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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?"
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!
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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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.
So why does he think the reverse is true?
He probably thinks that the reverse is true because he thinks that keeping a "small" network running is not a time-consuming task. People forget that when something goes wrong on their home computer, it can take a lot of time to get it working the right way (doubly so if you lack experience with the problem). Multiply that by 30, and something going wrong can take a lot of time.
I totally agree, an experienced sysadmin is needed.
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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.
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.
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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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.
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"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."
Not only that - without sysadmin experience, it's going to take you longer and be much harder to set something up that's of high quality not to need a lot of upkeep. (Unless you're someone who expects not to make any mistakes, is confident that any documents you use are bang up to date, and that the only criterion being used to decide how the system is designed is to minimise future sysadmin time.) It'd probably in my opinion be better financial sense to employ a consultant at least for the set up stage, particularly if they can help you get started and get you to understand the system. Even then, it'll probably take all of your time to start with, just to get your head round all the tasks that need to be done.
As I think everyone has said (yes, I want to be modded redundant!), 1% is ridiculously optimistic. Accept it if you have to, but you should try to insist on keeping records of time spent on sysadmin tasks and reviewing the situation on a regular basis.
You can rent this space for $5 a week.
The 1% figure is clearly rubbish, but your company has new owners and you don't have any immediate reason to jump ship (or anywhere immediately to jump to) it's at least worth trying to start on the right foot with them. Chances are the new owners are trying to work out of the current staff who is capable of doing what in the future - and the fact that you got chosen for "extra responsibilities" is a sign they have confidence in your capabilities. Chances also are that they're look at who may it may be possible to get rid of.
That said, it's essential that you keep track of exactly how much time is spent doing what, so that when your programming boss asks why work isn't getting done you can tell him, and likewise to your sysadmin boss.
Some sort of helpdesk system is essential, to allow basic categorisation of problems and help time tracking.
Try and specify some form of "service level agreement" - if only "1%" of your time is needed then that's 5 minutes a day ish - so users having to wait a day or so for an email reply from you shouldn't be a problem to your new boss. Ensure that he's told them that though!
Be wary of "out of hours" stuff too. If you run any kind of live systems (e.g. for customer interaction) they may need work at odd hours of the day or night. If you specifcally don't want to do this, or get paid X for it, best to try and set expectations (in as polite a way as possible).
You need to make it clear that it will take more than 1% of your time. One worm can hose a LAN and productivity may be lost for the entire day. The company doesn't want to go with someone full time. Suggest hiring a third party to manage the network. The third party can bill the company when there is a catastrophe, and you won't have to pay them a salary.
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
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.
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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.
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."
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"
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Not to mention these fun possibilities: ...) and your boss who doesn't value the admin side gives you bad reviews on your performance evals.
You get behind on your programming projects because you're doing admin tasks (backups, patches, testing patches/backups, checking logs,
You become the scapegoat for everything related to system failure. Hardware fails, you didn't do your job. Software patch creates unexpected software failures (this happens more frequently if you use 3rd party tools in addition to MS products), and any other thing that might fall at your feet.
There are many more examples but if your boss/company doesn't value the job of sysadmin you're not going to get any points for the work you do. Especially since he thinks it's 1% of your time. What a crock of shit.
I handled it by just ignoring the dumbfuck boss and finding another job (which is working for myself so yet again I'm the programmer and sysadmin, at least I respect my own work!).
Use an analogy on your boss...
Computer professionals are like medical professionals. Would you go to an allergist for a heart transplant? Of course not. However, many allergists are also GP's, so can handle simple things like prescribing blood pressure medication correctly. You would not want an allergist operating on you however.
Suggest bringing in a pro sysadmin to get things setup, and then you can run it from there.
While it's true that a sysadmin does not generate revenue, it's also true that downtime COSTS revenue. Again, we can go back to the Doctor analogy. While it's true that you can change your diet and excersize regimen to improve your heart, it would be VERY unwise to not see a doctor about controlling your blood pressure, cholesterol, etc.
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
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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 &
I have to agree on the "I just want to be a programmer" part, but perhaps with a different spin.
See, computer programming is different from system administration, just like being the CEO of a company is different from being the CFO, or being an engine rebuilder is different from being a transmisison rebuilder. Trouble is, most non-techies don't realize that, because they have no idea what techie people do.
So I suspect this person's new boss used to have a guy that did -everything-, and possibly did it well. That guy (or girl) worked long hours, was underpaid, and eventually got burned out and bailed. So this new boss probably thinks that all techies can do -everything-, and just assumes the previous person's poor attitude was responsible for their burnout/departure. This is an opportunity to teach the new boss that not all techie jobs are created equal, and not all skillsets transfer over.
On the other hand, saying "I only want to be a programmer" will be interpreted by his boss as "I am comfortable where I am and don't want to grow". This may be unfair, but that's how it will be viewed, and that's a bad thing.
Ideally, what this person might do is talk with the boss, and explain that programmers and system administrators have two very different skillsets, even though they have similar technical aptitudes, just like carpenters and electricians do. Explain that you'd love the opportunity to learn that new skillset, but it's going to take more than just leafing through a book, because keeping a network of 30 machines alive is a full-time job even for an experienced person.
Further, explain that it doesn't seem like a full-time job from the outside because the work comes in fits and spurts, where one day you might do very little, but the next you might have to work overnight to get things fixed, and most people outside of system administration have no idea those overnights are happening, because they're at home; all they see is an idle system admin sitting at a desk on the good days. Oh, and mention that you know all this from talking to a few system administrators that you know.
Finally, tell him that you will be happy to take it on, but it won't be practical unless the following conditions can be met:
1. You will have to take formal classes to learn how to do it right, at the company's expense and during paid work hours, so that you can do it efficiently and quickly when trouble arises;
2. When trouble arises, programming projects are going to be put on hold until the trouble is solved, and so programming deadlines will always need to slip by the number of hours or days it takes to solve the problem -- and those slipped deadlines are going to cost the company money;
3. Even when there is no obvious trouble, a certain amount of time must be put aside each day to do routine maintenance and take care of users' workstation issues, because jumping back and forth between administration and programming tasks will make any person in that role painfully inefficient;
4. There will be times that system administration tasks require late nights, overnights and weekend work, and it is only reasonable to be able to get comp time (or overtime, depending on if you're salaried or not) for those hours.
Will the boss like this? Probably not, but you're not saying "I won't do it" -- you're giving him/her an honest and intelligent assessment of the situation based on your own research into the problem, and you're giving him/her a plan under which you CAN take on the role. Of course, chances are the new boss will find the plan to be less than ideal, at which point you might suggest a part-time contractor system admin or whatnot.
And of course there's always the chance they will say "fine, go do it". If that happens, and they hold up their end of the bargain, then congratulations -- you've just gotten paid to learn a valuable and marketable new skill. On the other hand, if they don't hold up their end of the bargain (claiming you never talked about that, or "I misunderstood you -- well, just get it done for now and we'll worry about your hours later" and so forth), you have to acknowledge you're working for a sociopath, and you should leave.
Good luck to ya, buddy.
One could also focus on the positive aspects.
You will gain experience in an area where you currently have none. This may be useful when raise time comes around...but if it does not...it will be useful when you seek employment elsewhere.
Take advantage of any opportunity to get experience in a new area, especially training. Get your activities recognized in writing and keep them for future reference in your job hunting.
I can promise that it will pay you dividends down the road if you approach it with the right attitude and motivation. I used opportunities like that to work into my current position as an IT Manager for a telecommunications company. Experience CAN be as valuable as education in the right company, so do not rule it out unless you do not have the time available to develop your skills. By that I mean...don't sacrifice your family for the sake of your job. Consider it a learning opportunity... Read the books, get training, find contacts with others who are doing the same work and see where it takes you.
Also keep in mind that you willingness to take on extra responsibility will not hurt you in your the eyes of your supervisor either.
It really all depends on your focus...if you are a get by only type guy...then don't do it. If you are a motivated individual with the time to learn new things and the desire to be more than you are...then go for it.