I was seriously thinking about becoming a geographer or something a couple years ago and now and then I think that I really fucked up by not following through on that.
But ultimately I have a huge problem of being a lazy motherfucker and this job lets me paper over that problem easily and I'm not sure I can make this kind of money being this bad at any other job.
I've thought about other career options outside of IT but everything I'd rather do are things that would either get old fast, the pay is too low, or I lose the reliability and stability of my current job. I'm actually pretty good at what I do if I'm motivated to do it and get fair pay / benefits and have a good employer.
We were looking at our finances and plans and stuff and if things keep going the way they are I'm more than halfway to retirement and 'only' have 12-14 years to go and I don't want to do anything that would jeopardize that.
I feel like I need like a six month mid-career sabbatical or something though. I've just been so burned out and out of motivation lately that even the stuff I'm good at and used to enjoy doing I can barely force myself to do anymore. This past year has been exceptional though because in addition to normal COVID stress we lost one person on my team to cancer and haven't filled the position yet so I'm basically doing the job of two people.
I was seriously thinking about becoming a geographer or something a couple years ago and now and then I think that I really fucked up by not following through on that.
But ultimately I have a huge problem of being a lazy motherfucker and this job lets me paper over that problem easily and I'm not sure I can make this kind of money being this bad at any other job.
I got super depressed last year because I found out I can't actually work for the US forest dept as a ranger. That was like my dream job and I've aged out of it because of how the federal pensions work.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
I mean, i was a sysadmin working in an on prem Microsfot/windows shop. got laid off at the start of covid, unrelated to covid, and spent almost a year unemployed.
got a new job working for a startup where everything is cloud based, I manage google workspace/slack, and don't touch any microsoft products. I still deal with sysadmin stuff in terms of administration, and I'm basically writing all of the IT policy docs for the company, and leading the technology portion of a coming move to a new building.
So I'm doing a very different job, and was hoping that it would help. But after a year of being unemployed, and 7+ months of doing something very different than I was doing before...... I still feel burned out and don't know if I want to work in this industry.
Already got burnout/depression combo a couple of years ago courtesy of a shitty project with an even shittier scrum master.
Even though I'm pretty much in a dream situation in my present job, I still get some resurfacing of that due to the whole pandemic shitstorm (and living in a different country/continent than my entire life, etc.)
I've already concluded that I'm going to end up setting up a Café somewhere, someday. The Missus wants a farm, though.
I went through the same conversation with myself over the past year. Being incredibly burned out all the time made me wish I did something else for a living, but I too am incredibly lazy, and going back to working pay cheque to pay cheque was not something I wanted to do. I could go work for Amazon for a cool $21.65/hr start, but I don't want to work for Amazon.
Because if you're going to attempt to squeeze that big black monster into your slot you will need to be able to take at least 12 inches or else you're going to have a bad time...
I don't really think that another job is going to really make things better, is the big issue. I'd love to work less, but I don't think that any other industry is going to make that happen, or be less stressful.
My only advice is to find a job where you can work from home (or hybrid WFH).
yeah i also hate my job and wish i had never gone into IT but covid making us permanent work from home and flexible set your own hours has made it much more bearable.
Also in a somewhat mind blowing realization today I noticed a year ago we had 200+ VM's on vsphere; now we're down to 30 in GCP and on track to have none whatsoever in a year; everything will be on GKE host kubernetes pods using hosted google cloud SQL. when I started 15 years ago i never thought i'd be sysadminning with 0 servers
I mean I'll be honest I am in a unique position to what I am going into and I recognize that (not in the purview of this forum really but I'll answer DM's if you want to know)
but having changed my life once majorly and looking at doing it again if you hate your life you're far less trapped than you think you are.
Mostly just huntin' monsters.
XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
I don’t hate my job. I would rather learn a technology well and implement and support it. I don’t have time to do that currently, let alone by the time we’re rolling it out.
That said, I reckon I could go be a carpenter if my body could handle it. Home repair is letting me know that after this long at a desk it isn’t.
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BlackDragon480Bluster KerfuffleMaster of Windy ImportRegistered Userregular
I don’t hate my job. I would rather learn a technology well and implement and support it. I don’t have time to do that currently, let alone by the time we’re rolling it out.
That said, I reckon I could go be a carpenter if my body could handle it. Home repair is letting me know that after this long at a desk it isn’t.
If your carpentry dreams are dashed, there is still a chance you could make it as a scruffy looking nerf herder.
No matter where you go...there you are. ~ Buckaroo Banzai
I swear to god I may quit this job over having to use AWS CodeCommit.
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lwt1973King of ThievesSyndicationRegistered Userregular
We have a small remote office that I need to setup a site-to-site VPN on but I need a VPN router that can handle multiple networks on one VPN connection. Any suggestions on routers that worked for you that don't break the bank?
"He's sulking in his tent like Achilles! It's the Iliad?...from Homer?! READ A BOOK!!" -Handy
I'm trying to get things over to a more proactive approach to support, especially for server maintenance and the like. Either I'm really bad at Googling for the correct thing, or people really like to keep their server maintenance and client onboarding checklists secret. I'm going by memory from a job 4 years ago on what all was being checked on a monthly basis but I constantly feel like I'm missing something that would be good to check on.
So far I have:
Servers - RAID health, disk, RAM and CPU usage, review of logs for issues, updates (Windows, SQL, Exchange, etc)
NAS - disk health and usage, updates
Network - firmware updates for firewalls, switches, wireless APs
Backups - review and verification for local and cloud backups
Security - regular admin credential updates, user account verification (remove old users mainly)
O365 - user account verification, licensing usage, MFA, backups
I think it covers almost everything, anything that seems obvious that I may not have?
I think the reason your googling is coming up cold is because most companies focus on using monitoring systems with automated alerting and reporting rather than manual checklists.
Then you focus on how often certain executive summary reports should be sent out.
And in most companies and even many MSPs, the folks managing backups aren't the same folks as the server admins aren't the same folks as the wireless admins, etc.
That's not to say that automation can handle everything, but that most guidelines aren't in the form of a manual checklist for the jack-of-all-trades small business sysadmin, but guidelines on verifying the functionality of automated systems. For example, we do a recovery test from our backups once per year. That's part of our backup strategy, not part of a general IT checklist.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
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That_GuyI don't wanna be that guyRegistered Userregular
We have a small remote office that I need to setup a site-to-site VPN on but I need a VPN router that can handle multiple networks on one VPN connection. Any suggestions on routers that worked for you that don't break the bank?
Fortigate 40f. We've been using them for our smaller clients for some time now. The GUI is pretty awesome. They're more than home routers but pretty reasonably priced. I'm actually a FortiGate vendor and get special pricing. PM me if you want a quote.
We have a small remote office that I need to setup a site-to-site VPN on but I need a VPN router that can handle multiple networks on one VPN connection. Any suggestions on routers that worked for you that don't break the bank?
netgate pfsense typically gets my vote when you need features+budget. Never had an issue with them.
We have a small remote office that I need to setup a site-to-site VPN on but I need a VPN router that can handle multiple networks on one VPN connection. Any suggestions on routers that worked for you that don't break the bank?
Fortigate 40f. We've been using them for our smaller clients for some time now. The GUI is pretty awesome. They're more than home routers but pretty reasonably priced. I'm actually a FortiGate vendor and get special pricing. PM me if you want a quote.
Do they stop working when you stop paying for support?
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
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That_GuyI don't wanna be that guyRegistered Userregular
We have a small remote office that I need to setup a site-to-site VPN on but I need a VPN router that can handle multiple networks on one VPN connection. Any suggestions on routers that worked for you that don't break the bank?
Fortigate 40f. We've been using them for our smaller clients for some time now. The GUI is pretty awesome. They're more than home routers but pretty reasonably priced. I'm actually a FortiGate vendor and get special pricing. PM me if you want a quote.
Do they stop working when you stop paying for support?
Nope. You lose the benefit of their cloud based security services but the firewall itself works fine. You can still apply firewall rules, setup VPNs and divide your network up into whatever vlans you desire. The 40f supports SDWAN on all ports too.
My $.02 is if That_Guy is recommending something - vendor or not - they believe in it and it's a good product. If I was in the market I'd of course do my due diligence and comparisons but it would bump high on my list.
Gotta trust someone, and most of the regulars here aren't just shills.
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That_GuyI don't wanna be that guyRegistered Userregular
My $.02 is if That_Guy is recommending something - vendor or not - they believe in it and it's a good product. If I was in the market I'd of course do my due diligence and comparisons but it would bump high on my list.
Gotta trust someone, and most of the regulars here aren't just shills.
They don't pay me commision or even give me sales bonuses. Only about 1/3rd of my job is even sales related. You can get a great deal on used Fortigates off ebay if that's your thing. I can assure you that I stand to gain nothing from recommending FortiGates.
The company I work for has gone all-in on Fortigate and we really love them. We used to be a Cisco shop but are even starting to phase out our old reliable 2960x switches in favor of Fortiswitches. It's all working out for us pretty well so far but do your own research.
I still use Mikrotik for everything and I've had no issue with them, but it does require you to sometimes translate Mikrotik's lexicon of terms with Cisco's lexicon of terms. And while I've had zero issues with any Mikrotik product I've ever bought, I've heard many horror stories.
We have a small remote office that I need to setup a site-to-site VPN on but I need a VPN router that can handle multiple networks on one VPN connection. Any suggestions on routers that worked for you that don't break the bank?
Fortigate 40f. We've been using them for our smaller clients for some time now. The GUI is pretty awesome. They're more than home routers but pretty reasonably priced. I'm actually a FortiGate vendor and get special pricing. PM me if you want a quote.
Do they stop working when you stop paying for support?
Nope. You lose the benefit of their cloud based security services but the firewall itself works fine. You can still apply firewall rules, setup VPNs and divide your network up into whatever vlans you desire. The 40f supports SDWAN on all ports too.
Fantastic. Thank you!
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
*pounds head against VMware support*
WHY ARE YOU SO BAD AT THIS
We have two domains, an internal and external.
contoso.com
contosoint.com
All of our VMware Horizon servers and services are on the external domain. horizon.contoso.com and so forth
The new Horizon Universal products are supposed to tie together your on-premises deployment with your cloud deployment, so you can share users and configurations and such in between them. In order to do this, you need to add an on-premises Linux virtual appliance called a cloud connector.
In our environment, I spin up the cloud connector, give it the URL of a horizon server like horizon-01.contoso.com.
It starts to do the onprem-cloud pairing, and then suddenly the URL in the configuration portal changes without me telling it to, and then reads horizon-01.contosoint.com.
Then it errors out because the SSL certificate for our servers is on contoso.com, which doesn't match contosoint.com.
Why does the URL change? I didn't tell it to. How is it detecting the internal domain? From where? Why?
VMware support keeps coming back saying "the problem is an SSL certificate mismatch. the certificates have your external domain, and the cloud connector is connecting to your internal domain. Fix your certificates."
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
We are an Engineering group that has to test major equipment on site. We are trying to hire or attract engineers from other departments.
Our upper level management keeps asking why our postings don't get any interest when the second line of the announcement basically says you have to work in the office. (you do, but some positions can still WFH or have 50% telework)
Not sure what the right way is to sell it right now. Also there's an old stigma that there are meetings until 10pm every night (there aren't and haven't been for 5 years) and workers do like 100hr weeks (we don't but a number of us routinely work OT through a given pay period - in part because we are understaffed)
Hey uh, the job market is pretty great right now and you should look if you are at all unhappy.
Yep. Just my company alone has like 4 pages of software dev postings, the majority being remote only or remote option.
I ... hm.
Are they paying decently and not expecting me to be the next coming of John Carmack? All the remote ones I've found this past week want you in the building once or twice a month (not true remote), are paying absolutely shit ($20/hr), or expect the fucking world from their software guys.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
I searched on Indeed for linux sysadmin remote jobs and I feel strongly that I'm fucking up and should maybe upgrade my credentials and shit and go work for someplace that apparently pays 6 figures and has me mostly operate in an on-call capacity only.
Like I have no complaints about my current job or pay but holy shit not having hours would be wild.
I'm looking for a software engineer job that doesn't have on call and it's wild that this is still a thing for software.
Right now, for me, on-call is just extra money in the bank. I think I have gotten 2 off-hours pings this year and they were 10 minutes things.
My previous job? It was My Cat On-Call From Hell, getting easily a ping or two per-day. There was no amount of money that made that shit right. And we were understaffed so there was no way to actually fix those issues from happening.
Hey uh, the job market is pretty great right now and you should look if you are at all unhappy.
Yep. Just my company alone has like 4 pages of software dev postings, the majority being remote only or remote option.
I ... hm.
Are they paying decently and not expecting me to be the next coming of John Carmack? All the remote ones I've found this past week want you in the building once or twice a month (not true remote), are paying absolutely shit ($20/hr), or expect the fucking world from their software guys.
I mean, I like to think we're pretty reasonable? I do experience measurement of our engy population and most are pretty happy, though some groups obviously struggle just given our scale (we're an F100). Our pay scales are good from what I've seen, just not full SV/top end levels because we aren't a tech company. I can't really share any more without outing myself and sharing confidential info, sadly.
Posts
I don't know if I am too long for this field or if I pivot to something completely different.
XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
I've thought about other career options outside of IT but everything I'd rather do are things that would either get old fast, the pay is too low, or I lose the reliability and stability of my current job. I'm actually pretty good at what I do if I'm motivated to do it and get fair pay / benefits and have a good employer.
We were looking at our finances and plans and stuff and if things keep going the way they are I'm more than halfway to retirement and 'only' have 12-14 years to go and I don't want to do anything that would jeopardize that.
I feel like I need like a six month mid-career sabbatical or something though. I've just been so burned out and out of motivation lately that even the stuff I'm good at and used to enjoy doing I can barely force myself to do anymore. This past year has been exceptional though because in addition to normal COVID stress we lost one person on my team to cancer and haven't filled the position yet so I'm basically doing the job of two people.
I got super depressed last year because I found out I can't actually work for the US forest dept as a ranger. That was like my dream job and I've aged out of it because of how the federal pensions work.
XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
got a new job working for a startup where everything is cloud based, I manage google workspace/slack, and don't touch any microsoft products. I still deal with sysadmin stuff in terms of administration, and I'm basically writing all of the IT policy docs for the company, and leading the technology portion of a coming move to a new building.
So I'm doing a very different job, and was hoping that it would help. But after a year of being unemployed, and 7+ months of doing something very different than I was doing before...... I still feel burned out and don't know if I want to work in this industry.
Even though I'm pretty much in a dream situation in my present job, I still get some resurfacing of that due to the whole pandemic shitstorm (and living in a different country/continent than my entire life, etc.)
I've already concluded that I'm going to end up setting up a Café somewhere, someday. The Missus wants a farm, though.
My only advice is to find a job where you can work from home (or hybrid WFH).
Also in a somewhat mind blowing realization today I noticed a year ago we had 200+ VM's on vsphere; now we're down to 30 in GCP and on track to have none whatsoever in a year; everything will be on GKE host kubernetes pods using hosted google cloud SQL. when I started 15 years ago i never thought i'd be sysadminning with 0 servers
but having changed my life once majorly and looking at doing it again if you hate your life you're far less trapped than you think you are.
XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
That said, I reckon I could go be a carpenter if my body could handle it. Home repair is letting me know that after this long at a desk it isn’t.
If your carpentry dreams are dashed, there is still a chance you could make it as a scruffy looking nerf herder.
~ Buckaroo Banzai
I think the reason your googling is coming up cold is because most companies focus on using monitoring systems with automated alerting and reporting rather than manual checklists.
Then you focus on how often certain executive summary reports should be sent out.
And in most companies and even many MSPs, the folks managing backups aren't the same folks as the server admins aren't the same folks as the wireless admins, etc.
That's not to say that automation can handle everything, but that most guidelines aren't in the form of a manual checklist for the jack-of-all-trades small business sysadmin, but guidelines on verifying the functionality of automated systems. For example, we do a recovery test from our backups once per year. That's part of our backup strategy, not part of a general IT checklist.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Fortigate 40f. We've been using them for our smaller clients for some time now. The GUI is pretty awesome. They're more than home routers but pretty reasonably priced. I'm actually a FortiGate vendor and get special pricing. PM me if you want a quote.
netgate pfsense typically gets my vote when you need features+budget. Never had an issue with them.
Do they stop working when you stop paying for support?
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Nope. You lose the benefit of their cloud based security services but the firewall itself works fine. You can still apply firewall rules, setup VPNs and divide your network up into whatever vlans you desire. The 40f supports SDWAN on all ports too.
Gotta trust someone, and most of the regulars here aren't just shills.
They don't pay me commision or even give me sales bonuses. Only about 1/3rd of my job is even sales related. You can get a great deal on used Fortigates off ebay if that's your thing. I can assure you that I stand to gain nothing from recommending FortiGates.
The company I work for has gone all-in on Fortigate and we really love them. We used to be a Cisco shop but are even starting to phase out our old reliable 2960x switches in favor of Fortiswitches. It's all working out for us pretty well so far but do your own research.
That said, it is much more complex to run and I think they could really streamline the initial setup for it.
Fantastic. Thank you!
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Not today, but one day. It has to happen. I believe!
I will not be taking it.
I have a few job interviews lined up as I want to give more time for my personal projects to take off.
One of them is working for the big change management platform I like to champion but everyone else hates irrationally. :heartbeat:
Lol
(Not leaving tech yet I guess)
XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
Yep. Just my company alone has like 4 pages of software dev postings, the majority being remote only or remote option.
WHY ARE YOU SO BAD AT THIS
contoso.com
contosoint.com
All of our VMware Horizon servers and services are on the external domain. horizon.contoso.com and so forth
The new Horizon Universal products are supposed to tie together your on-premises deployment with your cloud deployment, so you can share users and configurations and such in between them. In order to do this, you need to add an on-premises Linux virtual appliance called a cloud connector.
In our environment, I spin up the cloud connector, give it the URL of a horizon server like horizon-01.contoso.com.
It starts to do the onprem-cloud pairing, and then suddenly the URL in the configuration portal changes without me telling it to, and then reads horizon-01.contosoint.com.
Then it errors out because the SSL certificate for our servers is on contoso.com, which doesn't match contosoint.com.
Why does the URL change? I didn't tell it to. How is it detecting the internal domain? From where? Why?
VMware support keeps coming back saying "the problem is an SSL certificate mismatch. the certificates have your external domain, and the cloud connector is connecting to your internal domain. Fix your certificates."
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Our upper level management keeps asking why our postings don't get any interest when the second line of the announcement basically says you have to work in the office. (you do, but some positions can still WFH or have 50% telework)
Not sure what the right way is to sell it right now. Also there's an old stigma that there are meetings until 10pm every night (there aren't and haven't been for 5 years) and workers do like 100hr weeks (we don't but a number of us routinely work OT through a given pay period - in part because we are understaffed)
I ... hm.
Are they paying decently and not expecting me to be the next coming of John Carmack? All the remote ones I've found this past week want you in the building once or twice a month (not true remote), are paying absolutely shit ($20/hr), or expect the fucking world from their software guys.
Like I have no complaints about my current job or pay but holy shit not having hours would be wild.
Right now, for me, on-call is just extra money in the bank. I think I have gotten 2 off-hours pings this year and they were 10 minutes things.
My previous job? It was My Cat On-Call From Hell, getting easily a ping or two per-day. There was no amount of money that made that shit right. And we were understaffed so there was no way to actually fix those issues from happening.
XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
instead of your employer just refusing to hire helpdesk staff to cover business hours
and putting their sysadmins "on call" to answer the normal day to day helpdesk tickets
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I mean, I like to think we're pretty reasonable? I do experience measurement of our engy population and most are pretty happy, though some groups obviously struggle just given our scale (we're an F100). Our pay scales are good from what I've seen, just not full SV/top end levels because we aren't a tech company. I can't really share any more without outing myself and sharing confidential info, sadly.