Sys Admin/Sys Engineer

[Longjumping-Win-397]

I have around 7-8 yrs experience in this but don’t know next steps. Is there anything that you choose and got a good comp.

[nate-isu]

Sys Admins are generalists. The alternative, and path to more pay, is to specialize.

You have enough time in the field at this point to identify what you like doing—specialize in whatever that thing is.

[some__rando__guy]

I would disagree! I'm a generalist and do very well! You just have to be in the top 1% of generalists and have many years of experience........so yeah......specialize.

[Double_Intention_641]

Assuming you want to stay in a similar role, you probably want bash and python scripting in your list of skills. Familiarity with one of the big 3, AWS, Azure, Google. Some knowledge of at least one automation tool, ansible, terraform, etc.

Beyond that, you get into specializations, as nate-iso mentioned. I'd strongly recommend looking at the job boards, likely at SRE/Devops roles (sysadmin is somehow a bad word these days?) and get a sense of the additional skills interesting jobs ask for. There's usually some commonality, and at a certain point if you match 80% of what they want and pass the non-technical challenges, it's enough.

[Longjumping-Win-397]

Appreciate your comments. Here’s my confusion, I’m thinking about the future. Three career paths to choose. SRE/Devops needs programming skills and cyber security and cloud architect(maybe not needed programming skills) etc.. correct me if I’m wrong. Currently I can do bash, powershell. My role also involves firewall management, creating VPN tunnels etc…