From linux admin to python programmer or how and why I changed my profession

For almost thirty years, I was promoted to senior system administrator. I had about forty servers with linux on board. The company grew and expanded, but the tasks were reduced to building up the power of the ready-made functionality.

And everything would be fine, but over time and for certain reasons, discomfort began to prevail over comfort.

First, the process of support itself, or rather its “permanent” nature or the absence of any completion. Small tasks, when executed, are superimposed on each other ad infinitum and turn into a huge lump that constantly changes its size - the ratio of completed and unfulfilled tasks. What ultimately generates the questions: "What I have already done useful, what else will I do, and to what, in the end, am I moving?"

Secondly, interrupts. In the matter of system administration, they stand out from all the problems and can take anyone out of their emotional balance. When you write code, you optimize the service and every half hour you are distracted by questions, urgent tasks and challenges - it is sometimes very hard to get back to work and time is spent on it - you can sit for fifteen minutes remembering where you were pulled from and what you did (In the book " Time management for system administrators "Thomas A. Limoncelli is well written about this). As a result, interrupts form the statement “I am not allowed to work”! ..
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Third, the habit of the work process. As is known, a person gets used to everything and that which initially caused admiration and brought overall satisfaction in the end, becomes ordinary and boring. When everything is spinning and working perfectly, only you and the department head know about it, users take it for granted and have no reason to be proud. On the other hand, they notice any minor mistake, which affects both the karma of the entire department and the internal state of the administrator - you convince yourself against the will - “I am a bad employee”.

All this concerns the service as a whole and such is its path. And I'm in it, little by little, but I lost faith.

What did I want? More immersion in more creative work, reducing influence from the side of small things, seeing the end result and getting satisfaction from it. And that's all. Tired and alienated by looking at our programmers department, reading habr or looking at developerslife gifs, I realized that if I can't get it in the field of adminstration, it's time to change my profession, and since I liked to write more and more code, the choice not long to wait.

The choice of language for me has always been a sheer frustration. At work, I wrote on bash, because I needed to write on something, and I’ve got enough of its capabilities for system administration. Perl didn’t like syntax. For a long time he tried to accustom himself to ansi C, he worked two books, - Unix development of network applications (William Richard Stevens) and Programming for UNIX. The most comprehensive manual (Mark J. Rochkind). But I did not find the use of acquired knowledge, I still regret the time spent. According to the requirements, I would like it to keep up with linux, it was universal, could both sys (for current scripts), and the web (with a backlog for the future) and not vyravlaznym on syntax. Around Python went very long, - its relative youth, low popularity, and, I do not know why, its name slowed down. Over time, watching the giant companies that increasingly use python in production, and by the time I decided to change my profession, I had already decided on the language, although there was not much to choose from.

The first six months I read Mark Lutz, tried to write something, but the knowledge was fragmentary and I was afraid to use it on the combat servers, and I did not see any benefit in replacing bash with python. Time dragged on, and I liked my idea less and less. In the end, I convinced myself that if I don’t succeed in it, I’ll succeed in others, we need courses, in a short time, with the elaboration of practice and that there is responsibility for the money paid. It will be easier and faster.

I found a monthly Python course at a local institute and persuaded the manual to make it necessary, although by the time of payment I was ready to pay for it myself. For a month of training, everything fell into place. Everything accumulated before and read on the Internet has decomposed in shelves and has become clear and transparent. No book can replace live teaching, where any inaccuracy or understatement can be explained on the spot.

Then, as if, for six months, gradually and in his spare time, he rewrote all the scripts and all the automation in python, wrote a statistics server for squid (python, wsgi). Already for his hard-earned, he took courses through the webinar on the PLO and django, because he decided not to try to argue their necessity to the current employer. Rewrote everything with the light of new knowledge. Then, for the sake of broadening my horizons, I also took courses in testing, but I did not like it, I left as a fallback.

The next six months, in addition to direct responsibilities, were spent on the support and optimization of the code I wrote and on the search for work. Considered only full-time, - could no longer admin, dreaming of new work and new opportunities.

During this time, about a dozen interviews for the junior position took place. Only about a dozen. But everywhere it was required or django + frontend, or with experience from two years. There is no experience in production, but I haven’t and I still don’t have any desire to engage in frontend. What is still strange, there were not many questions about the language, but there were many according to the theory - OOP, patterns, scrum methodologies, agile - which I naturally did not know. Continuing to bang my head against the doors of the conference rooms and listening to the standard phrase “We will call you back,” I continued to walk by invitation. And in the end I was taken backend by the developer in a closed project.

I have been working at the current place of work for several months and I can sum up.

In general, it was spent a year and a half. For some it is a lot, but with all the courses, nightly homework, reading, writing and rewriting the code, as well as with the current tasks in a growing company, for me this time has flown by.

That's what I wanted, I certainly got, although I was not happy about it for a long time - the feeling “I succeeded, I became a programmer” burned out very quickly, in about a week, and they came to replace him:

Work life with a wild load. Since college time, I have not strained my brain. As a result, poor sleep, thinking about the code in your free time, when, for example, you need to rest with your family, and even general feeling of well-being, although now you’re kind of involved. The fact that so much time has passed, I realized already when writing this article. Time has accelerated greatly and now I’m afraid that my whole life would just as quickly pass by. Maybe it's time to learn to relax.

The fight against procrastination. Good system administrators have a lot more free time than they say. Thanks to what a lot of subscriptions, channels on YouTube are accumulating, profile sites, jokes, many acquaintances in the network and interests. Personally, I could spend up to three hours a day reading and watching all this. What I had in my current position, for lack of time, had to be practically abandoned. Initially, I just read fluently, then I read just the headlines, and then I completely unsubscribed. I learned not to respond to instant messages of the messenger at my workplace, so as not to be distracted and lose my thoughts. Now he remains subscribed to a dozen of only specialized sites.

Initially, I tried to bind these difficulties to my age, and during one of the interviews I was told that it was not profitable for the company to invest money in me and that it was too late I decided to change my profession. But now I can say that this is not the case.

The thing is the profession of the system administrator. The work, the final result of which is committed to absolute law, greatly relaxes life positions and aspirations, and communication with users and listening to their grievances further strengthens the anti-social beginnings. And here already, someone like me, begins to think about greater utility, which leads to the search for a more harmonious life, and who arranges everything and he continues this difficult existence.

I noticed that recently a lot of familiar admins are starting to get ready for conversion, or have already changed their profession. And the development of cloud technologies and the expansion of the influence of outsourcing companies, only reinforce this trend.

System administration is slowly losing its relevance and in the near future, this profession is likely to change, become a hot start and, perhaps, an internship for more and more new programmers and other omni-directional IT specialists. But not more.