Should I go to school to be a SysAdmin?
November 14, 2014 11:11 PM Subscribe
I can't find work in my field and am increasingly desperate. I need to find some kind of path to employment and have been looking at my options in my local community college. Can you all help me make sense of IT as a career option?
Here are my details:
1. I have been out of work for a few years.
2. I have just turned 40.
3. I have a Master's Degree in Urban Planning, but since I have been out of work so, so long that I keep getting rejected (Note, I've applied in my area and out of my area).
4. I have no real experience with IT, programming, etc.
5. I am not an autodidact...I tend to need help when learning things.
So that's me. Based on my research, I keep coming up with anecdotes of IT professionals "figuring things out on their own" and "learning nothing from school" and "I never went to college at all and earn $60k/yr". Reading this is utterly terrifying because I don't definitely do not not have that The-Best-Way-To-Learn-Is-To-Do-It-Yourself-type brain. I have also come across a certain sensibility from employers (on, say, Reddit) about the people who truly are fit for this line of work...which is that the only people worth hiring are those professionals who do volunteer work for open source projects after their regular workday and eat/drink/sleep this world.
This is all intimidating and I fear that I simply may not belong in this field. On the other hand, I am not sure that I have the time to go back-to-school to do much else (for example, any health care job seems to require years of prerequisite work before I am even able to compete for a placement in a local CC program).
So the question is, is it realistic to think I could get a job in IT as an older worker, who doesn't fit the learning/tinkerer profile, and would be starting from square one today's labor marketplace?
(Note 2, the degree option I would be looking at would be a 12 month program, for about $4k, labeled "Database Application Development & Programming". I will definitely be talking to them, but I feel like an unbiased opinion may make sense).
Here are my details:
1. I have been out of work for a few years.
2. I have just turned 40.
3. I have a Master's Degree in Urban Planning, but since I have been out of work so, so long that I keep getting rejected (Note, I've applied in my area and out of my area).
4. I have no real experience with IT, programming, etc.
5. I am not an autodidact...I tend to need help when learning things.
So that's me. Based on my research, I keep coming up with anecdotes of IT professionals "figuring things out on their own" and "learning nothing from school" and "I never went to college at all and earn $60k/yr". Reading this is utterly terrifying because I don't definitely do not not have that The-Best-Way-To-Learn-Is-To-Do-It-Yourself-type brain. I have also come across a certain sensibility from employers (on, say, Reddit) about the people who truly are fit for this line of work...which is that the only people worth hiring are those professionals who do volunteer work for open source projects after their regular workday and eat/drink/sleep this world.
This is all intimidating and I fear that I simply may not belong in this field. On the other hand, I am not sure that I have the time to go back-to-school to do much else (for example, any health care job seems to require years of prerequisite work before I am even able to compete for a placement in a local CC program).
So the question is, is it realistic to think I could get a job in IT as an older worker, who doesn't fit the learning/tinkerer profile, and would be starting from square one today's labor marketplace?
(Note 2, the degree option I would be looking at would be a 12 month program, for about $4k, labeled "Database Application Development & Programming". I will definitely be talking to them, but I feel like an unbiased opinion may make sense).
A sysadmin job would be a horrible match for you, and you'd probably be awful at it. You'd be competing against people with decades of experience.
Best programmers (including database) have experience in another field. Have you looked at companies supplying software and services to urban planners to see what opportunities there may be for you?
posted by Sophont at 11:41 PM on November 14, 2014 [2 favorites]
Best programmers (including database) have experience in another field. Have you looked at companies supplying software and services to urban planners to see what opportunities there may be for you?
posted by Sophont at 11:41 PM on November 14, 2014 [2 favorites]
Do you have any experience with ArcGIS, SPSS, Crystal Reports? Because with a masters in Urban Planning, you could get a job that utilizes these mapping and statistical tools. I see a good number of jobs with state/city government which based on what you've stated in your post, qualify you as a candidate.
To directly answer your question about whether you should go back to school to be a sysadmin, I think that type of skillset is more vocational/technical school than a degree in CS or Information Sciences. I learned all my sysadmin skills through on-the-job training and experience. Same for pretty much all the techies I know..
Could you reach out to people who were in your cohort for your program and maybe do some professional networking?
posted by loquat at 11:48 PM on November 14, 2014 [3 favorites]
To directly answer your question about whether you should go back to school to be a sysadmin, I think that type of skillset is more vocational/technical school than a degree in CS or Information Sciences. I learned all my sysadmin skills through on-the-job training and experience. Same for pretty much all the techies I know..
Could you reach out to people who were in your cohort for your program and maybe do some professional networking?
posted by loquat at 11:48 PM on November 14, 2014 [3 favorites]
5. I am not an autodidact...I tend to need help when learning things.
Discounting tendencies (or lack thereof) to google something that you don't know, this is going to be your biggest hurdle to surmount if you'd like to break into this field, in many locales. (Perhaps not NYC; I run into quite a few who simply are being paid to make decisions higher than their pay grade. Ha.) Having autodidactic qualities, and solving problems, is an especially helpful boon, especially given that the nature of the business is trying to puzzle out solutions to problems you never knew existed.
posted by peeet at 11:53 PM on November 14, 2014
Discounting tendencies (or lack thereof) to google something that you don't know, this is going to be your biggest hurdle to surmount if you'd like to break into this field, in many locales. (Perhaps not NYC; I run into quite a few who simply are being paid to make decisions higher than their pay grade. Ha.) Having autodidactic qualities, and solving problems, is an especially helpful boon, especially given that the nature of the business is trying to puzzle out solutions to problems you never knew existed.
posted by peeet at 11:53 PM on November 14, 2014
It doesn't sound like sys admin is a particularly good fit for you. But hey:
Do you have any experience with ArcGIS, SPSS, Crystal Reports? Because with a masters in Urban Planning, you could get a job that utilizes these mapping and statistical tools.
...is totally what I was thinking too. I would imagine you might be a better match for an ArcGIS qualification or similar.
posted by DarlingBri at 12:01 AM on November 15, 2014 [1 favorite]
Do you have any experience with ArcGIS, SPSS, Crystal Reports? Because with a masters in Urban Planning, you could get a job that utilizes these mapping and statistical tools.
...is totally what I was thinking too. I would imagine you might be a better match for an ArcGIS qualification or similar.
posted by DarlingBri at 12:01 AM on November 15, 2014 [1 favorite]
I'm a 38 year old sysadmin who's learnt pretty much everything by doing and googling over the last 20 years. Last week; I diagnosed a malfunctioning switch, proved a network fault in the WAN link was definitively our suppliers equipment, finished the setup of our iPad management software and deployed some paid apps (harder than it sounds!), tracked down and fixed a bug that was causing a mail loop in our helpdesk software, manually got a couple of our old servers for supplier software safely through updates (and made sure a bunch more upgraded in sequence with no end-user downtime), and had a sit down meeting with one of our suppliers over our 3 year plans for hardware upgrades to our vmware setup, and discussed our plans for citrix app availability. And a bunch of other small stuff, like helping someone with a busted mouse, or run my boss through hard-closing iMail because it sucks. My next big job is tracking down a network printer issue that's causing hangs for some users on some machines; I'm pretty sure I know what driver is causing it, but will need to go event log and registry diving for sure.
The biggest strength to being a sysadmin is self-learning and adaptability. We encounter such a random set of weird issues and events, and deploy such a random mix of software to support that various department managers think is awesome, there's nothing you could learn at uni that would cover it. I did go to university, but electrical engineering, and very, very little of what I learned is useful to me now. We do have a CS grad who was very much of the 'do the training course first' mentality. He's a good guy, and excellent at the public relations side of running our help desk, and doing stuff he's done before. Chuck a new problem at him though, and he's totally at sea. He'd be terrible as a sysadmin.
I'm also seriously thinking of changing field myself. Classic sysadmins like me are going away; these days it's all being outsourced to cloud based software. We already outsource quite a bit at work; and while what I do as a job isn't going away yet, as Bring Your Own Device takes off, and the servers all go to the internet, and all you need is some basic helpdesk hand holders, with the rest being contracted out? Yeah.
So I'm eyeing up my future career options. Currently looking at dev-ops, where you're a hybrid coder and system wrangler. I already code quite a bit, so it seems a natural fit.
To sum up - I honestly don't mean to be mean, but from what you've said, sysadmin does not sound like the career for you.
Which is not to say you shouldn't look into IT as a career; there's a lot of stuff out there. Focus on what skills you can bring to the table already. One thing many, many IT workers lack is soft skills; I know it's not my strength. Being able to work with management and users on their terms, move through political in-house battles, soothe egos, hearts and minds etc. I don't know urban planning, but I imagine that soft skills are needed a lot in that line of work!
Two areas that might be worth looking at would be CAD work; there's a lot of scope out there for people with a mix of IT scripting skill and technical design chops, in a hundred different fields. Or straight up coding. If you're of a logical mindset and like to learn by example, then programming should be a reasonable fit for you - and there's a bunch of good free resources to try it out, such as codecademy. Programming plus other skills though, that's a real growth area, and one where you're much less likely to be going up against other people with 20 years experience doing it.
posted by ArkhanJG at 1:48 AM on November 15, 2014 [3 favorites]
The biggest strength to being a sysadmin is self-learning and adaptability. We encounter such a random set of weird issues and events, and deploy such a random mix of software to support that various department managers think is awesome, there's nothing you could learn at uni that would cover it. I did go to university, but electrical engineering, and very, very little of what I learned is useful to me now. We do have a CS grad who was very much of the 'do the training course first' mentality. He's a good guy, and excellent at the public relations side of running our help desk, and doing stuff he's done before. Chuck a new problem at him though, and he's totally at sea. He'd be terrible as a sysadmin.
I'm also seriously thinking of changing field myself. Classic sysadmins like me are going away; these days it's all being outsourced to cloud based software. We already outsource quite a bit at work; and while what I do as a job isn't going away yet, as Bring Your Own Device takes off, and the servers all go to the internet, and all you need is some basic helpdesk hand holders, with the rest being contracted out? Yeah.
So I'm eyeing up my future career options. Currently looking at dev-ops, where you're a hybrid coder and system wrangler. I already code quite a bit, so it seems a natural fit.
To sum up - I honestly don't mean to be mean, but from what you've said, sysadmin does not sound like the career for you.
Which is not to say you shouldn't look into IT as a career; there's a lot of stuff out there. Focus on what skills you can bring to the table already. One thing many, many IT workers lack is soft skills; I know it's not my strength. Being able to work with management and users on their terms, move through political in-house battles, soothe egos, hearts and minds etc. I don't know urban planning, but I imagine that soft skills are needed a lot in that line of work!
Two areas that might be worth looking at would be CAD work; there's a lot of scope out there for people with a mix of IT scripting skill and technical design chops, in a hundred different fields. Or straight up coding. If you're of a logical mindset and like to learn by example, then programming should be a reasonable fit for you - and there's a bunch of good free resources to try it out, such as codecademy. Programming plus other skills though, that's a real growth area, and one where you're much less likely to be going up against other people with 20 years experience doing it.
posted by ArkhanJG at 1:48 AM on November 15, 2014 [3 favorites]
I am also a 39 year old sysadmin with no college degree. To be frank, trying to get into it this late on the back of any kind of certification program, and just because it seems like a job you can get into without a degree, is probably a waste of time. People like me in the industry got into computers very young because we liked playing with computers. If we weren't doing it for a living, we'd still be setting up linux servers and stuff at home. I learned how to program on my own, on the weekends because I thought programming was fun.
Basically if you aren't already the guy in the office that people go to to fix computer problems, you probably aren't the kind of guy to get in to IT now.
That said, it's not impossible, but you'd probably have to get a real CS degree from a real college to do it. There's a need for tinkerers, sure, but IT also needs people who know the right way to do things and aren't just stumbling along with intuition and Google.
posted by empath at 5:05 AM on November 15, 2014
Basically if you aren't already the guy in the office that people go to to fix computer problems, you probably aren't the kind of guy to get in to IT now.
That said, it's not impossible, but you'd probably have to get a real CS degree from a real college to do it. There's a need for tinkerers, sure, but IT also needs people who know the right way to do things and aren't just stumbling along with intuition and Google.
posted by empath at 5:05 AM on November 15, 2014
The course name sounds more like application development than sys admin, but maybe its misleading.
If I had a large IT department and you came onboard, I'd look to you for help upfront in the development process. Gathering requirements, organizing info for proposals, etc. You should know how to do those thing, but you would need to pick up a lot of subject area knowledge.
posted by SemiSalt at 5:59 AM on November 15, 2014
If I had a large IT department and you came onboard, I'd look to you for help upfront in the development process. Gathering requirements, organizing info for proposals, etc. You should know how to do those thing, but you would need to pick up a lot of subject area knowledge.
posted by SemiSalt at 5:59 AM on November 15, 2014
You don't specifically say if computers interest you or if you're good at logical problem solving. Are you looking at IT just because it's out there, or because you're interested or good at it. I'd recommend NOT pursuing it if you don't fall into the latter category.
That being said, I'm 48, have a Planning degree and I've been doing web development with no formal training since 1995. The field is wide open. IT folks are in need all over the world.
posted by humboldt32 at 8:31 AM on November 15, 2014
That being said, I'm 48, have a Planning degree and I've been doing web development with no formal training since 1995. The field is wide open. IT folks are in need all over the world.
posted by humboldt32 at 8:31 AM on November 15, 2014
Applied IT like some people are suggesting is definitely more appropriate as would be some of the project management around stuff that you already have skills in from an urban planning perspective. The big service providers like ISPs do need people that can work with cities on issues like utility right of ways, etc.
The truth of the matter is the old school learned on the job sysadmin jobs are slowly going away as new strategies like DevOps and network virtualization technologies start descending from the high end shops into regular practice. That isn't to say that there is no role for the self-taught linux or windows guru in the current market but you will be competing with a truck load of people with no formal training but 20+ years of experience.
And it's a brutal ageist industry in general because hiring managers are always going to look at the young and easy to exploit kids for the junior sysadmin positions.
posted by vuron at 8:45 AM on November 15, 2014
The truth of the matter is the old school learned on the job sysadmin jobs are slowly going away as new strategies like DevOps and network virtualization technologies start descending from the high end shops into regular practice. That isn't to say that there is no role for the self-taught linux or windows guru in the current market but you will be competing with a truck load of people with no formal training but 20+ years of experience.
And it's a brutal ageist industry in general because hiring managers are always going to look at the young and easy to exploit kids for the junior sysadmin positions.
posted by vuron at 8:45 AM on November 15, 2014
I have also come across a certain sensibility from employers (on, say, Reddit) about the people who truly are fit for this line of work...which is that the only people worth hiring are those professionals who do volunteer work for open source projects after their regular workday and eat/drink/sleep this world.
System Administration is in high demand, but the costs of hiring a bad fit are still high. The core nugget of what they're advocating is having portfolio for hiring teams to review. A work experience substitute.
4. I have no real experience with IT, programming, etc.
5. I am not an autodidact...I tend to need help when learning things.
The best (and hardest) measurement of effective IT is how quickly they can change. This means deploying new technologies before there's a university course on it. And I work for a university -- we never offer courses on software beyond say MS Office. We focus on providing timeless instruction on foundational compsci concepts; while we will ask you to use software, it's not a core learning objective and you are expected to figure it out on your own.
This means you'll be reading a lot of manuals, man pages, source code, and making a lot of Google queries. Because there will be problems, and they will not be clearly documented in a runlist. So depending on how you mean 'autodidact', this may be a deal breaker-- if being asked to repair a system without being told what the underlying symptom is or how to fix it sounds stressful, you will not enjoy this job.
On the other hand, it's super easy to learn, really. Google has seen most errors somewhere on the internet before, and manuals are everpresent online. Communities like MetaFilter, StackOverflow and ServerFault exist as support networks for The One You Can't Figure Out. Systems give fairly objective feedback (either your website 503's, or doesn't), and modern DevOps tools make it much simpler to revert to a working configuration.
posted by pwnguin at 1:45 PM on November 15, 2014
System Administration is in high demand, but the costs of hiring a bad fit are still high. The core nugget of what they're advocating is having portfolio for hiring teams to review. A work experience substitute.
4. I have no real experience with IT, programming, etc.
5. I am not an autodidact...I tend to need help when learning things.
The best (and hardest) measurement of effective IT is how quickly they can change. This means deploying new technologies before there's a university course on it. And I work for a university -- we never offer courses on software beyond say MS Office. We focus on providing timeless instruction on foundational compsci concepts; while we will ask you to use software, it's not a core learning objective and you are expected to figure it out on your own.
This means you'll be reading a lot of manuals, man pages, source code, and making a lot of Google queries. Because there will be problems, and they will not be clearly documented in a runlist. So depending on how you mean 'autodidact', this may be a deal breaker-- if being asked to repair a system without being told what the underlying symptom is or how to fix it sounds stressful, you will not enjoy this job.
On the other hand, it's super easy to learn, really. Google has seen most errors somewhere on the internet before, and manuals are everpresent online. Communities like MetaFilter, StackOverflow and ServerFault exist as support networks for The One You Can't Figure Out. Systems give fairly objective feedback (either your website 503's, or doesn't), and modern DevOps tools make it much simpler to revert to a working configuration.
posted by pwnguin at 1:45 PM on November 15, 2014
I've worked in IT for the last 12 years and the whole sysadmin thing - that's kinda tough if you arent already attracted to the idea of IT as a general interest.
I got into IT initially as I thought I would have better career prospects but like you, didnt really love computers.
It has been a tougher fit and the other IT people, especially SysAdmins, seem to have all the answers. Like you could ask them the most esoteric shit (about IT) and somehow they would either know the answer or at least know how to find it. I also think that within 10-15 years, sysadmin jobs wont really be available they will be Devops jobs. That is the way the future is going.
You may want to check into Instructional Design/eLearning. With a bit of tech experience (general computer knowledge) and learning about crafting learning materials, that could be another avenue for you.
posted by gregjunior at 9:56 AM on November 22, 2014
I got into IT initially as I thought I would have better career prospects but like you, didnt really love computers.
It has been a tougher fit and the other IT people, especially SysAdmins, seem to have all the answers. Like you could ask them the most esoteric shit (about IT) and somehow they would either know the answer or at least know how to find it. I also think that within 10-15 years, sysadmin jobs wont really be available they will be Devops jobs. That is the way the future is going.
You may want to check into Instructional Design/eLearning. With a bit of tech experience (general computer knowledge) and learning about crafting learning materials, that could be another avenue for you.
posted by gregjunior at 9:56 AM on November 22, 2014
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The upsides are that the pay is good, you can work in almost any field (everyone has computers they need to keep running), and you can usually get a job. The downsides are that the hours can be lousy (computers break randomly, or your employer may need to get something done quickly) and there are many aspects that can be tedious.
All that being said, there are many careers related to IT besides sysadmin. Take an intro programming course (there are many available online for free these days) and see if you like that sort of thing. The learning curve at first will be hard so you'll need to give it a couple of months. You could also look into project management, or technical writing. Getting the first job will be hard, so you may need to volunteer or do some work very cheaply to get something on your resume first.
Good luck!
posted by DrumsIntheDeep at 11:37 PM on November 14, 2014