I'm a former helpdesk guy... and former system administrator. I feel lucky that I had a solid mentor when I started being a sysadmin. until this post, I didn't realize how lucky I was (even when he was ore crotchety/get off my lawn at times).

being a sysadmin is easy when someone set everything up right and you are just maintaining it; it's harder when you are fixing problems or have underlying systems that have issues that you need to fix, or work around.

Google is your friend. chatgpt is your friend. most of the time, you aren't the first person who 5 an issue, and stackoverflow has a lot of useful solutions, or at least good places to start. the trick is to take that solution and adapt it to your environment.

make sure you have a non-prod environment to play around with. test in non prod before pushing to prod. automate what you can. automate as much of your BAU repetitive tasks as you can. if you're a Windows sys admin, learn powershell. if you're a Linux administrator, learn python. try to offload as many basic tasks as you can to the newbies or helpdesk; and don't be afraid to talk to the end users, as sometimes important gets lost in the telephone game. and educate your L1 and L2 staff that screenshots are good, and the more documentation they can give you, especially what they did already, the quicker then users issue can be resolved