Ask HN: System administrator (to be or not to be)
well I dont mean to sound sad or disoriented but this is what the situation is.
I have been doing my masters in computer science but never interested in programming or rather never taken it seriously. Recently though I have been playing around with unix(solaris file system, veritas file system and veritas volume manager) that is mostly system administration stuff. and the materials I have gathered or learned when i say stuff like veritas (which is a licensed product) hence I cannot use it. So how do i prove my worth when i look for a job and are there any entry level system admin jobs with these. Any fellow Hackers who started off this way ?
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 48.8 ms ] threadCan't advise on the "how do i prove my worth", I found the job by networking and by virtue of being one of the very few at the time (1980) who knew UNIX well (at least at the user level) and was mentored/apprenticed for what I was lacking.
Here's another suggestion: learn how to do this in the cloud. For example, put some money in an AWS account and play around in that environment. If you have access to a suitable spare machine, get Linux + Xen running on it and go from there. Get x86-64 experience. Etc.
The cloud is hot for a variety of reasons, including most especially the lower barriers to entry (no capital costs besides maybe a Ezio Time Token). Those same lower barriers apply to sysadmins, e.g. getting up a cluster of 10 EC2 instances is something you can probably do for the price of a good meal, whereas it's unlikely you'd be able to borrow 10 physical machines and their system disks.
(Note: DO NOT BECOME A SOFTWARE TESTER: No respect, no upwards career path to speak of, deadly boring. Only do this if starvation is the alternative.)
Anyway, there's the specialty of software building. Someone needs to set things up so that developers can "push one button" and get the current system built (see the Joel Test). Many need help with version control/SCM and so on (and that has to be set up). And all these have to be maintained.
This can also extend into system administration, someone has to set up their systems, in some cases they'll have a test machine with the latest version of foundational software that they're trying to work with or on top of, and someone else should maintain that and keep it up to date.
(One of the disasters of Vista was how little time the programmers could spend on actually programming. Besides the usual, according to a Mini-Microsoft commentator, they'd have to spend about one day a week keeping their Vista test machine up to date.)
The downside is working with other people's shitty software, particular in the enterprise space where ticking boxes is more important than security or other features. There are 'SOX compliant' banking environments where the unchanged root password is stored in plain text on a file accessable by any client as a Windows drive. But they have a security policy exemption so it's OK.
Personally I can't stand the legacy stuff - working on something that's being retired gives me the shits and the ancient userspace of the proprietary Unix sucks when compared to the modern ones - but if you want to learn Solaris (especially Solaris 8, the most widely deployed release - yes, there are more people talking about ZFS and dtrace than using either), you can make some extra pain money for dealing with it till it's gone.
Re: proving your worth, I started as a knowledgable nerd helping the senior sysadmins, at somewhere where there was good comraderie - some of the people I met there became friends for life and by helping others rise up later in my career I did the same.
Major growth areas: virtualization (you can make great bank very quickly in vmware, then transfer that into cloud skills learning xen or kvm & cloud deploy concepts in your own time), storage (but it's boring). Anyone with web reporting skills will will points with management, as will anyone who can produce and consume microsoft file formats (eg, reporting, someone sends me a spreadsheet with 390 static routes, you turn that into a routes file). Your manager wants something they can show their manager to prove they (ie you) are doing a good job.