I concluded that there are four paths for a tech guy/woman getting older. (1) management; (2) guru, futurist, visionary, author, entrepreneur, personality (e.g., Tim O'reilly, Bruce Schneier, Linus Torvalds, Steve Wozniak); (3) tech warrior/veteran type who stays current, keeps up with changing technologies, etc.; (4) casualty, put out to pasture, laid off, demoted, or at best disrespected and undervalued by management and young hotshots. My own experience was that I tried management and didn't have the magic and couldn't stand the boredom and pointlessness of the politics. I know I'm not enough of an extrovert to be #2. And I realized that #4 is the default path, the path I was on by doing nothing about my rusty skills. I work at a large dot edu, so I've seen old IT guys kept around in a series of less and less skilled jobs till they're doing things like ordering laptops and toner cartridges, getting keys made, replacing projector bulbs, and updating disaster recovery procedure documents. So I reluctantly chose #3. I've paid for some of my own retraining, traveled to a couple conventions (one was on my own dime), set up a blog, twitter account, and got active on stackexchange. I'm making sure that my boss, colleagues, and anyone else, sees all of this. I got a small but unexpected raise recently, and I'm sure this is why. But the most important and unexpected outcome is that I no longer feel as vulnerable to a layoff. It is a lot of work, and I've missed out on a lot of great TV and chillout time. But I'm less miserable at work and I know that I've got a good chance in the job market if the axe falls. Good luck to you.

It would seem that the Achilles heel here is that the last hop or last mile or whatever you want to call it, points right to who you are and where to find you. Something a little more anonymous like a public library computer would be preferable over your home or work PC. But time on such computers is usually pretty limited.

Awesome! Maybe this means the economy is picking up! In the dotcom days tons of guys like you got hired. The problem was that, when the economy fell apart, the places that hired the don't-know-shit guys didn't lay all of them off. So some of those dummies are now in management...and they have an instinct to hire people who know as little, or less, than they know. You gotta love the corporate world. Anyway, if you intend to continue not knowing shit, then you should get into technical sales. You already have some bullshitting skills, you won't have to work as hard, and you'll make a lot of money. Just don't look at yourself in the mirror and you'll be fine.

Ya. I'm with you on this question. Now that Solaris is free, runs very well on x86, and even has a decent graphical desktop, I don't know of a reason to run OpenSolaris instead. BTW, I really do get the importance and greatness of GPL/BSD/CDDL/MPL OSes. They have their place. But for year in, year out industrial strength Unix, I think you can't go wrong with Solaris. Also, IMHO there is less value in using an open source OS if you simply don't have the time or interest in being a part of the community associated with that open source OS.

Rats. My "arrows" made up of equal sign and greater than symbols didn't work. Please consider the headline of my original post to be "Re:Why my path too was Linux to FreeBSD to Solaris".

If, like me, what you didn't like about Linux was the often shallow and generic help documentation and the constant sense of being a beta tester, despite running "stable" releases, then IMHO you may not like FreeBSD. Disclaimer: I stopped using FreeBSD shortly after the 4.8 to 5.0 upgrade. Disclaimer2: I run the commercial release of Solaris 10, having only run OpenSolaris for a few weeks. But if you are primarily concerned with performance and uptime then FreeBSD might be for you. As for the ports system, while it seems to have more apps than most Linuxes, not all the apps in the ports system install as seamlessly as others. You'll also encounter some ports that are behind the current rev of that app. If you want to install many apps for learning and experimentation then, in my experience most app install systems (Linux's RPM, Debian's aptget, FreeBSD's ports) require you to retreat to installing from source about 25% of the time. And finally, I've found nothing else quite as solid and well designed as Solaris' Service Management Facility tools (svcadm, svccfg, svcs, etc). It really gives you a lot of visibility into, and control over, the various dependencies an app needs and the various states a daemon can be in. Good luck.

I went into management for four years and found it boring, stressful, confusing, and finally the byzantine politics of upper management did me in. I ended up asking to be put back on the Unix team and I am so much happier now - and so much more competent and useful. Remember that while you are obviously intending to be a tech-savvy manager, you may end up being a talented techie who sucks as a manager.

The author wrote: "Lesson: Your users are your biggest security hole. Don't trust your users, especially if they're government agents." No. The lesson here is that those of us in the infosec business need to learn that, like it or not, the line where "hacking" becomes illegal is now 100% determined by people that are not IT-savvy and who are very, very serious about what they are trying to protect. It sucks, but we have to get used to it because our people are already going to prison for misunderstandings just like this. I'd say that if you're living in the US or Europe or certain parts of Asia, and you're doing ANYTHING slightly questionable to someone else's computer that is also in one of those places, you'd better realize that you're opening yourself up to all that the criminal justice system has to offer, including prison, house-arrest, parole, etc.