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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?"
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