Bitt, you may want to sniff around your local universities (UNC, Duke, etc.). I don't know any of the sysadms there, but I can tell you that our own sysadms seems to be reasonably happy. There's always a brand new building going in somewhere or an old building being gutted or a giant new supercomputer cluster being installed in the data center.

Also, isn't Apple building a giant data center somewhere near you? I assume the issue there, or at other giant data centers, is that the architects are off somewhere else and they're just hiring local monkeys to do basic maintenance.