DISQUS

Any suggestions on how a new entrant to the world of sysadmining can become the kind of professional you describe? After years of schooling and taking certification after certification I found it incredibly hard to get a job in my field. It seems the HR guys *want* a Cyrix guy, a Cisco guy or whatever. Once you are hired, that's pretty much all you ever work with, further channelizing you. I can't become the jack-of-all-trades unless I actually work with a variety of systems, and as you point out, the trend is for businesses to just buy packaged "solutions". The company I work for deals heavily with Microsoft Small Business Server and Cisco. We have a guy whose sole job is the Cisco gear, so all I ever get to learn is Microsoft's way of doing things. I've tried taking formal courses, only to have the certificates dismissed. (Too many companies burned by paper certs back in the late 80's I guess) I've tried playing with various things at home on my free time, but how much free time does a married sysadmin father of two have? For even the things I can study, there's a limit to how useful that practise can be. You can't really learn load balancers without some rather pricey hardware to play with, along with something to generate the traffic. And unless I do get hands-on work with something, it's damn hard getting a job where I would be responsible for keeping it deployed.

I've seen Dark Secret #6 mentioned many times on various urban legend type sites and on the better ones the basic facts are confirmed but with a caveat: It is indeed true that no-one "dies" at Disney Land, but the same thing is true at any Six Flags, Canada's Wonderland or other public venue. In most places, a person doesn't officially die until pronounced dead by an actual doctor. If a person drops dead of a heart attack or something in a public place the EMS/paramedics take him to the local hospital and the E.R. doctor attempts to revive him. Only after that has failed is he pronounced legally dead.