I think it’s just the same story in all NOCs. Sounds like there’s some unicorns but I’d bet those are few and far between.

I ran into an old coworker who was now manager of the NOC a couple years back and he offered me my old Tier 3 gig back ( I would’ve failed, been out for 5 years and all certs had lapsed) with a raise and I turned him down so fast it wasn’t funny.

I was the de facto on duty Incident Manager, they wouldn’t allow me to move into that role full time (with a 6 figure raise btw) so yeah. You have to really like abuse or the NOC to deal with it.

I occasionally think to myself maybe I’d like to go back to IT then I realize no matter how bad my life gets, it’s bette than working in IT.

We didn’t “produce revenue” in the NOC, but routinely solved multi million dollar outages before they happened, or after the lack of an IT department at the customer end caused an outage.

It was hard to get a raise, you only got yourself promoted out of it.

But you were the first person they called. I had three screens and 2 laptops and the all of a sudden I’d have 20+ IMs asking about this or that outage while I’m working to solve it.

Everyone wanted personal updates along with the actual updates and expected it right fucking now.

Meanwhile I’ve got Suzy on the line who I’ve asked repeatedly to check if her desktop is even plugged in while I trouble shoot a fiber break and a bad router or NAS who’s disk broke and is now filling up cloud storage.

I will never go back.

He knew the chips were stolen but that face says, “really?”

I mean come on. That clerk would’ve had to tell the cops about it. They were already stolen at that point. Who cares?