"The motherboard Post beep echoed down his spine, the black screen before him drew him in as the pulsing cursor kept time with his heartbeat. Error: No boot disk has been detected or the disk has failed, a grin crept in from behind his frown and unexpected excitement filled the room"
We all want to be the guy in the chair. This is a fundamental mindset for anyone who has been in a support role. The guy in the chair knows how to navigate the terminal. The guy in the chair anticipates a user's error and has a toolbox ready filled with tricks to mitigate the issue before him. The guy in the chair can google better than you can.
The guy in the chair, the systems engineer who has logged more time in a Linux terminal than doing miles on a treadmill, the systems administrator who has secretly named the servers under his care, or the DevOps engineer who has base templates for every environment he has spun up, these are the roles we see as the pinnacle of our career path.
But how do you get there?
We all start out with an interest in computers. How they work, how they break, how we build on them, how we break into them. That universal itch to physically switch a 1 to a zero, that universal itch to control the machine.
Command start
There is an unwritten natural progression from Desktop Support to Systems administration. From printers and drivers, file structures and Outlook pst's to printers and drivers, servers, Vmware, and Active Directory. Systems administration is the collegiate big brother to the freckle-faced Desktop Support engineer, two different points in the same line of progression, with skillsets miles apart. My Advice to get into Desktop support is to break your computer, fix it and break it again. If you are a millennial with GenX parents, congratulations you are in Desktop support, you have logged hundreds of hours in modem reboots and guided your parents through printer and email settings.
Desktop support is where you learn how to anticipate the needs and faults of the user, how to triage and investigate a problem, and how to document and implement fixes. The fundamentals learned here will iterate throughout your career.
Scaled Up
Depending on the business you find yourself in, Desktop support may not be the end. If your company is structured in an L-tier support structure, you can move up from L1 support to L3. If your company supports a large amount of corporate staff, local or global, sticking with CIT is always an option. But the chair beckons and whispers, and servers await to be conquered, clustered, and killed.
The transition from a Desktop support engineer to a System administrator is as seamless as driving a 1969 mustang after only driving a tesla all your life, things are about to move fast, rough, and wild.
Gone are the days of helping Janice in accounting with her printer problems while she tells you the name of every cat she owns, you have now entered the realm of confluence pages with hostnames and IPs of servers you support, ssh keys of Linux boxes in three different territories and Proxmox VM's humming like gregorian priests. Congratulations you have made it, but can you swim?
Your scope is broader, and you now have tickets from various teams throughout the company. Are you SSH'd into the server or did you reboot a user's machine? Is it quiet because it is a slow day or is the VOIP PBX down? Have you set the firewall ACLs to block explicit sites or only allow them? Do you have a patch ready for next week's system outage?
You've cut your teeth on Windows machines and now apt won't update on the ubuntu server, you are in another league where you not only have to hit every fastball but monitor its trajectory and speed and write a report to management.
Kill your darlings
You have mastered the terminal to a point where your only interaction is checking the crons that automate the bash scripts you have written for every foreseeable eventuality, your server's uptime somehow exceeds the OEM projected machine lifespan, and you have docker, on everything. Developers look up to you for writing the manual how on to use git, managers respect your work ethic and the systems you have built. Now what?
You are within your right to stay a system administrator, maybe specialize in cloud engineering or Linux engineering, or move up the ranks to become a manager or CIO.
But there's that itch, it's new, but it's there...
While writing that bash script that exports a mysql db from prod to integration, scrubbing it of its user data for developers to test on, something stayed behind. You find yourself looking into ansible or puppet for multiple-machine automation, you found yourself thinking about moving services from the multiple rack servers to microservices on kubernetes clusters on the public cloud. You spun up your first cluster using terraform and it dawned on you. DevOps is the next step of your evolution. Gone are the monolithic services hosted on Rackspace, and now it is in your power to kill your darlings and rebuild them daily.
Jenkins, CircleCI or Github actions. Ansible, Puppet or Chef. Your preferences in automation now lie with the language and documentation they are all built on. Your choice of cloud service is now based on how much money you are willing to throw into it. Your code repository used to consist of bash scripts, now they comprise of kubernetes manifests and terraform files. You used to distro-hop on a daily but now you struggle to choose between alma, alpine, or Debian container images. Welcome to the Culture.
GOTO START
You have reached the pinnacle, and your experience, and expertise have culminated in you becoming the guy in the chair. From this point, you can branch out into DevSecOps, SRE, Management, or even Platform Engineering. You have mastered your craft and you share your experience with others, Congratulations you have made it.
Always remember that feeling, that itch, the excitement of things broken waiting to be fixed, the rush of creating fixes for problems undocumented and every now and then create a ticket to Desktop Support, if you are lucky you might inspire the next guy in the chair.
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