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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?"
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