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Where Can You Go After Systems Administration?
Burnt-out-by-the-Pager asks: "I'm currently employed as a Systems Administrator for a hosting company, and I've been a sysadmin at various hosting companies for over 5 years. I started feeling 'burnt out' by it a few months ago - especially by the on-call pager duty, which makes having any sort of social life difficult. (I also suspect that the pager duty has been seriously affecting my health by frequently interrupting my sleep.) My question to the readers of /. - Where have you gone after being a Systems Administrator? Have you had to start at the bottom and work your way up, or has your sysadmin experience helped? And most importantly: has it made your life better?"
What this involves is stuff like an admin does (ie, setting up systems, installing software), but doesn't have the same level of support that you may expect in a normal sysadmin post. Plus I don't have to do on-call stuff!
Oh, and since this is as a contractor in an oil company, the pay has increased dramatically! :)
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I haven't even been a SysAdmin for that long, but I consistently get 'suggestions' from vendors that I might consider becoming a Disaster Recovery specialist. Is it glamorous or easy? No, but you know that if you get into a position where you actually have some say over DR, that what you say needs done will be done. All 3 companies that I've been at lately have slashed spending for IT. Except for DR - you'd think the DR team ate capital for lunch every day.
DR, performance tuning, interoperability, and so forth. You will limit yourself, but you always have your basic SysAdmin abilities to fall back on.
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
I went from working at a courthouse (the network goes down, and you potentially put an innocent man in jail) to an ISP (the network goes down, and 4000+ users will tell you things about your ancestry that you never knew), both of which involved a "red beeper", which in the first case, I was the only one competent, and in the second case, I was generally the only one who would wake up to answer it, so became the first to call.
I then went to a finance company with tons of salespeople and a small, split Novell network (not every salesperson even had a computer, as there was a secretary for every five of them to manage files).
In the first week, I went out to lunch with the CIO to a restaurant right around the corner from the office. Less than five minutes after we sat down, the power went out. I started twitching. Ten minutes went by, and I said "I'm going to run up to the office to make sure everything is okay".
The CIO said: "The servers shut down after a minute of no power... I figured, why stress the UPSes?". I sat in shock, and he just smiled at me and said: "Business is stopped anyway; the phonesets are dead. They're probably all leaving early to go to a bar".
Sure enough, when we got back, nobody even asked, the place was nearly empty, and he walked over to the servers, and nonchalantly flipped them on and turned on the monitor to watch the bootup.
"I've got them trained right".
You see, the business was nearly all outbound calls schmoozing people. It turned out that there was a honkin' UPS on the receptionist board, and all inbound messages were taken down with no problem.
So, yes, there are some damn fine places to be a sysadmin. I had the space, the time and the budget to plan and execute a nice, very stable network and stable of laptops for travelling salespeople.
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Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Learning the QA methodoligies has been easy. There are several good books out there. They're at home right now so I don't have the titles available. I've found that even the 'older' books, those written in the late 70's and 80's, are just as good as the newer books.
The biggest pluses - no pager, no 'I forgot my password', and lots of time to learn ALL the new technologies.
I switch back and forth between being a software engineer and a systems manager. Software engineering is an interesting job, but you probably want to make sure you don't get stuck being a code boy forever. The real fun comes in design and research for software development projects. Having a clue about security and the like will make you a bit more valueable.
:) Reall though, find a job where you actually plan, design, and implement solutions, rather then just provide a platform for applications.
On the other hand you can move in to Systems Management. It's kinda like systems admin but with a better title
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Darthtuttle
Thought Architect
Darthtuttle
Thought Architect
BOFH
The "Power Overwhelming" feeling gives me a hardon that would make Natalie Portman blush.
My maniacal laughs can be heard throughout the office, as I roam from system to system, wreaking havoc, restarting computers remotely on people I don't like, and checking the bosses E-Mail and deleting the ones that tell them to reduce my pay.
The only other job I would consider is the "prairie dog clapper".
(The guy who makes a loud noise in the cubicles which prompts everyone to stand up and look for the source, creating a "prairie dog" effect.)
krystal_blade
It will be easy to motivate our fellow man; there is hardly anything people treasure more than not being annihilated.
While now may not be the best time to do it, start looking for a job outside the ISP rat-race. I left that world for the financial industry just after Xmas, and I've never been happier. We have *MUCH* better equipment, better hours, my pager doesn't go off nearly as often (mostly due to working for a company that has the money to buy the right equipment), and I get paid much better.
Also, the technical challenge is much greater. At the ISP, I had a small single-tier network of mostly linux machines. Here, I have a multi-tier Sun-based production network, a 3 platform development network, plus all the routers, switches, load balancers, and firewalls I can eat. Seriously, I learned more about how you should really run a large-scale network in my first 3 months here than I did in 4+ years of ISP/Webhouse Admin experience.
I was in a very similar position to you a couple of years ago. At that time I was a Systems Engineer for CompuServe/Worldcom here in the UK. We covered the UK & Scandinavia. Long work hours & international travel were really eating into my social life - I'd been single for 3 yrs & couldn't honestly see how I'd meet a partner working the hours I did.
Like you, I did on-call: fine when there are 5 engineers in the group, hey, it's only one week in five, right? Wrong...when 2 of them resign because of the pay/hrs, you end up doing it one week in three. And for this you got? £2000 p/a (about $3000 at that time).
After a particularly heavy week (4 countries in 7 days) I sat down & decided to re-evaluate my life. Was what I was being paid (MUCH MUCH less than the sales/marketing people, with no commission or company car) worth the continual colds, mouth ulcers, etc? No - I was running myself into the ground. My mother even offered me my old room back "just until you can sort yourself out" (I'm 35, by the way!)
Luckily after 5 months or so searching I found a job that was a 10 minute commute (instead of a 90 minute drive) with a local company. I'm now their Network Development Manager - so it means yes, occasionally I have to play politics, and I don't get to touch the toys as much either. I took a salary cut of £6000 (approx $8000) - but believe me, it was worth it for my health, if nothing else.
Sometimes you just have to take a step back & look at what you're doing. Hope you sort something out soon.
Matt
If you like being a SysAdmin (you get to do many different things, unlike a programmer or a DBA) maybe you should consider changing industry.
/. without feeling guilty.
Banks and the like: want you slaved to your pager but they pay good money for it. Stay away.
ISP: wnat you slaved to your pager and pay nothing. No comment.
Oil Industry, specialy services companies: they don't always require such hectic pace of activity, it is not unusual that they are strictly 9 to 5 and one rarely needs to carry a pager. There are some peaks of activity but most of the time tasks are mundane and you have time to either play Quake or read
Integrators: very hectic during projects, otherwise just phone support but it depends on clients and contracts.
Universities: you will be close to starvation, but will get some degree of sanity and if you choose correctly will have a lot of fun. If you can afford it why not to take a break working for one until you find the strength to start all over again?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Usually just to the local pub.
I went from sysadmining for a university to being an industry consultant. (The 3x pay increase was nice.) The U job was OK, but the abuse by grad students who wanted me to make their 486 run like a Pentium/print porn on the color printer/(un)install whatever they wanted, and especially by faculty who considered themselves gods, and considered me their personal whipping boy, "stop by my house, my computer won't run my daughters educational games..." Well, I was ready to move to a new job.
I was very lucky to get placed at a client site that's been almost perfect. I only had one major page, which was when a helpful unix admin decided to "fix" the permissions on a production server. That was an interesting 14 hours of work, after spending six hours on the cell phone (trying to tell someone how to execute unix commands) while I was trying to get back to the client site.
After that, I went back to programming, and doing systems architecture work. I don't get paged, I get to be as creative as I can be, I get to play with the new stuff, and I get called in to help figure out the big, strange problems. I don't carry a pager, and I never get called at home. I'm going on 2 weeks vacation next month, and I'll actually be left totally alone.
The security job that another poster suggested is OK, so long as you're not supposed to be the prosecutor, too. Having a job where you bring employees into a meeting to scold them for doing something wrong is best left to the HR people, and not to the computer security people. Nothing sucks more than a user with an attitude, and who wants revenge.
Main point is, switch companies. Some companies want as many firemen as they can hire, since they seem hell-bent to give all the users matches and gasoline to play with. Other companies fireproof everything, and actually send the users to fireman school.
aka alt.sysadmin.recovery is where most burnt out sysadmins can be found :)
Seriously, if you have a broad knowledge of complex systems & the interactions between them and aren't afraid of using Powerpoint & Project then move in to an infrastructure architecture / project management role. These jobs can involve long hours but typically no pagers.
Security is good fun and good money, but a pager is required and it can get pretty hectic if things go titsup.com