[BBLISA] More info about my job search

[Betsy Schwartz]

I too got burned out on on-call work. As a middle-aged semi-single mom, 
it's just not something I can do much of right now and still function.   I 
ended up in academia in a relatively small shop, where I am informally on 
call via cell phone without the expectation that I'll bounce up with 15 
minute response time 24x7. This suits me fine - I am happy to fix the mail 
machine if it goes down on a Sunday morning, but I can turn off the phone 
when I go to bed at night.

Before this, I had one other job with a similar setup , at an engineering 
firm that didn't really need 24x7 coverage as they only worked days.

So the jobs do exist, but there are trade-offs.

One danger in a small shop can be 24x7 enduser tech support, and people do 
seem to get your home phone number. And, you're not going to be doing as 
many fun large scale projects; it's much more about keeping the shop 
running, doing your own maintenance,  interacting with users and customers 
and management, and other such work. Personally I enjoy this and I'm good 
at it, but it does mean you have to be very self-motivated to keep your 
skills and tools up to date.

Sometimes I think that in addition to Junion/Senior/ sysadmin levels, we 
ought to recognize different "tracks" - systems architecture, tools 
development, shop management, dba etc. Different senior sysadmin jobs do 
call for different skill sets.



Betsy Schwartz                                                    email: 
betsys at gsd.harvard.edu
Unix Systems Administrator,CRG                           voice: 617-495-5947
Harvard Graduate School of Design                         fax:    617-496-5866