The Wandering Geek

Over at the Overclocker’s Forums there is a lengthy rant by a sysadmin, lamenting the current state of the IT profession:

I make a living as a sysadmin. What does that mean, to be a sysadmin? Well, where I come from it means knowing a lot…

…Why is it that professional IT services today consist of service reps who tell you the things you are doing are untested, dangerous, unsupported, different, not usual, or a host of other words meaning they are scared shitless and unwilling to learn something new? Why is it that I spend my time building things people tell me for 6 months during build and test “will never work”, only to have them go into production and work ten times faster for one tenth the cost of the old system?…

…I’m disgusted. I’m pissed off. Quite frankly, I’m over IT.

I know from experience that he’s right about this (and do go read the entire post and some of the discussion thread that follows). The IT profession is flooded with ‘paper tigers’, marketing hacks, clueless micro-managers and people who just should not be sysadmins. It makes you understand why IT is so undervalued in most organizations, and why the sysadmin burnout rate is so high.

But it’s not all doom-and-gloom. Talented, well-rounded sysadmins should take the current state of IT and use it to their advantage. There is little security in most full-time jobs anymore, so why not do freelance work? Do decent work, solve some cool problems, document what you’ve done and leave. If someone breaks something down the road, you’ll likely be asked to fix it again - you may even be paid a retainer just to “be available”. Think of the clueless IT minions as your missing job security. The key is to know a little about a lot of things, while concentrating on the most important and potentially useful skills - those that “age” better than whatever is the current IT mega-product. A lot of this is about starting with foundations, so rather than learning about Check Point firewalls or MS Exchange in-depth, learn about TCP/IP and SMTP. Start tinkering with iptables or PF. Put host-based firewalls on your own servers, and experiment with small virtual servers and NAT. Figure out how to route packets and control access between hosts (virtual or otherwise). When something goes wrong, fire up tcpdump or Wireshark and try to figure out what’s happening. Build your own wireless access point and secure it. Setup remote backups with SSH and rsync, and write scripts in shell, Perl or Python to automate anything you do more than a few times. Setup your own DNS, SQL database, email and reverse web-proxy services. Set up an IPSec or PPTP VPN. Use free software operating systems like Debian GNU/Linux and OpenBSD that provide all these tools and more, for only the cost of hardware. It won’t take long before learning about the latest versions of Check Point or MS Exchange won’t be such a daunting task. And when that firewall or email server fails, you’ll have the skills and tools to figure out what’s going wrong (fixing problems with proprietary products like Check Point can be another issue entirely , but at least you’ll fully understand the underlying issues).

And because you haven’t specialized, you will likely have an advantage over your peers. You’ll be able to do Windows and Linux server work, network security, software development or database administration. Don’t forget technical training and documentation. In my case, I left cubicle-land years ago and haven’t looked back, having worked contracts that had elements of all of the above. I am much more satisfied than I ever was in any “stable” office job. As Robert Heinlein once wrote “Specialization is for insects”.