There's two things I've come to believe in my IT career regarding operations: 1. No organization anywhere is a paragon of excellence, and everyone can benefit

There's two things I've come to believe in my IT career regarding operations: 1. No organization anywhere is a paragon of excellence, and everyone can benefit from improvement. 2. Every organization is made up of humans just like you. With all that entails. Some things which seem blatantly obvious after the fact are easily overlooked when the pressure to deliver is high and other issues are taking precedence. I completely agree with your statement. In fact, when I do interviews, one of my favorite and most insightful questions to ask is, basically, "tell me about a time you screwed the pooch." If they don't have a story and they worked in ops, then it can suggest they didn't really do much. The really sharp ones I've interviewed have a good story or two (and can tell it in excruciating detail. =) * At a prior company I once tried appending to the list of NFS exports, but dropped the "no-root-squash" option, and instantly denied write permissions to our entire VMware farm. You can imagine what then happened to all of the VMs for this mission critical customer. =P