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Taking Time Off When You Are The Only Admin?
iso9k asks: "Yesterday I was called into my boss's office and told that I have maxed out my PTO. This means that I can no longer accrue time off for hours worked. I am the sole Network/Unix admin (no backup admin) at my company. I don't have time to take a week or two off. If I were to do so my return would involve two weeks of 60+ hours a week to make up for lost time with projects. My company will not 'cash me out.' The reason being 'you need to take some time off to recuperate.' The execs don't seem to understand that my being gone will not bode well for an Internet company where uptime is critical. This leaves me in a strange position. Do I take a week off and just let the network or Unix machines fail if they fail? Or do I stay here at the office and ignore my vacation accruement? Has anybody else run into this issue? What did you do?" For those of you in this situation: not having a backup administrator on staff is not a good sign. Instead of worrying about vacation, why not see about getting a back-up administrator hired so that you can take the much-needed time off?
First of all, you should make sure that any one system can crash without an emergency call to you. If mail is critical, put it on redunand servers. If you have a critical database get a cluster up to your needs. If Guido (you) gets hit by a bus what happens? Get a redunant admin of some sort.
Remember that if one system crashes you have others, build fail-over into your system. Sure your web server will run horridly slow (and a mite more insecure) when it is also doing all your mail, but at least you have both functions after the mail server burns up.
Okay, now that the above is taken care of, and your still not able to leave for a week. Well don't take a week. I work with a couple folks who no longer work fridays, instead taking a three day weekend. They are too critical to take a week off (The one guy was not, as we realized after he quit and those taking his job found the critical problems easy to turn into self correcting situations) so they just got us used to not looking for them on friday. One guy was able to set up the weekend parting for all his friends. Anouther used the time alone to practice guitar all day.
Start by making the computers take care of themselves. Then make sure if you die there is a line of succession. Use your time off to take fridays off. (Accually in your job you might need a different day if weekends are upgrade time so you use friday to prepare and monday to fix real world problems)
My advice if they tell you that you have maxed out your PTO, tell them that in that case you will be take a Holiday and going somewhere far away that you always wanted to go to.
That is why it is time off.
The cure of the ills of Democracy is more Democracy.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
Why, well at some point he would leave, you might as well have it happen in a controled way.
The cure of the ills of Democracy is more Democracy.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
Several people have suggested laptops, wireless toys and remote management tools. Those people, while they have their heart in the right place, are prisoners. When one's first reaction to your question is 'how do I get net access from a tropical island?', there's a big problem.
I've said this many times before on Slashdot (and I'd link to my earlier comments but Slashdot eats old comments) and I'm going to say it once more... If you can't leave town for two weeks and not have your company survive, you are a lousy system administrator.
For many years, I was much like you. I never wanted to leave town for two reasons. First, I was afraid that the system would fall into pieces and I'd be needed. My second worry was that it wouldn't I wouldn't. (And, if nothing broke, what value did I bring to the company?) Now, I understand that point one was related to my novice abilities as an administrator and ego The second point was fear and lack of ego.
Part of my job as a senior unix systems administrator -- if not the main part of my job -- is to make sure that I am irrelevant.
It's my job to create redundant systems such that any single failure won't interrupt production. It's my job to ensure that every problem is documented so that someone else with less experience can fix it the next time around. It's my job to make sure that, whenever possible, regular problems are self-fixing (ie: programming is tweaked and processes are automatically restarted when they die). It is my job to make sure that someone other than me (in my case, the help desk) knows how to fix all reoccuring issues that can't be handled with automation.
Today, I can leave town without worry. I still keep a laptop in the trunk with traveling and the computer room has my cell phone number but I very rarely have to use either.
The answer to your question is that you need to spend a couple months working up procedures, writing documentation and grooming a lackey. Once you have done that, take a couple weeks off. Bring your electronic toys just in case. But, if you have done your job, you won't need them.
InitZero
The DB admin wanted to take a 2-week vacation during the summer, and I was looking for summer employment, so they hired me to take over during the vacation. I spent about the first three or four weeks getting up to speed, and was ready for it with time to spare. The whole thing went off without a hitch. The admin got her vacation, and I earned some money and experience.
Also, set up chkproc to monitor processes and respawn them when they die (Linux only, but you can probably port it to other unices).
Perhaps with the combination of the two you can make it a week or two, with your pager only interrupting your tropical siesta a few times.
Never meant half of the things I said to you. So you know, there's a half that might be true - G. Phillips
You're quite right about ssh on windows. I found a freeware SSH client for windows (actually a whole suite of SSH-related utils besides just a term) that I really like. It's called PuTTY SSH. I can never remember the address for the web page, but I never need to because when I search for "PuTTY SSH" on google or yahoo it's the first hit. Give it a try the next time your stuck in the ass end of nowhere with nothing but a 486 running win95 and a 14.4 dialup connection, needing to log in to your corp. mail server remotely... (<-- true story) One advantage to the PuTTY SSH term is that it's small (~250Kb) and self contained (no installer, just one .EXE), so unless your on the most painful dialup connection imaginable it shouldn't take too long to grab from the website.
--
Fuck Censorship.
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
The company I work for specializes in out sourcing. We become your IT department. There are a lot of benefits. Imagine twenty medium sized companies that each have 1 full time sysadmin. They each pay $50,000 (made up number) yearly salary to their admin. Problems they have:
1. Vacation time. Everytime the admin takes time off, all problems get put on hold. Bad problem. And often isn't so easy to "just hire a backup admin". Unless you are talking about hiring an oursourcing company like us, then you'll be paying big bucks to have another admin on the payroll.
2. Skill sets. One admin, no matter how smart he is, will often not have ALL the tools, and ALL the skills necessary for his job. Usually this means that he spends a lot of time on the support phone learning whatever skill it is (e.g. cisco router programming) to solve a problem. Outsourcing companies like us are big enough to spread the cost of having such expertise in house. We have our own cisco router programmers that can be easily called on when their expertise is required. But this doesn't mean hiring another 50,000 employee with the expertise, it's already covered in the contract.
3. Benefits for the an admin working for us: Never has to worry about his job. It doesn't matter if a given company (customer) he is working at goes out of business or has to cut the budget or _whatever_. It doesn't affect him because he works for us. He can just go to another job site. Heck, he can go to another job site if he gets BORED. That's another benefit. Also, he doesn't have to worry about not knowing enough about any particular technology -- since he can rely on our expertise and knowledge base.
4. 24-hour support, Service Level Agreements, point-the-finger ability, etc. are some of the other problems that we can solve in our position. It's really fun to work this way. Our business mainly provides a service, but as part of that service, we can provide hardware, hosting (e-commerce or ASP), custom software developement, etc., etc. In fact, I love working here (not to mention slashdot.org browsing is encouraged).
But when those 20 companies get together and form a new company (us) that has 20 admins that are shared between the 20 companies -- it becomes much more efficient.
Specifically for this guys situation, I would say the best idea is to hire a "backup admin" through an outsourcing company like us, where they pay for someone like us to come in for whatever time he needs off.
Daniel
Then stage your own death, get a face job, and go grab that fortune :)
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Dude. 60 hour work weeks are not insane. If that's what happens when you take a couple weeks off, so be it.
When I started working my present job, my boss said he expected 50-60 hours per week standard. Right now, under the pressure of a deadline, it's more like 75-80 hours a week. Yeah, it sucks, but it's pretty much the same for friends of mine who work for other startups.
So, go to Morocco for a couple weeks, come back, put in those 12 hour days for a little bit, and don't feel like you're getting too bad a deal...
...with Cliff.
:)
Get a backup. Or at the very least, train someone who has *some* skill in IT to fix the things that normally go wrong. We have a few systems that can't be fixed without spending a horrible amount of time figuring them out. It's easier to teach someone "clear int bri0" than to volley messages with the phone company. Anyway, figure those situations out, and teach someone how to do them.
Ask for a laptop with wireless access. While this may be a big request, you would be able to take vacation and still fix things without coming into the office. Definitely get compensated though. And hopefully you're using an OS with true remote access.
But in the end.. what do you owe this company? Don't waste your life just so they won't wither. If they refuse to believe things will go to pot.. take some vacation. Then document how many calls you get while you aren't there. That will be very good evidence that they need to give you some backup.
If the company goes bankrupt or fires you while you were gone, then you get another job to earn money to buy the things you need and want. The job is there to support you, not the other way around.
pretty soon, you will have enough money to buy the things you need and want for the rest of your life. That's when you retire. Don't forget to do that.
I say let it burn. Take your vacation, and leave the pager at the office.
It is NOT your responsibility to make the staffing decisions, nor is it your responsibility to kill yourself with overwork so that the Management can A) Get richer off of your sacrifice and B) Continue in ignorance of thier staffing needs.
Moreover, if you are gone (quit, fired, leave, whatever) they will need to train a replacement, who *will* cost more than you, both in training time and salary. Plus even after they've paid for your replacement, they still have to spend for a reserve sysadmin. So it's in thier best interest to keep you around. It's in your best interest to use that leverage in negotiating with them.
So take a vacation! You may be surprised to find that everything is still standing when you get back. If so, great. If it burned to the ground in your absence, well, that's Management's problem. They pay you for 40 hours of your life every week. Don't give them more than what they pay for! Maybe you've heard the of the Technique of the Thousand Marbles? Depending on your age, you statistically have about 2000 weekends left to enjoy. Go buy 2000 marbles (BBs, whatever) and store them in a big jar. Every Saturday, take one marble out of the jar and discard it. Watch as the level diminishes over time. You never get your life back - and nobody ever said as thier dying words "I wish I had spent more time at the office."
I presume that you are in a salaried or hourly position, and that you don't have any significant equity/investment in the corporation. If they won't "cash you out" and you can't take time away, for god's sake, negotiate for a percentage ownership in the corporation! Not stock options, but actual stock. You need to own a piece of it. That way all your sacrifice to the benefit of the corporation comes back to benefit you in the long run. Any time that you put in above and beyond your contractual obligation is an investment in the company, same as cash. You ought to stand to benefit from that investment - in fact, you should benefit *more* from an investment of time, because money comes and goes, but like I said, you only get one life. Your life is more valuable than your money.
I know it may sound a bit crazy to march into the boss' office and demand a piece of the company - but look at it from thier perspective: It's free money. Giving you equity doesn't interfere with the cash flow. It's just a piece of paper that says you own n percent of the assets of Foo, inc. It doesn't come out of any budget, and it doesn't cost them anything in lost time or productivity. Why do you think the dot-com startups throw stock options around? It's CHEAP! There's no cash outlay in giving away bits of the company. And cash flow is what companies care most about managing.
So help them manage thier cash flow. Save them the expense of finding and training your replacement. Take some time off, and don't check in. If you absolutly can't or won't get your reward in the most valuable form (free time) then arrange to take it in the form of equity.
My $0.02, after having been the lone sysadmin for 4 years...
Impeach Bush! Guiltied to 12 technotronic galaxies