Well that's part of the problem Shicky, there are no real technical challenges in corporate IT any more for me. I spend most of my day raising change requests and tickets for other groups to make changes, some which can take weeks to go through various processes and review gates to achieve.
I remember a time where you could raise a ticket to cover someone's work, walk across the office and ask them to do it. Racking a server used to take me a couple of hours to get an IP, VLAN configured, racked up, base OS built and deployed. Now it takes weeks, if not longer.
Spend more time chasing the red tape around the place than actually doing proper work.
I understand the need for process, I understand why a company would want to have such mechanisms in place but rarely are they implemented in an efficient manner and as mentioned above just serve to obfuscate a job which should take a fraction of the time to complete.
The frustrations aside, my other main driver for wanting to work for a small company is to get back to a sense of pride and ownership in a job. To know that what you're doing will actually have an impact, to know that it'll be recognised. To also know that if you **** it up then you're in the firing line. A job where you really don't mind staying late to do something, or get in early to make a dent on. Something I think that is sorely missing for corporations, that eagerness and desire to go the extra mile hasn't been around in my experience for some time because it just doesn't get the recognition it deserves.
hear hear! Exactly what I've seen and feel though I failed to experience the old days when red tape wasn't quite such a road block. Part of me is wondering whether it is JUST this causing me to want to jump ship from IT completely or whether there is other things to blame. I guess as I feel I can't / don't want to make it as a developer, it screws the natural progression up for me.
I'd love to find some sort of split around nutrition / fitness / IT / business or some sort of mix anyway to test the water. At the moment teaching seems like the closest I would get.