Typical Day
It's 9:00AM. Tab Keyes has just sat down at his desk at the High Performance Computer Center (HP2C) at Big State University when he gets a frantic call from Professor Justhit Send, the head of the communications department.
"I have a problem," Professor Send tells Tab. "I sent an email to the wrong person."
"Okay," Tab says. Clearly, it's going to be one of those days.
"Is there any way to un-send the email, or delete it, or...or something?"
"I'm very sorry, Professor Send," Tab replies. "But there's nothing we can—"
There's a click. The line is dead. Professor Send has apparently hung up the phone in displeasure.
It never ceases to amaze Tab that so many people—even people with doctoral degrees—think that he and his co-workers at HP2C have unlimited power over things like computers and printers and the Internet. Tab is a student worker with the IT management team, which is a nebulous title that doesn't say anything about what he actually does.
One of his duties is to handle IT issues that pop up for the faculty and staff members at Big State University. On this particular morning, after responding to Dr. Send's phone call, Tab is assigned a ticket; he needs to go over to the foreign languages department and help a professor with a computer problem. Tab hops into one of the golf carts HP2C uses to get around the 30,000-person campus, and drives a mile over to the Spanish department.
He soon finds himself in the office of assistant professor Dr. Habla Mucho. "I can't get the Internet to work," Professor Mucho complains, "and I need it to work now because I'm doing some research for my seminar class on Monday and I have to be out of the office by noon because I'm going to Miami for the weekend on vacation and—"
"No problem, Professor Mucho," Tab says politely, as he takes a seat at the computer.
"Wait!" Professor Mucho squawks. She leans over him and starts clicking all sorts of windows on her computer closed. Tab rolls/averts his eyes.
Once she's finished, Tab gets to work. It doesn't take him more than a minute before he peers behind Professor Mucho's desk (there are wires everywhere) and discovers the problem.
"Did you realize that your Internet cable was unplugged?" Tab asks.
Professor Mucho huffs. Apparently not.
Tab plugs the cable back in, checks to make sure the Internet is now working properly, and asks if there's anything else he can assist Professor Mucho with. She's already back at her computer, tapping away at the keyboard. She offers an absentminded "No, thanks" and waves him away.
By noon, Tab has responded to a couple of other calls on campus. He unfreezes a frozen computer. He replaces a broken mouse with one that actually works. He helps a new staff member set up her email and voicemail.
He takes a break for lunch and eats outside at a picnic table with a couple of his fellow student workers. To a man (and, er, woman), they're all in the engineering department. Tab himself is halfway through double majors in computer science and mathematics.
He plans to get out of Big State University as soon as he graduates and find a job as an IT manager at a software company somewhere. He's okay as a coder, but he's really interested in pursuing a job in DevOps, or developmental operations, where he'd be responsible for maintaining code once it's been written and tested by a software engineering team.
In the afternoon, Tab gets to work on a task that's completely different from simple tech support. One of the projects that HP2C works on involves the development of a Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard for supercomputers, of which Big State University has several.
As an IT management student staffer, Tab does some coding on the MPI project, but he's also responsible for compiling all of the documentation on the software. HP2C's MPI standard has already been adopted by several major vendors, and is being used by organizations that Tab is very excited about but can't discuss because, well, that's classified.
Tab writes away until 4:00PM. The phones are quiet; the student worker manning the help desk spends his time playing Minesweeper on the computer. Tab loves Friday afternoons, because he can get a lot of work done without having to worry about putting out (figurative and literal) tech fires around campus.
By 4:30PM, Tab is back at the apartment he shares with his roommate and best friend, a biomedical engineering major. They go out and get barbecue for dinner.
Tab may not make much money right now, but he knows experienced DevOps engineers in the Bay Area make six-figure salaries. That's going to be him someday: He'll have an interesting job in tech and he'll earn good money. And, hey, maybe folks in Silicon Valley will have more appreciation for his skills than the people at Big State University do.