

Ask HN: From self taught developer to self taught sysadmin - throw20130914

Hi,<p>I&#x27;ve recently accepted a position as a sysadmin. I&#x27;ve been working as a software developer for the last decade or so, however the market where I live (far, far outside of SV) is somewhat thin for people with my skill set. Relocating is not an option, and I am not interested in telecommuting. Hence the switch (plus higher pay, and a more reputable company).<p>Others who have moved from development to administration: what, in hindsight, would you recommend to someone making the switch? Books&#x2F;non-obvious strategies&#x2F;etc.<p>Thanks!
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Patrick_Devine
It's hard to say without knowing what type of organization that you're
joining. Either you're going to a well run IT shop (good, but boring), or
entering a land of chaos and dysfunction (bad, but not boring).

If you're going to a place of chaos and dysfunction, your mindset should
really be about triage. To get things under control you need to be able to
quickly mitigate any kind of problem, which usually means trying to make
everything as homogenous as possible. Try to limit the number of permutations
of systems and the software which runs on them. Use imaging and devops tools
to stamp this homogeneity out across the organization. When I was a sysadmin,
I would generally have a centralized, backed up file server, and any
desktop/laptop that someone used would be nuked (using Ghost) if someone went
wrong with it. You don't really have time to do detailed analysis of failure
causes, so just get everything back up and running as quickly as possible.
This will probably annoy many people, but it lets you get a grip on things
relatively quickly.

On the other hand, if you're going to a good, but boring shop, you should be
doing more detailed fault analysis and theorizing how things could potentially
break. You then spend most of your time trying to implement things to stop
breakages from happening. This is where you probably want to be as an
organization, however a lot of managers probably aren't going to want to pay
for it. IT is a cost center, after all, so if you get it beyond the point
where you're out of dysfunction mode, many managers are content to deal with
the occasional catastrophic failure.

