What Am I: Finding Myself in IT | Hacker News Reader

What Am I: Finding Myself in IT

5 pointsbabab5 comments

I'm considering quitting my job in healthcare to pursue a career in IT. But I'm frankly unsure what I should call myself or what jobs I should apply for. Maybe you guys have some thoughts?

I'm in my 40's, worked a few years as a consultant in the 90's. Like installing Windows, setting up networking and hooking up DSL. Since then I studied something different and worked many years in healthcare. But I kept my interest in IT. Today I have several servers, both at home and in the cloud. I run Kubernetes, Ceph and have become quiet comfortable with that. I'm not a programmer although I usually can read code and adjust it to my needs. I'm more at home in the shell (bash, zsh) and have written a few scripts to automate stuff. And now I also have some experience in container orchestration (read kubectl and manifests).

I'm not sure what I expect from you guys. Maybe just some free associations on my thing.

Sounds like you’re looking for DevOps roles. Other titles include Cloud or Systems Engineer. K8s is an uncommon thing to find on a hobbyist homelab, and experience administrating clusters implies good knowledge in other subjects too.

You don’t have to be as good at coding as a Software Engineer, but I’d say if you brushed up on a language (Python or Go) enough to be comfortable, finding those jobs shouldn’t be hard at all.

1/ You could move to healthcare IT. Your healthcare experience will be valued.

2/ Keep looking and don’t use reason to give up on this idea that you have. Usually there’s something there behind these intuitions and feeling.

As a few have mentioned, direct yourself towards devops.

I am 50 and observed the transition from sysadmin to devops. There is a Microsoft certification pathway to devops expert. Read the 'skills measured' for the relevant courses. It will give you an overview of the devops space.

Its amazing that you have kubernetes and ceph at home! Shows a lot of initiative. There are a lot of DevOps/SRE/Cloud jobs that you can work towards. Getting the first job would be your biggest hurdle, should be smooth sailing after that.

Sounds like you're a systems administrator or operations, but probably not quite dev-ops.

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