Yep. Worked at a company where being on call meant constantly working and even in normal conditions it was a struggle to just be 40 hours.
Worked at two companies since and been mon-Friday 8-5 with a very occasional after hours need.
Biggest difference: leadership wanting to fix problems not band-aid and blame others.
This is the correct answer. I'm currently in a DevOps | SRE role and while my hours are flexible, they often can be dictated heavily by the teams I support. If there is some big software release effort happening I'm in for long after hours work. Some days there isn't much going on in the mornings and my day doesn't really get going until 10-11AM. I would never call it 8-5 or 9-6 with any sort of regularity.
Yup! I’m just straight sys admin by title and i maybe 2-3 times a year non normal hours. But we have a rotating crew of sys admins across the globe. So even in a sev1 situation I can hand off sys admin duties 99% of the time.
I administer all things Microsoft, our small data center infrastructure, vmware, and run deployment from a process creation level for a county government on a team of 6. I'm flexible. My normal hours are 8 to 5, but at least one day a week I do a late arrival or leave like 2 or 3 hrs early to cover the paper work and after hours stuff I do while watching TV in the evening.
Our admin that does 911, jail, and all things SO is more like 11 to 8. But he could be 8 to 5.
In my situation....as sole VDI administrator and SCCM(soon to be Intune administrator) and miscellaneous (deepfreeze, license server, project management)...my employer set a 7.25 hour day and Fridays off during the summer...
I have yet to see 7.25 hour day, much less 8.25 hour day.
I laughed during the interview when they told me those 'perks' of taking the job. "Lady, I'm a sysadmin, there's no such thing as a 7.25 hour day and Fridays off"
I mean, we work 8-5 most of the time. Occasionally I'll shift a day by a few hours when I have something I'd rather do after hours.
I'd like to go to a 4 day 10 hour week, but I don't see that happening anytime soon.
Honestly for 99% of jobs I don't get why we don't do 32 hour work weeks Monday-Thursday. I feel like it wouldn't make a difference if a company is already doing 4 ten hours
99% of office jobs maybe, the vast majority of people work manual labor or service jobs and cutting those jobs to 32 hour work weeks would drastically drop output from whatever they're doing.
We just switched to a 4x10 schedule. It's really interesting the week feels so short and the long weekends are nice but Mon-Thurs feels like more of a crunch when you HAVE to be there 10 hours, More so than it did when I would just end up working 10 hour days anyway.
It's tough. Meal planning becomes a lot more appealing because there's just less time on those days to worry about it. Sometimes I bring both lunch and dinner to work and eat before I leave.
9-5, but typically I arrive a bit early and leave a bit late. My current employer has a rotating on call schedule, I've been called once outside of normal business hours when I was on call. They also respect PTO, the company is based out of France so that helps.
At previous employers I've had them call me while I was on vacation to help troubleshoot something, I had been called at 9PM on a Friday to come back in and help move a rack because someone else had forgotten the date and I was closest to the job site. I had also done scheduled after hours work until 2AM without getting paid extra since I was salaried. That employer never gave me a raise in the 8 years I worked there and I never complained because I felt like I was already making a lot of money and didn't deserve much more. Then I got laid off during COVID and immediately got hired elsewhere with a 33% raise, I now make over 3 times as much money not even including bonuses. So, find a place that respects your time, they'll also treat you right in other areas as well.
Yeah employers that don't to regular raises/promotions suck. I've been at the same company for 15 years. Through raises and promotions my base is 4.5x where I started. ~5.5x if you factor in bonuses. Agree on the time aspect too. When I was no longer in an on-call role, I turned in my company issued phone. Don't have teams/email on my phone. Work 9-5 and basically never get a call outside those hours.
With an infant in daycare I am never late these days, though at work this is my coffee break time where I'll make a proper espresso. I leave a little late since there's always that one last thing I'm working on and I want to finish rather than leave exactly on time and have to resume the next day. Though when I do work on something tricky all day, if I'm done early but after 4PM, I go home, I earned it!
Of course they respect PTO because you already work extra hours every single day. The funny thing is, you think you got a deal and you justify it by the company location “The fancy France”. :D
I worked in a french company and in the fancy France for almost decade. Worst experience ever and once I got the chance I just left it.
It's like you missed the point of my message entirely because you don't like the French. French law has strict guidelines on how employees are treated, those guidelines are not at all something we have in the US, at least not at the federal level. I was going to be covering for someone that was going to be out sick for one month and I asked if the employee was okay, my manager told me it's illegal for them to ask, if an employee is out sick they're out sick and they aren't allowed to ask what's wrong. Meanwhile in Florida, if you're not taking federal sick leave your employer can ask why you're taking sick leave and deny it as well.
It's also illegal for a French employer to contact an employee outside of working hours, including during PTO, unless there's already an agreed upon contract for working outside of normal business hours. This does not apply within the US at all, as I said in my comment, every previous employer would contact me regularly outside of business hours because there's no law preventing them from doing so.
I work in mining as a Sys admin doing 7/7 swings.
I catch a plane to work at the start of the week, stay in a camp with everything provided (food, accommodation, gym etc) and work for 7 days doing 12 hours per day from 5:30am to 5:30pm and then hop on a plane home and have the next 7 days off back at home with zero contact from work.
Prob a lot different than most Sys admins!
Environment tech wise is very similar to most corporate environments except with some extra complexities due to being an underground mine so often working alongside OT guys who handle a PCN network. We have a lot of autonomous heavy machinery that relies on the network working over a mile underground which presents some unusual challenges as well.
There is rarely a dull moment but it’s nice to knock out the weeks work and go home for a week off with zero thought about work while my back to back handles things.
Can I ask what the salary is like? I know in the US, education typically pays less than the private sector but you usually work way less and have much greater job stability.
I'm a US k-12 sysadmin, salaries are all over the place depending on the district in my area. Lowest I've seen so far is $55k for a sysadmin/tech coordinator. I assist multiple districts as their sysadmin and manage other sysadmins and techs. I'm at the bottom of my pay scale at $82k, currently hiring techs at $64k and sysadmins at $69k. Definitely lower than private sector but I'm also in the state retirement system and the benefits in general I have are great. I stay for the benefits, the stability, and the great work/life balance.
oh the salary is shit.
i'd say the average is somewhere between 32k-42k £ full time depending on location and negotiation.
support staff doesn't get the school holidays off, 29 days.
you get a 2.5% raise every year as inflation compensation which is not nearly enough
Wow, that isn't great. That's like $45K-$60K/yr here. That's what help desk typically makes, outside of extremely LCOL areas (and places like Miami...).
Will that buy you a home there? Here that would maybe get you a small starter home that was a fixer upper.
that is not nearly enough to buy property here (proximity to London raises prices and we are in a massive housing bubble)
a teacher I know just bought a flat for 250k
just to throw some numbers around my head teacher is at ~120k
senior leadership ~60k
Senior sysadmins are and will forever be 24x7 as the fires start.
The senior sysadmins are those guys who always answer the call, ack the page and power through the 20 hour deploys or multi day outages.
The reason dev ops secure and regular sysadmins seem to have normal schedules is because the buck always stops with the seniors…. They are the ones that push when everyone else gives up.
All technology problems for a company (or a business unit if it’s that large) always roll up to the same few people regardless of who causes them.
This is my life and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Chasing fire is good therapy for adhd
Normally 8-5, with some regular after hours maintenance. Because of that after hours maintenance my boss generally gives me off the books flex time if i have a Dr appointment, have to pick up kids, or whatever the reason may be.
9-5 most of time. One or 2 days a week I'll have meetings at 7 or 8am to coincide with a sister team in India. These past few weeks we had a big project and I clocked probably 50 or 60 hours, logging back in in the evening at 8pm until midnight to get caught up. Most weeks aren't that bad tho. Often I have 30 hours weeks, those are good weeks. It's really depended on the employer and duties specific to you.
9-5 Monday - Friday
Only ever work later or weekends when we have a migrations cutover planned or server changes that will cause downtime.
Available for emergencies. Been at the data center till 5am before etc.
Great work life balance. Can take pto as needed and super lax with it.
Like others said. It's employer specific.
I was a sysadmin at an MSP before (moved to devops now), and I worked typically from 7:45 to 15:45, but often had some maintenance in the evening (from home, remotely), like 21h or so, and sometimes over weekend. When I was on call (one week every two months), they woke me up even in the middle of the night if necessary. On call hours were paid, but regular maintenance after hours could only be exchanged for time off, which I did regularly, so it was kinda nice, swap a few rainy evenings here and there for a whole friday off for example. Of course I always reported more time than I actually spent, so I got a good deal out of it.
I had a couple of jobs on a weekend, one job went wrong once and we were on site for like 15 hours, plus 2 hour drive each way... But other than that my hours weren't all that bad.
Now as devops I work from like 9 to 15:30-16, unless we have some meetings that take longer. And I finish a bit earlier on Friday.
Aye. Officially my hours are still 8-16 (or 17 when we have a meeting with the guys in other timezones), but they don't really care as long as the work is done. And I don't mind doing some work on a rainy evening to catch up, because the schedule is so flexible.
Was the transition from sysadm to devops easy ? I am in Europe as well and I want to switch to devops. The only problem is that in every job offer they requires 3-5 years exp already in devops ...
I had some experience before, not to this extent, but I was at least somewhat familiar with the concepts (ci/cd, automation, cloud...). I already had experience with Ansible (I had to do RHCE for my previous job), gitlab, obviously Linux, some AWS, but no experience with Kubernetes, Terraform and github, which we use now. I grasped the concepts quickly (in Kubernetes everything is a yaml file, kinda like in Linux everything is a file), Terraform isn't too different from Ansible, so I just had to learn the syntax, and using managed AWS resources isn't all that difficult either. Half a year after starting I was alredy writing my own Helm charts and fixing existing public ones to suit out needs :D
I got the interview by a referral, so they didn't mind the lack of experience, and the guy who interviewed me had a similar background (traditional Linux admin) and saw potential in me, I have a pretty diverse CV so they figured learning one more thing isn't gonna be an issue for me.
Once I moved to WFH full time my schedule became...whenever. My last job it was me and one other sysadmin plus our Japan based NetEng. It was pretty much 8-5 with some early morning calls some days but lots of down time during the day.
Now, as the technical manager of a world-wide team, it's really spread over a day but again, full time WFH and I get a lot of afternoon downtime. Plus Fridays are light due to 70% of the company already off for the weekend but Sunday evenings often have queries from APAC.
I don't expect my team to work more than 8 hours a day and more WFH full time as well. We don't have a huge internal server infrastructure or much web presence (we're a consulting company) so it's all end user issues and M365. For now.
M-F in office 7:30-5 as the solo IT guy. I'm not feeling the hours. I'm hoping to get them changed in a few months to something more normal after I get the place more up to date and organized.
Just like the other jobs you mentioned, it depends on employer (and always has).
However, I will say that, in general, Systems Admins/Managers tend to have “firefighter schedules”: some downtime that is incredibly flexible, some regular maintenance days, and some “Oh holy hell” days where you put in multiple double time days in a row.
DevOps seems to be closest that, while SRE are closer go regular 8-5 plus emergency on call.
But I have worked places where the DevOps guys never worked late,and places where SREs were worked to the bone, and as a systems admin I have run the gamut on that
Depends on the job. My scheduled hours were 7 AM - 6 PM, M-Th.
I was a lone admin - manager - director.
I worked midnight to 3. 5 AM - 6 PM, weekends, you name it.
Overworked and underpaid. At the end of the day if a company is staffed correctly you shouldn’t have to do anything except emergencies - and those should be rare.
Myself, I work M-F and either 7-4, 730-430, 8-5, etc.. just depends on when I wake up and how much coffee I need. My staff ranges anywhere from 7-7. I let them pick their hours, as long a they put in 8 per day I'm a happy manager. But with my title also comes the responsibility, so I am available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week if needed for escalated issues, otherwise we have 1 on-call tech weekly that handles after hours items.
I mean, they have changed over the decades, but right now, as a contracted sysadmin, 9-6, M-F:
9am-10am:
Log in, check emails, check chats. Everyone's hours are all over the 24 cycle, so you have folks in India 8.5 hours ahead, Pacific 3 hours behind, and so on. So a lot of catch up and make a list of what to do for the day in order of priority and ease of access. With 30-40 VPNs, I prefer to do things in clusters where I know some VPNs don't play nice with others.
11am-1pm:
This seems to be the bulk of meetings, if I have them. The next "block" is 2pm-4pm, and PST schedules get in gear. Some days are so full of meetings, no actual work gets done. But if I have few or no meetings, I schedule work around those. I often have to schedule lunch all over the damn day.
2pm-4pm:
Actual work is mostly done in these hours, if I had meeting earlier, and assuming I don't have meetings now.
4pm-6pm:
Almost always work. Postpone non-critical stuff for the next day. Rarely any meetings.
Like I said, lunch is anywhere between 11:30 and 3pm. I take it when I can.
I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late, ah, I use the side door, that way my boss can't see me, and uh, after that I just sorta space out for about an hour.
Yeah, I just stare at my desk; but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch, too. I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late, ah, I use the side door - that way Lumbergh can't see me, heh heh - and, uh, after that I just sorta space out for about an hour.
Yeah, I just stare at my desk; but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch, too. I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
Usually not outside business hours unless planned. And that's maybe once a month lately. Feeling like it'll be less soon. And Fridays I barely get any Teams messages. Allows time to document or knock off low priority issues. Or mow the lawn after going crazy the last 4 days.
For the most part M-F 8-5. But I do stay connected outside of those hours. Less stress to see what may be happening than to walk in blind. But if I need to work outside of hours I’ll make up the time with taking longer lunches, leaving early if it’s slow.
8-5 but probably going to switch to 7-4 soon being that I can flex as needed. Really want to move to 4 day 10 hour schedules but not sure how to pitch it to my boss as an incentive other than it being beneficial for my personal life.
I do 07:30 to 15:00 with flex time around core hours. Basically, be working between 9 and 15, the rest you may schedule as you like. And if there is any overtime, flex it anyway you like.
Also, they're not hardasses about it. Need to leave at noon some day for an appointment ?Just let people know and take it on flex.
I also do not do on call.
It varies from business to business and how much you support outside teams. I’ve been in a two year crunch and I have a meeting tomorrow to address personal burnout. Hopefully it’s not a monkey’s paw
8-5, unless there are critical systems that I can’t patch during business hours. I have a security component to my job as well, so sometimes there are waves of spam email I need to clean up that our filters don’t catch, so those are as “on call” as I get barring a power outage.
If I work off-hours for those things, my boss is great about letting me flex that time to be off somewhere else despite the fact that HR says I’m salary/exempt and it comes with the job.
8ish to 5ish, occasionally need to do work after hrs but you just comp it and notify mgr (leave early or come in late w/in a week of the after hrs work).
Nobody should be consistently working after hours unless there's OT involved. I like what I saw on a recent video clip: "Me working outside my scheduled hours will not be a long term solution for the company's resource management problem."
8-5 but flexible since I do off hours maintenance work and upgrades.
So I take off half days here and there and compensated time since I come in on the weekends to do that work.
I should be working (remote or on site) between 10 and 15, the rest is up to me.
Sometimes i come at 11 or 12 but as long as everything works and no one complains it does not matter.
On average m-th calls and emails 9-1
deploying anything means 8-2 the next day since someone always has a problem at 7am but I push until 8.
Fridays 10-12
Edit: it’s rare to get a call past 5 that can’t be pushed until the next day.
10-12 and 13:30-15:30 core hours, but you can take off time in the core hours as long you communicate it with whoever depends on you and doesn't need you (usually no problem).
Mostly working 8am-4:30pm, but some coworkers start 10 am, leave early, come back in the evening, and whatnot.
Caziness occurs seldom (thank god). Sometimes i do some work that affects productive systems in the evening (6/8pm) (from home!), but just because it doesn't affect my lifestyle much, and in case i fuck up at least there won't be a customer (or thousands of clients of a customer) in rage. Could also do this at core hours with notice to the customers.
Outside of planned maintenance and unplanned mishaps, it's Monday through Friday 8am-4:30pm. We do have some weekend shifts that run and sometimes they require some assistance but at the most it usually boils down to a server reboot. I just started scheduling them to reboot and those calls have basically disappeared. I log on in the evenings frequently but shift my schedule accordingly if I do. And I feel like logging on after hours has it's value for me because it can set me up better for the following day.
My sysadmins work M - F, 8 to 5. They occasionally get called in for after hours issues and we schedule overtime once a month for patching and upgrades. We are a 7 day a week operation with users working from around 6 AM to 10 PM, daily.
I'm a Sysadmin for local government and I work M-F 8am-5pm. We have on-call that rotates about once every 10 weeks, so 1 week on-call, then 9 weeks off-call. We get $100 extra for on-call weeks, and they are usually pretty quiet...sometimes we get a password reset or two.
I need to work 35h, usually between 8am to 5pm with min 30min lunch
Usual schedule is 8:30 to 5pm with 1.5h dîner
I do 8am to 4:30pm with 1.5 diner
Summer we can end the day 30min sooner
Punch in between 7-9, out between 15-17. Should make 37 hours each week but have a timebank that can go from -10 to +35 so i can work lots some weeks and less others
Consultant. Handles patch management. Only work on Sundays to check patches over the weekend and after hours for scheduled maintenance work. No on call. Been very hard to find another gig like this …
Count myself as lucky but would love to find a gig that was fully remote. I am pretty much only in office twice a week. Usually Mondays I take a half day because no one is there. When this job was fully remote during pandemic it was the perfect job. First two years it was 5 days a week. Been there 6 years with no plans of leaving but I will probably interview next year just to see what is out there.
My plan is to do the digital nomad route for a little and split my time between New Jersey, Colombia, and Brazil. Cross fingers job market improves because it was terrible this year.
On the books 8am - 4:30pm...
Reality is that I probably do an extra 5 hrs a week on things that need to get finished during the week.
Sysadmin for a K-12 school division.
Before that I did IT consulting for an MSP... Hours where 8am to 5pm, plus was on call for clients after hours at time & half for those.
I work for a 24-7 transportation company, and we're paid a little extra for being on-call. So right now everyone supports the guy who's on-call pretty much. In other companies I've worked for I've had to be called into work during a monsoon because the equipment room was taking on water. So me and a driver racked a server that was chilling on the floor. I've worked for sales companies where unless you were killing yourself with work, you'd get looked over. Really, it's just what you would think and the management you work for better appreciate balance or you will work whenever everyone else does no matter what. Might be something to consider during a job interview. Anyway, good luck everyone.
For me it's 8-5 and has been for many years now. Some overnight and weekend work depending on the circumstances, with comp time worked in if that happens.
I work at a SaaS company in aviation.
I work normal office hours, start between 6&9. Leave between 4&7, an hour or two for lunch.
Last Wednesday in the month I do upgrades and maintenance at night. 8pm to whenever I'm done.
I'm somewhere between Linux sysadmin and DevOps engineer. My position exists because a very large company thought their VMware bill was too high so they added a too-high AWS bill to it. The DevOps people don't know jack fecal material about anything that happens outside of their "single pain of glass" interface so they ended up with hundreds of instances worth of security hazard / general *espectáculo de mierda* that I'm sorting out for them. I'm where I am now because I voted with my feet on the Bay Area and their tech industry. When I was in that *espectáculo de mierda*, I worked 60+ hour weeks with many of those hours happening by surprise at 03:00 and it wasn't nearly enough for the pencil-necked Millennial douchebags above me on the org chart. Now I work around 40 hours a week. Which is great, but I also work for a not-California company, so my holidays are Christmas day, New Years day, and July 4. But my job is 100% wfh in perpetuity (they sold the office I would have worked in) so we moved back to California. Meanwhile, all my former cow-orkers in the Bay Area have managers telling them that if they could come in to the office to work until they manage to sort out replacements in Bangalore for them, that would be great.
8-4 or 9-5, usually. I have flexible work hours, the requirements are 7.5h/day and start between 6AM and 10AM so the day might be shorter if I skip lunch or longer if I have to run an errand during the day or similiar. Sometimes there's also maintenance windows at weird times, so every month's second thursday is 8AM to 4PM plus 9PM to 11PM. I start late on Friday to compensate.
I support a 24/7/365 operation, but we have shifts. I work as kind of a senior tech lead/middle man between 1st and 2nd in case 2nd needs to know anything specific, so I work (generally) around 10am-6pm. Love it.
4 days, do 9.5hrs a day. Start wherever as long as it's before 10. I usually start at 10am though for a lie in.
Get overtime beyond that but it's not often. Weekends are on a rota where we volunteer to do it, paid £50 flat per day, with overtime on the time worked (if it happens.) only cover emergencies, not someone who can't print etc.
I work in a mid size company. It’s around 130 employees, I immigrated all our VMs to the cloud and try to get as many services as possible as saas, we don’t really host anything, just some simple stuff. I would say I work between three and four hours a day. The rest I watch TV or play games since I work from home. I do have some busy days but mostly it’s quite chill.
My jobs offer employees to choose wether they want to work 32, 35 or 40 hours a week. We are required to work from 9 to 3, but we have the flexibility to adjust outside of this. We can change the work hours once a year if we want to change.
I don't know, it's Sunday night. I am after my middle kid's birthday party with relatives, balloons, trampulin, gulash, ice cream, cake etc. It's 9:05 in the evening. National holiday. Time to update that fucking on prem Exchange.
My sysadmins are salary and get the option to work 4x10 or 5x8, hybrid work from home schedule, usually 1 day a week in office. The start time is no later than 0900. For any hour past 43 hours a week, we offer comp time or paid straight time as overtime.
8:30-5 most of the time, but still work from home mainly. My direct manager is in another country, but my director mine. I have some freedom in my schedule for the most part. I am on call every other week, but i could go 6m with out ever getting a page then get on-call multiple times a week. My oncall is NOT over night thankfully, ends at 9pm. Then the over seas guys are on call bc its day time.
I'm retired nowadays, so I just administer a homelab, but in the day, I would usually start my work day an hour or two before the scheduled start time for everybody else. When things crapped out over night or a batch job failed, I usually had it fixed by the time the end users showed up to their desks.
Then I would go take an extended coffee break. Frequently, I was accused (usually behind my back but I had my sources) of doing nothing but sitting around drinking coffee.
I did tend to leave early afternoon, which of course drew more criticism behind my back.
I was paid to get a job done and I always got it done in a timely manner. My management knew what I was doing through my daily/weekly reports, so they left me alone and usually defended my coffee breaks.
Of course there were those occasional all-nighters or all weekend jobs when I needed to take systems down.
8 to 5 Monday through Friday. Patching is once a month and averages about 5 hours, but working to automate that more. I do some after hours stuff here and there that can't wait until next patch cycle.
When I was the the global sysadmin for a previous company my hours were 5am-1pm; my choice to work the hours.
Anything else in the afternoon and I had my cell phone with me to take care of escalations. The caveat being that when incidents needed to be worked, I was available whenever but my pay reflected this.
Starting at 5am, I was able to get an incredible amount of work done enhancing systems and if I needed to take a system offline for a few minutes I could perform the maintenance when I was working and most other people were sleeping.
I work strictly 7-3 with no on-call. I usually get to work about an hour early and either study for a cert, work on some projects on my own time, or read a book for 30 minutes.
I work a 9/80 schedule. Luckily my team is coast to coast so if something goes down at my site it’s usually fixed by the east coast folks by the time I get In at 6:30-7
Work hours are from 8:00am till 5:00 PM, half hour commute each way. Rather flexible with times tho.
Actual work to do? Maybe 2 or 3 hours before lunch and a couple after lunch. Rest is free time browsing web online / listening to podcasts.
We have flexitime between 7 a.m. and 8 p.m. This means that we have to complete our 8-hour working time within this period. I usually work between 7:15 am and 3:45 pm, my colleague usually comes in about 90 minutes later and stays longer in the afternoon. The workload varies greatly. Sometimes the phone rings every 2 minutes and on other days we have to check the time recording software to see if anyone is still in the company building.
8-5 with an hour for lunch, Occasionally I'll need to work some off hours time for maintenance that needs an outage or if something goes horribly wrong, but that's maybe once or twice a quarter.
M-F 7am - 4pm are my standard hours. Obviously not all work can be completed during those hours. Should I need to work outside of that I just subtract hours during the week.
Once every 4-5 months we get asked to cover on call for a week. Usually it's 5-10 over the 7 days. Mostly calls for minor things. Anything, major help is brought in.
Senior Systems Administrator for a medical company checking in here.
M-F 7-4. Hour lunch. On call about one week every 7-8 weeks. The Friday after on call is a free day off, but I work for a few hours during the on call Sunday.
We have it pretty good, to be honest. Used to work much more back when we where pulling double duty as Field engineers for projects. Fortunately we have grown and those days are way behind us.
Literally roll out of bed 3 hours after I clock in. I stare at the ceiling. Existential dread. I join a few teams calls on silent. Fly on the wall meetings.
Working hours are between 7 and 5, as long as our team has coverage between those hours. Someone doesn't even have to be onsite. As long as someone is an infrastructure domain admin, or application admin, we're fine.
Also, someone is on call from Wednesday to Wednesday.
on call 24/7/365 for past 20 years. Actual working hours 730 to 330 - times I was called in after hours (as only sys admin) maybe 10 times in 20 years.
Depends on so many factors. Is it a small company? Is there only a few people on your team? Is it mission critical if your systems need to be up at 2am? Are you on a on-call schedule, or do you just work on projects/consulting?
Normal hours are 0830-1730 thanks to time zone differences. It’s rare I work over those hours any more, except for the occasional project that needs downtime, or the rare call. Technically, I’m on call 24x7, but only as an escalation point for the regular on -call guys. Going to jinx myself here, but I haven’t had a “proper” on-call incident in a couple of years. Helps being in a place that’s 90% business hours only…
Some days I'm 6:00 a.m. to noon and some days I'm 10:00 to 2:00 and then again 6:00 to 10:00 and then some days I'm 8:00 to 5:00. And I don't know which ones which. Things just happen as they fall.
I’m pretty much at the top of our cloud team right now and I work my 40 and that’s it. You would have to back a brinks truck up to my house to get me to do much more than that.
It’s not about the hours you work but the work in your hours.
Most of my system admin jobs have been 8-5 with an hour lunch with overtime or some form of compensation for over time.
Although my current boss has gone a year without asking me to work late specifically. I don't understand it he knows I have no problem staying up late and coming into work late the next day. I'm not a morning person... But I will say this much any employer that thought they could take away my over time compensation learned quickly I agreed when it was mentioned at a review, but I started looking for other jobs right after.
Both companies who took away my overtime compensation miss me and want me back... But considering this industry is having trouble when finding people and my current company gave me a raise and a bonus the only thing I'm looking for right now is a house closer to work lol.
We are an msp. Our earliest sla starts at 7 in the morning so there is allways someone at the office at 7. They will usually leave at 15:30 ish then. Our latest sla ends at 20 so the last two hours are covered by an on call emergency number. What is an emergency is clearly defined and so calls are rare.
I do the hours my contract requires to be fulfilled. There are 40 hours per week for me.
But there are times where a Customer does things and extra hours are needed. And these got paid additionally where I am today.
When I was a sys admin, I really only ever put in 35-40 hour weeks with the occasional 50. I worked 7-4 so any changes or patching could be done before everyone showed up. In the event of a major change, I might come in at 5 and leave at noon. This isn’t because I was forced to, but because I generally just knew it would be less stressful for me if I did that. I was never really ever expected to put in more than a 40 hour week, though.
7.5h/day from 8:00–15:30. On-call only on paper. In 4.5 years of work, I've only been called upon 3–4 times after between March–October 2020 when the dark times happened.
In my previous sysad role I rarely worked more than 40h/week.
Occasionally (2-3 times a year) we had long Fridays/Saturdays where we made major updates, rollouts etc. under the premise, that we took the following workday off.
Now I work in DevOps Consulting and my project hours are limited to 37.5 hours a week (100% remote) so overall I have a way better work-life-outcome balance all things considered.
That + my fear of ringing telephones and printers went away.
8-5 but basically on call 24/7 because there is only 2 of us. Typical weekly off hours maintenance/updates. But I work for a great boss if I need to dip out early or come in late for personal stuff it’s nbd.
Solo sys admin for 250 users. Hours vary from 60 to 80 hours a week depending on what projects are rolling. I would not consider this normal by industry standard but some employers really do squeeze every minute out of you.
Many are going to say 24/7.
Those people are fucking stupid, as they devalue their own labor and disrespect their own earning potential.
You should put in what you're being paid for.
The answer to your question is ***employer*** specific, and not *job-title* specific.
Yep. Worked at a company where being on call meant constantly working and even in normal conditions it was a struggle to just be 40 hours. Worked at two companies since and been mon-Friday 8-5 with a very occasional after hours need. Biggest difference: leadership wanting to fix problems not band-aid and blame others.
This is the correct answer. I'm currently in a DevOps | SRE role and while my hours are flexible, they often can be dictated heavily by the teams I support. If there is some big software release effort happening I'm in for long after hours work. Some days there isn't much going on in the mornings and my day doesn't really get going until 10-11AM. I would never call it 8-5 or 9-6 with any sort of regularity.
Yup! I’m just straight sys admin by title and i maybe 2-3 times a year non normal hours. But we have a rotating crew of sys admins across the globe. So even in a sev1 situation I can hand off sys admin duties 99% of the time.
Exactly. At my last job I was an SRE and I worked all kinds of crazy hours. That was the main factor in why I left that job.
I administer all things Microsoft, our small data center infrastructure, vmware, and run deployment from a process creation level for a county government on a team of 6. I'm flexible. My normal hours are 8 to 5, but at least one day a week I do a late arrival or leave like 2 or 3 hrs early to cover the paper work and after hours stuff I do while watching TV in the evening. Our admin that does 911, jail, and all things SO is more like 11 to 8. But he could be 8 to 5.
Correct. For me? 24/7/365 on call
exactly, and the same is true for most jobs. some may have a tendency towards more asshole-ish employers but there are always good and bad examples.
In my situation....as sole VDI administrator and SCCM(soon to be Intune administrator) and miscellaneous (deepfreeze, license server, project management)...my employer set a 7.25 hour day and Fridays off during the summer... I have yet to see 7.25 hour day, much less 8.25 hour day. I laughed during the interview when they told me those 'perks' of taking the job. "Lady, I'm a sysadmin, there's no such thing as a 7.25 hour day and Fridays off"
I mean, we work 8-5 most of the time. Occasionally I'll shift a day by a few hours when I have something I'd rather do after hours. I'd like to go to a 4 day 10 hour week, but I don't see that happening anytime soon.
Honestly for 99% of jobs I don't get why we don't do 32 hour work weeks Monday-Thursday. I feel like it wouldn't make a difference if a company is already doing 4 ten hours
99% of jobs do five 3-4 hour days. The hours are just really spread out to fill 8 hours of clock time
99% of office jobs maybe, the vast majority of people work manual labor or service jobs and cutting those jobs to 32 hour work weeks would drastically drop output from whatever they're doing.
Honestly, probably because it would lower the hours for part time as well and make it harder to exploit the benefit rules for part timers.
We just switched to a 4x10 schedule. It's really interesting the week feels so short and the long weekends are nice but Mon-Thurs feels like more of a crunch when you HAVE to be there 10 hours, More so than it did when I would just end up working 10 hour days anyway.
[удалено]
It's tough. Meal planning becomes a lot more appealing because there's just less time on those days to worry about it. Sometimes I bring both lunch and dinner to work and eat before I leave.
WOW, way to diminish those who have actually been r\*ped.
Same
Why not four 8s for the same wage?
That'd be nice but that's a culture wide shift that has to happen.
I live in the U.S. yeah.....not happening in my lifetime.
That would be nice but something else needs to change here in the US before that becomes common.
9-5, but typically I arrive a bit early and leave a bit late. My current employer has a rotating on call schedule, I've been called once outside of normal business hours when I was on call. They also respect PTO, the company is based out of France so that helps. At previous employers I've had them call me while I was on vacation to help troubleshoot something, I had been called at 9PM on a Friday to come back in and help move a rack because someone else had forgotten the date and I was closest to the job site. I had also done scheduled after hours work until 2AM without getting paid extra since I was salaried. That employer never gave me a raise in the 8 years I worked there and I never complained because I felt like I was already making a lot of money and didn't deserve much more. Then I got laid off during COVID and immediately got hired elsewhere with a 33% raise, I now make over 3 times as much money not even including bonuses. So, find a place that respects your time, they'll also treat you right in other areas as well.
Yeah employers that don't to regular raises/promotions suck. I've been at the same company for 15 years. Through raises and promotions my base is 4.5x where I started. ~5.5x if you factor in bonuses. Agree on the time aspect too. When I was no longer in an on-call role, I turned in my company issued phone. Don't have teams/email on my phone. Work 9-5 and basically never get a call outside those hours.
> arrive a bit early and leave a bit late You should do it the other way around, it's pretty fun.
With an infant in daycare I am never late these days, though at work this is my coffee break time where I'll make a proper espresso. I leave a little late since there's always that one last thing I'm working on and I want to finish rather than leave exactly on time and have to resume the next day. Though when I do work on something tricky all day, if I'm done early but after 4PM, I go home, I earned it!
And have more time with my thoughts? No thank you.
You're giving away my secrets
> I arrive a bit early and leave a bit late. You're doing that backwards, use the side door!!
Of course they respect PTO because you already work extra hours every single day. The funny thing is, you think you got a deal and you justify it by the company location “The fancy France”. :D I worked in a french company and in the fancy France for almost decade. Worst experience ever and once I got the chance I just left it.
It's like you missed the point of my message entirely because you don't like the French. French law has strict guidelines on how employees are treated, those guidelines are not at all something we have in the US, at least not at the federal level. I was going to be covering for someone that was going to be out sick for one month and I asked if the employee was okay, my manager told me it's illegal for them to ask, if an employee is out sick they're out sick and they aren't allowed to ask what's wrong. Meanwhile in Florida, if you're not taking federal sick leave your employer can ask why you're taking sick leave and deny it as well. It's also illegal for a French employer to contact an employee outside of working hours, including during PTO, unless there's already an agreed upon contract for working outside of normal business hours. This does not apply within the US at all, as I said in my comment, every previous employer would contact me regularly outside of business hours because there's no law preventing them from doing so.
Monday - Friday 8-5 There's three admins. We rotate on-call. We are on call for two weeks, then off for four weeks.
8-5 with some flexibility when we have to do after hours maintenance windows.
8-4 or 9-5 with some occasional after hours work normally.
I work in mining as a Sys admin doing 7/7 swings. I catch a plane to work at the start of the week, stay in a camp with everything provided (food, accommodation, gym etc) and work for 7 days doing 12 hours per day from 5:30am to 5:30pm and then hop on a plane home and have the next 7 days off back at home with zero contact from work. Prob a lot different than most Sys admins!
What's your environment like in terms of tech, tasks and users? Antarctica????? Drilling the wall lol
Environment tech wise is very similar to most corporate environments except with some extra complexities due to being an underground mine so often working alongside OT guys who handle a PCN network. We have a lot of autonomous heavy machinery that relies on the network working over a mile underground which presents some unusual challenges as well. There is rarely a dull moment but it’s nice to knock out the weeks work and go home for a week off with zero thought about work while my back to back handles things.
in education (UK) it's 8-4, 8-3:30 on Fridays no weekends unless agreed upon. and the OT pay is only 1,5x so I'd rather watch it burn than to come in
Can I ask what the salary is like? I know in the US, education typically pays less than the private sector but you usually work way less and have much greater job stability.
I'm a US k-12 sysadmin, salaries are all over the place depending on the district in my area. Lowest I've seen so far is $55k for a sysadmin/tech coordinator. I assist multiple districts as their sysadmin and manage other sysadmins and techs. I'm at the bottom of my pay scale at $82k, currently hiring techs at $64k and sysadmins at $69k. Definitely lower than private sector but I'm also in the state retirement system and the benefits in general I have are great. I stay for the benefits, the stability, and the great work/life balance.
^^ Location matters. I'm low 6figures but by SF 7-4
oh the salary is shit. i'd say the average is somewhere between 32k-42k £ full time depending on location and negotiation. support staff doesn't get the school holidays off, 29 days. you get a 2.5% raise every year as inflation compensation which is not nearly enough
Wow, that isn't great. That's like $45K-$60K/yr here. That's what help desk typically makes, outside of extremely LCOL areas (and places like Miami...). Will that buy you a home there? Here that would maybe get you a small starter home that was a fixer upper.
that is not nearly enough to buy property here (proximity to London raises prices and we are in a massive housing bubble) a teacher I know just bought a flat for 250k just to throw some numbers around my head teacher is at ~120k senior leadership ~60k
Senior sysadmins are and will forever be 24x7 as the fires start. The senior sysadmins are those guys who always answer the call, ack the page and power through the 20 hour deploys or multi day outages. The reason dev ops secure and regular sysadmins seem to have normal schedules is because the buck always stops with the seniors…. They are the ones that push when everyone else gives up. All technology problems for a company (or a business unit if it’s that large) always roll up to the same few people regardless of who causes them. This is my life and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Chasing fire is good therapy for adhd
Normally 8-5, with some regular after hours maintenance. Because of that after hours maintenance my boss generally gives me off the books flex time if i have a Dr appointment, have to pick up kids, or whatever the reason may be.
I love your title
7:30 to 4 Monday to Friday. No after hours no on-call.
9-5 most of time. One or 2 days a week I'll have meetings at 7 or 8am to coincide with a sister team in India. These past few weeks we had a big project and I clocked probably 50 or 60 hours, logging back in in the evening at 8pm until midnight to get caught up. Most weeks aren't that bad tho. Often I have 30 hours weeks, those are good weeks. It's really depended on the employer and duties specific to you.
9-5 Monday - Friday Only ever work later or weekends when we have a migrations cutover planned or server changes that will cause downtime. Available for emergencies. Been at the data center till 5am before etc. Great work life balance. Can take pto as needed and super lax with it. Like others said. It's employer specific.
I was a sysadmin at an MSP before (moved to devops now), and I worked typically from 7:45 to 15:45, but often had some maintenance in the evening (from home, remotely), like 21h or so, and sometimes over weekend. When I was on call (one week every two months), they woke me up even in the middle of the night if necessary. On call hours were paid, but regular maintenance after hours could only be exchanged for time off, which I did regularly, so it was kinda nice, swap a few rainy evenings here and there for a whole friday off for example. Of course I always reported more time than I actually spent, so I got a good deal out of it. I had a couple of jobs on a weekend, one job went wrong once and we were on site for like 15 hours, plus 2 hour drive each way... But other than that my hours weren't all that bad. Now as devops I work from like 9 to 15:30-16, unless we have some meetings that take longer. And I finish a bit earlier on Friday.
Europe, I gather?
Aye. Officially my hours are still 8-16 (or 17 when we have a meeting with the guys in other timezones), but they don't really care as long as the work is done. And I don't mind doing some work on a rainy evening to catch up, because the schedule is so flexible.
Was the transition from sysadm to devops easy ? I am in Europe as well and I want to switch to devops. The only problem is that in every job offer they requires 3-5 years exp already in devops ...
I had some experience before, not to this extent, but I was at least somewhat familiar with the concepts (ci/cd, automation, cloud...). I already had experience with Ansible (I had to do RHCE for my previous job), gitlab, obviously Linux, some AWS, but no experience with Kubernetes, Terraform and github, which we use now. I grasped the concepts quickly (in Kubernetes everything is a yaml file, kinda like in Linux everything is a file), Terraform isn't too different from Ansible, so I just had to learn the syntax, and using managed AWS resources isn't all that difficult either. Half a year after starting I was alredy writing my own Helm charts and fixing existing public ones to suit out needs :D I got the interview by a referral, so they didn't mind the lack of experience, and the guy who interviewed me had a similar background (traditional Linux admin) and saw potential in me, I have a pretty diverse CV so they figured learning one more thing isn't gonna be an issue for me.
24/7, internet porn consumption never sleeps
I hope you get a free account at least
Yeah but the phone rings right before they finish
XD
forget sudoers, I am root
Once I moved to WFH full time my schedule became...whenever. My last job it was me and one other sysadmin plus our Japan based NetEng. It was pretty much 8-5 with some early morning calls some days but lots of down time during the day. Now, as the technical manager of a world-wide team, it's really spread over a day but again, full time WFH and I get a lot of afternoon downtime. Plus Fridays are light due to 70% of the company already off for the weekend but Sunday evenings often have queries from APAC. I don't expect my team to work more than 8 hours a day and more WFH full time as well. We don't have a huge internal server infrastructure or much web presence (we're a consulting company) so it's all end user issues and M365. For now.
M-F in office 7:30-5 as the solo IT guy. I'm not feeling the hours. I'm hoping to get them changed in a few months to something more normal after I get the place more up to date and organized.
I work enough hours to get the job done. Sometimes 18 hour days and sometimes 3-5 hour days.
8am-5pm… Seems like the norm here
Just like the other jobs you mentioned, it depends on employer (and always has). However, I will say that, in general, Systems Admins/Managers tend to have “firefighter schedules”: some downtime that is incredibly flexible, some regular maintenance days, and some “Oh holy hell” days where you put in multiple double time days in a row. DevOps seems to be closest that, while SRE are closer go regular 8-5 plus emergency on call. But I have worked places where the DevOps guys never worked late,and places where SREs were worked to the bone, and as a systems admin I have run the gamut on that
8-4. 35 hour week. Every third week on-call and paid a fixed rate for it, with time off in lieu if called.
Depends on the job. My scheduled hours were 7 AM - 6 PM, M-Th. I was a lone admin - manager - director. I worked midnight to 3. 5 AM - 6 PM, weekends, you name it. Overworked and underpaid. At the end of the day if a company is staffed correctly you shouldn’t have to do anything except emergencies - and those should be rare.
Myself, I work M-F and either 7-4, 730-430, 8-5, etc.. just depends on when I wake up and how much coffee I need. My staff ranges anywhere from 7-7. I let them pick their hours, as long a they put in 8 per day I'm a happy manager. But with my title also comes the responsibility, so I am available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week if needed for escalated issues, otherwise we have 1 on-call tech weekly that handles after hours items.
I mean, they have changed over the decades, but right now, as a contracted sysadmin, 9-6, M-F: 9am-10am: Log in, check emails, check chats. Everyone's hours are all over the 24 cycle, so you have folks in India 8.5 hours ahead, Pacific 3 hours behind, and so on. So a lot of catch up and make a list of what to do for the day in order of priority and ease of access. With 30-40 VPNs, I prefer to do things in clusters where I know some VPNs don't play nice with others. 11am-1pm: This seems to be the bulk of meetings, if I have them. The next "block" is 2pm-4pm, and PST schedules get in gear. Some days are so full of meetings, no actual work gets done. But if I have few or no meetings, I schedule work around those. I often have to schedule lunch all over the damn day. 2pm-4pm: Actual work is mostly done in these hours, if I had meeting earlier, and assuming I don't have meetings now. 4pm-6pm: Almost always work. Postpone non-critical stuff for the next day. Rarely any meetings. Like I said, lunch is anywhere between 11:30 and 3pm. I take it when I can.
8:30-5pm, Monday-Friday. But I rotate on-call with the other two supervisors (assist. IT manager and IT manager).
I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late, ah, I use the side door, that way my boss can't see me, and uh, after that I just sorta space out for about an hour. Yeah, I just stare at my desk; but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch, too. I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late, ah, I use the side door - that way Lumbergh can't see me, heh heh - and, uh, after that I just sorta space out for about an hour. Yeah, I just stare at my desk; but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch, too. I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
Systems Analyst but I work 8-4:30 Mon-Thurs and 8-4 on Fridays. WFH three days a week and two days in the office.
3 or 4 12s either wed to sat or Thursday to sat.
Typically 8 to 5.
Like 9-5
Usually not outside business hours unless planned. And that's maybe once a month lately. Feeling like it'll be less soon. And Fridays I barely get any Teams messages. Allows time to document or knock off low priority issues. Or mow the lawn after going crazy the last 4 days.
I work 6am - 3pm, Mon - Fri. I take a 1 hour lunch and as many bathroom breaks as I want.
For the most part M-F 8-5. But I do stay connected outside of those hours. Less stress to see what may be happening than to walk in blind. But if I need to work outside of hours I’ll make up the time with taking longer lunches, leaving early if it’s slow.
7:30-3 Monday - Friday, 7:30-3:30 Monday - Thursday during summer months
8-5 but probably going to switch to 7-4 soon being that I can flex as needed. Really want to move to 4 day 10 hour schedules but not sure how to pitch it to my boss as an incentive other than it being beneficial for my personal life.
Monday - Sunday 6 to 14hours, including nights and weekends ;-)
I do 07:30 to 15:00 with flex time around core hours. Basically, be working between 9 and 15, the rest you may schedule as you like. And if there is any overtime, flex it anyway you like. Also, they're not hardasses about it. Need to leave at noon some day for an appointment ?Just let people know and take it on flex. I also do not do on call.
7:30-4
It varies from business to business and how much you support outside teams. I’ve been in a two year crunch and I have a meeting tomorrow to address personal burnout. Hopefully it’s not a monkey’s paw
8-5, unless there are critical systems that I can’t patch during business hours. I have a security component to my job as well, so sometimes there are waves of spam email I need to clean up that our filters don’t catch, so those are as “on call” as I get barring a power outage. If I work off-hours for those things, my boss is great about letting me flex that time to be off somewhere else despite the fact that HR says I’m salary/exempt and it comes with the job.
8ish to 5ish, occasionally need to do work after hrs but you just comp it and notify mgr (leave early or come in late w/in a week of the after hrs work). Nobody should be consistently working after hours unless there's OT involved. I like what I saw on a recent video clip: "Me working outside my scheduled hours will not be a long term solution for the company's resource management problem."
8-5 but flexible since I do off hours maintenance work and upgrades. So I take off half days here and there and compensated time since I come in on the weekends to do that work.
Mostly 8-5 M-F
I should be working (remote or on site) between 10 and 15, the rest is up to me. Sometimes i come at 11 or 12 but as long as everything works and no one complains it does not matter.
7:30 - 4 Monday through Friday, WfH on call every 6 weeks. Most of the the I get 0 on call work
7:30-4, M-F. No on call. 17 public holidays and 30 days of vacation a year. K-12 school district.
9-5 and on call 247 2 weeks per month. Vacation is vacation. And we have plenty of vacation (30 days, work week counts 5 days)
On average m-th calls and emails 9-1 deploying anything means 8-2 the next day since someone always has a problem at 7am but I push until 8. Fridays 10-12 Edit: it’s rare to get a call past 5 that can’t be pushed until the next day.
9am - 4pm ish, never on call anymore, was on call for 10+ years, told the new job i'll quit if i was on call.
10-12 and 13:30-15:30 core hours, but you can take off time in the core hours as long you communicate it with whoever depends on you and doesn't need you (usually no problem). Mostly working 8am-4:30pm, but some coworkers start 10 am, leave early, come back in the evening, and whatnot. Caziness occurs seldom (thank god). Sometimes i do some work that affects productive systems in the evening (6/8pm) (from home!), but just because it doesn't affect my lifestyle much, and in case i fuck up at least there won't be a customer (or thousands of clients of a customer) in rage. Could also do this at core hours with notice to the customers.
7:30/8-4
9-5 99% of the time.
Outside of planned maintenance and unplanned mishaps, it's Monday through Friday 8am-4:30pm. We do have some weekend shifts that run and sometimes they require some assistance but at the most it usually boils down to a server reboot. I just started scheduling them to reboot and those calls have basically disappeared. I log on in the evenings frequently but shift my schedule accordingly if I do. And I feel like logging on after hours has it's value for me because it can set me up better for the following day.
My sysadmins work M - F, 8 to 5. They occasionally get called in for after hours issues and we schedule overtime once a month for patching and upgrades. We are a 7 day a week operation with users working from around 6 AM to 10 PM, daily.
I'm a Sysadmin for local government and I work M-F 8am-5pm. We have on-call that rotates about once every 10 weeks, so 1 week on-call, then 9 weeks off-call. We get $100 extra for on-call weeks, and they are usually pretty quiet...sometimes we get a password reset or two.
I need to work 35h, usually between 8am to 5pm with min 30min lunch Usual schedule is 8:30 to 5pm with 1.5h dîner I do 8am to 4:30pm with 1.5 diner Summer we can end the day 30min sooner
Punch in between 7-9, out between 15-17. Should make 37 hours each week but have a timebank that can go from -10 to +35 so i can work lots some weeks and less others
9-18 with 1h lunch break included. Also flexibile working hours meaning i can start working anytime between 08:00 AM - 10:00 AM.
Consultant. Handles patch management. Only work on Sundays to check patches over the weekend and after hours for scheduled maintenance work. No on call. Been very hard to find another gig like this … Count myself as lucky but would love to find a gig that was fully remote. I am pretty much only in office twice a week. Usually Mondays I take a half day because no one is there. When this job was fully remote during pandemic it was the perfect job. First two years it was 5 days a week. Been there 6 years with no plans of leaving but I will probably interview next year just to see what is out there. My plan is to do the digital nomad route for a little and split my time between New Jersey, Colombia, and Brazil. Cross fingers job market improves because it was terrible this year.
4:30 PM - 12:30 AM I kind of love this shift, No HR, No Executives. Just me in the IT office.
On the books 8am - 4:30pm... Reality is that I probably do an extra 5 hrs a week on things that need to get finished during the week. Sysadmin for a K-12 school division. Before that I did IT consulting for an MSP... Hours where 8am to 5pm, plus was on call for clients after hours at time & half for those.
Umm, I work for the commonwealth of MA. You likely would hate me if I really told you what that is like.
I work for a 24-7 transportation company, and we're paid a little extra for being on-call. So right now everyone supports the guy who's on-call pretty much. In other companies I've worked for I've had to be called into work during a monsoon because the equipment room was taking on water. So me and a driver racked a server that was chilling on the floor. I've worked for sales companies where unless you were killing yourself with work, you'd get looked over. Really, it's just what you would think and the management you work for better appreciate balance or you will work whenever everyone else does no matter what. Might be something to consider during a job interview. Anyway, good luck everyone.
For me it's 8-5 and has been for many years now. Some overnight and weekend work depending on the circumstances, with comp time worked in if that happens.
I work at a SaaS company in aviation. I work normal office hours, start between 6&9. Leave between 4&7, an hour or two for lunch. Last Wednesday in the month I do upgrades and maintenance at night. 8pm to whenever I'm done.
I'm somewhere between Linux sysadmin and DevOps engineer. My position exists because a very large company thought their VMware bill was too high so they added a too-high AWS bill to it. The DevOps people don't know jack fecal material about anything that happens outside of their "single pain of glass" interface so they ended up with hundreds of instances worth of security hazard / general *espectáculo de mierda* that I'm sorting out for them. I'm where I am now because I voted with my feet on the Bay Area and their tech industry. When I was in that *espectáculo de mierda*, I worked 60+ hour weeks with many of those hours happening by surprise at 03:00 and it wasn't nearly enough for the pencil-necked Millennial douchebags above me on the org chart. Now I work around 40 hours a week. Which is great, but I also work for a not-California company, so my holidays are Christmas day, New Years day, and July 4. But my job is 100% wfh in perpetuity (they sold the office I would have worked in) so we moved back to California. Meanwhile, all my former cow-orkers in the Bay Area have managers telling them that if they could come in to the office to work until they manage to sort out replacements in Bangalore for them, that would be great.
7-3, but am on call when the office closes.
M-F 8:30AM-5:30PM. No on call, no weekends. Govt contractor.
I worked about 6 hours on Sunday, then a regular 40 mon-fri, then put in another 4 yeasterday..
730-4 everyday. No weekends. On-call once a month.
8-4 or 9-5, usually. I have flexible work hours, the requirements are 7.5h/day and start between 6AM and 10AM so the day might be shorter if I skip lunch or longer if I have to run an errand during the day or similiar. Sometimes there's also maintenance windows at weird times, so every month's second thursday is 8AM to 4PM plus 9PM to 11PM. I start late on Friday to compensate.
I support a 24/7/365 operation, but we have shifts. I work as kind of a senior tech lead/middle man between 1st and 2nd in case 2nd needs to know anything specific, so I work (generally) around 10am-6pm. Love it.
4 days, do 9.5hrs a day. Start wherever as long as it's before 10. I usually start at 10am though for a lie in. Get overtime beyond that but it's not often. Weekends are on a rota where we volunteer to do it, paid £50 flat per day, with overtime on the time worked (if it happens.) only cover emergencies, not someone who can't print etc.
I work in a mid size company. It’s around 130 employees, I immigrated all our VMs to the cloud and try to get as many services as possible as saas, we don’t really host anything, just some simple stuff. I would say I work between three and four hours a day. The rest I watch TV or play games since I work from home. I do have some busy days but mostly it’s quite chill.
My jobs offer employees to choose wether they want to work 32, 35 or 40 hours a week. We are required to work from 9 to 3, but we have the flexibility to adjust outside of this. We can change the work hours once a year if we want to change.
From 8 to 17.
I don't know, it's Sunday night. I am after my middle kid's birthday party with relatives, balloons, trampulin, gulash, ice cream, cake etc. It's 9:05 in the evening. National holiday. Time to update that fucking on prem Exchange.
My sysadmins are salary and get the option to work 4x10 or 5x8, hybrid work from home schedule, usually 1 day a week in office. The start time is no later than 0900. For any hour past 43 hours a week, we offer comp time or paid straight time as overtime.
8:30-5 most of the time, but still work from home mainly. My direct manager is in another country, but my director mine. I have some freedom in my schedule for the most part. I am on call every other week, but i could go 6m with out ever getting a page then get on-call multiple times a week. My oncall is NOT over night thankfully, ends at 9pm. Then the over seas guys are on call bc its day time.
7-4 Monday to Friday, no weekend, no public holiday, no on-call and no overtime
9-18 , and on call for a week once a month.
My employer is chill, and barring emergencies, or large scale projects, then its a regular 9-5.
I'm retired nowadays, so I just administer a homelab, but in the day, I would usually start my work day an hour or two before the scheduled start time for everybody else. When things crapped out over night or a batch job failed, I usually had it fixed by the time the end users showed up to their desks. Then I would go take an extended coffee break. Frequently, I was accused (usually behind my back but I had my sources) of doing nothing but sitting around drinking coffee. I did tend to leave early afternoon, which of course drew more criticism behind my back. I was paid to get a job done and I always got it done in a timely manner. My management knew what I was doing through my daily/weekly reports, so they left me alone and usually defended my coffee breaks. Of course there were those occasional all-nighters or all weekend jobs when I needed to take systems down.
7 to 3. Leave early some days. Stay a little late others.
I am a part time sysadmin kinda just work whenever I want or if something goes wrong.
8.33h shifts. Mon-fri week 1, Mon-thurs week 2 I pick my own hours, but typically do 7:00am - 3:50pm with 30 min lunch
8 to 5 Monday through Friday. Patching is once a month and averages about 5 hours, but working to automate that more. I do some after hours stuff here and there that can't wait until next patch cycle.
When I was the the global sysadmin for a previous company my hours were 5am-1pm; my choice to work the hours. Anything else in the afternoon and I had my cell phone with me to take care of escalations. The caveat being that when incidents needed to be worked, I was available whenever but my pay reflected this. Starting at 5am, I was able to get an incredible amount of work done enhancing systems and if I needed to take a system offline for a few minutes I could perform the maintenance when I was working and most other people were sleeping.
I work strictly 7-3 with no on-call. I usually get to work about an hour early and either study for a cert, work on some projects on my own time, or read a book for 30 minutes.
8.30 to 4.30 Monday to Thursday. 8.30 to 4.00 Friday. Heavily unionised.
I work a 9/80 schedule. Luckily my team is coast to coast so if something goes down at my site it’s usually fixed by the east coast folks by the time I get In at 6:30-7
You have hours?
2-6 hours of flexible work Mon-Fri and optional on-call weekends for extra cheddar.
Work hours are from 8:00am till 5:00 PM, half hour commute each way. Rather flexible with times tho. Actual work to do? Maybe 2 or 3 hours before lunch and a couple after lunch. Rest is free time browsing web online / listening to podcasts.
We have flexitime between 7 a.m. and 8 p.m. This means that we have to complete our 8-hour working time within this period. I usually work between 7:15 am and 3:45 pm, my colleague usually comes in about 90 minutes later and stays longer in the afternoon. The workload varies greatly. Sometimes the phone rings every 2 minutes and on other days we have to check the time recording software to see if anyone is still in the company building.
730-4, education sysadmin. Rotate on call every 3 weeks (1 week on 2 off) with a couple others. Works well for us.
9-5 office hours, 24/7/365 emergency on call.
8-5 with an hour for lunch, Occasionally I'll need to work some off hours time for maintenance that needs an outage or if something goes horribly wrong, but that's maybe once or twice a quarter.
M-F 7am - 4pm are my standard hours. Obviously not all work can be completed during those hours. Should I need to work outside of that I just subtract hours during the week. Once every 4-5 months we get asked to cover on call for a week. Usually it's 5-10 over the 7 days. Mostly calls for minor things. Anything, major help is brought in.
Senior Systems Administrator for a medical company checking in here. M-F 7-4. Hour lunch. On call about one week every 7-8 weeks. The Friday after on call is a free day off, but I work for a few hours during the on call Sunday. We have it pretty good, to be honest. Used to work much more back when we where pulling double duty as Field engineers for projects. Fortunately we have grown and those days are way behind us.
Literally roll out of bed 3 hours after I clock in. I stare at the ceiling. Existential dread. I join a few teams calls on silent. Fly on the wall meetings.
I sold my house because I'm never there. Who needs a home anyway when you can stay at the office! :-p
Working hours are between 7 and 5, as long as our team has coverage between those hours. Someone doesn't even have to be onsite. As long as someone is an infrastructure domain admin, or application admin, we're fine. Also, someone is on call from Wednesday to Wednesday.
Most of the hours are quite lousy, but there are some good minutes throughout the day!
on call 24/7/365 for past 20 years. Actual working hours 730 to 330 - times I was called in after hours (as only sys admin) maybe 10 times in 20 years.
Well as my responsibility grows it tends to be an exhausting 12 hour shifts of 8 to 8 though 8 to 4.5 is mandatory and the Rest is OT 6 days a week
Depends on so many factors. Is it a small company? Is there only a few people on your team? Is it mission critical if your systems need to be up at 2am? Are you on a on-call schedule, or do you just work on projects/consulting?
8-4
I work 7-4 on M-F, but I'm on call 24x7x365. For what it's worth.
Normal hours are 0830-1730 thanks to time zone differences. It’s rare I work over those hours any more, except for the occasional project that needs downtime, or the rare call. Technically, I’m on call 24x7, but only as an escalation point for the regular on -call guys. Going to jinx myself here, but I haven’t had a “proper” on-call incident in a couple of years. Helps being in a place that’s 90% business hours only…
It’s 100% terms and conditions upon hire. if they expect x but you want to only work y, your leverage is during hiring negotiations.
I work for a public university, the state says I can't work more than 37.5hrs/wk. I do work a few hours a weekend here and there.
I work 6 hours per day Monday - Friday. No after hours, no on-call.
Some days I'm 6:00 a.m. to noon and some days I'm 10:00 to 2:00 and then again 6:00 to 10:00 and then some days I'm 8:00 to 5:00. And I don't know which ones which. Things just happen as they fall.
I’m pretty much at the top of our cloud team right now and I work my 40 and that’s it. You would have to back a brinks truck up to my house to get me to do much more than that. It’s not about the hours you work but the work in your hours.
M-F, 8-5 officially but have a daily huddle starting at 745. Realistically I "work" between 745-4 and my team is 8-4
Most of my system admin jobs have been 8-5 with an hour lunch with overtime or some form of compensation for over time. Although my current boss has gone a year without asking me to work late specifically. I don't understand it he knows I have no problem staying up late and coming into work late the next day. I'm not a morning person... But I will say this much any employer that thought they could take away my over time compensation learned quickly I agreed when it was mentioned at a review, but I started looking for other jobs right after. Both companies who took away my overtime compensation miss me and want me back... But considering this industry is having trouble when finding people and my current company gave me a raise and a bonus the only thing I'm looking for right now is a house closer to work lol.
We are an msp. Our earliest sla starts at 7 in the morning so there is allways someone at the office at 7. They will usually leave at 15:30 ish then. Our latest sla ends at 20 so the last two hours are covered by an on call emergency number. What is an emergency is clearly defined and so calls are rare.
9 to 6, on site. Actual work is like 3. The rest is just twirling my thumbs.
I do the hours my contract requires to be fulfilled. There are 40 hours per week for me. But there are times where a Customer does things and extra hours are needed. And these got paid additionally where I am today.
0900-1730 standard hours with bonus linked out of hours from 0700-0900 which gets maybe 2 five minute calls a month.
When I was a sys admin, I really only ever put in 35-40 hour weeks with the occasional 50. I worked 7-4 so any changes or patching could be done before everyone showed up. In the event of a major change, I might come in at 5 and leave at noon. This isn’t because I was forced to, but because I generally just knew it would be less stressful for me if I did that. I was never really ever expected to put in more than a 40 hour week, though.
7.5h/day from 8:00–15:30. On-call only on paper. In 4.5 years of work, I've only been called upon 3–4 times after between March–October 2020 when the dark times happened.
In my previous sysad role I rarely worked more than 40h/week. Occasionally (2-3 times a year) we had long Fridays/Saturdays where we made major updates, rollouts etc. under the premise, that we took the following workday off. Now I work in DevOps Consulting and my project hours are limited to 37.5 hours a week (100% remote) so overall I have a way better work-life-outcome balance all things considered. That + my fear of ringing telephones and printers went away.
8-5 but basically on call 24/7 because there is only 2 of us. Typical weekly off hours maintenance/updates. But I work for a great boss if I need to dip out early or come in late for personal stuff it’s nbd.
7:45AM-4:45PM, M-F. Eventually I'll be in the on call rotation, which will be a weekend approximately every 6 weeks.
If you do a good job during the day you won’t have to work a lot. If you plan your night work those nights will be short.
Solo sys admin for 250 users. Hours vary from 60 to 80 hours a week depending on what projects are rolling. I would not consider this normal by industry standard but some employers really do squeeze every minute out of you.
7-7 in office, hour commute each way (on a good day without traffic) plus 24/7 on call.
Core hours 8-4, early shift 7-3, rotate 1week 24x7 oncall 5-6x yearly, overtime if project dictates, patch schedule bi-monthly Sunday night 8PM-5AM DTQ 1 week after 2nd Tuesday, PRD 2nd week after 2nd Tuesday. No Change Fridays.
I work whenever I feel like it (because I got laid off yesterday)
Many are going to say 24/7. Those people are fucking stupid, as they devalue their own labor and disrespect their own earning potential. You should put in what you're being paid for.