[ This is a repost of the following article: ]
[ From: Zane Schaffer <mail@zane.town> ]
[ Subject: Sysadmins - what does it take? ]
[ Newsgroups: local.general ]
[ Message-ID: <tilbc3$1ifqg$1@tilde.club> ]

I've been working towards a shift in my career for the past two years.
My previous career was in music as a composer and performer - but I've
since moved away from that scene. For the past few years I've gather
more and more of an interest in running, scaffolding, and maintaining
hobby systems. I self hosted everything I could get my hands on, had our
whole house setup with dns ad blocking and sensors. I think I have the
level of knowledge you would expect from a hobby nerd.

This year I've been spending time diving into more programming -
specifically targeting C and more specifically embedded c. Going through Nand2Tetris and a few other projects really opened my eyes to how much
there is going on in the kernelspace and started a passion for that
domain.

With some background set and fastforwarding to the present - I'm not too
happy in my current dayjob. I work as a front end developer making
websites for car dealerships at a national level. The job is easy but extremeley unfullfilling - I'm grateful to have such a position but
eager to progress in my life. Most of my spare time is alotted to
configuring my systems, both local and remote servers. I figured that a position in the realm of sysadmin/SRE/devops/whatever-the-newest-term
might be a role that makes sense for me.

So, here is my reach out into the abyss of a slow but faithful nntp
server. Does anyone work in this domain? Where should I start if I
wanted to appear 'hireable'? I'd really love to talk to some real people
about this change and role in greater detail instead of scouring through
more and more old reddit posts. If you feel extra talkative, I'm always available at mail@zane.town or on our tilde IRC in #meta.

Thanks for reading

As always,
Z
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On 2022-10-18, Zane Schaffer <mail@zane.town> wrote:

So, here is my reach out into the abyss of a slow but faithful nntp
server. Does anyone work in this domain? Where should I start if I
wanted to appear 'hireable'?

I've been adjacent to that type of career for a couple decades and may
have some things to help. The first is to determine what sort of system administration you want to be doing as the field is quite diverse. You
could find yourself administering a school's IT architecture with manual
disk images and a bit of basic rack configuration, or you could be
configuring AWS via Puppet or Chef or the latest devops script of the
week (even Terraform).

Once you know what sort of engagement you'd be happy with, there's the
actual systems you'll be dealing with. Is this a server environment or
will you be maintaining end-user machines and their connections? Do you
need to know about QoS configurations, VoIP phone systems, office
networking and conferencing equipment, or is everything virtual?

It's really hard to know everything, but almost nobody does. Just pick something and start there. Learn what you can for free. Play with what
you can for cheap, and then probably learn Docker and Kubernetes, cause
they'll come up anyway.

Final advice: don't wait until you feel you're ready for the job. You'll
be waiting forever. Get some basics and give it a go with open eyes and
an eagerness to learn. You'll be fine. (You can't do worse than what
Twitter did.)
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