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What job do most people think is good, but you don't think you would enjoy? (lemmynsfw.com)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world
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[–] 6 points 10 months ago (2 children)

If you're good at scripting you might be able to find a spot automating back end stuff for a sysadmin/infrastructure team. Of course, that would be in a sane job market.

I started in IT support with a general tech AA degree (with some extra programming background from a comp sci BS I dropped out of when I realized I could never code 8 hours a day for a living) and started automating the grunt work of tech support and basic access management. Caught the eye of the sysadmin/infra team and they snatched me up. I've been learning project management, infra stuff, and deep sysadmin stuff, but I mostly automate everything I possibly can surrounding our duties. Most systems and software have pretty static apis/sdks for automating with them, so I don't need to stay current with whatever language or fad practice.

Recent projects have been around cleaning up shit in our Active Directory. Easy wins like deleting security groups with no members. Automating checks like once a month checking for any emtpy that haven't changed in two weeks. Recently got rid of our on-prem exchange email servers, so I whipped up a script to take contact objects from AD, delete any non-functional ones (typo'd domains, domains that were internal to us so there was no need for a contact object), and then to recreate the valid ones in Exchange Online, and finally delete the originals from AD.

It's not super difficult scripting-wise. And a lot of greybeards could learn scripting, but a lot are content to let new blood do it, which opens opportunities.

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    Thats kind of what I am doing at the moment and i enjoy writing those scripts but i get so nervous running them. Even though I'm really confident they won't break something i still feel I'm unlucky enough for the script to accidentally delete our prod dB.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago

    Lol, same. I spend more time writing guard rails, setting up verbose debugging output/logs, figuring out how I can test without blowing up shit, backing up data before, backing up what it's going to do, and then trying to set up automated confirmation of success or failure than I do coding the purely functional parts.

    I've run the "person has quit, yeet their access" script I made on people days early more than I should admit. Had to put in a lot of extra checks on that.

    If you're at a place still using VMWare, a tip: if you're trying to automate shutting down all the VMs for some hardware moves (get list of VMs, send Guest OS shutdown command, wait a certain amount of time, if VM still showing online force shutoff), VSphere will return the VM management devices/servers/whatever they're called (what vSphere runs on) in the list of VMs, and it will accept Guest OS shutdown commands sent to the thing hosting VM management/vSphere. Halfway through shutting it all down for a move I started getting "cannot reach VSphere" errors. Added an extra hour or two to that weekend project as we had to get into things through some other back end shanigans to finish shutdowns manually.

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