“What does a system administrator actually do?”
I was hooked by the discussion on how to become an administrator and log into IT through this.
The question goes something like this: “What does a physician actually do?” It could be an orderly, a nurse, the head doctor, a cardiac surgeon in a hospital, a local therapist in a clinic, a doctor engaged in statistics or working in the production of medical products/medicines.
The inherent properties of the profession are written – operating IT support. Everything else is very different. And the required skills and, accordingly, what needs to be taught. And even the irreplaceability factor. Although for me the plus is quite relative – the cleaning lady is also not replaceable in this case. But the downside is that if you are all IT in one person, they will pull you for different reasons, even if you are on sick leave or on vacation. And they even come with questions about the coffee maker that blinks the lights and doesn’t brew coffee (this is already a meme, but they actually came to me). And the functions will include purchasing equipment and maintaining contracts (cellular communications, purchasing equipment, cartridges, Internet, IT, consultant..) And those components – from SCS, PBX, VPN to DBMS and 1C cluster. And consultations “where is the approval button in EDF.” And this is not to everyone’s liking – a friend left admin after a couple of years to become a developer, saying, I don’t like working in the service department. There was an incident that I will remember for the rest of my life – the chief engineer comes to me and complains that he doesn’t have enough people, but I have two junior system administrators subordinate to him – give me one to break the ice. In large-scale farming there is specialization. You can deal, for example, only with the terminal service of Win servers. or only Postgress for Linux. And to administrate someone else’s territory (let’s say 1C, router or firewall) so as not to lose your qualifications) you will not be allowed to go outside the Zone. And they will not give access to the ilo servers – it will be configured by the data center engineer on duty.
But the prospects are not that great. Yes, you can go to devops. Or data engineers. But the choice is small. You can even become the head of the IT service of a small department, but the salary there is also not great. System administrator – concepts from the old world of IT – when systems were, as a rule, he was premium, and mice had a ball. and users didn’t really “fumble around” then being a computer guru seemed honorable. Now in the world as a whole, a lot of things are in the cloud (and supported by a PAAS/IASS/SAAS vendor). And solving simple problems in a small business – you won’t earn much from it (the competition is great). The big guys have their own, but even there the salary of administrators is lower than in development. In a small business there is a bonus – you set everything up, trained your employees and you sit and buy bamboo. But this doesn’t happen in large towns – the infrastructure is too big. I looked at the Yandex course program – it’s very worthy. But this is just for the big guy. Where every day you will be given tasks that you will rake through, and as soon as you have rake away and decide to read the habr-op, new tasks. You will have greater powers in the system, but there will also be increased attention from information security. And there are certain restrictions – for example, a developer without access to the product can sit remotely – even the data in the database is auto-generated in his dev circuit. But admins will not be allowed to work remotely, because compromising their management system is much more dangerous for business.
If you are looking for an entrance and there is no love specifically for the engineering and technical component and technical education, it makes sense to look towards other areas – from UX to BI or RTA.
