I posted a request for suggestions on my career, but there was no response. Can anyone please guide me if it was posted in the right forum or thread?
Hi Dear,
I am in my early thirties and going through a phase of career confusion. Since I am HPUX, Tru64 administrator I need some councelling from a few experied and senior members. Can you help me posting the message below so that I can get some valuable feedbacks?
Thanks a lot,
Muk
Initial 4 years, I was the system administrator of a small/mid sized company data centre in India. Have done installation, configuration, restore and day-to-day management of not only Tr64 and HPUX systems but also CISCO routers and access servers. Also includes Linux and windows boxes. Though did not have major high end devices to build expertise, but had Alpha DS20, DS40, HP 9000 etc. Intel boxes were mainly Compaq/Hp Proliant and a few XEON.
Then joined the Global Delivery of a major MNC in Bangalore as a Level 2 support for Tru64 and HPUX. I was introduced to not only remote support and high end systems with thousands of user base and business critical data/ application, but also best practices and method of quality of of service. Got certified in ITIL foundation.
After 1 year I was realigned with the application support organization and have been there since then, 5 years now. I have been managing customized applications developed on apache, radius, weblogic and oracle etc. They are all running on Unix.
Initial days of application support was interesting and I was eager child to explore the new technologies. Though I was in a bit of comfort zone that these softwares were running on HPUX platform and was easier for me to manage, but as time passed I realized I was expert of none.
Now my confusion is, what kind of job should I target next. I am tired of application support since without prior experience of development, I cannot dig deep inside. If I want to get back to Unix administration, I may not get paid as much as I am earning now. Moreover, all my last 5 years of experience will be down the drain. I was thinking of targeting shell, perl scripting since I have some amount of knowledge on it and I have done it in the past. I have done a bit of C, C++ programming quite a few years back.
Would highly appreciate if someone can guide me or we can discuss about a few sucess stories where people like me had to fight a mid career crisis.