Comment by swozey
2 years ago
I'm 39 now and have a lot of coworkers/friends in their 20s who are absolutely fascinated by Linux and know nothing about it. But they seriously think it's the coolest thing. When I became a sysadmin in my 20s nobody thought it was cool and we made $40k to run million dollar networks. What happened.
I have friends who just want to sit there and watch me code they're so fascinated and I spent basically my entire childhood/youth hiding my hobby because it was "nerdy."
Every time I post an SRE job listing I get more programmers who want to move into infra than infra who want to program. When I was a sysadmin in 2006ish I was DYING to be a programmer and NOBODY wanted to sysadmin it was the computer janitor no respect job.
Now I do the exact same thing but at hyper scale and it's cool I guess.
Starting pay in the field isnt worth my time, unfortunately, so I have spent the last few years of my twenties agressively pursing linux knowledge on my own time. Only hitch is that im spinning the wheels but not moving!
I want to say we brought on 1s around 90 but in full honesty that's just my assumption and what I would probably pay one if I signed the check.
I have had a lot of SWE 1 friends who wanted to move to SRE 1 and it's around 20k less than they want. They're usually around 90-120.
Which one is the best decision long term is very subjective. Personally I think an SRE needs far more experience in various things than a SWE so they should be someone further along in their career.
My first sysadmin job (around 2005-6 I think) was $40k, but I went from $12.50 so I was happy. Very SR SREs are in the 250s+ easy. Datadog and the faangs etc are in the 300ks.
And thats the other problem, my current job will eventually kill me, and to reach those levels of pay requires a level of stress that I see breaking people. That starting salary is nothing to bawk at, an incredible step for most, but that would be ~30% paycut given my circumstamces.
Im banking on someday being the guy that responds on reddit when you have an issue, "oh yea, just run sudo zap -wtf ${: | grep %". When I eventually master this arcane art, ill apply for a paygrade that keeps my lights on.
1 reply →
This is me :) dying to be a sysadmin... It is so cool
I'm a high school dropout, no GED, no degree, etc dude at the SRE staff/principal/architect level.
You can absolutely do it.
I went many career paths before I focused on this route. Sysadmin, network eng, network admin, IT, helpdesk, sys eng, platform architect, etc etc. You'll bounce around and figure out what you enjoy. I hated networking with a passion and my dream as a kid was to finish my CCIE lab, I did my written when I was 19-20. That was my rocketship to $130k+ and out of Home Depot back then 2008ish. Between not joining the marines after 9/11 and not getting my CCIE or going networking I had no idea where to go and wound up just in random tech areas until I finally realized I want to work as little as possible and that automating my entire job and everyone elses (devs) jobs is... a job. And I REALLY love writing the automation to automate myself and my teams. I want things to run so smooth that we only know infra is shifting if the shifting breaks.
I make way more than that now automating infrastructure and it is way more fun.
Ping me if you ever need advice.
https://github.com/mikejk8s
edit: And I'll say the one absolutely unifying thing in 90%+ of my career was - nix. I wouldn't be anywhere near where I am today without knowing how to manage nix. I owe my entire career to an efnet IRC channel that got me my first sysadmin job at a porn host and unix. There will never be a week in my career where I'm not writing some form of a bash script in a container or CI. Even the 4-5 years I was a literal Windows Systems Engineer I had to know *nix because of proxies and caching, etc.
Did you know IIS didn't know wtf a hostheader was until IIS 6 (2003ish?). You had to buy a 3rd party $35 plugin to host multiple websites with IIS lol.
And most people using IIS just think they need to use IIS because their desktop is running Windows. Not kidding. I had to manually write everything for Windows Server. It doesn't come with ANY RBL blocking or IP address blocking intelligence or anything by default and nobody in the Windows server sphere shares that stuff with one another. Awful ecosystem. I had to scan it's event logs for specific error codes and trigger firewall events if stuff like an account got too many password attempts. NO security by default.
In 15+ years of Windows NT nobody open sourced a damn automatic user block? I didn't either but hey it was corporate IP.. .
Wait until you try it out, it seems cool, but it's drudgery work most of the time.
I'm in the process of migrating the fleet from centos-7 to rocky-8, I can say for sure this is not fun. I'd rather be programming
I don't enjoy anything that isn't containers nowadays so I don't envy you at all. I hope it goes smoothly.
> Every time I post an SRE job listing I get more programmers who want to move into infra than infra who want to program.
No surprise there. Traditional coders have been replaced first by "coding bootcamp" graduates barely capable of churning CRUD apps and offshore body shops, and now it's AI. Respect for developers has fallen down the drain.
In contrast, us sysadmins will be like cockroaches: no matter what kind of bullshit management decides in their infinite wisdoms, someone like us will always be needed around to keep the lights on. Bonus points for dev-turned-sysadmin, we'll also serve as QA for the crap AI churns out, so we're a relatively safe career path.
I think the experience on the SWE end of things is a lot different than the SRE end. For instance, I wanted to hire 2 JR/SRE1s last year and my team are all self-taught so we wanted to focus on finding someone early in their career who we could actually teach good practices to - this is something that sysadmins/etc in the mid2000s didn't have at all. We were in that "Need 3-5 yoe" but nobody would hire you to get it and you better know what you were doing when you showed up.
We decided to bring on a current customer support agent who had no prior server/aws experience, and someone who came from client-side IT, which I remember being stuck in and DYING to try to figure out how to move up from. I've never heard of a SWE team bringing on someone who didn't already know a language. We expected to teach Terraform, go, etc.
I can't even remember what my team went to school for I don't even look at that part of someones resume beyond a curious glance.
Because the Infra/Ops people like us come from a less standardized CS background, you know, a LOT of us are dropouts and the rebellious punk youth types with face tats (/s) I think we tend to empathize a lot more for unique backgrounds over Stanford and what not.
We were treated like trash and almost everything was trial-by-fire, as in literally firing you if some big customers website went down. I got fired once for taking down a Six Flags database when I had 2 years of experience and NO other windows syseng at my company.
BUT! Now that people like us who did potentially get treated like absolute trash by NOCs or managers or whomever else stifled us in our climb up that hellish aldder are in charge we can break down the gates.
None of my job ads mention a college degree or anything of that nature and a bunch of my project friends in some major github projecfts do the same at their corps.
I HOPE things loosen up more on the SWE end of things. As an example, I hated my experience interviewing at Google.