My transition to the dark side: from sysadmin to marketing

Marketing say it with me: mar-ket-ing. No one word brings more disdain to the hearts of a sysadmin. Today I’m taking you on a trip down memory lane.

Hi! I’m Nate. I’ve had a life full of nerdiness that built a long career in systems administration. Starting late in the BBS days in the early 90’s, right when the Internet was coming to a home near you. See, as far back as I can remember I’ve loved gadgets and electronics. I’ve said before that I learned my alphabet on a Texas Instruments computer connected to the living room TV as a tot. Today I have their logo tattoo’d on my forearm because of it. Computers and technology are part of me. For as long as I can remember I’ve been trying to convince others that this tech or that is what THEY should be using, because I’m passionate about it.

When I found Linux as a teenager, somewhere around my Junior year in high school, it was Red Hat Linux 5.0. I tried to convince my high school to convert their Windows NT 4.0 network over to Linux. I didn’t even know why at the time, I just knew it was better. Was it better? Back then maybe it wasn’t but I didn’t care. I was passionate about it. So I did my best to get into the IT field when I was able, and that was one month after I’d graduated high school.

I started working in technical support for an ISP. Spending my nights after a day at business school helping people get their dial-up connections to the internet on their Packard Bell Pentium II’s running Windows 98. I had a hard time not trying to convert every single caller over to Linux. It was just that awesome. I did have a few conversations with folks about the finer points of Linux vs Windows, but most of the folks I talked to just didn’t get it. The other techs knew where to send the tough problems, or the handful of Linux users we had though. Send’em to Nate.

I’d spend my shifts mindlessly walking users through modem init-strings to try to get them to that coveted 53 Kbps (AT&FX baby! if you know you know), with PuTTY sessions opened to my home Linux box. Learning how to run a web site, or a DNS server, or mail, news, all the services that were hot at the time. I started my own web site, straight HTML, as most stuff was at the time. I used it as a way to learn how DNS worked, and how web servers worked. I still run it to this day, it’s my personal blog, The Undrground. I used it to share my passion for things. Eventually spreading into my love of outdoors and off-road activities and spinning off SWBCrawler, another blog and later YouTube channel where I share my love of Jeeps.

I was not cut out for call center work. If you ever want to feel like your talent is meaningless and call-times/volumes are everything, go work in a call center. I eventually got out of there, and started real admin work. Trial by fire stuff. I went to this little web host that ran BSD and Windows on all of their web stuff. I did my damnedest to sell the owner on CentOS Linux, and eventually I was able to persuade him to let me run some of the shared web hosts on Linux. After all I was the guy managing them!

I learned a ton there, things you cant learn as a hobbyist. Like the anxiety of a 2am page, and the bleary-eyed drive in to work to reboot a machine. This experience eventually lead to a job in Higher education, where I spent more than a decade administering a large network of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), along with other Red Hat products like Red Hat Virtualization.

I was in heaven. Working in higher education is a whole different world compared to commercial. You’re more driven by what’s right than what’s cheap. I mean, you can’t just flat out waste money but it’s pretty close. I was working with a bunch of other passionate folks, real nerds just like me. We spread the good word of Linux and open source across higher education, but all good things must come to an end. My last bits of advocacy at the college came to my new boss… Who seemed hell bent on taking all we’d worked for and essentially outsourcing it. What is the fun in that? So eventually I parted ways with the college and came to Red Hat as a Technical Account Manager.

I had dreamed of working for Red Hat for most of my career. Way back in that Tech Support job I had a co-worker who was also a Red Hat Linux user, and he told me of how awesome it sounded to work for Red Hat. It sounded cool, but almost unattainable. I’m not sure why I felt that way. I guess I was just too young to see the bigger picture. When I look back at it now though, a lot of what I did in my career, and in my personal life slowly got me closer to that dream, even if I didn’t know it. And there’s another thread thru this whole story that maybe you picked up on. This isn’t just the story of a nerd who built a career as a sysadmin. This is the story that built me into what I am today, a blogging, content creating, passionate… Marketer.

That’s right! After a few years as a TAM at Red Hat, an opportunity came along to move into a Technical Marketing Manager position at Red Hat, in the RHEL business. Seriously. If you asked me back in high school English class if I thought I’d one day be writing for a living… I’d have told you that you were insane. It’s funny how life happens though isn’t it? Today I use my technical abilities gained from all those years tinkering and saving the day at a Linux shell to make labs, and articles, and live streams. All in an effort to show the world what a great choice Red Hat Linux is… Almost like I was doing back in High School…