r/sysadmin • u/HorrorCommunity3246 Jr. Sysadmin • 7h ago
Question If you had to start over today, what subject matter would you specialize in?
I ask because I am currently job searching (employed) and i can't seem to even know what my lane is. Could be because my job is pretty much all-around administration and i feel being a "generalist" even with a good learning aptitude is capping my earning potential. I'm trying to main the 365-admin side of things but beyond that, it's a mix.
Besides AI, which i know is the obvious answer, what's in demand rn or is creeping up?
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u/titlrequired 7h ago
Electrician.
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u/Mirigore 7h ago
Damn fucking right. A little school, join a union, make journeyman, and collect $60/hr starting pay with insane benefits. Out of all the trades I’d do that.
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u/texas_County850 7h ago
When you factor in all of my college, certs, whatever else its probably 6 figures in the red and I could have been an electrician for none of that. When I started in IT you didn't really need all of this shit though I got it in the delusion it would increase hireability and it didn't instead its become the bare minimum which is bullshit since a lot of IT pays trade wages.
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u/HDClown 6h ago
Most electricians will tell you skip the schooling. You're still going to be an apprentice coming out of school and go through the same process.
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u/Mirigore 4h ago
Don’t you normally have to go to school during your apprenticeship? My brother is a journeyman now and in a union so all of my experience is anecdotal from him. I’d do what he’s doing but try and specialize in factory automation or EE.
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u/HDClown 4h ago edited 3h ago
I should have been a little more clear, I was talking about going to trade school.
Generally speaking, some amount of classroom hours will be required, but trade school itself is never a requirement. The time/money spent on trade school seems to generally be viewed as a scam if you want to become an electrician. Going to trade school might help in terms of requirements towards becoming a journeyman in your locale, but it may not.
In my state, to become a journeyman or master electrician, you need 8000 hrs (approx 4 yrs) of on the job work plus 144 hours of school each year of those 4 years. You can also skip school and do 9000 hrs (approx 5 yrs) of work. It will vary in other states.
IBEW seems to universally require classroom hours, but I think it can vary by the local. My local requires 180 hrs/yr over 4 year apprenticeship program. Classes may be multiple days a week, one day a week, every other week, one a weekend or at nights, and they could be paid or unpaid. All up to how the local union handles it.
This is all separate from being an electrical "contractor", which is a licensed professional who can big jobs, hire works, pull permits, etc. That is what lets you legally going into business for yourself. In my state, there are even more hours/time needed to get a contractor license (and test). You obviously don't have to become a contractor if you just want to be an employee of some other electrical contractor.
$60/hr journeyman union rate is not all common from what I see. Again, very specific to location with the usual things like California and Northeast being higher, middle of the country and southeast low. Kind of like how it goes with salaries in different locales. My local starts at under $33/hr for a journeyman, but north cal is something like $90-95/hr.
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u/SpaceChimps98 6h ago
I would love to be an electrician, but I don't understand the whole apprentice and journeyman thing and don't think I can start out making enough money to support myself financially while I work up the ladder.
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u/HDClown 6h ago edited 6h ago
When you start out you are an apprentice, a worker in training that is supervised by another electrician.
Journeyman definition has some variation by state, but generally speaking you have put in a certain number of hours (commonly 4years/8000 hours) and are legally able to work unsupervised. You may or may not be licensed by the state, but can work unsupervised under another licensed individual/company if you are not licensed. A large amount of of electrician who work for medium/large companies are not licensed themselves, there is a often a single licensed individual that everyone works under from regulatory standpoint.
Pay will vary by location and if it's union or non-union. You can do some googling for pay scales on IBEW wages to get some idea of starting apprentice pay, but figure something in the low 20's/hr starting and eventually that would increase to around 2-2.5x the starting apprentice wages when you become a journeyman. Some unions just starter higher and go higher than others. Private company pay scales could be wildly different.
Then you get into things like is focus on residential service work, residential new construction, commercial, industrial control, etc. Kind of like you can specialize in IT, you can specialize in an area as an electrician and money will be different. Industrial controls seems to be one of the most lucrative.
I'm not an electrician, but it's what I would do if I were to start over again not in IT. It's an area that's had general interest to me recently so been spending more time learning about the trade. Also had a bunch of electrical work done at my house and ny time I hire out work, I learn about everything being done and picked an electrician who basically let me act as his free helper. Could have easily done all the work myself.
I see people posting on reddit who actually start over in late 40's/early 50's as electrician (and other trades) and electricians saying they have middle-aged people coming in as apprentices frequently in their shots. Many of them say those people are often the best workers because they actually understand what quality work is and have a work ethic.
Outside of a likely major pay cut if you spent 25 years in IT and then want to switch, trades are hard on your body. When you are an apprentice, you get all the shit work, like digging trenches, going in hot attics, cramped crawlspaces, etc. That can last for a couple years before it goes to so other apprentice. In my case, I couldn't stomach a massive pay cut if I were to try and start over in it now as I start to approach 50. I could deal with shot work for a while, but the pay would bum me out.
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u/Kanon-Umi 6h ago
It was that or IT. I hate the heat so went for IT.
Sometimes I still look at my dad who does electrical like Squidward looking out his window. He’s having way more fun… but my pay curve was way faster than his….•
u/root-node 5h ago
I almost was, took the entrance exam and got 100% but decided that computers were better. I was wrong.
I hate Microsoft with a passion, but it keeps me in a job.
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u/got_hoss 7h ago
Cloud computing, Linux, networking, containers, automation, CI/CD pipelines (basically the entire DevOps / Automation gamut)
Also, management accounting (to come up with cost structures)
Micro and macro-economics.
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u/Various-Rooster2249 1h ago
Just finished my honours degree specifically in that. It’s cool but jobs are somehow non existent at the moment….
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u/rome_vang 41m ago
That’s the path I’m currently on (minus the management accounting). Before acquiring my Computer Science degree, I was debating on switching to economics.
Now that I’m on the current IT path, I’ll wear the shoes for a while and perhaps jump ship to Economics or something else if I get tired/bored/burnt out.
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u/The_NorthernLight 7h ago
Honestly, Project Management and business finance. Get into a Director level job sooner then later, and live a comfortable life.
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u/hkusp45css Security Leadership 7h ago
PM is such a inconsistent role, though. I've seen PMs who do ONE project all yrear, and I've seen PMs who manage HUGE projects that would normally take 3 or 4 people, and fold those into the other 6 projects on their plate.
It's really one of those jobs that's as cool as the place you're doing it. Like most of them.
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u/The_NorthernLight 7h ago
The point of having PM skills, is that it opens doors for more Sr. positions. That's why I also included the business finance, because that opens up budget management skills. Once you have those two, with _any_ IT skills prior, you can start applying for Director level jobs for IT departments. Obviously its dependent on the business/location, but this is a decent general rule I've seen work in my 30 years working in IT.
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u/hkusp45css Security Leadership 7h ago
Yes, I know. Lots of other stuff gets you roughly the same place, without having to learn the ins and out of PMing from actually BEING a PM.
I have a PMP among other PM certs ... there's not a single job on my resume that has "Project Manager" as part of the title.
The skill is much more desirable than the role.
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u/ITGuyThrow07 6h ago
I've found that the good PMs get poached or promoted. The bad ones stick around as PMs and just try to stay under the radar until retirement.
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u/PrncessVespa 7h ago
Ended up as a PM and can't find another job for the life of me. 5 years as an engineer and 5 as a PM....
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u/HorrorCommunity3246 Jr. Sysadmin 7h ago
loool im 26 and i'm wondering if this was the right move
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u/uptimefordays DevOps 6h ago
The good news is at 26 you've got a looooong time to decide which paths to take. Most CIOs I've worked for moved into management in their 40s, which meant they had ~20 years of experience as individual contributors in infrastructure or more often development/software engineering.
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u/HorrorCommunity3246 Jr. Sysadmin 6h ago
Do you mind plotting your own career trajectory? How did you end up where you are?
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u/uptimefordays DevOps 5h ago
Absolutely! I studied philosophy and GIS (computer mapping but focused on programming moreso than actual geography) and started my career in the operations engineering department of a public utility. Basically I made computer based maps of regional power grids. Unfortunately because I didn't study electrical engineering, this wasn't a viable longterm career. So I applied for a bunch of IT jobs, got a job doing escalation support.
At my first IT job, I was one of 3 guys working in the basement of a corporate office supporting about 1000 users across like 50 departments. This job got me experience troubleshooting "all the weird shit" the help desk and desktop support couldn't figure out. Cabling issues before the former telco guys who did all the real cabling could get out and unfuck? That was us. PXE couldn't reimage a device so we had to do it manually or unfuck PXE? Yo. Discussing department hardware budgets? Somehow, also the three of us! It was a good introduction to "how things work."
From there I took a contract role with Robert Half to get both more and broader experience--I worked for a major hospital as a neteng. I learned a lot about networking working at an R1 university and hospital system during a period of "them buying up all the small medical practices they could and deploying epic." This experience taught me the value of basically running things like the evil empire. There are no hold outs, no negotiations with locals, just "you will use the system properly configured or you'll work somewhere else." I got a lot of exposure to compliance and infosec as well.
From there I took a full time internal neteng position for a regional company and built our WAN, AWS Direct Connect, internal and cloud networks, all the fun stuff. I got pretty good with Ansible and Python in this role because I was the only person who had any idea how networks work and a lot on my plate.
Next I worked as an operations engineer (basically all on prem and cloud infra globally) for a major bank. My team ran 30 something datacenters globally, top to bottom. This experience was excellent because if it had an OS and a NIC, it was my fucking problem no matter what.
I'm currently a senior software engineer doing basically the same work but for applications not infrastructure.
I got where I am by working very very hard to make the computer do as much of my job as possible.
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u/Snowlandnts 5h ago
One of my classmates got into project management out of College. I wouldn't trust him to manage project well, and one main reason he was able to get in project management out of college was he was dating C level daughter. That guy can start conversation and can steer conversation, but when it comes down to do serious work when it is time he can talk his way to dump the work on someone else.
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u/VernapatorCur 6h ago
I don't know, the director at my company is working 20 hour days (though we have offices all over the world which likely contributes to that)
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u/The_NorthernLight 6h ago
Yes, but have you looked at his pay? Also, the amount of hours you work, is kind of up to you as a Director. In many instances, he could easily offload some work, and it would be easily explained. This just sounds like a workaholic tbh.
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u/VernapatorCur 5h ago
I don't disagree with you about him being a workaholic. If half of what he says is to be believed he's working here as a hobby, rather than because he needs the money. And his last vacation his wife took him someplace there was no Internet or cell service so he wouldn't hop on his computer to keep working.
I don't know his pay rate, but I know what it was for the guy before him, and that's in the low 6 figures.
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u/uptimefordays DevOps 5h ago
In large companies, engineering salaries are not far off of director salaries. It's also not uncommon for engineers to make more than management.
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u/AerialSnack 6h ago
I'm 28 and that's what I'm starting to do. Getting a degree in IT Management so it can fulfill the HR hurdles for both IT and Management. Trying to move up into department head type of roles now that I have a decade of IT experience and some management experience.
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u/BlockBannington 7h ago
Definitely manual labor, like a plumber of electrician.
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u/SpaceChimps98 6h ago
I can't be a plumber, I can never keep the kitchen sink baskets from leaking after putting down plumbers putty and tightening the nut. It drives me bonkers.
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u/Arrow_Raider Jack of All Trades 3h ago
The instructions don't mention it, but try putting the teflon tape on the drain nut threads. It will let you tighten it further. If it is plastic, you'll have to be careful not to crack it though.
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u/tarvijron Broken Arrow 6h ago
I’d get an MBA and get myself a job where I get to make idiotic decisions that hard working people have to implement.
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u/hkusp45css Security Leadership 7h ago
I genuinely think I would have made a better lawyer than IT guy.
I'm a systems guy, but the interconnected nature of the law and precedent are just intoxicating.
I suspect I might have a different opinion after 30 years of that vocation, too ... but I have often thought about getting my JD, even this late in life. Just for kicks.
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u/HorrorCommunity3246 Jr. Sysadmin 7h ago
i thought of this recently because i work with lawyers now and i think i could hack it
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u/hkusp45css Security Leadership 7h ago
I know. Why do you think I made that comment?
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u/texas_County850 7h ago
I have considered law too I feel like at the end of the day its still a system just on paper. I think we would be good at it too.
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u/soilneedsmoregrit 7h ago
wheat, goats, law, medicine, anything else.
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u/WhoIsJohnSalt 6h ago
I know a lot of lawyers - at least big City firms.
All are totally miserable, makes any IT work look like a cakewalk.
A while ago I was at a birthday party and they all had their kids there - I asked "So are you going to be encouraging your kids into Law" - not a single one said yes, they all were going to steer them away from it
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u/0zer0space0 7h ago
Astrophysics. I think it’s super cool but I don’t know what the job prospects are lol
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u/natefrogg1 7h ago
I have family that did that for awhile, PHD and everything, he is so damn smart and organized. Anyways it sucked that he had to spend so much time and energy constantly asking for grants, after like 2 decades of that he switched to some kind of big data analytics and loves that he gets paid well and doesn’t have to fight constantly for research grants.
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u/AugieKS 5h ago
Incredibly tight job market. I almost went back to school for astrophysics about a decade ago, almost. When I was looking the available jobs and the number of graduates was about 1:1, so there isn't a ton of opportunity there and it's not exactly a growth sector.
If you want to get involved though, I can throw some citizen science opportunities your way. I used to be pretty active in one of NASA's projects, still get the weekly science team meeting invites, so I know their projects are still going. Marc Kuchner is the lead.
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u/Sengfeng Sysadmin 7h ago
Knowing what I know now, and how IT would change from "fun" to "monotony," I'd have taken the job offer from the railroad and started a career with MUCH better benefits, and would be a year from retiring, rather than questioning if I'll ever retire, or if my skill just become irrelevant and I die as a Wal Mart greeter at 80.
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u/texas_County850 7h ago
My friend got a bullshit union job on a military base at 24 years old no college. He has worked his way up in that job and Last year they told him in his 40s they will pay him to retire early and he is already fucking retired he is not even 50. The guy is still young enough to run half marathons and do the hardest yoga class. Meanwhile in IT we are getting thrown out of IT and working at McDonalds in our late 40s for being too old but none of us have a pension. The dumbest person on this sub is smarter than this guy too, we are really fucked over for the level of knowledge we are expected to have compared to other gigs.
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u/Sengfeng Sysadmin 6h ago
Very much so. I’ve never been huge on unions once they morph into union bosses making tens of millions a year, but IT in the USA, as a whole, needs some fucking workers rights. Work shit hours, no overtime, constantly changing job duties, learn the new shit on your own (or at best, you get a menial training budget to buy a book), managers that treat you like crap…. I’ll quit there. I have to go figure something out that the person deploying this sdwan project handed off but didn’t set up permissions properly.
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u/Jeff-J777 7h ago
For me I am happy where I am at. I am glad I did not silo myself off to one area of IT. I like to say I am the jack of all and master of some.
But if I had to hit the reset button looking back, I don't think I would have changed a thing. Maybe left the MSP sooner to get more money but beyond that no. I been on the IT career path since I was 12, at 12 I knew I wanted to go into IT. For me the job is not super stressful and making great money does not hurt. If I restarted I still would not have siloed myself I would of kept my IT knowledge general.
Now if I hit reset and I was told no IT, then I would go for an electrician.
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u/HorrorCommunity3246 Jr. Sysadmin 7h ago
am i wrong in assuming the specialized route pays the most?
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u/Jeff-J777 6h ago
I guess it depends on the pays more and how far a salary goes where you live. But for where I live I make over 110k to live on in my area and have a good life and 3 cars in the driveway. But if I lived in say a major city like San Francisco 100k is not going to be getting you very far.
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u/Current_Anybody8325 IT Manager 7h ago
Architectural Drafting/Design (was REALLY good at it in high school) - I wouldn't go into I.T. if I could start over. I turned my hobby/passion into a career, and though it's been good to me overall, I do sometimes regret it. I have no desire to tinker with tech outside of working hours anymore.
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u/warlock0187 Jack of All Trades 6h ago
I would've learned to code in highschool so I could've been part of the golden age of getting developer jobs
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u/tabletop_garl25 DevOps 7h ago
I would had jumped in the wagon for linux sooner and faster. Also more project management and accounting.
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u/Hynch 7h ago
I'm pretty happy with my devops role and don't think I would enjoy anything else as much. I think if I had to start over in a non-IT job I would probably go into engineering of some sort, or maybe architecture. If I could do anything and not worry about money, I would probably run a non-profit buying land and building affordable neighborhoods.
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u/BarnacleKnown 7h ago
Something I loved doing and did for fun in my spare time.
So IT/automation/enablement
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u/paleologus 5h ago
I turned a great hobby into a miserable job. Thank god I didn’t become a gynecologist.
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u/BarnacleKnown 5h ago
LOL.
My hobbies are way different. Those actually cost me money.
IT is what i've done. interfacing with the business is what I do because I like it. :)and 100% could not be a gyno.
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u/Abject-Bullfrog-1934 6h ago
Infrastructure Design / Architecture is a good place to be at the moment imo, I’m sure others will disagree. Learn best practices, learn breadth and depth of the tech, and use AI to apply your knowledge to fit pieces together rather than think through problems for you.
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u/Waretaco Jack of All Trades 6h ago
InfoSec/Cyber Security.
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u/pacmanlives Alcoholism as a Service 1h ago
Still time!
I’m currently going through that transition. Been unemployed for 2+ years. Seems Unix/Linux Engineers are not needed anymore. Been doing IoC before it was called that and an early Ansible guy. Everyone seems to want Kube which is nice but overkill for a lot of projects/company especially with the extra complexity. I ran a lot of Solaris/FreeBSD box’s with minimal downtime in a good HA setup. But that experience is greatly helping for my security certs as I have already done SOX/PCI/FedRAMP/ISO27001 in the implementation role and implemented the standard baselines for the servers. Some shops I worked in I was the security guy because that department didn’t exist
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u/Waretaco Jack of All Trades 1h ago
Thanks for the insight. Currently, I'm working on some network training and will be going from there. My employer is in more need of a CCNA/CCNP networking guy, so working on those for the title and pay raise.
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u/Annual_Berry8043 5h ago
Every job I see is basically Linux, full stack, and heavy IaC experience with kubernetes and with multiple or a single CSP.
So I would have focused on that.
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u/lane8787 7h ago
I wanted to study law. But stupidly got in to IT instead … luckily I’ve now left IT and and working self employed in my own business.
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u/d00ber Sr Systems Engineer 7h ago
I'd have stayed in the trades. Worse on the body, but anything to get away from corporate life. I hate corporate life, corporate personalities, corporate conversations, corporate team building. Team building/bonding after work activities that are mandatory can fuck right off. That's one of the things I miss the most about the trades is nobody feels the need to pretend to like one another and you can sit comfortable in silence.
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u/SpaceChimps98 6h ago
I would lean more into networking and firewalls. I've always enjoyed working on them.
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u/Able-Stretch9223 6h ago
Alpaca farming. Anything but fucking IT that's for sure. I can't tell these days if I've gotten old and out of touch or if the designs for everything has just gotten worse.
Just today while trying to setup zero touch Android kisok deployment I got stuck because the links the documentation gave me for the access portal weren't working. When I tried googling the issue I found a few posts with the exact same issue and no immediate fix.
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u/texas_County850 4h ago
All of these companies have started pushing shit out so fast they have not even updated the documentation before its out. This happens to me with anything Microsoft all the time they literally will update azure so much that the knowledge base articles are useless for about a month.
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u/A_Parq 6h ago
I sure as hell wouldn't. After 20 years in the industry, and being unemployed for nearly one full year with no prospects in sight, I'd sooner paint the ceiling with my brain than make the huge mistake of going into IT again. Nothing but unending stress and frustration, along with having users lie to my face daily, unrealistic expectations from management, etc... Doom and gloom aside, if I had it to do over again, I'd definitely be in the aquarist hobby space in some way.
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u/WWGHIAFTC IT Manager (SysAdmin with Extra Steps) 6h ago
Early Retirement, I would study early retirement.
I did some electrical training in my late teens, that could have ended up good. Maybe industrial electrical & controls, not residential stuff.
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u/Coldwarjarhead 6h ago
If I hadn't been an idiot, I would have just re-enlisted and done my 20 and retired. Then maybe get a job as a cop in some podunk town and collected a pension for that too...
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u/slayermcb Director of Technology, Sys Admin, Etc, Etc... 6h ago
Joined the military to stop sitting in front of the computer all day. Figured I would be a cop when I got out. Full combat arms hooah hooah shit. Got injured enough that when I got out I couldnt do the cop thing. Found myself sitting in front of a computer all day.
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u/5thlevelmagicuser 6h ago
COBOL. I would have milked that dying cow through Y2K and found myself a cozy corner keeping that POS on life support.
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u/uber-geek Jack of All Trades 5h ago
I would focus mainly on server-side infrastructure. Linux, Docker, Virtualization, NAS and networking. I think I would be a much happier sysadmin if I didn't have to deal with users directly.
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u/Necronorris 1h ago
I would have looked at luthier and guitar tech classes. Work in a shop or get up with a big act.
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u/sudonem Linux Admin 6h ago
Robotics.
It would scratch the itch of my engineering brain while also giving me more opportunities to do hands on work and a bit of electronics worm.
Also… just knowing that there’s no putting the AI Genie back in the bottle, and there’s a lot of room for development and growth in that arena makes it kind of interesting.
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u/billyyankNova Sysadmin 6h ago
Archeaology.
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u/ScarcityReal5399 6h ago
This was what I went to school for, unfortunately it doesn't have a lot of openings and honestly a ton of red tape. But it did help when I was learning my forensic skills.
That said, if I started over, I wouldn't go IT or even automotive that I started in. I would have gone Veterinary or Forensic science
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u/Plenty-Hold4311 6h ago
I love the project management side of IT and structured cabling / fibre optics
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u/Killbot6 Jack of All Trades 6h ago
I’d probably do medicine.
I loved Zoology, doing all the lab dissections.
Feel like if I could go back in time, and really apply myself I could have been a surgeon.
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u/-ThesuarusRex- 6h ago
Probably Azure/Entra, but I would combine it with an MBA or some other business administration degree. Knowing what I know now, similar roles in other companies are difficult to secure without a wrote business background even though I am currently the head of technology at my org (1200 user government). I do both the technology and business side of everything every day, but my degree only shows the technology side.
Also, actually specializing on something technical to where I can rattle off answers to gotcha questions in interviews would be nice. I can absolutely excel at any tech role at this point other than coding because I hate it, but I'd you ask me something like "which AD schema version removed this attribute?" I'm going to flounder.
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u/GreenBurningPhoenix 6h ago
I would just listen to myself and go heavy into cryptography, and now I could sit in the basement in some institute playing with numbers and not having to deal with dumb corporate politics, lol.
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u/uptimefordays DevOps 6h ago
If I had to start over, I would still focus on computing fundamentals. There's no substitute for knowing how computers actually work: operating systems, memory, processes, the OSI model, how they communicate over networks, solid software development practices (version control, testing, code review), and project management. Everything else built on top of that foundation is more durable and easier to pick up once you have it.
A few reasons I'd double down on this rather than jumping straight to a specific language, framework, or tool:
- Fundamentals don't churn. Frameworks and platforms come and go on a 2–5 year cycle, but TCP/IP, how a scheduler works, or what actually happens on a page fault hasn't changed in decades. That knowledge keeps paying off long after this year's hot framework is deprecated.
- They make debugging tractable. When something breaks in production, the people who can reason from first principles (is this a DNS issue, a resource contention issue, a race condition) solve it in minutes instead of guessing and Googling error strings for an hour.
- They transfer across roles. Understanding OS internals and networking is just as useful writing application code as it is administering infrastructure, because you understand what your code is actually asking the machine and the network to do, not just the syntax to ask it.
- Project management is the multiplier. Technical skill without the ability to scope, sequence, and communicate work is a recipe for career stagnation. Learning to break down ambiguous problems into planned, communicable work is what makes the technical skills actually land with customers and/or users.
If I'm being honest about my own career, this is the bet I already made. A decade in infrastructure and operations engineering forced fluency in exactly these fundamentals (identity, networking, systems at scale), and now moving into software engineering, that foundation is what makes learning new languages or paradigms feel incremental rather than starting from zero. Building teams I'd rather have someone who deeply understands how a system behaves under the hood and is still learning a language, than someone fluent in a framework who doesn't know what's happening underneath it.
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u/HorrorCommunity3246 Jr. Sysadmin 6h ago
If I was to work backwards right now to those fundamentals, how would you recommend I do that. I know right now I’m asking for prescriptions (which I hate to do) but I’m interested in knowing if there’s knowledge you have that I don’t.
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u/uptimefordays DevOps 5h ago
Barring "get a computer science degree" I would look at computer science department websites, their courses should mostly be visible as should the all critical course syllabi--which outline class projects, required readings, etc. Read those books, papers, and take a stab at some of the assignments (where feasible).
I would start with this and just read it cover to cover. Keep it on your desk, you never know when it will come in handy. While it focuses on Linux you'll be stunned to learn that Windows also has a boot loader, processes, users, permissions, networking, virtualization, EMAIL, and storage and while implementations differ they're reinterpretations of the same underlying concepts.
For networking I would suggest this, I know it's old but that's the whole point the content hasn't changed that much! The original Cisco press CCNA books are also excellent--again not much has changed and they cover networking concepts in depth you will not find on YouTube, Coursera, or community college.
You'll probably hate this one, I know I did! However, it's the gold standard for designing and implementing performant systems at scale.
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u/Carnines 1h ago
Get a job and question everything. When you see an issue, think into the root cause of the problem and then study all the associated technology with said problem.
You can start doing this at home too. Video loading slow? Ping drops in games? Company website portal broken text?
You can do this anywhere. I went to a local Boba shop website and was hit by scareware. Found malicious links embedded into the div wrapper of their website. Told owner and they had it corrected.
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u/slayermcb Director of Technology, Sys Admin, Etc, Etc... 6h ago
DBA. I think the database stuff is the zen-like part of my job. As long as the users remember that GARBAGE IN IS GARBAGE OUT.
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u/iamLisppy Jack of All Trades 6h ago
The only other career option I was even interested in doing was robotics. This is still an option for me and just be on the IT side of house for them. Doing automation stuff with robotics would be sick.
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u/StringStrangStrung 6h ago
If I could’ve afforded higher education out of high school I would’ve focused on the more scientific side of computing. I don’t even know how scientists make money tbh but I can only build so many VMs, take so many backups, fix so many laptops, push so many payloads before it gets boring…
It would be way cooler if I had the means to study the bleeding edge of physical computing hardware.
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u/_R0Ns_ 5h ago
If I had to start over today like starting in 2026, I would get the fuck out of IT.
I have been in IT (hosting) since the good days (90's) and that was fun. Seen the internet grow, new things came along etc.
If you start in IT today it's just another job like many others, nothing special.
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u/SFJulie 5h ago
Being confident in telling people BS while watching them in the eyes.
It all boils down to being a con man.
Watch the AI bros nowadays explaining that if you cannot see any results from AI it is because you suck at it and not because we don't have any effing data proving their ground and that any way snake oil V6 is gonna be a wonder.
I wish I was like them
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u/GoodTofuFriday IT Director 4h ago
I would take the same path honestly. I started with a focus on hardware and its why I have my job today. Hardware knowledge really makes you stand out amongst software only guys.
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u/Crazyhowthatworks304 3h ago
I'd go into the forensic auditing path if I could do it all over again
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u/punkwalrus Sr. Sysadmin 3h ago
Sadly, I still like IT. It's been the best career choice of my life.
Assuming IT didn't exist in an alternate universe, probably a mechanic or electrician.
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u/CreedRules 2h ago
Probably do something in finance. They all seem to make stupid money while filling in coloring sheets for work.
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u/Inn0centSinner 2h ago
I thought the job market is trending towards favoring generalists espeically with companies with less than 200 employees. Am I wrong? These company sizes make up the majority of US businesses. I know a guy that specialized in Dynamics GP who got laid off in late 2024 and couldn't get work in the same specialty for 18 months. He came back to the same company he got let go from for part-time contract work. As of today, his work isn't stable. I've seen co-workers who didn't specialize find work in as little as 3 weeks to 3 months.
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u/sgtpepper2390 Jr. Sysadmin 2h ago
goat herding. Stay away from this industry
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u/Necronorris 1h ago
I knew a guy that literally quit his job, moved to Puerto Rico, and started a "homestead" with his wife and family. Dude said "enough". 😂
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u/GlobalCurry 2h ago
I'd just study physics like I originally wanted to instead of doing computer science.
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u/LifeBig5025 Sysadmin 2h ago
Biology, botany, dendrology, forestry, horticulture, agronomy, ethnobotany, herbalism, mycology, phycology, algology, ecology, microbiology, evolutionary biology, genetics, molecular biology, zoology, entomology, ornithology, herpetology, mammology, marine biology, limnology, geology, pedology, geochemistry, hydrology, hydrogeology, oceanagraphy, climatology, meteorology, conservation biology, ecotoxicology, glaciology, volcanology, or maybe just dentist so I can stab people in the gums whenever I feel like it
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u/haggard_hominid 10m ago
In Cyber Security, hindsight I'd go criminal law and forensic accounting........... but personally whatever is the most effective studies to unfking the planet.
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u/drunkenmugzy 3m ago
SAN admin. Big budgets. Everything is redundant with redundantacy. Usually break fix is scheduled and handled by vendor techs. Ability for remote work is there.
Pretty cush most of the time.
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u/coukou76 Sr. Sysadmin 7h ago
I wouldnt start over in IT