Looking For Alternate IT roles
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So I just need a plan then . I was thinking to just keep learning and get certifications about Microsoft stuff(mcsa), storage, VoIP, Linux of course, virtualization, and probably databases too. Does that sound like a good plan?
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@scottalanmiller said in Looking For Alternate IT roles:
@jmoore said in Looking For Alternate IT roles:
@Obsolesce said in Looking For Alternate IT roles:
@jmoore said in Looking For Alternate IT roles:
So I just need to keep learning skills in different areas until I find a position in one of those areas at a larger company. I should specifically look for an engineering role because it is not as senior as admin then?
Do you Want to do one more than the other? I personally more enjoy engineering and architecting. But every job I've had involves some administration. Though, I am pursuing architect.
Yes, I think I would prefer an engineering role more. From what I've seen of admins they have little time to keep learning and I don't want a position right now where I have to be on call constantly.
Keep in mind that there are no entry level engineers, and no engineers outside of the Fortune 500. SMB only blends roles, and only has admin as the primary function. Engineers are very rare in the real world as so few of them are needed.
Qualcomm for example, real life experience with people there.
Also now, if you do job searches for them, just about every IT role they have is Engineer. The only IT non-engineer roles they have that are "administrator", is DB admins.
In fact, when I search administrator, I either get IT related Engineers, or DB admins.
Similar results with other F500 companies.
At Amazon jobs, I even seen a "System Admin Engineer" role.... mostly DB admins though. But IMO that's a whole different ballpark.And Walmart... and X... mostly engineers.
I find it extremely hard to find non-engineer roles.
Do you have an example of an actual "Admin" role that's $350k? What's the title, and what is their actual duties?
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What exactly would a f500 company pay someone $400k to administer, who isn't a management title? Because, whatever system they are administering and being paid that much to do it I need to learn it ASAP!
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@jmoore said in Looking For Alternate IT roles:
So I just need a plan then . I was thinking to just keep learning and get certifications about Microsoft stuff(mcsa), storage, VoIP, Linux of course, virtualization, and probably databases too. Does that sound like a good plan?
No it doesn't. It sounds like a shotgun approach. You need to pick a general area of expertise and specialize in it. Being an IT generalist is fine, but if you want more $$ you need to specialize.
Cloud is really the go to field right now. I know of several fortune 100 companies that are trying to go fully cloud in the next 4-6 years. Cloud is also great because you actually have to learn all the stuff you listed (except VOIP).
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DevOps = Cross between IT admin and Engineer. It is almost solely scripting and command line based, which makes it awesome IMO.
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@IRJ said in Looking For Alternate IT roles:
Being an IT generalist is fine, but if you want more $$ you need to specialize.
And ideally, if being a generalist, it should be with intent, not by accident.
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@Obsolesce said in Looking For Alternate IT roles:
What exactly would a f500 company pay someone $400k to administer, who isn't a management title? Because, whatever system they are administering and being paid that much to do it I need to learn it ASAP!
Linux primarily is what pays in that range. I was literally consulting for a hedge fund two weeks ago talking about them setting their admin scale to $450K for the more senior roles. A manager admining something is crazy, totally different skills. Places that give manager titles to tech roles are the ones that will never pay well.
Windows will almost never top $300K, regardless of the role.
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@IRJ said in Looking For Alternate IT roles:
DevOps = Cross between IT admin and Engineer. It is almost solely scripting and command line based, which makes it awesome IMO.
Yeah, DevOps makes it almost impossible to keep your hats separate because you kind of role the two together.
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@scottalanmiller said in Looking For Alternate IT roles:
A manager admining something is crazy
Yeah I just threw that in there to make sure we were actually talking a regular admin role, and not some kind of management role making half a million a year.
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@scottalanmiller said in Looking For Alternate IT roles:
@IRJ said in Looking For Alternate IT roles:
DevOps = Cross between IT admin and Engineer. It is almost solely scripting and command line based, which makes it awesome IMO.
Yeah, DevOps makes it almost impossible to keep your hats separate because you kind of role the two together.
Also DevOps roles never deal with users. Some people may or may not like that
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@scottalanmiller said in Looking For Alternate IT roles:
@Obsolesce said in Looking For Alternate IT roles:
What exactly would a f500 company pay someone $400k to administer, who isn't a management title? Because, whatever system they are administering and being paid that much to do it I need to learn it ASAP!
Linux primarily is what pays in that range. I was literally consulting for a hedge fund two weeks ago talking about them setting their admin scale to $450K for the more senior roles. A manager admining something is crazy, totally different skills. Places that give manager titles to tech roles are the ones that will never pay well.
Windows will almost never top $300K, regardless of the role.
So what is it that a Linux systems admin does in a F500 to get $450k that the same role gets for 1/4 that in a non F500?
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DevOps is a culture, not really a role. If you're in a DevOps environment and you're sporting the DevOps Engineer title you're more than likely wearing a lot of hats and interfacing with multiple product teams.
DevOps Engineer
Site Reliability Engineer
Cloud Engineer
System EngineerA lot of the above titles have a lot of similar duties.
If you are looking at moving into a more modern role working for a shop that has a DevOps culture I'd focus on the following:
- Cloud Native solutions for AWS / Azure / GCP
- Linux (RHCE curriculum)
- Containerization (12 factor, Docker, K8s, maybe ECS if you're doing a lot of work with AWS )
- Understand the difference between containerization and serverless, what tools/platforms are associated with each.
- Site Reliability Engineering
- Infrastructure as Code (CloudFormation, Terraform)
- Configuration Management Systems (Ansible, Chef, maybe Puppet) -- A lot of my more recent work has been gravitating away from configuration management, but I would still recommend understanding the basics of each and how they are used.
- Understand Microservices
- Learn Python
- SDLC, Software Testing, and CI/CD tools
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@IRJ said in Looking For Alternate IT roles:
@jmoore said in Looking For Alternate IT roles:
So I just need a plan then . I was thinking to just keep learning and get certifications about Microsoft stuff(mcsa), storage, VoIP, Linux of course, virtualization, and probably databases too. Does that sound like a good plan?
No it doesn't. It sounds like a shotgun approach. You need to pick a general area of expertise and specialize in it. Being an IT generalist is fine, but if you want more $$ you need to specialize.
Cloud is really the go to field right now. I know of several fortune 100 companies that are trying to go fully cloud in the next 4-6 years. Cloud is also great because you actually have to learn all the stuff you listed (except VOIP).
Yeah picking will be hard. Also I didn't mean to generalize forever, just until I had a reason to specialize. Just trying not to pidgeon hole myself you know.
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@RamblingBiped said in Looking For Alternate IT roles:
DevOps is a culture, not really a role. If you're in a DevOps environment and you're sporting the DevOps Engineer title you're more than likely wearing a lot of hats and interfacing with multiple product teams.
Good post, but I'd rephrase this to say more like "DevOps is a role made up of more hats than one."
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Also, a modern "DevOps" Engineer is more of a Software Engineer role than a cross between SysAdmin and Systems Engineer.
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@IRJ said in Looking For Alternate IT roles:
DevOps = Cross between IT admin and Engineer. It is almost solely scripting and command line based, which makes it awesome IMO.
Devops is something I have my eye on
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@RamblingBiped said in Looking For Alternate IT roles:
Also, a modern "DevOps" Engineer is more of a Software Engineer role than a cross between SysAdmin and Systems Engineer.
I do DevOps, and I literally do zero SOftware Engineering. Mostly PowerShell, some Python. I don't need to know any programming languages. Sure, you can also do DevOps AND programming... you can be a programmer gone DevOps and CI/CD your software. Or, you can do DevOps to bridge IT Systems Engineering, Administration, and Operations.
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@IRJ said in Looking For Alternate IT roles:
@scottalanmiller said in Looking For Alternate IT roles:
@IRJ said in Looking For Alternate IT roles:
DevOps = Cross between IT admin and Engineer. It is almost solely scripting and command line based, which makes it awesome IMO.
Yeah, DevOps makes it almost impossible to keep your hats separate because you kind of role the two together.
Also DevOps roles never deal with users. Some people may or may not like that
Yeah I've primarily dealt with users for the last 5 years so it wouldn't hurt my feelings to do otherwise
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@Obsolesce If you're doing DevOps and you're not engineering software, aren't you just doing Ops then?
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@RamblingBiped thanks, that's a lot of good info. I've read about many if those topics before and a few are on my radar like ansible and AWS technologies. Learning python currently and it's interesting for sure.
