A techie guys view

I think people really need help on this.

I often spend a few minutes perusing the job listings on CL just to see who is hiring for what.

I think it is very easy to stay away from companies that are "misguided" I guess is the way to put it.

Know what you are hiring for.

If you are looking for someone to maintain servers, do dba work, support desktops, etc. you ARE NOT looking for a Network Administrator. The main focus of a network admin is to feed are care for networks. Not your stupid M$ Winblows server. Most really good network administrators are afraid of M$ because it has a propensity to blow up when we need it most. We love *nix OSes.

We all have our strengths. When you are building a (usually want to be) enterprise network do not hire a Sysadmin to do it for you. Spend some bucks and hire a part-time network architect to do the design and build for you. It will pay off in many ways.

When I build out a network I ask all of the questions that a dedicated Sysadmin (most likely) not think about. Most people do not end up with networks and systems that can scale. They will reach a critical mass that will require replacement of equipment. I design a network to grow until a point that you are running enough traffic that spending the money to open a second data center, building a new network, etc. is the least of your worries. You will have money if you have a good business model.

The life of a really good network.

1. Design a network and systems to handle about twice the traffic you anticipate. Make sure that you can grow by adding boxes (and perhaps relatively inexpensive leaf switches.)

2. You will have to replace your load-balancers. You should be running, at minimum, TCP offload. Make sure your next pair can handle the growth of a pod at least. You can then use the pair that you are removing from the

3. Replace the Firewalls between your app servers and the DB layer. Then make sure these are in redundant pair so you can use them in the next architecture. (Remove one, flip the routes, then move number 2.)

4. Rinse and repeat. You can also at this point start to build "pods," "islands," "silos" or what ever you want to call them.

The hard part about all of this? Getting it right the first time. There are many many questions to be answered. If you dont, you will end up with gear that just does not work for you. You dont really get good money for gear on Ebay.