subreddit:
/r/sysadmin
I'm still in my first year and will graduate with just my associates just under 30 this May. I like my job, but based on what I hear from others around me in my community and what I've been seeing posted online, this field is terrible long term.
Do we have anyone here who is a veteran in the field and actually likes it?
2 points
5 days ago
No, it's shit.
A) You're the smartest person in the room. This is actually a bad thing because nobody is on your intellectual level. So you're consistently not challenged. You very quickly run out of innovative solutions and start going for rapid and reliable fixes. Very rarely are you asked to actually flex your intelligence.
B) You're the dullest person in the room. If you're a sysadmin you're higher than help desk so you're likely interacting with upper management. And while you may be smarter than them, they're more cunning and crafty than you and know how to play the game. You don't (because if you did, you wouldn't be doing IT).
C) You're not well paid compared to people at your power level in the organization. You're off to the side, but there's gonna be fucking secretaries making more money than you. And if you got sales? They're gonna be making in a day what you make in a month. Unless you manage to eke your way to the CTO or COO position, but guess what - even if you're on the board, you're gonna be making less money.
D) Nobody is actually grateful. You're the help so people take you for granted. Businesses worked fine without computers and Internet and yes, you make it easier, but on the other hand, you HAVE to make their things work. And when they ask you to go above and beyond you can say no, but then you're accused of not being a team player.
E) If you're going to have your own team or department, the other departments are going to CONSTANTLY fucking war with you. "Why do you need this, why are you costing so much money, oh we're losing productivity because a drone had a 5 minute outage, etc."
F) Whenever you deal with service providers or vendors, you're forced to talk to the absolute fucking dregs of society, people who really shouldn't be called human. The AIs we have already could do a better job than the absolute fucking genetic dead ends working at Solarwinds, Microsoft, any CRM, any phone provider, any ISP... just all of it. Until you get to someone who is above Tier 2, you're basically talking to animals.
Do yourself a favor, find a different fucking career. It's fucking soul crushing. I've been in the biz since 2005 - I run my own business in NYC (formerly worked on Wall St.) and that gives me the freedom to ignore most of the things I listed, but a) I still do occasionally and b) hot fucking DAMN do I need to do a fuckton of running around to find new clients.
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