The sys admin job - some questions

I have some questions for folks who work or have worked as sys admins:

1. How much downtime is there?

I don't know much about the job, but I have the notion that once you've set the system up, provided nothing goes wrong, there's not much to do during the day and you have a lot of free time. Any truth to that?

2. How much does the field change?

Is sys admining one of those fields where it changes drastically every 6 months and you have to follow the industry really closely to know what's going on or is it more like once you've learned the job things don't change too much?

I recommend checking out /r/sysadmin. You'll see that a sysadmin's job is never done.

Bump - anyone got any thoughts?

Those sound like odd questions, such as someone looking to maximize on downtime and minimize on learning new things for change.

Dimitri said:

I don't know much about the job, but I have the notion that once you've set the system up, provided nothing goes wrong, there's not much to do during the day and you have a lot of free time. Any truth to that?

Click to expand...

'the system'? Usually you have 5 billion other things to set up. It's kind of like spinning plates on sticks, it gets tricker as you add more systems.