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Realistic Sysadmin Workload for a Company of 30?
An anonymous reader asks: "My company was recently sold to a new owner. Currently I am working as a programmer using a number of languages (Java, C, C#, PHP). I am the only maintainer/developer on a number of important code bases. The new owner wants to add 'Network Administration' to my list of responsibilities. We are moving locations and our infrastructure needs to be rebuilt from scratch. He claims that after being set up (something I am also responsible for) our company IT needs can be met using only 1% of my work week. Our user base will be 30 people, mostly programmers, with a minimum of non-techie staff. I am a professional programmer, but have no real sysadmin/network admin experience. His solution is 'We'll get you a book'. Learning new things is great but, I just want to be a programmer. I'm worried that this network admin responsibility will become my new full time job. Does this 1% statistic hold water?"
Employer forget that there are people out there who already know how to be a sysadmin. Instead they throw whoever is around in the position. I'm sure your a good programer, but whats gonna happen when there is a problem that you can't fix? You should remind your boss that sysadmin is an actuall profession that many of us are very skilled in.
I know a guy who was the primary programmer at a similarly sized company and also the lone admin. He consistently worked weeks of over 40 hours. Since programming was his first priority he rarely did admin stuff. Low priority admin tasks would never get done unless the projects really really dried up. High priority admin tasks would mean overnights and terrible times.
The boss likely doesn't want to hire a separate admin since that person doesn't make direct money for the company. A programmer makes software which brings revenue. An admin makes computers work, but doesn't bring in any direct revenue.
If you are moving there will be a lot of up front admin work. If you can set something up that is really kickass from the get go, then you can probably keep the amount of admin time per week in the future really low, but not down to 1%. Of course, this requires basically not programming for awhile just to plan and set everything up. But if you don't then the admin work will be this ghost constantly haunting your higher priority programming.
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You know 1% of your time is nowhere near reality.
You could end up spending half your time on sysadmin work, especially if you don't really know how to do it (and have to learn for a book you dind't want to read to begin with).
Not to say you aren't smart enough, but obviously both the system administration and your coding will suffer if you don't feel up for the job.
Sample this!
Whilst i'm not convinced about the 1% value, It is possible that that might work in a correctly, carefully set up network environment where each users accesses & rights is carefully set up, and you have a hardware support contract with someone, but I doubt it ;) ), plus i'll wager that those 30 odd people will mostly be running windows, and will have local admin rights - that really increases the difficulting in managing them, especially if they are connected to the internet in some way.
However, irl this is *not* going to happen.
for a start, you are not going to be able to plan and set it up right first time (thats where the experience bit comes in
Basically, your boss is being a cheapskate. You *need* a sysadmin, or at least someone whose job is officially part sysadmin and has experience - ask the boss whether he would want a sysadmin with little no programming experience and 'a book' to be writing the core code for your product? I suspect not. So why does he think the reverse is true?
"Success is based on knowing how far to go in going too far"
I mean, sure, once the network is set up, the infrastructure for 30 machines should be perfectly stable.
But then email stops working. Or someone gets spyware on their machine. Or a graphics card plays up. Or someone loses their printer settings. Or a mouse is playing up. Or someone can't get through to google.
As Sysadmin, whenever anything goes wrong you're the person they'll come to. If you're working purely with techies who can handle most problems themselves, then fine. But if there are _any_ non-technical people in your company then I'd estimate 25% of your time will be spent dealing with them.
However, your boss isn't going to listen to this. So what you do is find a free help-desk package (if you're using Windows then Liberum is pretty good) and get people to funnel all of their support calls through that. That way at the end of the month you can go to your boss and say "Look, this is the amount of work it takes to keep a network up and running. That's why I haven't got any programming done."
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Talk to your boss about security and tell him that it's a process not an investment and need a steady (time) budget.
Would be interessting what your boss answers.
Grundgesetz * 23. Mai 1949 - 30. November 2007 - http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/
That most executives with this kind of understanding of IT infrastructure (i.e. little to none) tend to confuse systems administration with tech support. Sounds like you're being asked to fill more than one set of shoes.
As a professional systems administrator myself, I can tell you that very few individuals posses the capability to both program and maintain a mixed network. I'm not saying it can't be done, but it usually requires giving up more than just one's wishes to stay in their area of expertise. It also requires giving up weekends and vacations, as you'll inadvertently become married to the machines as more time goes by. It's unfortunate that IT professionals have gone from being held in high esteem to the average corporate foot soldier, thrown about at the whims of unknowledgable people, and ultimately, expendable. Good luck with your situation.
End of Line.
If you don't know, how would he know what he's talking about?
I do both, and let me tell you it's more like 30% than 1% - and I'm not even doing everything. Not that it's not enjoyable, but proper sysadmining is a really important job, it's making sure everyone else is working smoothly. If it's badly done, the productivity of all these 30 employees will be affected.
Sounds like Job Security, to me. Try to talk your boss into a more realistic set of expectations and then relish in the fact that you're probably one of only a few of your friends who isn't unemployed, underemployed or using their EE degree to provide tech support to end-users on per-incident pay-support lines for some crappy line of USB-powered personal laptop fans.
If this is the case and you doing system adminstration for 30 people will only take 1% of your time, then the sysadmin work load / person is around 0.0003. This would mean that a company in a similar industry with a staff of 100,000 employees would only need a sysadmin crew of 30 people. When you think of it in those numbers, it immediately becomes apparent that the numbers are not even close.
From another angle, I would ask your boss why he has an admin, a marking/sales person, and/or an accounting person. The accounting work for a 30 person company has to be only a 1% work load for him. He can do all the administrative work in 1% of time. And there is absolutely no reason he can't take care of the sales and marketing items in another 1%. That's only 97% of time. What's he going to do with all that 97%?
As has been said before, there are real professionals who do systems administration. There are some people who can do reasonably well at sysadmin, network admin, network design, systems design, programming, etc. They are rather rare and they can't do all of them at the same time. For a company your size, it would probably make sense to get a person who specializes in sysadmin and can program a little bit (understands the code enough to be able to read and possible fix some stuff) and the two of you would work as backups to each other.
Run Away! Run awaaaay!
Why not fork?
It's not clear whether you're expected to be the systems administrator, the network engineer, or the all-purpose all-singing all-dancing IT guy. Let's examine all three scenarios.
We'll suppose you work a 50 hour week. 1% of that is 30 minutes. In the "network engineer" circumstance, that's about enough time -- assuming that you have a very well designed and stable, simple network built on the most reliable hardware available, and you never change anything, just fix it. That won't happen, of course, because you've never done this before and therefore you won't get it exactly right the first time. I won't even mention that your boss is a cheapskate who won't be buying the most reliable hardware anyway. The first time you need to deal with your upstream ISP will chew up 30 minutes. If you ever need to buy replacement hardware, that will take a few weeks' time as well.
Now, as a systems administrator for 30 people, plus maybe five or six servers, you'll blow through your 30 minutes of allotted time every Monday before lunch. Someone needs a password changed. Someone else says "mail isn't working". The sales critter hands you a laptop and says "I spilled beer on it, can you get my files back?" Those are just the incidental time-users. When are you going to upgrade your antispam system? There's an intermittent problem with one of the file servers. Diagnosis may take more than half an hour.
Do I really have to say anything about being the defacto IT shop? No, I didn't think so.
Tell your boss that you want to keep track of your IT hours and be paid for everything over 45 minutes a week at the same rate he would pay an outside contractor. Since he's certain that you'll never go over 30 minutes, this is a great bet for him.
You should start looking for a new job with management that can make more realistic predictions about workloads. Meanwhile, explain to your boss that you heard that your coworker runs a network at home -- maybe he's a better choice?
AnyKey-man hires you!
Are you going to learn how to be a sysadmin and network admin on the clock? Reading a book won't be enough. You'll need plenty of time, especially if you want to effectively secure your hosts and your network. My guess is he's not willing to pay for your time, especially not while your projects stall in the meantime.
There are consultants that just do setups. If he wants it done right, but is too cheap to hire a full or part time guy for just the servers and network, he needs to look at this as the next-best solution. At least, if they screw up, they can be held responsible. And then, as needed, either you or someone else can make minor modifications as situations warrant. Do you want to get blamed if the book you got and the weekend of cramming wasn't thorough enough to stop a scriptkiddie from 0wning j00r cvs server and erasing it, or worse, a competitor rootkitting it and installing a backdoor so they can watch your progress, maybe change some data, a couple months down the road while you're too busy on a real project to track vulnerabilities and new attack types in the 24 minutes a week allotted to this? (less than 5 minutes a day... can you even get through your email that quickly?)
Oh, and I'd say, get your resume ready. If he starts having more unrealistic expectations of his staff, you should probably look to go elsewhere.
I am partly IT manager for my company, which means the IT part is only half of my job. And yes, I do more than half of my time on IT subjects, but NOT on pure network administration.
On a Windows network, with 5 servers (mail/domain, database, batch server, terminal server, test server), with Oracle databases and 30 clients, including VPN support for remote users, I spend between 1 and 10% of my time on pure network admin. Depending on if there are large updates needed (e.g. Exchange 2000 -> 2003, etc.) or not.
In a Windows environment: Make sure you set up user rights properly (block access to installing programs, etc.). Really lock it down very good for the beginner users, but trust power users if you can and give them more flexibility to manage their own system. Create a good security profile for your company, use group policy to lock computers down AND distribute software (!), use WSUS (www.microsoft.com/wsus) for windows patches, don't be cheap on antivirus programs, spyware scanners, your base network appliances and a decent firewall. Make sure you have decent warranty on your hardware, and if needed support contracts for servers. Outsource the firewall and router configs.
The pure Windows network administration is automated here (group policy, windows patches, software installs,...), and apart from creating a user now and then, and replacing a faulty drive or old hardware, I hardly put time in the network.
When a reinstall of Windows is needed (once in 4 years on desktops, really) the group policies make sure it gets installed with the basic software automatically. I only have to adjust some settings specific to a user. That's it. A new PC is ready on our network within 2 hours, from a clean and empty drive.
Most of my IT time goes to other software projects.
But, it does take some time to create this initial setup. After that, you are spending like 1 day per month (3%) on the network. If you have a disaster (crashed server), of course you need some more time, but apart from that... it's easy.
Just demand your management 1 full month to really concentrate on the admin tasks. In this time learn how to work with the domains, group policies and the lot. The more time you put into setting it up, the more time you will gain afterwards. Set up the network really good, then go back to programming.
If you want to spend even less time: buy Mac OS X Server and Apple hardware.
Good luck! If you are a Linux shop: somebody else on Slashdot might have an idea.
You may want to look into having an outside computer IT company do the sysadmin work. Where I work, we manage many networks, including setting them up, from remote. Some of our clients are many hours away, yet rarely we have an issue that requires someone to be onsite. Usally there is a slightly more techie person onsite that can do simple tasks such as replacing a ethernet card or checking network connections, but if anything more complicate comes up, they call us, we fix it or walk the person through how to fix it. There are many solutions that scan the network at the firewall to protect against spyware, viruses, and content filtering, which also cuts down on alot of support calls. Sometimes you may even be lucky and find a company (like mine) that can do set fee contract support, so despite how many problems you have, it only costs the same per month.
My potato gun was confiscated by the United Nations. They said I wasn't allowed to have weapons of mash destruction.
You might think that programmers are easy to cater for as a sysadmin but you probably couldn't be further from the truth; programmers and other tech-savvy people will install programs, change OS settings, (un)plug cables, change BIOS configurations or whatever they have access rights for (if not; they might try to hack the OS to get these rights). It's a lot easier to support people who just use their computers to read some mail.
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Why don't you hire in a professional system admin to set everything up, and get some training to learn to basics, preferabilly from the same professional source that set up the network?
:-)
Something to be careful of, as it is a new owner they may be looking to expand your jobs to include other services which require more sys admin stuff in the future. Make sure they are aware that expanding from software production to servicing clients using the software could intale a whole area of system admin work to run it, and that you as the "admin guy" will probably not be able to do both development and system admin.
I agree that the 1% of the workload is optimistic, however if the user base is mostly computer savy it may be possible as they will (hopefully) maintain their own systems.
Warning, comments may not have been passed by the sanity department of my brain.
I had a very similar experience, and I assure you 1% (1/2 hour per week?!?) is nowhere close. I work for a multinational that is too cheap to put admins in each office. Instead, they have a small crew of very sharp people at headquarters, and someone - in our case the Controller - also gets admin duties. Our Controller left, and everyone decided I would be a great fill-in until they got a new Controller (my boss doesn't actually want me doing it, so it isn't supposed to be permanent). Since I was already busy enough, everyone in the office (around 40 people) was told to call the corporate help desk first. In theory all the IT folks back at the main office would do the bulk of the work and I would just have to handle "real emergencies" or something like that.
Yeah, sure...
The first two weeks I spent half of my week or more on "IT duties". It has tapered off some, but even though they are calling the help desk, and I don't actually have to do a lot of the work myself, I still spend at least 5-6 hours per week. Mostly on the more irritating end user items - "my printer won't work". Plus things that evidently can't be done remotely anyway - "hey, we need you to go in and do this on your server for us".
You can be a programmer and perform sys admin tasks. Pick up a good book on shell scripting (Mastering Unix Shell Scripting has a lot of sysadmin scripts) and automate things like the management of print queues and volumes. Keep a log of every request you get, the amount of time it takes you to handle the request, who requested, and what was given a lower priority in order to fulfill. When your time starts getting short (it will), make management prioritize their requests and provide a time estimate for completion (actual time is time estimate / utilization factor). But, before you do any of this, take a look at the computer room. If the place is a shithole, save yourself a lot of grief and go find a new job.
Ask me about my vow of silence!
And even then, I'm not sure if that time allocation compensates for the real amount of time spent doing sysadmin stuff.
Dont do it. There is no way that %1 of your week can attain the desired results. Plus to learn by book will not be fast enough if you are not already somewhat familiar with the core of the topic on hand.
IT fulltime is hard enough. Unless you get a reasonable raise or allowed OT, dont do it (and it looks like you wont get that raise or OT offer).
But that is me. PM me if you want a firsthand experience there, and why I have had 2 bad experiences in that ballpark and will not make a third.
Good luck either way pal.
Sigs are nice guns
If you do buckle under and play it his way I can guarantee you within a year of moving to your new office he will be blaming you for "not reading the book" for every extra minute you spend doing sysadmin work-- Likewise, you'll be blaming him for pushing you away from programming your programming career by insisting you "get the job done right first" with your admin duties.
Take a stand if you wish, but most small businessmen operate on the principle "No-one is irreplacable" and that means you too. You'd be alot happier working for someone who understands different IT roles and understands what your personal carreer goals are.
Height: 38U, Weight: 0 Newtons, Eyes: #0000FF, OS: Gray Matter 1.0 (Alpha)
I worked as a software developer for an ISV with 8 developers and a couple of non-techies a while back. I was also the sysadm and while I propably spent a couple of weeks doing sysadm week during the first few months it tapered down to about an hours worth or something like that once I had everything configured. If the users are competent enough you don't have to do much support work and once things are configured correctly you just have to do the occasional manual update and fix things when stuff breaks.
My company is down to about 100 people, 50 in the main office. We have three full-time IT staff (not counting a mainframe guy and a DBA) and they're swamped. One of those spends about 50% of his time on network issues (well, maybe 30% network and 20% voice-over-ip phones).
I looked after a network shared across 3 networks with around 30 staff.
Had a mix of Linux, Novell, NT 3.51, NT 4. MTAs included qmail, Exchange. Firewalls were routers, and ipfwadm...
So about 8 years ago.....
I also was an onsite engineer for charge out work...
To answer your question, it comes down to a few factors:
How old is the hardware? If its older hardware, then there will be more repairs.
Do your users have adequate training? If not, then you'll be doing lots of support.
Does your site consist of a lot of Internet connectivity, on-line shopping carts etc? If so, then add more hours to your maintainance.
Also don't forget stuff has to be backed up. That takes about 20-30 mintes a day to monitor backup logs, and managing tape routines.
What about application/security logs? You probably won't have time to even look at that stuff. Then stuff will probably break more often.
You see it comes down to how much time can be invested in the systems, the less management give you, the more time you'll spend on it.
I'd say you're average will be around 1 hour per day, every day - at a rough estimate.
Cheers.
Goodluck!
P.S - I got out of sys admin gig, now a full time security consultant the past 8 years and love it.
Realistically, no budgetable task takes 1% of a work week if it requires daily monitoring. 1% is just 24 minutes. Under 5 minutes each day.
Filing out a weekly report, okay, 1%. Filing out a daily report, you're talking 15 minutes min (5 minutes to change gears, 5 to write, 5 to proof).
In fact, 15 minutes is traditionally the smallest billable increment for a lot of jobs, with good reason. And even then, that works for 'known' tasks that you can initiate and complete with no unpredictables.
A more reasonable guess would be 2 hours/week: 15 minutes a day to check things plus 1 hour/week to either probe further or initate things. That's 5% of your weekly time and that's just to monitor and initiate fixes, assuming ordinary stuff.
Add in, say, creating new accountings or adding new features on a monthly basis, and you're talking 4 hours/week (installing, fixing, learning, debugging). 10% of your time, and we're still talking routine stuff.
So, for a well set up system with few users, no special requests, and just ordinary maintenance, 5% of your time. If they actually need to update or modify things, 10%.
And those are minimums. A good IT manager or sysadmin is proactive, keeping up to date on the system so you don't, say, have the disks fill up due to one rogue user. That takes, alas, time.
A.
Get the 1% after a certain date thing in writing, and make sure that it has a clause that if your time in that new task goes over 24 minutes in a week (1%), that it is counted as overtime (1.5x) pay.
He'll rethink that figure in a hurry.
- Preferences: Solaris 10 (servers), Ubuntu (desktops), Solaris 11 (personal servers) -
The 1% figure is clearly rubbish, but your company has new owners and you don't have any immediate reason to jump ship (or anywhere immediately to jump to) it's at least worth trying to start on the right foot with them. Chances are the new owners are trying to work out of the current staff who is capable of doing what in the future - and the fact that you got chosen for "extra responsibilities" is a sign they have confidence in your capabilities. Chances also are that they're look at who may it may be possible to get rid of.
That said, it's essential that you keep track of exactly how much time is spent doing what, so that when your programming boss asks why work isn't getting done you can tell him, and likewise to your sysadmin boss.
Some sort of helpdesk system is essential, to allow basic categorisation of problems and help time tracking.
Try and specify some form of "service level agreement" - if only "1%" of your time is needed then that's 5 minutes a day ish - so users having to wait a day or so for an email reply from you shouldn't be a problem to your new boss. Ensure that he's told them that though!
Be wary of "out of hours" stuff too. If you run any kind of live systems (e.g. for customer interaction) they may need work at odd hours of the day or night. If you specifcally don't want to do this, or get paid X for it, best to try and set expectations (in as polite a way as possible).
You need to make it clear that it will take more than 1% of your time. One worm can hose a LAN and productivity may be lost for the entire day. The company doesn't want to go with someone full time. Suggest hiring a third party to manage the network. The third party can bill the company when there is a catastrophe, and you won't have to pay them a salary.
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
I'm in a similar situation; however, there's one big difference - I didn't mind taking on the additional responsibilities. I just made that point that I was saving the company additional money by not re-hiring someone or outsourcing the job to a local consulting company.
As for the 1% metric, I would have to disagree (on the network admin side). It's closer to 5%, which isn't really a big deal. The big time crunch comes in when you set it all up - after setup, you will spend 0% of your time maintaining things (especially if you don't worry about firmware upgrades and patches).
Now, if you add in system admin to the whole bunch, people will start treating you like a help desk - how do I do this in Excel/Word/PowerPoint, why doesn't this website work, etc. In my experience sys admin will consume a lot more of your time than the network side because the sys admin side deals with people, not just hardware.
MOD PARENT UP! Very true, but a little too mild, in my opinion.
The job that is mentioned in the Slashdot story would take an already skilled person 50% to 100% of his time. That's because it is not serving regular users, it is serving programmers, who expect a lot more from their computers.
Computer administration is not just administration. There a many lengthy one-time projects, like finding better backup methods, or dealing with the latest vulnerability. Fixing and cleaning after a serious security breach can take a month, for example.
Anyone administering Windows computers must deal with the fact that there are people with huge amounts of money who want to exploit Microsoft's (deliberate) sloppiness. One list of major investors in spyware companies shows a total of over $139 million in venture capital. Remember, Microsoft makes more money if a user becomes tired of slowness and problems caused by spyware and buys a new computer, which is how most resolve such problems. If you administer Windows computers you have the richest man in the world and his rich think-alikes riding on your back.
It sounds like the old story. People with control over more money than brains buy a successful software company, figuring that they can extract more that ever before from the customers.
We already have enough information to predict that the company will go out of business. Because it is a reasonable assumption that the person who submitted the Slashdot story isn't the only one being abused, we know that the company has already begun dying; the abuse is killing the company right now. It may, however, be a slow death, sometimes old customers are reluctant to change to new software, and try to live with the new stupidity.
There is a reason why Dilbert is one of the most popular comics in the United States. The real bosses are actually worse than the pointy-haired bosses in the comic. The real PHB's abuse everyone, take more than their share of the money, and destroy the company, too.
The new owner of the company is wanting to test the limits to see how much he can abuse the Slashdot story writer. He is: 1) wildly out of touch, 2) ignorant, 3) self-destructive, 4) arrogant, 5) abusive, 6) seriously abusive, and 7) lacking in social skills.
What may happen is that not enough time will be spent on computer system administration, and the programmers will not be served. That's the self-destructive element.
I used to work at a similar sized company. Around 30 people, mostly programmers. Network admin was a full time job for two, sometimes three people.
Don't kid yourself, it's too much for one person if you have other tasks. Also, once you become an admin it's really hard to go back to programmer (both because you get lazy and also because you just won't have time).
I have always held steady in that area. I would probably be a really good admin but I refuse to do it. My statement is simply "I'm a programmer, not an admin." I can only imagine you have at some point given your boss reasons to believe you are a good admin type? Don't do that.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
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I did exactly what you've been asked to do. I'm a programmer. When the company was small (4/5 people) I was the defacto sysadmin. As it grew to 30 people, we hired a sysadmin, and I gave him the occasional hand (holidays, sickness). Then he left and we were late hiring his replacement, so I said I'd keep the systems ticking in the meantime. I wish I hadn't. Trust me, I was good at it. But it cost me a lot of heartache, I had to fight quite a few people (including the CEO). IT-related workload was high (say 20% of my time), but the thing that did it for me was the fact that sysadmins are expected to take a lot of flak when things go bad, and keep their mouth shut. I found that really hard. I tried explaining that I was just volunteering and filling in - I just did not have the time to do all they wanted. Yet the day-by-day grumbling about problems (some real, some not-so-real) made me bitter and unsatisfied. One day, after the umpteenth stroppogram, I threw in the towel. I said I wouldn't do it anymore. Never regretted it. Now we have a proper sysadmin and I kiss the ground he walks on.
I work for a (small) company that manages the whole IT infrastructure for several other small companies. We have a client (non-technical) with about 30 employees, and they only require approx 1 hr of our time after it is set up. However they are set up in a Windows Terminal server environment and we have locked it down so the user's can't mess ANYTHING up.
A network needs minimum maintenance if:
- User's are not allowed to touch the server
- Workstations are either locked down, or managed 100% by the user
- Workstations/Server are quality hardware. A fleet of 30 computer can have 1 non-HDD failure in 3 years. HDD failures are worse.
- Workstations are identical equipment
- You create a standard image and use Symantec Ghost (or equiv) to roll out
- You roll out a clean image if anything goes wrong with software and it takes longer than 15mins to fix
This is all expensive to start, but pays for itself withing the 1st year. Things that may work against you:
- Techies (Programmers, Hardware, Engineers) tend to mess around with their computers
- Maintaining Programs (new, upgrades, etc)
- Security updates
- High user churn
- Management who do not see the value of doing it right from the word go
- Development servers tend to break every other day.
Contary to popular opinion Windows networks can be secure, and can be easy to manage. Operative word is "can". Windows 2003 and Exchange 2003 are rock solid.
Not a chance. If you can, refuse (politely of course). If not, start looking for another job.
Look at it this way: 1% of a 40 hour work week is 24 minutes.
What are you going to be in charge of? Off the top of my head, I can think of:
- Mail server
- Spam filter (including dredging out false positives)
- Web server (if you have one)
- Phone system (don't look at me like that - you will end up dealing with this sooner or later)
- Software installation
- Software purchasing, upgrades and updates
- Security, including virus disinfection
- Hardware (my hard drive just died)
- Backups
Backups alone will more than fill your 24 minutes a week, I guarantee it.
Also, most of your users are techies. That means that the only problems you'll get to see from them are the ones that are too difficult for a non-sysadmin techie guy to solve (which is, by your own admission, what you are).
They will also try to get around your nice permission structure, or develop their own fixes to problems best addressed by you, "so as not to bother you with this trivial problem". I know - I am one of those techies and I do it all the time.
If fixing one of these when it goes wrong takes you an afternoon, then that's your sysadmin time for the next 10 weeks eaten up. Fix it now? Fine, but no backups till September.
As a reference point, the company I work for has about 50 people on site, and two full-time sysadmins. They are usually busy.
Sean Ellis
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Forgot to mention, I do think Linux has it's place in servers (Don't love MS that much).
However, I also think Linux only starts paying of when managing 3 or more servers. The learning curve is pretty high compared to Windows Server.
How to do something in windows is easy to figure out, but takes some time to replicate to other servers.
How to do something in Linux is hard to figure out, but takes little time to replicate.
Right tools for the situation.
P.S. Look into Windows SBS 2003
Managing a 30 PC lan won't be too much of a hard thing to do, even if, of course, it will take way much than 1% . It's another responsability, with a lot of things to do : hardware problems (the network is always to blame) , software and security , dealing with third parties (bandwith provider) etc etc ...
It depends on the nature of the network to admin but if it's not too hudge, it won't be to difficult. But if you do it you should really reall get a good raise for it . Everything has a price, and this is fairly expensive!
With that aggravating beauty, Lulu Walls.
One percent is only realistic if your new employer can guarantee that nothing unexpected will ever happen. One percent may cover the routine log-grazing and backup rotation as well as a few other tasks but if your mail server goes down, a switch dies or an operating system update takes down 75% of of your staff... well you get the idea.
Depends on your current work load (how much is 1% of it?), on how well you do your job, on how much is left to the users etc. I can guarantee you the minimum non-techie staff will probably be about 80% of your netadmin work. Thing is, once the network is set up correctly and everything works, simply everything works. Then your sysadmin work is just to sit and surf slashdot and be there when something breaks. And when something breaks, you fix it. Count, how much time you spend on fixing your own box, multiply by 30 and you have it - the 1% time is a reasonable estimate. Install patches, replace broken parts, upgrade software - that's not something that takes a lot.
This all depends strictly on one factor though.
Your boss.
Bosses tend to have a lot of dumb ideas and like to make admins execute them. So you may find yourself replacing a perfectly functional 100megabit LAN with 1GBIT one, you may find yourself switching the webserver to IIS from Apache (and back, a week later) or so. Make sure your boss isn't one of this kind. And make it be an admin ONLY. NOT webmaster. NOT unpaid after-hours home helpdesk. Not an accountant, a backup secretary or teacher. If these are to be your responsiblities, just add each as extra salary request. Be sure to list them, with sums you associate with them, so the resulting jaw-dropping salary request will be explained with the cheap rates you want in each of the fields separately. Then say you'd honestly rather see your responsiblities scaled back.
And request a backup. A second admin to be there when you don't have time, or to help you in a 2-man job. Maybe two of them. May be same kind of programmer as you. Things like troubleshooting failing network cables, big changes in the network, mass upgrades etc are done WAY faster when 2 people do them, and it makes holiday breaks "safer" too.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
The AnyKey man is a local sysadmin who is experienced to tell dumb users where the "any key" is. Popular in Russia. Usual salary is about $100/month. For students and other beginners.
Add new users; delete old ones; reset passwords when people forget; Manage disk space; read several sysadmin newsgroups and mailing lists to discover new exploits, viruses, worms, etc. that could affect your system; patch your system to fix these problems and install new versions; run backup software. Shit, the list is endless.
Who's going to run your mail server? Gonna do any spam filtering?
Being a sysadmin for 30 people is at least a 50% job, at a minimum. Depending on how much you rely on your network, both inter and intra, will determine whether sysadmin the other 50% of the time.
And if you have internet access and the usual clueless users (note: they're all clueless), you'll spend the other 50% of your time removing spyware, adware, viruses, worms, and all other sorts of nasty things from your users' PCs and your server(s).
You need to be proactive here. Tell them 'No!'. If you want to program, tell them to hire a sysadmin, otherwise you'll get sucked over to the sysadmin side and eventually they'll have to hire a new programmer to do your old job because you won't have had time to do it.
Yes, been there, done that.
As the "Network Administrator" how long does it take you to make an "administrative" decision to pick up the phone and call the IT-outsourced company you have decided to use to come fix the problem?
1% of your time seems reasonable for this effort.
Honestly, 1% is not enough. It may not require 100% of someone's time, but it's closer to the 100% than the 1%.
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=lang _en&safe=off&c2coff=1&client=firefox&rls=org.mozil la%3Aen-US%3Aunofficial&q=1%25+of+40+hours&btnG=Se arch
1% of (40 hours) = 24 minutes
So, get yourself an egg timer... Set it to 24. When it rings at 8:24 monday morning, go to your boss and say "1% of my work week has passed, which is all you said I was required to work as a sysadmin. Please feel free to report any problems to me next week between 8:00 and 8:24."
No Way
-- ted russ http://www.arach.net.au/~ted/mydynes/ http://www.arach.net.au/~ted/myblogs/
I work in a company of around 150 people. There are 1 (and a half, he is shared between projects) full time staff doing the administration. On top of that, there are people dotted around the company who do many other sysadmin/network admin tasks such as printers and network setup. That is a totaly Windows network however. The linux side, which has as many servers, two firewalls and six seperate networks for sandboxes, etc. only takes a few hours a week, but I expect my users to know what they are doing. The 1% is too low, but how far it is too low will depend on the competence of those around you. Gareth
Most of your post is sound, but one paragraph made me cringe.
Tell your boss that you want to keep track of your IT hours and be paid for everything over 45 minutes a week at the same rate he would pay an outside contractor.
No. This is just utterly wrong.
Since he's certain that you'll never go over 30 minutes, this is a great bet for him.
And this is *exactly* why he shouldn't - because his boss will take him up on it.
This is a job negotiation, not poker. You can't win by bluffing.
The best thing for him to do is simply tell his boss that he doesn't want to do it. What he should do is simply tell his boss exactly what he told us here:
I just want to be a programmer.
And decline the offer.
He knows what he wants, it's stupid to accept somethig else, especially when he knows that something else will make him unhappy.
Where I am currently working (A non-profit organization) there IT needs are low and there is less then 30 users of the system.
This does not mean their system needs are low. There is always someone who needs IT help constantly. So you will have little peace when you are "The guy" that is in charge of it. If you are friendly and social at work as a programmer people will be more apt to come to you for problems that shouldn't warrant your time... little things that people working should have learned years ago. Not to mention that since you are the sysadmin guy you are also known as the fax guy, the copier guy, and the phone system guy...
Of course you are building a new infrastructure from the ground up. It's a good chance that your boss(es) are going to come up with a lot of extra functionality that they think is cool or needed that will be a pain to get working correctly...
But I am just turning this into a rant.
I was maintaining the Linux-based CRM system I wrote for the company, which had matured over the three years I'd worked for them at the time. So it was no longer really a full-time job, and I spent a lot of time reading Slashdot and the like.
So when our sysadmin went on a drunken rampage and didn't return the next morning, I was given the job. I didn't want it, primarily because I knew nothing about Windows and had little enthusiasm for it.
I actually liked a lot of aspects of it. I was taking on and mastering new things, which was interesting for a while. But I did find that because it does involve interruptions, it was preventing me from doing a lot of programming I should have been doing. This was true especially when the boss decided to take on new projects and throw a lot more programming work to me than anticipated.
Dealing with spyware and adware and virii when you're not a Windows expert is a very, very bad idea. I was never able to prevent the rampant spread of them through our network. We used a lot of outside consultants, who were allegedly experts on this topic, but even they didn't do much better. This is probably because the owner of the company was (and probably still is) a cheapskate at heart.
When I would make some mistake, however minor, the boss would yell and scream at me at the top of his lungs, which made for a very poor working environment. And of course because I had a hand in decisionmaking, I would be blamed for every problem. This might seem reasonable, but I was never praised when things went well; that, of course, is just me doing my job.
I am no longer there. I now do multimedia development for a major university and use only Macs. Believe me, it's a lot better over here than over there.
I don't know if you'd go so far as to switch your career as drastically as I did, but I think you're descending towards very unhappy circumstances if you take his offer.
Hope that helps.
D
Something like US$1.05T? That's why I said our grandkids.
Especially after Federal Reserve Governor Edward Gramlich said we can't grow out of our deficit spending.
Guess what's left? Raising taxes and/or cutting services. You know the lobbyists won't let them cut much from the military funding. I guess when they stop raiding the Social Security funds, they'll go after Medicare/Medicaid next, then hospitals, schools, roads... oh, wait, they already are. Won't be much left for the surviving soldiers to come home to. Certainly not good jobs or the good health care and benefits they were promised when they signed up.
I agree with this comment the most. This is a clear case of when outsourcing is required. You are both in the middle of a move and trying to upgrade the infrastructure at the same time? This is where managements ignorance of technology and the 'it's all magic out of the box' mentality is simply dangerous.
Turn this quickly into a positive by explaining that while you understand the company's situation (hiring a person for this is expensive and unreasonable for many small companies), the fact remains that you are a programmer and not a network administrator. The best scenario is that the move and upgrade are outsourced, with you as project manager overseeing the installation. Even at this level, you will spend much, much more than 1% of your time. After a few months when the project is complete and all of the small kinks have been worked out, your time maintaining the network should drop to a reasonable two hours a week.
It is also helpful to make clear if your duties will be 'network' or 'help desk'. For this to be done right your boss should pick someone else for that.
If the network company works well for you, you keep them on retainer. I do that at my location (4000 users, 30+ servers), and I only need to call in the big guns around 5 times a year, at an average of 75 to 150 an hour depending on the project.
Also, the 'buy a book' comment once again proves how pointy-haired some managers can be. Since the average network book is around 600 - 1200 pages, it would take you a minimum of two weeks just to get through it, assuming you understood what you were reading. A quickie course can cost anywhere from $1000 to $8000 depending on the content. Is your boss willing to spend that on your education? Or would he rather spend it on outsourcing this properly?
They want to use someone with no sysadmin/network experience to design, implement, and maintain their network? Just give the person a book and let them loose? Are they hiring, I'm qualified for that job!
Free MacMini
If there are any colleges/universities within driving distance, I'm sure there would be at least one student looking for an internship. While you remain the guy-in-charge of the Network Admin duties, you can pass everything you want to your able-bodied collegiate partner-in-crime. Some schools even pay the hosting company to have a student intern.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
Always speculate about the upside and the downside of doing something. For this, the upside is learning sysadmin stuff, maybe a little respect, and maybe there's a threat of this being necessary to keep your job. But the downside can be nightmarish - problems will come up that take you away from the programming work, leading to diminished project responsibilities, spiraling until your main task is sysadmin, followed by hiring a real sysadmin, and then you're low man on the project totem pole.
Joel, 'zat really you?
Yeah, right.
So, get yourself an egg timer... Set it to 24. When it rings at 8:24 monday morning, go to your boss and say "1% of my work week has passed, which is all you said I was required to work as a sysadmin. Please feel free to report any problems to me next week between 8:00 and 8:24."
Of course if you ask like an ass your boss will think of you like one.
My advice is to give it a shot and see if you like it, all the while keeping track of time spent doing the System Administration work - reconfiguring the network, studying the book they buy you, fixing problems as they come along, etc.
Once you have a document you have something you can point to when you later confront your boss. Its not unreasonable for management to ask an employee to work a couple extra hours a week for a short period of time, and if you take it in stride and have a "good attitude" about it you should be compensated for it.
When you feel the time is right, pull your boss aside, show him how much time you're spending on these "new" activities, and tell him you either want a raise, more time off, telecommuting days, or even 100% flex hours. You're not being shit on with more work dumped on your head, this is an opportunity to advance a little if you look at it right. If nothing else its real-world work experience you can use to pad out your resume ("my company needed a SysAdmin but couldn't afford it and while that's not what interests me I stepped up...")
If you absolutely don't want to do it then consider quitting your job and finding "strictly programming" work elsewhere.
Just don't be a dick about it from square one because that's "not what you do"
Your Brain + EEG + LEGO Robots = Brainstorms
On the other hand, sysadminning will not dry up until well after programming has all gone offshore, so it may be better to embrace the new job.
Do you have any idea how most of us sysadmins got into the business? We started out as programmers, configuration management, hardware techs, etc. Then the inevitable happened. "Hey, you know something about networks. Could you take a look at this?" Ten years later, you look back on your life and wonder what happened.
The 1% is completely unrealistic. You may be able to design and implement a network that will take only 20 minutes a week to maintain - WITHOUT USERS!
Sysadmins know. It's the users that cause the problems. And heaven help you if you are connected to the Internet.
My guess is 25%.
Hi-Technical Excellent Taste and Flavor!
I was in a similar situation a few years ago. 45ish people, we rolled our own network, mostly techie types...
:-/
We needed about 1.5 system administrators.
Fortunately, we had two. So about 1/4 of my average work week was spent as a testing droid for the developers and-- get this-- getting ahead of the game.
Whoever told you 1% of your work week is on crack. Stuff simply just doesn't work that well.
-JDF
Does it extrapolate that a company of 3000 could be handled by a single admin? Pointless extrapolations aside, I spent time as a part-time SA for a 6-person company with a highly-competent staff (highly-competent... I was easily the dumbest guy there). The senior SA split time between programming and SA duties. We averaged 20-30 hours per week. Some were very quiet. Other weeks involved hardware issues.
That breaks down to:
4.17 hours per person
5 hours per server
1.79 hours per system (servers + clients)
Use those to calculate your potential time. YMMV.
(We had remarkably few OS issues, though, since we ran FreeBSD... thbbbtt!)
Amateurs discuss tactics. Professionals discuss logistics.
...is that once you've got the title/reputation as "the guy who fixes things when they break", you wind up with the weird stuff.
When I was that guy for a small company, yeah, I got the usual, "Hey, is the network slow today for some reason?" or "Uh, my machine's doing weird stuff."
I also got, "Do you know anything about the IVR system?" I got, "Don't suppose you know how to fix microwaves?" And my favorite: "Someone's stuck in the elevator and the maintenance guys don't get here 'til 8AM..."
Sure, you can just say no, but heck, just answering those questions alone will soak 1% of your work week... Small-company sysadmins have a tendency to become the person you ask about ANYTHING electronic...
(It turns out the file "blade" on a standard leatherman is just the right size to trip the door 'lock' catch on an elevator (that's what the round hole in the door is) so you can get the outside doors open, once you can see the inside doors from the outside you can see the latch for those...)
-JDF
The variability in the ratios depends on the user base, the quality of the initial set up, and support policies. Having a budget for regular harware replacement also helped a lot in keeping the body count down.
I'm aware of one company where desktop software problems never take more than 30 minutes to resolve; all user files are maintained on a server, and if a desktop problem can't be resolved in 15 minutes, the hardware is re-imaged. That company is big and has a support ratio of about 1 to 60, despite some pretty complex networking... On a slow day, they re-image about 5 boxes; they once had to reimage almost the entire desktop install base ASAP when the CEO distributed a mail-based virus; took almost 24 hours...
And a 30 user network.
But you're not a competent professional systems administrator. Most of the developers I've seen as admins have been a disaster, continually trying to code their way out of problems after the fact when they should have organised their way round the problems before they happened.
Deleted
Given the usual sysop's schedule: ...", "10 ways to know if you are a luser" etc. etc.. Will complain loudly if approached about an "on call" duty performed for a total of 1 hour three years ago. Of course nobody has the heart to inform him that 9.30am does not count as an unsociable hour. But then for the network dude every hour is unsociable.
1% work
29% complaining
10% coffee drinking and complaining
10% eating, spitting out crumbs whilst complaining
50% "unavailable", frequently seen either slinking into the carpark late, sneaking out early, in town buying Star Trek novels or crafting witty chain emails along the lines of "You're a luser if
Assumption: The company has plans to grow at the new location (else why did they move?)
If you take this job, say goodbye to programming for the duration. Maybe not right away, but eventually, you will have no time left to program at all.
As the company grows, the system administration tasks will grow. And you will always be the guy that knows the most about the systems.
Contextual knowledge will lock you into the role, because you know the system, and there isn't ever time to transfer all that knowledge to someone else, even if they do eventually hire a full time system administrator. There will still be things about the system setup where you are the most knowledgable person.
If you want to switch careers to system administration, this is your chance.
Just dealing with Spyware is a full time job.
A lot of the posts so far have suggested that it's totally unrealistic, and you should leave ASAP. From my experience, I'd say that it is quite unrealistic. Not only is that quite the underestimation, but the skillset is quite different. I work with several programmers that can crank out code, but only have the foggiest notion about system administration, never mind the people skills necessary to deal with people's problems kindly.
But, chances are that you might not just want to quit, because you posted this question here, rather than just leaving. Or maybe you posted so you felt better about that decision. However, if you do want to keep your job (at least for a little while) try explaining to your Boss that they're different skillsets, 'good at programming' isn't necessarily 'good at computers' (sysadmin, computer support, etc), and you think his estimation is too low. Then cut a deal that if after a month, if your time spent per week is more than 3%, he'll hire a professional Admin, so you can concentrate on your main job responsibilities. Just be sure to keep track of everything that you do, which will help make a stronger case.
That's how I got out of being the sysadmin at my job - it turned out that my Boss actually wanted me to to my main job well, and just didn't understand that the other duties were a major drain on my time. Chances are that your Boss isn't looking to sabotage his own investment, just unrealistic.
Although, you might want to start prepping your resume if he continues to be unrealistic. Hopefully he's hoping that your business will succeed, rather than looking for scapegoats.
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Obviously don't know what they're talking about. Tell them that if its only 1% they should be able to handle the work themselves.
I've worked as a sysadmin of various sorts for over 12 years now...I worked at an enterprise hq for a large enterprise (over 15,000), sysadmin head for a a mid-size group (300) and am now working to oversee a small group of about 30 people. Is it less work in an environment with 30 people...then 15,000...Hell ya! Is it 1% of your time...Heck NO!
Ultimately, a sysadmin is a problem solver in the technical field. 1 full time sysadmin for 30 people is about the proper number to manage really. If you think that having a sysadmin manage systems for technical people is easier, think again...technical people are often much much harder to deal with. In part, because they have just enough knowledge to be dangerous and hate to "play by the rules"....If you don't believe me, try to get 40 different programmers into a room and dare them to come up with a platform, a webserver, and an application in an hour...Now ironically, 5 programmers in a room can probably do it...
Anyway, theres usually less problems with the least savy technical people as they generally do what they're told and never try to go out of the scope of their systems. (..I found this out setting up systems for a bike courier service and a real-estate agency.)
That is going to be an issue from the get-go. It can't be just you, there has to be a backup for when you are sick, need to travel on business, get oissed from working 24x7 for a month, etc.
Personally if my boss ever said something as idiotic as 'it will only take 1% of your time' in a case like this I would start looking for a new job. The guy is obviously a know-nothing jerk and you aren't going to get anywhere working for him.
If there is one thing you take away from this post it should be this: the way people who favor a course of action process information is different from the way that people who disfavor it do. People who favor a course of action are very clear on the intended consequences, but only vaguely grasp it's unintended consequences. People who are against do the opposite.
When the people above favor something and the people below disfavor it, you get the "what were they thinking?" anti-pattern. When the opposite is true, you get the "dinosaur business" anti-pattern. In most businesses I have seen, you have on one hand people who are frustrated because people are too pig headed to change, and on the other people who are feeling pestered drop the work that has to be done in favor of some hair-brained scheme. Your job is to get this out of the realm of impulse and passive aggression into the realm of rational decision making.
There are a couple of strategies you can use here.
I can tell you often the quickest and easiest way to forestall a bad idea is to accept it's presumed benefits as given and cheerfully take on the job of planning to make everything work acceptably. You just need management to decide between some options you've come up with to handle some implementation details. Not passive aggressively chosen options either -- the best ones you can come up with. For example, if you are on vacation, even if you have a beeper, you won't be able to fix the email server. A part time admin like you could probably get control of the worst situations in, say two days if you're on site, but unless you have a second developer comparably involved it might be as long as a week. So, you get an estimate from an IT services company of what it would cost to have somebody come in on an emergency basis. See -- an undeniable problem scenario, and three options: double the effort, hire a consultant, or accept that there is a possibility that email may go down for up to a week. Continue cheerfully running down the list of dealing with all the problems that are undeniably possible, and all your reasonable solutions to these problems, until their resolve crumbles. If it doesn't make sure you have their commitment to each of your solutions, or to accepting the responsiblity for the risks involved.
This is a good strategy to take if you think that management commitment to this idea is shallow. More often than not people are looking for a quick fix, and enthusiasm evaporates once things don't look so quick.
A second strategy is to actively and frankly sell the idea of a professional adminstrator. Right off the bat, I'd say "I understand the benefits of this company of controlling overhead costs, and that a network administrator is a significant expense whose benefits are hard to measure on the bottom line. But I'd like a chance to show you that a professional administrator would be more cost effective." Then you ask to have a chance to do a little research and put together an analysis of the alternatives, which of course he'll understand is a sales pitch. This is a mode of decision making that managers understand and respect.
This is the most generally useful approach, but it depends on your salesmanship. You need three things: (1) knowledge of what would make the customer buy your product, (2) understanding of the ways the customer likes to make decisions (3) the customer's trust. You have to prepare your analysis of the customer and the pitch; try to find out what his hot buttons are and make sure you push them when the time comes to close the deal.
The outline I think is pretty clear. You examine why the best run companies in this industry use pros to administer (you don't have to establish this is so, or anything else that sounds reasonable). You show how network outages would have interfered with something that was important to the boss, like getting the proposal on the big contract out on time, and assign a round percentage chance of say 1%. You multiply this by the to
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
If you needed slashdot to figure out that the time estimate was way low then you obviously have no sysadmin/netadmin experience. Either say no, start looking for a new job, or expect to spend 30-50% of your time on admin tasks and to have your train of thought constantly interrupted while you're trying to make progress on your programming tasks.
Yep. This is what I was going to say.
1% is completely bogus. It was more than that when I worked at a 5 person company. It was small enough to be workable, though.
Later I worked at a c. 30 person company & another programmer had this problem. It took way more than 1% of his time. It was a problem, & the boss recognized it & did something about it.
So, if you can't convince him up front, keep a good record of the time you spend doing non-programming tasks. Don't complain. Do make ultimatums or challenges. Just let him see the record of what is actually happening.
Personally, if the boss can't be convinced upfront, I'd rather take on the extra duties that refuse them. If the boss ends up being right, fine. If not, I demonstrate that to him. In any case, I want to do everything I can to be a positive force & make my company the biggest success it can be.
To give him exactly what he's asking for. I'm a professional programmer myself, and on occasion, i need to step in and cover someone elses tasks.
If he says it will only take 1% of your time (wrong!), then that is what you give him. Keep a nice prioritized list of ALL the nice things you'd love to do if you had the time... but by golly, you've only got that 1% of your work week to do it in, so you figure it will take a few years.
When he's about to crack, suggest you bring in a contractor network admin, to build, configure and document your new infrustructure, and maybe then, supporting it may not take too much of your time.
good luck!
b
Since you mention C#, I'm assuming you have a bunch of Windows servers.
That being the case, anyone who thinks you can do sysadmin for 30 people in 30 minutes a week is just smoking crack. You can easily spend 30 minutes a week just keeping a couple of servers up to date with the weekly Microsoft security patches and watching the net for security problems. (Been there, done that.)
And of course, that's assuming an experienced sysadmin. Starting from zero knowledge, if you spend your 30 minutes a week studying, you'll be ready to go in a year or two. A single routine problem, like learning how to configure a firewall, can soak up a couple of hours of inexperienced sysadmin time.
Basically, you're being set up to fail. If you decide to stick around, make damn sure you start tracking how much time you spend on what, to a 5 minute granularity. That way when he asks why the Windows servers keep crashing and are infested with this month's worm, you'll be able to point to the logs to justify why you didn't get around to securing them in time.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Have you ever wondered why it takes Microsoft 6 months to fix a vulnerability when the Mozilla team requires less than 24 hours? Dogbert has the answer.
I don't know what your boss has been smoking, but it is blatantly obvious that he has smoked it all.
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1% of a work week comes to 24 minutes a week. I guess backups are not needed.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
You get paid to do approximately a 40 hour/week job. 1% of 40 hours is 24 mins a week or approximately 5 mins a day.
It will take you 5 mins a day just to review any automated reports you have that let you know that backups have completed successfully, that you aren't running out of filesystem space, check any weird exceptions in your log files etc etc.
This of course does not take into account any time spent actually putting any of these automated reports in, or fixing any problem with your servers, or even responding to user requests.
Frankly, anyone who says you can do it on 1% of a single person's job has obviously either never worked as a sysadmin or never done a proper job of being sysadmin.
Firstly, network/sysadmin is a job that never ends. Here's where it gets worse: if the company is successful like you hope it will be, the responsibilities will grow towards 100% of your time. The admin environment is constantly evolving with new opportunities and new threats. I've been there and done that with a similar sized company as the only admin. At first it was a real mess that had to be cleaned up: anti-virus software, tape backups, UPS, firewalls, disk quotas, etc. The it went into progress mode: more bandwidth, high-availability, PPP, VPN, streaming video/audio, on and on. More employees, traveling salespeople, hardware/software/storage/OS upgrades, satellite office, spam/worm filtering, crackers, the mail server is on fire and the VP of sales is screaming "the conference room projector doesn't work and my presentation is in 5 minutes!". It became too much for one person to handle fulltime and way too stressful for the money. I quit and they hired two people to replace me. There are probably thousands of similar stories like this on slashdot.
If you don't mind getting caught up in the storm it can be a fun ride and you'll learn a lot about different technologies. But if this isn't your career path then don't start, not even if they convince you that it will be until they find someone else.. it's never temporary. Just be careful what you're good at.
Speak truth to power.
...about the high school lad who asked slashdot where to get an intern position? Look for that,last week sometime, there's your sysadmin d00d!
networking, it's all networking!
Sure, in a perfect world, where nothing breaks, 1% might work.
1% works out to less than 20 hours per year.
A single breakin + analysis + restore incident (depending on severity) will eat that up.
Don't forget about creating user accounts, changing forgotten passwords, upgrading packages, evaluating new software, installing said software, hardware failures, new hardware, READING RELEVANT SECURITY LISTS, replacing toner cartridges, swapping backup tapes, restoring "oops, I deleted the wrong file!" files, deactivating user accounts, forwarding vacation mail, and a hundred other things that sysadmins must do...
S
Sysadmin here.
Note- anything over 2.6 days of downtime per year is over 1% of your time.
Also to me supporting 5 people would be easy, supporting 30 is about as difficult as supporting 60-100.
There are many things that soak up time to consider and limiting your time and service level only makes you look bad to your users and later your boss. Even if it is something you have little to do with, the responsibility becomes yours.
You'll be a desktop support/sysadmin, so consider these situations-
All your dells were purchased 2 years ago at the same time.
One week at 11am 2 of the mobos go FOOF! within 2 days of each other for no reason. Just like light bulbs. Blame ensues, but they're technical ppl so more blame ensues and then dies off. -You will catch a little blame for this, so $.02 in your blame bank.
You drop your project and spring into action! Now 3 programmers are doing 0 hrs of programming.
Your boss is cheap but wise and a good listener, so you have at least 1 backup machine at the ready to toss in right? Didn't think so.
Ok so resolve the problem. (1) Pick up the phone and call the mfgr for a few (million) hours, find all of the paperwork that was gleefully thrown away after the box was opened, and wait 1-10 days for a new mobo. (2) Or go shopping for a new one, or (3) buy 2 new computers.
(1) the mobo you receive looks similar but different! Driver and backup fun for you!
(2) the mobo you get is different, with different allignment holes and the port plate covers 1 set of USB ports and doesn't quite align with the lan port. This is noticed by other staff and more is deposited in the blame bank. You plug in the mobo and nothing happens except some sort of crackle. it seems dell switched the +5 and ground or something, so more phone calls ahead. Driver hunt ahead, and although you're making a good effort, the pressure is mounting and yes- more in the blamebank.
(3) boss has best buy ad to help save the (budget) day and you are charged with bringing in 2 eMachines! Oh won't you be popular!
Also user hears new computer is coming and wants whatever is hyped like alienware or somthing with a $9k graphics card and will begin the beg-a-thon.
Even if that doens't happen you'll spend a lot of time getting everything set up- ripping out the crappy software from a store box or ideally fresh installing, SP's/updates installed, many reboots, network config, security, etc. You probably don't have ghost deployed or a usable / up to date scripted install or the other countless toys that we rely on but the books don't tend to cover.
Oh.. You installed That _before_ This? eww. start over bud. It's mentioned in paragraph 90 of that readme. no, the updated one on the site.
You'll get to hear pleasent things like 'Is that machine done YET?' and 'Are you sure you know what you're doing cause it's taking a long time and I just plugged in mine and it worked at home!' 'Shouldn't this only take you a few minutes?' 'I need realplayer fixed before lunch'.
Ok so after 1-2 days everyone is happy again. Boss will always be cocked about 48 hrs of lost time. 2 days later one of the lcd screens dies on the system you replaced. You have 0.6 days left this year for sysadmin time. That doesn't usualy cover the printer que issues for the administrative staff.
So- backups. are you ever going be testing them or just crossing fingers? How many hrs/year will handling them take? over 4.8?
Everyone discovers a new streaming radio station! although your staff knows better they kill enough bandwidth for the boss to notice. You are the enforcer, and may be charged with making sure that it never happens again!
Tech skool programmer has managed to install citrix or vnc or a vpn. You give the security talk. You haven't got a clue what may have left or entered your network.
Boss sez- I keep getting this spam! fix it! you do. 2 weeks later 'i thought you fixed it!'
The network goes
Firefox &
...with no concept of IT or admin duties.
Do not take the admin duties unless they are going to hire another programmer, because you cannot do both and once you're admin that is all you're going to be doing from there on.
I'm one of 4 admins for a company of several hundred. When there's not an immediate crisis on our hands, there are always tons and tons of preventative measures and maintenece which need to be addressed to prevent further problems down the road. Nobody ever sees that though -- they just assume when a crisis is averted that we go back to our offices and sit doing nothing. It couldn't be further from the truth. We don't just put out fires as they pop up, we also work to prevent future fires (many of them self-imposed by management).
We spend 8 hours a day doing this, as well as regularly working after hours and weekends when need be, and we never truly "catch up", because as soon as we get something in place management changes something and it's back to square one. There's just enough of us to tread water, basically.
There's a reason network admins aren't also programmers -- it's because their job is more than enough and they have no time to program. So it'd be silly to think it's work well the other way.
Your CEO is a lying sack of shit, he wants you to do two jobs, you will be on call, expect no personal time off. Tell him that you are not interested in following that career path or you expect to manage at least two people to do that job. I've talked to many recruiters looking for a "Web Developer, Systems Administrator, Quality Assurance, Graphic Designer, Network Administrator", I tell them all to fuck off.
it's a sig, wtf?
For starters, I fully agree with the parent about using a ticket system to complain. It is one of the better ideas I've heard in a long time. And I highly recommend it as well.
A few months ago, I was officially a "programmer" for tech services at a 350 person company. There were seven people under tech support. Therefore, approximately 50 employees per person.
Now don't get me wrong, there were days when we had very little to do. And that's when I was pretty much a full-time programmer.
But, we all know that a service provider is a Markovian-based queue. That means there exists days like the one I spoke of before, but, in my experience, there exists an equal amount of days where you will be overwhelmed. Even with 7 employees in a company of 350, our phones were still ringing off the hooks.
This is typically because of a bigger problem. But the little things can add up. Like the parent mentioned, people can be completely unreasonable when it comes to how their computers function.
Now, I know that with 30 people, things won't be quite as bad. But, there are still going to be days where you will spend your entire day helping people. I hope for the person's sake that these days don't happen when they have something more important scheduled (like a meeting with a client) that they cannot be absent from.
Any bets that there will be someone hired after a higher up is stuck without a computer for a day because their "tech support" is busy as a programmer. Or will it be when a deadline is missed because the "programmer" was too busy with tech support.
Am I open minded towards open source, or closed minded towards closed source?
"Once you have a document you have something..."
Yeah, but if your really stay to the 24 min/week, all you will be able to show up is a blank document; just writing it down will squeeze that much time.
Another way of looking at it, is in 24 minutes per week you can maybe take a look at the logs to make sure nothing is screwy, and answer 1 minor "why can't i...?" question from the secretary, assuming it requires no additional support work (drivers installation, etc.) And forget about buying and setting up any new hardware.
and it's not worth it to outsource it.
Care to elaborate on that? Or are you just admitting that an outsourcer would give a realistic estimate of the necessary work involved, and charge accordingly?
Seeing as how an outsourcer can take advantage of the economy of scale with intermittent support, as well as the benefits of specialization in administrative technologies, you've got the burden of proof when making assertions like that.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
1% is waaaay low. How about another option: hire a full-time sysadmin, and have him/her pick up all the system admin functions the programmers have been doing? The programmers can focus on their real jobs instead of worrying about patches, backups, tracking licenses, getting broken hardware repaired and whatnot. The sysadmin could even be responsible for software builds, making install packages and other work the programmers might want to dump on someone else.
The infasturture decides this one. If you have some kind of simple linux or windows network which just uses one server to authenicate logins, a dhcp server box or soho router, plus a few web servers, and file servers it should be light work to admin. Now if you are setting up VLANS everyday for test networks and you need to use many kinds of management software for the network it is going to require more than 1% of your time. Is your email hosted internally or outsourced? It really depends on your network, nobody could tell you for sure. Now if everything is real simple I could see it take you 2 hours a week which is 5% of your time, 1% unlikely.
>>IT needs can be met using only 1% of my work week
.01 = .4hrs and .4hrs X 60 = 24 minutes per week.
this is clearly impossible. 40hrs X
I can't keep my own & personal & home-based machine in line, with what I want to do with it, in half an hour a week.
Clearly, your guy just wants it to... uh.. I accept our evil just-work overbeings....
sorry...
how 'bout you agree to 1% of your time (or was that ten? 4 hrs/wk?) and get your guy to agree that some tasks will go beyond 4 hrs per week and that you will pick-up those over-ridden tasks up as soon as the new week allows.
or accept that this is a new responsibility with no thank-you.
The previous comment about getting a helpdesk system is the best way to go if you are lumped with the extra burden of these tasks, once you have collated the information as to how many little (and big) admin jobs need doing use this as ammunition to tell your boss that "its not going to work" especially if you can quantify this in terms of hours....or you can tell your boss to pay you the full salary x2 for an admin and programmer...good luck..:)
After reading all the different comments, this comment is the most sound... Documentation is the best way to get your point across especially when you are being taken away from billable work. Like mentioned above, don't be a dick when presenting your documentation showing your 8 hours/week or so of sysadmin tasks. Unfortunately, I've found that by asking for a raise, more time off, etc... you can be labeled a "hard case" or "problem case" so if you do ask for perks or a raise, don't press the issue or it could backfire. This also depends on your company and the boss, but with what you've mentioned about your boss I would think it would backfire. Suggestions: 1) Deal with your boss and document your time spent on sysadmin tasks 2) Look for another job 3) All of the above Good luck in whatever you do and know you're not alone.
If your boss wants 1% of your work week to go to sysadminning, then on Monday Morning, spend exactly 24 minutes (1% of 40 hours) on sysadminning, and then go back to programming for the rest of the week. If he asks why XYZ is not done, explain that you have already utilized your full allotment of time for sysadminning.
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I actually came from the opposite direction, I was an admin at an ISP, asked to do some simple programming. Of course as the programs evolved they took more and more of my time. Honestly programming takes loads more time the network administration. Well except for the 1% of the time that a server crashes or the boss suddenly realizes he deleted an entire web directory. Still I would say at least 1-2 hours a day of admin stuff, just keeping up with security and stupid user requests. Also realize that you are going to be the default tech support guy for everyone in the office if you accept.
But you're not a competent professional systems administrator.
And don't take this as an insult. You wouldn't expect to know how to do VLSI chip design, though you could probably be taught. Same with sysadmin - you typically need about 3 years to be any good at it. If you're not good at it, you just make mistakes or not-well-thought-through decisions that come back to eat more of your time later.
Your boss need to hire a consultant. If you make $100K he's willing to spend $1000 on sysadmin. If he's right, that'll by a full day each year of a consultant's time. If he was expecting 20 hours of your time, ask him to budget $2500 instead. It's a bargain - if he's right....
Practically speaking, you're going to get sucked into sysadmin work and your real job will suffer and you'll get shit for that, probably a smaller raise, and if you deadlines suffer no job at all.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Not all companies will die even if they have problems like this. In some areas (especially finanace) there are precious few choices in terms of software providers, and they can all be bad. If there are only 2 companies that can take care of what you need, and both are run by idiots... Even better, if there's only one company that can help you meet a federal regulation...
Just because the company is in sick shape doesn't mean it's going to die out!
--LWM
Good point.
When you've proven him wrong tell him to hire somebody else.
As has been said many times before, 1% is 30 minutes.
So, note down all problems that come in on a Monday, start working on them, and when the 30 minutes of that week is over, tell your users that their problems are queued for the next couple of weeks.
Show your boss the list every day.
Or better yet - brush up your resume - don't work for such an ID10T. He does not understand what he is talking about. Do you think he will understand programming. Or anything else?
I don't. I like a boss that knows (and admits) when he doesn't know anything. And let me take the decision.
30 minutes. Sheez...
30 people just isn't big enough to justify a full time on-site admin. You can spend 10% of your time making decisions about the IT infrastructure and managing the relationship with the IT company, and they can take the how-to phonecalls, know which server hardware to buy, what OSes to load, handle backups, power failures, relationships with upstream providers, etc...
It's just as hard to admin a site of 200 people as it is to admin 30.
Our 30 person company currently takes up the services of about three-quarters of a person (split over two actual people) for IT, and it's really not enough. We really need at least one full-time dedicated IT guy, but the boss won't spring for it.
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
I am a guy who mostly wants to be a programmer but I'm also the only sysadmin or anything like it for a small (15ppl) client of mine.
After a significant break-in period I probably average only about 1 day a month there - which is still about 5% time, not 1%.
You have two different but related problems. 1) Your boss has no idea how much work this is and 2) Your boss wants to make you an admin and you don't want to be. I think you need to address these somewhat separately.
1) Convince your boss you probably need at least a 20% time experienced admin - more for the transition and more if they aren't an experienced admin. The basic rational is: "you can skimp on this as much as you like, but it costs LESS to make sure everything is safe than to try to fix it afterward"
2) Decide how much you really want this job - even if it becomes substantially sysadmin - and how much it really wants you. How much you push for concessions from your boss is based on this.
If you have the clout there, stand up for yourself. If you don't, look for a new job.
A reasonable thing would be to make him decide how much time you're really going to spend on it (say, 4 hours / week) and make him be very clear what's going to happen when that time is up... are you going to stop adminning?
Here are some other suggestions:
A) Get paid more. A reasonable answer to doing work you like less, or just doing more work on top of what you have might be to get paid more. (especially depending on your out-of-work lifestyle) So tell him you're going to get time-and-a-half overtime whenever it goes over 4 hours. Or just take a salary increase of some reasonable amount (depending on point #2...)
B) Make it (or part of it) somebody else's job. This could mean getting him to drop this on somebody else, hiring somebody or contracting it out.
Being a small _network_ admin really isn't that big of a job - if he nominates somebody else to be the desktop admin (even if they sometimes ask you questions because they're not as qualified... you don't need to be that qualified to run windows patches, run spybot, order new similar systems, answer user questions, etc.)
C) Give away some other responsibilities you don't like. Use this opportunity to give away that project you don't really want to maintain... etc.
D) B&C... Depending on the pay scales involved, you (and you should be involved) might hire a part-time intern or student to be your assistant - partially to do some of this work and partially to make up for the time you have to spend doing it. If you do a good job picking you'll end up with about the same amount of programming time you had before and management experience.
Note: You didn't mention OS - my experience has been that "Windows is a pain to admin" is much more true than "Windows doesn't work" The particular experiences related in this post are based on Windows desktops with a linux Samba server over a LAN.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
It's been almost a week since this was originally posted - and I'm curious as to whether the poster has followed what's been said and whether they've tried to apply any of the suggestions (and what the boss' reaction was).
/. all week!
Then again, maybe they've been too busy with the sysadmin to read
You can rent this space for $5 a week.