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Are Sysadmins Really that Bad?
tgbrittai asks: "According to Paul Boutin they are merely an obstacle to be manipulated or outmaneuvered. According to Steve Wozniak they are pimps. I've known my share of good and bad sysadmins, programmers and every other professional role out there, and I have to wonder: are sysadmins really THAT bad?"
Most times sys-admins are overworked and underpaid and have to deal with users who take advantage of their local IT person, tasking them to fix systems that they callously break. Others are truly worth the name "Bastard Operators from Hell". How would you rate your sys-admin and what things did you have to do to make things run smoothly (or not)?
Are you trying to get us in trouble?! It's a damn good thing I'm a subscriber, I managed to block slashdot in our squid cache and drop it in a dns blackhole just before this story went live.
Trolling is a art,
End of Thread.
From woz.org:
"If my son wants to be a pimp when he grows up, that's fine with me. I hope he's a good one and enjoys it and doesn't get caught. I'll support him in this. But if he wants to be a network administrator, he's out of the house and not part of my family. I tell this joke a lot. Once, a teacher told me that she tells the same one but for a 'teacher'."
....when he suggests "Treat everything he does as a favor. ". Actually, that's not a bad life strategy - when the waitress refills your coffee right away, treat it as if she didn't really have to - because, really, she didn't! She could have just ignored your empty cup, or waited a few minutes, or whatever.
Same with a sysadmin. When he adds a rewrite rule (done!) 20 seconds after you ask for it, act appreciative and say thanks, even though that's his job. Because he could have put it off until tomorrow and probably would have reasonable excuses for doing so. (Incidentally, I hosed up this rewrite rule the first time by leaving off the trailing $. Doh!)
The Army reading list
Can I really be trusted to tell you how good or bad I am?
.. which begs the quesion.. do we really have SysOps anymore?
Frankly, I've always loved the name SysOp.. it just sounds better.. even though it's not an accurate title anymore.
----- The internet has given everyone the ability to have their voice heard equally as loud.. even if they shouldn't be
Quality of sys admin is inversely proportional to the number of rules they have to work under.
The more red tape an admin has the worse the actual results they will provide
When you take a good sys admin, tell them what you want, give them a sensible budget and ask them to delvier it you will frequently get a great system.
When management try to micro manage, heap them with rules, specify particular components because they read an artical that described it as good or the vendor took them out to lunch you will get problems - lots of them.
Right now I work in a very large bank and some days I think the admins could not find their rear end with both hands and a man page - I've never met them persoanlly so no idea what they are actually like. From otehr friends I have working in banking I know how much red tape they have to work under and I suspect half of the problems the user end sees (bear in mind I'm an ex admin myself and now developer) are caused by the red tape, not by the admin.
Virtual break glass on the root password? 2 weeks aproval before changing anything, even if its trivial? These are the kind of things that can drive an admin insane.
Last company I worked for was a start up - a great place to work for a short period, the admin their was very competant on solaris, windows and linux, had a great system implemented. It didn't start going downhill til a new CEO came in that started to micromanage him (and everyone else). Thats why I got out, same for a few others, the sys admin is leaving when he can find something else he wants to do. Still even with all the hassel he had I still got great results from him, mainly because I respected his limitations, didn't break things, knew what I was doing and helped him out when he needed it. Sales staff on the other hand? With them if it wasn't explicitly on his supported list he;d tell them to take a running jump - because of all the hassel they caused breaking things (the same way repeatedly), ignoring instructions, using unsupported devices or software and then wanting it fixed - and they wondered why he didn't want to help them?
Sys admins are human like the rest of us - overly managed they are stiffled, pissed off they are unhelpful - what else would you expect?
$_="Slashdotter";$syn="OTT";s;..;;;sub _{print shift||$_};s!ash!Perl !;s=$syn=ack=i;tr+LLEd+BLAH+;_"Just Another ";_
Don't cry me a river about that...with the exception of upper echelons of management, I'd say most people do more for the company than they get back as a reward for their work.
I've been on both sides of the fence, I've seen users that put every piece of software they can find on their machine, then come calling when they break. I've been blamed for doing something to break a printer, about two weeks after I was there to swap a monitor.
On the flip side, I've worked in places with a tiny server share to store important data and an IT staff that doesn't really guarantee it'll be backed up. So we ended up having to work around the IT staff in a lot of things. It was easier to cobble together something that we can guarantee is backed up AND that has enough space for us than to go through the reams of paperwork to get more space and justify some sort of improved SLA.
In fairness to the IT folks though, a lot of the people working IT are just trying to feel their way through the system that was put in place before they started, and they think it's just as stupid as the end users. But they lack the power to change it, and their bosses don't want to.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
Not really..... now what was your username again?
*clickety*
http://www.theregister.co.uk/odds/bofh/
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
I think the new "fleet" (if I could call them that) of sysadmins are too inexperienced and are often thrown into a wild west of "our infrastructure works like this!... With an infrastructure that many times hasn't been planned out too well, is highly misconfigured, is a nightmare in progress. Often those sysadmins will have to adjust to someone else's tailored system and will fail miserably... I've seen it for years on end, horribly designed systems with no documentation, horribly managed systems butchered to perform a task. No two systems will be alike and I believe its this same scenario which makes or breaks an admin... However with the newer sysadmins coming around, and I've seen plenty in the past 3-4 years, they're inexperienced... Running Linux @ home or your own personal webserver does not make you a bonafide sysadmin. At least not in my little space... I know admins who strictly know perl... Good for you. Now go fix this legacy system which by the way doesn't have perl on it, and you're not allowed to install perl... Would you know how to do so in say awk and sed? To me a sysadmin knows things from the core up, not from a yum install *something*, apt-get *make-me-look-nice*, or whatever other command. Just my two centavos
Infiltrated dot Net
I've worked with many a sys admin who would have been laid off if they were a developer displaying that level of lack of knowledge in their field. In fact, many of the ones I've worked with have needed build guides that are so detailed that the average person off the street could take the same instructions and build up a system. I've known many bad developers, but the difference is that you could put them in front of a compiler with an assignment and they'd figure it out one way or another. It might not be great, but they'd get it done. Can't say the same thing for the admins; often as helpless as little kids when you put them in unfamiliar territory.
And yes, there are good admins out there. The problem is that admins are pulled in from all walks of life and often have little formal or informal education.
And he is the best Boss ever. He even reads /., which should demonstrate how cool he is. He certainly wouldn't do anything bad, like access my computer, log on to Slashdot, post an article telling the world how awesome he is, and then give me a warning to secure my computer (and change my /. password).
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
I currently work as a Network Admin for a large retail company. I started with this company as a store clerk, then moved to the helpdesk, while i was in college. This helped me learn patience and how to be polite with everyone no matter how annoying, wrong, irate the "customer"/"employee" is. I look at some coworkers who have no clue how to handle talking to a customer or a user needing help and give them lip every chance they get. I understand the frustrations of having petty work assigned to you by a VP level person that interrupts your day and workflow. All the time i have important time constrained projects interrupted by those "important" people who have to have some blackberry/treo/etc problem fixed asap. I have to drop whatever important task I am on and concentrate soley on the happiness of this one person. Ultimately thats what it comes down to i have found. Although i get my work done and i am thorough on all mky projects, I am not known for that, I am known for always being the nice guy who helps out the Execs and their exec assistants, and honestly that puts me in better light than anything else. Sometimes the interruptions are extremely frustrating, but when the execs are happy, everyone is happy.
Its not that there bad people. Most of them are pretty nice if you talk to them over lunch. The problem is they are so constrained by what they can do that they are very frustrating to work with. I must say they also hate working with me for the most part.
The problem is that I'm somewhat tech savy. The sys admin don't like anybody trying new things. Their management likes it even less. Do one little thing or install one little app and if you have problems your on your own. Doesn't matter if your laptop explodes, they'll blame it on VMWARE or whatever you happen to be running.
It wasn't always like this. In days of old the Sys Admin were local and reported into the same groups they supported. As such they knew what we were working on and would help out. Management would support this because it often lead to increased productivity or reliability. But at some point a bean counter decided we needed a corporate IT organization.
Once you decouple the support from the groups they support you end up with apathy and endless rules. Also to get the groups to try anything new you have to weave your way through a bureaucracy. You also end up with smaller and smaller IT groups because their contributions to the end product become harder and harder to trace. If a business unit needs to cut costs the first thing they look at is horizontal organizations outside their own structure. Its a lot easier to cut an outside IT guy than a developer working on a product.
Things look to be taking a turn for the worse. Some of our IT is now going to be out sourced. To me this is equivalent to saying I now fully support myself. I can just imagine trying to convince some contracted person in India that I really do need to have VMPlayer installed on my Windows laptop....
One should not theorize before one has data. -Sherlock Holmes-
Replace "X" with any profession, and the answer is the same: some are and some aren't. The professions with high barriers to entry (i.e. medicine) tend to root out some if not most of the incompetents or otherwise poorly qualified, but some will still slip through. The same is true of sysadmins. They obviously exist for reason -- maybe the article writer should ask, "What would a world without sysadmins look like?" For large organization, the answer is "chaos," and they would quickly re-implement the same positions now being mocked.
A better question is: is there a correlation between good sysadmins and /. readers?
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
I used to be a sys admin for a medium sized company. Some people thought I was great, some people thought I was a jerk. If someone was nice to me and was willing to learn how to do the simple things them selves I was more than happy to help them. People who I had to show how to attach a file to an email seven times saw a less friendly side of me.
That being said, some admins are just jerks no matter how nice you are to them, and some users are unreasonable and demanding no matter how hard you work for them.
MG
Randomly distributing Karma whenever possible.
Pay no attention to the systems administrator part of my job title...it's just a standard honorific. >_>
Before I launch into this, it really seems like they define good and bad by their customer service skills, so that's what I'm addressing by "good" and "bad", not so much their technical knowledge.
In my experience, the problems with sysadmins tends to be that with the ones that lack the ability to understand the user. This is what people refer to as the "IT mindset" where the user is the enemy and is doing whatever they can to make IT's life more difficult. In some cases, this is very true. There ARE abusive users out there. However, most people simply want to do their job, and their job is NOT getting these machines to work right. Getting back to the "understanding the user" thing, I find a great many sysadmins have no empathy for how a user feels when their machine has gone down, and why would they? When has a sysadmin ever really felt the panic and/or frustration of having a machine crash and not having the first clue of how to fix it? We KNOW what we should do, and while we'll be annoyed at the extra work, we're (hopefully) never flailing around blindly...or if we are we're careful never to show signs of it. A user's machine goes down and they have no idea what to do. They panic, they worry, they don't think logically...they immediately run to the nearest person who they think can help them and oftentimes get the look of "Why should I?" or "Can't you see I'm busy right now?"
Again, that doesn't mean there aren't people who don't actively try to bypass what they SHOULD be doing to get the problem they caused looked at immediately because they think they're more important. However, I think the sysadmins that most people complain about are the ones who let the handful of lazy/abusive users jade their dealings with the ones who simply want to do their job and go home.
However, I find that the "bad" sysadmins are about as common as the truly abusive users. They stand out in your memory so it seems like there's a lot of them, but they're actually far from the rule. YMMV, of course. After all, in the course of a day three or four people might stop to hold open a door for you, but the one you remember at the end of the day is the idiot that cut you off on the highway. Human memory is a funny thing...
We will have SysOps as long as we have people that don't wish to know anything about the mainframe / mini computer / etc. . Their titles may change somewhat, but ultimately the role will remain.
;)
Need that report, but don't know how to login to the mainframe? Call an operator.
Need this report to print in front of the 30 jobs in the queue? Call an operator.
Need to cancel a scheduled batch process? Call an operator.
Alternatively, we could just add those tasks onto the shoulders of the sysadmin... it's not like they don't have free cycles
Once, we were narrow of scope with a deep understanding of the subject matter. Now, we are a mile wide and an inch deep. Less focus, more distractions... ooh - something shiny...
I am my own sysadmin. I LOVE my sysadmin! It's those pitiful other people in the office that wouldn't know firewire from usb. They're the ones who really suck.
-You have been modded appropriately-
I strongly agree with everything you're saying. One of the 20 unofficial roles I have at a large bank is Unix System Administrator. I really only spend ~100 hours/year doing system administration, and that's only to deal with something breaking. We have enough work for a full time sysadmin, but we have management who aim to consistently do less than the minimum. I believe the fundamental problem of system administration in any business environment is that you never see the benefit of good results. You only see costs of failures and people running around putting out fires all of the time. A good system administrator tends to work himself out of a justification for a job because there's no compelling business reason to keep employing someone expensive whose benefits to the organization are invisible. Coming in on the weekend to replace hardware, fixing things that break before people notice they are down and recovering files for people who will never admit that they deleted something important are all common sysadmin tasks that are rarely acknowledged.
Micromanagement and imaginary, perceived cost savings create unsustainable environments. Here in a non-technology group of a large bank, we've got a handful of Sun servers attached to an EMC. There are numerous persistent memory errors on the Sun's that could be fixed with a service call and a small scheduled downtime. Well, in a normal environment that is all it takes. However, we don't currently have a maintenance contract. We did have a service contract years ago when the problems started, but maintaining systems is an anti-goal for management - apparently there is no profit in keeping things running. The EMC has been performing well, with the occaisional disk failure that is completely invisible thanks to RAID and automatic call home to get a replacement disk sent out. That's been our key saving grace since we don't backup anything(including production servers).
Unfortunately, this kind of short sighted, unprofessional approach to IT is common in business driven organizations. When everything comes crashing down, as it always will given sufficient time, someone will look at what happened and try to prevent it from happening again. This is the kind of sabatage through mismanagement that leads to the creation of company policies that make it hard for anyone to do their job. Our company has policies that require that system, network, security and database administrators all be separate people. The developers have to be separate as well and can't have access to production systems. There's some very good reasons for all of these policies, but business people can't resist the temptation of hiring one person to do all of these jobs. After all, who better to get things working and fix problems than a developer with root access to everything. It sure cuts down on time wasted in getting authorizations and having meetings.
Admins are literally wedged between workers and management.
... umm ... his quarter years report (yahu, sure), and if it isn't reactivated IMMEDIATELY, you're in deep dung.
You, as an admin, get orders from management how they envision the network security to be. You know it doesn't work that way and will only create an obstacle for the people you're to protect, but you will do it anyway. Because the guy you knew from the day shift one day took one such memo and trotted upstairs to the brass.
He hasn't been seen since.
So you do what you're ordered, block non-corporate mail accounts, block porn sites, block ebay, block... everything. This is usually when one of the middle managers complains that he can't go online anymore, which turns out as him being unable to access ebay anymore which he needs for
It escalates up to the top brass, you get said pile of manure onto your head for not cooperating with middle management and you now have to work out a plan how to block ebay without blocking it. Sounds impossible? I know that. You go upstairs and tell the brass. Can I have your stuff?
Then you head down to the cafeteria for some coffee. Coffee good. Coffee lifeblood. My precious. But you forgot your fake moustache and the noseglasses, so people immediately recognize you and start asking what's wrong and why they can't access gmail and gmx anymore. You explain the brass note. Which causes them to tell you in no uncertain terms what a weenie you are, because they need mails from a contractor that the corporate top security firewall won't let pass because they are deemed insecure attachments and how the hell they're now supposed to work.
Need I go on?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I don't think your post ended up where it should have. That or you should have explained yourself better. Thanks for the kind favour of replying to my (admittedly cheap) joke!
I just had to make this joke even though I'm not an IT person and the only 'nix box I have is my personal desktop
I have the greatest sysadmin in the world!
$ su -l
Enter password:
#
Why do you ask?
Several others have already said that SysAdmins are only as good as the rules and management that constrains them. Then again, there is the personality issue.
I am a SysAdmin myself like many on Slashdot. However, I do SysAdmin work on two different levels. At my day job, I manage gigantic enterprise class data systems with clustered servers for everything from distributed processing to my Oracle 10g RAC cluster. However, I also do work on the side in my spare time for small businesses and friends in the area. I do everything from some simple web development to distributed networks for file and application sharing. I've been given compliments and complaints but the compliments far outweigh the complains.
What I have heard most and that I like to hear is that people like to deal with me. They like to have me answer thier help desk calls because they know it will get fixed correctly and as fast as humanly possible. I like having that reputation and professional respect. Because of that, I don't have to fight with a user or management when I say I need time to figure out an issue or stand up a system. Does that make me a good SysAdmin? I dunno. I think it makes me a good employee. Then again, I get the same compliments from my small business customers and friends who would rather call me for help with their DSL account or a piece of troublesome software than any help line.
Given that, I think that a SysAdmin is an employee just like everyone else. Because of that, we shouldn't be venerated above others even though we are an employee with a special job. A SysAdmin allows other employees to be productive. If the SysAdmin isn't doing the job they have to do, then the company as a whole suffers. I suppose this is where the 'root is god' can get out of hand. When an entire company's infrastructure depends on the work of a few people, that's a high stress deal. Sometimes it gets to people. Bottom line though, we are all employees and just like the loud guy at the water cooler that nobody wants to hang around with, if we aren't profession and approachable like other employees, we are hurting ourselves. SysAdmins have to be computer geniuses, we have to be business oriented, we have to be people people and we have to be avaialable and approachable. It is not an easy task, believe me, I know! However, we all need to have a certain degree of professionalism when dealing with our customer base (users). We SysAdmins are our own downfall. The poor perception by the slobbering masses of users is our own fault. We can change it. While we do understand that our companies would not survive without us, it is not our place to make it so painfully obvious. The users don't care how great we think we are or even how great we are. They just want thier problems fixed quickly so they can get back to being how great they are. If we can just appease that desire from the users, I think that's what would make a good SysAdmin.
If you screw up your computer, you have no backlash, no negative repercussions, nothing to teach you not to do that again. Being a sysadmin now, and a power user before, I have to say this is the problem. People screw up, this is fine, problems arise, we fix them, that is our job. But when Joe user or Bob in management keeps doing the same stupid things, over and over w/ no negative repercussions, and it's your fault, and you have to fix it, and you can't do anything to them to teach them a lesson why NOT to do stupid shit, you stop caring.
Sysadmins are under appreciated, and expected to work miracles, w/ foolish users, you get the perception of a "Bad sysadmin". Want to fix the problems? Make Joe user who hosed his system for the 4th time this week, downloading a buncha crap and clicking on every virus he gets, do his job w/ out his computer. his deadlines are the same, but on our side, every time you screw up from the same mistake we've warned you about, our time to fix is going to double.
just my $.02
I work in a banking environment with less than the usual red tape (for a banking environment) and most sysadmins are still less than impressive.
As i see it, it's a problem with banks (who see IT as a cost center rather than an essencial part of empowering their business) and not red tape.
The truth is, as companies grow, checks and controls are added for a reason. Consider the scenario where Group A responsible for system 1 (say, Accounting) asks the sysadmins for a seemingly small change to the configuration on a server machine which in turn breaks the systems of Groups C and D (say, responsible for the Sales and the Dispatching systems) resulting in a down time of several hours and a month's worth man-hours wasted.
Checks and controls (say, a change approval system) are added preciselly to avoid this kind of scenario: beyond a certain level of complexity, some level of check and controls is required to avoid that everybody is constantly tripping in everybody else's toes.
Red tape (read, unnecessary bureaucracy) is born when bureaucracies gain a live of their own and rules are created for purposes such as "showing work done" or "creating and fencing a new area of responsability". Another way how red tape is born is when the reason for a rule ceases to exist but the rule is not remove.
In my experience, banks are not especially more prone to red tape than other big companies - mostly it boils down to:
- The quality of high-level and mid-level management. Good managers (like good programmers) aim for lean and mean and low clutter.
- How old the company is. Old companies, if they don't go through periodic process reinvention phases, tend to accumulate old rules which have long since become worthless.
- The level of competitiviness and the size of the profit margins on the business area/location where a company operates. Companies in highly competitive markets and/or having tight margins have a lot more incentive to "trim fat" than companies in stable markets with high barriers to entry.
The first IT job I took after getting out of the army was answering phones on a help desk for a retail company. We had to support about 1,500 users.
Not long before I started that job, the company had hired a new "Director of End User Technology" and this guy was sharp. His primary goal at the time was to straighten out the cobbled together mess of a network that had haphazardly grown department by department. The place was a real mess and the network ran like mud.
Over a period of about four years, we standardized our PCs and laptops, physically consolidated the servers that were spread all over the HQ building, corrected the messed up cabling, centralized administration, built a training room and implemented a number of classes, etc. It was a truly exciting and fun place to work and virtually everyone who I started out with on the help desk eventually learned, got certifications and moved into administration and/or engineering. When I had started there we had a real mom & pop shop type feel and very little oversight. All we had to go on were some clearly defined goals and a directive to "get things fixed."
We consistently accomplished our goals. Within the first couple years we had fixed the network and made it into something useful. The consequence was more use by upper management and as you might expect, more management from upper management. Every time we met another goal, the more visibility we received. The more visibility we received, the more layers of management they installed above us. Every layer of management installed made it harder and harder to actually get anything done, basically because each new layer of management knew less about IT but more about "managing.".
I guess mostly I'm just whining here, but eventually most of us who had built the network quit. They 'managed' us right out the door.
Politicians are like diapers - they should be changed frequently and for the same reasons.
afaik, sysadmins are bad, generally. Though, every sysadmin on this site who responds to me is NOT a bad sysadmin. sysadmins are the low-levelled idiots who couldn't pass onto a study or even serious education. And yes, they ARE stupid. There's about 5 of them on my school. I installed a different keyboard layout, and because they took all the rights to unset it, they blamed me for doing so and HAD TO INSTALL A NEW COPY OF WINDOWS. DUDE! A DIFFERENT KEYBOARD LAYOUT. * cough * configuration panel * cough * but... no, they disabled the configuration panel "because of security issues". dude... have you ever wondered how i switched the layout? there is no such security on windows, as long as the registry is wide open for writing. but they didn't really know how they actually set it all (i guess they hired a company), so they couldn't access the control panel (* cough * administrator passwords should be written down * cough *). hm? server down? well... just wait a week, so that your salary goes up, then hire a company to fix it. "what's a server anyway"... i nmapped the server (got router ip using ipconfig /a). appeared to be a Cent OS box. it also ran an empty apache server. i asked a sysadmin what the apache did over there: "How do you know it's a decent OS?" (no typos)
the guys in my school are plain idiots. they might know a little bit about what a motherboard is, or what the latest nvidia card is, but that's where it ends. oh, they also know how to order PC's at dell.
the major amount of sysadmins are idiots, who are sysadmin because the suck even more at other jobs. the sysadmins reading this message are good. they are actually interested in PCs, which is a thing the sysadmins i know lack.
No backups? No maintenance contract? In a BANK?
Sounds like time to leave, before the shit hits the fan & guess who gets the blame...the 'unofficial' sysadmin.
Hope you've CYA with lots of memos, friend...
Of course they are not that bad. They are human beings, and like all human beings some will be good at their job and some won't. Some will be nice, some won't.
It's idiotic to classify them as some kind of vermin. We all have a job to do and how we do it is based on our individual traits, not the position.
Say hello. Even when you don't need something.
Don't question what he does all day
Fill out the stupid request form
Treat everything he does as a favor
Never forget he can read your email
What this boils down to is:
I guess people forget that SAs are people and employees too and that they work under constraints placed on them by upper management.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
They treat every person like the worst illiterate wanker who ever yelled at them. Try a little customization, guys. I'm not the one who yelled at you for blocking porn and sent an email to the CEO over a half-hour planned email outage at 2am. That was a different guy, so don't treat me like scum, even if my request isn't technically sound. You don't know my job, and I don't have to know yours. At least I'm asking politely whether it's possible, not threatening to get you fired if you don't do it.
Whiners! You expect me to do your work? I've got lots of my own dumped by mgmt.
As a person who worked my way through school waiting tables and bartending, then dropping out in the *typical* SysAdmin fashion, I tend to liken my department's level of service to the level of service one would receive at a restaurant.
Heavily corporate restaurants make their customers sit through a whole song and dance about the restaurants offerings and their associated flair. Heavily corporate IT makes their customers (fellow employees or clients) wade through a song and dance about red tape and process.
Mom and Pop restaurants allow more freedom in day to day management of the customer experience, likewise startups do the same.
Greasy spoons with the head waitress who can run the floor and cook the food and do the dishes while balancing the books do it the head waitresses way...
You can draw the parallels anyway you like.
The real point is, as a SysAdmin, I try to keep in mind that me and my department are providing a service to our clients in whatever way, shape or form you want to define them. Without clients, while there may be considerably more time for Nethack and Slashdot posting, there would be no job.
I agree that 99% of the "I'm a sysadmin 'cause I run linux at home" crowd have gross delusions of competency.
But that final 1%....
The bottom line is somebody with a bit of skill and motivation can learn things at home that they could never dream of at work, precisely because nobody gives a damn if the network is down for a week. I would be laughed out of the office if I suggested a pilot project on the main network with Kerberos authentication and applications, or switching apps to use LDAP authentication, or running a VPN on the internal network as a precaution against internal compromise. But I've done all of them at home and learned a lot of the pros and cons. It's not the same as anyone who's used these tools at work, but there are a lot of well-experienced sysadmins with even less experience out there. And even the work-seasoned sysadmins might have only used one or two tools instead of trying every server supported by their distro.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
I've spent a number of years watching this on both sides. I seem to be relatively immune to this problem myself, but unfortunately I don't really want to be an admin. :-)
I think that probably the only real solution to this is counseling from above, together with a "three strikes and you're out" policy.
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
Banks, like all other companies, are filled with large numbers of people who do things that are totally useless. For example, a marketing organization doing their own IT isn't going to lose customers' money. The worst thing that could happen here is that we would fail to produce lists of prospective new customers who need to be sent junk mail or be hounded by telemarketers. Personally, I think those kinds of catastrophic system failures would be a net benefit to the human race, but I'm biased against marketing slime. =)
CYA memos are what everyone suggests, but they seem like a tactic for those who have already chosen to fail. Is the idea that you could pull them out in court and hope some jury believes them? They sure wouldn't have any bearing on finding a new job. All they say to a prospective employer is that you CYA first and serve the company second. Realistically, what can you do with CYA memos? Go above your management and say "see, I tried to CYA, please don't fire me"? That might work if you happen to work in a company where the corruption doesn't go all the way to the top. How many CEO's do you think got in their position without having some degree of moral flexibility?
Perhaps I'm a pessimist and there are more honest people with a strong sense of integrity in senior management in most companies than all of my experience would suggest. However, I think a better bet would be to have dozens of witnesses to the numerous times I've warned our Director, VP and SVP of the extremely high risks we're taking. I'm confident that our SVP is savvy enough to lie under oath and sound credible. Our director would tell the same story, but doesn't seem very credible even when telling the truth. The administrative assistants, project managers, developers and many others who have come and gone are probably less inclined to face severe consequences for perjury if they were asked to testify if they were aware of my numerous cautions against these blatant violations of company policy.
Sure, I could be the scapegoat someday, but isn't that true of everyone? One thing I can be sure of is that this organization would not want to have me testify in open court about how they work. =)
We are not "bad" at all. We are doing our jobs. What are our jobs? Our role is to keep our systems operational and secure.
Think of it in terms of roles.
Sys Admin: Protects and defends the infrastructure of your company. Prevents people from shooting themselves in the foot. Enforces good security policies. Identifies poorly performing software and forces its developers to improve it (or get shut down). Keeps your systems patched and ready. An iron fist in a velvet glove. An enigma wrapped in a mystery. A big, sexy man!
Programmer Type 1: Cooperative with sysadmin. Tries to write solid code. Doesn't break stuff. Often has a good rapport with sysadmin and finds, mysteriously, that his jobs get run on time, every time. Filled with the Tao.
Programmer Type 2: Bastard child of Peter Lorre and Marty Feldman (with the voice and the eyes). Doesn't care about correct practice, only what he can bang out in an hour. Takes ridiculous shortcuts, risks crashing servers and services. Source of all memory leaks. Tries to be clever and fails. Mortal enemy of all sysadmins and Type 1 programmers!
User: Whirling dervish of chaos in an otherwise orderly world. Between downloading P2P apps, questionable freeware, and trojan and adware corrupted hacks of popular programs, spends time inviting the wrath of the RIAA and MPAA by sharing his entire music collection from the main file server. Browses pr0n instead of working. Plays solitaire instead of working. Cries like a little girl every time he's forced to comply with official policy. Complains bitterly about those nasty sysadmins. Secretly wishes he was a pr0n star and has been stalking Shelly down in accounting. She'll mace him in the cafeteria later on in the week.
NO CARRIER
We're watching you and we also happen to know that a 3 phase 415V busbar runs dreadfully close to the RJ11 cable which terminates at your office desk telephone. I also recall this cable being reported as damaged (stripped bare by *accidental* friction). However the repair job is in our very long backlog queue at the moment, just after "Halon release trigger malfunctioning in Lockejaw's office".
Please call us if you have any further queries on what we do down here in the basement.
Blah, it's a fun job...it's ALWAYS challenging whether new problems/technologies arise and you get to figure out how to integrate them with the old...or it's dealing with people who somehow ALWAYS seem to have(create?) problems for themselves and thus you.
Those challenges are what I like about it...sure beats the hell out of working at Starbucks begging for tips with a cup that has a piece of paper with chicken scratch writing that says, "Tips Appreciated" on it.
"Just Smile and Nod." --Huck
I work as a System Support Engineer. My job is to sit behind a phone and computer, visually try to hold multiple plant or company infastructures in my mind with out ever viewing anything and step through Sys-Admins, DBAs, Engineers, and others through finding their root problem and providing a solution.
I've noticed a signficant break in those born after 1981 in terms of 'how' people understand computers. Not so co-incidently, those born after 1981 are also called Gen-Y or Millinials.
I have noticed that the following generations really don't understand computers, electronics, or any of the like. They know how to use them, they might learn some rules to follow. But to them, all this technology is simply like the microwave. I've had 'techs' try to 'clarify' with me that you know when your moving a file you can see the paper moving over from on folder to the other as well as all other sorts of rediculus ways of understanding the device they are working on.
How to these people can you possibly explain to them the source of the problem is a bad router that is tossing out a few bad packets once and a while at plant A, while their software is giving them a garbled message at plant B. Let alone stepping through the root problem.
These people can multitask like no other, text message 20 people 20 different messages at once; however, get them to think? That's another story. It's not about inexperience completely, it's about not studying and not understanding. I rather take the guy who has never heard of Solaris, and put them incharge of a Solaris machine who really understands computers then a person who has worked with Solaris for a year or two who ultimately doesn't understand the machine they are using.
Long answer: God damn it, yes.
You said it. I was one of two Unix SAs supporting a few dozen servers for which several hundred users depended for their jobs. If something went wrong, they called and, just like magic, things were fixed. They loved us and they loved the application. The worst thing that could happen would be a server death and when that happened, we'd call up the manageer of the affected group, ask them to have their people save their work locally and sit tight. Out of the closet would come a pre-configured replacement server. We'd plug it in, restore data from one of our three redundant back-up systems, and have those users up and running again in two hours, max.
I loved the work. Absolutely loved it. Because this was a government job with generous paid leave when one of us would be gone, having two of us meant there was always coverage and no downtime. Given that our users brought in 10s of millions of dollars a month, we were a paltry and perfectly justifiable expense.
Our problem was that nothing ever went wrong. Our big 'ol rack of servers hummed along with no drama and whenever the boss dropped by, he'd likely see us plodding through something routine like adding a user or checking system capacity reports. Every few days, we'd get bored and actually walk around the cube farm of the users, stick in our heads, and ask if everything was ok, can we do anything to make things work better? Our users loved us; our bosses didn't even seem to know what to write on our evaluations.
The Windows servers on the other side of the datacenter? Holy Cow, did those guys have the drama! Things were crashing all the time (We're back in the early NT days, mind you.) Whole populations of users suffered critical amounts of downtime. The admins put everything back together, of course, and were lauded as heroes because they had fixed the big, bad problems that had killed so many people's productivity for so long. They were HIGHLY visible to management. They got awards for fixing things. They were heroes.
Us Unix admins were those two people who sat over in the corner and never seemed to actually, visibly do anything.
You can see where this is leading, right? The Windows server side and the Windows front-line support side needed warm bodies, so I got thrown off Unix and into a GUI world I neither wanted nor understood. (Don't get me wrong, I've done the Windows work for years and I love helping people, but I'm not in love with the OS I now use and support.) Later, the other SA was tossed and our servers virtualized on mainframes. The number of SAs was cut to the bone and beyond. Virtualization was a nice concept and it works fine, but getting something fixed when it breaks is now a major red tape experience for our poor (former) users.
Fires to put out mean that firemen get chances to become heroes. Safety engineers who inspect your business and show you how clean the grease traps so nothing actually catches on fire are just needless expenses to be cut as soon as possible.
The moral is: Be a fireman. I figure they get more women, anyway.
The people that might find me antisocial are:
See, the above make me seem pretty grumpy, right? But the truth is that most days are fairly pleasant for both myself and (judging from feedback) for my "clients." However, there are always a few people that can magically manage to rain on a sunny day. Secretaries are often both the best and the worst. Some are obviously in their job because of wonderful PR skills, and manage to be extremely friendly, and, more refreshingly, honest (they can admit when they have messed something up, or don't know how something works). They also often have candies on their desks
But trust me, anyone can have a bad mood after being 2-3h late for lunch and when running a full day without breaks.
From TFA:
How do I get my sysadmin to do anything?
Very simple.
Cookies, brownies, pizza, etc. I've worked as a sysadmin, so I know all sysadmins like the ones with the little dark chocolate chunks in them.
Register the editry.
Good sysadmins seem to have time to fix problems that occure, keep up on normal maintenance, aploigize if the make a mistake and quickly fix it, fair with the users, open to new ideas and strays away from following a technology idology but uses the sciencetific method to do the best approach for the requirements.
Bad Sysadmins are going crazy just to keep the place running. Always to busy to fix problem that occure get back logged on normal maintenance, find excuses for the problems and because it "wasn't his fault" doesn't jump to fix the problem, thinks the users are stupid idiotes, Emotionally connected to the systems he installed a decade ago, followed a technology idology and uses this idology to fix the requrements (like forcing Linux onto a bunch of CAD Engineers, which causes them to loose many features that has saved them time in the past)
In short for almost any job that you do, you are a bad employee/boss if you use the excuse "I Don't have time for that." if you were a good employee then you could manage your time better, and if you feel that to much is being demmanded on you then you normally and politly find a way to get more time to do the work or requrest more resources.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I notice the summary above references the BOFH. Here again we see SysAdmin confused with Operator. This is one of the problems, most people view SysAdmin as some sort of Operator. In a Data Center the Operators are low-paid monkeys who can push a few buttons and dial a phone, but most importantly are willing to WORK ANY SHIFT! I used to work as an Operator, it sucks after a year and I wouldn't go back to rotating into graveyard shift. The problem is in most organizations they view SysAdmin as a higher-paid version of that. You are doing typically some very complex work, still have to answer your pager at 3AM or on vacation, and have bosses who can't understand why any given problem can't be resolved in about 5 minutes. Everyone in the organization thinks they are smarter than you, and bring you answers that you have to implement. I can't tell you how many times I've been handed a bunch of hardware and told "we bought this without consulting you, but here make it work!" The problem has as much to do with the perception of SysAdmin by YOU, as it does with the Sysadmin. Organizations generally treat us like garbage, so that's what they get. Some good quotes from alt.sysadmin.recovery here: http://home.xnet.com/~raven/Sysadmin/ASR.Quotes.ht ml
After 3 years in support for a fax solutions provider, I encountered what I would estimate to be a 5% level of competence. Meaning 95% of SA's I talked to don't know their ass from their elbow. I talked to this one admin of a windows network that didn't know what Active Directory is. Let me tell some more anecdotes.
Now, you might say that they're probably underpaid and overtasked... the underpaid and overtasked guys were actually usually the competent ones. I've had Windows admins call me, support for their FAX solution, for EXCHANGE support. Now I mostly handled Linux calls, My MSEXCH knowledge is very cursory... this guy got pissed and I basically referred him to a MS KB article on what he needed to do. Incompetence is so prevalent in the SA job role it's really just insane. It's gotta start somewhere above them though, cause management made the incompetent decision to hire this incompetent admin. So it's sort of a chicken/egg.
I also loved the admins who were all like "we HAVE to get a linux solution! linux is so rock solid! I don't really know how to use it or even log in to it, but it'll be the proverbial rock in the data center!" Then when it breaks here I am phonetically spelling out commands like cd and ls, while they enter the wrong kind of slashes (if they figure out how to log in first). Then when they enter the proper command finally they're like "I don't think it worked, nothing happened."
Another herd of sa's that were awesome were the ones who either had a language barrier or thought it might be impolite to say "no" when you ask "Is the XXX service running?" It makes for a really fun game where you just have to guess whether they really mean yes or no.
Well I won't keep boring you with my mundane tales of the greatest SA's of all time cause I think you get the picture.
"If you plant ice, you're gonna harvest wind."
Damn it Jim, I'm a doctor, not a sysadmin!
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
Very true.
I'm a sysadmin in a DoD Classified network on a USAF Base ( LOTS of red tape) and the first rule is security (which it should be). That pretty much means lock everything down. Some examples include: lock the USB ports, prevent writes to CD-RW Drives, prevent writes to DVD-RW Drives, audit everyhthing (PL2), prevent printer installs, software installs/removal, lock down screen savers (executable code), password changes every 62 days, approved software installs only which usually means we are lagged on releasees, etc, etc, etc. Some of these are silly, yes, but I don't make the rules. The "red tape" is mandated to us by the Air Force.
All this red tape creates a very unfriendly user environment where the users frequently are annoyed with the admins because they can't do something as simple as copy data from a classified PC to a classified laptop for a presentation. They have to track down an admin to do the copy for them. Paperwork must be filled out and whitnesses present. They may not have access to files due to security permissions. Won't delve into the requirements here but it has to do with employees from different companies all working the same program who potentially have access to each company's proprietary information. I can go on and on, but the bottom line is red tape creates a very unfriendly user environment where the users frequently claim the sysadmins "don't know what they are doing", which isn't the case at all. The users are deliberatly not allowed to do what they are trying to do. However a majority of the user community thinks us admins make the system painful to use on purpose. Not the case. and they frequently take out their frustrations on us.
Others are truly worth the name "Bastard Operators from Hell".
At home my son thinks so. Having had problems getting him off to go to bed and come to dinner, I set up a schedule in the router. The connection goes dead a half hour before dinner and before bedtime on school nights. If he is a pain, I change his password to deny use entirely for a while. Sometimes I just add myspace to the hosts file.
It's a dirty job, but he will be better for it.
The truth shall set you free!
The real moral is that if you want to be a valuable geek, you have to learn enough people skills to make sure other people know. I've got a couple of decades of professional experience under my belt and am an expert in several areas, but the most valuable experience I've had professionally comes from working in a large company with a good number of untrained monkeys.
There are a lot of people who can't tell the difference between a seasoned professional and someone who would have bought a computers for dummies book if they were literate. Some of these people will be promoted into management to keep them out of the way of people doing the work. Being able to interact with people on their level is an incredibly valuable skill. It's nice to work with intelligent people who know what you do, but not everyone gets that kind of dream job. Basic communication skills are important, even if you feel like a retard when you're doing what is expected. If you don't feel like a retard, you're probably not going to effectively communicate with the business people. =)
For example, I'll send out emails to users, managers and the VP to let them know that a disk on the EMC failed, switchover to one of the hot spares occurred without incident, the failed disk was replaced and transitioned back into the array without issues and with no more than negligible performance degradation to the systems and users. No data was lost and we're back up and running. This happens once or twice a year.
If you know anything about EMC arrays, storage systems in general, or how to get your VCR to stop blinking 12:00, you probably realize that I didn't really have to do anything other than be aware that something happened and let the field service technician do his job. I've spent my whole career learning about technology so I am perfectly capable of doing all of the maintenance myself, but in this kind of case, I just need to let someone else do their job. This is not exactly rocket science here. However, people who don't get the technology see something like this and think "Huh, I guess something broke and now it's fixed and everything's good. Good thing he knows what to do because I wouldn't even know who to call or what to say to them." Most of the people whose opinions matter have no idea what you do.
There are a lot of arsonist-firefighter types in IT. You can be just as valuable as them without losing any shred of decency as a human being. Just let people you help know to let your boss, your boss's boss, their boss, and anyone else they know how incredibly helpful you were. Chances are that they asked for your help because they needed you to do 10 minutes of work so they could avoid trying to spend weeks trying to figure it out themselves and making it much worse before it got to you. Most people will be willing to spend 60 seconds to send a quick email to help you out.
>they frequently take out their frustrations on us.
Of course they do. If they open their mouth within earshot of the people actually responsible, they get shipped to Baghdad the next day.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
user: hi, i'm getting an error that says my home directory is full, can you give me more space?
admin: no problem, give me a minute.
user (5 mins later): uh, my home directory is empty, where did all my files go?
admin: you said you needed more space, i made more space.
Once upon a time, in a land far-far away, I ran the IT department of a medium sized company. We weren't so big that I was the CIO, but I did repot directly to our corporate president (who reported to noone else, since he owned the company). A few hundred seats total, offices in 14 states, most of which were home offices, that sort of thing. I had a staff of eight, including four first-line phone technicians, and on the whole the entire operation ran quite smoothly.
The only times I had major problems, or heard of major complains, about a system administrator was when they started making one major flaw in their perception: that IT was there to do things in a way that was best for IT.
When a system administrator begins to believe that their entire function is self-serving, that they are there to support their own operations, that's when I've seen things go bad. Regardless if you are an IT consultancy firm, or an internal IT department, the sole purpose of IT is to play a supportive role in the organization. It's important to recognize that if IT didn't show up for a week, things would probably be okay (backup tapes would *really* need to be changed), but if the sales and customer service departments didn't show up for a week, we'd be damn near out of business.
I always tell people to think about their product. What is it you produce? System administrators, software engineers, they produce things that let *other* people get their work done *more* efficiently. If it's difficult for the sysadmin or developer to do, who cares? They aren't there to make life easier for themselves, or to devise some system that's perfect on the whiteboard but impractical in the real world - they are there to bring practical, cost-effective efficiencies to their end users.
Now, if you have a guy going around unplugging peoples network cables at the switch because they pissed him, fire that guy and hire a professional.
My $0.02.
More women?
We ARE talking about sysadmins aren't we? Either that or I'm working in the wrong place.
I said that firemen get more women than Unix SAs. Any positive integer exceeds zero, so I guess maybe that's not such a big deal.
or like backups, for that matter: the surest way to need them is to find out you don't have them. Or, as Rabbs put it, "Better to see a network that's working and a sysadmin that's not than the other way around."
... if there were problems, she'd be too busy fixing them to be reading slashdot or playing games or idling on IRC. If your job includes an architecture component, the analogy starts to break down, but still ... always better to be idle because things are working smoothly than busy because they're not.
If you're fortunate enough to be an admin working for management that understands the function of sysadmins (as with doctors, our goal is to work ourselves out of a job), be grateful. Most management can't seem to grasp the concept that a sysadmin who's sitting around playing Doom is a sign that things are going _well_
illum oportet crescere me autem minui
Now when's Sysadmin Day??
Dude, first hit on Google.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I am in one of those companies that apparently doesn't place high value on SysAdmins. Their trick is to 'hire from within', and then give the employee in the new position a paltry raise on their previous salary instead of paying what the market bears. I am seriously thinking about changing fields to development or something.
Interchange the roles of software writer and sysadmin in companies that do software - you stop treading on each other's toes. I also found if you talk to people with broke machines and fix them up so that they go properly, you take less abuse :0)
Also - Home Brew Builder Stephen Wozniak's Joke was slightly missquoted by your post - read it, it's a good one liner.
The purpose of existence is to make money.
I've had pretty good luck getting admins to install libraries and apps I've needed. Just show them what they are for and provide proper licenses and support info. Heck, I've even had them make entries into
My best example of a 'bad' one was the time everything on an HP-UX system (a business-critical server) just quit. It took me a few seconds to determine the cause:
The really bad admins I've worked with (they happened to be Windows admins, which wasn't Windows fault, but the direction IT chose to follow) were hired specifically to be a bunch of belligerent a*holes. IT management had a deal going on the side to push everything onto Windows, and as a few holdout systems didn't get converted, the IT managers weren't getting their MSFT stock options for reaching the 100% point. They responded by installing some nasty s.o.b.s in various key positions to complete the task.
Have gnu, will travel.
I concur. Leave. Leave quickly.
Banks have egregious regulatory & compliance requirements. A bank without backups is a pretty shocking thing. It's bound to blow up in their faces sooner or later just from a compliance point of view. I would not want to be around in the trenches when it blows up.
That sounds more like a non-critial system at a game studio than a banking environment.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
...the only catch with that is that if you have those kind of people skills then you really don't have to put up with a crap job like IT. You can do something more business oriented or just go into business for yourself.
The fact that you can have division of labor is one of the key benefits of civilization. Nullify that and then there's really not much point anymore. You might as well go back to the midieval guildsman model.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
You have GOT to be kidding me. As a former sysadmin who is now a team lead working at an outsourced account at A Very Large Bank, I know the value of change management. You would not believe the spaghetti bowl of nonsense that I found when I walked in the door, along with highly questionable sweetheart arrangements between sysadmins and the bank. I have spent late nights and long weekends doing the job of the completely incompetent sysadmins here, who think this is still The Wild West and make changes willy nilly that bring down applications and services with no thought as to how many users they affect.
Change management is a good thing. Nuff said.
OTOH I do agree that micromanagement and excessive red tape and naughty bad evil. Requiring a proposed change to be documented is not evil.
I wrote a blog post about this not too long ago. It's funny that this thread came up so soon afterwards.
r ception.html#links
I got my start in sysadmin work, and then moved over to programming. I've run across my fair share of BOFH, and they make everyone else look bad and probably even work harder. I've found that if I treat my department like a separate company and other people are the customers, that things go more smoothly. That's not to say that you let people run all over you. I suppose I've only worked in small businesses, so I don't know if that would be appropriate for large companies or not.
http://cmunkey.blogspot.com/2007/05/its-public-pe
Now you got me thinking - what is the collective noun for sys admins? Google only offered up "a pallor of sys admins". How about a rack of sys admins? A compilation of sys admins? A command-line of sys admins? A sneer of sys admins?
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
That's how engineering used to be in some places. That's why some cars need to have the engine removed to change half the spark plugs.
I'm a sysadmin but I'm getting helped. No No, wrong group. I often have projects where the user has something in mind and they go buy a computer/software/etc.
I've got one group that wants dual boot laptops to run Solaris and Windows. guess what? Solaris doesn't have drivers for some of the stuff. If they had involved me, I would have found a laptop that worked.
Another group needed a "workstation class PC" with PCI-X slots for custom hardware. They got Windows XP 64bits. None of the drivers work. They can't fit all the hardware in because 2 of the slots overlap. Use PCIe or PCI-X in this slot. They got a different model/brand then we have in IT so none of our existing ghost images or drivers work.
They'll stuff a rack of equipment into a room that is already 80 degrees because the AC is maxed out. And there's no power there.
They'll decide to use "Fibre Channel" to connect all thier systems so they can share disk space. They have Windows, Solaris, Linux and Vxworks trying to use it. Sure, it worked with SCSI tape drives.
They'll not replace NAS systems that are failing with the vendor out of business because they don't have the $$, but they'll spend $17k on recovery services. Or worse, they'll have bought a new NAS w/ double the space but not move stuff to it so they don't fill it. And the backup system can only backup 1/3 of the old system.
Everyone thinks they "know computers" today so they don't listen to the person with 20 years experience.
I am a former Sys Admin for my small company. We have now be purchased by a larger company. During my time at the smaller company, I had so much influence over the product that I am now one of the key designers of the product. But don't ask me how hard it is to turn over the keys to the larger company's admins. God, sometimes I wanna cry. "Call the help desk? Please, do you know I use to admin those things. Just let me have root for 2 minutes and I'll fix it myself. What do you mean you don't believe me?" Please, just shoot me now.
Hmm... I read these kind of articles, and the accompanying comments, and I wonder about certain people. I'm a systems administrator at a community college (80K new users / year - yeah!), and I don't [make | have] it bad. If the sysadmin treats you OK, return the favor. I'm constantly surprised by technical people who think they are "above the rules of common courtesy" or something. It's called being a "professional." If you do a good job, you can make a decent living. If you treat people well, they'll treat you well. Be upfront about what you can and can't do, and the managers won't think they have to ride you to get you to do something. From what I've seen, slacker-admins give other admins a bad rep. In the 10+ years I've been in the field, I've never met anyone who went into the sysadmin job for "the glory." It's about making a decent living, and - yes - being slightly anal about security. ;)
This tagline brought to you by 1500 monkeys in just under 17 years.
Been a while since you were in touch with the rest of the world.
All the sysadmins have been either good, great or gone. But I work for software developement companies. If the sysadmins weren't good or at least kept out of the developers' way, the product wouldn't get done and the whole company would go down the tubes.
Besides, most of the people I worked with could easily out-admin the admins, so if there was an issue, we'd just do it ourselves.
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
May I have more space in my home directory now, please?
Actual conversation with a sysadmin. The names have been removed to protect the idoits.
Me (M): I just entered a Pre-approved ECC to move the Learning Center content out.
Sysadmin (S): So you need something moved?
M: You're being facetious, right?
S: No. There are no details you just said you made a ECC.
M: See below: "I just entered a Pre-approved ECC to move the Learning Center content out."
S: So there must be a ECC task right?
Every conversation I have with this guy is a reinterpretation of "Who's on first?"
I just had a six month review. Everything was excellent. The only thing negative that was said was to "please keep my voice down when bitching about the sysadmins." Not stop bitching, just keep my voice down.
The guys I've run into just seem like they weren't in shape to be cops so they decided the easiest way to feel in charge was to be a Sys Admin.
Fine. Run your servers yourself. I'll take a vacation and be back in a month on consultant rates after you collapse on the floor in a sobbing heap from dealing with unreasonable users, unreasonable vendors, broken hardware and software that upper management dictated the use of, and trying to keep in your head every detail of 100+ boxes running half a dozen different operating systems for a dozen different purposes. All for 2/3rds the pay of a developer, if you're lucky.
Now would you like to let me get back to fixing this server, or are you happy without your email for a few days?
I literally have the worst of both worlds -- all the aggravations of a small company (not enough resources) and all the aggravations of a big company (too much red tape). I work for a small, moderately nimble software group in a very large company as a DBA, so in many ways I am basically a sysadmin. I need root access to my servers, at least during the build phase. However, we have sysadmins who refuse on a regular basis. They'd rather wait around all day for me, running the commands I give them via IM, then complain how they have no time to get anything else done.
Our operations team has no process by which to engage them for work. They don't track anything. They cannot and will not give you a firm completion date on any work. When I ask for specs on some of my production hardware, they say "We're too flexible and dynamic, we don't bother with keeping those records." But when I need something like vim installed on a server, they claim "that's not a standard build software package." They all go to lunch together, leaving no coverage for 1-2 hours in the middle of the day. They sit in their cubicles and deride everyone else they think is stupid. They got a project manager -- thank god, we almost got a few things done -- then they drove the new PM off to another group with their utter disdain for being organized and following direction. They horde servers and SAN disk space like it's platinum. They've got 70+ unused servers, but they can't be bothered to inventory all of them and let us use them for things that we need. They don't have simple things set up properly, things like time synchronization between servers (you try running clusters of servers where the clocks are off by 20 minutes from each other!), backups, etc. They provide NO monitoring whatsoever -- they don't know it's down until you tell them.
I have a service mentality. I work with developers and make software. I understand that if we weren't doing that, we'd have no jobs. Not these guys. They expend extraordinary amounts of time and effort telling us what they will not do and why they won't do it, but if they put even half that energy into just doing the fucking work, we'd all be much, much happier.
So yes, for me, sysadmins really are that bad. And ours aren't nearly talented enough to be as arrogant as they are. *
*If you're super talented, you can have a level of arrogance.
sysadmins/techs at my educational institution generally get Bent Over F-ing Handrail by people who, as the original post states, callously, or perhaps more accurately and literally, carelessly break the hardware and software that they're using. moreover, it seems that a LOT of these people do not have a good general understanding of what they're doing and what sort of laws apply to them and to what tasks they are allowed to perform on their workplace-provided computing equipment, regardless of the amount of or level of training offered to them months in advance of any change. we even provide a state of the art instructional tech lab for them to use, though few do. i think that if any sysadmins are truly bofh's reminiscent of simon travaglia's character, they've likely been driven to it by idiots. in fact, i know one sysadmin who, in the early days of networking (token ring) used a coaxial hypotentiometer to fry a glory stealing troll's ring network because the fellow had actually taken the FQDN that was registered to the business and redirected it to his own cluster of machines....doesn't it almost seem that BOFHness is a direct result of being bofh'ed?
I am awesome. As an added bonus, I'm always right. And if you don't believe me, i'll show you the metrics on how your bad code affected the production systems.
No, they don't listen. If you make enough noise, they just fire you because you are a trouble maker. Then when the plan they fired you over flops over, they contract to have it fixed for 8 times the price of your former salary. But that is ok, it comes out of a different budget.
Then they try to get you back for the same pay rate. And all you have to do is laugh and say "XX% increase for pain and suffering" or just say "No".
greg, REMEMBER ED CURRY!!!
Personally, I believe this is a symptom of the way English is taught in America. Previously we taught phonics and sentence diagramming - rules for how English works and rules for dissecting long sentences and multiple clauses.
Recently (the last couple decades) the trend has been towards Whole Language. While most actual implementations are, thankfully, more moderate, taken to its extreme the Whole Language concept is basically that if you read something, it means whatever you feel like it means right after you read it.
It isn't just methodologically different, it's _philosophically_ different. All of the burden is on the author to "evoke" the right interpretation. It basically says that there isn't a right and wrong interpretation of a sentence, but that what you feel about it is right. For a poem, perhaps that's appropriate at least in some circumstances. For any kind of contract, it's preposterous.
But almost anybody who is quite literate and learned the phonics / diagramming way can, eventually, parse a contract - even if they have to look up some words. Whole Language leaves off tools for deconstruction, which is essential in any case where the overall idea doesn't immediately come through.
This seems to be part of a larger trend of sacrificing right and wrong in our educational system in favor of trying to ensure the self esteem of the students at all costs.
As an example, the American Association of English Teachers recommends avoiding sentence diagramming, and this has been their recommendation for quite a few years. Even in the late 80s this was generally not taught in public schools anymore.
[While I know I'm asking for it, please don't judge the English in _this_ post too harshly; I'm sick at the moment.]
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
Where I am now, we have good sys admins. They do their job, I do mine, and interactions between us are pleasant. Even when I've got a problem, they're generally helpful in a non-condescending way. Of course, I'm a geek myself, so maybe that's more an indication of the problems I can't solve myself than their forebearance :-)
What gets my back up (or perhaps "got my back up" since it was a previous employer) is where the sys admin thinks that their job is to keep the computer I use in some sort of pristine "as-deployed" condition. The way I see it, the sys admin's job is to help everyone else do the actual work of the company... you know, the work that the customers pay for.
I appreciate the fact that there might be a corporate policy "no installing WoW" or "block all NSFW sites" -- but if someone proposes a policy that's ridiculous (like "no installing anything") isn't it also the job of the IT people to say "that's nuts--how will people get their work done?" After all, they should know better. I don't mind a reasonable limit (nor the enforcement of it); what I do mind are unreasonable limits blindly enforced.
Again, I really appreciate the IT guys here. They're very helpful (though I only see them once or twice a year) and easy to work with. They're more enablers than blockers, which is a terrific thing.
For all you sys admins out there who are like that: thanks!
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He seems to actually hold pimps in higher regard than SA's...
A good sysadmin works to follow this code of ethics (or one like it). A bad one does not.
There are people who have been given the title or responsibilities of a system/network/IT admin/manager at some point, and there are Professional SysAdmins. The two are not always the same, although the former can grow to become the latter. Accept no substitutes.
--------------
We as professional System Administrators do hereby commit ourselves to the highest standards of ethical and professional conduct, and agree to be guided by this code of ethics, and encourage every System Administrator to do the same.
Professionalism
* I will maintain professional conduct in the workplace and will not allow personal feelings or beliefs to cause me to treat people unfairly or unprofessionally.
Personal Integrity
* I will be honest in my professional dealings and forthcoming about my competence and the impact of my mistakes. I will seek assistance from others when required.
* I will avoid conflicts of interest and biases whenever possible. When my advice is sought, if I have a conflict of interest or bias, I will declare it if appropriate, and recuse myself if necessary.
Privacy
* I will access private information on computer systems only when it is necessary in the course of my technical duties. I will maintain and protect the confidentiality of any information to which I may have access, regardless of the method by which I came into knowledge of it.
Laws and Policies
* I will educate myself and others on relevant laws, regulations, and policies regarding the performance of my duties.
Communication
* I will communicate with management, users, and colleagues about computer matters of mutual interest. I will strive to listen to and understand the needs of all parties.
System Integrity
* I will strive to ensure the necessary integrity, reliability, and availability of the systems for which I am responsible.
* I will design and maintain each system in a manner to support the purpose of the system to the organization.
Education
* I will continue to update and enhance my technical knowledge and other work-related skills. I will share my knowledge and experience with others.
Responsibility to Computing Community
* I will cooperate with the larger computing community to maintain the integrity of network and computing resources.
Social Responsibility
* As an informed professional, I will encourage the writing and adoption of relevant policies and laws consistent with these ethical principles.
Ethical Responsibility
* I will strive to build and maintain a safe, healthy, and productive workplace.
* I will do my best to make decisions consistent with the safety, privacy, and well-being of my community and the public, and to disclose promptly factors that might pose unexamined risks or dangers.
* I will accept and offer honest criticism of technical work as appropriate and will credit properly the contributions of others.
* I will lead by example, maintaining a high ethical standard and degree of professionalism in the performance of all my duties. I will support colleagues and co-workers in following this code of ethics.
-------
Draft of September 12, 2003, approved September 18, 2003, by the SAGE Executive Committee and September 30, 2003, by the Ethics Working Group.
Co-signed by LOPSA, USENIX, and SAGE 2006.
Developers only need sysadmins to do the mundane tasks that they have no time or want to do. Developers can do all that a sysadmin can do and more. The frustrating thing is waiting around for a sysadmin to have time to do something for the developer that the developer could just do themselves if the corporation didn't have stupid rules in place
While I agree with you, this also depends upon the people who manage you. Just the other day my boss came in and I was re-routing some wires in our main rack, and my boss noted how easy it was to find things (all labeled of course). He also remembered the rats nest of wires we had 10 years ago at an old fascility.
My point being is that he accepted that 1) it was worth the effort and 2) that someone had to actually do it. I've seen a lot of operations where if you were "improving" situations that were already working, you were wasting time because it already worked. Such places do not reward good architecture, redundancy, or efficiency - places with continual fires to be extinguished. Those types of managers are exactly the ones who will toss you out when everything appears to work fine, and unfortunately there isn't much to make them understand because that's just the way they are. It's also scary because there are a LOT of places out there like that. But either way you're probably better off being a bit vocal just in case someone does manage to casually pick up on you doing a good job.
well as a system admin I would rate my self simply as AWESOME!
There are a lot of bad sysadmins out there and there's no good way to tell them apart, from a manangment prospective.
A bad sysadmin looks very busy all of the time so management and co-workers think that they are busy and important.
Things are always breaking and they come to the rescue. Things are down for days and through their heroic efforts, (cough, reinstall Windows, cough) things are back working.
While good sysadmins are proactive and very little breaks or goes wrong. They remain calm during user's crisises (because panic never fixed anything). They are seldomly seen by co-workers and management. They do things like scheduling down time when the system is working fine or nagging users to do thinks a "better" way when the old way worked fine for the users.
No one see them fixing much, and nothing ever breaks, and the network is never down, so they must no be very important or valuable to the company.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
A lot of issues plaguing systems admins can be boiled down to respect. I've got 17 years experience as a professional system admin, which is way more practical experience than some business graduate or an MBA fresh out of school. I don't expect them to bow before me, but don't tell me how to do my job. Tell me what outcome you want, but leave the execution up to me. When I became a system admin, I knew I was signing up for long hours, and what is basically a 24/7 job. I am always on call. That being said, remember that I have a wife and kids and a life of my own. I don't mind working during the weekend when necessary, but don't take my personal time for granted. Make it important. Don't call me in the middle of the night because someone is having problems with a dev system. Save those calls for production problems. Remember the quote from the movie "Road House"? "...just be nice." That's all. All I am asking for is a little professional respect.
Excessive drinking is fine...in moderation.
I am all of 165lbs of pure sysadmin meat. Yesterday, after the user and I tried ourselves, I called down to building management to have a rather large and heavy, L-shaped desk (made of spent uranium, I think) moved back from the wall an inch so I could fit a computer plug past the gap. They said they couldn't do anything without the "Internal Service Request" form. Not one for paperwork, even if it is online, 2 years ago I had delegated those duties (with my boss' concent) to the Business Manager, who seems to just love paperwork. She's out of town. So... we all wait.
The Admin and the Engineer
I hate being called "Human". It's an insult.
At least being called a resource makes me feel kind of valued.
As the gun nuts keep telling ya, Gun resources don't kill, human resources do.
1. The "red tape" ticketing systems, forms, tech support mailboxes etc allow IT to effectively triage problems and prioritize workflow. If everyone from your helpdesk is on the phone or away from their desk Joe user doesn't care that you are the wan guy and are in the middle of troubleshooting a down circuit he wants you to fix his e-mail signature now! Every IT department needs techs who enjoy jumping from issue to issue but if all of your IT people are doing that and can't spend more than 5 minutes at a time focusing on a project nothing big is every going to be accomplished
2. Funny that the author seems to think that IT is a dead end career path, he must not have been very motivated, maybe he failed his MCP exam? As much as certs get a bad rap at least you know that if you put in the effort to get one you'll know what you are worth. Making $200+/hr consulting as a CCNP does not sound too bad to me.
3. I agree that a lot of IT/sysadmin types are like cats or better yet divas. Why don't sales or marketing types act this way? Simple, it is because they are easily replacable/trainable. I used to work in sales and true, the best salespeople are brilliant but you don't need to a lot of smarts or training to be an average salesperson, you do need some analytical ability and have fairly extensive training to be an average sysadmin.
It is also a generational thing, most sysadmins are in their 20s and 30s, there aren't a lot of 40 and 50 year olds in the industry who are up on the latest IT technology. In general the younger generation places a higher value on their free time; they are not willing to work 60 hours a week and will revolt if they are asked to. Conversley in accounting, sales, even engineering the young bucks have to suck it up because the baby boomers at the company will work a 60 hour week without complaint.
Because he's watching your every keystroke.
Read my short stories - You won't regret it.
I believe it's a personality type conflict, and the fact that a sysadmin's position is less than rewarding.
I have never had a problem with any sysadmin's, even when I was at school and messing with their networks, I was always friends with them. It's probably more my ability to talk to them on (or above as it may well be) their level of understanding, and my ability to understand their jokes, mannerisms, and above all, sense of humour.
One thing I've noticed is, we nerds often act, speak and think differently to other people, who could not in the slightest fathom our motivations or understanding of the social context around them. Such as, we tend to be more deprecating and agresive than other people, when they come into contact with this, especially if they have not had a large amount of exposure to this kind of personality, they don't know how to take it. Some resent it, some feel threatened by it, others ignore it, some understand it.
In all incidents with "bad" sysadmin's it's generally their personality. Some time it can be their management (giving them too many tasks), or it's that you're frustrated and don't know why they won't do more to help you, or they aren't particularly competent (These are generally the ones who aren't nerds, and are doing it because "Hey, I heard there's good money in this field").
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
The moral is: Be a fireman. I figure they get more women, anyway.
I explained your post to my wife, and she said "It's because they've got big hoses".
<rant>
Fuck you and your condescending attitude.
What exactly makes you think that only people who are uninterested in writing software become sysadmins? Frankly I don't know how some can be a competent admin _without_ being able to program. How else can one admin manage hundreds of systems? In my experience it's the developers (lacking admin experience) that are clueless about things like configuration management, logging, security, resource allocation, software build/release process, etc.
You want to know a secret about cats? They _will_ listen to you if you treat them nicely. If your sysadmin doesn't talk to you it's probably because you did something to piss him off. In general sysadmins are just as friendly as anyone else.
Just because it looks like a sysadmin's not doing anything doesn't mean he isn't. He most likely stayed after hours for weeks at a time in order to automate things so that he can calmly sit in his office and monitor the network for trouble. One _possible_ sign of bad admins is seeing them run around like chickens with their heads cut off. That typically means they royally fscked something up.
You might find those forms idiotic, but they're essential. They ensure that a new hire gets the access and tools he needs and that when someone leaves they no longer have access to company resources. This sort of thing is _required_ of publicly traded companies (Sarbanes-Oxley), but you apparently don't know this. Also, the CEO most certainly does _not_ ask for those sorts of reports. Hell, we don't even _have_ a help desk!
Why exactly do you think sysadmin have delusions of grandeur? I suppose the green ones might, but it's all business for us experienced guys. </rant>
Sorry, I just found his article terribly offensive. I've been programming computers since I was five, doing UNIX admin. work since I was fifteen and professional software development the last ten or so years. I have _never_ experienced the things Paul's talking about.
This is the thing that kills me. The guy who put in the crappy software system that breaks if you look at it sideways gets praise whenever he fixes the thing instead of scorn for the problem occuring in the first place. Whereas the guy who puts in a reliable system that never goes down has to defend himself from a manager that thinks he doesn't do anything. WTF?
Conversely, we've another guy who really knows his stuff but who is nervous and soft-spoken. No-one goes to him. Well, except for me.
Maybe we should mate them and hire the offspring.
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
My bosses have recently taken to calling the workers human capital. It rather smacks of slavery, doesn't it?
... ouch!
Now I just hope they don't leverage me again
However, people who don't get the technology see something like this and think "Huh, I guess something broke and now it's fixed and everything's good.
Ok, I'm with you so far
Good thing he knows what to do because I wouldn't even know who to call or what to say to them." Most of the people whose opinions matter have no idea what you do.
Doh! You fell into the trap! They actually think "Well, that sounds easy, since he didn't have any troubles. We could probably fire him and let Joe the database developer do his job - they're both computer people. My idea would save the company money, I'd get promoted and buy a bigger BMW than that asshole down the street, Dave. Yeah, Dave would sure envy me. I wonder how much hair plugs cost? It's settled, I'm suggesting to the boss that we fire that lazy sysadmin tomorrow!"
Now that sounds cool - a SAN composed of tape drives! Transfer rate 1Gb/s, seek time 10 minutes.
"It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."
I think thats the difference between rules that sys admins work under and procedures the sys admins create and enforce - most importantly are given the authroity to enforce.
I've rarely seen good rules come from above.
I've seen a lot of good rules/procedures come from sys admins to be signed off on by above. In the cases where management accept the recommendation as is its a good thing - where it gets rejected, or discussed by manglement and "improved" it isn't
$_="Slashdotter";$syn="OTT";s;..;;;sub _{print shift||$_};s!ash!Perl !;s=$syn=ack=i;tr+LLEd+BLAH+;_"Just Another ";_
Yeah, that is one of my worries, users usually see the local system administrator also as their local helpdesk. They most of the times have completely no clue what tasks a sysadmin has. I am working as a sysadmin, where we have local small datacenter with still quite some servers in but our main Data Center is abroad. When the communication between the users and the helpdesk is bad or the response is like usually very slow, they tend to walk up to me during a teammeeting nagging my head off to get something done. They even do try to go over the line and actually start pissing me off saying it is my 'job' to help them since I am working in IT. That is where I draw the line. As a sysadmin with quite a lot of work, getting these responses do stick in my head, and usually those users I leave for what they are and let them float in their own crap. And even if you try to help and get the slap on the back from them for helping them, you still have your manager who will keep track of each and everytime you help and use it against you in your evaluations.
A group of sys admins is called a cluster...
No Nordic spear toter reference need apply.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
It has always been the speaker's/author's burden/privilege to communicate his or her message effectively. Knowing one's audience is crucial. Consider the politician. If a politician wishes to persuade the electorate to vote for him or her instead of an alternative, he or she needs to build a persuasive case now. Maybe he or she wishes the whole constituency had an Ivy League education (or maybe not - if cynical), but this politician knows that the audience must first understand and second be moved by his or her message to care. Some gilded linguistic ideal is a secondary consideration at best.
The secret to being a good sysadmin I believe (aside from the technical ability to do the job right) is to be able to never say NO... Treat people like you would your friends even if they made a boneheaded mistake or you are forced to follow procedure. Identify with your customers! That goes for how we treat other sysadmins as well. It always seems like a competition between us as to who knows what and who can do something better/faster. No one - I mean NO ONE - knows everything (trust me junior guy - you know something the senior guys don't even if they make you fell like crap sometimes with their high and mightiness)! I think it stems from job security but when one is bad we ALL look bad. Personality is inherint. Technical abilities can be taught. If you've got a good personality the rest will come eventually.
Alternative option: Outthink the business people. Write up how much time, money, convenience and hassle you _saved_ each time the Windows machines faceplant and yours don't. Convert it all to dollar figures by using efficiencies of interrupted vs uninterrupted staff and their combined salary rates converted to dollars per minute. Include secondary items such as the time spent reporting, diagnosing and repairing the errors, the time and money spent on software and hardware upgrades, the time it took for everyone to get back on track and the long-term effects that the crash would have not only on the productivity of the directly affected users, but all the people who interacted with them and were inconvenienced as a result. Once that figure has been arrived at, put next to it the cost in sysadmin-hours and dollar equivalent of the time and effort it took for you and your team throughout the past days, months etc in order to tweak the systems to the point where they simply did not crash. Make the numbers fairly large. Then, next to the second sets of figures, include the phrase "Already paid as part of standard contract." Then update the figures each month or so, along with year-to-date totals, and email them to the boss and a level or so up the food chain. Make sure the CIO or equivalent gets a copy. That way, they have something on hand which they can point to which says WHAT you do, WHERE your salaries are going, and most importantly, WHY you're being paid and HOW MUCH you're returning to the company as a result. Better still, if you or anyone on your bit of the food chain gets called into a meeting to justify your existence, you can bring a copy of the most recent report instead of spending ten minutes trying to explain why firing all the sysadmins would be a Bad Move to people who use laptops as status symbols and cat warmers. Yes, I believe in being pre-emptive.
I used to be a sys-admin, a sys-op, tech support specialist or whatever. They just threw me in there when no one else knew wtf was going on.
;-)
And hoped that my job description/title flavour of the month justified it.
But I got a kick about 10-15 year ago when kids started referring to their local geek (and evenhe did too) as a "Sye Sop"
What the heck was a "Sye Sop"? Eventually it dawned on me that they were referring to a sysop.
I also get a kick of the system admin of another company telling me about her "Scow" and "Novel" systems.
Scow? Hmnn I must be falling behind on my tech knowledge. Of course she was referring to S.C.O. and Novell...
I don't get out much in the world anymore; do the newbie Sye-Sops actually pronounce it "Scow" nowadays?
- Ecsad Essemal
The Hexadecimal TV-REMOTE!
You should come out to Iraq. I (and many others) have NIPR, SIPR, and CENTRIXS workstations sitting side by side at my desk with USB ports, CDRW drives, etc. My SIPR is connected to your SIPR. Think about it. Fun for the whole family. :)
strike
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
> Within the first couple years we had fixed the network and made it into something useful.
> The consequence was more use by upper management and as you might expect, more management
> from upper management. Every time we met another goal, the more visibility we received.
> The more visibility we received, the more layers of management they installed above us.
> Every layer of management installed made it harder and harder to actually get anything
> done, basically because each new layer of management knew less about IT but more about
> "managing.".
>
> I guess mostly I'm just whining here, but eventually most of us who had built the network
> quit. They 'managed' us right out the door.
Rambling follows. Cogent or indicative of caffiene deprivation?
There's a certain point of view among many sysadmins and developers that an ideal worth striving for is to avoid needless rework and busywork. If a task needs repeated, automate it. The lazy sysadmin / developer is the best. See Robert Heinlein's 'The Man Who Was Too Lazy To Fail" in "Time Enough For Love."
Among many managers, there is a point of view that says a constant hum of visible activity is a goal to strive for. It a task needs repeated, this indicates the importance of the task and means that it must be MANAGED. Managers can't manage shell scripts and other automated tasks, so it -has- to be done by a person. Manually. With mind-numbing repetition and constant reporting of progress to managers in charge of managing the lucky SOB who got assigned the task.
I think we need more lazy managers and fewer "activity for activities sake" managers. I KNOW we need lazy managers managing the lazy sysadmins and developers, and active managers managing the "Hmm... when was the last time you rebooted this Windows box?" folks.
My sysadmin is great, everything runs smooth. He is the man, never knew he was pimping though.
I work on a secondline helpdesk of an ISP and I believe I've seen both sides of this story. Seriously this is exacly the same problem as with the discussion -from a while ago- on tech/internet helpdesks. The problem lies within the system. The outsourcing, the pay per item, the chronical personnel shortage, the million tiny rules and the asshat managers(god I hate managers) disable a person to make use of his talents. This offcourse makes smarter people gtfo as soon as they have the chance , leaving behind the worse.
Also I think all the people here complaining about sysadmins are really complaining about callcenteragents with scripts that got selected for their short phone-time because they can pull answers out of their ass.
If this all wasn't the case then maybe the people they are there to provide services would have the patience to deal with the 95% morons/lusers(really it's bad at times) and still would be braindead enough to sense that you /.-er that most of the times knows what he is talking about have a real problem.
PS. I know enough to know what I do and don't know.