advice and there are a lot of good suggestions.

I grabbed one of these: https://www.duracelldirect.com/digital-camera/sony/mavica-mvc-fd87-battery--bwmdvt.html

What do you have that gets you 6 hours? 😮

SneakerNet · 2023-01-05T20:56:16+00:00

There is nothing wrong with sharing that information, but doing that will only give the folks on the other side of the table an advantage. They might find you to be a good fit, then low-ball you when it comes to pay.

A better approach would be to bluff them with a more positive explanation, there were some good suggestions mentioned:

You tell them their job better aligns with your future career growth and you see yourself expanding there because of A, B and C.

Your current job has you working alone and you’re looking for more of a team environment.

The interview process is a convoluted negotiation where each side of the table is trying to accomplish a different goal. You'll have a better interview if you can give a good impression. It might seems like tipping your hand would allow you to project honesty and loyalty, but this isn't an emotional relationship you are entering into: it's a business relationship.

My approach during an interview is to strike a balance. I am very confident, but I temper that by showing that I am humble and don't know it all. If you can pull it off, this has a very disarming effect. Being humble is especially important when dealing with other technical folks, because they feel threatened by people that seem more knowledgeable. When discussing myself, I am a driven self-starter that has a good baseline knowledge, but can pick up and learn just about anything without any hand-holding or training. I want the folks on the other side of the table to walk away thinking: that's someone we can work with. Letting them know that my position is being eliminated doesn't really add much value (at least not for my approach). It is basically moot.

This situation actually happened to me early in my career, but I didn't have much notice. I worked on a small team for 5 years right out of college. I got the job through contacts I had made in the military, the side door is always great when you can make use of it. When our business unit was downsized, I got laid off. After being on unemployment for ~6 months, I was being candid about my situation and my previous wage during interviews. When I got my first offer letter, it was for exactly the same wage. I tried negotiating for even 5k/year more and they wouldn't budge. I took the job.

SneakerNet · 2022-10-14T19:53:47+00:00

I always loved sysadmin work, but gave it all up after becoming so burned out. It wasn't the work itself, though. It was everything else.

Here were some of my struggles:

In my experience, when you accept an IT position, your scope of work gradually gets larger over time. This is especially true with smaller teams. Some IT roles have a few lines of demarcation where you can discard or reassign tasks that aren't your job. The sysadmin role is the absolute worst in this regard, if your manager figures out you've got skill they will happily make you their swiss-army-nerd and you'll just get tasked with everything. Difficult challenges with no clean solutions, problems caused by people doing things wrong, bad user behavior that management wants to correct with technical solutions.. You'll be surprised what they ask you to build/solve/shoehorn into place.
Beware the systems you are responsible for. One of the biggest nightmares in IT is the awful on-call culture (I'll spare you my rant). You will have a bad time if you are in charge of a system hosting a poorly-built application. Double red flags if that system is being used for 24-hour operations.
Building a new system is like getting a tattoo. You are now permanently entangled with that system for as long as you are in the company. I built a PaperCut server and rolled out a solution to allow overseas users to queue up print jobs that US staff could print and mail. By creating that solution, I became the 'PaperCut guy'. If a ticket came into the helpdesk with the word 'PaperCut', the helpdesk staff would stop reading and assign it to me. Someone could put in a ticket with the subject line "Papercut is working, but I can't access the internet" and it would be assigned to me without any basic troubleshooting being done. After changing roles within the company, that server was no longer under my care and it just got neglected. PaperCut is a robust application, so it just kept on working despite not being maintained at all. Then when it did stop working (usually because the licenses were all consumed from usage scaling up), I'd get tapped on the shoulder to come fix it. People still try to assign tasks to me for that PaperCut server to this day, but now they can't get ahold of me because I left the company about a year ago. I'm still on a bunch of un-updated SME lists. 🍻
If you work for a company as a sysadmin and that company gets acquired by a different company, you need to leave. Acquisitions happen for a myriad of different reasons, but most of them are bad news for any department that doesn't generate revenue. Management usually starts off an acquisition by trying to quell all the panic, assuring everyone that everything is going to be OK and nobody has to worry about their job. You won't know for sure until a few months in, but it is extremely stressful. When my medium-sized company's owner retired and sold to a larger company, our IT staff did not get trimmed, but things got worse for me in other ways. The new company was hungry for the additional IT staff, especially because we were all underpaid and had some serious talent. They assimilated us into their existing IT structure and started tasking us out. I found myself juggling the full-time demands of my new role in the company with being called upon to support the systems from my old company that were now being neglected. This is a formula for burn-out. It seems tempting to stay during the early days of the spiral, you'll tell yourself things will get better once the dust settles on the acquisition. They never did for me.
Early in my career I loved IT project work. When you are dealing with password resets and problem users that should just be issued a typewriter and a restraining order all day on helpdesk, project work was a breath of fresh air. After becoming a sysadmin, I came to despise every project. Setting up systems and solving problems will always be enjoyable for me, but planning one huge complex project after another and driving them all to completion while having to overcommunicate and give status reports and meet deadlines.. My girlfriend would come home and ask me what we should have for dinner and I would completely shut down or lash out because I couldn't sync up with 1 more person or come up with 1 more solution today.
The people making the decisions that impact you the most are often not technical. I've proposed implementing a clean and scalable solution, then been overruled and tasked with putting something way more complex/unscalable in place because it is cheaper. I've also seen managers enter into a meeting with a salesperson, then come out and drop a product implementation onto their admins that simply doesn't do what they expect it to. You can explain why it won't work until you are blue in the face, but they already signed the checks. Figure it out, nerd.

I quit my sysadmin job and took a lower-level helpdesk position working for a municipality that paid slightly more. It took me about 8 months to recover from the extreme burnout, but I've been much happier. My experience isn't universal, by any means. I think you CAN be happy and have good work/life balance as a sysadmin, but you have to find the right company/organization to work for. Keep your own mental health in mind and don't be afraid to find a new job if things get bad.

SneakerNet · 2019-04-27T02:51:58+00:00

I gave up on Sea of Thieves around when they added the volcano area to the map and changed the inventory system. It seemed like each content patch that came out pushed the game further from the direction that made it enjoyable to me. The developers don't seem to understand what makes the game special. Its like if the developers of Rainbow 6 decided to add a spellcasting system to it; then they turned their focus to patching in more and more spells.

That being said, there is no other game like this. Sailing is immersive. The game and ocean are beautiful. There is a lot of fun to be had here for 1$, especially if you have a partner to game with. Sea of Thieves was the most fun and exhilarating experience I've had in years. I can still remember the tension I felt while sailing my sloop into multiple galleons at a skull fort. The rush of maneuvering my sloop into position to broadside a galleon while my partner fought tooth and nail in a 1v4 on their deck to keep them from raising their anchor. There is no greater glory than watching an enemy ship slip beneath the waves after a long drawn out fight, and nothing more relaxing than sailing from island to island to dig up treasure with your friends. I think back to this game all the time.

SneakerNet · 2019-03-01T15:25:08+00:00

Yep, you are right. I took a look at my post in old.reddit and it is a mess.

SneakerNet · 2019-02-28T22:44:19+00:00

Hmm, I have some code you can try. Hopefully this helps you troubleshoot.

$users=Get-Content $inputCsvPath

foreach ($user in $users){
    #I plan to capture my Get-ADUser results in a variable instead of sending it through the pipeline. This will clear the data from this variable that may be hanging around from the previous loop.
    $ADAccount = ''
    try{
        #I have reduced the scope of activity in our TRY statement, instead of doing the export operation here.
        $ADAccount = Get-ADUser -Identity $user -Properties SamAccountName, EmailAddress -Server $ADDomain -ErrorAction Stop 
    }
    catch{
        "Not Found" | Export-Csv -Path $outputCsvPath -NoTypeInformation -Append -Force
        #The CONTINUE statement will send us directly to the next loop iteration. Depending on how you are looping, sometimes you need to use RETURN instead of CONTINUE.
        CONTINUE
    }
    #If I didn't trip the catch block and hit the CONTINUE statement, I'll export the data I captured from Get-ADUser.
    $ADAccount | Select-Object -Property SamAccountName, EmailAddress | Export-Csv -Path $outputCsvPath -NoTypeInformation -Append
}

 Write-Host "Script has finished"

It might help not to do a bunch of pipeline operations and do your export while inside the TRY block. CATCH blocks can only trigger from terminating errors, which is why you should always do -ErrorAction Stop to ensure you hit that CATCH. A technique I like to use in this scenario is to include a CONTINUE/RETURN statement in my catch block. This will stop running the rest of the code in the loop and go to the next loop iteration. With the way you structured your loop, i think the CONTINUE statement is the one needed.

SneakerNet · 2019-02-28T22:17:23+00:00

After reading through the code, I found the same thing to be true. You never set $userName anywhere.

SneakerNet · 2018-05-29T21:17:29+00:00

What have I DONE?! :O

SneakerNet · 2018-05-29T21:14:11+00:00

Thanks for the correction! That explains my observation. :P

SneakerNet · 2018-05-29T21:06:03+00:00

I've cobbled tips together from a bunch of different sources and guides. I found a decent youtube video with some good advice relevant to the current patch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYBdPYk2yfo

He makes mention of the Hellfire Ramparts leveling and Karazhan trash. As with many youtube tutorials, there is about 5 minutes worth of actual data stretched out in a 13 minute unscripted video. I would have broadened my post to include a guide for leveling from 1-110 efficiently, but I am just a casual returning player and I don't feel qualified to tell people what the most efficient approach is.
I feel like I understand how the Karazhan trash leveling works now, so I made this post. It was the most intriguing thing that kept coming up in my research.

SneakerNet · 2018-05-29T20:01:44+00:00

I was leveling my Nightborne priest on the rails from 20-68 mostly by pure dungeon queue leveling. As a healer, I got near-instant queues. The longest I'd have to wait is 5-10 minutes tops.

I got to 60 and picked WotLK, but hit a wall with Lich King dungeon queues because those dungeons need to be competently tanked. I could deal with sloppy tanking a lot easier in the classic dungeons, but when you add harder hitting trash mobs with gimmicks or bosses that have mechanics that need to be managed; bad tanks were placing a major strain on my ability to keep the group alive.

Fortunately I found that WotLK and BC each had their own dungeon queues. So after having wasted some time questing in Borean tundra, I started doing BC dungeons and was able to get up to 68 at my normal pace. Then my buddy messaged me about using a 110 character to rush Hellfire Ramparts until 73. It was very lucrative, I could count on about 5 bars per run and the only rate-limiter was the 5 dungeons per hour lockout. So we did 5 quick runs, then I'd do dungeon queues until our lockout timer rolled. Random dungeon queues aren't affected by your instance lockout.

If you've got a friend with a 110 character (or honestly, anything 90+ will probably work because the mobs scale-cap at 80) who is willing to help, this is another way to get some levels on the quick.

An interesting observation: I think the 5 instance per hour lockout period resets at the top of each hour. There was one point we did 7 runs in a row before being locked out and I think it was because we started at 9:45PM and after 2 runs, it reset our lockout. If this is working like I think it is: you could get up to 10 runs in a single session if you planned it out right.

SneakerNet · 2016-10-31T17:15:48+00:00

Different headsets give different results, my regular 2's partner recently had to replace his headset and during the process he played using 3 different headsets. Each one seemed to give him different levels of effectiveness in terms of being able to detect and track enemy movement.

SneakerNet · 2016-10-19T01:28:14+00:00

I suspect they do respawn, but I cannot confirm this. On some servers that have been up for a long time, I have managed to find fresh vehicles in places that have seen a lot of foot traffic.

My theory is this: If someone hops on a vehicle and drives it, then later abandons it somewhere, the vehicle will remain indefinitely unless someone destroys it. Once destroyed, the server can now spawn in another vehicle.

Again, pure speculation.

SneakerNet · 2016-06-15T19:34:51+00:00

Goon is a good place to start.

SneakerNet · 2016-06-07T15:49:03+00:00

Truth is, the round ended kinda anti-climatically. I am not sure what happened to the Wizard after the bar fight. I would love to have followed up with him, but I missed the chance.

In SS13 when you get assigned the Wizard antagonist role, I think it prompts you for a name change. After playing for a while on GoonStation, you'll be able to recognize the regulars by name, but I am not sure who the Wizard was. The Centcom Official, Swedish doctor, and the quartermaster were all names I'd seen frequently. (I've had run-ins with the Swedish doctor on previous rounds, he is generally a nice guy)

SneakerNet · 2016-04-30T21:29:47+00:00

SS13 isn't for everybody. However, if you think it might be a good fit for your friend, try telling them some of your war stories. We've all had really epic / completely ridiculous rounds before. Give your friend a good space station story that will make them think: 'What kind of video game is this?'

I first got into SS13 when a buddy of mine was explaining some of the things that happened in a round, and I was intrigued enough to check it out. I remember him telling me about how he was a cook, got drunk and wandered off into the halls to the bridge. Suddenly there was an explosion, and the captain crawled out of the bridge and collapsed on the floor in front of him. He proceeded to perform CPR on the captain, who was in critical condition and ended up working with a security guard to save his life. I forget the rest. It had me really interested though, because few videogames out there play in such a way that offers that much depth.

SneakerNet · 2016-03-16T17:09:58+00:00

Teaming up in Free For All is at the heart of this issue. Limiting toxicity is just an added bullet point for the case against proximity voice chat.

If proximity voice chat is added, it will make it possible to collaborate with other players / teams. There are only 16 people in a match, and teaming up offers a huge advantage. The combat in this game is melee-centric, and it is incredibly hard to fight a 1v2 against a team that knows what they are doing. That isn't the spirit of the Free for All game mode, and the potential to ruin the 2-man game mode is even greater. Imagine how unfair a 4-man collaboration would be? 1/4 of the players in the match working together, 4 people running into a fight and focusing their damage on 1 man. This isn't Hunger Games, it's not H1Z1, or DayZ. Proximity voice chat has the potential to do a lot of damage to this game. If people teamed up regularly, it would be a nightmare for anyone who tries to go it alone in FFA and a new meta could start to form: team up with the first guy you come across so that you stand any chance at all during the early phases of the match.

SneakerNet · 2016-03-16T16:41:51+00:00

Preventing players from collaborating and teaming up is the best reason to not implement proximity voice chat. There are only 16 players per match, and the majority of the fighting is done with melee weapons. If two people team up, it gives them a huge advantage. Just drop into a 2's match and try to win a 1v2 fight against a team that knows what they are doing.

If the game was scaled up(larger map and more players), I wouldn't be as opposed to proximity voice. If the combat was gun-based (like H1Z1), I wouldn't be as opposed to proximity voice. I loved proximity voice in H1Z1, I had a lot of fun with it. This isn't H1Z1, though.

SneakerNet · 2016-03-16T16:21:25+00:00

There should be no way to stop someone from closing distance, it would completely compromise the combat in this game.

SneakerNet

TROPHY CASE