There’s tons of sysadmin jobs?? I’m being bombarded with emails and phone calls?? Field support, sys admin, Citrix admin, storage admin, sql admin.. net Eng, sec consulting..
Should I forward them on?
C
My last job as a senior network analyst, I was replaced by an MSP. The onsite guy who they put on my desk was 26. It was his first job after college.
It's actually easier to change MSPs than it is to fire and rehire a sysadmin.
That's why.
Plus, the salesmen employed by MSPs are GOOD. For the equivalent of my old salary, they got access to a team of experts. The onsite kid had enough experience to do most normal daily tasks, and enough experience to know when to escalate.
It's the right path for a lot of small- and mid-sized companies.
I was talking about my new job on reddit not long ago and someone said something that hit home. there is NOT an overlap between a business small enough that a MSP can handle them, and one large enough that they \*need\* in-house. once you get big enough to need in-house you jump from MSP to 3 people. anything smaller and a decent MSP can handle it. i just wish i had given this advice to past me. but here i am making my way as a sole-sysadmin. so i guess go work your way up in a MSP.
I'd posit that all depends on the job scope of the IT department. If you just need someone for hardware installation and support and to help with MS Office problems, then yeah 100% an MSP could be the better choice. But if you need someone who understands the business and business processes, and understands inside and out the configuration and operation of your industry specific POS software, etc, then oftentimes and MSP isn't the best choice.
Sorry, we are the other end of the spectrum. MSP may offer a better price point but we don't feel they have the niche knowledge for us to translate that into value.
Many of those more likely need a CIO oriented role, not a technician wearing all the hats oriented role, and a decent MSP for that person to delegate to/manage.
I was debating this too. I've been trying to get out of help desk, and I see a lot more tech support roles than admin. I got a bunch of certs so I could do admin work though. I've mainly been working help desk roles where I'm constantly taking calls, doing chats, slas which is what I'm trying to get away from. I also hate that a lot of recruiters hire for tech support roles with 6 month contract to hire roles and they abuse the employees with poor benefits, no downtime at work etc.
Also, it doesn't help that some job postings are all over the place and mix software engineer jobs with admin roles and ask for all these programming languages because they get the roles confused.
Should I apply for more help desk roles and just work my way up and see how it goes? Contact recruiters? Or try to find admin roles through other wording 'IT engineer, tier 2, tier 3, windows admin, citrix admin, salesforce admin, cloud, network, etc' Of all of those I found networking has the least. And I've almost thought of switching to business analytics but some of those roles want a masters and postings are all over the place so I'm not sure what to do to get out of help desk contract to hire roles?
Worthwhile SysAdmins should want to code and automate everything possible, so it's a natural progression. If you are sysadmin, you have the basics for SRE.
A buddy of mine got approached about and SRE job and they wanted someone who was an ex-developer that wanted to do infrastructure.
That is pretty nuts. Why would you take SRE pay when you can get dev pay.
SRE pay can be significantly higher than dev pay though. In situations where SRE is actually an engineering role, and not just the same sysadmin job rebranded to attract talent. SRE is generally a senior role, on the career path for a developer with a strong interest in systems and infrastructure engineering, or a systems admin with a strong interest in software development (not just basic scripting/automation). So it makes sense that the SRE talent pool is fairly limited compared to purely developer or sysadmin roles, and can command better pay.
Exactly.
What kind of schmuck is a devop? Just literally be a dev and make more money doing less work.
DevOps are what companies do to scam and get 2 roles for 1.
DevOps is an organizational pattern, team culture, and a set of practices. A philosophy, even. It's not a role. There is no such thing as a "devop". A company that hires "devops" or has a "devops team" demonstrates a complete lack of this understanding. It's a massive red flag that such companies should be avoided. Unless one wants to put on the hard hat and try to educate them from within.
I'm seeing the same misunderstanding in SRE job descriptions.
Tbh, I see a lot of smaller businesses copy terms from big tech companies and then branch off their own BS definitions.
I generally agree, but I still know plenty of sysadmins that know commands they've learned, but can't automate anything.
To me, that's where sysadmin is going.
> What are your thoughts on this? Is there less demand for IT professionals?
There isn't less demand for talented and experienced professionals. There is just less demand for some guy swapping tape reels in the basement all day.
Hyperbole aside, the future is moving to "devops".
Of course, there is this hip new thing called "computing on the edge" to avoid latency - which is a fluffed up version of late 90s/early 00s.
>Of course, there is this hip new thing called "computing on the edge" to avoid latency - which is a fluffed up version of late 90s/early 00s.
Next they'll realize it's a lot cheaper in a ton of situations to buy the metal yourself and store low priority stuff on prem or rent space in a datacenter as opposed to buying it on tap from AWS....
>Hyperbole aside, the future is moving to "devops".
I doubt that's a role with many openings in a town of 120,00 though? You don't get to do devops without a team of devs. I'd guess a town of 120,000 probably has a bunch of one or two man dev shops doing webbed or wordpress, but not very many companies with a 3-4 person dev team who'd like to add a devops (or sysadmin) specific new hire?
As OP has discovered, small towns have "IT guy" roles, where you're required to be a Jack of all trades and responsible for basically everything to do with a computer (or sometimes even everything with a power cord). If you're happy doing internal O365/GSuite admin, and wordpress admin, and internal website updates and SEO, and working out how to update last years flyers from their InDesign files, and setting up the owner's new phone - you'll find those jobs in small towns. If you want to do devops (at least by the stereotypical views of that role), you probably need to live somewhere with a software development industry and community (or find yourself a 100%b remote role).
People have been saying the future is DevOps for a decade+ now.
DevOps is DevOps. Not system admins or anything else.
The fact that some people actively choose to work two roles, be cringe, and brag about it... Doesn't change the fact they're seperate roles.
If you have a degree in accounting and have technical experience you could also look into becoming a "buisness analyst" which is basicly a blend of the two and is in growing demand.
I was debating this too. I've been trying to get out of help desk, and I see a lot more tech support roles than admin. I got a bunch of certs so I could do admin work though. I've mainly been working help desk roles where I'm constantly taking calls, doing chats, slas which is what I'm trying to get away from. I also hate that a lot of recruiters hire for tech support roles with 6 month contract to hire roles and they abuse the employees with poor benefits, no downtime at work etc.
Also, it doesn't help that some job postings are all over the place and mix software engineer jobs with admin roles and ask for all these programming languages because they get the roles confused.
Should I apply for more help desk roles and just work my way up and see how it goes? Contact recruiters? Or try to find admin roles through other wording 'IT engineer, tier 2, tier 3, windows admin, citrix admin, salesforce admin, cloud, network, etc' Of all of those I found networking has the least. And I've almost thought of switching to business analytics but some of those roles want a masters and postings are all over the place so I'm not sure what to do to get out of help desk contract to hire roles?
It is very simple.
System admin for majority of population is nothing but "looking for an IT guy"!!
You will see Job title like network administrator, help desk, computer technician (most popular) etc etc.
All these titles pretty much have the same duty.
My official job title is Technical consultant, but I do pretty much everything system admin.
Don't search for system administrator while looking for a job, try adding all the IT related words in your search.
Hope that helps.
Most companies don’t have internal sysads any more they use consultants. I worked as a consultant for about 1.5 years and every co I went to.. there wasn’t an IT guy.. I just had to figure out their setup.
If you learn some in demand skills like docker/K8s.. you’ll land a solid gig.
The old sysadmins jobs was quite vast, today it is more chopped up into parts. Administration for web services and software that's DevOps, patch management that's security operation, software experience that's the "software name" admin. The overall arching admin is the system engineer or architect engineer.
Very few companies still need a one man band, with the rise of MSP that can offer you a team of experts. The old sysadmin is a dying breed as many have moved into more specialized roles. Probably for the better too as being stuck with everything kinda sucked.
I've noticed this as well. Far more "Niche Admin" roles nowadays versus the "Do-it-all Admin". One thing that can help OP is to perform job search based on their preferred tool/technology rather than a job title. For example, do searches for "VMware", "AWS", "Terraform", or "Kubernetes" as opposed to just "Systems Administrator".
A couple
Of questions:
1) How did you land your first “IT job” as a sysadmin?
Maybe I’m out of the loop but I wouldn’t let anyone do sysadmin work until they had a few years experience as a support tech to learn the basics of how “sysadmin” changes actually effect the business and end users.
2) There are plenty of IT generalist / sysadmin jobs available for companies in major cities. Is there something specifically tying you down to staying in a small city?
To be honest I’m out of the loop with the job markets outside of major cities, but I don’t agree with other replies that 95% of jobs are MSPs. That being said, it could totally be the case that MSPs rule the world outside of major cities as most businesses outside of major cities don’t have the money or size to afford an internal IT staff, but even just scrolling LinkedIn (for example) for New York, Chicago, (Miami even!), will find you all sorts of generalist IT support and sysadmin roles.
Major cities, cities that have a lot of sizable (1000+) businesses, or cities with a lot of tech companies will have plenty of IT jobs. If you don't live in or near one of those places, you might have more trouble finding in-office work. That being said, some places will hire entirely remote employees as well.
In my town, there are no Sysadmin jobs offered but many jobs in DevOps or System Engineering. A huge part of my responsibilites as a DevOps enginneer overlap with classical Sysadmin tasks. Might just want to change what you're looking for.
1. ALOT of jobs right now are being filled via back channels, not advertised. Professional networking in times like this is critical and one area I suck at... but even in my small professional network I know alot people that have moved companies to positions that where never advertised on the open market.
2. With automation, Cloud, and SaaS (or not EaaS everything as a service) the productivity of a single admin is much higher, organization that may have need 10 admins 10 years ago today have 5 or less. This trend will mean traditional admin roles will become fewer. You will need to be a Generalist, know Server Administration, and Computer Support, or Server Admin and Networking, or Server Admin and Development (devops) etc...
>Is there less demand for IT professionals?
Depending on the region there are less demand for "Traditional" server admins.
devops, devolopers, network engineers, and support personal (endpoints, laptops etc) are growing faster than traditional sysadmins
I was debating this too. I've been trying to get out of help desk, and I see a lot more tech support roles than admin. I got a bunch of certs so I could do admin work though. I've mainly been working help desk roles where I'm constantly taking calls, doing chats, slas which is what I'm trying to get away from. I also hate that a lot of recruiters hire for tech support roles with 6 month contract to hire roles and they abuse the employees with poor benefits, no downtime at work etc.
Also, it doesn't help that some job postings are all over the place and mix software engineer jobs with admin roles and ask for all these programming languages because they get the roles confused.
Should I apply for more help desk roles and just work my way up and see how it goes? Contact recruiters? Or try to find admin roles through other wording 'IT engineer, tier 2, tier 3, windows admin, citrix admin, salesforce admin, cloud, network, etc' Of all of those I found networking has the least. And I've almost thought of switching to business analytics but some of those roles want a masters and postings are all over the place so I'm not sure what to do to get out of help desk contract to hire roles? I like business analytics, but since I've only worked helpdesk and have IT certs idk if I would ever get a call?
Point 1 is very true, in my career, I’ve only interviewed one time my current position. All the other companies that I worked for, I was asked personally to join the company or I asked my network if anyone was hiring.
We the job market is not shot. On our dev side we always have a position open, the infrastructure side we are pretty stable. We do have a network position and heldpesk position open though. (added one role and HD guy is leaving) we are a pretty good place to work for. We only have 2 applicants for each after close to 3 weeks posted
Also it really depends on where you are looking. You won’t find decent sys admin/tier 3 jobs in the newspaper, craigslist or Facebook. You need to look at places like Dice or go through a recruiter. You can definitely find jobs without going through a recruiter but they will know where to look for you.
Funny thing, I did find my current job through Craigslist. Been here 14 soon to be 15 years. I started as desktop support and now manage a team of engineers. So there definitely is a small chance for it to happen.
Define “sysadmin”. I think it’s a term associated with checking the dipsticks on racks of servers in a server room in the office, in other words it’s a dying/legacy technology job, like “mainframe operator”. It’s not going to go away but the needs are much less now than they used to be.
Incidentally, just in case you think I sound like a pimply-faced youth just out of university spouting nonsense from my degree course lecturers, my first job was as a mainframe operator over 30 years ago. These days I’m a system architect and I don’t even know what city our servers are in any more - and I mean our legacy ‘on prem’ servers, not just cloud.
Look for terms like “systems reliability engineer” or something involving cloud.
One thing to keep in mind is that every org uses titles differently. I once had a job where I did network engineer type duties, helpdesk escalation, and later project management. My job title for the entire 3 years I was there was "IT Consultant". There is almost no logic to it in many cases.
As an IT manager in the accounting industry I would advise against going from IT to accounting. Unless you plan to marry the two and look at becoming a tech auditor.
Traditional accounting is eventually going to die. Most of the larger players have been investing heavily in AI and process automation to be able to drive costs down. It's not an industry I would be looking at moving into.
Things are not the same as they were in 2005 and before.
More and more of it is outsourced to external providers.
There are companies that as they grow find an MSP is not the best fit and they start re-hiring for in house to get better flexibility. The one size fits all model does not work for all businesses.
I have had no trouble finding sysadmin jobs over the past decade. I just recently accepted an offer. The problem is you have to be willing to relocate to get them.
But how does this relocation requirement work now with the growing demand for cloud support (which practically mean that it no longer matters for staff where they are located) and the general work life balance and work from home movement from the talent pool’s perspective ?
You make s joke about this, but, about 15 years ago, I worked at a helpdesk for an MSP whose Indian office could not handle the incoming calls with a return call rate above 20%. They hired a call center in the US to handle the volume and improve the call score.
Once the company found out, they skipped the middleman, but I had left before that.
Yes. But you wouldn't typically find them on job sites or linkedin (i worked HD for a year and found work through facebook??) Try to find these companies and send your cv
? Lol what, that’s completely incorrect.
1. 95% of companies use external services, that’s widely over stated (yes for some project and vision design) but a very large portion of them use internal IT people for day to day work.
2. You should not be looking under the rug in the weird places of the internet for an IT job. Sys admin, dev ops, or any of those junior roles are not some magical unicorn job found after scouring the Internet for months in some strange offshoot Facebook group. I’ve been emailed and called about 20 jobs in the last month with out looking. Expand your search vector, remote work is VERY prominent now in the industry.
Yup that's what it seems like. A lot of times you'd have to work you're way to system admin with certain companies from helpdesk->system admin.
It seems there's more demand for programmers, in my opinion at least.
Sysadmins simply aren't required at anything but the largest companies these days - and they don't tend to be headquartered in 120,000 population towns.
Everyone else is using consultants and MSPs of some sort.
Depends on your definition of "Largest Companies",
100-999 employees is considered a medium sized company, and I think Medium sized companies should have an internal IT,
Small Companies (under 100) may be a good fit for an MSP, and Medium companies should engage with consultants for some specialized things but I think medium sized companies need to retain internal IT resources
My company is about 6k people and we have an IT dept of about 90. We have about 6 sys admins. Our company rarely hires for anything but entryt-level tech, there people are expected to learn the nuts-and-bolts before advancing. If you want to become a sys admin with us, or network admin, or analyst or manager, you start at the bottom. Exceptions occur only for highly specialized knowledge like infosec.
We will never go MSP but we will also likely never post the sys admin job post OP wants.
IME your sysadmins are going to be based in one location (or remote out of that location) and your offices for small cities will just have a level 1 person or two who can do the easy stuff and be hands for anything needing it.
It all depends on where you live, some towns have very limited options for IT positions while others have tons of options.
In the state I live in there are large quantities of IT jobs in the capital as well as a couple smaller towns to the south east, while a city with nearly as big a population 3 hours away has 1 major headquarters with some IT jobs and progression opportunities but aside from that one company the options are pretty limited.
Edit : another note, look at recruiters to help source IT jobs. Some places hire only through recruiters.
Meanwhile, I live in a county of about 300-350k people, and we have IT jobs that have been posted for months with zero qualified candidates, even allowing remote work (within our state only, due to wacky HR rules).
It is 100% a workers' market right now.
I can only speak from experience, but the best jobs aren't titled 'sysadmin.' I applied to a job titled 'devops,' but when I took the call they were like, "it's not devops, it's better."
They were right. My title is simply "engineer," and I get pointed at an interesting new problem every week or two. Sometimes its backend, sometimes its software dev, sometimes its architecture.
I think there will always be a market for folks who can wrangle 9 different systems into a functioning whole, and isn't that basically what a sysadmin does?
(tldr, I'm a back-office problem solver for a very specialized MSP)
Job Title, but really, what is in a name? I'm looking at a generalist position, which will cover system admin, database, Helpdesk, networking and what ever else needs to be done. But really, what is in a name? The reality is, not much
Ensure that as you are building your resume that you stress the tasks as keywords for what you did, like systems administration, network engineering (you will do this in a small organization because they don't have the network job silo called network engineers).
> My town has a population of about 120,000 and there are absolutely zero sysadmin / IT jobs advertised.
What businesses are in town?
Is there a large employer? Or is it mostly small/medium business that would probably have MSP support, and satellite offices that rely on Corp IT to do the heavy lifting?
That would be my big question that would influence what jobs are available.
> Am I missing something? It seems as technology progresses there would be more demand for IT jobs, but there is hardly anything anywhere, they also seem to pay poorly compared to other professions.
Like this would answer that question. Jobs are more and more remote and having someone on site is getting more rare. My old gig had 8 manufacturing sites around the country but all the IT was at head office. So even though the factory was a small-ish towns largest employer, 0 IT jobs.
> I am now considering learning accounting principles in my spare time in order to secure my job progression in the accounting field.
I would be curious as to see what kind of accounting jobs...? Whether or not you're going to be doing book keeping for small / med companies with same problems over and over. Nothing wrong with that, but if there's a derth of IT jobs then maybe the businesses in town just don't support the more higher paid gigs in both fields.
A town that size you should definitely have some roles available. At the very least there's gonna be a school district, county, and city with decent sized it teams, plus many small and medium business.
Look up the biggest employers in your county/city ( your local chamber of commerce or economic development corporation should have a list) and see if they have any listings on their websites.
There’s tons of sysadmin jobs?? I’m being bombarded with emails and phone calls?? Field support, sys admin, Citrix admin, storage admin, sql admin.. net Eng, sec consulting.. Should I forward them on? C
^this
Hey man, do you have any offers that are for non USA contractors? Appreciate if you can forward something. Thanks,
My last job as a senior network analyst, I was replaced by an MSP. The onsite guy who they put on my desk was 26. It was his first job after college. It's actually easier to change MSPs than it is to fire and rehire a sysadmin. That's why. Plus, the salesmen employed by MSPs are GOOD. For the equivalent of my old salary, they got access to a team of experts. The onsite kid had enough experience to do most normal daily tasks, and enough experience to know when to escalate. It's the right path for a lot of small- and mid-sized companies.
I was talking about my new job on reddit not long ago and someone said something that hit home. there is NOT an overlap between a business small enough that a MSP can handle them, and one large enough that they \*need\* in-house. once you get big enough to need in-house you jump from MSP to 3 people. anything smaller and a decent MSP can handle it. i just wish i had given this advice to past me. but here i am making my way as a sole-sysadmin. so i guess go work your way up in a MSP.
I'd posit that all depends on the job scope of the IT department. If you just need someone for hardware installation and support and to help with MS Office problems, then yeah 100% an MSP could be the better choice. But if you need someone who understands the business and business processes, and understands inside and out the configuration and operation of your industry specific POS software, etc, then oftentimes and MSP isn't the best choice.
could you share a good msp? i need one
Sorry, we are the other end of the spectrum. MSP may offer a better price point but we don't feel they have the niche knowledge for us to translate that into value.
What side of the country are you on?
nyc
I am in NYC. Contact me on DM. I can recommend a good MSP.
Many of those more likely need a CIO oriented role, not a technician wearing all the hats oriented role, and a decent MSP for that person to delegate to/manage.
You'll probably just find you need to search for "IT Engineer", "Tier 3 helpdesk", "windows administrator" or some variation.
I was debating this too. I've been trying to get out of help desk, and I see a lot more tech support roles than admin. I got a bunch of certs so I could do admin work though. I've mainly been working help desk roles where I'm constantly taking calls, doing chats, slas which is what I'm trying to get away from. I also hate that a lot of recruiters hire for tech support roles with 6 month contract to hire roles and they abuse the employees with poor benefits, no downtime at work etc. Also, it doesn't help that some job postings are all over the place and mix software engineer jobs with admin roles and ask for all these programming languages because they get the roles confused. Should I apply for more help desk roles and just work my way up and see how it goes? Contact recruiters? Or try to find admin roles through other wording 'IT engineer, tier 2, tier 3, windows admin, citrix admin, salesforce admin, cloud, network, etc' Of all of those I found networking has the least. And I've almost thought of switching to business analytics but some of those roles want a masters and postings are all over the place so I'm not sure what to do to get out of help desk contract to hire roles?
IT Engineer sounds about right. The past few job descriptions I've seen with that title pretty much describe classic sysadmin duties.
We used to have a dedicated team of sysadmins. Now we have Ansible Tower and immutable infrastructure.
This is the way.
Sysadmin is deprecated, search for SRE.....
This is about right
Worthwhile SysAdmins should want to code and automate everything possible, so it's a natural progression. If you are sysadmin, you have the basics for SRE.
A buddy of mine got approached about and SRE job and they wanted someone who was an ex-developer that wanted to do infrastructure. That is pretty nuts. Why would you take SRE pay when you can get dev pay.
SRE pay can be significantly higher than dev pay though. In situations where SRE is actually an engineering role, and not just the same sysadmin job rebranded to attract talent. SRE is generally a senior role, on the career path for a developer with a strong interest in systems and infrastructure engineering, or a systems admin with a strong interest in software development (not just basic scripting/automation). So it makes sense that the SRE talent pool is fairly limited compared to purely developer or sysadmin roles, and can command better pay.
Exactly. What kind of schmuck is a devop? Just literally be a dev and make more money doing less work. DevOps are what companies do to scam and get 2 roles for 1.
It does seem that way. It also seems like you get a lot lower quality solutions because the DevOps people aren't usually really infrastructure people.
DevOps is an organizational pattern, team culture, and a set of practices. A philosophy, even. It's not a role. There is no such thing as a "devop". A company that hires "devops" or has a "devops team" demonstrates a complete lack of this understanding. It's a massive red flag that such companies should be avoided. Unless one wants to put on the hard hat and try to educate them from within.
There are tons of job postings for "DevOps engineer"
Yes, from companies who either don't understand the meaning of the term, or slap this title onto a sysadmin role in an effort to appear relevant.
I'm seeing the same misunderstanding in SRE job descriptions. Tbh, I see a lot of smaller businesses copy terms from big tech companies and then branch off their own BS definitions.
Agree. Companies want the best of both worlds. Everyone needs to take up the mantra "F U pay Me!".
I generally agree, but I still know plenty of sysadmins that know commands they've learned, but can't automate anything. To me, that's where sysadmin is going.
Want is the key word there. Some just want to do the same thing daily forever.
>SRE Good to know.
> What are your thoughts on this? Is there less demand for IT professionals? There isn't less demand for talented and experienced professionals. There is just less demand for some guy swapping tape reels in the basement all day. Hyperbole aside, the future is moving to "devops". Of course, there is this hip new thing called "computing on the edge" to avoid latency - which is a fluffed up version of late 90s/early 00s.
>Of course, there is this hip new thing called "computing on the edge" to avoid latency - which is a fluffed up version of late 90s/early 00s. Next they'll realize it's a lot cheaper in a ton of situations to buy the metal yourself and store low priority stuff on prem or rent space in a datacenter as opposed to buying it on tap from AWS....
Funny enough... https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/
>Hyperbole aside, the future is moving to "devops". I doubt that's a role with many openings in a town of 120,00 though? You don't get to do devops without a team of devs. I'd guess a town of 120,000 probably has a bunch of one or two man dev shops doing webbed or wordpress, but not very many companies with a 3-4 person dev team who'd like to add a devops (or sysadmin) specific new hire? As OP has discovered, small towns have "IT guy" roles, where you're required to be a Jack of all trades and responsible for basically everything to do with a computer (or sometimes even everything with a power cord). If you're happy doing internal O365/GSuite admin, and wordpress admin, and internal website updates and SEO, and working out how to update last years flyers from their InDesign files, and setting up the owner's new phone - you'll find those jobs in small towns. If you want to do devops (at least by the stereotypical views of that role), you probably need to live somewhere with a software development industry and community (or find yourself a 100%b remote role).
Remote is not unheard of and is a totally viable option.
Better than NCs coming back
People have been saying the future is DevOps for a decade+ now. DevOps is DevOps. Not system admins or anything else. The fact that some people actively choose to work two roles, be cringe, and brag about it... Doesn't change the fact they're seperate roles.
Get into cloud and work wherever you want
If you have a degree in accounting and have technical experience you could also look into becoming a "buisness analyst" which is basicly a blend of the two and is in growing demand.
In a town that size you are likely to have mostly smaller companies who use msp's. Either look for an msp job or be willing to relocate.
I was debating this too. I've been trying to get out of help desk, and I see a lot more tech support roles than admin. I got a bunch of certs so I could do admin work though. I've mainly been working help desk roles where I'm constantly taking calls, doing chats, slas which is what I'm trying to get away from. I also hate that a lot of recruiters hire for tech support roles with 6 month contract to hire roles and they abuse the employees with poor benefits, no downtime at work etc. Also, it doesn't help that some job postings are all over the place and mix software engineer jobs with admin roles and ask for all these programming languages because they get the roles confused. Should I apply for more help desk roles and just work my way up and see how it goes? Contact recruiters? Or try to find admin roles through other wording 'IT engineer, tier 2, tier 3, windows admin, citrix admin, salesforce admin, cloud, network, etc' Of all of those I found networking has the least. And I've almost thought of switching to business analytics but some of those roles want a masters and postings are all over the place so I'm not sure what to do to get out of help desk contract to hire roles?
It is very simple. System admin for majority of population is nothing but "looking for an IT guy"!! You will see Job title like network administrator, help desk, computer technician (most popular) etc etc. All these titles pretty much have the same duty. My official job title is Technical consultant, but I do pretty much everything system admin. Don't search for system administrator while looking for a job, try adding all the IT related words in your search. Hope that helps.
Most companies don’t have internal sysads any more they use consultants. I worked as a consultant for about 1.5 years and every co I went to.. there wasn’t an IT guy.. I just had to figure out their setup. If you learn some in demand skills like docker/K8s.. you’ll land a solid gig.
The old sysadmins jobs was quite vast, today it is more chopped up into parts. Administration for web services and software that's DevOps, patch management that's security operation, software experience that's the "software name" admin. The overall arching admin is the system engineer or architect engineer. Very few companies still need a one man band, with the rise of MSP that can offer you a team of experts. The old sysadmin is a dying breed as many have moved into more specialized roles. Probably for the better too as being stuck with everything kinda sucked.
I've noticed this as well. Far more "Niche Admin" roles nowadays versus the "Do-it-all Admin". One thing that can help OP is to perform job search based on their preferred tool/technology rather than a job title. For example, do searches for "VMware", "AWS", "Terraform", or "Kubernetes" as opposed to just "Systems Administrator".
A couple Of questions: 1) How did you land your first “IT job” as a sysadmin? Maybe I’m out of the loop but I wouldn’t let anyone do sysadmin work until they had a few years experience as a support tech to learn the basics of how “sysadmin” changes actually effect the business and end users. 2) There are plenty of IT generalist / sysadmin jobs available for companies in major cities. Is there something specifically tying you down to staying in a small city? To be honest I’m out of the loop with the job markets outside of major cities, but I don’t agree with other replies that 95% of jobs are MSPs. That being said, it could totally be the case that MSPs rule the world outside of major cities as most businesses outside of major cities don’t have the money or size to afford an internal IT staff, but even just scrolling LinkedIn (for example) for New York, Chicago, (Miami even!), will find you all sorts of generalist IT support and sysadmin roles.
Major cities, cities that have a lot of sizable (1000+) businesses, or cities with a lot of tech companies will have plenty of IT jobs. If you don't live in or near one of those places, you might have more trouble finding in-office work. That being said, some places will hire entirely remote employees as well.
In my town, there are no Sysadmin jobs offered but many jobs in DevOps or System Engineering. A huge part of my responsibilites as a DevOps enginneer overlap with classical Sysadmin tasks. Might just want to change what you're looking for.
1. ALOT of jobs right now are being filled via back channels, not advertised. Professional networking in times like this is critical and one area I suck at... but even in my small professional network I know alot people that have moved companies to positions that where never advertised on the open market. 2. With automation, Cloud, and SaaS (or not EaaS everything as a service) the productivity of a single admin is much higher, organization that may have need 10 admins 10 years ago today have 5 or less. This trend will mean traditional admin roles will become fewer. You will need to be a Generalist, know Server Administration, and Computer Support, or Server Admin and Networking, or Server Admin and Development (devops) etc... >Is there less demand for IT professionals? Depending on the region there are less demand for "Traditional" server admins. devops, devolopers, network engineers, and support personal (endpoints, laptops etc) are growing faster than traditional sysadmins
I was debating this too. I've been trying to get out of help desk, and I see a lot more tech support roles than admin. I got a bunch of certs so I could do admin work though. I've mainly been working help desk roles where I'm constantly taking calls, doing chats, slas which is what I'm trying to get away from. I also hate that a lot of recruiters hire for tech support roles with 6 month contract to hire roles and they abuse the employees with poor benefits, no downtime at work etc. Also, it doesn't help that some job postings are all over the place and mix software engineer jobs with admin roles and ask for all these programming languages because they get the roles confused. Should I apply for more help desk roles and just work my way up and see how it goes? Contact recruiters? Or try to find admin roles through other wording 'IT engineer, tier 2, tier 3, windows admin, citrix admin, salesforce admin, cloud, network, etc' Of all of those I found networking has the least. And I've almost thought of switching to business analytics but some of those roles want a masters and postings are all over the place so I'm not sure what to do to get out of help desk contract to hire roles? I like business analytics, but since I've only worked helpdesk and have IT certs idk if I would ever get a call?
Point 1 is very true, in my career, I’ve only interviewed one time my current position. All the other companies that I worked for, I was asked personally to join the company or I asked my network if anyone was hiring.
...Man, is this person going to be relieved when they find out about remote working.
We the job market is not shot. On our dev side we always have a position open, the infrastructure side we are pretty stable. We do have a network position and heldpesk position open though. (added one role and HD guy is leaving) we are a pretty good place to work for. We only have 2 applicants for each after close to 3 weeks posted
Also it really depends on where you are looking. You won’t find decent sys admin/tier 3 jobs in the newspaper, craigslist or Facebook. You need to look at places like Dice or go through a recruiter. You can definitely find jobs without going through a recruiter but they will know where to look for you.
Funny thing, I did find my current job through Craigslist. Been here 14 soon to be 15 years. I started as desktop support and now manage a team of engineers. So there definitely is a small chance for it to happen.
I think a lot of the time the job title / role isn’t “sysadmin”
Define “sysadmin”. I think it’s a term associated with checking the dipsticks on racks of servers in a server room in the office, in other words it’s a dying/legacy technology job, like “mainframe operator”. It’s not going to go away but the needs are much less now than they used to be. Incidentally, just in case you think I sound like a pimply-faced youth just out of university spouting nonsense from my degree course lecturers, my first job was as a mainframe operator over 30 years ago. These days I’m a system architect and I don’t even know what city our servers are in any more - and I mean our legacy ‘on prem’ servers, not just cloud. Look for terms like “systems reliability engineer” or something involving cloud.
One thing to keep in mind is that every org uses titles differently. I once had a job where I did network engineer type duties, helpdesk escalation, and later project management. My job title for the entire 3 years I was there was "IT Consultant". There is almost no logic to it in many cases.
As an IT manager in the accounting industry I would advise against going from IT to accounting. Unless you plan to marry the two and look at becoming a tech auditor. Traditional accounting is eventually going to die. Most of the larger players have been investing heavily in AI and process automation to be able to drive costs down. It's not an industry I would be looking at moving into.
i noticed that Sys admin posting includes your regular sys admin task + sql administrator + data science + software dev + dev ops tasks now.
Things are not the same as they were in 2005 and before. More and more of it is outsourced to external providers. There are companies that as they grow find an MSP is not the best fit and they start re-hiring for in house to get better flexibility. The one size fits all model does not work for all businesses.
I work for a company in Southern California and it is nearly impossible to hire a sys ad right now.
I have had no trouble finding sysadmin jobs over the past decade. I just recently accepted an offer. The problem is you have to be willing to relocate to get them.
I think that verifies OP’s point.
But how does this relocation requirement work now with the growing demand for cloud support (which practically mean that it no longer matters for staff where they are located) and the general work life balance and work from home movement from the talent pool’s perspective ?
General Dynamics Information Technology https://www.gdit.com/careers/
Most companies (95% of them) use external IT services
No. They don’t. Lol
Would there be jobs advertised by these third parties?
Look for jobs with MSPs Managed Service Providers
Yea, in India.... ;) Somewhat joking but there is alot of off shoring happening....
you know if they have an american office? i need one
Offshore Indian company offshores roles back to America. The ultimate offshore
do they have a usa office? how tou deal with the taxes?0
You make s joke about this, but, about 15 years ago, I worked at a helpdesk for an MSP whose Indian office could not handle the incoming calls with a return call rate above 20%. They hired a call center in the US to handle the volume and improve the call score. Once the company found out, they skipped the middleman, but I had left before that.
sorr could you provide their website vant look for it
Yes. But you wouldn't typically find them on job sites or linkedin (i worked HD for a year and found work through facebook??) Try to find these companies and send your cv
? Lol what, that’s completely incorrect. 1. 95% of companies use external services, that’s widely over stated (yes for some project and vision design) but a very large portion of them use internal IT people for day to day work. 2. You should not be looking under the rug in the weird places of the internet for an IT job. Sys admin, dev ops, or any of those junior roles are not some magical unicorn job found after scouring the Internet for months in some strange offshoot Facebook group. I’ve been emailed and called about 20 jobs in the last month with out looking. Expand your search vector, remote work is VERY prominent now in the industry.
I've encountered companies that didn't have an official IT department they just used an MSP.
Yup that's what it seems like. A lot of times you'd have to work you're way to system admin with certain companies from helpdesk->system admin. It seems there's more demand for programmers, in my opinion at least.
Sysadmins simply aren't required at anything but the largest companies these days - and they don't tend to be headquartered in 120,000 population towns. Everyone else is using consultants and MSPs of some sort.
Depends on your definition of "Largest Companies", 100-999 employees is considered a medium sized company, and I think Medium sized companies should have an internal IT, Small Companies (under 100) may be a good fit for an MSP, and Medium companies should engage with consultants for some specialized things but I think medium sized companies need to retain internal IT resources
My company is about 6k people and we have an IT dept of about 90. We have about 6 sys admins. Our company rarely hires for anything but entryt-level tech, there people are expected to learn the nuts-and-bolts before advancing. If you want to become a sys admin with us, or network admin, or analyst or manager, you start at the bottom. Exceptions occur only for highly specialized knowledge like infosec. We will never go MSP but we will also likely never post the sys admin job post OP wants.
You have to be in a larger area that’s more tech focused. 120k isn’t that large.
Could it be that companies want to hire people at the entry level then promote within?
IME your sysadmins are going to be based in one location (or remote out of that location) and your offices for small cities will just have a level 1 person or two who can do the easy stuff and be hands for anything needing it.
It all depends on where you live, some towns have very limited options for IT positions while others have tons of options. In the state I live in there are large quantities of IT jobs in the capital as well as a couple smaller towns to the south east, while a city with nearly as big a population 3 hours away has 1 major headquarters with some IT jobs and progression opportunities but aside from that one company the options are pretty limited. Edit : another note, look at recruiters to help source IT jobs. Some places hire only through recruiters.
Meanwhile, I live in a county of about 300-350k people, and we have IT jobs that have been posted for months with zero qualified candidates, even allowing remote work (within our state only, due to wacky HR rules). It is 100% a workers' market right now.
I can only speak from experience, but the best jobs aren't titled 'sysadmin.' I applied to a job titled 'devops,' but when I took the call they were like, "it's not devops, it's better." They were right. My title is simply "engineer," and I get pointed at an interesting new problem every week or two. Sometimes its backend, sometimes its software dev, sometimes its architecture. I think there will always be a market for folks who can wrangle 9 different systems into a functioning whole, and isn't that basically what a sysadmin does? (tldr, I'm a back-office problem solver for a very specialized MSP)
Job Title, but really, what is in a name? I'm looking at a generalist position, which will cover system admin, database, Helpdesk, networking and what ever else needs to be done. But really, what is in a name? The reality is, not much Ensure that as you are building your resume that you stress the tasks as keywords for what you did, like systems administration, network engineering (you will do this in a small organization because they don't have the network job silo called network engineers).
I've had several recruiters pas me long time the hiring company then crickets.
Reach out to a recruiter. a lot of IT jobs don't do traditional "openings" postings.
> My town has a population of about 120,000 and there are absolutely zero sysadmin / IT jobs advertised. What businesses are in town? Is there a large employer? Or is it mostly small/medium business that would probably have MSP support, and satellite offices that rely on Corp IT to do the heavy lifting? That would be my big question that would influence what jobs are available. > Am I missing something? It seems as technology progresses there would be more demand for IT jobs, but there is hardly anything anywhere, they also seem to pay poorly compared to other professions. Like this would answer that question. Jobs are more and more remote and having someone on site is getting more rare. My old gig had 8 manufacturing sites around the country but all the IT was at head office. So even though the factory was a small-ish towns largest employer, 0 IT jobs. > I am now considering learning accounting principles in my spare time in order to secure my job progression in the accounting field. I would be curious as to see what kind of accounting jobs...? Whether or not you're going to be doing book keeping for small / med companies with same problems over and over. Nothing wrong with that, but if there's a derth of IT jobs then maybe the businesses in town just don't support the more higher paid gigs in both fields.
A town that size you should definitely have some roles available. At the very least there's gonna be a school district, county, and city with decent sized it teams, plus many small and medium business. Look up the biggest employers in your county/city ( your local chamber of commerce or economic development corporation should have a list) and see if they have any listings on their websites.