Lemmy.World is looking for 4 new Systems operators to help with our growing community.
Volunteers will assist our existing systems team with monitoring and maintenance.
We’re ideally looking for chill folks that want to give back to their community and work on our back-end infrastructure. Must have 4+ years of professional experience working in systems administration. We are not looking for junior admins at this time. Please keep in mind that, while this is a volunteer gig, we would ask you to be able to help at least 5-10 hours a week. We also understand this is a hobby and that family and work comes first.
Applicants must be okay with providing their CV and/or LinkedIn profile AND sitting for a video interview. This is due to the sensitivity of the infrastructure you will have access to.
We are an international team that works from both North America EST time (-4) and Europe CEST (+2) so we would ask that candidates be flexible with their availability.
If you are in AEST (+10) or JST (+9) please let us know, as we are looking for at least one Sysadmin to help out during our overnight.
You may be asked to participate in an on-call pool. Please keep in mind that this is a round-robin style pool, so it’s alright if you’re busy as it will just move along the chain.
If you’re interested and want to apply, click here.
Survivorship bias. the IT market is a lot more saturated now than it was 20 years ago. This person got in somewhere good early on and rode that career train. These opportunities rarely exist today unless you arre a charismatic super talented genius. I would not bet on most people being able to ever pull those kinds of numbers before burning out. Being a money chaser is not worth it in today’s world, value your health mental wellbeing and personal life equally if not more than your bank account. Live well below your means and learn how to save/invest, and find a life/career path you can feel good and satisfied in even if its not paying a whole lot. You r quality of life will skyrocket and you will have enough $ to feel secure. I worked years in industrial trade, made good cash, it wasnt worth it in the end. Just my 2 cents.
Yeah it’s hard to gain the high value skillsets these days, and I think it’s one of the reason those of us that have been in it for decades are able to do fine now. I got lucky where early on in my career I got in with a company that was small and had enormous growth over a 10 year span.
I’m similar paid to the person in question and am also an independant contractor. I make similar due to my experience level and rather unique combination of skills so I just cut my hours way back and typically work a few hours a day. So burnout is a non issue. I take no work where I’m on call or “first responder” and I make sure it’s always written into the contract that way.
It took 25+ years of busting ass to get here, although I have no regrets, and I recognize I am incredibly lucky to have the circumstances play out this way.
Not really true. It takes a bit of knowing your worth, advocating for yourself in interviews, and job hopping as needed for pay raises every year or two while continuing to build your skills both on the job and outside of it. IT isn’t an industry that lends itself to job stability and high pay if you stay in a role long term, and stagnation can certainly be a factor if you decide to stop learning things.
Also. it’s still very possible to get in, but focus these days is DevOps, automation, virtualization, and more recently, AI. You won’t make bank in some shitty low tier helpdesk role.
A good start would be certification path to pick up some straightforward “guaranteed to get you work” kind of certs like:
Alternately, getting a few programming languages under your belt is totally doable for free with Youtube and other online courses and then doing your own projects with public repositories on Github for prospective employers to see. Getting a foot in the door with dev is gonna be very luck of the draw though.
You definitely wont’ start out making a wage that high on the Ops side, but finding a foot in the door at between $25 and $30 an hour shouldn’t be hard once you get some bare minimum experience under your belt.
College grads may have an easier time, but I wouldn’t know, I dropped out and went the certification/experience route some 15+ years ago.
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You’re probably right with the bullshit going on now. IBM just loves fucking up everything it touches. You wouldn’t believe the headaches all the RHEL 9 crap and the end of CentOS has caused for some of my customers. AlmaLinux seems like a decent alternative, but not sure how well it’s going to be received long term.
I’ll add that I don’t know if there are good certs for it, but SQL admins are pretty much always in demand, and I hear that kinda thing can pay well. I knew some folks in business Intelligence (BI) that did nothing but SQL and outputting charts and data for analytics and they made bank. Seemed like a pretty neat job too, I have to admit. It’s cool to take data like that and turn it into something useful for everyone else.
And having occasionally mucked around in postgres DBs, yeah, good on them. SQL can be both completely simple, and at the same time, ridiculously complex and involved, all depending on how deep down the rabbit hole you want to go. Blows my mind all the things you can do with it with so few commands.
I’d say IT sysadmin work sucks unless the company runs proper shit and has a handle on it, which is more than often beyond your influence in the position. A lot of times the company doesn’t want to hire enough people, and overworking yourself will never be enough to get everything done. So you spend your days trying to handle the highest impact tasks coming from management and above, constantly being pulled in different directions, and never really feeling like you got anything meaningful accomplished. IT priorities also often conflict with business priorities, and if not handled right you will be caught in the middle of this and all your decisions will be scrutinized by the interested parties.
$300/day @ 8 hours = $37.50/hr / $78k/yr $500/day @ 8 hours = $62.50/hr / $130k/yr
Which are imo on the low end of U.S. tech salary. Considering a contractor also has overhead like healthcare, business expenses, any time spent in administration take home would potentially be lower.
The market is softer right now but will probably rebound in a couple years.