Solid point about networking. No one really seems to dispute its presence there and rightly so it seems (again, I'm a programmer not an admin so my personal experience is limited).

> Many times you also need to think about what may not be the very best solution from a purely technical perspective but also what is the best from both a people and technical perspective.

This is huge when it comes to running the company's software imho. It's useless having the perfect solution if you can't get anyone to run it when "good enough" will have a plethora of folks ready and willing. Especially when it comes to managing the bus factor. When I asked the admin at my org about that, he explicitly said he didn't care about it (that's more an indictment of him than FreeBSD though).

Overall the human factor is something I've been trying to embrace more lately when it comes to work. For personal stuff though I'll be as esoteric as I like.

> the damn VM's are the only thing I run that does not properly report memory and CPU usage to VMware

Well that's just plain frustrating.