Advancing from Unix Sysadmin to Programmer

[Martin McMahon]

Hello there.

I am a 33 year old Unix System Admin and am currently at a stage
in my career where I have identified a change is needed in my career.

I am nearly finished (one year left) a B.Sc. in Information Technology
and have approx. 8 years of solid Unix System Admin experience behind
me. I am also proficient in Shell Programming, Perl and reasonably
proficient in C. I do not have experience in OO programming, but am
practising at home on personal projects.

I would be very grateful if there is someone out there who could
answer this question for me, or who has gone through the same scenario.
My question is:

Is it possible at this stage of my life to transfer (by whatever
means) to a purely programming role, considering my age,
experience and education?

Any experiences, opinions and criticisms are all appreciated.
I realise some may say that Unix Sysadmins *are* programmers,
but I do not believe that to be the case - we are more like
mechanics who maintain what has been designed and occasionally
repair or tack on certain additions of our own.

Finally for anyone who might believe I'm being rash -
I did not suddenly decide this, but have been thinking and mulling
this over in my head for over a year now. A conversation I had with
my boss recently (by far the best and open minded manager I have
ever worked for) is what enabled me to realise I needed to make a
decision.

[Victor Wagner]

: I am a 33 year old Unix System Admin and am currently at a stage
: in my career where I have identified a change is needed in my career.

[skip]

: My question is:

: Is it possible at this stage of my life to transfer (by whatever
: means) to a purely programming role, considering my age,
: experience and education?

If you feel it nesseccary - you can try. There is even more strange
careers out there.

If you feel that you can do programmer's job and can make your employer
beleive it - you ARE programmer.
--

[Johan]

be aware that it take time to be a good programmer. Also application
development will decrease the next years. Big companies will do offshore for
development, is much cheaper. Personally I don't believe it will work.
So, if you think you can be a programmer go for it.

J


"Martin McMahon" <nospammac@yahoo.com> schreef in bericht
news:8ededcd8.0405200405.41fb32d@posting.google.co m...

> Hello there.
>
> I am a 33 year old Unix System Admin and am currently at a stage
> in my career where I have identified a change is needed in my career.
>
> I am nearly finished (one year left) a B.Sc. in Information Technology
> and have approx. 8 years of solid Unix System Admin experience behind
> me. I am also proficient in Shell Programming, Perl and reasonably
> proficient in C. I do not have experience in OO programming, but am
> practising at home on personal projects.
>
> I would be very grateful if there is someone out there who could
> answer this question for me, or who has gone through the same scenario.
> My question is:
>
> Is it possible at this stage of my life to transfer (by whatever
> means) to a purely programming role, considering my age,
> experience and education?
>
> Any experiences, opinions and criticisms are all appreciated.
> I realise some may say that Unix Sysadmins *are* programmers,
> but I do not believe that to be the case - we are more like
> mechanics who maintain what has been designed and occasionally
> repair or tack on certain additions of our own.
>
> Finally for anyone who might believe I'm being rash -
> I did not suddenly decide this, but have been thinking and mulling
> this over in my head for over a year now. A conversation I had with
> my boss recently (by far the best and open minded manager I have
> ever worked for) is what enabled me to realise I needed to make a
> decision.

[David Schwartz]

Martin McMahon wrote:

> I am a 33 year old Unix System Admin and am currently at a stage
> in my career where I have identified a change is needed in my career.

[snip]

> Is it possible at this stage of my life to transfer (by whatever
> means) to a purely programming role, considering my age,
> experience and education?

Yes, of course. You're young and fairly experienced, so it should not be
all that difficult.

Unfortunately, though, there's no substitute for experience. You'll have
to make every programming mistake two or three times just like every other
programmer. And other programmers will be familiar with algorithms you've
never even heard of. And you can't read about these things and absorb them,
you have to run into problems and solve them.

You'll be behind the programming experience curve, but maybe you can
make up for that with your system administration skills and experience. One
of my top programmers was afraid to go into one of our DNS servers and make
a simple change (CNAME a failed server over to one that was still
working) -- he was afraid he'd break something.

DS

[hymie!]

In our last episode, the evil Dr. Lacto had captured our hero,
[email]nospammac@yahoo.com[/email] (Martin McMahon), who said:

>Hello there.

>I am a 33 year old Unix System Admin and am currently at a stage
>in my career where I have identified a change is needed in my career.

>Is it possible at this stage of my life to transfer (by whatever
>means) to a purely programming role, considering my age,
>experience and education?

Warning -- root is addictive. It's very humbling when you make the kind
of mistake that, in the past, you could have fixed for yourself, but
now you have to ask somebody else to fix for you.

(When I get the option, I give myself UID 755 just to be safe :)

hymie! [url]http://www.smart.net/~hymowitz[/url] [email]hymie@lactose.smart.net[/email]
================================================== =============================

[Otto Wyss]

David Schwartz <davids@webmaster.com> wrote:

> Martin McMahon wrote:
>

> > I am a 33 year old Unix System Admin and am currently at a stage
> > in my career where I have identified a change is needed in my career.

> [snip]

> > Is it possible at this stage of my life to transfer (by whatever
> > means) to a purely programming role, considering my age,
> > experience and education?

>
> Yes, of course. You're young and fairly experienced, so it should not be
> all that difficult.
>

But don't expect to much, dull programming jobs aren't better then sys
admin jobs and good programming jobs are very rare. If you feel you can
do it go for it.

> Unfortunately, though, there's no substitute for experience. You'll have
> to make every programming mistake two or three times just like every other
> programmer. And other programmers will be familiar with algorithms you've
> never even heard of. And you can't read about these things and absorb them,
> you have to run into problems and solve them.
>

While there is no substitute for experience, experience can be aquired
through hard work. IMO the best way to aquire experience without being
fired by the boss is to participate in any OpenSource project. I'd
choose a medium size project since it probably is easier to look
through. The advantage of OpenSource project is your code is viewed by
others and if you make errors they will immediately be critisiced. And
the most important reason if you make valuable contributions any other
error will be forgiven.

So just look for a not to big project which is activly maintained. On
your way you will need help which only active maintainers will provide.
Important, before you request to join the project look through the bug
list and try to to fix any. If you have fixed enough bugs the
maintainers will ask you to join the project anyway since they know
you're a valuable contributor. BTW I know some developers who I'd love
if they would join my projects but they prefer to stay contributor.
Always think it's much better to be a good contributor than a bad member
of a project.

Don't give up when you can't fix a bug, it might be too difficult for
your current knowledge. Just leave it for later and try a simpler one.
Also don't give up when a fix is rejected, maybe a third of mine were
rejected. In case there aren't any bugs (yes that can happen) try to add
a missing feature and make a patch.

IMO the best way to get experience is looking through other's code. And
fixing bug is the best way to do it. And providing fixes makes you a
good contributor which will be rewarded with help, etc. when you need
it. Keep in mind everything what counts in OpenSource is code or
documentation, everything which brings a project ahead.

O. Wyss

--
See a huge pile of work at "http://wyodesktop.sourceforge.net/"

[Rich Teer]

On Thu, 20 May 2004, Otto Wyss wrote:

> While there is no substitute for experience, experience can be aquired
> through hard work. IMO the best way to aquire experience without being
> fired by the boss is to participate in any OpenSource project. I'd
> choose a medium size project since it probably is easier to look
> through. The advantage of OpenSource project is your code is viewed by
> others and if you make errors they will immediately be critisiced. And
> the most important reason if you make valuable contributions any other
> error will be forgiven.

That is some good advice, but beware the flip-side: not all open source
code necessarily follows good programming techniques and some have
arguably horrible code layout standards.

--
Rich Teer, SCNA, SCSA

President,
Rite Online Inc.

Voice: +1 (250) 979-1638
URL: [url]http://www.rite-online.net[/url]

[Otto Wyss]

Rich Teer <rich.teer@rite-group.com> wrote:

> On Thu, 20 May 2004, Otto Wyss wrote:
>

> > While there is no substitute for experience, experience can be aquired
> > through hard work. IMO the best way to aquire experience without being
> > fired by the boss is to participate in any OpenSource project. I'd
> > choose a medium size project since it probably is easier to look
> > through. The advantage of OpenSource project is your code is viewed by
> > others and if you make errors they will immediately be critisiced. And
> > the most important reason if you make valuable contributions any other
> > error will be forgiven.

>
> That is some good advice, but beware the flip-side: not all open source
> code necessarily follows good programming techniques and some have
> arguably horrible code layout standards.

True! Just because of that I've created wxGuide
("http://wxguide.sourceforge.net/") which might help in improving it.

O. Wyss

--
See a huge pile of work at "http://wyodesktop.sourceforge.net/"

[Frank Cusack]

On 20 May 2004 05:05:33 -0700 [email]nospammac@yahoo.com[/email] (Martin McMahon) wrote:

> I am a 33 year old Unix System Admin and am currently at a stage
> in my career where I have identified a change is needed in my career.
>
> I am nearly finished (one year left) a B.Sc. in Information Technology
> and have approx. 8 years of solid Unix System Admin experience behind
> me. I am also proficient in Shell Programming, Perl and reasonably
> proficient in C. I do not have experience in OO programming, but am
> practising at home on personal projects.
>
> I would be very grateful if there is someone out there who could
> answer this question for me, or who has gone through the same scenario.
> My question is:
>
> Is it possible at this stage of my life to transfer (by whatever
> means) to a purely programming role, considering my age,
> experience and education?

Of course it is possible! However the fact that you are asking this
question at all hints that you may not be prepared for it.

There are many types of programming jobs. I can't think of any good
ones in which an Information Technology degree is helpful. Certainly
none where there is any job security. (And I assume you're only
considering unix programming jobs.) Don't get me wrong, you should
definitely complete your degree.

> Any experiences, opinions and criticisms are all appreciated.
> I realise some may say that Unix Sysadmins *are* programmers,
> but I do not believe that to be the case - we are more like
> mechanics who maintain what has been designed and occasionally
> repair or tack on certain additions of our own.

True, but there are many mere "mechanics" who build/maintain/extend
systems whose value is far greater than the sum of their parts. What
I really mean to say is, you are being self-limiting. If, as a
sysadmin, you are not "designing" and "extending" (to quote your own
words) systems, well I hate to say it but you are not very far along
in a SA career. Or, you've only worked for crappy companies.

You seem to be of the opinion that system administration is a lesser
role than programmer. I'd disagree; they're different skills. One
does not "advance" from SA into programming.

Experience is king. Given your SA background, you should have a leg
up on someone with similar programming skills (experience). So you
should figure out what kind of programming you'd like to do, and
gain *real* experience doing it--implement something that your
current employer needs. It can be done, quite readily if you put
your mind to it.

/fc

[Måns Rullgård]

Rich Teer <rich.teer@rite-group.com> writes:

> On Thu, 20 May 2004, Otto Wyss wrote:
>

>> While there is no substitute for experience, experience can be aquired
>> through hard work. IMO the best way to aquire experience without being
>> fired by the boss is to participate in any OpenSource project. I'd
>> choose a medium size project since it probably is easier to look
>> through. The advantage of OpenSource project is your code is viewed by
>> others and if you make errors they will immediately be critisiced. And
>> the most important reason if you make valuable contributions any other
>> error will be forgiven.

>
> That is some good advice, but beware the flip-side: not all open source
> code necessarily follows good programming techniques and some have
> arguably horrible code layout standards.

The same can be said about commercial closed source code. The
difference is only that nobody knows which programs have terrible
code.

--
Måns Rullgård
[email]mru@kth.se[/email]

[Robert Melson]

On Thursday 20 May 2004 06:05, Martin McMahon wrote:

> Hello there.
>
> I am a 33 year old Unix System Admin and am currently at a stage
> in my career where I have identified a change is needed in my career.
>
> I am nearly finished (one year left) a B.Sc. in Information Technology
> and have approx. 8 years of solid Unix System Admin experience behind
> me. I am also proficient in Shell Programming, Perl and reasonably
> proficient in C. I do not have experience in OO programming, but am
> practising at home on personal projects.
>
> I would be very grateful if there is someone out there who could
> answer this question for me, or who has gone through the same scenario.
> My question is:
>
> Is it possible at this stage of my life to transfer (by whatever
> means) to a purely programming role, considering my age,
> experience and education?
>
> Any experiences, opinions and criticisms are all appreciated.
> I realise some may say that Unix Sysadmins *are* programmers,
> but I do not believe that to be the case - we are more like
> mechanics who maintain what has been designed and occasionally
> repair or tack on certain additions of our own.
>
> Finally for anyone who might believe I'm being rash -
> I did not suddenly decide this, but have been thinking and mulling
> this over in my head for over a year now. A conversation I had with
> my boss recently (by far the best and open minded manager I have
> ever worked for) is what enabled me to realise I needed to make a
> decision.

I can only speak for myself here, but I made exactly the reverse transition:
from programming to sysadmin, largely because I felt programming was too
narrowly focused and, thereby, too limiting. Granted, you don't
necessarily create the next world-beater application as an admin, but you
have scope for programming, scripting (as distinct from programming),
hardware and software configuration and a host of other tasks and skills
that make _possible_ that world-beater and every other application that
appears.

Yeah, the hours are frequently miserable as an sysadmin, users and managers
often don't understand that you can't just snap your fingers and unscrew
their screw-ups, that regenning a system or replacing a hard-drive
necessarily takes time, that installing and configuring a new package in
the face of poor or non-existent documentation is not a day in the park.
BUT there are equal pressures as a programmer: KLOCS, code reviews and
walkthroughs, unreasonable and unpredictable customer and management
demands for more and newer "features" (what somebody called 'freeping
creaturism') and a host of other negatives.

_Can_ you make the transition at this stage of your career? Absolutely!
Should you? Only you can answer that.

Bob Melson


--
Robert G. Melson Nothing is more terrible than
Rio Grande MicroSolutions ignorance in action.
El Paso, Texas Goethe
melsonr(at)earthlink(dot)net

[Doug Freyburger]

Martin McMahon wrote:

>
> I am a 33 year old Unix System Admin and am currently at a stage
> in my career where I have identified a change is needed in my career.
>
> I am nearly finished (one year left) a B.Sc. in Information Technology
> and have approx. 8 years of solid Unix System Admin experience behind
> me. I am also proficient in Shell Programming, Perl and reasonably
> proficient in C. I do not have experience in OO programming, but am
> practising at home on personal projects.
>
> I would be very grateful if there is someone out there who could
> answer this question for me, or who has gone through the same scenario.

I went the opposite direction, and I considered the move from
developer to sysadmin to be advancing. That's entirely a matter
of personal tastes. Realistically both are engineering professions
and the change from one to the other is lateral.

> My question is:
> Is it possible at this stage of my life to transfer (by whatever
> means) to a purely programming role, considering my age,
> experience and education?

Certainly. Developer and sysadmin both require similar education
and training. They are different in personality not preparation.

> Any experiences, opinions and criticisms are all appreciated.
> I realise some may say that Unix Sysadmins *are* programmers,
> but I do not believe that to be the case - we are more like
> mechanics who maintain what has been designed and occasionally
> repair or tack on certain additions of our own.

Senior on the SAGE scale mandates extensive programming experience.
So there are intermediates out there who aren't programmers but
all of the seniors are programmers. No matter how long a
non-coder might have been in the field.

> Finally for anyone who might believe I'm being rash -
> I did not suddenly decide this, but have been thinking and mulling
> this over in my head for over a year now. A conversation I had with
> my boss recently (by far the best and open minded manager I have
> ever worked for) is what enabled me to realise I needed to make a
> decision.

Thought it over, good stuff. For me I eventually found development
dull but here I am a sysadmin 24 years now and it's still not dull.
You have decided to grab the steering wheel of your career. Very
appropriate action to take.

[Russell Shaw]

Rich Teer wrote:

> On Thu, 20 May 2004, Otto Wyss wrote:
>

>>While there is no substitute for experience, experience can be aquired
>>through hard work. IMO the best way to aquire experience without being
>>fired by the boss is to participate in any OpenSource project. I'd
>>choose a medium size project since it probably is easier to look
>>through. The advantage of OpenSource project is your code is viewed by
>>others and if you make errors they will immediately be critisiced. And
>>the most important reason if you make valuable contributions any other
>>error will be forgiven.

>
> That is some good advice, but beware the flip-side: not all open source
> code necessarily follows good programming techniques and some have
> arguably horrible code layout standards.

IMHO, it's better to keep a mundane and easy job that pays the bills and
do challenging and interesting programming hobbies, instead of doing the
interesting and challenging stuff for your day job, unless you already
happen to get into that position. Interesting and challenging work for
your day job gets too much like a hobby and you end up working all hours
for less pay than you should get. If you get really proficient at programming
(such as practicing on open-source projects for a while), then a new job
in the programming area should be much easier.

[Bjorn Borud]

[Robert Melson <melsonr@earthlink.net>]
|
| I can only speak for myself here, but I made exactly the reverse
| transition: from programming to sysadmin, largely because I felt
| programming was too narrowly focused and, thereby, too limiting.

I don't really understand why system administration and programming
has to be two completely different disciplines. in my experience,
people who can both function as programmers and sysadmins (and are
good at both) are better problem-solvers and are more likely to come
up with solutions when problems arise.


I agree with what was said earlier in the thread, but I would like to
add something: find yourself a suitable open source project to work
on in your spare time, but also: find a mentor. having someone who
can give you hints as to which direction to choose, what to read, what
to learn etc. is incredibly helpful. I am not sure how you would go
about finding one though :-).


-Bjørn

[Gary Armstrong]

Martin McMahon wrote:

> Hello there.
>
> I am a 33 year old Unix System Admin and am currently at a stage
> in my career where I have identified a change is needed in my career.
>
> I am nearly finished (one year left) a B.Sc. in Information Technology
> and have approx. 8 years of solid Unix System Admin experience behind
> me. I am also proficient in Shell Programming, Perl and reasonably
> proficient in C. I do not have experience in OO programming, but am
> practising at home on personal projects.
>
> I would be very grateful if there is someone out there who could
> answer this question for me, or who has gone through the same scenario.
> My question is:
>
> Is it possible at this stage of my life to transfer (by whatever
> means) to a purely programming role, considering my age,
> experience and education?
>
> Any experiences, opinions and criticisms are all appreciated.
> I realise some may say that Unix Sysadmins *are* programmers,
> but I do not believe that to be the case - we are more like
> mechanics who maintain what has been designed and occasionally
> repair or tack on certain additions of our own.
>

Uhhmmm, if I had to guess that's what most programmers do. I'd bet there
are more maintaining and adding on, then inventing.

> Finally for anyone who might believe I'm being rash -
> I did not suddenly decide this, but have been thinking and mulling
> this over in my head for over a year now. A conversation I had with
> my boss recently (by far the best and open minded manager I have
> ever worked for) is what enabled me to realise I needed to make a
> decision.

In my opinion, the coding experience isn't the major factor. Gaining the
domain experience is what takes time. Understanding how and what the
program should do is what will make you and your programs good. If you
code with no input to the spec, what fun is that( I think the term is
code pig )?

Just my $.02
Gary

BTW: I do both. I'm the only sysadmin and programmer at my company. The
computing environment and the programs used in production are mine.
Obviously we b small. 8^)

[Martin McMahon]

Many thanks to all for your advice and insightful comments.
It really does help to get as much advice as possible in
something like this.

Cheers,
Martin.

[Bjorn Reese]

On Thu, 20 May 2004 05:05:33 -0700, Martin McMahon wrote:

> Any experiences, opinions and criticisms are all appreciated.
> I realise some may say that Unix Sysadmins *are* programmers,
> but I do not believe that to be the case - we are more like
> mechanics who maintain what has been designed and occasionally
> repair or tack on certain additions of our own.

You have at least two things going for you:

First, as a sysadmin you have extensive experience in trouble-
shooting. Although the tools may differ from those used in
programming, the underlying principles are more or less the
same. This is an area where most new programmers have absolutely
no skills.

Second, more and more programmers are building systems from
existing (COTS) components, and are mainly writing the glue
between. The ability to get various parts of the system to
act nicely together is basically the same in admin and systems
programming.

What you need to focus on is, as you have already identified
yourself, the design activity. Understanding some OOP language
does not hurt either (any one with work.)

--
mail1dotstofanetdotdk

[Juha Laiho]

[email]nospammac@yahoo.com[/email] (Martin McMahon) said:

>I am a 33 year old Unix System Admin and am currently at a stage
>in my career where I have identified a change is needed in my career.
>
>I am nearly finished (one year left) a B.Sc. in Information Technology
>and have approx. 8 years of solid Unix System Admin experience behind
>me. I am also proficient in Shell Programming, Perl and reasonably
>proficient in C. I do not have experience in OO programming, but am
>practising at home on personal projects.

Depending on what all you've done during your career, you might have
more than you initially see.

You most probably pretty well know the Unix system functionality, f.ex.
possibilities and limitations of the file system (f.ex. ownership and
privilege issues). You also might know rather well the system call
interface, and realise that in the end system calls are the limit;
they either allow or prohibit some action.

Also, you may have been testing various TCP protocols using telnet, and
more or less understand the functionality of SMTP and HTTP protocols
(and again, possibilities and limitations of them). You may know what
can and cannot be expected as proxy server functionality.

You may also have some database experience -- depending on what exactly,
this also could be a benefit.

.... and so on. These may offer you a vastly wider knowledge base on
which to build your programming career than that of someone who has just
completed some base programming training. Lately, I've seen too many
programmers who don't have a clue about how to work with databases,
what are the limitations (and on the other hand services) of the OS
platform, and what are the possibilities and limitations of various
common protocols (and which protocols make sense in which uses).

This is not to say that there are programmers who also have wide knowledge
of the field, but I thought to list some possible assets you may have
overlooked.
--
Wolf a.k.a. Juha Laiho Espoo, Finland
(GC 3.0) GIT d- s+: a C++ ULSH++++$ P++@ L+++ E- W+$@ N++ !K w !O !M V
PS(+) PE Y+ PGP(+) t- 5 !X R !tv b+ !DI D G e+ h---- r+++ y++++
"...cancel my subscription to the resurrection!" (Jim Morrison)

[Brian Raiter]

> One of my top programmers was afraid to go into one of our DNS

> servers and make a simple change (CNAME a failed server over to one
> that was still working) -- he was afraid he'd break something.

As would I in that situation. I know enough to know how much I don't know.

b

[Chris Cox]

Martin McMahon wrote:

> Hello there.
>
> I am a 33 year old Unix System Admin and am currently at a stage
> in my career where I have identified a change is needed in my career.
>

....

> My question is:
>
> Is it possible at this stage of my life to transfer (by whatever
> means) to a purely programming role, considering my age,
> experience and education?

.....

Well... I don't think there's anything wrong with this. However, I'm a
Programmer (C, C++, LISP, Cobol, Assembler, Pascal, etc) that became a
Systems Administrator. I consider it a promotion. I often times assist
our SW developers with troubleshooting. So either way, I'd recommend
Systems Administration, but there's nothing wrong with knowing how to
program.... and you don't necessarily have to change career paths.