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Life in the Trenches: a Sysadmin Speaks

Posted by michael on from the they-can-speak? dept.

Anonymous Coward writes "A senior systems administrator at a big ISP in Australia offers a no-nonsense view about his line of work, the pros and the cons, ths ups and the downs."

1 of 205 comments (clear)

  1. What about the processes? by sbjornda · · Score: 5, Informative
    I would have liked to see the article talk more about the processes SysAdmins should be following. If he's really working for a major service provider then where are his hooks into:
    • Change control?
    • Incident management?
    • Problem management?
    • Change window?
    • Service level negotiations?
    • Capacity management?
    • Security management?

    As long as all the SysAdmins seem to be making it up as they go along, we will continue to be marginalized and geek-ified by management. Try on for size:

    Heck, even Microsoft is trying to get into the picture with its Microsoft Operational Framework, a kind of embrace-and-extend on ITIL, though I don't know of many places that are actually using it.

    It's not that the SysAdmin necessarily has to manage these processes - though in a small shop no one else will - but he/she/it needs at least to be able to talk the language and understand the processes that the IT Manager has set up. And if you are managing the shop, then this is your job. You must know this stuff as a matter of professional responsibility and "keeping up" in your field.

    A 20 min. presentation to the other managers on Best Practices and Processes in IT Management will gain you a lot of credibility and help lift you out of the geek gutter. There are decades worth of lessons that have been learned the hard way and documented into these processes. When you can demonstrate to management that you are drawing on a substantial body of knowledge that is geared towards improving service and reducing total cost of ownership, you will gain their respect (assuming that you care about their respect).

    Beyond this, I want to emphasize an excellent point that Sanders makes in the article. The SysAdmin job is one that is invisible if you're doing it right. A good day at work is a boring day. Excitement is a sign that something has gone wrong. You should structure your environment to be as boring and reliable as possible.

    Too many SysAdmins live off the adrenaline rush of fixing a broken server while everyone else in the organization sits on their thumbs waiting. That's costly for the organization, but ironically is the easy way out for the SysAdmin - you don't need to be disciplined or structure your time or do any planning or thinking, just jump from crisis to crisis. It's much more challenging to turn it into a boring desk job where most of your work is pushing paper and the machines pretty much take care of themselves. But guess which option is better for the organization's mission?

    Once you do get to that Nirvana state of boring life, you can strategize how to produce some measurables so you can blow your department's horn at the monthly managers meeting. Because if you do your job well, with the result that your work is invisible, they'll cut your funding unless you keep in their face on a regular basis.

    .nosig