Career change in IT, where to go from here....?

February 9, 2008 5:41 PM

I'm getting burnt out doing system administration work in high profile operations. It's not the stress or complexity, but more that I'm at a point where i want off-hours to be MY time and not on-call basically 24/7.

In the past i've done work as a web developer and DBA (php, perl, mysql, oracle), and these days it's system administration (unix, vmware, SAN, etc). I have a bachelors degree, and about 5 years experience. So where to go from here.

Anyone with experience switching over to a lab or test engineering type positions? Is it enough of a challenge? What about pre/post sales engineering? I've been trying to find other fields i could apply IT or general 'problem solver' experience to without much luck. I'm fascinated by search and rescue groups in my area, i'm sure it sounds trite but doing work that has an impact would be a dream.

posted by anonymous to Work & Money (7 answers total)

If you do scripting and database work, you could likely get a bioinformatics job pretty easily.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 5:52 PM on February 9, 2008

I was in this same position a few years ago, and the solution turned out to be moving from the small company I was at to a different (larger) company that actually staffed well enough that there could be a sane on-call rotation; I'm now on call one week out of every 2 months (and in a usual on-call cycle I generally only get 1-2 calls).

I can't tell you how much better it is working at a company where I can go home at a normal hour and actually not have to think about the office *at all* unless there is some sort of crazy huge problem- not to mention the fact that the projects I get to work on are at a far larger scale and are generally more interesting.
posted by abbazabba at 6:28 PM on February 9, 2008

I find lab/testing to be excruciatingly dull, probably because that work does not suit creative/problem solving types. Sales support work is rewarding, and usually involves a fair amount of thinking on one's feet and/or problem solving. Sales people can be interesting to work with, and usually see a means to an end in a slightly tighter time frame than a developer will.

Search and rescue groups can be formed around volunteers, in Australia the SES and CFA are two such organisations that draw from the community.
posted by mattoxic at 6:29 PM on February 9, 2008

I made the move from system administration to software testing and it has been a lot less fun. Less interesting problems to solve, more robotic and repetitious execution of test cases. This is software testing in general from what I've noticed. When I was a system administrator I was interested in network security, so I'm slowly working my way into the realm of software security. This is much more interesting from what I've seen so far. It requires a very broad technical knowledge (sysadmin experience comes in handy often) and a lot of creativity because you have to think like an attacker. Not sure if it's for you or not but it's something else to consider. If you're totally new to the field and want some resources send me a MeFi Mail and I'll give you what I've been using so far.
posted by saraswati at 7:01 PM on February 9, 2008

2nd-ing abbazabba, if you can stand a bit of a pay cut in exchange for stability... find a job at the nearest university. We've been down a few people so 6 months of 1 per 4 week on-call, but building back up to 1 per 8 week or so. Large projects. Good benefits. High tech (I have 10Gb to the internets, and a super computing cluster). Once we're staffed again it's one week every 2 months, and rarely have to even put on clothes, remote hands and such. There's still a bit of 24/7 in reading email and helping out, and the occasional emergency... So yeah, larger company that can support a group of admins. If you're not out to make a fortune, I'm all for working for .edu places... I've seen the same faces from .edu's for the past 10 years or so. Hell, I know people who were students 20 years ago... Depends on what you want.
posted by zengargoyle at 7:55 PM on February 9, 2008

If it's really the on-call time that's bothering you as opposed to the sysadmin work in general, I would talk to your boss about this. No system administrator for "high profile" operations should be on call 24/7--you should have a rotation where particular admins are on call one night/week at a time. That way, most of your off hours are your own, and you'll know when you're responsible for being on call. In addition, you can work to clarify exactly what services receive 24/7 support so you don't have to get woken up in the middle of the night for non-critical infrastructure. Lastly, perhaps you can come into work an hour late or so on days where you had to get paged the night before?

It's in your boss's interest to keep you around, so if you tell him/her you're getting burnt out and work to carve out a more equitable arrangement of time, you might find that you can arrange something more to your liking.

Lastly, sysadmin work often tends to convert well into a toolsmith type of position. I don't know what your company is like, but they may well need someone who can help develop in-house webapps or other tools to help everyone be more productive. This is something where you can start small with one simple project, and, with your boss's ok, gradually get into more and more if it's needed.
posted by zachlipton at 8:05 PM on February 9, 2008

At least around here (the Southwestern USA) search and rescue seems to be done by well organized volunteers. Call 'em up, see what they need... I'm sure they'd be happy to hear from ya.
posted by ph00dz at 7:24 AM on February 10, 2008