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submitted 11 months ago by lwadmin@lemmy.world to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world

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Lemmy.World is looking for 4 new Systems operators to help with our growing community.

Volunteers will assist our existing systems team with monitoring and maintenance.

We’re ideally looking for chill folks that want to give back to their community and work on our back-end infrastructure. Must have 4+ years of professional experience working in systems administration. We are not looking for junior admins at this time. Please keep in mind that, while this is a volunteer gig, we would ask you to be able to help at least 5-10 hours a week. We also understand this is a hobby and that family and work comes first.

Applicants must be okay with providing their CV and/or LinkedIn profile AND sitting for a video interview. This is due to the sensitivity of the infrastructure you will have access to.

We are an international team that works from both North America EST time (-4) and Europe CEST (+2) so we would ask that candidates be flexible with their availability.

If you are in AEST (+10) or JST (+9) please let us know, as we are looking for at least one Sysadmin to help out during our overnight.

You may be asked to participate in an on-call pool. Please keep in mind that this is a round-robin style pool, so it's alright if you're busy as it will just move along the chain.

If you're interested and want to apply, click here.

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[-] quantum_mechanic@lemmy.world 300 points 11 months ago

I have the experience, but not the energy nor passion as I am almost burned out already. I hope you find some awesome people.

[-] indierockspockears@lemmy.world 72 points 11 months ago

If it was a paying gig would you consider it? 5 to 10 hours a week, let's say 10. What kind of salary would you expect?

Just curious.

[-] JJROKCZ@lemmy.world 101 points 11 months ago

I also have the desired skill set and experience far surpassing what they’re asking for but not the time or energy to do this since my work already demands 60+ hours a week and on-call from me. Yes I’m American.

To answer your pay question; around 4-500 would be the average pay for 10 hours this position in the working world. Since the fediverse instances have next to zero reliable income (donations can’t be counted as reliable) I understand this is a difficult if not impossible bill to pay. This is why they’re asking for volunteers whose work schedule is more sane and therefore have the energy and time to commit. I wish I was available to do so, maybe if my current job search is successful at finding something more chill.

[-] quantum_mechanic@lemmy.world 41 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Knowing this is a volunteer project, I'd never request renumeration. If I were contracting with a large company, I guess I'd charge 300-500 per day. That's just based on quotes I get on LinkedIn, as I've never worked as a contractor. Also I couldn't have it interfere with my main job, where I'm also on call, so it would be lower priority.

[+] beckerist@lemmy.world 27 points 11 months ago

[deleted]

[-] Chunk@lemmy.world 11 points 11 months ago

I can't tell if this career path is worth the stress but you're describing a lot of money. And it makes me feel like this is worth it.

[-] Smokeydope@lemmy.world 34 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Survivorship bias. the IT market is a lot more saturated now than it was 20 years ago. This person got in somewhere good early on and rode that career train. These opportunities rarely exist today unless you arre a charismatic super talented genius. I would not bet on most people being able to ever pull those kinds of numbers before burning out. Being a money chaser is not worth it in today's world, value your health mental wellbeing and personal life equally if not more than your bank account. Live well below your means and learn how to save/invest, and find a life/career path you can feel good and satisfied in even if its not paying a whole lot. You r quality of life will skyrocket and you will have enough $ to feel secure. I worked years in industrial trade, made good cash, it wasnt worth it in the end. Just my 2 cents.

[-] Unforseen@lemmy.world 9 points 11 months ago

Yeah it's hard to gain the high value skillsets these days, and I think it's one of the reason those of us that have been in it for decades are able to do fine now. I got lucky where early on in my career I got in with a company that was small and had enormous growth over a 10 year span.

I'm similar paid to the person in question and am also an independant contractor. I make similar due to my experience level and rather unique combination of skills so I just cut my hours way back and typically work a few hours a day. So burnout is a non issue. I take no work where I'm on call or "first responder" and I make sure it's always written into the contract that way.

It took 25+ years of busting ass to get here, although I have no regrets, and I recognize I am incredibly lucky to have the circumstances play out this way.

[-] tomkatt@lemmy.world 8 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

This person got in somewhere good early on and rode that career train. These opportunities rarely exist today unless you arre a charismatic super talented genius.

Not really true. It takes a bit of knowing your worth, advocating for yourself in interviews, and job hopping as needed for pay raises every year or two while continuing to build your skills both on the job and outside of it. IT isn't an industry that lends itself to job stability and high pay if you stay in a role long term, and stagnation can certainly be a factor if you decide to stop learning things.

Also. it's still very possible to get in, but focus these days is DevOps, automation, virtualization, and more recently, AI. You won't make bank in some shitty low tier helpdesk role.

A good start would be certification path to pick up some straightforward "guaranteed to get you work" kind of certs like:

Linux+
Network+
VMware VCP-DCV (and later with experience maybe VCP-CMA)
Any Redhat cert
Security+ if you're interested in cybersecurity and/or federal work (USA, not sure about other places)

Alternately, getting a few programming languages under your belt is totally doable for free with Youtube and other online courses and then doing your own projects with public repositories on Github for prospective employers to see. Getting a foot in the door with dev is gonna be very luck of the draw though.

You definitely wont' start out making a wage that high on the Ops side, but finding a foot in the door at between $25 and $30 an hour shouldn't be hard once you get some bare minimum experience under your belt.

College grads may have an easier time, but I wouldn't know, I dropped out and went the certification/experience route some 15+ years ago.

[-] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 3 points 11 months ago

Any Redhat cert

Pick up the Oracle cert. It looks like Oracle is gonna be more valuable than RedHat for a while.

[-] tomkatt@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago

You're probably right with the bullshit going on now. IBM just loves fucking up everything it touches. You wouldn't believe the headaches all the RHEL 9 crap and the end of CentOS has caused for some of my customers. AlmaLinux seems like a decent alternative, but not sure how well it's going to be received long term.

I'll add that I don't know if there are good certs for it, but SQL admins are pretty much always in demand, and I hear that kinda thing can pay well. I knew some folks in business Intelligence (BI) that did nothing but SQL and outputting charts and data for analytics and they made bank. Seemed like a pretty neat job too, I have to admit. It's cool to take data like that and turn it into something useful for everyone else.

And having occasionally mucked around in postgres DBs, yeah, good on them. SQL can be both completely simple, and at the same time, ridiculously complex and involved, all depending on how deep down the rabbit hole you want to go. Blows my mind all the things you can do with it with so few commands.

[-] nijave@lemmy.world 3 points 11 months ago

$300/day @ 8 hours = $37.50/hr / $78k/yr $500/day @ 8 hours = $62.50/hr / $130k/yr

Which are imo on the low end of U.S. tech salary. Considering a contractor also has overhead like healthcare, business expenses, any time spent in administration take home would potentially be lower.

The market is softer right now but will probably rebound in a couple years.

[-] agent_flounder@lemmy.world 9 points 11 months ago

Infosec is a good choice if you have the ability to think analytically and to learn new things faster than average. Demand for such jobs is probably going to be growing for a while still.

[-] DokPsy@lemmy.world 3 points 11 months ago

That barrier to entry is no joke tho. I'm still trying to get myself to a point where I can confidently put my hat in the ring for infosec roles

[-] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 8 points 11 months ago

describing a lot of money

If you're in IT for the money, you're gonna hate it or yourself before long. Lagom.

[-] mayo@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago

I work in that area and I'm looking to get out. It sounds like OP has had a good tech career and is reaping rewards. It's not a bad job, but for me it feels like I basically babysit IT infrastructure and the people who use it. At it's best it is strategic and new implementations are fun, but where I live the working conditions and pay are better in parallel careers.

[-] _bug0ut@lemmy.world 11 points 11 months ago

oof its like you're either me or i'm you. hope you find your way past the burn out or out of it if you end up sinking into it. i'm going on like 3.5 years of battling it and there are better days and worse days, but i have no idea what else to even do. managing infra and writing code have been my entire career up to now.

[-] quantum_mechanic@lemmy.world 9 points 11 months ago

I'm about 1.5 years into it. Lost most passion for the job, but there are flashes of motivation here and there. Considering trying to move into full time development, but that would take a lot of effort. Tired of keeping up with the kubernetes ecosystem too.

[-] _bug0ut@lemmy.world 10 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Ah, alright, not quite me - I'll be 14 years deep in November. Honestly, one of the things that kept me motivated over the years was moving around - I stayed at the same company, but I started out doing QA (by hand, no automation), then got moved to handle release management, then moved to IT as a general Linux admin and spent a few years doing that, made friends with an infosec manager and he offered me a spot on his team working remote and doing container/docker security which morphed into a cloud security thing after he left the company (I hated the cloud). A couple years back I moved back to non-cloud/non-infosec work doing automation stuff with Ansible mainly, and for the time being only for our on-prem infrastructure (this may change in the future and I'm not really looking forward to it all that much).

At this point, nothing is really helping get my head back into the game 100% but I can still put out work and I'm just trying to find the joy in small victories and chasing the high you get when the code you wrote works flawlessly. I'm blessed to have a solid management structure above me who a) know me, b) like me (and the feeling is mutual, they're all great people), and c) are happy with my output.

I don't envy you working with kubernetes - my time in container security came during the early days of large companies trying to move to turning everything into microservices. It was a wild west kind of vibe and I basically had free reign... nowadays, I don't think I'd enjoy any of that in its current form.

I have great soft skills and I write pretty well, but outside of that my skillset is basically a degraded/decayed technology one because I've been treading water for a while now and not actively keeping up with all the shit in our sector that changes on a constant basis.

I've also seriously weighed moving into development, but I'm not sure if that's just going to fix anything for me. I like writing Python, but I don't know how that would feel full-time. Sucks, man.

[-] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 2 points 11 months ago

14 years deep in November.

Since July 1996 here, amateur/volunteer since ~93.

not actively keeping up with all the shit in our sector that changes on a constant basis

Learn the stuff that doesn't change as fast for a foundation, and go from there into stuff that tickles the coding fancy. Let the mayfly tech be handled by caffeine-addled thrill-chasers, while you just build stuff and sleep well.

[-] _bug0ut@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago

That's basically where I'm wedging myself in now. Ansible and Python, higher value but lower stress projects. Bigger wins, but ones that are able take the time needed to put them together, test, and refine.

It's almost a back-to-my-roots kind of thing for me, but with a fresh twist in terms of approach. I'm basically writing automations that make life easier for ops guys, to boil it down to it's essence.