---
title: 'Advice on becoming a sysadmin: A talk for my former self'
osem_url: https://osem.seagl.org/conferences/seagl2015/program/proposals/40
beginning: '2015-10-23T14:00:00.000-07:00'
end: '2015-10-23T14:50:00.000-07:00'
presenters:
- name: Paul English
  affiliation: Vaisala Inc, Seattle Area System Administrator's Guild, League of Professional
    System Administrators, Seattle Privacy Coalition, Techno-Activism 3rd Mondays,
    Emerald Onion Project
  osem_url: https://osem.seagl.org/users/57
  gravatar_id: d4766d549bcc8771e8731d8d442b1060
  biography: Paul English is President of the Seattle Area System Administrator's Guild, Board Member for the League of Professional System Administrators, and multi-year organizer of the Cascadia IT Conference.  Paul also works as a system administrator and manager at Vaisala Inc, creating weather forecasts for wind, solar and hydro power.
---

"It’s Difficult to Make Predictions, Especially About the Future" - So is Attribution

Being a sysadmin is a career path which can be fun, lucrative and one of the best ways to get paid to work with and on open source software. In this presentation I share some of the mistakes I made so you don't need to repeat them. Why not make new and interesting mistakes?

It is a confusing time to enter this field. Why not be a DevOps instead of a Sysadmin? What is this Site Reliability Engineer thing? What if the whole world goes NoOps? Do I really have to carry a pager? I'll provide some answers, hints and raw speculation.
