The profession of a system administrator is always accompanied by a stereotypical perception. A sysadmin is a kind of universal IT specialist in any company who repairs computers, raises the Internet, deals with office equipment, configures programs, etc. It got to the point that Sysadmin Day appeared - the last Friday of July, that is - today.
Moreover, the holiday has an anniversary today - the first Sysadmin Day was celebrated in 2000 in Chicago by an American "universal IT specialist" named Ted Kekatos. It was a picnic in nature with the participation of employees of a small software company.
The holiday came to Russia in 2006, when the All-Russian gathering of system administrators took place near Kaluga, to which a similar event was added later in Novosibirsk.
The profession lives and develops, and today is an excellent opportunity to look at its evolution, current state and prospects, opened up by the work of a system administrator in the world of "big IT".
Sysadmin: yesterday and today
Today, there are many variations of the practical filling of the work of a system administrator.
In a small company with up to 100 employees, the same person can perform the duties of a system administrator, manager, he will also manage software licenses and be responsible for maintaining office equipment, setting up Wi-Fi, responding to user requests, and being responsible for servers. If suddenly the company has 1C, then accordingly, this person will somehow understand this direction as well. Such is the job of a sysadmin in a relatively small business.
As for larger companies - service providers, cloud providers, software developers, etc., then, of course, there are more in-depth scenarios for the evolution of the system administrator profession.
For example, in such companies there will certainly be a position of a dedicated Unix administrator, Windows admin, there will definitely be a “security guard”, as well as network engineers. Surely they all have a head of IT department or an IT manager who is responsible for infrastructure management and IT projects in the department. Large companies will already need an IT director who understands strategic planning, and here it will not be superfluous to additionally obtain an MBA degree in addition to the already existing technical background. There is no single correct solution, it all depends on the company.
Most young colleagues who are just starting their careers as a sysadmin start with the first and second lines of technical support - answering stupid user questions, gaining experience and acquiring stress tolerance skills. They are trained by more experienced system administrators, they develop action algorithms for common troubleshooting scenarios, settings, etc. A person slowly learns, and if he is successful and he likes everything, he gradually grows to the next step.
Here we turn to the question of whether sysadmin can be considered as a kind of portal to a more serious IT career, or is it some kind of closed level where you can only develop horizontally?
The sky's the limit
First of all, I note that for a system administrator in the modern world, taking into account all the key areas of IT development, there is a fundamental opportunity to develop and grow professionally in any chosen direction.
First, you are an IT support specialist, then a system administrator, and then there is a choice of specialization. You can go to programmers, to Unix administrators, to network engineers, and also to become an IT system architect or security specialist, or even a project manager.
Of course, everything is not so simple - firstly, you need to gain experience, take exams in various curricula, receive certificates, regularly prove that you are able to show results and apply the knowledge and experience gained, constantly learn. If a system administrator chooses the development path in the direction of a system architect, then here you can count on a salary no worse than that of IT managers.
By the way, from the system administrator you can go to IT management. If you like to manage, collaborate, direct, then the path to project management is open to you.
Alternatively, you can remain a system administrator at a very good professional level, and develop in a highly specialized area, for example, in some cloud provider, focusing on cloud infrastructure and virtualization tasks.
Fortunately for system administrators, today there is no such opportunity that would not be open to colleagues - everyone chooses for himself where to grow and develop further.
Is education overrated?
Good news: we can say that the threshold for entering IT through the position of a system administrator does not require special, say, mathematical education.
Among my acquaintances, there were quite a few humanitarians who managed to build a successful career, starting with an IT support and further along the described route. The system administration here becomes excellent "IT universities".
Of course, technical education will not be superfluous and, on the contrary, it will be very useful, but even in this case, you will need to take some specialty courses and gain experience on real cases.
In general, if a person wants to become a system administrator, then today this is not such a closed profession as, say, a fighter pilot. You can start moving towards your dreams literally on the couch at home with the study of literature or courses from the smartphone screen. A lot of information in any direction is available in the form of free and paid courses and articles.
There is an opportunity to prepare for your first IT job at home and then calmly get into IT support.
Of course, those who studied related specialties at a university have a starting advantage, but, on the other hand, a person with a good mathematical education is unlikely to plan to go to support or to system administrators, most likely he will choose another path - for example, Big Data. And this seriously reduces competition directly at the initial level of entry into the industry.
Skills: top 5 sysadmin skills of 2020
Of course, a certain set of skills is still necessary for successful work as a system administrator in the conditions of 2020. Here he is.
First of all, it is the desire to work and grow in this profession, enthusiasm, efficiency and readiness to constantly learn. This is the main thing.
If a person somewhere heard that a system administrator is cool, but after trying, he realized that he did not like the profession, then it is better not to waste time and change your specialty. The profession requires an attitude "seriously and for a long time." In IT, things are constantly changing. Here you can’t learn something one-time and sit on this knowledge for 10 years and do nothing, not learn something new. "Study, study and study again." /IN. I. Lenin /
The second important aspect of the skill set is a good memory and analytical skills. You constantly need to keep a lot of knowledge in your head, add new volumes and subject areas to it, be able to creatively comprehend them and transform them into a sum of useful professional actions. And to be able to fish out and apply knowledge and experience at the right time.
The third part is the minimum set of professional knowledge. For graduates of specialized technical universities, it will be enough: knowledge of the basics of databases, principles of OS design (not deep, not at the level of an architect), an idea of how software interacts with hardware, an understanding of the principles of network operation, as well as initial programming skills, basic knowledge of TCP/IP, Unix, Windows systems. If you know how to reinstall Window and build your own computer, then you are almost ready to become a system administrator.
One of the signs of the times today is automation, every system administrator comes to the conclusion that it is easier to write some processes at the script level, thus reducing his tedious manual labor.
The fourth point is knowledge of the English language, this is an absolutely obligatory skill. It is better to replenish your personal baggage of knowledge from primary sources, the language of IT today is English.
Finally, the fifth aspect of the 2020 sysadmin skill set is multifunctionality. Now everything is intertwined, for example, and Windows and Unix, as a rule, are mixed in one infrastructure in different task blocks.
Unix is now used almost everywhere, both in corporate IT infrastructures and in the clouds, Unix already runs 1C and MS SQL, as well as Microsoft and Amazon cloud cloud servers.
Depending on the specifics of work in a particular company, a system administrator may need the ability to quickly figure out the most unexpected things, quickly integrate some ready-made cloud application or its API into the company's processes.
In a word, you need to conform to the stereotype of #tyzhaytishnik and be able to work for results in any tasks.
DevOps is almost invisible
One of the most obvious sysadmin career development scenarios and trends today is DevOps; at least that's the stereotype.
In fact, everything is not so simple: a DevOps specialist in modern IT is more of an assistant to a programmer who constantly brings to mind and “repairs” the infrastructure, understands why the code worked on one version of the library and did not work on another. DevOps also automates various algorithms for deploying and testing a product on its own or cloud servers, helps to select and configure the architecture of IT components. And of course, he can "program" something and read someone else's code, but this is not his main function.
DevOps is essentially a slightly more specialized system administrator. So he was called, but the profession and tasks essentially did not change. Again, now this profession is in trend, but those who did not have time to go there have a chance to do it over the next 5 years.
Today, the upward trend in the field of building an IT career from the level of a system administrator is robotics and automation (RPA), AI and Big Data, DevOps, Cloud admin.
The profession of a system administrator is always at the junction of different subject areas, it is a kind of constructor of competencies and skills for self-assembly. It will not be superfluous to get a skill - stress resistance and minimal knowledge of psychology. Do not forget that you work not only with IT, but also with people who are very, very different. You will also have to explain more than once why your IT solution is better than others and why you should use it.
I will add that the profession will remain in demand indefinitely. Because all the promises of large IT vendors announcing the release of “completely self-sufficient platforms and systems that will not break, will service and repair themselves” have not yet been confirmed by practice. Oracle, Microsoft and other large companies talk about this every now and then. But nothing like this happens, because information systems remain extremely diverse and heterogeneous in terms of platforms, languages, protocols, etc. No artificial intelligence is yet able to set up the smooth operation of complex IT architectures without error and without human intervention.
And this means that system administrators will be needed for a very long time and with very high requirements for their professionalism.
IT-manager of Linxdatacenter company Ilya Ilyichev
Source: habr.com