I was first introduced to the idea of blogging in Year 9. My ICT class had a teaching assistant who, unlike our main teacher, actually seemed to have a genuine interest and passion for the subject. It is not often you find teachers you click with, but when you do, it is a gift. They inspire you to do better, not to impress them but to impress yourself. My dad, being the hard-ass he was, would usually end parents’ evenings by asking the teachers, “What can we do to push Ed further?” This teaching assistant did not suggest lesson plans, guided learning, or a complex series of essays I had to write for no apparent reason - He suggested I start a blog.

I remember signing up for Blogger that night with my Dad, and setting up a site called “Eddie’s BBQ”. I don’t remember a lot about it other than it having the phrase “self-confessed nerd” in the tagline. I don’t think I ever even posted to it; in many ways, I think I did not understand the point. Anyone who has ever started a blog at one point is faced with the crisis of “I want to write but don’t know what to write about”. Being a teenager, I did what most did when things got hard, and gave up. Then during lockdown my personal tech-renaissance began, and I registered the domain eddiequinn.xyz after watching a video on “techno fuedalism but Luke Smith. The question still remained however: what do you write about when you don’t know what to write?

When I first started this blog, I in many ways was trying to figure out what I wanted this blog to be. Some of my original posts were emulating what I saw others doing online, tutorials. The thing about tutorials is they are only useful if people actually read them. A little-known fact about this blog is I have never enabled any form of analytics on it - I have no idea if anyone is reading it other than me, and those tutorials, as far as I knew, never helped anyone other than me. This realisation that the only person I could be sure was reading any of this changed my approach - I decided this blog was not written for anyone other than me. I let go of my ego and began to write about things that interested me.

All of this has been an elaborate lead-up to discuss the post “Dunning Kruger”. This was one of my earlier posts, where despite deciding who my audience was (it being myself), I still was feeling out the space. I had not committed myself to hyper-opinionated rant-style essays, which seems to be the form factor I have now adopted. This was instead a modest discussion on what intelligence is, and onto itself ironically, is an example of the Dunning-Kruger effect. I say this because I totally missed the point of what DK is trying to say. I think it has some good points, but I should have read more about the subject and let it stew for longer before writing about it.

For posterity, DK is a phenomenon that, as you first step into a subject, it is easy to convince yourself you know more than you do. You mistake yourself for an expert, despite knowing almost nothing. This is a lot of the reason I do not trust people who deal in absolutes about anything. Making a roundabout statement like “AI is safe, and you have nothing to worry about” (or vice versa) tells me two possible things:

• The speaker is not informed enough on the subject, because no one of note in the space can agree on this subject with any certainty.
• The speaker is lying to stir up panic or calm down potential panic.

I am a big believer in not assigning malice to something that can be equally explained by incompetence, so most of the time I choose to believe the first… unless it is a representative from OpenAI and Anthropic, whose warnings I take more as a form of guerrilla marketing as opposed to anything to pay attention to.

Oh, you have the most dangerous AI in existence?
Oh, this could cripple our very society if the public had access?
Oh, you can't risk giving it to us?

Convienient

Dunning-Kruger is a catch-22, however - Does me feeling stupid about a subject mean I am actually highly competent and I just don’t know it, or is it an accurate representation of what I am capable of? Such is the plight that has held me in Helpdesk as long as I have sat there, and such is the plight that caused me to drive a forklift for several years before getting my first IT job.

I am a big believer in Radical Self Reliance and Radical Ownership… Well, this post is going to suggest a new ethos… Radical Self Delusion.

Cornfields and The Colossus

I have written an awful lot on this blog about my own personal tech renaissance - how lockdown was the key to me taking ownership of my own future, and deciding to ditch my Economics degree in favour of Technology. I, however, have not written a lot about what the step into technology looked like, and this is somewhat vital to the story I want to tell in this post.

After finishing university, my first job was not IT. As with most people during the early 2020’s lockdown, I had immense trouble finding work. I would be lying if I said this was not a debilitating time for me. For years I had some form of structure and something I should be doing; such is the nature of the education system. I left it for a world that was curfewed and work was thin. I spent close to a year unsure of how to even find a job, getting more and more depressed by the day. I eventually went into an agency and effectively said: “I will shovel shit if you pay me”. This led to me working in a tropical fruit packing warehouse for five months, and then onto working for a smart warehouse company down the road once I got fed up of hammering Tarantulas three times a week. I worked my probation with the agency that hired me to the smart warehouse, and requested to be taken on full-time rather than via an agency. As I finished my second probation as a direct hire, I caught wind that a job in the IT department would be opening up.

Now my job in this smart warehouse was actually pretty kushi - I drove what is called a PPT, think of it like a differently-abled battery-powered forklift. I would arrive at 19:00, drive this thing for 12 hours moving crap from point A to point B. No one else wanted to work this job because it required you to stand still for 12 hours, and we worked in a fridge, meaning you got cold - I like the cold, however and I had a friend in the equipment room who gave me a freezer jacket, so I would usually be given these jobs because I was seemingly the only one who wanted to do it. The thing is, this honestly was a godsend because it meant that I could spend the entire shift listening to audiobooks and podcasts. I wish I had my “pocket casts year in review” for that year, because it showed I had listened to three months of podcasts that year.

So when I heard this job in IT opened up, I cornered one of the shift leads of the IT team to ask if I should apply. He asked if I had any experience in IT, and I said, “I use Linux, and I built my own PC”, to which he responded, You probably know more than half the people up there then”. I applied that night, combed over the job description for any keyword I could find, and loaded my playlist for my shifts with whatever I could find on Active Directory, the OSI model, TCP/IP, Windows Management, etc.

My first interview was memorable… I got asked, “What is DHCP?” to which I asked, “How much detail do you want me to go into?” I had just spent two weeks memorising the entire OSI model and specs for various protocols, including DHCP, after all. The interviewer said as much detail as possible… So I walked through the entire process of a device joining a network, the ARP request, the DORA flow, subnet ranges, VLAN tags, etc. The first interviewer said, “Sorry, that is incorrect”, while the other said, “No… it is correct; he just went into explicit detail, which, to be fair, you told him to”. I then watched these two argue for forty-five minutes, and got told to do a CompTIA A+ mock exam and email one of them the result. I did the exam… and then used inspect element to increase the score to 100%… and sent it. My second interview was with the actual manager of the team, where somehow I ended up on a 30-minute rant about the OSI model and why it was an inherently better model compared to the TCP/IP model. I got hired the next week on 30K.

“What does this have to do with anything, Ed”

This is a valid question.

I describe helpdesk as the cornfields of IT, as in the work feels pointless and meaningless and often soul-crushing. There are only so many times you can tell someone to make sure their Cloudflare WARP is authenticated before you really question if the role actually achieves anything other than being glorified babysitters for the technically inept.

Helpdesk workers… they look at The Colossus. This is the career they want, be it networking engineer or sysadmin. They will continue to work in the fields until “they are ready”… and this is the trap. I was ready to apply for helpdesk long before I ever stood on a PPT, and I was ready to move to being a sysadmin long before I started applying for jobs doing that.

The trap of the cornfields is waiting for permission. I spent years looking at senior engineers, architects, and managers (the Colossus towering over the horizon) and assumed they possessed some sacred, divine knowledge that I lacked. I kept making excuses - Wating to earn a certain cert, a title, or that magical, elusive feeling of “readiness” before we dare to step up.

Spoiler alert: That feeling never comes.

Every senior engineer I’ve met is just someone who got comfortable being uncomfortable, Googling errors at 2:00 AM, and pretending they know what they’re doing until it actually works. The gap between where you are and where you want to be isn’t talent or time; it’s the audacity to delusionally assume you can handle the job before anyone hands you the keys.

That brings us away from self-reliance and into something far more dangerous.

Apply anyway

I have seen an uncomfortable amount of “motivation-slop” online, but one of them which I have seen a fair amount of recently is “be delusional”. It is this idea that you need to ignore logic and just assume your plans will work out, and go full charge as if they will. It shares so much DNA with the concept of “burn the boats”; it may as well be the same phrase. It is to say to facts and logic, “ok well, I am going to do it anyway, and I have no exit plan”.

This advice is not what I am advocating for; it is close but not exact. Dunning-Kruger puts us into a mindset of assuming that we are not as intelligent as we think we are. I am going to suggest taking that as the truth, and assuming you are that intelligent anyway.

“Excuse me?”

Yes, this seems like an example of an oxymoron- to, on one hand, accept that the likelihood is you are not ready, and then to make decisions as if you are ready anyway. Within a vacuum, this sounds ridiculous, but the issue is this action is not being made in a vacuum.

I will give you a clear example: You are a second-line help desk specialist and want a job in cybersecurity. Logic says you are not ready:

• You do not have enough certifications.
• You are not even remotely close to the pay bracket.
• You only know a little bit about CyberSecurity.

Logic is right… But I am saying apply anyway. Really, what is the worst that would happen?

“I could get a job I am not qualified for and be found out as a fraud!”

The modern-day job market is absolutely horrendous; even qualified candidates have to perform this ritualistic dance just for a chance, where most of the time they get told no anyway. The truth of the matter is this: the market is so oversaturated that if you are not qualified, then you will not get the job.

The worst thing that will happen is they say no.

“So your advice is just apply anyway?”

Yeah, pretty much.

Here is the thing: I am not saying this as some bullshit inspo-bro advice. Anyone who knows me AFK knows that helpdesk does not scratch that itch for me anymore. I am reluctant to say I hate helpdesk, because hate is a strong word. A more accurate description is that the modern-day workplace is a two-way street - I get experience and skills to take to my next gig (plus money); they get my current skills to solve their problems. The give take nature of the help desk was looking a lot more like “give” than “take” is the best way to describe it.

Wanting to leave but not being desperate to leave puts you into a weird position where you have two reasonable choices.

1. Complain but never actually address the problem.
2. Get a new job

Option two is going to require you to expend a lot of effort for what is, in the grand scheme of things, not that much of a reward, if it is a lateral move. So most people think, “What is the point of me applying for another helpdesk role? I may as well stay here and put up with it” - they in essence opt for option 1.

I used to throw Discus (yes, this is related) - At competitions you have three qualifying throws, and further three if you throw over a certain distance. One day someone walked up to the pit, and off the bat threw far enough to qualify. His next throw was a personal best. For his third throw, his coach said: “You have qualified and got a PB now, so this last throw has no pressure on it - just let loose”. He then threw another PB, adding five meters to the previous.

Wanting to leave your job but not being desperate is exactly the same as that third throw. You don’t need to leave; there is nothing riding on it… So why not go for it. Apply for those long shot jobs.

My life is about to change quite drastically

“This is a lot easier said than done! You still work in helpdesk!”

Actually, no I don’t. I may write a blog post on the exact set of circumstances that was my reason for me to begin to apply for jobs. I have an idea for a talk I would like to do at EMF festival called “how to fuck your IT department” that I would like to do one day about this exact subject. The actual catalyst, however, was one day I was working on my homelab setting up Layer 3 routing on my network switch to fix a hairpin issue, and was pulled out of this by someone coming into the office complaining, “I can’t print this Google Calendar”. Ctrl + P - The solution was Ctrl + P.

This spiked my cortisol to such a degree that I signed myself up to live out of hotels for three weeks supporting other sites. While at these other sites, I had enough time away to basically decide there and then, “I am just going to apply for sysadmin jobs”. I used this time to revamp my website, my blog, and create an actual portfolio. I created a skill in Hermes-Agent to automatically search for jobs for me. I did research into job markets and how they go through cycles, so I knew what month would be best to apply for jobs.

All this led to me applying for close to one hundred and fifty jobs, of which I had thirty recruiter screening interviews, which led to twenty-five first interviews, five technical interviews, and one job offer. I start next month.

My life is about to change quite drastically.

When I first started in my helpdesk role, I was shaking with anxiety from imposter syndrome - I do not like this feeling… And I have it now. I have to keep on reminding myself I would not have gotten this role if I was not ready for it, just as I did back then. It is harder this time, because back then I was starting an entry-level IT role. Here I am jumping several rungs up the ladder from second-line helpdesk to infrastructure automation engineer. This does, however, not change how I feel validated that my skillset is good enough for at the very least a company being willing to take a chance on me.

Eddie’s BBQ

When thirteen-year-old me sat down to try and write that blog, I don’t think he would have ever imagined he would still be thinking about that fifteen years later. When I went back to uni for the second time, I don’t think I would have anticpated the hard right my life would take, leading me to this point. When I began applying for jobs at the start of the month, I did not think I would be writing this post.

If I’ve learned anything from my life so far, it’s that career progression isn’t a neat, linear staircase. It’s more like stumbling around in the dark until your hand accidentally finds a doorknob, turning it, and hoping the room on the other side has better lighting. The 13-year-old kid who typed “Eddie’s BBQ” into Blogger’s title bar didn’t know what a subnet was, let alone how to write a bash script to automate server provisioning. He certainly wouldn’t have believed he’d spend his nights listening to audiobooks in a freezing warehouse or arguing about the OSI model until two grown interviewers nearly threw hands.

That blog, and this blog, was never really about teaching anyone. It was just a chronicle of me growing as a person and technician - learning the best way I do, the hard way. So, if you’re sitting in your own version of the cornfields right now, staring up at whatever Colossus is looming over your horizon, do me a favour. Stop waiting for permission. Lean into the radical self-delusion.

Apply for the job. Send the resume. Go ahead and fake it ’til you make it - just maybe skip the Inspect Element trick on the mock exam, or at least don’t write a public blog post about it until you’ve signed the contract. As for me? I’ve got a couple of weeks left of telling people to clear their browser cache, a notice period to serve, and a whole lot of documentation to read before I start breaking production environments in a brand-new tax bracket.

Wish me luck.

Oh, and if any member of my old team is reading this, my locker is 6767.