Hey, what's up?
John Sonmez from simpleprogrammer.com.
Today, I'm going to be talking about the transition from sysadmin to developer and to give some
advice on this.
This question, I don’t have a name—Oh, it's from Amir.
Amir says, "Hi, John.
I enjoy your content on YouTube and I appreciate your willingness to share your experiences
and thoughts with others.
Do you have any advice for sysadmins looking to transition to developer role?
I have been a sysadmin for 12 years and am currently in a senior role making a competitive
salary.
However, my passion for the role has waned and I no longer find it enjoyable.
By the same token, my passion for coding and building solutions to business problems has
grown.
My sysadmin career has introduced me to different programming languages and I can confidently
state that I'm a strong PHP and PERL developer.
I'm currently doing some side PHP work for a startup in my free time, but it hasn't given
me the amount of work I was hoping for.
I created a coding blog to market myself to potential employers and also revamp my resume
to highlight my development work.
I've been scanning the job postings in my area, Pittsburgh, but most of them are looking
for Java or C# talent.
I'm thinking about taking some classes in one of those languages to get up the speed,
but wanted to get your opinion first.
I don’t want to go into 20 different directions and end up wasting my time.
Thanks and have a good week, Amir."
Amir, you seem like a very intelligent man there, just the way that you've gone about
your career and phrased this.
I could see what you're worried about here.
Here is what I would say.
Actually, it's kind of—I think now is the better time to transition from sysadmin to
developer and the easier time than there has been historically.
The big reason for this is because of devops.
If you don’t know what devops is—I'm sure you do but for those listening that don't,
devops is sort of this role that a system admin has become.
It's kind of system admin and development and IT and operations all kind of rolled in
together.
As we've started doing more agile development in the software development world, we've needed
more developers capable of understanding deployment and how the IT infrastructure works and we've
needed more IT infrastructure people and system admins, and stuff like that that understand
the development process and how the life cycle works and deployment, and all of these things
and writing code to automate some of the stuff and to work with built services and all this.
This, I think, is a good branch, a good splitting point, a good jumping stone, whatever it is,
in order for you to go from sysadmin to development without trying to directly jump that gap.
You might be able to—maybe you want to just directly jump into it, in which case you can
try that.
Having the PHP experience should definitely help you and you should be able to pick up
a language like C# or Java.
I don't think that will be much of a problem for you.
But not having experience in it might be difficult to get a job.
What I would say is that you want to look for devops jobs.
Try looking for devops jobs that may be or in C# or Java environments if you want to
learn those languages.
Get into one of those roles where—even at your current job, you can start doing more
devops type of stuff.
I think sysadmin is kind of a dying breed anyway.
Not that—I love sysadmins.
They're awesome, but I think that more and more, sysadmins are having to take up programming
anyway and become devops really.
In reality, I think that role is disappearing just like manual testing is disappearing.
It's not disappearing.
It's morphing into something else.
I would highly encourage you to look into devops.
See if you can get a job in devops.
See if you can transition your current job to be more of devops.
In that devops role, sort of make sure that you get to do some more coding.
Automate, develop system, write scripts for that.
That’s going to be skills that you're already used to, but also start working with the developers
more and see if you can negotiate something when you get into the job.
I think if you're in a devops position and you're writing a lot of coding and you're
a capable coder, it's going to be a lot easier to make that transition and say, "Hey, can
I just work on the development team or can I have some development tasks?
I'd also like to use some development."
That's a lot easier of a transition.
Now, I could be wrong but this is what I suspect.
I've never actually made this transition this way before.
If you're watching this video and you have some advice, if you've actually made this
transition or if you're in devops, you think this is a good idea or not, I would definitely
like to hear your input here because I'm curious on this myself.
Go ahead and leave a comment below.
If you like this video, if you haven't subscribed already, what are you waiting for?
Go ahead and click the Subscribe and you'll get 2 to 3 videos a day.
I do a lot of videos.
It's true, but I do it for you.
I'll talk to you next time.
Take care.