Ask HN: Help out an old data center tech monkey which job is about to deprecate | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Help out an old data center tech monkey which job is about to deprecate

5 pointsOldandLonely3 comments

I am not really old, but old enough to be on the verge of not being able to learn anything drastic and not being able to take a radical 180 for my own sake and change the course of a confirmed deprecation

I am one of those thick-skulled data center tech monkeys that for the most part doesn't know shit about the bigger picture, and knows only how to rack servers, connect network cables and replace hard drives

my only luck is that as my english is decent, I got hired in a fortune 500 software company.

I Never chose my path, I could have been a software engineer if I was a little bit lucky and worked for it, instead I work in the physical infrastructure, I do see that where I work is neither were the money or the gratitude is, and lately the company like many others decided to go full public cloud. we should be done in about 2/3 years

The company have good reputation and pays well, very above the average. for the same job, I cannot claim the same salary anywhere else. so naturally me and many of my peers are stuck, slave of the paycheck and we could be tempted to stay as long as we can, hoping that we will be able to jump off the sinking ship in time and find something else

I read HN among other websites to smell the ambiance and learn new acronym and also the culture, I found very interesting links, found also a lot of resources for self learning

But there is not so many books and articles that someone can read per day while working a very busy and stressful job. catching up in 1 or 2 years what some learned in 15 years is no easy task. I am looking for a shortcut.

I know that this needs huge efforts and I'm willing to provide, but rather than going one way for too long and finding out that it is the wrong direction, I am trying first to get the big picture and see where I am, and then if it exist, take a shortcut

You aren’t too old to learn new things unless you suffer from dementia, and I don’t get that impression. I’m probably older (60) and I still learn new things in software development and sys admin constantly.

Find out what cloud provider(s) your employer is migrating to. Learn those, get certified, get involved in the migration. You have two to three years to learn some new things that at least relate to what you do now. Don’t stand around waiting for the ship to sink, as you put it. Get on the team, learn about cloud hosting, networking, security. Make yourself valuable to your employer rather than standing there watching your job evaporate.

You can read books and articles but the best way to learn is by doing. Most likely your employer will go through some trial and error figuring out the migration, which gives you an excellent opportunity to learn by doing.

This. If your company is migrating to AWS, go with AWS certification. You need to go horzintal in your learning, i.e broad and wide in term of knowledge and certifications. After getting some experience or extensive labbing, you can go vertical, i.e deeper and more specific knowledge.

Find whatever projects your company is planning, read more about those projects. Then understand where your passion is and what value you can add. Start learning, then contact the people owning those projects. Say that you want to contribute and that your main job will not be affected, as you will be doing it on the side. Your transition will not happen overnight, and you need a lot of work to get there, but if you are persistent you will get there.

There are courses on AWS certification for 9$ on udemy. You can also get a free account from AWS and start labbing.

> I am one of those thick-skulled data center tech monkeys that for the most part doesn't know shit about the bigger picture, and knows only how to rack servers, connect network cables and replace hard drives

Don't know if this is useful in your case but, the "cloud" does no magically means those thing do not exist. A lot of the concepts that exist in hardware IT systems (networks, firewalls, proxies, routers, balancers, etc) have cloud equivalents. Maybe with a bit of work you can "transfer" your skills and become a "Cloud DevOps": Get into GCS, AWS, Azure, OCI and other cloud providers. These jobs are becoming more and more in request.

Good luck!

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