Having worked in I.T. for over a decade, in my experience ego is very much part of the technology landscape. I've had the privilege of working with and learning from some really smart people.Unchecked egos and badly managed expectations create a hostile workplaces people who could knew the ins and outs of obscure Unix systems and could work out IP ranges with a subnet mask or slash notation (I still suck at this).

If you work in an office, especially in I.T., a big part of your day is problem solving and trying to do some "deep work".

You don't need a study or a statistic to know that there are an ungodly amount of interruptions that take place in your average work day. But here's an excerpt from a study anyway:

Nothing achieves getting less productivity out of your workplace like being constantly interrupted by emails, instant messaging, phone calls or the (not all the time) dreaded "shoulder tap".

But it's a 2 minute question, you can just get back to it straight away right?

Understandably Morpheus had a bleak outlook on Systems, but it doesn't have to be our enemy.

There have been many titles for this role. From IT Engineer, Systems Engineer, Systems Integration Engineer to more recently the lauded ‘DevOps Engineer’. And current reading (for myself anyway) has introduced me to the the title ‘Site Reliability Engineer’ or SRE.

Whatever the titles are or have been this post will discuss what being a Systems Engineer has been in my experience and from the point of view of my career in Information Technology.