So many posts in this thread are spot on. I've heard descriptions of some tech positions being equivalent to 'internet plumbers,' well, having spent a two week

So many posts in this thread are spot on. I've heard descriptions of some tech positions being equivalent to 'internet plumbers,' well, having spent a two week rotation shadowing plumbers in my youth, I have come to think of what I do as more akin to being an 'internet garbage man.' I deal with the shit the no one else wants to deal with, or maybe more like an e-waste manager. There is gold in the shit, but no one wants to actually do the dirty work of building the system to move all the nasty sharp PCBs to somewhere that the precious metals can be extracted in a way that that delicate workers won't cut themselves to pieces. No surprise, it is hard to find people who want to do this job and are good at it. I see the demand in the academic world ('scholarly infrastructure' is a very niche place) where it is nearly impossible to hire someone who can do this work, so hearing that it is also impossible in industry means I guess it is time to start training the undergrads :/. I have an idea for a curriculum that could teach some of the principles for this kind of work (give them the gentoo handbook for a start, and see if they can follow it to get a database up and running from a box of parts), but I suspect that mostly it would act as a way to filter out people who simply don't like the activity, and you also have to have some amount of interpersonal skills in order to understand the use cases of your colleagues .... Anyone who cracks this problem will have solved a far more general one in the process.