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How Did You Become a UNIX Administrator?
xylix asks: "I figure there must be a number of UNIX admins among the Slashdot readership and I am wondering how you got into that field to start with. The reason I am asking is that I really want to be a UNIX admin but don't know how to get from here to there. What kind of education did you have(CS or other)? How did you start out (as a junior admin or moving laterally from another position)? What certifications are useful?"
"I am an English teacher now but am a techie at heart and spend all my time coding and using various Linux / BSD distros. I figure I am capable of handling a junior position, but most ads I see for *nix admins are looking for several years of work experience (on specific platforms), CS or EE degrees (I have a BA in philosophy) and perhaps years of experience in a specific industry (financial, wireless, transportation...).
I have been told by a couple people that at 33 I am far too old to start ANY kind of tech career (with no previous work experience). Anyone out there with experience to counter that? I know the job market is tough right now, but I am thinking long term."
This is rubbish. My wife is 33 and just started a new career as a developer. She had previously been doing international trade development, hated it, was bored silly by the politics, got out, took a two-year course at a local community college with a good reputation and is merrily writing business applications. Her previous career stood to her in that, unlike a lot of fresh developers, she understands business and accounting. I know of another developer who at age 48 retrained and has been doing that for a few years. Good luck to you!
That's it. I was in a boring-as-hell lower-level CS class, and usually skipped it. One day, I went, though I sat in the back and read some novel or something. Late in the class, a couple guys from the university Consulting Lab (UMCP's faculty/staff computer help desk) got up to recruit. I joined the team a few weeks later, and got hurled into the marvelous world of admin when our VAXstation 2000 (X-windows, 40MB hard drive) crapped out and I had to rebuild it from a 10mb tar file on a remote server (an early NeXT cube, no less :) )
:)
The rest, as they say, is history.
How would you get into it now? Don't really know. Certainly, it'd help to "play" with the stuff at home, but unless you've got 4-10 machines at home, networked, in regular use, you simply won't have the need to do a good job administering the server (and won't hit upon any of the major challenges).
Is 33 too old to start a tech career? From the standpoint of unconcious hiring discrimination, maybe you'll have a problem there. Plus, there's always the "why are you swtiching careers?" question. From the standpoint of being too old to learn -- bullshit. If you're smart, and can learn new tricks, you'll have a fighting chance.
Best advice -- learn to type fast, and find all the online documentation centers (man pages, web, etc.). If you type and can research the problem fast enough, nobody will ever know you don't know the answer ('cause you'll have just gotten the answer). After that, learn perl. Any time you find yourself doing the same thing more than once, spend the 20 minutes (or three hours) to write a script to do it instead. Then the next time it'll take 30 seconds to do, and you'll look smart.
Where do you teach english? If it's at a high school, you might be able to help part-time with in-house stuff, though I wouldn't be too surprised if a lot of that got given to students. If you're at a college, try the same tack with the help desk or whatever there... Then, maybe, look for jobs with contractors doing help desk in a UNIX or UNIX-Server shop (if you live in the Washington, DC area, there are LOTS of these jobs). You won't be doing admin, per se, but you'll be seeing the "lighter" side of it, especially the customer-side of things, and if you show enough aptitude and interest, you should be able to ease into a SysAdmin side. Another bonus for gov't contractor stuff -- they're used to "second careers" as military enlisted types retire and start working as geeks.
Good luck!
After I was hurt in a parachute accident in the US. Army, I moved to Tampa and started with a contractor answering phones at a support center for a large retail chain.
After a few months of training on my own, listening to processes the analysts were going thru etc. I was promoted to Tech Support Analyst Level 1. I read man pages, looked thru the available documentation on the systems etc. And kept learning. I then progressed to a Level 2 Analyst, and after a few months I was hired onto the company that I was contracted out to.. IBM!
After a few months as a Level 2 Analyst, I applied for a position in Technical Services. Here again I studied the OS we were using, SCO Open Server 5.04. Studied Korn shell programming, Learned PERL, Learned Perl OO methodology, learned hardware specific stuff like SCSI, IO, IRQ's etc.
During all of this time my passion was Linux, so I was also studying it as well. In March 2001 I received my RedHat RHCE, and applied for a position as a Software Engineer providing Linux Solutions for Xseries IBM servers.
By the way, I am a High School Drop-out.
Just goes to show you what hard work can do.
Greetings,
I may be younger than you, but here's how I did it...
I got my first degree BSc (Bachelor of Science for non Brits) in Applied Physics. I spent three years unemployed doing a lot of computer based voluntary work.
I went back to college, got my MSc (Master of Science) in Software Technology and went to work as a software engineer for the R&D side of a small company. The other part of the company was an ISP. We needed to get some new servers running so myself and one of the other Software engineers were allowed to install SunOs on them. We secured them as best we could, and from there I slowly moved into administration. Before long I was transferred to the ISP side of the company as the web servers moved over (don't ask why R&D ran the web servers). Then I was trained in Cisco Routers, got more involved in network administartion, and ended up moving to the US...
Now I'm in my second job over here both of them have been pure systems administration.
How can you get into Systems Administration? Well, my advice would be to get experience with other flavours of Unix. At least try Solaris X86 (a free download from Sun) and one of the BSD variants. Linux only isn't going to be so useful if they are looking for a Unix SA. HP-UX and AIX experience could also be useful, but harder to get unless you want to buy a workstation from e-bay.
Read at the very least one of Essential System Administration or The Unix Systems Administration Handbook.
Network... Join Usenix and SAGE. Go to local meetings. Advertise on the SAGE website that you are looking for junior positions. Talk to local technical recruiters. Keep an eye on local job postings.
Apply for non-junior positions, try and talk to the hiring manager first, but it's possible that they may not get what they're looking for, and be willing to accept a good junior candidate instead.
Don't worry about your lack of experience, you have most of what you need. As a teacher you should have good communication skills. You should be able to manage your time. You should be used to putting in long hours when needed. You should have problem solving skills. The knowledge of particular versions of Unix is secondary. I'm working on AIX now, it's radically different from other versions I've dealt with. It's still Unix, the other skills are more important.
I wouldn't try and get a help desk job and move over... I've never seen that done successfully.
I hope that this helps.
Z.
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