I worked at a university in a networking research group, doing research, and being one of the sysadmins for all our machines. (Since we were doing a lot of kernel development, using weird networking equipment and topologies for testing stuff, and having machines slung all over the internet for measurement purposes, we needed some sysadmins). We were the annoying research group that always wanted to do something bigger, different and more complicated than the centralised ITS was comfortable with.

After a while (Nearly 10 years!) the fact that most of my colleagues were students and would grow up and move on got to be too depressing for me. I also felt that I wasn't learning much in the way of new things. Where's the challenge? How was I better today than I was yesterday? Much of the learning I was doing was at home after hours.

Now I work for Google, doing some sysadmin/networking stuff there. It's fascinating because it's a different scale. Instead of having 150 machines to manage, Google has what can only be approximated as an infinite number of machines. The challenges are new, and there's more people to learn from. (Sorry, I don't know much about our mail infrastructure, there are large parts of it that bother me too)

But now, after 3 years at Google, I feel that I've learnt about how you do things at truly ludicrous scale. (Hint: More layers of indirection. Many more.) There's more to learn certainly, but I think I've passed the 80/20 point. The challenges are still interesting, and the problems can only be described as Epic (with a capital E).

I'll probably stay at Google and work on Epic problems and try and come up with novel solutions, but similar thoughts to yours have been weighing on my mind.

Perry

Oh, this rings bells. Like you, I worked in a university environment for a few years, without ever devising a proper game plan other than to "get better". Unfortunately, while I was happy, I didn't realise how well off I was and I laboured under the delusion that I needed to go out into the Real World to "have a career". Like Perry, I also grew tired of seeing friends leave (it didn't occur to me that I was surrounded by ample, readily-available opportunities to make new ones). (The remaining issue was that support staff tended to be put on rolling two year contracts so stability was not guaranteed.)

I look back now and wonder if I made the right decision. I had the career and yet haven't arrived at a better situation than I had then. (Of course, university computing departments have changed a lot too so there's no assurance that all would have been peaches and cream had I remained. And my career has always been stymied by my reluctance to work in the capital.) I guess there are always the paths untrod. All I will say is: if you're happy in your current job and it's stable, don't go chasing the chimera of 'career'.

- Ade

I too spent most of a decade as a University Sysadmin, and then moved out to the corporate world. Looking back several times over the last 20+ years I usually come away with the thought that I'm doing the same things I was doing back then. Sure I'm using different software, and on different scales and even different levels of corporate visibility, but in the end I'm still doing the same thing as before.

That being said, our company was recently taken over by a larger company from a different field. With this we now have a new CEO, who because he did not know what we did (from a practical standpoint - our new parent company is marketing, we deal with implementation), interviewed everyone in the company. One of his questions to me was "what next", which put me a bit off-balance at the time because I'm usually only thinking that sort of thing when I'm unsettled, and right now I'm reasonably comfortable here. Plus there really is no "next step" for me here as an Admin, it is either continue doing what I enjoy, in an environment that I enjoy or move elsewhere. Even if I were to move elsewhere I'm reasonably certain I would be looking back again in another few years thinking the same thing over again.

All that to say, I feel that "having a career" as an admin is a bit difficult in the traditional sense of what a career stands for, i.e. moving up the corporate ladder. A short ladder in the corporate world is still a short ladder.

My view is that it's certainly possible to move up on a technical level, especially if what you want to do is build systems instead of just run them. You can deal with more complex systems with more demanding requirements, larger systems, more automated systems, systems with more exotic parts (SANs, clustering software, heavy virtualization, and so on), the special challenges of scaling up an environment under load, or all of the above. Some of this slides into 'devops' but I don't think that's a bad thing.

(And there's all sorts of sub-fields too, like security, which is basically its own career if you want to go in that direction.)

For some of these you'll need to work in specific environments, such as a startup-like company or project within a larger company. For all of these you have to have a vision of what you like to do or want to do (for whatever reason). Many of these will require some degree of technical or team leadership because they're too big a job to be done by a single person acting alone, which may bias some people away from the higher end of them.

When I look at my life and personality, it's quite clear that I'm a problem solver. That sits at the centre of my approach to virtually everything (with a few notable exceptions like music). Sysadmin work seems to be the best way to leverage my skills set and aptitudes around that.

I would describe myself as having a career as a sysadmin though, and I don't think it necessarily implies any planning or forethought. I've had have a fairly clear trajectory, but it's never really been one I've planned, apart from one specific job change. For that one I went direct to the sysadmin manager at the company I worked for, outlined where I thought I was, and asked him what I needed to learn to join his team (and he obliged and went out of his way to get me into it). I think that's the only time I've specifically learned something to get a job!

Beyond that I've been lucky enough to just follow the opportunities that come up, if the time is right, with a preference towards ones that will present interesting problems. I don't jump on every opportunity, and I much prefer to work for a place for a number of years rather than jump jobs year-to-year like a surprising number of people seem to do.

That inherent drive to solve problems is what drives my skills development too, to a large part. I care very little about learning something technical because it will get me a better job, I learn it because it solves a problem I have or am anticipating, or because it's interesting on some geeky level :)

Some sysadmins I know approach this question from a different angle.

Who says that you need a career? You could approach what you do not as a career but rather as a trade or craft. If you do, your mindset is about improving and perfecting your craft rather than whether you're progressing in a career.

Just a thought.

I conceive of “career” as a subset of “legacy”. And thus I wonder, has my work made any difference to the world? Did I have any significance? The job I hold now does qualify, though only vaguely and distantly; my real impact, insofar as I’ve had any, has been outside of it.

(This is also to say that I wouldn’t approach the question of career from an angle of “what is the next rung for me to climb?” which also implies “do I even have any idea what the ladder in question is?” – which seems to be what you have trouble answering. My angle would would be, “am I satisfied with the significance of the work I’m doing?” (of which the implication is “is what I do for a living something whose significance I care about or am I satisfied pursuing that elsewhere in my life?”). Answers as to where to go next, if anywhere, will follow automatically. (Well… to some extent.))

(Mind you, this asks a new can of open-ended worms. Now the question without direct answers is, what kind of impact would I feel satisfied to have had? Can I pursue it? How? What is my realm of possibilities, and can I expand that?)

—Aristotle Pagaltzis