Your Boss is insane. There is no hope.
as the great Python boys said, "Run away Run away"
I would LOVE to go back to school, get a doctorate in physics and work in the field doing ANYTHING related to physics.
Instead I'm a Engineer hiding in a marketing dept happily making between 150-200k/year and I spend my lunch and weekends madly reading about physics, politics, ancient history, all the things that I really love, and would love to get paid to do.
Instead I write white papers, talk at conferences, run tests on hardware that I love, and I do for the most part love my job. But I would SOOO much rather being working for the DOD, or a school, or anyone, doing research. But I can't live on what they make.
And so I remain an engineer hiding in marketing eagerly awaiting Brian Greene's next talk
.5 in Technical Marketing. And if I can survive the politics I think I've found my spot. It's fun always planing with the bleeding edge stuff. I LOVED being an SE (Sales/System Engineer) but life points you in funny directions.
What I've found is there are a TON of "second tier" careers that are kind of like dual-classing in D&D, where you have to be a 8th level unix sysadmin || 10th level Windows admin || xth level Engineer of Foo, and then a 2nd level SE, and then you can apply for 1st level technical marketing engineer or something like that
As I said, there are lots of cool options after IT. And all of them are better than getting paged at 2am
How can you have a monopoly on something that is dead on gone?
What made IT fun was all the things that were fast and loose.
Back when....
As long as you answered your pager it didn't matter where you worked from.
SOX was something you wanted on Anima chicks
It was UNIX vs Windows (now it's Linux vs Linux, Apple vs Windows, Unix vs Unix, and Vmware laughing at everyone)
The entire Netapp OS fit on a floppy
No one regulated free gifts (man I HATE paying for iPods now)
Oh the parties, the trips.....EMC trips to boston that no one can remember.....
Budget? What's a budget?
Charge-back, Payback? As in that user is going to get "payback" for being such a noobie?
No logging, public ips to everyone desk, banks of modems, bbs, telnet accounts at best.net
Who had ever heard of an SLA?
WTF is "change control" (anyone who thinks they can control change needs to cut back on the medical marijuana)
Point is that every new industry is fun at it's early stage because you get away with just about anything. The ends justify almost any means.
Today it's all about Risk management, accountability, regulation, change control etc. Now IT SUCKS!
But it happens to every cool job eventually. All jobs eventually get regulated, documented, easily replicated, easily taught. And then they are no fun anymore.
And why I am no longer in IT =)
"Engineering without management is art." -- Jeff Johnson