I work as a Sharepoint developer. All is well, but with my knowledge of windows server in general and AD etc (much more than that of a dev) and what I have done on the cloud with hosting my own servers (which run well and have excellent uptime partly due to how I configured it all), my manager’s manager/manager both want me to move into server admin and infrastructure design stuff. I remember you said that you moved from development to sys admin as you found development boring. I kinda do too but only because where I work, there are no processes in place for testing etc nor source control so everything falls over and also my development ambitions don’t always match my company’s.
Would you recommend this move? A couple of things which may hurt me :
1) My certification and experience is more in dev (eg ASP.NET, C# etc) so that may hurt getting jobs as employers look for certain certs (I know that certs don’t mean everything and what I have done in the cloud with DNS/AD etc would mean A LOT MORE).
2) I haven’t used certain techs like Bladelogic, SCCM etc, which a lot of jobs seem to ask for (I have a license for sccm just didn’t deploy it for a number of reasons). If I decide to do this full time, experience in things like that would be quite important.
3) My only real proper experience is a previous job as a dev where I helped setup servers (like AD but messed it up) and on the cloud for my own use (where I’ve done it really well). The cloud thing is in itself a real selling point.
4) Not as many sys admin jobs as dev jobs? at least in London, UK (so I think, I could be wrong),
5) I don’t want to go down to being a junior again lol so I need to ramp up my learning a bit more (I know a lot about Windows but need to learn DNS some more, DFS, DHCP and maybe 1-2 other things). This does bother me.
6) Dev is boring when there is no proper systems eg source control etc so things break easily. I enjoy doing dev on my own servers as I have deployed the necessary subsystems such as source control, build servers, etc.
7) Responsibility is massive, as the devs will rely on me to correctly configure servers and I could be instrumental in ensuring uptime of the systems developed.
8) I can remain in dev/3rd line dev support, but then I am just another developer amongst 20 or so. Being the 2nd sys admin would mean I am not quite as generic now so my influence and visibility in the company goes much higher.
9) Development is a pain to keep up with, e.g. with the whole MS direction WRT Silverlight.
On the one hand, I am young (24) and having the oppurtunity to either in the same company after just a few yrs work experience (which at first was patchy due to not knowing how the world of work, works) is quite special (I am self taught in system admin and dev) so I should at least try it to see if I like it? Doing it for 6 months won’t really hurt my dev skills. However, any wisdom from people who can comment is much appreciated! I know there is another thread like this, which I read, but I am posting this anyway as every situation is unique.
Thanks
(copied from the comment, but I think its probably real world useful, after all its my own tactic)
whatever you get into, it will all be out of date in 5 years, so just keep learning new things. You can put a foot in both the Development and System admins camps, and call yourself a DevOps consultant. and make the $$$
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