Congratulations. You are already Elite Dangerous.
Elite Dangerous is a space simulation game set in a 1:1 scale Milky Way galaxy. You fly ships, haul cargo, fight pirates, explore uncharted systems, and build a reputation across 400 billion star systems. It is also, improbably, one of the most accurate simulations of what it feels like to work in IT.
Here is why.
You Already Know How to Read a Dashboard
Elite Dangerous puts you in a cockpit covered in status readouts. Hull integrity. Shield strength. Power distributor levels. Heat. Fuel. The ship is basically a Grafana dashboard that can also be shot at.
If you’ve ever stared at a monitoring screen and thought “something’s about to go wrong” before the alert fires, you will feel immediately at home. IT professionals are trained to read signal from noise at a glance. In Elite Dangerous, that is a survival skill.
Change Management is Literally the Same
In Elite Dangerous, upgrading your ship is called engineering. You gather materials, visit specialist engineers, and carefully modify your modules to improve performance. Do it wrong and your ship becomes less capable. Do it well and you become genuinely dangerous.
Sound familiar? It is just a change request. The galaxy is your CAB.
You Will Recognise the On-Call Culture Immediately
Elite Dangerous is notorious for something called “fuel rats” — a volunteer rescue organisation of players who drop everything to fly across the galaxy and save commanders who have run out of fuel in deep space. No pay. No reward. Just the quiet satisfaction of solving someone else’s crisis at an inconvenient hour.
If you have ever been on call, you are already a fuel rat. You just didn’t know the community existed.
Risk vs Reward is the Core Loop
Every IT decision is a risk calculation. Deploy now or wait for the patch? Upgrade the database in-hours or out-of-hours? Accept the vendor’s terms or hold the line?
Elite Dangerous asks the same questions constantly. Do you carry the high-value cargo through the dangerous system to earn more credits? Do you jump without fully scanning the star? Do you take the combat mission against a target that’s one rank above you?
IT professionals are better at this calculation than most. Years of incident reviews have a way of sharpening your instincts for when something is about to go catastrophically wrong.
The Loneliness is Realistic Too
Elite Dangerous is a game that can be played entirely alone. You can spend hours exploring the void between stars, mapping systems no human has ever seen, contributing to a shared database that makes the whole galaxy more known.
That is also a fairly accurate description of documentation work.
Where to Start if You’re New to the Game
The good news: Elite Dangerous rewards methodical thinking, patience, and the kind of quiet competence that IT professionals develop over years of keeping things running. You do not need fast reflexes. You need to read the situation.
Here’s a quick orientation:
Start with a Sidewinder (your first free ship — think of it as your first day on a help desk)
Do trading missions first — low risk, steady income, you learn the galaxy’s logistics
When you’re ready for more challenge, try combat or exploration — both reward the same analytical mindset you use at work
Read the ship guides on this site — they will save you hours of learning the hard way
One More Thing
If any of this resonates — the 3am calls, the quiet exhaustion, the feeling that you’re always the one who knows and that comes with its own kind of weight — there’s a book that was written specifically for people like you. It’s called Burned Out by Design? by Rich Owen. Part IT memoir, part survival guide, part the funniest book about professional suffering you’ll ever read.
You can find it here: Burned Out by Design? — The Book by Rich Owen — Paperback £9.99 | Kindle £5.99 on Amazon.
Now undock. The galaxy is waiting, Commander.