Hi sysadmins, I am thinking of doing a pretty drastic career change. I have 10+ years of experience in chemistry doing bioanalysis and a few years repairing breath alcohol analyzers. I have always considered messing around with electronics, networking, and computers/servers as a hobby and have been using various Linux distros as my main os for almost 20 years.
I have come to see my specialty in my line of work as a dead end. I’m pretty damn good at my job but I feel like automation is going to be taking over very soon, and I’m not that good that I think I’ll be in the top 10% that get to stick around and run the automations when the robots finally take over. So I’m considering doing a career change to IT/sysadmin.
What I’d like to know is what should I learn how to do to see if I’ll even like moving down this path? What can I set up at home, break, then fix that would give me an idea as to what the sysadmin life is really like?
I’m pretty sure I haven’t ever really done any sysadmin type work with my home setups, seeing as I build and set up services I want for myself and at the level I’m willing to put up with. For the most part I can be handed something already implemented and work within that space to keep it going and adjust it to what I want it to do or fit my set up. I can usually find my way through log files and error codes to figure out what the problem is and duckduckgo my way to a fix.
Sounds like you know at least enough for a junior admin job if you can find one. What you’re missing is the “street smarts” that only comes with experience. How things actually work in real life businesses, with real life users and salespeople and managers and C-levels throwing shit into the sauce.
Getting the job is going to be the hard part, for numerous reasons that have nothing to do with you personally. It’s a shitshow out there. Best of luck.