

Ask HN: Sys Admin Career Advice – How to Advance? - mlucero

Hey folks,<p>I realize it&#x27;s mostly coders here but I&#x27;m a mid-career systems administrator and I&#x27;m hoping to get some feedback on how I can push my career a little further. I have reached a point now where I&#x27;ve worked on many different pieces of infrastructure and I am really confident in the work I do. I feel like I could be useful on just about any team but still feel like I&#x27;m far from the level of teams working for twitter, google, facebook, etc. I would very much like to reach that level of knowledge and experience.<p>I currently maintain a medium size hadoop environment and don&#x27;t want to change where I work for at least a few years. I&#x27;m intermediate-advanced in all the basics like configuration management, scripting etc. I will continue to develop myself in those areas but hope for other types of suggestions.<p>Should I take classes and gain experience in traditional software development? Is it time to consider specializing in a very specific area of interest? Ask someone to be my mentor? What do you all think?<p>Just looking for some ideas on where to best invest my time...<p>Thanks!
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benzesandbetter
Of course, you should always be learning new technologies and tools. But that
part's obvious, so I'm not going to give it attention here.

I have two pieces of advice for you. The first is: Develop your sales and
storytelling ability. The second is: Follow the money.

One of the challenges of selling yourself as a SysAdmin, is that when you do
your job properly, things just work. This makes you almost invisible...
Generally, people only "notice" SysAdmins, when something is broken: builds
fail, a website slows down, a web service times out, mail starts bouncing,
etc. To improve your trajectory, you need to relentlessly train your ability
to show the key people in your organization your successes. (As a side
benefit, having this information organized is also highly useful to you if you
decide to shop for a new gig.) Think constantly about how to tell the stories
of your work, aided by stats and ideally, quotes from colleagues. I recommend
reading the Phoenix Project for a bit of insight about this. There's a
character in that story (Brent) who is the go-to devOps pro, but most people
in the organization don't realize how critical he is. This is a classical
failure in self-marketing. The company would literally fall apart if he wasn't
there, and yet he's working longer hours than anyone else and probably getting
paid about the same as his much less competent colleagues.

You also need to follow the money. In every business, there are certain things
that terrify senior management. Perhaps it's failing a SOX or audit or losing
PCI compliance. Maybe it's a breach of customer or patient data. Perhaps it's
having a key piece of infrastructure go offline. Move yourself as close as you
can to those business-critical elements. One of my projects is maintaining a
scheduling application for some very expensive medical imaging equipment for a
federal agency. These machines price out in the millions of dollars, and are
shared by more than 30 research groups. Having even one of them go offline
represents a huge cost to the organization. When I interviewed with them,
there was basically zero push-back about price or hourly rate. All they cared
about was how reliably I could keep these machines online. If I pitch them on
some ideas which will improve reliability or disaster response, they are, of
course, very receptive. That is the kind of infrastructure you want to be
close to. Figure out what keeps your CxO's up at night, and find ways to make
those problems go away.

Depending on your organization, these two things will improve your trajectory
to a point. You may start to reach a ceiling in terms of income, as they may
have a mental block with paying a sysadmin above, say, $150k/yr. If you want
to reach higher, you may need to make the jump to working for your self. At
that point, you probably want to find a better term for what you do than
"SysAdmin". Labels such as "Scalability Specialst", "BI Consultant", or
"Critical Infrastructure First Responder" might help you with positioning in
such a way to command more respect and income for your efforts.

~~~
mlucero
Thanks. This is definitely on the business side and an area where I think I
can still improve. I don't quite agree with the labels idea but I understand
why you're suggesting it. I'll keep this in mind.

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atsaloli
Check out "Path to Senior Sysadmin" talk by Adam Moskowitz

[https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa10/path-senior-
sysadmi...](https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa10/path-senior-sysadmin)

And the LOPSA mentorship program:
[https://lopsa.org/mentor](https://lopsa.org/mentor)

~~~
mlucero
Awesome links! Thank you!

~~~
atsaloli
You are welcome. :)

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saadazzz
I'm on the exact same boat. I'm trying to learn things like LXC, Docker,
etc...

I like to watch these screencasts:
[https://sysadmincasts.com/](https://sysadmincasts.com/)

I also follow
[http://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin](http://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin)

Try interacting with the community there since it's more focused on this.

Good luck!

~~~
mlucero
Thank you!

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percept
I'd imagine that "devops" would be beneficial.

(To whatever extent it's similar to what you do now, both "devops as a
discipline/practice," and "devops as a boardroom buzzword spoken by people
holding the purse strings," are important.)

------
op00to
Learn your company's business.

