| > 15 years as a sysadmin, anyone have suggestions for my next career move? I made the switch to Technical Product Marketing after 15+ years doing linux sysadmin stuff. This might seem weird at first but all tech companies have complex products that they are trying to sell to a technical audience. Marketing needs technical folks embedded that can translate between the tech stack and marketing speak. You can probably 2x your sysadmin compensation quite easily and offers tons of career growth (developer relations, tons of conference speaker opportunities, become some industry expert, etc). No idea about your skill set or area of expertise but here's an example from vmware [1]. Just search for "Technical Marketing". The job typically involves doing technical reviews of competitors, something you'll already do when deciding to choose a product as a sysadmin, reviewing internal marketing content to make sure people are telling the truth, doing talks/training, recording demos, interacting with PM/Eng about product releases, testing and writing about new releases, etc. If you like the technical side and don't mind teaching this can be a good transition. You basically leverage all the skills you've built over 15 years and apply them to something else quickly. The kicker here is that you can just apply to companies where you already use their products and know them inside and out (giving you a massive advantage compared to other people applying). Say, you do tons of AWS stuff, well who better to work with marketing on the technical side then a sysadmin who breaths this stuff everyday, or maybe you're doing stuff on cisco switches [2], or maybe some netapp storage fabric expert [3], same thing. All these companies have technical roles in marketing that want you and it can range from mega corps to cool startups like GitLab [4]. [1] https://careers.vmware.com/main/jobs/R2204162?lang=en-us [2] https://jobs.cisco.com/jobs/ProjectDetail/Technical-Marketin... [3] https://jobs.netapp.com/job/Bangalore%2C-Karnataka-Technical... [4] https://about.gitlab.com/job-families/marketing/technical-ma... |