Should I become a sysadmin?

Should I become a sysadmin?

Yeah, it seems like a good career choice if you're not intelligent enough to learn how to code.

don't do it you'll be everyone little bitch

Don't bitch out of CS m8...
Commit till the end or die trying

daaamn, IT people just got DESTROYED

It's not a bad job, but it can be pretty boring and I hear most of the MS certs are a pain in the ass. I work on the network side and I find it very enjoyable. I'd much rather be an admin than a code monkey. Plus more money.

Sysadmins do program. Well the good ones at least.

Perl FTW.

Ever heard of DevOps ?

You fucking retard.

GCHQ/NSA specifically seek out and target sysadmins. So they can try hack into networks easier.

Literally any Pajeet can be a programmer.

Coding is a great career choice if you're not intelligent enough to learn high-level systems administration concepts like traffic engineering, security architecture, etc.

It's pretty based - but 'oncall' will break you psychologically over time.

On the upside, if you do your job correctly the worst part of your day will be playing vidya/youtube while literally sitting through 4+hrs or conference calls with idiots, pajeet vendor reps, and pointless business-speak from project managers.

However - being on call means you have to wake up to this nonsense or interupt your weekend/off hours.

I became a programmer - yet still yearn for the quiet, well airconditioned solitude of the server room.

This Had a programming job out of college and then switched to sysadmin. Hate both of them, especially sysadmin job.

I want to leave sysadmin but the pay is decent and co-workers are nice.

Seriously considering going back to college to learn something non-IT at the moment. Any suggestions what to study?

OP, if you don't have that "itch" to do sysadmin stuff then don't do it.

>getting paid to watch anime, play vidya and shitpost Sup Forums

>if you do your job correctly the worst part of your day will be playing vidya/youtube while literally sitting through 4+hrs or conference calls with idiots, pajeet vendor reps, and pointless business-speak from project managers.
can confirm, I spend about 1 hour actually working, and the remainder I spend on PokeMMO and watching movies.

Why don't you like it?

This is very true.

I became a sysadmin ~5 months ago, it's really what I wanted to do and I'm loving it, maybe because there's still a lot of work to be done, as the previous guy did only shit, basically. But the meetings can be pretty boring, I just carry on with work while pretend-listening to their babbling.

tl;dr: the pay is good, the job is great if you like it, meetings are boring.

Install Red Hat.

What the fuck does a system admin even do? Monitor a compound's RAID set-up, replace the HDDs that fail. Do you literally just sit there in the office waiting for hardware to fail and go to replace it when it does? I assume if your boss wants a new feature added to the set-up you just do some research on how to implement the feature then do it.

>die trying

>dying for a career that will have you relegated into a code monkey position before you hit 30 years of age

wew

babysit servers and tech support when people fuck up

kek, sysadmin is harder than being a monkey "code artisan" of the Node Wide Web

How do I become a sysadmin.

I honestly do dick most of the day. Gotta deal with calls and the occasional fuck up. But all in all its not that bad. It's almost like being a neet but better. Main problem is when execs don't want to invest in critical infrastructure upgrades and ask you to make miracles.

I'm a Devops guy. I would never call myself a sysadmin. I mean you kind of have to start there, and I did too, but I also have a CS background. There's a huge gulf between a systems engineer and a run of the mill sysadmin working in a two rack server room in the basement of some manufacturing company in nowhereville middle america. It's painfully obvious if you look at /r/sysadmin. I actually had to unsub from there because of the low quality derps in 99% of the threads.

Y'all mother fuckers better learn some proper coding skills or you're fucked.

Also want to add that where I work (large software company), we've stopped hiring sysadmin folks (who generally get hired as operations engineers) and instead now seek to hire developers with a systems background. Systems engineers are required to pass the same interview tests we give to software engineers, while operations guys are at the least required to demonstrate proficient scripting ability.

Google started doing this a long time ago with their SREs and a lot of tech companies are doing the same thing.

>ywn be a comfy sysadmin living in the server room writing automation scripts

I want to become a sysadmin, but I'm not sure how. I already have an IT degree. should I just focus on learning Windows Server + Active Directory and Linux? do I need to become a tech support drone before I can move on to systems administration?

If you can skip the tech support step do so. Windows server active directory Linux and maybe sql

There's absolutely nothing comfy being inside DC. Either cold or warm as fuck. It you find good spot it's the fucking noise killing your ears.

>do I need to become a tech support
most likely you would need to work at least some time as a tech support guy and then after some time you might get promoted to sysadmin.

I don't like people

>not having an office at the datacenter
what are you, a pleb?

Then why speak about DC. You can have office space anywhere..

Get certified in what you want to do, get a junior sysadmin job. Help desk and doing end user support work of any kind is a total dead end, your career will go nowhere.

I think you might be the pleb here. Bigger companies pay blue collar types to do rack and stack and maintain hands on the hardware.

Can confirm. Had to jump out of end user support and into sysadmin to even get a shot at higher positions. Even in management, I still keep my coding sharp since you're expected to do more than manage.

Only issue is, if you gotta ask, it's probably not for you.

Kid, I hope you understand that IT professionals make more than programmers.

Can you actually advance in a company as a software developer or do they just keep you as a code monkey? I'm assuming you can at least progress to project manager or something like that.
t. computer science graduate who is yet to actually work in the field

Watching 2 racks is basically nothing, I managed a datacenter that had 30 racks all by myself.

What you're calling a sysadmin isn't a sysadmin.

There is the hardware side of it, but I basically only spent, on average about 10 minutes a week replacing hardware, replacing a disk is trivial, just walk the dc in the morning, look for amber lights and take 1 minute to put on a new drive.

I spend a lot of time messing with vSphere, Windows and Linux.

Everyone has to put on the time in the trenches of help desk/desktop support first.

Reddit is a shit tier community.

you maintain a scaled down version of the real thing, so where you can test out updates, hardware changes etc.
When you get the go, you do the changes in the fastest way possible.
If you do your job right, nobody will know what you do.
If you suck at your job, you constantly have to fix stuff while your boss is yelling at you.

It's the starting position retards, the only issue is if you stay in support longer than 3 years you get stuck there forever.

There's room for growth in any position, but on average IT pays more than programming because you can outsource programming easily.

>quiet

Enjoy getting replaced by the cloud, bitch boy.

also related

The cloud has only increased the amount of work I do.

Will sysadmin be "devopsed" once the devops tools get easier and even most hobby developers deploy and monitor their stuff with just a few commands and some container / infrastructure template?
Not asking if all sysadmins will lose their jobs, but if the demand will decrease a lot in the future

From my experience, developers are really bad at network operations stuff, focused the the most ridiculous shit when trying to fix things.

Source: my supervisor is a former programmer and I used to work in a hybrid sysadmin devops position and working with software engineers was exhausting due to their myopic focus on incorrect issues.

We are relatively small I'd say, two clusters and then some machines adding up to about 200 machines plus a few dozen VMs

Our monitoring has now reached over 4500 active checks, so there is a whole lot that can break and eventually needs being fixed.

As for new features, this might be alright when you only use standard software, but we also write inhouse additions to the stuff we use, so every upgrade has to be staged in a testing environment.

Don't. You WILL have to deal with completely incompetent people every day.

Sysadmins won't be replaced, but the job is changing. Learn to program now or you will be replaced though.

Don't take a job where you deal with end users. Move up the stack, make sure your customers are developers or other infrastructure folks.

I fully believe there's a terminal limit to what can and can't be optimized/automated/monitored, in which you have to have boots on the ground or on-hands staff that sit in on the meetings and code things themselves. You'd like to think that MSPs and consultants can do it for you on the cheap, and then you watch as business after business get suboptimal results and little recourse.

That said, I also believe most businesses are not at that limit yet. Expect anything that costs a fuckton (e.g. staff) to be shaved off when possible. Corps are still experimenting with the right balance between outsourced/third-party and in-house. So you should probably do what suggests anyway.

My recommendation? Specialize in something that can't easily be lost to automation and time, or requires unique solutions. DBAs, security programming (not just basic pen-testing bullshit), sector-specific administration (say, finance), or find a way into work that requires more-than-discretion or certain forms of compliance.

>getting paid more than programmers to do nothing

Only in if it doesn't involve administrating Windows systems.

>Enjoy getting replaced by the cloud
kek
t. cloud storage admin

Not unless H1B gets btfo.
>t. Training my replacement from India.

If you are Asian, sure.
If you are western, no, guess where it will be outsourced to.

The shitty programmers not actual engineers who can build high quality code bases

What is this thing called "devop"?

Lower level sub-6 figure programming can be outsourced not the entirety of programming jobs. Where the fields kind of you could say meet, in places like network security and what not where you need both IT and coding knowledge, is where the pay average for IT actually rises. Overall it isn't higher though

Sure, but everyone thinks they're high quality or that they can reach the top tier - and then they don't.