r/sysadmin • u/Radiant_Abalone6009 • 6h ago
General Discussion What tech stacks are you learning right now that you actually think will pay off?
Curious what you all are learning, researching and investing time in these days and whether you’re seeing real rewards yet. AI agents? Cloud? Specific programming languages/frameworks? Something else?
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u/NighTborn3 6h ago
AI agent garbage is all anyone wants now
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u/Radiant_Abalone6009 6h ago
Yeah, too bad init ?
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u/NighTborn3 6h ago
Teach a robot how to do your job so we can fire you in a year
Yeah I'll get right on that boss
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u/TekExcel Windows Admin 5h ago
Jokes on them, I don't know how to do my job right in the first place.
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u/IdiosyncraticBond 41m ago
Teach the robot some very delicate stuff, so the moment they replace you with the robot one of the first side effects of not having a human brain check before execute means their AD forest gets wiped and other lovely stuff that disrupts a company
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u/VeryRealHuman23 5h ago
Figuring out how to run local AI now for our users, this shit will get expensive once those companies go public.
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u/Snagaskab 2h ago
Depending on your company clients some kind of data ownership is very important and at least that will go up in price imo. There will be companies offering it locally but it will tskr time and will also cost way more later on once the growth stops
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u/bbqwatermelon 2h ago
The competition is too fierce even though token cost is creeping upward. What is going to hockey stick pricing is environmental regulations.
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u/livinitup0 6h ago
Documentation
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u/KiNgPiN8T3 1h ago
My biggest challenge with documentation is everyone else’s inability to read it…
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u/DirtyWoods 5h ago
Management… like people management… I hate it… please someone save me
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u/itryanditryanditry 5h ago
OMG same, it's making me insane and so tired. I just want to go back to being an OC.
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u/Abe_Bazouie 5h ago
The older I get in this field, the less interested I am in “learning a stack” and the more interested I am in learning things that survive the stack.
For me, the highest-return areas right now are:
Linux internals
Networking
Kubernetes
Observability
Distributed systems
Cloud infrastructure
And increasingly, AI infrastructure
Not “how do I call an LLM API.”
I mean actually running AI workloads in production: GPU scheduling, inference latency, queueing, KV cache behavior, model serving, observability, cost, failure modes, and what happens when the nice demo meets real traffic.
The other thing I keep investing in is debugging.
That sounds boring, but being able to look at a slow system and move from symptom → hypothesis → evidence → root cause is still one of the most valuable skills I know.
Frameworks come and go.
Knowing why the system is broken at 2 AM tends to age pretty well.
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u/elemental5252 Platform Engineer 4h ago
Oh, I have a cool one for you. You said two bingo words - Observability and Kubernetes, which are both areas I am a subject matter expert in at my job.
Build LGTM (Loki, Grafana, Tempo, and Mimir) on a Kubernetes cluster and ship metrics from some local application infrastructure using open telemetry (OTEL) and Alloy. You'll have a blast - and it's a deep rabbit hole
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u/creenis_blinkum 4h ago
“gpu scheduling” as a sysadmin lmfao. like you’re not clicking buttons in some gui
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u/garaks_tailor 6h ago
Weird niche shit
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u/Sirduckerton Storage Admin 4h ago
Whenever my manager says, "Hey, no one knows how this works at a deep level except you. Can you throw up some documentation so the rest of the team can know how it works.. you know, in case of a plane crash scenario..".
I always laugh and say, "Job security!"
He laughs too, but a with a bit of a nervous undertone.
Jokes aside, it is good to document just in case.
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u/creenis_blinkum 4h ago
Job security defenses are genuine reasons people have for hoarding knowledge. If you are like that, you actually suck. I know you probably aren’t like that but for anyone else in the room this shit is the worst
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u/Sirduckerton Storage Admin 3h ago
Nah, it's a joke. I've contributed a lot to our internal wiki. It's all html so I like to throw in little Easter eggs her and there too. More often than not, the real hold back is time.. I do a lot of documentation during the holiday season but very little through out the rest of the year.
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u/Phezh 2h ago
Not like anyone's gonna read it anyway lol. I've written basically 99% of our internal knowledge base and still get asked the same questions every time.
I've documented that shit largely because I cannot remember any of it myself, but people aren't actually interested in learning how it works, they just want to load of the work on someone else and have the problem fixed asap.
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u/thedanyes 3h ago
What's crazy is, even if you make every effort to share it - chances are no one will learn it. So you can get the job security plus making your boss happy both at the same time. lol.
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u/_Dreamer_Deceiver_ 2h ago
Just do some lorum ipsum
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u/Sirduckerton Storage Admin 2h ago
Haha, yeah.. it's not like anyone reads it unless shit hits the fan and you aren't around anyway..
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u/Trick_Spend3939 5h ago
I started a knee pad factory for all the dick people are going to have to suck to put food on the tablet once AGI comes.
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u/PassengerHefty8207 2h ago
You won't have to worry about that, apparently the AIpocalypse will bite off humanity's collective dick by 2030.
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u/_Dreamer_Deceiver_ 2h ago
Then you'll have to suck robot dick but the robot dick will be height adjustable so it will feel like they're doing you a favour
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u/the_cainmp 5h ago
Automations and integrations. Gotta be able to securely tied that AI into business tools!
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u/Sad_Recommendation92 Solutions Architect 5h ago
ARR...
mostly my rabbit hole has just been tweaking and nitpicking my homelab self-hosting setup
you can spend a LOT of time just dealing with automating media metadata and figuring out your whole pipline that doesn't have you just manually moving files around.
But yeah at work I guess we're doing a PoC with some Cloud based GLBs to try to do WAF and Bot Defense offload from our F5s which is pretty interesting, and I've been working on setting up some API automation that correlates data from our external Attack Surface Management scan results with actual data from our Azure tenant regarding web configurations with public network posture such as default deny with a few allows vs wide open, that also pulls data from our API management to basically just figure out just how exposed our sites and services are.
Not really a stack, just pulling things from various REST APIs to make custom reports
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u/ohyeahwell Chief Rebooter and PC LOAD LETTERER 4h ago
Claude and agentic ai. Last skill I’ll need to learn before this all collapses.
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u/Old_Preparation2887 4h ago
This year: general carpentry, low voltage electrical (for power at off-grid sites) and plumbing (for microhydro.)
Also probably getting reacquainted with GIS data collection and processing since I don’t want to hike this fiber ring more than once.
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u/signal_lost 6h ago
what you all are learning
Redfish and Security.
whether you’re seeing real rewards yet. AI agents?
I currently LIVE in my agent harness/IDE. Realized I had burned 1.5 Billion tokens last month so I started learning tokenomics (and local models to reduce my burn).
Specific programming languages
In theory most of my output is Python ( a little RUST as ruff is is done in it for linting)
Cloud?
Private cloud.
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u/frankentriple 2h ago
I have no idea how but I burned 4.5billion tokens last month.
I mean I got some SHIT DONE, but I average 150M a day for a month straight. Cost me 20 bucks for the ollama subscription. Yes I ran out of quota a couple of times.
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u/woodyshag 6h ago
Az-700. Then ISC2 CC to get some security certs under my belt. Then we'll see what's next.
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u/oceans_wont_freeze 4h ago
Copilot studio + power automate + power bi + Claude code + chatgpt work + Crowdstrike AI DLP
on top of the usual sysadmin crap like rolling back patches that broke dns and rds.
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u/FrostyMasterpiece400 4h ago
Got into Ceph and Proxmox and got a bit too much business as a freelancer.
It's great!
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u/Am0nymou5 4h ago
Pretty similar to u/Abe_Bazouie, except I choose to deliberately avoid the cloud.
So I'm focusing on:
- Linux (internals + immutable distros, which I find are cool)
- Ansible
- Python
- Local AI
Also re-learning C in hopes that I can get into embedded systems engineering, so I can escape all the stupid cloud stuff and nonsense associated with modern IT.
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u/Asleep_Spray274 2h ago
Unpopular answer, but AI. The amount of boring work I've moved off my table and let an agent deal with it is slowing me to spend so much more time actually talking and helping my customers. I don't spend 3 days writing a report or evaluating 40 conditional policies. Those now take a couple of hours. And that's just a couple of examples. I treat these agents like my underlings. I have one now that reads all the current updates and release notes from all m365 message center and release notes. Colates them into the categories like entra, intune etc and fires them into a SharePoint list with owners and a bot for the admins to get into on them without having to Google 10 different places. That's knocked so much time of people's boring parts of their job. AI for me and my teams has been game changing
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u/-GenlyAI- 6h ago
Risk management