
Ask HN: The fastest route to a job as a sysadmin? - paddyabroad
I realize that I&#x27;m asking a somewhat vague question but I&#x27;d be eager to hear any advice based on all the factors I mention below.<p>- I dropped out of my first year of a CS degree in 2003, left my home country, travelled for a couple of years, got married to an American and settled in Los Angeles, where I&#x27;ve been ever since.<p>- I work for a small online music retail business and have done for the last 12 years. I started doing data entry but I&#x27;ve worked my way up and I&#x27;m now basically the Operations Manager.<p>- I&#x27;m burned out, I&#x27;ve hit a roof for earning potential, and I really REALLY don&#x27;t enjoy the work. It&#x27;s soul crushing.<p>- The IT work that I do there, while minor (networking issues, setting up new users, etc), is about the only thing I enjoy anymore.<p>- I earn 60K a year. Low roof, huh? At least as far as Los Angeles COL goes.<p>- I have an 18-month old boy who takes up a lot of my time. Especially now that his daycare is closed due to Covid.<p>- Recently, after years of struggling to focus on any kind of new career direction in my downtime, my wife finally had enough and asked me to go talk to a therapist and&#x2F;or psychiatrist. This resulted in something I&#x27;d suspected for a long time– an ADHD diagnosis. This has made me hopeful but also extremely sad about all the time I&#x27;ve wasted.<p>- Along with therapy, some behavior shifts and the use of medication, I find myself being able to sustain focus on all manner of things that I never could before, so it&#x27;s time to knuckle down and start making moves.<p>I&#x27;m interested in becoming a systems administrator but I have some concerns about may age, my lack of degree, lack of experience, to name just a few. Am I kidding myself by attempting to go down this road? Is it too late for a career change? Are certifications worth pursuing (CompTIA, RHCSA, AWS, etc)? How future proof is it as a career?<p>Any guidance is much appreciated.  I&#x27;m feeling a little rudderless and like I have a lot working against me.
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giardini
Look for jobs in city, county and state government. There are all levels and
sorts of openings available and they are usually willing to train you! Be
ready to act b/c they may offer you a position immediately so be selective
about where you apply.

And don't overlook the benefits of staying awhile with such an organization
b/c the pension plans are often far better than those of private industry.

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paddyabroad
After a year or so lurking here, this is my first post. Albeit on a throwaway
account. Just FYI. I ran out of room above.

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jdenning
caveat lector: my sysadmin experience is all in Linux, I can't speak to life
as Windows admin, but I bet it's pretty similar.

> Am I kidding myself by attempting to go down this road? Is it too late for a
> career change?

The only answer I can give here is - it depends. The key skills of a sysadmin
are being able to figure out why a system is not behaving as expected, and
then fix it quickly (usually in a high pressure situation).

This is intentionally vague - the point is that as a sysadmin, you will
frequently be expected to be handed a black box problem with a vague
description like "the website stopped working" \- it's your job to figure out
why it's not working - is it the webserver, the database, the app, a
networking issue, a hardware issue, a service provider issue, ...? Over time,
you start to pick up a lot of domain-specific knowledge (e.g. "I bet that
zookeeper server had an OOM error again", "Systemd probably renamed the NIC
after the reboot", ...)

Of course, it's not possible to know everything about every possible
combination of software, so you also need to be good at rapidly determining
what you need to know next in order to continue diagnosing/solving the
problem.

You really only get good at this stuff with experience, and most entry-level
sysadmins have picked up their early experience via a lot of hobbyist
projects, and trying to fix their own broken machines.

You'll quickly find the need to get good at scripting (e.g. BASH), and you'll
most likely need to get back into programming.

> Are certifications worth pursuing (CompTIA, RHCSA, AWS, etc)?

You've got to be careful with certs. A lot of people will actually think less
of your resume if you have a bunch of certifications, usually because they
have been burned before hiring someone with a bunch of certifications who had
no idea what they were doing.

The best advice here is to search job listings for the certification you're
considering - if there are a bunch of jobs that sound interesting that require
or prefer that cert, then go for it. Of those you listed, I'd go for the AWS
cert.

> How future proof is it as a career?

This really depends on your ability to keep learning as technology progresses.
FWIW, (antecdotaly) it seems there is less age discrimination in the
SysAdmin/Ops space than in the Software Engineer space. YMMV.

Still interested? Cool, here's some more practical advice (kind of general,
because I don't know your skill-set):

1) Set up a home lab -- this doesn't need to be anything fancy, just a linux
box on which you can run a few virtual machines.

2) Start going through a bunch of tutorials using your new lab -- e.g. build a
simple website with something like Flask, and try to get it running like a
production site (behind a webserver, with an external database..search for
"run <web app framework> in production", and "<web app framework> high
availability"). Configure various services on different VMs and network them
together. Break things, see what the errors look like, then fix what you
broke.

3) Start automating -- you've been building a lot of VMs at this point, figure
out how to automate that. Write some custom scripts, play around with
configuration management frameworks.

4) Setup centralized logging, monitoring, and alerting for the stuff you built
in your VMs

5) Learn containers -- start with basic Docker; again look for some tutorials,
build, break, fix, repeat.

6) Learn about running containers in production -- kubernetes is current king.

7) Build a new lab on an IaaS (cloud) platform -- AWS is a safe bet.

8) Keep lots of notes. Build yourself a knowledge base of everything you have
learned, problems, solutions, scripts, etc.

9) Get good at programming, or at least learn good programming practices --
use version control (git), automated testing, continuous integration, etc.

10) Practice soft skills -- You need to be able to get people to describe the
problems they're having (gently coaxing them into giving you more details);
you need to be able to write effectively for documentation, status reports,
post-mortems, etc.

11) Try to find a mentor, either in person or online. I know this is easier
said than done. In any case, start chatting with people in domain-specific
chatrooms. When you hit a roadblock in one of your projects above, find a
community and start asking questions (protip: give sufficient detail about
your issue when asking questions for better responses). If you can make
friends here, they might be able to help you get a job.

Once you're getting comfortable with the above tasks: 12) Move beyond the
sysadmin title -- learn about DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering; once
you've followed the roadmap above, and have a couple of years experience as a
SysAdmin, you can make significantly more money in DevOps or SRE.

I truly hope this isn't discouraging. There's a lot to know, but hopefully
this type of learning is fun for you. Once you have a good general-knowledge
base, you can start specializing in things that interest you, and make a lot
more money.

Feel free to ask questions; I'll do my best to answer.

\--

One more thing: If you can find an entry level job you can get while ramping
up your skills, go for it! It's always better (for you) to let someone else
pay for your training.

(EDIT: minor clarifications)

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paddyabroad
This is all great. Thx so much for the detailed response. A lot to get through
but plenty to get started with.

