How is that working out for you? Isn't the pay significantly less being a sysadmin?
You need to pivot in work, especially as most of us will be working for 40 years+. I'm getting into the security stuff now, which I think is the new hotness.Only thing bringing me back to programming is golang which is absolutely superb for server-side stuff.
As a tech lead of a team that is largely junior, I keep running into places where a lack of sysadmin-type knowledge seriously harms the ability of a CS degree holder (anywhere from BSc to PhD) to do real-world software engineering work unless they have either been self-taught in sysadmin sort of things or have had a couple years experience that has forced that sort of experience on them.
To give an example, a fresh-out-of-school CS degree holder that never played with Linux servers for fun in his own time might be able to implement some software and then easily learn to Dockerize it, but may be stuck for three days on getting it to talk to other services both locally and in a test environment because of essentially zero exposure to ideas in networking - and yet the fix to the problem takes about 5 minutes for someone with exposure to how networking works. ("What's a bridge?")
Another example comes from general familiarity with the server/client model: the rule of thumb to have a max number of worker threads equal to twice the cores available unless there is a reason to re-evaluate that.
All that said, I would still favor sticking with the CS degree as well. Basic practical familiarity with sysadmin concerns can be more or less picked up over time via personal projects and then as needed on the job, but the formal knowledge accumulated over a CS degree would be much harder to do that with. I would only suggest to make sure to spend time on personal projects that, for lack of a better term, are full-stack.
However, if you haven't had networking experience in college, you went to a terrible program. I had exposure to networking (at Cal) in 3-4 classes.
(I used to work as an SRE, before I made my way back into functional programming and finance recently.)
I make as much as my developer counterparts, for what it's worth.
Next switch is likely starting a business.
37 y.o., still not tired of this!
I can see how someone could get bitter if they stayed in the same role/position most of their career, but in my experience this has tended to be people with a negative outlook/attitude/chip on shoulder in general... It really is what you make of it, people are people wherever you go, some are dicks, some are not.
Just accept the reality of the game and deal with it.
You don't need to spread your aura of doom everywhere you go.
>Everybody has to do everything.
Everybody needs to have _at least some degree of familiarity_ with everything, yes. But that has always been the case. There is not and there never has been a job posting for someone to design algorithms and do nothing else, nor to deploy HTTP servers and nothing else.
I expect that if you pick any part of any software/hardware stack, anyone with a reasonable amount of experience would be able to give real-world examples where familiarity with several (and sometimes all) other parts of that stack are not only beneficial but sometimes necessary. I also expect that illustrations would be able to found from any point in the history of computing, up to and including now.
I don't think it's "hard" per se, but it does require intentional effort. I can also see how, with a difficult work schedule, or family commitments, it may become hard or even impossible to carve out the time.
I'm about 23 years into this journey, and although I still remember plenty of esoteric trivia that was useful programming in the 90's, and is useless now, there still appears to be room to learn new things every day