I no longer have a job. It's a long story, but I was really unhappy where I was, so it's not a big loss, other than not having any income.

I've been a sysadmin for years. I like the architecture and design aspects of the sysadmin world; maintaining far less so. (My job had become all about maintenance, which is why I was unhappy.)

I feel like I should be changing my job search to be looking for something else, but I'm not sure what.

Any ideas?

I admittedly don't have a well-defined question here. I guess I'm just looking for some general input.

You could try spending your life loving others, especially the materially poor and those without hope. I've gotta admit, it's quite fulfilling.

The pay grade sucks, but somehow due to the generosity of others, there's always enough.

You can do that and be a sysadmin too

How about consulting or independent contractor. You could design their network and get the heck out of there. Don't know if this is really viable or not since I don't work in IT.

Is relocation an option?

Yeah, I'm sure it's possible, but I'm not sure about the stability or really how to go about it.

I was hoping Matt would chime in with some info about that.

Not really, but I doubt that opportunities are going to be much better anywhere than around here anyway.

In re-reading my post, I found it was a little more ambiguous than I intended.

I don't think I'll have a lot of trouble finding a job. What I expect to have trouble with, though, is finding the job I want. I don't really know how to go about looking for it or how to change my existing search to find what I want.

And what I want is not something wildly different from what I'm finding now; I just want to be more in charge of IT without being a manager.

This Matt? If so, I hate to say it, but I'm not really sure! The stuff I do is pretty plane-jane tech support stuff, not at all what you want to be doing. Furthermore, obtaining the work is by far the hardest part about it all. My uncle (a freelance writer) told me about working for yourself: "half of it is doing the work, half of it is getting the work." I think the "getting" side might actually be a little bigger. I've also found that marketing has gotten me nowhere. I have, however, started going to some business networking meetings, and those are looking promising. I think I'll be joining a group soon that's very focused in finding work for the other people in the group.

I'm pretty sure I know someone in your area who works for Red Hat, if that helps...

Touche'. Quite true.

I made the jump from IT with some software development to being a full time software developer about a year and a half ago, and couldn't be happier.

Software developers get to deal with the problem solving, while doing less of the day to day maintenance. Software developers are expected to automate their maintenance away, so there is almost no pressure to respond to the same inputs by perform the same actions. You also should get a project manager who should filter end user requests and enable you to focus on the real problems instead of peoples day to day issues.

If you're not interested in the coding side of things, consider going into web operations with a smaller but growing company. There is a whole class of mid size startups that have operations problems and need to get their developers out of it, or at least give their developers someone to help them with their problems. The people who are best at this are capable of writing code, but prefer the more nuts and bolts "what makes 'er tick" along with the pressures of real time consequences. At a web company that's growing the same pressures to automate/scale should drive out the tedium that comes with corporate IT.

A huge percentage of these jobs are located in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, which might be a downside if you're not willing to relocate.

Bitt, you may want to sniff around your local universities (UNC, Duke, etc.). I don't know any of the sysadms there, but I can tell you that our own sysadms seems to be reasonably happy. There's always a brand new building going in somewhere or an old building being gutted or a giant new supercomputer cluster being installed in the data center.

Also, isn't Apple building a giant data center somewhere near you? I assume the issue there, or at other giant data centers, is that the architects are off somewhere else and they're just hiring local monkeys to do basic maintenance.

Hmm... we have an opening here in Beaverton for a short term (3 month) Linux sys admin/IT support position, if you're interested in "doing something" while you think, and don't mind a brief change of scenery. (The email from Jan. 13 said get the resume ASAP.)

Two and a half years ago I got the chance to leave my old job and try something new. I know my situation isn't the same as yours, I was given a sum of money which made things a lot easier.

But the advice I can give you is to see this as an opportunity to do something you really love doing, or have been thinking about for years. Sometimes the right thing to do is the hardest, and financially for me it's been really difficult, but without doubt I am glad I took the chance to break out of the mould and follow a path I love to be on.

Cheers

Cris

To be honest, I really like the troubleshooting of sysadmin work. What I want is to find a job where I can do that all the time and leave the drudgery to someone else.

Sysadmin of what kinds of systems? What scale?

Have you considered doing "enterprise architecture" work? I think that might appeal to you. You can make decisions about technology and not necessarily manage people. Now that I'm back in the technology world, I notice that a lot of my customers (larger companies) have a very bright, technically savvy, big-picture, systems-thinking person on staff, usually reporting directly to the CIO and who is a thought leader rather than a people manager. I think this would be perfect and interesting work for you. It's basically a staff learning and problem-solving position.

Similar work would be a "solution architect" role on a large project team that is implementing (or planning to implement) complex technology with which you are familiar.

I also think there is a need in the world for a UNIX uber-admin working as a very highly paid consultant (actually, I think we have one on this board in Mark Lord). You would establish yourself as the dude to call when your admins can't figure out a problem and have screwed it up beyond their ability to fix it. It would be necessary to charge a king's ransom because there could be long periods between jobs. Kind of an "I'm Bitt and I solve problems (in UNIX!)", Winston Wolf sort of guy.

A bright, hard working, critical thinker is always in demand.

Jim

I think of myself as a Unix admin. I used to be a Solaris specialist, but not so much any more. Most of the last 4 years has been Linux. I also have a decent amount of experience with HPUX, and a smattering of AIX.

I also have strong networking experience from LAN to WAN, including site-to-site and enduser VPN, and some experience on internet backbones.

I can do Windows, but I really don't like to, especially desktop support.

I also have a good amount of experience in the technical side of facilities management: datacenter/server room planning, phone systems, videoconferencing, security systems, etc. I've actually moved entire server rooms something like three or four times now. (Not that I want to do that yet again; it's a nightmare.)

Anything else you can think of in the general realm of sysadmin I probably have some level of experience with. Probably the biggest field I have the least experience with is security. However, I have a number of good contacts in the security field, some of them right here on this board.

As far as scale, I've done admin for from one to several hundred servers, in remote datacenters and local and remote server rooms. I'm comfortable with any scale, really.

Yep. Any idea how to get into that?

I have some, yeah. Send me a PM here or on FB and we'll connect via email.

Jim

For what it's worth, I have a new permanent position now as a "Senior Systems Engineer" with Peak10.

Great news!

Congratulations! I'm glad to hear that.

That's awesome. Hopefully they'll be nice enough to let you browse your favorite online community from work.

Are you still able to handle Jeff's contract, or do you start immediately?


How'd you do on meeting this criteria?

Congrats, Bitt! Hope it's good for you.

So-so.

He's through with the main thrust for us- now he's just providing support for any issues we encounter. It seems the timing worked out well- finished with us on Friday and started the new job on Monday.

He did a great job, of course.