Comment by swozey

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.. .