Date: Thu, 9 Jul 1998 11:40:38 +0200 From: Martin Cracauer <cracauer@bik-gmbh.de> To: dave@gregory.dyn.ml.org, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: is sysadmin'ing a lucrative career? Message-ID: <19980709114038.44966@bik-gmbh.de> In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.3.96.980708171557.6619A-100000@gregory.dyn.ml.org>; from dave@gregory.dyn.ml.org on Wed, Jul 08, 1998 at 06:27:40PM -0400 References: <Pine.LNX.3.96.980708171557.6619A-100000@gregory.dyn.ml.org>
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In <Pine.LNX.3.96.980708171557.6619A-100000@gregory.dyn.ml.org>, dave@gregory.dyn.ml.org wrote: > It sure is nice to have such a great brain-pool to tap into... > I have a few questions about careers that maybe some of you professional > folks can answer. I just graduated with my BS in computer information > systems, and I am currently seeking employment. I am mainly looking at > UNIX jobs like sysadmin or programming in a UNIX environment. So far my > best offer seems to be a sys-admin/programmer position with a medium-size > company who is transferring all of their web-based services from a > provider to an in-house box. I find this opportunity appealing mainly > because I like the company (important to me), and I feel like the > experience will take me in the direction I want to go, i.e. UNIX, > sysadmin, internet. The potential downfall as I see it is that I don't > think I will necessarily get as much programming experience as I would > like (although I could be wrong). > > I'm thinking that system administration skills are valuable, but I'm > worried that they will only take me so far without serious programming (or > maybe database) experience to go along with it. I think it might not the the worst solution to take the admin job and learn programming by contributing to free software projects. No, I don't just want someone to contribute to FreeBSD :-) As someone who got through it I tend to say it's not good to be a beginning programmer in a professional job in a small company or a bigger company with overloaded and/or similar uncapable colleques. Your code will be taken seriously, shipped to customers and you will have to live with your beginner's stuff for the next 10 years and maintain bug compatiblity. Sounds unbeleivable, but that's common in all but the most serious software companies. On the other hand, if you try to contribute junk to free software, people will point you to your errors. Its invaluable to have good programmers nitpicking on your source code. You just don't get this in most companies a less educated programmer can get a job in. And I think an admin job at a bigger ISP can be a good start for a lot of smaller but interesting programming projects. Most ISP need a lot of scripting for accounting, to automatically configure something and to monitor their systems. If you are serious about programming, just make sure you do the right thing, which is C (or Lisp :-). Martin -- %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Martin Cracauer <cracauer@cons.org> http://www.cons.org/cracauer BSD User Group Hamburg, Germany http://www.bsdhh.org/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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