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If you're an Sys Admin, how did you get there...

A

abc

Diamond Member

From my recent observation through speaking to a few people who have been doing for ex. desktop types of support for anywhere from 1 to 3 years, it seems as though they have a complaint that they're stuck doing it and it's hard to break into another level.


Did you go from a tech support person and got enough experience and then got promoted to a sys. admin with your same company,
OR did you leave for an admin position that you got an interview for. (if this is the case i assume you at some point got to do a mix of sys. admin and desktop support stuff before you left).

Those that complain about this say that those in the sys. admin department try to keep seperate from the desktop team for job security etc., if they have an opening they'd hire from outside, one who is already an admin rather than taking the most sr. desktop guy to train him into the position.

so what's your story of how did you crack into the Admin level?
 
Originally posted by: abc
From my recent observation through speaking to a few people who have been doing for ex. desktop types of support for anywhere from 1 to 3 years, it seems as though they have a complaint that they're stuck doing it and it's hard to break into another level.


Did you go from a tech support person and got enough experience and then got promoted to a sys. admin with your same company,
OR did you leave for an admin position that you got an interview for. (if this is the case i assume you at some point got to do a mix of sys. admin and desktop support stuff before you left).

Those that complain about this say that those in the sys. admin department try to keep seperate from the desktop team for job security etc., if they have an opening they'd hire from outside, one who is already an admin rather than taking the most sr. desktop guy to train him into the position.

so what's your story of how did you crack into the Admin level?
Click to expand...

Went to school for 4 years and got my bachelor's degree in Computer Info Systems. Started a position has helpdesk which lasted 1 year and I couldn't take it anymore. Sys admin position opened up in my department and I applied for it, couldn't of been better timing because I was ready to quit the helpdesk, it sucked that bad.
 
can u give me a brief descripton of the kind of tasks you do as a system/network admin?

i'm 15, i have work experiance coming up, where they send me to somewhere to 'work' (not proper work but seeing how stuff is one and helpin here and there) somehwhere for 2 weeks. sounds intresting looking after alot of computers, but i'm not sure what all the things the jobs covers are. i'm intrested in computer hardware, networking, and operating systems

also what is the correct term that you are called, is it 'system administrator' (i need to know what to put on my sheet)

thank you
 
Originally posted by: LAUST
Started working for a hole in the wall shop about 12 years ago, there was a Novell guru there who I just started following around, we installed networks in places like Denver Tech College and other small business's like Mortgage and Insurance companies.

Thats how things started, as far as sys admin part, after that I went and worked for many other companies as an independant contractor, places like Michigan public schools, Nestle, Then USWest, Diners Club, then I worked at Nextel for abit and they liked my work and had an open position so I decided to finnally settle in there with the title "Network/Systems Admin"

Watch out who you learn from... it's AMAZING compaines even work at all with how many terrible IT people are out there, I'm currently on the side cleaning up the network for a County Library system here in Colorado and I'm amazed some of their stuff even works. The network closets alone are disgusting, I was finding 20 foot patch cables for what a 1 foot pigtale could have patched in. Thats another thing, good sys admins are jacks of all trades, they know OS's on desktop and server, they know network hardware and cabling, we try to know as much as we can.
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Oh god, so true. Before my boss or I got to my current company, the IT dept. was in shambles. The previous IT admin had his Exchange server on his PDC, along with Solomon(memory hog :disgust: ), our inventory/shipping program, and the firewall. When that server needed to be rebooted, the company basically stopped. :Q
 
Yeah the place I work at now had software without even the proper licensing!! I could not believe it. I fixed the problem by moving the proxy servers to mandrake linux instead of NT.
 
One of the great things of working for a startup is getting all new stuff. God I hated mom and pop companies with NT3.51/4, Exchange 4.0, and Win95. Sometimes you just got to bite the bullet and ...UPGRADE 😀
 
Oh god, so true. Before my boss or I got to my current company, the IT dept. was in shambles. The previous IT admin had his Exchange server on his PDC, along with Solomon(memory hog 😀isgust😉, our inventory/shipping program, and the firewall. When that server needed to be rebooted, the company basically stopped. :Q
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Brillant. 😀
 
I also 3rd what LAUST said. It can really go both ways and influence your motivation to work and strive for excellence.

abc, I'm hoping to head in that direction myself. The first thing I need is to step foot, get my feet wet, in almost anything. I know tech support is high on the likelihood, I don't like doing it, but it is experience nonetheless.

vi_edit is correct with regards to luck. A person can be hard working, knowledgable, but sometimes if the luck isn't there, it really does make that road much harder to walk on. There's two ladies in our computer networking course that knew about 1/5 of what others know, but the opportunity came to them. They lucked out. Life's great sometimes isn't it? 🙂 I'm happy for them though.

Spent almost 4-5 months sending out resumes and applying at opportunistic locations, but haven't heard a word. I even tried volunteering at a few places, but all said they didn't need extra help.

Internship didn't go that well, as nobody know who we were, nor did they have any sort of work arrangement for us.

What I'm looking for right now is not money, but experience. I believe small local businesses work best, where IT is small (2-3 person) and there's opportunity for me to work and at the same time learn a lot from one or two gurus. The kind of person I really would like to meet is someone who is very willing to teach you along the way, not the kind that closes up on you, leave you on your own, thinking you might steal their job if you they taught you too much.

Hopefully, something will come up soon. *sigh*

abc, as far as I was told by one of the lead person in an international IT outsourcing company, many promotions and shuffles all happen within the company and the many departments. They hardly advertise job openings, its mainly internal postings and word of mouth.


 
The kind of person I really would like to meet is someone who is very willing to teach you along the way, not the kind that closes up on you, leave you on your own, thinking you might steal their job if you they taught you too much.
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Come work for me; I'll teach you everything you need to know to take my 2am calls to attend to the servers in the data center. 😀
 
The best advice I could give anyone looking to become "The" admin, is to learn, learn and learn. Any good admin has his head in books/the web when no other task is pressing.

People expect you to have answers. You won't always have them, but you need to know where to get them, fast.
Research skills are extremely important. Knowing where to find answers is key.

You need to be levelheaded. It took me quite a while to learn (ok, hehe Im still learning) to remain calm when things go wrong (which they will). Good admins are cool when things heat up.

You need to learn to properly plan and think things through. You need to know that no matter how much planning you do, there will always be un-expected situations.

Watch your machines like a hawk. Get to know everything about them.

Finally, the chances of you becoming "the" admin are much slimmer in a large company. You have to work your way up through the ranks. This can mean years of help desk before they even let you touch a server.
If you start at a smaller place, your chances of landing the position are much better (IMO).

That said, I have friends who are making more/equal at their big company help desk jobs than I am as a small company admin. The difference is, I get to call alot of the shots. In a big company, no one single guy calls any shots.
 
Saltin, thankyou for putting money in my pocket, advice well taken, and very much agree with.

Correct, in a large company, there's way too much politics going on (even in my 2 month internship I can see a lot of people inflames in the meeting room!! not a pretty scene). I myself prefer to work for a small company, as you get exposed to a lot more situations, more opportunity to learn and grow as a human being. That is one of the mistakes I regret. I had the opportunity to choose between a big corp or a small firm for my internship. I took the road most travelled 🙁 I missed a great learning opportunity.


Descartes, seeing how I'm an insomniac, that'd be great actually, wouldn't mind it at all! A boy's gotta do what a boy's gotta do. 🙂 Too bad I live in Canada though 🙁
 
I kind of evolved over the years into it. I was working as a Fortran programmer and when that contract ended I ended up back at the main office. At the time they had a Vax 8350 that was coasting a boatload of money to run so when the new CFO came in one of the first things he wanted to do was shutdown the Vax and move over to a PC LAN. Being the only computer tech type in the building I ended up overseeing this and learning Novell 3.11 from the ground up. During this period I also got to learn all about telephone switches and T1 hookup and configuration along with voice compression technology. As time went on I kept falling further behind the market salary wise so I finally decided that all my benefits were not worth continuing with the company and changed jobs.

I was supposed to be working LAN support for Navy Personnel but that contract ended up folding so I ended up with my first help desk type job in the Pentagon. The workstations were all Win 95 and the backend servers were NT 3.51 and NT 4.0. We were also inheriting an EDS contract with a bunch of Novell 3.1x servers that we were going to migrate over to NT 4.0. I was able to go from knowing nothing about NT to being head of tier 2 on the server side in about 6 months in that job and really learned a lot.

Because of my experience there with migrating users and servers from Novell to NT I ended up in my current position with an offer from a small contractor that took on people on a temp to perm basis for a large company. They had a GSA contract to migrate people over from Novell to NT and I ended up being hired onto a 5 man team to accomplish this task. We then performed all the admin tasks required for that network until the contract ended. I am currently close to rollout now of a different project that I have been working on since June 2000 and not really working so much on the sys admin side of things at present. My current goal is to get onto a server testing and integration team once this project ends.
 
interesting. kind of sounds like as best as we try to manage where we go, the wind blows in which ever direction it wants, and our sail moves us along based on that.

anybody found themselves job hopping because each place they went to, it took a few weeks to feel the environment to sense that everybody in your group was stuck in the desktop group and wasn't moving up and out anytime soon (which means you sure as heck would not)?
 
I was stupidly lucky...

I did tech support for 6 months, then my boss asked if I wanted to be the network/sys admin with a nice pay hike 🙂

I got not certs, no experience... I am working on my degree in comp-sci though.
 
Started off as tech support in my company.

From there went to programming (sent to school by company) in which we used a lot of SQL.

I am now a SQL server dba, and I work closely with the systems admin.

My boss wants me to learn his job as well for when he leaves.
 
Started in a helpdesk job for a start up company that grew like crazy. I had to quickly learn how to administer NT because because the other IT guys were too busy programming or being lazy asses.


That was 3 years ago..

I since then left that low paying job and am making 20K more as a Admin for a large chemical company. I talk to people all over the world every day.

The only Cert I have is A+, and it is meaningless.

As someone mentioned above, you will never know all the answers but being able to know where to find the answers is a life saver in the job. You need good web searching skills and contacts you can call when things hit the fan so you can pick their brain.

 
I managed to skip the usual help-desk. For us, the track to SysAdmin did not typically go through the help-desk.

(For this large company) The problem is: The help-desk is highly structured, and hires people off-the-street, with no IT background necessary. They train them, put them on the phones 8hrs per day until they burn-out (quit or asked to leave) or manage to find their way into some other area.

The SysAdmin area (the area that handles Servers/networks): is not terribly structured, and requires a fair amount of initiative to get trained, teach yourself, and figure stuff out. Not the same personality mix as the desktop support area.

I worked for a (small) community hospital, built my own departmental lan (taught myself from the ground up), taught myself networking, applications. (no domain stuff, no TCP/IP at that point). Because I had initiative (took on the IT staff and built my own lan) and could "figure stuff out" (I was my own support, no vendors, no IT area to help me) I got the job (+ a nice raise). Moved fairly quickly to Tier 3 server support, and from there to security.

Operations areas are almost always looking for the "get the job done" guy, not the certified guy, or the one who needs off-site training. "Can-Do" is an important attitude, along w/ "Can Learn" behaviour. 🙂
 
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