How to become a system administrator - a guide for beginners (part 4)
Previous part: habrahabr.ru/post/119407
In this part: in search of specialization. At the request of the end of the post table of contents on the previous parts.
So, let's say you quite coped with those zoos that you inherited from your predecessor, implemented everything that needed to be urgently done, thinking about a couple of changes, you even had free time, etc.
')
I will not tell you how to organize a network of a company and “what to do by a sysadmin” - these articles are about a career, and I will describe exactly the things that are important for a career, not for everyday work.
As soon as you have free time, you are again at a conceptual crossroads. You can just keep working as an administrator, and do it for a long time. You will accumulate experience, your resume will become less and less flashy, and the expected amount will gradually grow, you will have some real success story ... So it can go on indefinitely. Moreover, about this stage of sysadminism almost legends add up “I set everything up and I can do what I want,” “the more the admin works, the worse he is,” “a good admin has to idle while the servers are running”, etc.
But what next? And further changes can be only from your side. You can either continue spontaneous development “to the needs of the employer,” or you can start building your own specialization. In this case, the “development for the needs of the employer” will be sporadic for you, since business in moments of calm does not need anything new from IT, it is necessary that it continues to work. For real development, you need to look deeper, and spend your free time not on fulfilling the duties of office plankton, but on training (if you thought that having gone from an anime to a “tough admin”, the torment with books / manuals would end - do not dream).
Speaking of business needs (since it is he who pays the money, it is he who determines the situation on the labor market)
These needs are:
I will not consider the area related to information security - I have no idea how these people live. I will say only one important thing: in fact, the information security specialist is a theoretical opponent of the system administrator, because the administrator’s task is to make it work, and the security person’s task is to make it not work. It is clear that there is a nuance - “it didn’t work for an unauthorized user” - but, in fact, that’s the case - the security officer doesn’t care about functionality and stability, he is only interested in stopping access to those who aren’t supposed to. And the administrator (by and large) doesn’t care whoever is copying himself to a flash drive - he needs it to always work. Such an opposition is the correct method of organizing the life of a company, because if a person at the same time thinks about how to make it work, but not work, there is a bias in one of the parties.
About the difference between self-service office and production:
Consider two examples: a travel company selling vouchers. Business processes: signing contracts with operators, selling vouchers to customers. Office life: the Internet at every workplace, the workplace of an accountant, the ability to print documents, possibly video surveillance. It is obvious that even if the entire computer equipment fails, the ticket will be sold. Just as they will conclude a contract (they will print it from a flash drive from their neighbors).
Now we change the picture a little bit: a travel company, managers use a centralized database to write out trips, the system automatically reserves transport tickets, marks the tour as sold. Plus, there is a site where the same thing happens without managers. Office life: Internet everywhere, printers, computers, accounting. Obviously, a manager who cannot log in to contact is not the same as a manager who cannot sell a ticket to a client due to the fact that the database server went down.
In bourgeois, this is called misson critical. Obviously, the misson critical examples are complete. The Internet provider has the opportunity for the user to go to contact - mission critical. The bank - to process the transaction on the card - misson critical. There are many more examples that can be cited - scan a barcode at the checkout at the point of sale, be able to complete the reports of the serviced companies in the outsourced accounting department, manage it, and so on, on a computer with a CNC machine tool.
So, to put it bluntly, admins are divided into two classes - those who serve the back / front office and those who are busy with misson critical applications. Of course, if we are talking about a small company that has 20 staff and two CNC machines, then the same person who sets up the machine will have to fix the Vkontaktik, but the bigger the company, the more tangible this difference becomes.
Now I’ll say a serious thought, I’m not completely sure of its absolute truth, but intuition insists on justice:
Truly deep specialization can only be when working with misson-critical applications.
Roughly speaking, if you adminit 1C in the accounting of two to five LLCs, of which the office consists (. Eh ... holding company type) where you work, then this one. Downhill bookkeeping if they notice, but it will not produce anything but a quagger. If you administer 1C in an outsourcing accounting company, for which time-simple bookkeeping means a loss of money, customers, etc. - then this is another. It will require much deeper knowledge of what you administer. It will be necessary, because to study something without need is interesting, sometimes useful, but not at all the same as learning the main thing in work.
Now for some harsh truth: the backoffice administrator is enikeyschik. Even if admin. Yes, we need a higher qualification, we need more serious knowledge and experience - but the class of tasks is the same.
Thus, if we leave aside the "specialization" on the back-front-office, then the real specialization can only be on Important Things for the Company. That is to misson critical. If a company has grown at least to the “medium” class, then it usually has special people for each class of tasks. These “special people” are the system administrators with a deep specialization.
And a little more about system integration ... It so happened that I know very little about this area, so I will retell what I was told in the comments to previous articles: these are people who turn-key organize IT for companies.
If we go beyond the company with 1-2 specialists in the state, then we will have two areas of development: specialization and "IT director", aka CIO.
Who is CIO? This is the man who commands the rest of the computer people. In essence, this is a person who translates from human to non-computer, who can explain to the shareholders' council / CEO what is happening, why we need money and why so many people. The same person assumes responsibility for dissolving ... your subordinates. Roughly speaking, if an enikeyschik accidentally took down all the data from a flash drive from the CEO, then the admin will say “he is guilty” and that will end his responsibility. But with the CIO they will ask, “why did you hire an idiot?” - and the CIO will be to blame. Especially if the problem is not a one-time, but a system one.
Actually, the CIO, of course, must know what is happening around (in the computer world), follow the technology, make decisions about the introduction / introduction of a particular technology, but it may not have deep knowledge in the field. In essence, his main job is to be a manager. To be able to read people, predict their behavior and attitude to the tasks set. He should be able to correctly understand what the company wants from him, at the right time to stop the growth of IT for the sake of IT and be able to formulate the business requirements for IT. When it becomes necessary to use certain technologies, the task of the CIO is to find people who understand this.
The more serious and complex is the misson-critical infrastructure (its part), the more we have a need for people who know at least a part of it, but thoroughly. (Let us not deceive ourselves: the dream of any business is an employee who knows and is able to do everything, does all of it, and can still work as a night watchman (combining this with preparing tax reports) and all this 10 thousand a month). The greater the importance of the component, the more and more knowledgeable person is needed. Note that any business will strive to save money, and one of the tasks of the CIO (from the preceding section) is to explain why a tatty who can’t set up ICQ, and picks around in this whole day you have to pay 5-7 times more than the same tattle which “worked with the Oracle”, and the Windows admin, and the patch cord can be compressed, and in general, “knows everything and knows how to do everything”.
It is deep specialization - in my opinion, the most interesting career for a person who is interested in computers. Career CIO means that most of the time you will not work with computers, but with people.
I find it very difficult to give here a complete list of specializations, but I will try to outline the basic areas:
I do not specifically write names - this is the most common and coarse classification of specializations. The presence of knowledge in one area does not mean their absence in another. For example, it is almost impossible to be a DBMS specialist without cramming into the OS giblets, on which the DBMS is spinning. Similarly, virtualization requires a good knowledge of the OS and networks.
Next comes the deepening of specialization. In the case of networks, it is: working with local networks, city networks, specialization in equipment of a certain vendor (who said “tsiska”?), Routing at the level of autonomous systems, in the case of an operating system - selection of individual components / types of applications. The division in the remaining parts is clear - vendors, solutions, technologies. (For example, specialization in Infiniband, from specializations on solutions of a specific vendor with specializations for certain types of use, can grow from specialization in storage systems).
In general, the division is very, very conditional. For example, I find it difficult to attribute someone somewhere specializing in digital signature management systems.
However, the main thing is that specialization is more important than universality. Why? Because people who “know little about much” are easy to make (companies need specific knowledge, because they are few, easy to teach), there are many of them on the market. On the contrary, a person who has “a lot of knowledge” (and it doesn’t matter here, “about a lot” or “about something concrete”) is a terrible deficit, because they have to grow them for a long time themselves (and they can also go to competitors and show all their training efforts), there are practically no around them, etc. The result is a salary due to a sharp distortion of the market in favor of workers. And the higher the specialization, the more acute this bias.
Invalid question. Specialization on a specific OS, of course, maybe, but this is a very rare (I think) specialization - they usually specialize in specific software running under a particular platform, and it is the software that dictates which OS. So, rather, the question relates to which software you want to work with.
Deep specialization can be in any area. For example, a person who really well and deeply knows the nuances of AD schema changes when installing an Exchange Server is a person with a very narrow and deep specialization. Similarly, a person who knows the subtleties of the organization of a single authorization in heterogeneous networks based on solaris / windows - has a deep specialization.
Not. First of all, having knowledge in some field does not make you a specialist (work experience is obligatory), and secondly, I wrote a little higher that the salary of a specialist is not due to his qualifications, but to a shortage of specialists. In other words, if nobody needs your specialization, then nobody will offer you any money either. Obviously?
Note that this leads to the following problem: the higher your specialization, the harder it is for you to look for work - you need a company that really needs a person who is deeply versed in the very area where you work (and sometimes the situation is that they require knowledge is either much more than yours or much less). An even more frequent case, since there are too many specializations, they are looking for someone who is well acquainted with adjacent areas. This poses a new dilemma when looking for a job - to look for one’s own specialization for a long time, or to find an adjacent one relatively quickly?
However, this reasoning has already begun, for the objectivity of which I cannot vouch.
Lastly, I want to describe my own sense of specialization. The closest model is some kind of "skillbuild" in the RPG. Some skills require skills in other areas not below a certain level; the higher the skill, the harder it is to get the next level; getting a new level in a particular area is quite perceptible as “levelap”. Moreover, the area is much narrower and more specific than specialization.
For example, I occasionally download leveles to myself in the linux system utilities. About half a year ago, for myself, I opened the options -A and -B for grep (output the specified number of lines after and before the found text), and about a year ago - the option "-o" (only output the found text, not all line. Each such discovery (of course, it’s not about “learning the options by heart”, but about “I know and can use it where it is needed) is a small but tangible levelup in a small area. Sometimes it happens that having“ pumped ”some levels in different (seemingly incoherent) areas, you discover a new "skill" for yourself, which cannot be studied without studying previous areas.
I wanted to tell about one more potential path of development of the sysadmin - to be the architect of the new systems. But, since it is precisely with this that I myself am now busy and still have not outgrown this level, I cannot objectively write about it objectively. In short: not just to serve the mission-critical application, but to decide how it will be, how it will work and how to do it. It is interesting, difficult, and I don’t know how to put it exactly in the higher hierarchy.
Part one : description of the profession, where to start
Part two Enikeem life: interview, what to do, what to strive for
Part Three From enikeev to admins: how to leave, where to leave.
In this part: in search of specialization. At the request of the end of the post table of contents on the previous parts.
Career sysadmin
So, let's say you quite coped with those zoos that you inherited from your predecessor, implemented everything that needed to be urgently done, thinking about a couple of changes, you even had free time, etc.
')
I will not tell you how to organize a network of a company and “what to do by a sysadmin” - these articles are about a career, and I will describe exactly the things that are important for a career, not for everyday work.
As soon as you have free time, you are again at a conceptual crossroads. You can just keep working as an administrator, and do it for a long time. You will accumulate experience, your resume will become less and less flashy, and the expected amount will gradually grow, you will have some real success story ... So it can go on indefinitely. Moreover, about this stage of sysadminism almost legends add up “I set everything up and I can do what I want,” “the more the admin works, the worse he is,” “a good admin has to idle while the servers are running”, etc.
But what next? And further changes can be only from your side. You can either continue spontaneous development “to the needs of the employer,” or you can start building your own specialization. In this case, the “development for the needs of the employer” will be sporadic for you, since business in moments of calm does not need anything new from IT, it is necessary that it continues to work. For real development, you need to look deeper, and spend your free time not on fulfilling the duties of office plankton, but on training (if you thought that having gone from an anime to a “tough admin”, the torment with books / manuals would end - do not dream).
Business needs
Speaking of business needs (since it is he who pays the money, it is he who determines the situation on the labor market)
These needs are:
- Office self-service (back / front office)
- Development / maintenance of means of production
- Information security
- System integration
I will not consider the area related to information security - I have no idea how these people live. I will say only one important thing: in fact, the information security specialist is a theoretical opponent of the system administrator, because the administrator’s task is to make it work, and the security person’s task is to make it not work. It is clear that there is a nuance - “it didn’t work for an unauthorized user” - but, in fact, that’s the case - the security officer doesn’t care about functionality and stability, he is only interested in stopping access to those who aren’t supposed to. And the administrator (by and large) doesn’t care whoever is copying himself to a flash drive - he needs it to always work. Such an opposition is the correct method of organizing the life of a company, because if a person at the same time thinks about how to make it work, but not work, there is a bias in one of the parties.
About the difference between self-service office and production:
Consider two examples: a travel company selling vouchers. Business processes: signing contracts with operators, selling vouchers to customers. Office life: the Internet at every workplace, the workplace of an accountant, the ability to print documents, possibly video surveillance. It is obvious that even if the entire computer equipment fails, the ticket will be sold. Just as they will conclude a contract (they will print it from a flash drive from their neighbors).
Now we change the picture a little bit: a travel company, managers use a centralized database to write out trips, the system automatically reserves transport tickets, marks the tour as sold. Plus, there is a site where the same thing happens without managers. Office life: Internet everywhere, printers, computers, accounting. Obviously, a manager who cannot log in to contact is not the same as a manager who cannot sell a ticket to a client due to the fact that the database server went down.
In bourgeois, this is called misson critical. Obviously, the misson critical examples are complete. The Internet provider has the opportunity for the user to go to contact - mission critical. The bank - to process the transaction on the card - misson critical. There are many more examples that can be cited - scan a barcode at the checkout at the point of sale, be able to complete the reports of the serviced companies in the outsourced accounting department, manage it, and so on, on a computer with a CNC machine tool.
So, to put it bluntly, admins are divided into two classes - those who serve the back / front office and those who are busy with misson critical applications. Of course, if we are talking about a small company that has 20 staff and two CNC machines, then the same person who sets up the machine will have to fix the Vkontaktik, but the bigger the company, the more tangible this difference becomes.
Now I’ll say a serious thought, I’m not completely sure of its absolute truth, but intuition insists on justice:
Truly deep specialization can only be when working with misson-critical applications.
Roughly speaking, if you adminit 1C in the accounting of two to five LLCs, of which the office consists (. Eh ... holding company type) where you work, then this one. Downhill bookkeeping if they notice, but it will not produce anything but a quagger. If you administer 1C in an outsourcing accounting company, for which time-simple bookkeeping means a loss of money, customers, etc. - then this is another. It will require much deeper knowledge of what you administer. It will be necessary, because to study something without need is interesting, sometimes useful, but not at all the same as learning the main thing in work.
Now for some harsh truth: the backoffice administrator is enikeyschik. Even if admin. Yes, we need a higher qualification, we need more serious knowledge and experience - but the class of tasks is the same.
Thus, if we leave aside the "specialization" on the back-front-office, then the real specialization can only be on Important Things for the Company. That is to misson critical. If a company has grown at least to the “medium” class, then it usually has special people for each class of tasks. These “special people” are the system administrators with a deep specialization.
And a little more about system integration ... It so happened that I know very little about this area, so I will retell what I was told in the comments to previous articles: these are people who turn-key organize IT for companies.
Career: CIO
If we go beyond the company with 1-2 specialists in the state, then we will have two areas of development: specialization and "IT director", aka CIO.
Who is CIO? This is the man who commands the rest of the computer people. In essence, this is a person who translates from human to non-computer, who can explain to the shareholders' council / CEO what is happening, why we need money and why so many people. The same person assumes responsibility for dissolving ... your subordinates. Roughly speaking, if an enikeyschik accidentally took down all the data from a flash drive from the CEO, then the admin will say “he is guilty” and that will end his responsibility. But with the CIO they will ask, “why did you hire an idiot?” - and the CIO will be to blame. Especially if the problem is not a one-time, but a system one.
Actually, the CIO, of course, must know what is happening around (in the computer world), follow the technology, make decisions about the introduction / introduction of a particular technology, but it may not have deep knowledge in the field. In essence, his main job is to be a manager. To be able to read people, predict their behavior and attitude to the tasks set. He should be able to correctly understand what the company wants from him, at the right time to stop the growth of IT for the sake of IT and be able to formulate the business requirements for IT. When it becomes necessary to use certain technologies, the task of the CIO is to find people who understand this.
Career: specialty
The more serious and complex is the misson-critical infrastructure (its part), the more we have a need for people who know at least a part of it, but thoroughly. (Let us not deceive ourselves: the dream of any business is an employee who knows and is able to do everything, does all of it, and can still work as a night watchman (combining this with preparing tax reports) and all this 10 thousand a month). The greater the importance of the component, the more and more knowledgeable person is needed. Note that any business will strive to save money, and one of the tasks of the CIO (from the preceding section) is to explain why a tatty who can’t set up ICQ, and picks around in this whole day you have to pay 5-7 times more than the same tattle which “worked with the Oracle”, and the Windows admin, and the patch cord can be compressed, and in general, “knows everything and knows how to do everything”.
It is deep specialization - in my opinion, the most interesting career for a person who is interested in computers. Career CIO means that most of the time you will not work with computers, but with people.
Specialization in what?
I find it very difficult to give here a complete list of specializations, but I will try to outline the basic areas:
- networks (local and Internet)
- Operating Systems
- application software packages (various DBMS, storage, ERP, CRM, etc.)
- Storage systems (data storage systems)
- virtualization
- industrial equipment
I do not specifically write names - this is the most common and coarse classification of specializations. The presence of knowledge in one area does not mean their absence in another. For example, it is almost impossible to be a DBMS specialist without cramming into the OS giblets, on which the DBMS is spinning. Similarly, virtualization requires a good knowledge of the OS and networks.
Next comes the deepening of specialization. In the case of networks, it is: working with local networks, city networks, specialization in equipment of a certain vendor (who said “tsiska”?), Routing at the level of autonomous systems, in the case of an operating system - selection of individual components / types of applications. The division in the remaining parts is clear - vendors, solutions, technologies. (For example, specialization in Infiniband, from specializations on solutions of a specific vendor with specializations for certain types of use, can grow from specialization in storage systems).
In general, the division is very, very conditional. For example, I find it difficult to attribute someone somewhere specializing in digital signature management systems.
However, the main thing is that specialization is more important than universality. Why? Because people who “know little about much” are easy to make (companies need specific knowledge, because they are few, easy to teach), there are many of them on the market. On the contrary, a person who has “a lot of knowledge” (and it doesn’t matter here, “about a lot” or “about something concrete”) is a terrible deficit, because they have to grow them for a long time themselves (and they can also go to competitors and show all their training efforts), there are practically no around them, etc. The result is a salary due to a sharp distortion of the market in favor of workers. And the higher the specialization, the more acute this bias.
Windows or Linux?
Invalid question. Specialization on a specific OS, of course, maybe, but this is a very rare (I think) specialization - they usually specialize in specific software running under a particular platform, and it is the software that dictates which OS. So, rather, the question relates to which software you want to work with.
Deep specialization can be in any area. For example, a person who really well and deeply knows the nuances of AD schema changes when installing an Exchange Server is a person with a very narrow and deep specialization. Similarly, a person who knows the subtleties of the organization of a single authorization in heterogeneous networks based on solaris / windows - has a deep specialization.
I am a specialist! Give a lot of money.
Not. First of all, having knowledge in some field does not make you a specialist (work experience is obligatory), and secondly, I wrote a little higher that the salary of a specialist is not due to his qualifications, but to a shortage of specialists. In other words, if nobody needs your specialization, then nobody will offer you any money either. Obviously?
Note that this leads to the following problem: the higher your specialization, the harder it is for you to look for work - you need a company that really needs a person who is deeply versed in the very area where you work (and sometimes the situation is that they require knowledge is either much more than yours or much less). An even more frequent case, since there are too many specializations, they are looking for someone who is well acquainted with adjacent areas. This poses a new dilemma when looking for a job - to look for one’s own specialization for a long time, or to find an adjacent one relatively quickly?
However, this reasoning has already begun, for the objectivity of which I cannot vouch.
Playing RPG
Lastly, I want to describe my own sense of specialization. The closest model is some kind of "skillbuild" in the RPG. Some skills require skills in other areas not below a certain level; the higher the skill, the harder it is to get the next level; getting a new level in a particular area is quite perceptible as “levelap”. Moreover, the area is much narrower and more specific than specialization.
For example, I occasionally download leveles to myself in the linux system utilities. About half a year ago, for myself, I opened the options -A and -B for grep (output the specified number of lines after and before the found text), and about a year ago - the option "-o" (only output the found text, not all line. Each such discovery (of course, it’s not about “learning the options by heart”, but about “I know and can use it where it is needed) is a small but tangible levelup in a small area. Sometimes it happens that having“ pumped ”some levels in different (seemingly incoherent) areas, you discover a new "skill" for yourself, which cannot be studied without studying previous areas.
Conclusion
I wanted to tell about one more potential path of development of the sysadmin - to be the architect of the new systems. But, since it is precisely with this that I myself am now busy and still have not outgrown this level, I cannot objectively write about it objectively. In short: not just to serve the mission-critical application, but to decide how it will be, how it will work and how to do it. It is interesting, difficult, and I don’t know how to put it exactly in the higher hierarchy.
Table of contents
Part one : description of the profession, where to start
Part two Enikeem life: interview, what to do, what to strive for
Part Three From enikeev to admins: how to leave, where to leave.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/120009/
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