Datacenter networking was my sharpest tool and it got me in the door to a FAANG-adjacent good pay and benefits company. When applying for roles the technical questions were exclusively networking but most of my resume projects and interview stories were automation/Python/Ansible for Networking/Linux management. Now I'm getting paid double and have exposure to much cooler technology and incredibly smart peers to learn from. Learning Go now as that's what they use primarily for network software and been loving it so far.
Each person writing a code typically has to become a domain expert in something else than just programming. This is because code is written to solve a problem and to solve it in a very specific way. And the reason why people utilizing computer code are paid more is because if certain tasks are automated using a code, it allows the company to very easily scale up the amount of that task. If entire processes are automated using computer code then it means that company can do more business with often the same amount of resources. This brings more value, more income to the company, and that reflects on employee salaries and more easy going culture inside the company. All because many things are automated.
You are paid to solve a business problem. Whether you automate it is up to you. The leverage you have over management is that they do not have your domain knowledge to actually do that, or even know that is possible. I don't publicise the fact im automating things because the moment I do, I'm rewarded with more work (usually). Put it into the analogy of a manufacturing line and it's like a person employed to assemble an iPhone, who has robotics engineering knowledge replacing himself with his self built robot and getting paid for the work it does. You wouldn't show that to your boss and still expect to take your paycheck while sitting in the cafeteria.
@@ash3rr Well there are certainly companies like you described. But then there are those that either started heavily with software development or turned to software development later on. And these tend to be the openminded, ready to try something new, different approach, chill atmosphere group of people. Im not advocating that everybody must work for such a company. Important is to recognize your environment. Personally if i knew that i was working for a company like you described i would never ever reveal that a robot is doing my job. If its a management that cares only about results and i do enjoy working for such a company, then they don't have to bother how am i doing the job as long as i am delivering results.
@@Flankymanga So if I don't be an SME I'm gonna be kicked out of the industry. I'm just losing motivation to learn anything and I'm not remotely good at anything else in life other than copy paste programming.
The only thing this channel is lacking is more of your awesome videos. Your videos have changed my life and did a major change to my career as a Support Engineer which was killing my ability and productivity overtime . I am happy to announce that I finally got my dream job as an IT Cloud Engineer which will be the beginning of a journey that I have always dreamed about. Thank you again for spreading the goodness ❤️❤️ Sometimes all we need is a small advice with enough dedication to make a life changing decision. and please upload more videos 🙏🙏
This right here is why I make videos. So happy to hear that they helped you on your journey! Congratulations on your hard work and success, it sounds like you’ve got some fun times ahead. Cheers!
I work as a production technician and while I don't have a lot of experiences as a sys admin/support, I can already tell you that learning to program has allowed to scale a lot of my teams production so much so I managed to leverage this for high payer. I continue to learn to program to solve problems elegantly and for longer term viability. As @Davo CC has mentioned, if the role doesn't require it among the team, then you' re left with very "patch it" mentalities across the board. Thanks for this video, it was super helpful to help me find a new trajectory in a career path.
This is really exciting to hear. Someone pointed this out in the live chat when this video premiered, but be aware that to get that pay/role bump after adding programming skills, a lot of people end up having to leave the companies they are at. Companies are often just terrible at promoting people who have grown.
@@tutoriaLinux This is absolutely true and I am fortunate enough to have work for a company that has promoted me and salary bumped me in the past 3 years due to my skill set and business impact.
I experienced this first hand. I work as a network engineer in NOC/2nd line but i like to dable in Python. Recently the manager of a consultants team at my company wanted to get me promoted to their team. Im not exactly sure why but i think it's because i helped him out with automating an annoying and time consuming process. Now all of the sudden he wants me in his team which means higher pay, etc. He was a little too late however, as i shortly before that accepted a role to start working in the SRE team of a different company as a system admin. Im not even that good at Python, i just know how to script towards APIs. But i guess that was enough for a raise and a promotion.
I'm going to start developing things again in my free time. Before I started working in Ops, I did some full stack web development tutorial and then built some websites that made API calls to bunch of public APIs. Now that I know the infrastructure side, I feel like there are so many more things I can play around in my personal projects.
Programming allows you to amplify other skillsets quite a lot - automation is a massive impact area, in info-sec and auditing I see a LOT of things simply not being done or completely avoided/steered around because noone has the knowledge on the ground to do this and they take dangerous risks like slapping things into production without pre-assessment, etc. It's a big gap in the privileges assignment space (hugely so inside ERPs). The biggest gap is the medium term solution area - slapped together short term solutions are often called upon to fill this gap and noone wants to put the time and and effort (or cost) into longer term solutions. Saddest here is how many people fight automation too; I think too many benefit from having x number of staff manually doing things (enlarging their empire) too.
@@tutoriaLinux I do see that quite a bit - depends on the environment. I've documented things and noone ever read the documents, they couldn't even find them (I had to guide them through their own directories over the phone at one point). If I were to crystal ball the future - I can see the increasing international tensions and wars leading to a move away from outsourcing and offshoring, I know quite a few CTOs who have said this ended up costing far more than they expected in practice. I think small bespoke solutions like this will be the future with the internal/external split shifting to extranet services only.
I have been building computers for quite a long time and playing around with programing/scripting. A few years ago I decided to devote my time fully to learning to program; I started with Python and once I really understoon syntax everything else fell into place. I may not be a master but I can and have used Python, Java, C, C++, HTML, CSS in the real world on real projects for a couple companys. At the same time I also taught my self micro electronics and designed and built two control boards and wrote the software for them. Due to that which shall not be named has happened, I no longer have those consultation jobs and the only reason I had the chance in the first place was I knew one of the higher ups in one of the companies and I was allowed to demonstrate my skills. How do you think I could get a job with a company now days when I don't have a piece of paper that says I know what I'm doing, I'm a disabled vet and I quite literally live in the middle of nowhere?
There is another higher step to SRE - Platform Engineering. This is seen commonly in mid-large companies who have unique requirements that public clouds don't offer or making it in house is significantly cheaper.
Yeah, I see that facebook and others have standardized on “platform engineering” now. It’s funny because I had a platform engineer title before I had an SRE title and at the time (2016-2018) SRE felt like the next step. This industry is so crazy, but I guess that’s what happens when a few enormous tech employers can change entire swaths of jobs by rebranding existing roles or publishing a book.
In my school I mainly learned basic routing and networking. Now I am just assigning permissions and rights, simple 1st level troubleshooting...... I am learning Linux and def want to learn more programming too. Just because it is super repetitive and I just autopilot through the day. :/
Thank you for this video. I didn't even know SRE was a title. I would love to get more programming in for my windows admining job, but I find there are tools that makeup for programming most of the time. I would love to increase my programming skills, but I'm not in a place to learn and know how and where to apply programming in a windows environment that would help others.
I get a raise every time I ask for one because of how good I've gotten at scripting around the million problems with HP's ThinPro OS (Ubuntu bastard). I mostly work on pet projects all day.
So if my stack is like terraform, k8s and azure. Should I chase upskilling in .net core (or any other oop language. Currently I use sometimes scripting languages)? I have never heard of cloud engineer/software engineer working with terraform and backend dev in the same role
I largely agree with this. I think the thornier issue is how strong is the trend of wanting Full Blown SWE (i.e. leetcode algos, systems design,e tc) to do SRE/DevOps roles. In the process of shifting left, it seems to me there has been a shift right for SWEs INTO operations a la Google/FAANG. It seems the DevOps notion of turning Ops into SWE is starting to die. This is fine except there's a big difference w/r/t interviewing between "can you code in python" and "can you solve these time/space constrained algos/designs in a time bucket?" I have been wary to give traditional IT advice to people breaking in, e.g. OTJ + projects + grind your way up the support chain to a level you are comfortable with.
Yeah, I agree with this. When the rubber meets the road in ops, many things are just not fully automatable, or too complicated to get a clean solution to without massive effort from an already-understaffed team. I think SRE is a nice idea but I have never been in an SRE role where I feel like, "wow, this company is really doing SRE the way Google imagines it should be done! (software-eng first)" Ironically I have heard from a Google engineer or two who say that this is also true at Google, so yeah, go figure. I also no longer tell people to start in support, because it's horribly easy to get stuck there :(
@@tutoriaLinux Yeah, general consensus is def it's more of a re-brand of the sysadmin/system engineer roles much like DevOps Engineer was a rebrand of the Release Engineer. Google in their SRE job description is at least somewhat honest and to the point -- either you're a SWE (i.e. leetcode/backend dev/etc) or you're so deep into linux you know what eBPF is. I have heard some interviews from SWE-turn-SRE and they usually talk about how they "fell into it" and how it "wasn't what they were expecting". One can read between the lines, but yeah I'd love to hear an honest conversation on how people felt about Ops once the "rubber hit the road". I'm old and had a lot of OTJ/mentoring so there was a certain level of soberness to it all. While I appreciate the "no Brents" mentality, part of me does wonder if we're setting up people for a rude awakening on how much manpower it takes to complex systems up.
I think it’s a similar approach as Linux skills. Learn the basics via a book or videos, start doing guided practical projects/tutorials, and then start adding extra features onto those projects by yourself, before creating a project from scratch with no guidance. Repeat that with a few projects from different domains (command line utility, text game, small web app, etc) and then you’ll pretty much be able to program. From there you can go in any direction and add skills.
Yeah, I'd be happy to. I find that once I set up a decent structure/schema in notion, it became a pretty great place to "dump" the stuff that used to take up a hundred browser tabs or reminder/todo/idea notes on my phone. Having a good structure is the part that makes all of your input/material actually useful/accessible after putting it into Notion. I'll make a video about how I use it soon (although my usage is constantly changing in small ways).
Thanks to Notion for sponsoring this video -- check it out here: ntn.so/tutorialinux
Datacenter networking was my sharpest tool and it got me in the door to a FAANG-adjacent good pay and benefits company. When applying for roles the technical questions were exclusively networking but most of my resume projects and interview stories were automation/Python/Ansible for Networking/Linux management. Now I'm getting paid double and have exposure to much cooler technology and incredibly smart peers to learn from. Learning Go now as that's what they use primarily for network software and been loving it so far.
Each person writing a code typically has to become a domain expert in something else than just programming. This is because code is written to solve a problem and to solve it in a very specific way. And the reason why people utilizing computer code are paid more is because if certain tasks are automated using a code, it allows the company to very easily scale up the amount of that task. If entire processes are automated using computer code then it means that company can do more business with often the same amount of resources. This brings more value, more income to the company, and that reflects on employee salaries and more easy going culture inside the company. All because many things are automated.
You are paid to solve a business problem. Whether you automate it is up to you. The leverage you have over management is that they do not have your domain knowledge to actually do that, or even know that is possible. I don't publicise the fact im automating things because the moment I do, I'm rewarded with more work (usually). Put it into the analogy of a manufacturing line and it's like a person employed to assemble an iPhone, who has robotics engineering knowledge replacing himself with his self built robot and getting paid for the work it does. You wouldn't show that to your boss and still expect to take your paycheck while sitting in the cafeteria.
@@ash3rr Well there are certainly companies like you described. But then there are those that either started heavily with software development or turned to software development later on. And these tend to be the openminded, ready to try something new, different approach, chill atmosphere group of people. Im not advocating that everybody must work for such a company. Important is to recognize your environment. Personally if i knew that i was working for a company like you described i would never ever reveal that a robot is doing my job. If its a management that cares only about results and i do enjoy working for such a company, then they don't have to bother how am i doing the job as long as i am delivering results.
@@Flankymanga So if I don't be an SME I'm gonna be kicked out of the industry. I'm just losing motivation to learn anything and I'm not remotely good at anything else in life other than copy paste programming.
The only thing this channel is lacking is more of your awesome videos. Your videos have changed my life and did a major change to my career as a Support Engineer which was killing my ability and productivity overtime . I am happy to announce that I finally got my dream job as an IT Cloud Engineer which will be the beginning of a journey that I have always dreamed about. Thank you again for spreading the goodness ❤️❤️
Sometimes all we need is a small advice with enough dedication to make a life changing decision.
and please upload more videos 🙏🙏
This right here is why I make videos. So happy to hear that they helped you on your journey! Congratulations on your hard work and success, it sounds like you’ve got some fun times ahead. Cheers!
@@green1880 A Cloud Guru
LOVE your videos man, they are super helpful and informative, keep it up!!
I work as a production technician and while I don't have a lot of experiences as a sys admin/support, I can already tell you that learning to program has allowed to scale a lot of my teams production so much so I managed to leverage this for high payer. I continue to learn to program to solve problems elegantly and for longer term viability. As @Davo CC has mentioned, if the role doesn't require it among the team, then you' re left with very "patch it" mentalities across the board. Thanks for this video, it was super helpful to help me find a new trajectory in a career path.
This is really exciting to hear. Someone pointed this out in the live chat when this video premiered, but be aware that to get that pay/role bump after adding programming skills, a lot of people end up having to leave the companies they are at. Companies are often just terrible at promoting people who have grown.
@@tutoriaLinux This is absolutely true and I am fortunate enough to have work for a company that has promoted me and salary bumped me in the past 3 years due to my skill set and business impact.
I experienced this first hand. I work as a network engineer in NOC/2nd line but i like to dable in Python. Recently the manager of a consultants team at my company wanted to get me promoted to their team. Im not exactly sure why but i think it's because i helped him out with automating an annoying and time consuming process. Now all of the sudden he wants me in his team which means higher pay, etc. He was a little too late however, as i shortly before that accepted a role to start working in the SRE team of a different company as a system admin. Im not even that good at Python, i just know how to script towards APIs. But i guess that was enough for a raise and a promotion.
I'm going to start developing things again in my free time. Before I started working in Ops, I did some full stack web development tutorial and then built some websites that made API calls to bunch of public APIs. Now that I know the infrastructure side, I feel like there are so many more things I can play around in my personal projects.
Programming allows you to amplify other skillsets quite a lot - automation is a massive impact area, in info-sec and auditing I see a LOT of things simply not being done or completely avoided/steered around because noone has the knowledge on the ground to do this and they take dangerous risks like slapping things into production without pre-assessment, etc. It's a big gap in the privileges assignment space (hugely so inside ERPs).
The biggest gap is the medium term solution area - slapped together short term solutions are often called upon to fill this gap and noone wants to put the time and and effort (or cost) into longer term solutions. Saddest here is how many people fight automation too; I think too many benefit from having x number of staff manually doing things (enlarging their empire) too.
Yeah, and it's true on the IC level too -- the idea being that if you never document or automate anything, you'll never be out of a job.
@@tutoriaLinux I do see that quite a bit - depends on the environment. I've documented things and noone ever read the documents, they couldn't even find them (I had to guide them through their own directories over the phone at one point). If I were to crystal ball the future - I can see the increasing international tensions and wars leading to a move away from outsourcing and offshoring, I know quite a few CTOs who have said this ended up costing far more than they expected in practice. I think small bespoke solutions like this will be the future with the internal/external split shifting to extranet services only.
I have been building computers for quite a long time and playing around with programing/scripting. A few years ago I decided to devote my time fully to learning to program; I started with Python and once I really understoon syntax everything else fell into place. I may not be a master but I can and have used Python, Java, C, C++, HTML, CSS in the real world on real projects for a couple companys. At the same time I also taught my self micro electronics and designed and built two control boards and wrote the software for them. Due to that which shall not be named has happened, I no longer have those consultation jobs and the only reason I had the chance in the first place was I knew one of the higher ups in one of the companies and I was allowed to demonstrate my skills. How do you think I could get a job with a company now days when I don't have a piece of paper that says I know what I'm doing, I'm a disabled vet and I quite literally live in the middle of nowhere?
There is another higher step to SRE - Platform Engineering. This is seen commonly in mid-large companies who have unique requirements that public clouds don't offer or making it in house is significantly cheaper.
Yeah, I see that facebook and others have standardized on “platform engineering” now. It’s funny because I had a platform engineer title before I had an SRE title and at the time (2016-2018) SRE felt like the next step. This industry is so crazy, but I guess that’s what happens when a few enormous tech employers can change entire swaths of jobs by rebranding existing roles or publishing a book.
Junior SysAdmin here at a support job, it kinda is draining and I think this video is pretty cool.
In my school I mainly learned basic routing and networking. Now I am just assigning permissions and rights, simple 1st level troubleshooting...... I am learning Linux and def want to learn more programming too. Just because it is super repetitive and I just autopilot through the day. :/
@@Hadw1n Learn Python!
Thank you for this video. I didn't even know SRE was a title. I would love to get more programming in for my windows admining job, but I find there are tools that makeup for programming most of the time. I would love to increase my programming skills, but I'm not in a place to learn and know how and where to apply programming in a windows environment that would help others.
Example use node to call Windows apis or binaries to automate a task. Very easy.
Good advice, I'm currently retraining my brain for Python from a bash, linux/unix sysadmin background ..
thank you
I get a raise every time I ask for one because of how good I've gotten at scripting around the million problems with HP's ThinPro OS (Ubuntu bastard). I mostly work on pet projects all day.
So if my stack is like terraform, k8s and azure. Should I chase upskilling in .net core (or any other oop language. Currently I use sometimes scripting languages)? I have never heard of cloud engineer/software engineer working with terraform and backend dev in the same role
Interesting take man!!!
Great advise!
I largely agree with this.
I think the thornier issue is how strong is the trend of wanting Full Blown SWE (i.e. leetcode algos, systems design,e tc) to do SRE/DevOps roles.
In the process of shifting left, it seems to me there has been a shift right for SWEs INTO operations a la Google/FAANG.
It seems the DevOps notion of turning Ops into SWE is starting to die. This is fine except there's a big difference w/r/t interviewing between "can you code in python" and "can you solve these time/space constrained algos/designs in a time bucket?"
I have been wary to give traditional IT advice to people breaking in, e.g. OTJ + projects + grind your way up the support chain to a level you are comfortable with.
Yeah, I agree with this. When the rubber meets the road in ops, many things are just not fully automatable, or too complicated to get a clean solution to without massive effort from an already-understaffed team. I think SRE is a nice idea but I have never been in an SRE role where I feel like, "wow, this company is really doing SRE the way Google imagines it should be done! (software-eng first)" Ironically I have heard from a Google engineer or two who say that this is also true at Google, so yeah, go figure.
I also no longer tell people to start in support, because it's horribly easy to get stuck there :(
@@tutoriaLinux Yeah, general consensus is def it's more of a re-brand of the sysadmin/system engineer roles much like DevOps Engineer was a rebrand of the Release Engineer.
Google in their SRE job description is at least somewhat honest and to the point -- either you're a SWE (i.e. leetcode/backend dev/etc) or you're so deep into linux you know what eBPF is.
I have heard some interviews from SWE-turn-SRE and they usually talk about how they "fell into it" and how it "wasn't what they were expecting". One can read between the lines, but yeah I'd love to hear an honest conversation on how people felt about Ops once the "rubber hit the road".
I'm old and had a lot of OTJ/mentoring so there was a certain level of soberness to it all. While I appreciate the "no Brents" mentality, part of me does wonder if we're setting up people for a rude awakening on how much manpower it takes to complex systems up.
Thanks for the video. What do you think is the most effective way to ramp up your programming skills if starting from zero?
I think it’s a similar approach as Linux skills. Learn the basics via a book or videos, start doing guided practical projects/tutorials, and then start adding extra features onto those projects by yourself, before creating a project from scratch with no guidance. Repeat that with a few projects from different domains (command line utility, text game, small web app, etc) and then you’ll pretty much be able to program. From there you can go in any direction and add skills.
Post how you use it. I’ve tried. I want to like it.
Yeah, I'd be happy to. I find that once I set up a decent structure/schema in notion, it became a pretty great place to "dump" the stuff that used to take up a hundred browser tabs or reminder/todo/idea notes on my phone. Having a good structure is the part that makes all of your input/material actually useful/accessible after putting it into Notion. I'll make a video about how I use it soon (although my usage is constantly changing in small ways).
Ban Notion!