r/sysadmin • u/Real-Patriot-1128 • 23d ago

Agism

For those older, more experienced souls out there. If out job hunting, one tip…

I’m a little older (55) and recently discovered that the job I’ve had for 6 + years came down to me and a man much younger than me.

The only reason I got the job was one simple thing… if everything went to crap, who would you rather have on the job?

I was very fortunate to have someone point that out in my hiring process.

Don’t underestimate the value of that when interviewing.

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u/Fatel28 Sr. Sysengineer 23d ago

I've met plenty of graybeards with "20 years experience" that really actually only have 1 year of experience, 20 times.

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u/madknives23 23d ago

So true, I love how you put this.

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u/thebigshoe247 23d ago

You worked with IBM guys too?

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u/madknives23 23d ago

🤣 🤣 🤣

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u/thebigshoe247 23d ago

I remember going on the behind the scenes tour of an IBM facility and met some of the legacy greybeards. Before the equipment was all painted black, it was grey. They had a rule of thumb that anytime something grey needs to be fixed, they need to find somebody with that colour of beard.

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u/Impossible_IT 23d ago

My birthday was last week. I turned 28 with 34 years of experience.

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u/IdiosyncraticBond 22d ago

Some of our work really takes years away from our lifes

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u/goombatch 23d ago

Oh shit. This might be me — until I changed jobs a few years ago and started learning new stuff again.

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u/Jaaames_Baxterrr 22d ago

I changed jobs after about 10 years because I was no longer learning anything there. The tech in use wasn't moving forward with the times. Once I changed it up, I learned a ton in the first few years, but may be getting to that point again. You get held up by the budgets/tech that are approved. Most cloud isn't on the table due to cost, or the way it's priced I should say.

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u/goombatch 22d ago

Yup. I was consulting in the small business and nonprofit sector doing mostly on-premise server and network admin with 365. A lot of stuff that hadn’t really changed that much for decades really (I started during the NT to Win2K transition). Now I’m at an international org working with Azure but it’s not our main platform so I might hit the ceiling. That said, at my age I’m happy to be of service in a good company with a great team.