Work / Role in IT that does not require to work night shift or work at night at all

NightShade1 · January 2022

Hello

I have been advice by my doctor that i should not work at night or night shift at all, like never for a health condition i have. I can work just fine in a normal work day. But i see that in IT thats of not working at night would be really hard.

I work right now as a network engineer. I was working out of hours before my health problems because it was part of my work, right now the company is not assigning me anything out my normal working hours. Im not sure if they will keep doing that or they will just find someone else that can work like i was working before and i would like to be prepared if that happens.

My skills are wired and wireless networking, Network access control, firewalls, some Active directory knowledge. thats like a summery.

Any ideas? or advices?

I saw in another forum that someone asked something similar and they were advising him to move to educational sector(as a system admin or something like that i think). Right now im not a administrator or anything i work on a company which is partner of many vendors like cisco and we do the installation of those devices to end users for example we sell cisco switches or wireless equipment and we sell those to a X or Y company and im in charge of those projects for example( i don t know how you call that in english) integrators? my english is not good sorry

E Double U · January 2022

In my eighteen year career, I only worked those late shifts when I was employed in a 24/7 NOC. Every other role was a regular Mon - Fri 9 to 5 in the roles networking, security, risk management, and general IT across two financial institutions, a telco, automobile manufacturer, and a school district.

My advice is to apply for jobs that interest you and if you get the interview this topic will be a deciding factor for you. I have seen plenty of vacancies that clearly state if there is shift work.

JDMurray · January 2022

Like E Double U suggested, only apply for positions on teams that are daytime-only, such as businesses whose customer-base is active only in the daytime, and global orgs that are 24/7 and use the follow-the-sun shift work model. Otherwise, most of the tenured workers will be on the first shift M-F and the new people will find themselves on nights and weekends.

JoJoCal19 · January 2022

Similar to E Double U and JDM, in my 17 year IT/InfoSec career, I've never worked a night shift. I have worked a very rare evening or weekend day, but that was like maybe 3-4 days in 16 years and if I recall correctly 2 of those were server upgrades at my first IT job, and the others were something else at my bank IT job (my second IT job). A NOC or other 24/7 operations type of job is the only IT jobs where I think there is actually a night "shift". Most all corporate jobs are 9-5 with some having an on-call only in case something happens. But the further along in your career you go and move up, the less likely it is to be included in that from what I've seen.

UnixGuy · January 2022

Like everyone said, avoid anything 'operations' or 'support' as those are the jobs that have an on-call roster

NightShade1 · January 2022

Okay, maybe its just differenr in my country. At least here if you are a system or network admin you have to work at night for exmaple let say you are in a project tp change a firewall or update the firmware. You have to do it out of bussiness hours. Who does that in your country????
You really guys work only from 8 to 5???? And nevee ever work at night??
I ll have to move there or something....

UnixGuy · January 2022

NightShade1 said:

Okay, maybe its just differenr in my country. At least here if you are a system or network admin you have to work at night for exmaple let say you are in a project tp change a firewall or update the firmware. You have to do it out of bussiness hours. Who does that in your country????
You really guys work only from 8 to 5???? And nevee ever work at night??
I ll have to move there or something....

It's not country specific it's role and company specific. When I was a systems admin in a bank I had tons of weekend work to upgrade/migrate systems etc.

E Double U · January 2022

NightShade1 said:

Okay, maybe its just different in my country. At least here if you are a system or network admin you have to work at night for example let say you are in a project to change a firewall or update the firmware. You have to do it out of business hours. Who does that in your country????
You really guys work only from 8 to 5???? And never ever work at night??
I'll have to move there or something....

For example, firewall changes are always done outside of normal business hours in every environment that I have worked in. But they are always done before the start of the day so working throughout the night was not necessary. In the environment that I worked where we outsourced management of those network security devices the change window was 04:00 - 06:00 if I recall correctly. In a previous job where I was responsible for performing the changes myself I always did them before 07:00. Getting up early for a change is not the same as having normal operational BAU work that requires working a full late shift.

Like UnixGuy, I do not believe this is a country specific issue, but role/organization specific.

Johnhe0414 · January 2022

Working in the local government sector, i can only recall a handful of times that I had to work after hours in the last 15 years. As an IT Business Analyst, most of our time is required during the day as we with other teams in our department and its mostly project related.

SteveLavoie · January 2022

IT Consultant and manager of a MSP.. I can tell you I still do late night, night and/or week-end ticket. It is part of the job being on-call 24/7 (at least I am not front-line most of the time).

Work / Role in IT that does not require to work night shift or work at night at all

Comments