Foundation Year
Hired at Angola LNG, three years after I helped build its first servers
I Was Already There
Long before Angola LNG was my employer, it was my client. At Menshen there was a big project coming: the Angola LNG separation project. At the start, the company ran everything on Chevron's systems, and the job was to build a new infrastructure of its own. I supported building the first domain controllers of that new infrastructure, and I worked on the workstation migration too, which was the unglamorous half of it: back up the user's data, install the operating system, add the domain, install the applications, restore the data.
That was never my only assignment. The Menshen years were a rotation. I covered for a colleague at the national airline while he was on vacation, holding down the system administrator role for the length of his leave. At Ridge Solutions I was system administrator and team coordinator, a team of exactly two. At Cobalt I coordinated the desktop support team under the contract we had there, and I was made coordinator on seniority rather than through any selection process. And in between all of it, back and forth to Angola LNG for different assignments.
The Offer That Could Not Be Made
They liked my work and my results. That part I knew. What I could not do anything about were the contract conflicts of the time, which meant they could not make me an offer, however much the work said otherwise. So I kept arriving as a consultant, doing the work of someone on the inside from the outside of the badge.
Applying Like Everyone Else
Then in 2013 Angola LNG was hiring a new group of system administrators, and when they knew I was available again I went through the application process alongside the other candidates. Not a shortcut, not a transfer. The same process as everyone else, and after a while, a contract.
Most of my colleagues from that intake went to Soyo. I stayed in Luanda.
What I Brought With Me
The technical part I already knew, because I had built a good deal of it. What I brought that mattered more was a habit: automate things. I always felt I am lazy to do repeatedly the same thing, so I need to find a way to make it faster and efficient. That is not a philosophy I chose so much as a temperament I noticed in myself and then leaned on.
I also brought a version of myself I would describe now less kindly. In the years before this one I was very obtuse. I thought the way my head worked was the same as everyone else's, that my logic was the logic everyone should have, that my knowledge was the knowledge everyone had. And I thought my colleagues did not need to like me. I just needed to be useful and efficient for them. Obtuse is my own word for it, and it is the word I would still use.