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?"
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.
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.