Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
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.