By employed I mean get a job in the industry either offline or online. Ideally something that would highly likely remain in-demand in the near future.
Honestly? Pretty much anything. Not a senior level position unless you’re willing to really fudge your resume but entry or mid level - sure. If you put your nose to the grindstone you can learn to do pretty much anything in a year… that’s a long fucking time.
What kind of IT were you looking at? System administration? IT Support/Help Desk? Development? Networking? Ops?
I went in with a 4 year degree, the other grad next to me went in with a 6 month kinda masters. You can pull it off if you try hard enough and know your shit, wish I’d known that before I wasted so long at uni.
6 month kinda masters
What’s that, diploma mill?
I assumed they misunderstood how a 4 1/2 year master’s program works, since the masters part is technically only half a year on paper. But I don’t think that necessarily makes sense in context…
Thanks for responding! Honestly, I’m looking for a profession that is most likely to remain in-demand for the foreseeable future. Secondly, well, the income potential, of course. What would you recommend?
I’m self-taught as well, and I’d say look through the current job market and offerings, but don’t worry all that much - teaching yourself IT usually nets you a considerable amount of transferable skills that you build upon if things don’t work out in one field; you also learn to learn and get much more comfortable with switching branches.
The less volatile your branch is, the less likely it is to turn out to be a fad that you’ll have to drop several years down the line at best. Crypto and blockchain, for example, were probably often recommended when the thing was on the rise, but that’s nowhere near as popular and safe now; I believe the current AI hype to follow the same fate. Basically, look at the news and trends and be careful with whatever big and stupid corporations push for, praise, or massively invest in: that’s usually nothing but good marketing successfully baiting the suits.
Web develoment is probably going to stay simultaneously volatile and relevant for decades more, so that’s a good option. Embedded development shouldn’t be going anywhere either, although that’s more low-level and intimidating, but it can be fun and stable and pay relatively well. I hate the smartphones industry and can’t really say much about Android or iOS development, but I doubt it’s doomed or anything.
So far, it seems like not following whatever Elon Musk or other billionaires tell you is the future is a good bet.
You really can’t go wrong landing an IT help desk position at a moderate sized non-tech company. You’ll be an essential employee and get a lot of recognition for your work.
Hmmmm…
Nothing wrong here.
Sr level would easily get weeded out during the interview process.
You’d think so. You’d definitely think so.
Sounds like experience.
In that case the employee was just a good at selling their mediocre skillset. Knowing (and gaming) the rules is probably half the game.
What do you think of cloud computing in general? Cloud dev, cloud admin, or cloud architect? Good idea to invest all my free time into?
Yea, I don’t think it’s going anywhere anytime soon.
Any specific place you’d recommend to start with? Perhaps a specific course?
I studied hard for a few months, got my A+ and network+ certs from CompTIA.
Got my first helpdesk job making about 47K. 3 years later I was making 85K as a sysadmin. Stay in Helpdesk for 12-24 months, keep studying, start to learn a major infrastructure brand, Azure, AWS, Red Hat Linux, Xen Server, Cisco, etc.
Stay aggro on salary, don’t be afraid to jump from job to job as long as you’re there for at least a year and you leave on decent terms.
And for the love of Tux, don’t settle for piss pay. I can’t tell you how many IT folks I’ve met already in the industry who are Sys admins/engineers/network admins, making 20%,30%,40% under the average pay in their area. Money isn’t everything, but it sure as hell ain’t nothing either.
And never forget: The company doesn’t care about you.
And never forget: The company doesn’t care about you.
This right here. Every time I bring this up, some Lemmy person starts licking the corporate boot.
You’re here to provide a service and get paid. Jumping jobs is the fastest way to increasing your salary. Your first job is to gain experience. The next jobs is supposed to get you paid.
But even after you get a entry level job, I see a lot of jr techs stop learning. Yes, helping someone with their mouse isn’t glamorous. Yes, resetting email passwords isn’t what you took the test for. And no, chances are your job will not let you climb the ladder because you’re doing so well fixing basic end-user BS.
Don’t ever stop learning on your free time and be prepared to jump to hit the higher levels of salary.
Totally right.
The company doesn’t care about you.
I wish more people would understand this.
Also, HR is there to protect the company, not you.
Absolutely accurate.
I’m always a bit irritated by that definite statement that companies don’t care.
The company I work for is small, ~30 people, and my boss/employer as a person cares about me. A lot as a worker/employee, maybe less so but also as a person/individual.
Yes, the company as a theoretical construct does not care for or about me. It’s a construct. But that ignores the people in it, and the variance between companies (even if it’s only a minority where leadership personally cares).
Without even a little bit of sarcasm, I am genuinely happy for you. Hold on to this job for as long as you can, because people like that are incredibly rare.
In my 30+ year career in IT I’ve only managed to work for a place like that once. It was 20 years ago, and I was the sixth employee to be hired, and at our peak we were at about 30 people. The owner was a super nice guy who cared about every single one of his employees. I learned a lot from him and consider him to be a friend and a mentor. We weathered the 2008 financial downturn better than most, but eventually business started to dry up and the company was sold to a large competitor. The boss was relegated to a consultancy role, and eventually got pushed out altogether. I lasted another 3 years at that place, but it was never the same after the buyout. Everyone became just another cog in the machine. Every place I worked at before that or since was your typical corporate position where my manager’s supervisor’s boss doesn’t even know I exist, much less care about me.
I consider the first 6 years in that company a highlight of my career, and keep in touch with that boss and others who worked there. So yes, treasure your time at a good workplace, and don’t take for granted the personal connections you make there.
All great advice, but I’m curious why you say you should leave on decent terms? As long as you don’t get fired, what’s wrong with being candid in an exit interview and potentially ruffling feathers by saying what you couldn’t before?
So this is definitely something that varies depending on your situation.
Depending on what country/state you live in, you may or may not have good employment laws protecting you.
On top of that, if you leave on solid terms, your former employer might put in an extra good word for you to your next one. I’ve even had one who offered to write a personal recommendation letter for my next employer.
It depends a lot on how much you are willing/able to play the game, and what the laws are in your region, and the nature of your employment type.
Leave on such good terms that you can use them as references and don’t have to fear them bad mouthing your skills.
Thanks. So is your advice to, basically, study networking?
Not only networking unless you just wanna be a network admin. But networking is one of the most important components, you need the basics to be a good sys admin regardless.
Understand IP addressing, subnets, DHCP, DNS, OSI model, basics of packet anatomy, basics of routing and switching.
Have a solid understanding of those things plus a few other networking subjects, you’ll be able to troubleshoot really well. Don’t be the sys admin who barely understands IP addressing, I’ve known that person…not good.
Entry level networking technician. You can get a bunch of useful Cisco certifications for free on their website. Try to get yourself an old switch from ebay to practice setting up a small network, vlans etc., and you’ve got a solid start.
Try to get yourself an old switch from ebay to practice setting up a small network, vlans etc., and you’ve got a solid start.
This is what (older) millenials had to do when they wanted to play video games with their friends, no broadband internet, we moved the computer, set up a lan. Good old time. But this is how 20-25 years latter, I have basic knowledge of network, and look at puzzled Gen Z kids when I tell them to set their IP adress and ping the hardware
Sure as hell wouldn’t know what port forwarding is if it wasn’t for playing lan games online
My entire devops career started with writing stupid E2 programs in GMOD and hosting a private Minecraft server (IIRC it was Bukkit or something similar). This is the real pride and accomplishment.
Aw yeaaah Java bukkit waddap
I work in cybersecurity now, though I spent about 15 years in Systems Administration. I credit my career to my father buying a computer and letting me tinker with it. There were two factors that taught me a ton about computers:
- Creating boot disks for games (this was back in the heyday of MS-DOS).
- Realizing “oh shit, I had better fix this before dad gets home.”
Nothing teaches how to work on computers quite like working on a computer. And much of that “working” is actually figuring out how to un-fuck the computer you just fucked up.
The last part is a gem I will forever love.
Nothing quite like the oh fuck.The job equivalent for the customer is us saying “That’s unusual” :)
Your comment made me really nostalgic for the days of setting up pan parties, configuring hamachi servers, etc. Good old days
I see this as also a very future proof career. Even if businesses move the vast majority of their infrastructure to the cloud they’ll still have an on premises network presence.
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Appreciate the response! Any specific video/reading course to start with?
I didn’t use any video resources back when I got into it, so really couldn’t tell, sorry. But I’m sure there will be some networking 101 courses on youtube.
IT Helpdesk/Support is definitely the most entry level position you can get without a related degree or experience. You can self study with a ton of free resources and learn enough to able to do good on a technical interview.
I came in via the support track, my advice would be to gather generalist skills like writing documents, editing spreadsheets, maintaining databases, etc. Once you get your foot in the door with that, grind hard to master all the systems a company uses, and keep expanding that software portfolio. Also look at automation software like Zapier that can bridge the gap between them (make them talk to each other). Operations is a great stepping stone from support, and there will always be a need for the person keeping it all going.
So I went to university on a general computer science course, so this might already discount this answer. However, during my final year, a friend who was already in the industry convinced me to push towards a cloud engineering role (systems engineering specifically with cloud services like Amazon and Azure). This was not something my course covered at all, so we went through containers, AWS, Terraform, Kubernetes etc. during our free time before he got me an interview for a junior role when I graduated. I was very lucky with my circumstances but I don’t think I would’ve gotten the role without that extra study.
These roles are in demand and will be for the foreseeable future. If you have general Linux knowledge then you should be able to pick it up fairly quickly.
Thanks! Any specific course recommendations?
I’m a self-taught sysadmin. It took me ~3 years to get comfortable, and I’m srill learning stuff that feels like if not 100-level then at most 200-level course knowledge…
I started making a pivot to self-taught pentesting in hopes of breaking into red-teaming, but I’m stuck at finding time to practice and learn and still invest some time in the parts of life that aren’t my job and/or future job. I enjoy doing it just for fun outside of the career potentials, but I’ve been burnt out for years from turning my current career into my hobby as well, I won’t make that mistake again
I guess the only answer I have is: depends on how much time you plan on investing in self-teaching. I wouldn’t say anything’s necessarily out of reach, but I would say that learning the skills is only half the battle of getting employed.
I do have a little advice with my perspective: don’t think of it in large timeframes, e.g. “I wan’t to get to this goal within a year,” do it in hours or less. Force yourself to sit down and do something that furthers that goal for X amount of hours each day; that way, you have a very clear metric and can start measuring progress by how much time you actually spent studying and applying for jobs and networking (as in building relationships with your peers and future employers… but also the other kind too).
Oh, another piece of advice: don’t just read, watch videos and listen to lectures—learn by doing. Set up a home lab for whatever it is. At least a solid 80% of what you’ll encounter in the field can be emulated with a good enough PC and the right software (yes, even cabling). And for everything else… Well, that’s just good fun to own all those tools and gadgets and gizmos galore and so, so, SO much cable of every kind.
Last bit: are you having fun? If it’s not fun to learn, it’ll be soul-crushingly, mind-numbingly dull when it’s your job. You don’t get to do the cool new stuff most days, most days it’s just replying to emails and forcing the users to restart while you observe because most of the time “Yeah, I already did that” means “I may not understand computers in the least, but I’m inexplicably dead certain that the thing the expert is telling me to do won’t work.” So make sure you’re enjoying even those bits now
Otherwise, get out now while you still can and the Sunk Cost Fallacy hasn’t kicked in.
Also: See what the enterprise sector uses and try to aquire NFR licenses to get the full spectrum of the tool set. (Veeam for example gives out 1 year NFR licenses by just giving them your name and an email).
NFR license
Not to belabor the point, but this is something I just learned about, and would have saved me many headaches
It’s a really bad time to get into it as a noob, especially self taught. There are jobs, but there’s also alot of downsizing and layoffs in an already fairly saturated industry. Even lower end stuff right now you’ll probably be up against people with certs, degrees, job experience.
If you’re legitimately interested in IT and want to learn more on your own, you should! Find what interests you the most, and there will be a million resources available free and cheap. I don’t think it’s a good time to put all your career eggs in that basket though like it sounds you’re thinking.
Honestly, if you’re trying for zero to money, AFAIK trades are still hurting. Maybe look into trade programs at your local community College. It’s not a cushy lazy white collar job but you’d potentially make similar or better money because everyone for 20 years has been clamoring for cushy lazy white collar jobs.
Theres also serious though niche demand for people with trades knowledge and IT skills too. Plus knowing how to automate all your reports is always helpful.
Things to consider if you have that IT kinda mind and don’t mind playing in the mud. Instrumentation and Controls Technician, always need someone who can mess with comms and networking bullshit. And im some places can get into automation programming, called mechatronics sometimes? HVAC/building automation technician. Industrial electrician focussing on trying to get into commissioning and PLC programming/automation.
A foot-in-the-door job is colo datacenter tech. I know a major national company that pays about $20/hr and will take what they can get at that price point. Not interesting, not promote-able, bad schedules. But a resume item. Exposure to enterprise-grade equipment. While there, get the advanced certs you realy want and work on networking with the customers and vendors.
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Pretty much anything if you’re willing to crush out some certs. 365 is in-demand and you can learn everything on Microsoft’s training modules. Alternatively, programming pays well if you’re willing to learn the languages.
Once you get your foot in the door, focus on upward mobility by job hopping. Always take a better job title over higher pay if you want the big bucks later on.
Also bear in mind that most IT jobs favor personality over skill set, even if they deny it on paper.
Thanks for the solid advice! What do you think of cloud computing in general? Cloud dev, cloud admin, or cloud architect? Good idea to invest all my free time into?
A few years ago, I’d say web dev. I’d hire a junior web dev fresh out of a boot camp with only 6 months of experience at 60-80k.
Today, my company won’t allow it, and I’m fighting to get new devs. We won’t even take a junior without a bunch of core competencies, things that will take at least a year to pick up. But even if we did, there’s a huge pool of applicants who want in.
Appreciate the response! What do you think of getting a Google Cloud Certification? Would that be worthwhile in your view?
I’ll answer this from my perspective, which is that of someone who started out in a tech support role 30-odd years ago, and now run engineering operations teams in data centres.
One of the best teachers is experience, but it’s hard to get that experience until someone gives you a chance. Support desk/helpdesk are great entry-level jobs that’ll get you started. To help with your self-study for something like this (and if you have the means) consider starting a small homelab and growing from there.
Perhaps you can find a cheap managed network switch - either new or second-hand - that lets you start playing with VLANs. Maybe an SBC or two (Raspberry Pi, Orange Pi, etc) so you can start to experiment with Linux, and hosting servers. That’ll open the door to playing with other things down the track - Docker, nginx, etc.
The point is, when interviewing for entry level roles, I (and many hiring managers I know) will usually ask if a candidate runs a home network. By no means does that mean a candidate without one doesn’t get due consideration but, when I see someone’s eyes (and passion) light up when talking about their homelab, I know I’m onto someone who will grow and develop well in the role I’m hiring for.
If this sounds like a path you want to go down, a couple of useful communities where you can get info and advice on homelabbing are [email protected] and [email protected].
To add to all the other good advice in this thread. I just wanted to point out that the hardest part is going to be getting that first job. So pay attention to any advice about any positions that are currently actively hiring with little to no experience. An alternative is some networking/nepotism and leverage some connections to get you in your first job.
After getting some reasonable level of experience things get a lot easier. You still need to know what you’re doing and be able to prove it, but you’ll face less of an initial barrier and be more likely to get an interview.
Related, if you see a listing for an “entry level” job that requires 5+ years of experience or whatever, apply for it anyway. Odds are no one with experience is going to want to take the salary they’re offering, so you might get an interview.
Self study here, but I’ve been in IT for almost 30 years now.
For someone that is determined most of the certifications out there can be attained through self study. That’s how I got my MCSE, CCNA, Red Hat Linux, and CLP (Certified Lotus Professional, yeah I know, no one has ever heard of it). I studied while working a helpdesk job and was hired by the sysadmin department of the same company. I attained the CLP, because at the time 2002 or so, there were not many Lotus/ Domino admins and there were a lot of companies, particularly insurance companies and Coca Cola, used it extensively. Being a Lotus/Domino admin got me a lot of attention at the time, but today it is worthless.
Knocking door to door with a cert and no actual experience will be a much tougher route to take, but it is definitely possible.
If it is what you want to do, there is no reason for you to crack a book today and start learning.
Thanks a lot for putting in the effort to answer thoughtfully!
So since right now I’m not in the field at all (I’m just an English teacher in Asia), what would you do if you were in my shoes? I’ve got some understanding of how computers and networks work but it’s all pretty basic with no programming knowledge. Would you still get a cert or would you first try to get a help desk job online? Or something else? Feeling really stuck here…
If you feel proficient it the usual windows environment, I’d re ommend to start at a helpdesk job like at an MSP.
Smaller MSPs also make it possible to aquire more knowledge in other fields if you are advancing and showing proactive interest.
That’s how I started my job career.Though this heavily depends on the work place and culture at the company.
At a minimum it helps to show interest. :)
Thanks! Any good place to find a job globally, as an international applicant, remote only?
Maybe you are better suited to be at a global company that can provide support in a language of both the host and your mother tongue?
Moat MSP corps have telephone helpdesk.But I am really not suited for advice regarding your unique position.
I just saw my last sentence and cringed. I meant to say there’s no reason for you to NOT crack a book and start learning. Sorry about that.
Programming, or Software Development is not Sysadmin work. While becoming a Software Developer will give you some Sys Admin skills, that’s the long way to go about it, if your primary goal isn’t to be a Developer.
Experience sells in Information Technology. Next in line are Certifications. Getting a helpdesk job would be your first step. While working on the helpdesk, start studying for certifications. It is said that Microsoft Engineers drive their Chevy’s, Network Engineers drive BMW’s, and Linux engineers fly their private jet to work.
If you have no experience, then start looking for low end help desk jobs and start studying ASAP. There are many online study guides and courses.
Thanks for an insightful answer. Any specific course you’d recommend for a beginner these days? And a specific industry?
Vue.js, it’s the simplest of the popular frontend frameworks
You can learn a hellton about sysadmin and DevOps by running a home lab and aiding that with some courses and maybe one cert or two but I wouldn’t splurge on certs that readily.
Golang, Express.js, Nest, Flask, SQL (a must), maybe Spark if you dare. Any popular and expressive framework/language for full stack/backend, except for Rails and PHP, those are dying technologies despite their still relatively high popularity in some countries.
Maybe Flutter, Swift or React Native if you want to get into mobile dev.
Just go to a job board, then to learnxinyminutes.com, pick something and start with building small, then medium sized, then maybe more complex projects or contributing to FLOSS written using your tech of interest (but please, PLEASE don’'t treat OSS contributions primarily as a way to get a job. Pick something you use instead. Try to figure out how you would implement something, do that and don’t let the impostor syndrome win if it uses a tech you’re familiar with whenever you want to open an issue on a git forge.
The term IT is extremely broad now, and it will depend on your interests, but it’s not all that difficult to get into.
There is quite a large demand now for certain skill sets where large companies that traditionally only hired people with specific degrees for IT roles are now opening those up to people without degrees at all.
Some general roles companies are in demand for now are web developers, data analysts, and cloud services.
Cloud services is also a broad category, but a lot of companies are looking for, and will be in demand in the near future, is a cloud storage engineer/ data engineer (however the company decides to spin it), where you essentially try to optimize the usage of storage the company is utilizing. You can easily learn the basics through AWS and really honing in on their s3 capability.
Anything related to data analyst/science is in high demand due to companies collecting so much data on their customers they have no clue what to do with it all. Data science teams basically figure that out for the company.
Easiest role to get your foot in the door would probably be IT technician/help desk, but in my opinion that’s also a harder one to break out of into other roles. It really depends on the company and how closely those help desk roles are aligned with other departments.
