Great article about being a SysAdmin

SysAdvent's (Great seasonal blog to follow!) "Always Be Hacking" Great points in this, and gives a really great perspective on both obtaining/excelling as a Sys Admin.

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pram

I agree with most of it except

At least one functional language

I don't see the utility of this for a sys admin, other than like working in an academic/financial institution I guess.

Functional languages are enough of a shift from 'standard' procedural programming that you'd have to invest a large amount of time mastering a completely new paradigm for extremely little payoff.

the_Grinch

Great article and definitely along the lines of my thinking. My college roommate, I was surprised to hear, wound up in IT. I say surprised because he was a Computer Engineering major and had vast dreams of what he wanted to do (oh youth). Ultimately, in speaking with him on Facebook, he found he didn't really love it, though he loved technology. Thus he switched over to Information Systems and has made quite a career of it. His coop at a Philadelphia university had him head up a project to create a linux backup/imaging solution for a large amount of desktops. From there he got a job with a local hosting company doing Linux Systems Development and is just loving life. I've always wanted to be a little more focused on the coding side, perhaps not writing huge programs, but definitely doing infrastructure related stuff.

My parting words, I definitely agree about Computer Science not being an absolute. It has it's place for sure and is definitely not going away, but I think a lot of people regret doing it. Another buddy of mine would often bust my balls that he was a Computer Science major vs my IS focused degree. His big remark was always, "oh you'll be be implementing the software that I wrote hahaha". My reply had always been, "well that may be true, I will be the guy that gets the crappy software you write to actually work in the real world". I ultimately won because while he graduated with the Computer Science degree, he focused in Networking and Systems Administration (and ultimately is not a programmer). Again, great article that definitely is helping me to focus on the future