Almost all the skills I have now were gained through trial

Almost all the skills I have now were gained through trial and error—messing up a thousand times and failing. Experience taught me what works and what does not work, and now I can look at a system and, by intuition, tell whether it will work or not.

One thing I understand very clearly at this level is that machines, equipment, code, and gadgets are easy to manage. These are not always the problems in systems. Most of the time, the human side of things is the problem—the unpredictability of people within the system. That is what causes most of the frustration: the human factor.

If a problem only consists of machines, code, and equipment, it takes less time. But once it involves human beings, it can take months longer to resolve.