On Mon, Apr 23, 2012 at 2:11 PM, Martin James Gehrke <[email protected]> wrote: > http://developers.slashdot.org/story/12/04/23/1928202/software-engineering-is-a-dead-end-career-says-bloomberg > http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/12/03/1435217/half-life-of-a-tech-worker-15-years > > I do try to grow professionally as a sysadmin on the younger side, but is > this something I should be worried about?
This is something that I've *personally* thought a lot about, and for me I think these articles are spot on, not to say it applies to everyone or every company. For me though it's more than a career, I love this work. At the same time, however, it's getting harder and harder to be "all in." And to some extent I don't want to be in an IT position where I don't have to be "all in" at least some of the time. Thus, I see myself migrating away from pure SA work over the next 5-10 years. I'm 31, married (going on 3 years), and have my first child on the way. The IT lifestyle is hard. There is a lot to keep up on, there are a lot of long days, a lot of weekends, late night scheduled work, etc., which for me don't translate out to an ideal lifestyle for the rest of my career. Also, In my case, the typing part of our jobs as SAs is really getting to me, I can only comfortably type 4-5 hours a day, and that will likely decline going out into the future. Luckily I run my own independent tech consulting business and as such I'm able to start shifting away from the technical aspects of IT a bit, and bring in junior folks to mentor and train to do the real work. I know this is personal, so not sure how much help my thoughts are, but that's my two cents. I'd also add that perhaps the biggest influence on my career as a SysAdmin came from a 60+ year old man that I proudly worked with at the University where I studied. To this day I'd put him up against the best SA on this list, he was a true professional with a perspective that I may never have. His methodical, accurate, and diligent work was much more consistent than the young "super stars" and very efficient overall. He had a grace about him, and never had a "rush" mentality even when the IT world seemed to be crushing down - cool as a cucumber. They probably had to hire two young folks to replace him when he retired. Nick _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
